*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do *** Two clips from: http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/20000610/index_sf4096.html BUSINESS SPECIAL The consensus machine The Internet has matured to the point where people are increasingly asking: who runs it, and on whose behalf? THERE is nothing like an absence of regulation for stimulating innovation. Such was the creed of early Internet enthusiasts. As John Gilmore, a noted online activist, has put it: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” The myth that the Internet has thrived only because it is anarchic is now firmly entrenched. Yet myth is what it is. In fact, cyberspace is highly organised and even regulated, and not just for technical standards. What is unique about the Internet is not that it is ungoverned; it is that its regulation has emerged from the bottom up and not the top down. “The Internet’s true strength is that, as an institution, it exhibits characteristics of policy formation that appeal to one’s sense of liberty,” argues Joseph Reagle, a policy analyst at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an Internet standards body. .... Toward the end: Governments might learn from online decision-making too. The Internet’s real promise for democracy may be less the much-ballyhooed electronic voting than the fact that the medium makes it easier for citizens to debate and inform themselves. The Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, for example, is working on software tools to organise “deliberative polls” online. The German government plans such a poll for a new data-protection law. Internet-governance bodies also provide a lesson in transparency. They document everything and make it accessible online. The IETF e-mail archives allow browsers to discover why certain decisions were taken, even if they date back years. The W3C has an internal rule that nothing really exists that is not posted on the consortium’s website. And ICANN posts transcripts of all board meetings, even telephone conferences. If ICANN succeeds in gaining legitimacy, it might one day spawn similar international organisations for other online policy issues with worldwide implications such as privacy (to avoid having a patchwork of different rules for the protection of personal information). That was actually the plan of Ira Magaziner, Bill Clinton’s point man for the Internet until 1999, who wrote the white paper that first called for the creation of ICANN. It would be absurd to assume that politics could be solved Internet-style, but governments would still do well to study the online decision-making process carefully. Something like it could, perhaps, help to narrow the gap between rulers and ruled—one more example of how the Internet may have a profound effect on the offline world. ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
