Cultural fault lines are forming on the Internet over the age-old question "Who will govern?" Will the Net govern itself? Or will it be manacled to a scaffold of antediluvian laws and regulations, drafted by bodies with scant legitimacy and fewer clues?
Driving this debate is a whole raft of problems - CDA-like legal nooses, copyright and intellectual property-related legislation, threats of "brown-outs," and the domain name crisis - all emblematic of the Net's coming of age. The Net desperately needs a place where it can discuss and debate rules for the final layers of the protocol stack - the economic and the social.
The recently formed Internet Law and Policy Forum, based in Montreal, seems to fit the bill. The ILPF may at first blush look like a power grab by a group of Internet old-timers and lawyers, but it's far better than the alternative: resisting self-government, thereby allowing someone else to come in and do it for us.
Jeffrey Ritter, the ILPF organizing chair, promises that the forum will provide "a neutral venue" where all stakeholders can come with problems, ideas, and solutions. Think of it as the Internet commu-nity's own think tank. It will help explain the Net's wizardry factor to governments. And hopefully it will convince authorities to keep their regulatory and police mitts off the Net until rules arrived at through open processes are available.
Underwritten by 22 corporate sponsors in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the ILPF is a global, nongovernmental organization, incorporated in Washington state. It will engage a worldwide array of stakeholders - including the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), industry associations and groupings, user and vendor groups, ISP communities, standards organizations, governmental and intergovernmental bodies, and public interest organizations. The ILPF will have no legislative power, only the ability to reach agreements with the entire Internet community. Nonetheless, the ILPF stirred up Net space this autumn. One prominent IETF member suggested that the ILPF was proposing something akin to "the Marxist smoke-filled room model," in which policymakers would be instructed and lectured to by a legal-policy digerati, only to go back to their real-world realms to do what they were going to do anyway. This was contrasted with the IETF's "original democratic model," in which people "sit around in a circle and talk" until consensus is reached. But Tony Rutkowski, VP for Internet business development at General Magic and a member of the ILPF executive committee, bluntly points out that "a lot of companies are voting with their feet in creating this consortium, because even in the technical realm, the IETF process is not very effective. The old-crowd Internet community does not like things like the World Wide Web; it sees it as an alien universe."Not surprisingly, some old Internet hands balk at the ILPF concept and see it as a bunch of DC carpetbaggers. Dave Farber, ISOC board member and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, worries that the "pragmatic training" of the ILPF's lawyers will cause them to be too narrow-minded and err on the conservative side. This concern, however, ignores the fact that engineers - along with the IETF - will be included in the ILPF process.Critics of the ILPF have also homed in on the questions of funding, board seats, and representation. Corporations that fund the initial pilot phase have the option of taking board seats. This has raised the hackles of public interest groups and others who ask how the interests of consumers and other noncorporate groups will be represented. But Ritter points out that having a board seat may be less important "than playing a constructive role in the process through participation in the working groups." Like it or not, the Internet's non-silicon-based architecture is finally branching out to match its technological diversity. The ILPF is part of this transition. Let's embrace it as a part of the Net's coming-of-age.
