[governance] FW: [IP] India proposes UN "takeover" of Internet

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [mailto:governance at lists.cpsr.org] On
> Behalf Of Pranesh Prakash
> 
> I love how WSIS and IGF "took over" the Internet, and I look forward to
> further "takeovers" of the Internet in the days to come.  I wonder if
> folks will now start #OccupyTheInternet
>

Cute.

Some history for Pranesh, since he is evidently unfamiliar with it. 

WSIS did indeed try to "take over" ICANN, it just failed because of the people and arguments you now reject. Although it was always an exaggeration to claim that the UN was trying to take over the Internet as a whole, these fears were exaggerated NOT because many governments did not, in fact, want to do that but simply because they lacked the capability to do so. And they lacked that capability because most of Internet and telecoms is in the hands of private companies responding to market forces - something that the same people also tend to reject.

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and probably other states are on record as favoring the elimination of ICANN and RIRs and their replacement by intergovernmental governance mechanisms. 

India has publicly embraced replacement of the RIR model with a national internet registry model. 

All of IBSA asserted during, and after, WSIS that they prefer a national sovereignty based model for internet governance. All of IBSA, and even the EC and other developed states, believe in the fallacy that states can make "public policy" for the Internet outside of an agreed constitutional and legal framework that carefully defines and delimits their powers and protects both the substantive and due process rights of individuals.  

And now you suggest that a proposal by a rising state to throw this all into the hands of the UN is some harmless thing.

Wake up. 

People in civil society, such as Jeremy, who rightly see some of the hypocrisy underlying defenses of the status quo but who fail to see the far more serious threat of destroying the more open, organically Developed Internet Institutions (ODII) by sovereignty-based intergovernmental hierarchies are deeply out of touch with political reality on a global basis, or are letting their anger get the better of them and losing perspective completely.  

We do not have to choose between the status quo and the UN (an earlier, kruftier status quo). Everyone needs to write that on the chalkboard 50 times. 

One thing I have noticed is that the people who feel this way are generally not people with first-hand experience of ICANN, and thus do not see how governments in the GAC behave. GAC's behavior is relevant because it shows you how govts actually intervene in a MS or more decentralized environment. How do they behave?

Here is one good example
http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2011/9/29/4909356.html 
Here is another
http://www.komaitis.org/1/post/2011/10/icann-41-the-fight-over-multistakeholderism.html#comments 

Govts amplify and reinforce the policy demands of vested interests and of state security/law enforcement. Sure, there will always be inequalities of power in any political economy, but intergovernmentalism is nothing more than a carving up of the space among the winners at the national level. Social democrats who see them as the "voice of the people" need to get a better grip on the empirical realities of how states actually behave. 



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