[governance] IANA contract to be opened for competitive bidding on November 4

[KovenRonald at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/26/11 2:32:17 AM, ian.peter at ianpeter.com writes:

> Hi Ronald,
> 
> At my last count there were over 140 countries, and I would expect them 
> all to have the opportunity to be involved. That’s why involving the UN makes 
> a lot of sense.
> 
Dear Ian --

There are actually more than 190 member governments of the UN now, and well 
over half of them favor or have put into practice I'net controls that 
amount to censorship.

The likeliest UN agency to administer the I'net, and the one that has shon 
that it most ardently seeks that, is the ITU, which also has a history of 
opposing multistakeholderism.

Below is a speech by the US official most involved in trying to preserve 
I'net freedom.

Could you imagine officials from the majority of UN member states making 
similar statements ?

And it's not just a matter of ringing rhetoric. USG practice has been 
overwhelmingly along the same lines. In the few instances where it has shown 
itself to be tempted to act otherwise, as over the WikiLeaks episode, it has 
pulled back and apparently thought better of it when confronted with protests 
over such potential inconsistencies pointing toward restrictionism.

Bests, Rony Koven

Remarks on Internet Freedom and Responsibility

Michael H. Posner
Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference
San Francisco, CA
October 25, 2011

Thank you very much for inviting me. I’d like to thank Access for 
organizing this conference and especially Brett Solomon, who has worked so hard to 
make it a hub for thoughtful exchange and discussion.
And I’d like to thank the many other friends here today who have helped map 
out how socially responsible companies can respect people’s fundamental 
freedoms online.
Today we face a series of challenges at the intersection of human rights, 
connective technologies, business and government. It’s a busy intersection 
and a lot of people want to put up traffic lights. In the next few minutes I 
want to help frame the challenges we face, and offer practical suggestions on 
the role of companies and how we can best work together to preserve 
Internet freedom.
First, a word about the challenges.
Almost every day, we see new examples of the power of connection 
technologies – the transformative power, and the disruptive power. Entire industries 
have been upended, starting with Old Media. In a single decade, new 
technologies have decimated traditional newsrooms and killed their business model, 
but given rise to literally millions of citizen bloggers and citizen 
filmmakers and a new global journalism outlet called You Tube. All in one decade.
Today we have tens of thousands of people armed with cell-phone cameras and 
video, documenting what is happening on the streets of the Middle East. 
Some can upload it within minutes. Others have to smuggle it out in places like 
Syria. But the truth is getting out.
And yet, these amazing technologies haven’t made it any safer to do 
reporting in these hard places – or for human rights activists to talk to one 
another.
The Arab spring brought home the power of the Internet to governments far 
beyond the Middle East, and the result has been more censorship, more 
surveillance and more restrictions.
Repressive governments used to set up firewalls at Internet Exchange Points 
to block external content they disliked. Now they’re using bots to delete po
sts and block emails in something approaching real time. They’re using 
surreptitious deep-packet inspection and sophisticated key-logger software to 
track what their citizens do online. They are exerting overbroad state control 
over content, over users, and over companies. And they’re trying to change 
national and international legal standards to legitimize it all.
Let me give you one example. Last month in New York the governments of 
China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan came to the UN to suggest the need for 
an “International Code of Conduct for Information Security.” This would 
shift cyberspace away from being a multi-stakeholder, people-driven model – to 
a system dominated by centralized government control. Not a good idea.
An online world where more and more countries begin policing content for 
ideological correctness – whether they call it a Halal Internet or a hate-free 
Internet – would extinguish the promise of technology to drive global 
understanding and the free exchange of information, ideas, and innovation.
So my first message to you is that the Internet space – which has seemed so 
open and free – could become less so. We are up against an ever more 
sophisticated range of technical, legal, and political challenges to freedom in 
cyberspace. Secretary Clinton has called the Internet the town square of the 
21st Century. The Obama administration has staked out a principled stand on 
Internet freedom, arguing that the fundamental freedoms apply online just as 
they do offline. That includes the right to freedom of expression, assembly 
and association.
I also want to say a word about the protection of intellectual property, 
which is sometimes seen as in conflict with Internet freedom. Even though it 
may be more difficult to enforce these rights in the Digital Age, as authors, 
artists and inventors are discovering, they are protected by international 
law. You don’t have the right to break into a movie theater and steal the 
film reels and you don’t have the right to steal movies online, either.
Before I joined the Obama administration, I spent most of my career in the 
NGO world, where for years I argued – you might say self-servingly – that 
progress on human rights is rarely generated by governments alone. Now from 
my perch inside government, it is even clearer to me that government can’t do 
it alone – and shouldn’t.
To advance these fundamental freedoms, we need the help of citizens, 
corporations and global civil society for what is likely to be a long, tough 
struggle with regimes that do not share our values or our views on the merits of 
openness. And I particularly want to call attention to the role of 
companies, because today corporations have more global influence than ever.
If Wal-Mart were a country, its annual revenues would rank it as the 23rd 
largest economy in the world -- ahead of Norway and Venezuela. That’s 
comparing annual revenues vs. GDP. Hewlett-Packard is only 11th on the Fortune 500, 
but its 2010 revenues would rank it ahead of Vietnam and Morocco.
So the private sector is more powerful than ever. But it’s also less 
private than ever. Today, we’re all living in a fishbowl. Any one of us may face 
public scrutiny for any decision we make. And now it’s instant scrutiny in 
real time. Most of us are still learning the new rules for life on webcam.
It used to be that companies only faced this kind of scrutiny in a crisis—
when the Labor Department exposed sweatshops or when violence erupted along a 
pipeline. The strategy was crisis-mitigation and damage control, without a 
lot of attention to the underlying issues. Today, more and more companies 
realize they can’t wait for the crisis to consider human rights. If you’re 
living in a fishbowl, on webcam, you have to do the right thing 24/7. And 
companies find it is often more effective to work together—even with their 
toughest competitors—as well as with governments like ours, and with NGOs. 
Through these cooperative efforts, they are addressing the underlying issues 
before they find themselves in the crosshairs of controversy.
Let me give you a few examples.
In the extractive industries, Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and 15 other major 
oil and mining giants, who do business in some of the toughest places on 
earth, met in Ottawa last month. They joined seven governments and 10 NGOs in a 
collaborative effort that aims to minimize the risk of human rights abuses 
by security forces in conflict areas, which is where the natural resources 
often are.
In the private security industry, Xe Services LLC, formerly Blackwater, and 
200 other private security companies have signed on to a new international 
code of conduct. The code addresses their use of force, and it bans torture, 
sexual exploitation, human trafficking and forced labor. The companies are 
now working with governments and NGOs to build a system to verify that 
everyone who signs up lives up to their pledge.
In the apparel industry, a number of large global companies have opened up 
factories in their global supply chains to scrutiny by independent auditors 
and posted reports about their labor practices online. For more than a 
decade, leading companies including Nike, adidas, Liz Claiborne and H&M have 
worked hard to improve working conditions in their supply chains, and they have 
found willing partners from NGOs and universities through an organization 
called the Fair Labor Association.
These companies are making money in hard places. Each has realized that one 
of the costs of doing business in those places is to assess the risks and 
to invest in developing principles, people and processes to address the human 
rights challenges they confront.
Your problems are not so different from those oil companies with wells in 
the Niger Delta, security contractors operating in Iraq or apparel companies 
sourcing in China or Bangladesh. Your challenges are unique, but the process 
of addressing those challenges is no different.
Over the coming decades, the growth markets for ICT companies will be 
disproportionally found in less developed countries. That’s where your next three 
billion customers live. And these are the places where repressive regimes 
are getting hold of the latest, greatest Western technologies and using them 
use them to spy on their own citizens for purposes of silencing dissent. 
Journalists, bloggers and activists are of course the primary targets.
So these are the places where companies will face the greatest scrutiny and 
real challenges. We’ve all seen the news about demands to turn over user 
information or questions about what has been sold to repressive regimes by 
Western companies. Three years ago, the headlines were about companies in 
China. Last month, rebels found Colonel Qaddafi’s Internet surveillance boiler 
room in Tripoli as reported in the Wall Street Journal. This week, it’s 
information technology in Syria.
Of course we have some sanctions in place, and we enforce them. But whether 
or not there are formal legal sanctions, companies should be thinking about 
how to do the right thing.
My point is that scrutiny—from the public, the media and Congress—is 
unlikely to diminish even if the Arab Awakening fades from the headlines, because 
other governments in some very important emerging markets appear fiercely 
determined to control what people do online. And just as the extractive 
industries, private security contractors and apparel companies have found a way 
forward under scrutiny; your industry must now do the same.
I’m not the right person to assess your business models, your technical 
capacities, or your dealings with individual governments. Each of you will take 
your own path. But after almost twenty years of working with companies on 
tough human rights issues, I can tell you what the smart companies are doing. 
In general, their response has five elements:
First, they have developed broad principles to guide their actions. In this 
field, these probably include principles on free expression and privacy and 
perhaps also criteria on when to avoid working with governments who use 
technology to become more efficient at committing gross human rights 
violations.
Second, smart companies are developing internal systems to ensure that 
these principles are applied in practice. This is not a public relations 
exercise. It requires senior level buy-in by company leaders, hiring people whose 
job it is to make sure it happens, and the same focus that executives apply 
to any other high priority for their business.
Third, leading companies devise internal benchmarks of progress. These 
benchmarks help assess risks and respond to problems, and they allow companies 
to evaluate whether they are solving the problems the principles seek to 
address.
Fourth, they are banding together to develop industry best practices and 
plans for collective action. In fiercely competitive industries, no company 
acting alone has the power to solve human rights problems. Working together, 
in concert with civil society organizations and willing governments like our 
own, you will have more clout. In my observation, in the area of human 
rights this often is an essential ingredient of success.
Finally, collective corporate action is bolstered by systematic engagement 
with stakeholders – with NGOs, universities, think tanks, experts and social 
investors. They have information, expertise and early warning of problems. 
Activists, journalists and bloggers are the canaries in your coal mine; if 
you listen, they can help you anticipate trouble and take steps to address 
problems before a crisis erupts. And for the record, I offer that same advice 
to the very governments who often shoot the instant messenger by going out 
and jailing bloggers instead of listening to the valuable information they 
convey. Whether you view your stakeholders as dissidents or advisors, they 
will shape the public debate on your issues. They can make you more credible 
and validate your efforts.
These elements aren’t a prescription or a quick fix. But they do offer a 
constructive approach that has worked for other companies. And I would be remi
ss if I did not call out the efforts of three particular companies, Yahoo, 
Microsoft and Google, for their leadership and all of the NGOs, academics, 
social investors and other stakeholders with whom they are working through the 
Global Network Initiative. For the past five years this group has wrestled 
collectively with the thorniest issues of the day. These are the kind of 
efforts that help us find ways forward together.
Cyberspace belongs to all of us now. It’s where we live. It’s where you 
earn your living. And just as no business wants to open its doors in a 
high-crime neighborhood, no business wants to be located on the street where police 
are beating up democracy protestors. And we all share an interest in an 
open Internet that supports a culture of entrepreneurship in which people 
around the world can thrive. It’s not just the technologies born here in Silicon 
Valley that are revolutionizing the world and creating huge demand for your 
products. It’s also the culture, the ethos of innovation, the dedication to 
freedom, fun and profit that are finding resonance around the world.
The Internet on which the future depends can’t be maintained as an open and 
global network if we don’t work together to figure out how to push back 
against those who care more about political domination than empowering 
innovation. My problem is your problem. It’s all of our problem.
Silicon Valley has already given birth to game-changing technologies and a 
profoundly new approach to philanthropy. Many people here have made it their 
life’s work not only to develop transformative technologies but also to put 
them in the hands of people in places where digital empowerment is leaps 
ahead of political or financial or educational empowerment. Never have great 
ideas gone from dream to global distribution so quickly.
But with great code comes great responsibility. It isn’t enough simply to 
develop a revolutionary product and leave it to others to figure out what 
happens next. You, the people in this room, are the brain trust for the coming 
generation – for the next five billion users who will be coming online. So I 
challenge each of you to work with us to help figure out what can happen 
next, what must happen next, to preserve the Internet as we know it. Or the 
autocrats will figure it out for us.
And I challenge each of you to innovate again. Not just in your products, 
but in the way you will serve your customers. People with real needs, and 
rights, and aspirations for a better life. Innovate for profit, but also for 
the people in the hard places. We will be your partner. Thank you.

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