[governance] Monroe Doctrin for Cyberspace?

[Karl Auerbach]

On 08/17/2009 01:14 PM, Paul Lehto wrote:
> One of the more powerful things in defense of the expansion of human
> freedom and equality...

One of the best ways to assure that a child fails is to require that 
child to compete with adults.

Internet governance is a child.

It is far, far too soon to engage on human rights issues as subjects of 
governance - one may discuss them, but an attempt to set forth today to 
build a supranational apparatus to protect those rights is likely to 
crash and fail.

It is better that internet governance take child steps to address issues 
that are more easily obtained, most particularly issues grounded in the 
level of service of internet services.

To make this concrete, an aspect of internet governance might be to 
establish service level definitions that must be met before a provider 
can claim to be offering support for VoIP.  These would include not only 
bandwidth, delay, and jitter measures but also non-discrimination and 
privacy standards and a definition of what "management" measures are 
considered appropriate and what are not.

In the DNS space, internet governance efforts could have success in 
doing that which ICANN has not: the establishment of criteria for DNS 
root (and perhaps some TLD) providers in terms of their ability to turn 
DNS query packets into DNS response packets, establishing metrics of 
availability, responsivity, privacy, and non-discrimination.

There is also plenty of room to address the difficult issue of how one 
(whether that "one" be a person or a nation) to obtain assurances (not 
guarantees) of adequate levels of packet transport to support proposed 
applications.  (For example, a nation that is considering a VoIP 
infrastructure might be concerned about assurances that that 
infrastructure can reach overseas.)  Thus, internet governance issues 
might address the establishment of a clearinghouse through which users 
(and their agents) and providers might meet and arrange end-to-end 
assurances (again, not guarantees.)

There is plenty of work to be done that can be done with success and 
that can build credibility for a subsequent effort to deal with the more 
difficult issues that are the focus of your note.

		--karl--

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