[At-Large] The SSAC has published SAC123 and SAC122

Mon Dec 25 21:03:33 UTC 2023

Now those calls are free, and no travel necessary. Is that due to treaties? That cannot be said. They were not a good thing unless you were wealthy. The rest of us were sending mail on onion-skin paper to save on the postage. 

Is it because of the technology evolution or because the treaties were bad (well, they weren’t perfect)

You can say the same about crossing a distance of 10 km before the technology of motor vehicles and now, nothing to do with treaties.

De : At-Large <at-large-bounces at atlarge-lists.icann.org> au nom de Antony Van Couvering via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Répondre à : Antony Van Couvering <avc at avc.vc>
Date : lundi 25 décembre 2023 à 20:34
À : Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch at gmail.com>
Cc : Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Objet : Re: [At-Large] The SSAC has published SAC123 and SAC122

The premise is doubtful. 

Did all those treaties work out that well in fact? 

I remember taking a truck to a boat to a taxi to post office, then waiting for an hour to have a 10-minute phone call with my grandparents in a tiny booth, along with my brothers and sisters. That hit the family budget hard. We got to do that once a year, as a special treat, while in Kenya. 

Make no mistake, the rates were set by a coterie of state monopolists and large corporations who played that role in some countries. 

Now those calls are free, and no travel necessary. Is that due to treaties? That cannot be said. They were not a good thing unless you were wealthy. The rest of us were sending mail on onion-skin paper to save on the postage. 

On Dec 25, 2023, at 01:52, Evan Leibovitch via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 25, 2023 at 12:35 AM Barry Shein via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:

I'd also point out that the global voice phone network, postal systems, package delivery, various forms of travel, at least, also had a "one world" goal.

Sure, and we actually got there. To sort out standards and interoperability between the countries of the world, we used these archaic things called "treaties", managed by purpose-built intergovernmental organizations, that have to date worked out pretty well over the decades. We've had ITU for phones since 1865, UPU for mail since 1874, and ICAO for air travel since 1947. Treaties were messy to make and occasionally get abused but have worked out relatively well. Traditionally in these operations, governments and the public interest drive decision-making, while business interests serve in an advisory role, usually through industry associations. As a result, major decisions made by such bodies usually have force of law among treaty signatories.

But the Internet world thought it knew better; it consciously and deliberately chose a different path. It bypassed the messiness of treaty-making and let industry make decisions while governments and the public interest were relegated to dispensable advisory roles. 

Generally this has worked, if only by accident and fortune. In the case of purely technical bodies such as IETF, W3C and ICANN's *SACs, decisions and standards have been generally accepted on technical merit; yet they still don't have the power of treaties behind them. Any sovereign jurisdiction can trivially choose to opt out, jeopardizing its own interoperability with the rest of the world but otherwise not breaking international law.

Decisions involving politics, money or other non-technical factors have a tougher path. Institutions must make visible and ongoing efforts to sustain legitimacy, and these decisions often need to be promoted through marketing campaigns or other forms of collective begging. Two perfect example subjects of such begging are IPv6 and Internationalised Domain Names. And without force of treaty, dealing with obvious abuses (such as the continued presence of .su) have no means of enforcement.

(IMO, ICANN actually did come close to "apocalyptic disaster" in 2020 -- whether it knew it or not at the time --  but was saved at the last minute by the California Attorney General) 

Every time ICANN or its pieces envision an existential threat, vested interests always hold up ITU as a boogeyman just waiting to consume ICANN were it to falter. At this time it would be difficult to demonstrate that an ITU-ran domain namespace would have botched as many public interest issues as ICANN has. Or maybe not the ITU, but another purpose-built treaty-based IGO.

And in the same period we began to understand the negative aspects of globalization like nuclear-tipped ICBMs and pollution (particularly the CO2 responsible for climate change) which also know no political boundaries tho don't require interoperability with their target other than the laws of physics.

Funny how even for those issues there are international treaties and conventions and IGOs. The Internet stands alone as being the one phenomenon of global public interest without treaties behind it (or even in the works). The UN tasked the IGF with coming up with a usable path forward, and it has failed pretty hard at that task.

Maybe the WSIS follow-ups can start afresh, so the world can set some standards for the app- and island- and AI-centric future Internet that Karl described. And maybe this reboot could at last put the public interest at the forefront rather than an afterthought. Maybe, even, mention of the "T" word to ensure that Internet openness is maintained by law rather than whim.

Happy holidays,

-- 

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada

@evanleibovitch / @el56

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