[governance] RE: [bestbits] What is 1Net? Blog post by Paul Wilson of APNIC

[Milton L Mueller]

I might add one other thing.

When Paul Wilson and other representatives of I* governance organizations happily concede that 'governments are stakeholders too' I believe that what they are doing is proposing a political bargain, not a coherent mode of governance.

In other words, they are trying to reach an accommodation with nation-states that will preserve key elements of the status quo by reassuring state actors that they will not be left out of or excluded from the system. By calling states-as-unitary-actors "stakeholders" who must be specially accommodated through contradictory and dysfunctional arrangements like the GAC, they are literally compromising what we know about how MS governance works in order to buy greater political support for the new institutions from the old institutions.

Think of Britain topping of its emerging democracy with a monarchy, if you want a historical analogy. Democracy and monarchy are fundamentally incompatible forms of government, and ultimately one must prevail over the other, but in the transitional period you are bound to get weird, path-dependent mixes of the two.

Of course, most of us are not parties to such a bargain. It does not serve our interests, and in fact it warps the entire bottom up policy development process.


________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] on behalf of Milton L Mueller [mueller at syr.edu]
Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2013 12:53 PM
To: Andrea Glorioso; governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Subject: [governance] RE: [bestbits] What is 1Net? Blog post by Paul Wilson of APNIC



> even though I agree with your passage that "Governments qua governments are supposed to aggregate
> and represent all the "stakeholders" under their jurisdiction", I'm not sure I fully understand the
> implications. What would then be the role of governments / public authorities in a multi-stakeholder
> governance model?

Two possible roles.

1. One would be to provide a generic legal framework (e.g., incorporation law for nonprofits or INGOs). With that in place governments can simply formally recognize a non-state MS process as authoritative in its domain and then stay out of it. Do not underestimate the importance of this role. True, it does not satisfy the ego of politicians and ministers who think they need to be the ones directing outcomes or 'in control' of the internet. But it does provide the social function that govts are supposed to provide: general rules that establish an orderly and just way of doing things while allowing social actors to pursue their own interests in creative and innovative ways. The fallacy of GAC is that it invites govts to make "policy" when their proper role is to make law, and it has the potential to give the full force of law to the policy opinions of a small collection of govt representatives assembled in a room at an ICANN meeting, with no normal procedural checks and balances or legal basis.

2. Govts can also be 'stakeholders' and participate as 'stakeholders' but only if they abandon the pretense of being a unitary actor, disaggregate their representation, and allow any and every agency to pursue its organizational self-interest in an open MS process. E.g. law enforcement agencies might be interested in some policies and processes and not others, the data protection authorities might intervene in ways different from and even opposed to the LEAs, the departmental CIOs might have an interest in issues that are irrelevant to Foreign Ministries and War Departments, individual Parliamentarians may intervene in ways opposed to official state policy, etc.

This kind of governmental participation in an MS process raises the same concerns as those of the participation of a bloc of large corporations with specific economic interests, of course, but at least it is more transparent what is going on.



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