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

[David Cake]

> On 26 Oct 2015, at 4:32 am, Mueller, Milton L <milton at gatech.edu> 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.

	Sure.
	P2P implies that individual internet clients connect directly to other internet clients, with no intrinsic ongoing distinction between the role of one client and another. Email is built on a client/server architecture - there is a very distinct difference between an email client (using the POP or IMAP or similar protocols to collect email from) and an email server (using the SMTP protocol to receive mail from other email servers, and store and forward). These two aspects of the email system are quite separate, and generally involve separate software, separate protocols, and separate operating parameters.
	It is true that the email server system is decentralised with no intrinsic hierarchy, but it is a network of servers rather than a peer to peer system - email servers have set, stable roles (to accept mail for specific domains) and do not shift these roles and resources around the way a peer to peer system does.
	I think the issue here is confusion of the technical architecture of a service with its economic/institutional structure. In the case of email, its technically a client-server architecture with non-hierarchical connections between servers, while economically/institutionally it is a decentralised system in which each server is responsible for its own service provision and administration.  While not entirely unrelated, the two are separate issues - you could have a peer to peer architecture that depended entirely on a single commercial client, or a server based architecture that was accessible via entirely open source and free software (as email is) or any combination thereof, or other variations depending on the service (Skype, for example, originally used peer to peer for direct communications (and client server for authentication and some other aspects), while being economically a single corporate service - enabling Microsoft to change its architecture to using Microsoft controlled supernodes, thus enabling central surveillance).
	Confusing the technical and economic and institutional architectures like this is a problem, because it leads to confusing the roles of the bodies that regulate the various levels.
	ICANN, for example, is constantly full of arguments along the lines of some group (be it govt/LEA/business/Civil society) saying ‘I want you to fix this problem’ and the ICANN community (or corporation) having to convince them that ‘I know you want to fix that problem, but you can’t fix it here because this is the wrong place’ - because people assume that its technical central role amounts to it being top of a political hierarchy (when actually, ICANN of course has no mandate to overrule national laws).
	Regards

		David


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