I'm an engineer, and I firmly believe that Internet matters and, in general, Information Society, should be kept separate from politics, so usually, I'm very skeptical to talk about those and mix things.
Let's start by saying that I'm Catalonian. Despite the dictatorial regime when I was born, forbidden teaching Catalonian, I learned it, even despite, initially for family reasons and now for work reasons, I live in Madrid. However, I keep saying everywhere I go, that I was born in Barcelona, where I consider myself from, and how wonderful is that region. I'm proud of my name, Jordi, and I don't allow anyone to call me Jorge, with is the Spanish translation.
Having traveled over 120 countries in the last 15 years, training people on IPv6 and doing IPv6 consultancy/deployment services, I consider myself "citizen of the world, " and I don't think, in the actual global world, there is any reason for being a nationalist or patriotic in the heart.
That being said, I have good friends and colleagues at every remote place in the world, and that's what really matters.
I think this clearly shows that I'm objective enough to write down this and not being biased by my origins, or my actual living town, on the other way around, being very open-minded as a world traveler.
I've been astonished the last few days because about the endless exchange of letters addressed to ICANN, the European Commission, ISOC chapters, and other Internet-related institutions, even blogs, articles, etc., which make no sense if you know the real history behind all this, instead of those letters with false information.
Let's set the stage. There is a region, within a democratic country, that has some percentage of the population that want to declare their independence. This group of people didn't ask the rest of the citizens in the country, even other people like myself, that was born there. In fact, because I don't live there right now, I will not be allowed to participate in the so-called "process". Even further, I don't know if I will get a passport from there, or if some of the friends I have there who don't want to split, will be expelled from the country, or if they will be allowed to sell their properties there, or if they will be confiscated, etc.
So, we are talking about a departure, asking the people to vote for it, not knowing at all what actually that means, including every small detail, and what will be the exit door for each of the possible cases.
I guess each region or town in our country has the same rights. I want to do it for my own house. I have the right of doing that… it is my property… my land!
Can you imagine this in your own country?
As we are a democratic country, there is a power separation (legislative versus juridical), and by the way, we have a Constitution, that all the Spanish citizens approved after the end of the dictatorial regime, and the corresponding Constitutional Court.
The Constitution is clearly not perfect, and now that we got more experience, since 1978, it could be amended for improving it, by consensus. This could even mean that we change our state model into a federal one, such as the German model, or many other options.
This is nothing different than what we do in IETF, making Internet standards, or in the RIRs, making public policies, or even in ICANN. Right?
Guess what, now some of the participants of a given Regional Internet Registry (RIR), decide to unilaterally change some of those rules, or even split in a different group — let's say a new RIR. Yeah, we could do that, but we need to agree on the process. Hey, coincidently we've had a similar situation recently — IANA/PTI — so we are familiar with that already.
Do you think we will agree in that group in my example, changing the policies before we complete the process? Do you think somebody will agree in finding consensus in a policy proposal not knowing all the details of it? Do you think we will keep allocating IP resources to that group according to new policies that they develop by themselves against the community consensus on the existing policies?
So, this is what the Catalonian Government has done. They have approved, against the law, special laws to make that process, to play games and act like in a theatre, and they try to convince citizens as puppets by means of lies and misinformation, which they are investing public money to propagate in a global world.
Law and order: In a democratic system, we all obey the law. If we don't like it, we have the system to change it. What we can never do is to disobey or call for disobeying before going for a change. Otherwise, this will be a crazy world. Everybody will be able to change his/her mind every other day and create risks for the rest of the citizens. Definitively not the way!
So of course, our Constitutional Court has called for obedience to our Constitution, which means no public money can be invested in the process, and the Catalonian Government, their maximum representatives, has forced people that disagree with the process to resign or pushed them against the law, or involved volunteers, asking for illegal actions, and invested in having embassies of a non-country, which cost a lot of money despite having difficulties to pay the public servants, to cover the cost of the education and health system, and so on, and asked for more money to the Spanish Central Government, from the taxes of all the citizens, which in part is being invested, in an illegal process.
Obviously, and despite, the wish to make this soft, and not being provocative, the Constitutional Court, during the last few days, was finally forced by the Catalonian Government provocation, to order the Spanish Police to execute the necessary steps to block ONLY the websites which make the propaganda of the process. However, the Catalonian Government and also volunteers used .CAT, among many other institutions, to duplicate those websites, once and again.
There is nothing against freedom of speech, there is nothing against .CAT, just making sure that the court orders are fulfilled by all the citizens, including public servants, regardless of the organization where they work. Public servants, individuals working for the Information Society, TLDs or other kind of registries, Service Providers, etc., all have the same obligation to follow the law as the rest of the citizens.
Where is the limit of the freedom of speech in Internet? Do you agree that if I publish a website with information about how to do a robbery at your home, call for volunteers to organize a terrorist attack, or to help me in any unlawful or criminal activity, and there is a court order against that website, this can't be considered as measures to restrict free and open access to Internet?
Censorship can be enforced in many ways. One of those ways is to publish false information and confuse people about the real facts, hiding the reality with lots of extra background noise.
When organizations and persons that have been elected by the Internet community take advantage of their positions to, instead of have objective positions, and not correlate those institutions and enact false accusations and misinformation, we can't anymore trust on those persons and they must resign.
The most open organizations, using their influence in the global information society, can actually execute a censorship action which is even much worse than any restriction to freedom of speech.
There are other relevant facts in this history. Many politicians that have been governing Catalonia for many years are being prosecuted for illegal activities, such as 3-5% commissions in public tenders, using public money for promoting the independence process, and such.
Guess what? Their only way-out is the independence, otherwise, they are going to need to pay for all what they have robbed to the public treasury, and it means money and prison. Is not that curious?
Is not curious that the Catalonian Autonomy is the one that in the last years got more credit from the Central Government? Do you expect they will be able to reimburse it?
Do you think if any of us, disobeys the law the same way, as this process is doing, will be ignored by the authorities, or we will be detained and requested to explain every detail of all the illegal actions in front of a judge?
Or do you expect authorities to ignore every illegal action from all the citizens and then we all get crazy, and we go into an anarchic world?
The Spanish Government has been very prudent, too much probably, as they could have used article 155 of our Constitution to suspend the Catalonian Autonomy, but they decided not to go that way, at least for the time being. This is not a clear demonstration of democracy and freedom of speech?
In Europe, since a long time ago, we are trying to integrate and be stronger. Splitting countries is against that spirit, don't make any sense.
Our community must be smart enough and ignore messages with false or incomplete information. Those messages are even considered apology of sedition, same as if we start creating websites doing apology of terrorism or any other illegal activities.
Let's avoid going on with all this misinformation and I plea to those having only the real facts and complete information to spread the message to avoid others getting confused.
Internet-related institutions must not trust anymore those individuals or organizations who are misinforming the rest of the world. Internet-related institutions must respect the law of democratic countries. Only when it is clearly proven that democracy is not real, we must act, otherwise, we are damaging our own credibility.
Those that have already published false information, must apologize. It is clear that they have got confused because the Catalonian Government and many of their actors in this theatre, have been far noisier than the rest of the community, but it's time to review. I will not point to them right now, but clearly, I will not mind doing so in a couple of days if they decide to keep their false accusations which are an insult for the rest of the Spanish citizens, including the majority of the Catalonians which aren't part of this and by extension an insult to the rest of the Internet community.
Written by Jordi Palet Martinez, IPv6 training and consultancy