[governance] [bestbits] Nominations for IGF closing and opening speakers

Wed Oct 28 10:05:42 EDT 2015

Milton

You basically do not agree with the proposition I advanced that the
Internet is getting more and more centralised and to that extent less
people centric, and you consider the two examples I gave in this regard
as 'not encouraging'. Whereby, I understand it to mean that your view is
that the Internet keeps getting more and more decentralised, and thus
more and more people-centric, or at least there is no proof to the
contrary. Am I right in making such a deduction?

I stand by my examples as proving my proposition, and I can cite a lot
of papers, even books, and others sources, even initiatives aiming at
're-decentralising the Internet' but I dont think that is going to
matter to you. Meanwhile, the proposition of increasing concentration of
power on and due to the Internet, unless deliberate interventions to the
contrary are employed, is so basic to the work that my organisation and
also our wider networks undertake that I am not sure where I can take
this argument any further with you. It is like saying that globalisation
causes no economic injustices, which is of course something that you
might as well believe. The only thing I can say, especially since you
frequently employ this allegation, is that such a viewpoint is no less
ideological than one which claims that globalisation does cause economic
injustices.

In any case, the evidences that you provide to show that all is well
with the Internet (at least on the economic and social rights/ justice
side) are very interesting. Most of your case rests on a single pillar,
that of user choice - since a lot of people are using the Internet, and
increasingly so, it must be providing them value, and that seals the
argument for you.

This is a typically erroneous way of looking at any technology's impact
on the society, especially such a pervasively general purpose, and
social, one as the new ICTs. Any new technology paradigm provides an
immediate cascade of useful possibilities, and value propositions. That
much is but obvious. However a claim that this 'fact' by itself proves
the currently dominant trajectory and manner of technology evolution as
the best one may not hold water. Other trajectories could yield more
benefit, overall, and/ or in the distributional aspect. I am sure that
you are not such a techno- deterministic so as to believe that there is
indeed only one possible path, that which we witness around us or have
witnessed. As the World Social Forum ( i can already see the derision on
your face :) ) says 'Another World is Possible'. We think that another
path for techno-social evolution of the Internet and associated social
phenomena is possible. As you perhaps know, there is a plan to hold an
Internet Social Forum next year, with the slogan 'Another Internet is
Possible'. (Meanwhile, do see the recent posting by Lee on 'platform
cooperativism' for an example of charting a ;different path' forward.)

I am sure you do not have time for all this 'ideological stuff'. But you
certainly have time to declare that the Internet is neoliberal, and this
new communication paradigm would or needs to follow none of the
old-world soft stuff of public, community or otherwise collectivist
approaches that do often get applied to communication and media systems
. And all this belief of yours is some kind of a given technical fact,
and nothing of an ideology!

Milton, user choices cannot determine everything and dont prove much.
Users make choices within the constrained structures that they are
subject to, and these structures themselves may not be easily mutable or
influenced by simple series of consumer choices. Such facts are well
known in sociological theory, and it is just an ideologically motivated
stream of economic thought that over-relies on 'user choice' to 'prove'
that what it in fact ideologically holds as a prior belief.

I am sure that you can and will also use your logic of, to quote, 
"choices people make to adopt, say, Facebook in huge and growing
numbers"  to prove that people do not care about a net neutral Internet,
neither do they value their privacy.

You are so taken by a narrow economic ideology that you seem to miss
every political nuance... When I showed my disappointment that the
Internet has continued to become more closed even under the watch of
IGF, I of course took the IGF as a (hopefully) participatory sphere for
public influence on Internet policies, but you chose to read it as I
trying to put the Internet under a "centralized system under any single
authority's "watch."

This quite eloquently shows how different our modes of political thought
and expression are, which is what makes it so much difficult for us to
carry on a conversation here; and, incidentally, not my stupidity or
ignorance which you miss no opportunity to point to. (yes, I know what a
p2p technology is. I spoke of email as p2p as you would speak of a
consumer to consumer model as against consumer to business.)

Lastly, I am quite surprised at how narrowly you construct the field of
Internet governance when you say that the Volkswagen and John Deere
cases that I referred to while being interesting have nothing to do with
IG... Dont you see that Volkswagen's software cheating is only a step
away from algorithm cheating and its possible devastating social impact;
and what does the argument of 'software with mechanical parts' mean in
the age of Internet of Things. I take the field of Internet governance
to widely sweep across the area of governance of the digital realm, and
especially today there is not much difference between a stand alone
digital artefact and a networked one, I mean there is a clear growing
convergence there.

parminder

On Monday 26 October 2015 02:02 AM, Mueller, Milton L wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> This is the 10th anniversary of WSIS which called for a people-centred and
>> development-oriented information society. Let us examine if we have a more
>> people-centric Internet today than we had in 2005, and if not so, what are the
>> reasons, and what should have been done, and needs to be done, especially
>> from the point of view of governance of the Internet.
>> Can we agree to this being a key element that we should be focussed on?
> No. 
>
> Can you provide me with a metric of "people-centeredness"? One that is meaningful to all and not a purely ideological construct? The examples you gave below were not encouraging. 
>
>> The Internet to me is rather less people- centric in its 'design' today than it
>> was 10 years ago... Of course so many more people use the Internet today,
>> which is rather obvious for a such a breakthrough technical advance, but for
> So the people who are adopting and using the Internet don't count in your calculation. Interesting. The choices people make to adopt, say, Facebook in huge and growing numbers, does not mean that they see value in this in your book. What then does it mean? 
>
>> the present purpose lets keep the focus on its design; is it more people-centric
>> today than it was 10 years ago
> I have no idea what you mean by the 'design' of the Internet. If you are not talking about techno-management, and you are not talking about the design of the standards and protocols, from your examples below it sounds like you are talking about the economic organization or business models of service providers who run "over the top." 
>
>> (1) Email was still the major p2p Internet application in 2005
> Sigh. Email as P2P. Can someone other than me explain what's wrong with this assertion to P? I don't have time.
>
>> media has overtaken it. Email system was based on public standards written
>> by IETF and other standards organisations, whereby there were no lock-ins
>> and every email service could interact with all others based on these public
>> protocols. 
> Every email service can still interact with all others, and so can all the platforms.
>
> I don't think you have a very accurate recollection or a very deep understanding of the compatibility issues here. What was your email client in 2005? Or 1995 for that matter? Mine was MS Outlook in 2005 and Netscape's browser in 1995. Have you tried moving your stored emails from either client to any other one? It was more difficult in 1995 than in 2005, and more difficult in 2005 than now. True, email standards interconnect all different clients then as now but there were various lock-in mechanisms. There is always a dynamic between competition, innovation and standardization, between open and proprietary, and you haven't made much of a case that we are tilting more one way than the other. 
>
>> Compare that with a Facebook or a Twitter and you will easily see
>> what I am driving at. 
> Sorry, I still don't see what you are driving at. I can see anyone's Tweet on the web, they can email me a link to it. Facebook seems to be a bit more closed off, (I am not a Facebook user (yeah, we do exist), so I am less sure of how users allow or do not allow access to their pages), but there were equivalent platforms in 2005. Since these blockages are a result of user choice, how is this a less "people-centered" internet? 
>
>> (2) In 2005, Web was the unchallenged king on the Internet, today proprietary
>> apps are increasingly taking its place. Again, I am not saying that we should
> Wrong. Most "proprietary" apps are free, and they link to and complement the web, they do not substitute for it. Furthermore, tons of web sites had (and still have) paywalls or login requirements in 2005.  
>
>> I think there is a limit to which we can simply keep extolling the great wonder
>> that the IGF is - we must explain what inter alia has it really contributed, or
>> failed to contribute, to the mentioned very problematic development, which
>> have been taking place under its watch, and the watch of a veritable travelling
>> circus that the global IG scene has become.
> Even though I largely agree with the implied criticism of the IGF, and 100% agree that we must always ask what it has contributed, I think when you say the Internet has developed in the way it has "under its watch" you are exaggerating the significance of what the IGF is or could be. The Internet, like the overall economy, is not a centralized system under any single authority's "watch."
>
>> In this background, ones heart cringes to witness, as I had to witness last week
>> in New York, how the UN's WSIS + 10 review process is behaving as if there is
>> just nothing wrong with the Internet, and the manner in which it is effecting
>> large-scale structural changes in the world, in almost all sectors. There was
>> practically no mention at all of the numerous issues in this regard that we
>> read almost daily in the newspapers (Volkswagen's software cheating, John
>> Deere claiming that its tractors are in fact software with mechanical parts,
>> and so on. To mention just two news that I read over the last 2-3 weeks alone.
>> The list in fact is unending).
> These are interesting developments in IT, but have no connection whatsoever to Internet governance.
>
>> There was no political energy at all in the room (at
>> WSIS review), and everyone seemed wanting the proceedings to end quickly
>> so that they could leave. This is quite in contrast to the politically charged
>> discussions during the original WSIS... What has happened in the meanwhile?
> Interesting question. Worth discussing. I have my ideas about that, but you probably would not like them.
>
>
>
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