Keep the Internet Free from Regulatory Mechanisms

At the December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, a number of autocratic countries such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia attempted to provide the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a U.N. organization, a regulatory power over the Internet. Eighty-nine countries voted to approve a treaty that would strengthen governmental power to control online content and deter broadband deployment.

This is not a good development, the Internet should remain an unregulated environment to ensure the free and unhindered flow of information across the world. I agree with the authors of the article that there should be no regulatory body, public or private, that would regulate internet content. The essence of the Internet is the freedom to exchange information across borders.

What are the benefits for ensuring that the Internet remains an unregulated environment?

First, an unregulated Internet means freedoms are respected and threats to its exercise are monitored, spread and challenged. A hallmark of autocracy is the control of the free exchange and flow of information. Across the history of the world, it has been repeatedly shown that when there is a free flow of data and information, autocratic governments lose out. The obsessive need to control information has always been and will always be the goal of oppressive governments for only in an environment of ignorance and intimidation can they truly survive and thrive. Knowledge begets power, and power begets courage to implement change. This is anathema to authoritarian regimes, whose monopoly of information and power can only be maintained by ensuring that power and information belongs only to its exclusive exercise.

Second, an unregulated Internet means that people are able to get unbiased, variegated and current information critical in making decisions, decisions that shape the social, political and economic discourse. In an increasingly techno-centric world milieu, progress depends on the free and unhindered as well as speedy flow of information. Such phenomenon also provides avenues for broad, comprehensive and encompassing economic, political and social progress to take root and make steady headway in ensuring a more open social matrix.

Third, an unregulated Internet is a counterweight to oppressive regimes from taking power, and if they do, ensure that such hold on power becomes untenable at best and essentially unsustainable. As previously stated, authoritarian regimes thrive in an environment of fear and ignorance, for ignorance begets fear, and fear ensures uncertainty, which guarantees a sense of powerlessness, which in turns breeds subjugation. Tyranny therefore is the end product of sustained ignorance and fear - the internet breaks that bubble, it empowers people, it connects ideas, it spreads camaraderie, it opens new vistas of possibilities.

The free world should always fight for a free and unregulated internet for it is the very foundation of Western liberal democracy that for all its shortcomings, still offers the best route for ensuring a better and more holistic platform for a better, progressive, open way of life.