Challenges the Internet poses to the policymaker

This paper addresses policymakers at national and international levels - regulators, standards bodies, politicians - arguing that there is no “beyond” the Internet. With the Internet so intimately intertwined with the lives of people, being used to build the backbone of large, important communities, an attempt to replace it with a new network would generate immense friction, and cost a lot. The transition would take long, because lots of complex software would need to be written, disrupting critical processes of the economy, indeed of governance. A plethora of regulators with very different manners and degrees of control would have to learn to work together at an international level, otherwise we might revert to the lawlessness of the Internet. The lost opportunity of Minitel, the botched attempt to look beyond the Internet in the 1990s via X.400 and the bankruptcy of large telecommunication companies in the wake of the dotcom boom are useful in appreciating the historical context and learning lessons from. Instead of looking beyond, the ITU should play a constructive role vis-à-vis the Internet. Suggestions presented are elimination of spam, and making the Internet accessible to all. These make commercial sense too.