Internet Governance

Good Afternoon!

Is it just me, or am I becoming addicted to blogging today? I think it has taken me about 12 hours for last night’s lecture about protocol and Internet regulation to sink in. After attempting the reading before the lecture, I walked into the room expecting to be totally confused. Surprisingly, I wasn’t too frazzled but it has taken me awhile to understand the complex issues that surround governing the Internet.

Whilst the Internet’s architecture appears to be ‘decentralised, non-hierarchical and particpatory’, encouraging open-source and peer-to-peer activities, the reality is in fact the complete opposite (Banks, 2006). In the reading, Galloway (2005, 142) contends with this idea, suggesting that “the founding principle of the Internet is control, not freedom. Control has existed from the beginning.” As John Banks mentioned in the lecture, power relationships are in fact embedded in technologies. John also mentioned that contemporary control issues associated with the Internet are largely a product of the ‘Political Economy’. Therefore, one can observe that the Internet – as a reflection of Western capitalism, is controlled by vested corporate interests, which encourage the exclusion of social groups from the distribution of creative knowledge, intellect and information.

Furthermore, Copyright and Intellectual Property legislation works very effectively to support enterprise monopolising Internet governance. As Christina Spurgeon mentioned in the lecture last week, these ‘Walled Gardens’ approaches work in favour of commercial enterprise, particularly those who create anti-competitive networks that ‘lock-in’ customers. For example, Time Warner, the parent company of AOL was able to take advantage of the network effects theory by making switching costs so high that customers were ‘locked-in’ to the company just because of the sheer inconvenience to change providers. Companies such as these also rely on network externalities like encouraging their users to invite their friends just so switching costs are increased.

Furthermore,The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the sole regulatory body on the Internet and is controlled by the US Government. I think this is totally unfair and unrepresentative of global interests, irrespective of the working groups that have been developed to represent minority interests at the Information Society World Summits. Essentially, even after community and welfare group opinions are presented at these Summits, the US Government still has the final control over ICAAN and its operations. I also agree with Galloway in that technical issues (e.g. Internet Protocol/Transmission Control Protocol and the Domain Name System) cannot be extracted from public policy issues (e.g. who can and can’t access the Internet) within Internet Governance Forums because in the real world these two issues must co-exist.

Finally, I support the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IETF is a large, open organisation comprised of technology experts who develop technical standards for the Internet to ensure its smooth evolution. I also think that the Internet Society is also a great organisation that supports the development of the Internet, without imposing strict legislation supporting the interests of commercial enterprise.

Although this lecture was a little harder to wrap my head around, I found it very useful. I am becoming more appreciative of Australia, particularly because we are a well-developed nation and are offered many privileges – including having access to the Internet! I hope you have a great evening!

Em x

References

Galloway, A. (2004). 'Insitutionalization', in, Protocol. How control exists after decentralization. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.