Internet Governance and the Global South

Demand for a New Framework

A. Bhuiyan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349466030, 9781137344335
• eBook ISBN: 9781137344342
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Politica economica

A welcome addition to Palgrave's Global Media Policy and Business series, Internet Governance and the Global South documents the role of the global south in Internet policymaking and challenges the globalization theories that declared the death of the state in global decision-making. Abu Bhuiyan argues that the global Internet politics is primarily a conflict between the states - the United States of America and the states of the global south - because the former controls Internet policymaking. The states of the global south have been both oppositional and acquiescing to the sponsored policies of the United States on Internet issues such as digital divide, multilingualism, intellectual property rights and cyber security. They do not oppose the neoliberal underpinnings of the policies promoted by the United States, but ask for an international framework to govern the Internet so that they can work as equal partners in setting norms for the global Internet.

1

Global South and Supranational Internet Policymaking

Internet policymaking, which refers to making regulations for the management of the domain name system, IP address allocation, management of the root, and ensuring access to the Internet and Internet security, has been the most controversial issue in supranational communication in recent years. A US-based private nonprofit organization called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages technical aspects of the Internet under the guidance of the US Department of Commerce. Since the Internet was invented as a project of the US Defense Department during the Cold War era, the US is the ultimate controller of the medium. The global south now claims its stakes in controlling the Internet. Transnational corporations and civil society organizations are also quite active in global Internet politics. Scholarly literature on this issue has been dominated by three themes: Internet governance, analyses of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), and the role of civil society in the WSIS processes. Internet governance literature covers three subthemes: some have discussed ICANN as a model of non-state governance;¹ some have pondered whether a network could lead to a new form of governance beyond the interference of the nation-states;² and some have argued that it is illusive to write off the state role in Internet governance.³

Analyses of the WSIS have focused on the character of this event, its content, and the role of civil society during this event organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Tunisia persuaded the ITU to hold a world summit to deal with concerns that the “developing countries” were falling behind the “developed countries” in terms of producing information and communication technologies (ICTs) and to figure out how ICTs could be used for socioeconomic development. It proposed to create a forum to achieve an international consensus about the use of ICTs to fulfill the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include alleviating extreme poverty, reducing gender inequality and child mortality, improving maternal health, and fighting diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria for the benefit of the “developing countries”. The 1998 Minneapolis Conference of the ITU decided to hold a world summit on the information society, and requested the United Nations (UN) General Assembly to make the final decision on holding this event. The General Assembly approved the decision and asked the ITU to take the lead in organizing it. The summit processes took place between June 2002 and December 2005 in Geneva and Tunisia, in two phases. ITU headquarters in Geneva hosted the executive secretariat of the summit, while Tunisia and Switzerland acted as host countries of the summit, having separate secretariats.

Highlighting the importance of the WSIS in global communication, Marc Raboy identified it as the third attempt of the UN system to deal with communication.⁴ The other two events were the codification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and the movement for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) which took place throughout the 1970s. Claudia Padovani,⁵ Kaarle Nordenstreng,⁶ and Victor Pickard⁷ have pointed out the changes and continuities in terms of issues by drawing parallels between the NWICO and the WSIS. Many issues, such as national sovereignty and the quest of the “developing countries” for development, are common to these events. The events differ mainly in terms of organizational procedures and stakeholder participation. But Marc Raboy argues that the WSIS “opens a new phase in global communication governance and global governance in general.”⁸ For Marc Raboy and Normand Landry, the WSIS processes have been a multistakeholder exercise involving states, civil society, and businesses.⁹ Bart Cammaerts and Nico Carpentier agree with them, saying that the WSIS demonstrates a form of multistakeholderism.¹⁰ But, for McLaughlin and Pickard, the WSIS is a manifestation of the neocorporate mode of governance at the global level. They argue that

Neo-corporatism is the contemporary version of a long-standing approach to policymaking known as corporatism. As a strategy for policy concertation, corporatism was originally adopted to maintain social equilibrium in the welfare state by welcoming labor unions into cooperative relations with business interests and the state on matters of economic policymaking.¹¹

They go on to say that neocorporatism was made a norm of global communication policymaking at the WSIS by incorporating civil society actors into the summit processes. Similarly, Cees Hamelink sees the WSIS as a triumph of neoliberalism in global communication policymaking, as it did not make any efforts to critique the existing neoliberal political and economic environment within which decisions about ICTs are made.¹² Although the stated goal of the summit was to devise strategies to enable ICTs to contribute to poverty alleviation, the control of the Internet became the most debated issue, observed Andrew Calabrese.¹³ The US and the global south contested for the control of global Internet policymaking. Here the global south refers to the countries with a score of less than 0.8 on the Human Development Index and located in Africa, Asia, and South and Central America. Brazil, India, China, Cuba, Iran, South Africa, and Tunisia are taken as the representatives of the global south in this book because of their active engagement in the Internet governance conflict.

Although these states are known as “third world states” and “developing countries” in communication literature, I call them the global south as the end of the Cold War eliminated the conceptual basis of the term “third world”, which emerged from the idea of three worlds—the first world (i.e., the West or the North, comprising the industrially developed states), the second world (i.e., the East, comprising the former Soviet Union and East European socialist states), and the third world (i.e., the South, comprising the rest of the countries). There is hardly any justification to use the term “third world state” to identify the states in the global south from a spatial perspective. But Vijay Prashad argues that the third world was not just a spatial category.¹⁴ Rather, it embodied a collective spirit of the states outside the capitalist and socialist blocs toward socioeconomic emancipation by challenging Western modernity. On the other hand, the term “developing countries” originated within Western development discourses in the 1950s that defined Western states as developed and the states in the global south as developing or underdeveloped. I will avoid using the label of “developing countries” to identify the chosen states because this label incorporates them into the dominant Western development discourses as inferior actors.

The states representing the global south are diverse in many ways—in terms of size, continents, history, and style of political and economic management. Brazil, China, India, and South Africa are big states, while Cuba, Iran, and Tunisia are small. The big states represent three continents—South America, Asia, and Africa—and house the majority of the world’s population. Cuba and Brazil became free from colonial rule during the first wave of decolonization in the 19th century, while India and Tunisia became independent in the mid-20th century, after the Second World War. Brazil and Cuba were settler colonies, while India and Tunisia were typical colonies. South Africa is made up of former settler colonies. Although it fought Western imperial domination and a brief Japanese occupation, China was not colonized in the way Brazil, India, Cuba, and Tunisia were. But Maoist China always upheld a spirit of establishing a mode of indigenous development that would be different from Western modernity and Stalinist Soviet statism, and was a key influence on the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), as argued by Lin Chun.¹⁵ Supported by the Soviet Union and China, India, Cuba, and Tunisia were key actors in the NWICO movement. The Tunisian ambassador to the UN worked as the spokesperson of the NWICO movement. China and Cuba had socialist revolutions, while Iran had an Islamic revolution. The other states earned independence through popular uprisings against colonial rule. All these states are postrevolutionary in the sense that they all promised their citizens an alternative modernity to Western modernity. They all strive for self-reliance and self-control in economics, culture, and communications. Their quest for national development by maintaining a strong national identity brings all of these states into the same category. Each of these countries has a Human Development Index below 0.8, according to the Human Development Report 2013. All of them have been active in global Internet politics. However, one may ask why South Korea or Venezuela was not selected as a representative. South Korea has made exceptional progress in expanding the Internet and increasing people’s access to this medium, but distanced itself from the Internet governance conflict. Moreover, South Korea has long been a client state of the US. It can be counted as a part of the global north, with a Human Development Index of 0.877. On the other hand, Venezuela organized a regional television network—Telesur—to offset the influence of US television networks in Latin America, but has scarcely become involved in the global Internet policymaking processes.

Other stakeholders such as the European Union (EU), civil society, and businesses are also engaged in global Internet politics. The EU, founded by Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands in the early 1950s, is a supra-state with 27 states as members. The Single Europe Act created a single EU market in the late 1980s, allowing free movements of goods, services, people, and money across the member states. The EU, with an economy slightly bigger than that of the US, developed a common currency called the euro in the early 2000s. In addition to proposing economic initiatives, the EU has a small defense force called the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF), involving units of land, air, and sea forces, which has so far worked as a peacekeeping force.¹⁶ Stephen Gill argues that EU unity is based on a narrow economistic vision, and the lack of congruence between political and economic aspects of European integration and the lack of popular support for such a project undermine its capability to become a dominant power.¹⁷ The EU is yet to develop a common stand on defense and foreign policy, since its stance on these issues is affected by German reluctance to get more involved, British pro-Americanism, and traditional French individualism.¹⁸ However, the EU’s united economic stance gives it a countervailing bargaining power against the US in international trade negotiations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations.¹⁹ Politically, there is little difference between the values of the US and the EU, although they sometimes differ from each other on global political and economic issues. Perry Anderson claims that the recent expansion of the EU into Eastern Europe has happened according to the wishes of the US.²⁰ The threats of Soviet socialism united the EU with the US once, and now threats from Islamic radicalism will keep it there, argues Bradley Thayer.²¹ At the WSIS, the EU worked as a cohesive unit and tried to mediate between the interests of the US and the global south in Internet policy issues.

As well as the states, transnational corporations, and West-based civil society organizations are also actively involved in global Internet politics. The participation of such non-state actors in global decision-making bodies has increased significantly in recent years, taking various forms, including participation in multilateral policy dialogues by NGOs and transnational corporations; advocacy partnerships (i.e., mainly by NGOs) with multilateral organizations; public–private partnerships to arrange funds for managing multilateral projects; and sharing research information and experiences with multilateral bodies and planning and implementing multilateral projects, argue Benedicte Bull, Morten Boas, and Desmond McNeill.²² In the case of Internet policymaking, businesses are dominant actors in ICANN, while the WSIS opened an opportunity for both civil society and businesses to play important roles in the multilateral bodies of global communication policymaking. It was the second UN summit to accept the accreditation of business entities after the 2002 Monterrey UN summit, named Financing for Development. In the first phase of the WSIS, 98 business entities attended the meetings. In the second phase, their number increased to 226, with the encouragement of Western states. In the business category, mainly representatives of the transnational corporations (TNCs) involved in ICT business participated in the meetings. Leslie Sklair would define the representatives of these transnational companies as the members of the transnational capitalist class.²³ They participated in the name of the Coordinating Committee on Business Interlocutors (CCBI) with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) as the chair. Apart from the ICC, the key members of the CCBI included the Business Council for the United Nations (BCUN), Global Business Dialogue on Electronic Commerce (GBDe), Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC), Money Matters Institute (MMI), United States Council for International Business (USCIB), World Economic Forum (WEF), and the World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA). Many transnational ICT companies such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco System, Siemens, VeriSign, Google, Hewlett Packard, Apple, AT&T, Dell, NTT DOCOMO, NEC, British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Sprint, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Verizon, Mitsubishi, Nokia, and Huawei Technology are members of these organizations.

Similarly to businesses, civil society also had an elevated status at the WSIS compared with the previous UN communication events. Marc Raboy points out that civil society has been involved in UN summitry for quite some time in various capacities, but not as an “equal partner”; the WSIS treated civil society as an equal partner to other stakeholders.²⁴ However, it needs to be clarified what civil society means here. Civil society as a term has taken many meanings over the years. For Hegel, civil society included the market, while for Gramsci it is the space where consent is generated in favor of the hegemonic class.²⁵ In contemporary uses of the term, civil society refers to the nonprofit sectors, which are oppositional to the state. However, within the UN system, nongovernment entities, private enterprises, and intergovernmental organizations belong to the civil society category. The WSIS created a Civil Society Bureau (CSB) to coordinate civil society activities, which included entities like “The Media”, “Creators and Active Promoters of Culture”, “Networks and Campaigns”, and “Cities and Local Authorities” as civil society members.²⁶ The CSB also included representatives from various caucuses (i.e., the Human Rights Caucus, the Internet Governance Caucus, the Gender Caucus, etc.) and the regional contact points of the summit. In the first phase, 481 NGOs participated in the WSIS processes in the civil society category, and in the second phase their number went up to 606. Cammaerts and Carpenter note that civil society was diverse in terms of structure and ideological orientation.²⁷ It had representatives from grassroots, regional, and global civil society organizations with all types of ideological orientations, such as conservative, liberal, and radical. Marc Raboy claims that Voices 21, a London-based loose coalition of media activists formed in 1999 to act as a voice for communication issues, was the pioneer in organizing civil society actors at the WSIS.²⁸ It negotiated with other West-based NGOs such as the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), the Association for Progressive Communication (APC), and the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) to increase civil society influence at the WSIS. All these organizations together launched a platform called the Campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) to establish communication rights as a central issue of the WSIS.²⁹ CRIS later joined forces with other NGOs and civil society groups dealing with communication issues, such as Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German foundation, which organizes public service ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• 1. Global South and Supranational Internet Policymaking
• 2. From UNESCO to ICANN: Rise of a New Model of Global Communication Policymaking
• 3. Uniqueness of ICANN
• 4. Resistance to the ICANN Model of Internet Governance
• 5. Bridging Digital Divide: Neoliberal Means with State Control(?)
• 6. Multilingualism: Does It Legitimize the ICANN Model?
• 7. Intellectual Property Rights on the Internet: The Global South’s Struggle for a Lenient Regime
• 8. Cybersecurity and States: Same Bed, Different Nightmares
• 9. New Multilateralism for Internet Policymaking
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index