After enjoying a fabulous Thanksgiving week, I fell sick. This is the usual flu like symptoms and cold and cough that I can’t seem to prevent twice a year. Except, this time it hit me hard. I rarely choose to stay home when I feel sick from cold and cough. After a long time, I had to do it. Now I am feeling much better, though I have a few more days of recovery left. On Monday, 11/26 and Tue, 11/27, some of us gathered in Bryn Mawr College for the Seven College Gathering. This used to be the seven sisters, which is now down to really six, of which one is a sibling (Vassar). This year, in addition to the usual groups that gather – the Presidents, Provosts and Deans of Students – they also invited the CIOs because of the importance and the future of Libraries and Technologies in small Liberal Arts Colleges.

It was a very nice gathering and the group of CIOs discussed various matters ranging from online learning to the Libraries as space, but most importantly, we agreed to collaborate on a couple of projects. One around digitization of materials in the archives for a Women in Education project and another around how best to support Digital Humanities in our campuses. The details of these will emerge later and I will be happy to share when we know more.

In case you have not heard, a UN sponsored conference begins in Dubai this week – World Conference on International Communication (WCIT)  – organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The official language used here would lead one to think about this is yet another conference to talk about “international communication”, tariffs, taxes and the likes. It turns out that this is a conference where some select countries (the usual suspects like Russia and China) are pushing for international agreements on regulating internet traffic. As we all know, this has become the dominant vehicle for international communication. We all should pay attention to this and express our opinion on why any regulation is such a bad idea. You can do that at a Google Sponsored site – Take Action.

The internet went from its infancy to adulthood too rapidly for the lawmakers to control it. I don’t want to rehash the well known debates of the balance of good and evil in Internet or complicated topics such as lost sales tax revenues resulting from internet commerce. Suffice it to say that the growth in the use of the internet fueled by the world wide web, is like many of the modern technologies. They happen so fast and is driven by the technologists and the users eager to use them that the full ramifications of any technologies such as their sociological impact or health effects come as an afterthought. Then the patchwork, such as net neutrality, SOPA, PIPA etc. happen  and don’t generally stand a chance. Once people are used to certain things, it is so hard to take them away.

It is exactly the same with the proliferation of internet to all the countries in the world. Initially, this was welcomed because many saw this an attractive technology for the benefit of their countries and it was the “in thing” to do to stay on par with the rest of the world. I don’t know this for a fact, but I am willing to bet that many political leaders had no idea about the power of social media. Once they began seeing what it can do to shake the fundamental political and power structures in the countries in ways that are so counter to what the leadership wants, they are on a path to curb it, or regulate it. Whether it is China’s attempt to censor content or the recent attempt by Syria to cut off internet for a couple of days, these are are desperate and half-baked attempts at trying to curb the free flow of information and freedom of expression. Of course, everyone is entitled to different opinions on these loaded subjects, but these countries don’t seem to understand that the technologies of today don’t lend themselves to simply turning some machinery off to accomplish this. There are so many different ways in which we communicate, be it wired, wireless or mobile, it is hard to first off cut them all off (like Iran found out). Secondly, if you do that, you may actually be inadvertently cutting off some highly critical communications path also.

The reason why we should care about the discussion at WCIT is that the regulation will affect all of us! They are talking about things like “sender-pays” (where all communications from me to my folks in India will result in the various ISPs who carry those communications from me to them should pay the government of India a fee) and internet censorship which will affect all of us. In terms of sender-pays, some companies (even those in the US) argue that the more media rich content is being delivered, the more the telecom companies have to invest to be able to deliver this to the users. Therefore they want the companies like Google (for YouTube) and Netflix to pay them! This obviously is against the idea of net neutrality which calls for non-discrimination of content being delivered. Of course, I don’t buy this argument, because the telecom companies are making a boat load of money despite their investments in faster mobile technologies, so they must be socking it to the end users…

The more troublesome part is the censorship, “national control”,  and access to identity information of the sender.  I will stop with that and let you imagine a worst case scenario for each of these and you will get how serious this nonsense is. A leaked memo (taken from http://www.computing.co.uk) states that Russia has these ominous proposals (apparently these have been watered down):

• “Member States shall have the sovereign right to regulate the activities of operating agencies providing Internet access services within their national territory…
• …the sovereign right to manage the Internet within their national territory, as well as to manage national Internet domain names.
• …should ensure that administrations and operating agencies cooperate with the aim of developing the Internet within their national territory.
• …should ensure that administrations and operating agencies cooperate with the aim of maintaining the security, integrity and reliable operation of the national Internet segment.”

So, you get it. Please pay attention and have your voices heard – Take Action!