[npoc-voice] Olevie's posting on "CONGO has lost its role it played during the WSIS"

[Sam Lanfranco <lanfran@xxxxxxxx>]

Olévié has brought to NPOC-Voice list the important issue of stakeholder 
voice across not just human rights (case cited) or Internet governance 
(NPOC primary remit) but across all global policy issues. CONGO, was 
envisioned as a primary support and platform for a civil society 
stakeholder voice. It understood that such stakeholder presence has to 
involve broad and deep knowledgeable stakeholder engagement in policy 
processes. CONGO is in trouble.
I will take this opportunity to burden NPOC-Voice colleagues what 
amounts to the second part of my manifesto as NPOC Policy Committee 
Chair, the part that has to do with broader and deeper stakeholder 
engagement in Internet policy. It is the last of my longish postings 
here (circa 1000 words). When I want to say this much I will resort to 
short comments and a blog link to longer content.
It is worth a brief reflection on why stakeholder voice is more 
important now than ever (i.e., what has changed other than our 
sensitivities to injustice, dignity and the like), what are the key 
obstacles, and what are the ways forward. This is not the place for the 
treatise, so bullet points will have to do: 1. The industrialization and 
colonialism of the 19th Century produced a 20th Century demand for a 
complementary layer of governance, the multilateral treaty and 
organization, that linked nation states, and where power remained 
centralized; 2. The 20th Century’s recognition of human rights, social 
justice and dignity as goals, and the end of colonialism, shifted 
attention back to the well-being of the community and the individual, 
calling for greater stakeholder voice, and finally; 3. Greater economic 
interdependence and the technological revolution of the Internet shrank 
distance and opened space for humans to build structures and processes 
across time and space that will help animate, or obstruct greater 
stakeholder voice and the pursuit of those lofty goals. In short, 
successful innovation in multistakeholder voice and governance will be 
to the 21st Century what innovation in multilateral governance was to 
the 20th Century; unthinkable at first and eventually essential and 
pervasive.
This puts the challenge of how to get there from here squarely on the 
agenda of all stakeholders but more directly on the shoulders of civil 
society with its focus on both voice and the broader goals, and not the 
narrower agenda of commercial interests, or the sometimes less than 
representative efforts of national governments. There are two key tasks 
here. One has to do with the Internet itself and the other has to do 
with deepening and broadening knowledgeable stakeholder engagement in 
policy dialogue and governance.
While we generally agree that a free and open Internet is essential 
there is no consensus yet as to what that actually means in practice. In 
part this is the problem in the South Asian parable of the seven blind 
men trying to describe an elephant. Stakeholders see elements of the 
Internet and respond to strategic options, with regard to policy or 
tactics, based on that perception. Is the Internet like a central 
nervous system but linking multiple bodies? Is its impact as medium or 
as message? Did or will it create a global village? What do all of these 
have to do with how to get stakeholder voice and how to use it to have 
creative and effective dialogue around where we go from here?
It is useful to think of the Internet as a pervasive human construction 
that should function a bit like naturer’s own pervasive construction, 
gravity. Just as gravity gives a vehicle the same road traction for a 
vehicle in Argentina, Botswana, or China, or for a rich person’s car and 
a poor persons’ bike, and independent of whether they are going to work 
or to play; at some fundamental and agreed upon level the core (stable 
and secure) workings of the Internet should be universal.
Beyond that much of the policy dialogue and debate around the Internet 
has to do not with the Internet itself but with lofty goals that came 
out of the 20th Century and are within the remit of civil society 
organizations. Just as traffic rules are not about gravity per se, much 
of Internet use is not about the Internet per se, and needs to be 
addressed beyond organizations like ICANN. The Universal Declaration of 
Human Rights (UDHR) is instructive here. It sets the principles, the 
core values, but other institutions deal with the legislative and 
judicial aspects of policy. This suggests that a key ongoing policy area 
is how Internet governance is deployed, both horizontally around the 
globe (who covers what?) and vertically through existing layers of 
governance (what at what level?). Neither a One-Stop-Shop nor a 
One-Size-Fits-All works here.
At the core of this in terms of observing core values and pursuing 
ultimate goals is broad and deep knowledgeable stakeholder engagement. 
Here I think we have several problems. One of course is that the 
Internet is poorly understood. It is new and its gravity-like human 
built core properties are still being determined. This calls for a two 
level educational effort. At one level is an ICANN style stakeholder 
outreach that tries to encompass what the Internet is and what, within 
ICANN’s remit, the policy issues are, hoping to attract interest and 
involvement. At a more important level the educational challenge is to 
help stakeholders understand where they reside in the Internet ecosystem 
and help them discover what policy and strategic issues are important to 
them, especially from a civil society perspective.
The next challenge is how to give voice, how to engage, knowledgeable 
and concerned stakeholders. We have another problem here. Thus far the 
strategy has been something like a global town hall (non-democracy) 
approach where selected (how?) representatives (of whom?) are invited to 
global events. Pre-planning and time constrain agendas, dialogue, and 
outcomes (mainly used as inputs to next event). For outcomes to be more 
than that, stakeholder coalitions have to be structured to participate 
in policy dialogue at the levels of governance where policy is made, 
implemented, and adjudicated. For the infinite future that will be 
within the nation state and piecemeal across various multilateral 
structures, much as has been done with the UDHR. Direct town hall 
democracy always gives way to layered representative democracy when 
stakeholder numbers grow.
Figuring out how to go beyond WSIS## and ICANN## to a layered and 
ongoing civil society stakeholder involvement, and anchoring involvement 
closer to where stakeholders reside within the Internet ecosystem, and 
closer to their “local-but-shared” Internet issues, are at the core of 
successful multistakeholder governance. This is not only top of the 
agenda for ICANN now, but will be top of the agenda for the world as the 
21st Century rolls on.
We cannot simply hold larger town hall meetings in unused Brazilian 
World Cup arenas. But there is another venue, one that supports 
structures and processes across asynchronous time and space. It is 
called the Internet. We need to spend less time chasing funding for 
limited voice at time constrained events, and more time building 
stakeholder breadth and depth in these asynchronous spaces of the 
Internet., and effectively linking those efforts to policy making at all 
levels.
Sam L.

--
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"It is a disgrace to be rich and honoured
in an unjust state" -Confucius
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Dr Sam Lanfranco (Prof Emeritus & Senior Scholar)
Econ, York U., Toronto, Ontario, CANADA - M3J 1P3
email: Lanfran@xxxxxxxx   Skype: slanfranco
blog:  http://samlanfranco.blogspot.com
Phone: +1 613-476-0429 cell: +1 416-816-2852