john perry barlow writes "The Accra Manifesto
Accra, Ghana
Tuesday, March 12, 2002 (revised Wed. March 13, 2002)

Since its beginnings, Cyberspace has provided new approaches for the
benign ordering of human affairs. As we begin to develop institutions
to govern the digital world, we must avoid returning to industrial
models that have generally failed in the analog world to assure
equity, liberty, and human inclusion. Instead, let us build upon the
promise of what has already proven effective in this social
experiment.

The paramount governing values that have so far emerged in this grand
collective enterprise are openness, inclusion, technical
practicality, emergent form, decentralization, transparency,
tolerance, diversity, and a fierce willingness to defend free
expression and the preservation of identity. These are appropriate
values. They are working.

They should be allowed to go on working, both in the eventual systems
for allocating domain names and numbers and in all other matters of
Cyberspace governance. Neither the current operations of ICANN nor
the current proposal put forward by its president appear to place
much faith in them.

Cyberspace has thus far been an environment where architecture is
politics. ICANN has turned this practical formulation on its head by
attempting to make politics architecture.

To assist in designing a governing process that will promote these
values and thus direct us toward the future and away from the past
the undersigned propose the following to the ICANN meeting in Accra:

1. It appears to us that ICANN has so far failed to generate the
moral authority necessary to govern an environment where authority
must be based on the general respect of the governed rather than its
ability to impose solutions by fiat.

2. It has failed for a variety of reasons. Chief among these are its
impulse to adapt existing and mechanical models of government to a
social space that cannot easily be coerced into submission. It
attempts to impose government instead of proposing governance.

3. ICANN is overly centralized and, by virtue of its incorporation in
the United States and its practical dependency on American
contractors, perpetuates the dangerous belief that the Internet is an
American environment. We believe that root should not be based in the
U.S.

4. ICANN was established in a gray area of institutional reality that
makes it nearly invulnerable to legal or political rebuke. If ICANN
were a function of the U.S. Government, at least it could be brought
into court and held accountable for unconstitutional behavior. The
current structure provides almost no opportunity for redress in the
area of domain names and none at all in the area of domain numbering.
It's power is vast and growing. Its accountability is small and
shrinking.

5. By abandoning the simple and fair system of "1st come, 1st served"
domain name allocation that served the Internet well from the
beginning, ICANN has created a quagmire of unnecessary disputes and
suppressed expression, and has irrationally conflated trademark law
with domain assignment.

6. Efforts to turn Cyberspace into a traditional democracy, however
laudable in principle, may never work well in a social space where it
is extremely difficult to define either the electorate or a credible
system whereby the people might express their will. Nonetheless,
public representation on the board is so important that we can't
afford to give up on it. It would be well to remember that democracy
is more than a mechanical process of providing that every single
member of a constituency has a say. Rather it is a system of
governance that seeks the consent of the governed, however that
assent is conveyed. To assure that ICANN is democratic in this sense,
there must be a low entry barrier to unofficial involvement its
decision-making processes, and, possibly, a decentralized, community
based system for selecting "at large" board members.

7. The current proposal before ICANN would fix this problem by
inserting existing nation states into a space where they have no
natural sovereignty. While this might, at first pass, lend the
popular accountability of governments to its processes, it's likely
to result in a system as ineffectual as the ITU or the United
Nations. Further, given the wave of negative reaction to the Lynn
proposal, its adoption would likely further reduce ICANN's
credibility.

8. ICANN, by its cumbersome deliberative processes, already slows the
adoption of new technology and might prevent the timely alteration of
the technical underpinnings of the Internet in the event of an
impending collapse of the system. The addition of even more ponderous
governments to the stew of authority would only exacerbate the
potential for failure.

9. The current structure of the root servers, as documented in the
MDR meeting, has the servers distributed between government,
commercial, academic, and non-profit organizations distributed around
the world. Such a structure is highly resistant to capture and leads
to the robustness and diversity of the Internet. One possible
outcome of the Lynn proposal is that the root servers are
contractually bound to a single organization. This inherently is
less stable and more susceptible to capture than the current
structure which should be protected as a fundamental architectural
principle.

10. The best way to assure inclusion is to derive systems that are
easy for those governed to understand. ICANN is already too complex
in its practices to admit informed participation. The Lynn proposal
would only add to this complexity.

11. The IETF once provided a good model for governing processes that
are well-suited to Cyberspace. It was a system for governance by
ideas, rather than by people, laws, or "stake-holders," in that the
most elegant solutions were adopted by the consensus of a
self-defining community, regardless of the standing of those who
proposed them. That the IETF has become less successful in solving
problems results less from a flaw in this model than its having been
high-jacked by corporate interests. ICANN, in its original design and
current state, ignores the value of these proven approaches.

12. To address these failures, we propose that ICANN decentralize and
convey operational authority to the communities that naturally define
themselves around the top-level domains, restricting its duties to
the resolution of disputes that cannot be resolved within the
communities. In other words, we believe that ICANN should become a
loose confederation of autonomous domains, rather like the federal
government of the United States during Jefferson's time.

13. Prior to delegating its operational functions to the domains, we
believe that ICANN might demonstrate its understanding of these
principles by defining at least two new public domains. Among these
we suggest .lib (for libraries) and .pub (for entities, whether
organizations or individuals, working for the common good). It is our
belief that the systems of self-governance such communities are
likely to develop might serve to instruct other domains in the
ordering of their own affairs.

14. One of the areas where existing systems of government have
worked, to varying degrees of effectiveness, has been in conveying
and preserving such human rights as free expression and protection
from unchecked corporate self-interest. ICANN might have a continued
role in directing itself to the assurance of such rights in
Cyberspace. A reformed ICANN might also propose broad policies and
technical solutions, but would do so as respected leaders and not as
a junta.

15. The previously existing systems for governance in Cyberspace have
shown the practical efficiency of fixing only that which is broken.
This is a principle ICANN would do well to emulate.

Cyberspace is not a place. It is a dialog of cultures. We believe
that if ICANN were to adopt the above principles, it might, through
light-handed arbitration of real, rather than projected, problems,
acquire the moral authority that has so far evaded it. We fear that
if it fails to consider the concerns that have driven us to make this
declaration, it will find itself in the unenviable position of trying
to impose its will on a global community with neither a mandate nor
force of arms. At best, it will become irrelevant as the citizens of
Cyberspace develop methods to work around it. At worst, it will be
directly dangerous to the health of the Internet. The chaos that
might follow either development will not serve our descendents well.

While many of the undersigned do not accept every single one of the
above statements, we are in sufficient agreement with the spirit of
this statement that we hereby attach our names and hope that the
governing board of ICANN will make a sincere effort to incorporate
its beliefs and adopt its recommendations.

John Perry Barlow barlow@eff.org , Co-Founder & Vice Chairman,
Electronic Frontier Foundation"