Indablog

ICANN’s Rod Beckstrom linked to this article by Janna Quitney Anderson, motivating this response from a well-known I* critic:

The problem with things like this is they obscure the fact the internet is a collective of private networks, there’s no public component. If the UN would like a network to abide by a certain 10 principles its certainly welcome to build a network like that. But no matter how feelgood I don’t see the utility of what they’re proposing, and and its toothless. Besides I still remember John Perry Barlow’s “declaration of independqance of cyberspace”

My followup:

But Richard, Like members of any durable community, the founders of the Internet shared a collection of charter myths, and those myths gave rise to a more or less explicit set of driving norms. Chief among them were Interoperability, Scalability, Connectivity, Accessibility, Layering, and the End-to-End Principle.

Those norms helped socialize newcomers, and were widely embraced because they were inherently attractive.

Even though these norms still convey a technical flavor, it’s clear enough that they intersect well with the broader human values of inclusivity, responsibility, and free expression…. See More

I don’t have much of a problem with “things like this” because of my view that openly stated norms and conventions can, and indeed often do, function as public components of a community… even if they’re not formalized by a state-backed legal authority.

Even so, it’s an open question as to how legitimate it would be to undertake a full-fledged restatement of the community’s norms as commandments… not just cherished values. In Ph.D.-speak, this gets at the difference between assertive rules and directive rules. Is there a mechanism by which members of the community can fairly and fully articulate a consensus view of how the behavior of all members should be bound?

(Shameless plug alert: I’ve been trying to build one.)

The article is also here.

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