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G-20 leaders resolve to prevent exploitation of Internet for terrorism
G-20 leaders resolve to prevent exploitation of Internet for terrorism
This statement was reportedly an initiative of the Australian Prime Minister.
Given the track record of private firms policing hate speech, I'm very concerned at what this will mean.
Bulk data collection of everyone's internet history? International efforts to block or shut down websites with questionable content? Bans on the general sale of VPNs? Proxies are now illegal?
The thing is... the internet isn't really being used to orchestrate terrorist attacks and I don't understand how locking down the internet China style will stop such attacks. The ISIS gunmen who attacked the Bataclan theatre in Paris used burner phones to communicate with one another.
I find it troubling that they call on platforms to act of their own accord and according to their own plans. This seems like a highly undemocratic way of dealing with a potent threat to the functioning of democracies wordwide.
EDIT: In addition, that photo with the SBS article (second link) is much too cheerful (smiles across the board!) for one with Bolsanaro, Putin, and Xinping in it, and Trump joking with Mohammad Bin Salman on the front row :-/
The text of the announcement had to be agreed to by countries as different as Canada, the UK, and Germany on one hand, and Russia, China, and Turkey on the other hand. We're lucky they said anything at all!
I'm not sure what you mean by "undemocratic", though. Surely, leaving the plans and actions up to individual companies to decide is a very democratic approach - as opposed to an autocratic approach such as laying down intrusive laws telling companies what to do.
Leaving society-shaping policy up to profit-driven private corporations that have a single or at best small group of extremely wealthy individuals at the helm seems to me a combination of oligarchy, technocracy, and corpocracy.
How is public policy determined by unaccountable private monopolies (practically) democratic? It's better than dictatorship, sure, but that's not a very high bar.
'Telling companies what to do' is a sine qua non for democracy. All markets are constructed spaces, made possible and policed by states. And the interests of (large and multnational) companies often conflicts with the public interest. See, e.g., anti-trust, safety regulations, fair advertising rules, transparent accounting obligations, etcetera...
This reminds me of the "Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology" Saudi Arabia announced a couple years ago (which gave us this amazing photo)
How's that going? Guess it hasn't made much progress if they still need to make another resolution to tackle this issue.