The James Martin 21st Century School - Blog

Decisions that will shape information societies for decades to come are being taken today, but not where you might expect. Rather than the White House or Silicon Valley, we should look to the NSA in Fort Meade and the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva for the source of the policies that will have the biggest impact on global privacy, security and innovation.

On 26 February 2009, Dr Ian Brown, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute came to the James Martin 21st Century School to give a seminar: "Faraday Cages, Marbled Palaces and Humpty Dumpty: the Reality of Internet Governance". He outlined three case studies illustrating the difficulty of building legitimate forms of internet governance.

Dr Brown began with the encryption policy debate that ran from the 1970s with the NSA's attempts to ban the publication of cryptographic publications, to control funding of cryptography research, and to ban the export of cryptographic software, due to fears that "terrorists, drug traffickers and criminals" would exploit it.

The NSA never had much luck in achieving this goal, which Dr Brown attributed to the fact that encryption policy was driven by a small number of stakeholders with little legitimacy. The NSA could never convince other governments that it was in their best interests to support this move, rather than employ the software to protect their own information from US intelligence. In addition, effective regulation was near impossible once the information was globally available and due to high levels of user demand for encryption capabilities.

The second case study centred on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and efforts to enforce global copyright treaties. Here, the failure was due to the difficulty of effective regulation given how many people knew how to circumvent technologies employed to prevent piracy, combined, once again with high levels of user demand for pirated media.

Lastly, Dr Brown contrasted the effectiveness of the NSA and WIPO with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This is the organisation which manages the domain name system, IP addresses and port allocation. Legally it is a private corporation, although ICANN did briefly institute elections for a board of directors as a way to bring more legitimacy to the organisation. The experiment was a failure, and ICANN now derives its legitimacy from an extremely open consultation process and the fairness of the results it produces. Though its legitimacy is still somewhat suspect, ICANN is seen as a 'least worst' solution.

In considering why ICANN succeeded where the NSA and WIPO have failed, Dr Brown concluded that ICANN's advantage lay in the fact that its goals were more achievable. Whereas WIPO dealt in issues of copyright relevant to the millions of individuals sharing digital media files, and several powerful actors had an interest in thwarting the NSA's attempts at encryption controls, ICANN's work attracts interest from a more specialised audience.

Following the seminar, a discussion with the audience highlighted a particular interest in the wisdom of trying to democratise internet governance. Several participants expressed concerns that seeking to create a democratic consensus on issues of internet governance would fail to provide any principles of constitutional protection for minority communities.

You can see the slides from Dr Brown's seminar on his blog.