IP: Internet governance: herding cats and sacred cows

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 11:51:23 +0200
From: Robert Shaw <robert.shaw () itu int>
To: declan () well com
Subject: Internet governance: herding cats and sacred cows

Declan,

Your readers might be interested in this talk I gave at 
INET 98.

Robert

-- 
Robert Shaw <robert.shaw () itu int>
Head a.i., IED/Advisor, Global Information Infrastructure
International Telecommunication Union <http://www.itu.int>
Place des Nations, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland

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                 Internet governance: herding cats and sacred cows
                                                                  
                                                      Robert Shaw*
                                                       Version 1.1
               Based on talk given at INET 98, Geneva, Switzerland
                                                     July 22, 1998
                                                                  

   A few days ago, I gave a talk at the ITU to a group of students
on  a  European telecommunications summer school program. The pre-
arranged topic of my talk was "Internet governance". Of course,  I
started  my talk by saying that I hadn't the slightest  idea  what
the term "Internet governance" meant.
   
   You  would  think I might. During the last couple of years,  I,
along  with  a  current committee of around thirteen people,  have
been  involved  in  what  can only be described  as  a  three-ring
circus:  an attempt to overhaul the administration of the Internet
generic  top  level  domains like .com, .net,  and  .org.  When  a
smaller  first  committee, the Internet Ad Hoc Committee  or  IAHC
started  this work in 1996, I doubt that any of the IAHC had  ever
heard  of  the  term Internet governance. In fact,  we  were  very
careful  to  limit the scope of our activity and would  have  been
accused of absurd hubris to equate this work with the much grander
sounding "Internet governance".
   
   Someone once said "trying to govern the Internet is like trying
to  herd cats: it just doesn't work". And as someone else noted  -
"cats  are clearly much smarter than dogs: the proof is  that  you
could never tie eight cats together and get them to pull a sled in
one  direction".  One could argue that what we need is a few  dogs
pulling in the same direction.
   
   But,  of course, on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog.
I,  along with another rotating group of committee members working
on this problem, have experienced enough bizarre characters, self-
proclaimed representatives of organizations that are nothing  more
than  a few web pages, and conspiracy theories to last a lifetime.
We've been sued, attacked in thousands of emails on mailing lists,
compared  to  communists against free enterprise,  claimed  to  be
lackeys  of foreign powers, or part of a secret plot to  move  the
Internet to Switzerland. No motive that we could possibly have  is
too base.   No possible accusation has been left unsaid. I've read
enough  false  press  reports about our work to  forever  distrust
quasi-real-time  web journalism. Indeed, who  has  time  to  check
sources when you need to publish next hour?
   
   We've  been  accused of selling out to the trademark  community
and  at  the same time not doing enough to help protect trademarks
in  domain names. We've been chastised because we haven't  figured
out  a  way  to  put  principles of free speech into  domain  name
administration [personally, I would have thought that the Internet
offered plenty of opportunities for free speech without having  to
embed  in  its naming infrastructure]. We've been told that  we're
progressing too fast - and too slow.
   
   And,  of course, the incumbent administrator of gTLDs operating
under a five year contract that should have ended on September 30,
1998  [now  extended to September 2000], is,  shall  we  say,  not
particularly  keen  on any plan that threatens  a  monthly  multi-
million dollar revenue stream or their market capitalization.
   
   Basically  we're making everyone unhappy which  ironically  may
mean  that  we've  reached  an  equal  compromise  between  wildly
divergent points of view.
   
   Unbelievably, it just seems to just get worse and  worse.  When
we  started  our  work  in  1996, only a few  people  outside  the
Internet technical or service community cared about domain  names.
Now  almost every week, there is a new trade association, advocacy
group,  trademark  lawyer, cyber-libertarian,  academic  or  bored
teenager with a 15 dollar a month dial-up account who surfaces and
decides  that they too need to join in and add their two cents  to
this  topic.  We're "stakeholders" too they say. "Our  views  also
need to be represented". The first problem is that each time these
new  people  surface,  they suggest the same unworkable  solutions
that  have been discussed to death and long ago put to bed - so  a
great  deal of time and effort is spent rehashing covered  ground.
The  second  problem  is that with a shift of  focus  to  Internet
governance,  there  are many who, for whatever  reason,  interpret
self-governance as a wonderful opportunity for self-promotion.  To
those  I issue you this warning: there is no glory here. It  is  a
thankless job.
   
   What  some  people have forgotten is that the  urgency  of  our
original  work came from the Internet operational community.  When
we started, there was a very real danger of the domain name system
fragmenting into multiple roots which most believe would have been
a  terrible  disaster for the Internet. The consequence  would  be
equivalent to dialing the international direct dialing code 41 and
being   routed  to  Switzerland  one  day  and  Kenya  the   next.
Fortunately, this danger now seems to have somewhat faded.
   
   When we prepared our plan, we issued a request for comments and
synthesized thousands of ideas into what we thought was  the  best
compromise solution. We thought that the force of good  ideas  and
sound  principles would be sufficient to get to the holy grail  of
consensus  and move forward. We issued more requests for  comments
to  tune  our  work. We attended scores of meetings to  meet  with
people  and  discuss  what they were seeking. We  provided  almost
daily  updates of information on our web site so that people could
understand  what  we were doing. We maintained  mailing  lists  of
thousands of subscribers.
   
   How  this  debate  has  progressed into a  debate  on  Internet
governance has been totally surprising to others and myself in the
committees  working on this. True, this is a complex  subject  and
touches upon difficult subjects such a management of international
resources,   competition   policy  and  domain   name/intellectual
property  disputes. But how and when did we make the leap  to  the
grand  sounding  Internet governance? Even in the US  Government's
recently   released   "White  Paper"   on   domain   name   system
administration, it  uses the grandiose term "Internet governance".
   
   The  White  Paper  "policy statement" is  a  classic  study  in
ambiguity.  As  all graduate literature students know,  the  well-
known authority on ambiguity is William Empson, a British literary
critic  who  wrote a very popular book in 1930 called  the  "Seven
Types  of Ambiguity". He defined ambiguity as "any verbal  nuance,
however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to  the
same  piece of language". Much of the White Paper is so  ambiguous
that  the  reader  has  no choice but to invent  his  or  her  own
meanings.  And  this  allows all parties  to  believe  that  their
particular  views  have been endorsed - which may  be  politically
astute - but progress always requires moving from platitudes to the
specific and there is no reason to believe that any more consensus
will  emerge  than  in  the  past. There  are  hundreds  of  tough
decisions to make that the White Paper punts to a new "non-profit"
corporation Board of Directors.
   
   Today's  politically correct mantra is that the private  sector
should  lead. But without details, we're not sure what this  says.
What  does  "private sector" mean? Isn't the current administrator
of the Internet generic top level domains from the private sector?
So  what's the problem? The problem is that they, like any company
in  control of a valuable global resource, will obviously  try  to
maximize  profits for their shareholders. Public interest  issues,
what  a  civil society normally invests in governments to protect,
are missing.
   
   Harvard  Professor  Lawrence Lessig argues  in  his  insightful
essay "Governance"[1], how infectious and politically correct is the
idea that no government bodies, whether national or international,
should have a role to play in regulating cyberspace. Remarking  on
the  US  government proposal to create a non-profit US corporation
to  set global policy for domain names, Lessig notes "We have lost
the  idea that ordinary government might work, and so deep is this
thought  that even the government doesn't consider the  idea  that
government might have a role in governing cyberspace."
   
   But  isn't this a paradox? That the birthplace of the  Internet
and  the self-professed  champion of democracy is promulgating its
own  disillusionment with the applicability of its own  democratic
processes for the Internet? Lessig concludes his essay with "In  a
critical sense, we are not democrats anymore. Cyberspace has shown
us this, and it should push us to figure out why".
   
   So  what are we? Ironically, the principles of democratic ideas
are  so  ingrained in our collective beliefs that we're  convinced
that  this is the best way to govern cyberspace. Everyday we  read
calls   for  a  new  widespread  net  democracy  with  voting   by
stakeholders (whoever that is). But is this really want  we  want?
Why is it that one of the most successful paradigms of the post-
industrial age, the Internet Engineering Task Force, avoids voting
like  the plague? And wasn't the Communications Decency Act passed
virtually  unanimously  by popular vote in  the  US  Congress  but
netizens everywhere rejoiced when it was overturned by the Supreme
Court? Do we really want direct democracy for Internet governance?
And  if  we do, in a world of private sector rule, where  are  the
checks and balances that modern democracies have?
   
   You  may have noticed that I have become a profound cynic about
private-sector self-governance. Two years ago this wasn't true but
after watching the self-interest of the private sector during  the
last  two  years, I've changed my mind. This is not reflective  of
some dark desire to regulate the Internet - it is just recognition
of  the  reality of commercial forces. I'm reminded of  the  great
liberal  philosopher Adam Smith, who, more than two hundred  years
ago,   said  public  monopolies  are  terrible.  They  are   slow,
bureaucratic,  inefficient and so on. But he also  added,  private
monopolies are all of this, and in addition, greedy.
   
    The  bottom  line  is that the success of the  Internet  is  a
Pyretic  victory  -  it has now become far too  successful  to  be
treated  any  different than the rest of society and the  economy.
The  price of success is all the baggage and political correctness
which has been hated by the Internet engineering community for  so
many  years. The fact that the debates now have turned to Internet
governance  instead of the relatively arcane topic of domain  name
administration says a lot - our focus has changed to  making  sure
that all the sacred cows are stroked and that they feel that their
views  are part of the process even if we get to exactly the  same
results. While this may eventually lead to progress, it will  most
certainly be a slow, bureaucratic, and inefficient progress -  and
one  that  has  very little resemblance to what made the  Internet
what it is today.

_______________________________
* Advisor, Global Information Infrastructure, International
Telecommunication Union, Geneva, Switzerland. The views expressed
in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the ITU or its membership.
[1] http://cyber.harvard.edu/works/lessig/Ny_q_d1.pdf



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