Mashups and Internet Governance

March 20, 2010 nightvole
Tags: blog, Cyber Crime, Governance, internet, ISTB01, Mashups, transnational, Visual Headlines., Woozor

The vision of the internet as a libertarian paradise has lately been challenged by the increasing perception that the internet needs to have limits and agreed upon rules/limitations. In other words Internet governance, but implementing or for that matter much less agreeing on the type governance is problematic due to the nature of the internet as a transnational vehicle which makes it difficult to apply any one country’s laws because it is hard to pin down exactly where responsibility and jurisdiction lie in such a space as the internet. Additionally there is also the issue of various conflicting views on how governance is too being approached. The answer to deal with this transnational issue is to set up a transnational organisation that can effectively administer Internet governance. There has already been steps taken to address this however it has had limited effect.

Enter mashups: which are a new kind of applications which combines the data of several different platform and then presents it in a useful manner. For Example Woozor is a Google Maps / Weather.com mash up providing 10 day weather forecasts all around the world. Another is visual headlines which displays current news via images of global happenings.

This would be useful to governments because if offers the potential for more easy solutions by allowing us to see the larger picture, on how various small issues are connected to each other. In terms of Internet Governance I also think that it can be a useful tool, because it can serve to combine the information from many separate sources. This is crucial because the whole problem with internet governance is how it lacks comprehensive knowledge and doesn’t have adequate communication between sources: This is seen in the attempts on governments to crack down on cyber crime which have unfortunately failed because of the aforementioned issues where the differences and lack of cooperation between countries made it impossible to effectively deal with the problem on cyber crime. Mishaps could help solve this by allowing governments to see a comprehensive display of information of cyber crime: which would in turn enable us to combat it at as we would have the appropriate info to take global transnational initiatives.

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