[governance] New dot com agreement changes USG-ICANN relationship

[Milton Mueller]

>>> db at dannybutt.net 12/4/2006 4:12 AM >>>
>I always saw ICANN as being on a USG leash that would be 
>pulled whenever convenient, or if it became too international 
>- regardless of the formal wording of the MoU. 

Always on a leash, yes; the point however was that when it was created
the promise was otherwise. And we came very close to getting rid of the
leash. I still think it is valid and important to push for keeping the 
Internet more in the realm of civil society and business and relying on
govts only for minimal, well-defined, well constrained law enforcement
needs. 

>Hopefully we 
>can now dispense with the distracting fiction that ICANN 
>was an model of a mythical user- led global internet. 

The Internet _was_ largely user-led; the governmental instrusions have
come late. USG had no official control over the root until 1997. The
model or founding concept was a valid one, and preferable in many
respects to an intergovernmental organization. 

>The primary actors in that organisation have  
>always been more or less in accord with USG interests, 
>gestures  against "government control" notwithstanding.

This is only partially correct, it drastically understates the level of
conflict and tension within the dominant political coalition that
created ICANN. 

>From my POV, a truly multistakeholder process advocated 
>by civil  society has to assert multilateralism as one of its 
>strongest principles, rather than using idealist antipathy to 
>any governmental involvement as a way of avoiding the 
>questions about who actually has the power in IG 
>arrangements.

Two errors here: first, those of us opposing inappropriate and
repressive forms of govt involvement in the Internet cannot be accused
of "avoiding questions about who actually has power" by any sane person
who reads. We've been making very pointed statements about who has
power, and how state power and private interest intersect in the ICANN
regime, long before people wanted to hear it. And have earned
significant enmity from both those who have power and those who make a
career out of avoiding facing those questions. 

Second, your appeal to "multilateralism" is in fact a way of avoiding
precisely those questions. The issue of power gets dissolved into
UN-style blather about the "family of nations" and the incredible
assumption that national states perfectly represent their people.
Multilateralism simply means multiple governments, many of them
undemocratic and overtly repressive, negotiating with each other,
looking out for their geopolitical, strategic and interests. 

It is very hard, for example, to make a case that "multi-lateralizing"
control of the root improves anything or adds any value to the internet,
while it is easy to show how it could create new problems and create the
potential for holding the internet hostage to geopolitical concerns. 

"Multi-stakeholder" ism likewise obscures rather than clarifies. 

We need a new global governance regime and in entering into it we must
as a principle be deeply aware of the fact that the Internet's growth
and much of its value came from the fact that govts had no regulation or
control over how it initially evolved. We need to define a proper
division of labor between state/interstate coercion and constrain, which
should be minimal, and Internet operation and content, which should
remain with PS/CS. 

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