[liberationtech] Internet transition to private industry

[Sandy Harris]

Doug Schuler <douglas at publicsphereproject.org> wrote:

> For an article I'm writing I'd like to know what are the best references to the decision-making that took place in transitioning the internet to private industry in the early 1990's (or point me in the right direction). You can share this with me personally or with the list. I'll be happy to share what I find with this list. Thanks!!

Like most opinions on the topic, mine are highly debatable. However,
here they are for whatever they may be worth. In the early years of
this century, I was nowhere near the center of things, but I was on
several mailing lists, following things & sometimes commenting. I gave
up & unsubscribed sometime before 2010.

As I see it, the whole organisation was subverted to become a
management & enforcement operation beholden to various large companies
 The original proposal had the board with a majority of elected
representatives of the users. That never happened & eventually they
eliminated user representation entirely leaving the "stakeholders" (I
hate that word, almost as much as "human resources") in complete
control.

One example of this is that ICANN now has a whole complex mechanism
for enforcing copyright & trademark claims, of course heavily biased
toward the companies involved. There is of course an argument that
some such mechanism is needed since the various national do not work
well on the net. However, it does not seem at all clear that the
current mechanisms are the right ones & there's also a strong argument
the other way.

Back in the days when Usenet was important, sys admins had a saying
that they'd act against "abuse OF the net, not abuse ON the net", so
for example they'd block spam but leave claims of libel or slander to
the courts. Arguably, that should apply to ICANN, & if they are going
to block anything it should be spammers and/or virus distributors, not
copyright offenders. Arguably they should also look at things like
making every router that connects to China drop the bogus TCP reset
packets which the Great Firewall uses to disrupt connections.

In the period when ICANN did have elected directors, one of them was
Karl Auerbach who I am cc'ing on this message. I did not agree with
everything he said, but did consider him one of the saner voices in
the discussions. I'd say a through perusal of his blog at
https://www.cavebear.com/ is essential to your project.

Perhaps the most absurd example of ICANN malfesance turned into a
lawsuit. Staff refused to give Auerbach some financial data without a
non-disclosure agreement & he took the position that, as a director,
he had a responsibilty to oversee things & staff a legal obligation to
provide unrestricted access. He went to court & won:
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/director-sues-organization-oversees-internet