Individual users and community networks
I had intended to speak from the floor at the Vancouver ICANN final Public Forum, Saturday December 3rd. But the need to catch a ferry to Vancouver Island cut short my time. Here is what I would have said …. GG ------------------------ My name is Garth Graham and I’m here representing Telecommunities Canada (TC <www.tc.ca>). TC is a national association of community networking associations. Our members are concerned with the practices of using ICTs for community development. As a first-time participant in an ICANN meeting – I am surprised with the nebulousness way that ICANN seems to engage with the concept of the “Individual User.” For people in community networking, the individual facing daily life online, and acting to connect that to the well being of his or her community, is at the heart of what they do. For example, in this province where you are meeting, the BC Community Connectivity Co-operative (BC3) has huge experience in bringing Broadband to rural and remote communities by using the communities themselves to solve the “last mile” problem. Their practices in relating ICTs to community development are as good as it gets anywhere on earth. I haven’t noticed anyone from BC3 at this meeting. The problems that concern them include things like bit traffic load leveling, appropriate technology selection, and contesting the roles of primary telecommunications carriers in balancing questions of public policy for an Information Society. In a world where Internet governance and governance are converging, perhaps they should be concerned about the stability of DN Services. But they aren’t. Yesterday, I heard someone say that the post-WSIS world would allow ICANN to off-load “distractions” to other agencies and to concentrate more closely on its core values. It does occur to me that ICANN might, therefore, try to treat the needs of the individual user as a distraction that could be left for the new IG Forum. Or, to put it another way, that the individual could now morph into the consumer of a registrar’s products. That would be a mistake. Paul Towmey made reference to WSIS as a conflict of ideas between control and capital on the one hand, and “viral cooperation” on the other. To be effective in defense of the needs of the individual user, the fact that ICANN itself is also a forum for resolving that conflict needs to be made more explicit that my first impression suggests that it is. If ICANN does acknowledge a stake in that conflict of ideas, I think it will rapidly become clear that understanding the needs of the individual online is not at all a “civil society” question. To assume that it is will box the all-important question of individual’s role too tightly into the control side of the conflict. Who and what an individual is online, and what they do there that’s different …in how they use an IP model to connect in social relationships … is a question that’s fundamental to our understanding of what an Information Society actually is. And, whatever WSIS did, it did not successfully address that definition. But the devil, as always, is in the details. And the details of the Internet’s centrality to the definition of an information Society are in ICANN. To be accountable for the stability and security of the Internet places ICANN squarely in the middle of addressing the Internet’s socio-economic and political impact. Who benefits and who pays? Community networks know a lot about the answers to that question. |