On Apr 21, 2005, at 10:27 AM, Danny Butt wrote:
Hi Jeremy
My point was simply that the geopolitical imaginary of "the Internet" and what's "interesting" about it depends a lot on where you sit. So, for example, if I had to guess a story about the Internet in China that would make its way into the US tech business press, I'd say "censorship" because this fits with the dominant narrative of Chinese politics that appears in publications like Red Herring. (Rather than China as home to the second-largest nation of users in the world, or the largest IPv6 network in the world). That's not saying that I don't think that the censorship isn't a valid concern for those working on these issues, but in an environment where there's so little discussion of East Asian use, its role as a "general news item" seems a bit gratuitous. Those bad Chinese, eh! Although, the story tells us, "new technologies may keep total censorship in China at bay". The good Internet, eh!
On the other hand, outside of the U.S., UK, and Australia, very few researchers on internet governance would claim as you do that a) that the existing coordinating bodies adequately represent global interests or b) the relationship between internet governance bodies and the US government is "tenuous".
I think that depends on what they mean by 'internet governance' as I noted earlier. If you mean icann, it is representative in a sense. if you mean ietf, etc. it is representative in a sense. however, if you mean the u.s. contract, then of course it is not representative at all. if you mean the powers that be in the non-state and non-technical sense, then those are not representative, and that will be covered in part at my hopefully soon to be accepted ir6.0 talk this year entitled Capital Policy: the transnational subpolitics of internet governance.
To give an example, it is possible under the terms of reference of the MoU constituting the relationship between the Dept of Commerce and ICANN, for an entire international country code top level domain (such as .cn) to be removed from the root zone file on the demands of the U.S. government. This would effectively remove it from the Internet.
not really, because while ICANN can direct, who will enforce? other than economic enforcement... there may not be any real system of enforcement within the system other than exclusion, and that would require a unified effort, one that I doubt is possible.
No one seriously expects the US government to do that (but note, none of the "endpoints" have the ability to do that).
actually, you can remove routing at any border or any endpoint, just like you can add it at any of those places. true, that doesn't make it disappear for everyone, but you can make whole areas of the world disappear for anyone depending on your place in the chain. That is what is interesting about dns. by the way although icann and the post-arpa roots are the dominant hegemony, they are not the only name system in operation, they can be ignored entirely if your country has the technical capacity to do so, which many countries do. also, we should note that while the ruling root sits in the u.s. currently, the other root servers are fairly well distributed in various nations http://www.root-servers.org/. what that means to me is that in a realpolitik mode, the u.s. is only governing by consent, because any given one of those could break and become an independent root should they so desire or should the authority in their country demand it.
Yet, you may be able to understand why many do not see that as being a viable state of affairs for a global medium. It may also be possible for us, extrapolating from the "censoring Chinese" story, to see how this situation might also play into certain common assumptions about the United States government's role in international affairs.
yes, I should say that I support the dissolution of icann and the movement of naming to a u.n. associated body, but do not currently see that it should be the ITU.
From US media sources Internet governance is overwhelmingly posited as a "UN grab for power over the Internet", rather than a serious issue with the potential to make or break the "global" nature of the Internet. I'm implicitly suggesting that a) this is a big deal, because it affects the entire net, not just a nation state, b) it's being decided right now, and there are many important documents awaiting comment and c) it's something that many researchers on this forum are well placed to affect, as most of this list reside in the nations seeking to maintain the patently unbalanced status quo.
As a network of researchers in this medium we have 1) our own research interests, but also 2) a responsibility for the medium's development, that suggests we should be monitoring the issues/news of the day and developing understanding of them. It's good to share articles etc. outside of our own specialisms. But on the second point, I think we'd do well as researchers to take a critical perspective on who decides what counts as news and what our implication in the stories is.
Cheers,
Danny
ps - anyone interested in the governance issues, as well as checking the wgig and internetgovernance.org papers, may also want to look at two excellent papers:
Peake, Adam (2004) Internet governance and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Report for Association of Progressive Communications, http://rights.apc.org/documents/governance.pdf
Drake, William. "Reframing Internet Governance Discourse: Fifteen Baseline Propositions." http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/Drake2.pdf
On 4/20/05 9:34 PM, "jeremy hunsinger" <jhuns@vt.edu> wrote:
but... this has been covered in the news too... at least the wgig for wsis has been covered. it is interesting. but it is unclear what you mean by 'running the internet'. if you mean icann, which is the only bit that really is tied to the u.s. government, though tenuously... I hardly think that human readable domain names, which is pretty much all they do, is 'running the internet'.... even if, for instance one claims that icann is running the internet, under the ausipices of the u.s. commerce, you would still be hard pressed to say it is a u.s. organization, or non-representative of international interests(granted though, only certain types of interests are represented well) if you mean ietf, iab, irtf, isoc, w3c... well those are all open organizations with solid international credentials.
now do any of those organizations really run the internet? or govern it? each does in some way, to some extent, but none does it entirely, nor do the whole of them govern it entirely. most of the internet is governed by the endpoints, and those that profit from them, which is why censorship is important, because it shows precisely that fact, that countries can govern the internet as well.
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