isen.blog

Bruce Sterling observes:

The UN has cumbersome rules, no popular participation, and can't get anything useful done about the darkly rising tide of stateless terror and military adventurism. The UN was invented  to "unite nations" rather than people. The Internet unites people, but it's politically illegitimate. Vigilante lawfare outfits like RIAA and MPAA can torment users and ISPs at will.

He continues:

Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations.
*snip*
The World Summit on the Information Society is the weirdest global summit on the globe. The sponsor of WSIS is the International Telecommunications Union, an outfit that formally belongs to the UN, but it is fifty years older. Today the terms "Union," "International" and "Telecommunications" are all archaic, so the ITU needs a raison d'etre. The ITU's idea of a summit looks nothing much like normal, formal UN summits, except for the customary big hall and swarms of translators. In the WSIS summit in Geneva in December 2003, diplomats abandoned their podiums to go mix it up with hardware vendors. That behavior is unheard of.  Odder yet, civil society groups (normally kept at a nice safe distance at summits, shrieking and sucking tear gas) were cordially brought right into the mix. At WSIS, the NGOS were finally treated as what they are: connectors, network brokers, and means of access.

I used to think that the ITU represented the worst of the telcos, but Bruce Sterling has this annoying habit of radically reframing some of the issues I most take for granted . . . if you're curious, or maybe even a little bit pissed off at the above, I suggest you give Sterling's essay a fair shake before dismissing it.

[Comments especially welcome, because I am not quite sure what to make of Sterling's call to participate myself -- David I]