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

[Milton L Mueller]

I want to amend my comments with one very important concession to the IBSA/CIRP advocates: 
If CIRP can make the ICANN GAC go away and die...er, become incorporated into it, it may find stronger support vibes emanating from Syracuse. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [mailto:governance at lists.cpsr.org] On
> Behalf Of Milton L Mueller
> Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 3:20 PM
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Pranesh Prakash; Lee W McKnight
> Subject: RE: [governance] FW: [IP] India proposes UN "takeover" of
> Internet
> 
> > -----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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