[governance] equality of stakeholders? (was Re: Tangential...)

[Norbert Bollow]

Kerry Brown <kerry at kdbsystems.com> wrote:

> Why are we as civil participants advocating for any government
> control of the Internet. An international board of representatives of
> all stakeholders with none having any more power than any other is
> the preferred option. We are on the way to that already.

I don't see how you can say that we're on the path to that. Governments
have the power to collect taxes and thereby fund whatever they choose
to do. Industry stakeholders, as part and parcel of selling their
services, also have the power to make us fund whatever lobbying and
other governance activities they choose to undertake.

I don't think that it could be said that civil society organizations
are in any way on the path towards having similar powers of taxation.

We're maybe on the way to having the right to having a seat at the
table provided we self-fund all expenses and the time that it takes, or
manage to confince some funder.

Unless a way is found to fix this fundamental inequality, in any
governance system that does not give government representatives a
special responsibility to act in the public interest and the power to
act as umpire at least in some kinds of conflicts of interest, what
you describe is impossible. Even when theoretically all stakeholders
have equal rights of participation (even getting at least that degree
of equality is still an uphill battle in many fora), civil society
organizations will in practical reality always have less power than
industry stakeholders.

What I see as a possible solution to this dilemma is that unequal power
is not necessarily a disaster, since there are different kinds of
power. In principle, the greater financial power of industry
stakeholders could be balanced by greater moral authority of civil
society organizations, when in a democratically governed country that
leads to a greater ability to influence public opinion.

Key ingredients to Internet governance (or governance in any
other field) being truly in the public interest are therefore: 
- governments employing not only experts on their respective legal
  system (i.e. lawyers) but also people with an in-depth understanding
  of the subject matter under consideration (e.g. on how dns works,
  what the Internet technical community expects of root server
  operators, etc.)
- these government experts keeeping their understanding up-to-date by
  engaging in relevant in-depth, technical discussions (e.g. active
  participation in IETF working-groups, and for topics outside the
  scope of IETF this role could be played by ECTF working-groups.)
- appropriate national mechanisms with the effect that when a
  government takes positions that are technically wrong or clearly not
  in the public interest, there is a resulting broad public opinion
  backlash.

In my view, it will be good to increase the role of governments in
Internet governance roughly at the same pace as these three ingredients
are put in place.

Greetings,
Norbert

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