Extending Rights to the Internet: (Was RE: [governance] Example

Eric Dierker cogitoergosum at sbcglobal.net
Mon Nov 30 11:49:59 EST 2009


I find the below short, a good place to address acces at its' core -- Right to infrastructure.
 
Telefonica to appeal wholesale regulation
Reuters reports that Telefonica intends to appeal a decision by Spanish telecoms regulator the CMT to impose conditions on the opening of its network infrastructure allowing competitors to use its conduits to roll out their own fibre networks. ‘The bilateral agreements that we have to share infrastructure have worked well and we see no reason for regulation to cover every single detail,’ the telco said on Friday. Last Thursday the CMT approved a range of prices, terms and services to allow alternative operators to deploy their own fibre-optic networks using Telefonica’s infrastructure, including its ducts, poles and exchange boxes.


--- On Mon, 11/30/09, Garth Graham <garth.graham at telus.net> wrote:


From: Garth Graham <garth.graham at telus.net>
Subject: Re: Extending Rights to the Internet: (Was RE: [governance] Example
To: "governance" <governance at lists.cpsr.org>
Date: Monday, November 30, 2009, 4:42 PM


On 30-Nov-09, at 1:08 AM, Ian Peter wrote:

> The historical basis we can pick up is the right to communicate - ....... I would dearly love to see the right to communicate revised. Forget whether its called the Internet or something else or what it morphs to - the lack of access to any ubiquitous media is a denial of a fundamental human right and
> opportunity.

This thread raises another "fundamental" and historical right, one which also morphs and is central to the purpose of agencies like IGC.  People have a right to good governance.  But that right comes with a corresponding responsibility to say what that is.  It seems to me that "IGC" will always have difficulty meeting that responsibility effectively, because the range of opinions about the nature of good governance will remain contested.  Perhaps then the current message about the nature of good governance should be merely to reflect the range of opinions?

To me, the Internet is not "just a tool."  It's a symptom or emergent effect of a significant shift in the way we do things (including governance), away from the mechanistic and towards the relational.  It was my intention in a previous post (repeated below) to unpack the idea of what a responsible statement of good governance now means in the context of that shift.  To me, it means that future effective regulation will be distributed locally and recursively, not globally.  The problem is to get appropriate "global" (and also national) regulatory and governance systems which take that shift into account. For example, the best national strategies for the uses of the Internet for development I'm seeing make a significant effort to address "digital inclusion" as an essential dimension of changed policy in the public interest.


>     From:       garth.graham at telus.net
>     Subject:     Re: Extending Rights to the Internet: (Was RE: [governance] Example
>     Date:     November 27, 2009 7:06:59 AM PST
>     To:       governance at lists.cpsr.org
>     
> On 27-Nov-09, at 4:30 AM, Parminder wrote:
> 
>> Economically less powerful (developing) countries do not have the muscle to regulate these unprecedentedly huge  global digital companies, and so they have to simply submit. ........ (the framework of a new wave of neo-imperialism). .......Who then regulates these giant corporates, whose power now rivals that of many states? ....... as the (non-level) digital playground is being set out, without due regulation in global public interest. To get the right global governance  institutions and outcomes to address this vital issue, in my opinion, is what should centrally constitute  the 'development agenda in IG'.
>> (1) global  economy (and society)  have to  regulated  in global public interest , and
>> (2) the interest of developing countries is often different from that of developed countries.
>> Appropriate global regulatory and governance systems have to be built which take into account these differentials, ... Exclusion has to be seen and addressed in its real, felt forms and not by simplistic comparisons, which smack of insensitivity.
>> 
> 
> "Who then regulates?" Indeed!
> 
> There is a way to avoid merely replacing one form of global authoritarianism with another. Elinor Ostrom  identifies eight "design principles" (perhaps a better word in the context of development capacity than "rights?) of stable local "common property resource management" (1).  Considering the Internet' social spaces as common property resources, a "form" of governance that effectively addresses exclusion would need to include:
> 1.     Clearly defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external unentitled parties);
> 2.     Rules regarding the appropriation and provision of common resources are adapted to local conditions;
> 3.     Collective-choice arrangements allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process;
> 4.     Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators;
> 5.     There is a scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules;
> 6.     Mechanisms of conflict resolution are cheap and of easy access;
> 7.     The self-determination of the community is recognized by higher-level authorities;
> 8.     In the case of larger common-pool resources: organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs at the base level.
> 
> Reflecting on the application of these principles, it would seem that the Internet's capacity to sustain the autonomy of self-organizing communities of common interest is anything but chaos.  I am comfortable that ISOC's "Internet Ecology" model of Internet Governance is beginning to take these principles into account.
> 
> [1] Ostrom, Elinor: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. 1990. p.90. and Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton, Princeton University Press. 2005. p.259.

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