Info for those who are not on the ifwp list.
http://www.thestandard.com/articles/opinion_display/0,1266,1718-0,00.html
A Bad Turn for Net Governance
By Lawrence Lessig
We're coming to the end of our first experiment with "stakeholder
government" in cyberspace � and the results are not promising.
In about a week, the U.S. government is scheduled to turn over control of
the IP number and domain name systems to a private nonprofit corporation
dedicated to the interests of the "Internet community as a whole." This
corporation, as the administration's White Paper laid out, will be governed
by the Net's "stakeholders" � a term left undefined. In the months since
the White Paper's release, various groups have scrambled to make a claim.
One group now seems destined to prevail � but in a way that raises all the
familiar questions about stakeholder government.
At the start, things looked more promising. A gaggle of self-declared
stakeholders formed an International Forum on the White Paper. The IFWP
launched a series of meetings � in Reston, Va.; Geneva; Singapore; and
finally Buenos Aires � with the goal of developing a rough consensus about
how such a corporation should be governed. The result was a set of
principles. They're vague in places and not always consistent; some are a
bit loony.
But they are the stuff of any ordinary, open decision-making process and a
credit to the organizers of the IFWP.
At the same time, however, there was a parallel process. Jon Postel,
sometime "God of the Internet," through his organization, the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority � backed by attorneys, and in cooperation with a
number of the largest corporate interests at stake � began drafting his own
bylaws for this new corporate structure. He presented these bylaws to the
various IFWP working groups and asked that they be accepted as the basis
for future work. The working groups declined his offer, so Postel and his
lawyers went their own way. Over the months, they have produced three
drafts. Each draft has been posted on the Net and is open for comments �
but each draft was kept solely under IANA control.
These two processes produced two very different results. IANA proposed a
powerful but closed corporation. Principles of separation, or checks on its
powers, don't sing in its draft. The board need not answer to the demands
of "members"; there are no "members." The only check on its powers will be
the California Attorney General, who might have other things to do than
monitor this board. It is an engineer's corporation, but with none of the
virtues of openness and vulnerability that mark organizations such as the
Internet Engineering Task Force.
IFWP's process, by contrast, produced principles, instead of a corporation.
Some principles track IANA's draft, but with differences. They demand more
openness. They call for a membership organization. They envision a clearer
(and more traditional) separation between the board and management of the
corporation. To bring the process to a close, IFWP invited IANA to join in
a public meeting, to work out a final draft for a new corporation that
would reflect the best work of both groups.
But IANA resisted setting its document against another in a context that it
could not control. As negotiations about the final meeting proceeded, IANA
recruited members of the IFWP coalition to withdraw the request, and it
finally succeeded in getting NSI to agree that any meeting should be
delayed until IANA had a chance to strike their own deal. The result is
stalemate in the IFWP process, and, if clocks count, a victory for IANA.
One needn't question motives. The conflict here comes in part from clashing
cultures: Technical types are struggling to maintain control over a
quasitechnical body, and nontechnical types are insisting on a role. And,
in part, it reveals the problem that any stakeholder system will suffer:
Insiders view stakeholders as "those they know," and outsiders must
struggle to be recognized. But, in this case, something more significant
has been lost.
This was the Net's first try at a self-organized governing process. Any
definition of "stakeholders" must include IANA as one among many. But by
refusing to deal except in a context that it controls, IANA forgets "among
many." By what right? Decisions about corporate structure are not
technical; they are not matters taught at MIT. They are legal and political
� judgments about governance � and no single group has special standing in
their formation. Rather than something different, IANA gives us politics as
usual: Insiders, in closed meetings, answering to ideas and arguments as
only they think best. Not a promising start for the process of
self-governance on the Internet.
Lawrence Lessig is the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
E-mail him at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Joop Teernstra
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.imachination.com
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