Vol 43, Issue 1 Features
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This year the list of internet governance issues under discussion will get longer but more people will expect concrete results from the numerous meetings. Whether we see the next stumbling step forward on the long march through the internet governance ecosystem depends to a high degree on the outcomes of two different, but interrelated processes which will overshadow internet discussion in 2015:
In the internet microcosm — the management of names and numbers — the key issue will be how the so-called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) functions are transferred to an accountable multistakeholder mechanism without compromising the security and stability of the internet.
In the internet macrocosm — the management of internetrelated public policies — the key issue will be how the multistakeholder governance approach is further enhanced to find practical solutions for the growing number of political, economic, social, cultural and legal internet problems, among others, in renewing the mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
“A failure of the IANA transition in September would not be a disaster for the internet.”
IANA STEWARDSHIP TRANSITION
In March 2014, the US government announced that it is considering terminating the so-called IANA contract. Global discussion will peak in the coming months. In September 2015, the contract expires. Since the announcement was made last year, a structured process has emerged where numerous communities, experts and working groups on various levels are developing ideas on how to proceed. An IANA stewardship transition coordination group (ICG) — 30 individual experts representing all stakeholders, including governments — now awaits more specific proposals from three subgroups, dealing with concrete issues for protocols, numbers and names.
The broad-based public discussion has so far produced a number of options for possible solutions. The plan is that the ICG will bring the various ideas into a reasonable and workable plan which would match the criteria of the US government and send it later — via the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) board — to the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The ICANN meetings in Singapore (February 2015) and Buenos Aires (June 2015) were and are great opportunities to discuss in open and transparent forums the pros and cons of the proposals that would finally enable the US government to decide whether it will move towards a transition or renew the existing contract.
On the one hand, the IANA function is not a big deal. The role of the US government has over the years been purely clerical. One could compare the planned transition with the removal of the training wheels from a children’s bicycle. Somebody has to double-check whether all communications among the involved parties have followed the agreed rules and authorise publication of TLD (top-level domain) zone files in the root server system.
On the other hand, this function is full of political symbolism. For years, it was the subject of speculation, myths and political mistrust. So it is not a surprise that the NTIA plan, aimed at finalising a transition announced back in 1998, has doubters and opponents on both sides of the political spectrum.
For some groups — including conservative members of the US Congress — the whole plan is a bad idea. They want to keep the status quo. In their eyes, there is a risk that the transition will open the door for a ‘capture’ of the internet by the ‘bad guys’ (undemocratic governments). On the other side, there are groups that want to use this opportunity for a big jump to settle all other problems related to the management of critical internet resources at once, far beyond the narrow functions described in the existing IANA contract. The risk is that a too ambitious plan that settles one problem has the potential to create two new ones.
It is not an easy task for the IGC to find the right balance. Strong safeguards against capture are needed and unintended side-effects have to be avoided. This will provide hard work ahead for the multistakeholder internet governance community. On the other hand, a failure of the IANA transition in September 2015 would not be a disaster for the internet. It would just be a missed opportunity.
Nevertheless, postponement of the transition would send wrong signals about the potential of the multistakeholder process and could have another unintended side-effect in pushing the broader discussion in the internet governance macrocosm into a direction where old proposals of ‘intergovernmental internet councils’ could be recycled.
“Some governments may argue that the multistakeholder approach does not work.”
THE INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM (IGF) MANDATE
If there is no IANA transition in September 2015, some governments could use the high-level intergovernmental WSIS 10+ conference (World Summit on the Information Society), scheduled for December 2015 in New York, to argue that the multistakeholder approach does not work and there is a need to go back to multilateral governmental oversight.
WSIS 10+ will review the Tunis Agenda from 2005. Ten years ago, the IANA contract was the subject of a very controversial discussion. Many governments did not accept the special stewardship role of the US government. Referring to the principle of sovereign equality of states — a principle under international law enshrined in the UN Charter — they argued that all governments should have the same rights. The compromise language of the Tunis Agenda can be found in Paragraph 68: “We recognise that all governments should have an equal role and responsibility for international internet governance and for ensuring the stability, security and continuity of the internet.”
Since Tunis, the issue has been discussed in many IGF sessions and in the UN Commission on Science and Technology Development (UNCSTD) Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC) without any consensus. One group proposed replacing the sole oversight of the US government by an intergovernmental body where all governments have equal rights. The other group argued that a better solution is to have a domain name system (DNS) mechanism managed by the internet community. In other words, if the IANA transition fails, WSIS 10+ would become a battlefield among governments over how to reorganise the internet under governmental oversight.
There is still another problem. Efforts to renew the mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) during the recent 69th General Assembly of the United Nations failed. The decision was postponed to the 70th General Assembly, which now will be in parallel with the final intergovernmental negotiation phase for WSIS 10+.
The risk is high that renewal of the mandate of the IGF will become a political negotiation in which some governments seek a price for their agreement to give the IGF another five or ten years. One should not forget that the UN in New York is a purely intergovernmental body where all sorts of political power plays are performed. The political culture in the UN in New York is much more driven by 20th century ‘tit-for-tat’ dealmaking than the political culture in the UN in Geneva, where the 21st century multistakeholder approach has a lot of supporters.
“This system as a whole is decentralised, diversified and has no central authority.”
MANY OTHER AVENUES
But IANA transition, IGF renewal and preparation for WSIS 10+ are not the only items on the 2015 internet governance agenda. There are numerous events where it will or already has been discussed:
Along with those meetings there will be more than 50 national and regional IGFs around the globe. Nearly 20 global and regional meetings will be hosted by the I*-organisations (ICANN, IETF, RIRs and others). And there are many academic and business conferences where internet governance will be discussed.
The growing internet governance ecosystem looks more and more like a rainforest. In this virtual rainforest we have an endless and growing diversity of networks, services, applications, regimes and other properties which co-exist in a mutually interdependent mechanism of communication, coordination and collaboration.
In the internet governance ecosystem many players with very different legal, economic and political statuses operate on many different layers, on local, national, regional and international levels, driven by technical innovation, user needs, market opportunities and political interests.
As a result, we see a very dynamic process where a broad variety of different regulatory, co-regulatory or self-regulatory regimes emerge, co-exist and complement or conflict with each other. And this system as a whole is decentralised, diversified and has no central authority.
The absence of a central authority does not mean that there should not be something like an internet governance agenda for 2025. It is true that it is difficult to bring this broad diversity into a meaningful structure. One way to group the hundreds of separate issues could be to pack them into four baskets, knowing that each basket will be filled with another broad diversity of sub-issues and that all the baskets are more or less interlinked.
What would the priorities be in the four baskets of such an ‘internet governance agenda 2025’?
With all the cyberattacks we have seen in 2014, this issue will get higher priority in the internet governance discussion. The problem here is that there is no accepted definition of cybersecurity. There are issues related to the technical security of the networks; issues related to the prevention of crimes in cyberspace; and issues related to national security. In particular, the last category, which includes cyberwar, cyberterrorism and cyberespionage, has meanwhile attracted the higher spheres of political discussion.
In the United Nations, a so-called Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), which operates under the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, has proposed a set of confidence-building measures for cyberspace. There is also a proposal for an intergovernmental code of conduct and a cybersecurity convention.
However, there is no consensus among governments, and it would be a big surprise if 2015 produces a breakthrough. It would also be unrealistic to expect that there could be bilateral or multilateral ‘no-spy’ agreements. Regardless of the global outcry after the Snowden disclosures, cyberespionage will continue in 2015.
It is more realistic to expect enhancement of the various bilateral cybersecurity dialogues that have started in recent years among the big cyberpowers — the US, China and the EU. And we will probably see efforts at reaching regional cybersecurity arrangements. Russia is now proposing a special information security convention for the forthcoming summit meeting of the BRICS countries and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Ufa in summer 2015.
“In 2015 the world economy would collapse if the internet were to go down.”
In 2015 the world economy would collapse if the internet were to go down. And the big internet corporations are now the main drivers of innovation, economic growth and job creation. Will we see more domination by the so-called GAFAs (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), and Cisco, Intel and Microsoft? Will the big players from China, such as Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Lenovo, Xiaomi and others challenge US domination? What can Europe do? The new European Commission has an ambitious digital agenda and puts its fingers also on related legal issues, such as competition law, taxation, data protection, and respect for national legislation.
But for developing countries, cybereconomy still means first of all development of an infrastructure that enables access to the internet. And the call for broadband for all leads to the controversial issue of network neutrality. Will this become a global issue? So far, internet governance is not directly included in global trade negotiations.
However, the internet underpins not only the TPP, TTIP and TiSA processes, it will also emerge sooner or later everywhere on the global economy agenda, as one can see from the new internet governance engagement of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos.
Freedom of expression, censorship, content control, privacy, data protection, cultural diversity and access to the internet are all unsettled issues. It was important that the United Nations confirmed that individuals have the same human rights offline and online. But there is a need for more clarification and action. This will be primarily the challenge for the UN Human Rights Council (HRC). But internetrelated human rights issues are now everywhere, and not only in countries that have problems implementing their duties under the UN human rights conventions. Human rights groups are calling for a human rights assessment for the export of dual-use technology.
Even in the technical community, human rights are now seen as a problem. ICANN’s new registrar accreditation agreement (RAA) has put the privacy problem in the Whois database back on the agenda. And ICANN’s new gTLD (generic top-level domain) programme has raised issues of freedom of expression when it comes to selection of domain names. Even in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), some groups are calling now for a human rights assessment for new internet protocols.
With new innovation, like cloud computing, the internet of things, voice and face recognition, there are new challenges for protocols, standards, codes and the management of identifiers, such as names, numbers and sensors. As never before, new technological innovations have public policy implications, and public policies can‘t be developed and implemented anymore by ignoring the changing technological environment. Some 15 years ago, codemakers and lawmakers could live in different worlds and ignore each other.
That time is over. The new challenge for both sides now is to learn to work hand in hand. This needs a higher level of sharing of experience and expertise, but also of sharing policy development and decision making, a principle proposed by the internet governance definition adopted by the Tunis Agenda in 2005.
Last year saw an innovation in implementing this philosophy of sharing. The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance (NetMundial), held in São Paulo in April 2014, produced a remarkable outcome: it adopted a universal declaration of internet governance principles and a roadmap for further actions.
This conference was the result of growing dissatisfaction with the lost trust in the internet after the Snowden revelations. The Brazilian government and the I*organisations paved the way for an enhanced mechanism of policymaking, where all stakeholders participated not only in their respective roles and on an equal footing but also produced a concrete output in the form of the declaration of principles and the roadmap.
The São Paulo principles now constitute the most recognised set of norms for the governance of the internet, supported by an overwhelming majority of governments and key players from the private sector, civil society and the technical community. The roadmap can be seen more or less as the skeleton for an internet governance agenda for the year 2025.
There was a clear message from São Paulo that the existing multistakeholder mechanisms for the discussion of internet problems, in particular the IGF, need to be further strengthened. But the conference statement also said that a more concrete outcome had to be delivered by the multistakeholder processes to solve unresolved problems.
The NetMundial Initiative (NMI) that started as a follow-up in August 2014 to the São Paulo conference is another opportunity to enhance the existing mechanism by bringing additional expertise, knowledge, resources and authority to the process. The nominated members of the new NMI coordination council have a unique chance to stabilise the still fragile multistakeholder internet governance processes by demonstrating that a collaborative approach on an equal footing would enable the various internet constituencies to bring solutions to problems via concrete projects on a case-by-case basis.
There is a great potential for a win-win situation between the IGF and the NMI. Problems that are identified by the IGF can be forwarded by the NMI to the right places in the internet governance ecosystem, where a settlement could probably be found. NMI could function like a root server in the DNS: it takes queries from one side of the network and sends it to the other side, where the answer could be found. In other words, NMI — in close linkage with the IGF – could function as an internet governance clearinghouse. The idea of such a clearinghouse is not new. It was proposed five years ago in the UNCSTD working group on IGF improvement but never implemented.
It is up to the global community to specify the mission, mandate and the rules of procedure for the São Paulo follow-up. There is now an open discussion period nearing its end. The team which has been selected by the three founding organisations — CGI.br (Brazilian internet steering committee), ICANN and WEF — will have its first meeting on 31 March 2015. It remains to be seen how such a unique roundtable would work, where ministers from China, the US and Egypt and a vice president from the European Commission sit on an equal footing with a former chair of the civil society Internet Governance Caucus (IGC), a director from Human Rights Watch (HRW), a former chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the father of the internet in Africa, the secretary general of the World Information Technology and Service Alliance (WITSA) and the CEO of Alibaba.
It is too early to speculate how this new experiment will work. The good news is that one main driver of the NMI, Brazil’s CGI.br, is also the main organiser of the forthcoming 10th IGF in João Pessoa. This will help to avoid misunderstandings. The timing is critical. The 10th IGF takes place in November 2015. In December 2015, the General Assembly of the United Nations will have to decide on whether to renew the IGF mandate, and one week later the intergovernmental WSIS 10+ is to adopt its new information society development agenda for the next ten years.
This year will be indeed an exciting one for internet governance.
The internet governance calendar is more packed than ever. Wolfgang Kleinwachter charts the key events that could shape an agenda for 2025
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