[governance] EC consultation in NY: my report

[Milton L Mueller]

Thanks. 

I see from earlier posts that Parminder has sent the text of the IBSA proposal 

Also see that a URL with the videocast is also available. This allowed me to test my assertions about the length of Sha's responses against facts, and while it may be true that he consumed 40% of the discussion hour, his response to my 4 min intervention was 5 min, not 10 or 15. (My apologies to Mr. Sha - it only felt that long) ;-) 

--MM


________________________________________
From: McTim [dogwallah at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 2010 12:40 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Milton L Mueller
Cc: Drake William
Subject: Re: [governance] EC consultation in NY: my report

Excellent report Milton (and analysis).

--
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel



On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> Hello, all
> Despite having to get up at 4 am and getting only 2 hours sleep the night before, and despite incredibly cold weather that froze the fuel line on the small propellor-powered US Air plane and caused a three-hour delay in departure, I made it to the Dec 14 EC consultation, only about 80 minutes after the starting time.
>
> There were only about 50 people there.
> Noteworthy: the UN staff who handled our requests for participation were quite helpful. We sent emails to Elivira Doyle and she arranged badges for us and we got in. Although David Allen was the only IGC member formally scheduled for an intervention, during the discussion period I made a request to speak and was successful in making a rather pointed intervention, which caused Sha to launch into a 10-15 minute rebuttal, but which he also praised as on point. Sha himself encouraged discussion and seemed sincere about that although his trademark monologues may have consumed 40% of the available discussion time.
>
> I do have a printed copy of the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) proposal, and since virtually all of the substantive debate was provoked by that proposal and the ideas underlying it, I plan to scan it at the office and email it to this list tomorrow - snow permitting (it's dropping about an inch an hour now) So this turned into a rather interesting debate on intergovernmentalism vs. multistakeholderism, which was sometimes disguised as a debate over whether Enhanced Cooperation (EC) and the IGF are "two distinct processes" but is really a debate over whether the Internet needs new institutions or should be governed by traditional nation-state systems.
>
> David Allen and I had lunch with the friendly Brazil representatives (Cesar Sauer was one of them) along with ISOC's Bill Graham. To the Brazil govt, the debate is between those who want "Change" in Internet governance and those who want to defend the status quo. My understanding of their position is that they believe that only an inter-governmental body is in a position to make real decisions and thus to bring about some kind of change toward real global governance of the internet. Unfortuantely, by global governance they think in pretty standard, old-fashioned sovereigntist terms as intergovernmental agreements. They think that the political forces at work within the IGF will prevent anything more substantive from happening, so to them the only alternative is to go intergovernmental. They would like to develop a framework of global public policy principles and believe that the discourse around that will smoke out the authoritarian states who won't be able to defend a more repressive approach. They don't see this as undermining IGF or MS, to them it's just another process made in addition to what is going on now. In other words, to them EC has little or nothing to do with multistakeholderism per se, but means new mechanisms for governments to cooperate.
>
> What they don't seem to understand is how such a new intergovernmental entity would shift attention and power away from the new MS institutions, especially IGF. I agreed with them that we need change, but that the IGF should be strengthened rather than relegated to the role of a talk shop. Why not have the IGF made recommendations? We had an interesting discussion on that, and even Bill Graham did not reject the idea outright, just pointed out some of the difficulties that would arise. They don't think of the Internet as a new polity or the basis for a new global governance institution.
>
> In my public comments, I expressed my belief that the IBSA proposal would fragment, rather than enhance, cooperation. One set of governments - the developing countries which includes both democracies and dictatorships - would go one way and the other set - Western, developed, would work within existing IG institutions. I tried to explain why the internet requires new, non-national governance institutions. I argued that the Internet "public" that requires "public policy" is more than a collection of 100+ national publics. I said I agreed with Brazil that we needed change but called openly for strengthening IGF rather than creating a new intergovernmental arrangement. My most pointed criticism - one that got the DESA people scurrying - was to ask why, if EC was a separate process from IGF, was the CSTD suddenly proposing to exclude CS and business from _developing recommendations for improvements in the IGF_!!!
>
> As noted before, Sha spent at least 10 minutes responding to me. He put a lot of emphasis on how EC and IGF were two distinct things. This sounds very convincing to the developing country governments, because it suggests that states can develop their own exclusive mechanisms for "cooperation." But it's really a hollow argument, because it ducks the question of why states need to do that in an exclusive way, and it signals that they are giving up on the IGF as an effective vehicle for change. Frankly, I think IBSA would be the doom of IGF - who would to go to it if a states-only process is going on in parallel and instead of solving the problems of the IGF's weaknesses we simply create another thing that excludes two of the three involved sectors? And if you are truly in favor of the status quo, then you should embrace IBSA because it will be easy to isolate the critical states there.
>
> Note also that the loopiest NGO intervention came from a woman who's organization was indeed ECOSOC accredited.
>
> --MM
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