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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Antisemitism in the Soviet Union

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew a centuries-old regime of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire, dismantling its Pale of Settlement. However, the previous legacy of antisemitism was continued by the Soviet state, especially under Joseph Stalin. After 1948, antisemitism reached new heights in the Soviet Union, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, in which numerous Yiddish-writing poets, writers, painters and sculptors were arrested or killed. This campaign culminated in the so-called Doctors' plot, in which a group of doctors (almost all of whom were Jewish) were subjected to a show trial for supposedly having plotted to assassinate Stalin.

History

Before the revolution

Further information: History of the Jews in Russia

Under the Tsars, Jews – who numbered approximately 5 million in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, and mostly lived in poverty – had been confined to a Pale of Settlement, where they experienced prejudice and persecution, often in the form of discriminatory laws, and they had often been the victims of pogroms, many of which were either organized or tacitly approved of by the Tsarist authorities. In response to the oppression which they were being subjected to, many Jews either emigrated from the Russian Empire or joined radical political parties, such as the Jewish Bund, the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Mensheviks. There were also numerous antisemitic publications of the era which gained widespread circulation.

After the revolution

February Revolution and Provisional Government

The Russian Provisional Government cancelled all restrictions imposed on the Jews by the Tsarist regime, in a move parallel to the Jewish emancipation in Western Europe that had taken place during the 19th century abolishing Jewish disabilities.

The Bolsheviks

The October Revolution officially abolished the Pale of Settlement and other laws which regarded the Jews as an outlawed people. At the same time, the Bolsheviks were strongly opposed to Judaism (and indeed to any religion) and conducted an extensive campaign to suppress the religious traditions among the Jewish population, alongside traditional Jewish culture. In 1918, the Yevsektsiya was established to promote Marxism, secularism and Jewish assimilation into Soviet society, and supposedly bringing Communism to the Jewish masses.

In August 1919 Jewish properties, including synagogues, were seized and many Jewish communities were dissolved. The anti-religious laws against all expressions of religion and religious education were being taken out on all religious groups, including the Jewish communities. Many Rabbis and other religious officials were forced to resign from their posts under the threat of violent persecution. This type of persecution continued on into the 1920s. Jews were also frequently placed disproportionately on the front lines of Russian wars in the early 1900s as well as WW2. As a result, large numbers of Jews emigrated out of Russia to places like the United States. Changing their family's last name during emigration to reduce perceived risk was not uncommon.

In March 1919, Lenin delivered a speech "On Anti-Jewish Pogroms" where he denounced antisemitism as an "attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews". The speech was in line with the previous condemnation of the antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by the White Army during the Russian Civil War. In 1914 Lenin had said "No nationality in Russia is as oppressed and persecuted as the Jews".

Information campaigns against antisemitism were conducted in the Red Army and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. The official stance of the Soviet government in 1934 was to oppose antisemitism "anywhere in the world" and claimed to express "fraternal feelings to the Jewish people", praising the Jewish contributions towards international socialism.

Under Stalin

Further information: Joseph Stalin and antisemitism

Joseph Stalin emerged as dictator of the Soviet Union following a power struggle with Leon Trotsky after Lenin's death. Stalin has been accused of resorting to antisemitism in some of his arguments against Trotsky, who was of Jewish heritage. Those who knew Stalin, such as Nikita Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews that had manifested themselves before the 1917 Revolution. As early as 1907, Stalin wrote a letter differentiating between a "Jewish faction" and a "true Russian faction" in Bolshevism. Stalin's secretary Boris Bazhanov stated that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenin's death. Stalin adopted antisemitic policies which were reinforced with his anti-Westernism. Antisemitism, as historian, Orientalist and anthropologist Raphael Patai and geneticist Jennifer Patai Wing put it in their book The Myth of the Jewish Race, was "couched in the language of opposition to Zionism". Since 1936 in the show trial of "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center", the suspects, prominent Bolshevik leaders, were accused of hiding their Jewish origins under Slavic names.

On 3 May 1939, Stalin fired foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, who was closely identified with the anti-Nazi position. Stalin said "The Soviet Government intended to improve its relations with Hitler and if possible sign a pact with Nazi Germany. As a Jew and an avowed opponent of such a policy, Litvinov stood in the way." The move opened Stalin's way to close ties with the Nazi state, as well as a quiet campaign removing Jews in high Soviet positions.

After World War II antisemitism escalated openly as a campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan" (a euphemism for "Jew"). In his speech titled "On Several Reasons for the Lag in Soviet Dramaturgy" at a plenary session of the board of the Soviet Writers' Union in December 1948, Alexander Fadeyev equated the cosmopolitans with the Jews. In this anti-cosmopolitan campaign, many leading Jewish writers and artists were killed. Terms like "rootless cosmopolitans", "bourgeois cosmopolitans", and "individuals devoid of nation or tribe" appeared in newspapers. The Soviet press accused cosmopolitans of "groveling before the West", helping "American imperialism", "slavish imitation of bourgeois culture" and "bourgeois aestheticism". Victimization of Jews in the USSR at the hands of the Nazis was denied, Jewish scholars were removed from the sciences, and emigration rights were denied to Jews. The Stalinist antisemitic campaign ultimately culminated in the Doctors' plot in 1953. According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors' plot was "clearly aimed at the total liquidation of Jewish cultural life". Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in a "Jewish world conspiracy".

Soviet antisemitism extended to policy in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. As the historian Norman Naimark has noted, officials in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) by 1947–48 displayed a "growing obsession" with the presence of Jews in the military administration, in particular their presence in the Cadres Department's Propaganda Administration. Jews in German universities who resisted Sovietisation were characterized as having "non-Aryan background" and being "lined up with the bourgeois parties".

Scholars such as Erich Goldhagen claim that following the death of Stalin, the policy of the Soviet Union towards Jews and the Jewish question became more discreet, with indirect antisemitic policies over direct physical assault. Erich Goldhagen suggests that despite being famously critical of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev did not view Stalin's antisemitic policies as "monstrous acts" or "rude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state".

Under Brezhnev

Antisemitism in the Soviet Union once again peaked during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, following Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. "Anti-Zionist" propaganda, including the film Secret and Explicit, was often antisemitic in nature. Many of Brezhnev's close advisors, most principally Mikhail Suslov, were also fervent antisemites. Jewish emigration to Israel and the United States, which had been allowed in limited amounts under the rule of Khrushchev, once more became heavily restricted, primarily due to concerns that Jews were a security liability or treasonous. Would-be emigrants, or refuseniks, often required a vyzov, or special invitation from a relative living abroad, for their application to be even considered by the Soviet authorities. In addition, in order to emigrate, one needed written permission from all immediate family members. The rules were often stretched in order to prevent Jews from leaving, and ability for appeal was rarely permitted. Substantial fees were also required to be paid, both to emigrate and as "reimbursement".

Institutional racism against Jews was widespread in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, with many sectors of the government being off-limits. Following the failure of the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair, in which 12 refuseniks unsuccessfully attempted to hijack a plane and flee west, crackdowns on Jews and the refusenik movement followed. Informal centres for studying the Hebrew language, the Torah and Jewish culture were closed.

Immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967, the antisemitic conditions started causing desire to emigrate to Israel for many Soviet Jews. A Jewish Ukrainian radio engineer, Boris Kochubievsky, sought to move to Israel. In a letter to Brezhnev, Kochubievsky stated:

I am a Jew. I want to live in the Jewish state. That is my right, just as it is the rights of a Ukrainian to live in the Ukraine, the right of a Russian to live in Russia, the right of a Georgian to live in Georgia. I want to live in Israel. That is my dream, that is the goal not only of my life but also of the lives of hundreds of generation that preceded me, of my ancestors who were expelled from their land. I want to my children to study in the Hebrew language. I want to read Jewish papers, I want to attend a Jewish theatre. What is wrong with that? What is my crime ...?

Within the week he was called in to the KGB bureau and without questioning, was taken to a mental institution in his hometown of Kiev. While this may seem as an isolated incident, the aftermath of the Six-Day War affected almost every Jew within the Soviet Union. Jews who had been subject to assimilation under previous regimes were now confronted with a new sense in vigour and revival in their Jewish faith and heritage. On February 23, 1979, a six-page article was distributed throughout the cities of Moscow and Leningrad, which criticized Brezhnev and seven other individuals for being "Zionist". The article contained traces of deep-rooted antisemitism in which the anonymous author, a member of the Russian Liberation Organization, set out ways to identify Zionists; these included "hairy chest and arms", "shifty eyes", and a "hook-like nose".

A major stride was made in the United States in regards to helping the Soviet Jews on 18 October 1974, when Senator Henry M. Jackson, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Senator Jacob Javits and Congressman Charles Vanik met to discuss the finalization of the "Jackson–Vanik amendment" which had been in limbo in the United States Congress for nearly a year. After the meeting, Jackson told reporters that a "historic understanding in the area of human rights" had been met and while he did not "comment on what the Russians have done [...] there [had] been a complete turnaround here on the basic points". The amendment set out to reward the Soviet Union for letting some Soviet Jews leave the country.

On February 22, 1981, in a speech, which lasted over 5 hours, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev denounced anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. While Lenin and Stalin had much of the same in various statements and speeches, this was the first time that a high-ranking Soviet official had done so in front of the entire Party. Brezhnev acknowledged that anti-Semitism existed within the Eastern Bloc and saw that many different ethnic groups existed whose "requirements" were not being met. For decades, people of different ethnic, or religious backgrounds were assimilated into Soviet society and denied the ability or resources to get the education or practice their religion as they had previously done. Brezhnev made it official Soviet Policy to provide these ethnic groups with these "requirements" and cited a fear of the "emergence of inter-ethnic tensions" as the reason. The announcement of the policy was followed with a generic, but significant Party message;

The CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] has fought and will always fight resolutely against such phenomena [inter-ethnic tensions] which are alien to the nature of socialism as chauvinism or nationalism, against any nationalistic aberrations such as, let us say, anti-Semitism or Zionism. We are against tendencies aimed at artificial erosion of national characteristics. But to the same extent, we consider impermissible their artificial exaggeration. It is the sacred duty of the party to educate the working people in the spirit of Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism, of a proud feeling of belonging to a single great Soviet motherland.

While to most, the issue of anti-Semitism seemed to be dropped very casually and almost accidentally, it was very much calculated and planned, as was everything else the Party did. At this time the Soviet Union was feeling pressure from around the world to solve many human rights violations that were taking place within their borders, and the statement responded to the inquiries of countries such as Australia and Belgium. While the Party seemed to be taking a hard stance against anti-Semitism, the fact remained that anti-Semitic propaganda had long been present in the Soviet Union, making it extremely difficult to solve the problems right away. Furthermore, Jewish organizations in Washington D.C. were calling attention to the problems of Soviet Jewry to American leaders.

Antisemitism, however, remained widespread both within and outside the Communist Party; antisemitic media continued to be published with the assent of the government, while antisemitic propaganda (believed variously to be the work of far-right groups or the Soviet government) spread throughout cities in the Soviet Union during the late 1970s. Mikhail Savitsky's 1979 painting, Summer Theatre, depicted a Nazi extermination camp guard and Jewish prisoner grinning between a pile of Russian corpses.

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Zionist antisemitism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Zionist antisemitism is the phenomenon in which individuals, groups, or governments support the Zionist movement and the State of Israel while they simultaneously hold antisemitic views about Jews. In some cases, Zionism may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. The prevalence of antisemitism has been widely noted within the Christian Zionist movement, whose adherents may hold antisemitic and supersessionist beliefs about Jews while they also support Zionism for eschatological reasons. Antisemitic right-wing nationalists, particularly in Europe and the United States, sometimes support the Zionist movement because they wish that Jews will be expelled or emigrate to Israel. The Israeli government's alleged collaboration with antisemitic politicians abroad has been criticized as an example of Zionist antisemitism. Anti-Zionists have criticized the Zionist movement for its alleged complicity with or its alleged capitulation to antisemitism since its inception, with some anti-Zionists also referring to Zionism as a form of antisemitism.

Allegations of antisemitism within Zionism

According to the anti-imperialist Jewish-American academic Amy Kaplan, Jewish history "shows that anti-Semitism and pro-Zionism have never been mutually exclusive." Kaplan believes that Zionist advocates "for a Jewish state enlisted stereotypes of Jews –wittingly or not–to further their cause." She lists Theodor Herzl as an early Zionist who appealed to antisemitic European leaders who believed that the "Jewish Question" would be solved by sending European Jews to Palestine. Edwin Montagu, an ardent anti-Zionist and the sole Jewish member of the British Cabinet, was "passionately opposed to the [Balfour] declaration on the grounds that...it was a capitulation to anti-Semitic bigotry, with its suggestion that Palestine was the natural destination of the Jews..." Writing for International Socialist Review, Annie Levin argues that the writings of Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and other European Zionists were "littered with descriptions of European Jews as parasites, social diseases, germs, aliens"...and she also argues that these antisemitic views "flowed quite logically from Zionism’s basic assumptions about Jews. Zionists accepted the 19th century view that anti-Semitism–in fact all racial difference–was a permanent feature of human nature. For this reason it was pointless to struggle against it." Levin claims that Jews have often been "hostile to Zionism" because the movement "called for a retreat from the struggle against anti-Semitism." Writing for Jacobin, Sarah Levy claimed that early Zionists "partnered with a rabidly antisemitic British ruling class to secure funding for their colonial project in Palestine" while they also aided British attempts to "defeat left-wing “International Jews” (such as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, among others)" because "Churchill understood that revolutionary socialists, organizing against racist pogroms in their own countries, posed a threat to the ruling class’s need to divide and rule its population, and so understood the benefit to supporting a “Jewish movement” that could counter this logic of antiracism and internationalism."

According to the political theorist Michael Walzer, early Jewish anti-Zionists in the 19th-century were often Orthodox Jews who believed that Zionism was a heretical ideology. These Orthodox Jews believed that the return of Jews to Eretz Israel and the establishment of a state would only occur after the Messiah came. Until the arrival of the Messiah, Orthodox Jews believed that Jews must accept living in diaspora and defer to non-Jewish rulers while waiting for redemption. Zionists, who were usually secular, despised the perceived passivity of Orthodox Jews to the point that they were often referred to as antisemites by Orthodox anti-Zionists.

The Austrian-Jewish anti-Zionist writer Karl Kraus attacked Zionism in general and in his book Eine Krone für Zion (A Crown for Zion), he attacked Herzl in particular, making the claim that antisemitism is the essence of the Zionist movement. Kraus referred to Zionist aims as antisemitic and he also called Zionists "Jewish antisemites", asserting that "Aryan antisemites" and Zionist Jewish antisemites share the same goal of expelling Jews from European culture.

Richard S. Levy, a scholar of antisemitism, has written that "Antisemites certainly found Zionism useful" because Zionism provided "antisemitic Zionists" with a justification as to why Jewish people who were living in the diaspora should be expelled from the societies which they had lived in for centuries. Coerced emigration to Palestine appealed to antisemites because it provided them with a "solution to the Jewish question".

The Zionist writer Bari Weiss has stated that there is a history of antisemites endorsing Zionism, listing Arthur Balfour as an example of an antisemitic Zionist.

In 1988, the Middle East Solidarity group published Why Zionism is Anti-Semitic: Jewish Socialist Critiques of Zionism.

In an article titled Anti-Semitic Zionists, the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery wrote that the "avowed aim of Zionism is to ingather all the Jews in the world in the Jewish State. The avowed aim of the anti-Semites is to expel the Jews from all their countries. Both sides want the same." Avnery wrote that Zionism has been antisemitic since its foundation, citing Herzl's cooperation with the antisemitic Czarist regime in Russia. Far from a "unique chapter", Avnery asserts that "many attempts have been made to enlist anti-Semites to help in the implementation of the Zionist project" throughout history.

Steven M. Cohen, sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has written that antisemitism is found among right-wing Zionists. Cohen believes that "Many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews." Todd Gitlin, sociologist at Columbia University, believes that right-wing Zionism and antisemitism "have the same soul...they rhyme" because both are variants of ultra-nationalism.

Joseph Massad, a Palestinian academic at Columbia University, has stated that "It is Israel's claims that it represents and speaks for all Jews that are the most anti-Semitic claims of all." Massad states that "Jewish opponents of Zionism" understood that gentile Europeans "shared the precepts of anti-Semitism" and that Zionists and antisemites held a shared belief in "the expulsion of Jews from Europe." Massad believes that most pre-War European Jews resisted the "anti-Semitic basis of Zionism", while European countries typically supported "the anti-Semitic programme of Zionism".

Europe

France

The French-Jewish journalist Alain Gresh has stated that he has "always been convinced that some pro-Zionists are anti-Semitic." Gresh noted that the antisemitic right-wing politician and Nazi collaborator Xavier Vallat believed that "Jews would never integrate into France and that they had to go to Israel." Gresh also notes that the European far right "consider Israel an ally", as demonstrated by the "case of the anti-Soros anti-Semitic billboard campaign in Hungary."

In 2018, the Jewish French Union for Peace (UJFP), a pro-BDS Jewish anti-Zionist organization, was denied funding from the French government after producing video clips that claimed that Zionism is antisemitic. One member claimed that "it’s a form of anti-Semitism" for the Israeli government to claim to speak on behalf of all Jews, while another member said they were "revolted by the fact that an Israeli leader can come to France and tell French Jews: ‘you have a second country.'"

Germany and Austria

The philosemitic, Zionist Antideutsche movement in Germany and Austria has been accused of targeting left-wing German Jews and Austrian Jews. According to Haaretz writer Ofri Ilany, "Incensed Germans, some of them descendants of Nazis, don't hesitate to attack Jewish and Israeli left-wingers" and "besmirch Jews" and violate their freedom of expression "under the banner of the struggle against anti-Semitism." The left-wing Austrian-Jewish activist Isabel Frey believes that "Jews are fetishized in this pseudo-tolerant way and assumed to have unified interests" by the political mainstream in Austria and Germany. According to Frey, "Jewish leftists are being accused of antisemitism by non-Jewish leftists. To me, these accusations are a way of denigrating our Jewish identities, of saying that we’re the “wrong kind” of Jew. I keep asking myself, are these accusations themselves a kind of antisemitism?" Michael Sappir, an Israeli-born German-Jewish anti-Zionist activist affiliated with Jewish-Israeli Dissent Leipzig, has said that the experience of being an anti-Zionist Jewish leftist in Germany can be disempowering and "very isolating" because the German left is often associated with the Antideutsch movement. According to Sapir, Jewish leftists and other pro-Palestinian voices are marginalized in part because "Antideutsch groups have managed to bully them into silence" and that Jewish leftists "felt very insulted by the idea of calling this struggle “antisemitic.”

Poland

During the 1920s and 1930s, the General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland was vocally critical of antisemitic Zionism. The Polish government during this period was a staunch supporter of the Zionist movement, while also adopting increasingly antisemitic domestic policies. The Polish government actively encouraged emigration to Mandatory Palestine because it decreased the population of Polish Jews. The Bund produced election campaign materials including the terms "antisemitic Zionists" and "Zionist antisemites", arguing that the Zionist promotion of emigration and cooperation with the Polish government strengthened antisemitic forces within Polish society. The historian Emanuel Melzer believes that the Polish government's attitudes towards Zionism and Jewish emigration "implied that Jews were superfluous, alien, and even a destructive element" and that this attitude "might have had its repercussions on a part of the Polish population's attitude towards the Jews during the war", but acknowledges that the Shoah itself was not caused by the intensification of Polish antisemitism between 1936 and 1939.

In 1925, Polish Zionist members of the Sejm capitalized on governmental support for Zionism by negotiating an agreement with the government known as the Ugoda. The Ugoda was an agreement between the Polish prime minister Władysław Grabski and Zionist leaders in eastern Galicia, including Leon Reich. The agreement granted certain cultural and religious rights to Jews in exchange for Jewish support for Polish nationalist interests; however, the Galician Zionists had little to show for their compromise because the Polish government later refused to honor many aspects of the agreement. During the 1930s, Revisionist Zionists viewed the Polish government as an ally and promoted cooperation between Polish Zionists and Polish nationalists, despite the antisemitism of the Polish government.

Norway

The Norwegian far-right domestic terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is both an antisemitic neo-Nazi and a strong supporter of the State of Israel. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has described Breivik's ideology as an "extreme version" of "Zionist anti-Semitism", writing that Breivik is "antisemitic, but pro-Israel" because in Breivik's view the Israeli state is a "first line of defense against Muslim expansion". Žižek notes that Breivik believes that France and the United Kingdom have a "Jewish problem" due to their large Jewish populations, whereas the rest of Western Europe doesn't, describing this as Breivik's belief that "Jews are OK as long as there aren't too many of them" living in diaspora. The journalist Michelle Goldberg has referred to Breivik as an "ardent Zionist" who "has nothing but contempt for the majority of Jewish people", arguing that his "embrace of Israel...far from being unique, is just the latest sign" that "in European politics, fascism and an aggressive sort of Zionism increasingly go together." Goldberg cites Islamophobia as a commonality between the State of Israel and "European white nationalists".

Israel

Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionists in Mandatory Palestine sometimes criticized secular Jewish Zionists as "antisemitic Zionists" for interfering with Orthodox practice. Rabbi Baruch Meir Klein, President of the New York Board of Rabbis, claimed that the "Goyyim in America let us be Jews. They do not ruin our Talmud Torah. They do not reform our schools...They do not ridicule Jews who go to Mikveh or Kloppen Hoyshaness...It is enough for me to be in Galuth with Goyyim. I have no need to be [in Eretz Israel], in Galuth under Jews who are antisemitic Zionists."

Atalia Omer has written that in Israel "young activists increasingly recognize that their safety depends on linking the fight against antisemitism to other social justice struggles", mentioning the Israeli activists who have "taken to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s regime and many others such as B'Tselem for years have decried the weaponization of antisemitism." Omer believes that these "critical voices are silenced within the entrenched ideological regime that the IHRA represents as it coalesces with white nationalist and Christian Zionist antisemitism."

Paraguay

According to the Palestinian academic Joseph Massad, the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner launched antisemitic campaigns against Paraguayan Jews who criticized his regime while also supporting the State of Israel, which provided his regime with weapons.

United States

After World War II, during the second Red Scare, some members of Congress called for the British government to open Mandatory Palestine to Jewish emigration, hoping that Jewish refugees (suspected to be Communists) would migrate to Palestine rather than to the United States.

The historian David N. Myers has written that "Leading white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor liken their movement to Zionism, seeing it as a model for the kind of monoethnic purity they favor in [the United States]." Myers states that the "combination of pro-Israel and antisemitic sensibilities" is common within American politics due to the combined influences of the "Christian evangelical Right with its end-game theology", "archly conservative" Catholics, and the political ideology of Donald Trump. Atalia Omer has noted "convergences between white supremacist violence and exclusionary politics which often comes in the form of Zionist antisemitism", citing Richard Spencer's "white Zionism" as an example.

Right-wing evangelical Christians in the United States are often vocally Zionist while also holding antisemitic attitudes towards Jews. Conservative Christians are amongst the strongest supporters of the State of Israel in the United States. With 7.1 million members, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is the largest Zionist organization in the United States. Many Christian Zionists believe that the Gathering of Israel is a prerequisite for the final coming of the Christian messiah, after which a portion of Jews will convert and the majority of Jews will be killed and condemned to Hell. Ben Lorber and Aidan Orly, writing in Religion Dispatches, have described Christian Zionism as "one of the largest antisemitic movements in the world today". Ha'aretz writer Joshua Shanes condemned CUFI founder John Hagee for promoting an "apocalyptic and deeply antisemitic worldview" and promoting some of the "most dangerous myths of the modern era." Hagee has promoted financial conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family controlling the federal reserve, claimed that Hitler was sent by God to murder Jews who refused to emigrate to Israel, and described the Antichrist as a "half-Jew homosexual." Slavoj Žižek has also described John Hagee, as well as Glenn Beck, as examples of Christian fundamentalist "anti-Semitic Zionists." Žižek believes that Zionism itself has "paradoxically become anti-Semitic" because the movement promotes hatred of anti-Zionist Jews by constructing a figure of Jewish anti-Zionism "along anti-Semitic lines." Žižek describes the way that Jewish anti-Zionists are maligned as "Self-hating Jews" by Zionists as an example of Zionist antisemitism.

Zionist leaders and organizations in the United States have been widely criticized, particularly by the Jewish left, for allegedly downplaying the severity of antisemitism in the United States and for alleged complicity with the Trump administration in order to pursue pro-Israel, Zionist causes. Atalia Omer, a professor of religion at the University of Notre Dame, has written that "Israel's silence on white nationalism and its implicit or explicit condoning of antisemitic Zionists" has decisively convinced many American Jews that the Israeli government is not keeping Jews safe and is actively endangering Jews living in the diaspora. Omer cites the "moral shock" of Israeli silence on white nationalist antisemitism for discrediting the "Zionist monopoly over the narrative of Jewish survival." Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), has been criticized for being "notably silent" about antisemitism during the Trump era. ZOA was deluged by messages from outraged supporters following ZOA's support for Steve Bannon and Klein's statement that he could not be an antisemite because "He's the opposite of an antisemite. He's a philo-semite." +972 Magazine's Natasha Roth-Rowland believes that a "rise of Zionist antisemitism as a standard behavior among large swaths of the GOP and its ecosystem has become a defining feature of the American far right’s worldview and modus operandi."

In 2017, Judith Butler denounced antisemitic manifestations of Zionism within the Trump administration. Butler named Breitbart and Steve Bannon as purveyors of "antisemitic Zionism", writing that Bannon is both a "strong Zionist" and that "his antisemitism apparently does not get in the way of his support for the Israeli state, and that his supporters in the Israeli government do not seem to mind." Butler argued that right-wing antisemitic Zionism is a manifestation of white supremacy, whereby the white Ashkenazi ruling class in Israel makes alliances with right-wing politicians in other countries on the basis of shared anti-Arab racism, anti-Palestinianism, and Islamophobia.

In 2019, the Russian-born Jewish-American journalist Masha Gessen described Donald Trump as a "pro-Zionist anti-Semite". Gessen noted that Trump's administration had pursued pro-Israel policies while also spreading Jewish stereotypes, such as the speech Trump delivered at the Israeli American Council National Summit where he declared that "A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well...You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all." Calling Trump's comments "plain, easily recognizable anti-Semitism", Gessen believes Trump views American Jews as "alien beings whom he associates with the state of Israel."

The liberal journalist Peter Beinart believes that Zionist antisemitism is likely on the rise in the United States and that it is unclear that Zionists are less likely to harbor antisemitic sentiments compared to anti-Zionists. According to Beinart, "It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it."

During the Summer of 2020, the Palestine Solidarity Collective (PSC) at York University published comments on social media claiming that Zionism is an antisemitic political movement.

During the January 6 United States Capitol attack, several insurrectionists waved Israeli flags, sparking commentary from multiple organizations that described a link between Zionist ideology and antisemitic right-wing extremism. The Adalah Justice Project tweeted that "the forces in the US who seek to maintain white supremacy are inspired by Israel's racism and vice versa", which was retweeted by Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The SJP chapter at the University of Illinois at Chicago also tweeted that the presence of Israeli flags "shouldn’t be surprising, as far right ideologies all stem from the same form of racist hatred." These comments were condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as "anti-Israel". Jewish Voice for Peace maintained that "Antisemitic Zionists are common in right-wing movements", that "Many white nationalists both hate Jews and love Israel", and alleged that both Zionist organizations and the Israeli government have failed to condemn antisemitic white nationalists. Ben Lorber, writing for +972 Magazine, argued that American white nationalism support for the "Jewish state's supremacist values fits comfortably with its deep antisemitism" and that "philosemitic Christian Zionism carries deep undercurrents of anti-Judaism." Lorber refers to the phenomenon of right-Zionism fitting "comfortably alongside simmering currents of antisemitism" as "Antisemitic Zionism".

The Zionist organization Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) was accused of antisemitism by Jewish progressives during the 2020 election, after DMFI released attack ads against the progressive Jewish California politician Sara Jacobs. The ads emphasized Jacobs' wealthy background, portraying her "fortune and privileged life" as making her out of touch with ordinary Americans. The Intercept claimed that the "imagery and language employed by many of the ads are reminiscent of common antisemitic tropes", noting that DMFI had previously endorsed wealthy non-Jewish candidates. Rachel Rosen, a DMFI spokesperson, denied accusations that the ads were antisemitic.

In August 2022, the left-wing Jewish organization IfNotNow condemned AIPAC for antisemitism after AIPAC claimed that "George Soros has a long history of backing anti-Israel groups" and that "J Street & Soros work to undermine" pro-Israel Democrats. IfNotNow asserted that AIPAC was not a Jewish organization, did not represent Jews, and in allegedly promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about Soros, AIPAC had become part of the "antisemitic far right."

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Internet governance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Internet
Visualization of Internet routing paths
An Opte Project visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet

Internet governance consists of a system of laws, rules, policies and practices that dictate how its board members manage and oversee the affairs of any internet related-regulatory body. This article describes how the Internet was and is currently governed, some inherent controversies, and ongoing debates regarding how and why the Internet should or should not be governed in future. (Internet governance should not be confused with e-governance, which refers to governmental use of technology in its governing duties.)

Background

Main article: Internet
 
Who-Runs-the-Internet-graphic

No one person, company, organization or government runs the Internet. It is a globally distributed network comprising many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body with each constituent network setting and enforcing its own policies. Its governance is conducted by a decentralized and international multistakeholder network of interconnected autonomous groups drawing from civil society, the private sector, governments, the academic and research communities and national and international organizations. They work cooperatively from their respective roles to create shared policies and standards that maintain the Internet's global interoperability for the public good.

However, to help ensure interoperability, several key technical and policy aspects of the underlying core infrastructure and the principal namespaces are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. ICANN oversees the assignment of globally unique identifiers on the Internet, including domain names, Internet protocol addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. This seeks to create a globally unified namespace to ensure the global reach of the Internet. ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet's technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities.

There has been a long-held dispute over the management of the DNS root zone, whose final control fell under the supervision of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Considering that the U.S. Department of Commerce could unilaterally terminate the Affirmation of Commitments with ICANN, the authority of DNS administration was likewise seen as revocable and derived from a single State, namely the United States. The involvement of NTIA started in 1998 and was supposed to be temporal, but it wasn't until April 2014 in an ICANN meeting held in Brazil, partly heated after Snowden revelations, that this situation changed resulting in an important shift of control transitioning administrative duties of the DNS root zones from NTIA to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) during a period that ended in September 2016.

The technical underpinning and standardization of the Internet's core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.

On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in Tunis, established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to open an ongoing, non-binding conversation among multiple stakeholders about the future of Internet governance. Since WSIS, the term "Internet governance" has been broadened beyond narrow technical concerns to include a wider range of Internet-related policy issues.

Definition

The definition of Internet governance has been contested by differing groups across political and ideological lines. One of the main debates concerns the authority and participation of certain actors, such as national governments, corporate entities and civil society, to play a role in the Internet's governance.

A working group established after a UN-initiated World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) proposed the following definition of Internet governance as part of its June 2005 report:

Internet governance is the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.

Law professor Yochai Benkler developed a conceptualization of Internet governance by the idea of three "layers" of governance:

  • Physical infrastructure layer (through which information travels)
  • Code or logical layer (controls the infrastructure)
  • Content layer (contains the information signaled through the network)

Professors Jovan Kurbalija and Laura DeNardis also offer comprehensive definitions to "Internet Governance". According to Kurbalija, the broad approach to Internet Governance goes "beyond Internet infrastructural aspects and address other legal, economic, developmental, and sociocultural issues"; along similar lines, DeNardis argues that "Internet Governance generally refers to policy and technical coordination issues related to the exchange of information over the Internet". One of the more policy-relevant questions today is exactly whether the regulatory responses are appropriate to police the content delivered through the Internet: it includes important rules for the improvement of Internet safety and for dealing with threats such as cyber-bullying, copyright infringement, data protection and other illegal or disruptive activities.

Internet governance now constitutes a college-level field of study with many syllabi available.

History

Main article: History of the Internet

The original ARPANET is one of the components which eventually evolved to become the Internet. As its name suggests the ARPANET was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense. During the development of ARPANET, a numbered series of Request for Comments (RFCs) memos documented technical decisions and methods of working as they evolved. The standards of today's Internet are still documented by RFCs.

Between 1984 and 1986 the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) created the NSFNET backbone, using TCP/IP, to connect their supercomputing facilities. NSFNET became a general-purpose research network, a hub to connect the supercomputing centers to each other and to the regional research and education networks that would in turn connect campus networks. The combined networks became generally known as the Internet. By the end of 1989, Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK were connected to the Internet, which had grown to contain more than 160,000 hosts.

In 1990, the ARPANET was formally terminated. In 1991 the NSF began to relax its restrictions on commercial use on NSFNET and commercial network providers began to interconnect. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended on 30 April 1995, when the NSF ended its sponsorship of the NSFNET Backbone Service and the service ended. Today almost all Internet infrastructure in the United States, and large portion in other countries, is provided and owned by the private sector. Traffic is exchanged between these networks, at major interconnection points, in accordance with established Internet standards and commercial agreements.

Governors

During 1979 the Internet Configuration Control Board was founded by DARPA to oversee the network's development. During 1984 it was renamed the Internet Advisory Board (IAB), and during 1986 it became the Internet Activities Board.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was formed during 1986 by the U.S. government to develop and promote Internet standards. It consisted initially of researchers, but by the end of the year participation was available to anyone, and its business was performed largely by email.

From the early days of the network until his death during 1998, Jon Postel oversaw address allocation and other Internet protocol numbering and assignments in his capacity as Director of the Computer Networks Division at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, under a contract from the Department of Defense. This function eventually became known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and as it expanded to include management of the global Domain Name System (DNS) root servers, a small organization grew. Postel also served as RFC Editor.

Allocation of IP addresses was delegated to five regional Internet registries (RIRs):

After Jon Postel's death in 1998, IANA became part of ICANN, a California nonprofit established in September 1998 by the U.S. government and awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Initially two board members were elected by the Internet community at large, though this was changed by the rest of the board in 2002 in a poorly attended public meeting in Accra, Ghana.

In 1992 the Internet Society (ISOC) was founded, with a mission to "assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". Its members include individuals (anyone may join) as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and universities. The IAB was renamed the Internet Architecture Board, and became part of ISOC. The Internet Engineering Task Force also became part of the ISOC. The IETF is overseen currently by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), and longer-term research is carried on by the Internet Research Task Force and overseen by the Internet Research Steering Group.

At the first World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in 2003, the topic of Internet governance was discussed. ICANN's status as a private corporation under contract to the U.S. government created controversy among other governments, especially Brazil, China, South Africa, and some Arab states. Since no general agreement existed even on the definition of what comprised Internet governance, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan initiated a Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to clarify the issues and report before the second part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis 2005. After much controversial debate, during which the U.S. delegation refused to consider surrendering the U.S. control of the Root Zone file, participants agreed on a compromise to allow for wider international debate on the policy principles. They agreed to establish an Internet Governance Forum (IGF), to be convened by the United Nations Secretary General before the end of the second quarter of 2006. The Greek government volunteered to host the first such meeting.

Annual global IGFs have been held since 2006, with the Forum renewed for five years by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2010. In addition to the annual global IGF, regional IGFs have been organized in Africa, the Arab region, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in sub-regions. in December 2015, the United Nations General Assembly renewed the IGF for another ten years, in the context of the WSIS 10-year overall review.

Media Freedom

Media, freedom of expression and freedom of information have been long recognized as principles of internet governance, included in the 2003 Geneva Declaration and 2005 Tunis Commitment of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Given the crossborder, decentralized nature of the internet, an enabling environment for media freedom in the digital age requires global multi-stakeholder cooperation and shared respect for human rights. In broad terms, two different visions have been seen to shape global internet governance debates in recent years: fragmentation versus common principles.

Internet Universality and the ROAM principles

On the one hand, some national governments, particularly in the Central and Eastern European and Asia-Pacific regions, have emphasized state sovereignty as an organizing premise of national and global internet governance. In some regions, data localization laws—requiring that data be stored, processed and circulated within a given jurisdiction—have been introduced to keep citizens' personal data in the country, both to retain regulatory authority over such data and to strengthen the case for greater jurisdiction. Countries in the Central and Eastern European, Asia-Pacific, and African regions all have legislation requiring some localization. Data localization requirements increase the likelihood of multiple standards and the fragmentation of the internet, limiting the free flow of information, and in some cases increasing the potential for surveillance, which in turn impacts on freedom of expression.

On the other hand, the dominant practice has been towards a unified, universal internet with broadly shared norms and principles. The NETmundial meeting, held in Brazil in 2014, produced a multistakeholder statement the 'internet should continue to be a globally coherent, interconnected, stable, unfragmented, scalable and accessible network-of-networks.' In 2015, UNESCO's General Conference endorsed the concept of Internet Universality and the 'ROAM Principles', which state that the internet should be ‘(i) Human Rights-based (ii) Open, (iii) Accessible to all, and (iv) Nurtured by Multistakeholder participation’. The ROAM Principles combine standards for process (multi-stakeholderism to avoid potential capture of the internet by a single power center with corresponding risks), with recommendations about substance (what those principles should be). The fundamental position is for a global internet where ROAM principles frame regional, national and local diversities. In this context, significant objectives are media freedom, network interoperability, net neutrality and the free flow of information (minimal barriers to the rights to receive and impart information across borders, and any limitations to accord with international standards).

In a study of 30 key initiatives aimed at establishing a bill of rights online during the period between 1999 and 2015, researchers at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center found that the right to freedom of expression online was protected in more documents (26) than any other right. The UN General Assembly committed itself to multistakeholderism in December 2015 through a resolution extending the WSIS process and IGF mandate for an additional decade. It further underlined the importance of human rights and media-related issues such as the safety of journalists.

Growing support for the multistakeholder model was also observed in the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship transition, in which oversight of the internet's addressing system shifted from a contract with the United States Department of Commerce to a new private sector entity with new multi-stakeholder accountability mechanisms. Another support of the multistakeholder approach has been the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations, the updated and considerably expanded second edition of the 2013 Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. The annual conferences linked to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime and meetings of the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, mandated by the United Nations General Assembly, have deliberated on norms such as protection of critical infrastructure and the application of international law to cyberspace.

In the period 2012–2016, the African Union passed the Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection and the Commonwealth Secretariat adopted the Report of the Working Group of Experts on Cybercrime.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) compelled all 15 member states to implement data protection laws and authorities through the adoption of the Supplementary Act on Personal Data Protection in 2010. Again in 2011, the ECOWAS adopted a Directive on Fighting Cybercrime to combat growing Cybercrime activities in the West African region. In response to the growing need for ICT infrastructures, Cybersecurity, and increasing Cybercrime, the ECOWAS, on 18 January 2021, adopted the regional strategy for Cybersecurity and the fight against Cybercrime.

In a bid to unify data protection across Europe and give data subjects autonomy over their data, the European Union implemented the General Data Protection Regulation on 25 May 2018. It replaced the insufficient Data Protection Directive of 1995. The EU describes it as the "toughest privacy and security law" globally. Under the GDPR, data subjects have the right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, profiling, object to automated processing, and data portability.

Internet Encryption

Privacy and security online have been of paramount concern to internet users with growing cybercrime and cyberattacks worldwide. A 2019 poll by Safety Monitor shows that 13 percent of people aged 15 and above have been victims of cybercrimes such as identity fraud, hacking, and cyberbullying in the Netherlands. INTERPOL recommends using encrypted internet to stay safe online. Encryption technology serves as a channel to ensuring privacy and security online. It is one of the strongest tools to help internet users globally stay secured on the internet, especially in the aspect of data protection. However, criminals leverage the privacy, security, and confidentiality of online encryption technology to perpetrate cybercrimes and sometimes be absolved of its legal criminal consequences. It has sparked debates between internet governors and governments of various countries on whether encryption technology should stay or its use stopped.

The UK Government, in May 2021, proposed the Online Safety Bill, a new regulatory framework to address cyberattacks and cybercrimes in the UK, but without a strong encryption technology. This is in a bid to make the UK the safest place to use the internet in the world and curb the damaging effect of harmful content shared online, including child pornography. However, the Internet Society argues that a lack of strong encryption exposes internet users to even greater risks of cyber attacks, cybercrimes, adding that it overrides data protection laws.

Globalization and governance controversy

Role of ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce

The position of the U.S. Department of Commerce as the controller of some aspects of the Internet gradually attracted criticism from those who felt that control should be more international. A hands-off philosophy by the Department of Commerce helped limit this criticism, but this was undermined in 2005 when the Bush administration intervened to help kill the .xxx top-level domain proposal, and, much more severely, following the 2013 disclosures of mass surveillance by the U.S. government.

When the IANA functions were handed over to ICANN, a new U.S. nonprofit, controversy increased. ICANN's decision-making process was criticised by some observers as being secretive and unaccountable. When the directors' posts which had previously been elected by the "at-large" community of Internet users were abolished, some feared that ICANN would become illegitimate and its qualifications questionable, due to the fact that it was now losing the aspect of being a neutral governing body. ICANN stated that it was merely streamlining decision-making, and developing a structure suitable for the modern Internet. On 1 October 2015, following a community-led process spanning months, the stewardship of the IANA functions were transitioned to the global Internet community.

Other topics of controversy included the creation and control of generic top-level domains (.com, .org, and possible new ones, such as .biz or .xxx), the control of country-code domains, recent proposals for a large increase in ICANN's budget and responsibilities, and a proposed "domain tax" to pay for the increase.

There were also suggestions that individual governments should have more control, or that the International Telecommunication Union or the United Nations should have a function in Internet governance.

IBSA proposal (2011)

One controversial proposal to this effect, resulting from a September 2011 summit among India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA), would seek to move Internet governance into a "UN Committee on Internet-Related Policy" (UN-CIRP). The move was a reaction to a perception that the principles of the 2005 Tunis Agenda for the Information Society had not been met. The statement called for the subordination of independent technical organizations such as ICANN and the ITU to a political organization operating under the auspices of the United Nations. After outrage from India's civil society and media, the Indian government backed away from the proposal.

Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation (2013)

On 7 October 2013 the Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Cooperation was released by the leaders of a number of organizations involved in coordinating the Internet's global technical infrastructure, loosely known as the "I*" (or "I-star") group. Among other things, the statement "expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance" and "called for accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing". This desire to move away from a United States centric approach is seen as a reaction to the ongoing NSA surveillance scandal. The statement was signed by the heads of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society, and the five regional Internet address registries (African Network Information Center, American Registry for Internet Numbers, Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, Latin America and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry, and Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre).

Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NetMundial) (2013)

In October 2013, Fadi Chehadé, former President and CEO of ICANN, met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia. Upon Chehadé's invitation, the two announced that Brazil would host an international summit on Internet governance in April 2014. The announcement came after the 2013 disclosures of mass surveillance by the U.S. government, and President Rousseff's speech at the opening session of the 2013 United Nations General Assembly, where she strongly criticized the U.S. surveillance program as a "breach of international law". The "Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NETMundial)" will include representatives of government, industry, civil society, and academia. At the IGF VIII meeting in Bali in October 2013 a commentator noted that Brazil intends the meeting to be a "summit" in the sense that it will be high level with decision-making authority. The organizers of the "NETmundial" meeting have decided that an online forum called "/1net", set up by the I* group, will be a major conduit of non-governmental input into the three committees preparing for the meeting in April.

NetMundial managed to convene a large number of global actors to produce a consensus statement on internet governance principles and a roadmap for the future evolution of the internet governance ecosystem. NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement – the outcome of the Meeting – was elaborated in an open and participatory manner, by means of successive consultations. This consensus should be qualified in that even though the statement was adopted by consensus, some participants, specifically the Russian Federation, India, Cuba, and ARTICLE 19, representing some participants from civil society expressed some dissent with its contents and the process.

NetMundial Initiative (2014)

The NetMundial Initiative is an initiative by ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade along with representatives of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil), commonly referred to as "CGI.br"., which was inspired by the 2014 NetMundial meeting. Brazil's close involvement derived from accusations of digital espionage against then-president Dilma Rousseff.

A month later, the Panel On Global Internet Cooperation and Governance Mechanisms (convened by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) with assistance from The Annenberg Foundation), supported and included the NetMundial statement in its own report.

End of U.S. Department of Commerce oversight

On 1 October 2016 ICANN ended its contract with the United States Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

This marked a historic moment in the history of the Internet. The contract between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for performance of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, functions, drew its roots from the earliest days of the Internet. Initially the contract was seen as a temporary measure, according to Lawrence Strickling, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information from 2009 to 2017.

Internet users saw no change or difference in their experience online as a result of what ICANN and others called the IANA Stewardship Transition. As Stephen D. Crocker, ICANN Board Chair from 2011 to 2017, said in a news release at the time of the contract expiration, “This community validated the multistakeholder model of Internet governance. It has shown that a governance model defined by the inclusion of all voices, including business, academics, technical experts, civil society, governments and many others is the best way to assure that the Internet of tomorrow remains as free, open, and accessible as the Internet of today.”

The concerted effort began in March 2014, when NTIA asked ICANN to convene the global multistakeholder community – made up of private-sector representatives, technical experts, academics, civil society, governments and individual Internet end users – to come together and create a proposal to replace NTIA’s historic stewardship role. The community, in response to the NTIA’s request for a proposal, said that they wanted to enhance ICANN’s accountability mechanisms as well. NTIA later agreed to consider proposals for both together.

People involved in global Internet governance worked for nearly two years to develop two consensus-based proposals. Stakeholders spent more than 26,000 working hours on the proposal, exchanged more than 33,000 messages on mailing lists, held more than 600 meetings and calls and incurred millions of dollars of legal fees to develop the plan, which the community completed, and ICANN submitted to NTIA for review in March 2016.

On 24 May 2016, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee held its oversight hearing on "Examining the Multistakeholder Plan for Transitioning the Internet Assigned Number Authority.” Though the Senators present expressed support for the transition, a few expressed concerns that the accountability mechanisms in the proposal should be tested during an extension of the NTIA’s contract with ICANN.

Two weeks later, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz introduced the “Protecting Internet Freedom Act,” a bill to prohibit NTIA from allowing the IANA functions contract to lapse unless authorized by Congress. The bill never left the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

On 9 June 2016, NTIA, after working with other U.S. Government agencies to conduct a thorough review, announced that the proposal package developed by the global Internet multistakeholder community met the criteria it had outlined in March 2014. In summary, NTIA found that the proposal package:

  • Supported and enhanced the multistakeholder model because it was developed by a multistakeholder process that engaged Internet stakeholders around the world, and built on existing multistakeholder arrangements, processes, and concepts.
  • Maintained the security, stability, and resiliency of the Internet DNS because it relied on ICANN’s current operational practices to perform the IANA functions. The proposed accountability and oversight provisions bolstered the ability of Internet stakeholders to ensure ongoing security, stability, and resiliency.
  • Met the needs and expectations of the global customers and partners of the IANA services because it was directly created by those customers and partners of the IANA functions. The accountability recommendations ensured that ICANN would perform in accordance with the will of the multistakeholder community.
  • Maintained the openness of the Internet because it required that the IANA functions, databases, operations, and related policymaking remain fully open and accessible, just as they were prior to the transition.

The vast proposals required various changes to ICANN’s structure and Bylaws, which ICANN and its various stakeholder groups completed in advance of 30 September 2016, the date at which the IANA functions contract was set to expire.

Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace

On 12 November 2018 at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron launched the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. This high-level declaration presents a framework of common principles for regulating the Internet and fighting back against cyber attacks, hate speech and other cyber threats.

Council on Foreign Relations task force report no. 80 (2022)

In May 2022, the Council on Foreign Relations completed its Independent Task Force Report No. 80, "Confronting Reality in Cyberspace: Foreign Policy for a Fragmented Internet" recommending that the U.S.reconsider its cyber, digital trade and online freedom policies that champion a free and open internet, as having failed.

NCSC ransomware speech at Tel Aviv Cyber Week (2022)

During the 12th annual Tel Aviv Cyber Week in 2022, UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) CEO Lindy Cameron underlined, as did others, that the pervasiveness of ransomware is the primary cyber threat to global security, and quickly evolving.

Internet Shutdowns

Internet shutdowns refer to when state authorities deliberately shut down the internet. In other cases, Internet shutdown could describe intentional acts by state authorities to slow down internet connections. Other terms used to describe internet shutdown include 'blanket shutdown,' 'kill switches,' 'blackout,' 'digital curfews.' Shutdowns could be for only a few hours, days, weeks, and sometimes months. Governments often justify internet shutdowns on grounds of public safety, prevention of mass hysteria, hate speech, fake news, national security, and sometimes for transparency of an ongoing electioneering process. However, reports indicate that shutdowns are a deliberate attempt at internet censorship by the governments. Apart from posing great harm to internet freedom, the shutdown of the internet harms public health, economies, educational systems, internet advancements, vulnerable groups, and democratic societies. This is because they impede on public communication through the internet for a while, thereby putting many activities at a standstill.

In the past years, no fewer than 35 countries have experienced internet shutdowns. According to reports by Access Now a non-profit digital right group, 25 countries across the globe experienced government-induced internet shutdown 196 times in 2018. In 2019, Access Now reports indicated that 33 countries experienced a government-induced internet shutdown 213 times. The 2020 report from the digital right group implied that 29 countries deliberately shut down their internet 155 times. With the growing trend of internet shutdowns, digital rights groups, including Internet Society, Access Now, #KeepItOn Coalition, and others have condemned it, noting it is an 'infringement on digital rights' of netizens. These groups have also been at the forefront of tracking and reporting shutdowns in real-time as well as analyzing its impact on internet advancement, internet freedom, and societies.

Internet bodies

United Nations bodies

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