[governance] what is it that threatens the Internet community or 'who is afraid of the IGF'

[Karl Auerbach]

Parminder wrote:

> I Agree. And would like an examination of and a good discussion on what is
> it exactly that threatens the Internet community.

1. An overriding exclusion of living, breathing people, or their chosen 
delegates from the process of making decisions.  Already ICANN is 
sucking nearly $500,000,000 (US) every year out of the pockets of 
internet users (and putting it into the pockets of registries) without 
providing any way for those users to have a meaningful voice.

The word "stakeholder" should be stricken from the vocabulary of 
governance and replaced with explicit statements of who are the intended 
beneficiaries and intended actors with the power of making choices.

2. An absence of legitimacy - Governance bodies are being proposed 
without any source of authority.  The essence of governance is the 
ability to say "no" to things that may otherwise be lawful and 
permissable.  Proper governance requires a clear foundation of authority 
from some well accepted source, or the exercise of authority in a well 
practiced, uncontested, and beneficial manner for enough time (decades, 
if not longer).  ICANN, again being the model for how things ought not 
to be done, is floating, like Swift's Laputa ( 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa ), over the internet without any 
source of authority except its own self say so and in likely 
contravention to laws in several nations against such self 
aggrandizements of authority (i.e. laws against anti-competitive practices.)

3. Fragmentation of the net:  The net is slowly being fractured into 
fiefdoms of providers, fiefdoms of protocols, fiefdoms of content 
(usually along national boundaries).  This tendency is increased by 
anti-spam and packet blocking filters that are rarely reviewed and even 
more rarely removed: whole parts of the network address space, both of 
IP address and domain names, have become contaminated and largely 
useless as a result.

4. Elimination of best-effort transport.  Providers are imposing data 
constrictive mechanisms in order to degrade competition to their own 
products.  This will ultimately result in users being able to obtain 
adequate service levels only across a single provider.  The net will 
resemble a country in which super highways end at city or country 
borders and are not interconnected across those boundaries.

4a. The corollary to #4 above is that those who have applications that 
require end-to-end services, such as conversational VoIP, may find it 
difficult to obtain the end-to-end packet delivery service quality 
needed to sustain the application.

5. Critical resource starvation.  Already IPv4 addresses are becoming 
scare and those of us who have blocks of addresses are prevented from 
redistributing those addresses on a market driven basis.  IPv6 
addresses, although IPv6 has 2**96 times as much space as IPv4, may 
prove too expensive or too wrapped in paperwork for them to be available 
to end users.  The net effect (pun intended) can be a lock-in of 
customers to providers because of the difficulty of obtaining alternate 
address space, or more likely, bearing the cost of renumbering.

(We may also face routing starvation of a sort as the number of 
destination prefixes reaches, and perhaps exceeds, the capacity of 
existing routing equipment and the flux of routing change begins to 
excede the rate at which those changes can be propagated and digested.)

Note: IP address policy is an extremely difficult area that, unlike 
domain names, is filled with real technical concerns and limitations 
with strong effects on policy.  The RIRs have been doing a reasonable 
job of navigating these waters, but their viewpoint tends to be more 
heavily focused on provider needs rather than end-user needs.

		--karl--
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