[governance] Re: [WSIS CS-Plenary] ICANN/ITU "legitimacy"

[Vittorio Bertola]

Il giorno lun, 11-04-2005 alle 00:54 -0400, Milton Mueller ha scritto:
> >>> Tom Vest <tomvest at comcast.net> 4/10/2005 3:22:30 PM >>>
> >WHOIS requirements don't apply to Internet users; they 
> >apply to Internet *producers*, i.e., entities that wish to 
> >participate in and add to the Internet's physical and logical 
> >architecture. 
> 
> Your distinction between "producers" and "users" doesn't work. There is
> no intellgible distinction between "users" and "entities that wish to
> participate in and add to the Internet's physical and logical
> architecture." 

Actually, I'd like to stress that this is really the key point that
makes the Internet what it is, and makes it so different from previous
telecommunications systems, and makes it so fit to spread knowledge and
freedom.

On the telegraph, radio, fixed telephone, television and mobile
telephone networks, users did not have in practice any possibility to
produce content, and let alone innovate the technology. There was a huge
centralized operator (or a handful of them, usually gathered in a
cartel) that set up the network, managed it, and decided which content
and which services users would be allowed to access. Still today, if you
want to offer applications or services to the customers of a mobile
network, you usually have to sign a deal with the operator, and are
forced to accept its controls and conditions.

On the Internet, on the other hand, users are free to reprogram the edge
nodes of the network; they have easy ways to introduce new content and
to create new services and applications. In fact, most applications were
born this way: the World Wide Web was not invented by an ISP to make a
business out of it and increase the revenues, but was invented by a
individual user who was doing a completely unrelated job and needed this
new tool to support it. The same can be said of a lot of stuff - and
even when services were invented for money, they were rarely invented by
network operators.

Creating a distinction between "producers" and "users" is exactly the
way to destroy the Internet, push individuals out of control over what
happens on the net, and restore centralized control by a few big
entities (be them governments, State-owned industries, private
corporations or whatever, it doesn't make much of a difference).

(On Whois specifically, people like Milton and I have been spending
years in fighting this battle... and now, it's not just a battle to get
one fundamental human right, privacy, incorporated in the domain name
system; it's also a political struggle in terms of sovereignty, since
some business groups that are very powerful at ICANN are effectively
exploiting it to prevent national privacy laws of other countries from
being applied, even if the entire transactions happens in those
countries' territories.)
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...