Internet Freedom

[Dan Krimm]

I am reading these appeals from Mohab and Hago with genuine empathy, and
yet some concern.  The short answer is that in the end there is no silver
bullet, yet there may be smaller opportunities for advancement to be
discovered and exploited along the way.

We live in a world where national sovereignty is still the central
organizing principle of public governance.  While we do have multinational
treaty organizations to help nations organize themselves collectively,
those treaties only have as much weight as nations place in them,
individually and collectively.

ICANN itself is a relatively weak organization, structurally, which may be
a blessing at this point as if it became powerful and simultaneously
captured by a small selection of nation stakeholders (at the expense of
other stakeholders), it could become a force for anti-democratic power.

Also, ICANN only addresses DNS at this point.  Even if a distributed
alternative DNS architecture were to be adopted, as Karl Auerbach and
others have discussed, there are still physical bottlenecks that can easily
be controlled by a national government.  The network topology is not
uniform, but rather it has "fat pipes and thin pipes" and "supernodes and
mini-nodes" that describe a sort of hierarchical structure.  The supernodes
and fat pipes are the bottlenecks, which makes it relatively easy to target
those choke-points.

The "information society" is not a coherent, intact governing institution
like a national government (not that all national governments can
necessarily be described as "coherent" -- but the most coherent ones tend
to be the most authoritarian as well).  So, there is no comprehensive
"legislation" that the information society can pass and enforce the way a
national government enforces its laws.

ICANN in particular can set certain kinds of narrow policy regarding domain
names, but the process for establishing that policy is extraordinarily
complicated even compared to free-wheeling democratic legislatures, and
ICANN's procedural protocols are often vague or incompletely defined.  We
seem to spend as much or more time discussing policy-making protocol as we
do discussing actual policy in the advisory councils, constituencies and
stakeholder groups, especially as ICANN is in the middle of a thorough
restructuring of these policy-making bodies.  Most of what civil society
attempts to do at ICANN is simply to push back at bad policy, rather than
advance policy that could actively sustain and support individual liberties
in a broad sense.

Some ideas, now:

 (1) The physical infrastructure of the networks is as important as any
software architecture.  In order to protect the physical networks from
control by a central authority, you need to explore "grid" or "mesh"
networks that are connected at the end-user node level, without any
hierarchical topology to create bottlenecks that can be used to enforce
access and control.

There is a limit to how much you can do with grid/mesh: you can't get
across an ocean without either a satellite link or a big cable across the
ocean floor, and those will continue to remain bottlenecks for the
indefinite future.  Also, each individual node needs its own power source,
and the density and proximity of nodes needs to reach a certain threshold
in order to get it working with any real effectiveness.  But, local
grids/meshes could be very useful for local organization, which is useful
entirely separately from international visibility.

 (2) Any infrastructure that is critical for business activity cannot be
"turned off" without unacceptable impact on the economy of a nation, and to
the extent that can be leveraged for public interest purposes it may limit
the extent to which a national government can prevent it (I'm thinking
about dial-up telephone, "POTS" or "plain old telephone service").  This
was important in Egypt, if I understand correctly, once the government had
blocked DNS addressing within the country -- it allowed some modest degree
of Internet access via Europe in order to get messages out of the country.

 (3) Encryption technology can be used to protect privacy of
communications, and to some extent privacy of identity, especially on
something like a grid/mesh network, so that even if government authorities
get onto that network they may not be able to get too far with it, without
a great deal of "human intelligence" first.

These are all possibilities to be explored on a unilateral bottom-up
technological basis, rather than from a top-down legislative basis.  Maybe
others here have other ideas as well.

Whatever "information society" is, it does not have control over national
legislation, so I don't think that is a fruitful path to explore at this
time.  To the extent that we have international governance (resolutions,
treaties, and enforcement), it is currently conducted mostly through
national representatives, respecting national sovereignty.  This particular
point is currently at issue in ICANN (I don't know what progress may have
been made this past week in that regard), but I don't think that one should
expect it to actively support the goals of (civilian) "Internet Freedom" in
a broad sense either way.  Either governments will gain more powerful
control through the GAC, in which case it becomes yet another lever of
national sovereign control, or else the GAC is kept in a more balanced role
with other stakeholder groups, in which case the variety of interests among
those various stakeholders often leads to impasses and stalemates rather
than strong prompt action in terms of policy in the public interest.

Either way, policy takes long stretches of time to be established, because
the differences are deep and often have the potential for broad impact, and
consensus is not guaranteed in those cases.  Lack of consensus prevents
movement in and of itself.  Not every stakeholder in "information society"
is concerned directly with civil liberties and the public interest (law
enforcement may have different ideas about the "public interest" than
political activists, for example -- commercial and intellectual property
interests may think differently about whose freedom is most important
compared to consumer and non-commercial groups, for another), so one cannot
look there for a unified front to protect Internet Freedom.

So, don't look to the "top level" of organization to solve these issues,
but dig down into the details and find the smaller opportunities.  Big
jumps are not going to happen, so look for the smaller steps forward.

Ultimately, this is an ongoing mission and the outcome is not assured
either way.  It requires engagement and persistence indefinitely, because
whatever individual battles might be resolved at any point in time,
tomorrow is always another day, and neither victory nor defeat can always
be guaranteed to endure.

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.



At 6:38 AM -0700 3/19/11, Hago Dafalla wrote:
>Dear friend.
>
>
>    We in the Arab world and third world the only thing available to us to
>express our will and our freedom from the oppression of dictators is the
>Internet. Crumbs rulers began to impose their control over the means of
>communication and not to allow people to express their aspirations to live
>in freedom and Alkarimz So we hope the information society to pass laws
>and legislation that protects the freedom of the internet and not withheld
>for no reason whatsoever.Any ideas?
>
>     Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
>
>   Thanks
>
>Hago Dafalla
>Sudan
>
>Listen
>Read phonetically
>
>
>
>--- On Fri, 18/3/11, Milton L Mueller <mueller at SYR.EDU> wrote:
>
>
>From: Milton L Mueller <mueller at SYR.EDU>
>Subject: Re: Internet Freedom
>To:
>Date: Friday, 18 March, 2011, 17:22
>
>Welcome Mohab. It is great to see people in Egypt trying to prevent
>another internet shutdown!
>
>Perhaps the best way is through constitutional protections that would
>establish political speech as a protected sphere, and deny your head of
>state the right to arbitrarily shut down the Internet or other media of
>communication.
>
>
>
>Another important step is to promote liberalization and competition in the
>telecommunication industry, so that the licensees are not subject to the
>direct orders of the government, and there is a more diverse environment
>among suppliers of service.
>
>
>
>Of course, these steps have to be institutionalized by Egyptians mainly,
>although much can be learned from other countries' experience.
>
>
>
>From: NCSG-NCUC [mailto:NCSG-NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Mohab Altlaity
>Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2011 3:19 AM
>To: NCSG-NCUC-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
>Subject: [NCSG-NCUC-DISCUSS] Internet Freedom
>
>
>
>Hello Everyone;
>This is Mohab Altlaity from Egypt ..
>I'm new to this mailing list ... i have just joined :) ..
>
>I'm not sure if you discussed this topic before or not ..
>It is about the Internet freedom ... how to prevent any country from
>stopping the Internet in their countries ..
>I wanna find a way to prevent what happened before "and can be done again"
>in some countries against the Internet activists ...
>
>Any ideas?
>
>
>
>Mohab Mohammad Altlaity
>Embedded SW Engineer,
>VIAS Egypt -Valeo Interbranch Automotive Software.
><http://www.valeo.com>http://www.valeo.com
>
>Mobile: 0106938463
>
>
>
>