My favorite quote(s) from this very brief article:
"Right now, the most recognizable Internet governance
body is a California-based non-profit company, the
International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN)."
"But developing countries want an international body,
such as the U.N.'s International Telecommunication
Union (ITU), to have control over governance -- from
distributing Web site domains to fighting spam."
- ferg
My favorite quote is:
"All countries want to counter spam -- unsolicited commercial messages that can flood email accounts by the hundreds and burden the web with unwanted traffic."
Especially in lite of the comment you posted and the fact that developing
countries seem to be the major sources of SPAM these days.
Of course, given all the good that the ITU has done for telecommunications
and RF Spectrum control.... (NOT!)
Finally, there's the issue of can the internet really be "governed". My
inclination is not. ICANN certainly is not "governing" the internet.
Sure, ICANN has some level of control over the creation of new TLDs and
is responsible for handing out addresses and protocol/port numbers at
the top level, but, ICANN doesn't approve or reject new protocols. They
don't control how packets are routed at any real operational level. They
don't set any real policies other than those for address allocation.
Nor would they really be able to if they tried. Further, ICANN gets
what little power it does have primarily from the consent of the
network operational community and general agreement that stable operations
within the ICANN framework is better than chaos. If it comes to a tug
of war between ICANN and ITU, it will be interesting to see if anyone
actually wins. How many operators will follow ICANN and how many will
follow ITU? How many will simply start running a different Internet?
How many other competing ANAs will develop in the process?
Interesting times in the Chinese sense of the term.
Owen
a) spam, not SPAM (which is a tasty luncheon meat from Hormel)
b) s/sources/entry points/ The vast majority of spam is American in nature.
I'm intrigued at the failure to distinguish between the web and email, given that spam is a messaging phenomenon, not a publishing phenomenon.
d/
It's actually a failure to distinguish the web from the Internet.
Scott W Brim wrote:
i was probably too cryptic. yes, they are using the term 'web' to mean 'the internet'.
the problem is that professional writing needs to be careful, and a failure at such a basic level as using web to apply to email does not bode well for the utility of the article...
d/
Dave, as you're in Apricot anyway .. there's an APDIP session today
evening that's discussing these ITU/WGIG issues.
http://igov.apdip.net/events/apricot2005/document_view
UNDP-APDIP Session@Apricot 2005/APNIC 19 in partnership with Internet
Governance Task Force of Japan
Venue: Room B1 on 2F, Kyoto International Conference Hall (KICH), Kyoto, Japan
When I hear Robert Mugabe talk about internet governance I don't really get the impression that he has the interests of the people of Zimbabwe at heart.
joelja
the report itself is linked to from
http://www.itu.int/wsis/wgig/index.html
Many of you may find it more interesting and
useful to read through and comment upon one
or two of the working papers posted here:
http://wgig.org/working-papers.html
I would hope that people with special expertise
in these areas might take the time to read one of
these working papers to ensure that they don't have major
inaccuracies. Remember, this is politics and in politics
perception often equals reality.
This is the list of topics they cover.
- Administration of Internet names and IP addresses
- Administration of the Root Server system
- Peering and Interconnection
- Telecommunications infrastructure, broadband access, convergence with
NGN
- Cyber security, cybercrime
- Competition policy, liberalization, privatization and regulations
- Multilingualization of Internet naming systems
- Spam
- Dispute Resolution
- Security of network and information systems
- Technical Standards
- Affordable and universal access
- Social dimensions and inclusion
- VoIP
- E-commerce
- Consumer, user protection and privacy
- Unlawful content and access protection
- Intellectual Property Rights (Executive Summary)
- Cultural and linguistic diversity
- Education and human capacity building
- National Policies and Regulations
A lot of the papers have major holes in them. But they are first
inputs, dont represent any kind of consensus at the WGIG and are open
for comment.
So please do send in your comments. I have, and other people nanogers
know (Bill Manning, Karl Auerbach etc) have as well
Of operational interest - Do note one particular set of comments -
such as the ones by Paul Wilson (DG of APNIC) ... the WGIG seems
rather interested in a set of proposals by Houlin Zhao at ITU-T,
proposals that in my opinion tend to treat IP addressing rather the
same way as telephone numbering. The RIR's original responses to this
are at http://www.nro.net
--srs
If the UN wants control of the INET WE invented. Let them build their own.
Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:
yOn Thu, 24 Feb 2005, William Warren wrote:
If the UN wants control of the INET WE invented. Let them build their own.
I think people get confused about who the stake holders in internet operation/governance really are... certainly ICANN allways was when I was actively observing it.
The stake holders with the most to lose are ordinary enduser consumers of interenet services. They just want to get their work / entertainment / communication done, and to the extent that technocrats, bureaucrats , crimnals , extremely greedy businesses , and rogue governments setup barriers that impede them from doing that they lose.
a message of 45 lines which said:
If the UN wants control of the INET WE invented.
Who is WE? ICANN? The US governement?