nettime Arun Mehta: Unpacking Internet Governance
A view from New Delhi. Original to the Asiasource mailing list. Fwded with the author's permission. my $0.02 on the subject of Internet governance, your contribution solicited at http://www.india-gii.org/wiki/index.php/Presentations/WSIS Arun Unpacking Internet Governance -- And Finding Red Herrings Arun Mehta, [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet seemed to come out of nowhere. Governments didn't plan it, international institutions hadn't even discussed it, and industry largely also didn't expect it. Most remarkable in its growth, was the seeming absence of governance of any kind. The US government certainly wasn't in charge, except for some minor areas, like domain names. Other governments, conservative to different degrees, were horrified to discover a lack of content control that they could do almost nothing about. The telecom companies, which carried the traffic, were too busy selling bandwidth at growth rates of 500% per annum, to worry that here, for the first time, significant technological innovation in telecommunications happened outside their control, and even without their significant involvement. The ITU first learnt of the power of the Internet, when its X.400 email standard was summarily rejected. Now, Wi-Fi, a wireless Internet, you might say, is seriously undermining Bluetooth and 3G, both technologies in which the ITU and telecom companies have made huge investments. Once, the ITU ruled telecom: progress took place at the rate at which lawyers in Geneva could hammer out agreements. For governments, telecom companies and the ITU, the situation now is akin to that of a leader of the French Revolution, who, looking out of the window, said, There go my people. I better find out where they are going, so I can lead them there. The Internet has not only managed furious numeric growth rate with hardly a hitch, it has exhibited rapid technological progress as well. E-mail, chat, the web, e-commerce, file sharing, are just some of the innovations that we have seen in the last two decades, and each have had profound impact. Once, the postman was a much-awaited daily visitor, now who uses paper and envelopes to send letters? The publishing industry once published vast quantities of glossy pamplets to distribute at exhibitions. Now, few people bother to even visit, let alone pick up the raddi. While e-commerce is transforming the way business is done inindustry after industry, file sharing in perceived as a serious threat by the huge entertainment industries. And technological progress on the Internet is showing no signs of slowing down. RSS (Rich Site Summary) has made it far more attractive to keep track of news electronically, rather than to peruse several paper newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the most remarkable attribute of the Internet, is that nobody seems to know who runs it. Our only experience of authority is our Internet Service Provider, who may be lazy, and maintain poor service levels and security, or authoritarian and prevent access to certain services. But most people do not perceive the ISP to be a serious problem, and if they do, they usually can switch to a better one. But other than the limited role that the ISP plays, who governs the Internet? That most people are completely stumped when asked this question, indicates, according to me, how well the Internet is run, and cheaply at that. The governments and international bodies seeking to take charge of the Internet would do well to learn from the model of governance that the Internet practices, instead of seeking to enforce their obsolete models of centralized control and command. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. Problems of the Internet This is not to suggest that the Internet doesn't have problems: 1. Poorcountries pay for traffic in both directions, when connecting to rich countries like the US. 2. We all receive far too much junk mail, or spam. 3. There are too many viruses and worms floating around the Internet. That the ITU has not been able to sort out problem 1, is an indication of how little the genuine problems of the Internet seem to matter to the ITU: asymmetric bandwidth pricing is hardly such a big problem that some negotiation, and the setting up of local, national and regional bandwidth exchanges couldn't quickly take care of. Spam could easily bebrought under control, if governments, globally, were to hold ISPs liable for the spam emanating from their network. The same, I would submit would work for viruses: a few fines, and ISPs would quickly tighten their security. There could be a couple more genuine problems that don't occur to me at the moment, but other than that, we have a bunch of red herrings. The Red Herrings Foremost among them, is the whole discussion of domain names, and who should control them. Internet traffic is routed using IP addresses, similar to phone numbers on the telecom network. People came up with the clever idea of allowing people to use groups of
nettime Follow-up: India's_patent_flip
As a follow-up to the earlier note posted re: India's presentation at the recent WIPO meetings and ss a sign of the speed and force with which IP issues are emerging as an ideological fault-line in the development policy please see the attached. MG Businessworld India The patent flip-flops Latha Jishnu Does India know what its stand on the internationalharmonisation of patent rules is? That's what the world is asking as Delhi does some amazing flip-flops at World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo), the apex global organisation for intellectual property (IP) issues. India has told a bemused Wipo in a note verbale that it does not support the recommendations made by an informal consultative meeting of the organisation in Casablanca in February. That session had been chaired by R.A. Mashelkar, director-general, Council of Scientific Industrial Research. A globally reputed scientist and expert on IP, he was India's representative. (See 'The Next Battle Ground', BW, 11 April). The note clarified that there is no change in India's long-standing position on the issues being addressed at Wipo. That is, India is firmly with the Group of Friends of Development (Group), a 14-nation bloc in Wipo led by Argentina and Brazil, which is pushing for a more nuanced approach to standardisation of patents. The Group wants to drive Wipo activities towards development-oriented results. It has been critical of the Casablanca resolution which had listed upward harmonisation of patent laws as a priority. The flip-flops come at a critical time. On 13 April, Wipo wound up an intergovernmental meeting where the simmering differences between the US and its allies, and the Group almost spilled over. Three wearying days of closed-door meetings, mostly between small groups, proved inconclusive. Wipo agreed that the talks on the development agenda will be continued in June and July. Even Singapore, which is locked into a tight IP protection regime with the US through its 'state-of-the-art' free trade agreement, said on 11 April that IP protection cannot be a one-size-fits-all regime. But India, earlier seen as a key negotiator on this issue, is now being viewed with an increasing degree of suspicion - by both the allies and the opposition. Although Indian officials have thrown their weight behind the Group, it is still not part of it. Worse, its stand changes within weeks. The question that is being asked is: who is driving India's policy on IP and the Wipo agenda? The note verbale, embarrassingly for Delhi, implies Mashelkar chaired the Casablanca meeting in his personal capacity. Officials here say as secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, he would not have attended the meeting without clearance from science technology (ST) minister Kapil Sibal. Mashelkar did not respond to queries. But why should the ST ministry be involved in Wipo talks? Traditionally, IP has been the purview of the HRD ministry and its officials attend the sessions fairly regularly. But HRD minister Arjun Singh is not known to be engaged with the issue of IP rights. However, the Department of Industrial Policy Promotion of the commerce ministry, part of the inter-ministerial group formulating policy on IP, is known to favour the US line on upward harmonisation and commerce ministry officials have sometimes found themselves at loggerheads with India's declared position on IP rights. In December 2003, joint secretary A.E. Ahmed started a bureaucratic storm because of his reluctance to oppose a US move to take the Patent Cooperation Treaty into substantive patent issues. He was moved out, but not before raising a question mark over India's position. Evidently, some bureaucrats, with the tacit support of their ministers, have been pushing individual agendas in Wipo. Till there is a cohesive line, there could be more embarrassments. -- Prabhu Ram, Max-Planck-Institut for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, MarstallPlatz 1, 80539 Munich GERMANY Tel: + 49 89 24246226 Mob: + 49 17629830521 Web: http://infoserve.blogspot.com ___ A2k mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/a2k # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Arun Mehta: Unpacking Internet Governance
This is perhaps the most naive part of the otherwise very naive article: Foremost among them, is the whole discussion of domain names, and who should control them. Internet traffic is routed using IP addresses, similar to phone numbers on the telecom network. People came up with the clever idea of allowing people to use groups of alphanumerical characters instead of these large numbers, with computers automatically making the conversion. Such a big deal should not be made about who uses which name to represent a specific IP address, and frankly, most of us don't care. We just use google to find whichever company or individual we are looking for. There is a deep discrepancy between reality and perception here. Using regulated dictionary approach (DNS ICANN) enables, at least, each participant to control the name and associate it with marketing/advertizing strategy (commercial, ideological, social, whatever.) Search engines, on the other hand, are private entities that can (and always will) do anything that maximizes their gain (sometimes in the short and sometimes in the long run.) For instance, it is perfectly possible for Google, Inc. to dissapear India as such and direct all queries to Pakistan or whatever. (maybe because Pakistan bought Google, via indirect or direct means.) The point is that you want your dictionary (and both DNS and search engines are dictionaries, with different latencies) ran under published rules. This rampant ignorance of alleged activists is the most scary phenomenon lately. end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __ Do you Yahoo!? Plan great trips with Yahoo! Travel: Now over 17,000 guides! http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Arun Mehta: Unpacking Internet Governance
I know many on this list will be aware of the various technical and factual inaccuracies in Mehta's piece (WiFi vs Bluetooth? a new one on me), even outside of the techno-determinist rhetoric and unhelpful equation of governance==government. Two alternative sources below that I think give a excellent overview of the Internet Governance issues (Peake's is good for the general reader, Drake for people who already have been following some of the dialogue). The issues are *not* mostly about control by ITU - few of the civil society folks most critical of ICANN want to see control handed over to the ITU. Nevertheless the flaws in ICANN's governance are real and significant, as others on nettime have pointed out, and it is *already* implementing law in relation to trademark issues - it's just that the law happens to only reflect that of the national government whose MoU constitutes ICANN as a legal entity in the first place. ICANN continues to pretend that developing countries' governance concerns (or even European concerns, given the serious allegations over ICANN's awarding of the .net contract to Verisign,) are mere rabble rousing and will eventually go away. If they do go away, it might be literally through the establishment of alternative root server systems that will make for some *very* interesting platform competition. Of course, old-schoolers will say that the end-to-end principle should not be compromised, but with growing economic incentives for de-peering in highly developed countries, national firewalls in many developing ones , and ballooning Network Address Translation on eg the GPRS network I'm sending this mail from, I think we should be mindful that there are no principles that can't be thrown out the window if some people can make enough money from doing so. It may not be long before we reflect on the global medium of the Internet with the wistfulness that we might hold for the Geneva Convention. Peake, Adam (2004) Internet governance and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Report for Association of Progressive Communications, http://rights.apc.org/documents/governance.pdf Reframing Internet Governance Discourse: Fifteen Baseline Propositions. In, Don MacLean, ed. Internet Governance: A Grand Collaboration New York: United Nations Information and Communication Technology Taskforce, 2004, pp. 122-161 (book at http://www.unicttf.org/perl/documents.pl?id=1392). Also published as a working paper of the Social Science Research Council's Research Network on IT and Governance, 2004. http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/Drake2.pdf Cheers, Danny -- http://www.dannybutt.net weblogs: adventures in cultural politics - http://acp.dannybutt.net digital media - http://digital.dannybutt.net On 4/16/05 8:45 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A view from New Delhi. Original to the Asiasource mailing list. Fwded with the author's permission. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
