Well, you can be sure everyone invited to this Paris gala is investing lots of time figuring out how to get what they want from each other. This is no garden variety meet-and-greet. The pols want a little more control and a little less backlash when they attempt to exert it. The tech boys, particularly the new social media digitocracy, want hands off from the government types, which they will try to win by appearing cheerful, winsome and non-threatening. You could probably have made a lot of money last week by cornering the market in personality disorder medication.
The background is the Arab Spring and the role the social media played in fomenting it. The western leaders in their elegant suits dont fear mobs of disenfranchised youths so much as they fear mobs of fame-hungry bloggers and hackers. DSK's travails, while good news for M. Sarkozy in the short term, are a warning to all and sundry that public humiliation is one uploaded cell-phone photo away.
As for this week in Paris, the luminaries will circle likes dogs sniffing each other in a park. Nothing momentous will happen right away...but this is just the beginning of what could be a very interesting test of wills. JL
Martin Muller, Marcel Rosenbach and Stefan Simons report in Der Spiegel (hat tip Leslie Gaines-Ross):
"Nicolas Sarkozy is all too familiar with the pitfalls of the Internet. It wasn't long ago that the French president became the victim of an online attack himself, when unknown hackers hijacked his Facebook account and, in his name, circulated the false report that he would not be running for another term in office. Sarkozy reacted with surprising equanimity to the hacker attack, poking fun at the many spelling errors in his adversaries' message.
But, since Monday, Sarkozy has been having a chance to discuss the attack in front of some very important people. He has invited three of the world's most powerful Internet luminaries to a forum in Paris: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, the world's largest search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Facebook, the world's largest social-networking site, with more than 650 million users; and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the world's largest online retailer.
This is a rare gathering of such important figures. And the fact that Sarkozy, who is no stranger to the limelight, will actually be the one basking in the glow of great names is a particularly striking sign of the true importance of these online demigods. Indeed, people might not be able to point Paris out on the map, but they do know where the virtual realm of Facebook is: everywhere.
To make sure that the two-day G-8 summit starting Thursday in the coastal resort town of Deauville isn't just another routine meeting about the global policy agenda, Sarkozy chose to have this special "eG8" summit focused on the Internet before the main meeting.
The event, which is sponsored by major corporations and is being held under giant tents in Paris' Tuileries Garden, will see thousands of top industry executives and leading academics sharing their visions over two days. Anyone who was looking to hold the title of "co-chairman" of the event only had to fork over €250,000 ($350,000) for the privilege
Sarkozy has big plans. A joint resolution would essentially embrace the digital vision of Deauville, which the Elysée Palace refers to as a "thematic premier, that -- curiously enough -- has never been jointly addressed by the leaders of the industrialized nations."
The Frenchman has never shied away from theatrics and lofty words. And there's no denying that the major online companies -- which are mostly American -- and the world's top politicians -- and particularly the European ones -- either don't know much about or are suspicious of each other.
There are many topics to be discussed, including data protection, fighting terrorism, hacker attacks and, most recently, the seemingly manic desire of Apple and similar companies to hoard user location data.
Still, the Internet community views Sarkozy's effort to make "the Internet" the central topic of a G-8 summit with a great deal of suspicion. And perhaps with good reason: More than three years ago, Sarkozy declared war on the Web. At the time, he referred to it as a "Wild West" and characterized it as an "extralegal zone." In the style of an Internet Napoleon, he announced his intention to "civilize the Internet." Since then, he has pursued regulation with nothing short of missionary zeal.
Civilizing the Virtual 'Wild West'
In 2008, Frédéric Lefebvre, a member of parliament for the UMP, the conservative governing party, raged that, without strict controls, the Internet would remain a hotbed of "psychopaths, rapists, racists and thieves." After a recent meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, Sarkozy added: "Regulating the Internet to correct its excesses and abuses that come about in the total absence of rules -- this is a moral imperative!"
For some time, there has been a storm of new Internet-related laws and regulations designed to protect authors, copyright and internal security as well as to block certain websites. Sarkozy has aimed to "regulate," "cleanse" or at least "civilize" the same media sector that has often embarrassed him by publishing revealing quotes, photos and videos.
In 2010, France introduced a rigid three-step model for copyright violations and created a new regulatory agency called HADOPI. Under the legislation, anyone caught illegally copying music receives two warnings, the first by e-mail and the second by registered mail. At third violation brings anything ranging from monetary fines to an Internet ban. For the law's many critics, being blocked by one's Internet service provider is tantamount to a "digital death penalty."
The Sarkozy administration also turned its attention to unpopular content. A package of laws on internal security adopted in February includes the possibility of blocking certain websites, such as those displaying child pornography.
An Issue of Civilization … or Control?
Sarkozy apparently wanted to leave nothing to chance for his big "Net G-8" appearance. Last fall, when then-Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was planning to host a conference on freedom of expression, Sarkozy sent him a letter warning him not to forget about his own goal of fostering a civilized Internet and reminding Kouchner that he, le président, had chosen this as a central issue of the France's G-8 presidency. As a result, the conference was promptly cancelled.
This track record has only fueled the current fears of online activists. The summit is "a farce," says Jérémie Zimmermann, the cofounder and spokesman of the advocacy group "La Quadrature du Net," noting that Sarkozy has made it clear that he wants to impose his authoritarian ideas about regulation on his G-8 colleagues.
La Quadrature du Net, together with other Net activists and initiatives, already called for protests in advance of the summit. Under the slogan "G-8 vs. Internet," the group argues that the world's governments are "uniting to control and censor the Internet."
It's always possible that Sarkozy will garner some support for his initiatives from his Internet celebrity guests in Paris. But, while in London last week, Google's Schmidt said that efforts to block domain names and Internet censorship could have devastating consequences for free speech. "I would be very, very careful about that stuff," Schmidt said.
Part 2: German Missteps
It's no accident that some are afraid of seeing France's ideas exported. Only last fall, the European Parliament approved a report by the French UMP/EVP parliamentarian Marielle Gallo calling for sanctions similar to those of France's three-step penalty plan to be instituted throughout Europe. Though it has yet to succeed, the music industry wants to see similar regulations introduced in Germany.
Former German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), rejected the French model. And industry associations also haven't had any luck with her successor, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP).
In Germany, after a brief boom, the debate over Internet policy quickly subsided, partly because the federal government has sometimes deeply embarrassed itself with its efforts. The best example is the "Access Restriction Law," which was intended to bar access to websites with child pornography. Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen promoted the project when she was still family minister, thereby inadvertently helping to give birth to and attract voters to Germany's Pirate Party.
The movement quickly found its bêtes noires in "Zensursula," a portmanteau word combining her first name and the German word for censorship, and then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble ("Stasi 2.0"), the current finance minister. After the new coalition government came into power, the FDP succeeded in having a moratorium placed on the law. And now new laws are repealing the regulations that never went into effect.
From Overhasty to Hostile
When Defense Minister Thomas de Maizière was still the interior minister, he seemed to be taking a more deft approach. He designated Internet policy as one of the key issues to be addressed during his term in office. He invited experts to attend round-table discussions in the hopes of improving the poisoned climate. And he gave a speech laying out his Internet policy, in which he philosophized broadly on the Net while giving a particular focus to the relationship the state should have to it.
Still, before de Maizière could make any headway, reality caught up with him in the form of a heated debate over Google Street View, Facebook and data privacy in Germany. De Maizière's fellow cabinet member, Federal Minister of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection Ilse Aigner, made significantly more headlines than the cautious interior minister when she made the naïve (and now realized) threat to deactivate her Facebook account.
Doing so forced de Maizière to set precedents more quickly than he had hoped to. The result was another hastily compiled piece of draft legislation that primarily emphasized the self-regulation of companies and was supposed to define a "red line" for privacy protection on the Internet. But, as of late, little has been heard about the draft bill or the entire political field.
When the Interior Ministry was asked to comment on the matter, officials there said that the situation remained fundamentally unchanged and that outside academic experts would now be consulted owing to the complexity of the issues. The ministry, they added, is now "in the reflection phase."
In March, de Maizière was replaced as head of the Interior Ministry by Hans-Peter Friedrich, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Party (CDU). In terms of domestic politics, the CSU has traditionally viewed data privacy as something that merely shields criminals. Indeed, despite Friedrich's snappy slogans about "laptops and lederhosen," his main constituency isn't exactly at home in the online world.
A Minor Setback for Sarkozy
There have also been setbacks in France. Last week, shortly before his major online summit, Sarkozy also suffered an embarrassing setback. In the wake of a data leak, his Internet agency HADOPI cut off its ties with the company that it administered the three-step process with. But at least the head of the agency notified the public quickly and in a fitting manner: via Twitter.
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