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Vint Cerf on Internet Governance and Beyond
scebo writes "With the first phase of United Nations World Summit (WSIS) held in Dec of 2003 and the next phase to be held in 2005, there have been extensive debates regarding Internet Governance. Can it be governed? Who should govern it? What is Internet governance? Vint Cerf has offered his own opinion on the subject over at CircleID which attempts to answer some of the key questions raised: 'It has been suggested by some participants in the WSIS discussions that the role of ICANN might be undertaken by the traditional International Telecommunications Union (ITU). While the ITU has served the world as the international forum for the handling of many international issues associated with traditional tele-communications, the Internet has disrupted the neat categorization of various telecommunications media. It is the potential bearer of every form of communication. ICANN has evolved international processes and structures over the last six years to cope with a limited set of issues associated with this rich, complex and rapidly evolving infrastructure. The world needs an effective and well-supported ICANN but the participants in the World Summit on the Information Society and the Working Group on Internet Governance now need to turn their attention to the full panoply of public policy issues that, as discussed above, lie outside the mandate of ICANN. These need a thorough and open airing in this next phase of the World Summit on the Information Society.'"
In the 21st century, he would've added "root-zone Name Servers".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The world needs an effective and well-supported ICANN
Somehow I think I could live without one.
all of those end in vowels....
What about the USPS. For a bunch of grouchy people who seem to get a lot of rest in while most of the traffic finds its destination, and abhores change like nature does a vacuume, it's hard to do better.
Yes, but what about things like Denial of Service Attacks? Spam etc?
After seeing legislation such as the Patriot Act and the DMCA, I could never trust the United States to govern the Internet. In fact, I don't think it is governable at all. You'd have to have 100% agreement from all countries in order to govern it. It's almost impossible to get countries to agree on anything at all let alone something that could be as challenging as the Internet. I mean dictators would want to keep out subversive material and free speechers would want the opposite.
Spam, fraud, and theft are all wrongs done by one person to another.
Pornography per se, assuming that the producers and consumers are all consenting adults, should not be grouped in with them as an "abuse" of the Internet.
Sheesh. The UN couldn't manage a two car parade, let alone Internet governance.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That said, this whole scenario is about as likely as Kerry actually winning Ohio and becoming president. The US will never cede control of DARPA's "baby" in the interest of "national security" and "national pride." Look at all the problems with trying to divest control from the US government- Verisign/Net Sol and ICANN come to mind. A UN body might work, but I don't see that happening.
"It is the potential bearer of every form of communication"
I get the feeling this refers to access and content, not protocol. There is something inherently evil in the concept that communication must be governed.
The internet represents global free press and a global means for people to assemble. The calls for 'protection from bits' is a smokescreen. We should all be thinking, 'who behind that screen will benefit from governance?' I doubt it's a friendly fat wizard.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
I agree that most of the IT infractions are already on the books IRL. Nonetheless, they are mostly local books, not international books. After working with comp. forensics, I can tell that even if it is technically doable (read my lips, I didn't say easy...), IT law enforcement is a heck of a mess when several physical locations are involved (hosting, ISP, attacking computer, attacked computer...)
On the specific IT crimes, computer intrusion has been on the books since the late 80s, at least in France, and the CyberCrime convention started a global movement towards procedural agreement.
That being said, the use of a third-party arbitration might not be a bad idea, most of all because they might be among the few case-law renderers to actually know soemthing about what they're talking about (cf. the Yahoo! Auction case in France and the (not-so) clever Juge Gomez) [
I stopped reading halfway down where Mr. Cerf made reference to:
That's ridiculous. If we treat porn as, by definition, an abuse of the net then the floodgates open for all sorts of draconian content control. As legal experience in the U.S. has shown, the word "pornography" can be stretched far too broadly far too easily.
Leave the porn alone, Vinnie. You don't know what you're messin' with. Set up an effective way to police porn on the net and about a zillion geeks are gonna be gunnin' for ya.
Not to mention that pesky ol' "freedom of speech" thing.
While I could be wrong, I seem to recal pronography existing prior to the Internet.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
For the most part, I don't think the status quo is too bad, at least with respect to web content. The relevant laws are pretty much determined by where you host and serve content from, so if that copyrighted material is out of copyright in Australia, and hosted in Australia, then there's no obligation by the Australians to prevent Americans from downloading it, though those Americans are still bound by American laws once they have it.
... well, only illegal because one of the countries involved says its illegal. In which case they are free to enforce their laws already. :)
Likewise for eBay et. al. - if it's hosted in America, and legal in America, but the French try to buy it from America, then that's their problem. If they want to make it illegal to buy nazi memorabilia from abroad, let them, but don't try to enforce your laws on somebody else's content.
Yes, that creates free-for-all zones on the web in countries that don't really enforce any of their own laws when it comes to online content. If you don't want to accidentally stumble on that stuff, it's not too hard to block content from China, for example, just like they do from us.
The real remaining problems then are things like spam. Yes, you can change the rules as you describe them by amending SMTP, POP, etc. to prevent these problems, and that's going on, but ultimately spam is a social problem, not a purely technical one. Expecting a perfect technical solution seems unreasonable to me, since the solutions all seem to introduce substantial costs into the usage equation, for every degree of protection you get, you seem to lose some of the usefulness and beauty of it too.
Additionally, transnational fraud is at an all-time high. It's easy for 419 scammers from Africa to defraud dumb Americans and Europeans (no, it's not just Americans that get taken in these scams) - and there's no legal recourse when the government in question doesn't enforce its own laws, or the government is in bed with the perpetrators of the fraud. You can't deny that the Internet made this kind of fraud accessible, while before it would have been effectively impossible to pull this off from five thousand miles away.
If what you're saying is "the government of Nigeria needs to enforce its laws", then yes, I agree with you. That would probably solve this problem, at least if every country complied. But without anybody forcing them to, there's no way to effectively do this. Hell, you can blackhole all IP traffic from the non-compliant country, and it won't help, because they'll use freemail servers in other countries that don't block them.
Likewise with cracking/site defacement/electronic breaking and entering. Also illegal in many places, unenforceable in many of those, and unregulated in some countries still, and it's impossible to prevent entirely through technological means. Again, what's the mechanism for forcing rogue countries to enforce their laws or pass laws against this?
I think it can probably be done without an international oversight body per se - if the US and EU got together and told Russia, Nigeria, etc. they better start enforcing laws against this stuff or face sanctions, there would probably be some action. For some reason, the US government seems far more interested in getting other countries to buy into its MPAA/RIAA/Disney copyright protection regime and patent insanity than protecting its citizens from fraud or giving its business and net community at large legal recourse for electronic vandalism. God forbid our government do something for anybody other than a special interest group. And something that it would be hard for people to whine about too, since it really would help everybody out, not just us. Hard to argue that spam, fraud and electronic vandalism are somehow culturally relative values we'd be imposing on the world.
As for the rest of the problems Vint cites - misinformation, harrassment, illegal transactions, I think those are overstated. The information on the Internet is fundamentally only as trustworthy as the person who put it there, harrassment across country borders isn't a huge problem as far as I know, and illegal transactions are
I agree, I also belive that one of the primary motivating factors for regulation is to somehow squeeze money out of the MILLIONS of people using the Internet.
"oh no, they can't do that the Internet is a global entity"
If you beleive this, you are dreaming
The Internet is not tied to the US, however, that wouldn't stop the government entities from imposing taxes on it. How bad do you think politicians are salavating at the chance to get a piece of that action?
The Internet has grown due to the fact that it has NOT been restrained by government, Governing the Internet will surly hinder the growth.
not traffic cops. just keep the infrastructure working guys. when somebody breaks a law using the roadways, the same cops go after them that would chase the crook who walked away from the bank. The blurring of borders is a byproduct of transportaion as much as of information flow. That blurring is a problem for the cops...they need to reach the level of agreement that the worlds telco's and backbones already achieve and stay the heck out of technology questions.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Most of these problems are the result of stupid users and bad hardware. The solution need not be legalistic.
The real motivator is, of course, copyright infringement.
Being the freedom-loving capitalist I am, I say let the free market evolve a better business model, and don't pass arbitrarily restrictive laws.
But nobody cares what I have to say...I'm not rich.
I guess someone in a particular, large building in NYC reads slashdot. Flamebait indeed.
Why should the internet have a international government? Does the international phone system?
If the nation of chad wants to block web access to foo, let them implement the filters to do so, on computers that reside under their national boundries.
Do YOU look forward to the day when you get a cease and decist order from the UN, or uniTelcomgov, or whatever, because something you put on your webpage is offensive to someone in Tehran? Maybe you won't get a cease and desist. Maybe your ISP will be threatened to have their "internet supplier" permit revoked if they don't take said content down immediatley?
If you don't think that's a likely scenario, you're not thinking the issue through. There are any number of regimes that would be pleased as punch to go about blocking access to information by making you take it offline, rather than have to worry about firewalls, filters, and stopping proxies. Doing stuff is hard. Complaining about it to a central authority is easy.
But hey, in the name of getting rid of junk mail, lets all cede our national and individual sovereignity to foreign bodies!
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Why does EVERYONE feel like EVERYTHING has to be regulated and governed!? Sure there is spam, sure there are preditors, sure it's full of stolen movies and music, and you can't forget the porn....but so is life!! And we already regulate the hell out of it and that doesn't even work too well. So tax payers should pay for this governance why? It will do nothen but restrict our freedom. Increase cost to run a website, a ebusiness, pretty much to do anything. I feel this is just another attempt by rich business men to hog tie the internet for their pure profit. They dont want competition and they dont want people sharing information on that dasterdly deeds them and the politicians do. If we govern the internet and regulate it too much it's not going to be the internet we know and love. and yes, I realize this topic is more deeper then I have touched on...but I have better things to do then research it all up. So keep that in mind when you respond. I know how you /.`ers get...