Monday, December 20, 2010
Saideman's Semi-Spew: Secessionistly Speaking
Steve Saideman's blog post on state's rights is worth reading: Saideman's Semi-Spew: Secessionistly Speaking
Saturday, December 18, 2010
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.
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.
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