Saideman's Semi-Spew: Secessionistly Speaking

Steve Saideman's blog post on state's rights is worth reading: Saideman's Semi-Spew: Secessionistly Speaking

Vint Cerf says current Internet governance is "bottoms-up." He's wrong.

In the news today has been UN discussions concerning the governance of the Internet.

Google's Cerf Slams UN 'Monopoly on Internet Governance' | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

It's not reported quite this way, but here's my take on it: The rest of the world is sick and tired of US dominance of Internet governance. Now some of those countries -- the authoritarian ones -- want more control over the Internet because they dislike the architecture that enables end-runs against state-controls on content. But other countries are just annoyed by the fact that much of Internet governance is conducted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit, created at the behest of the Clinton administration, chartered in California, and operating under a Memorandum of Understanding with the US Department of Commerce. (How weird is that?)

Vint Cerf, quoted in the article above, is wrong, in my opinion. I disagree with the premise of his statement that "The current bottoms-up, open approach works—protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation." Gone are the days when the only users of Bitnet and ARPANET were the engineers who were creating the network from the bottom up. Governance of the Internet today is NOT "bottoms up" and users are not protected from the vested interests of those who are governing the Internet. In short, ICANN promotes governance of and for corporate vested interests, with large corporations having an advantage. Corporate entities definitely have vested interests, and sometimes those interests involve slowing innovation. (If you created the last great innovation, you want to slow others from creating the next innovation.) Users have little voice (no voice, really) in the governance provided by ICANN, and we users are subject to decisions made by corporate entities such as ISPs.

I wrote about some of these themes a while back in:
R. Marlin-Bennett (2001). “ICANN and Democracy: Contradictions and Possibilities.” info: the journal of regulation and strategy for telecommunications information and media 3.4 (August 2001), pp. 299-311. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14636690110801978

The big problem is that we, the world, have never really figured out what the Internet is. If it's more or less a communication medium, then international cooperation on international communication has some well-established precedents: the Universal Postal Union was created in 1874. The International Telecommunications Union was established even earlier in 1865 to deal with what has been called "the first internet" -- telegraph networks.

Or maybe the Internet is a public, a place for interaction among people who may be geographically distant but can still bump virtual shoulders online. There's a lot of work that suggests that the Internet is becoming a cyberpolis. Perhaps this works in some very limited circumstances (our neighborhood listserv, for example, but that works because of the geographical proximity of the participants not without it). I just don't see this happening to a large extent. Nevertheless, It would be great if the Internet actually were a democratically governed place where cyber-citizens could come together to discuss matters of global public import. After all, here I am writing a blog, at some level engaging in cyber-enabled democratic deliberation. The reality is, though, that VERY FEW -- IF ANY -- people are going to read this. And most of them are my friends. But if the Internet is a cyberpolis, then we might want to think about how it might be democratically governed. ICANN, despite its claims of democratic legitimacy and bottom-up governance, doesn't meet that test, in my opinion.

Or maybe the Internet is nothing more than a rather free market, with minimal regulation and subject to logic of the market place. This is where I think the Internet is, for the most part, heading; this saddens me. In the absence of appropriate regulation, large corporation are becoming dominant. Oligopoly has always been understood as market failure, and oligopolistic control of the Internet (Google, Microsoft) will skew future developments toward things that make money for those corporations that have the power to make the market.

I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm better at critiquing governance than coming up with new forms.

Offshoring key federal government functions????

It seems to me that government must be responsible for its e-government functions, namely its website and citizen services provided online. All in all, I'm usually pretty pleased with the US government's websites. I recently went to the IRS page and used a rather useful calculator to do some planning. The calculator seemed to work fine, but soon things got interesting.

I clicked on a link that promised to explain estimated payments. The information in the window that popped up was not understandable and contained an obvious error, so, good doobie that I am, I reported the problem to the website helpdesk.

When you submit something to the IRS helpdesk, the website helpfully advises you to add irs.gov.website.helpdesk@speedymail.com to your approved email sender list.

Speedymail.com????? Well, boys and girls, we've outsourced the IRS website helpdesk to a company called AFFINA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Hinduja Group, which was "started in Sind, the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization, where more than 5,000 years ago, the human race learnt its first lessons in organized business and banking."

Now don't get me wrong: I am not actually opposed to offshoring because it can be efficient for firms and helpful for developing economies. (I am, though, a rather enthusiastic supporter of "inshoring," setting up call centers in poorer parts of the US to provide jobs at home. Besides, those people from Arkansas are so nice!) But to get back to my story . . .

I think of this as simple syllogism:

Government services should be performed by nationals of the country in question (whenever possible).
Government services in the information age include e-government services.
Therefore, e-government services should be performed by nationals of the country in question.

Have we reached the point of our de-development that we do not have enough competent people in this country to handle website customer care for the IRS? Is it really the right choice (I don't mean the cheapest choice, I mean the appropriate choice for a public function) to be outsourced?

Tomorrow is election day in Maryland. Maybe we can get the votes counted in India.

Sigh.

Power, Deborah, Shabbat Shirah

In my undergraduate course on power, I start off with passages from the Bible. I think reading the Bible's presentation of power critically is important for students of international relations for a couple of reasons. First of all, the Bible shapes Western thought. Thomas Hobbes read the Bible. When he titled his book, Leviathan, he knew what the leviathan was in Scripture. To understand his and other Western philosophers' starting point, you have to understand the Bible. Second, it is naive to think that the biblical understandings of power (e.g., power as a manifestation of God's will) do not matter in our modern (or postmodern) world. Religious faith motivates an awful lot of political behavior. We would be stupid to forget to analyze it.

So, I have the unusual syllabus that treats the Bible as a source of theory about power. Over the years, I've honed in on a few favorite passages to highlight the particular themes that interest me: the power of words (Balaam and Balak, curses and blessings), the role of leadership (Joshua taking the reins of power), brute -- and brutish -- force (Samson), and the power of women (Deborah, and also in the stories of Rahab and Yael).

It did not occur to me that I would be assigning my students to read the passages from Judges that tell Deborah's story right before Shabbat Shirah, when we'll be reading those very passages in synagogue. Divine inspiration?? I don't think God micro-manages syllabi. A nice coincidence in a stochastic universe.

Memories of Haiti

We’re all thinking of Haiti and Haitians now, so I thought I would write about my experience of Haiti.

Haiti changed my life. It was August, 1972, and a few weeks before my 13th birthday and becoming bat mitzvah. I accompanied my parents on a cruise of the Caribbean. St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, and Nassau were pleasant and touristy, with plenty of shops selling all sorts of things my mom and dad were interested in. Cap Haitien, Haiti, was different. Cap Haitien was not the touristy, built up part of the island, and our arrival there (rather than at Port-au-Prince), was the ship captain’s decision for some reason I don’t recall.

Before disembarking (I think by dingies) and visiting the island, the cruise director – yes, the same guy who planned the costume party and the amateur night – presented a lecture of Haiti’s politics. I have forgotten his name, but the lesson remains.

The average annual income for a Haitian family, he told us, was $76 per year. (Calculating GDP per capita from World Bank statistics, I get $97 in 1972 – not exactly the same measure, but suggesting the same awful situation.) The US, he reported, had provided a considerable amount of aid to Haiti, but it all ended up first in Papa Doc Duvalier’s pocket, and then in that of his son, Baby Doc. I can’t remember whether the cruise director spoke of the Tonton Macoute, but I suspect that he did. His passion for the people of Haiti and his outrage over their suffering was clear.

When we reached land, we were immediately surrounded by people who looked quite poor begging (and my father could not resist giving out some money), but we quickly got into a taxi with a driver who promised to show us the sights (the ruins of the Citadel).

My memories of the Citadel are very vague. My memories of what we saw on the trip there are crystalline. As we drove into the hills, I saw children with distended bellies. I knew that those bellies meant serious malnutrition. I also knew that I (overly nourished and white) was a child just like those children (malnourished and black). Odd how, when one is a child, one seems to belong to the Family of Children. Why, why was I so lucky/rich/healthy when they were not? What had the Duvaliers done to this country? How could leaders hurt the defenseless children?

I still do not understand inequality, injustice, and why some people are fortunate and others not. Oh, I can use the skills of my profession to study theories of dependencia, biopolitics, power, globalization, and the like; but I still have a visceral lack of understanding. That sense of moral outrage (usually hidden behind sober scholarship that is notably NOT about Haiti) is what has led me to become a political scientist, and despite the disciplinary norms of careful, non-polemical work, it is that moral outrage that still motivates my research.

I am not a crusader; my roll is not to be one of the fighters for freedom and justice. I admire those who are. My roll is to ask the “why?” question. I prod, over and over again and on a very small scale, the question of why? In doing so, I can only chip away at very small pieces of (what Bill Connolly reminds us is) the human predicament. I started asking why in the summer of 1972 in the hills of Cap Haitien, Haiti.