[governance] it ain't broke

[Danny Butt]

Veni, with due respect, this is a non argument. Of course - no one  
cares about any kind of policy. They just want to improve their  
standard of living. If you ask them what economic policy they prefer,  
the vast majority wouldn't care even to respond, etc.

But that doesn't mean that any governance structure shouldn't be  
improved when it is the underpinning for who controls who gets to use  
resources and how. And in particular, governance structures for  
critical infrastructure can and should be made more effectively  
responsive to all stakeholders. You don't say well, the average  
electricity user doesn't care about who provides their power, so we  
shouldn't be talking about governments being involved in it. To  
pretend that Internet Governance is fine because what we had 12 years  
ago led to rapid uptake of the technology is surely unrealistic when  
it's a totally different animal, and that attitude is the reason why  
ICANN has not reformed itself into the responsive organisation many  
of its initial supporters in the AP region had initially hoped, and  
why there is so little faith in it.

Is it just me, or are the disagreements on the list, alongside the  
sombre mood of the (excellent, thanks!) reports from prepcom,  
suggestive that the WGIG report hasn't made as much of an impact in  
aligning people's concepts of IG as we might have hoped?

Regards,

Danny

-- 
Danny Butt
db at dannybutt.net | http://www.dannybutt.net

On 23/09/2005, at 5:54 PM, veni markovski wrote:

> But if you go to the end users and ask them what model they prefer,
> the vast majority wouldn't care even to respond. That's the truth -
> the users are not interested if it's ICANN, or the UN running the
> root management and the DNS and IP address allocation. They care that
> Google works, that they have connectivity, and that there are no
> viruses to ruin their (net)work.
>

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