[governance] Towards an Internet Social Forum

Fri Feb 6 02:30:04 EST 2015

Hmmm...

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From: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org
[mailto:governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Malcolm
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2015 4:17 PM
To: governance at lists.igcaucus.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Towards an Internet Social Forum

On 5/02/2015 3:20 pm, michael gurstein wrote:
> Unfortunately Jeremy, your "balanced framing" begs the most fundamental
questions, which I, at least, have been asking for some specific answer for,
for some time (this is at least the 3rd time that I have presented the
following questions in one or another form).

Each time you've asked you've been answered, so I'm not sure that anything I
could say would satisfy you, even if I had the time to reply at length which
I don't.  So just some quick points.

[MG>] and a few in return... (and yes, each time I've been "answered" with
similar statements as below i.e. statements of the "well we can't point to
anything right now but come back in xxx years or so and we'll have a good
set of MS models to show you...; circular and self-reflexive
arguments/definitions;  pointing to unpublished Ph.D. theses; that sort of
thing... hardly the stuff for replacing 3000 years of building popular
democracy and hardly sufficient (hopefully) to persuade us to all stampede
towards governance by unelected elites unless you are already committed in
that direction...

> Perhaps now would be a good time for you or someone to actually give some
detail on what is meant by:
> a. multstakeholder models--which ones, how are they structured, what are
the internal/external accountability mechanisms etc.etc.--you know the
normal things that people might expect to know if they are being asked to
commit their and our futures to these "models"--or are we all now to give up
these questions since the elites have decided that these matters are of
interest and are seeming to be proceeding with or without the consent of the
governed.

Many of the fundamentals are covered in the NETmundial principles, but the
operationalisation of these principles remains a work in progress. 
For ICANN that work has been ongoing 17 years, for the IGF it has been
10 years... but the Westminster system took about 300 years to develop to
where it is, so your demand for a comprehensive blueprint now seems a bit
unreasonable.  Having said that, a number of us including me have put
forward some quite specific proposals, which I can point you to. 
The NETmundial meeting itself also shows what becomes possible where the
political will is there.

[MG>] This is the best you can do? Describing the governance model to which
you are asking the world to entrust the electronic infrastructure which
increasingly underlies all aspects of daily life--as "a work in progress";
as the "work" of a thoroughly bloated out of control agency living very high
off the hog on their accountable Internet tax revenue whose governance model
on seems to be to spend a zillion dollars ferrying anyone who seems to have
an interest to every possible exotic 5 star hotel location anywhere in the
world, wining and dining this thoroughly compromised army into stupefaction
and then calling that governance; as a bunch of half cooked proposals
squirreled away in inaccessible jargon and inaccessible blogs; and as a one
two day event organized to respond to an Internet calamity and then hijacked
to support the interests of precisely those who sponsored the calamity...
hmmm....

> b. democratic representation--okay, now you have used the "D" word--what
exactly do you mean and how does this fit into the above "models" (and
please no vague hand waving about an equally undefined "participatory
democracy"

There are reams of literature on this, have you read any of it?  Or for an
overview, see
http://igfwatch.org/discussion-board/a-civil-society-agenda-for-internet-gov
ernance-in-2013-internet-freedom-in-a-world-of-states-part-3. 
For the next IGF there is a proposal (on which I'm a advisor) to hold a
deliberative poll.  It doesn't mean that everyone in the world has to be
involved, it means that about 300 people who cover all significantly
affected perspectives should be involved.

[MG>] I (re)read the blog post you pointed to and what I got was a rather
repetitive set of circular definitions defining MSist "democracy" as being
"how MSism is currently operating".  So MSism is fundamentally democratic
because MSism is how democracy is defined (according to the blogpost) ... If
it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then by (my) definition it must
be a dog because I want it to be...

> c.  "global Internet governance in which governments ... not a priori have
the lead role"--who in the absence of governments then does have the lead
role, how is their role determined, who decides who has the lead role in
which circumstance, how (if at all) are those alternatively in the "lead
role" to be held externally accountable, what are their internal processes
of accountability in these alternative modalities, how is
representitivity/inclusivity maintained/ensured (or perhaps it doesn't
matter?) in the absence of some form of anchored democratic processes.

I posted about this yesterday in response to Parminder.

 [MG>] Which as I recall was less an answer than another circular
argument... According to your post we resolve issues of accountability and
jurisdiction as between governments and multistakeholder processes by
developing additional multistakeholder processes to address these issues and
presumably we resolve issues for governing those processes by developing
further MS processes and turtles on turtles as far as the eye can see (with
nary a reference to a democratic process or democratic accountability
anywhere up or down the line...

Quite frankly I'm still waiting for something on MSism with some substance
and depth to discuss.  One of the reasons for the degeneration in the level
of debate is that the debate is so conceptually lopsided.  Without something
serious to discuss concerning what is meant by MSism and the MS model in
broader Internet Governance all that is possible is the verbal ping pong
which everyone is so bored with.

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

Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161

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