[governance] Fwd: [Isf] Fwd: [alai-amlat-en] A Social Forum to build a people’s Internet

Fri Apr 3 02:36:04 EDT 2015

Please see below, and enclosed in the 'Tunis Call for a People's
Internet' given and approved at various meetings, including the workshop
on an Internet Social Forum, at the recently concluded World Social
Forum... parminder

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[Isf] Fwd: [alai-amlat-en] A Social Forum to build a people’s
Internet
Date: 	Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:07:21 -0500
From: 	Sally Burch - ALAI <sburch at alainet.org>
To: 	isf at internetsocialforum.net

(Spanish version / versión español:
http://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/168590)

A Social Forum to build a peoples Internet

ALAI

ALAI AMLAT-en, 02/04/2015.- While social movements and actors worldwide
have integrated the Internet and cyberspace as a key dimension of their
practices of work, organization and coordination, their inclusion as a
topic of political and strategic debate has been, up to now, relatively
marginal; an instrumental view of the Internet still predominates.  At
most, the debate is taking place in the realm of communications, when in
fact it is also about a new dimension of economics, politics, culture
and the social order, with huge implications for power rearrangements
and for the future of democracy itself.

The proposal to organize a Thematic Social Forum about the Internet,
presented at the World Social Forum 2015, which recently ended in Tunis
(24-29 March), seeks to trace a path to expand this vision, while
opening a debate towards building a common agenda on these issues.

The initiative, which already has close to a hundred organizations
signed on, and received explicit support in several spaces of the WSF,
states in its presentation text(1) that: "... we are alarmed to see how
both our private and public spaces are being co-opted and controlled for
private gain; how private corporations are carving the public Internet
into walled spaces; how our personal data is being manipulated and
proprietised; how a global surveillance society is emerging, with little
or no privacy; how information on the Internet is being arbitrarily
censored, and people's right to communicate curtailed; and, how the
Internet is being militarised. Meanwhile, decision-making on public
policy matters relating to the Internet remains dangerously removed from
the mechanisms of democratic governance."

It also proposes that the Internet Social Forum (ISF) should be a space
to discuss "the Internet we want and how to build it", that is, an
Internet for the people; indeed, this is urgent "before the knowledge
and access-to-information revolution is irretrievably captured by
corporate interests and security agencies that will deepen the nexus of
corruption between politics and money."

But, why would an Internet Social Forum be the best option? The UN World
Summit on the Information Society (2003 and 2005), where civil society
organizations agreed on a vision and proposals focused on communication
rights(2), defined a "multistakeholder" model for the global follow-up
entities (ie involving governments, private sector and civil society).
In practice, this has inhibited the creation of a specific space to
develop discourse and a framework for proposals clearly located within
an anti-neoliberal vision, able to criticize and generate resistance to
the growing monopoly control over Internet of the big transnational
corporations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and others). The World
Social Forum appears an ideal space to do so.

Moreover, the WSF facilitates convergence with other social struggles
and action agendas: among others, in Tunis the ISF initiative entered
into dialogue with the convergence of resistance to transnational
corporations and the convergence on the right to communicate. The
International Council of the WSF is including the ISF in its calendar of
activities for next year.

In Tunis, the organizing bodies of the workshop on "Organizing an
Internet Social Forum - A call to occupy Internet" extended the
invitation to other organizations that share the WSF Charter of
Principles (3) to join the initiative, under the modality of an open and
democratic space. Among the first things to consider will be the
definition of the place, date and mode of organization of the ISF.

(1)  http://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/168669
(2)  https://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/civil-society-declaration-es.pdf
(3)  http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=2

URL of this article:  http://alainet.org/en/articulo/168670

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