<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Hi
</div><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><br class=""></div><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Excellent post Anriette, I agree on all points. Guilt by association with those advocating for different interests is not a path to mutual understanding and consensus, irrespective of whether it is pro-multistakeholder people criticizing pro-intergovernemental people or vice versa. We should be trying to make both kinds of institutional arrangements work better from a CS standpoint, and the only way to do that is to engage.</div><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><br class=""></div><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">The one key bit where I disagree with Sean is the notion, also invoked this morning by David, that multistakeholder agenda setting and debate is fine but actual decisions and formally binding agreements must be intergovernmental. This is simply not how it works now in large areas of global IG, and to me at least it is literally inconceivable that an intergovernmental monopoly on decisions pertaining to names, numbers, technical standards, network security, e-commerce and other bits would have produced better results in the past or will happen and do so in the future. So some of us try to work in the relevant multistakeholder spaces and make them better by inter alia attenuating the levels of ‘capture’ by powerful interests. We win some and more often we lose some, just like in intergovernmental bodies. But as Woody Allen said, 80 percent of life is just showing up.</div><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><br class=""></div><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Best</div><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><br class=""></div><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Bill</div><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><br class=""></div><div apple-content-edited="true" class=""><br class=""></div>
<br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Feb 3, 2015, at 9:48 PM, Anriette Esterhuysen <<a href="mailto:anriette@apc.org" class="">anriette@apc.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><pre wrap="" style="font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">Dear all (apologies for long message)
Thanks to Sean for his positive message. I agree with him that "<font color="#330033" class="">Its possible to plausibly
stake out a lot more common ground" between </font>- he quotes from Avri's message - <font color="#330033" class="">"those who support
multistakeholder distributed mechanisms on Internet policy issues and
those who support sovereign special rights on international Internet
public policy".</font>
<font color="#330033" class="">At least one way of achieving this is to avoid the tendency to posit dichotomies - for
example </font><font color="#330033" class="">t</font><font color="#330033" class="">o say (and it has been said more than once on this list) </font>that
civil society groups who work for the respect and promotion of human
rights on the internet have abandoned the struggle for social
justice.
There are many people in civil society broadly
that work for both. Human rights comprises civil and political rights
and economic <b class="">and</b> social rights. At the level of people's
everyday reality these rights are indivisible from one another and
from social justice. The struggle for gender equality is a struggle
for both. And without the right to free expression, and without a
free media, it is impossible for people to speak out against economic
policies and political practice that deepens social injustice.
In South Africa the only reason why we are still
able to talk about social injustice, and government policies that
entrench social inequality is because we still have freedom of
expression - something that did not exist here until after the demise
of apartheid.
Efforts by the South African government to limit
press freedom, and increase the State's ability to keep secrets, are
constant and both direct and indirect, but they are resisted by all
other than the political class. All you need to do is to look at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.r2k.org.za/">http://www.r2k.org.za/</a> to see how interlinked social justice and
human rights struggles are in South Africa. And I am sure this is not
that different in most other parts of the world.
Respect for human rights is part of what is
needed to create more equal societies and a fairer distribution of
power and resources. It is not enough, but it is a very important
dimension of a broader struggle for social, economic and
environmental justice.
It is important to acknowledge that part of the
reason that civil and political rights have had more attention than
economic, social, and cultural rights, is because powerful
governments and corporations promote these rights (selectively of
course) for their own interests.
But that doesn't mean that those from CS who
have been fighting for human rights online have sold out, or that
civil and political rights on the internet are not important. It does
mean that we need to find better strategies to make progress on
economic, social and cultural rights, as well as on achieving social
justice.
New forums such as the Internet Social Forum
will be, I hope, such a strategy. It should be able to succeed on its
own merits/values rather than on deligitimising work that is already
being done by others. Acknowledging work already under way, and
challenging/supporting it to expand on how human rights are
understood in the online environment to include ESCR and social
justice will achieve far more in my view, than trying to discredit
existing efforts.
Another problematic claim made on this list is
that people from civil society who supported the NETmundial outcome
statement (many of those who were supportive, including APC, had some
reservations - see <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.apc.org/en/node/19224">http://www.apc.org/en/node/19224</a>) and who engage
in multistakeholder initiatives have 'sold out' and that all they are
doing is legitimising these spaces.
Firstly, it is simply not accurate to imply that
civil society activists who participate in spaces that are dominated
by either businesses or governments have inevitably been co-opted by
those spaces.
This cannot be assumed to be true for civil
society who work in intergovernmental spaces such as the ITU where
civil society has very little influence other than working through
government delegations or for civil society working in
multi-stakeholder policy spaces such as ICANN.
Efforts to bring about change in policy and in
behaviour requires engaging those you disagree with. It also requires
forming coalitions and alliances, but unless those like-minded
alliances interact with actors they disagree with, they are not
likely to have much impact. Interaction takes many shapes: protest,
challenge, debate. It involves finding out where lines of division
are drawn, and also where there is possible common ground or
leverage.
I have never attended a WEF meeting but
left-wing colleagues from South African and international civil
society involved in the campaign for access to medicines (HIV
retrovirals and TB meds) as well as those involved in GCAP (Global
Campaign Against Poverty) and climate change attend repeatedly to
speak out and to challenge business and governments. Their presence
in Davos does not necessarily mean they have been coopted. In the
campaign for access to medicines spaces like the WEF were an
important battle ground and was used by civil society to gain
government support to force pharmaceutical companies to change.
Secondly, to say that that civil society
participation in problematic bodies like the NETmundial Initiative
will achieving nothing other than legitimising them is questionable.
It will take far more than the presence of a few individuals from
civil society to legitimise the NMI. The NMI will rise or fall on
what it achieves and how transparent and inclusive its processes are.
Those of us who are involved are trying our best to use the NMI as an
opportunity to support the initiative started by the Brazilian
government with the NETmundial to deepen the understanding and
practice of multi-stakeholder governance, to take the best we can
from the Marco Civil and the experience of the <a href="http://cgi.br/" class="">CGI.br</a> and make it go
further.
Of course there are different, and likely
conflicting, agendas in the NMI. But are there not conflicting
agendas in intergovernmental UN spaces?
Sean, I fully share your view that UN spaces are
incredibly important and I also believe that our ultimate goal must
be to transform both global and national governance environments.
To achieve social justice civil society needs to
challenge both governments and businesses. To challenge them (and
their often complicit behaviour) we need to recognise that neither
'sector' is homogeneous, and we have to work in both
intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder spaces.
However, I question the assumption that
multistakeholder policy spaces are more 'captured' by business interests than intergovernmental spaces are.
In my experience this is simply not true. A case
in point would be the mobile phone industry in Africa. It is rare to
find them in multistakeholder internet governance spaces. It is
common to find them at intergovernmental meetings and in
policy-making processes at national level. You don't have to scratch
very deep to identify which form of 'governance' serves their
interests best. It is not multi-stakeholder.
As a broad based forum of civil society
organisations and individuals working for public interest oriented
internet governance we (by 'we' I include many if not most people on
this list) should be able to benefit from being involved in different
types of IG platforms/institutions. In my view it is an advantage
that some people on this list are close to the ITU, or have ITU
membership (as I am happy to say APC has since the Plenipot).
Similarly it is in our interest that some of us work closely with
their national governments, while others participate in ICANN, the
NMI, or the IETF.
The notion that only those who have rejected
engagement with multi-stakeholder spaces or approaches have a
legitimate claim to being part of the struggle for social justice
undermines our ability to collaborate, to deepen our analysis, and,
to be constructively critical of ourselves in ways that can help us
be more effective.
I don't want to minimise political differences
in civil society. Differences are real - but this space has become so
dominated by judgemental assumptions and lack of respect for one
another that we don't get to talk about these differences in a
helpful way. Let's argue those differences out in the form of
concrete interventions in policy processes rather than at the level
of personal or ideological accusations.
If the Internet Social Forum creates a new space
for collaboration and linkages with broader civil society and social
movements it can be a dynamic and important new channel for civil
society working for fair inclusive public-interest oriented internet
governance.
If it is exclusive and judgemental, and
dismissive of the many people and organisations (including on this
list) who do not use the same jargon and who have not jumped on any
bandwagon in the polarised discussion that dominates this list, it
will deepen divisions and is not likely to be very effective in
meeting
is stated goals.
It is also not helpful when people assume that
the ISF will be exclusive, judgemental, unwelcoming. Let's give it a
chance, participate, and use this opportunity to expand existing efforts.
Anriette
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