It has long been argued that the United States has too much influence over the Internet. But abroad, a recent proposal making its way through the U.S. Senate has raised the debate to a fever pitch. The proposal drawn up by Senator Joe Lieberman would give the U.S. president the authority to ‘shut down’ the Internet for 90 days without Congressional authorization.
Columnist Vittorio Emanuele Parsi of Italy’s La Stampa writes that in pursuing such authority for the American chief executive, U.S. lawmakers are again showing how little they care for the consequences on other nations – and have shown that recent criticism of Beijing by Hillary Clinton was at the very least hypocritical.
In defense of the U.S. initiative, La Stampa’s Vittorio Emanuele Parsi writes in part:
Not even after the September 11 terrorist attacks did we anticipate that the Executive could “confiscate” the Web from its citizens for such a long period by simple presidential order. The 90-day period directly evokes another particularly delicate case in which the exercise of presidential power is afforded wide discretion. It is the arrangement under which the president can deploy American forces for 90 days without formal authorization from Congress.
Since World War II, U.S. involvement in most conflicts have been undertaken under this discretionary power. Now that the Internet is likely to be the battleground of the future – and in many ways could be a more dangerous field of battle than the traditional ones – the U.S. is playing catch up to put its national defense in a position to act in a timely fashion.
But making the case for much of the rest of the world, Parsi writes in part:
On the other hand, however, it is easy to see that due to the very nature of the worldwide Web, a closure of U.S. providers would have consequences far beyond the borders of the United States. Yet, once again, just as has occurred with bipartisan regularity since the end of the Cold War (with the exception of the first Bush Administration), the multilateral implications of unilateral solutions are given very little consideration along the banks of the Potomac. Such was the case with George W. Bush and his neo-con advisers, and the pattern seems like it is being reproduced with Barack Obama and his liberal eggheads.
One should frankly acknowledge that the gulf between the U.S. and Europe has deepened with respect to maintaining an optimal balance between the protection of individual liberty and civil rights on the one hand, and collective security on the other. Paradoxically, this brings the U.S. closer to China, which just months ago, was loudly denounced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Internet censorship. It is indeed a contradiction that in an era of growing de-Westernization, a further step in this dangerous direction is being taken by the United States of all places, the creator and greatest beneficiary of Western political ideas.
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