Internet
Politics
In
every century there are few things in which society was dependent and these
things changes according to need of society and this phenomenon is universal
like in older days society depends upon agriculture so it was called Agro based
society in which India, China mostly Asian countries were leading than it
changes to Industrial revolution in which Britain leads and every other country
copied the same thing , it was Industrial based Society. After few decades
technology came and captures the whole society in which leading countries were
America and Japan than they ruled this world because of their technology based
society structure and then a new invention changes everything because of this
new invention any society can become powerful because everyone got the reach of
knowledge. This invention was Internet which opens the doors for every country
including third world countries to explore knowledge. This is called
Information society. It runs on information whoever has an information can rule
this world for example if you have information about shares of share market you
can earn millions within seconds , if any country has information about other
countries military operations or passwords it could beat them , If corporations
or multinational companies have information about government policies than they
can get the tender or earn millions with that information so now a day’s
information is very important whoever has a information can rule this world.
Today we are living in a information society where everyone is fighting for
getting more information or knowledge and try to make themselves powerful
whether it is human being or country.
The question arises if everyone is
getting knowledge and information than what is the problem? Absolutely no
problem if it is as simple as it looks but because information is now related
to money and power politics so a few people trying to control it and they are
controlling it in their own way but nobody knows about it, except few people.
Now the question is HOW? How they control information and even if they control
the information why people don’t know about it? The answer is because most of
the people are more interested in using the technology rather than knowing who
owns it or who controls it? Only a few people asked these questions and they
tried to find out the politics behind it and then they find out some amazing
facts about this internet politics. In this article I want to share these facts
than it is up to the people whether they want to change this politics or they
are happy to live with it.
According to famous news paper “The
guardian” – “Tens of thousands of accounts associated with customers of
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have their data turned over to US
government authorities every six months as the result of secret court orders,
the tech giants disclosed for the first time”
Companies
said :- The NSA collects our data based on four different
legal authorities: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978,
Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and modified in 2004 and 2008, Section 215 of the
Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008.
In this way companies and government are doing
continuous surveillance on people as well as third world countries . Most of
the countries have Microsoft server in their government offices and Microsoft
has full access to those servers because they have designed their operating
system software in such a way that they can enter in any computer through
internet . Social networking sites like Facebook and twitter etc also have full
access to the data of users and google the biggest search engine use this data
for commercial use . Whenever we click on any advertise on google it stores
that information and then similar advertise shows on our gmail and every site
we visit on google [ Source :- http://donttrack.us/
]. So they knows what we click ? What we search? And What we like? .This much
level of surveillance in our private life is happening. Imagine that How much
it is dangerous in terms of defense or security of a nation or a person . Now a
days youngsters are using Wassup on their mobile phones it also stores complete
information about a person and they have access on our complete mobile phone
that means your contacts, your messages, your private photos or videos
everything. Someone can say what’s wrong in that , its not a matter of tension
for a normal person but those who are activist or politician or businessman .
Their complete information can be tracked out through this software or
application. Now Wassup is owned by facebook which I already mentioned steal
information of people and government of America and NSA take that complete
information that means information of every individual around the world who are
using facebook or wassup or google is not secured and America has all that
private information . It is very
dangerous let us take an example if the president or prime minister is using
these apps or sites or windows server of Microsoft and they put some private
information in it or they have some private photographs or files in their
emails or mobile phone than these apps can steal that information and it could
be used against that country or any famous person can be black mailed because
of his private data even bigger corporations can buy that data from these sites
and black mail someone to pass their tender or black mail ministers to change
in policies. So this kind of surveillance is very dangerous for society and
some countries like America want to control this world and they knew it is
information society so they want to control the complete internet . As we all
know internet is a result of an experiment called ARPANET done by US army and
then they give it for public but control is always in their hands than big
hardware companies like IBM controls the complete market of computer hardware .
Now also APPLE and Microsoft both are American companies and they both sells
their softwares like operating system or Microsoft office etc but the question
arises is who gave them this permission to sell and the problem is not about
selling , problem is patents and copyrights no one else can make the similar
product like they made . So this thing creates their monopoly in world computer
market and because of this in India also we have to purchase genuine windows
than genuine anti virus than their silver light their frame work their
Microsoft office and this all costs too much for a company or educational
institute and in that also they give us only application software they don’t
give us source code. If a person has a source code he can do changes in
software and he can also make his own operation system but the multinational
giants don’t want any competitor in their business so they don’t give source
codes . Similarly all the domain names are controlled by only few bigger
companies like ICANN and ICANN reports to US government department of commerce
[ Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240089169/Who-controls-the-Internet
]. "That's a concern around the world."
It is not hard to see why. Take, for instance, a scenario in which a country
wants to change certain aspects of its domain names. Any changes carried out at
the "top" level - adding new country-level suffixes, for example -
have to be checked by the US Department of Commerce, which verifies that proper
procedure has been followed. Once that check has been done, the actual implementation
of the change is carried out by Verisign, a US-based private company that
manages the root name database, which contains the full official list of
recognised suffixes. "The US government could block a modification to
this database," Minisci says. "So the US can, theoretically, decide
who is on the internet and who isn't."
Now the questions arises
can we do something about it ? The answer is yes we can . There are few people
around this world who saw this problem much before and they started making
similar platforms of open source softwares . The biggest example of open source
operating system is LINUX. It is free of cost and free downloadable from
internet and they also give us source code through which we can make changes in
operating system ans we can also learn how to make new operating system . If we
use it we can end the monopoly of Microsoft windows and APPLE macintosh
operating systems . Similarly like Microsoft office LINUX has Libra Office and
for photoshop of adobe they have GIMP , For replacement of Corel draw they
created INCSCAPE etc a lot of free softwares are available in market as well as
they are free downloadable from internet we can download it learn it and teach
it to others and when these free or open softwares starts spreading around the
globe than only this monopoly of USA based bigger giant companies ends. So we
have to spread these free software as fast as possible and we should also focus
on research and development of new softwares and new domain name thing so that
control on internet is distributed among all. Being aware and make others aware
about this politics is the only option left otherwise in this era of
information society we will again see one more imperialism of America on this
world like we saw British imperialism at time of industrial revolution .
Written
by :-
Shubham
Verma .
