[2] [Editor's Note: On February 27, 2004, the International Tele-
communications Union held an experts workshop to address the question of
Internet governance. The following was presented as part of a panel
chaired by Robert Kahn.]
Netizen Participation in Internet Governance
ITU Workshop on Internet Governance
Geneva, February 27, 2004
Izumi Aizu, Deputy Directory,
Institute for HyperNetwork Society
izumi@anr.org
I have been involved with "Internet Governance", or areas of global Domain
Name system management since around 1996. I was the Secretary General of
the Asia and Pacific Association, which became a formal member of the
Steering Committee of the so-called IFWP, International Forum on the White
Paper. The IFWP process was a global effort to setup a new body to manage
the DNS, upon receiving the call by the United States Government to
"privatize" and "internationalize" the DNS management in an open and
inclusive approach. We advocated the equal participation in the process
and the body, eventually setup as ICANN, from Asia and Pacific regional
viewpoints. Today, I would like to provide my proposal of putting the
"Netizens" into the global governing framework of the Internet as we are
tasked by the WSIS process to do.
There is the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. It has more
than 60 individuals from most of the regions of the world and worked very
hard to contribute to the Civil Society Declaration for the WSIS in its
Internet Governance section. I suggest to you to take the principles
proposed there into serious consideration for the coming debate. It would
be more appreciated if this group gets formal recognition and is invited
as a group to the next phase of the discussion including the Working Group
under the Secretary General Koffi Anan.
As we are all aware, we are facing a new kind of challenge for this
Internet Governance.
The Internet made it possible to send and receive information from
anyone's desktop, laptop, or even from mobile phones on the go, with
minimal cost, very easily and instantly, to anywhere in the world,
ignoring the geographic and institutional borders including that of nation
states. This fact poses transnational challenges that are difficult to
solve by applying the traditional "nation" based approaches.
Frankly, most of the current International or intergovernmental
organizations were designed in the industrial age and not ready to deal
with these national or global issues as efficiently and effectively as we
want. They are slow to identify the issues, slow to come up with
solutions, slow to agree with each other, often constrained by national
and bureaucratic borders, and too rigid to respond to the rapid,
ever-changing technologies and their applications. When they come up with
a legal framework against certain types of spams, the spammers are already
well ahead of the game creating new methods which are hard to trace and
enforce. And this is just a small example of the large iceberg.
Therefore, there is a clear need to establish a new governance model in
which, I think, the Netizens from Civil society will play a vital role, in
cooperation with the government, International organizations, business
sector and technical community.
First and foremost, the Internet is becoming an everyday tool, or
commodity, for most of us. In Japan over 60% of the population or 70
million people are now using the Internet in one way or other, and 70% of
the subscribers are now enjoying a highspeed broadband connection, which
gives an "always on" feature. Korea as you know has the highest
penetration of broadband, with 80% penetration to the household and the
usage is very high. China, now is number 2 in terms of the number of users
after the United States with 80 million people. The development of I-mode
in Japan gave rise to the use of mobile phones to access the Internet,
opening up the age of ubiquitous, or pervasive networking. As pointed out
by many previous speakers, the Internet empowers the ordinary citizen with
tremendous power – sending thousands of e-mails to millions of people at a
cost of a few dollars, sending both positive messages as well as
destructive viruses.
With this potential, millions of users are facing, or creating societal
challenges. In Japan, victims of online dating services or mobile or
ordinary Internet, is on the rise, targeting young women in schools, with
more than 100 serious crimes a year. P2P file exchange is posing a threat
to copyright holders, but it also is opening up new and creative ways of
sharing works among citizens. Compared with these, Domain Names and IP
address management is a far less serious problem , but we may face more
challenges.
For any Internet governance model to work, it should fit in with the
reality of the local and regional situation. As one of the few speakers
from the Asian Pacific region, I would like to bring your attention to the
very diverse situation of Internet development in our region, from highly
developed places like Japan or Korea, to where it is just in its infancy
in Afghanistan, East Timor and Iraq, suffering from wars and conflicts, or
the tiny economy of Bhutan and many other LDCs. Though the Internet has
been mostly developed by the so-called "Internet community" in many Asian
countries, similar to that of developed countries, I could say that
governments play a greater role in supporting the Internet in
infrastructure and capacity building activities.
In the case of Asia and the Pacific, there has been a very strong
tradition of voluntary coordination and cooperation among the Internet
community. Here are all the "AP" organizations working on different areas
of Internet management, from address and Domain Name management to
infrastructure development or spam or security matters. We have an annual
summit, just taking place right now in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, called
APRICOT. This voluntary coordination is appreciated by governments but
receives no control, nor financial support from government at all. It is
working just fine.
As many speakers have already mentioned, we should try to follow the
governance model of the architecture of the Internet which is based on a
layered structure. Functions of each layer are different, so too the
governance models should be. It is also necessary, however, to bring about
coordination among different actors at different layers.
The word "Netizen" was first coined by a 20-year old student, the late
Michael Hauben, in New York, in 1993. He was trying to identify the new
residents of the network community, from Net Citizen to Netizen. These
active users were originally found in the technical community, but now
they have spread into civil society at large. They are the main actors of
the Information Society, as Prof. Shumpei Kumon of GLOCOM offered in his
theoretical analysis, that in the Information Society, the social games
are played around intellectual values, not economic values, as in
industrial society.
We see very active groups affecting the society, like slash-dot in the
U.S. or 2-channel, its equivalent in Japan. We know many active political
activities are generated from online forums in Korea, where Netizen has
already become a common Korean term, affecting the outcome of the
Presidential campaign, or in China where people are now starting to use
online forums to criticize the government (sometime). The rise of Smart
Mobs is illustrated by my friend Howard Rheingold in his book, showing the
positive and negative potential impact of using these cheap, open, mobile
technologies.
Why then should we let Netizens participate in this global governance?
First, for any democratic governance it is necessary to establish the
Consent of the Governed as a basic principle of governance. But we should
go even further. The Netizen is the main actor in Internet development.
Netizens are the great inventors and innovators of such tools as WWW,
Mosaic or Netscape browsers, Yahoo by David Filo and Jerry Yang, students
at Stanford University, or ICQ or Amazon which were also developed mainly
by users. Missing them is like playing football without any top-notch
players. Third, decisions around Internet governance will affect so many
end-users directly. You need to listen to those who are affected by the
decisions.
Netizens will act as a watchdog, or function to provide an appropriate
Checks and Balances system, to counter other interests. By involving them
they will have more of a sense of responsibility too.
I also want to try to list some merits of having Netizens participate.
First, Netizens have direct knowledge and rich experience on most issues
caused by the use of the Internet. If you are the parents, quite often
your children know much more about using the Net than you do.
Second, Netizens are flexible, and work more efficiently than many
incumbent institutions where protocols and procedures take up too much
time and act as barriers for timely decisions.
Third, Netizens are global citizens, not constrained by national
boundaries. There are many communities of interest, spread globally,
irrespective of geographic or other existing social boundaries.
Netizen participation will increase diversity. By making regional balance
compulsory, Netizens from all regions of the globe will participate in
governance activities.
Netizens will provide a counter economic balance, not dominated by large
corporate interests, but adding non-profit, non-governmental forces. It
will also provide cultural diversity, with a multilingual environment. It
will reduce the marginalization of the minority, too. By encouraging
Netizens to participate, affirmative efforts to listen to minority groups,
persons with disabilities, women in vulnerable situations, linguistic
minorities, all will have more opportunities for their voices to be heard.
Netizens share the view with the technical community that freedom at the
edge of the network is the core value of the Internet. Traditional telecom
operators, or mobile phone operators, on the other hand, may not
necessarily share this vision and tend to "close" the network by inserting
their central control that is convenient for the operators as well as the
many "passive" consumers. We are concerned that this may stifle the
innovation and development of the Internet we have enjoyed so far.
There are risks of excluding Netizens from the global governance
mechanism. If we only rely on technologists, they may lack the human
viewpoint. If we rely too much on corporations, aspects of human rights
might be compromised in the name of profit-making, e.g. in the case of
privacy protection. And if we rely too much on government or bureaucratic
mechanisms, then we may face narrow "top-down" approaches or closed
decisions.
In conclusion, we need to include Netizens for the self-governance
mechanisms to work. This will help solve the dichotomy of private-sector
only approach vs strong government involvement. It will create an
appropriate, more balanced structure. There are active Netizens in the
developing parts of the world who will also enhance the balanced
participation. In order to make effective participation of the Netizens
possible, it is necessary that their autonomous, distributed and
collaborative network of networks exist. Efforts at ICANN At Large is one
such example, trying to be bottom-up, coordinated globally, based on the
subsidiary principle, that addresses that local issues be solved locally
first, and seek for global solutions for only globally challenging issues.
We also need self-certification mechanisms in place that work.
I have some suggestions and information for the upcoming process. We
should be really open and inclusive: We need to involve more stakeholders
from the developing parts of the world, and people in non-Western regions.
We should also consider reaching out to people with different backgrounds;
people with disabilities, for example, to bring them into the main stream
of the debate. For effective outreach, regional meetings are essential to
be able to listen to these diverse voices, ones you may not hear here in
Geneva or in New York. To show our commitment, we, ICANN ALAC with other
constituencies are hosting a WSIS Workshop at the coming ICANN Rome
meeting next week. It will be on Mar 4, 2004, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm and it
is open to everyone. I hope many events like this will be organized to
produce fruitful dialogue among us.
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Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 12 No 2, Spring 2004. 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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