Danny Butt on Sun, 17 Apr 2005 06:07:27 +0200 (CEST) |
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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, "patrice@xs4all.nl" <patrice@xs4all.nl> 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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net