I just got an e-mail from someone currently attending the IGF meeting in Geneva . The e-mail ended up in my spam folder because the IP address used for the WLAN at the meeting is on a spambot/virusbot blacklist, namely cbl.abuseat.org. Apparently some guy there has his computer infected by a spambot or a virusbot. Because the local host uses a NAT, all the computers share the same public IP address. This means that all the attendees to the meeting risk seeing their e-mails blacklisted somewhere.

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

The European Commission has released a communication on IPv6, in time for the IPv6 Day in Brussels next 30th May.  It goes in the same direction as the report presented at the OECD Ministerial meeting on “Future of the Internet Economy”, that was held in Seoul, Korea earlier this next month. At the same time, the Commission committed to make its own web services available on IPv6 by 2010.

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.

Veni Markovski has an excellent article on his blog about Civil Society Professionals in Internet Governance. You know, the people you meet each and every time in IGF, ICANN and other related meetings.  Quoting from his post:

- 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

The ever excellent Internet Protocol Journal, published by Cisco has an article this month by Steve Gibbard about the distribution of the Internet root servers. The press often writes there are only 13 of them. There are actually 117 at the time of this writing, and most of them outside the USA. This article will tell you where and what the remaining issues are. The study goes on to examine the geographical location of the gTLD and ccTLD servers.

<unpaid ad>The IPJ is a free publication of Cisco. Contrary to many manufacturer funded publications, this one is not a collection of advertisements and self-glorifying articles. Quite to the contrary, it is open to all contributors and is of a very high standard. Cisco should be commanded for providing this useful service to the community. In the end, this black and white publication benefits more to their image than expensive, flashy coloured ads. It is free, as in “free beer”. There are no strings attached. If you wish a paper copy subscription, just fill in the form on the web site. </unpaid ad>

The online registration for Internet Governance Forum in Athens, Greece, from 30th October to 2nd November 2006 is now open at http://www.intgovforum.org/register/index.php.

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.

Becky Burr (former NTIA official) and lobbyist Marilyn Cade has made a proposal to create a multilateral working group to oversee the root zone file updates.

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.

Newsweek is currently running a story in its international edition on the current state of Internet Governance. Don’t rush to read it in the hope of fresh news or insightful comments. This is targeted at a general audience and is thus subject to the generalizations, counter-truths, half truths and politically correct arguments.

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.

I have started a Google Calendar mentioning Internet governance related events.

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.

It seems like every ICANN board member needs to run a blog these days. Veni Markovski has started his own one.

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.

I have often argued both on this blog and in live discussions that spam is a non-issue, which could be addressed by the ISP industry if it really wanted to. All the tools are there. A free software like SpamCannibal could do the job for low traffic operations. For ISPs, they could link their routers to DNS backlists and drop packets on port 25 from rogue ISP IP addresses or AS’es. Once the legitimate customer of ISP X will start complaining that their e-mail are being rejected on a massive scale and threaten to switch providers, be sure that ISP X will effectively stop hosting spam operations.

Only the political/economical willingness is missing. Right now, ISPs are just making lots of $$$ out of spam. That’s selling bandwidth after all. This is what you get when an industry focuses on short term profits rather than societal/ethical behaviour. Or customers could begin to sue their connectivity provider and ask for compensation for damage. After all, spam is costing billions of dollars each year to individuals and companies, in terms of lost time and resources. Saying that the carrier is neutral and is not responsible for carrying spam is unresponsible.
If the industry does not want to auto-regulate itself and really enforce its AUPs, one day or another governemnts will have to threaten them with fines is they continue to carry spammers on their network. So, spam issues, in the WSIS context, is just a smoke screen to divert us from real issues, ie unilateral political control on key Internet resources. But spam is a popular subject, as everyone is facing it. It makes good headlines in the popular press.

Harold Furchgott-Roth is a former member of the US Federal communications Commission. He currently runs a piece in several US newspapers on the outcome of WSIS.

It is titled “How the White House Defended the Internet” and is a fun read for those of us liking stupid, one-sided arguments. It seems only Steven Forrest can find this thrilling. Bret Faussett disagrees with most of the arguments presented.
While most consider the WSIS was a success for the US, as it did not have to surrender its control on the Internet,   Furchgott-Roth nevertheless considers that the UN is a winner, too .

As the title of the paper suggests, it it clear for him the US “saved” the Internet. However, he fails to mention that the USG is currently one of the biggest threats to the stability of the Internet, given the way US national politics has rotten the ICANN debate, as witnessed by the .XXX debacle.

Europe yesterday launched the first satellite of its Galileo project, which will go into operational service in 2010. Galileo is meant to compete with the US GPS system.

So, asks the tongue-in-cheek Auerbach, why would Europe start a competing project while the US GPS system has been running fine ? Why does Europe want to move away from a US-controlled GPS ?

Just replace GPS with DNS in the above sentence. All arguments applying to GPS stand true for the DNS. It is a well known fact the the USG has been degrading the precision of its GPS system on purpose for military strategic reasons. It is not unimaginable that the same could be applied to DNS also.

It is certainly not a coincidence that the former Internet czar of the European Commission and director of the ICANN Brussels office, Paul Verhoef, is now is charge of the Galileo programme.

Luc Faubert wrote an article on the ISOC@WSIS blog, describing ITU’s Itsumi (ie not the Itsumi we know and love ), as an emperor wishing to rule the Internet. While I certainly agree that the ITU is not the best authority to rule the Internet, whatever that means, there are some statements by Luc I disagree with. There are posted here as the moderator of ISOC@WSIS does not seem to read his e-mails to approve comments.

Governance discussions whose outcome have no impact whatsoever on users represented well over half the efforts

I would not be as affirmative as Luc is regarding the fact that it does not affect users. ccTLDs, for example, have much to do with patriotic feelings. The potential disappearance of a ccTLD under the current framework is a geostrategic issue. These two issues are addressed in the WSIS agreement. Porn TLDs do shock some cultures.
So yes, DNS TLDs are a political matter. This is a major concept that the technical community does not want to take into account. It is arguing that it is politicization of a purely technical matter. Sorry guys. Technology is here to serve societal and political goals. It is not an answer in itself, but can help addressing and solving the issues.

As for the “emperor”, there has been one for years and he made it clear he does not want to share its treasure. We should make sure there is no emperor, not even a soft-handed one. And if there must be an emperor somehow, let us apply the law of constitutional monarchies, ie the king reigns but does not govern.

L’hebdomadaire Woxx a publié ce vendredi un article sur le Sommet Mondial de la Société de l’Information au travers d’un entretien avec votre serviteur. Le voici .

The Luxembourgish Woxx weekly has published this Friday an article on the World Summit on the Information Society through an interview with yours truly. Here it is. .

According to this report by Kieren Mc Carthy, the US government will keep its oversight on the DNS root zone. Apparently, the EU has received a strong message from the US Department of State which frightened some member states. As a result, they surrended to the US proposal.

At WSIS last night,  the minimal agreement reached says that a Internet governance Forum will be established within 5 years. This forum will not have any oversight function. ICANN will fundamentally remain how it is today, ie under contract with the US Department of Commerce.

There may be some changes within the Government Advisory Committee of ICANN, but nothing fundamental.

The question now is if all this UN/ITU/Unesco circus was necessary to come up with such a small conclusion. They could as well have used the money  to fund the summit and its parrallel meetings to effectively address the digital divide.

In all languages, the Tunisian regime managed to lose a chance to make itself look positive. Should we send the blue helmets to protect the Summit ? Apparently, the priviledges and immunities granted to the WSIS participants have been forgotten.

French daily’s visiting correspondent badly beaten and stabbed on Tunis street

Journalists, others at World Summit on the Information Society attacked by authorities

Dans toutes les langues, le régime tunisien a raté une belle occasion de se mettre en valeur positivement. Faut-il envoyer les casques bleus pour protéger le sommet ? Les privilèges et immunités accordés aux participants du SMSI sont apparamment lettre morte.

Une équipe de journalistes belges molestée en Tunisie

La police de M. Ben Ali est accusée de chercher à intimider la presse

Tricia Drakes and Michael Palage have posted a proposal to solve one of the issues that has repeatedly been mentioned during the WSIS consultations. Make countries find it awkward that changes to their ccTLD in the root zone file has to be approved by the US DoC.

While this proposal will doubtlessly address some of the concerns, it does not yet solve the issue with gTLDs, nor does it address the perspective of an real, independent regulatory agency for names and numbers.

A lot of discussions surrounding WSIS and ICANN focus on the oversight function of the US government. Hans Klein’s recent paper sheds a good light on the different  contracts between ICANN and the USG. However, Klein does not discuss how legitimate these contracts are.

Any undergraduate law student knows that one party can only sell, rent or otherwise grant rights to goods and services it personnally owns. So the question is fundamentally: does the US own the Internet ? Surely, the USG owns the US military network, as well as the federal and possibly the academic. But the Internet is a network of networks. Can the USG impose its oversight on networks it does not own ?   Based on this hypothesis, the  contracts between the DoC and ICANN could only apply to the USG networks. Extending these contracts to any network directly or indirectly connected to the US administration ones would be a gross legal mis-conception, especially outside the US, as US law is not applicable elsewhere in the world.

Saying that the US owns the Internet because it financed part of its development would be like pretending that the EU should have oversight on each and any GSM telephone network in the world because the standards were developed with EU research money, or that the Finnish governement holds a right on every installation of Linux because it was developed by a Finnish student on the Helsinki university computers.

Unfortunately, neither the ICANN board, nor the staff have ever questioned how legitimate these contracts are and if they should not be considered void by design, because the other party has no right to contract on a service it does not own.

Just wanted to point out to two articles which explain with simple words and concepts what the current ussues of Internet governance are.
 
One is by Andy Oram on O’Reilly. The other is by Juan Sanchez on ReasonOnline. I praise these guys for explaing complicated issues while not oversimplyfing them.