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

[Tom Vest]

On Apr 11, 2005, at 8:37 AM, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> 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).

Countries: 240 +/-
   -- a few big, a larger number of small

Independent Networks (ASNs): 19,300 +/- 5,000 (components of multi-ASN 
ARDs)
   -- a few big, a vastly larger number of small

Two orders of magnitude seems like a big difference to me.

All things remaining equal (IP policy era, years online, telecom 
infrastructure, GDP, etc.), the more ISPs are associated with a given 
country, the more Internet resources (users + usage + uses) are 
associated with that country. In other words, a country with only x 
networks will have fewer Internet resources relative to its (IP policy 
era, years online, telecom infrastructure, GDP, etc.), compared to a 
country with (x+n) networks. This model is an especially good predictor 
of the distribution of Internet resources for the 63-64 countries that 
came online after 1997, during the same basic IP policy era.

So, it seems to me that having more producers results in having more 
Internet resources (users + usage + uses).

But perhaps this is irrelevant to the aims of Internet governance?

Tom Vest, PCH