What are our regulators doing to protect Canadian internet sovereignty?

This is the basis of the follow up letter from Digital Policy Canada drafted to the CIRA sponsored Canadian Internet Forum this week. The fundamental question we need to ask, what are Canadian regulators doing to protect Canadians, as well as their intellectual property, from foreign state actors who assert legal or technical controls over them? Right now for example, the American government is attempting to position itself as the global internet police, by taking down foreign domain names, even if no laws have been broken in that country.

If you run a website, that broke no Canadian laws, how would you feel if the American, or any, foreign government took it down because they didn’t like it?

Digital policy asked this question a year ago, and requested a follow up by the end of 2011. As no response was received, help us ask the question: what are our regulators doing to protect Canadian internet sovereignty?

If you’re on twitter, you can join the discussion using the #ciraif hashtag.

You can read the entire Digital Policy Canada letter here [pdf]

Disclosure: I am a co-founder and active member of Digital Policy Canada.