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

Dan Krimm dan at musicunbound.com
Mon Jul 23 16:52:41 EDT 2007


Rhonda,

I guess I would say that the Internet is no longer (and can no longer be)
relegated to a "protected environment" for development.  Those days are
over.  Political dynamics have imposed themselves upon this communication
platform with a vengeance, and there is no getting rid of them.  The reason
for this is that the Internet has become *important* politically, whereas
at the outset it was purely a tech development project that the politicians
did not understand as affecting them significantly.

Well, that project has born many valuable fruit, and those fruit are
proving to be massively disruptive to the power balance of the past.  There
are many positive potentials here for "the little guy" but by the same
token it threatens entrenched powers potentially at their very core, and
there are also threats to recast the technology into a tool for massive
oppression (or to more subtly shape its implementation in ways that
maintain the power divide under the radar, without alerting the general
population to their betrayal).

Regardless of what would be ideal, I find it unrealistic to think that
politics can ever be banished from the process ever again, any more than it
can when it comes to television/radio policy or telecommunications policy
in general.  The Internet is becoming the future of the Fourth Estate, and
that makes it front and center in all political dynamics.  The spotlight is
shining on it, and that spotlight is not about to go away.

The Internet is far too impactful on political power dynamics that are far
too important to ever recreate the protected development environment again.
The cat is out of the bag, and there's no putting it back.

This is a measure of the success of any scientific/technological
development effort: if the kings want to control your technology, you know
it makes a big difference to society generally.  The involvement of
political dynamics is inevitable for any successful and mature technology
of broad social impact (and thus broad political impact).

The Internet has grown up, and this is what happens when you leave the nest
for the wild world.  You have to deal with power on its own terms, because
now you are playing in the realm of adults, and you can't have the parents
set the rules unilaterally any more.

The initial startup environment of the Internet is a one-time occurrence
that can never be recaptured at this level of technological maturity.  "You
can't go home again."  My advice is to get used to it and learn how to
navigate in these rough waters.  We're out of the controlled swimming pool
and out onto the wild ocean where hurricanes and sharks and rip tides are
simply part of the axioms of life.

If you want another swimming pool, find another nascent technology to work
on.  This one has been birthed, weaned and sent out into the cruel world to
fend for itself.  The egg shell has been permanently shattered, and will
never be put together again.

Dan

PS -- Sorry for the long string of metaphors.  I'm just trying to find
stories that will get the point across.  :-)



At 8:01 AM -0400 7/23/07, Ronda Hauben wrote:
>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 <<mailto:dan at musicunbound.com>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>http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook
>
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