[governance] Google's officer with detention order in brasil

[Milton L Mueller]

Parminder,
In my opinion your responses and statements continue to take the form of crude leftist propaganda rather than real dialogue. But I understand that you, like most propagandists, get a lot of mileage out of simply repeating the same message over and over again until people grow weary of responding. So I will make some perfunctory efforts to respond just to demonstrate that most of us are not intimidated by aggressive repetition of invalid arguments.

They should use democratic processes, and if the processes are not fine, fight to have the right processes.

MM: So you are proposing that people meekly comply with such crude interventions until such time as legislatures change, judges change, etc.? I on the other hand would support the right of people to exercise internationally guaranteed free expression rights in defiance of any government.

Putin was elected in Russia, Hugo Chavez was "elected" in Venezuela, I supposed they must be obeyed in your calculation? And you speak of struggles for democracy!

This is the history of struggles for democracy, which continue, although a new neoliberal discourse has been trying to confuse them through concepts like users rights (whats wrong with people's rights!), multistakeholderism (whats wrong with participatory democracy), internet exceptionalism and so on.

MM: You are stuck in a 19th century mindset involving the territorial nation-state with elected officials as the ultimate and only form of democracy. It is unfortunate that your thinking has not progressed. And by the way, all successful and progressive democracies are in fact liberal democracies, so it is not democracy per se that is of value, but democracy as one element of a political system that safeguards individual human rights.

You of course realise that US gov has full authority over its own digital space, and considerable authority over that of other countries. Thus it may be more useful to direct civil society fire power where the illegitimate concentration of power lies.

MM: I have directed and am directing considerable firepower at USG exercises of national power over cyberspace, as you well know.
And there are many advocates of US power who believe that it does NOT have sufficient authority over its own digital space. I guess you haven't been paying attention to the cybersecurity legislation debates in the US.

I have failed to see any proposals from you for framing global laws for, what we both agree is and should be preserved as a, global Internet.

MM: Then you are simply ignorant, and need to do your reading.

Challenging application of national laws on the Internet in developing countries (the fact of a particular law being bad is a very different issues and should be dealt by democratic and civil society processes) and instead advocating application of US globally does not make for a very convincing case.

MM: I favor globalized and networked institutions for setting policy and, more important, minimal coercive interventions regardless of where they come from. As you well know. So nice try, but I don't think your attempt to exploit anti-US populism really works in my case.

On the other hand, it is clear from your comments above that you do NOT support international laws guaranteeing freedom of expression "regardless of frontiers." In this case, you want national laws applied regardless of their impact on freedom of information. Your political appeals are based on a crude anti-business agenda, not on an Internet freedom agenda.

"Big business is bad " is a nice simple slogan, and many people will respond to it, and it can get lots of folks elected to local political office. But let's keep in mind the basic facts of the situation we are debating. What was the "crime" here?  It was: not taking down a video criticizing a politician within 24 hours. Can you tell me how the public was harmed by this? Do you view this as a gigantic violation of public interest? You are really quite comical. At least the communists and socialists of the 1920s were dealing with life-and-death issues in regard to their critique of business. If you are going to wage an international war against the depredations of big business, you had better come up with something more substantive than Google's terms of use applied to people getting free service, or its resistance to silly and obstructive local laws regarding video takedowns. And we all know that if Google took down videos arbitrarily, you would be criticizing them for that, as well. It's very clear where your simple-minded politics are coming from.

On the other hand, I do understand that in the new neoliberal global world order, their is this new political direction of richer classes in most countries (especially, but not only, developing countries) to seek to opt out of the democratic order they are 'subject to' in favour of a new post-democratic global order whose political capital lies in the US, because whether they like it or not, any new system still needs some kind of political coercive authority, for instance to make those early dawn knocks to catch people doing things as dangerous as sharing video files.

Again, there is no coherent political or legal argument here, there is simply 1970s-vintage foaming at the mouth against "US imperialism". Should the world ever be unfortunate enough to put you and your ideas in a position of power and responsibility, you will soon learn - as did all the 'anti-imperialist' socialist dictatorships and economic failures in the developing world of the 1970s - that simply being against the US does not produce anything of value for subject populations. You have to have a substantive agenda.

you have said that US laws and judges are good and should continue to overlord over the ICANN (for whatever 'minimalist' areas that you lay down).

Another crude distortion. We have had a debate about California nonprofit incorporation law. ICANN has to incorporate somewhere, and I have said that in terms of public accountability, which you claim to support, that California law is as good as any, and that it is BETTER than international organization laws, which immunize organizations from all kinds of things. You are basically claiming that a treaty can be devised that is better, but no such treaty exists! And given the realities of inter-state political bargaining, there is very little likelihood that the outcome of a treaty process would be better. You have lost this argument,  obviously, so your only recourse is to return to your anti-US mantra and claim that I support US as "overlord."

I think most people can see through this.

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