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". 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. No one seriously expects the US government to do that (but note, none of the "endpoints" have the ability to do that). 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.
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.