A private memo from within the G8 meeting on Thursday between internet chiefs and world leaders indicates strong levels of support from Barack Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and co for the principles of internet freedom put forward by Facebook, Google and their peers.
The confidential document, seen by the FT, supports the internet’s role in furthering the distribution of knowledge and free speech, broadly accepting a light-touch, internationally harmonised approach to regulation.
This private view from inside the Deauville meeting – billed as a potential clash between internet entrepreneurship and a French president hell-bent on taming the web – suggests a much more friendly and positive exchange.
The leaked document sets out around a dozen of the G8 leaders’ responses to the presentation by Eric Schmidt of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Yuri Milner of DST Global, as well as France Telecom’s Stephane Richard, Rakuten’s Hiroshi Mikitani and Publicis Groupe’s Maurice Levy.
The very first item holds up the internet as a vehicle for the positive forces in society that helped bring about the end of the cold war. Although the web can scarcely have played much role of a in the fall of the Berlin wall, it’s an eye-catching comparison that puts the internet on an even bigger pedestal than the latest Arab spring may indicate.
Other items include advocating the faster deployment of fibre-optic broadband, greater cooperation on cyber security and “open data” principles for governments. Everyone in the room opposed internet censorship in any form, and said every nation has a role to play in keeping the web “open”.
There was even acknowledgement of the need to update some aspects of copyright – albeit more along the lines of the UK’s Hargreaves Review proposals to allow things like format-shifting, rather than the radical overhaul advocated by Lawrence Lessig and John Perry Barlow at the e-G8 Forum in Paris earlier this week.
On the crucial issue of privacy, the G8 leaders seem to have heeded Mr Zuckerberg’s plea not to conflate greater protection of personal information with a broad-brush regulation of social networks and other web services.
The very fact that a passage confirming the G8 leaders’ commitment to a “strong and flourishing internet” has been included in the public declaration is a great endorsement of the technology industry’s “essential” role in today’s society.
Both David Cameron and Barack Obama have made much of their internet-friendly approach to government. (Indeed, some have criticised Mr Cameron for being too close to Google.) And political smiles behind closed doors don’t always result in public action.
Nonetheless, the meeting must have given the internet delegation further confidence that it was worth making the short-notice trip to France. Perhaps we can expect to see an e-G8 every year.
