IETF WAS Re: [governance] Enhanced Cooperation (was Re: reality check on economics)

[Norbert Bollow]

Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> Andrea Glorioso <andrea at digitalpolicy.it> wrote:
> > > I would envision the body that is modeled on the IETF to not make the
> > > final decisions, but develop a set of models of potential regulations on
> > > these topics, with documentation of advantages and drawbacks of each,
> > > and leave it to the relevant parliaments to make the choice between
> > > them.
> >
> > Then I must wonder, noting that the European Commission does not have an
> > official position on this: if the mandate Committe for Internet Related
> > Policies was modified to take out the "oversight" of standards-setting
> > bodies (an unfortunate term in my opinion) and the "crisis management"
> > (which can mean everything and the contrary of everything) would it then
> > be such a horrible solution to make these pesky governments a bit happier?
> 
> Sorry I simply don't understand this question.

Oh sorry... understanding has finally dawned on me that with "Committe
for Internet Related Policies" you're referring to India's CIRP
proposal... somehow my mind had filed those debates under the search
keys "CIRP" and "an unconvincing Internet governance proposal from
India that I'm not particularly interested in", but not under
"Committee for Internet Related Policies".

Here's my answer, in fact it's what I've been trying to say all along
during this conversation:

In my opinion, making governments "a bit happier" is no more a
worhwhile objective for spending tax money on than making civil
society a bit happier, or making businesses a bit happier.

What we need is something that develops, in a reasonably fair way,
reasonably good solutions to the problems that we have.

Therefore, we need to create a kind of social information processing
system that
 * takes as input the knowledge and understanding of
   knowledgeable participating people, and
 * produces, in a reasonably fair way, output texts that reflect a
   rough consensus of these knowledgeable participants.

We can learn from IETF how this can work.

We cannot learn from any classical intergovernmental structure how
this can work, because the classical intergovernmental structures do
not contain solutions to the problem of powerful stakeholders having
unreasonably great influence.

Those who seek to create forms of global governance should IMO
therefore inform themselves about what can be learned from IETF, by
having someone on their team who has actual experience of
participating there. Just reading up on the IETF from the outside
isn't sufficient, as it doesn't give you the kind of understanding
that you need to have. In fact, when just reading IETF documents from
the outside you're likely to misunderstand even key terms like
"Internet", a word which in the IETF context still has its original
connotations of internetworking, i.e. connecting networks together and
the necessary protocol work for making that happen -- in IETF contexts
this word still primarily refers to the lower protocol layers.

Greetings,
Norbert

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