[governance] Internet humbles UN telecoms agency

[Mawaki Chango]

Whew, we just dodged that bullet, hun!?... We were told WSIS was out
to take over the internet... now, aren't they loving WCIT? Some may be
thinking tonight it wouldn't have been a bad idea to enable IGF --not
to make policy, but-- clearly to feed into some global,
multistakeholder, meaningful policy-making process. I'm not sure, but
could that have been a more likely way to preempt the ambitions of
some old international organization whose raison d'etre was to
regulate telegraph, as The Economist would remind us?

Echoing some of Marillia's concerns above, I'm not sure who's winning
here, though. Neither do I suggest that signing the current version of
ITRs would be or would have been a victory --to whomever.

The sad thing is that still many of the very governments who oppose
certain language to be included in the treaty under the claim that it
will provide cover to some bad (anti-freedom) governments, will also
some day make arbitrary or unfair decisions about the internet
(arbitrary or unfair from the standpoint of those very principles they
publicly base their position on). The only option we are left with, it
seems, is to support/ally with the latter governments because, more
often than not, they have been on the right side of history --whatever
that means. But let's make no mistake: all governments, whether
reputed freedom champions or evil, reserve the right to make wrong
decisions, including by the public's interest and rights, under the
shadow of their sovereignty --and they will use that peculiar right,
even against those public's rights, whenever it suits them and they
can get away with it. The difference is: some of them just don't need
the license/legitimization of a treaty to do so even beyond their
borders, nor do they want to help deliver a forum where they could be
publicly held to account for those actions; while some others feel
their standing may be augmented by the existence of such treaty which
formalizes the obligations and responsibilities of all, but most
importantly in their eye, the obligations and responsibilities of the
other (more powerful) players. (In any case, this latter category of
governments might think, we are known to be the bad guys anyway, so no
big deal if we get caught time to time.)

It seems we are entering a world where treaties will become less and
less possible, except on a few issues where there's already a large
consensus, perhaps something like a world of minimal service diplomacy
on the big (yet non lethal) issues, a diplomacy left to operate on the
basis of respectability and good intentions?... Yet, it also seems to
me the world will increasingly face problems that have more than two
sides to them -- good and bad, winning and losing sides. Or is one of
these two conditions the cause of the other? What has diplomacy to do
with the internet, anyway?

In case you wonder, this is not about establishing false
equivalencies... We're just not in a WCIT celebratory mood.
Cheers all the same!

Mawaki

P.S. For those who have been making a parallel between NWICO and WSIS,
you may now want to try your brain on NWICO vs WCIT... some of the
connections may be troubling and you might enjoy that!


On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Declan McCullagh [mailto:declan at well.com]
>>
>> If the ITU had kept references to the Internet out of the treaty (and
>> meant it),
>
> [Milton L Mueller] Uh, they DID keep references to the internet out of the treaty. The only references to the internet were stuffed into a non-binding plenary resolution that did not really give the ITU any actual governance authority over anything.
>
>> what happened here that the ITU et al badly misjudged the situation and
>> tried to call a bluff -- which actually wasn't one?
>>
> [Milton L Mueller] For an understanding of "what happened here" so forthcoming IGP blog post.
>
>
>
>
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