[governance] Article on national sovereignty and communications in Indian Magazine Diplomatist

[Barry Shein]

Reading the article what strikes me is: How is the internet different,
fundamentally, from the voice or sms telephone networks (which most of
the internet travels on), or postal and package carriers, as a few
examples which come to mind?

They're all indepedent systems interconnected by some agreement of
protocols. For example sharing of undersea cables or mutual
recognition of postage.

Something which does distinguish them is that there seems to be much
less concern about regulating the content of these other
networks. Generally just customs, import/export regulation, and of
course any overt criminal content in all cases.

So we are led to a paradox raised implicitly by the article:

The internet is different because it resists regulation of its content
by any centralized, typically sovereign, actors. This is because its
control is distributed in super-sovereign or extra-sovereign patterns.

Yet it is the internet's very identifiable control points such as the
DNS system's single root-structured (in practice, not in theory)
management which causes us to worry about control and who shall
administer that control.

So, it is distributed and independent of sovereign control, except
when it isn't?

I think this can be repaired with a prefix of "we would prefer it
were..."  rather than trying to create this illusion that there is
anything inherent in the internet which resists control, any more than
my first examples, voice networks etc.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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