Nobody Gives a Crap About Internet Governance

Filed under Domains, Journalism

Judging from the comments received by the NTIA on ICANN and the DNS Transition project, there are a hell of a lot of confused people out there.

(If you don’t know the background and don’t know shit about ICANN, you’re in the majority of this blog’s readers, but it’s probably best to stop reading now, because I’m not going to give the executive summary this time)

Here’s what I think happened.

In early June, the NTIA, part of the US Department Of Commerce, asked for public comments on whether ICANN is doing a good job, and what should happen in September, when ICANN in theory loses its NTIA-granted powers to oversee the domain name system and IP address allocation.

Shortly thereafter, Dr Milton Mueller encouraged readers of the ICANNWatch.org and the InternetGovernance.org web sites to submit a form letter to NTIA saying that ICANN’s powers should not be solely subject to the US government’s oversight.

Mueller came in for a bit of criticism from a couple of bloggers for “despising ICANN” and “spamming” NTIA, but these criticisms were ill-informed, sensationalist, and, in my opinion, should be ignored.

Form letters are a proven method for lobbying government on matters such as these, as demonstrated by Dr James Dobson, the far-right religious fruitcake who got Bush Jr elected on a platform of homophobia in 2004 and who last year shepherded his cult into a form-letter spamathon as a cynical tool get NTIA to obstruct the proposed .xxx domain.

While Mueller cannot be criticized for mimicking Dobson’s methods for noble purposes, he surely knew he was pissing into the wind. Milton knows better than I that the volume of emails received is only relevant if the Powers-That-Be are scared of the person orchestrating the attack.

The US administration is scared of Dobson, they’re not scared of Mueller.

After Mueller’s campaign died down, nobody gave a crap about the DNS Transition project for a while.

Then Kieren McCarthy, who I consider a mate and respect as a reporter, spunked out a piece on the NTIA comment period that was published on The Register on July 3, encouraging people to email the NTIA to say, in their own words, what they thought about the whole ICANN thing.

At this point, a tonne of people emailed NTIA either as a direct result of reading Kieren’s piece, or as a result of reading one of the lazy copycat articles that were published in other publications that same day. Either way, the NTIA got a relatively large amount of email in the next 24 hours.

First point – Thank Christ For Kieren McCarthy.

A reporter that persuaded a bunch of people to exercise their democratic right to call their government into account. The importance of that cannot be understated. I have enormous respect for any reporter who can command that kind of influence, regardless of his nationality.

Kieren’s article, and its copycats, got more common sense sent into the NTIA in one day than any other day that this hideously under-publicized comment period was running. For that, he commands kudos.

Regardless, a lot of the people who emailed NTIA didn’t have a fucking clue what they were talking about. And I kinda think The Register is a little bit responsible there, too.

A sizable chunk of these emails appear to be complaining to the NTIA about “net neutrality”.

I just read the first 80 of the 300 or so comments that were filed on July 3, and about 30 of those are definitely complaining about net neutrality, an absolutely different topic. Another 20 or so are complaining generally about the internet, and it’s not clear whether they’re talking about DNS or ICANN or net neutrality or something else entirely. Some of them are talking complete garbage, regardless of their purported subject matter.

A minority of these emails are clearly written by intelligent people who know what they’re talking about — not hardcore geeks, not DNS wonks, just regular internet-using folk who have a rudimentary grasp of what they’re responding to and the ability to express their views in comprehensible English. Unfortunately, those folk appear to be in the minority.

I’m guessing NTIA will probably take about 20% of the total emails seriously, maximum. Maybe less, if the submitters of those rational missives are not American voters. The rest will be consigned to the irrelevant/loony/foreigner bin.

I reckon the large number of off-the-mark NTIA emails shows clearly that few Register-reading people (ergo English-speaking geeks who can be arsed to comment on this kind of thing) give much of a crap about ICANN’s role in internet governance.

If I am correct in my opinion that The Register, a British blog, is the main way that US citizens find their avenue to interact with their government on these matters, then The Register needs to start taking its responsibilities a bit more seriously.

First, acknowledge that ICANN does not run the internet.

This is crucial.

Don’t publish this:

“The US government is asking for comments on how the internet should be run, and anyone is allowed to comment – but you’ll need to be quick.”

“Runs the internet” may be a simple way of describing ICANN in mainstream press articles aimed at people who don’t know the background, but it simply isn’t correct.

Using that terminology in articles read by hundreds of thousands of geeks, many of whom are not native English speakers and many more of whom are Americans with an actual voice on the subject, only ends up harming the debate, especially when you’re the primary news source on the story for most people.

Yeah, yeah, ICANN’s theoretical powers are immense. Yeah, yeah, ICANN is a tiny LA-based outfit that theoretically gets to negotiate national idenities with national governments. Yeah, yeah, ICANN gets to theoretically regulate billion-dollar companies. In reality, those governments have all the power. In reality, those billion-dollar companies have all the power. In reality, ICANN doesn’t actually do that much.

If ICANN ran the internet, and had powers over free speech and so forth, we wouldn’t be having this retarded debate about Google in China. If ICANN could regulate billion-dollar companies, it wouldn’t get bitch-slapped by VeriSign on a disturbingly regular basis.

ICANN doesn’t run the internet.

If you’re a US voter and you want to know what ICANN does do, go read its web site. If you want to comment to the NTIA, you have until the end of the day, so be quick.

Just try and make it slightly less off-topic than this stuff:

“Please keep the internet open for all forms of traffic without regard to origin or destination. Do not cave into to the greedy bells and cable co’s. We need a law that established net neutrality.”
“Allowing ISP’s to manage or restrict the Internet will change the equality of the Internet and the wonderful direction the web is going may see a roadblock.”
“Please do not build a ‘fast lane’ I do not think anyone should have the right to control, review and determine how I receive my packets, information.”
“I make a living from the Internet. If there is no neutrality, I will not be able to do that! I already pay for hosting, bandwidth and connectivity, but if content providers like me have to pay EVERY large player a regular fee, there will be far fewer people and places providing content.”
“Whatever happens, I believe the concept of “Net Neutrality” is key. You simply cannon allow companies to control the internet like they do cable television. It will change the way the internet as a whole works for the worse.”
“I want network neutrality, plain and simple. The bandwidth problem surely isn’t a simple one, but I don’t think making a tiered internet is a good solution.”
“In my view, the internet must remain neutral and not under the control of large corporate entities. The stifling of the free exchange of ideas and unfiltered communication will likely result, to the detriment of entrepreneurs worldwide.”
“keep private companies out of our internet! we should have the freedom to do whatever we would wish, insofar as it does not bring harm to others! that is our right, as determined by the constitution.”
“Keep ICAAN. Keep large carriers from implementing ‘Pay more for good service.’”
“It is very important for internet to stay neutral for everyone. We don’t want a two-speeded internet and certainly not want profit hungry telecomunication corporation to make ton of money on our backs.”
“My views: Keep ICANN. Net Neutrality is a must.”
“Concerned Parties, I yield my time to the gentleman from Illinois: The topic today is net neutrality.”
“Basically my input is ‘leave it alone’. It is working well, don’t regulate, censor it, throttle it, meter it, attempt to control it — ‘leave it alone’.”
“It would cause catastrophic economic and social consequences should the major ISP’s desire to charge more for preferred/faster service be realized.”
“Please allow for net neutrality. It’s how the internet is intended to be.”
“Save Net Neutrality”
“I would hate to see us lose ‘net neutrality’ and see the net be turned into a one way broadcast medium like television.”
“I do not want a future where there is a US-NET, where you can’t get your neighbours website but WALMART is available.”
“Net neutrality is a must allowing, telecom companies to control who gets what band width and how much through put and speed is a direct contradiction to america’s open market values.”
“Please leave the internet alone. It has been humming along fine these last few years, and when the big cable and phone companies start trying to pass laws that make them the only game in town – please say no.”
“The internet should be kept neutral.”
“To have some sites have an additional charge seems to be setting up a two-tier system, where some people would only be able to access the less desirable content. It is in effect seperated the lower and upper classes once again.”
“Leave the internet alone! It’s doing perfectly fine, you fools. You don’t need to control EVERYTHING. Keep it neutral.”
“I believe in Net Neutrality, where each packet is treated as every other packet. Each person should be able to say what they want, and pass information as they see fit.”
“Please allow those knowledgeable in the technology of the Internet have the most influence in technical decisions. Please support Network Neutrality.”
“The internet needs to be neutral, and kept the way it is now!”
“I feel that the government should force ISP companies to give people access to the internet without question or any fines. Also the ISP companies should not have records about what people look at on the internet, that is a violation of our rights.”
“I believe the internet should NOT be run by the telecom. One reason for this is because they have already wasted some 200 billing dollars of the taxpayers money, and now they want to control how people get their information with the tiered internet.”
“I know there are probably a lot of reasons why you want to charge, companies like Google are getting fat, well other companies can do the same thing, don’t blame the companies, blame the Internet providers for not thinking of it first.”

---

You Might Like These Posts (automatically generated):

1. IANA Coverage Quite Varied
2. ICANN Abandons Core Governance Principles
3. Victory Over ICANN’s Comment Period?

2006-07-07  ::  Kevin Murphy