How Russia and the UN are actually planning to take over the Internet | TheHill

How Russia and the UN are actually planning to take over the Internet | TheHill: "Only the academic publishing industry has enthusiastically adopted DOA in the form of its digital object identifier standard. Since 2000, journal articles are assigned permanent identifiers that point to digital versions of the articles. Metadata associated with journal article objects usually point to a traditional URL where the article can be accessed.

In a more advanced DOA environment, the system might use the permanent identifier associated with your laptop to determine whether you had the right to access the article.

 As it turns out, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia all really like the idea of baking information management directly into next-generation protocols. These governments all believe that information flows a bit too freely on today’s Internet. Wouldn’t it be great, they reason, if tomorrow’s Internet allowed us to track all devices online as well as withhold access to any content we did not want to disseminate?

Authoritarian regimes missed the boat on influencing existing Internet standards, but so-called “next-generation networks” provide a new opportunity.

The U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is an agency that, among other activities, hosts standards meetings between governments and telecom companies. Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia have used this forum to advance their vision for next-generation networks, including DOA.

The main point of attack is the ITU telecom sector’s Study Group 20, which focuses on the so-called “Internet of Things.”

The authoritarian regimes have banded together to ensure that DOA is adopted as the overarching standard for IoT devices, ostensibly in the name of protecting against “device counterfeiting.” In reality, DOA will allow IoT devices to be pervasively and persistently tracked. Next-generation networks could deny access to any device without a valid identifier. And by requiring registration at the point of purchase, tracking will extend to people, not just the devices.


In the long run, these next-generation networks open the door to rethinking the Internet on territorial lines. Suppose the Russian government, as is likely, runs the authoritative DOA server for everyone in Russia. In addition to tracking activity online, they could control the flow of information into the country and censor information at the border." 'via Blog this'