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Commerce Secretary feeds digital catnip to NET NERDS

Pritzker swears to protect net, beat evil-doers, defeat Smaug

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker has vowed to protect the “free, vibrant and open internet” by letting net nerds decide how to replace the US government’s traditional role overseeing the internet.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of ICANN’s meeting in Los Angeles, Pritzker took the well-travelled route of praising the net’s global reach, and finding a child in a faraway land – in this case, India’s Abban Jose Tom – to highlight its possibilities and general wonderfulness. Abban, 19, runs a website design business.

“We live in an era when all an entrepreneur needs to start, build and promote a business is a mobile device and a Wi-Fi connection,” she marvelled. “It is also a vital platform for free expression and the exchange of ideas.”

And of course, this was all made possible (in large part) by the people in the room who represent the net’s infrastructure industry.

Pritzker kept feeding the catnip, telling attendees that together this week, in Los Angeles, they would “protect and preserve this revolutionary platform” and “shape lives and livelihoods in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, long into the future”.

With encouragement though came dire warnings. There are “enemies who want to reduce internet governance to a meeting of governmental technocrats promoting narrow national interests”. And just next week, at a United Nations meeting in Korea “we will see proposals to put governments in charge of internet governance” (although so far, only one proposal — resolution 180 — has turned up, suggesting making the ITU a provider of internet addressing numbers).

But don’t worry because she and Uncle Sam will stand up for all that is good and right. “The United States will not allow the internet to be co-opted by any person, entity or nation seeking to substitute their parochial world view for the collective wisdom of this community.”

All this praise has a purpose of course. Having had its hand forced by revelations that far from being a beneficent uncle, parts of the US government had co-opted the net and substituted their parochial world view through mass surveillance, the department announced in March that it would “transition” its role at the top level of the net and write itself out of a contract for the so-called “IANA functions”.

What’s more, the net community will decide how to do that itself, and there will be no rules, save one: governments are not allowed to be in control.

Having taken that bold decision, the US government is now reliant on the global net community – in reality more like a gathering of warring tribes – to reach an agreement. However, based on the first six months of work, more than a little encouragement to pull together is going to be needed.

Talking about the increasingly canonized “multistakeholder model” – where all affected parties play a part in reaching decisions – Pritzker noted that: "We must all recognize that this is not inevitable. We all know that the multistakeholder governance and institutions such as ICANN are under intense and unprecedented pressure and scrutiny. Yet we are confident the multistakeholder model offers the greatest assurance that the internet will continue to thrive.”

Pritzker then high-tailed it out of the conference to catch up with President Obama in San Francisco. Perhaps it was just as well. The session immediately after the opening ceremony saw all the heads of ICANN’s various factions on stage discussing the question “is the current structure working?” and musing on why they can’t ever seem to agree with each other.

As for the group tasked with coming up with the critical solution for replacing US government control ... they had one meeting planned this week. And it took place during lunch hour. ®

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