[governance] Principles

[Karl Auerbach]

On 10/01/2012 03:10 PM, Koven Ronald wrote:

> ... posited on the notion that the Internet has
> revoked the 2,500 previous years of political philosophy and history.

More like about 370 years - since the Treaty of Westphalia.

The truth is that that world of geograhic-bounded nation-states *is* 
eroding; the edges of nation-states are getting fuzzy, especially since 
1945 with the rise of nation-agile multinational corporations and since 
the mid 1990's with the rise of the internet and world wide web.

The granules of power that are eroding from the edges of nation-states 
are not disappearing, they are flowing into the hands of either private 
actors or bodies of internet governance.

Those granules represent plenary, often non-reviewable, authority over 
matters affecting the internet and its users.

When I was on the Board of Directors of ICANN I had fun tweeking the 
nose of a US Senator when I informed him of the indisputable fact that 
I, in conjunction with about 10 other Directors, could pass a rule over 
internet use of trademarks and names that would supersede and trump 
anything that he, as a mere United States Senator, could enact.

He got angry - much in the way we see the fear and anger of nation 
states bubbling over in attempts to re-assert and re-insert national 
governments into these new bodies of governance.

We are building internet governance on models that are more from the era 
of flower-power and high-hopes rather than on the 18th century models 
that recognize the aggregation of unchecked power and try to constrain 
that aggregation, models that form the basis of many national 
constitutions of today.

We have forgotten history.

Several of us have proposed various models of internet governance - and 
these models have all emphasized small, extremely limited, and clearly 
separated bodies, with extremely limited, if any, discretionary powers, 
each wrapped around exactly one highly and clearly defined internet 
governance issue.

That model of concise, tightly shrink-wrapped, and almost clerical 
bodies of governance would help eliminate the opportunity for a body to 
dance among the issues to leverage one issue against another to the tune 
played by whatever group of stakeholders has captured that body.  We saw 
that happen with ICANN when it staved off insolvency some years ago by 
making an implicit pact with the address registries so that ICANN could 
have the cash to to survive and assert its role over domain names.

	--karl--



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