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

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 10/30/2011 03:20 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> 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.

In fact my attitude to this proposal is informed very strongly by
political reality. You might recall that the IGC's original response to
WGIG's IGF proposal was that the the IGF should be situated outside of
the United Nations, too.  If it had been, would it even still exist
now?  Yet the IGF is not the earlier, kruftier version of the UN that
the IGC perhaps feared when advocating that it be situated outside the UN.

For the last few years I have taken heat for my idea that the IGF, if it
is to be able to make recommendations as its mandate requires, should
before allow governments (and the other stakeholder groups too) a power
of veto over those recommendations before they are issued.  That
position, and my response to the CIRP proposal,* are influenced strongly
by the same political realities.

I am not one of those social democrats of whom you speak, who believe
that intergovernmental organisations represent the will of the people
(in fact, I don't even know any such social democrats).  But I do accept
that "enhanced cooperation" was never going to be just the IGF on
steroids: it was always going to be government-led.  As such, situating
it in the UN is not preferable, merely inevitable.

The UN is, doubtless, as corrupt as the United States Congress or the
Chinese Community Party.  But to its credit, it does play such
plutocracies and dictatorships against each other, resulting in the
curbing of their worst excesses.  Consider for example, how much worse
the WIPO Copyright Treaties or ACTA would have been, if the United
States, EU and Japan had been able to draft these on their own.

So even if the CIRP was purely intergovernmental, we might still expect
that its policies may be "somewhat less bad than the status quo". But
because of its multi-stakeholder character, we can hope for much more:
that civil society will finally have a and positive real impact on
policies such as those that are being developed right now, outside of
any transnational multi-stakeholder framework, that are destroying the
Internet as we know it.

* http://jere.my/l/1t

-- 

*Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Project Coordinator*
Consumers International
Kuala Lumpur Office for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 7726 1599

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