Power and Authority in Internet Governance

Return of the State?

Blayne Haggart, Natasha Tusikov, Jan Aart Scholte, Blayne Haggart, Natasha Tusikov, Jan Aart Scholte

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000361629
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Political Process

Power and Authority in Internet Governance investigates the hotly contested role of the state in today's digital society. The book asks: Is the state "back" in internet regulation? If so, what forms are state involvement taking, and with what consequences for the future?

The volume includes case studies from across the world and addresses a wide range of issues regarding internet infrastructure, data and content. The book pushes the debate beyond a simplistic dichotomy between liberalism and authoritarianism in order to consider also greater state involvement based on values of democracy and human rights. Seeing internet governance as a complex arena where power is contested among diverse non-state and state actors across local, national, regional and global scales, the book offers a critical and nuanced discussion of how the internet is governed – and how it should be governed.

Power and Authority in Internet Governance provides an important resource for researchers across international relations, global governance, science and technology studies and law as well as policymakers and analysts concerned with regulating the global internet.

Part 1
Internet governance

The bird’s-eye view

1 From governance denial to state regulation

A controversy-based typology of internet governance models

Mauro Santaniello

Introduction

During the inaugural ceremony of the 2018 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron unsettled the audience, and more generally the internet community, with an unprecedented speech on internet-related policy issues. Macron’s presence marked the first time ever that a head of state had opened the Forum in the plenary assembly’s 13 years of existence. Unusual till then for the IGF, the president also made his speech in the presence of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, laying out an extensive, informed set of policy proposals.¹ In his speech, Macron broke with the most recent European “conservative” tradition, which was fundamentally in agreement with the US Government’s attempt to preserve the international regime of internet governance that emerged from the privatisation process of the 1990s. Macron called for “a movement of reform” in global internet governance in general and more state regulation of the internet in particular. More specifically, Macron argued for the need for “new forms of multilateral cooperation” in internet governance, as opposed to both the Californian model of internet governance “of complete self-management” that is fundamentally “not democratic” and the Chinese model, in which the state is “hegemonic” and individual rights are not guaranteed.²

These new forms of cooperation, in Macron’s view, should be based on democratic regulation and would be consistent with the values of the founders of the internet, which, according to his narrative, are currently endangered. In Macron’s words, “the internet we take for granted is under threat” on three levels: On the network level, it is threatened by “state-orchestrated and criminal cyber attacks”; on the content level, it is menaced by “hate speech,” “dissemination of terrorist content,” and “authoritarian regimes who exploit these opportunities to penetrate our democracies”; and on the level of data governance, “it is threatened by giant platforms which risk to no longer being simple gateways but gatekeepers, controlling members’ personal data.” State-backed and criminal attackers, authoritarian regimes and the giant US-based online platforms constitute together the villains in Macron’s narrative, with France and, above all, Europe the heroes standing in defense of the free internet.

Macron’s speech – its location, its content, its rhetorical style – was presented and received as a discursive turning point in the European approach to internet-related policy issues, reviving the debate over alternative global internet governance models. On the one hand, it represented a change in strategy by a relevant European state actor, which can be fully understood only by taking into account the historical evolution of this field of policy, its main controversies, and dynamics among its actors and coalitions. On the other, it was an attempt to delineate a new governance model for the internet and to build a new discursive coalition around it.

In order to historically contextualise Macron’s speech and to better understand its political significance for the global governance of the internet, this chapter will (a) briefly reconstruct the historical development of the main political controversies about internet governance in the international arena; (b) draw, on these controversies, a typology of archetypical global internet governance models; and (c) situate Macron’s initiative and the current European approach to internet regulation against these models, highlighting their relevance for international relations in the field of internet governance, as well as global trends, rifts and conflicts emerging from the unresolved tensions between state and non-state actors in internet policymaking.

This chapter identifies two main controversies concerning the institutional design of international venues of internet-related policymaking, namely the controversy related to the extent to which these venues are open and decision-making is inclusive of all interested stakeholders and the controversy about the implementation of decisions made in the venue, in particular the level of enforceability and coercion of its policy outputs. These controversies are conceptualised as analytical dimensions whose intersection helps us to deductively characterise four different ideal-typical models of internet governance: neoliberalism, sovereigntism, multistakeholderism and constitutionalism. Each model is discussed and outlined with its main attributes and its underlying ideology. Then, this typology is used to assess Macron’s speech, statements from other European political leaders, and their overall relevance for the global governance of the internet. The analysis shows, among other things, that while on the level of principles and values Macron’s proposal is clearly based on a liberal-democratic approach rooted in constitutional theory, on the level of concrete policy proposals his words seem to embrace a less inclusive model focused more on the exercise of national sovereignty than on fundamental rights protection. Also, both Macron’s speech and statements from other European politicians clearly testify a turn to state regulation in the European internet governance, one that is mainly addressed to digital platforms rather than traditional issues such as the management of infrastructure and the administration of critical resources. It is concluded that a new stage of structural changes and political struggles seems to be started at the international level around internet-related issues and that it is still hard to understand where these transformations are heading. The aim of this chapter is to provide some conceptual coordinates to better situate and analyse ongoing power reconfigurations and actors’ repositioning in the global internet governance, building on the historical development of the policy field but also abstracting single disputes of the past into a more general level of analysis able to catch long-term trends.

Internet governance forums: from governance denial to state regulation

The early internet, Arpanet, was built by what political scientists call a “policy community” (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974; Rhodes 1990, 1997); that is, a network of stable relations between a restricted number of actors, sharing a common set of values, beliefs, experiences, specialist languages and career paths (Hogwood 1987), relatively isolated from the general public and other institutional networks (Rhodes 1986), and characterised by a low level of internal conflict due to the fact that each participant, even within a hierarchical distribution of power and resources, is engaged in a positive-sum game (Rhodes and Marsh 1992). Arpanet’s policy community was “a rather close-knit and trusted network of researchers and scientists from the same cultural background with a shared set of values and beliefs” (Ziewitz and Brown 2013, 11). This community was abundantly supported by public funds (Hafner and Lyon 1996), mainly from the US Department of Defense through its Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Members of the community made decisions about design and functioning of Arpanet by means of a deliberative principle known as “rough consensus and running code” (Clark 1992), based on an informal decision-making process aimed at finding practical solutions to be easily implemented (Bradner 1999). This model of governance, which has been defined as “ad hoc governance” by the sociologist Manuel Castells (2001, 31) and as a “technical regime” by the political scientist Jeanette Hofmann (2007, 77), has been operating since the end of the 1960s. In the second half of the 1990s, the US government decided to transfer the operational control over the internet from the technical community of engineers and computer scientists based in US universities to the private sector, as well as to replace the oversight role of the US Department of Defense with that of the US Department of Commerce (Mueller 2002; Goldsmith and Wu 2006). The business leadership in internet development, configuration and management was institutionalised through a set of public policies adopted in the second half of the 1990s. For example, in 1995, the original backbone of the internet, the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), was commercialised. As well, the 1996 US Telecommunications Act liberalised the US communications market, allowing media corporations to compete with telecommunications operators, and vice versa, paving the way for the consolidation of big media companies through mergers and acquisitions (Mouritsen 2002). The Telecommunications Act was paralleled, at the international level, by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Agreement on Basic Telecommunications Services. This agreement, which entered into force on 1 January 1998, called upon member governments to liberalise their domestic telecommunications markets and to open them to global competition.

Furthermore, in 1997, the US administration of Bill Clinton issued its Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, which established the principle that “the private sector should lead … the development of a global competitive, market-based system to register Internet domain names” (Clinton 1997). The presidential order that accompanied the framework also instructed the Department of Commerce (DoC) to “make the governance of the domain name system private and competitive and to create a contractually based self-regulatory regime” (ibidem). In the same years, the US government actively worked to support the privatised nature of the internet governance regime, preventing the technical community from establishing a Geneva-based organisation that, together with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the International Trademark Association (ITA) and the UN International Telecommunications Union (ITU), would exercise control over the Domain Name System (DNS). On 5 June 1998, the DoC’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued its own “Statement of Policy on the Management of Internet Names and Addresses,” known as the White Paper, sanctioning the basis for the establishment of a new corporation for the administration of the DNS, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was effectively founded on 18 September 1998.

These policies, aimed at privatising, commercialising, deregulating and liberalising the internet, were mirrored by domestic and international pushes to strengthen digital-copyright protection. In 1996, WIPO’s World Copyright Treaty (WCT) and World Performances and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) ensured legal protection for and enforcement of rules related to digital rights management (DRM) copyright-protection regimes, paralleled in the United States by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). As a result of these actions, by the end of the 1990s, the United States had constructed an internet self-governance regime at the domestic and...