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December 1, 2005

Governance: the Stakes

In an ongoing dialogue with colleague Dan Krimm, the future governance of the internet is the feature topic, and our cross chatter is working in two directions. One is to solidify the stance and urgency for protecting the breakthrough in information access that the internet provides our societies. The other is to give shape, and even a model, to the analysis of the stakeholder issues involved.

The latter is rife with complexity because it is currently more like sorting out a collision than it is like planning a development. Enough groups with enough special interests are already in the space with either enough momentum or enough determination to make it, amazingly, crowded -- not in terms of room to maneuver but instead in terms of how to maneuver. On second thought, to face up to this problem means getting ahead of the collisions, like air traffic control .

Recently Dan put a fine point on the general thrust of legal activity around internet governance. Said Dan, "As long as there is consumer demand for certain features, and someone willing to build the products with those features, and no law against building those features, there should be a market for them. In short, the hardware manufacturers are not the corps invested in content control, more the media and telecom corps. So consumer electronics corps tend to be open-design oriented, while RIAA/MPAA are trying to shut things down."

My riff on that, which I replied to Dan, went like this: " the hardware manufacturers are not the corps invested in content control, rather, the *content manufacturers* are the corp invested in hardware control."

Putting it that way, it's easy to start thinking that content manufacturers have two fish to fry: (1) distributing content specifically to increase its value, while having the means of distribution NOT decrease its value; and (2) creating content specifically to leverage the existing means of distribution.

Relative to each other, the first item leans towards regulation while the second leans towards innovation. But if we took that as an "axis" (regulation vs. innovation) then maybe another significant axis -- "liberties vs.security" -- would give us a social cross-reference to the operational issues...
Running with that, I get this:

We need say more than this, but this looks immediately useful as a way to organize the description of concerns that characterize any given stakeholder.

The thought now: use the tool to describe, in turn, the individual personal user, the business user, the content product manufacturer, the hardware product manufacturer, etc. -- and reveal the "interests" that need to be prioritized and/or reconciled.

Is a reconciliation necessary? For whom? As Dan puts it, there's an awful lot at stake -- too much to not pay attention. Just one of his examples: he notes that "the gist of it is that corporations are lobbying government for legislation that would increase their control over content transmission and CPU design... Some legislators are not averse to designing the technology with more control, because government could use that control as well. In other words, it's not just a free market here, but collusion of strategy between government and big business to build the Big Brother society..."

P.S.
How about the "space" within the more typical business enterprise? Governance has become a huge issue both in terms of the business functions and the enabling business infrastructure.

To the extent that a business has a strategy that drives its decisions and activity, the business's "special interest" now faces greater scrutiny by public and other authorities than ever before, who want to get a better grip on what the business does not just "in" the marketplace but to the marketplace.

And within the enterprise, the idea that multiple divisions, processes and managers -- all trying to hit performance targets -- will "share" the company's resource capacity is also under greater examination than ever. It would seem that these are situations which lend themselves just as well to decoding by the same framework as the one above.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 1, 2005 4:59 PM

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