[governance] Towards an Internet Social Forum

[Norbert Klein]

+1

Norbert Klein
Caambodia


On 02/04/2015 06:41 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Sean O Siochru <sean at nexus.ie
> <mailto: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 <mailto:dgolumbia at gmail.com>
>
>
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