Total Legal Relevance

OK, say you’re not totally put off by my last post, and you still want to explore the magical world of…. I’m not going to use the phrase “access to knowledge” ever again, I’m instead going to say….

the magical question of how to promote wider distribution of the conversational tools by which we come up with the know-how, narrative shortcuts, mnemonics, stylistic moves, inventions, and other valuable things that make up ‘knowledge’ within our networked information society.

It seems to me the first thing you’d want to do is get a rough sense for the lay of the regulatory land. To do this, maybe you’d compile a cross-section of different countries’ approaches to regulation of communications platforms — with an eye towards what entities/agencies are actually *doing* the regulating in various locations, and what these countries conceive of as the *purpose* of regulating communications networks. Some might say they craft their communications policy in order to promote citizen safety and national security, others might say the point is to foster innovation and promote economic development, a few might have higher aspirations of protecting citizen autonomy and privacy, many would agree that it’s important to encourage investment in communications infrastructure, etc. Different countries, and different regulatory bodies within those countries, would have all kinds of mixed and imperfectly overlapping motivations. That’s kinda the nature of governance.

Then, with these different approaches and goals in mind, it would be useful to analyze how best to formulate and implement a constitution or set of internationally acceptable first principles regarding the future of these communication platforms — because, and this is important, no one doubts that communications have become and will continue to become less provincial and more international in scope, both in terms of who’s doing the communicating and what kind of platforms the communicating is being done upon.

Maybe the *substance* of the constitution and its first principles isn’t as important as figuring out how best to *structure* the multi-stakeholder networked governance institution that will formulate and implement these principles. WIkipedia, for instance, didn’t get mired in debates over the substantive details of its encyclopedia; it just set people to work and gave them a rough (and editable) framework for resolving the disputes that would inevitably arise about substantive details. Writing a global network constitution would be as or more difficult than writing an encyclopedia, so it likely makes more sense to start by outlining the broad procedural contours of this governance institution: who would have a seat at the table? which private vs. public entities should be included and how much relative bargaining power should each have? what procedures would be required to amend the constitution?

What other structural and procedural concerns would need to be resolved before vesting the parties with any substantive powers to negotiate a shared communications infrastructure?