IT

A colleague was asking for some simple advice about all-in-one printer/copier/fax devices and got instead a rambling lecture on my paper workflow. There is no reason the Internet should be exempted from my long-winded rants, so here goes, an excruciatingly detailed description of my paper workflow. It shares the same general outline as my digital photography workflow, with a few twists.

Formats

The paperless office is what I am striving for. Digital files are easier to protect than paper from fire or theft, and you can carry them with you everywhere on a Flash memory stick. As for file formats, you don’t want to be locked in, so you should either use TIFF or PDF, both of which have open-source readers and are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, unlike Microsoft’s proprietary lock-in format of the day.

TIFF is easier to retouch in an image editing program, but:

1. Few programs cope correctly with multi-page TIFFs
2. PDF allows you to combine a bitmap layer to have an exact fac-simile with a searchable OCR text layer for retrieval, TIFF does not.
3. TIFF is inefficient for vector documents, e.g. receipts printed from a web page.
4. The TIFF format lacks many of the amenities designed in a format like PDF expressly designed as a digital replacement for paper.

Generating PDFs from web pages or office documents is as simple as printing (Mac OS X offers this feature out of the box, for Windows, you can print to PostScript and use Ghostscript to convert the PS to PDF.

Please note the bloated Acrobat Reader is not a must-have to view PDFs, Mac OS X’s Preview does a much better job, and on Windows Foxit Reader is a perfectly serviceable alternative that easily fits on a Flash USB stick. UNIX users have Ghostscript and the numerous UI wrappers that make paging and zooming easy..

Acquisition

You should process incoming mail as soon as you receive it, and not let it build up. If you have a backlog, set it aside and start your new system, applicable to all new snail mail. That way the situation does not degrade further, and you can revisit old mail later.

Junk mail that could lead to identity theft (e.g. credit card solicitations) should be shredded or even better, burnt (assuming your local environmental regulations permit this). if you get a powerful enough shredder, it can swallow the entire envelope without even forcing you to open it. Of course, you should only consider a cross-cut shredder. Junk mail that does not contain identifiable information should be recycled. When in doubt, shred. Everything else should be scanned.

Forget about flatbed scanners, what you want is a sheet-fed batch document scanner. It should support duplex mode, i.e. be capable of scanning both sides of a sheet of paper in a single pass. For Mac users Fujitsu ScanSnap is pretty much the only game in town, and for Windows users I recommend the Canon DR-2050C (the ScanSnap is available in a Windows version, but the Canon has a more reliable paper feed less prone to double-feeding). Either will quickly scan a sheaf of paperwork to a PDF file at 15–20 pages per minute.

Filing

Paper is a paradox: it is the most intuitive medium to deal with in the short-term, but also the most unwieldy and unmanageable over time. As soon as you layer two sheets into a pile, you have lost the fluidity that is paper’s essential strength. Shuffling through a pile takes an ever increasing amount of time as the pile grows.

For this reason, you want to organize your filing plan in the digital domain as much as possible. Many experts set up elaborate filing plans with color-coded manila folders and will wax lyrical about the benefits of ball-bearing sliding file cabinets. In the real world, few people have the room to store a full-fledged file cabinet.

The simplest form of filing is a chronological file. You don’t even need file folders — I just toss my mail in a letter tray after I scan it. At the end of each month, I dump the accumulated mail into a 6″x9″ clasp envelope (depending on how much mail you receive, you may need bigger envelopes), and label it with the year and month. In all likelihood, you will never access these documents again, so there is no point in arranging them more finely than that. This filing arrangement takes next to no effort and is very compact – you can keep a year’s worth in the same space as a half dozen suspended file folders, as can be seen with 9 months’ worth of mail in the photo below (the CD jewel case is for scale).

There are some sensitive documents you should still file the old-fashioned way for legal reasons, such as birth certificates, diplomas, property titles, tax returns and so on. You should still scan them to have a backup in case of fire.

Date stamping

As you may have to retrieve the paper original for a scanned document, is important to date stamp every page (or at least the first page) of any mail you receive. I use a Dymo Datemark, a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that has a rubber ribbon with embossed characters running around an ink roller and a small moving hammer that strikes when the right numeral passes by. All you really need is a month resolution so you know which envelope to fetch, thus an ordinary month-year rubber stamp would do as well. Ideally you would have software to insert a digital date stamp directly in the document, but I have not found any yet. A tip: stamp your document diagonally so the time stamp stands out from the horizontal text.

Management

Much as it pains me to admit it, Adobe Acrobat (supplied with the Fujitsu ScanSnap) is the most straightforward way to manage PDF files on Windows, e.g. merge multiple files together, insert new pages, annotate documents and so on. Through web capture OCR, it can create an invisible text layer that makes the PDF searchable with Spotlight. There are alternatives, such as Foxit PDF Page Organizer or PaperPort on Windows, and PDFPen on OS X. Since Leopard, Apple’s Preview app has included most of the PDF editing functionality required, so I take great pains to ensure my Macs are untainted by Acrobat (e.g. unselecting it when installing CS3). See also my article on resetting the creator code for PDF files on OS X so they are opened by Preview for viewing.

Encryption

If you are storing a backup of your personal papers at work or on a public service like Google’s rumored Gdrive, you don’t want third-parties to access your confidential information. Similarly, you don’t want to be exposed to identity theft if you lose a USB Flash stick with the data on it. The solution is simple: encryption.

There are many encryption packages available. Most probably have back doors for the NSA, but your threat model is the ID fraudster rummaging through your trash for backup DVDs or discarded bank statements, not the government. I use OpenSSL’s built-in encryption utility as it is cross-platform and easily scripted (I compiled a Windows executable for myself, and it is small enough to be stored on a Flash card). Mac and UNIX computers have it preinstalled, of course, do man enc for more details.

To encrypt a file using 256-bit AES, you would use the command:

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -in somefile.pdf -out somefile.pdf.aes

to decrypt it, you would issue the command:

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in somefile.pdf.aes -out somefile.pdf

OpenSSL will prompt you for the password, but you can also supply it as a command-line argument, e.g. in a script.

Backup

Backing up scanned documents is no different than backing up photos (apart from the encryption requirements), so I will just link to my previous essay on the subject or my current backup scheme. In addition to my external Firewire hard drive rotation scheme, I have a script that does an incremental encryption of modified files using OpenSSL, and then uploads the encrypted files to my office computer using rsync.

Retention period

I tend to agree with Tim Bray in that you shouldn’t bother erasing old files, as the minimal disk space savings are not worth the risk of making a mistake. As for paper documents, you should ask your accountant what retention policy you should adopt, but a default of 2 years should be sufficient (the documents that need more, such as tax returns, are in the “file traditionally” category, in any case).

Fax

The original question was about fax. OS X can be configured to receive faxes on a modem and email them to you as PDF attachments, at which point you can edit them in Acrobat, and fax it back if required, without ever having to kill a tree with printouts. Windows has similar functionality. Of course, fax belongs in the dust-heap of history, along with clay tablets, but habits change surprisingly slowly.

Update (2006-08-26):

I recently upgraded my shredder to a Staples SPL-770M micro-cut shredder. The particles generated by the shredder are incredibly minute, much smaller than those of conventional home or office grade shredders, and it is also very quiet to boot.

Unfortunately, it isn’t able to shred an entire unopened junk mail envelope, and the micro-cut shredding action does not work very well if you feed it folded paper (the particles at the fold tend to cling as if knitted together). This unit is also more expensive than conventional shredders (but significantly cheaper than near mil-spec DIN level 5 shredders that are the nearest equivalent). Staples regularly has specials on them, however. Highly recommended.

Update (2007-04-12):

I recently upgraded my document scanner to a Fujitsu fi-5120C. The ScanSnap has a relatively poor paper feed mechanism, which often jams or double-feeds. Many reviews of the new S500M complain it also sufffers from double-feeding. The 5120C is significantly more expensive but it has a much more reliable paper feed with hitherto high-end features like ultrasonic double-feed detection. You do need to buy ScanTango software to run it on the Mac, however.

Update (2009-01-21):

I moved recently, and realized I have never yet had to open one of those envelopes. From now on, all papers not required for legal reasons (e.g. tax documents) go straight to the shredder after scanning.

Update (2009-09-08):

The new ScanSnap 1500 has ultrasonic double-feed detection. I bought a copy of ABBYY FineReader Express for the Mac. It used to be only available as bundled software with certain scanners like recent ScanSnaps, or software packages like DEVONthink, but you can now buy it as a standalone utility. It is not full-featured, missing some of the more esoteric OCR functionality of the Windows version, batch capabilities and scripting, but works well, unlike the crash-prone ReadIRIS I had but seldom used.

Update (2009-09-22):

Xamance is a really interesting French startup. Their product, the Xambox, integrates a document scanner, document management software and a physical paper filing system. The system can tell you exactly where to find the paper original for a scanned document (“use box 2, third document after tab 7”). In other words, essentially the same filing system I suggest above, but systematically managed in a database for easy retrieval.

It is quite expensive, however, making it more of a solution for businesses. I have moved on and no longer need the safety blanket of keeping the originals, but I can easily see how a complete solution like this would be valuable for businesses that are required for compliance to keep originals, such as notaries, or even government public records offices.

Credit card receipt slips and business cards are problematic for a paperless workflow. They are prone to jam in scanners, have non-standard layouts so hunting for information takes more time than it should, and are usually so trivial you don’t really feel they are worth scanning in the first place. I just subscribed to the Shoeboxed service to manage mine.They take care of the scanning and for pouring the resulting data in a form that can be directly imported into personal finance or contact-management software. I don’t yet have sufficient experience with the service, but on paper at least it seems like a valuable service that will easily save me an hour a week.

Update (2011-01-13):

I finally broke down and upgraded to a ScanSnap S1500M (we have one at work, and it is indeed a major improvement over the older models). In theory this is a downgrade as the fi-5120C is a business scanner, whereas the S1500M is a consumer/SoHo model, but with some simple customization, the integrated software bundle makes for a much more streamlined workflow: put the paper in the hopper, press the button, that’s it. With the fi-5120C, I had to select the scan settings in ScanTango, scan, press the close button, select a filename, drag the file into ABBYY FineReader, select OCR options, click save, click to confirm I do want to overwrite the original file, then dismiss the scan detection window. One step vs. nine.

Update (2012-06-19):

For portable storage of the documents, I don’t bother with manually encrypting the files any more. The IronKey S200 is a far superior option: mil-spec security and hardware encryption, with tamper-resistant circuitry, potted for environment resistance and using SLC flash memory for speed. Sure, it’s expensive, but you get what you pay for (I tried to cut costs by getting the MLC D200, and ended up returning it because it is so slow as to be unusable).

Blogging is often seen as a narcissistic pursuit. It can be, but the best bloggers (that is not necessarily synonymous with the most popular) put their audience first. To do that, you need to know it first. Most blogs have three very distinct types of readers:

1. Regular visitors who use web browsers and bookmarks to visit. If the page doesn’t change often enough, they will get discouraged by the lack of changes and eventually stop coming. You need to post often to keep this population engaged.
2. People who come from a search engine looking for very specific information. If they do not find what they are looking for, they will move on to the next site in their list, then possibly linger for other articles and may eventually graduate to repeat visitor status. Closely related are people who follow links from other sites, pointing to yours.
3. Those who let feed readers do the polling for them, and thus do not necessarily care how often a feed is updated. Feed readers allow for much more scalable browsing – I currently subscribe to 188 feeds (not all of them are listed in my blogroll), and I certainly couldn’t afford to visit 188 sites each day. Feed readers are still a minority, but specially for commercial publications, a very attractive one of tech-savvy early adopters. The flip side of this is a more demanding audience. Many people go overboard with the number of feeds and burn out, then mass unsubscribe. If you are a little careful, you can avoid this pendulum effect by pruning feeds that no longer offer a sufficient signal to noise ratio.

The following sections, in no particular order, are rough guidelines on how best to cater to the needs of the other two types of users.

Maintain a high signal to noise ratio

Posting consistently good information on a daily or even weekly basis is no trivial amount of work. I certainly cannot manage more than a couple of postings per month, and I’d rather not clutter my website with “filler material” if I can help it. For this reason, I have essentially given up on the first constituency, and can only hope that they can graduate to feed readers as the technology becomes more mainstream.

Needless to say, test posts are amateurish and you should not waste your readers’ time with them. Do the right thing and use a separate staging environment for your blog. If your blogging provider doesn’t provide one, switch to a supplier that has a clue.

Posting to say that one is not going to post for a few days due to travel, a vacation or any other reason is the height of idiocy and the sure sign of a narcissist. A one-way trip to the unsubscribe button as far as I am concerned.

Distinguish between browsers and feed readers

In November of last year, I had an interesting conversation with Om Malik. My feedback to him was that he was posting too often and needed to pay more attention to the quality rather than the quantity of his postings.

The issue is not quite as simple as that. To some extent the needs of these browser users and those who subscribe to feeds are contradictory, but a good compromise is to omit the inevitable filler or site status update articles from the Atom or RSS feeds. Few blog tools offer this feature, however.

Only allow permalinks to be indexed

Search engines will index your home page, which is normally just a summary of the last N articles you wrote. Indeed, it will often have the highest page rank (or whatever metric is used). An older article may be pushed out but still listed in the (now out of date) search engine index. The latency is often considerable, and the end result is that people searching for something saw a tantalizing preview in the search engine results listing, but cannot find it once they land on the home page, or in the best of cases they will have to wade through dozens of irrelevant articles to get to it. Ideally, you want them to reach the relevant permalink page directly without stopping by the home page.

There is a simple way to eliminate this frustration for search engine users: make the home page (and other summary pages like category-level summaries or archive index pages) non-indexable. This can be done by adding the following meta tags to the top of the summary pages, but not to permalink pages. The search engine spiders will crawl through the summary pages to the permalinks, but only store the permalink pages in their index. Thus, all searches will lead to relevant and specific content free from extraneous material (which is still available, just one click away).

Here again, not all weblog software supports having different templates for permalink pages than for summary pages.

There is an unfortunate side-effect of this — as your home page is no longer indexed, you may experience a drop in search engine listings. My weblog is no longer the first hit for Google search for “Fazal Majid”. In my opinion, the improved relevance for search engine users far outweighs the bruising to my ego, which needs regular deflating anyways.

Support feed autodiscovery

Supporting autodiscovery of RSS feeds or Atom feeds makes it much easier for novice users to detect the availability of feeds (Firefox and Safari already support it, and IE will soon). Adding them to a page is a no-brainer.

Categorize your articles

In all likelihood, your postings cover a variety of topics. Categorizing them means users can subscribe only to those of interest to them, and thus increases your feed’s signal to noise ratio.

Keep a stable feed URL under your control

If your feed location changes, set up a redirection. If this is not possible, at least post an article in the old feed to let subscribers know where to get the new feed.

Depending on a third-party feed provider like Feedburner is risky — if they ever go out of business, your subscribers are stranded. Even worse, if a link farm operator buys back the domain, they can easily start spamming your subscribers, and make it look as if the spam is coming from you. Your feeds are just as mission-critical as your email and hosting, don’t enter in an outsourcing arrangement casually, specially not one without a clear exit strategy.

Maintain old posts

Most photographers, writers and musicians depend on residuals (recurring revenue from older work) for their income and to support them in retirement. Unless your site is pure fluff (and you would not be reading this if that were the case), your old articles are still valuable. Indeed, there is often a Zipf law at work and you may find some specific archived articles account for the bulk of your traffic (in my case, my article on lossy Nikon NEF compression is a perennial favorite).

It is worth dusting these old articles off every now and then:

• You should fix or replace the inevitable broken links (there are many programs available to locate broken links on a site, I have my own but linkchecker is a pretty good free one.
• The content in the article may have gone stale and need refreshing, Don’t rewrite history, however, and change it in a way that alters the original meaning — better to append an update to the article. If there was a factual error, don’t leave it in the main text of the article, but leave a mention of the correction at the end
• there is no statute of limitations on typos or spelling mistakes. Sloppy writing is a sign of disrespect towards your readers; Rewriting text to clarify the meaning is also worthwhile on heavily visited “backlist” pages. The spirit of the English language lies in straightforwardness, one thing all the good style guides agree on.
• For those of you who have comments enabled on their site, pay special attention to your archives, comment spammers will often target those pages as it is often easier for them to avoid detection there. You may want to disable comments on older articles.
• Provide redirection for old URLs so old links do not break. Simple courtesy, really.

Make your feeds friendly for aggregators

Having written my own feed reader, I have all too much experience with broken or dysfunctional feeds. There is only so much feed reader programmers can do to work around brain-dead feeds.

• Stay shy of the bleeding edge in feed syndication formats. Atom offers a number of fancy features, but you have to assume many feed readers may break if you use too many of them. It is best if your feed files use fully qualified absolute URLs, even if Atom supports relative URLs, for instance. Unicode is also a double-edged sword, prefer HTML entity-encoding them over relying on a feed reader to deal with content-encoding correctly.
• Understand GUIDs. Too many feeds with brain-dead blogging software will issue a new GUID when an article is edited or corrected, or when its title is changed. Weblogs Inc. sites are egregious offenders, as is Reuters. The end-result is that an article will appear several times in the user’s aggregator, which is incredibly annoying. Temboz has a feature to automatically suppress duplicate titles, but that won’t cope with rewritten titles.
• Full contents vs. abstracts is a point of contention. Very long posts are disruptive on web-based feed readers, but on the other hand most people dislike the underhanded teaser tactics of commercial sites that try and draw you to their website to drive ad revenue, and providing only abstracts may turn them off your feed altogether. Remember, the unsubscribe button is a mere click away…

Blogging ethics

The golden rule of blogging is that it’s all about the readers. Everything follows from this simple principle. You should strive to be relevant and considerate of their time. Take the time to spell-check your text. It is very difficult to edit one’s own text, but any article can benefit from a little time spent maturing, and from tighter and more lucid prose.

Don’t be narcissistic, unless friends and family are the primary audience. Most people couldn’t care less about your pets, your garden or for the most part your personal life (announcing major life events like a wedding or the birth of your children is perfectly normal, however).

Respect for your readers requires absolute intellectual honesty. Laziness or expediency are no excuse for poor fact-checking or revisionist edits. Enough said…

Update (2008-05-21):

Unfortunately setting the meta tags above seems to throw Google off so that it stops indexing pages altogether (Yahoo and MSN search have no problems). So much for the myth of Google’s technical omnipotence… As a result, I have removed them and would advise you to do as well.

Update (2015-11-20):

If you use JavaScript and cookie-based web analytics like Piwik or Mint, make sure those script tags are disabled if the browser sends the Do-Not-Track header. As for third-party services like Google Analytics, just don’t. Using those services means you are selling giving away your readers’ privacy to some of the most rapacious infringers in the world.

I ran the Cyrus IMAP server for almost a year on my home server, but I recently switched to Dovecot. I originally used Cyrus because of its demonstrated scalability and in part because it is a product of my father’s alma mater, but it is quite hard to set up, and quite brittle to changes in its dependencies.

The last straw was when I tried unsuccessfully to set up another instance of Cyrus on a server, with the exact same configuration files and permissions, but different versions of the Berkeley DB and Cyrus SASL libraries, and it simply wouldn’t cooperate. In disgust, I downloaded Dovecot, compiled it and installed it in less time it took me just to figure out that Cyrus wouldn’t allow me to authenticate because the ever-crufty SASL library failed in a new inscrutable way. I had also never managed to get Cyrus’ SSL to work reliably, it is nearly effortless with Dovecot.

Dovecot is much easier to build and manage, does not have dependencies on unreliable cruft like the Cyrus SASL library, and is much easier to integrate with procmail, SpamAssassin and other goodies thanks to its use of the Maildir format rather than a proprietary database cum filesystem structure like Cyrus. From what I have seen of the internals of the Cyrus 2.2 “skiplist” database back-end (which replaced the BerkeleyDB back-end used in previous releases), I have a hard time believing it is significantly more efficient than Dovecot, if at all.

One problem was migrating my email – I have pretty much all my email since 1995 in my IMAP mailbox, migrated from various Emacs Babyl mailbox files or Exchange PSTs over time. The Dovecot Wiki points to this migration script, but for recent versions of Cyrus like the 2.2.12 I ran, it has two major shortcomings:

1. It will not preserve the flag that indicates whether an email was read or not.
2. It does not preserve the delivery timestamp for the emails so they all look as if they were delivered at the time you did the conversion.

I wrote my own migration script in Python, cyrus2maildir.py, to avoid these shortcomings. It does not preserve the “replied to” flag, but the Read flag is carried over, as is the delivery timestamp (in some edge cases like emails you sent, it has to guess, though). This is not a very polished program because I spent far more time on it than I had anticipated, and basically stopped once I got it working, but it should be usable, or at least a starting point for anyone with some Python skills. Of course, it can also be used by users of other Maildir++ based servers like Courier.

The script should guess most parameters, and will dump the emails to a directory named Maildir.cyrus/ in your home directory. By default, your user will not have read access to the Cyrus mail spool, you may have to alter permissions (I do not recommend running the script as root). For the syntax, just type: cyrus2maildir.py -h

On an unrelated note, Solaris 10 users may find the SMF manifest and method useful to automate service management and fault recovery. To install them, copy the manifest to /var/svc/manifest/site and the method to /lib/svc/method and install them into SMF with the command: svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/imap-dovecot.xml

After an abortive experiment with a Nokia Symbian Series 60 smartphone, I bought a Palm T|X on Wednesday, the very day it was announced. I find PDAs superior to fiddly, fragile and cumbersome laptops, and have owned no fewer than 9 Palm compatible handhelds (*) in the last 5 years, which means I upgrade handhelds at least three times more often than my main (desktop) computers. My previous PDA is a Palm Tungsten T3 (I actually bought it after the T5 was announced, so underwhelming the latter is). I even obtained a spare T3 in case the first one broke (since given to my father). I am not entirely sure yet as to whether the T|X is really an upgrade. Here are some first impressions after a few days of use:

Pros:

• Built-in WiFi. No more fiddling with the easily lost SDIO WiFi card.
• A better browser. Blazer feels much snappier than Web Pro, specially with the new Fast mode (disables CSS and image loading).
• More memory, non-volatile if the battery fails.
• Lighter.
• Can actually dial and send SMS on a Nokia 6230 via Bluetooth

Cons:

• Plastic construction feels much less robust (but at least it is not pretending to be metal like the E, E2 or T5, that’s just tacky).
• No voice recorder, charge LED or vibrating alarm. I seldom use the voice recorder, as I prefer taking notes on 3×5 jotter cards, but the voice recorder works when you have to capture that elusive idea while driving.
• 20–25% slower processor. Graffiti2 is noticeably slower to respond, for instance.
• The flip cover with the hinge on the side is less convenient than the one on top, which flips up like a reporter’s notebook, in one fluid motion.
• The SD slot has a plastic filler card, not a spring-loaded cover.
• Bigger. Many people complain about the true Tungstens’ slider, but it is very natural to use, and much more convenient than the power switch.
• The stylus has a nice heft to it, but is not as substantial as the T3’s, and less easy to extract from its slot.
• Yet another connector design incompatible with previous accessories. The cradle is an expensive option.
• The home icon on the status bar has disappeared. This is very annoying in daily use
• The application buttons and the 5-way navigator are less responsive and smaller. The T3 has generally superior haptics (feels much better in the hand).

The only potential deal-breaker is the slower Graffiti performance (there is a visible lag). I will probably keep the T|X due to the convenience of integrated WiFi, but the T3 is a superior device in almost all other respects, in the same class as the Palm V as one of the PDA world’s truly outstanding designs. If Palm were to come out with a new model marrying the WiFi and newer software stack of the T|X with the solid construction and faster processor of the T3, I would definitely upgrade again.

(*): Handspring Visor, Sony Clié T615C, Kyocera QCP-6035, Palm Tungsten T, Sony Clié UX50, Palm Zire 71, Palm Tungsten T3 (x2), and now the Palm T|X.

Update (2010-05-16):

The T|X was the last Palm device I bought. I switched to an iPhone in 2007 and never looked back.

There has been much speculation recently about a possible rift in Internet governance. Essentially, many countries resent the US government’s control over the Internet’s policy oversight. They advocate the transfer of those responsibilities to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a more multilateral venue. The big news is that the European Union, which previously sat on the fence, came out strongly in favor of this proposal. Unsurprisingly, the US government is hostile to it. More surprisingly, I agree with their unilateralist impulse, obviously for very different reasons. I was planning on writing up a technical explanation as most of the IT press has it completely wrong, as usual, but Eric Rescorla has beaten me to the punch with an excellent summary.

Many commentators have made much hay of the fact the ITU is under the umbrella of the United Nations. The Bush administration is clearly reticent, to say the least, towards the UN, but that is a fairly widespread sentiment among the American policy establishment, by no means limited to Republicans. For some reason, many Americans harbor the absurd fear that somehow the UN is plotting against US sovereignty. Of course, the reality is the UN cannot afford its parking tickets, let alone black helicopters. American hostility towards the UN is curious, as it was the brainchild of a US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, its charter was signed in San Francisco (at Herbst Theatre, less than a mile from where I live), and it is headquartered in New York.

The UN is ineffective and corrupt, but that is because the powers on the Security Council want it that way. The UN does not have its own army and depends on its member nations, specially those on the Security Council to perform its missions. It is hardly fair to lay the blame for failure in Somalia on the UN’s doorstep. As for corruption, mostly in the form of patronage, it was the way the US and the USSR greased the wheels of diplomacy during the Cold War, buying the votes of tin-pot nations by granting cushy UN jobs to the nephews of their kleptocrats.

A more damning condemnation of the UN is the fact the body does not embody any kind of global democratic representation. The principle is one country, one vote. Just as residents of Wyoming have 60 times more power per capita in the US Senate than Californians, India’s billion inhabitants have as many votes in the General Assembly as those of the tiny Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein. The real action is in the Security Council anyways, but they are not fully represented there either. Had Americans not had a soft spot for Chiang Kai-Shek, China, with its own billion souls, would not have a seat at that table either. That said, the Internet population is spread unevenly across the globe, and the Security Council is probably more representative of it.

In any case, the ITU was established in 1865, long before the UN, and its institutional memory is much different. It is also based in Geneva, like most international organizations, geographically and culturally a world away from New York. In other words, even though it is formally an arm of the UN, the ITU is in practice completely autonomous. The members of the Security Council do not enjoy veto rights in the ITU, and the appointment of its secretary general, while a relatively technocratic and unpoliticized affair, is not subject to US approval, or at least acquiescence, the way the UN secretary-general’s is, or that of more sensitive organizations like the IAEA.

My primary objections to the ITU are not about its political structure, governance or democratic legitimacy, but about its competence, or more precisely the lack of it. The ITU is basically the forum where government PTT monopolies meet incumbent telcos to devise big standards and blow big amounts of hot air. Well into the nineties, they were pushing for a bloated network architecture called OSI, as an alternative to the Internet’s elegant TCP/IP protocol suite. I was not surprised — I used to work at France Télécom’s R&D labs, and had plenty of opportunity to gauge the “caliber” of the incompetent parasites who would go on ITU junkets. Truth be said, those people’s chief competency is bureaucratic wrangling, and like rats leaving a ship, they have since decamped to the greener pastures of the IETF, whose immune system could not prevent a dramatic drop in the quality of its output. The ITU’s institutional bias is towards complex solutions that enshrine the role of legacy telcos, managed scarcity and self-proclaimed intelligent networks that are architected to prevent disruptive change by users on the edge.

When people hyperventilate about Internet governance, they tend to focus on the Domain Name System, even though the real scandal is IPv4 address allocation, like the fact Stanford and MIT each have more IP addresses allocated to them than all of China. Many other hot-button items like the fight against child pornography or pedophiles more properly belongs in criminal-justice organizations like Interpol. But let us humor the pundits and focus on the DNS.

First of all, the country-specific top-level domains like .fr, .cn or the new kid on the block, .eu, are for all practical purposes already under decentralized control. Any government that is afraid the US might tamper with its own country domain (for some reason Brazil is often mentioned in this context) can easily take measures to prevent disruption of domestic traffic by requiring its ISPs to point their DNS servers to authoritative servers under its control for that zone. Thus, the area of contention is really the international generic top-level domains (gTLDs), chief of all .com, the only one that really matters.

What is the threat model for a country that is distrustful of US intentions? The possibility that the US government might delete or redirect a domain it does not like, say, al-qaeda.org? Actually, this happens all the time, not due to the malevolence of the US government, but to the active incompetence of Network Solutions (NSI). You may recall NSI, now a division of Verisign, is the entrenched monopoly that manages the .com top-level domain, and which has so far successfully browbeaten ICANN into prolonging its monopoly, one of its most outrageous claims being that it has intellectual property rights to the .com database. Their security measures, on the other hand, owe more to Keystone Kops, and they routinely allow domain names like sex.com to be hijacked. Breaking the NSI monopoly would be a worthwhile policy objective, but it does not require a change in governance, just the political will to confront Verisign (which, granted, may be more easily found outside the US).

This leads me to believe the root cause for all the hue and cry, apart from the ITU angling for relevance, may well be the question of how the proceeds from domain registration fees are apportioned. Many of the policy decisions concerning the domain name system pertain to the creation of new TLDs like .museum or, more controversially, .xxx. The fact is, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night thinking: “I wish there were a top-level domain .aero so I could reserve a name under it instead of my lame .com domain!”. All these alternative TLDs are at best poor substitutes for .com. Registrars, on the other hand, who provide most of the funding for ICANN, have a vested interest in the proliferation of TLDs, as that gives them more opportunities to collect registration fees.