Fear stops Western experts from publicly backing Internet sovereignty: researcher

Many officials engaged in network affairs and scholars specializing in cyberspace from Western countries all agree Internet sovereignty in private, but they cannot advocate sovereignty of Internet in public due to the power of Western media, said Lu Chuanying, assistant researcher from the global governance studies department under Shanghai Institutes for International Studies.

Lu said doubting China's Internet sovereignty is ill-founded and not worthy of debating and from an objective point of view, different culture and development phase lead to the diversified cognition to Internet space.

There has been a certain conclusion about cyberspace sovereignty because in 2003, the UN's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) had put forward "formulating public policy related to Internet belongs to the sovereignty of a country," Lu said.

In July 2015, a report issued by the UN's information security expert group, which consisted of the US government and governments of other countries, highlighted respecting the sovereignty of a country in cyberspace, according to Lu.

Nowadays, every country exercises the sovereignty of network, and promoting the development of Internet infrastructure and protecting Internet security have become a consensus of governments, Lu said.

Lu believed all kinds of public policies and legislations about Internet are a natural part of country's Internet sovereignty. Moreover, the infrastructure, data and users, which make up the cyberspace, all have a clear sovereignty.