Who owns the Internet? We do!

[Marc Perkel]

I agree with you for the most part Dan in the we need some sort of
structure or organization to ensure the public gets the maximum
experience out of the Internet. However I feel that the Commercial Users
have a disproportionate stronger voice in this that the Non-Commercial
users and they are not representative of what's best for the future of
humanity.

Commercial interests are more focused on creating monopolies to make
money. They would squeeze us like the oil companies and credit card
companies. They would put the value of preventing illegal downloads over
free speech. They would want to monitor, regulate, spy, and manipulate
our communication. Similarly governments have different cultures and
values. In Iran people like me would be put to death. Women could be
stoned for getting online without a male supervisor to keep them out of
trouble. So we as the people of the world need to assert control and
prevent domination be commercial entities and government entities.

ICANN governs best when it governs least. We need to minimize rather
than to expand our regulatory role and only act to expand the
possibilities of what the Internet can provide. We aren't law
enforcement, nor an extension of government, nor are we the protectors
of corporate profits. We need to think through our role and to ensure
that non-commercial users are dominate.

Dan Krimm wrote:
> I've been mostly lurking here since moving on from my work with IP Justice,
> but the core of this idea seems sound, even for those of us who approach
> policy from a stance separate from (but not necessarily in conflict with)
> the spiritual experience.
>
> In economic terms, the precedent exists in infrastructure we often call
> "public utilities" (these can be services delivered directly by [local]
> government, or in a broader sense, services delivered by private companies
> but regulated by government in the public interest).  This often occurs in
> the realm of so-called "natural monopolies" where the structure of the
> market (high start-up costs, ever-lowering marginal costs) leads to
> incentives to have a single service provider (basically because duplicate
> or non-interfacing infrastructures are wasteful or less effective, and in
> some cases unnecessarily intrusive on public property).
>
> The main point here is that the Internet is no longer "an option" in order
> to live a productive life in the 21st Century Technological Society, any
> more than recusing oneself from centralized water delivery, electricity
> delivery, natural gas, and sewer systems.  Yes, you could carry water up
> from a river, burn a wood generator for electricity, purchase propane from
> retail stores, have an individual septic system, but these are far less
> efficient means of delivering these services than the central services,
> especially in urban contexts, and a modern society relies on the
> centralized infrastructure to lubricate the economy.
>
> The Internet surely represents a similar advance in communication
> infrastructure, and should be viewed in similar ways.
>
> In particular, it should be viewed as a proper domain of public regulation
> in the public interest.  And in my view, one of the primary public
> interests here is the general principle of "common carriage" which has
> precedents in public infrastructure for transportation (bridges, ferries,
> roads), but also extends to information services such as telephone and
> cable television service (yes, it already extends to telecommunications
> services in other technological domains).
>
> So I would argue that the public as a whole has a right to regulate such
> services to protect such public interests, even when specific services are
> owned and delivered privately.
>
>
> As for what institutions have standing to represent the public interest,
> well, that's a different question.  I personally would want to require some
> structural accountability to the general public (not just one subset of the
> public, and not on condition of tangential criteria of membership) in order
> for any relevant institution to have such standing.
>
> Structuring such accountability is the chief challenge confronting ICANN,
> and getting it right (or at least less wrong) seems more important than
> ever.  The big question is, who is "we" and how is "we" defined in legal
> and representative terms?
>
> Dan
>
>
> --
> Any opinions expressed in this message are those of the author alone and do
> not necessarily reflect any position of the author's employer.
>
>
>