Slashdot Mirror
Meet the Man Who Will Save the Internet
UltimaGuy writes to tell us The Register is running an interesting piece about Masood Khan, chairman of the sub-committee that is takling many of the difficult questions about internet governance. Mr. Khan has been able to draw enormous respect for many of the participatory nations and seems to have a very direct style of management. From the article: "I would encourage you all not to focus on general themes of internet governance but instead go to the heart of the matter," were Khan's opening words. And then he listed them. "The question of a future mechanism, the question of oversight, and the paradigm of co-operation amongst all stakeholders."
1. The word "stakeholder" is a euphemism for "special interests". If one looks carefully how it is used both in the WSIS and ICANN, the word "stakeholder" tends to encompass selected groups, most often groups who make money from the internet, and never includes individual users of the net.
In other words, under both the WSIS and ICANN rubric, individual users of the internet are not "stakeholders" and thus have neither right nor ability under WSIS or ICANN to express their interests, much less have an ability to vote on how those interests and concerns are handled.
2. Much of the discussion in WSIS (and ICANN) is like a fight over a toy steering wheel in an automobile. ICANN and WSIS wrongly equate regulation of the business of selling domain names with control of the internet.
In other words, they are arguing over something that is so divorced from technical reality of the net that the outcome, whatever it may be, will provide no assurance that the internet retains its ability to move packets from source IP address to destination IP address with dispatch and reasonable (but neither perfect nor guaranteed) reliability. The outcome will almost certainly be only about the handling of business practices in the business of selling domain names.
Do not expect WSIS or ICANN to comprehend that the real goal of internet governance is the preservation of the end-to-end principle for the benefit of internet users.
In only the broadest sense of the term does the U.S. control the internet. They are certainly the country with the most influence, but they have little control over the inner workings. The U.N. might as well be asking the U.S. to relinquish control over the Coca Cola Corporation*.
Also as the recent spats between Tier 1s have shown us, the internet is vulnerable but highly adaptive. Connections were impacted for only a brief time and no long term damage was done. It's not perfect by any means but the U.N. isn't providing any solutions besides "Once we run things it will be better".
*Side note* reading up a little on the relationship between then government and Coca Cola Inc is loads of fun, political intrique, espionage, and killing communism oh my.
We all hear people complaining that they don't "control" the internet.
I'm not American. But well Internet works, it is free and I trust more an American administration than a Chinese one at the moment.
So the basic question is: Who force them to stay "inside" the Internet? They have routers, they have servers, uplinks, they can setup their own ICANN server within a day.
If they feel so threatenned by the American institution, why don't they leave it and setup their own?
Do you often surf on their web sites? Personnaly all I receive from China is SPAM.
Let's call it the "Politically correct" Internet. It will under the control of China, Iran, Cuba, Syria, Tunisia and all these fantastic countries we hear complaining. And for the rest of us we keep things as they are.
I don't want to surf all the day on a network partly monitored by non democratic countries. The UN is full of them, I don't want them to control any part of my life, not a single nanosecond, not a single bit.
Olivier