[governance] [JNC - Forum] Call for Participation: Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, 2015

[Barry Shein]

From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net>
On 18-May-2015, at 1:18 am, Louis Pouzin (well) <pouzin at well.com> wrote:
>>=20
>> The most stable definition:   Fig leaf for US dominance
>
>People say that all the time.  But then there are people in the USA who thi=
>nk Obama is out to send the US army into Texas to conquer it and put it und=
>er martial law.

By and large only some Texans who imagine their state is something
Obama would actually want.

Although the US certainly controls a number of important control
points in the net a lot of its "dominance" has little to do with those
control points.

Take, for example, NSA surveillance.

I don't believe the control points people are talking about, such as
the IANA contract or location of ICANN, had anything whatsoever to do
with the pervasiveness of NSA surveillance.

NSA could have done what it did even if the IANA contract were under
the control of Outer Slobbovia.

It was largely a product of economic dominance and first-mover
advantage. A lot of the world's internet traffic moved through
organizations (telecom companies etc) which NSA could get jurisdiction
over or otherwise influence to their needs.

There's a conflation of US as political entity (non-trivial) and US as
economic and trade entity (non-trivial.)

And of course a coincidence of world events such as the rise of global
terrorist activity and its use of the net which rationalized the
surveillance in many actors' minds who might otherwise have hesitated.

And of course vast budgets, hundreds of millions of US$ were paid to
telecom companies for that snooping.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

The World              | bzs at TheWorld.com           | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD        | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
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