[governance] RE: [bestbits] What is 1Net? Blog post by Paul Wilson of APNIC

[Milton L Mueller]

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In your view, what would be the domains or the thematic areas suitable for that? In addition, would there be a space for governmental frameworks that do not only aim to "organize" the scenario, but also to provide substantive guidelines, or general principles on the public interest? My question would be if governments would still be able to occasionally intervene when problems arise, such as deviation from public interest, monopolies, unjustifiable asymmetries, etc

Monopolies? Are there no antitrust laws in your jurisdiction that can be applied? Can they not be applied regardless of whether it is an internet company, a bicycle producer or a farm supply company? Are there no consumer protection laws? This is something I do not understand about much of the IG dialogue, esp in GAC. Governments have the crazy idea that they must load up domain name-specific rules and regulations to achieve goals that are already quite achievable via existing laws. They literally seem to think that they can regulate the health sector by passing rules governing the domain name .HEALTH.

As for "deviation from the public interest," that is exactly the kind of vague, ex post policy direction that we don't want national governments to invoke in global Internet governance. First, because it is not a well-defined rule or prescription but just a feeling (usually a product of political lobbying) that the outcome of a process doesn't satisfy some organized interest group. Second, because national governments cannot speak for the global public interest, only (at best) their own national interest, and since there are 192 of these national interests, any public interest standard driven by governments is likely to produce chaos.

Every governmental agency or department? What about the coherence that governments must strive to pursuit? Ideally, the "best position" comes after counterposing different positions of different Ministers. In your proposal, we would disregard the important of this internal dialogue. So then? Internal Ministers would do foreign policy? What if gov end up moving completely different agendas in different bodies, depending on which department is participating? How to ensure a stable regime?

Your discussion above assumes that the relevant dialogue only occurs _within_ a national government, with the _national_ interest being the main criterion. The whole point of MS and of transnational internet is to push the dialogue into a global context and achieve agreement on the best position for everyone. Again, your thinking seems to be so state-centric that you elevate the national interest to the top and forget about the rest of us. If we are talking about governance of the global Internet why shouldn't a Brazilian Minister of Communications have to argue with an Asian LEA or a European and American ISP as well as the Brazilian foreign ministry in coming up with his/her position?

Assuming that an agreement can be reached, this kind of dialogue _improves_ stability over the purely national, internal-government dialogue.It will be very easy for the Brazilians, or the Americans, to agree among themselves and argue a position against each other that may be incompatible; but if they have to do it together, with both sides seeing the variation in their country's position, the final outcome will command more consensus worldwide.


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