(isi)
2.3 Governing Internet networks as a commons
WCN constitute, essentially, a political choice: by establishing a mix of social and relational ties between participants involved in the provision of the network infrastructure, they promote a more democratic and cooperative political system, with a more symmetrical and participatory governance structure (Bauwens 2005).
Historically, such a participatory, consensus-driven governance model has only been applied to a limited number of layers of the Internet (Lessig 1999). Early on, it had been the founding ethos of Internet governance and soon became a norm for the development of Internet protocols and standards (e.g. IETF for Internet networking standards; W3C for web standards) where decision-making is decentralized—or, in the words of David C. Clark: ‘We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code’ (Clark 1992). At the application and content layers, commons-based governance can also be found in the context of the Free Software and Creative Commons movements, with projects such as Linux and Wikipedia. The revival of community networks has shown that the model of open governance characteristic of many ‘common pool resources’ (Ostrom 1990) can also be applied to the physical, last-mile infrastructure of the network, with important consequences on the following key features:
a) Transparency: Transparency is an important precondition to open governance. Most WCNs adopted transparent accounting: whether related to expenses or equipment costs, fees or other revenue streams, all items are typically made publicly available.. On a more technical front, many centralized WCNs have made the logical interface for administrating the network available to all members who wish to access it, whereas in the context of more decentralized mesh networks, the community is in charge of maintaining a public database of active relay nodes.
b) Inclusiveness: in the context of many WCN, it is for the community itself to decide the manner in which the network should effectively be designed and managed. This goal is achieved via flat organizations and a peer-to-peer approach to decision-making, based on deliberation and consensus. While most of the communication is done via mailing lists, many WCNs try to organize weekly or monthly meetings where all willing participants and the most active volunteers can get together to socialize and discuss important management issues. ‘Day-to-day decisions are often proposed and debated on mailing lists and social networks, while most important decisions are usually presented and discussed in meetings,’ says one member of Guifi.net (Mr. Pablo Boronat Pérez, pers.comm., 28 March, 2014).
Yet, as is often the case in Internet governance fora, community networks tend to favor the most active members. Some define themselves as a ‘do-ocracy’:
We are organized in a non-hierarchical community where common decisions are made consensually through constructive debate and arguments, but where in the case of equivalent arguments, we favor arguments of those who are more actively participating in the network,” writes a member of the Slovenian network Wlan Slovenija (Mitar, pers.comm., 23 March, 2014).
Yet, the network requires at a complete consensus, because the dissatisfied can in any moment decide not to participate anymore. That way, the whole network would be at loss.” Thus, as with Internet standard-setting bodies and free software projects, the governance of grassroots community networks ultimately mandates consensus to alleviate the risk of ‘forking’. The network’s technical properties and, in particular, the possibility for dissatisfied users to leave the original network and create a new one reinforce the group’s commitment to consensus-driven governance.
c) Social goals: Most WCNs are committed to serving the wider community to which they belong. As outlined before, many provide connectivity to places that traditional, commercial ISPs neglect. These are often undeserved areas or poor neighborhoods, whether in rural or urban settings.
In order to take into account the socio-economic situation of some of their members, several of the organizations we surveyed give preferential subscription fees to unemployed people and students, and some even consider their subscriber’s fee a ‘suggested donation’. Often, WCN even configure their networks to provide free Internet access to cultural centers, public parks, squats, or even schools, city halls and healthcare centers.
d) Education: For community networks, users’ lack of technical skills is sometimes one of the most challenging problems, and can lead projects to fail (Albert 2013). Educating users to the use of technical tools and network management is therefore an important task for community networks to thrive and meet their goal of creating inclusive and citizen-centric networks. This objective is sought, for instance, by the Digital Stewards program, a technology training designed by the OTI. Started in the US, but also replicated in countries such as Tunisia and India, the curriculum aims to impart to community members the basic knowledge and skills required to design and deploy a communications network, such as wireless mesh networks. More generally, in all the WCNs we have interviewed, active and skilled volunteers are in charge of training new-comers and neophytes, helping them, for instance, to set up and manage their routers and Wi-Fi antennas.
In addition to sharing knowledge about how the network functions, WCNs also encourage users to adopt a more pro-active approach to securing network connectivity and their online communications. Accordingly, community networks often promote the use of free software, decentralized online services and end-to-end encryption techniques. ‘We are educating users how they can protect themselves on our and any other network,’ says one of our interviewees (Mr. Pablo Boronat Pérez, pers.comm., 28 March, 2014). Surveillance is also an important concern: ‘We are teaching people that even through they do not have to give their identity to log into our mesh network, they are not anonymous toward the authorities or other entities due to hardware and software profiles of their devices and other metadata’, explains another participant (Mr. Juergen Neumann, pers.comm., 26 March 2014).
e) Incentives for participation: The flip-side to a commons-based governance for WCNs, however, is that they only subsist insofar as there is someone willing to contribute to the network. As opposed to software, which, once produced, remains operational and available to all, WCNs cannot operate without a constant provision of bandwidth resources to sustain the infrastructure and to pass traffic on to relay nodes across the network. Members have an incentive to provide resources to the network and to work together to address any network failure that might occur (say, a displaced radio antenna) so as to maximize the benefits they can derive from it, both individually and collectively.
While free riding cannot be completely avoided, WCNs have to provide enough incentives for the community to contribute a sufficient amount of resources so as to ensure the long-term sustainability of the network. This is especially true in the context of mesh networks: given that they use a dynamic routing method where relay nodes and routes are not predetermined, the efficiency of the network depends on the number of users who accept at any given moment to operate as relay nodes. This way, although specific routing protocols might allow for the establishment of supernodes (which have priority over the other nodes by virtue of their greater bandwidth, for instance), all users can potentially contribute to increasing the network bandwidth.
A limited number of WMNs are experimenting with innovative mechanisms to incentivize participation and to encourage users contributions to the network. For instance, Guifi.net elaborated the idea of deploying a ‘CommunityCoin’—a cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin’s block-chain technology whose objective is to reward the contribution of community members so as encourage and facilitate the assessment of internal community participation. While these coins do not have any real monetary value, they can be spent by community members to purchase a variety of goods or services from other community members. Here, again, the political goal of encouraging the establishment of strong and cohesive communities capable of self-organising in order to fulfill their own needs by their own means is reinforced by technical necessities.
As we have seen in this overview of European community networks, grassroots organizations are a citizen response to the growing centralization and corporate enclosure of network infrastructures operated by commercial ISPs. Given the motivations underlying these initiatives, as well as the technical and governance features they implement, WCN have the potential of shifting the power dynamics in the telecom sector, by addressing many of the concerns raised by the growing concentration of power in last-miles networks, and potentially at the backbone level as well.