Stories from Abroad

The US government has initiated an extraordinary outreach campaign to foreign allies, trying to persuade wireless and internet providers in these countries to avoid telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies Co., apparently. American officials have briefed their government counterparts and telecom executives in friendly countries where Huawei equipment is already in wide use, including Germany, Italy and Japan, about what they see as cybersecurity risks.

Vice President Mike Pence insisted the Trump Administration has defended the freedom of the press globally, and dismissed comparisons between the White House's decision to revoke CNN reporter Jim Acosta's press pass and Vice President Pence's criticism of Myanmar's leader for jailing two journalists.

The scale of Chinese state support for the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, the close supply chain integration between the United States and China, and China’s role as an economic and military competitor to the United States create enormous economic, security, supply chain, and data privacy risks for the United States.

The 2018 edition of Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) focuses on local access models, specifically, community networks as self-organised, self-managed or locally developed solutions for local access, based on the conviction that one of the keys to affordable access is giving local people the skills and tools to solve their own connectivity challenges. Instead of buying an access service from a large corporate entity, community networks allow community members to self-provide and share infrastructure.

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which has been investigating the misuse of personal data by political campaigns, found that defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica violated British law when it used improperly harvested Facebook data to aid Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and would face a significant fine if it were not already in bankruptcy.

Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. The inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to protect people’s rights and freedoms on the internet. The contract outlines central principles that will be built into a full contract and published in May 2019, when half of the world’s population will be able to get online.

The 20^th Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) elected the first woman to one of five top executive positions in the history of the organization. Member States of ITU, the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technology, completed the elections for the posts of ITU Secretary-General, ITU Deputy Secretary-General, Director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) and Director of ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT). The winning candidates are:

Officials in Beijing are providing governments around the world with technology and training that enable them to control their own citizens. As Chinese companies compete with their international counterparts in crucial fields such as artificial intelligence and 5G mobile service, the democratic norms that long governed the global Internet are falling by the wayside. When it comes to Internet freedom, many governments are eager to buy the restrictive model that China is selling.

The internet is growing less free around the world, and democracy itself is withering under its influence. Disinformation and propaganda disseminated online have poisoned the public sphere. The unbridled collection of personal data has broken down traditional notions of privacy. And a cohort of countries is moving toward digital authoritarianism by embracing the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems. As a result of these trends, global internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year in 2018.