SV: [governance] CNAS Commentary: "The Internet Yalta"

Tue Feb 12 06:01:32 EST 2013

Hi

in my eyes, the "Digital Yalta" was in summer 2005 when the USG government published its four IG principles and recognized the "sovereignty" over ccTLDs and got in compensation from China the acceptance (for the time being) of the management of the A-Root Server for the global Internet. So the "deal" was: "If you recognize our sovereignty over our national space we can live we with the global management mechanism as it has emerged from history". 

Neither the Chinese nor the USG had been members of the WGIG but the US Statement came out two weeks after WGIG finished its work (at the isolated Chateau) and two weeks before WGIG presented its results to the public. Well timed!

The outcome of the "hidden deal" was that China was silent during the following PrepCom3 in September 2005. This misguided the EU. The EU was waiting for a Chinese-US battle over "private sector vs. governmental leadership" and prepared a "new cooperation model" in form of a private-public partnership as a compromise. The irony was that there was nothing to compromise anymore between US and China (China got para. 63 and US para. 55). 

When the EU proposed its prepared "new cooperation model" (which gave governments a role on the level of principle and the private sector the leadership for the day-to-day-opreration) PrepCom3 was pulled into a EU-US conflict. The EU proposal looked like the creation of an intergovernmental Internet council and it got support from Syria, Cuba, Russia, Iran and others (not from China). Ther US opposed it and the EU could not explain where the "level of principle" ended and the day-to-day operation starts (Is the introduction of new gTLD a question for the "level of principle" or is it a "day-to-day operation"?). 

The outcome is well known: Instead of a "new cooperation model" (as proposed by the EU) we got a "process of enhanced cooperation". Voila! Welcome backl!   

WCIT is different but it circles around the same key question: National sovereignty in cyberspace. As the Chinese vice-minister has defined this in his speech in Budapest in October 2012 he sees "cybersovereignty" as the "key principle" for Internet Governance and as "an extension of national sovereignty into cyberspace".

What does this mean?  Sovereignty in international law is defined by sovereingty of a territory. How the borderless cyberspace fits into this concept? 

The Russian have a slightly different but similar approach. They use the terminolgy of the "national Internet segment" which also starts with an extended understanding of "national sovereignty". 

This different approaches to the understanding of national sovereignty in cyberpace has indeed the potential to escalate into something like a virtual cold war. This is the geo-political layer. But this conflict is now overlapped by two other layers of conflicts: One is the economic layer and the conflict between the old new economy (telcos, publishers, broadcasters etc.) and the new new economy (search engines, social networks, cloud computing etc.). And there is a social layer which is the conflict about sharing of policy development and decision making in a multistakeholder model among governments, private sector and civil socviety (within western democracies).  

With other words, we will see a growing set of conflicts around IG within the next five yers and a lot of (issue based) rainbow coalitions. This goes beyond the "black or white scheme" of the first cold war of the 1950s/1980s.

An interesting proof of this layered mix of interests and constellation came ot from the consultations civil society had with the US government (Ambassador Kremer and Larry Strickling) when civil society argued that they are WITH the USG in the ITR negotiations but AGAINST the USG in the ACTA negotiations. 

No stable partnerships. It depends from the issue. It starts from values and interests.

My two cents.

Wolfgang    

________________________________

Fra: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org på vegne af Nick Ashton-Hart
Sendt: ti 12-02-2013 07:36
Til: governance at lists.igcaucus.org; Louis Pouzin (well)
Cc: Philipp Mirtl
Emne: Re: [governance] CNAS Commentary: "The Internet Yalta"

I have to say, the whole Cold War analogy post-WCIT is grossly overbaked IMO. I can tell you it is seen as a joke in Geneva amongst delegations (including amongst those accused of being the protagonists/antagonists).

--
Regards,
Nick Ashton-Hart

Sent from my one of my handheld thingies, please excuse linguistic mangling.

On 11 Feb 2013, at 16:22, "Louis Pouzin (well)" <pouzin at well.com> wrote:

	Hi Philipp,

	Congrats for your very perceptive analysis. The fragmentation trend is indeed on the ground already. Do you have any comments on the creeping cyberwar ?

	Best, Louis
	- - -

	On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 1:36 PM, Philipp Mirtl <Philipp.Mirtl at oiip.ac.at> wrote:

		Dear list members,

		For those who are interested, I forward you the link to a recently published commentary on WCIT-12: http://www.cnas.org/theinternetyalta.

		The abstract reads as follows:

		The December 2012 meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) may be the digital equivalent of the February 1945 meeting of the Allied powers in Yalta: the beginning of a long Internet Cold War between authoritarian and liberal-democratic countries. The battles over Internet governance that surfaced at WCIT are not just about competing visions of the Internet, with one side favoring openness and the other security. They are also about two different visions of political power one in which that power is increasingly distributed and includes non-state actors, and one in which state power is dominant. At the Yalta Conference, Western democracies made two fundamental mistakes: first, they allowed naive statements of wishful thinking to supplant actual realities on the ground. Second, they overlooked the risk inherent in permitting ambiguous definitions. Both of these mistakes may have been repeated at WCIT.

		Best regards,

		Philipp Mirtl

		Fellow / Adviser

		sterreichisches Institut fr Internationale Politik (oiip)

		Austrian Institute for International Affairs

		Berggasse 7

		A-1090 WIEN/VIENNA

		Tel: +43-(0)1-581 11 06-29

		Fax: +43-(1)1-581 11 06-10

		E-Mail: philipp.mirtl at oiip.ac.at <mailto:philipp.mirtl at oiip.ac.at> 

		Website: www.oiip.ac.at <http://www.oiip.ac.at/> 

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