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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 17/12/18 3:08 AM, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:bzs@TheWorld.com">bzs@TheWorld.com</a>
wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:23574.50673.196776.73734@gargle.gargle.HOWL">
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The World Trade Organization might be another model which isn't ICANN
(a bag of contracts) but isn't the UN either.
No doubt other analogues could be dredged up.
Granted the WTO is a system of multinational nation-state treaties but
nonetheless it exhibits parallels to what some are expressing in a
supranational governance body. In particular dispute resolution
mechanisms.</pre>
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<p><font face="Verdana">For WTO to be the primary body to arbitrate
Internet/ digital issues would be first to declare the Internet,
and the digital arena generally, to be primarily a commercial
space and issue, which would be suicidal...</font> We already
suffer greatly from the fact that the first policy framework ever
around the Internet -- back in 1997 -- was the US's '<a
href="https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/Commerce/index.html">Framework
for electronic global commerce</a>' ... Apart from declaring the
Internet as primarily a commercial space, t ordained that the
'private sector shall lead' and governments should stay as far
away as possible, and also, in consonance, called for the Internet
and electronic commerce to be a tariff free zone. <br>
</p>
<p>In short, the Internet was declared as essentially neo-liberal,
and as the Internet and digital has permeated every sphere and
arena, it indeed has become an exceptionally strong
no-liberalising force over the last two decades. It should be no
coincidence that this period has also seen the steepest rise in
equalities ever across the world, which underlies much of the
social and political unrest that we witness today...</p>
<p>We do not want to further aggravate the original sin that US
policy makers did to take Internet/ digital governance to the
WTO....</p>
<p>Internet should primarily be recognised as a collaborative social
space, which inter alia also allows commercial interactions and
economic reorganisation. Its rules and regimes should be informed
with this first principle. And that would require a very different
kind of international governance of the Internet/ digital, which,
if there is appetite here for that, we can discuss..</p>
<p> best, parminder <br>
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