FC: Marc Rotenberg reviews Milton Mueller's new book on ICANN

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Wed Jul 31 2002 - 21:47:09 PDT

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    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
    
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