The London cyberspace conference

There was a cyberspace conference in London recently, organised by the UK Government. The British High Commission organised a panel in NZ to discuss some of the issues for the conference, and I was one of the three panelists.

Another panelist, Stephen Bell, has written an article about the panel. A couple of quotes:

Legislative co-operation across countries is productive in tightly defined categories of offence, said Farrar; he gave the example of child pornography or spam, where there is a common understanding of an online activity that does harm.

But an attempt to combine legislative systems designed within different cultures poses the danger of an unduly restrictive “lowest common denominator” system of regulation and of simplistic “remedies” such as UK prime minister David Cameron’s airing the idea of shutting down Twitter to avert riots of the kind that recently hit British cities. Cameron quickly thought better of that suggestion in the face of public protest.

I quite enjoyed having a little dig at the UK PM, as it was hosted by the UK High Commission 🙂

“In theory, it’s illegal for anyone under 14 to be on Facebook,” said Farrar; “but there are whole classes of six-year-olds on it; they just add ten years to their age. Do you educate them on how to use Facebook, or just say ‘they shouldn’t be on there; let’s pretend they’re not’?”

A pragmatic approach is best; perhaps a “Facebook lite for kids” should be set up, he suggested.

It is best to cater for demand, than try to pretend it does not exist.

There is huge opportunity for digitally assisted processes to make citizen interaction with government easier and to further democracy by easing interaction on the formation of laws, said Farrar. “As a small business owner, I love interacting with Inland Revenue – I never thought I’d say that. If there’s a problem nowadays, I don’t spend two days on the phone any more; I use their secure email service.”

Note I’m less enthusiastic over the size of my payments to them 🙂