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

Sun Oct 30 12:48:05 EDT 2011

As we have seen from the OECD which has a similar mechanism for
non-governmental stakeholder participation, ultimately the power remains
with powerful. These are sometimes governments, sometimes commercial
interest groups. Often government positions are assumed, particularly in
the case of the US, based on lobbying from such interest groups in DC.

Just giving other stakeholder groups the opportunity to give inputs is
not enough and will not ensure effective multi-stakeholder
participation. Good that there is a proposal to have a working group to
discuss this.. but the overall structure and decision-flow proposed ends
up with the GA and it is therefore by definition not multi-stakeholder.

This might be OK for some of the decisions clustered in the rough scope
of work for this committee.. but not for most of the work it appears to
want to take on.

I agree with Jeremy that the status quo is not working, but I don't see
this committee being as open to civil society influence as you seem to
think it might be. Similar modalities in the OECD is not achieving that
degree of influence for civil society, and I don't see that this will
either.

Perhaps, with a much, much narrower and more focused scope of work such
a committee could constitute an improvement on current
'intergovernmental' processes in the UN and the GAC.

Anriette

On 30/10/11 09:14, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> 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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> and authoritative global voice for consumers. With over 220 member
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> 
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-- 
------------------------------------------------------
anriette esterhuysen anriette at apc.org
executive director, association for progressive communications
www.apc.org
po box 29755, melville 2109
south africa
tel/fax +27 11 726 1692
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