Here is a great post by Danny Butt from New Zealand (on the f/c network)about Internet Governance issues. The politics of the Internet is not just about the content that it contains, but also about the politics of its ‘global’ architecture.
In regard to the root server issue, an interesting idea was put forward on/. (don’t have the link) about whether, say, China and a bunch of other non-G8 countries might just set up a new set of root servers, an alternative internet/ICANN (there’s no technical reason why this couldn’t happen). Sure, the countries using this new system may not get access to a lot of US/UK sites, and exporters in those countries would suffer, but at the moment it’s the US who wants “access” to China anyway so it would be an interesting
game of chicken on the global governance superhighway.
This would “break” the “global internet” idea, but that idea is going out the window anyway (or in fact never truly existed), not just with the fact that the US doesn’t want to make governance global so therefore it’s not a global medium; but that widespread de-peering is happening regardless, even within nation-states. (Telstra Clear stopped peering at the WIX yesterday: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?ObjectID=3569738
There seems to be a pretty strong lack of faith in a lot of global
governance systems – e.g. in the DRM work I’m doing there is some agreement that the global reciprocal agreements governing performance rights collecting societies is on the verge of collapse. Jonathan Friedman discusses the decline of cosmopolitanism and globalism here:
http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol5/number2/html/friedman/index.html
So the attempts to gain fair access to ICANN etc. for developing countries are well documented, but is anyone discussing dropping out of the process?
x.d
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http://www.dannybutt.net
http://weblog.dannybutt.net http://www.place.net.nz