Fergus Cassidy

Other voices

IT was the internet equivalent of the 1916 Proclamation. John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' stands as an important historical statement in the same way as the one read out in front of the GPO in Dublin.

Written in February 1996, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Frontier, opened his proclamation with the following rebel yell:

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

I remember reading it about a year after it was posted on the web and admit to being gobsmacked by the tone and vehemence of Barlow's words. If his intent was to start a debate and get people thinking about this thing called 'cyberspace', then he succeeded.

But there was no doubt that he was also throwing down the gauntlet and challenging the status quo, as he perceived it: "Government's derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world."

There's also some aspirational ideas that wouldn't be out of place in many national constitutions or laws today: "We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth".

What runs like a seam throughout the short document however, is his staunch loyalty to cyberspace which he describes as consisting of "transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications".

Reading the same document today, there can be no doubt that the pendulum of internet time swings much, much faster. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace reflects that, because so much has changed since then.

The very notion of cyberspace these days seems dated, no longer written or spoken about, largely because we don't know what the hell it is or is supposed to be.

Barlow's work reflects the currency of a time, long long ago when the internet was but a pup and his words tell of those who would resist the collar and lead. Not only that, but this new cyberspace world would address its own problems and conflicts: "We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours".

And there is it. The one aspect of the document which Barlow nailed was governance, with the underlying reality that some form of governance would arise.

That's the difference between Barlow's declaration and so much of the other gobbledygook written back then. He is aware of the fact that some sort of governance is coming: "Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means".

I'm sure Barlow took some inspiration or lead from another declaration of its time. It's not a coincidence that some of the thinking in the past about cyberspace is more than a nod to the celestial version.

'The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space', signed in 1967, commits the world to the idea that the exploration and use of outer space "shall be the province of all mankind".

This kind of treaty is rare, there's another on the oceans, but it still stands up well almost 40 years later. Both were negotiated and steered by the United Nations. So far, there are no countries looking to renege or renegotiate.

The world of the internet in 1996 had more in common with space and the oceans than it does now. And how much so we're about to find out as the UN once again attempts to create a treaty. It's not being called that, but that is exactly what's in store.

In an effort to start, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has already identified governance as the core issue on which everything else hangs. This attempt to get agreement on the future of the internet is being supervised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency formed in 1947.

The ITU was established "as an impartial, international organisation within which governments and the private sector could work together to coordinate the operation of telecommunication networks and services and advance the development of communications technology".

For most of its life, the ITU was a regulatory body, allocating national phone numbers and radio frequencies, but then the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the ITU's future along with it.

The privatisation of many telephone networks, which had firmly remained in state hands in plenty of countries, plus the onward march of the internet, left the ITU trying to hold on to their baby as the bath water ran out. As the global communications system moves inexorably on to the internet, the ITU is only trying to do what it's been doing successfully since the 1840s.

What John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration' correctly signalled was the emergence of new parties which had not previously existed in the telecommunications realm. The ITU's (read UN) raison d'etre as a broker between "governments and the private sector" doesn't take into account new realities of emerging non-government and non-private sector voices.

If it somehow manages to do that, nothing will ever be the same again.