Netgain Challenge

Increasingly, state actors are effective at asserting various levels of information sovereignty, or, authoritative control over information flows, within their territories. Well known are heavy handed attempts towards censorship, but less documented are the ways in which policy makers, in cooperation with the private sector, build architectures of control into the technologies we use to communicate. These controls range, but are justified by a desire for greater: political/social control, security, IP protections, cultural protections, or law enforcement capabilities. As international norms shifts further away from a free flow of information, and a right to access information, towards information sovereignty, informational rights of global netizens are jeopardized. Existing research is ad hoc and segmented, and a comprehensive, systematic and integrated analysis is needed to map how all governments are enacting regimes of control. We need a global, all-encompassing transparency report.