I’ve been looking into the cybersecurity issue lately, and I finally took the time to do an in-depth read of the [Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency](http://csis.org/publication/securing-cyberspace-44th-presidency) report, which is frequently cited as one of the soundest analyses of the issue. It was written by something of a self-appointed presidential transition commission called the “Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th President,” chaired by two congressmen and with a membership of notables from the IT industry, defense contractors, and academia, and sponsored by CSIS.
What I was struck by is the complete lack of any verifiable evidence to support the report’s claim that “cybersecurity is now a major national security problem for the United states[.]” While it offers many assertions about the sorry state of security in government and private networks, the report advances no reviewable evidence to explain the scope or probability of the supposed threat. The implication seems to be that the authors are working from classified sources, but the “if you only knew what we know” argument from authority didn’t work out for us in the run up to the Iraq war, and we should be wary of it now.
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Although I won’t be able to get around to penning a formal review of it for a couple more weeks, I was excited to get a copy of Milton Mueller‘s new book, Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, in the mail today. I looks like a terrific treatment of some important cyberlaw issues. Here’s the summary:
Mueller identifies four areas of conflict and coordination that are generating a global politics of Internet governance: intellectual property, cyber-security, content regulation, and the control of critical Internet resources (domain names and IP addresses). He investigates how recent theories about networked governance and peer production can be applied to the Internet, offers case studies that illustrate the Internet’s unique governance problems, and charts the historical evolution of global Internet governance institutions, including the formation of a transnational policy network around the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society).
As a fan of Net-related political taxonomies and philosophical paradigms, I couldn’t help but quickly jump ahead to the very interesting concluding chapter on “Ideologies and Visions,” in which Mueller examines “the political spectrum of Internet governance.” There, on page 268, I was very excited to see this statement in his section on “Elements of Denationalized Liberalism”: Continue reading →
If I ever had any hope of “keeping up” with developments in the regulation of information technology—or even the nine specific areas I explored in The Laws of Disruption—that hope was lost long ago. The last few months I haven’t even been able to keep up just sorting the piles of printouts of stories I’ve “clipped” from just a few key sources, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET News.com and The Washington Post.
I’ve just gone through a big pile of clippings that cover April-July. A few highlights: In May, YouTube surpassed 2 billion daily hits. Today, Facebook announced it has more than 500,000,000 members. Researchers last week demonstrated technology that draws device power from radio waves.
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Internet governance is often thought of as ICANN and domain names, but the Internet Governance Forum, a body of the UN, takes a broad approach. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking on a panel about online safety at IGF-USA, a national body that reports to the full IGF. We’ll discuss the recent NTIA OSTWG “Youth Safety on a Living Internet” report, among other online safety issues such as sexting, cyberbullying, and proposed state legislation.
UPDATE: Here’s a summary and video excerpt of my presentation.
Here’s the panel:
Moderator: Danny Weitzner, Associate Administrator, Office of Policy Analysis and Development U.S. Department of Commerce
Panelists:
- Michael W. McKeehan, Executive Director, Internet and Technology Policy, Verizon
- Braden Cox, Policy Counsel, NetChoice Coalition
- Anne Collier, via remote participation [Invited]
- Jennifer Hanley, Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)
- Stacie Rumenap, Stop Child Predators
Respondents:
- Morgan C. Little, Elon University Graduate, Political Science, American University
- Jane Coffin, NTIA: comments on some of the global activities
- Bessie Pang, Executive Director, POLCYB
Check it out and come for the other panels on cybersecurity, cloud computing and global governance for governments. Registration is free.
The way Ben Kunz puts it in a new Business Week article, “Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many delivered via the Internet. They are designed to keep you wedded to a particular company’s ecosystem and set of products.”
I like Ben’s article a lot because it recognizes that “
walling off” and a “widening universe” are not mutually exclusive. If only policymakers and regulators acknowledged that. They must know it, but admitting it means acknowledging their limited relevance to consumer well-being and a need to step aside. So they feign ignorance.
Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve always regarded a “Splinternet” as a good thing that means more, not less, communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and marketing to kids.
Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of consumers and investors. We won’t likely talk of an “Internet” with a capital-“I” and a reverent tremble the way we do now, because what matters is not the Internet as it happens to look right now, but underlying Internet technology that can just as easily erupt everywhere else, too.
Meanwhile, new application, device and content competition within and across networks disciplines the market process and “regulates” things far better than the FCC can. Yet the FCC’s very function is to administer or artificially direct proprietary business models, which it must continue to attempt to do (and as it pleads for assistance in doing in the net neutrality rulemaking) if it is going to remain relevant. I described the urgency of stopping the agency’s campaign recently in “Splinternets and cyberspaces vs. net neutrality,” and also in the January 2010 comments to the FCC on net neutrality.
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White House cybersecurity chief Mike McConnell had a 1,400-word piece in the Washington Post on Sunday in which he stressed a public-private partnership as the key to a robust cyber-defense. One paragraph caught my attention, though:
We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
I’m not sure what he’s talking about, and I’d love if a knowledgeable reader would chime in. I’m not sure how such a spoof-proof geolocation system would work without a complete overhaul of how the internet works.
Lots of good things in The Washington Post today following up on U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s historic address last week about the importance of global Internet freedom. First, The Post has published a powerful supporting statement from Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, entitled, “Tear Down These Virtual Walls.” Bildt notes that:
Two decades ago a wall made of concrete, built to divide the free and unfree, was torn down. Today it is the freedom of cyberspace that is under threat from regimes as keen as dictatorships past to control and limit the possibilities of their citizens. They are trying to build firewalls against freedom. At the end of the day, I am convinced they are fighting a losing battle — that cyber walls are as certain to fall as the walls of concrete once did.
He then goes on to argue that, following Secretary Clinton’s address last week, “We should now forge a new transatlantic partnership for protecting and promoting the freedoms of cyberspace. Together, we should call for all these walls to be torn down.” He continues:
Much like the way the rule of the law is critical to protecting the freedoms we enjoy as citizens in our societies, and international law protects the peace between our nations, we must seek to shape the rules that will protect the rights and the freedom of cyberspace.
Importantly, The Washington Post itself also editorialized today about “The Internet War.” Continue reading →
Here in Washington, DC we’re finally experiencing a changing of the seasons. The summer heat is retreating as cool , autumn air invades. It’s a changing of the guard–just like what’s happening to ICANN with today’s expiration of its oversight by the U.S. government. Only its a spring-like blossoming for ICANN.
The Department of Commerce has allowed the JPA to expire, thus completing the transition of DNS management to ICANN. There were many skeptics that wanted to give ICANN more time to develop permanent mechanisms for true accountability. Others were concerned about the threat of capture, especially on hearing proposals from the United Nations and European Commission to assume control over a newly-independent ICANN.
Over at the NetChoice blog, Steve DelBianco says that we should be pleasantly surprised to see the new Affirmation of Commitments unveiled by ICANN today, because it does much to address both of those concerns. It creates review mechanisms for accountability, new domains, and domains in non-Latin characters (IDNs).
These new “review teams” could bring to ICANN something similar to the ‘official review’ we have for football and tennis. For close, controversial decisions, this framework could help ICANN to correct a bad call and get back on-track. I can see a couple of areas where these new review teams can have an impact right away:
I’m glad to see that the security review team has a forward-looking focus on making sure the DNS stays up 24-7, around the world, even under increasing security threats and a major expansion of top-level domains.
The review team for competition and consumer choice might finally get ICANN to get its registrars to fulfill the role they were designed for: to offer consumers a choice of all top level domains—not just the ones that a registrar prefers to sell.
So it seems more like a Spring-like flowering than a Fall dropping of the leaves. ICANN gets independence, plus there’s a balanced framework that brings all governments into the oversight process alongside private sector stakeholders, with a sharpened focus on security and serving global internet users.
Louis XVI
Americans often quote, or allude to, the French expression “Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!” But few realize that this apparent paradox was meant quite literally by the French:From its first official proclamation in 1422 upon the coronation of Charles VII to 1774, when Louis XV finally died, the term expressed the abstract constitutional concept that sovereignty transfered from the old king (the first “Le Roi“) to the new king (the second “Le Roi“) the very instant the old king died. Thus, France was literally never without a king until until the monarchy was finally dis-established in early 1793. When Louis XVI was guillotined later that year, his death was acclaimed simply with “Le Roi est mort!”
Tomorrow, September 30, ICANN’s Joint Project Agreement with the Department of Commerce finally terminates. “Le JPA est mort!” But a new agreement (the “Affirmation”) will take its place, apparently providing more accountability than the JPA ever did. Vive l’Affirmation! There may come a day when, like Louis XVI, ICANN’s JPA-like agreement with Commerce terminates and nothing is there to replace it, but that day has not yet come.
Grant Gross has a great piece on this new agreement. Grant extensively quotes my PFF Adjunct Fellow (my ICANN mentor and former ICANN board member) Mike Palage, who explained that the JPA’s successor (JPA II?):
will tell [ICANN] what it should do, but it can’t legally bind them [much like past agreements]… It gives the appearance in the global community that the U.S. government has recognized that ICANN has done what is was supposed to do. What it’s also doing is … it’s putting in some accountability mechanisms.”
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