[governance] FW: TP: city government exercising policy on Google Applications / consumer rights / Consumer Protection Act / trial period

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 15.07.11 14:09, parminder wrote:
>
>
> On Friday 15 July 2011 02:11 PM, Daniel Kalchev wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 15.07.11 03:57, Paul Lehto wrote:
>>>
>>> Now Mike, when you point to a subset of the people affected by CIRA
>>> (domain registrants) and note that they can be voting members if they
>>> wish, but ignore the mere user who is also governed to some extent by
>>> CIRA, and then call that exclusion "reasonably democratic", you're
>>> really saying that a largish aristocracy is "reasonably democratic."
>>
>> This is all true, except you miss the whole point. Internet resources 
>> are private, not public.
>
> This is the crux of the disagreement. Internet is public, not private.

I explicitly mentioned 'resources' there.


>
> However, I am obliged, though also a bit shocked with the starkness of 
> it, that you have clearly explained below many people's thinking and 
> ideology about what the Internet is, especially many of those people 
> who are closely associated with its governance today. This is the 
> ideology that organisation like ours seeks to fight professionally. We 
> see the grave danger in using the influence of the Internet over our 
> world as a key neoliberal strategy towards marketising most things, if 
> not all thing.

This is how the human world goes, for many thousands years. One group 
discovers a new good, then others come along and want a piece of it too, 
eventually both groups give up their freedom for 'governance' and the 
next Empire is born.

Just random thoughts:
It is interesting to note, as you did, that the Internet is giving so 
much power to those who buy into the freedom idea. When there is high 
concentration of power, there is always change.
History always goes in circles (some hope it is a spiral, but this has 
not yet proven) and that may mean that democracy as such is moving to 
'history' while some 'old' form of sharing the public goods will 
resurrect. Who knows.

>
> You ask, is this arrangement democratic... No absolutely not  9I know 
> you yourself are clear that it is not democratic). And I understand 
> that the civil society here, and elsewhere, is largely for democracy 
> vis a vis the governance of the Internet as for other things.

Those who seek Governance just seek power and control.

Human society is a collection of independent individuals that agree to 
abide by common law. That law is typically local (country, state, city, 
family). Internet is global. I keep repeating this, as this is where the 
problem with the current system is.

If the current system wants to preserve the status-quo, it must restrict 
it's regulation attempts to things that matter locally. Or change.

If someone says they want democracy in a ccTLD registry (or, an ISP, or 
an hosting company -- they are NOT different from Internet point of 
view, just different parts of the infrastructure), then what they say is 
that they want control over the operation of that infrastructure. ICANN, 
unfortunately is moving into the direction of becoming a para-TLD 
registry, instead of policy and consensus building forum it was supposed 
to be. Asking for democracy in the new ICANN is the same thing.

I have yet another theory that relates to Internet and possible future 
development, based on the concept that humans are multi-dimensional 
creatures. But we have gone already way off-topic.


By the way, I fail to understand why we argue about the obvious. A ccTLD 
registry (say CIRA) operates under existing law, that is built and 
enforced by democratically elected forces. In this environment CIRA is 
just like an individual. That may be an very clever, resourceful and 
valuable for the society individual, but still -- just part of the whole 
society that had submitted to being subject to democratic powers. We 
don't require each individual to be subject to democracy (say,

Daniel
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