Larry Downes, for Forbes, with a very nice article recounting all of the missteps at WCIT and discussing their implications. Notably, Downes feels the collapse at WCIT will have the following impact:
The WCIT conference will go down as a turning point, when the world divided into governments who recognize the value of an open Internet, managed, developed and regulated by its users, and those who no longer feel obliged to pretend the spread of information is in the best interests of their citizens.
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Joseph Menn’s article for Reuters echoes that sentiment, discussing a possible balkanization of the Internet and a fear that “the Internet remains in imminent danger of new controls imposed by various countries” with the failure at WCIT possibly “hastening the end of the Net as we know it.” Remember that Iran was already moving towards an intranet. Then again, the article quotes Syracuse University’s Milton Mueller: “People who want to `secede’ from that global connectivity will have to introduce costly technical exceptions to do so.”
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