Walt Mossberg Quotes

The only way the Internet will continue to remain the thriving medium it has become today is to keep it under the control of the United States.

The Chinese government learnt how to manage the Internet from Western developed countries; we have not learnt enough yet.

Remember, 'governance' is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis - it touches everything. It's everywhere, and that's why Internet governance is Topic A in many corners.

No matter what you do, any country in the world is going to have the ability to set its own rules internally. Any country in the world can pull the plug. It's not a question of technical issues, it's not a question of right or wrong, it's not a question of whether global Internet governance is right or wrong. It's just with us.

I fear that light touch regulations that have allowed the Internet to prosper will now be replaced by a heavy hand that stifles innovation and does not adapt well to change. The Internet is not broken.

The thing we have to be careful of is that the Internet is a global communications medium, and if one country tips the balance in regulating its use or regulating what companies or individuals do on the web, it could have an economic impact that might be unintended, quite frankly, by the regulations themselves.

The development of the Internet has posed new challenges to national sovereignty, security and development interests.

The idea of the Internet as sort of open and democratic and free and with no hierarchy, the libertarian beginnings as it were, with peer-to-peer networks... I'd sort of like for everyone to just admit that we're beyond that now.

Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.

Google's entire business model and its planning for the future are banking on an open and free Internet. And it will not succeed if the Internet becomes overly balkanized.

So long as confusion reigns, there will be no successful global Internet agenda, only contradiction.

The first legislation that I produced relating to the Internet was a bill to overturn a restriction inside of the law that prohibited the Internet backbone from being used for anything other than research and scientific and educational communication.

News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker's garage.

A free and open Internet should not have to be weighed down by legal challenges - its dynamism is essential to our economy.

Increasingly, I'm finding myself uncomfortable about how the Internet's developing, who's influencing its development, and who is not.

While many governments are committed to maintaining flexible regimes for fast-moving Internet technologies, some others have been quite explicit about their desire to put a single U.N. or other intergovernmental body in control of the Net.

Turning the Internet over to the U.N. or some other phony international organization would be a disaster, and I am not willing to stand by and let it happen.

There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.

If the U.N. were to be successful in its efforts to control the Internet, countries where human rights records range from questionable to criminal could be put in charge of determining what is and is not allowed to appear online.

We are having Internet Governance discussions and meetings and a very large number of people are discussing the future of the Internet who have no clue as to what the Internet is except that it is important and that they have to be involved.

A number of countries, including Russia and China, have put forward proposals to regulate aspects of the Internet like 'crime' and 'security' that are currently unregulated at the global level due to lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens' rights.

At its core, the FCC's plan to regulate the Internet will force businesses and people to check first with the government and get permission to innovate.

If multi-stakeholder Internet governance is to survive an endless series of challenges, its champions must commit to serving the interests and protecting the rights of all Internet users around the world, particularly those in developing countries where Internet use is growing fastest.

The Internet is a politically contested space.

The challenge is to manage the Web in an open way-not too much bureaucracy, not subject to political or commercial pressures. The U.S. should demonstrate that it is prepared to share control with the world.