http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/11/361&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
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http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/11/361&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
2011.05.31 in E-Strategies/Policy | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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2011.05.31 in E-Strategies/Policy | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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This report underlines the need to ensure that citizens and businesses are easily able to access an open and neutral internet. It follows a Commission commitment, at the time of adoption of the EU telecom reform package, to report to the Parliament and Council and reflects comments made during a public consultation, which attracted over 300 responses, and wide discussions with interested parties including a summit organised with the European Parliament.
The Commission will be vigilant that new EU telecoms rules on transparency, quality of service and the ability to switch operator, which entered into force on 25 May 2011, are applied in a way that ensures that these open and neutral internet principles are respected in practice. For example, the Commission will pay close attention to the existence of generalised restrictions of lawful services and applications and to EU citizens' and businesses' broadband connections being as fast as indicated by Internet Service Providers' advertising.
Other rules directly relevant to net neutrality that have also been in force as part of new EU telecoms rules include requirements concerning:
2011.05.31 in E-Strategies/Policy | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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Broadband is today’s transformational technology. By revolutionizing access to content and changing the delivery paradigms for a whole host of public and private sector services, it is becoming essential basic infrastructure for every country’s future development. Yet for the moment, access to high-speed Internet is very much a rich-world privilege. To truly harness the power of information and communication technologies to create tomorrow’s Knowledge Societies and meet the Millennium Development Goals, new approaches to driving broadband roll-out across economic barriers are urgently needed. This report looks at what broadband can bring, the state of deployment around the world, and innovative models that can help bring high-speed connectivity to the world’s poorest communities.
The full report and Executive Summary will be available for download from 12:00 CET on Monday 6 June at:
www.broadbandcommission.org/index.html#outcomes
2011.05.31 in E-Strategies/Policy, Infrastructure | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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By: Rebekah Heacock
The OpenNet Initiative is pleased to share a report authored by Helmi Noman on the rise of the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of pro-government computer hackers that are actively targeting political opposition and Western websites:
Since the beginning of the popular uprisings and protests in the Middle East and North Africa, events in the region have been characterized by increased contestation in cyberspace among regime sympathizers, governments, and opposition movements. One component of this contestation is the tendency among governments and networks of citizens supportive of the state to use offensive computer network attacks. Such tactics are supplements to legal, regulatory, and other controls, and technical forms of Internet censorship.
For example, a group known as the Iranian Cyber Army has defaced Twitter and Iranian opposition websites. Also, Tunisian political activists and Yemeni oppositional websites have both accused their government security organizations of launching attacks on their sites in an attempt to silence their message and deny access to their content.
In this report, we document the activities of the Syrian Electronic Army, which appears to be a case of an open and organized pro-government computer attack group that is actively targeting political opposition and Western websites. Our aim is to assess to what extent we can find evidence of Syrian government assistance for the attack groups, and what the significance of the attacks themselves are for civil society and cyberspace contestation.
Noman is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs (University of Toronto), and a Research Affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. The report, originally posted on the InfoWar Monitor site, is titled "The Emergence of Open and Organized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army."
A full version of the report is available here: The Emergence of Open and Organized Pro-Government Cyber Attacks in the Middle East: The Case of the Syrian Electronic Army
http://opennet.net/blog/2011/05/new-report-pro-government-hackers-middle-east
2011.05.31 in E-Activism | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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The leader of the world's richest countries meeting in Deauville, France have pledge billions of dollars in aid and debt relief to Arab countries that are transitioning from autocracy to democracy. The G8 leaders were unified in their support for the democratic uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, but there were divisions on how far governments should go in regulating the interent
Aid To Arab Spring Countries
On the eve of the G8 summit, the US President Barrack Obama and the UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged the most industrialised nations to stand by the side of those seeking democracy in the Arab world.
The US President Barack Obama led the way by pledging $1 Billion USD for debt relief and another $1 Billion in loans for Egypt. The European Union yesterday had already pledged an additional 1.24 Billion Euros to support North African countries.
But like most aid offers these have strings attached and unless the countries stay on the path of democracy this aid would evaporate. Jose Barroso, the European Commission President bluntly said "Our aid is conditional: we will do more if they do more."
However, the financial crisis and the lack of growth in the richer countries are also hampering their efforts to provide aid to others when governments are being forced to cut public sector spending. Domestic political compulsions are forcing the leaders to rethink international development aid.
Despite all the financial pressures at home from both left and the right, the Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged £110 Million over the next four years which includes £40 Million dedicated to promoting democracy in the region.
Regulating the Internet
The most powerful political leaders in the world were joined by some of the leading technology business figures to discuss how best to move forward with regulating the internet.
The Facebook boss, Mark Zuckerberg who shed his usual jeans and t shirt for a suit argued that governments should lay off the internet. The Facebook founder and one of the most powerful internet entrepreneurs challenged the French President Nikolas Sarkozy's call for more regulation.
"People tell me: 'It's great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it's also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people," Zuckerberg said. "But it's hard to have one without the other. You can't isolate some things you like about the internet, and control other things you don't."
His thoughts were echoed by Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of the internet giant Google. The internet is the greatest force for good in the world. We should not have premature regulation ahead of innovation," he said. "There are technical solutions to these problems. Sarkozy sent a strong message he'd like to work with us on these issues."
There is division not only between the G8 leaders and the business world but also among the leaders themselves. There is a genuine debate between freedom/rights and responsibilites and it was reflected in the communique released by the leaders.
In their communique, the leaders agreed that the net is a force for good which has acted as a catalyst for economic growth and personal freedom. But at the same time, the communique warns of the risks internet brings to individual privacy and intellectual property.
http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/421302011.05.31 in E-Strategies/Policy | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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With recent impacts in the uprisings across the Middle East and in the 2008 Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, social media has demonstrated its capacity to compel social movements and create large-scale change quickly. For organizations seeking to spread their messages while at the same time creating a strong sense of community organization offline, social media thus presents opportunities to bring people together like never before. Several NGOs are looking at new ways to integrate social media into their work to build communities offline and simultaneously accomplish organizational goals in the real world.
This case study explores the fashions through which Berkeley based NGO Citizen Engagement Laboratory works with digital media to amplify its message, organize community support, and achieve its goals, specifically focusing on its recent campaign to get advertisers to drop Glenn Beck from commercial campaigns.
Working in the realms of advocacy, social justice, human rights and political engagement, Citizen Engagement Laboratory (CEL) seeks to empower under-represented constituencies by providing information technology services, best practices, media production, and fundraising to online communities. The organization collaborates with advertisers, other NGOs, and social enterprises to support lightweight, tech-savvy change campaigns that can challenge even the biggest of pundits and conglomerates. In order to steer their partnered online communities towards success, CEL uses the Internet to allow its members to speak in unison and behind simple, powerful messages, and with an amplified political voice over the circuits of a widespread network of activists and like-minded supporters.
To do this, CEL strategically reaches out to social entrepreneurs who can become the unifying voice of under-represented constituencies, and empowers them with the tools of social networking. Working with these social entrepreneurs, CEL incubates their respected identity-based community online, to build a virtual network, and then builds support offline using proven community organizing techniques to bring people together. Targeting specific audiences and goals, CEL channels its efforts on unifying community voice, online and off, to push communities towards fulfilling its organizational goals, to successfully expand awareness and action on identity-based issues.
CEL’s present projects include ColorOfChange.org – the largest national online organization focused on issues affecting African-Americans; VideoTheVote.org – an election monitoring project that empowers citizen-journalists to document voter disenfranchisement; Presente.org – a project empowering Latino communities to strengthen their political voice; and GetEQUAL.org – an online organization seeking to create full federal equality for the LGBTQ community.
Under its ColorOfChange.org project, CEL uses the Internet to bring together members of the African-American community from all over the country and build support for the array of inequality issues they face across America. Recently, the organization launched a campaign titled, “Drop Glenn Beck”, to work with mainstream companies including Walmart, GEICO, Verizon, and Chase to drop their advertisements from the Glenn Beck Show on Fox News Channel. Seeing Beck’s comments from a July 28, 2009 broadcast in which he called President Obama a “racist” who had a “deep-seated hatred for white people” as an opportunity to convince advertisers to remove their support from the program, CEL organized and mobilized online and offline communities to help dump Beck. Over the course of the campaign, over 100 companies dropped their support from Beck’s show, helping mitigate Beck’s political clout and negatively impact Fox News Channel’s revenue streams.
In the process, CEL gathered over 280,000 signatures on its petition asking advertisers to remove commercial support of Beck’s show; contacted over 70 companies via phone and e-mail communicating its members concern and urging them to renounce support of the program; and built a multi-media campaign titled, TheRealGlennBeck.com, to serve as a central database of Beck’s race-baiting and misinforming praxis. Moreover, the organization brought together the Black community in Harlem to protest Beck’s inaugural “A Christmas Sweater”, and convinced the Harlem Gospel Choir to not perform during the program.
In an interview with one of the organization’s producers, the philosophy behind CEL’s methodology became more lucid. Recognizing that NGOs face a score of challenges in fostering real world participation and action, CEL works to combine effective community organizing tactics with online support systems. That is, in order to accomplish the kind of activism supported by the Beck campaign, CEL recognizes that NGOs need to use technology to get people involved. To do this, the organization strategically reaches out to target communities that can work together towards a common goal, and empowers them with a massive organizing campaign to deliver a powerful story that can convince decision-makers within power circles to take action.
In respect of the Glenn Beck campaign, this manifested itself as a matter of demonstrating why Beck’s commentary negatively portrayed the African-American community, and how members of the ColorOfChange.org virtual community viewed his actions. Using the political clout packed by the over 600,000 members of the community represented by ColorOfChange.org, the message that Beck’s tactics were viewed negatively by the African-American community was clearly understandable, and action to pull support from Beck’s program became easily justified by advertisers.
While the process of integrating online and offline community organizing techniques seems rather straightforward, there are still challenges in working to organize people using such means. First and foremost, any campaign that is launched inevitably faces criticism from opponents, especially if the target is as large an icon as Beck. Initial support for the “Drop Glenn Beck” campaign, for example, was difficult to harness at first, as not many companies wanted to be the preliminary sponsors of such a movement. Only after demonstrated support from ColorOfChange.org did companies begin to see the larger possibilities at play and take action. As such, coordinating such an effort is frequently an uphill battle, and speaks to the second but just as equal a challenge faced by community organizers. That is, working with such under-represented constituencies, it is often times difficult to get people organized and keep communities strong. Virtual communities must continuously provide support internally while facing external criticism and keep their dreams alive as they work to build an equitable world around their vision in reality.
Looking towards the future of civic engagement, it is clear that combining effective community organizing techniques with digital outreach and social media campaigns is essential to fostering social and political change movements. Though it also seems that there is still a challenge of matching organizational technique with an appropriate context. Given that social media is only a tool for incentivizing change, there are inherent challenges facing organizations seeking to organize communities off line. Every campaign must have a clear focus and keep momentum going both internally and externally; both virtually and in real-life. Looking at CEL as a case study, it is clear that there are innumerous ways to have success with this framework, though it also seems that perhaps the best practices of successful community organizing remain in the real world and well-tested tactics of the past. Lessons for the future indeed…
2011.05.31 in E-Activism, Social Media | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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Twitter is to launch its own photo-sharing service to compete with existing services such as Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr, according to multiple sources. The announcement is expected this week at the D9 conference in California, where the company's chief executive Dick Costolo will be speaking on Wednesday. The service may be provided via the website twimg.com, which Twitter has owned since July 2010, according to TechCrunch, which first reported the plans. One possibility is that the photo service will be monetised by including advertisements as Twitter tries to move to a more commercial model. The move will be seen as further encroachment by Twitter on areas formerly seeded and exploited by third-party developers.
http://www.ejc.net/media_news/twitter_planning_photo-sharing_service/2011.05.31 in Content, Netbiz , Social Media | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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http://www.ejc.net/media_news/eutelsat_launches_satellite_internet_service_across_europe/
2011.05.31 in Infrastructure | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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The Applicant Guidebook is a comprehensive guide for applicants that describes the New Generic Top-Level Domain program's requirements and evaluation processes. The Applicant Guidebook has been developed and improved through extensive public review by specialized working groups and ICANN's Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees. Each draft has been accompanied by extensive public comment analyses, explanatory memoranda and independent reports.
This version contains updates based on community feedback and the recent consultations between ICANN's Board of Directors and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). Building on a three-day meeting in Brussels and many agreed-upon changes in the 15 April Draft of the Guidebook, the collaborative GAC-Board work has continued.
Most recently, designated representatives of the Board and the GAC held teleconferences to discuss trademark protections and objection procedures for governments. The full Board and GAC met in teleconference on 20 May, and the GAC provided written comments on 26 May. Several additional changes have been made based on this latest round of meetings and there were several additional areas of compromise. The Board and GAC agreed to hold another meeting in Singapore on 19 June.
The Applicant Guidebook is intended to be a comprehensive guide and will be regularly updated as aspects of the process are implemented. The Board will listen to community dialogue at the ICANN public meeting in Singapore, and will continue to solicit comments on specific areas.
Below you will find the Applicant Guidebook (in "clean" and "redline" versions), explanatory memoranda on various relevant issues, and the summary and analysis of public comments on the prior Discussion Draft of the Applicant Guidebook.
http://icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/comments-7-en.htm2011.05.31 in Infrastructure, Netbiz | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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