[governance] Programme outline and schedule released

[Karl Auerbach]

William Drake wrote:

> ... Which is not to say that the proposed topics are not
> interesting and important, or that we won't all have a good time in Rio.

My initial reaction was somewhat parallel to yours.  Let me, by way of
indirection say that I live in a town in which political correctness is
a way of life - people here don't own "pets", rather animals have
"guardians", etc.  So I'm pretty familiar with euphemisms that lead to
nothing but discussions that endlessly and repeatedly swirl along, going
nowhere, like a Faulkner story about being adrift in a Mississippi flood.

Now, I have spent the last two weeks dealing with the hard technical
reality of making an enterprise-size multivendor VOIP system work - or
rather making it work and then clobbering it to explore, for a
constructive purpose, how to make it not work.  (A few photos of the
test rig are up at http://www.cavebear.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=122 )

One thing that becomes immediately apparent when dealing with the
internet at that level is that technology and reality are not waiting
around waiting for governance.  Expediency is the order of the day.
Choices are being made in a vacuum of policy, and those choices rapidly
ossify into economic irreversibility.

Has anyone here, for instance, been noticing how ARIN is making (with
very public and reasoned deliberation) some pretty serious choices about
IP address allocations?

We *do* need effective institutions of internet governance.  There are
real jobs to be done.  The risk is that if left undone someone (human)
or something (mother nature) will cause real internet outages or
failures of adequate service.  And avarice of simple  - and I include in
this the inability of countries that have invested in net
infrastructures to adequately utilize those infrastructures because
governance has been lacking.  (See for example my proposal a while back
about governance to help assure adequate end-to-end path quality to
sustain certain applications, especially VOIP.)

All in all what this says to me is this - the existing vacuum of
governance is real and unless things get concrete really fast that
vacuum will be filled by the those who move the fastest with the mostest
- which means well financed US, European, and certain Asian industrial
interests.

It may be the traditional language of diplomatic discourse, but my sense
is that the euphemisms and indirections, and delays to engage on the
real issues of internet governance is going to lead to an future
internet that is so laden with toll gates and cull-outs for incumbent
industrial segments (such as the intellectual property protection
industry) that it will make the old telco's green with envy.

I had hope for an program that was more concrete and firmly addresses
the following matters:

   A) The jobs to be done

   B) The principles to be applied to those jobs

   C) the concrete engines to perform those jobs

		--karl--

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