[2]          Is the Internet a Laboratory for Democracy?
                                        by Ronda Hauben
                                        ronda@panix.com

[Editor's Note: Following is an edited and expanded version of an
invited talk "Is the Internet a Laboratory for Democracy: The Vision
of the Netizens or the E-commerce Agenda?" given at the European Union
NGO Citizen's Agenda Conference in Tampere, Finland, December 5, 1999. 
The URL for the conference was http://www.citizen2000.net/E2 ]

I am happy to be here today at this EU Conference on Citizens2000
exploring the nature of citizenship at this special time in history
when we are about to welcome in not only a new century but also a new
millennium.

It is interesting that many of the questions being asked at this
conference are the questions that show that we have both the old and
the new surrounding us and it is not always easy to understand the new
as it isn't something that we are familiar with.

Yesterday during one of the opening sessions of the conference, the
question was raised by both someone in the audience and someone on the
panel on stage, about why the voting level of people voting in
elections in Europe is low. This is true in the U.S. as well. The
session yesterday raised the important need to go beyond
representative democracy in political forms available to the citizen
in modern times. And the question was asked: "What would be the new
ways of participating?"

I am delighted to be here today at this conference considering the
role of citizens in the coming millennium. This seminar "Civic
Participation, Virtual Democracy and the Net" is not only exploring
the role of citizenship but also a new form of citizenship, that of
the form of citizen which is one of the newly emerging developments
brought into the world by the Internet. That of the Netizen.

The question I want to raise with my talk is "Is the Internet a
laboratory for democracy?" And I hope that we can discuss this
question more fully as part of this seminar. Also I want to raise the
question of what this shows us about the nature of the Internet and
about the new forms of participatory democracy the Internet makes
possible.

When I first got access to Usenet, online newsgroups that are
accessible via the Internet, my earliest posts were greeted with
comments from people around the U.S. and from other countries like
Scotland and Canada and Australia. I was thrilled with the ability to
have a serious discussion on a variety of important issues. This was
the situation when I first got access to an e-mail account and Usenet
in January 1992 from the Cleveland Free-Net.

I had heard that Usenet was a collection of newsgroups filled with all
sorts of interesting information, but I didn't know how to contribute
to it. I wrote out a description of what I was interested in
discussing and sent it to the only online newsgroup forum that I could
figure out how to access at the time, which was called
misc.books.technical.
 
First Post on Usenet

From: au329@freenet.cleveland.edu
Newsgroup: misc.books.technical
Date: 10 Jan 92 07:48:58
   
   I am interested in discussing the history of economics 
i.e., Mercantilists, physiocrats, Adam smith, ricardo, marx, 
marshall, keynes, etc. With the world in such a turmoil it 
would seem that the science of economics needs to be 
invigorated. Is there anyplace on Usenet News where this 
kind of discussion is taking place?
   Ronda

The response to this and my other early posts surprised me. I had
posted to the Usenet newsgroup misc.books.technical because this was
the only newsgroup I could get access to and I was new using Usenet,
using it from the Cleveland Free-Net. Within a day I had 10 e-mails
from across the U.S. and a few from abroad. Do you have any idea
why? The newsgroup misc.books.technical was for the discussion of
technical subjects and I was asking about how to discuss economics. 
People from around the U.S. and abroad wrote me to tell me that I had
posted in the wrong newsgroup. Several of those who wrote told me the
newsgroup where I should have posted in was "sci.econ." Others wrote,
describing how Usenet worked. Even more surprising was that one
person actually wrote, encouraging me to post in the appropriate
newsgroup and saying to me: "We're all ears!"

I had interested people and they had acted both to tell me what I had
done wrong and also to tell me how to be able to make my contribution
so that it could be utilized and considered by others.

This was an impressive experience for me. Ten people had taken time
out from their lives to help me correct a problem, and to make it
possible for me to begin to contribute to Usenet and its growing
worldwide community of users.

A short time later I found another online forum, a "mailing list". 
Unlike the newsgroups that were forums where I could go to
participate, joining a mailing list led me to get messages that came
to my mailbox and often would fill my mailbox. This was 1992. The
U.S. portion of the Internet, during this time period of 1992-1993 was
basically government owned and operated. The mailing list I had
joined was called "com-priv". This mailing list was discussing plans
for privatizing the U.S. portion of the Internet and making it
commercial. On this mailing list I found U.S. government officials
from different U.S. government agencies, including the National
Science Foundation who were in charge of networking there. There were
officers from the newly created Internet Society, and some of the
people who had begun to operate or were hoping to soon operate
commercial access points who called themselves Internet Service
Providers (ISP).

When I posted on "com-priv" asking why the U.S. portion of the
Internet was being privatized, my posts were either ignored or I would
get an e-mail asking me why someone who had just arrived into the
discussion would have such strong views on this topic.

Here my contributions were discouraged or ignored. I wondered why I
could find no discussion about the planned privatization. What were
the reasons for it to happen? What were the reasons it might be a
problem? And why was no such discussion allowed on the mailing list?

I posted on "com-priv" asking a question about the development of the
Internet. Also through e-mail I got in contact with some of the
pioneers of early Usenet and the Internet.

I eventually left the "com-priv"mailing list, but I had begun to
realize that I wanted to understand the origins of Usenet and the
Internet, and to understand how the interesting participatory
environment I was experiencing online on Usenet had developed. My
access to Usenet depended on the Internet and I wondered why the U.S.
portion of the Internet was being privatized.

I soon learned that the pioneering vision of J. C. R. Licklider had
inspired many of the earliest networking developments. Licklider was
a scientist, a psychologist who had studied the brain to learn how
hearing was made possible. Also he had participated in the discussion
circles in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area where Norbert Wiener and
others discussed the nature and laws governing communication in humans
and machines. From this ferment the theory of communication, control
and feedback, of cybernetics, was developed.

Wiener recognized the importance of determining the nature of the
relationship between the human and the computer. Licklider decided to
do a study to understand what would be a desirable relationship. As
part of Licklider's research study, he wrote down all the tasks he did
as part of his research. Reviewing the notes he made, he discovered
that a large percentage of his time was spent doing routine tasks that
the computer could do, and only a small percentage of his time was
spent doing the kind of tasks like thinking about the data he had
gathered that the human was uniquely qualified to do.

Licklider reasoned that what was needed in the human-computer
relationship was a partnership, where each partner, the human partner
and the computer partner, would work together doing what they each
could do best. This would be the most productive arrangement. It
would result in the most desirable rapport.

Licklider called this relationship "human-computer symbiosis" and he
wrote about his experience in a paper he published in 1960 called
"Human-Computer Symbiosis"(1).

In the paper, Licklider described how there was a need for
human-computer interaction in order to achieve the kind of rapport
that he proposed was desirable between the two partners in this new
form of symbiotic relationship. Also in the paper, Licklider outlines
the kind of research needed to create this interactivity between the
human and the computer.

This was a time when computers were big machines filling large data
processing center rooms. A person wanting to run a program would have
to type it on punch cards, and then bring the stack of cards to the
data processing center and leave them. The person would come back
hours or days later to pick up a printout to see what the program had
done and if it had worked. Forgetting a period or a comma would often
mean the program had to be resubmitted. Getting the program to run
might take several days and numerous trips to the data processing
center.

The research program that Licklider outlined in his paper was for a
new form of computer architecture that would make it possible for a
person to interact directly with the computer, to be able to type into
the computer oneself, instead of having to bring punch cards to
someone else to feed into the computer. Also Licklider's research
program included creating interactive graphics.

At the time that Licklider was doing his research, there was a
realization inside the U.S. Department of Defense that these huge
batch processing computers were too hard to use for people to be able
to utilize the value of the computer. Licklider was invited to set up
a research office inside the civilian scientific research agency
called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) that had been created
under the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Licklider started the
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO).  Building on early
efforts to determine what methods were needed to support fundamental
research, Licklider decided to support the creation of what he called
"Centers of Excellence" at chosen universities in the U.S.

Licklider supported the creation of Project MAC at MIT and another
research program at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. These were research programs to study the computer's
potential and to explore the human computer relationship. A
particular interest of the research was how the computer could be used
for more than arithmetic calculations. In particular, Licklider was
interested in how the computer could be developed as a communication
device.

If you remember Licklider was a scientist interested in the nature and
mechanisms of human communication both in the research he had done
about the nature of the brain and how it made communication possible
and in the discussions he was part of in the Wiener circles. As
Licklider was helping to set up research centers at universities he
felt it would be important to have a network of these different
centers to make it possible for the researchers at the different
programs to communicate with each other.

In this way they would be able to identify what they had in common and
what the general nature of the study they were doing was. Licklider
called this network of leading researchers, "the intergalactic
network". Since he was interested in facilitating communication among
the different research projects and researchers, he knew that a goal
of computer research would be to create a computer network.

The earliest efforts at IPTO to create a computer network didn't
succeed. Licklider left IPTO in 1964 after almost 2 years. But the
vision he was developing helped to inspire others who became the
directors of IPTO to continue to pursue this effort.

Research in interactive computing led to the creation of different
communities of researchers able to share a computer and interact with
it directly and with each other. This new form of computing was
called time-sharing. As head of IPTO in 1966, another psychologist,
Robert Taylor also recognized the importance of linking different
time-sharing systems at different universities. He brought Larry
Roberts to ARPA to head IPTO and to create a packet switching network
project which came to be called the ARPANET, i.e. a network connecting
the different ARPA centers of excellence.

Robert Kahn, who had worked on the design of the ARPANET and its
development at BBN, came to IPTO in November 1972. Kahn began the
internetworking project, the effort to make it possible to share
computer resources among those who were on different networks. These
resources included people collaborating and communicating, as well as
sharing programs and other computer resources. Kahn directed the
research from 1972 through the 1980s that made the Internet possible. 
IPTO was ended in 1986.

By 1992 the Internet had developed and spread around the U.S. and
Usenet had spread through several countries in Europe and was
accessible via the Internet or via uucp. A student at Columbia
University in NYC, Michael Hauben, had a project to do for a class he
was taking in computers and society. He had only recently gotten
access to the Internet as a Columbia student. But he had experience
as a teenager on local bulletin board systems (BBS's) in Michigan. 
He had heard that the Internet was a much more extensive
communications system and was interested in knowing how far it reached
and what it made it possible for people to do.

He wrote a set of questions and posted them on Usenet and on relevant
mailing lists. E-mail responses immediately started arriving and in a
few days he'd received over 60 responses from people around the world. 
He discovered that those around the world who had gotten access to the
Internet were excited about what it made possible. And because they
had found that it was something of value, they wanted to contribute to
it and to help others get access to it.

What Hauben found was that there was a new form of citizenship
emerging from the experience of those who were participating online. 
One of the conventions used to refer to the Net or to those related to
Usenet as net.xxxx with xxxx being the term you were referring to. 
People occasionally talked about a net.cop or a net.citizen. Michael
contracted net.citizen into netizen. The concept of netizen that he
had discovered was someone who saw himself as a citizen of the net. 
This described the people online who were doing what they could to
contribute to the discussion or other needs of the developing Internet
and were active to spread it to others.

Further research that Hauben and others did revealed other examples of
this new form of participatory global citizenship that was emerging
from the development of the Internet.

There are many examples of this new form of citizenship being
developed and taking on some of the important challenges of spreading
the Internet to all.

Following are a few brief examples of the achievements by netizens:

1) The NTIA online conference held by the U.S. government in November
1994 on the question of universal access to the Internet.

After there was protest against the privatization of the U.S. backbone
to the Internet, the U.S. Department of Commerce decided to hold an
online conference to discuss the issue of universal access. A vibrant
debate over the privatization occurred in the online conference. 
Many people explained why the privatization was a poor policy decision
and that it would impede the spread of Internet access, rather than
facilitate it. Others supported the privatization. But the dominant
sentiment was that the U.S. government shouldn't change its role in
Internet development until it had a plan for how to make access
available to all. Though the online conference didn't stop the
privatization, it made a record that there was significant public
opposition to the privatization policy. And it demonstrated that the
form of an online conference was a valuable means of exploring
difficult but important public policy issues.

2) The Intel Story 

Another example of netizen activity was demonstrated by the way online
discussion on a Usenet newsgroup was able to uncover a bug in the
first Intel Pentium computer chip. When newspapers reporters tried to
ignore the problem, online discussion by users not only brought the
problem to the attention of the public, but they also challenged
reporters who tried to make excuses for the problem.

3) Communications Decency Act.

When the U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, vigorous
discussion online on Usenet, and on mailing lists condemned the law. 
And numerous web sites were blackened in protest. Judges hearing the
court challenge to the law wrote a strong decision criticizing efforts
by the U.S. government for trying to restrict the "global
conversation" that the Internet makes possible.

An important example of the power of the netizens is the 1996 Federal
District Court decision in Pennsylvania overturning the Communications
Decency Act (CDA).

4) The U.S. government anti-trust decision about Microsoft.

A more recent example of netizenship helping to challenge unbridled
power is demonstrated by the recent finding by a U.S. court that
Microsoft is guilty of violating the U.S. anti-trust law. The online
development of an alternative and better operating system by Linux
programmers around the world, along with the online discussion of the
problems with Microsoft, helped to provide an environment where the
U.S. government has been pressured to apply its anti trust laws to
Microsoft's activity.

5) The ICANN challenge to the future of the Internet

A new and greater challenge has recently developed for netizens who
care about the development of the Internet and the fulfillment of the
future promise that there will be access for all to this new
participatory medium of global communication holds.

I learned about the problem of ICANN in the spring of last 1998 from a
Japanese mailing list that I had been invited to participate in.

The U.S. government had posted a rule making procedure on the web
stating that they were going to give key functions of the Internet to
the private sector removing them from public ownership and protection.

These functions included the IP number system for providing a unique
number to computers on the Internet to make it possible for users to
send and receive messages across the diverse networks of the Internet. 
It included the domain name system and root server system. This
system provides the network and computer names that users use like
xxxx@columbia.edu or xxxx@citizen2000.net.

A statement by the U.S. government called the Green paper had been put
online at a U.S. government web site by the U.S. Department of
Commerce. After learning that there was only a day left to comment on
it, I was able to access it, copy it, read it and write a response. 
The Green paper presented the Internet solely as a means for
e-commerce and provided no means of supporting the global
communication that is the important general function of the Internet. 
I responded with a critique of the Green paper which I sent to the
comments section on the U.S. government web site. I also posted it on
relevant Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists on the Internet.

A number of people wrote me including someone from the American
Library Association, and from a newspaper for local governments. 
They asked me if they could reprint my response in their publications. 
I later learned that the U.S. government did not want to summarize the
comments as required by a rule making procedure and instead dropped
the rule, but tried to continue with the privatization.

Subsequently there was a meeting of the Internet Society in Geneva,
Switzerland. The U.S. advisor for policy to the President, Ira
Magaziner announced that the U.S. government was planning to give the
DNS system to the private sector (whatever that meant). When I tried
to talk with Magaziner about why this would be harmful for the public,
he told me to send him e-mail.

After I returned home, I sent several e-mail messages to Magaziner and
finally got an answer. Also after several e-mails he agreed to talk
with me by phone. In response to my questions, Magaziner told me that
there were two problems he was solving with his privatization plan.
   1. The complaint by some trademark holders that they weren't being
      protected adequately from others getting domain names that were
      similar to their trade marks.
   2. The desire of the International community to participate in the
      administration of the Internet and its essential functions.

When I told Magaziner my objections to the U.S. government plan to
privatize essential functions of the Internet's infrastructure,
Magaziner told me I would have to give him a proposal putting my
objections into operational form if I wanted him to consider them. I
felt that the second problem, the desire of countries around the world
to participate in Internet development and administration, was the
primary problem to be taken up and that the trademark problem could
only be solved after understanding the other problem. I wrote a
proposal to create a collaborative scientific prototype to document
the administrative functions to be taken on, and to create an open
online process to involve the online community in developing this
prototype. Also I proposed that a task of this cooperative effort
would be to identify the problem to be solved, and the vested
interests to be identified who would make it hard to solve the
problem, and to make a proposal toward determining a solution.

I spent a week writing a proposal based on my research on how Usenet
spread abroad via a cooperative process of development among members
of the European, Australian and Asian Unix communities. The process
that I was proposing, of a collaborative international activity to
identify the problem, was a process I felt would provide a prototype
to help to solve the problem

Also Magaziner indicated a concern of industry that different
countries would pass different laws related to the Internet.

Magaziner promised me a response to my proposal, however, instead of
his calling me to discuss it, a few weeks later I heard from Becky
Burr, in the NTIA in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Meanwhile the
U.S. government contractors who were then administering the domain
name and root server system functions, a company called Network
Solutions Inc. (NSI) and the Internet Assigned Names and Numbers
Authority (IANA) were negotiating under U.S. government oversight to
create a private entity to provide for what was called "industry self
governance" of these controlling functions of the Internet. NSI at
this point in time was owned by SAIC, a large privately held defense
contractor corporation formed originally by a number of people from
the U.S. Department of Defense. It held the NSF contract for
administering domain names. IANA was created by the Information
Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, who
had a DARPA contract to administer significant parts of the Internet's
infrastructure. Both DARPA and the NSF are U.S. government agencies. 
ISI had been created through contracts with DARPA.

Supposedly negotiations between NSI and IANA broke down and a proposal
was presented by IANA to form a private sector corporation to carry
out the privatization of these publicly owned and controlled
functions. IANA's proposal was prepared by a supposedly pro bono
lawyer from one of the largest U.S. corporate law firms. How a
proposal prepared by a U.S. government contractor was a private sector
proposal is still a mystery to understand. But perhaps the fact that
it is illegal according to U.S. law for the U.S. government to create
a private sector entity to conduct government functions can help
account for the Orwellian nature of the terms used to describe a
public entity as the creator of a private sector proposal. (Also the
head of IANA during this period had been threatened by Magaziner with
prosecution in connection with a dispute and activity that had
developed over whether NSI or IANA would control the DNS root server
system.)

The IANA proposal was to privatize essential functions of the
Internet's infrastructure. These would be put under the control of a
board of directors. A private sector non profit company was to be
created under California's non profit corporate law. The company
would be called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN). The U.S. government was to transfer to this
corporation essential functions of the Internet, including the root
server system, the IP numbers, the domain name system and the protocol
development process (IETF).

Originally there were three proposals submitted to the U.S. Department
of Commerce, the proposal I had been asked to submit to Magaziner, the
IANA proposal, and an alternative proposal for a private corporation
that was submitted by several who had been involved in the IFWP
mailing list who called themselves the Boston Group. Later a 4th
proposal was also submitted.

The U.S. government allowed a very short period of time for public
comments on the proposals and then declared the IANA proposal to
create ICANN as its choice proposal. All the government did to
consider the proposal I had submitted was to have a U.S. Department of
Commerce official call and talk to me on the telephone for about 20
minutes. She asked if there was something from my proposal that could
go into the IANA proposal to represent my concerns. When I said that
my proposal required government support for scientists and
collaborative scientific activity, she didn't explore why that was
true, but ended any contact. Afterwards she sent me an e-mail message
thanking me for my "constructive participation."

During this period there was a hearing in the U.S. Congress, held by
the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Basic Science and
the Subcommittee on Technology about what was happening with the DNS
system privatization. Some of the people opposing the ICANN proposal
tried to contact Congressmen on the subcommittee or their staffers. 
When I asked the staffers if I could submit testimony in the hearing,
I was told that the committee would then have to let everyone submit
testimony. They asked me to submit questions that the Congressmen
could ask of those they had invited to testify. I submitted several
questions including the question "by what authority was the U.S.
government transferring these publicly owned and controlled essential
functions of the Internet to the so called 'private sector'"? I
maintained contact with the staffers, often able to use e-mail to do
so, along with the telephone. Two days before the hearing I was told
that I could submit testimony into the record. I sent testimony via
e-mail (which became part of the published record of the hearing) and
I also attended the hearing. Several others who were on the IFWP
mailing list also attended the hearing and also submitted questions or
testimony that was later included in the published record of the
hearing.

6) Mailing list and ICANN

An important means for participation in these issues has been online
mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups relevant to the topics There have
been posts and sometimes discussion on these online forms about what
has been happening with the plans of the U.S. government to carry out
this privatization of the essential functions of the Internet's
infrastructure.

On the Netizens Association Mailing list there was an ongoing long
term discussion of the need to let the public, both those online and
off, know about what has been happening in the Internet privatization
process the U.S. government is carrying out. For quite a while the
U.S. press articles on ICANN activity were only press releases for the
U.S. government plan. Finally, after a large meeting in November 1998
in Cambridge, MA, where there were many questions asked about the
privatization and much protest expressed about what was happening,
there were a few accounts reporting that there was criticism of ICANN
published in the online and even in the print press.

After a number of posts on the Netizens mailing list about problems
with the creation and development of ICANN and the way it treats
users, there was a serious discussion about the need to break through
the lack of media coverage of the problems with ICANN. A Hungarian
freelance writer John Horvath wrote a long and detailed article about
the problems of the privatization and of the lack of information for
the public about what is being done. Horvath's article was printed in
an online German journal Telepolis. Included in the article was a
criticism of the way the European Union officials involved were not
protecting the public which was similar to the criticism about what
U.S. government officials were doing. A European Union official wrote
complaining about the article and saying that the writer needed to do
more research on the European position about the privatization. The
fact that there was such dialogue, which even got printed in the forum
section of an online journal, was important. Horvath's article was
referred to broadly online. (It was reprinted in the Amateur
Computerist. See: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACN9-2.txt )

Other mailing lists carried this discussion. One such mailing list
was the mailing list known as the IFWP mailing list. This mailing
list was mainly made up of people who favored the privatization but
had disagreements about how it was being carried out. However, there
has been a long and sustained discussion of some of the issues on this
mailing list during the course of the 1998-1999 period. The mailing
list has now been ended.

Another mailing list carrying some discussion of the ICANN controversy
was the Telecom Digest which was a moderated mailing list and also a
moderated Usenet newsgroup. The moderator of this mailing list, Pat
Townsend, had directed the mailing list for a number of years and it
was highly regarded by many online. Townsend expressed his concern
about what was happening and felt that those who are online know what
was going on and that they have a chance to consider the effect that
ICANN's privatization may have on their future net access. He posted
some of the articles sent to him by the critics of ICANN and requested
that ICANN advocates like Vint Cerf or others respond. He also
received some responses he was told he couldn't post. During this
period, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was providing
some minimal financial support for the mailing list. An official of
the ITU wrote to the list, expressing his displeasure with the digest
carrying discussion critical of ICANN. The official indicated that
the problem was that the critics weren't reliable and that any time
one does something there will be criticism. He suggested that if the
mailing list continued to carry such discussion, it would put in
jeopardy the funding that was received from the ITU.

In September, 1999, the organization Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility (CPSR) held a conference and invited a few of those
opposing ICANN and ICANN advocates to be speakers at the conference. 
The conference was sponsored by the Open Society Foundation (Soros
Foundation) and the Marino Institute Foundation. CPSR also invited
Ralph Nader, who presented a proposal for a multilateral agreement of
different nations to support ICANN. A response to Nader's proposal
was posted on mailing lists critiquing it for not challenging the way
that the U.S. government had created ICANN to transfer essential
functions of the Internet's infrastructure from the public sector to
the control of private entity created illegitimately by the U.S.
government. Also the critique challenged Nader's claim that online
users are to be regarded as consumers. Portraying users and netizens
as consumers limits their rights and their ability to function as
netizens, presenting them instead as those who are involved in buying
what others sell.

There have been a number of other important developments in the ICANN
controversy. There have been letters sent to executive branch
officials by U.S. Congressmen asking for explanations of behind the
scenes government activity to create ICANN and to form the Government
Advisory Council (GAC), an advisory body of government officials to
ICANN. Congress asked the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) to
investigate the secret process which resulted in the choice of the
interim board members for ICANN. The GAO was asked for an opinion on
the authority of the U.S. government to create ICANN and to transfer
public property to ICANN, along with the authority to fund U.S.
representatives to attend the GAC meetings. Other government agencies
have become involved in trying to challenge ICANN's closed and
arbitrary structure. For example, advocates from the U.S. Small
Business Administration (SBA) have complained to ICANN about the lack
of procedural rights for small business owners and others to
participate in ICANN's activities. A few recent books have been
published which note the problem of privatizing the public Internet
functions. (See, for example, Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert
McChesney, University of Illinois Press, 1999, pg. 134)

What are the lessons one can draw from the experience of the past year
and a half participating in the fight against the privatization of
essential Internet functions?

Is the Internet a laboratory for democracy?

I have found that the Internet provides for important ways for
citizens to participate in and extend democracy. Also, in the process
of participating online, I have learned something about the nature of
democracy.

I have been able to communicate with other citizens in the U.S. and
netizens around the world on issues of public concern. I have learned
how the principles behind the creation of Usenet and of the Internet
are important democratic principles. Usenet was created to make it
possible for people to communicate. The Internet was created for a
similar reason, but phrased in a slightly different way, i.e. to
remove the constraints on communication. It was also created to
facilitate resource sharing across diverse networks.

I have gotten help and support from netizens abroad to be able to be a
citizen at home. I have gotten help from other citizens in the U.S.
to be able to contribute to netizenship abroad. There are new
democratic forms and concepts being pioneered by those concerned with
the development of the Internet and of Usenet that will help in the
battles.

I have come to the conclusion that the Internet is a laboratory for
democracy. Those who are willing to contribute in this exploration
will contribute to the further development and spread of the Internet
and will gain in their ability to be better netizens and more
effective citizens. But it isn't easy and we need improved ways to
support each other and to work together.

In summary I want to describe a recent interaction that the Internet
has made possible. In the process of taking up the challenges of the
ICANN controversy I was invited onto a mailing list. For a while
posts to the mailing list were encouraged, but after challenging
Nader's plan to represent users as consumers, moderators of the
mailing list said they weren't going to post much on ICANN any longer. 
They continued to post the articles they wrote, but they didn't post
another post that I sent, even when it was not about ICANN. Also I
had a talk I had planned to give cancelled. I wrote a post about how
I had previously had other talks I was scheduled to give cancelled,
and how articles I had been invited to write for publications,
including a publication by the Internet Society, were subsequently
pulled from publication. The moderators of the mailing list that
wasn't posting my articles wouldn't post this, but I posted it on
another mailing list that I still had access to.

Someone from Norway wrote me in response, describing the frustration
in his country with the U.S. corporate effort to dominate around the
world using the Internet as the mechanism for e-commerce. Also he
described some of the activity of those in the Linux movement in
different countries to create an alternative to Microsoft's operating
system. He raised the question whether something like that is needed
for the Internet as well. In the process of the discussion with him I
was reminded of Licklider's vision for the future of the network. In
an article published in 1968, written with Robert Taylor, Licklider
and Taylor wrote about the vision for the network that was only just
being planned. They wrote (1):

      For the society, the impact will be good or bad depending mainly
   on the question: Will 'to be on line' be a privilege or a right? If
   only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the
   advantage of 'intelligence amplification,' the network may
   exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual
   opportunity.
      On the other hand, if the network idea should prove to do for
   education what a few have envisioned in hope, if not in concrete
   detailed plan, and if all minds should prove to be responsive,
   surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure.
      Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever,
   for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the networks
   software to all the new generations of computers coming closer and
   closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire
   population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of
   on-line interactive debugging.
   
The Linux movement provides a material example of those carrying on
Licklider's vision as they collaborate and work together to debug the
developing software to make it possible for the Internet to spread and
develop.

But Usenet and Internet pioneers I have known have taught me that
there is another form of debugging that is equally important.(2) That
debugging is to identify and solve the problems of the Internet's
continuing development. Just as the Internet provides the means to
participate in the creation and development of Linux, similarly it
also provides the means to participate in the creation and development
of the administration of its political and administrative
infrastructure. This is in some ways a harder challenge, but to fail
to do so is to leave the vested interests free to stifle and then end
the future development of the Internet as a two-way interactive
communications medium. They want to replace it with a centrally
controlled and e-commerce directed commercenet.(3) Their slogan is
"making the world safe for e-commerce."(4) Netizens need a slogan as
well, one which will indicate the need for the continuing interactive
participation of users in the growth of the Internet and of the
democratic participation of citizens and netizens to solve the
problems of present and future Internet development. Perhaps such a
slogan is "the Internet is a laboratory for democracy for ever more
participatory debugging to identify and solve the problems of future
Internet development." 

-------------------- 
Notes 

(1) From In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider 1915-1990, Aug. 7, 1990, p.
40, reprinted by Digital Research Center; originally published as "The
Computer as a Communication Device," in Science and Technology, April,
1968. They also write:

      "First, life will be happier for the on-line individual because
   the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected
   more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of
   proximity. Second, communication will be more effective and
   productive, and therefore more enjoyable. Third, much
   communication and interaction will be with programs and programming
   models, which will be...both challenging and rewarding. And,
   fourth, there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can
   afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of
   information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to
   him, with programs ready to guide him or to help him explore." 

(2) Examples of such debugging of problems includes the role played by
Mark Crispin on the TCP digest in the 1982 period before thecutover to
TCP/IP on the ARPANET. Crispin noted that TCP/IP was a good protocol
but that milestones for the cutover had been planned even though the
needed implementations for the PDP-10 computers hadn't been developed. 
Similarly, on early Usenet a number of the Usenet pioneers encouraged
open discussion of problems and changes as they maintained that Usenet
was a users' network and unless users participated in the decisions
they wouldn't be decisions that were good decisions. 

(3) ICANN is an example of creating a centrally controlled management 
form to centralize control over the Internet in a few private hands. 
The U.S.  government claimed that it would transit the publicly owned 
central functions of the Internet's infrastructure to a privately owned 
and controlled ICANN by September 2000. They did not succeed in doing 
so and as of Spring 2001, the U.S. government is still involved in the
contracts with ICANN determining the administration of these
functions.

(4) The General Accounting Office (GAO) report about ICANN and the U.S. 
Department of Commerce, issued in July 2000, noted that there was a 
problem with the U.S. government plan to privatize the publicly owned 
functions of the Internet's infrastructure. The report pointed out: 
"Under the Property Clause of the Constitution disposal of government 
property requires statutory authority. U.S. Constitution, Art IV, SS 3." 
(pg 26). The report noted that the Executive branch of the U.S. 
government could not just transfer public property to a private company. 
That there were laws and constitutional obligations regarding federal 
property and its deposition.

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Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 10 No 2 Spring 2001.
The whole issue or a subscription is available for free via email.
Send a request to jrh@ais.org  or see  http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/
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