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

[Guru@ITfC]

There is a small but critical difference between what Milton has argued and
what Raul has responded to.

Raul is suggesting that 'most people in his country/region are not
interested in CIR, which means that CIR is not identified as important by
developing countries'.

I am sure if a poll were to be run in India, more than 99 % of our 1 billion
+ population would not have even heard of CIRs, are we suggesting that we
infer from this that CIR issue is not important for India.

But Milton suggest, the issue is one of 'relevance'.  Even if most Indians
have not heard of CIRs, will the nature of governance of CIRs impact their
ability to use these CIRs. Without doubt they will and there are clear
examples in the IPV4 vs IPV6 issue (in terms of current inequitable
allocation of ip addresses and inability to satisfy the needs of new users
from developing countries), or issue of domain names in languages other than
english (India is home to 25 + languages, each spoken by more than 10
million people). It is quite clear .... Given that CIRs are / will become
limited/scarce, how can their equitable distribution be ensured when their
own governance, by being dominated by a few groups/interests, is not.

Or even more simply that the internet represents a significant
infrastructure/asset in the world today, which impacts the lives of billions
of people all over the world ... And hence the rules for running / designing
it need to be framed keeping diverse interests in mind ... And it is too
much to expect that a small set of groups/countries will do this in a fair
manner. A move towards greater involvement of other stakeholders is
therefore necessary (though not sufficient) for ensuring greater equity in
the use of CIRs. (We have argued on this list several times that the
'internet community comprises of all of us who are impacted by the internet
... Not only those who are on-line today').

The concept of 'informed choice' suggests that unless we take the debate to
people in a meaningful and coherent manner and explain its relevance and
criticality, else it could be dangerous to make inferences from polls
(though I am not aware of the details of the poll Raul mentions) .... See
Dan Krim in an earlier mail state "It's a difficult thing to explain how
these policy developments at ICANN affect general public interests, but when
they are actually explained in a way that general public people can
understand, it does increasingly make a difference". Unless the required
investment of time and effort is made, it may be dangerous to presume lack
of interest in an issue that will have significant impact on our lives.

Guru
Ps - the issue of IPV4 reminded me of the fossil fuel - greenhouse effect
discusions in the environmental debates ... The increased use of fossil
fuels in the rapidly growing economies of India and China gets stick for
increased pollution/global warming .... And these countries are expected to
put in their 'share' of sacrifice, which the developed countries did not...
Apart from the fact that the prices for these fuels that are being paid
today by the developing countries is several times what the developed
countries paid, during their periods of rapid growth.

Pps - the idea of my mail is not to convert the entire IG issue into one of
developed vs developing countries, or that developing countries will have
only one perspective .... There are power hierarchies every where, including
within developing countries ... But just to highlight the danger of
overlooking any differential developing country concerns, or being
'apolitical' and assuming that they would be subsumed within the concerns or
welfare of the dominant groups.

-----Original Message-----
From: Raul Echeberria [mailto:raul at lacnic.net] 
Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 10:04 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: RE: [governance] what is it that threatens the Internet community
or 'who is afraid of the IGF'


Milton:

It is a very interesting mail.

As somebody coming from a developing country, I can tell you that the
attention to the issue of Critical Internet Resources is very low in my
region, with the exception of the Brazilian Government.

In fact, it is very interesting the result of the survey conducted by ECLAC
(Economic Commision for Latin America and the Caribbean).
http://www.cepal.org/cgi-bin/getprod.asp?xml=/socinfo/noticias/paginas/8/269
98/P26998.xml&xsl=/socinfo/tpl/p18f.xsl&base=/socinfo/tpl/top-bottom.xsl

If you click in results you will see that Internet Governance in general
(expression associated mainly to the CIR) is very low ranked. 
There are different rankings but in all of the this issue is ranked about
position 37 in the list or priorities for the region regardind Information
Society.

So, It is clear that most of people in developing countries don't care about
that. It is interesting to see that the participation in the survey was very
diverse and balanced with a lot of people from governmnets, civil society,
private sector and academic sector.

This survey will be the base for the desinging of the Regional Information
Society next 3 years plan. A new version of the survey will be issued next
week.

Probably some government will bring the issue to the table again before the
Regional conference in El Salvador in November and probably it will become
part of the plan, but it will not happen because it was defined as a
priority, that's clear.

This is for commenting what you said about your experience in the meeting in
Oxford.


Other thing is if both set of issues: CIR and 
development oriented issues are incompatibles and 
we can discuss abut only one of them. Clearly they are not.
We can and we have to discuss both. But it is 
important to say that we have to discuss CIR 
because we think that it is important and we have 
to accept that saying that developing countries 
are worried about that is not a valid argument.

You raised other point that is if CIR related 
issues are or are not important for developing 
countries. And I agree with your approach and 
with some of the examples that you use. I think 
that they are important and have important impact in developing countries.

But what to proceed so?, If mainly people from 
developed countries, decided that this is 
important for developing countries despite de 
fact that those countrie don't identify these 
issues as important, we will be in the same 
situation that you criticized regarding Oxford 
meeting, and in fact my perception is that the 
participation of people from my region in IGF 
meeting in Rio will not be very large and most of 
us from LAC in Rio will be the "usual suspects" 
(including myself of course) . Hopefully I am wrong.


So, we have to find out the balance. We can 
discuss anything but it is clear that most 
important issues for developing countries are 
those related with development. Should we stop to 
discuss CIR, no, but we can not use developing 
countries concerns as the justification for that.
Is this important for Developing Countries? we 
think yes, but so, we have to work more for 
really engage them in the discussion and not let 
mainly people from the most developed part of the 
world, to decide based on what is their 
perception about developing countries needs.


Raúl



At 08:37 p.m. 06/09/2007, Milton L Mueller wrote:


> > -----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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