[governance] Re: IG questions that are not ICANN [was: Irony]

[William Drake]

Hi Avri,

On 12/12/07 6:13 PM, "Avri Doria" <avri at psg.com> wrote:

> 
> On 12 dec 2007, at 03.44, William Drake wrote:
> 
>> No, I was making an argument that governments and industry from
>> around the world that can and do take actions of consequence
>> plainly believe in the importance of and get involved in ITU, which
>> seems a parsimonious explanation of why they spend a great deal of
>> time and resources participating.
> 
> 
> one small anecdotal data point i have.  The S. Korean ministry of
> information and tech in 2007 made a decision to focus its standards
> making investment on the ITU for the NGN convergence architecture/
> protocols, which caused the leading research institute to reassign
> everyone to IT work and to lay off contractors (that's me) who were
> working on any other standards activity.  anyone who has been to the
> ITU SG meetings lately wil have noticed this change of focus on their
> part (several have pointed it out to me).  to have  substantial
> indistrial player like S. Korea make suc a decsion is not a small
> thing, especially if you look at how intertwined their Industrial R&D
> is with Govt policy and research funding.

As it happens, the Korean delegation at the little working party meeting
going on now numbers 13 people, the largest.  For other issues it's a
different mix, variable geometry.  But in general, there's obviously
substantial interest among governments and large firms in hardened
information infrastructures that can securely handle substantial levels of
e-com, e-gov, interfaces with other critical infrastructures, etc., and
clear recognition that vulnerabilities can originate anywhere, and sometimes
it makes sense to look to existing global coordination mechanisms rather
than undertaking the costs of inventing new ones.
 
> Yes, this is only a technical standards body in ITU-T and not one of
> the more policy oriented bodies.  But one accepts any part of the
> thesis that  technology and policy are tight coupled and that much of
> technology represents hardened policy, then this is a significant
> data point.  This can certainly be seen, one small example, in the
> way various technological choices could facilitate the ability  to
> set policies (in the sense of actions to be taken by a intermediate
> system entity) for actions to be taken upon deep data inspection of
> the traffi passing through a network.  Actions such as; drop, slow
> down, record ...
> 
> 
> I would argue that since the WSIS defeat, ITU has been strategically
> picking its battles and cannot be safely counted as an insignificant
> force for the future. And would argue that the decisions made there,
> will have an effect on the nature on the Internet in the future.  So
> the more that people who care can participate in all phases of heir
> activities, the better.

One would think.

> I would also argue that we don't need a unified front position in CS
> o get involved.  It is enough the multivariate views of CS get
> expressed and get expressed effectively and often for them to affect
> the trade-offs made in the engineering/policy decisions on a decision
> by decision basis.  Sure if there is a unified position CS an be
> stronger, but we don't need to wait for that golden day.

On substantive issues sure, the golden day won't come, but on the procedural
issues of transparency and open doors, if there's no unified front there
won't be the possibility to get involved and disagree amongst ourselves in
the first place.

Whatever.  Back to our regularly scheduled programming....

BD


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