[governance] regulating the digital space - whose laws apply, and whose do not

[Norbert Bollow]

Paul Lehto <lehto.paul at gmail.com> wrote:

> Basically, without real global democracy, you have a PROFESSIONAL,
> FULL-TIME business interest consortium that pays people to do policy
> and governance, against a VOLUNTEER PART TIME force of grass roots
> activists.  There's no fair match here, unless we can call the
> question and submit it to a vote of the people.

IMO, with any global governance system, great caution should
be taken to avoid giving it too much power. Even in governance
systems that are intended to be democratic, the possibility of
obvious or covert power grabs can never be completely rules out.
(I'm not talking about unreasonable conspiracy theories here.
History is full of examples. And if you include in the "power
grab" scenarios the very typical situations of regulators
paying just a bit too much attention to what industry lobbyists
are saying, it becomes very difficult to find any country where
this kind of thing is not happening right now.)

The fact that there multiple (quite a few) countries provides an
important corrective, in several ways: Different countries will
(to some degree) try different policies, resulting in greater
understanding of the effects of various policies. Well-educated
people often have the possisbility to emigrating to a country
where they like the political system better, and will be able to
publish critical literature while in such a country. All this
would be lost by establishing a global government, even if strong
efforts are made to make it a democratic government.

That said, I like the indea of an "international internet parliament",
provided the scope of decidion-making in that parliament is limited
to questions which really need to be addressed globally.

I would point out though that there's a clear non sequitur in Paul's
argument. There's no reason why the problem of the current undue
influence of professional corporate lobbyists couldn't be countered
in other ways. In fact there's no reason why, especially in countries
with democratic governance system, national governments can't wise
up to the problem and pay people to really represent the public
interest, advocate for human rights, etc, in those fora. Of course
mechanisms need to be put in place to unmask and discredit and fire
those who would represent corporate particular interests while
pretending to represent the public interest. This happens in the
scientific community to people who tell pseudo-scientific lies in
order to further a corporate agenda, and I'm sure that it is possible
to establish similar mechanisms also in the area of "government funded
public interest advocacy" that I'm proposing. Furthermore,
establishing this kind of thing would not require convincing national
governments to let go of a very significant part of their power, which
is a precondition for any "global democrary". So I would argue that
the obstacles against this kind of solution strategy are less that the
obstacles to implementing any kind of global democracy.

Greetings,
Norbert
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