[governance] Proposed text for a sign-on or IGC statement re:

[Milton L Mueller]

As a quick response (on the road, must run out the door soon), I think we are using the term "private sector" in very different ways. To me it just means "civil society" in the more general sense that the term has been used in political theory, which includes the voluntary, agreement-based non-governmental parts of society. This includes both business and what we on this list consider to be noncommercial civil society.

As for the term "Internet community," yes, I understand the ways that term has been misused, having critcizied it extensively myself. But I hate to concede the term, because it expresses the way Internet (and many other forms of ICT governance) blurs the line between producer and consumer of information and communication products and services. As a network technology the Internet creates its own public, its own community, its own polity. That is what I mean.

--MM

________________________________
From: Parminder [mailto:parminder at itforchange.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2009 7:03 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Milton L Mueller
Subject: Re: [governance] Proposed text for a sign-on or IGC statement re:

Milton

>Political sovereignty for the Internet community is precisely what we seek. It should, of course, be one in which the new global institution(s) are accountable to a broad >segment of Internet society. But this is the fundamental underlying drama of ICANN and its status vis a vis U.S. government and other states.

I do not understand the meaning of 'internet community' in this context and therefore cannot appreciate what you mean by political sovereignty for it. For us, all people of the world have legitimate and equal political interest in all key Internet matters. Can you please explain why would you not just say 'global community' instead. Any particular reason? Especially when we both agreed that we are speaking here of not some narrow technical policy issues, but important political matters, for instance FoE and 'access to knowledge'.

The political use of the term 'internet community', in the manner I have seen it mostly used now-a-days, has become one part of a dangerous attempt to create an artificially new global  reality,  with a new basis for constructing its constituents, *for the purpose of engineering* some radical global political redetermination that fly in the face of long revered precepts of democracy, public interest, representation, social justice and equity. In such attempts at global political redetermination lie the principle congruity of neoliberal and the dominant information society discourses.
>Seems we have a choice of three models. 1) Work in the general framework of private sector, civil society based governance; 2) take an ITU/WIPO, >pure-intergovernmental approach; 3) take what might be called a competing hegemon approach, in which US contends with EU, China, Russia, Brazil and India for >dominance, and use IGOs (and ICANN) as tools when convenient and act unilaterally when not. The latter two options are state-directed but the third relies more on great >power deals than established institutional frameworks.
>I'll take 1).

We are strongly opposed to any private (meaning business, using standard UN terminology) sector leadership for any global governance model. I made this clear in my previous email. We see important CS role in new global governance models, but there is lot to be done and learnt in this area, and it is really not easy to structure CS participation  in any body with strong policy roles. As mentioned in my email, we very much encourage and participate in any innovations in this area (ex, IGF). In fact, WGIG did propose alternative global Internet policy institutional  frameworks (see its models 1, 3 and 4), which  were worth  a  try, and certainly worth full CS support.   Unfortunately, much of the CS in the IG arena did not support these alternatives and struck to supporting existing ICANNist model. That was our best chance, and it is still our best chance. We need to work towards real internationalization of the IG system, with innovative models that have high civil society representation. Significantly, more we delay in supporting and pushing for such new possibilities, the global environment for acceptability of anything other than a simple UN kind inter-governmental model may only keep  becoming worse.

To sum our position, we prefer to work with democratically representative bodies, using CS presence for 'deepening democracy' at the global level, rather than acquiesce to corporate leadership of global governance. (Milton, since I understand you wont want corporates to have leading political role with regard to domestic issue inside the US, why have different standards and definitions of democracy for your country and for the outside?)

We do realize that many governments are not themselves democratic representatives of  the people of their countries, and in this context we should work hard for strengthening the democratization of national as well as global governance. The ruse of poor governance for privatizing  governance has been used for too long  by some global forces vis-a-vs developing countries for us not to understand this ploy rather well. It has been one of the main planks of the 'Washington consensus' policies. Interestingly UK's Prime Minister declared  at the recent G 20 London summit that the 'Washington consensus was over'. Lets use this opportunity to move beyond its (more rabid) sister 'Californian consensus' (the ICANN+ model) towards some real globally democratic arrangements, rather than wait for a crisis, as the London Summit did.

Parminder




Milton L Mueller wrote:

Parminder:
Thanks very much for this long-overdue but welcome and well-considered explanation. We have indeed felt exasperated at times by the lack of engagement by IGC/IGF civil society. It has always seemed to me that ICANN repeatedly raises political issues and struggles that, in the IGF context, attract a great deal of activity but have very little impact relative to the ICANN venue. And while it wasn't hard to surmise that some of the logic you developed below underlay the hesitation to get involved, it is better to have an open dialogue about this.

A  few specific responses and questions below:
Either ICANN, and its GNSO, is merely doing 'relatively' mundane, though often important, administrative tasks in managing some critical Internet resources, meaning tasks that do not have much political implication, or ICANN indeed does tasks with significant political implications.

It is the latter, obviously.

However, in case ICANN/ GNSO does work with important political implications we simply do not agree with much of its constitutive logic - for instance, of equality/balance between demand and supply side of the 'domain name' marketplace, or even between other commercial and non-commercial parties. We also do not agree to its basic criterion for legitimate interest/ representation that requires one to at least be a domain registrant. We do not think that is the point - for instance even in the KTCN campaign of NCUC on the FoE issue.

For those who are weak on the acronyms, KTCN = keep the core neutral, FoE = freedom of expression. I do not see how the KTCN campaign had anything to do with whether one was a domain registrant or not, but perhaps I miss your point.

Such 'user' based and stakeholder based global governance systems disproportionately favoring organized private sector (US-ians may read, business sector) - to counter whose power is a central governance issue at the global level - are exactly the wrong models of global governance to promote. Such models are poised to overall do much greater damage than good to the global public interest. They are especially dangerous when they seek political sovereignty, which we are afraid much of these minor structural adjustments are aimed at consolidating. To the extent that there is a certain complicity in the ICANN arena in this regard - including of some of the involved civil society actors - we must strongly disassociate ourselves from supporting any such implications of the present, or any other, proposal for structural changes in the ICANN.

Political sovereignty for the Internet community is precisely what we seek. It should, of course, be one in which the new global institution(s) are accountable to a broad segment of Internet society. But this is the fundamental underlying drama of ICANN and its status vis a vis U.S. government and other states.

On the other hand, we can understand and accept user/ stakeholder models for relatively low-level technical policy tasks, which are politically accountable to globally legitimate entities (sorry, but US government is not).

Who is?
Seems we have a choice of three models. 1) Work in the general framework of private sector, civil society based governance; 2) take an ITU/WIPO, pure-intergovernmental approach; 3) take what might be called a competing hegemon approach, in which US contends with EU, China, Russia, Brazil and India for dominance, and use IGOs (and ICANN) as tools when convenient and act unilaterally when not. The latter two options are state-directed but the third relies more on great power deals than established institutional frameworks.

I'll take 1).

All  such  governance innovations - out-of-the-box, subversive, whatever - that look like they are especially pushing forward marginalized interests attract our strong interest. All 'innovations' that further entrench dominant interests -whether economic, political, geo-political, class -  are correspondingly received with strong political opposition.

Understand this well. If you want to know why IGP verges on the status of "radioactive" within ICANN/US/DoC circles it's because of this. But I suspect our concept of what kind of policies best overcome marginalization may differ.

Setting that aside, I see based on your final comments below that you at least partly realize why the NCSG charter should be supported in this case. To spell it out more clearly, the reason NCSG is being targeted by ICANN staff as something to be fragmented and manipulated is precisely because NCUC has been completely independent of staff control and dominance (unlike ALAC and the RALOs) and because the policies it has advocated have seemed "oppositional" and challenging to some of those "dominant interests."

We will like to see the NCSG 6.0 charter developed by the NCUC adopted by the ICANN instead of the alternative one, and especially agree that its direct instead of constituency based election of council members is  a much better process. It is better because it has a higher chance of representing global public interest, each candidate having to muster a much wider support.

Thanks! When it comes to the bottom line, I am happy to see that you "get it."


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