[At-Large] input to WSIS+20 comments sought

Sun Mar 12 14:52:46 UTC 2023

That's very thoughtful and thorough. But just an observation on your
useful bifurcation.

Muddling through requires a social consensus (on what is acceptable
practice) and the basis for that is breaking down. The UK has made a
long term virtue of muddling through as a core way to handle strategic
governance but it is under very serious strain because unwritten rules
that underpin this have been disastrously flouted.

The alternative top down governance model largely sites outside national
democratic institutions and is doing rather well for itself if you see what BIS 
are saying about carving up crypto and WIPO carving up "streaming"
content just now. They are not alone. They openly admit what they
"recommend" becomes law in the most important economies. The question
then for citizens is to ponder what is the role of a Parliament other than make those
laws and Supreme Courts to enforce them?

C

Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> writes:

> I agree that there are some really tricky devils in the details.
>
> And I agree that definitions are where a lot of those devils like to live.
>
> I see governance (and many other aspects of life) as having one of two
> basic modes of operation:
>
> 1) There is governance that acts through what I call the prime mover
> theory:  A great deal of effort is expended to create a compendious
> and almost fractally detailed policy or law or whatever noun we want
> to use.  This is a method often found in things like building codes
> where the field is fairly mature and this kind of detailed rulemaking
> can be done fairly well.
>
> 2) And then there is governance by positive muddling.  This is best
> for when we just kinda know the rough direction we want to go - as
> Parminder puts it, the "constitutional" approach - and then as we go
> forth we end up banging into situations and making adjustments and
> adding provisos.  This is kind of how the common law system of case
> law works.
>
> My sense is that we would be better served by moving forward via
> positive muddling - we set a general direction (such as with the
> "First Law of the Internet") and then start decorating it as we go
> forth and bang into real situations.
>
> One of the things that I like about the muddling-forward approach is
> that it often puts off some hard choices until a tomorrow that may
> never come.
>
> And yes we will reach tension points, like privacy/encryption vs law
> enforcement.  There's probably never going to be a stable balance
> point there, and it may be best to let the policy adopt, and adopt
> again, and then again to the changes in social and political winds.
>
> Here in the US I've kind of lost faith in the notion that we policy or
> law ratchets ever forward and ever better - our supreme court (I no
> longer honor it with capitalization of its name) is in an unprincipled
> process of throwing out nearly a century of law. I would anticipate
> those kind of swings in Internet policy, at least for a long period of
> time.
>
>         --karl--
>
> On 3/10/23 2:06 AM, christian de larrinaga wrote:
>> Sympathetic to this Karl. But ...
>>
>> Check the UK's Online Safety Bill. For "public detriment" we should now read
>> the use of the terms "harms" and "safety". Both are subjectively assessed and at high risk of
>> politicisation. They are also being bandied about to be used for
>> prevention of harms. This is at the root of argument to make use of
>> encryption too risky on communications providers bottom lines.
>>
>> C
>>
>>
>>
>> Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> writes:
>>
>>> With regard to principles, I like to start with a foundation, vague
>>> and ambiguous as it may be, to set a general direction.
>>>
>>> Below is what I have been proposing for a long time...
>>>
>>> (By-the-way, this formulation finds its distant ancestor in the US
>>> "Hush-a-Phone" case, a rather significant, and somewhat amusing, case
>>> that was the start of a sequence that led to the opening of telco
>>> circuits to other sues, such as the ARPAnet and Internet.)
>>>
>>> First Law of the Internet
>>>
>>> + Every person shall be free to use the Internet in any way
>>>    that is privately beneficial without being publicly
>>>    detrimental.
>>>
>>>     - The burden of demonstrating public detriment shall
>>>       be on those who wish to prevent the private use.
>>>
>>>         - Such a demonstration shall require clear and
>>>           convincing evidence of public detriment.
>>>
>>>     - The public detriment must be of such degree and extent
>>>       as to justify the suppression of the private activity.
>>>
>>> https://www.cavebear.com/old_cbblog/000059.html
>>>
>>> The general shape of this principle is that one has a freedom to use
>>> the net as they please.  But that pleasure is subject to the rather
>>> cloudy boundary of "public detriment".  However, the principle places
>>> the burden of proving that "public detriment" on those who complain.
>>> And the level and evidence of that proof has to be high, not merely a
>>> bald assertion.
>>>
>>>          --karl--
>>>
>>>
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-- 
christian de larrinaga 
https://firsthand.net