----- Forwarded message from nettime's_roving_reporter -----
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 23:53:37 -0100
From: nettime's_roving_reporter
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Subject: <nettime> Milton Mueller: Core Internet institutions abandon the US Government
Reply-To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
< http://www.internetgovernance.org/2013/10/11/the-core-internet-institutions-... >
The core Internet institutions abandon the US Government
[Milton Mueller]
October 11, 2013
In Montevideo, Uruguay this week, the Directors of all the major
Internet organizations - ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force,
the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the
Internet Society, all five of the regional Internet address registries
- turned their back on the US government. With striking unanimity, the
organizations that actually develop and administer Internet standards
and resources initiated a break with 3 decades of U.S. dominance of
Internet governance.
[15]A statement released by this group called for "accelerating the
globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in
which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an
equal footing." That part of the statement constituted an explicit
rejection of the US Commerce Department's unilateral oversight of ICANN
through the IANA contract. It also indirectly attacks the US unilateral
approach to the Affirmation of Commitments, the pact between the US and
ICANN which provides for periodic reviews of its activities by the GAC
and other members of the ICANN community. (The Affirmation was
conceived as an agreement between ICANN and the US exclusively - it
would not have been difficult to allow other states to sign on as
well.)
15. http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-07oct13-en.htm
Underscoring the global significance and the determination of the group
to have a global impact, the Montevideo statement was released in
English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese. In conversations
with some of the participants of the Montevideo meeting, it became
clear that they were thinking of new forms of multistakeholder
oversight as a substitute for US oversight, although no detailed
blueprint exists.
But that was only the beginning. A day after the Montevideo
declaration, the President and CEO of ICANN, Fadi Chehadi - the man
vetted by the US government to lead its keystone Internet governance
institution - met with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. And at this
meeting, Chehade engaged in some audacious private Internet diplomacy.
He asked "the president [of Brazil] to elevate her leadership to a new
level, to ensure that we can all get together around a new model of
governance in which all are equal." A press release from the Brazilian
government said that President Rousseff [16]wanted the event to be held
in April 2014 in Rio de Janeiro. The President of ICANN thus not only
allied himself with a political figure who has been intensely critical
of the US government and the NSA spying program, he conspired with her
to convene a global meeting to begin forging a new system of Internet
governance that would move beyond the old world of US hegemony.
16. http://www.news24.com/Technology/News/Brazil-to-host-internet-governance-sum...
Make no mistake about it: this is important. It is the latest, and one
of the most significant manifestations of the fallout from the Snowden
revelations about NSA spying on the global Internet. It's one thing
when the government of Brazil, a longtime antagonist regarding the US
role in Internet governance, gets indignant and makes threats because
of the revelations. And of course, the gloating of representatives of
the International Telecommunication Union could be expected. But this
is different. Brazil's state is now allied with the spokespersons for
all of the organically evolved Internet institutions, the
representatives of the very "multi-stakeholder model" the US purports
to defend. You know you've made a big mistake, a life-changing mistake,
when even your own children abandon you en masse.
Here at the Internet Governance Project we take only a grim
satisfaction in this latest turn of events. We have been urging the USG
to end its privileged role and complete the privatization of the DNS
management for nearly ten years. The proper substitute for unilateral
Commerce Department oversight, we argued, was not multilateral
"political oversight" but[17] an international agreement articulating
clear rules regarding what ICANN can and cannot do, an agreement that
explicitly protects freedom of expression and other individual rights
and liberal Internet governance principles. We have heard every
argument imaginable about why this did not have to happen: no one
really cared about the governance of the DNS root; there was no better
alternative; the rest of the world secretly wanted the US to do this;
etc., etc. A combination of arrogance, complacency and domestic
political pressure prevented any action.
17. http://www.internetgovernance.org/2009/06/08/igp-calls-for-us-led-internatio...
Had that advice been heeded, had the US sought to divest itself of its
unilateral oversight on its own initiative, it could have exercised
some control over the transition and advanced its cherished values of
freedom and democracy. It could have ensured, for example, that an
independent ICANN was subject to clear limits on its authority and to
new forms of accountability, which it badly needs. Now the U.S. has
lost the initiative, irretrievably. The future evolution of Internet
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