China`s push to control the internet

**House of Wax** · 09-15-2016, 10:10 PM

China Could Control the Global Internet After Oct. 1

In November 2014, Li Yuxiao, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace, stated, according to the state-run China Daily, “Now is the time for China to realize its responsibilities. If the United States is willing to give up its running of the internet sphere, the question comes as to who will take the baton and how it would be run?”

“We have to first set our goal in cyberspace, and then think about the strategy to take, before moving on to refining our laws,” he said.

Li’s comments were in response to news, also in 2014, that the United States would relinquish its remaining federal government control of the internet by ending its contract between the Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is scheduled for Oct. 1.

As the United States plans to relinquish control of ICANN—and with this, fully end U.S. oversight of the Internet—the Chinese regime has moved to fill the void.

Over the last two years, it has drafted an authoritarian set of laws that governs every facet of the Internet, and it has formed or gained control over domestic and international bodies to press these new laws for the Internet through the United Nations, through domestic enforcement including on foreign companies inside China, and through organizations formed to interface directly with major technology companies abroad.

China Wants to Control What You Watch
ICANN is the body that governs domain name registration and ensures users are not redirected to a site they don’t intend to visit.

The United Nations branch responsible for internet-related issues, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), has been pushing to assume control of ICANN—and China has been working hard to control the ITU.

Laying the Groundwork
In the two years since Li gave his speech at the World Internet Conference, which had the slogan “An Interconnected World Shared and Governed by All,” the Chinese regime has gained ground in the goal to govern the global internet that Li laid out. The three-day conference in Wuzhen brought together more than 1,000 internet companies from over 100 countries and regions.

The chairman of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Steve Crocker speaks during the opening of the ICANN meeting in Singapore on Feb. 9, 2015. The U.S. plan to relinquish control of ICANN opens the door for China to have greater influence over the global Internet.

Li is now the secretary-general of the Cyber Security Association of China, which is chaired by Fang Binxing, the creator of China’s “Great Firewall,” which censors and monitors its internet. While the association uses enforcement of “cybersecurity” as a front, it is tasked specifically with enforcing the Chinese regime’s version of law on the internet.

China is also now at the helm of the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations body that has pushed to control the global Internet. Internet, which they have already started trying to enforce on U.S. and other companies operating in China.

The Chinese regime has also begun bringing major U.S. tech firms—including Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., and IBM—into its Technological Committee 260, tasked, according to the Wall Street Journal, with helping Chinese authorities draft rules for issues including encryption, big data, and cybersecurity and with determining which technologies should be “secure and controllable” under the Chinese regime.

The Chinese regime created a requirement that all key network infrastructure and information systems need to be “secure and controllable” as one piece of the sweeping National Security Law that covered everything from culture to politics, military space, the economy, the environment, and technology.

Soon after it was passed on July 1, 2015, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explained the requirement as “part of a strategic effort” intended to “ultimately supplant foreign technology companies both in China and in markets around the world.”

While the Chinese regime has started using “cybersecurity” to mask its goals, officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its state-run news outlets were very candid about their intentions at the 2014 World Internet Conference.

The state-run China Daily reported at the time that, “experts said China is using the platform to sell its own strategy and rules to the world, a mission that the world’s largest cyberpower with the most internet users has deemed significant and urgent.”

CCP Premier Li Keqiang said, in comments summarized by China Daily, that “China is considering setting up its own rules in cyberspace,” and that the CCP wants to create a “common code of rules” for the internet.

China Daily then quoted Shen Yi, an associate professor specializing in cybersecurity at Fudan University, who stated more directly that “China has the capability now to set up international rules for cyberspace and use our strategy and our rules to influence the world.”

A Contentious Move
Many U.S. government officials, organizations, and experts have sounded an alarm about the upcoming plans for the United States to relinquish control of ICANN, over concerns that a foreign authoritarian power may attempt to do precisely what the Chinese regime has already set into motion.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) introduced a bill, the Protecting Internet Freedom Act, on June 8, which seeks to prevent the U.S. handover of ICANN, and to ensure the United States retains sole ownership of .com and .mil domain names.

A post about the bill on Ted Cruz’s website states, “If that proposal goes through, countries like Russia, China, and Iran could be able to censor speech on the internet, including here in the United States, by blocking access to sites they don’t like.”

According to Chris Mattmann, who helped create some of the core technologies of the internet, these concerns could hold true, since part of ICANN’s role is to manage and coordinate the Domain Name System (DNS). If ICANN is no longer under U.S. oversight, he said, the process of determining which websites are shown to you when you enter a URL “will no longer be driven the U.S. Department of Commerce,” and this and this could be manipulated by foreign powers for anything from censorship to cyberattacks.

Mattmann helped develop how email systems work under a proposal from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is a department of ICANN. He also helped develop several Apache systems that are at the heart of the internet, and currently works with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“I think it needs to be heavily vetted,” he said, referring to ICANN, noting “Even when the Internet is itself distributed and decentralized, which it is, it starts to break down when there isn’t some element of centralized authority.”

These sentiments were shared by Philip Zimmermann, creator of the PGP encryption standard and chief scientist and co-founder of Silent Circle, a company specializing in secure communications.

Zimmerman said the United States needs to maintain control over the internet, lest “we give into control by an international body that can be easily influenced by member states that are oppressive societies.”

“The internet is supposed to make the weak have a voice, you know. If China controls their own domains within their country, it’s going to be easy to suppress opposition,” he said.

According to Barney Warf, a geography professor at the University of Kansas who has published research on global Internet freedom and governance, “this is a brutal, fascist, oppressive regime that has gone out of its way to suppress human rights.” He said even the possibility that the CCP could enforce its laws over the global Internet is a frightening thought.

Warf said one of the advantages of the Internet was that while the United States governed it informally, it did not place any firm control over the Internet, and this factor allowed innovation to flourish. He said the lack of strict governance gave people room to “experiment and make mistakes,” and added “I think the internet has thrived because there is no central power to it.”

Laws For the Internet
In January 2014, the ITU of the U.N. elected China’s Houlin Zhao to lead the organization that seeks to govern electronic communications.

Zhao had stated previously that censorship is subjective, and according to The New American in October 2014, when Zhao was asked about “the dictatorship’s massive censorship regime targeting dissent, dissidents, and ideas it disagrees with,” he replied evasively. “Some kind of censorship may not be strange to other countries,” he reportedly said.

**rlmccarty2000** · 09-16-2016, 01:05 PM

I read some articles on this and I`m sure I do not fully understand the whole concept, but from what I have read the whole thing is more about making money selling web addresses more than actually controlling the internet. If I am wrong please correct me. From what I have read Cruz is kind of confused and trying to make a political statement rather than actually save the internet from the Commies.