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

[Guru@ITfC]

Completely agree with Milton .... Why is Access and CIR an 'either or'
situation? Why should discussion on CIR be perceived to be at the cost of
discussing access.

Redistribution of power (influence over governance processes) is not any
less vital an issue than the actual provision of access. To me it is obvious
that such redistribution is a part and even a pre-requisite to meaningful
provision of equitable access. If some groups/countries have
disproportionate share of power/authority, what makes anyone believe that
the sharing of resources will not be in a manner inequitable to the rest,
who are out of this arrangement. Should we live on the 'goodness' and 'good
intentions' of those in power, doling out largesse?

It would be great for CS/IGC to come out speaking for reform of the current
arrangements towards greater democratization in Rio. 

On a lighter vein ... On Milton's statement that "It is important to point
out that Jeanette is just accurately reporting what she hears, not what she
believes", it would be interesting to hear it from the horse's mouth  :-) 

Guru
IT for Change, Bangalore 
Bridging Development Realities and Technological Possibilities 
www.ITforChange.net | 
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.~Thomas
Huxley~ 

-----Original Message-----
From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu] 
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 5:07 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Jeanette Hofmann; Parminder
Subject: RE: [governance] what is it that threatens the Internet community
or 'who is afraid of the IGF'



> -----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


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