Internet Privacy, Digital Rights Come to Forefront as Web Evolves, Panelists Say
Where the first decades of the Internet were marked by a hands-off approach to regulation and legal issues, lawmakers must now focus on ensuring users’ privacy as the worldwide network of networks becomes ever more fundamental to so much of society, lawmakers and privacy experts said Wednesday. At a New America Foundation panel on transatlantic perspectives on digital rights and online privacy (http://xrl.us/bnh7hj), a delegation from Germany discussed Europeans’ concerns on digital policy issues.
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Confronting two totalitarian regimes in recent history has made Germans particularly passionate about protecting privacy on the Internet, said Konstantin von Notz, a member of German Parliament. In Germany, privacy is based on the understanding that the only player on the field able to threaten an individual’s privacy by collecting and scanning massive data is the government, he said, and smartphones make that threat ever more persistent. “I get tracked and profiled where I stand, where I go, where I shop, where I sleep, and where I go on vacations,” he said. Privacy is a fundamental constitutional right both in Germany and the U.S., he said. Von Notz expects Americans to soon confront a similarly intense discussion on the role of government in protecting citizens’ privacy.
The last 10 months have seen more directed focus on digital rights than the last 20 years, said Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn. “The digital rights issues have just exploded.” Although not at the point in the U.S. where people are being kicked out of office based on how they voted on the Stop Online Piracy Act, “we're getting darn close,” she said. “That is a major sea change."
Germans are just beginning to show an interest in the issue of copyright, said Markus Beckedahl, founder of netzpolitik.org. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement sparked a February protest in Berlin where Beckedahl expected to see about 600 protesters, but saw closer to 10,000, he said. “It was a bit like a revolution for us.” Since then, there’s been a heated debate on copyright reform in Germany. “It was our chance to demand something,” he said.
Daniel Weitzner, deputy chief technology officer-Internet policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, spoke of the need for regulation that protects users’ privacy while still allowing for the Internet to continue scaling up rapidly and quickly adopting innovations and new technologies. “We have to make sure that the rules are able to develop flexibly to keep up with the speed of innovation,” he said. Weitzner said there needs to be a conversation about how to extend free trade agreements to the Internet environment, while ensuring that the U.N. does not assert formal multilateral control over the Internet. “We think this would be an enormous mistake,” he said. “It would be harmful to the free expression environment of the Internet if we subject the free flow of information that currently exists on the Internet to a U.N. kind of one-country-one-vote style of governance.”