[governance] JNC perspective on making Internet governance democratic (was Re: URGENT: Last call...)

Jeremy Malcolm jmalcolm at eff.org
Fri Nov 21 12:47:17 EST 2014


On 21/11/2014 5:22 am, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> JNC certainly has every intention of working hard to convince many of
> those who are currently unconvinced of the importance and feasibility
> of making Internet governance democratic. Greetings, Norbert 

Whilst such evangelical zeal is - I suppose - admirable, do you really
think that is going to be productive, rather than just compounding the
discord you have already caused?  As you know full well, none of those
whom you are addressing accept for a moment that their ideal of
multi-stakeholder Internet governance is undemocratic, as JNC insists it is.

Neither are they naïve babes in the wood who haven't fully thought
through their positions, over in some cases a decade or longer.  I can
assure you that there will not be some sudden transformation, as along
the road to Damascus, where the scales fall from our eyes and we convert
to the JNC ideology, if only you berate us about our sins for long enough.

I am not saying that there is no value in you developing a socialist
critique of emerging multi-stakeholder global governance norms for which
others are advocating. But recognise that your audience for that
critique is always going to be limited, and you are not going to win
over hearts and minds with these continued personal attacks - you are
only going to continue to alienate people.

The rather quite despicable slur that Michael levied against Anriette
and APC about not being concerned with social justice is a paradigm
example of this - I'm not claiming that it alienated Anriette and I
certainly don't expect that it will silence her, but it may certainly
alienate and silence others who respect her and APC's many years of
selfless service.

As Ian alluded to in a recent mail, what you are doing is simply driving
people away, either completely out of the conversation, or at least into
a stated of cowed silence where they afraid to voice their opinions. If
ever you seem to have "won" the debate, it will only be because they are
frightened to contribute to it for fear of retribution, or because they
have moved their discussions to closed lists where you are not present
(indeed this is already happening).

JNC needs to have a long, hard think about whether this is what you
really want.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Global Policy Analyst
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://eff.org
jmalcolm at eff.org

Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161

:: Defending Your Rights in the Digital World ::


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