[kictanet] God did it, why can't we? UN ponders 'Net "10 commandments"

[alice]

God did it, why can't we? UN ponders 'Net "10 commandments"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/god-did-it-why-cant-we-un-ponders-net-10-commandments.ars

Turns out God had a pretty hot idea all those years ago. As the 
UN-backed Internet Governance Forum 2009 met last week just a stone's 
throw from Mount Sinai, some wondered whether it wasn't time to draft a 
"10 commandments" for the Internet. And everyone had ideas about what 
should be on it.

By Janna Quitney Anderson <http://arstechnica.com/author/nate-anderson/> 
| Last updated November 23, 2009 1:07 PM

Write a new 10 Commandments of the Internet, Peter proposed, and draft 
them on a tablet PC on Mount Sinai.

The "Peter" in question was Internet historian Ian Peter, and the place 
was the UN-backed Internet Governance Forum 2009 held last week in Sharm 
El Sheikh, Egypt, a few kilometers from Mount Sinai.

Peter's model for his proposed commandments isn't Moses, but the 
engineers and computer science guys who dreamed up the Internet back in 
the 1960s, building it through an amazingly open and collaborative 
effort that continues functioning to this day. When he asked if anyone 
would be interested in formally documenting the principles of the 
Internet ethos, Internet ecosystem or whatever one might call it, hands 
shot up all around the room.


      Thou shalt document thy networking principles

An all-star lineup of folks at the top echelon of the organizations that 
arose out of the principles established in the 1960s were at IGF 2009 to 
speak, and represented organizations such as the Internet Society, the 
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Internet Corporation for 
Assigned Names and Numbers. And everyone had an opinion about the issues 
most central to the Internet.

Daniel Dardailler of W3C said, "Computer science principles require that 
layers can work separately. The Web sits on top of the Internet. This 
separation is important. Everything has to be extensible. You want only 
one root—you want unique ID—we need to keep one root. The Web is putting 
data in the pipe and we don’t want the data to go faster through some 
sites without our knowledge. Common to Internet technology is that we 
are open-standards and open-source. Everyone should be able to test the 
system with their own platform. We want our technologies to be 
royalty-free. For the Web it’s important. We are at the top of the 
stack—there will be more things later on, but right now we are the 
interface. Everyone needs to have access to the system. It has to be 
visible to any type of device. Separation of content from implementation 
is paramount. Websites should have metadata.

“The principle that runs throughout all of what I have said is the 
principle of choice. I buy a computer in France, I arrive in Egypt, in 
my hotel I get WiFi and I can use it. We don’t want to go back to a 
point where we have incompatibility. The Internet has been on the 
forefront in regard to allowing people to participate in the design of 
communication.”

Alun Michael, a member of the UK Parliament and an active Internet 
policy maker, said there is a need to be careful to grasp what is 
important but not to squeeze too hard. “We need to grasp three nettles,” 
he explained. “First we’re dealing with a future not yet conceived. 
Management techniques of industry, government, [and] the international 
community are too slow to keep up with changes on the Internet. Second, 
the core values are the technical values and they affect the whole of 
society and not just engineers. Cities don’t often turn out as their 
architects intended. It’s about the people. We also need to not just 
listen to young people, we need to hand it over to young people. They 
talk about the issues in a completely different way and there’s a real 
and powerful opportunity to use that talent and engagement in a positive 
way. Third, the IGF process needs to communicate to legislators who do 
not take an interest in this process in any way. Policymakers are 
overwhelmed by issues like cybersecurity. We need a proportionate 
response. My favorite quotation about legislation comes from 1890s: 
‘Laws rarely prevent what they forbid.’ We have the opportunity for much 
better governance in the real-world sense. Do proposals to fix the 
problem threaten the core values of the Internet? We have to prove that 
a cooperative approach works. It depends on the right people at the 
right times do something about it. We have to deliver solutions instead 
of relying on the last refuge of the policymaker which is to legislate 
and regulate.”

Nathan James, director of OneWebDay, began by bringing up the importance 
of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has 
the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes 
freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and 
impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

"This is a beautiful expression of one of the most sacred of human 
rights,” he said. “I would argue that the real value of the Internet is 
its human network of users and that a discussion of core Internet values 
must begin with the consideration of the human values of its users. Do 
users value the end-to-end principle, open innovation systems, a secure 
root, the most modern version of IP? If they do, most of them don’t know 
it. Instead, users value the Internet as an expression of their deeper 
values and aspirations: expression, collaboration, dissent, freedom, 
democracy, family, friendship, community, opportunity, justice, even fun.”

Alejandro Pisanty, a longtime leader in both the Internet Society and 
ICANN, said he sees core values under threat. “The Internet was 
conceived as a means of communication between computers,” he said, 
describing that in the early years of computing nobody knew this would 
all scale up to be a network of billions of users. “Standards-developing 
organizations did not imagine this was serious. No network is a simple 
network. Computer processing power was limited. You had to make things 
extra-simple to communicate. There was a flat hierarchy. Request for 
Comments (RFC) 760 has several interesting phrases and statements, 
including, 'Be liberal with what you receive and conservative with what 
you send.' This later became part of RFC 1855 on netiquette. It 
translates to ethics of openness and tolerance of communication.”

Pisanty believes these values are in danger. “They can be threatened. It 
can start with things that come from the corporate world. You should not 
be privileging one product over others. All packets are equal. It can 
come from the desire to bring back the owned-network model—the telephone 
company model—people try to make this happen over and over again. It is 
one of the tricks we must not fall for. We have to look very carefully 
from the Internet point of view to not let openness be crushed by 
constraints that are built into the technology or by other means."

Ian Peter then took his own turn, saying, “As a tool for our 
development, the Internet is an extraordinarily powerful one and an 
extraordinarily useful one. In 1988, Brian Carpenter said the principle 
of constant change is probably the only thing that will continue to 
change indefinitely. In the middle of all of this change, what is it 
that we need to protect? It’s a great task for us to determine what the 
core of it is that makes it so exciting.”

He listed some of the core values he treasures—his selected list of 
possibilities for his proposed 10 Commandments:

   1. Independence of applications
   2. New applications can be added anytime that’s a core value
   3. Permissionless innovation
   4. Open standards
   5. Accessible and globally inclusive—anyone can use it
   6. User choice—I can choose what applications I use and where I go to
      with them
   7. Ease of use—I can use it in my language, I can use it in a device
      I’m familiar with
   8. Freedom of expression
   9. The ability to change rapidly
  10. Trustworthy and reliable is one we have to work on; it’s got to be
      a core value.

Upon completing his list, Peter delivered the clever twist. “Quite 
coincidentally,” he said, “there are 10 of these. Now here we are in the 
shadows of Mount Sinai. If we had good remote communication, we could go 
up there and we could write this on a tablet of stone.

“I don’t think [drawing up such a list] is a job for any one 
organization. I would like us in the IGF to be involved in bringing 
something forward. We need to find some way for all sorts of people who 
hold these beliefs quite dearly to express this and get this into a 
document."

/IGF 2009 coverage is provided courtesy of a team from Elon University 
in North Carolina, USA. Janna Quitney Anderson, director of the 
Imagining the Internet Center and associate professor in the School of 
Communications at Elon, wrote this entry. See more on IGF Egypt at 
www.imaginingtheinternet.org <http://www.imaginingtheinternet.org/>.
/

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