--- Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 11:55:21 -0400 To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> From: Marc Rotenberg <rotenbergat_private> Subject: Marc Rotenberg on Milton Mueller's "Ruling the Root" (MIT Press) Declan - I received several favorable comments on this recent review of Milton Mueller's book about ICANN. Please forward to Politech if you think appropriate. Regards, Marc. ======================================================================= [7] EPIC Bookstore - Ruling the Root ======================================================================= Milton L. Mueller, "Ruling the Root" (MIT Press 2002) http://www.epic.org/bookstore/powells/redirect/alert914.html Ten years ago 1,500 people gathered in Kobe, Japan for the first annual meeting of the Internet Society. The mood was upbeat and the program fast-paced. Panels and workshops explored net access in the developing world, new network applications and technologies, and multi-media techniques. A track on policy examined privacy, security, appropriate use and globalization, but the focus at the conference was clearly the protocols, not the policies. Lawyers were the exception. There was no Mosaic, let alone Netscape. "Governance" was not yet on the agenda. Fast forward to the present. The recent meetings of ICANN, the entity created by the Department of Commerce to manage the central root server, have been nothing short of rancorous. An experiment in Internet self-governance has mutated into an exercise in secret policies, outraged critics, and increasing failures to make real public participation. What has happened in the past decade that has turned Internet policy into such unpleasant business? A good answer to this question will be found in Milton Mueller's Ruling the Root (MIT Press 2002). Mueller traces the early days of root management, associated with the benevolent rule of Jon Postel, through the efforts of Ira Magaziner and the Department of Commerce to create a non-profit corporation that would "reflect the will of the Internet community," on to the present day where the struggles over public participation, legitimacy, and scope threaten to pull the plug on ICANN. His interest is in understanding how the management of the root, which perhaps was too easily called "governance," became institutionalized. His conclusion is simple: instead of a decentralized form of governance, root management came to resemble radio frequency allocation where a scarce resource (or a perhaps more precisely, a resource made scarce) could be used to leverage other policy goals. To push the Internet back into one of the boxes of Ithiel Pool's famous taxonomy of communications technologies, management of the root was treated as broadcast regulation rather than print publication. Not surprisingly, a battle over the allocation of newly minted property rights followed. Mueller's writing is clear and the coverage of the topic extensive, though some may find the discussion slow-going. This is not Katie Hafner writing about the creation of the Internet or Steven Levy on the birth of the hacker culture. But this is a careful and serious exploration of a topic in desperate need of such treatment. Mueller propose several theoretic models to explain such topics in Internet development as resource allocation and the formation of property rights, though Mueller's well chosen analogies may actually do more to help clarify some of the current policy challenges. Consider, for example, why there is little public debate over Ethernet addresses (they are simply numbers, not names) or what the consequences might be of adopting a controlled vocabulary for network identities (card catalogs are too formal). As professor Michael Froomkin elsewhere observed, the "metaphor is the key" in many of the critical technology policy debates. Mueller touches briefly on some of the privacy problems that follow from the current administration of the Internet. The WHOIS database, originally intended to allow network administrators to find and fix problems with minimal hassle, now offers one-stop shopping for spammers, criminal investigators, and copyright enforcers. That WHOIS data might be used for such purposes is probably unavoidable, but whether WHOIS should be designed to facilitate such use is a topic that deserves more debate. Some of the conflicts in the growth of the Internet could be anticipated. The use of names rather than numbers to identify computers connected to the Internet created genuine concerns for both trademark maximalists and trademark minimalists. But it also created value and to go back to a system of numbers at this point, as some have urged, would still be a net loss. Mueller himself seems to oscillate between skeptic and idealist as he offers his own assessment of the prospects for Internet governance. At times he appears critical of those, such as Internet law expert David Johnson and cyberprof David Post, who believed that a new form of government for the Internet was not only possible but necessary. At other times, he chastises those trademark lawyers who vigorously protected their clients interests in the .com domain asking why this was necessary when the Internet made possible a much broader domain space. Well, yes, that would be true if the address space did indeed expand, but scarcity is the current reality. Mueller offers a clear warning that the institutionalization of the root threatens to diminish the openness and decentralization of the Internet. But maybe there is another warning as well. Perhaps governance should be left to governments. At least governments that create the opportunity to vote have found it very difficult to later retract the right. - Marc Rotenberg ================================ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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