After reading the topic all of us must wonder on questions like
What exactly is the internet? Is it the transmitters or the social websites and apps?
Is the internet the same as or different to cyberspace ?
These questions are important to determine what the internet is? And who owns it?
It’s very correct to ask who first started the internet? but very controversial to answer who owns it? The internet was started by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf in 1970’s and is own by none of us.
We should consider the internet as an immaterial connection. All of us have mobile phones and we also chat on them. This means we too are the stakeholders ,therefore, in how it is regulated and run.
It has become fashionable to say that on social media we are the product, and this is a helpful way to describe a business model in which platforms offer to deliver advertisements to us as users, but it doesn’t accurately capture the extent to which we are producers too. We are perhaps the people who upload content on the internet. So, we all actively contribute to building up the internet.
Hence, The Internet Engineering Task Force declares that
“ Nobody owns the internet, there is no centralized control,
And nobody can turn it off.”
One main problem which arised with this structure of internet was that Information about online activities of people in one country was stored and processed by the citizens of the other country.
All the countries have not found a successful solution to this problem but both Russia and China have passed laws that allow all online service providers to store their citizens data within their national borders and make them available to government authorities.
So, Everytime you visit a website or an app that service captures the address of your device.
There are two types of IP addresses-
- IP version 4
- IP version 6
These IP addresses are allotted in ranges to broadband and mobile internet providers and that means the internet providers are able to track the country in which the user is in.
Who should protect you on the internet?
According to some political philosophers, there is a social contract between citizens, in terms of which place a duty on governments to protect the citizens and grant citizens right to that protection in exchange for some of their freedoms.
Since so much of the internet is in private hands, the private sector has some responsibility for our security. UK’s Online Bill proposed one of its objective to hold tech companies accountable for user’s safety and also grants them power to block social media and messaging services.
Where will the next billion internet users come from? Who are the next protectors of internet?
Very, clearly this source answers it. The maximum internet users, owners and protectors would be coming from Asia. It is found that Asia, people have the maximum screen time and are the most technosavic people around the word.
How to protect the internet?
Everyone should be responsible for ensuring the stability of the internet.
No state or country actor should take actions that impair the stability of cyberspace.
State or non- state actors should take reasonable steps to protect the internet.
Effort to protect the internet should not violate human rights.
This community approach envisages ‘everyone’ as all citizens of the world, not only the powers that be: specifically, “every individual connected to cyberspace must take reasonable efforts to ensure their own devices are not compromised and, perhaps, used in attacks.” Challenging the long-held notion that governments secure public spaces on our behalf, it demands more of us as citizens of cyberspace. It gives us responsibilities as well as rights.
