Fear, Ignorance Said to Drive Governments’ Push into Internet Governance
SAN FRANCISCO -- Efforts by national governments to move Internet governance to organizations such as the ITU and the U.N., where they hold sway, reflect their growing fear of the power that can be exerted online, said Vice President Markus Kummer of the Internet Society. It also reflects their mistrust of the engineering organizations that have historically set policy, he said. “The Internet has become so important that it was inevitable that governments would wake up to it,” Kummer said at the .Nxt conference last week. Governments remain “not just clueless but dynamically anti-clueful” concerning how cyberspace works, said John Perry Barlow, an Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and board member.
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It’s difficult for many governments to understand how the “open, distributed” structure of Internet governance can work, because public officials “are used to operating in a centralized, top-down fashion,” Kummer said. And “then there are the other governments that are scared of the Internet because it undermines their authority. … Up to a point, all governments are scared of the Internet,” he said. The “kill switch” -- a government’s authority to suspend public access to the network -- “is the ultimate symbol of how afraid governments can be,” Kummer said. “Clearly, they would like to have more control over the Internet.” Some governments want “a walled garden Internet” where a great deal of national control can be exercised, and “to a large extent that is the case in some countries,” he said. Through the World Summit on the Information Society, the “U.N. was dragged into this discussion” of how private Internet governance should remain “mainly because governments thought there was a need to have this discussion,” he said.
ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the regional domain registries -- the current governance bodies, with fewer control levers available to governments -- need to respond by improving how they work, Kummer said. He’s “confident that we can maintain the current system, but we cannot take it for granted,” he said. “There is constant nibbling at the edges.” With “the institutionalization that is taking place,” including in ICANN, Internet rights are now “ordained by these delivering bodies” rather coming bottom up from assurances based on engineering decisions as they had, said Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist.
In the big picture, Barlow said, Internet rights look about the same as in 1996, when he wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” The “forces of the future and the past have managed to maintain a pretty good Mexican standoff, and I expect that will continue to be the case,” he said.