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

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> 2. A debate on critical Internet resources that absorbs almost all
> public attention although other issues, particularely access, are what
> most people in developing countries really care about. As long as they
> are not online they don't give a damn about the role of the USG in
> Internet Governance.

It is important to point out that Jeanette is just accurately reporting what she hears, not what she believes. 

And I have heard this argument many times before. Indeed, I heard it at the Oxford Internet Institute conference last year, where a room full of British, Americans and Europeans insisted that developing countries don't care about the CIR issues, they care about development and access. And when I pointed out that no one in the room was from a developing country, and that the parties who had raised the issue repeatedly in global forums were Brazil, South Africa, China and a other developing countries, that line of dialogue came to a rather abrupt end.

The theory here seems to be that time and energy spent discussing internet resource policy is purchased at the expense of developing telecom access facilities. So, for example, if Milton Mueller would just shut up about ICANN for 30 days, this would immediately translate into, oh, 230 additional access lines in Kenya -- a net value of about US$ 230,000.  

I don't know whether the economics of this have been worked out yet. It may be that my interventions in ICANN require such enormous investments in countermeasures from the USG, the World Bank and Japan that funds are diverted from global foreign aid. It may be that IGP's criticism of ICANN unsettles international capital markets, raising the interest rate and inverting the yield curve on bonds. Now there is a topic for future GigaNet symposia. 

Anyway, in a period where we are about to run out of IPv4 addresses, we are starting a debate on markets for IP addresses and the old regime won't even consider it because it would upset their control. And there are serious policy debates even within IETF about the bloc size of IPv6 address distributions. The idea that CIR is not relevant to ALL countries is just crazy. But it is certainly relevant to developing countries, who will be the primary source of demand for address space in the years to come. 

Likewise, most growth in domain name markets will come from multilingual new TLDs, which are most relevant to developing countries. 

Not to mention DNSSEC, another critical CIR issue.

The challenge is indeed to move beyond old divisions and dichotomies. But I am afraid that the ISOC-US crowd, or those who attempt to discourage discussion of these issues, are the ones who are stuck in the 2005 WSIS debates. They think there is nothing to say about this but to repeat ITU-ICANN Punch and Judy show. Aside from showing a terrible lack of imagination, this is irresponsible. There are really meaty policy issues there.

As physical access in developing countries grows, and as their own domestic ISP market increases in size, they will inherit a world where the rules for getting IP addresses and entering the domain name market have been written in the USA. More important than the geographic source of the rules is their substance: are they efficient, do they encourage competition, are they equitable? Perhaps at Rio we can move beyond Tunis if we actually have a real discussion of these issues.

--Milton Mueller


No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.485 / Virus Database: 269.13.7/992 - Release Date: 9/6/2007 8:36 AM
 
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance