Key Internet Institutions Ditch US Leadership; Brazil To Host Global Summit To Draw Up New Governance Model

Here's a hugely important story that brings together three major threads. First, the continuing wrangling over the form that Internet governance should take. Second, the fact that NSA's massive surveillance operations around the world have included economic espionage. And third, Brazil's increasingly angry reaction to that spying. As a post from the Internet Governance Project explains: 

On Techdirt.

Why ICANN Is Evil, Part 58697

I've been tracking the goings-on at ICANN, which oversees domain names and many other crucial aspects of the Internet, for many years now, and I've yet to see anything good come out of the organisation. Here's someone else who has problems with them:

In this Article, I challenge the prevailing idea that ICANN's governance of the Internet's infrastructure does not threaten free speech and that ICANN's governance of the Internet therefore need not embody special protections for free speech. I argue that ICANN's authority over the Internet's infrastructure empowers it to enact regulations affecting speech within the most powerful forum for expression ever developed. ICANN cannot remain true to the democratic norms it was designed to embody unless it adopts policies to protect freedom of expression. While ICANN's recent self-evaluation and proposed reforms are intended to ensure compliance with its obligations under its governance agreement, these proposed reforms will render it less able to embody the norms of liberal democracy and less capable of protecting individuals' fundamental rights. Unless ICANN reforms its governance structure to render it consistent with the procedural and substantive norms of democracy articulated herein, ICANN should be stripped of its decision-making authority over the Internet's infrastructure.

Strip, strip, strip. (Via IGP blog.)

Second Life Gets Local Governance (a Bit)

One of the unresolved issues for virtual worlds is governance. If, as Second Life appears to do, there is a claim that this is a user-generated world, then it makes sense for users to run the place, too. Moreover, since users certainly pay a tax for the pleasure of living in Second Life, they should arguably have some form of representation. The first baby steps towards this have just been taken:

Many moons back, a portion of Linden’s Community Team developed a project meant to deliver better local Governance control to the grid. What does this mean? Many things. For starters: The Estate Level Abuse program which we’ve been Beta Testing since January. This was a test designed to allow estate owners to receive and resolve their own abuse reports in the method in which they best see fit. No longer subject to Linden’s ideas on how abuse could be handled, estate owners in the test had abuse reports filed on their land sent directly to their email.