Europe calls for global Internet treaty

Europe has proposed a global Internet Treaty to protect the Internet from political interference and place into international law its founding principles of open standards, network neutrality, freedom of expression and pluralistic governance.

The draft law was compared to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as the Council of Europe presented it to web luminaries from around the world at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week. Dignitaries warned that governments were threatening the Internet with fragmentation by bringing it under political control. The proposed Internet Treaty would require countries to sustain the technological foundations that made the network of networks possible. The proposed law would also require global co-operation in the protection of critical Internet infrastructure. It would similarly preserve the multi-stakeholder system of governance that has forced governments to subordinate their desires to regulate the net to forums that give an equal voice to engineers and representatives of commercial and civil society. The treaty would make the system of Internet governance overseen by ICANN adhere to international human rights law. The treaty's principles would furthermore uphold rights to freedom of expression and association and require states to preserve "human dignity" and the "free and autonomous development of identity" on the Internet.