[governance] <nettime> VW

[parminder]

On Monday 28 September 2015 10:07 PM, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> On 27/09/2015 3:16 pm, Michael Gurstein wrote:
>> Significant portions of Civil Society have bought into this approach which is firmly premised on the notion that somehow the private sector should be directly involved in making governance decisions because well, they are so public spirited, or that they have the long term interests of everyone at heart ("they are people too aren't they"), or we can trust them much more than those perfidious folks in government, or they are "accountable" to their shareholders and wouldn't do anything completely untoward to risk shareholder value etc.etc. (you know the drill...
> No, not really that at all.  They have to be involved because they are
> already involved.  For now, the decisions of companies like Facebook and
> Google about their terms of service and so on are de facto transnational
> rules for the Internet, at least as much as the rules that governments
> make (collectively or individually).  So it impossible to disentangle
> these companies from the process of situating those rules within a more
> accountable global framework of principle.

Jeremy, basically you are accepting that, in your view, democracy is no
longer feasible or to be preferred, or both, in matters of Internet
governance. That is a remarkable claim/ acceptance, even though it is
what has always underpinned the equal footing multi-stakeholder model.
To that extent I commend your honesty and integrity which is much more
than what can be said about most other supporters of the equal footing
model who tend to simply disappear from any discussion when they are
asked to come down to actual implications (both theoretical and
practical) of such a model.

That compliment for honesty and forthrightness having been paid, may I
ask you a question. How is your assertion different from the claims of
the feudal class during early days of the evolution of democracy, say,
In England, for the biggest pie of the national level political decision
making power, on the basis that they owned large-scale landed property,
and thus held control over the key productive resources of that time -
thereby also setting the de facto rules in most aspects of contemporary
social life, ... This can be seen the history of the House of Lords, and
also the fact that for a very long time ownership of property was  a
condition of enfranchisement....

What you are advocating, albeit by presenting it as something
inevitable, I see is exactly the same... Corporates today 'own' the
biggest chunks of what are the contemporary key productive resources,
and of what on the Internet can comparably be called as  digital estate
and thus setting in your words 'de facto transnational rules for the
Internet'. You give this as the logic for why we should accept them to
be given a highly disproportionate role in the political governance of
the Internet and the associated phenomenon. I say disproportionate
because every shareholder, big or small, of these companies does already
have a political role equal to every other person (minus the difference
that power of various resources make, but lets disregard that for the
moment) .

What you are presenting is directly a case for digital fedualism, which
equal footing multistakeholderism of course really is. I am astonished
that such a philosophy can have such widespread support as equal footing
multistakeholderism indeed has in some very dominant circles of Internet
governance.

Aligning political power to economic power, at institutional levels and
not just in hidden, informal ways which have always existed, is what the
current global neoliberal design currently is. (An important traditional
role of political power has been to regulate and rein in the execesses
of economic power.) The World Economic Forum is often considered as its
key global nerve centre, although I'd say it will be more factual to say
that the primary nerve centre is in fact still solidly inside the US
economic and political establishments. This most important global
problem and danger is extensively recognised among global civil society
movements, and is actively resisted. It is the fact that these dangerous
global developments are, on the other hand, actually supported by a big
chunk of civil society in the Internet governance space which creates a
significant dissonance that this space has with the mainstream global
civil society.

parminder

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