Funny this comes from the very people who would like to set up strategies to fight cybercrime …

Lesson to be learned:

One: NATs are a nuisance. They are responsible for collateral damage.

Two: In a hostile networking environment, never ever trust the local network and fire up your ssh or IPsec tunnel to a machine you can trust.

Three: give us IPv6 as soon as possible to get rid of NATs

It is good to see that intergovermental organizations take the lead on this, after 10 years of failure of the private sector to actually deploy IPv6. This is a good example of why governments are needed in the Internet governance arena, be it the IGF or the GAC in ICANN.

Quick and dirty fixes like NATs allow for small investments and high short-term returns. This is what most CEOs in the Internet industry are concerned with,  because they risk to get fired if they do not provide a good and quick return to shareholders. When a long term and societal vision is needed, governments become key leading partners.

It is true that these governments also include a bunch of “supreme guides of the people’s revolution” and other sorts of autocrats and dictators. Indeed, they censor and control their local Internet. These are the same people who control other media like TV or the written press. There is nothing new under the sun, and I still do not understand some in the Internet community who like us to think the Net is different from other media and that the (bad) rules do not apply.

This is why we need the increased presence of democratic governments in Internet governance circles. Unfortunately, the current ideology in democratic countries is to let the private sector do whatever it  wants, with little political support. Not-so-democratic governments, on the contrary, tend to be very active. The end result, as we see in the IGF, is that the latter come up with requests that neither the private sector nor the “civil society” (whatever that means) can counter, because they lack the political weight. A good dictator knows the best way to silence the private sector is to become one of its customers, because no company wants to loose business.  Which leads us back to paragraph 3 above.

- we may be seeing the emergence of a professional class of civil society activists (”CS professionals”).
- the CS professionals are alleged to have specific private interests. Their careers, income, and status depend on the Internet governance process.
- the CS professionals are alleged to have a biased world view, based on easy access to the Internet, full command of the English language, and personal origins in USA and Western Europe.
- representatives from less affluent, non-English-speaking societies may find themselves marginalized by this CS professional class

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The IGF’s hosting provider, Net Access, has also hosted spammers, which means the IP address of their server (66.246.220.27) is on several black lists. In case you do not receive a confirmation message of your registration, this may be the reason. Check your spam filters.

I would characterize the Burr-Cade proposal as a “small step for mankind and a giant step for the US” to paraphrase Neil Armstrong. The main merit of the proposal is that it looks like something the USG might want to follow.

Sevaral people suggested there should be no governmental oversight at all but that does not look realistic, in the sense that there can be huge economic and political interests behind ICANN decisions. Historically, governments have always been involved in foreign economic policy decisions (WTO) and would be blamed by their people if they did not. ICANN is yet another such process.

Like it or not, there are sovereignty issues linked to ccTLDs. There is no way one could exclude governments from the decision process.

Regarding the composition of this oversight group, I would say that the European representation should be reviewed. It would not be accepted by the EU that UK, itself a member of the EU, gets a seat on its own. I would rather expect two seats for the EU, one permanent and one rotating according to the EU presidency. The third seat should be for non-EU countries.

The authors of the proposal show they have no clue regarding regional political weightings. Rather, they suggest American-friendly countries. It would be wiser to allow regional governmental councils (African Union, Organization of American States, etc) to designate their representatives.

All in all, I would personally support this proposal as a starting point for discussions. It is incidentally close to a reply to a WSIS questionnaire last year, in which I suggested that the oversight on the root should be done by a sub-committee of the GAC.

Update: Becky Burr will discuss her proposal during the ICANN Strategy Committee Consultations today at 9:00am (Marina del Rey time). There will be a live audio feed.

Update2: This article is also featured on CircleID.

A few pearls:

The Open Root Servers Network is depicted as an “anti-american” initiative. Of course, Newsweek failed to mention that Paul Vixie, an American citizen, was running one of these root servers. This would not have helped making the case. And, as is usual these days, critizing, or questioning the rethorics of, an administration is equivalent to being the enemy of a country.

In the same vein, Newsweek considers it is unwise from the French and German governments to pour money into an European IT research project whose goal is to develop a search engine technology. On the other hand, Newsweek does consider that the USG funding of Arpanet and subsequent research that helped develop the Internet is OK. To summarize: US funding of research is fine, but Europeans should not do the same.

Newsweek should have called this article “Internet governance for dummies”. Unfortunately, after reading it, one is still a dummy.

The calendar is here is ics and xml formats.

This is work in progress. Feel to inform me of forthcoming events I have failed to mention.

While this stems from a good intention, it is looks like a bad good idea. I tried to follow some ICANN meetings through these webcasts, only to come out frustrated. Even with a good broadband connection, the quality is rather poor. One can stand the bad video, frozen images and 5 minute delay for only a few minutes. Just imagine what that would look like and how much it would cost using a 9600 bps dial-up connection in Africa. Add to that that communications is really one way. Feeding back your opinion to the meeting is close to impossible, if only for the delay, which would prevent from replying in time.

So, instead of spending lots of money on webcasting, the IGF would do better to spend it on sponsoring the attendance of those delegates who can not afford to travel. Sure, webcasting is sexy, but only for those who can watch it with comfort. However, nothing can replace face-to-face meetings. At WSIS, IGF or ICANN, many of the important conversations are happening in the corridors or at the bar. They are not webcasted. If you want to influence a process, you need to be there.