[governance] "civil society doing someone else's dirty work"

[Milton Mueller]

Alejandro, you could not have come up with a better description of the
current ICANN regime...! 

more below

>>> apisan at servidor.unam.mx 4/15/2007 11:34 PM >>>
>In pursuing the above, or other trajectories, one must also 
>make sure that Civil Society is not being recruited to do someone 
>else's dirty work. That is one of the risks that I see this year for 
>moving towards a Framework Convention, as well as that the 
>idea fuels or resonates with the idea of a Global Government, 
>besides other objections that may become a separate 
>track when timely.

In fact a Framework Convention (FC) is precisely the kind of "one step
at a time" attempt to come up with solutions to specific problems that
you praise, Alej.

Obviously ICANN has a problem relating its technical coordination
mandate with political, public policy concerns. An FC would take a step
toward solving that problem by bringing governments into the process in
a lawful, formal, democratically constrained way. In substantive policy
terms, we at IGP have always viewed the FC as a way to LIMIT national
govts power over Internet coordination as much as a way to insert it
where it is needed. We cannot of course guarantee that such a rational
outcome would occur, but that's the risk you always take with
constitutional moments. And a good feature of formal sovereign
negotiations is that if the results end up bad no sovereign has to sign
on to them. (A far cry from the de facto global technical power ICANN
holds)

We may actually agree, you and I, on the need not to create "new
beasts" willy nilly, although in my case it is more a deep awareness of
the huge costs and long time periods required to create new institutions
than any normative commitment to incrementalism.

The "global government" charge against an FC doesn't scare me. ICANN
already is a global governance form. Such a charge would no doubt be
exploited by vested interests in the US and elsewhere who want to
preserve the status quo -- that is, after all, the same line they took
with WSIS (UN Take over of the internet) and it worked well for them,
but now that GAC is looking and behaving more and more like the UN,
people will soon see through that line, especially as it becomes clearer
and clearer that the USG is the most active and aggressive govt and the
one pushing to enlarge governmental power over ICANN outcomes. Hypocrisy
tends to catch up with you over time...


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