[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Dan Krimm]

>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.

Often the end user does not *know* about them, and particularly what their
*ramifications* would be to the power balance of the control over
information, thus has no *opportunity* to care or not care.  But I would
predict that, to the extent that end users were told what would happen in
many of these cases, they would have a very clear preference for policy, as
it affects their power to communicate, which means the power to transact
business, the power to stay in touch with friends and family, the power to
communicate without state surveillance and censorship, the power to
broadcast information to the rest of the world.

Commercial interests are, of course, increasingly involved with political
power, so any area where commercial interests have a political interest is
one where the general public should have a political interest, especially
when it comes to the information infrastructure.

The point is, regardless whether or not *most end users understand* that
these (Internet governance) issues are about power, they are *in fact*
ineliminably about power, and they will shape political power balances in
our societies for generations to come.

I would not deny that affordable pricing of Internet access is a
prerequisite to being part of the distribution of power that the Internet
can enable, but the point we are trying to make is that these other
policies are undermining that (positively disruptive) potential.  If, by
the time access becomes affordable, it is not worth having any more than a
state-controlled cable TV network, we have lost the game anyway.

Personally, it seems clear to me that these issues should not be traded off
between one another.  We must address them all simultaneously, because they
are *all* prerequisite to protecting the full power-distributing potential
of the Internet.

And if we mess it up now, we may not ever get a chance to fix it.  The
"people in control" continue to learn new ways to control the network, and
even if they didn't figure it out the first time or two, they play a mean
game of catch-up and are not to be dismissed, especially with all of the
resources they have at hand (such as mandating architecture, or doing deals
with commercial interests and allowing those commercial interests to
mandate architecture).

No democratic system of governance is self-sustaining on auto-pilot.  It
requires constant vigilance to protect the fragile mechanisms of
accountability.  Democracy is not a victory, it is a process.

So let's make a deal.  I will not dismiss the issues that you (rightly)
find so critical, and perhaps you will not dismiss the issues that I (and
others) (also rightly) find so critical.

The full empowering potential of the Internet will not be achieved without
*both* affordable/ubiquitous access *and* common carriage, privacy, etc.

To trade off one against the other makes no sense to me.  They are both/all
critical issues that must be addressed now, because there are threats in
all of these areas.  Heck, with the US now in the middle of the pack
globally in terms of broadband access and falling lower as time progresses,
affordable access is a hot topic in the US as well, and it is inseparable
from the power dynamics that are going on at the FCC for example.

In the end all of these Internet issues are about (political) power, on all
sides.

Dan



At 1:33 AM -0500 11/24/07, Veni Markovski wrote:
>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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