President Barack Obama called for a series of international agreements to regulate activity on the Internet, citing his preference not to start an arms race in cyberspace.
“What we cannot do is have a situation in which suddenly this becomes the Wild, Wild West,” President Obama said during a press conference in China on Monday after the G-20 Summit, referring to every country using the Internet as they wished, including using it to hack into other countries’ data.
Obama asserted, however, that America was winning the Internet battle, despite repeated hacks into the data controlled by the United States.
“Frankly, we’ve got more capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively,” he said, referring to a growing escalation of cyber capabilities from other governments.
He added that he wanted to avoid an arms race in cyberspace, but rather institute international norms “so that everybody’s acting responsibly.”
Journalists questioned the President about recent reports that Russian hackers had hacked into voters’ election data. While he admitted Russia and other countries had made hacking attempts in the past, he declined to discuss the reports in detail, citing an ongoing investigation.
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