Archive for the ‘IGF’ Category

Innovation and IGF – Lessons from Purple Rain

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

I never meant to cause you any trouble,
I never meant to cause you any pain

The opening lines of Purple Rain serve to sum up the challenges faced by innovative SMEs around the world, seeking to protect their investments with IP. At the Internet Governance Forum, no one means to cause them any pain…but they do. There is a widespread campaign by some, primarily in the OSS community (but they are not alone) to devalue and trivialize intellectual property around the world and SMEs have the most to lose. This campaign has many faces including debates surrounding so-called Open Standards, development, accessibility and blatant preferences for open source software. There are legitimate issues to be addressed in each of these topic areas, but the overreaching tendency is to minimize the value of IP. Truthfully, large companies with their thousands of patents and cross licenses have far less to fear from this devaluation. It is smaller companies with their one or two patents, central to their entire business, that stand to lose the most.

You might rightfully ask, what does all this have to do with the Internet Governance Forum. The answer is that the IGF has increasingly become a minefield of unintended consequences for small innovators. The IGF has become a critical venue where governments, NGOs and business get together to discuss the internet. There is really no other forum like it where posturing is at a practical minimum, discussions are open and frank, and everyone that wants to be is at the table. Changing the IGF, even just a little, would most likely undermine these rather unique positive, and frankly essential, characteristics. None of this means there are no dangers about which to be vigilant.

In open standards discussions, the definition of “open” seems to be creeping towards “implementable via the GPL,” a license that was created specifically to be at odds with IP. There are plenty of open source licenses which are compatible with IP and we need to make sure that OSS does not necessarily mean only the GPL. Anyone can choose the GPL as their license, particularly if he or she is trying to build a community around their software project, but there should be no entitlement that the world will always accommodate it. There are positives and negatives to selecting the GPL as your software license and everyone should go in with their eyes open. If SMEs are going to be involved in the standards process and allow their IP to be part of the process, there have to be ways to protect it, such as field of use restrictions, even in a royalty-free implementation of a standard. There might be instances where implementations of standards need to be developed under another GPL-compatible license so that those rights can be preserved. It happens all the time today and the world has not ended.

In the context of development and accessibility, we need to strike a balance between innovation and means-based cost management. Up-front costs cannot be the only driver for governments or the disabled community or they will not get the innovation they so desperately need. My father, who is both seeing and hearing impaired has benefited greatly from his Kindle and his hearing aid, both of which are based on IP for which innovators are compensated and this cannot be any different in software. In fact the core technology of the Kindle came from one of our members, Mobipocket, and existed only as software before it was integrated into a hardware device.

These messages are not new but I suppose the IGF is a new forum in which they are debated and we need to stay on top of those debates. More people from the innovation community need to get involved in the IGF and drive an innovation message for both governments around the world as well as the disabled community. If that message isn’t delivered, short-sighted concerns about up-front costs will significantly hamper innovation in their spaces.

The IGF is an incredible and unique forum in which everyone can be at the table. But as with any big family, no one is hoping you will go hungry but if you are not at the table, there is nothing stopping someone else from eating your lunch.

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A Modest Proposal for ICANN

Monday, June 21st, 2010

When it comes to accountability, ICANN would rather be compared to other U.S. nonprofit companies than to the regulatory bodies it more closely resembles. If they truly wish to be treated like a nonprofit, rather than a regulator, there is a very simple solution: make all contributions strictly voluntary.

The ever-disappointed Accountability and Transparency Review Team for ICANN met with the ICANN board yesterday, and were told their expectations for real accountability mechanisms were simply TOO high.  Instead of attempting to model accountability mechanisms after the global regulatory bodies ICANN most resembles, an ICANN Board member suggested that new accountability measures should be based on those of US-based nonprofits. I think this is a BRILLIANT idea.

American-based nonprofits like International Red Cross and the Sierra Club have the ultimate accountability mechanism. If they stop serving the needs of their constituents, their constituents can simply end their support.

With such a simple, effective mechanism in place, comprehensive and redundant systems of checks and balances really aren’t necessary. Nonprofits know that they live and die on the trust and commitment of their supporters, and they act accordingly.

So if ICANN wants the community to get off its back about improving its accountability processes, the solution is simple. Instead of extracting a forced donation from every domain name registrant in the world, ICANN should make that donation optional.

On every registrar’s checkout page, ICANN could include a simple checkbox with the caption “click here if you’d like to donate a dollar to support DNS management.” If that change causes a minor drop off in ICANN’s funding, ICANN could supplement its income with a global pledge drive in which it highlighted its achievements and asked users for their support.

Some of ICANN’s executives may have to take pay cuts, and our beloved global meetings may have to be held in less exotic locations, but the accountability problem would be solved once and for all, and ICANN could have its wish of being compared not to regulators, but to other U.S. nonprofits.

Alternatively, ICANN’s board and staff can abandon the utterly spurious argument that it should be treated like other nonprofits, and set about trying to correct the serious accountability flaws that have plagued the organization since its inception.

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Chance of Getting Real ICANN Accountability Could Evaporate in September

Monday, August 24th, 2009

For the past two years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has faced mounting pressure to make itself more accountable to Internet stakeholders. Now a key driver of that pressure is in jeopardy as ICANN seeks to walk away from a critical agreement with the U.S. Government.

Accountability is the Holy Grail of the ICANN process. If there's one thing that the diverse and often disagreeable group of ICANN stakeholders agrees on, it's that the organization must be more accountable to the global Internet community. Indeed, ICANN itself concedes this point and has engaged in a lengthy process to "improve institutional confidence" by — among other things — bolstering its accountability.

But even as it talks about creating new accountability mechanisms, ICANN has been working overtime to end the only real accountability mechanism it has ever known. In September, the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between ICANN and the U.S. Government is set to expire. With it may go the best chance for ICANN to achieve real, sustainable accountability.

ICANN stakeholders have been clamoring for increased accountability for years, but what really focused those cries into a cohesive effort was the midterm review of the JPA conducted by the U.S. Commerce Department starting in late 2007. When ICANN asserted that it had achieved its accountability goals, Internet stakeholders voiced their ongoing concerns en masse, driving ICANN to reconsider what it had "achieved."

In this sense, the JPA serves two key roles for ICANN. The agreement is, in itself, an accountability mechanism, in that it forces ICANN to account for its progress and face its critics in an open forum. Equally important, the JPA has served as a catalyst for ICANN to build the sustainable, internal accountability mechanisms that will eventually replace it.

But that work is far from complete. While ICANN may have proposed a series of measures for improving accountability and "institutional confidence," it has left no time to determine whether those measures will actually work.

I may be betraying my engineering bias, but as I said at the last ICANN meeting in Sydney: "What's measured gets done.  And there are no measures inside of this institutional confidence initiative.  We don't know whose confidence it is we're trying to increase.  We don't know how we're measuring that confidence.  We don't know what the stakes are if that confidence isn't increased.  We don't have a time frame by which
that confidence needs to be increased.  And yet we all know it's important."

Talking about accountability does not create accountability. Creating new policies may create accountability, but it takes time to know whether those measures are actually working. We can debate the appropriate way to measure ICANN's success, or the appropriate timeframe for doing so, but as of this writing, no such analysis has been contemplated or proposed by ICANN officials.

In this context, the proposed termination of the JPA is extremely troubling. In order to be accountable, ICANN must answer to someone or something other than itself. ICANN maintains that it is accountable to its "community," but members of that community, myself included, have strongly disputed that assertion.

If the JPA ends before a real accountability regime is established, ICANN will be truly accountable to no one. Given the organization's struggles to impose accountability, even under direct pressure, it is difficult to imagine that it will succeed when that pressure evaporates.

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IGF And The Secret War on Freedom of Speech (AMENDED)

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Three years ago, the Financial Times published an op-ed by ACT president Jonathan Zuck regarding the first effort by governments like China, Iran, and Cuba to replace ICANN and its multi-stakeholder, bottom up-decision making process with a top-down government led body to dictate technological and policy decisions.  At the time, Jonathan wrote:

These countries and others want to become global regulators of the
internet. This effort is being driven under the guise of "internet
governance", but it is really about internet control: control of how
and whether one gets access; control of content and control over the
internet's infrastructure, the crown jewels that make all of it work.

A simple look at "who" is pushing for more government control over Internet governance issues reminds us that this really still about increasing government control and limiting Internet freedom.

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's PMBerlusconi041808-putin

While Berlusconi isn't here at IGF, he is reportedly planning to use Italy's upcoming presidency of the G8 Summit to push for an international agreement to "regulate the
internet."

If you aren't familiar with Mr. Berlusconi's political past, you might find this mildy troubling, but not "Katy Bar the Door" frightening the way I (and seemingly most Italian bloggers do). 

When you run a government as corrupt as Mr. Berlusconi's, you generally have a disdain for Freedom of the Press.  Otherwise, they may question you when your government passes new legislation to grant
immunity from criminal trials to the holders of the five highest
offices of state, at the same time you are on trial for criminal offenses.  Thankfully for Mr. Berlusconi he already owns most of the press in Italy, so they don't ask the serious questions.  But, for pesky real journalists and bloggers like those at the Economist, he has used every tool at his disposal to silence them. 

Everton Lucero & The Brazilian Government
Brazilian-press-association1

At the IGF today, Everton Lucero, the Brazilian representative to ICANN's
Government Advisory Council (GAC) delivered a beautiful speech filled with inspiring rhetoric about returning Internet Governance back to the concept of "We the People" and taking the power out of the hands of the "nobles and landlords."  Unfortunately, that is all it was: a beautiful speech that ignored reality in an attempt to grab the power to control the Internet and censor content.  ICANN gives the user community, "The People," a direct voice in decision-making that most governments do not even come close to delivering.

Despite its embrace of Free Software and the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, the Brazilian Government's actions to censor speech have inspired this campaign from the Brazilian Press Association. 

Brazil's government has shown an increasing distaste for Freedom of Speech, especially on the Internet.  The government had a recent documentary exposing some of the most egregious efforts at political censorship of the press pulled from local television.

On the Internet, Brazil bullied Google into giving them the ability to freely censor content on the social network, Orkut.  It has even threatened to join China in blocking  access to ALL WordPress blogs!

Clearly we don't want governments like this gaining MORE power of the future of the Internet.  I
can't think of better example of why we should fear the calls by
government bureaucrats here at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to
replace the Internet's current multi-stakeholder governance mechanisms
with government-led bodies.  The governments calling for these
changes almost universally are interested in limiting the freedom of
today's Internet – not increasing it.

UPDATE/AMENDMENT: In similar comments before the IGF main session yesterday, I made the mistake of overstating Brazil's efforts to censor political dissent online – comparing them directly to China (who had just made comments critical of ICANN).  It was an unfortunate exaggeration in the heat of the moment.  Free Speech is protected by the Brazilian constitution and they do have a pretty diverse media world that is far different than China.  But that does not change the fact that they have made troubling moves toward the Internet and political speech as referenced above. This has left them with a "Partly Free" rating from Freedom House. This article from Committee to Protect Journalists outlines additional efforts by the current Brazilian government to regulate or censor media.

According to the Brazilian delegate's response to my comments, however, it also appears I misunderstood his position on ICANN. I sincerely hope I did, and they are merely looking to work within the ICANN world, rather than tear it down or replace it.

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Live from Hyderabad! Alphabet Soup Conference Time!

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

ACT has two people who have flown to Hyderabad, India to participate in multiple events built around the United Nations Economic Development arm sponsored “Internet Governance Forum” Conference.
In addition to the main IGF conference, there’s the ICC/BASIS meeting, the WITSA meeting, the GigaNet meeting and a whole raft of “Dynamic Coalition” meetings.
Right now in the WITSA meeting, Markus Kummer Executive Coordinator of the Secretariat of the UN IGF, is giving a breakdown of the Conference to the board of WITSA.
Here is a summary of Mr. Kummer’s main points and the vision for IGF moving forward:
History and basis for IGF:

  • WSIS asked the UN Sec Gen to establish the IGF.
  • IT industry did not ask for IGF, but is beginning to see the value in IGF’s ‘soft governance’ model
  • IGF is run by the UN Economic Development project (not the ITU).
  • IGF was purposely given no rules of procedure or document negotiation powers.
  • While some groups want IGF to have voting rules, governments would never agree to be bound by votes where non-Government stakeholders gets equal voting rights.

Future of IGF:

  • Will IGF continue after its current mandate ends in 2010?
  • UN Sec Gen will do a review and recommend a resolution to the full UN Gen Assembly.
  • Only Governments will vote on that resolution of whether to continue IGF. They won’t amend the resolution substantially.

So what does this all mean? It means the international governmental community is very interested in the Internet, and they aren’t going away – but they are interested in hearing from more than just other governments.

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IGF Dispatch: No one has a monopoly on “Knowledge”

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

The phrase has been a popular refrain here at the Internet Governance Forum.  While it certainly sounds good, it is being used to justify everything from tweaking copyright law to outright theft.   

Jamie love and many from the audience of a plenary on Openness brought up the topic of patents and copyrights as barriers to the broad access to “knowledge” regardless of what it took to come up with that “knowledge.”

Now it’s true that a lot of material that is paid for by the government, especially if they are not paid back, and stuff for which the term of patent and copyright have passed should all be in the public domain and there’s some work to get them there. That’s a far cry from simply taking entire sectors of innovation, like software and security and declaring them public goods whereby the moment that innovation is developed it must be shared by everyone for free.  In market economies, copyright and patents provide the incentives necessary for investment in innovation, and declaring any innovation of value a "common good" and giving it to the public will cripple that system.

There’s a little thing called the tragedy of the commons whereby you get this sort of public good only once and then folks realize they can’t put their kids through college working on “public goods” so they switch fields and the public doesn’t get any more goods.

Of course, only among people like Jamie Love, can you be heard above the laughter when suggesting that the solution is simply for the government to do all of the innovating.  Yes, that should do the public a lot of good!

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IGF Dispatch: The Upside of Piracy

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

I love to watch Jamie Love speak because of fluidity with which he weaves the latest joke or theory into his discourse as though its established fact. There’s a claim that’s been brewing that Microsoft has been “letting piracy pass” in the past in order to gain market share and now that everyone is “locked in” they are moving in to collect their reward.

First of all, this kind of “lock in” is a joke. The theory goes that once you’ve created a bunch of documents in a proprietary format, you won’t be able to change tools. So how does this help with Windows that doesn’t really have any file formats?

Second, all of the office productivity suites are able to read each others file formats. To state otherwise is to search out some esoteric exception that proves the rule.

Finally, it would come as a great surprise to organizations like SIIA (formally SPA) and the BSA that Microsoft or anyone else has been giving a “pass” to piracy until recently. The entire raison d’etre for these orgs has been the pursuit of software pirates around the world for many many years.

Perhaps most important, what about all of the small businesses who have been losing revenues (the software industry loses twice as much as the recording industry to piracy by the way) but who have not achieved this “lock in” or market share. Should they just grin and bear it as they watch their software pirated around the globe? Pretty broad brush Mr. Love!

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IGF Dispatch: Selling Routers to Beijing: Corporate Responsibility under Repressive Regimes

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Today there was a lot of talk at the IGF about corporate responsibility and censorship in repressive regimes. It was a wonderful opportunity to bash China, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. 

This is certainly a complex topic with arguments to be made for both engagement and refusal to deal under certain circumstances but it’s a mistake to put corporations in the position of judge and jury over their customers.

A number of participants seemed to think that IT companies were acting in collusion with repressive regimes because they were selling technology to them. Now come on people, these are not exactly thumb screws that are being sold here but routers, search engines and word processors.  Nearly every country, developed or lesser developed, in the world have a segment of the population that would like restrictions on information flow because of religious beliefs or the protection of their children.

Should corporations be creating an index of every community in the world and wag their finger at those of which they do not approve? What if the owners of the company are highly religious and you and I don’t agree with their choices? Taken to its logical extreme, this could even lead to a refusal to deal with their own governments which could bring up a whole host of problems.

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IGF Dispatch: Selling Routers to Beijing: Corporate Responsibility under Repressive Regimes

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Okay, so it’s just a catchy title but an irony of this ridiculous debate about corporate responsibility just the same. Here at IGF in Athens, there’s a discussion of how corporations should use their “massive bargaining power” to influence the internal policies of repressive regimes. As discussed in my previous post, this is a ridiculous argument because corporations do NOT have that kind of power at all.

First, governments like China can choose to simply pirate the products of companies like Cisco, rather than paying for them. This happens all the time. Perhaps this one area where IGF may find consensus that piracy is NOT good.

Second, the rise of free and open source software has given repressive regimes another option. By making open source software freely available, FLOSS developers are sidestepping both moral and legal restrictions on trade that might otherwise change the world. As FLOSS starts to run super computers thanks to IBM, we’ll actually be making software freely available that is expressly forbidden for export to just such regimes and terrorist organizations. Shame on you FOSS people!

Perhaps, the next version of the GPLv3 should go further than simply banning the use of GPL software for DRM and include limitations on who can use the software based on moral grounds (see Section 3 – the DRM provision – of the GPLv3 discussion draft ). There has been a lot of discussion about these types of limitations during the drafting process, but nothing has come of it.

Doesn’t really matter though; it would be useless anyway. Those repressive regimes don’t really care about copyright law and would just pirate the code.

In the end, this post is designed to demonstrate how ridiculous this argument has become. We can’t look to either corporations or the open source community to enforce the world’s various forms of moral righteousness.

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IGF Dispatch: All we need is a standard

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Under the heading “let me just assert this and maybe people will believe it,” I keep hearing this argument about “open standards” being the metaphorical cure for cancer in the IT sector.

Of course, no one is really sure what they mean when they come out with this rhetoric. In Denmark, the Parliament passed a law that procurement would be restricted to “open standards” that have no cost, but the government is having a little trouble implementing it because it could mean that everyone would have to stop using their GSM phones and WiFi hotspots.

Here at the IGF conference in Athens, open standards, according to moderator Ken Cukier, are the secret sauce to solving the internet’s security problems. Panelists Gus Hosien and Richard Simpson had the sense to say that an “open approach” makes sense, but that no governance group should pick winners in the competing standards arena. Of course, any standards-setting body would work far too slowly to respond to new security threats that arise on Internet time.

And the ‘Open Standards solves everything, including poor dental hygene’ folks tried to convolute this to say that only CERTAIN open standards deserve love. During one presentation, Jamie Love attempted to suggest that there is no monopoly product in the web page creation market because HTML is a standard – therefore we should support ODF, the document format being flacked by IBM and Sun instead of the OpenXML standard being proposed by Microsoft and Apple. But if they are both open standards, how does supporting one of them to the point of monopoly cure your imaginary problems with the other open standard? This one just makes your head hurt.

First of all, it’s not like HTML originated from some discussion at a standards body. In fact, let’s look at what Wiki has to say about it:

“Tim Berners-Lee created the original HTML (and many of the associated protocols such as HTTP) on a NeXTcube workstation using the NeXTSTEP development environment. At the time, HTML was not a specification, but a collection of tools to solve an immediate problem: the communication and dissemination of ongoing research among Berners-Lee and a group of his colleagues. His solution later combined with the emerging international and public internet to garner worldwide attention.”

Now, if we fast-forward to 2006 we see that the w3c could not come close to keeping up with what was going on in the marketplace with CSS, Java and everything else. You simply had free market innovation taking place and everyone was trying everything and that’s how it’s supposed to happen. Ultimately, standards bodies do help to create some level of “floor” but they sure as hell never push for the ceiling.

I suppose I can put “open” in front of just about anything and I’ll get some easy allies.

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