http://www.npr.org/2012/08/09/158482024/foreign-policy-the-un-takes-on-the-i... Foreign Policy: The UN Takes On The Internet by REBECCA MACKINNON [image: Terry Kramer, U.S. ambassador to the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT), speaks on August 1 at the Information Technology Council in Washington, D.C.] Enlarge<http://www.npr.org/2012/08/09/158482024/foreign-policy-the-un-takes-on-the-internet>Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Terry Kramer, U.S. ambassador to the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT), speaks on August 1 at the Information Technology Council in Washington, D.C. text size A<http://www.npr.org/2012/08/09/158482024/foreign-policy-the-un-takes-on-the-i...> A<http://www.npr.org/2012/08/09/158482024/foreign-policy-the-un-takes-on-the-i...> A<http://www.npr.org/2012/08/09/158482024/foreign-policy-the-un-takes-on-the-i...> August 9, 2012 *Rebecca MacKinnon is a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a former CNN bureau chief in Tokyo and Beijing, co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices, and author of *Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom*.* On Aug. 2, the U.S. House of Representativespassed<http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/242007-house-urges-obama...> a resolution <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hconres127> urging the White House to stop an obscure U.N. agency from asserting greater control over the Internet. It is the "consistent and unequivocal policy of the United States," the lawmakers affirmed<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hconres127/text>, "to promote a global Internet free from government control and preserve and advance the successful multistakeholder model that governs the Internet today." President Barack Obama's administration sometimes finds itself at odds with members of Congress who oppose nearly everything the United Nations does on principle. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recentlycomplained<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-24/clinton-hits-black-helicopters-crow...> of "black helicopter" conspiracy theorists harming the national interest after they blocked U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty for the second time. When it comes to the Internet, however, Congress, the White House<http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/260214/us_will_push_for_open_m...> , technology companies<http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2012/08/google-applauds-bipartisan-re...>, and civil liberties groups<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-harris/internet-governance_b_1643856.ht...> are all on the same page: All agree that the United Nations — a body representing the interests of governments — should not be given control over a globally interconnected network that transcends the geography of nation-states. The Internet is too valuable to be managed by governments alone. Yet there is less agreement over how well the alternative "multistakeholder" model of Internet governance is working — or whether it is really serving all of us as well as it might. The immediate threat to the Internet as we know it is the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT)<http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx> scheduled for December in Dubai by the International Telecommunication Union<http://www.itu.int/en/Pages/default.aspx> (ITU), a U.N. body whose remit has thus far been limited to global telephone systems. Members meet behind closed doors. Their policy proposals were until recently accessible only to members — until activists forced transparency upon them through a website called "WCITLeaks<http://wcitleaks.org/>." The leaked documents reveal how a number of governments — in league with some old-school telecommunications companies seeking to regain revenues lost to the Internet — are proposing to rewrite global international telecommunications regulations <http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/itr/> in ways that opponents believe will corrode, if not destroy, the open and free nature of the Internet. (For readers wanting to delve into details, a number of nonprofit organizations including the Center for Democracy and Technology<https://www.cdt.org/issue/itu> and the Internet Society <http://www.internetsociety.org/wcit/> have published analyses of the leaked documents and other recent ITU statements.) A number of countries, including Russia and China, have put forward proposals to regulate aspects of the Internet like "crime" and "security" that are currently unregulated at the global level due to lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens' rights. Other proposals focus on changes to who handles technical coordination and the setting of standards that enable all the devices, networks, and software across the Internet to communicate and connect with one another. Most of those technical coordination functions are currently handled by a constellation of institutions whose doors are open to all groups with a "stake" in the Internet's future: engineers, activists, unaffiliated individuals, and corporate and government representatives. These institutions are not exactly household names. Only a tiny fraction of the billion-plus people on the planet who increasingly depend on the Internet have ever heard of the U.S.-based nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) <http://icann.org/>, which coordinates the global domain-name system, the collection of regional Internet registries<http://www.nro.net/about-the-nro/regional-internet-registries> that coordinate IP addresses, or the Internet Engineering Task Force<http://www.ietf.org/> (IETF), which develops global technical standards so that devices and software all around the world can interoperate with one another — let alone any of the other organizations that coordinate Internet-related resources and standards. This governance ecosystem has worked astonishingly well in managing the Internet's exponential growth, largely because the system is so open and decentralized that any person anywhere on Earth with engineering or software-programming skills can invent new software applications, devices, and other networked technologies that can all interconnect with one another without needing to obtain permission or buy a license from anybody. Some other ITU proposals would shift some of these organizations' roles to the ITU itself, which — because it primarily serves the interests of U.N. member states and excludes other stakeholders in its decision-making processes — will reflect a bias toward centralization, bureaucracy, predictability, and control. This would inevitably corrode if not destroy the Internet's openness and permission-free qualities that have made the Internet such a powerful platform for innovation and empowerment. This is by no means, however, the first attempt by powerful governments to assert power through the ITU. China, Russia, and many developing countries have complained for nearly two decades that the new, nongovernmental multistakeholder institutions are dominated by Americans and Western Europeans who manipulate outcomes to serve their own commercial and geopolitical advantage. These critiques converge with the interests of former and current state-owned phone companies wanting to restore revenues of yore before email and Skype wiped out the need for most international phone calls. "There is still a continual theme that the glories of the past in terms of the telco monopolies of decades ago can somehow be reconstructed within the landscape of the Internet," writes Geoff Huston<http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-07/carriagevcontent.html>, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Center. Doing so might also raise government revenues in some places, and thus a number of developing-country governments have lined up behind Russia, China, and other authoritarian regimes in support of empowering the ITU. To continue reading this article, visit ForeignPolicy.com<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/08/the_united_nations_and_the_...> . -- Glenn McKnight mcknight.glenn@gmail.com skype gmcknight twitter gmcknight Http://www.globalcatalysts.com http://newsocialmedia.wordpress.com
Hi Glenn, I'm running for the North American RALO ALAC Rep, not writer for Foreign Policy, so I'm going to skip over the low hanging fruit like whether the ITU is an obscure UN agency and so forth. The At-Large issue is the ALAC advice to the corporation board ... will it help the board or ... not, and the NARALO issue is which of its candidates to elect, representing the region, which will best contribute to the ALAC authoring advice which will help the Board. You may recall that the US DoC/NTIA issued a Request for Information on the IANA Function, a NOTICE under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). The response of the CEO, and presumably the Board, a COMMENT under the APA, viewed the IANA Functions as integral to the larger role of the contractor (ICANN). The views of then-CEO Beckstrom were endorsed by the ALAC in its COMMENT. The DoC/NTIA received several comments which offered a significantly different view on the contractual dependency of the IANA Functions and other functions exercised by the contractor (ICANN). I wrote one, co-signed by Beau Brendler and Jean-Jacques Subrenat, as did Bill Manning and Dimtry Burkov. You may also recall that the DoC/NTIA rejected the theory offered in the Beckstrom letter and subsequently published a Request for Proposals in the Federal Register for a competitive award of the IANA Function, independent of the other roles carried out by the current contractor. The point I'm attempting to make is that agreement isn't advice, and the ALAC, which includes a candidate in the current election, agreed with a view rejected by government -- its advice did not help the Board. Obviously, which candidate this RALO elects as its ALAC Rep can have an effect on the counsel available to the Board from the ALAC. This is a long note, and I've not even gotten to the thicket of interests, issues and choices that eventually do present the opportunity for ALAC to advise the Board -- possibly not in agreement with the prevailing expressions of interest and framing of issues and consequences of choices. I'll take these up in what I hope will be a two cups of coffee note, like this one, tomorrow, or the next day I have network access, somewhere on the north shore of Lake Superior. Eric Brunner-Williams Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012
Hi Glenn, This is the continuation of the note I sent the na-discuss list yesterday. As a reminder, I'm running for the North American RALO ALAC Rep, not writer for Foreign Policy, so I'm going to skip over the low hanging fruit like whether the ITU is an obscure UN agency and so forth. The fundamental issue for the contractor (ICANN) exercising delegated rule making authority from the DoC/NTIA (Froomkin theory) or as a sui generis public-private multi-stakeholder actor (Simms theory) are not identical. No court has decided which theory, Professor Froomkin's, or Outside Counsel Simms's, is correct, so one needs to consider both. If ICANN exercises delegated rule making authority, then ICANN needs to advise the DoC/NTIA on what issues raised by third party governments present no technical or administrative challenges to the current operational practice. This may, as advice must, in theory, be inconsistent with the government's current position of record as it enters discussion with other governments. If ICANN is sui generis -- and Mr. Simms' theory appears to have been holed below the waterline earlier this year when the government held competitive bidding through the GSA for the IANA Function, not once, but twice -- then it need not, in theory, advise the government on issues which do not have operational or contractual consequences. It may decline to offer advice which may be inconsistent with the government's current position. This then, whether or not to attempt to form advice which may be not a mere echo or paraphrase of the government's current position, is a "choice of theory of ICANN" question.
Glenn, The continuation of the note I sent the na-discuss list earlier was truncated* -- this is the conclusion of that note. The first fragment ended with this para: "This then, whether or not to attempt to form advice which may be not a mere echo or paraphrase of the government's current position, is a "choice of theory of ICANN" question." A restatement of this, also from the Froomkin-Simms series of articles in the Lewis and Clark Technology Law Review, is whether one views the contractor as exercising government agency, or not. In my view, the contractor exercises government agency. A widely held view is that ICANN is already, by some unidentified process, been made independent of the USG, and so exercises no government agency. As I mentioned in the prior fragment, this view is difficult to reconcile with the first competitive tender of the IANA Function contract since the initial, non-competitive award to USC/ISI decades ago, as well as the relatively brief period -- 36 months -- of the award to the incumbent contractor. As a candidate running for the North American RALO ALAC Rep, my plain view on the "choice of theory of ICANN" question is that ICANN "exercises government agency." I think the corporation has a duty to advise the DoC/NTIA on what issues raised by third party governments present no technical or administrative challenges to the current operational practice. I think the ALAC has a consequent duty to advise the Board on the issues. As I noted before, advice may be inconsistent with the Board's, and the government's current positions of record on the issues. In sum, thus far, my first note addressed the question of whether there is an issue relevant to the choice of candidates, and this, my second note, in two accidental parts, addressed the question of whether the ALAC has a duty to advise on the issues. In my next note (and I do hope I can wrap this up in just one more "two cup note") I'll briefly point out what advice I think the Board, and the government, require from the By Laws entity tasked to provide advice reflecting the public interest unrestricted by territorial concerns. Eric Brunner-Williams Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012 * I was in Wawa (Ojib for "goose") Ontario. Downstream bandwidth was adequate for POP, upstream bandwidth was apparently not, and of course, sitting around for a sequence of HTTP POSTs to complete was out of the realm of endurable wastes of time.
On 10 August 2012 09:12, Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@abenaki.wabanaki.net>wrote:
You may recall that the US DoC/NTIA issued a Request for Information on the IANA Function, a NOTICE under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). The response of the CEO, and presumably the Board, a COMMENT under the APA, viewed the IANA Functions as integral to the larger role of the contractor (ICANN).
The views of then-CEO Beckstrom were endorsed by the ALAC in its COMMENT.
The DoC/NTIA received several comments which offered a significantly different view on the contractual dependency of the IANA Functions and other functions exercised by the contractor (ICANN). I wrote one, co-signed by Beau Brendler and Jean-Jacques Subrenat, as did Bill Manning and Dimtry Burkov.
You may also recall that the DoC/NTIA rejected the theory offered in the Beckstrom letter and subsequently published a Request for Proposals in the Federal Register for a competitive award of the IANA Function, independent of the other roles carried out by the current contractor.
And then, after all that hemming and hawing, the IANA contract was eventually awarded to.... the current contractor. Given the lack of transparency on all sides, we have no way of knowing whether the USG rejection of the original ICANN position was on genuine philosophical grounds, political gamesmanship vis the EU and ITU, or simply trying to extract more concessions from ICANN. But the end result was the status quo. The effect on this process of Beckstrom's letter, the ALAC agreement with it, or any ancillary comments is impossible to determine but was likely negligible. The point I'm attempting to make is that agreement isn't advice, and the
ALAC, which includes a candidate in the current election, agreed with a view rejected by government -- its advice did not help the Board.
I am puzzled by the logical leap from "the ALAC's point of view being rejected by the US government", to "its actions were unhelpful or the wrong thing to do". I am quite sure I -- and many of you -- hold many personal beliefs that are contrary to various facets of US (or for that matter, Canadian or any) government policy. Expressing those beliefs is hardly unhelpful, and sometimes it is absolutely necessary. One thing is for certain, though... ALAC's bylaw-defined role is to advise ICANN, not the US government. Our advice to ICANN on other matters -- most notably on the excesses of over-zealous trademark protection and use of the DNS redirection as a tool of law enforcement -- would similarly be rejected. But that does not make it wrong (let alone unhelpful) to provide such advice. In our comments on the GAC "scorecard" on the gTLD program, the ALAC sometimes sided with the governments (to the chagrin of some of our colleagues in civil society). But we also frequently pushed back, agreeing with the established ICANN positions as being closer to what we perceived as the global public interest. And sometimes we suggested a middle ground between the two. What ALAC *has* done -- something in which I have played a significant role -- is markedly improving the relationship between ALAC and governments within the ICANN sphere. I was one of the co-authors of the first-*ever*joint GAC-ALAC statement, on gTLD applicant support. That effort produced results, changing previously-firm ICANN's policy; having that kind of results-producing collaboration happen was more important that having my signature on it. And more collaborative work is yet to come, as we research areas of common concern such as ICANN's lack of transparency and its difficulty in enforcing its own contracts. Cheers, - Evan
And then, after all that hemming and hawing, the IANA contract was eventually awarded to.... the current contractor.
It would have been pretty amazing if they awarded it to anyone else, given the extremely specialized knowledge involved. I agree that it's really hard to tell what the point of the exercise was. There's been a long running quiet discussion about separating the DNS zone part of IANA from the much less political ports and parameters part. I can't tell whether this was part of the exercise either. R's, John
John,
It would have been pretty amazing if they awarded it to anyone else, given the extremely specialized knowledge involved. I agree that it's really hard to tell what the point of the exercise was.
You know that Verisign implements the changes recommended by the IANA after the DoC approves the IANA recommended change to the root zone. Had Verisign chosen to tender a competitive bid, factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would have been determinative. Similarly, had the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (and also the .US operator) chosen to tender a competitive bid, again, factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would have been determinative. I didn't expect VGRS to risk an increase of the the competition policy interest of the DoJ for a minor dollar value contract. Nor did I expect NeuStar to risk its 2012 round gTLD applications -- own and tenant -- for a minor dollar value contract. I suggest that "the point of the exercise" was: 1. establish that the contract for the IANA Functions is severable from all other roles of the government contractor currently responsible for address and names policy coordination, and rules for the allocations, uses, and recovery of addresses and names; 2. inform the de facto sole source provider of address and names policy coordination, and rules for the allocations, uses, and recovery of addresses and names, of certain long-standing deficiencies in its performance; 3. inform other governments that the period of administrative delay in changes to A and NS records in the IANA root zone file for the purpose of compelling obligations from foreign governments to the current contractor is definitively ended, with metrics in place to detect administrative, and other sources of delay(s). See #2, supra; 4. provide a 36 month notice to potential competitive providers of address and names policy coordination, and rules for the allocations, uses, and recovery of addresses and names, ensuring the government the best effort of the current contractor during the tender period, or a prepared, alternative contractor during the subsequent contract period. Thanks for the comment. Eric Brunner-Williams Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012
Had Verisign chosen to tender a competitive bid, factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would have been determinative.
Similarly, had the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (and also the .US operator) chosen to tender a competitive bid, again, factors other than the extremely specialized knowledge of the incumbent contractor would have been determinative.
Acually, based on correspondence with IANA people, it is my impression that putting updates into the root zone and sending it along to Verisign is the easy part. Small countries sometimes send in requests to make foolish or impossible changes, and tactful negotiations are required to get to something reasonable since they can't tell countries that they're being stupid. Also, there is a constant stream of updates from the IETF to the ports and parameter registries, and I can say from personal experience that IANA has a lot of specialized expertise there, too. The obvious thing for a competing bidder to do would be to hire current or former IANA staff, but there's definitely an expertise issue beyond what Verisign and Neustar already do. That said, I agree with your theory about what DoC was doing. They've made it quite clear for a very long time that they're not going to use access to the root to pressure other countries. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
Hi Glenn, This is the third part of the note I sent the na-discuss list on the 10th. My first note addressed the question of whether there is an issue relevant to the choice of candidates, my second note, in two accidental parts, addressed the question of whether the ALAC has a duty to advise on the issues. In this note I'll briefly point out what I think is in the public interest unrestricted by territorial concerns, and can be communicated as formal advice, to the Board, and government. Unfortunately, the mistake as to cause for the growth of the internet has to be dealt with, as taken at face value ordinarily sane people start saying things about the UN that used to just decorate rural billboards erected by the John Birch Society, or merely recite the deregulatory mantra that has lead to market failure in so many areas of the economy. Senator Ron Wyden (D OR) chairs the Congressional Internet Caucus. He claims the absence of regulation is the primary cause for the growth of network attached devices. The importance of the mistake as to cause is that "growth" appears to be objective (a sequence of numbers increasing non-linearly over time), and is argued in the Wyden narrative to be the primary cause for "innovation" and material and cultural well-being. I've the impression that this is the "standard narrative" in industry in North America. The better analysis is that NIC prices dropped from the tens of thousands of dollars for the VAX 11/780 (I bought several for SRI's facilities in the mid-80s), to unpriced single-chip elements of the standard single board computer. Moore's Law was not restricted to NIC components, nor was it restricted to those NIC components the East Asian winners of the single board integration economic competition selected for their North American sales. The price of attaching a device to a network dropped under a force as fundamental as gravity, unrelated to the public policy of any national business, research or commodity computer market, in particular, the climate in Silicon Valley, or Inside the Beltway. The Wyden narrative can then only survive if attachment to networks in national market is sensitive to regulation. In my years of working through the IETF (my first contribution was to RFCs 1122 and 1123, though earlier I'd written the standard socket API description), I've not heard that device attachment rates correlated to any but draconian policies (e.g., Burma, North Korea), and the determining factor generally was business uptake and consumer discretionary spending. In short, its all about declining manufacturing cost and access to capital, not the presence, or absence, of the modern administrative state. If regulation cannot be shown to have measurable effect, then the public interest is not necessarily identical to the the corporate, and momentary* administration interests in deregulation. Whether the regulatory oversight arises from the FTC (consumer protection), the FCC (telecommunications regulation), the DoJ (competition regulation), the DoC (through, or independent of ICANN), or some other agency of government**, alone or in combination, or through agencies of the United States and one or more additional governments, the claim that regulation will have measurable adverse effect is unsupported except by ideology or economic interest in the absence of regulatory oversight. Thus the ALAC advice to the Board should be to distance itself from the claims, unsupported by data, that deregulation, not DARPA dollars leading manufacturers down the Moore's Law manufacturing cost curve, created the current, unequal, but regionally pervasive, distributed computing capability. Further, the ALAC advice to the Board should be that regulation, by one or more agencies, of one or more governments, presents no intractable issue, and that as the incumbent contractor, it can accommodate transition to a contractual model with two or more public authorities. I know this all comes down to the ITU boogie man, it has been this way for decades of fencing between the connectionless (data) and the connectionist (voice) technical communities. The ITU has gotten less anachronistic -- in terms of technologies -- but it remains tied to a territorial and revenue model that challenge -- fundamentally -- the routing and transport model I helped document in RFCs 1122 and 1123. However, the choices available to government, and therefore its contractor, are not limited to one, or one hundred and eighty governments. Many trans-national resources are policied by a small number of governments acting in the broader interest, with significant policy participation by civil society, such as ALAC offers currently. As a reminder, I'm running for the North American RALO ALAC Rep, not writer for Foreign Policy, so I've skipped over the low hanging fruit like whether the ITU is an obscure UN agency and so forth. Eric Brunner-Williams Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012 * Deregulation as a policy began during the Reagan and Bush I Administrations, continued during the Clinton Administration, and continued during the Bush II Administration. I recommend the accessible introduction to the second and third editions of Fox's Administrative Law, available at any academic law library, for a few thousand word summary of status of the American administrative state. ** the DoD oversight period ended when I was at SRI, and despite the current froth of "cyber security" rhetoric and legislation, it is my hope that militarization of the civil data infrastructure will not increase. Cc: Senator Ron Wyden, District Office, 405 East 8th Ave., Suite 2020 Eugene, OR, 97401 (via snail mail)
Glenn, Thanks for the thought provoking post. I've greatly enjoyed writing bits of a response over the past several days. The first note was written while minding children splashing about the beach on the north shore of Lake Huron. The second note was written in part in Wawa, and in part while again minding children splashing about the beach on the north shore of Lake Superior, as was the whole of the third note. It has been a very pleasant writing experience, off-line, with intermittent access when traveling by road. v4 exhaustion and the slow uptake of v6 point to futures of broken nets -- either due to carrier grade NATs, putting "smarts" back into the dumb network -- leading the connectionless network away from the end to end argument towards the connectionist (ITU) network model, or due to gateways essentially implementing the same scoping of address meaning -- leading the connectionless network away from the single address space (and hence single root) model towards an interconnect of national or regional networks model (see ITU, supra). The ITU's proposal to replace the working regional address registries may fail, I contributed a policy note to the U.S. Delegation to the ITU Meeting on IPv6 (Geneva), in March of 2010, making the case that transnational populations could be adversely affected by making v6 allocations only through national registries -- an example being the Rom population in Europe, and one or more European governments pursuing policies adverse to Roms and in violation of the Treaty of Europe and International Law. However, it is hard to keep a straight face and make the claim that the ITU must necessarily do worse at new gTLD policy making than ICANN has in the past year. If the ITU did exactly what ICANN did, adding only an equity of member state limit on identical business models, then ICANN's own diversity and inclusive goals would be better met than is currently the case -- where most of the approximately 2,000 identical business case applications are made by North American applicants using domestic or off-shore tax haven domiciles. The next three years, when the IANA Functions contract is up for competitive bid again, when more than one bidder can be expected, will be very, very challenging for ICANN as an institution, and for the continued existence of its "public interest" mission contained in both the Green and White Papers. Eric Brunner-Williams Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012
participants (5)
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Bret Fausett -
Eric Brunner-Williams -
Evan Leibovitch -
Glenn McKnight -
John R. Levine