[governance] Who owns the Internet?

[JFC Morfin]

At 13:36 20/03/2009, Ginger Paque wrote:
>I will be interested to read if anybody thinks the Internet has an owner. I
>don't think it does. I suppose we could say the users own it.
>Why do you ask?
>Ginger

Dear Ginger,
the question is the same as who owns the world?

- Some will say the people. So says the WSIS for the Internet (a 
people centric information society) - and ISOC implicitly says the 
users, that Paul Twomey translates in "those who pay ICANN" (Paris, 2008).

- The USC has a definition which tends to say that the Internet is 
under its jurisdiction. What the Tunis agreement tends to confirm for 
the Internet Legacy, the Internet new emergence relating to enhanced 
cooperations the USG prevented the elaboration to protect ICANN.

- Some others will say God or nature. As the one who can change or stop it..

A. Who can change it :

Since the Internet is men designed as (RFC 2026) "a loosely-organized 
international collaboration of autonomous, interconnected networks, 
supports host-to-host communication through voluntary adherence to 
open protocols and procedures defined by Internet Standards"  people 
who can change the protocols and procedures are its (co-)owners.

RFC 3935 says that : "The IETF has traditionally been a community for 
experimentation with things that are not fully understood, 
standardization of protocols for which some understanding has been 
reached, and publication of (and refinement of) protocols originally 
specified outside the IETF process.". This means that those who build 
and can change the Internet are ultimately the IETF Members, but 
actually in refining what is specified/triggered outside, i.e. by 
leading users. In Internet lingo, leads users are named "@larges".

These @large can change (build and rebuild) the internet in its two 
mains areas of adherence:
- governance: social adherence - what is discussed here.
- internance (*): technical adherence - what IETF missed a forum for 
and we created the IUCG for (Internet Users Contributing Group, 
http://iucg.org - iucg at ietf.org - charter:  http://iucg.org/wiki/IUCG_Charter)

However, there is a big difference between the capacity to change and 
the control of the change. Complexity and size dramatically reduced 
the capacity to initiate and control a change as one single body. 
This is why ICANN is not paying much attention to @larges.

This is changing through the work france at large and others are 
carrying on the "Internet PLUS" concept as an architecture, a testing 
possibility, and a transition strategy (IUCG Draft under work: 
http://iucg.org/drafts/draft-iucg-innov-dep-strat-00.txt). The power 
to transform the Internet belongs then to anyone with a good idea and 
a testing/demonstration ability (due to viral dissemination)

That is, if there was not - as for the world - the people hysteresis. 
i.e. the capacity not to immediately understand, accept, and adapt to 
that good idea. So, it belongs to those who can control that 
hysteresis through laws, publicity, influence :
- the mission of the IETF is to influence those who design, use and 
manage the Internet
- the commercial world (cf. RFC 3869) where IAB says: "The principal 
thesis of this document is that if commercial funding is the main 
source of funding for future Internet research, the future of the 
Internet infrastructure could be in trouble."

B. Who can stop it

There are three of them :
- the IANA owner -hence the USG controlled ICANN/Google IANA "war".
- cyberwarfare units
- bots and hackers - an increasingly worrying issue

The only alternative at that level is the @large's response of a 
distributed architecture of usage, answering the call for a person 
centric multilingual information society.

jfc
(*) taken as "technical administration, operations and governance".






   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20090321/e78c312b/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
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