Internet Governance & ICANN

Let’s Craft the Perfect Internet Policy… No, Wait, It’s Already Been Done!

by Adam Thierer on February 15, 2012 · 4 comments

Friends of Internet freedom, I need your assistance. I think we need to develop a principled, pro-liberty blueprint for Internet policy going forward. Can you help me draw up five solid principles to guide that effort?

No, wait, don’t worry about it… it has has already been done!

As I noted in my latest weekly Forbes column, “Fifteen years ago, the Clinton Administration proposed a paradigm for how cyberspace should be governed that remains the most succinct articulation of a pro-liberty, market-oriented vision for cyberspace ever penned. It recommended that we rely on civil society, contractual negotiations, voluntary agreements, and ongoing marketplace experiments to solve information age problems. In essence, they were recommending a high-tech Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm (to the Internet).”

That was the vision articulated by President Clinton’s chief policy counsel Ira Magaziner, who was in charge of crafting the administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce in July 1997. I was blown away by the document then and continue to genuflect before it today. Let’s recall the five principles at the heart of this beautiful Framework: Continue reading →

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Will the UN take over Net governance?

by Jerry Brito on February 13, 2012 · 3 comments

Over at TIME.com I write that we should keep a close eye on moves by Russia, China and other countries to move Internet governance to the UN:

>All this year, and culminating in December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, the nations of the world will be negotiating a treaty to govern international telecommunications services between countries. It is widely believed that some countries, including Russia and China, will take the opportunity to push for U.N. control of Internet governance. Such a turn of events would certainly be troubling. …

>It’s amazing to think about it, but no state governs the Internet today. Decisions about its architecture are made by consensus among engineers and other volunteers. And that, in fact, is what has kept it open and free.

>“Upending the fundamentals of the multi-stakeholder model is likely to Balkanize the Internet at best, and suffocate it at worst,” FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said recently in a speech. “A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make decisions in lightning-fast Internet time.”

Read the whole thing at TIME.com.

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Book Review: Consent of the Networked by Rebecca MacKinnon

by Adam Thierer on January 25, 2012 · 125 comments

Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, is well-researched exploration of the forces driving Internet developments and policy across the globe today. She serves up an outstanding history of recent global protest movements and social revolutions and explores the role that Internet technologies and digital networks played in those efforts. She also surveys some of the recent policy fights here and abroad over issues such as online privacy, Net neutrality regulation, free speech matters, and the copyright wars. The Consent of the Networked is certainly worth reading and will go down as one of the most important Internet policy books of 2012.

A Call to Action

Of course, it’s not just a history lesson. MacKinnon has also issued a call-to-arms here. As a well-known web activist, MacKinnon has emerged as a leading force in the broad-based, if loosely-defined, “Net freedom” movement. The term “Net freedom,” she notes, means very different things to different people. It’s “like a Rorschach inkblot test: different people look at the same ink splotch and see very different things.” (p. 188) Nonetheless, on the global stage, the Internet freedom movement is fundamentally tied up with efforts to hold both governments and corporate actors more accountable for their actions toward the Netizens, digital networks, and online speech and expression. Continue reading →

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How the Internet Evolves to Overcome Censorship

by Jerry Brito on November 21, 2011 · 0 comments

Over at TIME.com, I write that while Congress mulls an Internet blacklist in SOPA, there are efforts underway to reengineer parts of the Net to make communications more decentralized and censorship-proof. These include distributed and decentralized DNS systems, currencies, and social networks, as well as attempts to circumvent ISPs using mesh networking.

>It’s not a certainty that these projects will all succeed. Most probably won’t. Yet these far-out efforts serve as proof-of-concept for a censorship-resistant Internet. Just as between Napster and BitTorrent there was Gnutella and Freenet, it will take time for these concepts to mature. What is certain is the trend. The more governments squeeze the Internet in an attempt to control information, the more it will turn to sand around their fingers.

Read the whole thing here.

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Would Top-Down Global Planning Have Created the Net?

by Adam Thierer on October 3, 2011 · 0 comments

Here’s a sharp editorial from The Economist about Internet governance entitled, “In Praise of Chaos: Governments’ Attempts to Control the Internet Should be Resisted.” In the wake of the recent Internet Governance Forum meeting, many folks are once again debating the question of who rules the Net? Along with Wayne Crews, I edited a huge collection of essays on that topic back in 2003 and it’s a subject that continues to interest me greatly. As I noted here last week, many of those who desire greater centralization of control over Net governance decisions are using the fear that “fragmentation” will occur without some sort of greater plan for the Net’s future. I believe these fears are greatly overstated and are being used to justify expanded government meddling with online culture and economics.

The new Economist piece nicely brings into focus the key question about who or what we should trust to guide the future of the Internet. It rightly notes that the current state of Net governance is, well, messy. But that’s not such a bad thing when compared to the alternative: Continue reading →

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Online ‘Fragmentation’ Fears & the Downside of a ‘Globally Coherent Approach’ to Internet Governance

by Adam Thierer on September 27, 2011 · 3 comments

In a speech today before the Internet Governance Forum entitled “Taking Care of the Internet,” Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, argued for “a globally coherent approach” to preserve “the global character of the Internet, and keep it from fragmenting.” That sounds good in theory but, as always, the devil is in the details. No one wants to see a highly balkanized Internet with each country and continent becoming a digital island cut off from the rest of Internet. On the other hand, if “a globally coherent approach” means layers of international red tape and bureaucracy, then fragmentation doesn’t sound so bad by comparison. That’s particularly true for those of us who live in countries to cherish principles of freedom of speech and free enterprise, as we do in the United States.

For example, to most of the rest of the planet, America’s First Amendment is viewed as a pesky local ordinance that simply interferes with the ability of government to establish rules for acceptable speech and expression throughout society. What, then, does “a globally coherent approach” to Internet governance mean when America’s values conflict with other countries and continents? Does it mean that the U.S. should conform to a global norm as established by a “consensus body”? Who would that be? The OECD? The United Nations? The International Telecommunications Union? If so, it is clear that protections for freedom of speech and expression would be sacrificed on the altar of “consensus” or a “coherent global approach” to Net governance. Continue reading →

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Trading IPv4 Addresses Starts Making Internet Elders Nervous

by Milton Mueller on August 15, 2011 · 11 comments

Paul Vixie, a renowned Internet pioneer who runs the Internet Systems Consortium, has written an article in ACM Queue attacking “those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems.” The publication of this article is a sign of a growing, important debate around the reform of IP address registries in the age of IPv4 exhaustion.

Vixie defends the Regional Internet Registries monopoly on IP address registration services and its current, needs-based policies toward address transfers. I am sure that Paul sincerely believes in the arguments he makes, but it’s also true that Vixie is the chairman of the Board of The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the regional address registry for North America. When Vixie argues that ARIN’s exclusive control over Whois and address transfer services is beneficial and “in the physics” he is also defending the authority and revenue model of his own organization against a perceived threat.

And that takes us to another relevant fact. The argument Vixie makes is cast in generalities, but he is really attacking a specific firm, a holding company known as Denuo. Denuo has formed both a secondary marketplace called Addrex for the legitimate trading of IPv4 number blocks, and an IP Address Registrar company known as Depository. Let’s set aside Depository for the moment (I will come back to it) and concentrate on Addrex, which has become the first end-to-end platform for legacy address holders to sell their IPv4 number blocks. Famously, Addrex scored a major success as the intermediary for the Nortel-Microsoft trade. But Nortel-Microsoft was unusually visible because it had to go through bankruptcy court. Is anything else happening? I spoke to Addrex’s President Charles Lee since then to find out. “We are very busy signing up a growing number of global corporate and governmental customers to sell their unused assets,” he said. I asked him what the buyer side of the marketplace was beginning to look like and he said “Our value proposition to large Asian network operators has resonated quite effectively and we expect to enter into many agreements with them over the coming months.” Surely Vixie and the ARIN Board have gotten wind of this. So when Vixie begins a public attack on this company and its business model, he is signaling to the rest of us that ARIN is worried. Continue reading →

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Schumer to DOJ: Shut down Silk Road and bitcoin

by Jerry Brito on June 8, 2011 · 10 comments

The day many had expected is finally here. This Reuters headline says it all: [Senators seek crackdown on “Bitcoin” currency](http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/sns-rt-us-financial-bitcoitre7573t3-20110608,0,1767151.story).

The main target of Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin is Silk Road–the [online illicit drug bazaar](http://gawker.com/5805928/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imaginable) run via the TOR network–but bitcoin, the currency of choice on Silk Road, is also in their sights. (Also, Sens. Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill [are also getting in on the action.](http://www.fox2now.com/news/ktvi-missouri-lawmakers-want-to-shut-down-drug-dealing-website-20110607,0,2162224.story)) In [a recent letter](http://pastebin.com/VurF7dgr) Schimer and Manchin have asked the DOJ and DEA to shut down Silk Road, and “seize” the website’s domain. More to the point, in his press conference, [which you can watch here](http://www.wpix.com/videobeta/f76e263d-8ab3-4028-bf42-1b18c3eb9b5d/News/RAW-VIDEO-Sen-Schumer-On-Silk-Road), Schumer said that bitcoin is “an online form of money laundering used to disguise the source of money, and to disguise who’s both selling and buying the drug.”

As the DOJ and DEA plan a response and this issue develops, I though I’d offer some initial thoughts:

– Bitcoin is digital cash, and like any form of cash, it can be used for good or for ill. Because, like all cash, it is largely anonymous, it will be used by persons looking to evade official scrutiny. This could be contributing anonymously to unpopular causes like Wikileaks, but it could also mean buying drugs online. We don’t ban hard to trace paper cash because we understand that there’s nothing inherently bad about it; it’s what people do with it that’s can be problematic. Bitcoin should be treated the same way.

That said about what I think ought to be, what’s really interesting is what will be regardless of normative values. That is, can Silk Road and bitcoin “cracked down”?

– The federal government is no doubt going to go after Silk Road. This sets up another “natural experiment” like [the one presented by LulzSec taking bitcoin donations](http://techliberation.com/2011/06/03/bitcoin-silk-road-and-lulzsec-oh-my/). Given that the site exists as a [.onion an anonymous hidden service](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion) via TOR, will the feds be able to find who’s behind it and shut it down? We’ll see. They certainly won’t be able to “seize the domain” as Schumer and Manchin’s letter suggests. If a year from now the site is still operating, will we be able to say that government does not “[possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.](http://www.wired.com/wired/if/declaration/)”

– If the federal government seeks to go after bitcoin, it won’t be able to take down the network. That’s just impossible as far as I can tell. The weakest link in the bitcoin ecosystem, however, are the exchanges, like Mt Gox. These allow you to trade your bitcoins for dollars and vice versa. At this point, there’s not a lot you can buy with bitcoins, so the ability to trade them to a widely accepted currency is important.
According to Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of the bitcoin project, Mt Gox “is careful to comply with all anti-money-laundering laws and regulations.” I’d love to know more about this. As far as I can tell, we know very little about who runs Mt Gox and how they comply with the law.

– Even if the federal government is able to shut down Silk Road and exchanges like Mt Gox, we will quickly see others take their place. Silk Road will be supplanted by another anonymart ([to use Kevin Kelly’s phrase](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_stealthy_an.php)), and we’ll see a replay of the drug war we know too well from meatspace. As for exchanges, we’ll see new ones pop up, likely in jurisdictions with liberal banking laws, and it will be interesting to see if Congress tries to make it illegal for financial institutions and payment processors to deal with them, just as they’ve made it illegal to deal with offshore online casinos. What I hope we’ll see emerge is a properly licensed and legally compliant domestic exchange that is as committed to fighting money laundering as Citibank. That would certainly help test bitcoin’s legality. This [great paper by Reuben Grinberg](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1817857) that gives me hope that, for now at least, there’s nothing inherently illegal about trading bitcoins.

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Congress takes another stab at combating Rogue Websites with the PROTECT IP Act

by Ryan Radia on May 12, 2011 · 23 comments

Last November, I penned an essay on these pages about the COICA legislation that had recently been approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. While I praised Congress’s efforts to tackle the problem of “rogue websites” — sites dedicated to trafficking in counterfeit goods and/or distributing copyright infringing content — I warned that the bill lacked crucial safeguards to protect free speech and due process, as several dozen law professors had also cautioned. Thus, I suggested several changes to the legislation that would have limited its scope to truly bad actors while reducing the probability of burdening protected expression through “false positives.” Thanks in part to the efforts of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), COICA never made it a floor vote last session.

Today, three U.S. Senators introduced a similar bill, entitled the PROTECT IP Act (bill text), which, like COICA, establishes new mechanisms for combating Internet sites that are “dedicated to infringing activities.” I’m glad to see that lawmakers adopted several of my suggestions, making the PROTECT IP Act a major improvement over its predecessor. While the new bill still contains some potentially serious problems, on net, it represents a more balanced approach to fighting online copyright and trademark infringement while recognizing fundamental civil liberties.

Continue reading →

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Event Video: What Should Lawmakers Do About Rogue Websites?

by Ryan Radia on May 10, 2011 · 7 comments

POLITICO reports that a bill aimed at combating so-called “rogue websites” will soon be introduced in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Patrick Leahy. The legislation, entitled the PROTECT IP Act, will substantially resemble COICA (PDF), a bill that was reported unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee late last year but did not reach a floor vote. As more details about the new bill emerge, we’ll likely have much more to say about it here on TLF.

I discussed my concerns about and suggested changes to the COICA legislation here last November; the PROTECT IP Act reportedly contains several new provisions aimed at mitigating concerns about the statute’s breadth and procedural protections. However, as Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt, the new bill — unlike COICA — contains a private right of action, although that right may not permit rights holders to disable infringing domain names. Also unlike COICA, the PROTECT IP Act would apparently require search engines to cease linking to domain names that a court has deemed to be “dedicated to infringing activities.”

For a more in-depth look at this contentious and complex issue, check out the panel discussion that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and TechFreedom hosted last month. Our April 7 event explored the need for, and concerns about, legislative proposals to combat websites that facilitate and engage in unlawful counterfeiting and copyright infringement. The event was moderated by Juliana Gruenwald of National Journal. The panelists included me, Danny McPherson of VeriSign, Tom Sydnor of the Association for Competitive Technology, Dan Castro of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, David Sohn of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Larry Downes of TechFreedom.