We're coming to the end of our first experiment with "stakeholder government" in cyberspace - and the results are not promising.
In about a week, the U.S. government is scheduled to turn over control of the IP number and domain name systems to a private nonprofit corporation dedicated to the interests of the "Internet community as a whole." This corporation, as the administration's White Paper laid out, will be governed by the Net's "stakeholders" - a term left undefined. In the months since the White Paper's release, various groups have scrambled to make a claim. One group now seems destined to prevail - but in a way that raises all the familiar questions about stakeholder government.
At the start, things looked more promising. A gaggle of self-declared stakeholders formed an International Forum on the White Paper. The IFWP launched a series of meetings - in Reston, Va.; Geneva; Singapore; and finally Buenos Aires - with the goal of developing a rough consensus about how such a corporation should be governed. The result was a set of principles. They're vague in places and not always consistent; some are a bit loony. But they are the stuff of any ordinary, open decision-making process and a credit to the organizers of the IFWP.
At the same time, however, there was a parallel process. Jon Postel, sometime "God of the Internet," through his organization, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - backed by attorneys, and in cooperation with a number of the largest corporate interests at stake - began drafting his own bylaws for this new corporate structure. He presented these bylaws to the various IFWP working groups and asked that they be accepted as the basis for future work. The working groups declined his offer, so Postel and his lawyers went their own way. Over the months, they have produced three drafts. Each draft has been posted on the Net and is open for comments - but each draft was kept solely under IANA control.
These two processes produced two very different results. IANA proposed a powerful but closed corporation. Principles of separation, or checks on its powers, don't sing in its draft. The board need not answer to the demands of "members"; there are no "members." The only check on its powers will be the California Attorney General, who might have other things to do than monitor this board. It is an engineer's corporation, but with none of the virtues of openness and vulnerability that mark organizations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force.
IFWP's process, by contrast, produced principles, instead of a corporation. Some principles track IANA's draft, but with differences. They demand more openness. They call for a membership organization. They envision a clearer (and more traditional) separation between the board and management of the corporation. To bring the process to a close, IFWP invited IANA to join in a public meeting, to work out a final draft for a new corporation that would reflect the best work of both groups.
