Subject: [Internetgovtech] "internet governance" -- Mistaking jurisdiction for service

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:31:06 -0500

In this note I hope to show that "service" is a reasonable way to think
about "governance", and it is distinct from "territorial jurisdiction".
I also hope to show that "internet governance" is not necessarily equal
to the largely sterile "ITU vs IETF" (or "circuit vs datagram") theater,
nor a field completely occupied by existing actors.

When I first went to Beijing and met with individuals from the two agencies
which chartered CNNIC I became aware of several related issues: some claims
advanced by the United States relative to the distribution of Microsoft and
other instance-licensed digital products, and the hard currency settlement
cost for overseas communications caused by a bug in the UTF8 code in the MS
browser, generally generating three packet streams per domain name presented
in Han Script, per browser instance -- one to Redmond, one to Sunnyvale, and
one to Reston.

The reason for the CNNIC nameserver constellation was simply to end a cost,
then considerable, caused by a bug in a widely used browser product, then
bundled into an operating system product, then argued in United States vs.
Microsoft Corporation (253 F.3d 2345) as "tied" products. Interposition on
incorrect resolution was latter extended to interposition on non-resolution
(the Han Script TLDs), and with technical support from DPI vendors, mostly
domiciled in the United States, extended to become known as "The Great
Firewall".

Availablity, and correct availability without the waste of trans-pacific
queries, of identifiers in Han Script, was the end-user desired service,
the goal of some rational effort towards "internet governance".

It is incorrect to view the jurisdictional claims of a territorial polity 
citing this, or a similar service, as the basis for some effort towards
"internet governance". Modulo the pre-existing national standards for the
CJKV scripts, in particular the traditional and simplified Chinese scripts,
and the choice of the monopoly operator with market power in the DNS market
to use an alternate source of glyphs, the end-user service requirement was
not confined to any "national market", existing among the Chinese language
computer users of the South East Asia, North America, and Europe.

A similar fact pattern arises when considering the needs of users of
scripts which are presented right-to-left. When writing an invited
response to the League of Arab States request for guidance on an RFP
for a label-space with RtL presentation the issues of "variants" due
to the earlier choice of the monopoly operator with market power in the DNS
market to use an alternate source of glyphs was not limited to any subset
of the League of Arab States, but was claimed by other "non-Arab" territorial
jurisdictions, and by the Arabic and Farsi speaking populations of Europe
and North America.

My point here is that what can be meant by "internet governance" may be
the real needs of users for identifiers associated with resources other
than Arabic decimal digits and Latin characters. And, the act of providing
"governance" creating this service, feature or attribute of the "internet"
is not necessarily limited to agencies associated with territorial
jurisdictions, though these are frequent actors, and also frequently attempt
to exercise an exclusive agency, substituting "territorial jurisdiction"
as a basis for a claimed right to form, or inform "governance, for end-user
"necessity and utility".

Eric