[governance] Towards an Internet Social Forum

[David Golumbia]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Sean O Siochru <sean at nexus.ie> wrote:

>
> However, in anything I said above, I did not mention decision-making - it
> was about *discussion and debate*, and about trying to establish what is
> in the public interest and trying to influence other - including the wider
> public - to these points of view. This is the public sphere.
>
> International decision-making, and the appropriate structures to take more
> or less binding decisions, are not the same.  And this is where government
> do have a privileged role. I think this is what Avri is referring to:  "sovereign
> special rights on international Internet public policy issues" i.e.
> governments having special rights to take decisions.
>
>
Because I appreciated Sean's email very much, and agreed with nearly
everything in it, I wanted to reiterate the sharp distinction he makes
above. I do this in part because the follow-up messages have not always
seemed to acknowledge it.

*Discussion and debate*, within democratic governance, can and should take
any number of forms. All "stakeholders" can and should be involved. That
doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about the best ways for them to occur in any
given situation, but there should be and can be no particular restrictions
on the forms of such debates.

*Actual decisions and formally binding agreements* must be handled through
existing governmental systems. If you reject this--and I do read some here
and elsewhere in these discussions to be rejecting it--then you are
rejecting fundamental aspects of our current political system that are
widely understood as foundations of democracy. If you want to debate this
question and suggest alternative systems, fine. We should debate it. But
until this system is replaced with one that a vast majority agrees is as
democratic or more democratic than the current one, through a process that
is itself democratic, it is unacceptable for anyone but the duly-appointed
(and usually elected) officials to make those rules or enforce those laws.
Such actions are very literally *antidemocratic *unless those systems that
the vast majority of the population in most democratic polities takes to be
democratic assent to them.

I sit far outside the halls of governance, internet or otherwise, but I do
not have to look far to see companies like Google, Facebook, and Uber
repeatedly challenging exactly the formal role of government to make these
decisions, without the required public debate and governmental assent
required by democratic principles, often using rhetoric that suggests in
Alice-in-Wonderland fashion that it is somehow antidemocratic for
democratic governments to enforce their own laws, and it's hard for me to
imagine that same logic doesn't occur at every level of these discussions
(and I have quite a bit of evidence that it does occur there).

Obviously the existence of national and international standards-setting
bodies--some authorized and some not authorized by governmental
bodies--results in a lot of grey areas regarding what is and is not a
decision or binding agreement. However, given the centrality of democratic
principles to the world we currently live in, no matter how thoroughly
corrupted and benighted, there is every reason to err on the side of what
those principles require. The more "the internet" becomes a part of every
aspect of life, the more it should honor principles that the world has
spent hundreds of years developing, even if--*especially *if--what
ultimately results are new systems that honor those principles even more
fully.

-- 
David Golumbia
dgolumbia at gmail.com
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