As WSIS approaches...

Yes, as WSIS approaches, I start getting more and more e-mails and articles about the issue of internet governance. As was stated in ZDNet's article: "The three-day summit - originally organized to brainstorm ways to bridge the digital divide in developing countries - has morphed this year into a contentious debate over who should control key portions of the Internet." Which really links to Lisa's comment to my previous post about politics involved in the process.

However, at this point, I just wanted to share with you a few articles that I got today, for I don't have the time to comment in length about it now. The first article is the mentioned above piece from ZDNet UK about the violence between the government and human right activists in Tunisia prior to the summit. The second article from spacewar.com (didn't have the time to check the origins of it) and it is yet another debate about the internet governance issue (I believe we'll have more on this issue). Another interesting article is from news.com.au and it nice, brief summary of the two major positions over the issue (note to myself – read more about the European proposal). The last, but not the least, for now is a view from Indian perspective on the issue of internet government, but even more than that on the (unjustified?) shift from the original focus of the summit on real problems to the issue of “who owns the internet”.

Shall keep on tracking the developments...

The bloggers' silence as a metaphor

It seems that I am not the only one that is being confused with the silence of the online community about the issue of internet governance. Here is an nice summarizing article about bloggers' (absence of) coverage of WSIS and internet governance. I have no idea what "National Journal" is and the article's title takes a firm stand on the issue ("The U.N. As A Threat To Online Speech"), I think it can be treated as a nice resource on the issue. Moreover, it seems that the bloggers' silence is just one example of online silence.

Another good resource about the issue may be the ISOC's internet governance page. It has lots of links to documents and websites dealing with the issue, however they are very technical in my eyes.

More resources are welcome...

More thoughts on internet governance

Continuing the issue of internet governance, you may find it interesting to read this article by John Markoff (but only if you have a subscription to online version of NY Times, I got it through one of my mailing lists).

The article argues that centralized governance of the internet is virtually impossible and that the argument over Icann is shifting the argument to the wrong direction. Here are a couple of quotes:

The network designers believe that the very structure of the Internet makes it anathema to the top-down control that governments have traditionally exercised over earlier communications networks.

Unlike centralized networks with a single point of failure and control, the Internet was designed to suffer damage and continue to function. That same quality makes it exceedingly difficult to control or filter.

"The idea of Internet control is an oxymoron," said Robert Taylor, who as a director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon during the 1960's initiated the development of the Arpanet.

"Everyone seems to think that the D.N.S. system is a big deal, but it's not the heartbeat of the Internet," said Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who did pioneering research in data packet switching, the fundamental technique underlying networks. "Who controls the flow of the ocean? Nobody controls it, and it works just fine. There are some things that can't be controlled and should be left distributed."

Although the ocean metaphor is nice, I find a difficulty accepting it. Unlike oceans, Internet is a human, technological invention and as such, it would be really problematic if there was no way to control it. Particularly, when we talk about 13 root domain servers that construct the backbone of the internet, the political argument over the physical control over them becomes more understandable (at least in my eyes). Thus, arguments such as:

Icann was founded with the intent of becoming an independent or "denationalized" group. But in June, the Bush administration backed away from that plan, saying in a "statement of principles" issued by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that the United States had the right to maintain oversight of Icann indefinitely.

Are really worrisome. Last year I was at a conference dealing with tools to “fight terror in the internet”. Its main focus was on data mining and online surveillance tools. Pretty horrifying for social science person. However, most of the ‘solutions’ presented were still dependent on local legislation, which didn’t imply global threat from the US intervention. What I am trying to say is that maybe the system is not perfect and there is great room for improvement. Moreover, as you could see in the Kofi Anann’s article I sited in the previous post, the main official motivation behind the proposal to change the current system is developmental. However, when you read a phrase like:

In recent years, Icann has become a lightning rod, focusing opposition to American political and economic power. A group of countries, led by developing nations like Iran, China and Brazil, has put forward a range of proposals calling for Icann's management to be made international; most call for a shift to a group like the United Nations.

you come to doubt that the main motivation is bridging the divides between the developed and the developing world. Neither Iran, nor China, excelled in promoting the personal freedom of their citizens (unless I am really deeply in false consciousness).

Well, maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but the debate over internet governance really bothers me and I am skeptical of the embedded durability of the system against centralized control. Although the internet has a seemingly grassroots structure and certainly grassroots associated culture, I think it is important to keep it a civil society organized platform, rather than allowing either governmental organization/s controlling it. It seems to me the responsible governments would look for a way to build on the existing system, improving its openness and accessibility by unprivileged groups and societies, rather to look for a way of fitting it to the old-fashioned boundaries (which seems not to work that well anyway – poverty rates keep on raising worldwide). But this is where the politics get in and I wonder what will be the final result…

Another interesting question that comes to mind is what simple people, particularly those who already use internet and utilize it for doing good, can do to express their opinion on the future of internet governance? And if they want to do anything, how can they (dare I say “we”) carry that out? What do the netizents want?

Is Wikipedia that mediocre?

Today Veronica sent me an article where Andrew Orlowski tries to establish a claim that Wikipedia is a temporal phenomenon doomed due to its mediocre quality. Most of the support to his claim he gains from the people running “Britannica” and my question – what would he expect? Would he expect them saying that this is a real threat to their business? Would they acknowledge that there is a potentially good enough source to make their product obsolete?

I haven’t conducted or read any research on Wikipedia (although it exists). Due to my skepticism, at the beginning I used occasionally to compare wiki entries with those of Britannica. Those usually turned to be correct and even richer + having context, which is usually not found in printed encyclopedias (try looking at the debates behind such ‘controversial’ topics as “terrorism” for example). Recently, I meet reference to Wikipedia in academic articles and just a few months ago, I heard a researcher from MIT referring to it as “the best information source these days”. Personally, I tend to use Wikipedia pretty often to get initial idea of new terms (particularly about food :).

Reading an article like this I am getting the same feeling I indicated in the previous post. It seems that there is something new and principally different emerging on the web and the older, established systems are refusing to accept this new ‘thing’. Just today at the research methods class I TA there was a discussion about science and the lecturer gave an example of Copernicus, whose ideas were rejected by the church. They were not rejected purely by some religious verdict. The church had its own scientists who proved he was wrong using the scientific tools/instruments of that period. The basic claim was that if we calculate the speed of the Earth, we are getting some 1750km/h – so, how come we do not feel it? The answer came only a few decades later with Galileo’s findings and today people treat this as obvious without even thinking of doubting it (which is not necessarily good).

Of course there is room to criticize Wikipedia, but maybe as a phenomenon, it is something the current paradigms did not learn yet to understand and/or explain? So the best tactic is to preserve the known and understandable? To feel safe? Do the encyclopedias the only owners of public knowledge?

P.S. Also there were a couple of phrases in the article that were very difficult to leave unnoticed. For example, after spending 5 hours yesterday and 3 hours today in the library, the Tom Panelas’s quote “People who use Wikipedia either wouldn't have done anything before - they didn't go to the library to get the information…” is really offensive. Also, at least the last part of Daan Strebe’s remark: “I think of it only as a reference lacking authority, like the rest of the Web” is quite a simplistic generalization given the number of reliable online sources and academic journals.

P.P.S. I couldn’t find who the people/organizations behind “The Register” are. Anyone can help?

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:

“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…