<div id="news-item-info">
<h2 class="news-item-title">God did it, why can't we? UN ponders 'Net "10 commandments"</h2>
<p class="news-item-teaser"><a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/god-did-it-why-cant-we-un-ponders-net-10-commandments.ars">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/god-did-it-why-cant-we-un-ponders-net-10-commandments.ars</a></p>
<p class="news-item-teaser">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.</p>
<div class="news-item-byline">By <a href="http://arstechnica.com/author/nate-anderson/">Janna Quitney Anderson</a> | Last updated <abbr class="timeago datetime" title="2009-11-23T19:07:00Z">November 23, 2009 1:07 PM</abbr></div>
</div><p>Write a new 10 Commandments of the Internet, Peter proposed, and draft them on a tablet PC on Mount Sinai.
</p><p>
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. </p><p>
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.
</p>
<h3>Thou shalt document thy networking principles
</h3>
<p>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.
</p><p>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.
</p><p>“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.”
</p><p>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.”
</p><p>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.
</p><p>"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.”
</p><p>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.” </p><p>
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."
</p><p>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.”
</p><p>
He listed some of the core values he treasures—his selected list of possibilities for his proposed 10 Commandments:
</p>
<ol><li>Independence of applications
</li><li>New applications can be added anytime that’s a core value
</li><li>Permissionless innovation
</li><li>Open standards
</li><li>Accessible and globally inclusive—anyone can use it
</li><li>User choice—I can choose what applications I use and where I go to with them
</li><li>Ease of use—I can use it in my language, I can use it in a device I’m familiar with
</li><li>Freedom of expression
</li><li>The ability to change rapidly
</li><li>Trustworthy and reliable is one we have to work on; it’s got to be a core value. </li></ol>
<p>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.
</p><p>“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."</p>
<p><em>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 <a href="http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/">www.imaginingtheinternet.org</a>.</em></p>