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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.
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