[governance] Reinstate the Vote

Sat Nov 24 01:33:11 EST 2007

Dan,

In my message I was talking about "some of the Americans". Nobody
would seriously name a whole nation as taking things for granted.
As for the access to information - trust me, even when the people in
power were trying to control it, there were ways to achieve it. The
point about freedom of speech is fundamental - but only in certain
societies. In others it is more important to actually have affordable
access.

Of the many issues around the Internet, the DNS and esp. the IP
addresses are not on the priority list of anyone except people with
some commercial interest, scientific researchers, professionals. The
end user does not care about them. That actually is the big pain of
some people here - that regardless of what they say, and how loud, the
users still don't care about ICANN, but about how much they pay for
what kind of service.

Just an example - when people leave the huge quotes after every mail,
how many think that this may take more time for the dial-up user in,
say, Kambodja? Guess what - only a few od us have actually paid their
Internet access by the bytes, not by the bit. At the beginning of the
Internet it was 3.5 cents for 1 Kb (1024 bytes) in Bulgaria.

And when we know the majority of the people (and users) have this as a
problem, but the native-English speakers try to put their thoughts in
our minds that THIS is not a problem, what do you expect? After all,
no wonder some end up with personal attacks - they just don't
understand us, and probably at some point think that we are idiots,
incompetent, etc. just because we don't share their views about the
domain names.

Veni

- Original message -
-- if you have political power, then you have these freedoms,  and if
you do not have political power, generally you do not these  freedoms
in meaningful terms

On 11/23/07, Dan Krimm <dan at musicunbound.com> wrote:
> I hope everyone in the US had a Happy Thanksgiving holiday -- I certainly
> did: I didn't go online for a moment.  And what a state this list is in as
> I return...
>
> One comment, certainly not intended to be ad hominem:
>
>
> At 12:23 PM -0500 11/23/07, Veni Markovski wrote:
>
> >For some of the Americans the issues about the Internet are related to
> >something, which some of them believe, is related to power. For the other
> >Netizens - we care about the price at which we get our Internet
> >connection, about the freedom of access, freedom of speech, etc.
> >But some of the Americans, who take so many things for granted, just
> >because they happen to be born in the USA, we need to just try to educate
> >them about "the other world".
>
>
> I would wonder how "freedom of access" and "freedom of expression" (both of
> which I personally feel quite passionate about protecting), are not
> fundamentally issues of power.  IMHO these rights are not merely "related
> to power" but are in fact *direct manifestations of power* -- if you have
> political power, then you have these freedoms, and if you do not have
> political power, generally you do not these freedoms in meaningful terms
> (though those in power may try to convince you that you do have them --
> that makes it easier to control you, if you don't believe you have anything
> to fight for).
>
> Certainly my experience is dominated by the US environment, and in this
> politically highly divided country these freedoms are among the most
> important power issues we are fighting about.  All of our freedoms are in
> direct danger, because in this country we are facing a systematic erosion
> of the rule of law in favor of the rule of humans.
>
> A lot of people outside the US criticize the US (actually, the US
> government) because of its supremely arrogant attitudes toward the rest of
> the world.  What they may not realize is that *very many* people inside the
> US (I would include myself) criticize the current US administration for
> precisely those reasons, and that those imperial behaviors are aimed
> domestically as well as overseas.  What the current US administration has
> done is systematically erode the checks and balances in our own
> Constitution in rather dangerous ways, with the strategic help of corporate
> mass media (and increasingly the telcos and cable companies are getting
> into it), and we are genuinely alarmed and trying our level best to fight
> back against what we see as steps to take our own country away from
> democratic standards of governance and toward a more authoritarian model
> that involves strong control over information.
>
> (In short, Orwell's dystopia can be arrived at either through
> over-centralization of public government or by wild deregulation of the
> private sector.  In both extreme cases, the public and private sectors
> ultimately merge in a monopoly of elite power over and against the general
> public.  Personally I view the "socialism versus free market" debate as a
> patently false dichotomy.  I can go into further detail elsewhere if you
> like, but for the purposes of this particular discussion, I merely wish to
> set the conceptual context, which is that the US is currently facing the
> most serious threat to civil liberties in several generations.)
>
> So, in my personal case, it is not about "taking [anything] for granted"
> anywhere else in the world, but rather about seeing a frightening potential
> on the horizon at home that may not yet have propagated to all other areas
> of the world, but which needs to be opposed here and now and also at the
> international level regardless of whether it has arrived fully formed in
> all other regions.
>
> So, please understand that in the US the "privatization" trend in the sense
> of "outsourcing public governance" has some *very* nefarious overtones, and
> US domestic civil society has grown a hair-trigger sensitivity to such
> dynamics when they seem to be designed to undermine accountability of
> public governance to the general public in favor of giving power to wealthy
> private sector entities, and to growing closer bonds between private
> (economic) and public (political) power.  (In the public policy world this
> is expressed by the jargon term "industry capture" [of government] and is
> often driven by "iron triangles" between industry lobbyists, agency
> regulators, and legislators.)
>
> So, this is the political context within which some of us see dynamics of
> Internet governance (the very word "governance" is about the institutional
> structures determining who has political *power* to control others), and it
> fits into this larger context in a fairly direct and disturbing manner.
> This is the "governance" list, after all, and the "G" in IGC and IGF and
> IGP is all about political power.
>
> So, with due respect, I present this description as a way to inform "the
> other world" as to what is going on inside the US, how it fits in with what
> you might see of explicit US foreign relations (which are tangibly
> frightening to many "USians"), the role towards which US civil society has
> gravitated in the last 7 years, how trends surrounding control of access
> and expression on the Internet fit into a disturbing pattern of strategic
> power shifts, and why we might see commonalities between the general
> problems of power battles in the US and the specific case of Internet
> governance, especially in cases where IG has a foot in the US legal and
> political jurisdiction.
>
> In short, the US is living through a recap of the "gilded age" of the
> previous century, once again moving systematically toward plutocracy, and
> creating a new generation of "robber barons" who strive to control the
> general public at home and have imperial designs abroad.  US civil society
> (and many in academia) are aligned against this dangerous trend both
> domestically and with regard to international affairs.  And, the
> information infrastructure is front and center in these power battles,
> because in the Information Age (or the "Information Society" if you
> prefer), control over information is perhaps the most important currency of
> political power itself.
>
> If we are throwing around traditional mottos, the one I prefer for our age
> is "knowledge is power" and the confluence of money and information-control
> is the "nuclear-powered" version of political power in the emerging
> information society, and the Internet (the most "disruptive" technology of
> our lifetimes, so far, even more than nuclear technology) is at the core of
> *all* of this.
>
> I would suggest that this is the framework within which you would best
> understand our positions and recommendations.  There is no separation
> between freedom of access and freedom of expression and "power to the
> people" -- in my framework they are all part of the same thing, and the
> Internet is inextricably woven throughout the entire cloth.
>
> Bottom line: The Internet is *all* about power of information (and control
> over information), and that is becoming the most important form of power in
> our world as time progresses.
>
> Dan
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