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November 24, 2005

Getting the Net Value of the 'Net

The internet is a complex organization of systems and content that is already fully deployed in live productions. So what's new? It is also a laboratory for testing and studying how we balance open sources, standards and objectives -- converting innovation into a "common good" when material scarcity is not a dominant factor. Meanwhile, business organizations in general are being encouraged more and more to pursue their structure organically and systemically through web interactions. Thus, the issue of governing cyberspace versus development, as discussed below, is actually not just about the internet but as well about the nature of the modern self-organizing enterprise...

How much "internet" is there?

For many of us, the internet is already practically ubiquitous. But despite its existing pervasiveness and our familiarity with it, the internet is neither virtually nor otherwise a "natural" environment. It's an artificial environment -- one in which a diverse population is steadily learning how to create, find and deliver many kinds of value. Given that, although the environment is artificial and is still being deliberately invented, it would seem to be in the public's best interest if it was a "protected" environment.

But because this "public" has many different constitutencies with different interests, not everyone agrees on what exactly it is about the internet that should be protected -- just as is the case with markets and national parks.

Different parties in the environment implement "controls" there to protect their own interests, but when the type and impact of these controls follows an independent agenda of the implementer, and when many such parties are motivated mainly to protect their own, then most parties have uncertain futures regarding success with their own agendas in that same landscape.

So, enlightened regulation is the thought that comes to mind -- but on what basis is agreement to the rules established? This is definitely not self-evident.

For example, an approach bred from defending the "rights" of each party to maintain its interests can't be a surprising choice, but it relies on a flawed assumption -- namely, that the active parties are actually creating the internet's expanse and that there is no significant limitation on the future expanse, therefore making it unnecessary to negotiate cohabitation in it, but rather merely to stake claims in the frontier land rush. But what's the problem? Too many tortoises in a population that includes hares. How do the tortoises get a claim?

Or another approach assumes that in much of the extant internet, "there's no 'there' there..." In this view, the only part of the internet that is worth controlling is the part that is already valuable. This cultivates a confrontation of squatters' rights and developers' rights, while leaving open the question of when the remaining wilderness has stopped being just wild. Problem: imperialism (and larceny) is a major threat.

The examples merely illustrate that stakeholders vary by the location, type and level of their interest. However, this is the whole point. Through metaphor and empiricism, the definition of the internet morphs from one thing to another amongst different users' perspectives. None of the users wants their interests to be regulated; instead they want them to be protected. Their interests define the internet for them, and in that sense they all want "the environment" they call "the internet" to be protected.

Thus, universal protection has the built in challenge of finding a greatest common denominator. Case in point: because the internet is so easily seen as an extension of some other communications infrastructure (environment) such as for marketing, academia or news, those infrastructures present norms or expectations of practice that mean differing and possibly competing sets of requirements within the internet . But you can't protect something that is all things to all people. Before the internet can be universally protected as an environment, it first needs defining in terms of the basic characteristics that can distinguish it from other environments; and then an effort should aim to ensure that the interests of one user/party there do not arbitrarily eliminate realization of the interests of others there. The key part of that thought is the "not arbitrary" clause; this effort must happen according to a policy that already prioritizes the different types of interest before they get to exert themselves.

Naturally, we debate how to set those priorities... but we should not be looking for the perfect answer; instead, we need a consistently appropriate way of arriving at an answer.

Protection versus Regulation: Policy versus Rules

We start here with presenting the internet environment by a signature common denominator. The elementary presumption is that everyone should have the right to access and exploit this environment's inherent support for distributing and otherwise managing digital hyperlinked media. Yet our experience of this exploitation and this "everyone" is incredibly complex. The US vs. foreign countries, the government vs. large corporations, and the whole scene regarding industry vs. hackers/cybercriminals -- all of these confluences drive intense debate about how to govern the internet, and complicate our concerns with ensuring a universal right.

We know from such problems that you cannot actually regulate the environment any more than you can herd cats. Instead, you can do two things: you can "constrain" the environment by limiting how it affects you, and you can regulate the approach to interacting with the environment.

So for example, you can regulate services, a key instrument through which you approach the interactions. Regulated services gradually build up the environment into an infrastructure. We can presuppose that this infrastructure should be "open" or freely shared, but experience shows that this idea won't be accepted at face value, because infrastructures require investments and investments are, frankly, competitive choices made by parties who already have disposable assets.

The question is, what are the principles behind the investment in and regulation of the services, for the public interest? Principles representing the "public interest" in reality presuppose that the public itself can be distinguished as a special interest group. It follows that, practically, the public should have a pertinent governance policy about services. But what, then, is the public's investment that creates an entitlement to bring policy?

Whose internet is it?

Where rules are essentially about requirements, policies are essentially about priorities. This points at the difference between constraining (via policy) versus regulating (via rules), and again we note that the environment itself is not regulated -- rather, it is constrained, while the approach to interacting with it (e.g., services) is regulated. In short, services should support policy. But whose policy, and why?

The key feature of a typical public policy is "fairness". Regarding the internet through the logic above, the public viewpoint is that Fairness itself should be "protected" (not regulated), and in particular "rights to access". However, to do that, the means of protection should be regulated, so that they are consistent with public priorities.

But equal "rights to access" is not the same thing as having actual equal access. Case in point: currently, the lack of a standard public requirement to have a "personal use license" to the internet means that anyone merely capable of getting themselves on the "info superhighway" can drive there, at whatever risk this poses to everyone else and to the environment. This is not equality, it is indifference. Meanwhile, some people, even benignly, pose much greater risks to others, and some people get much more out of their activity than do others. Obviously, this is not necessarily "fair or unfair", but it is rather a difference that might be qualified in many ways.

Against those conditions, environmental protection addresses the issue of "fairness" by balancing the risks that the environment's inhabitants pose to each other by their pursuits. The intention of the balance is that for any inhabitant, the environment effectively offers what the inhabitant distinctively needs from this environment, which clearly must also include preserving the user's opportunity and thus means preserving the environment.

Yet, fairness in no way dictates that the inhabitant must use this particular environment to satisfy need. Merely showing up does not bestow any special rights. Meanwhile, an environment without barriers to entry can easily collect a population, but a population is not automatically a "public". In sum, the default situation is that there are no public rights. To get them and assert them means we have to argue for them successfully.

Development
For the idea of the "public" to be effective, it must intentionally qualify members of a population, with a notion of membership that assumes a desirable commonality of interest. "All Comers" and "Public" are not synonymous. Members of the public have obligations to each other. All comers don't.

But both groups show up in the internet of their own accord; and when they do, both groups encounter the same three general circumstances describing the environment. These three conditions simultaneously exist, and come to the foreground of the user's consciousness mainly according to what it is that the user is trying to do.
- In the first, voluntary use of the environment comes with an "as is, at your own risk" norm of support.
- In the second, operation within the environment is facilitated by agreements and development.
- In the third, synthetic engineering of the environment optimizes the facilities.

In fact, different users provide, enjoy or cultivate these conditions according to their own various agendas. Thus, in determining a universal policy for global usage, support, facilitation and engineering become the primary subjects of policy assessment -- as a user's activity in each subject area is examined for its impact on other users and assess those impacts in terms of fairness.

Defining the stakeholder
In this impact assessment, the normal presumption is that any given user's requirements can be adequately identified so that it can be determined how critical the environment is to the satisfaction of the user's needs. That criticality is one standard dimension by which a user population can be anticipated, segmented, triaged and prioritized. Users discovered having less critical dependency (current or future) on the environment might be assumed to have "lesser say" about how the environment is to be managed.

But there is a pre-qualifying issue, which is the question "Why are the user's requirements considered to be 'requirements'? Can we be sure that they are not simply options?" In short, how easily could the user get what they need from someplace else?

In that light, we logically look for the motivation behind the user's need, understanding that the motivation generates objectives that the user decides to meet -- objectives which in turn spawn the user's view of certain options being "requirements" instead of just alternatives.

The thing is, as a community of potential users or as a population in the environment, we are not obligated to agree with the particular other user's objective. Thus we are not necessarily in agreement with the related means, conditions and consequences of pursuing it. Nonetheless, at the ground level, the internet is actually developed, and still developing, mainly through the decisions made about executing these pursuits.

Assessing the stakes
Policy makes a difference by explicitly implementing key aspects of governance of the relationship with the environment. In the effort to establish policy, we cross-reference support, facilitation and engineering against means, conditions and consequences -- creating the basic framework for comparative assessment across different user objectives.

When we thus look within this framework at how means of support, conditions of facilitation, consequences of engineering, or other factors might develop or manifest themselves, we determine alternatives, risks, services, and other concepts that represent the interests of different stakeholders in the environment.

The translation of interests into rights is the logical imperative of the policy. The presumption of the public policy is that individual parties do not encounter or enter the environment with "inherent" rights -- but instead that the policy allows the public to grant rights according to "public interest". Without a policy, there is no common "granting" mechanism other than culture and power -- and those two mechanisms may be randomly at odds with each other even as they bilaterally shape and reshape each other. But characteristic of our times, we really can already take the use of the internet for granted. Thus, as a global device for real-time interaction, the internet begs for a cross-cultural "public" to arise -- making reconciliation not just important but urgent.

We have seen the Internet, and it is Us
In a given environment, potential users of the environment will gravitate towards less randomness as a matter of common sense. Their general modes for acquiring increased certainty span R&D (build), subscription (buy), and sheer hustle (borrow). All of these modes do present practical challenges to users, who consequently find themselves separating out according to their differing ability to effectively take advantage of each mode.

But while such segmentation naturally occurs, this observation in no way specifies the party's particular "use" in question. The attempted uses range freely across the segmentation -- and as uses are discovered and cataloged they represent objectives that must be assessed by policy. These objectives are the first order of policy business, with the opportunities for their satisfaction being a key topic of protections.

Meanwhile, the internet is -- almost by definition -- a network of networks. Standardization of the protocols for internetworking does not per se dictate that access to all networks should be a universal right. Any given network is greatly understood as an ecosystem, and not all ecosystems are compatible with each other. Extending the comparison, an ecosystem is like a subculture. Policies should constructively serve subcultures, but this raises the issue of when and how much the policy for one subculture should be required to support another subculture, so an assessment should tackle this too.

Commercial marketing, news journalism, and academic research are examples of distinct subcultures. Operating within the internet, under different dynamics and having different agendas, they co-exist without necessarily co-operating or collaborating. In exploiting the basic internet technical architecture to create operational infrastructures for themselves, they each present respectively different requirements, which are variously satisfied through built, bought or borrowed means.

As cohabitants of the internet environment, the different subcultures may actually share operational means, but the terms of the sharing are neither mandatory nor guaranteed. Rather, these interactions of different communities come with the same set (scope) of issues already identified in the above framework of policy assessment.

Our framework is portable; each different subculture may use it to assess and tailor its own policy. But the framework also searches for the same issues regardless of whether the scale of user comparison is personal (person-to-person), organizational (group-to-group), or greater. Policy can be assessed and set for the different scales.

Each subculture may have its optimal policy. This makes us wonder about the need for compromise, or in general the way to achieve reconciliations. But although multiple subcultures or ecosystems are present, and while many different levels of interaction are simultaneously active in an subculture, the framework's similarity of scope across the different groups and scales logically suggests that there is not a need for some superpolicy (or "policy of policies") to govern any given ecosystem -- nor the network of ecosystems.

Instead, it is more appropriate to move to strategy as the enabling and unifying discipline for public governance.

The internet calls for a strategy of environmental management, that states what kind of value is the goal of the public policy and thus directs all supporting logics used to reconcile the complexity of its population's diversity.

Growing and Harvesting the Net
In the political realm, global does not mean universal, and rules do not mean rights. Consequently, the ethics of environmental protection cannot be articulated as absolutes but only as motivated responsibilities towards goals.

What emerges from this perspective is that governance is likely to be ineffective without strategy, and that the translation of policy into rules is likely to be ineffective without strategic agreements amongst stakeholders.

Because our highest-level community perception of the internet is that it is a "resource", we attack the "environmental protection" issues from the viewpoint of "resource management and optimization."

But at the ground level, what complicates the issues in practice is that operations to often reduce the discipline of managing the resource into the management of artificially produced assets. In effect, asset management competes with strategy as the value system for governance.

Internet policy for the public interest cannot be rationally successful when dominated by asset management, because assets are essentially private and, aside from notions of quality, require no ethical influence at all to be successfully developed.

Whereas, (in the common parlance of Archestra research) a resource is "an asset with an assignment." iven that assignments would be to serve the public interest, managing the evolution of the internet on the basis of "resource" is a profoundly different objective than managing on the basis of assets.

Without at all confusing "global vs. universal" nor "rules vs. rights", the conversion of assets into resources can point at the key concepts of public interest and commonwealth. Management of the internet should be based on growing resources, not growing assets. In parallel, the translation of interests into rights, through the influence of policy, must be based on strategic management of resources -- judiciously cultivating a shield of protection for the environment and its inhabitants.

As we assume a nearly relentless further growth of the internet's pervasiveness, putting rules before strategy can stick a finger in the dike but it won't relieve the development pressure of asset management that breaks the dam. So our mandate is to create and adopt for the internet a resource-oriented universal strategy that can be globally executed.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at November 24, 2005 10:18 AM

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