[governance] Effects of lack of electricity on the digital divide

Ronda Hauben ronda.netizen at gmail.com
Mon Jul 23 08:01:14 EDT 2007


Dan, what you say leaves out that the Internet's early development was done
in an environment that was a protected environment, an environment that was
an open academic situation where there could be public discussion of the
science done, sharing of what was happening, and researchers from different
countries were able to collaborate. The design of tcp/ip grew up in such a
culture. I have some papers describing this and how the problems were dealt
with. I would be glad to provide the urls.

Its important to know the discuss the real situation, not create scenarios.

Someone the scientific origins seem to be lost in the current milieu.

An Acceptible Use Policy was critical at the early stages. Similarly that
this was developed in an academic environment and that it wasn't under
proprietary restrictions.

There was a need to involve a large scientific community in the development
and I even found that the early papers went to researchers in Eastern Europe
(despite the cold war on at the time) and that they discussed the early
tcp/ip architecture plans and alternatives at a research institute in
Laxenburg, Austria  at the International Institute of Applied Systems
Analysis, (IIASA) in the early and mid 1970s.

So its important to sort out the scientific environment needed for
technological developments and how to create and nourish such an
environment.

Ronda

On 7/22/07, Dan Krimm <dan at musicunbound.com> wrote:
>
> At 7:26 PM -0400 7/22/07, Ronda Hauben wrote:
>
> >The problems described remind me of the kinds of problems (though
> >different) that the pioneers building the Internet faced, and they
> figured
> >out how to solve them as they were focusing on a scientific approach and
> >using the technology they had developed to help them solve the problems.
> >...
> >So its not that the commercial should not be part of the situation
> dealing
> >with the problem, but putting the solution in their hands is probably not
> >going to solve the problems in itself.
>
>
> I would suggest that there are three domains here, not just two.
> Commercial, yes.  Technological (science), yes.  But also *public policy*.
> What was solved in the technological origins of the Internet also included
> a number of implicit (and perhaps explicit) public policy issues.
>
> For example, the technical architecture of TCP/IP encompasses the public
> policy issue of common carriage of information.  It would be up to David
> Reed and Vint Cerf to recount how much the public policy issues were an
> explicit part of that architectural decision, but even if they weren't
> explicitly thinking of the public policy issue of common carriage, their
> decision affected that policy, at least for some years (it is seriously
> threatened in the US these days, because we lack the interconnection
> regulation that sustains structural competition such as in the EU -- we're
> actually fighting that fight right now over a patch of wireless spectrum
> that is due to be freed up in the pending transition from analog to
> digital
> TV).
>
> In the US, we still fight over the issue of universal geographical
> coverage
> (the policy code word is "red-lining" which has been generally prohibited
> for telco service and depending on the municipality may or may not be
> allowed for cable TV -- the application to Internet service is unclear so
> far, but looming).  This is likely not going to be addressed
> technologically or by the market on its own -- the only technological
> solution would be to find a way to make provision of service to sparsely
> populated areas comparable to the costs of provision to more densely
> populated areas, thus allowing market demand to attract profitable
> provision of service to all areas.  In the absence of such a technological
> breakthrough, coverage of unprofitable regions will ultimately require
> public regulation of coverage to avoid "creaming" by commercial service
> providers (to maximize profit), or else abject public deployment and
> provision of service to otherwise unserved regions of the market.
>
> If these sorts of things are still issues in the US (which they most
> certainly are), it's not hard to see why they would be issues elsewhere as
> well.  Where markets and architecture fail, and where social norms do not
> apply, regulation should still be considered in order to rectify those
> failures.  This is one reason why "Internet Governance" is really an
> integrated component of "public governance" in general.
>
> Dan
>
> PS -- Furthermore, the long term fate of the global energy crunch will
> clearly impact the long term fate of the digital divide around the world.
> If we start rationing energy, the wealthy will surely find ways to avoid
> having to constrain their own use, while rationing applies
> disproportionately to the non-wealthy.  I don't think this issue is at all
> geographically constrained in the long run.  Beware the erosion of the
> commonwealth, because a divided society is a wasteful, weak and
> contentious
> society.
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-- 
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet

http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook
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