[governance] A Wave of the Watch List, and Speech Disappears

[Milton L Mueller]

Rony, your biggest problem is that you seem to lack any vision regarding
how things might change for the better, and all your ideas amount to in
the end is a rationalization of the status quo. The problem is that the
status quo is getting worse and worse from a libertarian and a
democratic standpoint. So standing pat, changing nothing, is not an
option, if you really stand for the values WPFC claims to stand for.
Unless you are happy with unrestricted government surveillance, growing
content filtering and censorship, and growing national assertions of
terrirtorial jurisdiction.  

 

Let me give you a clear example of the contradictions - or perhaps just
laziness - in your thinking. 

 

My dictionary defines that as 1. a legal power to hear and make
determinations of cases, 2 . an authority or sovereign power to govern,
control or legislate, 3. a sphere of authority.

And Milton speaks of a "global jurisdiction."

What could that possibly be but an international court, if not an
authority to govern on a global scale?

 

There's no way any of that could be anything but governmental.

 

Well, I already raised the example of ICANN. As seems to be your habit,
you eliminated this topic from your response, perhaps because it's
inconvenient for your argument. 

 

Now in this case I am not holding up ICANN as a good or bad example, but
purely as a fact which needs to be explained, and as an existence proof
of institutional innovation and where it might lead us.

 

We could have used existing intergovernmental organizations to do what
ICANN does. But we didn't. Fortunately there was no Rony Koven around to
tell us otherwise. (Interestingly, it is an institution that you have
been at pains to defend from most critiques. Perhaps that is only
because it is now part of the status quo) It is global in its authority,
it is not "an international court" that gives authoritarian governments
more power than they already have, on the contrary, by shifting some
decisions to this global nongovernmental authority many of those govts
are quite upset about it. While there has certainly been an increasing
assertion of governmental authority, the initial push to do things this
way probably reduced the amount of direct govtal control - and if the
original design had been adhered to, we would be even further along
those lines, with a democratic Board election mechanism and an end to US
unilateral oversight.  

 

So, when you say:

 

I reckpon that a multi-stakeholder authority is bound to turn into a
mechanism in which non-governmental elements are simpy coopted into
legitimizing governmental authority. It's a little like all the
self-regulatory bodies privatized executors of governmental functions.
And then there's the the latest approach, less than a decade old, of
co-regulation. That's when distinctions between private and public break
down completely, and non-governmental elements join up with governments.
That used to be called corporatism, the political theory of
Italian-style fascism.

Apparently you have not been reading my own critiques of
multi-stakeholder ideology, or my long-term critiques of the growing
informal power of GAC within ICANN, or perhaps anything else I've
written over the past ten years which shows that I (and many others,
e.g. Karl and his critique of "stakeholderism") are quite aware of these
dangers. Of course these kinds of dangers exist. No one is saying it
will be easy or simple. But where are you going with it, Rony? What
institutional options do you propose other than....doing nothing? And
isn't it clear that various powerful economic and political interests
will take us if we do nothing?

 

Civil society people have fallen into a kind of anarchists' mentality in
which they imagine they can escape the authority of governments. 

 

Mostly this is nonsense -- a completely wrong and unfair argument. What
we are debating here is precisely the development of new forms of
governmentality at the global level. In fact, Internet has and will
continue to escape some aspects of the authority of governments, a fact
which has both positive (undermining censorship) and negative
(cybercrime) aspects. We have a new kind of governance problem and thus
we need new kinds of governance institutions.

 

It's playing with fire 

 

There is no way not to play with fire. Decisions about Internet
governance are being made and will continue to be made whether we
discuss it or not. 

 

What will happen is governmental or intergovernmental assertions of
authority -- jurisdiction, if you will. And Milton Mueller is
willy-nilly helping to create a conceptual framework for such authority
to be asserted.

 

So now YOU are the one implying that we can escape governmental
assertions of authority. 

A little realism is called for. Messy disorderliness allows freedom in
the interstices. 

 

I agree with this, it is a very important insight. 

 

Attempts to create order lead straight to assertions of authority. 

 

Authority will be asserted whenever there are social conflicts that have
to be resolved. That is just a fact of societal life. Again, the trick
is to do it in a way that preserves essential values such as freedom. 

 

The libertarian approach must include a fine sense of when to leave well
enough alone. 

 

I don't see much that is "well enough" in current developments. Let's
see if you can make a credible case that the status quo - conceived
dynamically, because it is actively moving in certain directions which
are anything but "libertarian" - should be left alone. 

 

--MM

 

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