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5 Memorandum To: President Obama From: Peter W. Singer and Ian Wallace Date: January 23, 2014 Subject: Secure the Future of the Internet Summary and Recommendations The next year will be a crucial one for the future of the Internet, a technology that has driven the most change and progress in our lifetimes. Between Edward Snowden’s revelations and the resulting blowback, and upcoming international talks on global “Internet governance,” this already complex domain is quickly rising as a major challenge to your administration. While many urge you and the United States to keep a low profile, our interests are better served by actively leading the global debate on the future of the Internet. We recommend that Internet policy and strategy be elevated as a top priority for your administration under the clear direction of the White House. You should develop a strategic plan to identify and achieve key U.S. goals for the future of the Internet and its governance and to ensure that all parts of the U.S. government work to advance them. It also means doing a better job of involving and leveraging the U. S. private sector. This effort must include energizing international partners and even competitors—especially in key “swing” countries—to engage their own governments to prevent the balkanization of the Internet and handover of governance to bodies that would stifle the free flow of information and harm both global trade and political freedom. To be utterly clear, the future of the Internet is about more than just responding to the NSA reform recommendations of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology—important though that will be for other reasons. It is a broader, strategic issue that you should take personal ownership of and put in place an empowered, inter-agency team led by a designated White House official to implement the strategic plan. This may even require a new position with dual status on the National Security Staff and National Economic Council. This also means asserting more proactive BIG BETS 6 peter w. singer and ian wallace control of the covert activities that could undermine that strategy and deciding whether these operations are worth the risk, underscoring the commitment to balance intelligence benefit with greater national strategic goals. You should establish a clear message that the events of last year have not changed our fundamental position on the future of the Internet and roll it out soon in a major speech overseas—ideally somewhere in the developing world, where much of the Internet’s growth is now taking place. This speech needs to acknowledge global concerns raised by various espionage efforts to monitor certain types of information. But it should also raise broader issues to remind people of the political and economic advantages of an Internet where information still flows openly, facilitated by the appropriate mix of government, industry and civil society participation in a complex web of governance mechanisms . That message should also make a clear distinction between America’s approach to the Internet and Internet freedom and that of many of our critics in authoritarian governments. Background There is a divide emerging in the international community between those countries who prefer an international legal framework that allows governments alone to regulate the international aspects of the Internet—for example, through the United Nations and specifically the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)—and those, such as the United States and our closest allies, who recognize that the extraordinary success of the Internet lies in its unique governance regime that blends private sector and civil society involvement alongside national governments, while minimizing the amount of formal control. The way the Internet has developed to date benefits both U.S. and global citizens and consumers, but we must recognize that not every foreign government sees it that way. For many new democracies as well as authoritarian regimes it is seen as a foreign, destabilizing force. And, economically, while it has undoubtedly benefited U.S. companies, this has sometimes been at the expense of local state-backed telecoms companies. We are also seen by many to retain disproportionate formal control over many of the institutions that oversee the technical operation of the Internet (especially the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). In reality, the U.S. government exercises virtually no control through those mechanisms, but our critics argue that we want to retain the status quo in order to retain U.S. “hegemony” over the Internet. International...

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