The International Telecommunication Union has elected its new Secretary-General to a four-year term. Hamadoun Toure recently said that the United Nations will not try to take the lead in determining the
future of the Internet.
The Mercury News reports that Toure said:
It is not my intention to take over the governance of the Internet. There is no one single issue that can be dealt with by one organization
alone.
This is good news for those (like me) that feared aggressive UN posturing to create a "superstructure" regulatory presence over all things Internet. The reality is that what we conceptually view as "the Internet" is actually a multitude of technical layers that would be difficult-if not impossible-to regulate under one governmental body.
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Shopping is normally good for the economy, but not when the shoppers are net neutrality advocates looking for friendly deals on a regulatory forum. Policy makers in Michigan, their current target, should tell pro-regulatory activists to go home, with good reason.
Those who support net neutrality legislation frame themselves as proponents of the Net, but in reality their recommendations would have an anti-Internet effect. The worry is that network providers like AT&T or Comcast will start charging some Web sites more than others. It is true that network providers would like to charge high-traffic Web sites for their larger usage of the network, but it remains unclear why that would be wrong or unfair.
Voip.com, an Internet phone provider, is one of the corporations calling for government intervention. Without government oversight, it argues, “consumer-friendly applications like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming homegrown video would likely be squeezed out by the larger corporations that can afford to pay for unfettered service.”
It’s obvious that Voip.com is simply trying to avoid the risk of paying more for their network use, but the thing Voip.com’s executives have missed is that the Net is getting crowded. If network operators can’t recoup their costs for the higher bandwidth use, then the network will slow down for everyone and services like VoIP, online gaming, and streaming video won’t work so well anymore.
Read more here.
The UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) held in Athens, Greece just ended. There’s some interesting blogs that discuss the happenings there, including one from the BBC and from my colleagues that were there in attendance, Jonathan Zuck and Steve DelBianco.
There was a lot of talk – but that’s ok, this is what this UN-created forum is all (and thankfully only) about. There were sessions with such broad topics as “openness” and “diversity” and “access.” Basic access to infrastructure for Internet connections is a problem for many people, especially in Africa. We think all youngsters know about MySpace? Think again (from the BBC blog):
A representative of the Council of Europe was made to look a little foolish when he asked the panel of young people about the growing use of social networks by young people and possible over use of such things as MySpace.
A young Nigerian told him: “If you ask a person in Lagos ‘What is MySpace?’ he is going to stare at your face.
And regarding “openness” I invite you to check out the ACT blog where, among other IGF entries, Jonathan writes how the phrase “no one has a monopoly on knowledge” has been a popular refrain at the IGF:
While it certainly sounds good, it is being used to justify everything from tweaking copyright law to outright theft. Many from the audience of a plenary on Openness brought up the topic of patents and copyrights as barriers to the broad access to “knowledge” regardless of what it took to come up with that “knowledge.”
Now it’s true that a lot of material that is paid for by the government, especially if they are not paid back, and stuff for which the term of patent and copyright have passed should all be in the public domain and there’s some work to get them there. That’s a far cry from simply taking entire sectors of innovation, like software and security and declaring them public goods whereby the moment that innovation is developed it must be shared by everyone for free. In market economies, copyright and patents provide the incentives necessary for investment in innovation, and declaring any innovation of value a “common good” and giving it to the public will cripple that system.
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James recently pointed out that The Economist had editorialized about how America’s recent Internet gambling ban, The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, would actually do little to deter online betting. This week, Business Week picks this silly law apart. As Business Week’s Catherine Holahan reports:
Indeed, the new law will do little to stop online gambling, say gamblers, betting companies, and industry analysts alike. Instead, the law will drive out regulated, publicly traded companies like PartyGaming, the Gibraltar-based parent of PartyPoker, and make way for private gambling companies and banks based in nations where such industries are loosely policed at best. As a result, the new law could ultimately make billions of dollars in U.S. online gambling transactions more difficult to trace, and increase the likelihood that funds end up in criminal hands. “It leaves an opening for some of the more unscrupulous companies coming in from unregulated places,” says Frank Catania, past director of New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement and president of Catania Consulting Group.
The exodus is under way–and the companies that are on the way out are those with the most financial transparency. PartyGaming, 888Holdings, and SportingBet, all of which are traded on the London Stock Exchange, have said they’re exiting the U.S. market. Roughly 70% of PartyGaming’s $319 million in second-quarter sales and 50% of 888 Holdings’ revenue came from the U.S.
Private online gambling companies, on the other hand, have been defiant in the face of the new law, arguing it does not apply to them and cannot be enforced. Bodog Entertainment Group, which operates a Costa Rican online gambling site, has no plans to bar U.S. customers. “We’ve structured our business in such a way that we’ll have no problems adapting to any changes in the online gaming environment,” says Bodog founder Calvin Ayre. Similarly, PokerStars released a statement saying its lawyers had “concluded that these provisions do not alter the U.S. legal situation with respect to our offering of online poker games.
Now you know why our TLF colleague Tom Bell labels the measure “The UnInGEn-ious Act.” Read his excellent analysis here and here.
The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reports that Iran has just banned high-speed Internet connections in an effort to restrict access to foreign culture:
“In a blow to the country’s estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net. The order follows a purge on illegal satellite dishes, which millions of Iranians use to clandestinely watch western television. Police have seized thousands of dishes in recent months.”
One wonders how long such a strategy can really work since communications and computing devices continue to get smaller and faster every day. Unless you shut down all the networks and tightly restrict access to all the potential digital devices out there, especially wireless devices, then this approach is not likely to work in the long run. For example, a recent story in the Washington Post noted how despite strict communications and media laws in Saudi Arabia (the country once sought to ban cell phone cameras), the youth of that country are finding ways around media restrictions:
“Cellphone technology is changing the way young people meet and date in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the most insular, conservative and religiously strict societies in the world. Calls and texting–and more recently, Bluetooth–are breaking down age-old barriers and giving young men and women discreet new ways around the sentries of romance.”
Nonetheless, the combination in Iran of a totalitarian religious state and a traditionally closed culture could mean that their restrictions will be fairly effective, at least in the short term, in preventing people from gaining access to culture and information outside their borders. But we’ll see how long they can hold back the growing tide of digital information and the relentless march of technological progress.
The Register reports that Wal-Mart has failed to gain control of boycottwalmart.com:
The panel ruled that Wal-Mart’s case could not stand because nobody finding the website boycottwalmart.com would imagine that the site belonged to the retailer.
“This panel is of the view that members of the public wishing to find a website associated with the Complainant would not be confused as to whether the Complainant owned or operated the website at ‘www.boycottwalmart.com’,” said its decision. “It would be perfectly clear to anyone who recognized the Complainant’s trademarks that the disputed domain name would not resolve to a site used by the Complainant to promote its own goods or services.”
“Accordingly, the Panel finds that ‘boycottwalmart.com’ is neither identical nor confusingly similar to the trademark “Wal-mart” nor any proven variants of that mark,” it ruled.
This seems like a sensible decision. This is a recurring issue in Internet governance. Perhaps the most famous example was the eToys/etoy dispute of the dot-com era. It was strangely appropriate when eToys subsequently went down in flames, while etoy appears to be alive and kicking (I have to admit I have no idea what etoy actually does).
EFF highlights a very bad treaty being pushed for ratification in the Senate:
The Convention on Cybercrime is a sweeping treaty that has been waiting in the wings of the Senate for nearly three years. Now the administration is putting pressure on the Senate to ratify it in the next two days. If it does, it would mean the U.S. would enforce not just our own, but the rest of the world’s bad Net laws. Call your Senator now, and ask them to hold its ratification.
The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries’ “cybercrime” laws – even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdiction’s requests to log their users’ behavior without due process, or compensation.
Apparently, the treaty is being held up by an anonymous Republican Senator:
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It appears that the US government is tip toeing toward reliquishing control of the Internet, and The Register explains in a long and intersting article. I thought these comments were particularly interesting:
It was apparent from the carefully selected panel and audience members that the internet – despite its global reach – remains an English-speaking possession. Not one of the 11 panel members, nor any of the 22 people that spoke during the meeting, had anything but English as their first language.
While talk centered on the future of the internet and its tremendous global influence, the people that sat there discussing it represented only a tiny minority of those that now use the internet every day. Reflections on the difficulty of expanding the current internet governance mechanisms to encompass the global audience inadvertently highlighted the very parochialism of those that currently form the ICANN in-crowd.
When historians come to review events in Washington on 26 July 2006, they will no doubt be reminded of discussions in previous centuries over why individual citizens should be given a vote. Or, perhaps, why landowners or the educated classes shouldn’t be given more votes than the masses.
On some level, this is obviously right. The Internet is now used by a great many non-Americans, and it’s understandable that they’d like some input into ICANN’s decisions. But I think the “democratic” frame for thinking about the issue is somewhat wrongheaded. The Internet is not a democratic country, and ICANN isn’t its government.
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Ben Charny reports that federal officials leaned on ICANN to reject the .xxx domain the other week.
One reason why it’s so easy to reject things like the U.N.‘s demand for a piece of “Internet governance” is because their aims are so transparently political. ICANN remains technically under U.S. government authority, but the government hasn’t exercised that authority much. Perhaps until now.
If true: bad thing.
(HT: Free2Innovate)
Here find my comments on the dangers of “net neutrality.” Who even remembers video dialtone? “Open video services.” And other similar regulatory ventures.
“Open” sounds awful democratic. But when it is a regulatory mandate it quickly devolves into something navigable only by an elite.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.