[bestbits] IGF plus

[JFC Morfin]

At 06:22 28/08/2013, michael gurstein wrote:
>Reading these articles with post-Snowden eyes however, I must say that I
>found the overall discussion very naïve and even disingenuous on the part of
>some.  MSism takes as its central and defining concept the notion of the
>"stake" as in a specific and "personal" (or direct) involvement in the
>matter under discussion.
>
>What is lacking in this notion (and notably I didn't see any reference to it
>in any of the articles in that journal issue) is the notion of "interest" as
>in financial "interest", or perhaps more importantly "national interest".

Michael,

I fully agree with the word "naive". The stakes are the people, 
national, corporate and multinational interests. Our cup of tea are 
people and their relational spaces interests.

The rest is blah, blah, blah. This is the same as about a pseudo 
"technical and academic community" category. Each MS category has its 
technical and academic community, with dramatically different (self) 
assigned objectives. There are colossal economic, strategic, cultural 
interests being in coopetition, sometimes in conflict, at some points 
at war. Let get real.

The IGF is everything but democracy. It is a place and a game of 
force and power. MSism is a polycratic system where a-symmetric 
e-diplomacy/conterwarfare can be made pseudo-symmetric. This 
pseudo-symmetry has nothing to do with democracy or HRs. It is only 
accepted because the different stakeholders' categories do not have 
the same influence terms and the self-interest of each category in a 
4D universe is to protect its interests in each of the terms. 
Business is short term oriented, Governments are middle term 
oriented, International organizations are long term oriented and 
Civil Society is multi-term implied. They may have money, power, and 
cooperation, but let remember at last that "There is no wealth but 
men" (Jean Bodin), that is ourselves.

The US strategy is simple and applied everywhere: the survival of the 
US calls for the widest international cooperation ... coordinated by 
the US. This is the, most probably pertinent and at least widely 
acknowedged, conclusion of "The grand chessboard" of Zbigniew Brzezinski

This survival has a well known definition in terms of internet 
governance: statUS-quo. The question the Civil Society is to answer 
is simple: is statUS-quo favorable to the people of the world? This 
question is not an easy one, including for those who viscerally 
oppose them because the US position in the Internet is too dominant 
to die. The risk we face is that the US relies far too much on the US 
private sector technical lack of contributions (hence may be the 
emphasis on a "technical and academic community"), on the ICANN 
contractual strategy, and architectonics lack of 
innovation/propositions: as a result the digital giant we tend to 
rely upon has feet of clay.

jfc