Milton Mueller wrote:
> The debate is really about property rights--to names, the name
> space, and secondarily addresses.
[much snipped]
> I am not pro-regulation (people who know me know that that is an understatement),
> but markets and private sectors exist in a context of property rights. When property
> rights are undefined, there is no stable basis for a private sector. Governments
> define and maintain property rights. In this case, the USG abdicated. We will pay
> for that mistake for a long time.
>
> In my capacity as a professional academic and historian of telecommunications, I am
> going to make sure that posterity understands just how badly the US Dept of Commerce
> has botched this thing.
[...]
> Yes, shared vs proprietary TLDs is precisely the kind of property rights issue that
> the USG should have resolved, not left to ICANN. Even if it did not resolve it in
> the way I personally would have liked, it should have been resolved BEFORE creating
> ICANN. However, the ISOC faction must share a great deal of the blame for this
> blunder: first because of its attempt to self-privatize without any legal authority,
> and secondly because of its promotion of the mythology of "self-governance." The
> whole Internet community seems to have been blinded by this silly idea that the
> Internet somehow existed outside of civil society, makeing it possible for ISOC to
> promote the mistaken idea that the USG was "intervening" in a "self-governing"
> process. This rhetorical ploy was compounded by its later encouragement
> (exploitation?) of European political jealousies in order to counteract the USG's
> involvement.
Intriguing, but I think we have different perceptions about what
constitutes civil society. I'm investigating what these DNS-related
events might say about the prospects for a post-Westphalian order. I'm
not talking about a civil society in which nation-states necessarily
disappear, but a process by new expressly global forms of civil society
emerge as a "place" where resources are coordinated across space and
time according to formal and coherent rules. A place with its own form
of property rights. Therefore, it's significant that both the POC/CORE
process and now the ICANN/WIPO processes were/are so concerned with
establishing things like: 1) authority over discrete elements of the
Internet; 2) public oversight bodies, and; 3) dispute resolution
mechanisms.
And yes, there is some attempt to play the nation-states against each
other toward this end, but, to repeat what I've said before,
nation-states themselves are inherently vulnerable to the Internet
because online social and commercial activity is becoming both an engine
of prosperity and an increasing threat to centralized order. Sustained
prosperity is essential to the legitimacy of national governments, but
so is the ability to hold predominant control over coercive mechanisms.
The proliferation of diverse communication channels, encryption, tax
avoidance schemes threatens such power. It seems to me that proponents
of Internet self-governance (the post-Westphalians) have acquired more
political leverage by exploiting this internal ambivalence within states
than by exacerbating differences among them.
Norms of individuality and free speech play a role here as well.
In any case, I listened to as much of the Saturday meeting as I could. I
thought it was very interesting. I think BCIS did a good job putting it
together, and that John Zittrain served ably as moderator. I'm always
happy to hear what Scott Bradner has to say. But I'm not clear whether
the process moved forward in a discernable way. I was in strong
agreement with Fred Wertheimer's inital comment that a self-selected
leadership sounds like a pragamtic approach just as long as it maintains
transparency. Unfortunatly, there was no consensus on that point, and he
even seemed to move away from it as the notion of global netizenship got
bandied about. I also thought Jay Hauben made an interesting and valid
point that the mandate against the participation of national governments
works to favor the relational power of the United States government
within this process.
Craig Simon
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