While the search engine giants did join forces under national interests, it did face more and more difficult and largely unsolved questions regarding relationships between legacy national governments, as diverse as they are, and supranational organisations, and also between the governments themselves. There are various issues here, but perhaps one of the most severe issues is the ongoing aim to establish supranational mandate as de-facto, including some largely one-sided coalitions. Indeed the eternal obstacle in constructing global governance is the difficulty of identifying, institutionalising and establishing one. Many people talk about it, some people want it, some tried out and failed, yet very rarely it is discussed as of what are the root causes for the difficulty and how should one prevent if not suppress the aims in the future to proceed on that path. At the end of the horrors of world wars, an institution was formed, based on the concepts of territoriality and sovereignty, however which is now more and less eroding. Please be reminded about the preceding events before the second world war broke off, one of them which was the abolishment of the league of nations, the glue and fabric to keep the rebelling sovereigns down and in order.
The global cybersecurity initiative, and indeed the various transnational organisations, businesses if one will, are increasingly acting as de-facto replacement of the legacy institutions which have failed to respond to the challenge of inter-territorial networks. While the search engine giants operate with world’s governments by tampering with the search results based on their requests, it will more than anything aim to enforce its own role as the one, the one who can say who are legitimate governments and authorities to issue such warrants as well as fall back to the mundane concept of national cyberspace. For the actual victim of search engines, the goodness of self-censoring indexes does only little good. Most of the cases are just solved by altering country-specific indexes, an act which perversely tries to emboss the concept of territoriality to the cyberspace as well as to the modern transnational thinking and identities.
What these giants, raising up to the clouds, only rarely want to discuss is the actual nature of their global presence and indeed the mandate. Instead, in the name of the business, the global presence is often declared before that has seen the light. All of the businesses, if not, advertise world-class products and offerings, which for the most part are just speculative derivatives. Not any single search engine giant, like not any single company or entity, will ever reach a truly global presence. And most of us know it, yet many try to advertise otherwise. Some sovereigns go so far as to send out their battalions of mad elephants, in the effort to try to build or uphold one.
The legacy governments, many of them, like to play along with the beast because they love the perverse game of peep shows. And for most of the time, they lick the cream of the muffin, to push themselves up, and in many cases to persecute their own dissidents and increasing ranks of political asylum seekers. There is not much cybersecurity left there.
Recently Australian government authorities were reported to have been requesting one search engine business to tamper their product offerings, because, as they were reported to have been saying, the information offered by that product was revealing something about someone whose identity in a court proceeding was meant to be classified. While that may sound like a humble aim to protect that person, yet even when the giant beast did obey, what was done did little to none good for the person involved. And the truth is, that not even Australian government nor the giant care about the fate of that specific person, for most of the part they are just worried either about their business or about the capabilities in the cyberspace. You guess which one is more worried about which. Yet both of them were celebrated as winners in privacy management, cybersecurity as well as human rights.
Replace the giant from the business sector as a supranational organisation (and boom) you have a good load of history approach. Similarly to the business giant, legacy governments love to play with fire, as their global proxy forces are supporting their domestic politics in the name of the populist money-shot, the globalisation and cybersecurity. Containing the violent nations and governments at the time of agreement after their horrific actions were meant to ensure that no war would emerge. Yet, while the effectivity of the system can be questioned, the times what we have now when the cages are left wide open, nationalism is gaining a foothold, governments are getting intoxicated of the euphoria of the global mandate, what we would need in the cyberspace is the global cyber institutions enforcing the cages for the nationalistic forces in cyberspace and indeed during globalisation. Without global deterrence, mad elephants will pootle around without much hesitation and cause a lot of human misery. Like intoxicated usually, they won’t realize the consequences of their own actions, but just try to project that the subordinates, and indeed their disobedience is the issue, when in fact the elephants themselves should sit down and bow the mice.
Author
Kristo Helasvuo, Guest Author.