There was seldom as much public debate about the consequences of political action on the internet as there is today. But for one small group in Austria, there is still too little of it. The discussions whose absence was lamented at a public meeting of the initiative netzpolitischer konvent der österreichischen zivilgesellschaft (Convention of Austrian Civil Society on Net Politics or npk) at the Metalab in Vienna at the end of October bear the titles net neutrality, data protection, private sphere, open data and copyright – themes that for years have interested the activists who gathered there in a small meeting room.

If one sums up all these fields, the result is a focus on the theme of surveillance- This is a topic that has now, owing to the data provided by Edward Snowden, come under scrutiny from civil society, which has already found itself confronted by the consequences of developments in net politics. The netzpolitischer konvent evokes memories of the early days of the internet, and its brochure starts with the sentence: Hands off our internet! This is a demand that was made as far back as 1996 by John Perry Barlow in his cyber-manifesto A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Back then, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the USA was fighting against the introduction of the first official regulations on the internet and the implementation there of surveillance technologies on a standard basis. Calling on governments to disappear from cyberspace made more sense in those days – simply because many of them had not yet made it there. For a long time, politicians in Europe avoided even saying the word “internet”; the term almost never occurred in official EU documents before the end of the 1990s. Instead, the talk was of integrated broadband networks, value-added services and Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). Today, people are speaking about cyberspace again. What is meant, however, is no longer the world of the 1990s, William Gibson's book Neuromancer or Barlow's declaration of independence, but the introduction of military order on the internet: command & control.

The journalist Günter Hack said recently, in hindsight: “The biggest success of the NSA was making us believe that we had won.” He is right. But in every historical review of internet history, it should be added that this myth was also cultivated by internet business. Now it depicts itself as the NSA's victim. The intention of the small brochure that came out of the founding meeting of the npk in April 2013 is to instil courage in society amid the digital world of information “with twelve simple steps towards an open information society in the 21st century.” However, even the authors find that demands such as “the same internet for all”, “breaking up data monopolies”, “privacy by design”, “transparency law” and “shorter protection time with extension option for the copyright holders” raise more all too familiar questions, rather than providing new answers regarding co-existence on the internet.

The npk itself has not reached this point yet. Rather, it works on the presumption that there are no net politics in Austria: an amazing premise that probably no one outside of Austria would formulate. On the contrary: the Big Brother Award was awarded earlier in Austria than in Germany. The constitutional challenge to data retention that the Arbeitskreis Vorrat lodged with the European Court of Justice in the form of a class action brought by more than 11,000 Austrian citizens is still running. The current legal proceedings in Ireland, europe versus facebook, were instituted by a group of Austrian students and are now entering a new round. And even the political parties would now be ashamed not to nominate a spokesperson for internet affairs.

To find answers, it is necessary to pose the right questions, say both internet historians and military strategists. The decisive question for the networked society, according to 82-year-old French computer scientist Louis Pouzin, is: “Who will control the information in the future?” Finding an answer to this that includes civil society would at any rate be a worthwhile task – and not just for Austria.

At present, the npk is rather enmeshed in processes of group dynamics that – to judge by the event in the Metalab – are difficult to reduce to any common denominator. The meeting resolved that a conference in 2014 was to bring more clarity in the matter

http://npk.servus.at/

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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