FC: Marc Rotenberg reviews Milton Mueller's new book on ICANN

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 11:55:21 -0400
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
From: Marc Rotenberg <rotenberg () epic org>
Subject: Marc Rotenberg on Milton Mueller's "Ruling the Root" (MIT Press)

Declan -

I received several favorable comments on this recent review
of Milton Mueller's book about ICANN. Please forward to
Politech if you think appropriate.

Regards,

Marc.



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[7] EPIC Bookstore - Ruling the Root
=======================================================================

Milton L. Mueller, "Ruling the Root" (MIT Press 2002)

     http://www.epic.org/bookstore/powells/redirect/alert914.html

Ten years ago 1,500 people gathered in Kobe, Japan for the first
annual meeting of the Internet Society.  The mood was upbeat and the
program fast-paced.  Panels and workshops explored net access in the
developing world, new network applications and technologies, and
multi-media techniques.  A track on policy examined privacy, security,
appropriate use and globalization, but the focus at the conference was
clearly the protocols, not the policies.  Lawyers were the exception.
There was no Mosaic, let alone Netscape.  "Governance" was not yet on
the agenda.

Fast forward to the present.  The recent meetings of ICANN, the entity
created by the Department of Commerce to manage the central root
server, have been nothing short of rancorous.  An experiment in
Internet self-governance has mutated into an exercise in secret
policies, outraged critics, and increasing failures to make real
public participation.

What has happened in the past decade that has turned Internet policy
into such unpleasant business?  A good answer to this question will be
found in Milton Mueller's Ruling the Root (MIT Press 2002).

Mueller traces the early days of root management, associated with the
benevolent rule of Jon Postel, through the efforts of Ira Magaziner
and the Department of Commerce to create a non-profit corporation that
would "reflect the will of the Internet community," on to the present
day where the struggles over public participation, legitimacy, and
scope threaten to pull the plug on ICANN.

His interest is in understanding how the management of the root, which
perhaps was too easily called "governance," became institutionalized.
His conclusion is simple: instead of a decentralized form of
governance, root management came to resemble radio frequency
allocation where a scarce resource (or a perhaps more precisely, a
resource made scarce) could be used to leverage other policy goals.
To push the Internet back into one of the boxes of Ithiel Pool's
famous taxonomy of communications technologies, management of the root
was treated as broadcast regulation rather than print publication.
Not surprisingly, a battle over the allocation of newly minted
property rights followed.

Mueller's writing is clear and the coverage of the topic extensive,
though some may find the discussion slow-going.  This is not Katie
Hafner writing about the creation of the Internet or Steven Levy on
the birth of the hacker culture.  But this is a careful and serious
exploration of a topic in desperate need of such treatment.  Mueller
propose several theoretic models to explain such topics in Internet
development as resource allocation and the formation of property
rights, though Mueller's well chosen analogies may actually do more to
help clarify some of the current policy challenges.  Consider, for
example, why there is little public debate over Ethernet addresses
(they are simply numbers, not names) or what the consequences might be
of adopting a controlled vocabulary for network identities (card
catalogs are too formal).  As professor Michael Froomkin elsewhere
observed, the "metaphor is the key" in many of the critical technology
policy debates.

Mueller touches briefly on some of the privacy problems that follow
from the current administration of the Internet.  The WHOIS database,
originally intended to allow network administrators to find and fix
problems with minimal hassle, now offers one-stop shopping for
spammers, criminal investigators, and copyright enforcers.  That WHOIS
data might be used for such purposes is probably unavoidable, but
whether WHOIS should be designed to facilitate such use is a topic
that deserves more debate.

Some of the conflicts in the growth of the Internet could be
anticipated.  The use of names rather than numbers to identify
computers connected to the Internet created genuine concerns for both
trademark maximalists and trademark minimalists.  But it also created
value and to go back to a system of numbers at this point, as some
have urged, would still be a net loss.

Mueller himself seems to oscillate between skeptic and idealist as he
offers his own assessment of the prospects for Internet governance.
At times he appears critical of those, such as Internet law expert
David Johnson and cyberprof David Post, who believed that a new form
of government for the Internet was not only possible but necessary.
At other times, he chastises those trademark lawyers who vigorously
protected their clients interests in the .com domain asking why this
was necessary when the Internet made possible a much broader domain
space.  Well, yes, that would be true if the address space did indeed
expand, but scarcity is the current reality.

Mueller offers a clear warning that the institutionalization of the
root threatens to diminish the openness and decentralization of the
Internet.  But maybe there is another warning as well.  Perhaps
governance should be left to governments.  At least governments that
create the opportunity to vote have found it very difficult to later
retract the right.

- Marc Rotenberg

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