[governance] Towards an Internet Social Forum

Wed Feb 4 03:39:47 EST 2015

Hi

Excellent post Anriette, I agree on all points. Guilt by association with those advocating for different interests is not a path to mutual understanding and consensus, irrespective of whether it is pro-multistakeholder people criticizing pro-intergovernemental people or vice versa.   We should be trying to make both kinds of institutional arrangements work better from a CS standpoint, and the only way to do that is to engage.

The one key bit where I disagree with Sean is the notion, also invoked this morning by David, that multistakeholder agenda setting and debate is fine but actual decisions and formally binding agreements must be intergovernmental.  This is simply not how it works now in large areas of global IG, and to me at least it is literally inconceivable that an intergovernmental monopoly on decisions pertaining to names, numbers, technical standards, network security, e-commerce and other bits would have produced better results in the past or will happen and do so in the future.  So some of us try to work in the relevant multistakeholder spaces and make them better by inter alia attenuating the levels of ‘capture’ by powerful interests.  We win some and more often we lose some, just like in intergovernmental bodies.  But as Woody Allen said, 80 percent of life is just showing up.

Best

Bill

> On Feb 3, 2015, at 9:48 PM, Anriette Esterhuysen <anriette at apc.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear all (apologies for long message)
> 
> Thanks to Sean for his positive message. I agree with him that "Its possible to plausibly
> stake out a lot more common ground" between - he quotes from Avri's message - "those who support
> multistakeholder distributed mechanisms on Internet policy issues and 
> those who support sovereign special rights on international Internet
> public policy".
> 
> At least one way of achieving this is to avoid the tendency to posit dichotomies - for
> example to say (and it has been said more than once on this list) that
> civil society groups who work for the respect and promotion of human
> rights on the internet have abandoned the struggle for social
> justice. 
> 
> There are many people in civil society broadly
> that work for both. Human rights comprises civil and political rights
> and economic and social rights. At the level of people's
> everyday reality these rights are indivisible from one another and
> from social justice. The struggle for gender equality is a struggle
> for both. And without the right to free expression, and without a
> free media, it is impossible for people to speak out against economic
> policies and political practice that deepens social injustice. 
> 
> 
> In South Africa the only reason why we are still
> able to talk about social injustice, and government policies that
> entrench social inequality is because we still have freedom of
> expression - something that did not exist here until after the demise
> of apartheid.
> 
> 
> Efforts by the South African government to limit
> press freedom, and increase the State's ability to keep secrets, are
> constant and both direct and indirect, but they are resisted by all
> other than the political class. All you need to do is to look at
> http://www.r2k.org.za/ <http://www.r2k.org.za/> to see how interlinked social justice and
> human rights struggles are in South Africa. And I am sure this is not
> that different in most other parts of the world. 
> 
> 
> Respect for human rights is part of what is
> needed to create more equal societies and a fairer distribution of
> power and resources. It is not enough, but it is a very important
> dimension of a broader struggle for social, economic and
> environmental justice. 
> 
> 
> It is important to acknowledge that part of the
> reason that civil and political rights have had more attention than
> economic, social, and cultural rights, is because powerful
> governments and corporations promote these rights (selectively of
> course) for their own interests. 
> 
> 
> But that doesn't mean that those from CS who
> have been fighting for human rights online have sold out, or that
> civil and political rights on the internet are not important. It does
> mean that we need to find better strategies to make progress on
> economic, social and cultural rights, as well as on achieving social
> justice.
> 
> 
> New forums such as the Internet Social Forum
> will be, I hope, such a strategy. It should be able to succeed on its
> own merits/values rather than on deligitimising work that is already
> being done by others. Acknowledging work already under way, and
> challenging/supporting it to expand on how human rights are
> understood in the online environment to include ESCR and social
> justice will achieve far more in my view, than trying to discredit
> existing efforts.
> 
> 
> Another problematic claim made on this list is
> that people from civil society who supported the NETmundial outcome
> statement (many of those who were supportive, including APC, had some
> reservations - see http://www.apc.org/en/node/19224 <http://www.apc.org/en/node/19224>) and who engage
> in multistakeholder initiatives have 'sold out' and that all they are
> doing is legitimising these spaces.
> 
> 
> Firstly, it is simply not accurate to imply that
> civil society activists who participate in spaces that are dominated
> by either businesses or governments have inevitably been co-opted by
> those spaces. 
> 
> 
> This cannot be assumed to be true for civil
> society who work in intergovernmental spaces such as the ITU where
> civil society has very little influence other than working through
> government delegations or for civil society working in
> multi-stakeholder policy spaces such as ICANN.
> 
> 
> Efforts to bring about change in policy and in
> behaviour requires engaging those you disagree with. It also requires
> forming coalitions and alliances, but unless those like-minded
> alliances interact with actors they disagree with, they are not
> likely to have much impact. Interaction takes many shapes: protest,
> challenge, debate. It involves finding out where lines of division
> are drawn, and also where there is possible common ground or
> leverage.
> 
> 
> I have never attended a WEF meeting but
> left-wing colleagues from South African  and international civil
> society involved in the campaign for access to medicines (HIV
> retrovirals and TB meds) as well as those involved in GCAP (Global
> Campaign Against Poverty) and climate change attend repeatedly to
> speak out and to challenge business and governments. Their presence
> in Davos does not necessarily mean they have been coopted. In the
> campaign for access to medicines spaces like the WEF were an
> important battle ground and was used by civil society to gain
> government support to force pharmaceutical companies to change.
> 
> 
> Secondly, to say that that civil society
> participation in problematic bodies like the NETmundial Initiative
> will achieving nothing other than legitimising them is questionable.
> It will take far more than the presence of a few individuals from
> civil society to legitimise the NMI. The NMI will rise or fall on
> what it achieves and how transparent and inclusive its processes are.
> Those of us who are involved are trying our best to use the NMI as an
> opportunity to support the initiative started by the Brazilian
> government with the NETmundial to deepen the understanding and
> practice of multi-stakeholder governance, to take the best we can
> from the Marco Civil and the experience of the CGI.br <http://cgi.br/> and make it go
> further.
> 
> 
> Of course there are different, and likely
> conflicting, agendas in the NMI. But are there not conflicting
> agendas in intergovernmental UN spaces? 
> 
> 
> Sean, I fully share your view that UN spaces are
> incredibly important and I also believe that our ultimate goal must
> be to transform both global and national governance environments.
> 
> 
> To achieve social justice civil society needs to
> challenge both governments and businesses. To challenge them (and
> their often complicit behaviour) we need to recognise that neither
> 'sector' is homogeneous, and we have to work in both
> intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder spaces.
> 
> 
> However, I question the assumption that 
> multistakeholder policy spaces are more 'captured' by business interests than intergovernmental spaces are.
> 
> 
> In my experience this is simply not true. A case
> in point would be the mobile phone industry in Africa. It is rare to
> find them in multistakeholder internet governance spaces. It is
> common to find them at intergovernmental meetings and in
> policy-making processes at national level. You don't have to scratch
> very deep to identify which form of 'governance' serves their
> interests best. It is not multi-stakeholder.
> 
> 
> As a broad based forum of civil society
> organisations and individuals working for public interest oriented
> internet governance we (by 'we' I include many if not most people on
> this list) should be able to benefit from being involved in different
> types of IG platforms/institutions. In my view it is an advantage
> that some people on this list are close to the ITU, or have ITU
> membership (as I am happy to say APC has since the Plenipot).
> Similarly it is in our interest that some of us work closely with
> their national governments, while others participate in ICANN, the
> NMI, or the IETF. 
> 
> 
> The notion that only those who have rejected
> engagement with multi-stakeholder spaces or approaches have a
> legitimate claim to being part of the struggle for social justice
> undermines our ability to collaborate, to deepen our analysis, and,
> to be constructively critical of ourselves in ways that can help us
> be more effective.
> 
> 
> I don't want to minimise political differences
> in civil society. Differences are real - but this space has become so
> dominated by judgemental assumptions and lack of respect for one
> another that we don't get to talk about these differences in a
> helpful way. Let's argue those differences out in the form of
> concrete interventions in policy processes rather than at the level
> of personal or ideological accusations. 
> 
> 
> If the Internet Social Forum creates a new space
> for collaboration and linkages with broader civil society and social
> movements it can be a dynamic and important new channel for civil
> society working for fair inclusive public-interest oriented internet
> governance.
> 
> 
> If it is exclusive and judgemental, and
> dismissive of the many people and organisations (including on this
> list) who do not use the same jargon and who have not jumped on any
> bandwagon in the polarised discussion that dominates this list, it
> will deepen divisions and is not likely to be very effective in
> meeting
> is stated goals.
> 
> 
> It is also not helpful when people assume that 
> the ISF will be exclusive, judgemental, unwelcoming. Let's give it a
> chance, participate, and use this opportunity to expand existing efforts.
> 
> 
> Anriette
> 

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