[governance] Monroe Doctrin for Cyberspace?

[Paul Lehto]

Re: "child steps" and gradualism...

The internet may be a "child" relative to older documents but it has
already had applied to it, as it should, "adult" rights like the First
Amendment freedom of speech in the USA.   The horse is out of the barn
and the internet is already grown up.

Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "tranquillizing drug of gradualism"
-- and demanded that democracy/rights be made real NOW.

This is always the call.  Half of a right is not a right at all.
Torture every other day, anyone?  Free speech only on weekends?  Such
compromises are nothing but violations.  Thus, a compromise of a core
right is nothing less than a violation of a core right.

Whatever the right is conceived to be, if it is a core right, it is
entitled to full performance at the present moment, not child steps.

What changes over history is the CONCEPTION of the rights and their
robustness.  That is, the TARGET changes.  But the right is always to
have the target now, not to compromise on the target.

Paul Lehto, Juris Doctor
On 8/17/09, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box #1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-2333
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