I wrote that 2011 would be a year in which the net would be beneath a multi-pronged attack that menaces to alter it irrevocable in ways that may spiflicate much of the net possible. Well, 2011 has arrive and mostly gone, and it became out that my optimism may have been mislaid but not invalid.


The FCC vote I concerned to in last year's column turned out to be normally better for the net but it did not take long for a telecom carrier to sue the FCC asserting that the commission had no power to tell the carrier to treat its clients reasonably, my concern about the power of the copyright manufacture, at least in the U.S, was a bit untimely but not mislaid.


Congress is now considering the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), polices explicitly planned to destroy the net substructure in an effort to save the disused business models of copyright giants. Congress, so far, has established to be resistant to the objections of the individual who planned, built and run the net (here and here). It looks like the only things Congress can view are the componant of the net that their subscribers run the fundamental wires and the message that is a little componant of what flows over the net.


We should soon recognize who wins this contend, the net or one of the minor players in the net biosphere the copyright industry, and if the industry wins in Congress we shall then view where President Obama's commitment lies with the Constitution he once instructed or with the industry that donates money to his campaign. A ray of guess for a better outcome arrives from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's and Vice President Joe Biden's statements in favor of net freedom, but money too often talks louder to politicians than justice throughout an election year.


The fate of the net outside the U.S. has been cleaner, at least in spots. China has not been entire that subtle about its impression that an unshackled net is a threat to the country, throughout the Arab world, governments determine out that China might just have a point, europe, in universal, contempt the feelings of the president of France, has ordinarily arrive down on the side of Internet freedom.


2011: The year's biggest security snafus


What does 2012 look like for individual who care about net freedom, at this point it is not clean what is clean is that complacency on the componant of the pro-net crowd would be a identical bad duggestion.


The year forwards will be full of challenges to net freedom, it will begin with Congress becoming back to work later the holidays, ever a potential threat, but in this case they will get back to doing the copyright industry's bidding with the SOPA and PIPA bills, the year will end with the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in December.


Among the proposals being drifted for circumstance is one that would put the (ITU), with its country-established decision procedure, in charge of most of the net, adding the net Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society.