[bestbits] [governance] Whose lives are we helping, anyway? WAS Re: Remarks at UNESCO Closing Ceremony of "Connecting the Dots Conference"

[Milton L Mueller]

>Clearly the point is being missed here.
>
>"Internet Governance" as a phrase in international policy is a creature of WSIS.

I would disagree with that, Nick. The ICANN/DNS root debates, known as 'Internet governance" debates at the time, preceded WSIS by 6-7 years, and actually involved the ITU from about 1996 (as Suresh has intimated). In fact WSIS represented little more than many of the world's governments waking up to the fact that the Internet existed, was important, and that a new set of private sector-led institutions had been created that they had a very diminished role in. It was literally a reactionary event.

My book on these early battles (Ruling the root), published in 2002 and written before WSIS, used the term "internet governance" in the title and everyone knew what it meant. True, WSIS politicized Internet governance more than it had been and attempted to bring it into the multilateral system, but that is not the same as saying that the topic and controversy was a "creature" of WSIS.

WSIS actually started as an attempt to promote telecom infrastructure development; ICANN and IG were unintended and emergent agenda items as it developed. That history is recounted in Networks and States (2010).

In terms of whose lives we are helping, it's an unfortunate fact of reality that people who build things and make them work at some stage of the game have to deal with forces and people from the political realm who want to control them or feel threatened by what they do. Thus, simply fending off these efforts can help a lot of lives.

--MM

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