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.'"

Comments

That was long.

[Anonymous Coward]

It had big words. Now I'm sleepy.

And since I'm not a reader. Let's pick a Texas company at random and make them wholly responsible, and we'll give them a blank check. And when we learn about the inevitable graft and pending implosion, we can say, "It's hard work. I'm working hard! I'm going to take half of July off with my normal August vacation. Which is hard."

No need

[bludstone]

Governance is needed to establish and eforce rules so that the general public, ie, society, can operate.

On the internet, these rules are already agreed to. TCP/IP, FTP, HTTP, and other wonderful acronyms.

The things that are illegal online are also illegal irl. If you enforce the general societal rules already on the books, then there is no need for a Internet government.

At least, in my opinion.

Re:No need

[Fnkmaster]

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.

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 ... well, only illegal because one of the countries involved says its illegal. In which case they are free to enforce their laws already. :)

He lists pornography as an "abuse." What?

[jayerandom]

Cerf writes

"...spam (unsolicited commercial electronic mail), fraud, theft, pornography, and the long list of other abuses that creative human beings have invented for the Internet."

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.

In a perfect world...

[lothar97]

We'd have what we really need: an independent group that has oversight of the few things the Internet relies upon- DNS, domain registration, etc. I'm not even talking WWW compliance and the like. This group would have representatives from the different regions of the world, and include education, corporate, and government entities. It would not be under control of any one entity.

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.

the potential bearer of every form of commucation

[Sai Babu]

"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.

Arggggg.....

[WindowLicker916]

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...