[governance] Response to Jeremy's insinuations (was Re: Remarks at UNESCO Closing Ceremony...)

[Norbert Bollow]

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015 15:08:43 -0800
Jeremy Malcolm <jmalcolm at eff.org> wrote:

> I wasn't the one who started propagating the
> idea that multi-stakeholderism and democracy are mutually exclusive.
> I don't believe that they are; on the contrary; multi-stakeholder
> processes aim to deepen democracy.  In particular, contrary to JNC
> assertions, multi-stakeholder Internet governance is not about giving
> companies any additional power to write the rules by which they are
> governed.

I find that Jeremy's insinuations about "JNC assertions" that are quite
serious distortions of our actual positions are getting quite tiresome.

Here is a response with an URL which (contrary to the archives of this
mailing list) can be linked to directly:


http://sustainability.oriented.systems/qirtaiba/

For JNC, “democratic” simply means: democratic. The claims of @qirtaiba
to the contrary are false.

Jeremy Malcolm of EFF [1], tweeting as @qirtaiba, has made the
following claim on twitter in the context of the UNESCO Connecting the
Dots conference [2] in Paris:

    Pondering whether to object to JNC’s addition of “democratic”
    before multi-stakeholder which is code for maintaining primacy of
    governments 

More recently he has also repeated essentially the same claim in a
blogpost [3].

However, what Jeremy claims is the view of the Just Net Coalition (JNC)
[4] on “democratic multi-stakeholderism” is not in any way an actual
position of JNC.

For JNC, “democratic” simply means: democratic.

We insist that just like governance at national levels must be
democratic (which has been internationally accepted as a human right,
even if there are countries where this is not currently implemented
satisfactorily), any and all global governance must also be democratic.

JNC’s foundational document, the Delhi Declaration [5], states this as
follows:

    Globally, there is a severe democratic deficit with regard to
    Internet governance. It is urgently required to establish
    appropriate platforms and mechanisms for global governance of the
    Internet that are democratic and participative. 

We are opposed to any kind of system in which multistakeholderism is
implemented in a way that is not democratic.

We are not opposed to participative mechanisms for global governance of
the Internet. In fact we explicitly demand, in our foundational
document, mechanisms for global governance of the Internet which are
democratic and participative.

This demand has nothing whatsoever to do with what Jeremy claims is our
goal, which he describes as a “limited type of government-led
rulemaking”. That would clearly not be participative.

We insist that Internet governance must be democratic and participative.

Now, Jeremy could perhaps be excused in thinking that “democratic” must
necessarily be meant as a reference to governments if no proposal had
been made of any model of governance which is both democratic and
participative. However that is not the case. In fact it is part of the
public record that Jeremy is well-aware since 2012 of my proposal for
the development of public policy documents by means of global
open-participation multistakeholder processes, where I propose that it
would be national parliaments which make decisions about policy options
where no consensus is reached: Jeremy himself invited me to present
this proposal at the initial “Best Bits” meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan.
(The current version of this poposal is here. [6])

[In case someone might be wondering whether Jeremy might simply have
forgotten about my concrete proposal for making Internet governance
inclusive as well as democratic: I don’t think so, because Jeremy’s
other recent blogpost [7] is so full of factually false assertions in
relation to JNC and some of the most active people in JNC (including
myself) that explaining it all as an honest mistake is in my view
clearly no longer possible. A point-by-point response to that older
blogpost is here. [8]]

There may be other possible approaches to designing governance
processes so that they are democratic as well as participative. This is
a topic that needs further discussion.

In my view, the central question in relation to open-participation
multistakeholder processes, which makes them democratic or
non-democratic, is this: What happens if no consensus is reached? In
the current system of Internet governance, lack of consensus means too
often that no governance decision is taken and therefore businesses are
free to act with unlimited irresponsibility, in whatever way they
choose (or are compelled to act by state surveillance demands, which
are in many cases in direct violation of human rights). As a result,
the current governance system (as a whole) for the Internet is not
democratic.

Greetings,
Norbert

[1] http://eff.org
[2] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/netconference2015
[3]
http://igfwatch.org/discussion-board/unesco-resists-jncs-attempt-to-turn-democracy-against-ordinary-internet-users
[4] http://justnetcoalition.org/
[5] http://justnetcoalition.org/delhi-declaration
[6] http://wisdomtaskforce.org/
[7]
http://igfwatch.org/discussion-board/who-are-the-just-net-coalition-and-what-can-we-expect-from-the-internet-social-forum
[8] http://justnetcoalition.org/reply-jeremy-malcolm

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