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

[Jeanette Hofmann]

Guru at ITfC schrieb:
> 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  :-) 

Hi Guru, I don't think of myself as a horse. Whatever. Milton is right 
that I was reporting about what I hear people say. My own position is 
somewhat inbetween the one that Milton expressed and the one that I 
described. While it is true that discussions on access and discussion on 
critical internet resourses don't exclude each other, it is also true 
that public attention is limited. During WSIS, the debate on Internet 
Governance was so dominant that other controversial issues such as the 
financing of ICTs never got the attention it deserved. This is why I 
understand that people fear debates on CIR. Personally I have always 
argued in favor of discussing the future of Internet Governance in case 
that is what you were asking about.
jeanette
> 
> 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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