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Panelists say government-erected barriers to the free flow of data online would essentially break the Internet ecosystem that powers economies and lets people share and collaborate across the globe. "The simplest outcome is that we are going to end up breaking the Internet." "The impact is severe, and it is getting worse," Google's executive chairman and former chief executive said. The discussion was about economic and regulatory backlash caused by a US spying scandal that has undermined trust in US Internet firms ability or willingness to keep people's online communications private. ![]() Smith sounded pessimistic at the chances, but said the attempt had to be made.Schmidt's concern was echoed by Facebook, Microsoft, Dropbox and others involved in a panel discussion in Silicon Valley led by c. The rest of the panel agreed that legislation was needed quickly, but there wasn't much hope, as far as they could see, at Congress putting aside party political division to do what was right for American businesses. The president's own review board had noted that mass surveillance by the NSA had achieved nothing in terms of stopping America's enemies, Wyden claimed, and yet the intelligence community was still fighting any attempts at reform. It had been expected that the USA FREEDOM Act, which would curtail some of the NSA's snooping, is stuck in Congress and there's little sign that the Republicans and Democrats can get their act together and pass legislation quickly, he said. However, Wyden warned that legislation on the matter may not be forthcoming. "If we want a long term future for our technology industry we need to recognize that." "We need to remember that 96 per cent of the world's population lives outside the US," he said. That would lead to the loss of America's most powerful asset – trust. Until that was sorted out, in an open and forthright piece of legislation, then the rest of the world would continue to look on American companies and their government with suspicion, Smith said. #Dropbox inc ramsey homsany general counsel PcIf people create something, irrespective of if it was held on their home PC or in a data center, then it was their property, he argued. #Dropbox inc ramsey homsany general counsel fullWhat is needed, he argued, is a law that ensures the full and transparent disclosure of what exactly can be accessed by cops and g-men. America's data protection laws were 30 years old, he said, and almost any technology that was 30 years old was in a museum by now. Microsoft's Brad Smith said there were only two ways to protect privacy: better technology and stronger privacy legislation. Google had started encrypting network traffic between its data centers, as had many other Silicon Valley firms, because they had found out from the Edward Snowden leaks that intelligence agencies were tapping their links. Schmidt said the government shouldn’t be surprised that his firm and others were gearing up their encryption. #Dropbox inc ramsey homsany general counsel softwareWyden also wondered why cops and feds were outraged at the decision by Apple and Google to encrypt files on smartphones by default: the police already had all the powers they needed to monitor criminal activity, he said, and any backdoors in the software for official snoops to use could be exploited by criminals and hackers. Governments could start enacting protectionist trade laws under the guise of safeguarding privacy and deterring spies. Wyden said laws that control where information must be stored would undo decades of hard work in bringing down trade barriers and opening up freer markets. If such laws were enacted, it would destroy the ability of small startups to operate outside of US territory, he claimed.įacebook's Colin Stretch added that having overseas data centers would cause massive privacy problems of their own: governments that don’t respect citizens' privacy would be within reach of large amounts of data. Homsany pointed out that 70 per cent of Dropbox's customers were overseas, and it would cost over a billion dollars to comply with such regulations for Western Europe alone. Such policies therefore have the ability to balkanize internet traffic. US companies with large numbers of customers in overseas territories therefore would have to build data centers in each market, which would drastically drive up costs. What's terrifying the tech industry is the prospect of more laws like those enacted in Russia: the President Putin-led nation insists data on Russian citizens is stored solely on servers in the country. ![]()
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