<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 4:25 AM, parminder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:parminder@itforchange.net" target="_blank">parminder@itforchange.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div>On Monday 28 September 2015 10:07 PM,
Jeremy Malcolm wrote:<br>
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<pre>On 27/09/2015 3:16 pm, Michael Gurstein wrote:
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<pre>Significant portions of Civil Society have bought into this approach which is firmly premised on the notion that somehow the private sector should be directly involved in making governance decisions because well, they are so public spirited, or that they have the long term interests of everyone at heart ("they are people too aren't they"), or we can trust them much more than those perfidious folks in government, or they are "accountable" to their shareholders and wouldn't do anything completely untoward to risk shareholder value etc.etc. (you know the drill...
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<pre>No, not really that at all. They have to be involved because they are
already involved. For now, the decisions of companies like Facebook and
Google about their terms of service and so on are de facto transnational
rules for the Internet, at least as much as the rules that governments
make (collectively or individually). So it impossible to disentangle
these companies from the process of situating those rules within a more
accountable global framework of principle.</pre>
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Jeremy, basically you are accepting that, in your view, democracy is
no longer feasible or to be preferred, or both, in matters of
Internet governance. </div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Now you are just trolling, Jeremy neither said nor meant what you are saying.</div><div><br></div><div>He is merely pointing out the obvious reality.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">That is a remarkable claim/ acceptance, even
though it is what has always underpinned the equal footing
multi-stakeholder model. </div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Disagree. What underpins the multi-equal stakeholder model is the collaborative ethos of the early Internet.</div><div><br></div><div>The rest of your argument is based on the above flawed premises, and so needs no comment.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div><br></div><div>McTim</div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">To that extent I commend your honesty and
integrity which is much more than what can be said about most other
supporters of the equal footing model who tend to simply disappear
from any discussion when they are asked to come down to actual
implications (both theoretical and practical) of such a model.<br>
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That compliment for honesty and forthrightness having been paid, may
I ask you a question. How is your assertion different from the
claims of the feudal class during early days of the evolution of
democracy, say, In England, for the biggest pie of the national
level political decision making power, on the basis that they owned
large-scale landed property, and thus held control over the key
productive resources of that time - thereby also setting the de
facto rules in most aspects of contemporary social life, ... This
can be seen the history of the House of Lords, and also the fact
that for a very long time ownership of property was a condition of
enfranchisement....<br>
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What you are advocating, albeit by presenting it as something
inevitable, I see is exactly the same... Corporates today 'own' the
biggest chunks of what are the contemporary key productive
resources, and of what on the Internet can comparably be called as
digital estate and thus setting in your words 'de facto
transnational rules for the Internet'. You give this as the logic
for why we should accept them to be given a highly disproportionate
role in the political governance of the Internet and the associated
phenomenon. I say disproportionate because every shareholder, big or
small, of these companies does already have a political role equal
to every other person (minus the difference that power of various
resources make, but lets disregard that for the moment) .<br>
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What you are presenting is directly a case for digital fedualism,
which equal footing multistakeholderism of course really is. I am
astonished that such a philosophy can have such widespread support
as equal footing multistakeholderism indeed has in some very
dominant circles of Internet governance. <br>
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Aligning political power to economic power, at institutional levels
and not just in hidden, informal ways which have always existed, is
what the current global neoliberal design currently is. (An
important traditional role of political power has been to regulate
and rein in the execesses of economic power.) The World Economic
Forum is often considered as its key global nerve centre, although
I'd say it will be more factual to say that the primary nerve centre
is in fact still solidly inside the US economic and political
establishments. This most important global problem and danger is
extensively recognised among global civil society movements, and is
actively resisted. It is the fact that these dangerous global
developments are, on the other hand, actually supported by a big
chunk of civil society in the Internet governance space which
creates a significant dissonance that this space has with the
mainstream global civil society. <br><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
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parminder</font></span><span class=""><br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">Cheers,<br><br>McTim<br>"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel</div>
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