Karen Coyle note, 13 Oct

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998
To: cpsr-activists
From: Karen Coyle
Subject: Notes on CPSR Symposium

*** Feel free to forward to any interested parties ***

One Planet, One Net: The Public Interest in Internet Governance Sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility October 10, 1998

As promised, the first of a series on notes on the One Net Symposium.

CPSR's Symposium day was encapsulated between two very powerful, very intelligent speeches: Lawrence Lessig was the opening keynote; Einar Stefferud the dinner keynote. And these two thinkers left us with a very interesting dilemma:

- Lessig made the point that without government there is no representation of the people's voice. A non-profit corporation may have the best of intentions, but it is not an elected body of the people. So where do you get/place democracy in that scenario? - Stef argued that you can govern a network; a network belongs to someone, has a role or purpose, etc. But an internetwork cannot be governed or managed any more than you can manage the economy. It is a vast series of interactions not belonging to any one jurisdiction.

If I think about these two statements separately, they both seem true. But there's an obvious problem when I put them together. In order to be able to say "you're both right," we need to add another element, which I think is probably best described as diplomacy. The future of Internet governance is not of traditional lawmaking within a single jurisdiction but of negotiated agreements across jurisdictions. That still leaves us with the governance problem, which to me requires us to answer an initial question: what is the governable unit within the Internet?

It is significant (and we can thank the Open Society Institute for help making this possible) that this meeting had a sizeable international presence, both in the presenters and in the audience. Our discussion on Sunday morning about building coalitions was about global action as well as U.S. goals. Two points that were made at that discussion sum up the role of intra- and inter-national activities:

- The US is often the "sticking point" on many international accords (privacy, copyright). International coalition building allows us within the US to put the same pressure on our country that it is receiving from the international community, thus increasing the power of that pressure.

- We must not abandon our role in trying to influence the US government for a totally international action plan, because the US is such a powerful actor in the Internet arena that we can best serve the world by making changes here at home.

Over the next week or so notes, slides and speaker talks will appear on the CPSR Web pages:
http://www.cpsr.org.

In addition, the Symposium talks were videotaped and availability of tapes will be announced soon.

******************************************
              Karen Coyle
  Western Regional Director, Computer 
  Professionals for Social Responsibility
          http://www.cpsr.org
****     kcoyle@ix.netcom.com         ****
****        510/987-0567              ****
****   http://www.dla.ucop.edu/~kec   ****