Why Talk About Internet Governance?

andyo wrote to mention an article on the O' Reilly network entitled Why They're Talking About Internet Governance. The piece goes into the history of how things came to be in the first place, as regards the distribution of internet domain space. From the article: "Having established commercial beachheads on the Internet, corporations wanted to own the whole terrain. Through the World Intellectual Property Organization ... they were designing a new regime for handling domain names. It was nicely suited to large corporations ... Within weeks of the successful conclusion of the Global Incorporation Alliance Workshop, a lash-up of Internet leaders, Network Solutions, and other back room forces popped a proposal of their own on a surprised and unprepared Internet community. The proposal ... ultimately led to ICANN. Most stakeholders were left out of the decision--even many large corporations were angry--but the Commerce Department approved the proposal, happy to wash its hands of the issue. "

Comments

Damage, censorship and governance

[nharmon]

Have you ever heard the saying, "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it"? I'm not sure who said it, but he/she was right on. To expand on this, we need to look at governance in the same way we look at censorship.

If you have never read World of Ends, I recommend you do so now.

The solution to "governance" over the internet is to remain true to the foundations it was developed under. The internet as an agreement cannot be governed. It can only exist while there is compromise and consensus. So, here is what I believe is the best solution to this problem:

1. For the time being, maintain the status quo of having ICANN responsible for the assignment of IPv4 addresses.

2. Transition into IPv6 by assigning blocks of IP addresses to all countries. Perhaps leaving some addresses for space stations, the moon, mars, etc. Do this though multi-national treaties. This is where the United Nations can help out, but the UN should only be a facilitator. Remember, the Internet is an agreement among nations.

3. Have each country be responsible for assigning its block of IP addresses, and for the management of their TLDs.

4. Transfer .com, .org, and .edu management to some sort of NGO (ICANN for example), with the purpose being for multi-national corporations, organizations, and institutions of higher education who do not associate with any particular nation (for example would be icrc.org)

The important thing is that the internet remain decentralized. This seems to be the point that everybody is missing. It doesn't matter who governs the internet, because nobody should govern the entire internet. Its works best as an agreement, and that is how we should proceed.

Committee != 'Democracy'

[dada21]

Here's my #1 problem with governments: the committee. These mini-groups tend to debate over what is best for them, not their constituents.

Example of typical bad true Democracy: 51 out of 100 people love large bananas. They vote to regulate bananas, and now only large bananas are available.

Example of typical bad representative democracy: 5 representatives of 100 people form a banana size committee. 2 of them have friends or family who grow medium sized bananas. 51 of 100 citizens prefer large bananas. The 2 reps convince the other 3 to set the definition of 'large' as equal to the medium sized bananas, in exchange for adding pork to the law that helps the other 3 reps.

Example of free market democracy: 51 out of 100 people like large bananas. 30 like medium, and 19 like tiny. Banana growers grow all 3 sizes, selling them at a price set by the supply of certain sizes and the demand for those sizes.

The first two forms of democracy are, well, bananas. Nuts! This is how we live today in the US. The UN is even worse,with almost zero input by the constituents.

Internet governance is best delegated to corporations and individuals. Profit is merely a reflection of a company's ability to meet the demands (price, quality, performance) of their customers. Profit can not be demanded. Profit can not be stolen. Profit can not be fraudulent for long. Except when a company is given monopoly power by government mandate (schools, roads, etc).

The Internet is a group of individuals who pick an ISP. The groups of ISPs choose a backbone provider. The backbones choose to interconnect.

Why is governance needed? If a backbone decides to break away, customers and ISPs will choose another backbone. If an ISP decides to censor or charge too much, users can select another ISP (except when government forces zero choice).

There is zero need for government involvement, except to tax, regulate, censor and control.

Better not just more TLDs

[logicnazi]

I agree with most things that Oram says in this article. I have one quibble and one major disagreement I will put in another post.

The quibble is that freeing up more tlds won't necessarily solve the scarcity of good domain names. If done incorrectly it could even make the problem worse.

The point of domain names is to provide a quick and easy way to remember and communicate internet locations. So long as tlds categorize sites into content relevant categories they do work to relieve the demand for domain names. For instance if you want to go to fuckedchicks (made up) your favorite porn cite remembering that it is in .xxx (assuming it gets popular) is of no difficulty since it is easily connected with important facts you already remember about the site. On the other hand when tlds don't have much to do with content adding more of them can have a negative effect. If you know your favorite blog is computationaltruth.???/blog/ knowing the content or other facts about the site hardly helps you distingush between net, org and com. Since most people and all corporations want to achieve easy memorability when there is no obvious content (or other already known information) based discrimination more tlds can either just increase the confusion encouraging corporations to buy CORPNAME.* for all possible options. Worse too many tlds means some may fade into obscurity and fads keep the 'good' names just as scarce.

Or to put it another way too many non-content related tlds make all domains harder to remember and hence don't solve the problem but just spread out the pain by making every name slightly worse.

So far it seems that the country codes (and perhaps some even smaller geographic codes) are good (in the sense above) tlds as are the .xxx, .edu and .gov. Org and Com and Net are necessery general purpose names but that model shouldn't be followed with things like .biz which just sow confusion (is that a .com or a .biz)? The important question is whether there are enough good new content related tlds and that is something I don't know.