Is Sachin Pilot right? Must we get everyone online?

Governments and their ministers love buzzwords. If you needed proof, all you had to do was follow the tweets emerging from the two-day London Conference on Cyberspace (#londoncyber) conference which wrapped up on Wednesday. “The government doesn’t own this debate - this debate is yours,” said Foreign Secretary William Hague in his closing remarks. He must have been referring to those in business suits who were in attendance, but it is an empty statement. What you mean the debate is mine? You control the laws and money; I use the internet. So I have to debate with you, not with myself. But Hague didn’t mean citizens, or certainly not e-citizens (another buzzword). He meant businesses and the private sector who can come up with ways to make money from the Internet (positives), and the ways to protect individuals and governments from cyber attacks (negatives). Talk about protecting freedom of expression and social networks is pretty cheap when Hague’s own government threatened to shut down networks when riots broke out in their own back yard. [caption id=“attachment_122568” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Reuters”]  [/caption]Just like terminology, Hague proposed seven principles for the net which are broad, vague and pretty difficult to police. One of Hague’s seven laws was, “the need for everyone to have the ability to access cyberspace and the skills, technology, confidence and opportunity to do so”. This isn’t new. It has been said before that internet access should be a “right”. India’s Minister of State for Information and Communications Technology Shri Sachin Pilot attended the London conference and implied it was the government’s job to satisfy that right. There appears to be no full transcript of Pilot’s comments at the conference, other than a press release that Indian media outlets used nearly verbatim. But during the session, Mark Graham [twitter.com/geoplace], a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, quoted Pilot as saying: “It is the role of government to get people online - the market can’t do it alone.” Certainly this matches with the press release outlining “India’s ambitious National e-Governance Plan to create a citizen-centric and business centric environment and to connect every Indian to the information highway”. But those are slightly different statements. Insisting that a government should improve infrastructure, including digital capacity, is not the same as the government “getting people online”. That implies an imperative to provide access in the same way as access to clean drinking water or sanitation. It also implies that individuals need to be online. They can choose to go online but nobody requires you to do so. It will not feed you or keep you clothed and sheltered from the elements. And you can freely express yourself without the internet. If the government is responsible for getting you online, can they also remove or restrict that access? The “right” of internet connectivity also has wider implications, barely touched upon at the London conference. Certainly many delegates and speeches highlighted the growing threats from cyber attacks, criminality and attempts to restrict access. Minister Pilot called for an international approach “to ensure that Internet continues to thrive without the fear of its misuse” similar to India’s own “Crisis Management Plan” to “counter cyber attacks and cyber terrorism and to constantly scan the Indian cyber space”. If the internet is borderless, (something geeks love to celebrate), what do you do when nations use it to spy on other nations or worse? There were hints during the conference towards China being behind various cyber attacks, though Hague refused to be drawn on that question. Now, if we take the logic that internet access is a human right, then does the denial of that right by a foreign power constitute an act of war? If China poisoned India’s water supply, harming the right to life, it would be classed as international criminality. Is a denial of service attack now equivalent to attempted genocide? Perhaps the biggest problem with conferences on technology, beyond the buzzwords, is that the majority of people who use the internet couldn’t care less. They only want a service that works - and to use it however they like, for good or for bad. It’s not entirely clear who tweeted this first, but it was widely picked up: “The future of the web will be decided by a girl with a $10 laptop in India, not men in suits at #LondonCyber.” We need to continually question whether the priorities of any government are to ensure that girl’s basic human rights are met first, or if men in suits would rather just “get her online”.