INTERNET ENTREPRENEURS confronted their would-be regulators in Deauville yesterday as the leaders of Facebook, Google and other technology companies warned the G8 leaders to tread carefully in attempting to police the web.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said that mooted rules on copyright or privacy could stymie innovation and inhibit the free expression that fuelled the recent Arab uprisings.
Usually fierce competitors, the two groups joined forces to resist proposed new rules to “civilise” the internet, championed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the meeting’s host.
In response, Mr Sarkozy told the executives to support greater rule of law on the web in such a way that innovation would not be harmed.
Earlier in the week he warned of the “anarchy” of the internet in its current form, telling the e-G8 Forum in Paris on Tuesday: “You cannot escape a minimum set of rules”.
The discussion – the first time the technology has been represented at the meeting of the G8 group of leading nations – comes as governments in the US and UK consider new schemes to force internet companies to block websites that facilitate online piracy.
Mr Zuckerberg sought to explain to national leaders that measures to combat perceived pitfalls of the online world, such as illegal downloading of copyrighted material, could have unintended consequences.
“On the one hand you have the internet which is this really powerful force for giving people a voice,” he said. “Now it’s tempting to say that on security or privacy you can go towards the most extreme [regulatory] option and maintain all the value that we currently recognise. I’m worried personally that’s not true,” said the 27-year-old entrepreneur.
“The industry as a whole is concerned that premature regulation . . . can shut off whole new industries, whole new opportunities, whole new innovations,” Mr Schmidt said.
The proposals put to the G8 were based on discussions in Paris earlier this week at the e-G8, a gathering of internet entrepreneurs and policymakers convened by Mr Sarkozy.
Representing their views at the G8 were Maurice Lévy, chief executive of Publicis; Stéphane Richard of France Telecom; and Hiroshi Mikitani, of Rakuten, Japan’s largest online retailer.
“The rules of society should also apply to the internet, such as intellectual property [and] fair competition,” said Mr Richard.
Meanwhile, the world’s richest countries agreed a multibillion-dollar aid package for Tunisia and Egypt, the two countries at the forefront of toppling autocratic regimes in the Arab uprising.
Members of the Group of Eight economic powers, led by the US, committed at their summit in Deauville to provide a combination of debt relief, aid and assistance to the two Arab countries to help build their democracies.
In other news, Qatar has been talking to oil-rich Gulf partners about a new plan to create a Middle East Development Bank to support Arab states in transitions to democracy. The Gulf state has been taking advice from experts on the creation of the bank. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)
