Internet governance is interesting because its challenges require us to rethink some of the ways we manage globally. Just as the environmental can no longer be adequately managed by national states alone, the proper development of the Internet requires a type of coordination that spans national boundaries and includes other parties than governments.

It is quite accepted in the different fora where debates occur on Internet governance related issues that governments alone cannot and should not be the only decisional stakeholders. The private sector and civil society are now accepted as de facto players in the field. Our classical international governance models however, provide us with relatively little experience in solving global challenges of the nature that the Internet has brought about.

The nature of the Internet dictates that its governance touch on matters that are technical, legal, economic and socio-cultural. As a case in point, the mere introduction of internationalized top-level domain names (.tél for example) requires the involvement of the technical people within the IETF and ICANN, of the private sector to operate the new TLD, and could involve governments (for example if .tél, the abbreviation for the French word “téléphone” also meant “sex” in arabic) or copyright holders (if a Belgian company was called “.tél” for example). These matters are complex, and the general lack of recognized and accepted means of agreeing on these matters makes it worse.

Other even more complex challenges must be dealt with if internauts are to continue to be able to use the Internet with confidence. How will spam be dealt with? Do we even agree on what unsolicited email is? If it is merely mail that I have not solicited, then probably 75% of the mail I receive even from friends could be said to be unsolicited in the sense that I didn’t explicitly ask for it. Should companies be able to advertise freely using the Internet? Which legislature should apply when spam reaching European internauts originates from Canada and transits through US-based servers? Answers to these questions are not obvious.

However challenging Internet governance issues may be, they must be dealt with in order to ensure the graceful evolution of the Internet. Because the nature of the Internet itself changes constantly, it is dangerous to think that past methods used to solve Internet-related challenges will continue to work. Note that this does not mean they will not work, just that we should be vigilant in choosing the problem-solving methods we will use.

The “root” the title refers to is the root of the Internet, or its name space, i.e. the identifiers to the left of the implicit period that ends all domain names used on the Internet. lucfaubert.com for example should theoretically be written lucfaubert.com. but that last period is not necessary. You can actually use it, however, in most browsers and it will work.

Mueller’s book is a good introduction to the challenges faced with the Internet community in determining who owned the root, who should control it and how it should be managed. He recounts the circumvoluted series of events leading to the creation of ICANN to manage the root and shows how property rights and trademark owners have influenced the development of policy on management of the root.

Mueller also documents ICANN’s ineffectiveness at implementing proper user representation within the organization, at either the board or the constituency levels.

An interesting book for people curious about the history of the Internet.

Le Réseau Maillons travaille actuellement à un grand chantier qui permettra de fournir l’Internet haute vitesse à tous les foyers et entreprises des régions rurales du Québec qui n’y ont pas encore accès. À titre de président d’ISOC Québec, je participe à ce projet, Un Québec branché sur le monde, qui est intéressant pour plusieurs raisons :

• il utilise une approche novatrice où les milieux communautaires, les gouvernements et le secteur privé collaborent pour accomplir ce que le secteur privé seul ne peut pas réaliser;
• il adopte une approche holistique à l’utilisation d’Internet en fournissant, outre une connexion Internet, de l’équipement, de la formation et de l’accompagnement pour favoriser l’appropriation d’Internet;
• il aura des retombées économiques et sociales positives sur toutes les régions rurales du Québec;
• il est piloté par des associations à but non lucratif travaillant autour de l’Internet au Québec.

Un article rédigé pour la revue Accès libre 

La diversité des projets participatifs présentés au récent forum d’ISOC Québec intitulé « L’internet participatif : conjuguer le futur au pluriel » a permis d’illustrer la nature tautologique de ce que nous appelons l’Internet participatif. La nature même de l’Internet est participative. L’interopérabilité que sous-tendent les normes techniques qui définissent l’Internet et les applications qu’on y a développées ont permis d’élaborer le plus formidable outil de collaboration et de participation que l’humanité ait connu.

Les archives des listes de distribution, la blogosphère et Wikipedia représentent quelques-unes des traces les plus parlantes du phénomène participatif auquel l’Internet a donné naissance. La magnificence de la chose va de soi, certes, mais l’élan qui pousse plusieurs à considérer — avec raison — l’Internet comme la plus importante réalisation technique de l’homme, les amène souvent — prématurément — à le considérer comme la source de changements sociétaux qui bouleversent l’humanité. Or pour le moment, seuls 16 % des humains peuvent être bouleversés, car 84 % de ces derniers n’ont pas accès à Internet.

Bien que la nature participative de l’Internet ne fasse pas de doute, en augmentant le niveau de technicité des outils participatifs que nous utilisons, nous avons aussi involontairement restreint leur utilisation à une petite proportion des humains; ceux qui savent lire et écrire et qui ont accès à l’Internet. Dans ce contexte, que vaut un outil réservé à 16 % de l’humanité ? Plutôt que de dénigrer l’importance de l’Internet qui est tout de même disponible à 68 % de la population nord-américaine, il s’agit, donné que nous ayons à cœur de permettre à la totalité de la population humaine d’utiliser l’Internet, de trouver les moyens pour que les 5 481 639 671 humains qui n’y ont pas encore accès puissent s’y brancher, et comment permettre aux analphabètes de participer avec les autres. Il reste du pain sur la planche.

Civil society, the business sector, International organization and the technical community have fought throughout the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), a difficult and noble battle in order to gain the right to participate in further debates on the Internet as equal stakeholders on par with governments. They have now achieved this.

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) created to continue the WSIS discussion on Internet governance has been created with a charter calling for “full and equal participation by all stakeholders”. This victory represents a major achievement. It is the result of an incalculable amount of time spent by a handful of dedicated individuals who have relentlessly argued for what they believed in.

These “houses” must now learn to play the game with their newfound status in the debate. During WSIS, when their right to talk in the Plenary amounted to a few measly minutes per day, their representatives had to come up with statements that tried to coalesce their constituents’ views. Constituents often argued arduously over the content of these statements. The statements’ consensual nature has tended to dilute their substance to their least common denominator. Now that each representative can speak freely in the IGF space, they are grappling with the dilemma of either allowing everybody to speak for himself or of coordinating their positions as they did in the past.
It may be useful for these groups to consider the question from a global IGF perspective rather than from their individual group’s one. The issues on the table to be discussed in the IGF include:

• Spam,
• Multilingualism,
• Cybercrime,
• Cybersecurity,
• Privacy and Data Protection,
• Freedom of Expression and Human Rights,
• International Interconnection Costs,
• Bridging the Digital Divide: Access and Policies,
• Bridging the Digital Divide: Financing,
• Rules for e-commerce, e-business and consumer protection,
• Management of Internet resources.

These themes are of a nature such that they tend to polarize points of vue in a way that aggregates a few vastly differing perspectives.
Everybody in the debate must now weigh the value of an unlimited number of participants could bring to the debate against the complexity this number of participants generates in discussing the issues and agreeing on a finite set of clear recommendations intended to policy makers.

How would working groups inspired by the oft-cited IETF model function with hundreds of participants? While the example set by Wikipedia where an unlimited number of participants nonetheless achieve working definitions for the encyclopaedia’s entries may certainly be cause for hope, it is not clear that the IGF’s working groups can work this way, although when you think about it, IGF’s purpose is also to produce final text. Granted, Wikipedia’s text must define the past or present while IGF’s text defines the future, but the end product in both cases is still text.

The question lead to a fascinating—in my opinion—challenge: how can representatives carrying delegated authority work productively with individuals? The fundamental difference between Wikipedia and IGF constituents is that some of IGF’s constituents carry delegated authority.

Why do governments exist? Why don’t all citizens manage government-managed affairs? Because citizens figured it wasn’t efficient to do so and delegated to governments the authority to manage their affairs.

In Wikipedia, participants contribute as individuals. No Wikipedia constituents carry delegated authority. In the IGF however, government and organization delegates carry authority delegated to them by their citizens or members. How then can government and organization delegates representing thousands or millions of citizens work productively with individuals speaking only for themselves? Is the opinion of a person vested with delegated authority more valuable than that of an individual? This is one of the most important challenges IGF participants must address. Their solution to the challenge may lead the way to for a new model of cooperation where governments and other constituants learn to work together in a productive way.

If this happens, this model could be exported to other spaces where global challenges such as international law, the environment, health and poverty desperately require global solutions.

It is worth noting that, should this new global problem-solving model emerge, it will do so from the very same institution that was intended to achieve global problem-solving when we created it 60 years ago, the United Nations.

A piece I wrote for ISOC’s WSIS blog on the dynamics behind the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).