[governance] Fwd: Final composition of the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation

[Milton L Mueller]

Milton

At the highest level I do agree that there is, to some extent,  a new global public made largely possible by the Internet, and corresponding to it a new global polity, which are worth conceptualising, and then also pursuing at practical levels. I am ready to do both theorising and principles building around such an emergent global public and polity with you, as well as do thought experiments about how the new political structures should and could look like....
Wonderful. Have you read my book yet? ;-) only partly kidding. It is not only mine, but many others you should read if you are serious about "thought experiments" with new political structures. I am not trying to turn you into an academic, but on the other hand mailing lists are not the best place to get carefully thought-out ideas.
Agreed that nation states based representation model is imperfect in the present circumstances. Additional forms of public representations have to explored and developed.
It is not just about "public representation" because that may imply a standard legislative structure with traditional forms of political authority but expanded, frighteningly, to a global scope. There are large parts of the internet, possibly all of it, that should not be governed via that paradigm at all.
So there are a wide variety of new institutional mechanisms for aggregating users and suppliers into policy making processes, such as networked cooperation among ISPs, the mechanisms used by RIRs to elect their ACs and Boards,
But of course these new explorations need to be based on some top level principles. The problem is - and I have articulated it often - I am yet to hear such top level principles for bringing in non nation state based public representative to global governance levels. Neither in fact one sees any progress towards articulating practical models of what really is meant by when for instance Wolfgang says that governments should "share their decision making capacity".
Well, I partly agree that "sharing decision making capacity" is a well-intended, but not terribly meaningful description of a regime. It obfuscates the sticky issues, which we see in livid color in ICANN's GAC.
At the top principles level, two thing come to my mind very strongly

1) Means of selection of non gov representatives of the 'global public' in multistakeholder (MS) processes ( we have seen deep sensitivity in this group against discussing such things)
We may have a conceptual disconnect here if, when you talk about "representatives of the global public," you are talking about a single, hierarchical global legislative - regulatory agency that covers all aspects of "the internet." No system of representation is going to make that a good idea. To me it is first a question of what authority the process has, how it gets that authority and how it is scoped, the degree to which it is voluntary or hierarchical, subject to market discipline, or choice, or not. Those things are primary. Then you can tackle questions about representation.
But to give you a more specific response, I was and still am an advocate of publicly elected ICANN board members. I see no reason why simple electoral democracy, with some  structural safeguards such as regional distribution, should not be used for the board. The standard risks and problems with direct democracy are limited because of the limited scope of ICANN's authority. ICANN would still need a better "constitution" delimiting its authority, and it may well be that the best place to get that constitution in the current world is from an intergovernmental process involving international law with MS participation in its negotiation.
And not all MS participation has to be "representative" - it can also be organized along the lines of the traditional Internet institutions, i.e., open participation by individuals who represent only themselves. Indeed, as a principle the governing well-defined sectors that require specialized knowledge, that can be a very good method.
20 Role of businesses or private sector (one cannot understand that if business is not given a voting role in national polities, on what basis should they get a voting role in global polity, but happy to hear justifications)
All businesses should be expropriated and replaced by the dictatorship of the public interest advocates, in line with the precepts of Parminder-Gurstein thought!
Just kidding.
(Had you there for a moment, no?)
Not all governance is about voting. Markets are a form of governance, one that works well in many, many contexts.
Where general public input is needed, the "open participation by individuals" paradigm does not need to distinguish representation by status. I do not favor corporatist models that try to assign a certain number of representative slots to people based on some category such as "business," "labor" "civil society" or whatever.
However, some aspects of governance _can_ actually best be governed through industry associations where  there is a direct alignment between the economic stakes of the actors and the effectiveness of the overall system. The administration of credit card number assignments, for example, is handled perfectly well by a self-governing industry association. Of course, it is also possible that such systems become cartels or have other adverse public interest effects and need to be broken up or regulated opened up to broader public participation.
I have some problem with the WSIS 'respective role' definition but not going to the extent of claiming that all stakeholders have the same claim to policy making process. Do you say that they an equal role? If not what differential role do you see?

My point of reference, again, is the individual. In that respect all individuals are equal.

Then perhaps US congress' decisions taken without consulting your university may also be considered non binding by your university.

No, because we live under the political authority of the US federal government and have some opportunity to participate in selecting the congress's members. I do not, however, have any representation in the 30 African governments, dozens of European governments, China, Asian countries, etc. who negotiated the WSIS documents.

This is interesting. From below, I understand that by new institutions you mean ICANN, RIR etc. I agree with the existing policy making role of these institutions, and most developing countires like India also agree.... I think it is extremely important we dont confuse narrow technical policy role with larger public policy role in non tech areas like net neutrality, data protection and privacy, ecommerce taxation, cyber security and so on... Are you saying that these new institutions - ICANN etc - should have a role in these latter policy areas as well.

No. their mandate should remain limited.
Most of the issues you list can be handled via standard national regulatory processes. Certainly NN can be and is being so handled. The one clear exception might be cybersecurity, we may need new institutional arramgenets for that; privacy/dp may also be an exception, although there are extensive and quite vigorous national and supra-national regulatory institutions (EC) around that so it probably is not an exception.

Yes, we should stand against any form of arbitrary interventions in legitimate areas of technical policy making by the ICANN system - and the root signing authority of the US government and ICANN's answerability to US jurisdiction today are the two most significant levers for such 'arbitrary' intervention.

Agreed.

Again , pl propose your model. It is difficult to just stand up in the Working Group and say, we want it trans-nationalised, but right now we are not sure what is looks like practically. During preceding discussions I had suggested a few options.
By "Again," are you referring to the fact that you've asked me this question about 3 times before and I have put before you a fairly detailed proposal in response each time, based on the IGP response to the 2009 NTIA RFC?? Forgive me if I pass up another round.





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20130403/015b9a95/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t