[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Dan Krimm]

I hope everyone in the US had a Happy Thanksgiving holiday -- I certainly
did: I didn't go online for a moment.  And what a state this list is in as
I return...

One comment, certainly not intended to be ad hominem:


At 12:23 PM -0500 11/23/07, Veni Markovski wrote:

>For some of the Americans the issues about the Internet are related to
>something, which some of them believe, is related to power. For the other
>Netizens - we care about the price at which we get our Internet
>connection, about the freedom of access, freedom of speech, etc.
>But some of the Americans, who take so many things for granted, just
>because they happen to be born in the USA, we need to just try to educate
>them about "the other world".


I would wonder how "freedom of access" and "freedom of expression" (both of
which I personally feel quite passionate about protecting), are not
fundamentally issues of power.  IMHO these rights are not merely "related
to power" but are in fact *direct manifestations of power* -- if you have
political power, then you have these freedoms, and if you do not have
political power, generally you do not these freedoms in meaningful terms
(though those in power may try to convince you that you do have them --
that makes it easier to control you, if you don't believe you have anything
to fight for).

Certainly my experience is dominated by the US environment, and in this
politically highly divided country these freedoms are among the most
important power issues we are fighting about.  All of our freedoms are in
direct danger, because in this country we are facing a systematic erosion
of the rule of law in favor of the rule of humans.

A lot of people outside the US criticize the US (actually, the US
government) because of its supremely arrogant attitudes toward the rest of
the world.  What they may not realize is that *very many* people inside the
US (I would include myself) criticize the current US administration for
precisely those reasons, and that those imperial behaviors are aimed
domestically as well as overseas.  What the current US administration has
done is systematically erode the checks and balances in our own
Constitution in rather dangerous ways, with the strategic help of corporate
mass media (and increasingly the telcos and cable companies are getting
into it), and we are genuinely alarmed and trying our level best to fight
back against what we see as steps to take our own country away from
democratic standards of governance and toward a more authoritarian model
that involves strong control over information.

(In short, Orwell's dystopia can be arrived at either through
over-centralization of public government or by wild deregulation of the
private sector.  In both extreme cases, the public and private sectors
ultimately merge in a monopoly of elite power over and against the general
public.  Personally I view the "socialism versus free market" debate as a
patently false dichotomy.  I can go into further detail elsewhere if you
like, but for the purposes of this particular discussion, I merely wish to
set the conceptual context, which is that the US is currently facing the
most serious threat to civil liberties in several generations.)

So, in my personal case, it is not about "taking [anything] for granted"
anywhere else in the world, but rather about seeing a frightening potential
on the horizon at home that may not yet have propagated to all other areas
of the world, but which needs to be opposed here and now and also at the
international level regardless of whether it has arrived fully formed in
all other regions.

So, please understand that in the US the "privatization" trend in the sense
of "outsourcing public governance" has some *very* nefarious overtones, and
US domestic civil society has grown a hair-trigger sensitivity to such
dynamics when they seem to be designed to undermine accountability of
public governance to the general public in favor of giving power to wealthy
private sector entities, and to growing closer bonds between private
(economic) and public (political) power.  (In the public policy world this
is expressed by the jargon term "industry capture" [of government] and is
often driven by "iron triangles" between industry lobbyists, agency
regulators, and legislators.)

So, this is the political context within which some of us see dynamics of
Internet governance (the very word "governance" is about the institutional
structures determining who has political *power* to control others), and it
fits into this larger context in a fairly direct and disturbing manner.
This is the "governance" list, after all, and the "G" in IGC and IGF and
IGP is all about political power.

So, with due respect, I present this description as a way to inform "the
other world" as to what is going on inside the US, how it fits in with what
you might see of explicit US foreign relations (which are tangibly
frightening to many "USians"), the role towards which US civil society has
gravitated in the last 7 years, how trends surrounding control of access
and expression on the Internet fit into a disturbing pattern of strategic
power shifts, and why we might see commonalities between the general
problems of power battles in the US and the specific case of Internet
governance, especially in cases where IG has a foot in the US legal and
political jurisdiction.

In short, the US is living through a recap of the "gilded age" of the
previous century, once again moving systematically toward plutocracy, and
creating a new generation of "robber barons" who strive to control the
general public at home and have imperial designs abroad.  US civil society
(and many in academia) are aligned against this dangerous trend both
domestically and with regard to international affairs.  And, the
information infrastructure is front and center in these power battles,
because in the Information Age (or the "Information Society" if you
prefer), control over information is perhaps the most important currency of
political power itself.

If we are throwing around traditional mottos, the one I prefer for our age
is "knowledge is power" and the confluence of money and information-control
is the "nuclear-powered" version of political power in the emerging
information society, and the Internet (the most "disruptive" technology of
our lifetimes, so far, even more than nuclear technology) is at the core of
*all* of this.

I would suggest that this is the framework within which you would best
understand our positions and recommendations.  There is no separation
between freedom of access and freedom of expression and "power to the
people" -- in my framework they are all part of the same thing, and the
Internet is inextricably woven throughout the entire cloth.

Bottom line: The Internet is *all* about power of information (and control
over information), and that is becoming the most important form of power in
our world as time progresses.

Dan
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