Eg8 societecivile : Différence entre versions

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(Yochai Benkler)
(Yochai Benkler)
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This is an enormous learning moment. That  opposition has been there for fifteen years, and occasionally we’ve  seen periods such as in the United States twelve years ago where the  approach of shutting things down, making Internet Service Providers have  to look upon of  what it is that the content of their producers,  regulating on software, regulating new services to make sure that they  don't make too much of a threat to the incumbent industries win. Then there was a  long period of lolling in between where we understood the centrality of  the commons,  where we understood the centrality of what's open, and now what is  baffling about this two days is the seemingly resurgence of what we saw  ten, twelve, fifteen years ago as though we had  learned nothing. When people yesterday on the panel on IP were talking  about if we don't have strong intellectual  property the Internet will  be just an empty set of tubes and boxes, I heard that fifteen years ago,  and maybe, maybe then it was a plausible assumption.
 
This is an enormous learning moment. That  opposition has been there for fifteen years, and occasionally we’ve  seen periods such as in the United States twelve years ago where the  approach of shutting things down, making Internet Service Providers have  to look upon of  what it is that the content of their producers,  regulating on software, regulating new services to make sure that they  don't make too much of a threat to the incumbent industries win. Then there was a  long period of lolling in between where we understood the centrality of  the commons,  where we understood the centrality of what's open, and now what is  baffling about this two days is the seemingly resurgence of what we saw  ten, twelve, fifteen years ago as though we had  learned nothing. When people yesterday on the panel on IP were talking  about if we don't have strong intellectual  property the Internet will  be just an empty set of tubes and boxes, I heard that fifteen years ago,  and maybe, maybe then it was a plausible assumption.
  
Today, it  is laughable, except that it seems to have the ear of power. So, I  think that what's critical here, is to understand is that there are  pathways, like the Hargreaves Report from last week shows a pathway that  says: No! I don't have to lock things down, I have to be very careful  about locking things down for IP, instead I need to explore ways to open  and allow flows. That's the critical opposition. Achieving socially desirable and acceptable and legitimate goals while retaining an open fluid flowing free Internet. Versus, being so scared of the new, that you  are willing to lock it down, or to try to lock it down and to distort  it, that's the opposition on which we all have to be, whether it's about  business, and innovation, about social equality and access, or about  democracy and participation, whether it's about liberty, equality or  fraternity. We all have to be on the same side of the path of retaining
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Today, it  is laughable, except that it seems to have the ear of power. So, I  think that what's critical here, is to understand is that there are  pathways, like the Hargreaves Report from last week shows a pathway that  says: No! I don't have to lock things down, I have to be very careful  about locking things down for IP, instead I need to explore ways to open  and allow flows. That's the critical opposition. Achieving socially desirable and acceptable and legitimate goals while retaining an open fluid flowing free Internet. Versus, being so scared of the new, that you  are willing to lock it down, or to try to lock it down and to distort  it, that's the opposition on which we all have to be, whether it's about  business, and innovation, about social equality and access, or about  democracy and participation, whether it's about liberty, equality or  fraternity. We all have to be on the same side of the path of retaining an open net.

Version du 26 mai 2011 à 15:11

Conférence de presse de la Société Civile lors de l'eG8

  • [LL] Lawrence Lessig (law teacher Creative Commons founder)
  • [JJ] Jeff Jarvis (american journalist),
  • [JFJ] Jean-François Julliard (secrétaire général de RSF)
  • [SC] Susan Crawford (former ICANN board member l'ICANN)
  • [JZ] Jérémie Zimmermann (spokesman of La Quadrature du Net).
  • [YB] Yochai Benkler (co-directeur du Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet).


Jérémie Zimmermann

Thank you, everyone to be here, sorry for the improvising and the impromptu condition of this press conference, as you also know, there is very very little, if any, representation of civil society in this eG8. In last minute on Thursday, they threw in some foldable chairs for us, they improvised some freedom of expression panel just to say that our issues were represented after all. But what we saw yesterday was Nicolas Sarkozy addressing only CEOs and business actors, telling them You are the internet, You are the revolution and You are doing everything.

And you now have the responsibility to fight the pedonazis, the terrorists, and the copyright wars, so this is something that disturbs us, I think, all of us, here. Maybe each of us will make a quick statement of 4 to 5 minutes, let's say 4 minutes if we can do it. We have fantastic people around here from Yochai Benkler of the Berkman Center, to Jean-François Julliard of Reporters Sans Frontières, to Susan, how would you define yourself?

Susan Crawford

Susan Crawford, former ICANN board member.

Jérémie Zimmermann

Professor Lawrence Lessig who doesn't need any introduction at all, and Jeff Jarvis. Maybe Susan, you can begin.

Susan Crawford

The communique's already been drafted for this g8 summit, errr meeting, this e-g8 meeting.

It's been leaked to the NYtimes which published this story this morning, explaining exactly what the communique would say. The reason this press conference has been called is that civil society groups have joined together from around the world, to issue a very short and simple statement, calling on the eG8 and in turn the G8 to protect the open internet, to maintain the neutrality of the internet, to establish the principles that encourage the free flow of the information. All of us sitting up here today understand as do you out there, that an open internet is actually the basis for a democratic flourishing around the world; that all government policies that hoped to encourage citizens to flourish including education, health, energy policy ... very variety of policy that operates in the world today are all encouraged by the existance of an open Internet and that access to the Internet is fundamental to human beings around the world. These are the most important policies that governments should be embracing: an open and fast and fair, and free Internet, so it's a very simple reason for this conference. We wanna make sure that these other voices are heard, even though the communique itself may already have been drafted. I call on my colleagues here, and Mr Jarvis, Mr Lessig, Mr Benkler and reporters from Reporters Without Borders to amplify on these remarks. But it's really very simple. We feel these voices aren't being heard. We really want to ensure that the voiceless, the future that hasn't been invited to this conference is allowed to have its say as well.

Jérémie Zimmermann

Thank you Suzan. We have a few copies here of the civil society statement to the eG8 and G8.

The signature list is not the latest one. You can see groups such as Access Now who couldn't get a badge to enter here, the Association for Progressive Communications… I won’t name them all, but there is german Digitale Gesellschaft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the European EDRI and so on and so on… There is also this petition, that was organized by Access Now, that has been signed now by people from more than nineteen countries, to reclaim exactly what was mentionned before, which is all that is not at the eG8. So, maybe we will hear now Jean-François, because he will be leaving for a workshop later on, and (yep, reporters without borders).

Jean-François Julliard

Yeah, thank you, I’m going to speak in French, I’m sorry for those who don’t understand French, but I will say the same during the next panel in a couple of minutes, but I would like to say a few words

In French because there are many French reporters here.

I am extremely disappointed by what is said here, in this meeting from the start, because we gathered the top people concerned with the internet throughout the world, the CEOs of the biggest companies, those that made Internet’s extraordinary growth possible, whereas there hasn’t been a single word concerning those who are suffering because of the Internet, I think of the 126 people who are now in jail, 126 bloggers NetCitizens, Internet users, who are jailed in Iran, in China, in Libya, in Vietnam, and in a whole lot of other countries, who are jailed only because they have used Internet, I find this outrageous that no one had a thought for them yet, none of the leaders in the Internet sector who talked since the beginning of the meeting have had a thought for them.

It is good to want to promote Internet, but we should start with having a thought for those who are suffering from this, and I can also tell that if we need to make only one recommendation to the G8 and the governments that compose the G8, it would be to put the defence of a Free internet before anything else. There is today one person in three in the world, one internet user in three, who doesn’t have access to a free internet.

So before thinking of regulation, before thinking of even defending intellectual property, before thinking to promote economic transactions on the Internet, we need to focus on keeping Internet free. Focus on allowing the Internet users, all around the world, wherever they might be, to keep accessing a free Internet, and to keep accessing the same Internet. So if we have to make only one recommendation, it’s this one, disregarding any other recommendation, the G8 governments need to make the defence of a Free internet their one absolute priority.

Jérémie Zimmermann

Thank you Jean-François. It's very hard now to choose who between those impressive analysts will speak first. Shall we cast a vote ? Professor Lessig, maybe ?

Lawrence Lessig

Yes, so, I just spoke and I'll be very brief. It's surprising to come to France and find something so deeply American going on. In the United States, for the last 30 years, we've been trapped in an ideology that says that we should regulate by getting business together and ask them what is good public policy. We've done that in the United States to our great detriment.The financial crisis brought about by deregulation pushed on the American government by financial interests who benefited and then brought the economy down.

And in every other area of Internet policy we see the same thing we have no broadband as Bankler's report for the Berkman Center demonstrates, we have no penetration, no effect of broadband in the United States because of a strong policy of deregulation that the American government bought, and it bought because the only people they cared to listen to were business.

So to come to France, and to see an event like this, where the presumption of the President is « Get the biggest businesses together and ask them what the future of the internet should be » is astonishing, it’s just, I, you know, I did a little bit of French philosophy, but I don’t remember the French philosopher who said « Public policy is best devised by asking the businesses to draw up the public policy. ». That doesn’t sound very French to me.

  • applause*.

So I’d love to come back to the Paris that I loved before, which is not the American version of Paris, but the French version of Paris, by a reminder that they are more interests than the interest of business. Business is important, and in business there is a division between the incumbents and the innovators and we have to keep that division alive. But there is also the people who built the internet. They weren’t originally business, it was civil society, it was ISOC, it was ICANN, euh not ICANN, it was IETF, but it was a bunch of people who just aren’t here, so I agree with Susan, we need to find a way to remind the people here, that the people who are not here, who are just as important to the story.

Yochai Benkler

To avoid repeating, the critical change produced by the digital network environment is a radical decentralization of the capacity to speak, to create, to innovate, to see together, to socialize, the radical distribution of the poor means of production, computations, communications, storage, sensing, capture human sociality that which gets us together inside the experience, being there on the ground. That is true for the first time since the industrial revolution, that people can actually, with the things they own, capture the world and do something that is at the very core of the most advanced economies. Preserving that framework, preserving a framework that is open, free-flowing, flexible, adaptive to change and inviting so that one person's sacrifice in Sidi Bouziz can then be translated throughout the Arab world into a moment of mobilization. That’s new, that’s what is critical.

For over fifteen years now, we have seen two opposing camps around the question of internet policy, one camp is the camp of the 20th century incumbents, who are afraid that something will change, who are afraid of the people rising to participate, afraid of the outsiders innovating, and coming from the edges, who aren't authorized by the incumbents to innovate, who don’t have to come and say « Will you please implement this for me on your network? ». These are all the companies that we see now as great fifteen years ago, were from the outside « That’s where the source of innovation is».

And the other has been « Let’s keep things open, let’s keep things flexible, let’s keep things flow. ». And this opposition between those who say « It’s going too fast, slow it down, make it manageable, make it safe » and those who say « It’s extraordinary, it’s creative, let’s open this up, because we’re in a process of continuous experimentation, and adaptation, and learning.»

This is an enormous learning moment. That opposition has been there for fifteen years, and occasionally we’ve seen periods such as in the United States twelve years ago where the approach of shutting things down, making Internet Service Providers have to look upon of what it is that the content of their producers, regulating on software, regulating new services to make sure that they don't make too much of a threat to the incumbent industries win. Then there was a long period of lolling in between where we understood the centrality of the commons, where we understood the centrality of what's open, and now what is baffling about this two days is the seemingly resurgence of what we saw ten, twelve, fifteen years ago as though we had learned nothing. When people yesterday on the panel on IP were talking about if we don't have strong intellectual property the Internet will be just an empty set of tubes and boxes, I heard that fifteen years ago, and maybe, maybe then it was a plausible assumption.

Today, it is laughable, except that it seems to have the ear of power. So, I think that what's critical here, is to understand is that there are pathways, like the Hargreaves Report from last week shows a pathway that says: No! I don't have to lock things down, I have to be very careful about locking things down for IP, instead I need to explore ways to open and allow flows. That's the critical opposition. Achieving socially desirable and acceptable and legitimate goals while retaining an open fluid flowing free Internet. Versus, being so scared of the new, that you are willing to lock it down, or to try to lock it down and to distort it, that's the opposition on which we all have to be, whether it's about business, and innovation, about social equality and access, or about democracy and participation, whether it's about liberty, equality or fraternity. We all have to be on the same side of the path of retaining an open net.