Flying jet with a scooter license?
Seems like I was extremely lucky today…
It’s been a while since I am concerned with the Internet governance issue. WSIS seems to host an extensive debate on the issue and the coming summit in Tunis is supposed to host the culmination. While the summit presents a great degree of politics into the technological realm (thus making official thing that we already know), the official argument about internet governance is more ideological than anything else. So in the next lines, I’ll try to focus on the ideological realm…
So, today I played with google.news and came across an article from Washington post, where Kofi Annan presents the point of view of UN starting with a-very-comfortable-to-quote:
He continues with:
After re-reading the original article three times, I wondered if it was only me feeling uncomfortable with the presented arguments and moreover with the presented perspective of governments running the internet. At the time of writing this post, Technorati has 17 blog posts linked to this article. Surprisingly, all 15 of those I could read, were skeptical to critical regarding the UN intensions. You can view Kenneth Anderson’s post as one of the moderate reactions; others were much stronger phrased.
Since all the blogs above were all in English and most of them were clearly identified as American, I thought to continue looking for additional views and searched for blogs in Russian and in Hebrew. Both searches were not fruitful, but I’ll keep on looking. An extended search brought some interesting results like this and this, dealing with the entire isuse of internet governance, as well as some pages with resources such as this and this (a US advocating NGO). Finally, I managed to find a post talking in favor of transmitting the internet governance to UN.
I shall keep on looking for additional views, but these preliminary results made me thinking why would the netizens oppose a change in current system of internet governance? Is it mere “don’t fix it until it broken”? I think that the answer can be found in the statement of SG himself – the cultural gap between the internet as a phenomenon and the modern politics as we know them.
About a year ago, my friend Sharon and I wrote a paper about the relationships between the civil society and the internet platform. In retrospective, there is one major point missing from our article – the grassroots nature of the internet itself, or as put by the SG “traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making”. The conflict arises when there is an attempt to govern something we yet learned to understand (internet) with irrelevant tools (policies and practices developed prior to the internet). I would say that in a way it reminds the attempts of church to deal with discoveries of Copernicus.
The fact that there is a world summit called to discuss internet related issues with particular focus on who is going to control it, is another fact supporting its extreme significance in modern societies. The governments have discovered that there is something happening that they cannot ignore anymore. Apparently, the culture emerging online makes the governments worry, each for its own reasons, but mostly for loosing control. On the one hand, it is acceptable and favorable to talk about grassroots democracy, flourishing civil society and civil activism. The modern technology allows maximizing all those, creating new forms of organizations and activism (both positive and negative). This doesn’t fit the old hierarchical and centralized models of governance. This leads to fear in the old system. It shakes it… So, what seems to happen is instead of understanding the change and channeling it for mutual benefits, there is an attempt to fit it into known small frames of bureaucracy for we feel more comfortable in familiar environment. This attempt looks like trying to fly a jet with a 50cc scooter driving license – I don’t think it can work.
There is a reason for existence of the civil society. As I see it, the reason is a failure of official governments or the private sector to answer the needs of people (the issue of developing countries brought by Kofi Annan in his article is an excellent example for this). It is an expression of values and personal abilities of individuals, who are willing to change their close environment or even the world. What stands at the basis of civil society are first of all the people. Similarly, even if the technological infrastructure was developed by the military and the academia, the culture of the web is a result of human interaction. This culture seems to be very different from what the world has known. One of the characteristics of this culture is its bottom-up evolution and relatively flat structure (take blogs for example). The other characteristic is the fact that this young culture is populated mostly by young, playing a role in crystallizing their views and perceptions. Can you fit it into a box of static rules and procedures? Can you do it without practically destroying it?
Of course one could claim that in current situation the internet is not a pure civil society realm, but is under US supervision. It seems that the fact that this internet governance argument exists, means that the current system is open enough to allow emergence of a new culture (I am a bit too tired now to continue with explanations and discussion :).
Although I believe this post presents a stand I would like to end it with questions. What am I missing in arguments in support of transferring internet governance to UN? Where the current system is failing on a practical level so it (the internet governance system) prevents the developing countries from benefiting the web? Isn’t getting the internet officially politicized bares more dangers than building on the existing practices and improving them? How do you think this should be settled?
I’ll try to follow up on this and everyone is mostly welcome to comment…
It’s been a while since I am concerned with the Internet governance issue. WSIS seems to host an extensive debate on the issue and the coming summit in Tunis is supposed to host the culmination. While the summit presents a great degree of politics into the technological realm (thus making official thing that we already know), the official argument about internet governance is more ideological than anything else. So in the next lines, I’ll try to focus on the ideological realm…
So, today I played with google.news and came across an article from Washington post, where Kofi Annan presents the point of view of UN starting with a-very-comfortable-to-quote:
“One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to "take over," police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United Nations wants only to ensure the Internet's global reach”
He continues with:
“For historical reasons, the United States has the ultimate authority over some of the Internet's core resources. It is an authority that many say should be shared with the international community. The United States, which has exercised its oversight responsibilities fairly and honorably, recognizes that other governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns, and that efforts to make the governance arrangements more international should continue.
The need for change is a reflection of the future, when Internet growth will be most dramatic in developing countries. What we are seeing is the beginning of a dialogue between two different cultures: the nongovernmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making, and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental rganizations.”
After re-reading the original article three times, I wondered if it was only me feeling uncomfortable with the presented arguments and moreover with the presented perspective of governments running the internet. At the time of writing this post, Technorati has 17 blog posts linked to this article. Surprisingly, all 15 of those I could read, were skeptical to critical regarding the UN intensions. You can view Kenneth Anderson’s post as one of the moderate reactions; others were much stronger phrased.
Since all the blogs above were all in English and most of them were clearly identified as American, I thought to continue looking for additional views and searched for blogs in Russian and in Hebrew. Both searches were not fruitful, but I’ll keep on looking. An extended search brought some interesting results like this and this, dealing with the entire isuse of internet governance, as well as some pages with resources such as this and this (a US advocating NGO). Finally, I managed to find a post talking in favor of transmitting the internet governance to UN.
I shall keep on looking for additional views, but these preliminary results made me thinking why would the netizens oppose a change in current system of internet governance? Is it mere “don’t fix it until it broken”? I think that the answer can be found in the statement of SG himself – the cultural gap between the internet as a phenomenon and the modern politics as we know them.
About a year ago, my friend Sharon and I wrote a paper about the relationships between the civil society and the internet platform. In retrospective, there is one major point missing from our article – the grassroots nature of the internet itself, or as put by the SG “traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making”. The conflict arises when there is an attempt to govern something we yet learned to understand (internet) with irrelevant tools (policies and practices developed prior to the internet). I would say that in a way it reminds the attempts of church to deal with discoveries of Copernicus.
The fact that there is a world summit called to discuss internet related issues with particular focus on who is going to control it, is another fact supporting its extreme significance in modern societies. The governments have discovered that there is something happening that they cannot ignore anymore. Apparently, the culture emerging online makes the governments worry, each for its own reasons, but mostly for loosing control. On the one hand, it is acceptable and favorable to talk about grassroots democracy, flourishing civil society and civil activism. The modern technology allows maximizing all those, creating new forms of organizations and activism (both positive and negative). This doesn’t fit the old hierarchical and centralized models of governance. This leads to fear in the old system. It shakes it… So, what seems to happen is instead of understanding the change and channeling it for mutual benefits, there is an attempt to fit it into known small frames of bureaucracy for we feel more comfortable in familiar environment. This attempt looks like trying to fly a jet with a 50cc scooter driving license – I don’t think it can work.
There is a reason for existence of the civil society. As I see it, the reason is a failure of official governments or the private sector to answer the needs of people (the issue of developing countries brought by Kofi Annan in his article is an excellent example for this). It is an expression of values and personal abilities of individuals, who are willing to change their close environment or even the world. What stands at the basis of civil society are first of all the people. Similarly, even if the technological infrastructure was developed by the military and the academia, the culture of the web is a result of human interaction. This culture seems to be very different from what the world has known. One of the characteristics of this culture is its bottom-up evolution and relatively flat structure (take blogs for example). The other characteristic is the fact that this young culture is populated mostly by young, playing a role in crystallizing their views and perceptions. Can you fit it into a box of static rules and procedures? Can you do it without practically destroying it?
Of course one could claim that in current situation the internet is not a pure civil society realm, but is under US supervision. It seems that the fact that this internet governance argument exists, means that the current system is open enough to allow emergence of a new culture (I am a bit too tired now to continue with explanations and discussion :).
Although I believe this post presents a stand I would like to end it with questions. What am I missing in arguments in support of transferring internet governance to UN? Where the current system is failing on a practical level so it (the internet governance system) prevents the developing countries from benefiting the web? Isn’t getting the internet officially politicized bares more dangers than building on the existing practices and improving them? How do you think this should be settled?
I’ll try to follow up on this and everyone is mostly welcome to comment…
3 comments:
I would have to say first that your questions at the end might be the most powerful part of your post and I truly hope a decent effort is made to articulate answers for those at the summit!!
Let's write them here in bullet points (as I interpeted what you wrote):
* Where is the current system is failing to allow developing countries to benefit from the web?
* Will "policing" the Internet with traditional governing methods be more of a hindrance (to the Internet's usefulness) than help?
* Is there a way to simply build on the existing Internet controls to distribute the current "political dominance" of US organisations over the Internet over organisations in different countries? (Isn't this already happening spontaneously anyway?)
Frankly, I had assumed some answers must already exist, but I don't know how compelling they would be (eg. the fact that non-ASCII domain names weren't permitted in earlier years).
Possibly, the people who could answer these questions don't blog or maybe don't even have much access to the Internet, so it may be a waste of time to try and find bloggers who disagree with Kofi Annan.
That was a quick reply :)
I would agree with you about the existence of answers, unless the facts “on the ground” were not indicating a failure. There is a huge digital divide, soci-economic inequalities, etc. and the gaps are widening. Even if we assume that the gaps cannot be completely bridged, what should be the tendency, towards widening or narrowing them?
I think that you pointed out exactly the three main points. Adding a bit more complication to it I would also ask: what is the contribution of governments compared to the nature of infrastructure and its management (ICANN?) to the failure of developing countries to benefit from new ICTs? I don’t think that internet has invented corruption and I don’t think that it is due to the internet that also in developing countries there is a widening gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and in their cases it is even more radical than in the economically more developed countries.
This actually links back to the second point of applying the existing bureaucratic tools to governing the internet. Is it possible that we have something new here? Something new that requires new management tools?
And as to the third point, I really join you in questioning isn’t the internet as infrastructure relatively free and the ‘political dominance’ of US is not limiting it (although I could name quite a few scholars who would disagree on that). However, saying that from a user perspective, I am saying that from a user’s perspective enjoying pretty much cutting age technology. Maybe the things seem different from a user’s perspective in developing country? But from a user’s perspective and not politician’s perspective!
I don’t think that people who do not experience the internet can answer these questions. How can you compare different cars if you have never driven one? I think it should be a combination of those who knows how to drive and those who want to learn to, but still didn’t have a chance. It is much more complicated that it may appear at the first glance.
What are “non-ASCII domain names”?
Quick perhaps, but I still didn't try to answer any of the questions!
One point I forgot to mention is that the SG aimed his article at US Americans by publishing it on the Washington Post. Perhaps if it was published on BBC or IndiaTimes or Al Jazeera website there would be more responses in agreement and perhaps more in other languages.
Sorry to confuse regarding non-ASCII domain names: they are called internationalised domain names. Eg. новости.ru which will work soon, when the ".ru" DNS starts supporting IDNs.
Apparently this system is already working (as of 2005) and just depends on browser support (and DNS support) at the moment. I imagine if people who can read non-ASCII character quickly can type them quickly, this change may speed up the "global democratisation" of the net. I wonder if someone has made serious predictions on what the upshots might be?
Post a Comment