At 07:30 PM 12/3/2003, Dean Anderson wrote...
There are, though, good reasons to have some government controls on
telecom. Whether these controls are too excessive or too lax is not up to
ICANN or the ITU. I can think of cases were some good has come of it.
E911, for example. Radio, TV, cellphone allocations. Ham Radio licences.
If license-free wireless operation weren't restricted in power, few people
would be able to use 802.11 because one company would be broadcasting at
hundreds of watts, etc.
None of what you mention is even remotely comparable to the Internet. RF
spectrum is a naturally shared, limited medium. Because physical law cannot be
changed, manmade laws must be used to regulate it for efficient use.
No such case can be made for the Internet, which is not bounded in either
bandwidth or number of connections in any practical sense. It is also not
something which can be subjected to any sort of control, as it is not a
"thing." The Internet is strictly an intellectual construct, nothing more.
There is nothing physical or real to control. It's a bunch of network operators
who have agreed to interconnect using agreed-upon protocols.
Sure, some governments can try to control some of the physical media which the
Internet makes use of, but getting around that is simply a matter of
reconfiguration.