Part Three: Who Controls the Internet?

In part one and part two of our three-part series, we discussed attempts to regulate the Internet both nationally and globally. Though the future of internet governance is unknown, as regulatory agencies and governments clamp down, cooperation between Internet advocacy groups and regulatory agencies could help avoid increased Internet censorship or possible balkanization.

If the Internet were a movie, it would fall into the genre of films following the general plot of King Kong. What begins as a gentle giant, peaceful and safe in its natural habitat, eventually gets scared, terrorizes the public with a destructive rampage, and ends up shot with a tranquilizer dart and made to perform in the circus, or similar. Sometimes the movie ends at this point, the protagonist misunderstood and with no real chance of redemption, and the ending is sad (The Elephant Man). In other stories, the monster is rescued or even redeemed in the eyes of the once-angry public (The Iron Giant). The Internet is just one cyber-9/11 away from being shackled, upsetting the Web’s so-far rosy childhood that the public has enjoyed so much. Even barring an emergency, with federal lawmakers and restrictive foreign nations pushing for increased regulation, it’s possible that the Internet could become less free, less open and less useful than it is today, making for quite the sad ending.