The week before the London Cyber Conference in November 2011, the Russian Embassy in London published on its website a “Concept of a Convention on International Information Security,” which, in the unlikely scenario that world powers could agree on its principles, would assure that individual countries would assume their own sovereign roles with respect to cyberspace policy in their own countries.
“Practicing power politics in cyberspace in the name of cyber-freedom is untenable,” said Wang Qun, China’s ambassador for disarmament affairs, in a speech in New York last October.
But Vint Cerf, as a representative of Google and other major US Internet companies, isn’t standing for it.
“But if there’s one thing that we should not do, it is to centralize decision-making power,” Cerf told the committee on Thursday.
“The greatest strength of the current system of Internet governance is its meritocratic democracy. Anyone who cares can voice ideas and opinions, but the ultimate decisions are governed by broad consensus. It might not always be the most convenient of systems, but it’s the fairest, safest, and historically most effective way to ensure that good ideas win out and bad ideas die.”