[discuss] CIGI and Chatham House launch Global Commission on Internet Governance - FYI

[Michel Gauthier]

At 16:36 23/01/2014, Seun Ojedeji wrote:
>Perhaps the reason why technical community prefer to stay within 
>their server closets; lots of talking avenues emerging in the IG 
>space and i really wonder how practically effective its various 
>proceeds will be towards getting things globally implemented on the 
>Internet. Especially as it seem the disconnect is getting widened.

Seun,

A simple analysis which might help is that we are talking of 
networks. Networks have three main strata:

- hardware and bandwidth;
- software and protocols;
- brainware and languages.

The "technical community" you talk about is most probably the 
software and protocols community. The "IG community" is a part of the 
common people's brainware and languages community.

The widening disconnect you observe appears to proceed from an 
epistemic divide between to brainware functions:

1. to deploy and use real hardware and bandwidth through actual 
software and protocols in order to do things better.

2. to imagine and govern a non-existing internet for still 
undertermined purpose.

The disconnect is simply that these two functions are theorytically 
orthogonal. However, there might be a politcal leak. The question is 
how far the second function may pollute the first one.

M G