Safety and cooperation essential for Internet development
- By Zhu Wei
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 25, 2014
Wuzhen summit is a very high level conference. From President Xi Jinping's greetings to the attendance of Premier Li Keqiang, from the Chinese government's high-level presence to the participation of China's Internet leaders, everything reveals the Chinese people and government's openness about network management and administration and also shows China's self-confidence in the Internet.
The Wuzhen summit not only offered a platform for the global Internet, but it enables the world to better know and avoid misjudgment in the future, and try to explore the rules and orders to administer and manage the networks and solve cyberspace safety problems with openness and democracy.
To ensure Internet safety involves system project engineering, which includes not only improving legislation, the judiciary and law enforcement to reach a level ensuring safety, but also improving technologies to provide vital back-up. The legal and technological approaches respectively have their own emphases. The former is concerned with settlement after an incident, the latter is concerned with taking advanced precautions.
The legal approach focuses on the guidance of legislation and respect for the judiciary. The Internet legal system must be more international than normal laws. New crimes such as Internet terrorist violence, cyberspace multi-national crime, network drug traffic and the Internet multi-national hunt for fugitives cannot be handled by a single country, but needs international consensus as soon as possible.
Besides, cyber-actions involve separation between space and time. The individual may commit a crime in a place while living in another. So, the crime may not belong to a single jurisdiction in one country, which will be very hard to deal with effectively. On the one hand, countries should respect one another's laws and cannot measure their own citizens' actions in other countries. On the other hand, nations should strengthen cooperation and help other countries enforce their laws.
Cyber-technologies are also a very important element in maintaining network safety. Whether Internet security technologies are advanced is closely related to user experience, trade safety and national security. Currently, the development speed of the Internet technologies is much faster than those related to security. This is a challenge faced by all countries.
At the same time, due to the fact that the Internet is in virtual space, some illegal attackers' identities cannot be identified, so this may add to misjudgment and anger among countries. This technical and cognition problem needs more international and inter-governmental cooperation to resolve.
Therefore, the Wuzhen summit stresses the idea of "multilateral cooperation," arguing that only through technological cooperation with good communications and connectivity between countries, and a co-sharing and co-administrative approach, can Internet safety and common prosperity in the cyberspace be truly realized.
The writer is a researcher from China University of Political Science and Law.
The article was translated by Zhang Rui. Its original version was published in Chinese.
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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