KDB Systems

It’s been over a year since I posted to this blog. In that time I’ve become increas­ingly con­cerned about Inter­net Gov­er­nance and how it affects all of us. It’s not that I’m no longer inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy and Microsoft. I just got home from help­ing at a Microsoft spon­sored event, the MVP SMB Com­mu­nity Road­show, in Win­nipeg yes­ter­day. We were demon­strat­ing Win­dows Mul­ti­point Server 2011 among other things. It’s almost unbe­liev­able how cool this is and what a dra­matic effect it could have on IT for the SMB mar­ket. It is mostly tar­geted at the aca­d­e­mic mar­ket but I think the poten­tial for SMB is much big­ger. I’m still very excited about tech­nol­ogy. Inter­net Gov­er­nance though ramps up my excite­ment to a whole other level.

In 2008 I was elected to the board of direc­tors for the Cana­dian Inter­net Reg­is­tra­tion Author­ity for a three year term. That term is almost up and I’m stand­ing for re-election. Dur­ing my three years on the board as I gained knowl­edge of the domain indus­try, how the Inter­net works, DNS, ICANN, the IGF, ISOC, and more I realised that the world has come to rely on the Inter­net. For some­thing that the world relies on its gov­er­nance is very dif­fer­ent from any­thing else I can think of. It is not well under­stood by peo­ple out­side of those involved. There appears to be a strug­gle for con­trol of it that could have pro­found con­se­quences for all of us. Cur­rently the Inter­net is gov­erned by a very loose con­glom­er­a­tion of com­mer­cial inter­ests, gov­ern­ments, spe­cial inter­est groups, and just plain peo­ple. ICANN arguably the most impor­tant Inter­net Gov­er­nance organ­i­sa­tion has what’s called a multi-stakeholder bot­tom up gov­er­nance model. Any­one can attend an ICANN meet­ing. There are three a year and they move all over the globe. It’s free for any­one to reg­is­ter and attend but you do have to pay your own expenses. CIRA will be host­ing one in Toronto in 2012. Once there you can attend almost any ses­sion. Very few are closed. There is a pub­lic forum where any­body can get up to the micro­phone and have their say. You can join spe­cial inter­est groups within ICANN and put for­ward poli­cies through these groups. It is very chaotic and con­fused but some­how the Inter­net stays run­ning. The net­work pro­to­cols used to con­nect and com­mu­ni­cate with the Inter­net are free and open. No one con­trols them. All this chaos, con­fu­sion, and lack of con­trol con­found gov­ern­ments and many com­mer­cial inter­ests. They want more reg­u­la­tion and con­trol. Some gov­ern­ments want to cen­sor what their cit­i­zens can see and do on the Inter­net. Some com­mer­cial inter­est groups want more con­trol of com­merce on the Inter­net. Some of the spe­cial inter­est groups want more reg­u­la­tion to pro­tect the pub­lic from the gov­ern­ments and com­mer­cial inter­ests. The pub­lic seems to just want to access all the cool stuff on the Inter­net, prefer­ably as cheaply as pos­si­ble. Right now there seems to be some sort of bal­ance between all these diver­gent inter­ests. The bal­ance sways a bit but so far it is some­where near the mid­dle. I’d like to see it stay in the mid­dle. To that end I’m going to use this blog to explore Inter­net Gov­er­nance issues. Because I’m cur­rently in the mid­dle of try­ing to get re-elected to the CIRA board I’ll prob­a­bly be blog­ging about that a lot. Because tech­nol­ogy fas­ci­nates me there’ll def­i­nitely be posts about the tech­nol­ogy of the Inter­net. Finally when I see some­thing cool like Mul­ti­point Server 2011 I’ll write about that.

Stay tuned my next post will be about the CIRA election.