As earlier predicted, global politicians who see their turfs dramatically being eroded by the rapidly expanding flow of decentralized information, enabled and facilitated by the web, will declare an open war against the cyberspace.
The New York Times reports,
Leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized countries are set to issue a provocative call for stronger Internet regulation, a cause championed by the host of the meeting, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, but fiercely opposed by some Internet companies and free-speech groups.
The G-8 leaders will urge the adoption of measures to protect children from online predators, to strengthen privacy rights and to crack down on digital copyright piracy, according to two people who have seen drafts of a communiqué the G-8 will issue at the end of a meeting this week in Deauville, France. At the same time, the document is expected to include a pledge to maintain openness and to support entrepreneurial, rather than government-led, development of the Internet.
This balancing act was reflected Tuesday in a speech by Mr. Sarkozy, who convened a special gathering of the global digerati in Paris on the eve of the G-8 meeting. Calling the rise of the Internet a “revolution,” Mr. Sarkozy compared its impact to that of two previous transforming episodes in global history: the age of exploration and the industrial revolution.
The Internet revolution “doesn’t have a flag, it doesn’t have a slogan, it belongs to everyone,” he said, citing the recent uprisings in the Arab world as examples of its positive effects.
These actions represent “resistance to change”, whereby politicians will try to enforce information control or censorship in the way the industrial age used to operate.
The horizontal flow of information threatens the institutional centralized frameworks built upon the industrial age economy.
As I earlier wrote,
Political and economic ideology latched on a vertical top-bottom flow of power will be on a collision course with horizontal real time flow of democratized knowledge.
This would likely result to less applicability of ideologies based on centralization, which could substantially erode its support base and shift political capital to decentralized structure of political governance that would conform with the horizontal structure of information flows.
People will know more therefore control from the top will be less an appealing idea.
But again these attempts to regulate the web are likely to fail.
Nevertheless the war on the internet accounts as part of the adjustment process away from the command and control structure of the industrial ages with the knowledge revolution taking place beyond the reach of politicians. Besides, technological advances will work around regulations.
As visionary Alvin Toffler writes (Revolutionary Wealth p.40)
As change accelerates still further, institutional crisis will not be limited to the United States. Every country in the twenty-first-century world economy—including China, India, Japan and the E.U. nations—will need to invest new style institutions and adjust the balance between synchronization and de-synchronization. Some countries may find it more difficult than the United States, whose culture, at least, smiles on change-makers.
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