ICANN's Plan
I support ICANN. It's better than the alternative for carrying out its very narrow mission: making sure entries in the root don't conflict, staying on top of changes to the IANA database, and serving as a forum for the creation of consensus policies (within a constrained “picket fence” of topics) for which documented support exists. Although there has been a “if you're not with us, you're against us” embattled feeling in the air where ICANN is concerned, I do think that the ICANN experiment in self-ordering for global names and numbers continues to be worthwhile, and I want it to succeed.
But I do have some concerns about ICANN's recently-released Strategic Plan [pdf]. Complete with UN-style document numbering, it's clearly the product of a great deal of work by the staff and by consultants to ICANN. The only problem is that it's a plan without limiting principles or a clear recognition of ICANN's limited role in the world.
Some specifics:
1. Staff to double over the coming year; budget to continue to rise by leaps and bounds; new gTLDs and .net to provide revenue stream based on .75 per “transaction” (or “billable event”) and slices of new registry services.
2. Regional offices to open around the world; more meetings to happen, including sub-regional meetings; special funds earmarked for developing nations to be gathered and disbursed.
3. ICANN to take a central role with respect to security; multilingual efforts to be substantially increased; better PR for ICANN to be provided.
There's a central tension here. ICANN says, appropriately, that it's not going to handle spam or content issues or anything else. Its job is to make recommendations to the US Department of Commerce concerning what changes should be made in the root zone file, and to maintain the list of IP addresses that the Regional Internet Registries hand out. This is a very very limited job.
The plan set forth in this document, while eminently logically presented, seems far out of proportion to this very limited job, for the following reasons:
a. Most of ICANN's work could be (should be) done online. Why have even more meetings? Why have even more regional presences?
b. By contract, the scope of ICANN's authority to set consensus policies has been sharply limited. This plan contains no recognition of this fact.
c. ICANN has to date made very little progress on items it says it needs more money to accomplish. But the plan provides no milestones for the use of this additional money. For example, although the plan makes clear that root server security is one of ICANN's top priorities, ICANN has never succeeded in making any progress with these operators (and may never do so). Same with formal agreements with ccTLDs. The address space is well taken care of, but that's thanks to the RIRs — not ICANN.
d. ICANN claims credit for tasks it has very little to do with. For example, ICANN points to the successful resolution of billions of name requests. But that's thanks to private operators, not ICANN. And ICANN has nothing whatsoever to do with coordination of technical parameters — it hands that job off to root server operators, the RIRs, and the IETF. To the extent ICANN seeks funding to “continue” these jobs, they can be done for free.
What ICANN does need is support for the volunteers who work on policy development — we'd have a better answer to WIPO II if we had better help. And ICANN does need staff to deal with registry and registrar requests that ICANN finish things it has promised to do. But ICANN doesn't need more meetings, doesn't need regional offices, and doesn't need to generate funds to support work on connectivity and other issues in developing nations. These things don't fit with its very limited mandate.
And ICANN certainly doesn't need money to continue endless work on tasks for which it has – to date — showed no particular aptitude. Particularly where no performance milestones are present to limit its endless appetite for growth. (It's amazing that this flurry of tasks and subtasks isn't linked to a visible docket sheet that people can follow online.)
Here's a question for ICANN. Assume a guaranteed, no-negotiation-necessary budget of $5 million a year. How would you carry out your tasks? I have a feeling that it could be done. It just doesn't take that much work to check entries in the IANA database, allow a new gTLD to open, or allow online work on consensus policies to go forward.
Complexity and Linked
I've had the benefit of two long plane flights and an enormous layover (16 hours) recently, so I have been having visions of internet governance. What else is there to think about when you're completely unconnected from the world and the stranger next to you keeps unconsciously elbowing you throughout the long night?
Two books have made the journey with me: Waldrop's 'Complexity' and Barabasi's 'Linked.' Waldrop writes about the founding of the Sante Fe Institute, and the enormous interdisciplinary excitement of its early days. One by one, the PhDs tell their stories — they were alone, tootling along with their research, until they were brought together in Sante Fe and realized that other people had been working on the same problems.
Linked is aimed at getting us all to recognize the common characteristics of complex networks: scale-free, subject to power laws, rich-get-richer growth patterns.
So, add the two together: what's the best way to govern a complex network that is self-organizing, emergent, subject to power laws, and living on its own? The Santa Fe founders would say, “Watch it with care, but don't pretend that you can predict its course or channel its development.”
I also have the ICANN Strategic Plan with me. On the next flight (one more to go), I'll add it to the first two and see what results. I wonder whether the authors of the Plan have read the other two books. Even if they haven't, ICANN Board members say the right things. They're not governing; they're watching and facilitating.
Red v. blue election
The recent election was fraudulent. Turnout was suspiciously high in the eastern portions of the country. Voter intimidation and repeat voting took place nationwide. Factory workers were told to request absentee ballots and then hand them to their supervisors — thus keeping the workers from voting. Thugs appeared, convicts and criminals, to beat people up and keep them from voting the way they wanted to. Here's the map of this election:
(map from Yuschenko site – site loads very slowly)
That's right: it's the Ukraine. This image shows (I think) what should have happened if the votes were counted fairly. Yushchenko (red) would have beaten Yanyukovych (blue, and tied to Russia and the east).
Here's another image showing which province went to which candidate:
(maps from the BBC)
The Ukraine Supreme Court has suspended the publication of the results of the election until it has a chance to examine the opposition's arguments. Yanukovych's henchmen say:
“No-one, not even the Supreme Court, has the right to cancel [the result]”
It's not really red v. blue — Yushchenko's color is orange, and people wearing orange buttons in support of him have already lost their jobs in Kiev.
And we here in the US had a fair election.
The highest technology
Full-bandwidth, human interaction is the highest technology we have. A crowded funeral, an enormous demonstration, or a small group talking — every time, some kind of resonance takes over. So have a happy Thanksgiving. And don't work too hard when it's over.
In-Game Advertising
Now that devices are frustrating fast-fowarding (”don't try to get up — we own your attention — don't skip this commercial“) by making you view banners if you try to skip ads, the end of the advertising arms-race must be near.
Ads have to become inseparable from “content” in order to survive — so woven in that we can't ignore or delete them. Mainstream media is catching on to the far horizons of product placement. Newsweek reports this week that
companies are looking to place the customer inside an advertising game, or “advergame,” almost indefinitely. “You are now in the world the advertiser has created for you,” says advergame designer Dan Fergeson.
This is what Times Square does too, but you can always decide to duck down a side street.
Here's a regulatory question: how does the FTC decide what is deceptive about a fully-immersive advertisement? Is it false and misleading to show someone a really great, enriching life inside an advertisement when the product being advertised is shoddy and grey?
I'd say “stay tuned,” but the thing is that we may get to the point of not being able to tell when we're “tuned” intentionally to a mass media event — and when we're just blindly talking to someone who is being paid to sell to us.
Net Day
We're clearly surrounded by self-organizing systems, at all levels. Things are becoming more interesting all the time.
And, for me, things became even more interesting tonight when I tried to explain to a small group of people why we need a Net Day next fall. The group had endless suggestions:
1. Don't depict an online “wave” — that's just a mob! (Answer: Sometimes humans like to synchronize. It might be fun to have a brief global “wave” during which individuals clicked to light up their part of the network map.)
2. What abstract goals would a Net Day serve? (Answer: Like Earth Day, a Net Day would raise consciousness by helping people see a picture of the network generated one pixel at a time by groups. The picture could be created over the course of several months; individuals could work within groups to accept or change the colors and shapes generated by other groups “around” them. Visuals coming.)
3. Who's going to pay for Net Day? (Answer: Enlightened companies and foundations who want to market the idea of a healthy network to mainstream people who aren't online yet. But not everyone will agree on every online goal; adding more people to the network may be the only common global hope.)
I've been assured by some of the books I re-read (I do this a lot) that there is a place for us in the universe. And Lee Smolin's Life of the Cosmos made me believe for one shining summer that I actually understood the evolution of galaxies (and therefore the evolution of people).
That moment may have passed. Time to re-read.
But now I'm wondering if there's a way to show people — without using a lot of text — that there's a place for them online in the evolving electronic world, and that their individual actions shape the picture of the network.
We had a good conversation. (One problem: someone listening tonight said it would cost $100 million to adequately market this idea. Hmm. I hope that's not the case. Maybe it's better not to know how much effort this is going to take.)
It takes only 30 people in a stadium of 50,000 to start a wave going. How many bloggers would it take to start Net Day off?
Things That Start With P
In general, a second Bush administration is good for tech companies. It's unlikely that there are geeks in this White House who are anxious to place their stamp on the internet.
But the next four years hold risks for speech. Even the most innovation-friendly conservative loses his head when it comes to protecting kids from smut online — material that is perfectly lawful for adults to view.
It's not difficult to imagine that an alliance between the content industry and Christian conservatives could be joined to fight against a passel of things that start with P: porn, piracy, and P2P. The goal: to frame the internet as a dark den of iniquity rather than an engine of economic growth and opportunity. (”Someone should be in charge of this thing that is destroying our controlled distribution channel.”)
In a kind of harmonic convergence, this pack of Ps can be tied together: P2P systems can be attacked in hearings as full of porn and piracy. And it's not difficult to predict that we'll see some one-off P-related initiatives that are aimed towards son-of son-of CDA attempts. (CDT has a great resource page here.)
Just yesterday, Sen.Brownback led a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee in a remarkable P-attack hearing, targeting online pornography addiction.
There's a hysterical tone to the reports of this hearing. It sounds like recovered-memory testimony, or the twinkie defense, or other famous witch-hunts across the ages. “My God! I had no idea this well-established syndrome was such a problem!”
Line up to watch the P-rade. We'll all meet afterwards in court.
FCC and Net Ecology
Here are three thoughts tying together (1) the groundswell perceived by Jeff Jarvis with respect to the FCC's future and (2) the project of helping people see the differences between networks and hierarchies:
1. The Flash Part. Advances come through making things visible. Get people to see, for one day in September 2005, how they are connected to others online, whether as bloggers, members of an online community, or lurkers. (”Net Ecology Day.”) Show this picture (which will be quite a sight) to people who aren't online often or at all.
2. The Empirical Part. Connect this picture (somehow) to money and opportunity. Each of us believes we're above average and just about to escape from whatever rut we're in. That's what gives us hope to go on. If we realized just how badly things were actually going, we'd all be Eeyores. So link Net Ecology Day to jobs, numbers, innovation, and opportunity. Because people are able to be online and connect to others, jobs and revenues and all the rest are bubbling up, creating entirely new economies. Show people who aren't netheads that they could be employed by being online.
3. The Netizen/Policy Part. By September 2005, connect the visualization and the empirical evidence of opportunity to the dangers of overregulation of the internet. Show how order can emerge from decentralized, productive actions (linking and working together), without any single government agency being in charge of online social policies.
This may help cheer up David Weinberger, if nothing else.
All ideas welcome.
Incumbent-Driven Regulation
I'm thinking of working on a major internet governance conference for next fall. Please, everyone, talk me out of it. It's an unbelievable amount of work; even the Nethead/Bellhead one-day no-papers no-presentations fest took enormous amounts of non-monetary resources to put together. Why would I ever try that again?
But tonight a wise friend of mine said, Well, I'm with you on the internet regulation front, because all regulation in this area is incumbent-driven and badly-done. This reminded me of a cartoon in this week's New Yorker:
BLAG and Weitzner
It's a blog about the state Attorneys General. So it's a BLAG, not a blog. And Jim Tierney is running it — go take a look.
Also, Danny Weitzner of W3C has a new blog! Very exciting.
Where's your blog?