[At-Large] Multistakeholderism Explained (was Re: ICANN75: Mandatory Funded Traveler Registration for Roberto Gaetano)

Tue Aug 2 01:02:03 UTC 2022

+++ @Evan
Fully agree.
Olévié

Le lun. 1 août 2022 à 21:22, Evan Leibovitch via At-Large <
at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> a écrit :

> Hi Wolfgang,
>
> I was at the WSIS conference in Geneva -- in fact I led a 21-person
> delegation (page 155 of the list of participants
> <https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/docs/geneva/summit_participants.pdf>) --
> and we were involved in some of the prepcoms.
>
> I saw first-hand how that process SHAFTED the public interest and bestow
> on it zero trust.
>
> My community was advancing the use of open source software in
> infrastructure, the benefits of which were self-evident -- especially on
> projects funded by the public sector. Indeed it was exhilarating to see
> governments advance this in advance. However, relentless pressure from
> industry groups led to what I had learned later was called "death by the
> square brackets". Original text promoting open source was  reduced to
> "[promoting open source]" in later drafts, to "[use open source]", to
> "[consider open source]" and eventually to the point where any references
> to "open source" were COMPLETELY removed from later texts
> <https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/md/03/wsispc3/c/S03-WSISPC3-C-0172!!PDF-E.pdf>.
> We didn't even bother going to Tunis, we'd seen the whole process as a sham
> by then.
>
> As Antony's description describes, in-group politics worked to the benefit
> of the vested interests. In our case, the Civil Society delegation
> screwed itself
> <https://web.archive.org/web/20170205194713/https://cyber.harvard.edu/wsis/Leibovitch.html/>
> -- my group dissented from its communique -- but it's not a stretch to
> assert that the dysfunction was by design.
>
> Now, here we are in 2022 and both governments and large corporations are
> creating Open Source Program Offices
> <https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/ec-ospo>. But WSIS actually
> retarded this process by nearly two decades, never even suggesting
> consideration of a technology model that some now call essential.
>
> So ... from my corner of the world ... screw WSIS. Regardless of the
> rhetoric, it provided few practical steps forward and some steps back. (Our
> silver lining was the adjacent ICT4D show where we gave away more than
> 10,000 Linux CDs to attendees regardless of what WSiS told them to ignore.)
>
> I'll happily agree with you that the closest that MSM has ever come to
> actually serving the public interest was at Netmundial -- a shining moment
> of clarity and maybe even mutual goodwill. So how has THAT model progressed
> or been adopted in its eight years of life? Multiple experiences have
> demonstrated that the greed and entitlement of the vested interests would
> never let real benefits of theoretical MSM happen, and they have been
> willing to risk the entire experiment just to keep the status quo in place.
>
> Have they bet correctly?
>
> - Evan
>
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2022 at 6:17 AM Wolfgang Kleinwächter via At-Large <
> at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> good discussion. The concept of "Multistakeholderism" has many
>> dimensions, different sources and can be seen primarily as a political
>> experiment in new social territories to promote the concept of "sharing" in
>> policy development and decision making which goes beyond the concept of the
>> "representative democarcy" (and far beyond the concept of "autocracy").
>>
>> One practical (political) source for the multistakeholder approach in the
>> governance of the Internet was the UN World Summit on the Information
>> Society (WSIS), 2002 - 2005. During the first WSIS phase (2002 - 2003)
>> there was a political US-China conflict around Internet Governance. The US
>> wanted to have "private sector leadership", China "governmental
>> leadership". China argued, that "self-regulation (and private sector
>> leadership) was good for one million Internet user. But for one billion
>> users governments have to step in. US argued, if it isn´t broken, don´t fix
>> it. There was no agreement among the two governments, Kofi Annan
>> established the (multistakeholder) UN Working Group of Internet Governance
>> (WGIG) and the WGIG concluded (after two years of intensive discussions)
>> that the Internet doesn´t need a leader, but the collaboration of all
>> stakeholders, which included "sharing of decision making procedures". The
>> WGIG-definition included, that stakeholders has to be involved "in their
>> respective roles", but the idea, to add "on equal footing" did not get
>> enough support among the WGIG members. The proposed "WGIG Definition" made
>> its way into the Tunis Agenda (November 2005). Governments in Tunis didn´t
>> have any better idea. But it was a compromise, embedded into other
>> paragraphs of the Tunis Agenda, including the recognition of "national
>> sovereignty" for ccTLDs and the leading role of governments with regard to
>> "Internet related public policy issues". Technical community got the lead
>> in the "day-to-day-operations", but it was unclear, what the borderline
>> between "Internet related public policy issues" and "day-to-day operations"
>> was. The WGIG-definition differentiated also between the "development" and
>> the "use" of the Internet. This differentiation produced the concept of
>> "governance OF the Internet" and "governance ON the Internet". It was
>> expected that the IGF will help to deepen the understanding about the
>> multistakeholder approach. The IGF was helpful indeed, but it is neither a
>> decision making body nor a think tank. Also the related process of
>> "enhanced cooperation", which was aimed to clarify some of the open issues,
>> didn´t produce anything, regardless of the work of two UNCTD Working Groups
>> (WGEC I & II) in the 2010s. The best description of what the
>> multistakeholder approach is (or should be) can be found in the "Net
>> Mundial Declaration" from Sao Paulo (April 2014), which "defines" clear
>> criteria as bottom up policy development, inclusivity, equality, access,
>> transparency, accountability, openess, agility, decentralization etc. This
>> is a good list of you want to "measure" the temparature of a
>> multistakeholder process,
>>
>> Theoretically, the multistakeholder approach was interpreted as an
>> advanced model for a "participatory democracy" (or "liquid democracy"),
>> where the "people themselves", that is the concerned and affected groups,
>> participate on equal footing in policy development and decision making.
>> This was inspired to a high degree by the RFC processes, established by the
>> IETF already in the 1980s and 1990s, long before ICANN was established.
>> Remember David Clark (1992): “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We
>> believe in: *rough consensus* and *running code."* It was "rough
>> conesnsus", not conseus. The ability to compromise and the will to share
>> ressorces and decision making - based on trusted relationships among
>> stakeholders - was the basis of such a concept. "Participatory Democracy"
>> in this understanding was not aimed to substitute the "Representative
>> Democracy". It was seen as an enhancement of the established procedures to
>> solve problems in areas, where the "representative democracy" has its
>> limits and restrictions. MultistakehoIderism was seen also as different
>> from "public-private partnership", which excludes to a high degree civil
>> society (and the technical community) from policy development and decision
>> making. The argument was, if "big government" and "big business" will go
>> together, this will lead to "tyranny" of the powerful". Civil society is
>> needed to balance the conflicting interests and to block the misuse of
>> political and economic power against citizens and users.  With other words,
>> the multistakeholder approach does only work with a strong civil society.
>>
>> This was the theory. Illusion? Utopia? What we see today is, that the
>> concept is used/misused intentionally by groups (including governments) to
>> promote their own interests."Balancing" or "Sharing" is not the main
>> driving force, if new legislation or new services are introduced. The
>> Chinese government supports the multistakehooder approach, but it is
>> "multistakehoderism" under the leadership of the Communist Party. The EU
>> supports multistakeholderism, but it is MS under the leadership of the EU
>> Commission. Even in the US there is a lot of lip service. The "Declaration
>> of the Future of the Internet" (April 2022) supports the Multistakeholder
>> approach to Internet Governance, but the text was produced by the "White
>> House" in consultation with some (mainly European) governments alone. No
>> multistakeholder discussioon and no public comment period. Civil society
>> was sidelined.
>>
>> With other words, the 2020s see the "back-swinging of the pendelum". Is
>> the US "Council of Foreign Rerlations" right, if it states that "the era of
>> the global Internet is over" (July 2022)? What next? Do we have "re-invent"
>> the wheel for the "Post Internet Era"? Do we need MS for AI Governance,
>> Blockchain Governance, W3 Governance?
>>
>> I would recommend to be prepared for WSIS+20.It will start soon. Be
>> engaged in the drafting of the Global Digital Compact (GDC). Comments are
>> welcome by the UN until September 30, 2022.
>>
>> Wolfgang
>>
>>
>>
>> Barry Shein via At-Large <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org> hat am
>> 28.07.2022 08:02 CEST geschrieben:
>>
>>
>> The Criticism section for the wikipedia page on
>> Multistakeholder_governance:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multistakeholder_governance
>>
>> Was removed on 5 March 2017 due to lack of sources and other complaints.
>>
>> What it said was (from the 22 November 2016 version):
>>
>> Criticism
>>
>> Criticism of multistakeholderism comes from Paul R. Lehto,
>> J.D.[citation needed], who fears that in multistakeholderism, those
>> who would be lobbyists become legislators, and nobody else has a
>> vote. Lehto states that "In a democracy, it is a scandal when
>> lobbyists have so much influence that they write the drafts of
>> laws. But in multistakeholder situations they take that scandal to a
>> whole new level: those who would be lobbyists in a democracy
>> (corporations, experts, civil society) become the legislators
>> themselves, and dispense with all public elections and not only
>> write the laws but pass them, enforce them, and in some cases even
>> set up courts of arbitration that are usually conditioned on waiving
>> the right to go to the court system set up by democracies. A vote is
>> just a minimum requirement of justice. Without a vote, law is just
>> force inflicted by the wealthy and powerful. Multistakeholderism is
>> a coup d’etat against democracy by those who would merely be
>> lobbyists in a democratic system.
>>
>> The important thought can be summed up (by me) as:
>>
>> In a multistakeholder system you dispense with legislators as
>> targets for influence by interested lobbyists and just let the
>> lobbyists be the legislators.
>>
>> I think there are uses for multistakeholderism*.
>>
>> I'm not convinced it was a good idea for ICANN.
>>
>> My impression is it was a popular buzzword at the time and it
>> afforded, as above, governance primarily by interested parties.
>>
>> That said, I am not an expert in governance models.
>>
>> I've chatted about this with people who are and have come to respect
>> that it's an area of expertise.
>>
>> It would be interesting to hear from such experts vis a vis ICANN.
>>
>> It's not that interesting to hear from people who aren't experts other
>> than their subsequent reaction to the advice of such experts which
>> would be important since they would become the governed.
>>
>> How might this change?
>>
>> The problem, if it is a problem, is that those with the power to force
>> change (e.g., govts or similar) are probably pretty happy that someone
>> else (i.e., ICANN) worries about this remit.
>>
>> The net runs pretty well even if there are complaints, scandals have
>> been relatively minor and have been handled internally, so why upend
>> their system? The devil you know versus the devil you don't.
>>
>> Put another way I think one needs something more than "it doesn't seem
>> fair or democratic" or "some decisions I would have done differently".
>>
>> * Perhaps for example some public relations council for the dairy
>> industry so interested parties can decide how the budget is spent. Or
>> a medical licensing organization where decisions to remove a doctor's
>> license can only be fairly made by a group of MDs who understand the
>> issues.
>>
>> --
>> -Barry Shein
>>
>> Software Tool & Die | bzs at TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com
>> Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD
>> The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*
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