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The Political Economy of Cyberspace Masters of the Internet <br>
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FEBRUARY 07, 2013<img id="3bd86ece-5be5-4549-8072-5badf8b7850c"
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<br>
The Political Economy of Cyberspace<br>
Masters of the Internet<br>
by DAN SCHILLER<br>
The geopolitics of the Internet broke open during the first half
of December at an international conference in Dubai convened by
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN affiliate
agency with 193 national members. At these meetings, states
(thronged by corporate advisors) forge agreements to enable
international communications via cables and satellites. These
gatherings, however boring and bureaucratic, are crucial because
of the enormous importance of networks in the operation of the
transnational political economy.<br>
<br>
The December 2012 World Conference on International
Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai produced a major controversy:
should ITU members vest the agency with oversight responsibilities
for the Internet, responsibilities comparable to those it has
exercised for decades for other forms of international
communication?<br>
<br>
The United States said no, and the US position won out: the new
ITU treaty document did not grant the agency a formal role in what
has come to be called “global Internet governance”. However, a
majority of countries voted to attach a resolution “invit[ing]
member states to elaborate on their respective position on
international Internet-related technical, development and public
policy issues within the mandate of the ITU at various ITU fora.”
Objecting to “even symbolic global oversight”, as a New York Times
writer put it (1), the US refused to sign the treaty and walked
away. So did France, Germany, Japan, India, Kenya, Colombia,
Canada, Britain and other nations. However, more than two-thirds
of the attending countries — 89 all told — endorsed the document.
(And some of the nations that did not sign may accept the treaty
later.)<br>
<br>
To understand what is at stake we need to make our way through the
rhetorical smog. For months prior to the WCIT, the
Euro-American press trumpeted warnings that this was to be an
epochal clash between upholders of an open Internet and would-be
government usurpers, led by authoritarian states like Russia, Iran
and China. The terms of reference were set so rigidly that one
European telecom company executive called it a campaign of
“propaganda warfare” (2).<br>
<br>
Freedom of expression is no trifling issue. No matter where we
live, there is reason for worry that the Internet’s relative
openness is being usurped, corroded or canalised. This does not
necessarily imply armies of state censors or “great firewalls”.
The US National Security Agency, for example, sifts wholesale
through electronic transmissions transiting satellite and cable
networks, through its extensive “listening posts” and its gigantic
new data centre at Bluffdale Utah (3); and the US government has
gone after a true proponent of freedom of expression — WikiLeaks —
in deadly earnest. US Internet companies such as Facebook and
Google have transformed the Web into a “surveillance engine” to
vacuum up commercially profitable data about users’ behaviour.<br>
<br>
Interests Concealed<br>
<br>
Even during the 1970s, the rhetoric of “free flow of information”
had long functioned as a central tenet of US foreign policy.
During the era of decolonisation and cold war the doctrine
purported to be a shining beacon, lighting the world’s way to
emancipation from imperialism and state repression. Today it
continues to paint deep-seated economic and strategic interests in
an appealing language of universal human rights. “Internet
freedom”, “freedom to connect”, “net freedom” — terms circulated
by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Google executives
together in the run-up to the WCIT — are today’s version of the
longstanding “free flow” precept. But just as before,
“Internet freedom” is a red herring. Calculatingly manipulative,
it tells us to entrust a fundamental human right to a pair of
powerfully self-interested social actors: corporations and states.<br>
<br>
The deliberations at the WCIT were multifaceted, and encompassed
crosscutting issues. One was the terms of trade between
Internet services like Google and the companies that transport
their voluminous data streams — network operators and ISPs like
Verizon, Deutsche Telekom or Free. This business fight harbours
implications for a more general and important policy issue: who
should pay for the continual modernisations of network
infrastructure on which recurrent augmentations and enhancements
of Internet service depend. Xavier Niel’s bold attack on Google’s
French revenues, when he implemented an ad-blocker as his Free
network’s default setting, placed this issue in bold relief before
the public. But the terms of trade in the global Internet industry
are also important because any general edict that
content providers must pay network operators — Niel’s goal,
similar to that of other telecom companies — would carry grave
consequences for the Net Neutrality policies which have been so
vital for Internet users.<br>
<br>
Until now, this power has been wielded disproportionately by the
US (4). During the 1990s, when the web-centric Internet exploded
onto the world stage, the US made intense efforts to
institutionalise its management role. Domain names led by dotcom,
and numerical web addresses and network identifiers, need to be
unique for the system to operate; and the ability to assign them
in turn establishes a point from which institutional power may be
projected over the extraterritorial Internet. Management of these
critical Internet resources is exercised by a US agency, the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under contract to the
US Department of Commerce. The IANA operates ostensibly as a unit
of a separate, and seemingly more accountable, California-based
non-profit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN). Technical standards for the Internet are
developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the
Internet Architecture Board (IAB) within another non-profit
corporation, the Internet Society. The composition and funding of
these organisations render them more responsive to US preferences
than to users’ demands (5).<br>
<br>
The leading global commercial Internet sites are not operated by
Chinese or Russian, let alone by Kenyan or Mexican capital. As
everyone knows, it is Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and
Amazon that have built up the dotcom services used by people all
over the world. And a widening array of commodification projects
and corporate commodity chains continues to be predicated on
cross-border flows of Internet data; today’s ongoing transition <img
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width="175">to “cloud computing” services will further widen
this dependence. The Internet’s unbalanced control structure
provides an essential basis for US corporate and military
supremacy in cyberspace. While the US government exercises an
outsized role, other states possess scant opportunity
— individually or collectively — to regulate the system. By
instituting various technical and legal measures, of course, they
may exercise sovereignty over their domestic Internets; but even
when they stake out these merely national jurisdictions, they are
assailed by US policymakers. Milton Mueller aptly captures this
asymmetry in observing that, as it is presently constituted, the
Internet embodies a US policy of “unilateral globalism” (6).<br>
<br>
Property logic<br>
<br>
Exercising this management function has permitted the US to instil
property-logic at the heart of Internet system development —
through ICANN. Although it is a complex, semi-autonomous
institution, ICANN’s power over the Domain Name System was
deployed to confer extraterritorial advantages on corporate
trademark owners and other property interests — over the protests
of non-commercial organisations which, despite being
represented within ICANN, found themselves unable to prevail over
Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and other big companies. And ICANN
used private contract law to bind to its rules the far-flung
organisations which administer generic and country code top-level
domains worldwide. National providers of various Internet
applications control their domestic markets in a number of
countries, including Russia, China and the Republic of Korea. Yet
the transnational Internet services — the most profitable and
strategic points in this extraterritorial system — are citadels
built by US capital and state power.<br>
<br>
Nearly from the outset, other nations have resisted their
subordinate status. As signs that the US was not about to
relinquish its control grew, so did opposition. It helped prompt a
series of high-profile meetings — the World Summit on the
Information Society, organised by the ITU and held in Geneva and
Tunis between 2003 and 2005.<br>
<br>
This World Summit was an explicit precursor of the 2012 clash in
Dubai, in that it established at least a small beachhead for
states (beside that of the US) in global Internet governance.
ICANN’s “Government Advisory Committee”, charged with providing
input to the organisation’s “multi-stakeholder” process, grants
governments the same formal status as corporations and civil
society groups. Many states actually might have been content with
this curious arrangement, but for one glaring fact. For all the
crowing about bottom-up diversity and multi-stakeholderism, global
Internet governance was not an egalitarian, or even a pluralist,
enterprise. It was patent that stakeholder number one was the US
Executive Branch.<br>
<br>
The demise of the unipolar moment, followed by the plunge into
what has become a long world depression, greatly accentuated
and widened interstate conflict over the political economy of
cyberspace. Other governments continued to look for a point of
leverage, from which they could attempt to open up global Internet
coordination and management. In 2010-11 they even appealed
directly to the US Department of Commerce, when it began a
proceeding to evaluate its contract renewal with IANA for the
management of Internet addresses. Quite extraordinarily, several
countries and one international organisation — the ITU — submitted
formal comments. The government of Kenya proposed a “transition”
away from management of the IANA functions by the US Department of
Commerce, and toward a multilateral government-centred regime. US
control should be modified by globalising the arrangements for the
entire institutional superstructure that had been built up around
Internet names and addresses. India, Mexico, Egypt and China made
strikingly similar submissions.<br>
<br>
Dan Schiller is professor at the University of Illinois
(Urbana-Champaign) and author of ‘Digital Capitalism: Networking
the Global Market Systems’ (MIT Press, Cambridge, US, 2000)<br>
<br>
Notes.<br>
<br>
(1) Eric Pfanner, “Message, if murky, from U.S. to world”, The New
York Times, 15 December 2012.<br>
<br>
(2) Rachel Sanderson and Daniel Thomas, “US under fire after
telecoms treaty talks fail”, Financial Times, London, 17 December
2012.<br>
<br>
(3) James Bamford, “The NSA is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy
Center”, Wired, San Francisco, April 2012.<br>
<br>
(4) Dwayne Winseck, “Big New Global Threat to the Internet or
Paper Tiger? The ITU and Global Internet Regulation”, 10 June
2012; dwmw.wordpress.com<br>
<br>
(5) Harold Kwalwasser, “Internet Governance”,Cyberpower and
National Security, National Defense University Press-Potomac
Press, Washington-Dulles, 2009.<br>
<br>
(6) Milton L Mueller, Networks and States: the Global Politics of
Internet Governance, MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 2010.<br>
<br>
(7) L Gordon Crovitz, “America’s first big digital defeat”,The
Wall Street Journal, New York, 17 December 2012.<br>
<br>
The US responded by ratcheting up the rhetoric of “Internet
freedom” as an attempt to repel the escalating threat to its
management control. No doubt it has intensified its bilateral
lobbying to induce some of the dissenting states to come back into
the fold. The effects became evident at the WCIT, when India and
Kenya joined the US in rejecting the treaty.<br>
<br>
What will happen now? It’s certain that US government agencies and
leading units of Internet capital such as Google will continue to
project all the power at their disposal to strengthen the
US-centric Internet, and to discredit its opponents. The political
challenge to the US’s “global unilateralism”, however, now has
broken into the open — where it is certain to remain. A Wall
Street Journal editorialist did not hesitate to call Dubai
“America’s first big digital defeat” (7).<br>
<br>
This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose
English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full
text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch
features two or three articles from LMD every month.<br>
<br>
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