An article citing Internet & Jurisdiction and the 2016 Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference was published in the print edition of The Economist on November 5, 2016 (pp. 50-51). Titled "Lost in the Splinternet," the article highlights the work of the global multistakeholder policy network Internet & Jurisdiction and the Conference, where participants from all stakeholder groups gathered "for the first international conference dedicated to finding ways for countries to co-ordinate internet policies."
Left unchecked, the growing maze of barriers on the internet will damage economies and hamper political freedom
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Internet & Jurisdiction in The Economist (November 5, 2016 issue)
If nothing is done the open internet could, in a decade or two, be a thing of the past.
The Economist article describes the risk of a "legal arms race" in cyberspace, a notion first put forth in the I&J Paper, Jurisdiction on the Internet: From Legal Arms Race to Transnational Cooperation, and cites cases from I&J's new Retrospect Database as a resource for understanding trends regarding the application of laws on the cross-border Internet.
The publication includes quotes from Vint Cerf (Member of the Advisory Group of the Global Internet & Jurisdiction Conference), Urs Gasser (Member of the I&J Observatory), and Carl Bildt (Opening speaker of the Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference), as well as I&J's Deputy Director, Paul Fehlinger.
“We need to be as creative as the inventors of the internet,” says Paul Fehlinger of Internet & Jurisdiction, which is organising the Paris conference.
The publication of The Economist's article comes less than two weeks before the inaugural Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference, to be held on November 14-16, 2016. The multistakeholder Conference of the policy network Internet & Jurisdiction will bring together 200 key senior actors from governments, businesses, technical operators, civil society, academia, and international organizations to foster cooperation and catalyze the development of operational solutions for addressing the challenges posed by jurisdiction on the cross-border Internet. The Conference is institutionally supported by the OECD, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the European Commission, ICANN, and the Slovak Presidency of the EU.
On November 21, 2016 and following the Global Internet and Jurisdiction Conference, The Economist published a second article reporting again about the Conference.