[discuss] ICANN policy and "Internet Governance"

[David Cake]

On 7 Jan 2014, at 8:12 pm, William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Jan 7, 2014, at 8:04 AM, David Cake <dave at DIFFERENCE.COM.AU> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 4 Jan 2014, at 6:32 am, Milton L Mueller <mueller at SYR.EDU> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> The part of Brian's paper that I strongly agreed with is that the term for many 
>>>> appears to be a catch-all for "anything related to the Internet about which I 
>>>> feel strongly Something Should Be Done".  I understood him to be arguing that 
>>>> it's not an actionable category, and I agree with him.  
>>> 
>>> It's true that "Internet governance" becomes indistinguishable from "Internet policy" for many people, if one is not careful and allows it to happen. For those of us more familiar with policy debates, however, 'public policy' typically means _national_ policy. We also tend to qualify the term "Internet governance" with the modifier "global Internet governance" although admittedly often that is implicit.  
>> 
>> 	I don't think that this distinction is quite as Milton describes, because there certainly exist some bodies that would generally be classified as Internet governance, rather than public policy, bodies, that operate only at the national level and are not global - multi-stakeholder ccTLD bodies, for example. 
>> 	But it is true that public policy is normally thought of as a national government led process, and Milton's distinction holds true most of the time. 
> 
> Now I’m puzzled too.  To me public policy can be a form of governance——is US policy viz the root, IANA, ICANN, etc. not (global) IG?---or it may not be, e.g. stuff about applications of the net to particular functional problems, procurement, etc. that doesn’t establish generalizable principles, norms, rules, procedures, etc. affecting the net’s organization and use.  It depends on the substantive matters at hand, so neither hard national/global or policy/governance binaries work.  

	Yes, hard boundaries do not work, and the terms public policy and Internet governance are certainly overlapping sets. 
	But in the ways in which the terms are in common use within the general Internet governance world - I think most people would consider some of the more independent ccTLD authorities to be national level Internet governance institutions, while we might talk of a communications regulator (that may well attempt to regulate some Internet content at a national level, but not wider net organisation or use) as an Internet related public policy body.
	Cheers

		David
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