[governance] Ex-White House Official Joins Group Fighting "Excessive" Online Privacy Laws

[Milton L Mueller]

I would say that this is a bit rhetorical, but in any case, here you are positioning 'issue networks' as basically advocacy networks, right. No, advocacy oriented issue networks are not the real problem - they are indeed the network age form of policy advocacy. (Although the nature of relationship of civil society actors with corporate and state actors will need to continually be critically scrutinised and analysed even in the network age).

Let me bring you back to what kind of 'issue networks'  we have been discussing here, and I quote Bertrand's last email; "The only viable approach is rather to build on the concept of distributed governance frameworks, and build issue-based governance networks, associating in a transparent and accountable manner the "relevant stakeholders".

To which you responded " Yes, networks focused on specific issues" (Milton)

The above makes it amply clear that we have *not* been discussing advocacy network but discussing 'issue networks as governance mechanisms'. Importantly Bertrand made these comments in relation to the Tunis Agenda imperative for global governance related institutional developments, and indeed closed his email by speaking  of 'enhancec cooperations' in plural. Obviously his 'issue networks' idea has  aclose connection with this term of of 'enhanced cooperations'.

[Milton L Mueller] very good, you clarified this well.

My critique of 'issue networks' is in terms of their employment as new forms of governance systems in a manner that tends to supplant the more institutional democratic governance systems. You may or may not agree with such a critique, but I cant see why you have to divert the debate by accusing me of being against advocacy networks per se, and freedom of political expression...

[Milton L Mueller] didn’t mean to divert, it just sounded to me like you were attacking their right to organize an advocacy network. Clearly, you were not.

By the same token, a governance network in the sense BdlC and I used the term does not necessarily mean a corporatist or business-led network or governance structure. There are some of those, of course, and ICANN is clearly biased in that direction and if you are familiar with my work in that environment you will know that I have systematically resisted it.

The key distinction for me, in that conversation, is whether the governance occurs in a very broad, government-like legislative framework or is narrower in scope.
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