The Battle for the Internet - 100 Years Later, keyboard battles

A hundred years ago, fighting was fought in the trench. Today, however, it is fought behind a computer keyboard. So it is no coincidence that on November 12th in Paris, the next day of the end of World War I, the Forum on Internet Governance opened, an annual summit that has continued to be organised since 2006 and unites all major global players in industry: governments, private companies, civil society.

Starting with Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, this year's theme will be “internet trust”, the element that more than anyone else is lost in the online world, thirty years after the internet is born worldwide.

The idealism of founding fathers has gradually left the way to hate, manipulators, the risk of new conflicts and hacker attacks. Today the internet sums up the world's contradictions: it's a room for learning and exchange, but also a universe made of collisions and risks.

Two separate Internets

One of the greatest dangers is certainly an authoritarian turn of technology. The Internet has been run since the beginning with procedures called “emulation-actorial”, according to the technical range. In essence, the definition of rules and the framework of rules is done with the cooperation of all parties involved, including private individuals and civil society. No one can impose his law on the grid.

China, which has become one of the world's technology giants, has a different vision and gives the state a central role in regulation, with the inevitable risk of censorship. This is what's happening in Beijing, where internet control is stricter than any other country in the world. Last week, China organised an alternative summit to promote the Chinese “model”.

At this rate we can be found with two different internet sites, one open and the other closed, contrary to the world without initially imagined obstacles.

The other, more well-known danger is the one that stems from the great power that today is in the hands of big sector companies Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon that have recently come under heavy criticism.

That's why Tim Berners Lee, an Internet creator, has just launched a new project called Inrupt, decentralise the network and return users control of their personal data.

Berners Lee's analysis is without appeal: “Rest has been turned into a machine that produces injustice and division, influenced by powerful forces that use it to impose their “agenda.

Used by more than half of the world's population, the Internet already has a very important place in our lives, and the result cannot be abandoned to market forces. This must be the central message of the Paris Forum.