I. Time Bomb

In 1979 the Dubai World Trade Centre dominated the skyline of Dubai City, on the horn of the Arabian Peninsula. Today, the World Trade Centre looks quaint, like an old egg carton stuck into the ground amid a phantasma­goric forest of skyscrapers. But come December the World Trade Centre will once more be the most important place in Dubai City—and, for a couple of weeks, one of the more important places in the world. Diplomats from 193 countries will converge there to renegotiate a United Nations treaty called the International Telecommunications Regulations. The sprawling document, which governs telephone, television, and radio networks, may be extended to cover the Internet, raising questions about who should control it, and how. Arrayed on one side will be representatives from the United States and other major Western powers, advocating what many call “Internet freedom,” a plastic concept that has been defined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the right to use the Internet to “express one’s views,” to “peacefully assemble,” and to “seek or share” information. The U.S. and most of its allies basically want to keep Internet governance the way it is: run by a small group of technical nonprofit and volunteer organizations, most of them based in the United States.

On the other side will be representatives from countries where governments want to place restrictions on how people use the Internet. These include Russia, China, Brazil, India, Iran, and a host of others. All of them have implemented or experimented with more intrusive monitoring of online activities than the U.S. is publicly known to practice. A number of countries have openly called for the creation of a “new global body” to oversee online policy. At the very least, they’d like to give the United Nations a great deal more control over the Internet.

Mediating these forces in Dubai will be a man named Hamadoun Touré. Charming and wily, he is a satellite engineer who was born in Mali, educated in the Soviet Union, and now lives in Geneva. He serves as secretary-general of the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union (I.T.U.).

Touré abjures pallid diplomatic doublespeak, instead opting for full-on self-contradiction that nonetheless leaves little doubt where his sympathies lie. In one breath Touré says, “The people who are trying to say that I.T.U. has an intention of taking over the management of the Internet simply do not know how the I.T.U. is functioning.” In the next, noting that Internet users in America represent only a tenth of the total, he says, “When an invention becomes used by billions across the world, it no longer remains the sole property of one nation, however powerful that nation might be. There should be a mechanism where many countries have an opportunity to have a say. I think that’s democratic. Do you think that’s democratic?”

There is a war under way for control of the Internet, and every day brings word of new clashes on a shifting and widening battlefront. Governments, corporations, criminals, anarchists—they all have their own war aims.

In February, the Swedish Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from three founders of the Pirate Bay, the world’s largest illegal file-sharing Web site, who had been sentenced to prison for copyright infringement. The same day, one of those men issued an online call to arms, urging users to abandon the entertainment industry: “Stop seeing their movies. Stop listening to their music.... Remix, reuse, use, abuse.” Shortly after that, Google was discovered to have been secretly bypassing privacy settings on Apple iPhones and computers that use the Safari browser; the company was monitoring Web activity by people who believed they’d blocked such tracking. Around the same time, the European Union proposed that companies such as Google must obtain explicit consent from individuals for data collection; but these regulations would not take effect for years, by which point digital dossiers on almost every Internet user will have been bought and sold by marketers many times over. Meanwhile, the F.B.I. has been distributing “See something, say something” flyers to Internet-café owners in the U.S., warning that the use of certain basic cyber-security measures could be considered grounds for suspicion of possible terrorist activity. In response to the F.B.I.’s growing preoccupation with virtual insurgents, guerrilla hackers operating under the name Anonymous posted online an audio recording of F.B.I. and Scotland Yard officials discussing how to handle Anonymous attacks. Then Interpol, together with American and European authorities, busted 31 suspected Anonymous hackers—including the one who covertly recorded that conference call—and an F.B.I. official declared victory over LulzSec, one of the most prominent Anonymous splinters, with the boast that “we’re chopping off the head” of that faction.