THE NONSENSE OF GOVERNMENT TAKING OVER INTERNET GOVERNANCE
by A.M.Rutkowski *
With great recent regularity, from otherwise lucid
individuals, there has been a constant refrain about
"governments taking over Internet governance." This
bogeyman is generally raised in conjunction with the
prospects of some initiative or another failing. What is
equally amazing is the acceptance of such a far-reaching
assertion as some kind of truism.
What the refrain ignores is that this simply cannot in
any realistic sense occur. It is nonsense. Governments
and intergovernmental organizations can do a lot of things
if they so chose. One of them is not taking over
"governance of the Internet." For the purposes of
discussion here, "governance" means on a widespread basis,
assigning mandatory Internet identifiers, or establishing
some kind of requirement with conditions to use the
Internet, or regulating its overall operation.
The reasons are three-fold:
1) governments lack the authority
2) governments lack the enforcement capability
3) governments already tried this gambit for 15 years and
completely failed.
Authority
---------
In all but the most repressive countries, government
agencies do not have presently have the authority to
"govern" the Internet. The Internet is treated as an
enhanced communications network under almost all basic
national and international public policy for the past
thirty years..
While there has been some recent retrenchment on this
policy through attempts in the International
Telecommunication Union, European Union, and the ICANN-GAC
through attempts to declare Internet Name and Address
systems to be public resources, these are still at the
"quasi-assertion" stage that would require some
significantly more substantial step to actually make the
authority materialize, and that seems unlikely to occur.
It is one thing for a handful of government bureaucrats
under some rubric to pass resolutions or principles that
with a wave of their hand assert that Internet identifiers
are public resources. It is quite another for them to
actually carry this off under existing legal and political
systems. What occurs in these instances is action boy some
official under a bluff of authority that they don't really
have or are likely to achieve.
Any attempt to acquire such authority would spark more
thorough inquiry into the actual bases for an assertion
that Internet identifiers - or for that matter the Internet
itself - were public resources. At that point, the
bureaucrats would fail to meet any known test of what
constitutes a public resource or network.
Enforcement
-----------
Governments have some potentially Draconian enforcement
capabilities. However, the notion that these capabilities
include reaching into all the 50 million computers and
million networks around the world to effectively enforce
what names or addresses they use moving bits of information
among machines, would certainly be met with widespread
resistance and probably ultimately exceed the enforcement
budgets of most governments.
A unfortunately large number of people engaged in the
Internet governance dialogues don't have a clue as to what
the Internet even is. Typically, the Internet is viewed as
some latter-day cross between their telephone network and
TV set that magically provides Email and web images. They
figure that if the telephone networks and TV broadcasting
was regulated, so can the Internet.
What they ignore is that the Internet is simply some
computer code that enables privately owned computers and
networking resources to be shared. For most people, it's
simply part of the software that is found on their
computer.
To enforce an Internet governance regime would literally
require the ability to monitor and control how every
individual and system operator in the world set up their
machines. This is particularly the case for the Internet
Domain Name System - where by design, the set up of the
entire system occurs on the periphery of the network.
Even doing it indirectly by cutting off access to
underlying circuits - which was attempted when many
governments made the Internet illegal in the 1980s - is no
longer feasible today, since many of those underlying
circuits run the Internet Protocol as a native switching
and system management software.
History
-------
Anyone who has been around the Internet or
telecommunications policy arena for more than the past five
years, will likely recall that the governments of the world
- including many agencies of the US Government - for 15
years tried to develop a homogenous global governance
regime for all computer networking called Open Systems
Interconnection or OSI.
Most of these government folks are the same ones involved
in the current Internet governance dialogue. They had
their own rules and regulations, their own numbering and
domain name system, their own mandatory standards. The
Internet was derisively referred to by these government and
intergovernmental officials as illegal and "de facto." Their
own regime was referred to as the legal or "de jure"
network.
Despite billions of dollars and forests of trees felled
for this nonsensical regime, it ultimately failed so
abysmally that it left the European computer networking
industry in ruins and disappeared from the public lexicon.
The reason the ITU, the EC and the US Dept of Commerce and
other cooperating entities failed, was ultimately because
they didn't have the authority or enforcement capabilities
to pull it off. They were not able to mandate what people
and companies did with their computers and networks.
Unfortunately, history tends to repeat itself, and these
same cast of characters think they can simply drag their
failed OSI regime from under the rug and reapply it to the
Internet. It will simply fail again.
So the next time you hear someone say - if so-and-so
doesn't happen with respect to the Internet, the government
will step in - just say "nonsense." But - like I would tell
my law school classes - don't believe me - do your own
research and see what you find. Question authority,
enforcement, and look at the history!
*speaking only for myself.
