[governance] The Political Economy of Cyberspace Masters of the Internet

[parminder]

The Political Economy of Cyberspace Masters of the Internet
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/07/masters-of-the-internet/
FEBRUARY 07, 2013

The Political Economy of Cyberspace
Masters of the Internet
by DAN SCHILLER
The geopolitics of the Internet broke open during the first half of 
December at an international conference in Dubai convened by 
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN affiliate agency 
with 193 national members. At these meetings, states (thronged 
by corporate advisors) forge agreements to enable international 
communications via cables and satellites. These gatherings, however 
boring and bureaucratic, are crucial because of the enormous importance 
of networks in the operation of the transnational political economy.

The December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications 
(WCIT) in Dubai produced a major controversy: should ITU members vest 
the agency with oversight responsibilities for the Internet, 
responsibilities comparable to those it has exercised for decades for 
other forms of international communication?

The United States said no, and the US position won out: the new ITU 
treaty document did not grant the agency a formal role in what has come 
to be called “global Internet governance”. However, a majority of 
countries voted to attach a resolution “invit[ing] member states 
to elaborate on their respective position on international 
Internet-related technical, development and public policy issues within 
the mandate of the ITU at various ITU fora.” Objecting to “even symbolic 
global oversight”, as a New York Times writer put it (1), the US refused 
to sign the treaty and walked away. So did France, Germany, Japan, 
India, Kenya, Colombia, Canada, Britain and other nations. However, more 
than two-thirds of the attending countries — 89 all told — endorsed the 
document. (And some of the nations that did not sign may accept 
the treaty later.)

To understand what is at stake we need to make our way through the 
rhetorical smog. For months prior to the WCIT, the Euro-American press 
trumpeted warnings that this was to be an epochal clash between 
upholders of an open Internet and would-be government usurpers, led by 
authoritarian states like Russia, Iran and China. The terms of reference 
were set so rigidly that one European telecom company executive called 
it a campaign of “propaganda warfare” (2).

Freedom of expression is no trifling issue. No matter where we live, 
there is reason for worry that the Internet’s relative openness is 
being usurped, corroded or canalised. This does not necessarily imply 
armies of state censors or “great firewalls”. The US National 
Security Agency, for example, sifts wholesale through electronic 
transmissions transiting satellite and cable networks, through its 
extensive “listening posts” and its gigantic new data centre at 
Bluffdale Utah (3); and the US government has gone after a true 
proponent of freedom of expression — WikiLeaks — in deadly earnest. US 
Internet companies such as Facebook and Google have transformed the Web 
into a “surveillance engine” to vacuum up commercially profitable data 
about users’ behaviour.

Interests Concealed

Even during the 1970s, the rhetoric of “free flow of information” had 
long functioned as a central tenet of US foreign policy. During the era 
of decolonisation and cold war the doctrine purported to be a shining 
beacon, lighting the world’s way to emancipation from imperialism 
and state repression. Today it continues to paint deep-seated economic 
and strategic interests in an appealing language of universal 
human rights. “Internet freedom”, “freedom to connect”, “net freedom” — 
terms circulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and 
Google executives together in the run-up to the WCIT — are today’s 
version of the longstanding “free flow” precept. But just as before, 
“Internet freedom” is a red herring. Calculatingly manipulative, it 
tells us to entrust a fundamental human right to a pair of powerfully 
self-interested social actors: corporations and states.

The deliberations at the WCIT were multifaceted, and encompassed 
crosscutting issues. One was the terms of trade between 
Internet services like Google and the companies that transport their 
voluminous data streams — network operators and ISPs like Verizon, 
Deutsche Telekom or Free. This business fight harbours implications for 
a more general and important policy issue: who should pay for the 
continual modernisations of network infrastructure on which recurrent 
augmentations and enhancements of Internet service depend. Xavier 
Niel’s bold attack on Google’s French revenues, when he implemented an 
ad-blocker as his Free network’s default setting, placed this issue 
in bold relief before the public. But the terms of trade in the global 
Internet industry are also important because any general edict that 
content providers must pay network operators — Niel’s goal, similar to 
that of other telecom companies — would carry grave consequences for 
the Net Neutrality policies which have been so vital for Internet users.

Until now, this power has been wielded disproportionately by the US (4). 
During the 1990s, when the web-centric Internet exploded onto the world 
stage, the US made intense efforts to institutionalise its management 
role. Domain names led by dotcom, and numerical web addresses and 
network identifiers, need to be unique for the system to operate; and 
the ability to assign them in turn establishes a point from which 
institutional power may be projected over the extraterritorial Internet. 
Management of these critical Internet resources is exercised by a US 
agency, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under contract 
to the US Department of Commerce. The IANA operates ostensibly as a unit 
of a separate, and seemingly more accountable, California-based 
non-profit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers (ICANN). Technical standards for the Internet are developed by 
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture 
Board (IAB) within another non-profit corporation, the Internet Society. 
The composition and funding of these organisations render them more 
responsive to US preferences than to users’ demands (5).

The leading global commercial Internet sites are not operated by Chinese 
or Russian, let alone by Kenyan or Mexican capital. As everyone knows, 
it is Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon that have built up 
the dotcom services used by people all over the world. And a widening 
array of commodification projects and corporate commodity chains 
continues to be predicated on cross-border flows of Internet data; 
today’s ongoing transition schillerdigito “cloud computing” services 
will further widen this dependence. The Internet’s unbalanced control 
structure provides an essential basis for US corporate and military 
supremacy in cyberspace. While the US government exercises an outsized 
role, other states possess scant opportunity — individually or 
collectively — to regulate the system. By instituting various technical 
and legal measures, of course, they may exercise sovereignty over their 
domestic Internets; but even when they stake out these merely national 
jurisdictions, they are assailed by US policymakers. Milton Mueller 
aptly captures this asymmetry in observing that, as it is presently 
constituted, the Internet embodies a US policy of “unilateral globalism” 
(6).

Property logic

Exercising this management function has permitted the US to instil 
property-logic at the heart of Internet system development — through 
ICANN. Although it is a complex, semi-autonomous institution, ICANN’s 
power over the Domain Name System was deployed to confer 
extraterritorial advantages on corporate trademark owners and other 
property interests — over the protests of non-commercial organisations 
which, despite being represented within ICANN, found themselves unable 
to prevail over Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and other big companies. And 
ICANN used private contract law to bind to its rules the far-flung 
organisations which administer generic and country code top-level 
domains worldwide. National providers of various Internet applications 
control their domestic markets in a number of countries, including 
Russia, China and the Republic of Korea. Yet the transnational Internet 
services — the most profitable and strategic points in this 
extraterritorial system — are citadels built by US capital and state power.

Nearly from the outset, other nations have resisted their subordinate 
status. As signs that the US was not about to relinquish its 
control grew, so did opposition. It helped prompt a series of 
high-profile meetings — the World Summit on the Information Society, 
organised by the ITU and held in Geneva and Tunis between 2003 and 2005.

This World Summit was an explicit precursor of the 2012 clash in Dubai, 
in that it established at least a small beachhead for states 
(beside that of the US) in global Internet governance. ICANN’s 
“Government Advisory Committee”, charged with providing input to the 
organisation’s “multi-stakeholder” process, grants governments the same 
formal status as corporations and civil society groups. Many states 
actually might have been content with this curious arrangement, but for 
one glaring fact. For all the crowing about bottom-up diversity and 
multi-stakeholderism, global Internet governance was not an egalitarian, 
or even a pluralist, enterprise. It was patent that stakeholder 
number one was the US Executive Branch.

The demise of the unipolar moment, followed by the plunge into what has 
become a long world depression, greatly accentuated and widened 
interstate conflict over the political economy of cyberspace. Other 
governments continued to look for a point of leverage, from which they 
could attempt to open up global Internet coordination and management. In 
2010-11 they even appealed directly to the US Department of Commerce, 
when it began a proceeding to evaluate its contract renewal with IANA 
for the management of Internet addresses. Quite extraordinarily, several 
countries and one international organisation — the ITU — submitted 
formal comments. The government of Kenya proposed a “transition” away 
from management of the IANA functions by the US Department of Commerce, 
and toward a multilateral government-centred regime. US control should 
be modified by globalising the arrangements for the entire 
institutional superstructure that had been built up around Internet 
names and addresses. India, Mexico, Egypt and China made strikingly 
similar submissions.

Dan Schiller is professor at the University of Illinois 
(Urbana-Champaign) and author of ‘Digital Capitalism: Networking the 
Global Market Systems’ (MIT Press, Cambridge, US, 2000)

Notes.

(1) Eric Pfanner, “Message, if murky, from U.S. to world”, The New York 
Times, 15 December 2012.

(2) Rachel Sanderson and Daniel Thomas, “US under fire after telecoms 
treaty talks fail”, Financial Times, London, 17 December 2012.

(3) James Bamford, “The NSA is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy 
Center”, Wired, San Francisco, April 2012.

(4) Dwayne Winseck, “Big New Global Threat to the Internet or Paper 
Tiger? The ITU and Global Internet Regulation”, 10 June 
2012; dwmw.wordpress.com

(5) Harold Kwalwasser, “Internet Governance”,Cyberpower and National 
Security, National Defense University Press-Potomac 
Press, Washington-Dulles, 2009.

(6) Milton L Mueller, Networks and States: the Global Politics of 
Internet Governance, MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 2010.

(7) L Gordon Crovitz, “America’s first big digital defeat”,The Wall 
Street Journal, New York, 17 December 2012.

The US responded by ratcheting up the rhetoric of “Internet freedom” as 
an attempt to repel the escalating threat to its management control. No 
doubt it has intensified its bilateral lobbying to induce some of the 
dissenting states to come back into the fold. The effects became evident 
at the WCIT, when India and Kenya joined the US in rejecting the treaty.

What will happen now? It’s certain that US government agencies and 
leading units of Internet capital such as Google will continue to 
project all the power at their disposal to strengthen the US-centric 
Internet, and to discredit its opponents. The political challenge to the 
US’s “global unilateralism”, however, now has broken into the open — 
where it is certain to remain. A Wall Street Journal editorialist did 
not hesitate to call Dubai “America’s first big digital defeat” (7).

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose 
English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full 
text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch 
features two or three articles from LMD every month.
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