[governance] IS THE DIGITAL DIVIDE A PHANTOM?

[Dan Krimm]

What this says to me is that "Internet Governance" is insufficient to
address the Public Governance issues surrounding the Internet.

So, let's talk about Internet access as a matter of broad Public Governance
(PG) rather than narrow Internet Governance (IG), and let's talk about the
relationship of IG to PG of the Internet (PGoI -- starting by
distinguishing them, and then by incorporating IG into the PG domain).

Seems to me this crowd has been going around in circles about this ever
since I joined up last fall.  I imagine for quite some time before as well.

Maybe it's time to start defining terms in detail.  You guys have defined
IG in narrow technical terms, which is fair enough.  But then, PGoI is
something that needs to be addressed separately starting yesterday, because
that is where issues like the Digital Divide and Net Neutrality make a
difference to public citizens across the globe.

It may be that we can never "solve all problems" and that even if we start
small, we might not be able to solve *those* problems, or if we can then we
may not be able to translate those narrow solutions to broader public
policy domains.

Politics (like time itself) waits for no human.  It is happening in real
time, and we need to deal with it in real time, even if we don't have the
perfect solution figured out just yet.  Perfection is not an option in
politics, public policy, and public governance.  It may not be an option
for PGoI either.  Politics is like walking on quicksand -- it's a moving
target and the perfect theoretical solution may simply not exist, or may be
quickly obsoleted.

How do we "satisfice" in getting the best we can, now?  I would suggest
that by narrowing our focus to only technical IG, we lose sight of the
broader issues that still *must* and *will* be addressed, even in the
default.  (Even if we decide to ignore those issues, that is in fact an
affirmative decision that addresses the policy by "retaining the status
quo" and that may not be the best policy choice available to us.)

Of course, the choice of the appropriate political venue to address these
issues is a critical factor in the choice, and that is a big part of our
struggle today, as we do not yet necessarily have an ideal venue to deal
with these issues.

That's perhaps the biggest problem we face today, from a structural
standpoint.  If there is no "there" there in terms of accountable political
venue and jurisdiction, then no matter what the best choices are, we will
have a difficult time implementing them in a productive manner.

Dan



At 12:27 AM +0300 7/31/07, McTim wrote:
>On 7/30/07, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:
>> McTim wrote:
>>
>> > We clearly have differing definitions of "access"   For me, It's
>> > accesible if I can ping the host (Do I have acccess to the Internet?).
>> >  For you it's reading a page?  Try Google's "translate this" feature.
>>
>> I believe in starting small and learning before trying to solve all
>> problems.  Thus for purposes of these intial stages of internet
>> governance I have on several occassions defined the internet in the
>> following terms:
>>
>>     The internet is the open system that carries IP packets from source
>> IP addresses to destination IP addresses.
>>
>> Governance of that the thing that reifies that limited definition is
>> already a complex topic that has, so far, defied solution.
>>
>> Going beyond that and including governance of layered-on, optional
>> applications (such as HTML carried in HTTP, i.e. "the web") seems, to my
>> mind, to be biting off too much and reduces the chances of success.
>
>Agreed.
>
>My favorite definition is Seth Breidbart's:
>
>"It's the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive
>symmetric closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP
> packet from".
>
>
>--
>Cheers,
>
>McTim
>$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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