[governance] Re: reality check on economics

[Norbert Bollow]

Lee W McKnight <lmcknigh at syr.edu> wrote:
> Not all lawyers that serve on UDRP panels need also have attended x IETF or
> RIR meetings to be positive contributors, for example.

Sure, but I was not asserting a precondition for participation in
Internet governance processes in general.

My assertion was this:
: it should be considered required education for anyone
: intending to be involved in the creation of new Internet governance
: structures (regardless of whether those structures get called
: "Enhanced Cooperation" or something else) to first participate, over a
: significant period of time, in these rough-consensus oriented Internet
: governance processes that exist already.

> And for some reason, the very effective and high impact W3C is
> always left out of these discussions, when their specs for HTML5 are
> more likely to directly impact many more people worldwide than the
> guts of the inter-network as settled by IETF.  I'd suggest W3C has
> more sessions newbies could get their feet wet with.

The reason why I mentioned IETF and the RIRs but not W3C is that W3C
(in my eyes at least) fails to be a compelling example for the kinds of
dynamics that effectively prevent powerful companies from having undue
influence.

Maybe this is to a significant extent not W3C's fault, but a result
of the task "prevent powerful companies from having undue influence"
being much harder in regard to e.g. HTML5 than in regard to the topics
that IETF and the RIRs are working on.

But the fact remains that it is simply unreasonable to expect anyone
to do a good job at creating a governance institution in a context
where the chief problem is abuses of power by powerful corporations
if they're not familiar with the existing insitutions who succeed in
avoiding to succumb to that kind of power.

Again, I'm *not* right now in the process of making suggestions to
newbies in general about how to productively "get their feet wet".

But if that "Enhanced Cooperation" thing is supposed to make sense
and do its job well (regardless of how precisely this job is going to
be defined, I think it's pretty clear that it's going to be something
where "prevent powerful companies from having undue influence" is
going to be critically important), the key actors in establishing the
institutions and processes for "Enhanced Cooperation" had better make
sure that they're represented by people who understand how preventing
powerful companies from having undue influence can work in practice.

Greetings,
Norbert

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