[discuss] What is to replace the NTIA?

[Michel Gauthier]

When considering all the inputs on this list one sees that:

1. the Internet City currently work without a Mayor in being 
ultimately policed by the NTIA.
2. Internet City however grows larger and larger and has started 
distrusting its sheriff.
3. So the Sheriff talks about quitting. However, none is happy with 
any of his assistants becoming sheriff or them forming a sheriff club.
4. there are several options as crime, corruption and disorder is feared:
     - army takes over, and ITU keeps things quite, with citizen squads
     - blue helmets come in: a Police Department is formed under UN 
jurisdiction
     - popular auto-defense soviets start associating
     - each quarter selects its own Sheriff and they cooperate.
     - each stakeholder freely associates or not in brigades and keep 
his/her gun home

Any other kind of option? Which one do you prefer?
In such a city and in each options, how common services work, 
develop, get payed, coordinate.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, explained very well at the end of the Grand 
Chessboard: the XXth century US are like the XVII/XIXth centuries UK: 
an island confronted to the Continent. In such a configuration the 
peace of the entire world can only result from a cooperation of every 
nation, coordinated by the island. Otherwise the island get 
frustrated at being left aside and a conflict results.

The NTIA bet is that the Internet has changed that situation: it has 
made the entire world a single continent where all the interests are 
entangled in the same complexity.

The second NTIA bet is that this complexity is no wider than the 
Internet, at least for the cyberspace, and therefore that a well 
organized IG can be enough to address the issue.

The third NTIA bet is that ICANN will be par, by its own charisma, 
with the other institutions that take care of the human political, 
economical, cultural, military, police, legal, religious, etc. spaces.

I do not know for sure, but I feel that the NTIA's view of the world 
is a static dream.

- A dream,because reality is more complex (the digisphere is wider 
than the cyberspace), but that this can be discussed.
- Static because they seem to consider the internet development is 
completed. As, if from now on, the internet development will only be 
incremental and smooth enough to be seamlessly governed by the newly 
established IG. This is like if they have transformed their 
status-quo strategy in faith.

I would be quite interested by comments.

M G.