How Mine Safety is Like Internet Governance

Hello, Andy Steingruebl here:

There was a great piece on NPR  (a link to some of it here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/04/safety_agency_to_use_ignored_p.html)  the other day about the MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) and how their enforcement against unsafe mines has been sorely lacking.  One key piece of the story is that essentially the statutory authority granted to the MSHA is to close a mine, or a section of it.  They don’t have the power to levy fines for example, or prosecute individuals doing unsafe things.

As a result, their main weapon is essentially the nuclear option against a mine operator.  They are therefore reluctant to use that authority, and so they have instead created a system of letters-of-pending-action or somesuch.  Under these they indicate to a mine operator that they are getting close to a breach of their requirements, and they give them a cure timeframe.  Because mine operators can appeal any judgments, this ends up being a real obstacle to credible enforcement.  Historically we’ve seen the same things from the FAA.  They are loathe to write up formal findings because they have the possibility of causing major harm to an airline, rather than just getting them to modify the offending behavior.

 ICANN has a similar problem with policing their registrars.  historically the only penalty they can impose is removing a registrar’s accreditation.  This is the nuclear option.  They have typically been loathe to fully remove a registrar, and so we end up with bad registrars in the system. We've seen them step up the enforcement recently, but I think these are probably still enforcements against only the most egregious offenders.

The lesson for us in working to craft internet governance and regulations is that we need to understand this dynamic between regulator and regulated-entity, and create flexible schemes that allow the regulator to effectively police, without each policing action being a nuclear option, and thus causing regulated entities to fight every judgment action in court, etc.