[governance] IT for Change's background paper for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Rio - 2007

[Milton L Mueller]

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Subject: [governance] IT for Change's background paper for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Rio - 2007

 

From the background paper:

 

"It is therefore suggested that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the public body in-charge of allocating Internet domain name spaces, should carve out one or more TLDs exclusively for public domain content, say, .pd. Such a domain name space should be run by ICANN itself, directly or through a separate non-profit entity funded by ICANN." 

 

Ah, Parminder! Your vision remains irretrievably statist and old-left and you have learned nothing from the past 50 years. This is the conclusion I draw from your manifesto.

 

Apparently, you believe that you cannot have a public domain unless it is run by a centralized governmental authority and funded through tax revenue. You seek to recreate, at a global level, the redistributionist national state of social democracy....without the democracy or a constitution preserving individual rights. Yikes!

 

And then, after turning all such power over to a centralized, remote monopolistic entity you will be completely bewildered when the following perfectly predictable results occur:

         * ICANN starts to attach conditions to what you can do in .pd, which it can enforce quite well as it controls both access and the purse strings

         * redistribution starts to go from the poor and less privileged to the privileged as special interests converge on the central authority

         * the inefficiencies and remoteness of the central authority become unbearable

         * diversity and competition are snuffed out in order to preserve and protect the political bargains made by the centralized regime, so no disruptive technologies like the internet are permitted to come along again. 

 

Hooray, you will have recreated the public telephone monopolies of the 20th century! Only on a global scale! What an achievement! 

 

It's a mistake to see public open information as constituting a sector completely separate from and hostile to private markets. Yet this type of rhetoric pervades your statement. The two are interrelated and interdependent, and often mutually supporting. There are all kinds of public domain information available on the internet, supported, developed and promoted by diverse sources: everything from universities to foundations to local govts to slightly dodgy P2P sites. This is not to say that we don't have a legitimate battle over the institutional regime for intellectual property, which is absurdly biased and (contrary to your rhetoric) not a market solution at all but a very heavy handed form of state intervention in the economy. Why not promote the GPL or CC approach, using contractually contructed commons, which can coexist with the good aspects of a competitive market. Always puzzles me why you seem to hate the market so much when in the telecom/internet sector it has delivered such advances in countries such as....India:

 

"The current surge in growth of telecommunications use in India is in stark contrast to the stagnation of previous decades. Telephone penetration nationwide inched up to only 2 per cent of the population in the 50 years following independence in 1947. But industry reforms [i.e., market liberalization] launched in 1998 have propelled penetration to 19 per cent in May."


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