<h1 class="title"><a href="http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/09/03/history-teaches-us-nothing">http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/09/03/history-teaches-us-nothing</a></h1><h1 class="title">If history teaches us anything…</h1>
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<a href="http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/09/03/history-teaches-us-nothing">http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/09/03/history-teaches-us-nothing</a><br><br>by Emily Taylor | 3 Sep 2011 | </span>
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<p class="pullquote-container"><span class="pullquote-processed pullquote-quote">an obscure organization of 50 people located on the third floor of a building overlooking a marina in Los Angeles</span><img src="http://news.dot-nxt.com/images/people/emily-taylor-s.jpg" align="left" hspace="8">…it’s
that history teaches us nothing. Reading the European Commission’s six
papers on Internet governance this week was like flipping back in time
to the bad old days of the World Summit on the Information Society, when
it looked like the management of the domain name system would get
sucked into an intergovernmental agency, and the technical coordination
mired in geo-politics.<br>
<br>
Eight years ago, governments decided they were worried about the
Internet. It was having an ever-increasing influence over their
societies, and causing a number of significant and previously unknown
problems. The trouble was: they couldn’t find out which government
department was in charge of it.<br>
<br>
The most tangible entity that was eventually discovered was <span class="pullquote pullquote-processed">an obscure organization of 50 people located on the third floor of a building overlooking a marina in Los Angeles</span>. That clearly wasn’t good enough, so the World Summit on the Information Society was created.<br>
<br>
Even accounting for the fast pace of the Internet, 29 September 2005
isn’t all that long ago. That was the day when David Hendon of the UK
Department of Trade and Industry (then BERR, now BIS), woke up to find
that he was in the centre of a media and political storm, all because of
a rather bland diplo-speak EU statement on Internet Governance the day
before.</p>
<p class="pullquote-container"><span class="pullquote-processed pullquote-quote">In the end, good sense prevailed, and somehow there was a realization that new systems were need for a new medium</span>Reading
the EU statement now, it seems hard to believe why it caused such a
firestorm. A lot of the ideas and text is quite close to the final text
in the WSIS Tunis Agenda. The “crime” was that it called for a “new
cooperation model” for Internet governance, with “international
government involvement”. The US, Argentina, well, everyone really,
interpreted the EU as calling for an end to the United States’ sole
oversight over ICANN. <br>
<br>
But this wasn’t just a squabble over the rather dry subject of Internet
infrastructure. The real damage that EU statement did in 2005 was to
strengthen the position of authoritarian governments, like China, Syria
and Iran, who wanted (and still want) greater control over choke points
in the Internet – to restore harmony whenever messy old freedom of
expression gets in the way.<br>
<br>
<span class="pullquote pullquote-processed">In the end, good sense prevailed, and somehow there was a realization that new systems were need for a new medium</span>.
A new form of collaborative governance was created –
multistakeholderism – and the technical coordination of Internet
addressing remained where it was, because it worked.<br>
<br>
But history teaches us nothing. So, as Tolkein would say, “And some
things that should not have been forgotten were lost.” This year has
seen extraordinary reactions against the freedoms afforded by the
Internet from the most unlikely sources:<br>
</p>
<ul><li>The British Prime Minister responded to the recent riots in the UK
by announcing that he’s looking at banning people from social networks
such as Twitter and Facebook. At the same time, the post-Mubarak
Egyptian government is considering how to protect its citizens from a
repeat of the Internet switch off that happened earlier this year. Has
the world gone upside down?</li><li>A UN report in 2011 stated that Internet access was a human right,
described the “chilling effect” on freedom of expression of technical
measures such as blocking or filtering, and condemned the erosion of
intermediary liability (which protects ISPs)</li><li>The same report praised Chile and Brazil for enacting legislation
that demanded due process – a court order – before cutting people off
from the Internet. Just as Nominet, the .uk registry, has brought
forward proposals to cut off the domain names on the say-so of law
enforcement without due process.</li></ul>
<p class="pullquote-container"><span class="pullquote-processed pullquote-quote">In the United Nations, Western governments are always outvoted</span> <br>
This insidious erosion of Internet freedoms has crept into the dry world
of Internet governance. In the 6 years since WSIS, it seemed that the
concept of multistakeholder governance had become universally accepted.
The G8 and the OECD in 2011 stated that it was the only appropriate way
of developing Internet policy. Ironically, the UN body appointed to
review the Internet Governance Forum (which invented
multistakeholderism) decided to exclude non-governmental stakeholders
from the review, and only later reluctantly invited them in as guests,
not full participants.<br>
<br>
But a history lesson on WSIS might remind Western governments why
multistakeholderism is in their best interests when it comes to the
Internet. <span class="pullquote pullquote-processed">In the United Nations, Western governments are always outvoted</span>.
The most powerful group within the UN is the Group of 77 countries
(confusingly, numbering 131 members) and China. But in a
multistakeholder environment, Western governments can generally rely on
the support of business and (mostly) civil society to counter the
authoritarian instincts of the majority of governments.<br>
<br>
So, why is the European Commission <a href="http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/08/31/ec-greater-government-control">doing this</a>?
Why is it effectively proposing that the IANA contract become the “new
cooperation model” that the EU was searching for back in 2005? Perhaps
in the rarified world of the EU, comprising Western democracies, it
thinks that all governments behave in the same way? Maybe it believes
that a bilateral deal between the US/EU providing oversight of Internet
addressing will be acceptable to other governments? <br>
<br>
The answer, of course, lies in the acts and omissions of ICANN itself –
the enfant terrible of Internet Governance, which has shown itself
disdainful of government input. Inevitably, those Western Governments
who have taken the painful route of supporting ICANN over the past 6
years, can no longer pretend that an obscure organisation on the third
floor of a building overlooking a marina in Los Angeles is the answer to
global Internet governance.<br>
<br>
The shame of it is that in cutting ICANN loose the European Commission
is once again playing into the hands of governments whose values it
should not share, and – as Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden,
put it in 2005 in an article on WSIS – will bring it “enthusiastic
applause from Tehran, Beijing and Havana.” It seems that, so far as the
EC is concerned, “history is bunk”.</p>
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