[governance] Are Internet users powerless or empowered, and how?

[Karl Auerbach]

Dan Krimm wrote:

> I agree that we (whoever "we" are) are still in a very early learning stage
> about Internet governance in general,

Some say that governance of matters related to internet is new.  Is that 
really the case?  Many of these same issues came up with telephony, and 
before that, with telegraphy, and before that with everything from the 
handling of trade documents (bills of lading, letters of credit, that 
sort of thing), and if we reach far back we can even see the issues of 
transnational issues arising in the development of double entry 
bookkeeping by the renaissance Italian bankers to govern their far flung 
enterprises.

Governance in terms of the control of power is nothing new - Even Moses 
discovered (when he struck the stone and demanded that it bring forth 
water) that he could be called to account for abuse of his delegation of 
authority.

For at least 250 years there has been developing a broad and deep 
understanding about the nature of governance and methods to try to keep 
its powers within their designated channels and limits.

In that sense internet governance is nothing new - the same issues about 
power exist, the same aspects of human nature are still at work, and the 
same potential solutions regarding the constraint of that power also apply.

Yet, perhaps because the internet was born during trailing years of the 
flower power era, there is a sense that the net is somehow different. 
But as we can easily see, even on the internet people and institutions 
still want money and authority, institutions still want to grow their 
budgets and org charts, and there are still contests to be the biggest 
and meanest.

A lot of people like to wave around the words "public private 
partnership" as if that actually meant something good.  But it does not. 
  Rather it tends to mean the gifting of plenary governmental grades of 
power to a body that adheres to the closed and exclusionary, not to 
mention the often very self interested, norms of private for-profit 
corporations.

We've seen how ICANN, formed in a moment of panic about what might 
happen when the US government's authority over Network Solutions was to 
end in 1998, has grown into something that covers the domain name 
landscape like kudsu and intrudes into matters that relate to the 
internet and DNS only through a long and questionable chain of 
indirections and presumptions.  Why, for example, should oversight of 
the technical stability of DNS require the creation of an entire system 
of trademark law (the UDRP)?

We seem to have forgotten what we learned in the 1700's, that bodies of 
governance should have powers that are very clearly delineated; that the 
exercise of those powers must be shared among competing, and even 
mutually suspicious, elements; that there be means for the general 
populace to change those in authority and even to adjust the structure 
of the system of governance itself; and that governance is a matter for 
all, not for some chosen few.

We will find few, perhaps none, of these lessons expressed in today's 
bodies of internet governance.

One might argue that the internet is too technical for techniques and 
principles of governance past.  While it is true that the words and 
subject matter may be new, bodies of governance have long been 
established and found workable on very deep and arcane matters as 
diverse as medicine, structural engineering, or aircraft flight safety.

Do you remember the 1936 movie "Things To Come"? ( 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_to_Come )  That film expressed a 
kind of technological hubris, that technology, being pure and clean, 
will overcome the ills of dirty "politics".  Today's approach to 
internet governance seems to derive from much of that same well.

Yet after August 6, 1945 can anyone say that technology is really 
divorced from politics?

To finish up - internet governance is not really anything new.  We 
should not ignore the past ignore the methods that have been learned, 
applied, and refined through centuries.   Do we really want to test 
Satyandra's rule that those who do not remember the past are doomed to 
repeat it?

		--karl--
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