[AfrICANN-discuss] God did it, why can't we? UN ponders 'Net "10 commandments"

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

 God did it, why can't we? UN ponders 'Net "10 commandments"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/god-did-it-why-cant-we-un-ponders-net-10-commandments.ars

Turns out God had a pretty hot idea all those years ago. As the UN-backed
Internet Governance Forum 2009 met last week just a stone's throw from Mount
Sinai, some wondered whether it wasn't time to draft a "10 commandments" for
the Internet. And everyone had ideas about what should be on it.
By Janna Quitney Anderson <http://arstechnica.com/author/nate-anderson/> |
Last updated November 23, 2009 1:07 PM

Write a new 10 Commandments of the Internet, Peter proposed, and draft them
on a tablet PC on Mount Sinai.

The "Peter" in question was Internet historian Ian Peter, and the place was
the UN-backed Internet Governance Forum 2009 held last week in Sharm El
Sheikh, Egypt, a few kilometers from Mount Sinai.

Peter's model for his proposed commandments isn't Moses, but the engineers
and computer science guys who dreamed up the Internet back in the 1960s,
building it through an amazingly open and collaborative effort that
continues functioning to this day. When he asked if anyone would be
interested in formally documenting the principles of the Internet ethos,
Internet ecosystem or whatever one might call it, hands shot up all around
the room.
Thou shalt document thy networking principles

An all-star lineup of folks at the top echelon of the organizations that
arose out of the principles established in the 1960s were at IGF 2009 to
speak, and represented organizations such as the Internet Society, the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers. And everyone had an opinion about the issues most central to
the Internet.

Daniel Dardailler of W3C said, "Computer science principles require that
layers can work separately. The Web sits on top of the Internet. This
separation is important. Everything has to be extensible. You want only one
root—you want unique ID—we need to keep one root. The Web is putting data in
the pipe and we don’t want the data to go faster through some sites without
our knowledge. Common to Internet technology is that we are open-standards
and open-source. Everyone should be able to test the system with their own
platform. We want our technologies to be royalty-free. For the Web it’s
important. We are at the top of the stack—there will be more things later
on, but right now we are the interface. Everyone needs to have access to the
system. It has to be visible to any type of device. Separation of content
from implementation is paramount. Websites should have metadata.

“The principle that runs throughout all of what I have said is the principle
of choice. I buy a computer in France, I arrive in Egypt, in my hotel I get
WiFi and I can use it. We don’t want to go back to a point where we have
incompatibility. The Internet has been on the forefront in regard to
allowing people to participate in the design of communication.”

Alun Michael, a member of the UK Parliament and an active Internet policy
maker, said there is a need to be careful to grasp what is important but not
to squeeze too hard. “We need to grasp three nettles,” he explained. “First
we’re dealing with a future not yet conceived. Management techniques of
industry, government, [and] the international community are too slow to keep
up with changes on the Internet. Second, the core values are the technical
values and they affect the whole of society and not just engineers. Cities
don’t often turn out as their architects intended. It’s about the people. We
also need to not just listen to young people, we need to hand it over to
young people. They talk about the issues in a completely different way and
there’s a real and powerful opportunity to use that talent and engagement in
a positive way. Third, the IGF process needs to communicate to legislators
who do not take an interest in this process in any way. Policymakers are
overwhelmed by issues like cybersecurity. We need a proportionate response.
My favorite quotation about legislation comes from 1890s: ‘Laws rarely
prevent what they forbid.’ We have the opportunity for much better
governance in the real-world sense. Do proposals to fix the problem threaten
the core values of the Internet? We have to prove that a cooperative
approach works. It depends on the right people at the right times do
something about it. We have to deliver solutions instead of relying on the
last refuge of the policymaker which is to legislate and regulate.”

Nathan James, director of OneWebDay, began by bringing up the importance of
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the
right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart
information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

"This is a beautiful expression of one of the most sacred of human rights,”
he said. “I would argue that the real value of the Internet is its human
network of users and that a discussion of core Internet values must begin
with the consideration of the human values of its users. Do users value the
end-to-end principle, open innovation systems, a secure root, the most
modern version of IP? If they do, most of them don’t know it. Instead, users
value the Internet as an expression of their deeper values and aspirations:
expression, collaboration, dissent, freedom, democracy, family, friendship,
community, opportunity, justice, even fun.”

Alejandro Pisanty, a longtime leader in both the Internet Society and ICANN,
said he sees core values under threat. “The Internet was conceived as a
means of communication between computers,” he said, describing that in the
early years of computing nobody knew this would all scale up to be a network
of billions of users. “Standards-developing organizations did not imagine
this was serious. No network is a simple network. Computer processing power
was limited. You had to make things extra-simple to communicate. There was a
flat hierarchy. Request for Comments (RFC) 760 has several interesting
phrases and statements, including, 'Be liberal with what you receive and
conservative with what you send.' This later became part of RFC 1855 on
netiquette. It translates to ethics of openness and tolerance of
communication.”

Pisanty believes these values are in danger. “They can be threatened. It can
start with things that come from the corporate world. You should not be
privileging one product over others. All packets are equal. It can come from
the desire to bring back the owned-network model—the telephone company
model—people try to make this happen over and over again. It is one of the
tricks we must not fall for. We have to look very carefully from the
Internet point of view to not let openness be crushed by constraints that
are built into the technology or by other means."

Ian Peter then took his own turn, saying, “As a tool for our development,
the Internet is an extraordinarily powerful one and an extraordinarily
useful one. In 1988, Brian Carpenter said the principle of constant change
is probably the only thing that will continue to change indefinitely. In the
middle of all of this change, what is it that we need to protect? It’s a
great task for us to determine what the core of it is that makes it so
exciting.”

He listed some of the core values he treasures—his selected list of
possibilities for his proposed 10 Commandments:

   1. Independence of applications
   2. New applications can be added anytime that’s a core value
   3. Permissionless innovation
   4. Open standards
   5. Accessible and globally inclusive—anyone can use it
   6. User choice—I can choose what applications I use and where I go to
   with them
   7. Ease of use—I can use it in my language, I can use it in a device I’m
   familiar with
   8. Freedom of expression
   9. The ability to change rapidly
   10. Trustworthy and reliable is one we have to work on; it’s got to be a
   core value.

Upon completing his list, Peter delivered the clever twist. “Quite
coincidentally,” he said, “there are 10 of these. Now here we are in the
shadows of Mount Sinai. If we had good remote communication, we could go up
there and we could write this on a tablet of stone.

“I don’t think [drawing up such a list] is a job for any one organization. I
would like us in the IGF to be involved in bringing something forward. We
need to find some way for all sorts of people who hold these beliefs quite
dearly to express this and get this into a document."

*IGF 2009 coverage is provided courtesy of a team from Elon University in
North Carolina, USA. Janna Quitney Anderson, director of the Imagining the
Internet Center and associate professor in the School of Communications at
Elon, wrote this entry. See more on IGF Egypt at
www.imaginingtheinternet.org.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/africann/attachments/20091201/e7ac576c/attachment.htm