To understand the proposal being made to the UN by four countries led by Russia and China, you have to understand how they define their terms. In their vocabulary ‘information terrorism’ means free speech.

The Internet is not the only information infrastructure that has become a critical infrastructure. It is hardly surprising then that governments are looking to control it. In some cases the control issues are entirely reasonable.

A few years ago the government of France moved to block some US led RFID proposals which would have effectively granted a US owned company the ability to impose a global trade embargo on French companies by denying them assignment of necessary product codes.

China and Russia have been in partnership for quite some time and were pushing to block the use of the Internet for Arab spring like protests long before the Iranian election protests that proceeded the Arab spring. Much of the language in the UN resolution appeared in an earlier Shanghai Cooperation Organization treaty signed by China and Russia. It looks like this draft was written by the Chinese side as calling for a new governance body to replace ICANN is one of their recurring talking points. A sample:

Each State voluntarily subscribing to the code pledges: (b) Not to use information and communications technologies, including networks, to carry out hostile activities or acts of aggression, pose threats to international peace and security or proliferate information weapons or related technologies;

Posing threats to the security of dictatorships is what some of us designed the Web for in the first place. The lack of central control is not an accident of its design.

We are already starting to see states attacking their citizens through attacks on the Internet infrastructure. In the coming years those attacks will escalate and it is likely that we will see Russia, China and other states attempting to opt-out of parts of the Internet control and security mechanisms and introducing alternatives under their direct control.

Unlike the Cold War which was primarily a contest between the US and the Soviet Union, the Cyber War is a struggle between totalitarian governments and their own people.