I’ve just discovered that the “famous” MANAS journal published weekly by Henry Geiger between January 7, 1948 and December 28, 1888 is available online! My friend Gérald Lefebvre introduced the young and curious reader I was in 1987 to MANAS. MANAS issues came as a breath of fresh air whipping my brain every week for a little more than a year, until Geiger’s death put an end to its publication. Luckily, I had access to many years of past issues through my friend Gérald’s collection.

MANAS was a great journal, known to only a few. Its subscriber base was only 2000-3000 strong, but quite influential, with people like Caryl Chessman, Marc Chagall, Henry Miller, E. F. Schumacher, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Wendell Berry, John Holt and Theodore Roszak, who all also contributed a paper here and there.

The purpose of MANAS as stated in each issue was:

MANAS is a journal of independent inquiry, concerned with the study of the principles which move world society on its present course, and with searching for contrasting principles- that may be capable of supporting intelligent idealism under the conditions of the twentieth century. MANAS is concerned, therefore, with philosophy and with practical psychology, in as direct and simple a manner as the editors and contributors can write. The word “manas” comes from a common root suggesting “man” or “the thinker.” Editorial articles are unsigned, since MANAS wishes to present ideas and viewpoints, not personalities.

The people responsible for publishing MANAS on the Web are from the E. F. Schumacher Society and they have done a great job. The archives are searchable and a very thorough index is also available.

This archive is really worth spending some time on. Visit it and bask in Geiger’s ideas and pantheon with people like Plato, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tse, Gandhi, Tom Paine, Emerson, Pico della Mirandola, Simone Weil, Jose Ortega y Gassett, Abraham Maslow, Hannah Arendt, Thoreau, and a host of others.

An unforgettable journey, and one of what Wendy Grossman calls “pockets of insane brilliance”.

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 February 2007 Harvard Business Review publishes an article by Jeb Brugmann and C.K. Prahalad arguing that:

[…] companies and NGOs are increasingly going into business together, pursuing scale and profits, social equity, and empowerment as part of an integrated value chain.

The following quote probably best illustrates Friedman’s point of view:

Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich […]
p. 49

Friedman paints a world where companies compete worldwide, with rapidly falling classical barriers to entry like geography or culture, and muses on how this is impacting life in well-established developed countries like the U.S. He tells his girls:

Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner — people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework — people in China and India are starving for your jobs.
p. 237

Although Friedman resolutely prefers the opportunity and creative freedom that comes with globalization, he also cautions against blind elimination of all impediments to the free flow of services and capital:

[…] the debate about capitalism has been, from the very beginning, about which frictions, barriers, and boundaries are mere source of waste and inefficiency, and which are sources of identity and belonging that we should try to protect.
p. 204

He goes on describing the need for corporations and states to define where each of them fit in this new world, states representing the biggest source of friction and corporations pressuring them to eliminate these sources of friction.

Friedman’s thesis that the world is flat, although catchy, reductive and not very new, leads him to interesting conclusions nonetheless:

The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves.
p. 262

and, quoting Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an IBM computer scientist:

We need to think more seriously than ever about how we encourage people to focus on productive outcomes that advance and unite civilization — peaceful imaginations that seek to minimize alienation and celebrate interdependence rather than self-sufficiency, inclusion rather than exclusion, openness, opportunity, and hope rather than limits, suspicion, and grievance.
p. 443

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.

Van Creveld goes through the history of the state, from prehistory to this day. His conclusion: that states were “constructed by and for war” and that their importance is rapidly declining along within the benefits of war.

Van Creveld is, probably rightly, fascinated by war and its role in shaping the destiny of states:

No less important than the massive contribution that war made to the state’s structure and organization was its function as an emotionally unifying factor.”
p. 336

and

I believe that the real reason why war exists is because men have always liked war, and women, warriors.
p. 337

He reminds us of something interesting about the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an institution well-known to people involved in telecommunications or Internet governance:

Its foundation, which took place in 1865, marked the first time when states created an organization in which themselves were members, but which at the same time had a legal persona of its own as well as a permanent staff and a permanent headquarters at which it could be reached. Within its own limited field, the organization was authorized to make decisions that were binding on states.
p. 382

This is the book for people who think they can’t draw but would like to. The good news is that everybody can draw better, but what I like best about this book is that it changes how we see the outside world. It is the sort of book that changes some lives.

Hafner and Lyon have written a history of the beginnings of the ARPAnet and the other networks that were later linked together to later become the Internet.

While they give proper credit to the parallel efforts of Paul Baran in the U.S. and Donald Davies in the U.K. in defining the concept of packet-switching, I think Frenchman Louis Pouzin’s contribution to the practical implementation of the datagram is not adequately represented.

The authors tell the story of how the efforts of so many people came together because of the vision and leadership of Joseph Licklider and especially Larry Roberts at ARPA, who envisioned to link computers by a network to share computational and informational resources–not to build a network that, as the popular myth goes, was to withstand a nuclear attack.

The proper thing to do after writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was to write the Charter of Human Responsibilities. The Foundation for future generations took care of it. 

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.