Remarks of Assistant Secretary Redl at the Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference

Governments around the world are finding that the old ways of ensuring national security, conducting law enforcement operations, and protecting the privacy rights of their citizens are being challenged by a medium that does not conform to borders or existing legal regimes. Indeed, the Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network’s three workstreams hit at the heart of these challenges.

In the “data and jurisdiction” discussion, for instance, we see how prior methods of obtaining evidence for criminal investigations and prosecutions are being undercut by rapid changes in technology. As a result of the growth of cloud computing and new and sophisticated data storage methods, longstanding legal and policy regimes, designed in an analog world where information was almost exclusively stored locally, are today becoming in many ways obsolete.    In the “content and jurisdiction” workstream, similarly, we’re witnessing how the mass proliferation of digital content, made available on a global scale by the Internet, is leading to legal, cultural, and - in certain respects -  ideological conflicts. These are conflicts that are putting immense pressure not only on governments, who must uphold their domestic laws, but also on the platforms hosting the content, as they are forced to reconcile regularly competing legal demands of multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.   And in the “domains and jurisdiction” discussion, lastly, we’re seeing how the underlying infrastructure of the Internet is being tested by abuses of, and on, the Domain Name System, and the inherent ambiguity of what is an appropriate response to potentially abusive behavior.