The Next Net

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.