Between ITU and ICANN
This morning I met with Victor Mayer-Schönberger at the JFK School of Government. We discussed governance issues and the Internet. Mayer-Schönberger is just finishing an article on the World Summit oin the Information Society (WSIS). During this summit the EU suggested that Internet governance issues be handled by a sui generis international institution. This institution would then be governmed by a basic charter of "rights" or qualities that Internet governance has to adhere to: openness, end-to-end...
The proposal was shot down by the US who felt that it was a bad idea, for reasons that are not clear. Mayer-Schönberger pointed out that if this had become international law, the result would have been that WSIS could have created a way to hold China and other dictatorships in check. They could then not design networks with heavy filtering, without violating the basic charter of Internet governance.
According to Mayer-Schönberger, then, the WSIS had within it's reach the possibility to restrain Chinese repression of the Internet, and they stopped it. Why? The formal reason might have been that the US was afraid that the Internet would come under the purvey of the ITU - connected to the UN. This would have been understandable. In the ITU we find a lot of countries that completely lack democratic legitimacy, and to allow them to govern the Internet is a horrible idea. But this was not the idea put forward by the EU - they did not want to choose between ICANN and ITU - they wanted to created a third alternative. But they were stopped - for what reason?
Mayer-Schönberger thinks that the interests of the Chinese government actually coincides with those of the large telecommunication companies in the US: they do not want to see end-to-end as a permanent quality of the Internet. They want to be able to control the networks, to prioritize traffic and de-commoditize connectivity.
We discussed at length the idea of end-to-end networks and the qualities the embody. Now, Mayer-Schönberger is not an unreserved fan of this design principle. He states that it seems clear that the end-to-end structure, the scale-free networks as well, seem adpated to incremental innovation - but not radical innovation. A strong believer in Stephen Jay Goulds model of punctuated equilibrium, Mayer-Schönberger believes that human innovation moves in large steps, and then remains in place. We should design our networks to accomodate this kind of innovation. But how? That is a hard question, but it seems as if we need new topologies to be able to strengthen this kind of innovation.
But how will these new networks look? One plausible idea that Mayer-Schöneberger works with is the idea of decentralised Napster-like networks where the computing resources are shared amongst a large number of different actors. Mayer-Schönberger has studied Second Life and other MMORPG to discern the architectural direction these gaming infrastructures are moving in. These games may well, in the future, allow for decentralised, radical innovation.