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Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 198
Netizens-Digest Saturday, October 31 1998 Volume 01 : Number 198
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
Re: [netz] Re: [ifwp] Re: Netizens are citizens of Net not customers
[netz] Re: [ifwp] Re: Re: ITU Actions
Re: [netz] Re: [ifwp] Re: Netizens are citizens of Net not customers
[netz] Re: ITU Actions (reposted)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 16:25:03 +0100 (CET)
From: Ingo Luetkebohle <ingo@devconsult.de>
Subject: Re: [netz] Re: [ifwp] Re: Netizens are citizens of Net not customers
On Sat, 31 Oct 1998, Ronda Hauben wrote:
> >Non Governmental Organizations can represent people. Corporations are
> >NGO's, with the added function of generating money. That is not, in itself,
> >a hindrance to the function of representation.
> Isn't it the opposite, that Non Governmental Organizations are
> corporations that aren't supposed to be generating money, but doing
> some other function.
Sorry, I confused the terms here. The intention was to use a general term,
applying to NGO's, corporations and every other organization thats not a
government. You are right that the term "NGO" is normally only used for
non-profit organizations.
> >To make them represent you, you have to influence them. Whereas
> >corporations are primarily influenced by money, governments are influenced
> I don't know of any way to make any non-Governmental organization
> represent people.
Well, perhaps they don't represent "The People", but they can represent
some people -- why shouldn't they be able to do that?
The privatization zealots say that a private organization *can* represent
the internet users. I consider this to be correct -- its possible unless
shown otherwise.
*But* they say that a private organization *will* represent the internet
users. I consider this to be unproven and there are good reasons to doubt
it. This is a critical juncture: The privatization people take this step
(from *can* to *will*) for granted. I can't prove them wrong on their first
assumption (*can*), but I can argue their right to make this last step.
It all boils down to the fact that with a private organization you might
get lucky, but you can't be sure. If it acts badly, we have no means to
stop it. This is an unacceptable risk. With a governmental organization, if
it acts badly, we have a means to stop it. Therefore, I consider a
governmental (or inter-governmental) organization to be better suited for
the purpose of controlling TLD's.
> But the "free market theory" doesn't function for the ordinary person,
> it only enriches the wealthy.
I prefer to show that the free market theory has limits that are not
acceptable in this situation, instead of proving it completely wrong. Its
much easier to do the former than to do the latter.
> But there is a difference. I can walk up to a politician and challenge
> him or her. With a corporation I can't do anything, except try to sue,
> and they have much deeper pockets than I do and I can only get into a
> deep whole.
Thats exactly what I meant to say :-)
> When there are two or three big corporations that dominant in a
> country, you can't start another corporation, as the biggies keep
> others out.
This is just a specialization of what I said. I described it in more
general terms.
> Do you think that this isn't true? Do you think that the public
> purposes of the Internet and the public processes that have grown up
> and have helped the Internet to grow and flourish *can* continue to
> exist if the essential functions of the Internet are put under the
> control (and ownership) of a private corporation?
I doubt it, but I'm not sure.
- --
Ingo Luetkebohle / 21st Century Digital Boy
dev/consulting Gesellschaft fuer Netzwerkentwicklung und -beratung mbH
url: http://www.devconsult.de/ - fon: 0521-1365800 - fax: 0521-1365803
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 13:50:24 -0500 (EST)
From: Ronda Hauben <ronda@panix.com>
Subject: [netz] Re: [ifwp] Re: Re: ITU Actions
Tony Rutkowski <amr@netmagic.com> wrote:
responding to Ronda Hauben's question about the NTIA industry
advisory group:
>>Do you know what companies are on it? Since it is called
>>an "industrry advisory group" one would expect it were
>>companies.
>Perhaps you don't appreciate that "industry" in the
>telecommunication and information policy field includes
>just about everyone. This has always been the case
>(for at least the past 100 years or so).
>Thus, this group consists of CIX, CDT, Silicon Valley SIC,
>MPAA, IIPA, SPA, IIA, CSPP, ISOC, USTA, DMA, EMA, ITAA,
>ITI, ATIS, TIA, CNRI, ISA, Commercenet, CSIS/GIIC, USCIB,
>RSAC, RIAA, and APSI.
Are most of these organizations or trade groups? I only
recognize a few of the intitials. Is that the CIX the
service providers trade organization. And I recognize
the Internet Society (ISOC) and Center for Networking
Research Infrasture (CNRI). I don't recognize most of the
others like Commercenet, ISA, SPA etc.
>As well as IBM, AOL, General Magic, Netscape, Cybercash,
>Oracle, Microsoft, Time Warner, Compuserve, ATT, MCI,
>Piper Marbury, CERTCO, EDS, BellSouth, Nynex, and Disney.
>
>Are you concerned about Mickey Mouse?
>--tony
I am concerned about those who want to remain users who can
represent themselves on the Internet.
I didn't think that most of the names I do recognize in your
list would understand the importance of communication to the
users on the Internet and so am concerned with the fact that
the NTIA seems to be promoting telecom deregulation which
is the kind of thing that got rid of the important kind
of research lab that was Bell Labs, and bodes a similar
fate for the Internet.
Do you know how one gets included on this NTIA indusry
advisory group?
How do they get alerts? Via email, fax, mail, phone?
Would you agree that losing Bell Labs was a loss?
Or that Bell Labs contributions to the world via
the creation of UNIX, the transistor, the laser,
contributions to spreading Usenet, etc. were
something important for our time and for the current
level of technological advancement we have today?
Ronda
ronda@panix.com
Netizens: On the History and Impact
of Usenet and the Internet
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
in print edition ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
------------------------------
Date: 31 Oct 1998 20:48:20 +0100
From: Carsten Laekamp <lakamp@capway.com>
Subject: Re: [netz] Re: [ifwp] Re: Netizens are citizens of Net not customers
Ronda Hauben <ronda@panix.com> writes:
> Now for the debate!
No, not straight away :)
> >Anyway, I don't see the point. No organisation, be it non- or
> >for-profit, can represent a "customer" unless it has a mandate (e.g.. a
> >law firm will have that mandate in certain circumstances).
>
> The original discussion had to do with someone who claimed that
> corporations "represent" the interests of the customer, or consumer.
My mistake. I did some last-minute editing on that post and it didn't
come out very clear. What I meant was: no organisation (with a few
very specific exceptions) can represent anyone else than its
members. Whether it is set up for making profit or not isn't the
issue. I did understand the point of the discussion but not that of
knowing what a corporation was set up for.
> I see what you are saying about a lawyer representing his client,
> but that is as a hired person to do a particular job.
It was just an example of one of those specific situations. Maybe I
was being over-cautious <g>.
> As of 1995, when the NSF let NSI charge for domain names,
> and for a yearly fee for anyone who had a domain name,
> from then on the U.S. govt allowed abuses in the registration
> and practice of hoarding, speculation, etc. of domain names.
>
> That was an abuse of its responsibility by the U.S. government
> but there is an entity that can be held responsible for
> this abuse. Also, however, the U.S. government was doing this
> as part of its plan to privatize these essential functions,
> rather than as part of a recognition that it needed to be
> responsible to the public in how it administered these
> essential functions.
>
> So the problem with the NSF was *not* that the domain name
> functions need to be privatized, but the opposed. The problem
> has arised because the NSF needed to be responsible for the
> *public* administration of these functions.
>
Unfortunately, this is the common strategy when you want to make a
privatisation look necessary. The same strategy that was/is used for
e.g. the German, British and French railway companies or for the
French telephone company: first break things on purpose and then blame
it on the state monopoly.
> It wasn't that the U.S. government represented other countries'
> people.
>
Still, it was the US government who had the power (and probably still
has), since they (used to ?)control most of the international
logistics. The current process was initiated by the *US* government
and, if I understand you well, it also affects country codes foreign
to the US.
> I don't find the "free market" theory functioning either with
> regard to creating or distributing wealth, or with regard to
> government.
I agree that it shouldn't be applied to government. The fact that this
is done too often is IMHO the reason for a large number of
shortcommings of Western governments in the last years.
OTOH, just look at the wealth of those countries that have a free
market (to some extent), compared to that of all the others.
>
> In fact, the long history of labor legislation and factory regulation
> shows that it has arisen as a result of the "free market" theory
> to provide a good life for people.
>
> Before labor and factory regulation, children were maimed and injured
> and their fathers were thrown out of the factories onto the streets.
> There were 50 years of devastation to the British population in
> the 1800-1850's until the shorter hours legislation was passed,
> and even then it was a fight to have it implemented.
Please, don't mix up "free market" and "rugged capitalism" (although
many of those who advocate the former today really want the
latter). Free market involves competition, as soon as that disappears,
the market won't be free anymore. Therefore, it needs rules to keep it
free.Some (probably the loudest) people talk about self-regulation of
the market This has been proven not to work in many
instances. Therefore, some outside regulation (i.e. from the
governments and from international conventions) *is* needed, I agree
with you on that.
However, if you look at the history of labour legislation, you will
see that much of it was enforced by the workers or the unions. If you
see the labour market as "a market", these are respectively the
providers and corporations of providers. Therefore, it sort of comes from
a form of auto-regulatory process of the (labour) market.
> Without legislation and regulation, corporations must all lower
> the standards of their workers, and of their products, in their
> supposed competition with the other corporations.
What seems the most important in what you say there is the *supposed
competition*. I "wonder" why we have been having an economical crisis
for 20 years, and a financial boom at the same time. If we had a close
look at who owns what, we'd probably find out that there isn't any
real competition anymore (but a look at recent mergers shows the
same).
I know that all this leads far away from the question of control, but
I think it will get clear later in this message why I went this way.
>
> The Internet was built by a very different process. It was
> built by the government funded and supported scientific and
> technical research. This is the kind of process that provides
> progress and it is the kind of process that needs to be
> continued to support the Internet's growth and development.
Yes. However, this is too far from today's main ideology for anyone to
convince a politician to consider this an argument. BTW: I don't think
that the Internet would have evolved the same way if businesses hadn't
got involved with it.
> But the point about representation is that in the U.S. those
> who take as what seems to be their religion the "free market"
> (and who then are part of the largest corporations that dominate
> the economy), are saying that the Internet is a "market" and
> that that will be the future of the Internet.
Difficult to see it differently. I don't think we can revolve to the
academic network the Internet once was. Whether this is unfortunate or
not is another question.
Anyway, as you said, the free market is a religion today (and the
official one, in some countries). Therefore you'll have to speak in
terms of the market if you want to convince people. Show the public
that what is really being built here is a monopoly and you'll get
large support. Say that the free market is not the solution, and they
will dismiss your arguments as "communist <censored>", however right
you may be.
> That the big corporations need to control the Internet and
> what they do will represent the interests of the users.
And that's exactly the point where their logics can, no: should, be
challenged.
> But the Interenet is a place where the users represent themselves.
Well, yes, as long as it pleases those who have the real power,
i.e. the control of the technical means of propagation of the
information. If the users really had the power, these plans to change
the status of the Internet couldn't exist.
> And as the big corporate entities are given the public assets
> and control over the Internet, we will no longer have
> an Internet, but a commercenet of their content and their
> e-shopping malls, etc.
>
> That is *not* desirable, to say the least.
No, it isn't. However, I don't think that things would go that
far. They would loose part of the users if they went that way and
therefore make the whole thing less attractive for their clients. But
censorship would certainly evolve much faster than it has been and
that is the more acute problem.
> It is scientific and technical research that produces better ways
> to make products and improve life for people, not industry
> competition.
Hmmm, scientific and technical research also brought the industrial
revolution, robotics, etc...., all things that first brought
lower income or unemployement to the people. And it wasn't scientific
and technical research that made (and hopefully will make) things
better later on.
(In the U.S. the telecom deregulation has
> led to higher prices for the home user, fraud in the way
> people have their telecom carrier changed without their consent,
> lots of annoying phone calls from telephone vendors, etc.)
Yes, mainly because it was a locked market, given to big
corporations. Of course, this will be exactly the same with the
Internet but, as I said before, you won't even convince a majority of
Internet users with this kind of arguments. Just look at the number of
people in the US who continued using AOL when other ISPs were offering
flat rates and AOL wasn't (and, in that case, there wasn't any
ideology involved)
> And we have lost Bell Labs, the preeminent research laboratory
> that gave the world Unix, the transistor, the laser, etc.
>
Wasn't the transistor invented by TI ?
Anyway, what you did _in_the_past_ doesn't count for the market. And,
in some way, this benefits the customer.
> This is interesting. It shows the two different viewpoints of
> public and private.
Yes, but IMHO not the two viewpoints you're thinking of ;)
I don't consider that a public school that gets financed (even
partially) by a private party, moreover one it provides services to,
to be a public service. And a school the curriculum of which
isn't controlled by public bodies anymore certainly isn't a public
institution anymore. Therefore, the laws of the market, and not of the
public service, apply, at least for the classes involved in that
exchange.
It seems that your state's court had the same vision.
> But we do have the ability, to at least some extent, to care for
> the Internet now. I can contribute my posts.
Yes. And that's the thing that will probably change first :(
> Nor has MCI/Worldcom yet won the battle to raise my rates for
> access, to change tcp/ip to something where they can charge
> for packets and priorities of packets, though they will aim
> for such a situation.
Well, this is possible, even now. Some ISPs charge by the
Mbyte. And, here, those ISPs who use a X25 connection to their users
already pay for the level of priority of those packets (the company
which provides that service belonging to the _state-owned_ phone
company that still has the monopoly for local phone calls)
> >Of course, they will never get a chance to change this, if a
> >corporation takes over control. The main reason being that it will be
> >_control_ and not competition.
>
> Interesting. But I don't understand how you feel competition can
> build a computer-communications network.
It cannot, IMHO. That's the point.However the privatisation will be
set up, it will end in a monopoly or a trust.
> At the IFWP meeting in Geneva this summer, service providers
> came to protest the creation of the IP numbers council.
>
> They said that those who sell them numbers are being empowered
> to control how the number sales will be made.
>
> That the vendors are getting to form a council of vendors to
> regulated themselves. And those who are the customers of those
> vendors, the service providers, will be even more at the mercy
> of the vendors. The U.S. government is setting up a self
> regulatory structure of the largest and most powerful entities.
And I think that these are precisely the points that should be
focused on.
> But it is the RFC cooperative process and the Usenet newsgroup
> or mailing list discussion that are what is needed to figure
> out how to develop the Internet and to solve its problems,
> not competition.
I'd rather be quiet about that. Not only does it go against the
interests of those lobbies that have the real power, but it is also a
form of direct democracy, which must be what politicians fear most.
;-)
- --
Carsten Läkamp
claekamp@mindless.com
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 15:22:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Jay Hauben <jay@dorsai.org>
Subject: [netz] Re: ITU Actions (reposted)
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 14:09:15 -0500
To: list@ifwp.org, IFWP Discussion List <list@ifwp.org>
From: Tony Rutkowski <amr@netmagic.com>
Subject: Re: [ifwp] Re: Re: Re: ITU Actions
Cc: netizens@columbia.edu
Ronda,
>Are most of these organizations or trade groups? I only
>recognize a few of the intitials. Is that the CIX the
>service providers trade organization. And I recognize
>the Internet Society (ISOC) and Center for Networking
>Research Infrasture (CNRI). I don't recognize most of the
>others like Commercenet, ISA, SPA etc.
These are the standard stable of non-profit organizations
of various flavors and constituencies in the Washington
area that are significantly involved in the field.
(CNRI is the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.)
>I didn't think that most of the names I do recognize in your
>list would understand the importance of communication to the
>users on the Internet and so am concerned with the fact that
>the NTIA seems to be promoting telecom deregulation which
>is the kind of thing that got rid of the important kind
>of research lab that was Bell Labs, and bodes a similar
>fate for the Internet.
You might be surprised by their understanding. Might
I suggest that Internet development and Bell Labs R&D
are somethat orthogonal at best.
>Do you know how one gets included on this NTIA indusry
>advisory group?
Send a note to ssettle@ntia.doc.gov and provide her
with a fax number.
>Would you agree that losing Bell Labs was a loss?
Oh my. Should we put the old monolithic AT&T network
back together as well? Times change. That was the
old world paradigm. It's gone. I prefer today's
R&D development architectures.
- --tony
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End of Netizens-Digest V1 #198
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