Avri,
My hope is that the major civil society
constituencies in
this process can unite around opposition to any governance model
based on a
single global organization. After centuries of governance
evolution this is not
how governance is structured in other areas. Gravity is even more pervasive
than is the Internet and we have not argued that traction is
everywhere so we
should have global governance of driving regulations :-)
In my meetings with students and others who
respond with
little knowledge and prior thought, they frequently innocently
propose some “UN
body” to govern the Internet using the simple argument that
“somebody has to do
something about this”, the “this” being everything from
exploitation of
children to government spying and commercial data mining.
The challenge here is to shift the discussion
to deeper
issues of how governance does and might work. Starting from the
usual agreement that any
governance should be democratic, and not authoritarian, the
problem becomes immediately
apparent. Should global
votes be weighted
one country one vote, or weighted by population. With Tuvalu (pop
10,000) and
China (pop 1363 million), China and large population countries
would not agree
to one country one vote. With China’s 1363 million and the U.S.’s
318 million,
the U.S and small population countries would not agree to one
person one vote. There is no basis here for agreement for a single
multilateral global governance body.
Governance of the Internet is likely to look
more like the
multi-polar and multi-leveled governance models that have evolved
everywhere over
time. That path to Internet governance structures is paved with
more
knowledgeable and engaged stakeholder constituencies, organizing
as
cohorts pursuing their respective objectives at several levels at
the same time.
Such it has always been and such it will always be, even in the
virtual
territories of the Internet, and such it will be in the long run
no matter how this DNS
transition rolls out in the short run.
Sam Lanfranco