AW: [governance] Re: [IGP-ANNOUNCE] IGP Alert: Reforming ICANN

[dan at musicunbound.com]

Seems to me the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy is too simplistic to capture
the nuances of representative governance at a large scale.

Bottom-up, as Wolfgang says, cannot scale beyond very small sizes (i.e.,
"pure democracy" in the tribal or Greek city-state sense).  "Top-down"
systems with some hierarchy of representation therefore must ultimately be
considered, however a "pure" top-down system would be absolutely
authoritarian.

The conundrum that "modern democracy" has been struggling to figure out
for the last few centuries is how to give bottom-up citizen voice to
top-down hierarchal models of governance.  (In market economics this is
also referred to as the "principal/agent problem" because we live in a
post-Leonardo world where specialization of knowledge and function is an
absolute necessity and therefore trust must actually be made to work,
whether in the private or public sector, or else injustice will be done.)

It's nice to think about "peer-to-peer" but ultimately I don't see how
that might really work in practice, because as a concept it is (1) still
too fuzzily defined, and (2) subject to the same problems as "bottom-up"
forms, in the end.

The first thing to recognize here is that one should not expect to
discover the perfect form of large-scale governance.  It's really not on
the horizon, yet, so far as I know.  It would be a little  arrogant to
expect that this group of technically-minded folks is going to invent it
out of thin air after generations upon generations of people in the
political/policy realms have pondered and pounded against this without
perfecting it yet.

The silver lining here is that by experimenting in small steps, maybe over
(a very long) time there is a chance of learning something new, partly by
trial and error.  (But since there is large potential for error, take
small steps for the trials at this point.)

In some ways, the success of a hybrid system (top-down hierarchy with
bottom-up access and influence) will turn on mundane things like tools of
communication and the effectiveness of human use of those tools.  The
truly unprecedented potential of the Internet is to create governance
tools that are more genuinely participatory than in the past (this
"e-governance" thing that is all the rage in the last decade).  But of
course, the back-end must be connected to the UI, and creating the UI
without connecting it to real policy-making can be ineffective at best and
a sham at worst.

>From my outside vantage, the IGP proposal seems sensible (especially if
not over-interpreted -- yes, miscommunication is a tremendous potential
here).  Rather than try to label this idea as belonging to any category of
models and run the risk of stumbling into ideological intransigence, it
might be more productive simply to look at the details of the proposal and
consider what will and won't work about the specifics.

That is, consider the proposal in a bottom-up fashion rather than a
top-down fashion, because the top-down concept isn't really fully formed
at present.

Classification, taxonomy, categorization: beware of this.  It exists only
after the fact.  If you jump too quickly into nailing it down, you are
prone to preempt real progress because you start "calling things names"
(in both the neutral and negative connotations) rather than addressing
their actual merits or demerits.

Just my two cents in a moment between the cracks.

Dan

--
Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and
do not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.



On Fri, February 8, 2008 4:10 pm, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> On 08/02/2008, at 7:30 PM, KovenRonald at aol.com wrote:
>
>> One of the attractions of the Internet Governance Forum is its more
>> or less amiable anarchy. Imagining its transformation into some sort
>> of Internet oversight body strikes me not only as nightmarish but --
>> worse still -- as unmanageable.
>
> Nothing more is suggested than that it be transformed into a body with
> the capacity to fulfil its mandate, inter alia to "[i]nterface with
> appropriate inter-governmental organizations and other institutions on
> matters under their purview", to "[p]romote and assess, on an ongoing
> basis, the embodiment of WSIS principles in Internet governance
> processes", and to "[i]dentify emerging issues, bring them to the
> attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and, where
> appropriate, make recommendations".
>
> Forgive me for continuing to parrot the Tunis Agenda, but whenever
> Parminder, the IGP, myself and others are accused of seeking to expand
> the IGF's role and to transform it into something it was never
> intended to be, it boggles me that the IGF's original mandate seems to
> have been forgotten.
>
>> Universal bottom-up democracy seems chimeric. Bottom-up democracy
>> works in relatively small territorial entities. It is hard to
>> imagine a kind of world government based on that model.
>
> It's a bit late to be having second thoughts on this now.  WSIS
> decided that the future of Internet governance was to be multilateral
> (later, "multi-stakeholder"), transparent, democratic and inclusive.
> The IGF was to be a central institution in the evolution of the
> existing regime towards that model.  Part of its mandate is to
> coordinate with bodies holding formal authority, such as domestic
> governments and international organisations, not in order to usurp
> their function, but in order to elevate them to greater levels of
> democratic legitimacy.
>
> This is not a form of top-down accountability at all.  Rather it is a
> form of network or peer-to-peer accountability, in which the IGF acts
> as a peer of ICANN in the Internet governance regime in assessing its
> compliance with the WSIS process criteria and making recommendations
> "where appropriate".
>
> --
> Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
> Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
> host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'
>
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> 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
>


____________________________________________________________
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