The Working Group on Internet Governance -10th Anniversary Reflections

258 Pages·2016·6.55 MB·English

by  William J. Drake (ed.)

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: [phone]
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
contents
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
UndersTAndInG 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
I
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
decided to look back and put down what they have learnt from that ex-
perience. 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 gov-
ernments 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 con-
trol 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 proto-
cols 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 dia-
logue 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 formal leadership of the process to draft a consensus.
The Working group on inTerneT governance 8
There was another lesson that I learnt. The Internet is inherently democrat-
ic in its design. Anyone who logs in is as privileged as anyone else in access-
ing its vast resources. More than that, a deeply rooted libertarian, almost
anarchic, attitude guided the pioneers who designed a system immune to
any form of centralized control. We had to recognize this through a process
of consultation open to anyone who felt that he or she had something to
contribute or to learn or to monitor. The learning was that a small group
negotiating process must always be embedded in an open-ended process of
consultation and total transparency in the evolution of the consensus.
As I look back at my experience of the WGIG and MAG what strikes me is
how pleasant it was, how happy I would be if I had to do it all over again!
The design of the process is one reason for this. But the commitment, the
courtesy and the friendliness that the individuals who participated in the
process brought to the process was as important. That a decade later they
have come together to produce this volume is a reflection of the bonds that
were forged then. So let me end by thanking them for what they did then
and what they are doing now to forge a new way of managing an increas-
ingly interconnected world.
The Working group on inTerneT governance 9
Introduction
WHy THe WGIG sTIll mATTers
William J. Drake
o
n 15-16 December 2015, the United Nations (UN) General As-
sembly will mark the 10th anniversary of the conclusion of the
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with a high-
level intergovernmental meeting that was preceded by an inter-
governmental preparatory process. Topics that could be debated in this
context include, inter alia, financing programmes concerning information
and communications technologies for development; the purported need for
new UN-based cyber security arrangements; the perceived strengths and
weaknesses of existing multistakeholder and multilateral mechanisms con-
cerning Internet governance, and possible “improvements” thereto; and
whether and for how long to renew the mandate of the Internet Gover-
nance Forum (IGF), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year as well.
2015 is also the 10th anniversary of a multistakeholder experiment that
helped bring the WSIS negotiations to a successful conclusion – the Working
Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The WSIS Declaration of Principles
and the WSIS Plan of Action agreed at the Geneva Summit in December
2013 set the WGIG’s terms of reference and work programme. The relevant
provision of the former read: “We ask the Secretary-General of the United
Nations to set up a working group on Internet governance, in an open and
inclusive process that ensures a mechanism for the full and active participa-
tion of governments, the private sector and civil society from both devel-
oping and developed countries, involving relevant intergovernmental and
international organizations and forums, to investigate and make proposals
for action, as appropriate, on the governance of Internet by 2005.”1
1. World Summit on the Information Society. (2003). Declaration of Principles – Building the
Information Society: A Global Challenge in the New Millennium. WSIS-03/GENEVA/DOC/4-E.
December 12, p. 7. www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html.
The Working group on inTerneT governance 10