Focus 580; Internet Governance

Good morning this is Focus 580 our morning telephone talk show. My name is Jack Brighton. Glad you're listening. Our producers by the way Harriet Williamson and Martha Diehl and Henry Frayne is our technical director who governs the Internet. You could easily assume that no one does since the internet has come to seem like they are invisible and everywhere we might pay Internet service providers for our connections to the Internet. But the Internet itself seems like public space anarchic perhaps but pretty much free of regulation or control. But in fact the functioning of the Internet depends on rules and protocols. Since so much of what we now do depends on the Internet. The question of who decides on the rules and protocols is a very important issue. During this hour focus 588 will talk about the question of who governs the Internet and some of the big issues in Internet governance being debated right now globally. Our guest is a scholar who is deeply involved in that debate. Milton Mueller he's professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. He's also co-director of the convergence center which focuses on issues raised by the convergence of media. He's also one of the founders of the Internet governance

project a consortium of university scholars working on Internet governance policy issues and he's a senior associate of the Global Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School of citizenship and Public Affairs. M. Mueller is also author of the book ruling the root Internet governance and the taming of cyberspace published by the MIT Press in 2000 into and he joins us on this our focus 580 to talk about these issues. And as we do that we also welcome your questions. All you have to do for those of you listening is pick up the telephone. The number around Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line anywhere you hear us if you're listening on the Internet in fact anywhere in the continental U.S. 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Professor Mueller thanks for joining us. I'm happy to be here thank you Jack. I want to ask about the history of Internet governance and how we got to where we are now but before we give listeners the idea that they can safely take a nap. Can I ask you first to talk about

why this matter is what is at stake in the discussion of Internet governance. I think it's it's a complete change in the way we have organized our government. And this is particularly evident at the international level. It's an exaggeration at this point but maybe not in the long term to say that we could be looking at the elimination of the nation state just to be provocative because the Internet has been notoriously borderless and governments are based on territorial boundaries and you know if you're in one side of a border you're under the jurisdiction the United States if you're on the other side you're in Mexico and you have a completely different set of laws. So the the interesting thing about the Internet the profound thing about the Internet and perhaps this seems remote to many listeners but it is borderless it. It simply doesn't respect geographical boundaries and so the governments are trying to figure out how can we control this how can we regulate it.

Wow. Well and of course our economy is now fundamentally connected to the Internet Culture Media Education the arts transactions e-commerce all of these forms of commerce that are taking place over the Internet. Now governments still control money. So they get some some leverage there and they still control sort of the shipping of physical objects that that's the interesting thing about the Internet is that there's no physical object there in the bits can just go through pipes and if you can manage to get access to them it really doesn't matter very much where they're located. So maybe we could talk a bit about the history of this then because I think you know it's clear that when the internet was created invented it was a Defense Department project mostly for commanding control of you know information in the event of you know perhaps a horrible conflict. But then you know

nobody really for saw how it just took off and grew after that it became something else entirely. So it became a government it was started as a government project but then it became partially privatized and I'm really still not clear on how that happened or to what extent it happened. It's very interesting that particularly in a university community like Illinois what happened basically is that the Defense Department was interested in the very basic problem is that we've got 16 different kinds of networks out there in the field we've got radio networks we've got wired networks we've got this network we've got that network. How do we get the data to interconnect them all. And they funded a bunch of scientists in California elsewhere to solve that problem. And they came up with the software protocol that that breaks up data in the packets and allows it to go on any kind of physical network. Now once they had solved that problem the Defense Department kind of lost interest and they pretty much turned it over to the National Science Foundation which said this is a pretty cool idea why

don't we start interconnecting in universities and government networks with this protocol this software. And so they started building and everybody that got onto the Internet said wow this is amazing. I mean I remember you know one thousand eighty eight one thousand nine hundred nine. We used to have to send things to people in other countries and it would take you know two weeks or something to get a reply. Suddenly you're tapping off emails to people in Brazil or Hong Kong and you're getting you know replies in a matter of minutes. So this was highly revolutionary and people wanted to join the internet. And so soon everybody wanted to join the internet and it spread beyond the control of government. Even though the government subsidized the creation of sort of the proliferation of the Internet and they subsidized some of these backbone functions that made it operate

its people started taking over those functions and running them for themselves in the early 90s. And they started commercialising those functions. And before you knew it you had the internet spreading internationally primarily under the control of private sector or university entities and the federal government sort of not wanting to get into the way but not not really knowing what it wanted to do with this with this monster or this you know this monster in a good sense it was just proliferating like like kudzu I guess is a better analogy. So. All of this came to a head sometime around 1900. Five one thousand ninety six. Because the web of the World Wide Web suddenly made the Internet something that anybody could use and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were registering domain names and they were

browsing the internet and looking at all of these documents and they were doing this on a global basis. And at that point we had to face some institutional problems. We said we said well who controls that. The Root who controls the root of the domain namespace who controls who gets these top level domain names like com net and org. Who decides what policies these things in force on each other. There were conflicts over trademark rights when you registered a domain name somebody else could possibly register a name that you thought you should have exclusive rights to. For example if somebody registered w i l l dot org which they did OK and not us unfortunately. OK so you know they could say that's an ordinary English word Will. OK they could there could be their last name. On the other hand if they're pretending to be a radio station and they're confusing people then there could be legal issues around trademarks.

But nobody knew exactly how these issues applied to the domain name space and who was running the Internet's centralized functions at that time basically it was a computer scientist at the University of Southern California called John Foss style. And he was a very smart guy but nobody elected him. You know he just kind of in he built up this network and he and a team of other very brilliant computer scientists built up this network but they were not legislators they were not elected they were not policy people. And so when it came time to start making decisions about law and policy and how this would be applied to the internet it was really a crisis because there simply was no defined system of authority. Nobody knew who. Nobody knew what was a legitimate way to make decisions about these policy issues and also because the unit depends on consistent rules and protocols to work with the issue of maintaining that seems to be pretty important.

In fact that's one of the most interesting that is things that happen in a 95 96 timeframe. At that time the people who are running dot.com registry. Started charging $50 a year for a domain name and people were saying whoa wait a minute here's this supposedly government funded network noncommercial and suddenly it's being commercialized and why can't I start a top level domain let's call it Dot beers or dot Inc. And why can't I charge $50 and run a business in competition with this company. Well again it was a question of who decides. Lots of people thought there should be competition but who had the authority to decide who's going to be a new top level domain that nobody knew. So that's the kind of debates that started taking place in this in this timeframe. Well we'll carry on with that that thread. We do have a caller to include in a conversation will go ahead and do that. And I have a bunch of questions myself but let's talk

with someone on line number four. Good morning. Oh yes two questions ones. Right down the alley you're talking about now a short time ago I got the tail end of a new NRP business report. Were there a lot of countries very upset with the monopolization basically of domain names by the United States they didn't mention that Philly you're talking about were in any country has to go through that to get a domain name any person within that country and that they're concerned about the United States trying to control the Internet in that respective plus the fact that it's they mention also mentioned some you know you're shoving English down or next to the one if you can make a comment about that. And second question deals with a very general question about mainly deal with China. Some of the contracts he's been making with some of them are well are

internet outfits Microsoft. Things like that. Non-contract I guess too. And how do they create a bottleneck. Do they have people sitting there I know they have people sitting around checking out what other Chinese are doing on the Internet. Do they have people somewhere where there is a nodule that all the electrical lines come and are. Or what about it do they do with wireless you know to control basically what's going on and they can do it why can't you know somebody else start doing. Thanks a lot. Thanks Michel. Let me begin with the China question just because I think we can get it out of the way a little faster the other question you ask leads us into a long story about what's happening right now. So with respect to China what I understand what they're doing is basically the government controls almost everything in Chinese society including the telecommunications infrastructure. So they have basically two very highly controlled state owned international telecommunications operators and

they're simply told that they're going to have a single gateway for internet access. Some people call it the Chinese internet. And some things coming through that Internet are they block a lot of things simply filter them out of existence and then they do in fact have the Public Security Bureau monitoring people on the Internet. Now it doesn't mean there's not a lot of room in China for somebody to discretely access things that they don't think they should be that the authorities don't like. But but if you become Anyway prominent and if you start organizing people and really making any kind of political waves then of course they have the the means to track you down and follow you. The difference between China and the in the U.S. and other more democratic countries is that first of all we've liberalized our telecommunications infrastructures there's multiple operators making all kinds of you know connections which are not directly controlled or surveilled by the government. And secondly we have

human rights protections individual rights to freedom of expression and so on and privacy which at least to some extent perhaps less and less to some extent allow us to operate without that kind of surveillance. So that's a China question now. Now the other question is in some ways more directly relevant to what's going on right now. It's a question as other countries are upset about the U.S. and you have almost got it right in terms of what's going on here it's the problem is when we were talking about these policy issues that nobody knew how to resolve. So basically in 1908 the government the U.S. government took steps to resolve them and it said we're not going to go out and sign an international treaty we're not going to create. We're not going to throw this into the hands of the United Nations we're going to do something all by ourselves and we're going to try to keep it in the private sector so that we don't have all of these crazy politics intervening on the Internet in many ways the privatization It was a wise choice

because it is so political There are so many conflicting jurisdictions and territories and policies coming in from the world's governments. And on the other hand we need to create a global compatible administrative regime for the Internet. So what we did was we created I can I can as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It's a incorporated in the United States and the United States said we're going to create a sort of private sector governance agency. We're going to allow business and civil society. You know the universities and technical people and advocates to sort of govern the Internet you know through that mechanism. And we the United States while we're implementing this experiment for two years we're going to have this supervisory control over the route we're going to say that I can you know whenever it changes the fundamental contents of the root zone

file deciding that there's a dot com or a dot bit is a red dot info we're going to supervise what they do and make sure that everything is on the up and up and we're going to hold on to that power for two years and then we're going to turn it over completely to I can. Well guess what happen. It's very difficult for governments to give up power. And it was controversy. Obviously there's you know conservatives could say you're giving up control of the Internet. Liberals could say you're privatizing something that should be public. The General Accounting Office said you might need legislative authority to give something like that away and you don't have it. That means Congress has to pass a law any way the U.S. government sat on that power and refused to give it up. And then the Bush administration came into power and has even less interest in giving it up. So we're holding on to this unilateral power over I can

and that's what other countries are complaining about. They're saying well. Why should this be unilateral power. Why shouldn't this power be shared with other governments. And the answer to that question is very very complicated. On the one hand it obviously makes sense for there to be some kind of international agreement about how I can should be supervised. On the other hand once you get into these international agencies and international debates you realize that a lot of what these governments are interested in is not protecting and enhancing the Internet. They're interested in playing various kinds of power games. So for example you know China is very interested in exercising more control over information that comes into its country or even more trivially to us they're interested in excluding Taiwan from international organizations and they're interested in making sure that groups like Human Rights in China are not allowed to speak at international

meetings. So they they have all these kind of games that they're playing. And then there's countries like South Africa South Africa's very you know they have legitimate complaints about the unilateralism of the U.S. but when you ask them what do you really want to do. One of the things they've really made a lot of noise about is that they're very upset because somebody registered the name South Africa dot com. And they don't have South Africa. Well you know from my point of view as a civil libertarian you know the word South Africa is not owned by the country of South Africa. OK it's a word. If I want to name a book South Africa you know I can name my book South Africa if I want to name a website South Africa I can name it as South Africa. I don't see that I have to seek the government of South Africa's permission to register a domain name or to have a website about South Africa. But in fact that's what a lot of these governments actually want. They want you to they want to have more control over

over how people are using the Internet particularly as it affects them. So there's all kinds of political dangers that would be associated with internationalizing this. And I'm not trying to rationalize the U.S. government's unilateral control in fact the Internet governance project has been the main critic. We should we said for the last two years the US government should have taken the lead in finding a way to handle this problem that would protect the internet and would make sure that it doesn't get sucked into these these kinds of unconstructive political debates. But the government adopted a purely defensive posture they basically said we've got control we can't give it up we don't care what you say and we're going to sit here and hold onto it as long as we bloody well please. Now maybe you know if you're a Bush supporter or somebody who believes in you and unilateral you know U.S. unilateral ism. Maybe you like that

policy but it's hasn't proved to be very effective because it basically means you're sitting in a bunker and everybody in the world is shooting at you and you're not taking any positive actions that are going to solve the problems. You know that why everybody is upset with you and there is a contradiction between saying we don't want governments involved. Oh except for us you know. And the U.S. is of course an increasingly controversial force on the international stage. You know now because of the war in Iraq and and other kinds of actions we've taken so. So we've gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle here. Well there's there's much more there we have a couple callers to get to and I promise I'll do that but I just want to ask one quick follow up questions. Probably not quick. So maybe that's not fair. Your concern as I understand it is yes we need to have these these discussions and negotiations and figured out a better or better regime for governing the

Internet. Your concern is that the process of that incorporate the basic principles that keep the Internet essentially of a public space. You know and that the rules are established that don't privilege certain actors and so forth is that it's probably too simplified and way to put it but it's a good way of putting it to use a more technical term we propose that the U.S. government and all the other governments negotiate a framework agreement on principles and that the principles that they agree on would be things that would not just assert government control over the Internet which is what a lot of the governments want but would say here's what you can't do. OK here is a First Amendment for the Internet a global first amendment if you like here is a statement about not using the technical mechanisms of the Internet administration to interfere with content in applications. We want to see the Internet protected and we want to see those protections negotiated in an inn agreed in an international basis in a

binding way. It may be idealistic It may be very difficult to achieve but we think you know if the US government wants to assert that it's out there defending the freedom of the Internet that would be the way to do it not sitting there in in a bunker and saying we've got control and we're not going to let you have any. OK. Well we will talk about the details of those principles but we do have a couple people waiting we'll go next to Champagne County listener line number one. Good morning. Good morning. I want to go back to 95 when and I asked Network Solutions. I incorporated I guess International had a fairly exclusive control the domain name. And for a while I don't know if they still are held by scientific applications on an international computing SAIC which we have a presence of this corporation on our campus and apparently they're doing work on Operation stockpile and simulating nuclear explosions or something like that but that's another show. Right. But the FDIC has had and may still have some of these people like Bobby

Inman of the NSA Melvin Laird. Ex CIA director Robert Gates Secretary Sperry director John Deutch have all been asked members so it's pretty spooky outfit and it seems to me I know that some people from trying to crunch here have sort of dismissed this as well. Well we already know that the Internet came out of DARPA's So we shouldn't worry about you know it's already pretty well penetrated as it were. And we shouldn't worry about network solutions but you know if you're looking at this as you've been trying to from the point of view of countries abroad good actors or bad actors it's got to give someone some pause. And I'd like to know how you cover of the whole NSA. I have a Network Solutions story. OK. It's a great question. Ruling the route the book outlines the relationships in the way NSA is relationship to AI can evolve.

Basically there's been this very tense competitive situation between Nike and in their work solutions from the beginning of Ikea and in 1988 until this year. And basically it was all about creating competition and in reducing Network Solutions dominance of the market so that the first thing they did was they. They made it possible for multiple competing registrars to register names and dot com. And that policy worked very effectively at reducing the price of registrations for domain names and at reducing the dominant market share of NSI and then they started pursuing a policy of divestiture in which first they took away dot org from Network Solutions and gave it to public interest registry. And the next step was to consider taking away dot net. And that's when the the sort of spooky connections you

talk about came into play. Network Solutions does have. They're no longer owned by SAIC but they have I think still have some shareholdings but now they're owned by their assigned. They were sold to various sign. But obviously this is a very big corporation with very well-connected in Washington and they really lobbied Washington saying. That if you took away dot net from them that the whole that there would be a national security issue basically they said that it would be a question of since so many Internet service providers infrastructure is registered under the dot net domain. That taking away dot net from from various sign and giving it to somebody overseas you know somehow raise national security issues and they played that very effectively within Washington. And they they were allowed to keep dot net. And since then they're

assigned and I can't I've been pretty friendly. As you might imagine the various sign was happy with that decision. Now you know there was really nothing wrong with the operation of dot net by Verizon I hasten to add. They did a good job of running the infrastructure that operated on net and on that basis they had a good case that they should be allowed to keep it. The issue was one more one of creating more competition. And and this is important. One of again internationalizing. The infrastructure the control the infrastructure. If you look at I can almost every decision they've made it's had serious economic consequences has gone to a U.S. company. And you know the issue of whether they're going to take away dot net from an American company and give it to let's say a European company. This is the kind of thing that the other countries are concerned about because we control I can you know I can make these kinds of economically consequential decisions. They say well of course they're going to give it to an American company and we would probably feel equally miffed

if it was all sort of carefully can control by the Europeans and they gave all the lucrative contracts to European companies. So that's a point of tension that remains. OK. Well that is the question we have another caller waiting on me just to take a moment to reintroduce our guest during this hour focused 580 since we're just past our midpoint. We're talking with Milton Mueller he's professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies also co-director of the convergence center which focuses on issues raised by the convergence of media and he's also one of the founders of the Internet governance project a consortium of the university scholars working on Internet governance policy issues and that's we're talking about during this hour of the show. If you want to join us the number around Champaign-Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. Toll free anywhere else you hear us 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. I guess we'll go next to another listener since they've been waiting very patiently. Lie number two in Champaign. Good morning. Morning. Yeah. My question is I'm

assuming that with the advent of e-mail that the U.S. government has been inundated with e-mails about this issue and that much more so than they ever were with letters. And I'm wondering is there. Is there any talk about different public offices being accountable saying yes we've received this many thousands of e-mails about this subject you know saying yes we've received these and this is what we plan on doing. And I know that there's another issue attached to that is that you can send the e-mails you know to Congress or the White House from wherever you want. So the be the issue of you know how do we know that these are U.S. citizens and we were needing to be representing them. I'll hang up and listen. OK. Very interesting question and it goes to the nature of what's typically called e-government which is the introduction of the capabilities of networked information technologies into the processes of government. What happened in

this case was it was one of these pendulum swings or cycles in which in the late 90s the government kind of opened up to these kinds of email based interactions with citizens and they were inundated literally inundated with so much e-mail that now they're cutting back and going back to the idea that we don't care if you send an email if you really care about this issue you'll sit down and lick a stamp and send a handwritten letter in to us and then we know not only that you're real but that you care enough about the issue to spend 15 or 20 minutes. Now sure there are people who. You know they have these official receptacles for e-mail input but the simply the flood of citizen pursuits of participation is such that the institutions couldn't handle it. There are tools for trying to deal with it but it would it's typical of what you hear in the I.T. realm that if you really want to take advantage of the capabilities of the technology you can't just do the same thing you have to re-engineer

your whole process. And so yes they would have to introduce some kind of verification mechanism. Yes they would have to scale up to handle much larger quantities because the cost and the barriers to communication would go down. So people those kinds of changes simply haven't been made those would be more fundamental changes in the nature of government and it's a very interesting question as to how or when those changes get made. I'm some topic. We can maybe explore that in another time there are a number of things that I think to get through this. This issue of Internet governance we need to try to touch on some of the some of the more recent events that you write about. We're talking about this issue of the dispute over the US's role in managing I cann the demeaning system and so forth. There is a process underway in the United Nations. And as I understand it quite a controversy that broke out over the past year or so through the UN World Summit on the

information society. Do you want to sort of explain that. Yeah the World Summit on the information society is a U.N. summit where sort of all the the heads of state get together and try to negotiate some kind of agreed statement or even policies and actions that they would take on a particular problem so we had a summit on the environment. The end of the famous Rio summit. We had the Beijing meeting on women in 1905 and so on. So the World Summit on the Information Society was in that vein. What happened in December 2003 was that all of this dissatisfaction of other countries about I can an Internet government boiled over and the U.N. couldn't really agree on what to do about it. And what they agreed as they frequently do when they don't know what to do is they create a blue ribbon commission that's going to study the problem so they created something called the UN working group on Internet governance. Now this may seem very un exciting

to you or me as Americans but this was a very innovative entity for the United Nations because it included one third government representatives one third civil society and one third of business and by civil society I mean sort of public interest groups like the Association for progressive communications or academics technical people who were not part of a not really an official government delegation. And what they learned is that the civil society people actually know more about the Internet than the governments and those people really played a very very influential role in producing the output of this working group. The US didn't particularly like the outcome of the working group because it called into attention the problem of. The U.S. unilateral control of I can and the route and so now we're in the phase where the the result of this working group are being negotiated by governments and they're kind of trying to come up with a common policy.

I just got back to us from Geneva. This meeting actually wrapped up September 30th. And they are in some very significant negotiations about this this issue of what to do about Internet governance and the U.S. was somewhat surprised or at least they said they were surprised in that the European Union sort of sided with people who are now attacking the U.S. policy towards I can and in a governance. And the Europeans along with some other countries are calling for what they call an intergovernmental Oversight Council which would replace the U.S. government's oversight of I Can an Internet governance with the Council of Governments. And that council would not allow the direct participation of private sector and civil society as I can do. Instead there would be an advisory council in which people ordinary people could try to provide some input to this intergovernmental Council. So

this is a very interesting kind of reversal of the situation now because within I can it's basically private sector and civil society driven. And governments have an advisory committee in there but they can't put people on the board. The council would completely reverse that situation and set up the Supervisory Committee and you know there's a debate now going on about whether this is a good idea. They are also talking about the creation of what we call a multi-stakeholder forum discussion forum sort of for expert analysis of Internet governance policies and this would be fully open to participation by all the stakeholders civil society business and governments and they would all presumably be of equal status. But it wouldn't have any negotiating power. So those are two changes that are being proposed coming out of this with this process. But it's very controversial unresolved among the governments and it won't be resolved until the final summit meeting in Tunisia in the middle of November of this year.

OK well we have another caller waiting let's include them in our conversation. Someone in Belgium Illinois that is why number four. Good morning good morning first. Maybe you've covered this a bit earlier but if you go to the archives but I don't understand I'm pretty much a novice at the sort of things uninformed I'm sure. Why can't you have any name Blue Dot blue you know and why do we have to let anybody. What's going to be Rush is a very good question and we've debated this. The reason you need to have some control over domain names because domain names are like an exclusive resource there. They have to be unique. It's like a seat on an airline if you're assigned seat number 13 A. You don't want somebody else coming in and trying to sit in seat 13 A. So if you are you know assigned a blue dot com.

One person has to be responsible for blue dot com. Now and I think you can understand it is kind of like the occupation of a radio frequency or an airline seat or any kind of a resource like that where there's exclusivity. But if you're asking me why can't there be 100 new top level domain names. Let's say a dot blue dot B I L L A dot Milton. The answer is that there could be and this is one of the reasons that people like me have been very critical of I can is that they've sat on top of the domain name space and they've considered it. You know like they're they're engaged in the nuclear arms control you know that that it's so risky and so difficult to create these new top level domains. Well it isn't. It's simply a matter of putting them into the root zone file and licensing a registry that has responsibility for that. There are there are policy issues regarding how those registries operate there are some consumer protection issues but fundamentally these things could have been worked out in the space of

18 months and instead I can has dragged them on and on for five years and that's because there's people who don't want them to create new top level domains there's the trademark interests you know of just view it as a nuisance because they feel like there might be more people registering names that they have rights to. There's obviously the incumbents in the industry are not crazy about creating all kinds of new top level domains. There's issues about it you know. So you know pricing and regulation of these registries and so on. There are some clues. So much for so many of them. Well I want to be value in him. That's what I'm getting at. If you have any three digits or letters or whatever you want him to have it totally lose its value it would lose its scarcity value. Yes. YEAH EXACTLY what I'm talking about right. Right but do you want why should you make scarcity where there isn't any really I mean

it. In other words it's just like an e-mail address. Ultimately you know it's a unique identifier and make sure that the mail goes to you. But there's no reason that you should try to control you know Bill dot com and make sure that you're the only bill in the world. You know I mean obviously that might create some added value for you but for society as a whole is not clear why you want to enforce an artificial scarcity when when the resource itself is not that scarce. Exactly. Thanks very much. Thanks for the call. We have just about 10 or 12 minutes left with our guest Milton Bueller professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies She's also one of the founders of the Internet governance governance project which is a consortium of university scholars working on Internet governance policy issues and that's what we're talking about during this hour of the show. If you want to join us in the remaining time at 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 around Champaign-Urbana toll free anywhere else. 800 to 2 2 9

4 5 5. Sort of a list of things that I hope we get to and of course I'm always way too ambitious you know with the time that we have. But I wanted to talk about maybe I talk to no not at all it's been very very helpful. And there's just simply too much to talk about. What kind of governance do you think is appropriate for the Internet. Can we talk about that. Yeah I think it's. It's a very complex form of governance. It's a very distributed form of governance. We want to have the Internet's flexibility and adaptability be maintained. So the interesting thing about the Internet is that you've got these standards and those are common and global and they're nonproprietary so anybody can use and there's no patents or no no fees you have to pay to adopt these standards so that's that perfect that should remain as it is. But the other aspect that people sometimes forget is that all of these networks that are interconnected through the Internet protocols and standards or

private networks for the most part they are privately owned they are separately administered and that's good too because that means that people can have different policies they can have customized configurations they can have the kind of bandwidth they want. They can implement their own governing policies for their own little space. It's kind of an extreme federalism non governmental kind of federalism. So we want to retain that also so that becomes a kind of a balancing act where you're I mean it works it really does work there are various ways. Let me take a problem that everybody agrees is a problem right. Spam OK everybody's sick of getting their mailbox full of junk emails. I'm getting them in a rush and I'm getting them in Chinese and Korean I can't even read them I don't know why I'm being spammed by people. But it's just simply a characteristic an externality kind of a pollution produced by the nature of the openness of the Internet so how do you

solve spam. Well it's clear that whatever you're going to do is going to be a combination of technical standards new technical standards that might allow you to filter better some kinds of application level developments such as the spam sorting mechanisms or filtering mechanisms that like Brightmail that people implement for their own network. And then you have a market let people choose what kind of filtering application they want to use instead of imposing one uniformly. And then there's legislation you know there's there's For the most directly abusive forms of spam there is laws that have been passed some of them have not been very effective. And so we have a mix. You know a bunch of different mechanisms for trying to deal with this problem at the moment none of them are tremendously successful. But. You know I think it's better to kind of go proceed along that path where the innovation and change is driven by the users and people at the edges of the network rather than being imposed

top down by some governmental agency. OK we have another call to talk with let's include them someone in Chicago on line number four. Good morning. It's most informative and I appreciate everything you've been talking about. Can you give me a comment on Didn't matter of taxation. Somebody things are crying out and thinking of taxation in my mind I know all the financial transactions and all the operational functions. Could you comment about taxation and enters into the picture. Well the taxation face is one of the same problems that lots of internet things have which is the problem of territoriality. Taxes are a territorial. Thing the government is bounded by is territory and so you have to figure out a way. If you're going to tax internet transactions you have to figure out where the person is and what taxes apply to them. And

the technology of the Internet is such that you can figure that out pretty pretty well. Not perfectly but you can figure out you know whether somebody is in Chicago for example or by their IP address because you know which Internet service provider was given that IP address. And you you know were aware that in it's a service provider is is using those Internet addresses. But I think as e-commerce progresses that's going to be one of the main issues that has to be worked out and people have been debating that issue for about eight or nine years. Trying to figure out what kind of a database could be established to reference you know where is the person buying and where is the person selling and what laws should apply. You mention that you know the territoriality of you know if you if you had to if you wanted to impose taxes that would be a key element. But the Internet is non territorial mainly just because it evolved that way isn't it. Isn't that right.

We have dot com dot org and dot net instead of what we do have dot us and Dot Tanzania or whatever they are. But those are the top level domains. That's right it is primarily a matter of evolution that it could have been done differently. You know when the Internet was started if the national governments were in control we could have given address blocks to every country in every address block would be assigned to a particular country. We could have had no global top level domains no dot com No dun net just US UK or Germany. But it didn't evolve that way and now it's too late to change. And there this is one of the things that governments are agitating about particularly with respect IP addresses. They want the International Telecommunication Union would love to have us go back to let's give the addresses to Peru let's give this many addresses to China and Taiwan and then China can control them. And I think the community of people who have grown up around the Internet are very much opposed to that because

they realize that you know What do governments want to do with that power it's seems to be all about control and not very much about building. It seems to be that you know they maybe they want to only give addresses to their favorite suppliers and not give them to other people's of that they have more control over the telecom market in their country or they want to take addresses away from people who are using the Internet to say things that they don't like. So this non-governmental non territorial nature of the Internet is that it isn't on the whole a very positive thing. I mean we have to deal with problems like spam we have to deal with cyber crime phishing those kinds of things and will need governments to do that. But there's no reason to make the technical administration of the Internet pushed into these national boundaries. This is very interesting because we don't we only unfortunately have about three minutes left. But. I guess my question would be is the internet such a unique thing in that it touches everything. I mean in terms of you know government

functions the economy culture and crosses his boundaries in ways that really are very difficult to control. Do we need a very very different approach to governance than anything we've ever encountered before. We already have one. And that's I can is very different. It's globalized it's privatized it's contractually based governance. And that's why it's causing such a stir in the international scene it's perceived correctly I think as a threat. In the early stages of I Can it was actually experimenting with forms of democratic global governance you actually had people all over the world voting to elect the Board members if I can. Now unfortunately the powers that be kind of executed or got rid of that experiment in global democracy but it was actually quite effective while it lasted it was a very interesting way of of having a form of governance that was legitimate but

democratic but but not governmental in the traditional sense. So in the coming what would you expect. You mentioned the meeting in November in Tunisia. Is it going to get resolved then how long this process is going to continue. Something will get resolved in Tunisia they have to come up with a declaration because that's the end of the end of the process. That's the summit the summit itself most of the real work goes on before before the summit and then at the actual summit everything's supposed to be in a nice tidy package that they can just sign off on what's happening now is that we're going into the summit and things are not ready. Things are going to have to be negotiated in one or two weeks before the summit and hopefully they'll be able to agree on something and they will pull some you know maybe a ridiculously minor thing that they can agree on out of this or maybe they will make some of these major changes it's really difficult to tell when you suggest a framework or approach that would essentially be very much like the framework on climate

change. Right. That would keep the negotiations going for years and we think the issues are profound enough that they need to keep going. And we think that the inability to agree that we've seen is simply reinforced our notion that they're dealing with fundamental issues that need to be negotiated over a longer term. Finally I guess I'm wondering you know hopefully we've we've highlighted the relevance of these issues for folks who may just simply use the Internet and don't really think much about it. How do people sort of stay in informed and involved in you know if they if they want to participate in this debate what would you suggest. We I would suggest that they check out the couple of websites. One of them is the Internet governance project which is simply Internet governance dot org and they can check out the the wiseass website the World Summit website if they really want to follow what's happening and that's it.

W w w r i t u as an International Telecommunication Union dot i n t slash wiseass. And that will sort of give them an overview on what's happening although it will be described in terms that are very international organization ease and probably difficult for ordinary people to follow. I think they'll see this stuff starting to pop up in the newspapers and there's all kinds of sites on the Internet policy. If you use Google or any other search engine you know type in Internet governance and see what pops up. And I think we at the at the project have been. Executing we've been developing ways of remote participation online collaboration technologies which allow you to basically communicate in real time with people who are all over the world who are following this issue.

For example we ran around in conjunction with the latest Geneva meetings we had one of these online sessions and we invited people now. Obviously we don't have the publicity apparatus to get everybody in the world informed about this and if we did we probably couldn't handle that. But if you follow our own website and you really are interested in getting involved then there will be opportunities to do so. OK well we'll have to stop there is much more we could talk about I'll put those website addresses on our our website as well for people who visit that and get the archives and so forth. Our guest has been Milton Mueller Professor at this here Syracuse University School of Information Studies co-director of the convergence center and one of the founders of the Internet governance project. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you.