The forum has largely been overtaken by discussion of ICANN’s move to organize a new Internet governance coalition. ICANN representatives have had both open- and closed-door meetings to push the proposal, but there are still many questions that have not been adequately answered.
One important question is about the private discussions that have led to this. The I-stars came out at least nominally aligned on this issue, though there is speculation that they are not all totally unified. Over drinks, I mentioned to an ICANN board member that it rubs a lot of people in civil society the wrong way that the I-stars seem to have coordinated on this in private. He replied that I was probably assuming too much about the level of coordination. If that’s the case, then I wonder if we will hear more from the other I-stars about their level of support for ICANN’s machinations.
More basically, we still don’t know much about the Rio non-summit. It will be in Rio, it will be in May, there will be some sort of output document. But we don’t know the agenda, or the agenda-setting process, or even the process for setting an agenda-setting process.
And strategically, we don’t know how the Brazil meeting is going to affect all of the other parts of the take-over-the-Internet industry in the coming year. The CWG-Internet happens next month, and they will take up Brazil’s proposal from the WTPF. But since Brazil is positioning itself as a leader in this new process (and aligned with ICANN now), what will they try to get at the CWG? WTDC is in March-April. And of course the Plenipot will be in the fall next year. If the Brazil summit is perceived to have failed in any sense, will that make the battle at Plenipot even more intense?
Also, whose idea was it to have a gala without alcohol?
As expected, today at 1pm there was a packed, off-the-books meeting facilitated by the “I-star” organizations (ICANN, ISOC, IETF, and a bunch of groups that don’t begin with I). The purpose of the meeting was to build support for a new Internet governance “coalition.” The argument is that because of the NSA’s global surveillance programs, the US is losing support for its perceived leadership on Internet governance. In order to avoid greater governmental or intergovernmental intrusion into the Internet, the technical community, as signaled in the Montevideo statement, must go on the offensive and create an alternative to such intrusion.
This argument is controversial, to say the least. To what extent does the “offensive” entail creating a top-down institution to deal with Internet policy issues? Neither the technical community nor civil society wants government to be in charge of the Internet, but the technical community (especially ICANN) seems much more comfortable with top-down non-governmental control. I worry that ICANN is going to become increasingly government-like. In any case, we are witnessing a small but historic rift between civil society and the technical community, which have always been on the same side in the war to keep governments off the Internet.
Even if ICANN’s argument makes a kind of sense, it may be reckless to pursue it in the proposed way. It’s now looking like there will be a don’t-call-it-a-summit in Rio in early May, hosted by the Brazilian government, to discuss these issues. Even if ICANN has good reason to believe that Brazil is negotiating in good faith, there is always the possibility that Brazil gets what it wants in the end. They are not likely to just roll over.
I’m open to the idea that we need an affirmative answer to the question of Internet policy institutions. But I’d feel a lot more comfortable if such institutions evolved bottom-up rather than emerging from a grand push, organized secretly by some members of the technical community, to create an alternative. Hopefully with the creation of the new coalition mailing list, everything can be done out in the open from here on out.
Day 1 of the Internet Governance Forum is in the books, and everyone is talking about what will happen on Day 2. Brazil recently announced that it will host a meeting on Internet governance in April. Tomorrow, ICANN is hosting a meeting at 1pm to explain how the April meeting will work.
Everyone that I’ve talked to in the hallways has brought up the meeting in April. No one is quite sure what to expect.
On one hand, Brazil has been part of the coalition that is pushing to do more Internet governance at the ITU. On the other hand, ICANN seems to be a willing participant in Brazil’s scheme. The recent “Montevideo Statement,” issued by various Internet organizations, called for globalizing the IANA function, which means at a minimum removing the US’s special role of maintaining the domain name system’s root zone file.
ICANN wants independence from the US government, and Brazil wants ICANN to be independent from the US government (and possibly dependent on the ITU), so this makes them allies for now.
Bizarrely, NSA surveillance continues to be cited as a reason for Brazil’s actions, although of course the IANA function has nothing to do with surveillance. The IANA issue is mostly about status. Other governments seem to feel slighted by the US’s control of the root zone file.
In any case, tomorrow we may know slightly more about ICANN and Brazil’s schemes.
The New York Times reports:
The Russians, who with only minimal success, had for years sought to make these companies provide law enforcement access to data within Russia, reacted angrily. Mr. Gattarov formed an ad hoc committee in response to Mr. Snowden’s leaks.
Ostensibly with the goal of safeguarding Russian citizens’ private lives and letters from spying, the committee revived a long-simmering Russian initiative to transfer control of Internet technical standards and domain name assignments from two nongovernmental groups that control them today to an arm of the United Nations, the International Telecommunications [sic] Union.
It’s not immediately clear to me how moving Internet standards and DNS from IETF and ICANN to the ITU is supposed to stop the NSA from spying on Russians, so the smart read is that this is retaliation pure and simple.
Brazil’s foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, for example, a week ago endorsed the Russian proposal to transfer some control over Internet technical standards to the United Nations telecommunications agency.
While these are not major changes in policy positions, the NSA’s surveillance programs seem to be galvanizing those who want the ITU to take an active role in Internet governance. It’s time for the USA to practice what it preaches on Internet freedom.
Next week, I’ll be in Geneva for the 2013 World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum, better known by the acronym WTPF-13. This is the first major ITU conference since the WCIT in December, and the first real test of whether what some are calling the “post-WCIT era” really exists, and if so, what it means. For those just now tuning in, the WCIT was a treaty conference in Dubai in which some ITU member states pushed hard to make elements of the Internet subject to intergovernmental agreement, resulting in the refusal of 55 countries to sign the treaty. I published a retrospective account of my experience at the WCIT at Ars Technica.
The WTPF will be different than the WCIT in several important ways: Continue reading →
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
As we approach the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum, the debate over whether intergovernmental organizations like the International Telecommunication Union should have a role to play in Internet governance continues. One argument in favor of intergovernmentalism, advanced, for instance, by former ITU Counsellor Richard Hill (now operating his own ITU lobbying organization, delightfully named APIG), goes as follows:
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Louis XVI
Americans often quote, or allude to, the French expression ”
Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!” But few realize that this apparent paradox was meant quite literally by the French:From its first official proclamation in 1422 upon the coronation of Charles VII to 1774, when Louis XV finally died, the term expressed the abstract constitutional concept that sovereignty transfered from the old king (the first “Le Roi“) to the new king (the second “Le Roi“) the very instant the old king died. Thus, France was literally never without a king until until the monarchy was finally dis-established in early 1793. When Louis XVI was guillotined later that year, his death was acclaimed simply with “Le Roi est mort!“
Tomorrow, September 30, ICANN’s Joint Project Agreement with the Department of Commerce finally terminates. “
Le JPA est mort!” But a new agreement (the “Affirmation”) will take its place, apparently providing more accountability than the JPA ever did. Vive l’Affirmation! There may come a day when, like Louis XVI, ICANN’s JPA-like agreement with Commerce terminates and nothing is there to replace it, but that day has not yet come.
Grant Gross has a great piece on this new agreement. Grant extensively quotes my PFF Adjunct Fellow (my ICANN mentor and former ICANN board member) Mike Palage, who explained that the JPA’s successor (JPA II?):
will tell [ICANN] what it should do, but it can’t legally bind them [much like past agreements]… It gives the appearance in the global community that the U.S. government has recognized that ICANN has done what is was supposed to do. What it’s also doing is … it’s putting in some accountability mechanisms.”
Continue reading →
TLF readers are undoubtedly familiar with the concept of regulatory capture. It’s a form of government failure, when a regulatory agency becomes overly influenced by the special interests of those (often large companies) it oversees. Over at the NetChoice blog, my colleague Steve DelBianco talks about a different form of capture that’s equally bad–government capture of private sector management of the Internet’s addressing system. He asserts:
Before the US Government abdicates its oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) it should take a long, hard look at the mounting efforts by world governments to assume greater power over the Internet’s addressing system. If those efforts meet no further resistance, the once-theoretical threat of “capture” could become a reality.
So what? In place of U.S. oversight, there are those that wish to create an international government bureaucracy to run ICANN:
In place of U.S. Government management, the [European] Commission recommends the creation of a multi-governmental tribunal with authority over ICANN. The European Commission posits that this new bureaucratic structure would not involve itself in “day-to-day” activities, but the distinction between “day-to-day” and other activities is utterly meaningless from a policy standpoint. Also, given the activism of the countries involved in such an effort, it would be ludicrous to expect such an entity to use its newfound power sparingly.
Steve’s post has a lot of background and explains things in detail, but I’ll share his ultimate conclusion: our Commerce Dept. should be working with ICANN to retain the protective aspects of the JPA while ICANN develops permanent mechanisms to prevent external capture. It better hurry…it has only until the end of September to do something!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.