SAO PAULO: Call it the Snowden Effect. Last July, as newspapers reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was snooping on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, she immediately cancelled a state visit to the White House.
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As more documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed that the US was spying on Brazil’s state firms and collecting data about its citizens, Rousseff blasted the Americans at the United Nations and announced a plan to hold a global meeting on internet<\/a> governance — who runs it and how. At the same time, Rousseff began to push a bill, Marco Civil<\/a>, in the country’s parliament to protect people’s online rights. This sparked fears in Washington that Brazil was trying to “Balkanize” the network which now forms the backbone of the global economic order.
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The internet<\/a>’s moment of truth arrived this week as representatives from 97 countries checked into the hotels of Brazil’s financial capital to participate in NETmundial, the Global Multi-stakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance. On April 23 and 24, diplomats and tech firm honchos locked horns with grizzly-haired academics and geeks in bermudas at a glitzy hotel. Some 10 km away, at the Sao Paulo Cultural Centre, civil society activists engaged in passionate debates on surveillance, with Julian Assange<\/a> joining in through a video link from London.
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\nSmall Steps Towards Freedom<\/strong>
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\nWith the future of the Net being discussed in a Brazilian city someone dubbed the meeting as the World Cup of the internet. But its scale was arguably larger than any sporting spectacle: 1,500 delegates, 188 presentations; 30 global hubs; and thousands of tweets pouring in every minute. But the discussions were as tricky as dribbling in a football game. While the Americans worked hard to keep their “control” over the internet, the Russians and the Chinese tackled them by seeking greater government say in their own countries.
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\nThe drama became tense on Thursday when, at a media conference in St Petersburg, Russian President Vladimir Putin branded the internet a “CIA project”. Till the last moment, nobody knew how the meet would end: with a caipirinha for everyone or with no outcome document in hand?
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\nEven before experts began debating the new roadmap Rousseff set the tone for the meeting in clear terms. “Internet governance should be multipartite, transparent and open to all. The participation of governments should occur with equality so that no country has more weight than others,” Rousseff said in her opening speech. If that was not strong enough a message to the US, Rousseff again condemned the mass spying programmes. “These events are not acceptable, were not acceptable in the past, and remain unacceptable today in that they are an affront to the free nature of the internet as an open, democratic platform.”
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\nAmid a strong anti-surveillance mood, NETmundial ended with the “Sao Paulo Declaration” which stated that the internet should be “free of government regulation and should be a fully self-regulated space”. Though the document is legally non-binding and processes are yet to be put in place to make the “multi-stakeholder” system work, many see the meeting as a turning point. “There is a long way to go before the internet is fully democratized, but a good beginning has been made. The process of preparing a roadmap for the internet has started,” said Neville Roy Singham, chairman and founder of ThoughtWorks, a Chicago-based tech firm. “By talking against surveillance, the Brazilian president has taken the lead in creating the new internet.”
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