Before we get all up in arms about governments taking monopoly, we should remind ourselves that the "bottom up" approach being championed here gave us the Google-Verizon open internet proposal in August. As I understand it, the proposal have implied net neutrality for wireline services but has an opt-out for wireless internet. So the bottom up approach is not a guarantee that it will produce better policies.
But on balance, the bottom up approach has certainly been good for the internet. I just want to keep it in perspective.
Think about it... the issue for wireline services is you can't just put in your own easily. Not an issue with wireless services. There is no special monopoly being given to wireless operators like wire operators.
I disagree. Google is completely wrong and self-serving here. Even evil.
It is important for people to realize the idea of "conservation of government". There are many areas of life that will be governed by rules, like it or not. If government does it, they will be rules set by government, and therefore having some accountability to the people, in democratic societies.
If government declines to be the rule-setter, private industry usually takes up the slack. Their rules have no accountability to individuals. But either way, the amount of government is conserved, only the basis for it and accountability of it change.
If the U.S. decided to abolish the FDA, for example, there would still be rules governing food quality in the United States. They would be rules set by consortiums of grocery store chains and meat packers and the like. "Walmart will buy meat only of this quality and no worse", whatever that quality level might be. The food protection rules didn't disappear, they just became divorced from accountability to the public.
Libertarians (Vint Cerf certainly is one, and corporations generally are as well) pronounce that shifting governance from government to corporations is good. Certainly it is in the corporate interest. As for good, any given shift could be good (in the sense that you could have a benevolent dictator, for a time), but in the aggregate, divorcing accountability from governance certainly results in worse governance (the average dictator is worse than the average elected representative).
The unelected, unaccountable, responsive-only-to-money Chamber of Commerce is not in fact the right entity to be deciding internet governance issues. Elected governments are.
While I agree with your general point, I disagree with the idea that there is currently any accountability in our government's regulatory bodies. Regulatory agencies (FDA, FCC, DMV, etc) are set up in theory to remove micromanaging burdens from our legislators, but in reality, they end up becoming law-making bodies that are shielded from political repercussions.
One of our biggest obstacles to correcting our governance is returning political accountability to the regulatory and bureaucratic bodies.
I don't think rules made by coercive government and rules made by industry are the only two possible choices.
If people voluntarily join organizations such as a community that has rules but that cannot be arbitrarily changed without consent and where individuals can leave, even taking their real estate out of the agreement, such an arrangement could still adopt all kinds of standards. This would not a coercive arrangement, but one that people voluntarily join to get the benefits of belonging.
One rule such a community might have could be that all members agree to only buy and sell food that meets certain standards. You would likely have many communities adopting different standards, many of which would likely be BETTER than one ALREADY watered down to satisfy industry.
With such arrangements, it would be possible for people to promote and enjoy standards of their choosing, without having the never-ending struggle over what those standards should be.
Why is it that we all must live be the same rules when many can live side by side? We seem to be ok with other nations choosing their own standards, but not our own countrymen. No, they must live lives designed by committee.
A voluntary rules making community could actually go much further than government can in making rules. This is not a problem when people can vote with their feet and simply end their membership when the rules get to be too much. Try doing that with government.
What would such a group look like? I'd really like to know how you would go about starting such a group to ensure net neutrality, but even your food example seems far-fetched: How would you coerce manufacturers to give you enough detail about the contents of their products and the production methods? It seems that any boycott-based group with standards significantly higher than the status quo would starve before it could get enough economic power to influence the mega-corporations they are trying to regulate.
It's an idea I really wish could work, but it commits the #1 libertarian fallacy of assuming that markets are free enough to be called capitalist.
how do you think organic food started? people decided that the FDA's labels for what is and is not acceptable was too granular so they created their own certification based on their own values.
I would argue that government regulation lowers quality in general because it creates an overhead for any competing entity. Consider if the government created a "free milk" program and payed for it with taxes. Instead of suppliers competing for the many quality levels that consumers are interested in the vast majority now only cater to one quality level: that set by regulation. What is easier to game? one customer (the regulator) or millions of competing customers?
> What is easier to game? one customer (the regulator) or millions of competing customers?
I'm not sure what you're asking here. It's quite clear to me that one regulatory body, which can hire inspectors and food-testers and use economies of scale to regulate an entire industry, is much less easy to fool than individuals purchasing milk, who cannot cost-effectively hire inspectors and food-testers and thus cannot evaluate the quality of the product AT ALL.
and another standard will soon arise because the same people who wanted to pay a premium for higher quality food are complaining that now that organic has been regulated the quality has decreased drastically. producers are gaming the rules.
Organic food production is regulated by the US government in part due to lobbying from commercial certifying agencies. Organic food's benefits to the consumer are also mostly imaginary. How does that make it a good example of successful non-governmental regulation?
Your "free milk program" example is far more than government regulation, so I'm not really sure why it belongs in this discussion. It seems to be a badly-executed straw-man argument.
Any such group is simply a niche market and one that would be more clearly defined and quantified than most, assuming its ever allowed to exist at all. All kinds of companies target niches all the time.
You say this idea assumes markets are free enough to be called capitalist? How does it do that exactly?
If the regulation from below imposes standards that are actually restricting for the big players in the market, they can simply ignore the consumers' wishes unless the barriers to entry and scaling up in that market are sufficiently low that the interested consumers are able to organize their own supplier to meet their demand. Clearly, this is not going to be a feasible method for regulating internet backbones, because it's far, far too expensive to set up your own tier 2 network with only grassroots funding.
You mention that governments are accountable to the people, probably because the people can vote. I don't see why a vote with a dollar is inferior to a vote on a ballot with respect to accountability.
In many cases, you have more choice for your politicians than for the businesses you deal with. For example, in they US you pretty much never have more than two choices for ISP, and since they are subject to almost identical market pressures, they usually end up being more similar than the two main political parties are in their treatment of big business.
And how does that negate people's ability to choose the products they will buy or keep companies from catering to specific portions of the market and thus caring very much how people vote with their dollars?
Geez, do I really have to spell it out for you? Politicians have to somehow get a majority vote. Voting with dollars would only requires one rich person to support a company, it doesn't matter if no one else pays them a dime. It's sort of the extreme inverse intention of most campaign finance laws.
I still can't see a problem here. A business with a single customer exists in an almost complete vacuum and doesn't influence the market. What's more it's very risky as its revenues aren't diversified. It's completely dependent on its only customer.
that's right. consumers can have a monopoly over a business too. in fact, I seem to recall there are a whole bunch of companies struggling to figure out how to please the customers of a single niche and that live or die depending on how well they do that.
Government accountability is a myth. Governments run into enormous debt, change pension systems, wage wars ... Where's the responsibility? Loosing elections isn't a serious consequence.
The problem with the idea of 'government' is that, every actual government of the world exists on a 'nation' basis. If US government takes over the Internet, there is not reason for Australia, France, China Russia governments not 'govern' the Internet
The result will be multiple national Intranets and political "internet borders".
ICANN is easily manipulated and/or a shill. As has been shown very recently with the domain confiscations, ICANN cannot be trusted. We need an organization that is similar to ICANN but totally transparent and directly accountable to the public without being even remotely connected to any government.
I have no idea how to implement such a body, but hopefully, someone more clever than myself will discover a way.
There is an inherent conflict with the idea that global top level domains (GTLDs) can be effectively managed without a matching global legal jurisdiction, which of course doesn't exist and won't exist anytime soon.
Using country code domains exclusively would have aligned the domain namespace with real-world legal jurisdictions and simplified or at least 'localized' these sorts of disputes.
In this alternate world you could still have domain mismanagement but it would exist in a scope that could be addressed within existing legal and political boundaries.
The existing situation with GTLDs, ICANN, and conflicting legal jurisdictions is a gordian knot.
Wikileaks highlights how governments' interest can differ from the "citizens of the Internet" (for lack of a better term). Of course governments do act as an important counterweight to keep corporations from abusing their monopolies on internet governments ....
From a governance perspective, who speaks for "Google users"?
Maybe I'm in the minority here but I'd rather governments have control here. At least I have a vote and rights in my government. I'm not a Google shareholder so Google, not so much.
I would prefer to keep control as decentralized as possible. To that end, I support sending loads of corporations to the internet governance meeting, as well as universities, non-profit groups, and random dudes with too much time on their hands.
It's fine for them to discuss things like improving rural internet access. That's legitimate. But if they get up to any authoritarian shenanigans, I want those discussions to get bogged down in endless arguments.
The inter-networks are too important to be governed by anyone, be they governments or companies. Government implies coercion and regulations, regardless of where it comes from.
Not that the regulators won't try, they will be adamant about their "right" to "bring order" over apparent chaos.
My understanding is that net-neutrality is only enforceable via government regulation. Meaning, that without the government mandating neutrality, the corporations would be free to break neutrality.
As is usual, to provide freedom to one group, one must limit the freedoms of another, and we usually use government to do that.
I agree with this sentiment, but have some reservations about government ability to maintain neutrality. As things are, government doesn't understand how the technology works, and are ill equipped to regulate something they know so little about.
The government doesn't know about anything in that sense. They rely on everyone else to make a stink. We decry lobbyists, but the EFF is a lobbying organization. Joining them helps to pass the legislation. Nothing could help them understand it.
While ISPs can stiff their customers, they have the option of switching. There is no escaping from legislation, however.
If there is a doctrine of "no regulation/no legislation", corporations would have less of an incentive to mess with the political process (less rent-seeking behavior).
Net neutrality, while ostensibly a pro-consumer piece of legislation, nonetheless opens the door for future regulation (and yes, of censorship) of this space.
The very premise of this article is totally ridiculous.
The beauty of the internet is that you can easily share vast amounts of digitized information with anyone without having to be in the same place.
Not that it's governed by X or Y. And the IGF doesn't govern it anyway.
In the end this forum is a total joke anyway, a pointless waste of money, much like many parts of the UN from which it stems. Any actual decisions are made elsewhere.
And even if it did matter why should we support a bunch of companies and academics taking part in this sort of thing? Who elected them? What if it were Zynga sitting on this committee instead of Google? Would anyone be outraged at their departure?
"Governments shouldn't have a monopoly on governance."
Isn't governance what governments are for? Granted, governments are dysfunctional in many ways, but suggesting governments let others govern seems a bit silly. Who else is going to govern? Should we let corporations sit on committees, next to officials, forgetting that officials were elected, and corporations were not?
There is no guarantee that companies are going to take care of our interests better than governments do. And let's not forget that governments are dysfunctional largely because of the influence that corporations themselves already exert on them.
All As do B, but not everyone that does B is an A. I don't need an organization with a geographic monopoly on police powers to run my son's little league.
>There is no guarantee that companies are going to take care of our interests better than governments do.
Straw-man. The argument isn't that companies are going to "take care of our interests", it's that both politicians and CEOs respond to self-interest, but at least firms have competition for our dollars, thus are incentivized on a continual basis to meet our wants.
The problem with the preceding is that government -- either intentionally, or as an unintended consequence -- helps to constrain the competitive market pressures.
I would put a lot more stock in the "net neutrality" legislation advocates if they even bothered to look at what extant legislation might be contributing to the hypothetical problem before agitating for increased government manipulation of the market.
Further:
- Firms can operate in different markets; I can choose my barber independently from my grocer. With governments there are often competing factors in making electoral decisions, such that we are left with choosing the lesser of the evil package-deals.
- Multiple firms can service different sets of preferences. We don't need to vote on what color tie to wear, and then have the minority yield to majority's preference.
You missed the obvious, but none the less ignored, idea (at least in the US we pretend) that governments govern with the consent of the people. Perhaps someone wouldn't mind speaking up?
While I somewhat agree with you, I do think that in the age of the pervasiveness of the Internet, we are moving to a time when sovereign governments have (if only) slightly less relevance than they did before. Sovereigns govern groups of people pretty much by geographic location based on 'citizenry' of areas where they reside/work/were born. With the rise of the Internet we now have new groups of people that have come together not based on geographic locations, but on shared ideas, interests, financial ventures, and what have you. These people can come together from all over the world online and may have more to do with each other than each members respective citizenry. To assume that sovereigns can/will/should act in the interest of this emerging enterprise is fairly far fetched in my opinion. Corporate interests may not defend them either, but still, on the Internet large corporations are almost sovereigns unto themselves. It'd be nice if some of these interest groups could have a/some seat(s) on this commission to help voice the interests of people who continually operate without respect to sovereign borders online.
I've said it before...I'm fairly confident the government will subsidize a nation-wide 5th generation wireless technology for free internet for all. It'll likely be restricted to just 80/8080 traffic, be throttled, and of course governed and monitored by the government. Since it's completely voluntary to use this network, it breaks no laws since by using it, you will grant them permission to snoop if they so choose.
Call me crazy, but I think it's inevitable...likely to go down 10-15 years from now.
In Australia our government is rolling out a nationwide fibre to the home network called, National Broadband Network or NBN.
It isn't free but the capital expenditure is 100% subsidised by the NBN Corporation (A govt owned corporation that has a few very large corporate shareholders).
To me, this story was interesting to HN not because Google was commenting, but because Vint Cerf was. When he writes about Internet governance, I listen. The UN forms committees and working groups all the time; I'm not going to sign a petition to one of them unless someone I trust on the matter feels so strongly about it.
Translated from corporate speak: "Entities voted for by the people, and representing the people's interests shouldn't have a monopoly on Internet governance. I.e, the people, shouldn't have a monopoly on Internet governance".
Now, you could argue that the some/all governments represent the people badly. But this is an argument/call to arms to demand BETTER representation, not for giving up control to other, opaque, entities.
But on balance, the bottom up approach has certainly been good for the internet. I just want to keep it in perspective.
References for the Google-Verizon deal:
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/joint-policy-...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10920871