BARCELONA, Nov 2 — Tension is in the air in the grand old Hungarian capital city of Budapest, where thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets to protest against their government’s plans to introduce a tax on Internet usage.

An estimated 100,000 people aired their views on Tuesday night, marching across the iconic Elisabeth Bridge over the deep waters of the Danube and waving their mobile phones in the air in a symbolic gesture of defiance.

As generally happens with the most effective popular uprisings, the protest arose swiftly and spontaneously after being originated by one ordinary member of the public, 27-year-old Balazs Gulya, who set up a Facebook page to complain about the planned new taxation and rapidly found himself surrounded by a whirlwind of popular support.

The amounts at play are pretty insignificant: individuals users would be taxed a maximum of 700 Hungarian Forints (roughly RM9) per month, while companies would be asked to cough up no more than 5,000 Forints.

And on the face of it, there is nothing particularly malicious behind the plans announced by Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party, with the intention being simply to raise badly-needed funds to help ease the country’s national debt, rather than any sinister monitoring of the data passing along the information superhighway.

The taxation plans are, the perplexed outsider could easily conclude, nothing more than the same kind of revenue raising ruse dreamed up by governments all over the world, and one which would actually exert very little impact upon the daily lives of citizens.

People hold up their mobile phones as they protest against a new tax on Internet data transfers in the centre of Budapest on Tuesday. — Picture by Reuters

As far as the protesters are concerned, however, that is not the point, and for many Hungarians this development is just the latest in a long line of measures being taken by an increasingly authoritarian government, with the intrusion into one of the few areas of life that has until now remained truly free from taxation — access to the Internet — being seen as the final straw.

It is also exactly the kind of issue regularly debated and publicised by the global governing body — as close as it gets, anyway — for the Internet: ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

As a relatively new innovation, the subject of how the Internet should be governed and legislated is a long, long way from finding anything like an international consensus.

Although they have virtually no direct decision-making powers, the task of ICANN is attempting to navigate the various treacherous questions over how the Internet should be used — including issues such as government taxation.

It is a far from straightforward role and the inherent complications are evident from the long-standing debate surrounding how ICANN is structured as an organisation: Who is involved, how decisions are reached, what its policies should be and how on earth it can possibly strike the desired balance between representing the best interests of government, commerce and the general population.

In the past, ICANN was effectively a branch of the United States government, with the US Department of Commerce having a major say over policy decisions.

That is slowly changing, however, following Barack Obama’s laudable decision earlier this year to “give away” his government’s disproportionate influence over how the Internet should be legislated.

One of the key influences upon ICANN’s philosophy is none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the English computer scientist who is largely credited with “inventing” the Internet during his time as an employee at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (often known as CERN) in Switzerland in the 1980s.

Berners-Lee is a strong advocate of maintaining a free and open Internet — earlier this year he called for the introduction of a global constitution or bill of rights over Internet usage, with the intention of preventing excessive manipulation from governmental and corporate forces — and his views would surely be supported by the vast majority of the world’s population.

Certainly, Berners-Lee must be strongly disapproving of the Hungarian government’s proposed taxation scheme, however large or small the sums involved.

However, the problem is that neither he nor ICANN are in any position to force the Hungarian government — or any other government — to drop or even in any way amend their plans. They can advise, cajole, condemn and implement any manner of persuasive tactics, but their ultimate influence upon the decision-making process is zero.

The Hungarian government can do whatever it likes in the realm of Internet governance, and the same was true in Turkey earlier this year when the government briefly ordered the blocking of Twitter following online criticism of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Despite the wishes of its inventor, there is currently no legally or even morally binding global constitution to govern the World Wide Web. Perhaps that’s just as well: Perhaps the best organisations to guide and control of our usage of the Internet are locally elected governments rather than distant, anonymous committees of computer boffins and social ideologists.

The ideal would probably be a compromise between the two: A loose global framework provided by ICANN, giving governments and other organisations a degree of independence to exploit the opportunities offered by the Internet without being able to abuse their positions of privilege.

But as this week’s protests in Hungary have shown, reaching that kind of compromise will not be easy.

*The Hungarian government has since relented and decided to scrap the Internet tax.

*This is personal opinion of the columnist.