Customer Reviews

Internet Governance: A Grand Collaboration (Ict Task Force Series)

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It's a good sign of the Internet's global reach that the UN has produced this collection of papers on what is and might be done to further the growth.

The book talks about how governments might want to control what their citizens see on the Internet. For various social reasons, usually related to stability. Of course, the easy global access given to you, once you're on the net, can make it difficult for a government to enforce its policies. Though sophisticated methods at key routers might let the government effectively do so, for those users who are not technically adept.

Perhaps the biggest issue is how to enable affordable access to the over 5 billion people currently lacking it. For all the current reach of the Internet, that only covers some 1 billion or so in the developed world, and parts of the developing world. It is this fundamental issue of equity that drives a lot of the authors' concerns. The proposed solutions are laudatory. Though sufficient funding is always an issue. Maybe as the cost of hardware and bandwidth keeps falling, then affordability should rise due to this alone, even if none of the book's suggestions come to pass.