The Working Group on Internet Governance

The Working Group on Internet Governance 10th anniversary reflections Edited by William J. Drake The Working Group on Internet Governance 10th anniversary reflections Edited by William J. Drake The Working Group on Internet Governance 10th anniversary reflections Editor William J. Drake Publication production Roxana Bassi (APC) Editorial support Lori Nordstrom (APC) Proofreading Valerie Dee Graphic design Monocromo [email protected] Phone: +598 2400 1685 Financial support provided by The Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) The Internet Society (ISOC) Published by APC 2016 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Some rights reserved. The Working Group on Internet Governance: 10th anniversary reflections ISBN 978-92-95102-50-7 APC-201601-CIPP-R-EN-DIGITAL-241 Acknowledgements For their financial support of this project, I would like to thank the the Asia-Pacific Net- work Information Centre (APNIC), the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the Internet Society (ISOC). At APC, Roxana Bassi managed the production process and Lori Nordstrom managed the copy editing. Many thanks to them both for their hard work and patience. William J. Drake C ontents PREFACE ........................................................................................................7 Nitin Desai INTRODUCTION Why the WGIG still matters ........................................................................ 10 William J. Drake HISTORICAL OVERVIEW A watershed moment in multilateral diplomacy: Adapting governance models to the 21st century ...........................................................................33 Markus Kummer UNDERSA T NDING INTERNET GOVERNANCE Sharing decision making in Internet governance: The impact of the WGIG definition ...............................................................................66 Wolfgang Kleinwächter The WGIG and the taxonomy of Internet governance .................................89 Jovan Kurbalija A critical look at critical Internet resources, since the WGIG ....................108 Paul Wilson and Pablo Hinojosa Internet governance in Russia: A brief history of the term and the process ..........................................................................................117 Michael Yakushev INSTITUTIONALIZING MULTISTAKEHOLDER COOPERATION Multistakeholderism and the democratic deficit ........................................123 Peng Hwa Ang and Sherly Haristya The WGIG and the technical community ..................................................135 Avri Doria Before and after the WGIG: Twenty years of multistakeholder Internet governance in Brazil .....................................................................141 Hartmut R. Glaser and Diego R. Canabarro The Internet Governance Forum: Lasting legacy of the WGIG ..................156 Anriette Esterhuysen and Karen Banks FROM OVERSIGHT TO STEwaRDSHIP How the WGIG considered the politicization of Internet governance ........170 Juan Fernández González From oversight to enhanced cooperation ...................................................184 David Hendon The vexing problems of oversight and stewardship in Internet governance ...............................................................................189 Alejandro Pisanty INTERNET GOVERNANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT Internet governance for development: From digital divide to digital economy .....................................................................................208 Baher Esmat The WGIG legacy and the reengineering of decision-making processes in Africa .....................................................................................217 Olivier Nana Nzépa CLOSING REFLECTIONS The WGIG in retrospect ............................................................................236 Jãnis Kãrkliņš The impact of the WGIG: Reflections after 10 years .................................241 Fiona Alexander The consequences of the WGIG as viewed 10 years after its final report .......244 Raúl Echeberría AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES ...............................................................................251 Preface Nitin Desai am delighted that the diverse group that came together more than a decade ago to work out a way of managing the most important tech- nological, economic, social and political innovation of our time has I decided to look back and put down what they have learnt from that experience. Let me therefore contribute to this learning by focusing on what I learnt from my experience as the chair of the Working Group on Inter- net Governance (WGIG) and later the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) that helped to organize the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). I came to the task after spending over a decade managing the issue-based summits organized by the UN between 1992 and 2002. These summits came at a time when globalization was connecting national economies through production value chains, national cultures through the spread of global communications, tourism and migration and ecosystems through a vastly increased global flow of materials and energy. They required governments to look beyond their national interest to the broader interest of the human species. To a certain extent this was already happening in the global networks of non-governmental organizations for the promotion of human rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, development assistance, humanitarian relief, etc. These global communities of concern focused their analysis, actions and advocacy on their global interest. Their growing engagement in the great global summits altered the dynamics of the multilateral negotiating process by superposing issue-based advocacy on the usual interplay of national interest. But in the final analysis the governments remained in control and the non-governmental participants remained vocal, and sometimes strident, advocates rather than becoming consensus seekers. THE WORKING GROUP ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE 7 The Internet governance dialogue that I came to in the World Summit on the Information Society was very different. This was a case where the In- ternet technical community negotiated the needed protocols and a set of private bodies managed the operations of the net. Governments (other than one) were left outside and were looking for a way of acquiring control or at least significant influence on public policy concerns. Whereas in the global summits that I had managed in the UN the political challenge was to persuade governments to give non-government organizations space in the process, in the Internet governance process it was the other way around. The private non-governmental network of technologists had to be reassured that engagement with governments and other stakeholders was necessary and useful. The WGIG started with a degree of distrust and apprehension on the part of all stakeholders. One reason for this was the very different etiquette of interaction in the different stakeholder communities. The technocrats who negotiated Internet protocols and managed the Internet were used to a pragmatic mode of conversation that focused on finding a rough consensus that ignored extreme views. I started calling it an “everybody but the nut cases” consensus and was quite envious that we did not have that at our disposal in the UN! The governments on the other hand had a rather strict definition of consensus that allowed a single dissenter to hold up agree- ment. Their etiquette of interaction was diplomatic and they would preface any disagreement or critical remark at least with “far be it for me to say...” and then deliver their lethal blow. The community of non-governmental internet activists, on the other hand, had a tendency to exaggerate their dissent in order to make sure they would be heard and not be mistaken for collaborators! The representatives of corporations were used to the protocols of lobbying and asserted what they saw as the long-term interest of the for-profit players in the Internet space. But this changed as we went along. Gradually the participants discovered that there was merit in points of view other than their own. They realized that the individuals who represented the interests they had always fought against did not have horns on their head. One reason for this is that we instituted an etiquette of politeness that prohibited any form of ad hominem argument (“He would say this because he is a part of the Internet Mafia/he represents a dictatorship/he is a professional agitator/he cares only for profit”). More than that, an unchanging group of participants thrown together in an intimate dialogue had to respect the bona fides of all participants. But what brought all of them together was the complete equality in the modalities of participation in the process. We did not have one set of participants who had to negotiate and forge a compromise and another set who were outside the negotiating process and whose only role was to assert their point as loudly and as often as possible. Everyone was involved in finding solutions to resolve differences, in drafting consensus texts and in persuading others to accept them. The basic lesson is make everyone part of the search for solutions instead of relying on the

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