The future of Internet governance

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting-American Society of International Law, Annual, 2007

PROFESSOR FROOMKIN:

To make registrars enforcers.

PROFESSOR WU:

Right. That sounds like a good thing, so tell us what is wrong about that?

PROFESSOR FROOMKIN:

Now we have institutionalized this idea that this odd body can make content-control decisions in ways that are not reviewable and not controllable, yet makes decisions that are enforceable and enlists other people to do things.

MS. DYSON:

It makes the registrars into police.

PROFESSOR FROOMKIN:

Right. Please do not get me wrong. I am happy to say that no one at ICANN has suggested that they are about to do that.

MS. DYSON:

I want to go back to what David said and talk about how important it is to think first about people just getting access to the Internet. I do not think it is going to be done by the ITU. Is there anybody here from Kazakhstan? Well, we should talk because I was there in September and spent a fair amount of time talking with local NGOs. One problem there is that Internet access is extremely expensive. It is approximately $350 a month. While I was there, it was revealed that the guy who runs Kazakh Telecom, which is half owned by the state and half owned by other interests, makes $350,000 a month. Nobody was shocked by this, and they were not really talking about the amount. What they were talking about is, "Gosh, I wonder who in the government caused this information to be revealed?"

Of course, Kazakh Telecom has a monopoly. When I was leaving, just by chance I flew out next to the Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan, the guy who tried to shut down Borat. Rather than engage him in a futile discussion on freedom of speech of anything like that, I said, "You know, it would really help your economy if you just lowered your charges by 50%. It would probably more than double your revenue, and you would become even more profitable. You do not even need to create competition for Kazakh Telecom." But of course there are a lot of people in the Kazakh establishment who are not particularly interested in providing access to lots of people more cheaply. That is one of the big problems. You go in there, and these people do not even want this to happen because they are making higher rents on the situation the way it is. And they do not want new channels for political speech.

QUESTIONS

QUESTIONER 1:

My name is James Apple, with the International Judicial Academy. My question is to the panel: What are the arguments against having something like the World Trade Organization where you have a set of protocols and dispute resolution and appellate body and a whole system of trade disputes? What is the argument for doing that for the Internet?

PROFESSOR WU:

Do you mean having the WTO itself assert more authority over the Internet? Because I think that is going to happen.

QUESTIONER 1:

No. That would be a possibility but the other would be to have a separate organization devoted to the Internet: the WIO, the World Internet Organization.

PROFESSOR FROOMKIN:

I think that there are a huge number of problems with that. I will just mention two. One is that, as a philosophical matter, I am not ashamed to say that I do not want governments regulating my communication with you, and that would be an inevitable consequence of that structure, one which makes me exceedingly uncomfortable. The second is that the governance mechanisms of the WTO are insufficient for the regulation of communications.