#multistakeholderism

Multi-stakeholderism: a corporate push for a new form of global governance

The World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative is perhaps the best reflection of how corporations and other elites envision the future of governance. It calls for replacing intergovernmental decision-making with a system of multi-stakeholder governance, but what does this mean for democracy, accountability and the rule of law?

The survey follows a disastrous launch in November, where the three co-organizers – ICANN, NIC.br and the World Economic Forum – attempted to impose their vision of a multi-stakeholder internet governance body, and were repeatedly rejected by the technical community, business world and civil society. Regardless, the organizers and in particular ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade pushed ahead in an effort to meet a planned launch of the initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. That push resulted in the creation of a coordination council, but in the process caused a big loss of goodwill and trust in the process and organizers. The survey will attempt to rebuild trust and do what the organizers should have done in the first place: ask what gap the initiative can fill.

Everything I've seen and heard makes me think Namecoin is critical.  These centralisations of money and power are just magnets to those who would rule.  Even at the country code level, there's politics and platitudes that merely mask the enjoyment of the smarm and swagger of power.

Rumors are flying that ICANN wants to move away from the bottom-up meme that has become its badge of legitimacy.  This is not a good thing.

I have been researching the definition and roots of the term bottom-up for a while now, and it has a mixed background of definition and usage ranging from financial analysis and protein instrumentation to computer science.  IETF, a group whose decision making practices evolved from engineering and research practice, uses it to refer to the rough consensus process. In On consensus and humming in the IETF

we strive to make our decisions by the consent of all participants, though allowing for some dissent (rough consensus), and to have the actual products of engineering (running code) trump theoretical designs. [RFC7282]

I recommend RFC7282 to anyone interested in the meaning of rough consensus as it includes a very fine discussion of both the practice and of things that can be misunderstood about the process. There are three important elements in the IETF definition:

consent of all participants is the goal

some dissent on issues can occur

fact and experience based decision making

ICANN also has its practice of bottom-up decision making though it is not described anywhere with the elegance of RFC7282. It is reflected in gory detail, however, in the policy development practices of groups like the GNSO. A review of these procedures will show that they are:

consent of all participants is the goal

some dissent on issues can occur

fact and experience based decision making

For many years now ICANN has been referring to its private sector led methods as the multistakeholder bottom-up process. This has referred to the structures, both formal and in practice, that define the trust model for ICANN activities between the Stakeholder community and ICANN as a corporate entity composed of Board and Staff. 

The threat referred to in the title of this blog comes from a misunderstanding of bottom-up. ICANN is currently engaged in a tussle between the community and the corporation. The root of this tussle is  a confounding of:

consent of all participants is the goal

with

fact and experience based decision making

The fact that all participants must consent to decisions, does not mean that all facts and experience, or ideas, must originate among the participants.  In the IETF  a protocol can come from anywhere, as an idea from the leadership, a university paper, or a corporate r&d development prototype. But while it may not matter where the idea for something comes from, it matters whether all participants come to a rough consensus on the protocol.  Beyond that, once the participants accept a protocol, it comes under their change control.  They can then twist it, fix it and render it completely unrecognizable according to the dictates of rough consensus.

Similarly, in ICANN policy development process (PDP) the idea for a policy or practice can originate anywhere.  Most PDPs start with a staff analysis of the issues.  Most practices start with a staff rough proposal. Once presented though, what the community does with these raw materials is under the control of the various ICANN consensus processes.  Once they complete their work they send it on to the corporation, i.e the Board and staff, as a recommendation.

But the process does not end there.  It continues. If the Board and staff have difficulty with the recommendation they must be sent back to the community for more work, they can't just change it on it own, though they can offer suggestions. The process of ICANN consensus involves a cycle where any ICANN outcome must first achieve balance of the community and corporate concerns.

A couple of rules in this process emerge:

No matter where a suggestion, experience or fact comes from, it is the participants who must come to consensus on the outcome.

Once a consensus is reached the corporation must review and it may even make further recommendations to improve the outcome.

Whenever an outcome is changed by the corporation, it must go back to the community.

This cycle of ICANN community and corporate, the ICANN consensus, continues until the outcome is stable. When the ICANN system works, it reaches a homeostasis.  Those are the good times at ICANN when everyone is in harmony with trust abounding.

With the sensitive and pressing nature of the work being done on new gTLDS, IANA Stewardship, ICANN accountability, and the pressures of the global Internet environment, the ICANN cycle of community and corporation has started wobbling.  As any cyclist knows, once a wheel starts to wobble, trust in the bike begins to ebb. Trust only returns once the wheel is trued.

Recently the ICANN corporation has been worrying about the trust of the community. As is often the case in social dynamics, this has been understood in emotional terms.  Sometimes when people are emotional,  they start to look for radical solutions.  For example some might decide that the bottom-up processes no longer work, are not obligatory and can be circumvented.  Others decide that the corporation is no longer fit for purpose.

And the wheel starts to wobble even more.

And the emotional content increases.

Perhaps what is needed is to stop, look at the wheel and take the time to true it.  At ICANN this means allowing that the community and corporation to cooperate in the upcoming accountability process. We need to review our structures and strengthen them so that the ICANN corporation can fulfill its commitments, so that the ICANN Community can again believe that ICANN is fit for purpose and so that we can convince the global Internet environment that ICANN deserves its role in the governance of critical Internet resources.

(The following is a version of a submission made to NetMundial 2014)

One of the first principles of Internet governance has been the democratic principle as it contains within its aspirations the fulfillment of many other human rights’ based principles.  There are few who would argue against the principle that Internet governance ought to be democratic.  There is disagreement, however, on whether the multistakeholder model, currently being used, represents a way forward for democracy and whether it fulfills the democratic principle that is central to our discussions.

One of the most common complaints against the Multistakeholder approach is the it by-passes the democratically elected representatives of the people.  Often when one is sitting with governments, one hears a statement of the form:

“ We do not know what Multistakeholder means, but we all know what Democracy means”

Among those who consider themselves democratic, each with its own definition of democracy, we find:

Autocracy 1.0 sometimes known as People’s Democracies

Autocracy 2.0 where one is offered the ability to elect the incumbent

Constitutional monarchies

Parliamentary republics

Presidential mulch-partite republics

Simple majority rule democracies

Democracy that incorporates minority rights in the voting

Democracy that impedes minority rights in the voting

Democracy that balances national religious membership

Plebiscite based direct democracy

Since the time of Aristotle we have been arguing about Democracy and invoking its name for all sorts of systems where the people, or at least some people, have some say in their governance regime.  Even Athens was democratic, at least for males born in Athens.  

And even when we look at the most basic form of multilateral expressions of democracy, we find that the ‘one person  one vote’ is more an ideal than a reality, where nations with a population of tens of thousands have the same vote as those with a population of over a billion.  Yet we view the UN as representing a form of democracy, we have seen that in many cases, this still does not serve the multivariate interests of the people - it is focused on the notion of states as entities and it is out of scope to serve the needs of people within a country.  And it has proven itself as inadequate for handling the needs of the Internet, whether it was the creation of the protocols and other technology that created the Internet or the issues and policy questions that resulted from the behaviors on the Internet.  the problems are too complex for any one grouping, including a multi-lateral grouping to handle.

The question comes down to what we mean by democracy on the Internet?  

When we speak of  democracy, especially with regard to the Internet, we need to develop ever improved forms of participatory democracy.  Participatory democracy is an advance on democracy that has seen few examples in the world to date outside of the Internet, though there some.  It is a form of democracy that is enabled by the Internet and one that may only have been possible in the small town meeting hall before the current age.  The possible scope of participatory democracy is one that balances the best of representational democracy with the ideal of direct democracy.

The variety of multistakeholder models are forms of participatory democracy.  Multistakeholder models build on, and includes, the State based multilateral system in an attempt to move towards more participation by the people and the organizations they form.  Some states may do a decent job of representing the citizen residing within their geographically bounded territory for a particular set of interests related to that place and time.  The states, however, do little for a wider set of rights-based interests people may have, do nothing (or worse) for the non-citizens under their control (especially those who are undocumented), and have little to say about inter-jurisdictional disputes in the absence of treaty.  Beyond that the state frequently infringes upon the rights of citizens, residents and non-resident alike; rights they have agreed to by covenant.  The other human rights based interests require greater participation than can be achieved by governments alone.  It is often Non Governmental Organizations that serve these rights and cross-border interests without discrimination based on geography, nationality or other circumstance.

We all have seen, though, many ways in which the multistakeholder models that are being deployed are still underdeveloped and even flawed at times.  there is still a lot to be complained about and improved upon.   But to misquote Winston Churchill’s quote on democracy:

“Multistakeholderism is the worst form of governance, except all the others that have been tried.”  (Drake 2011)

The WGIG Background Report (Page 239 Paragraph 58) explained:

“Democracy is defined in different ways in a multilateral context and by different stakeholders according to their particular perspectives. Governments generally hold to a view based on national sovereignty with equal say for all countries and decisions reached through consensus. Each citizen is held to be represented and to be able to influence decisions through national consultation and decision-making mechanisms. Some are of the view that most governments include members of their civil society in their delegations to the extent practical and in any case they take into account the interests of their civil societies when establishing agreements at multilateral bodies. Civil society advocates on the other hand would argue that the term goes beyond this, requiring direct full participation in decision making by many nongovernmental groups from the private sector and civil society. Furthermore, they have expressed the view that governments are not actively or consistently consulting with other sectors of society prior to establishing agreements within multilateral bodies.”

And when the context is the Internet, this extends to the technologists who built and preserve the system as well as the Internet Service Providers and other industries that deploy the technology.   Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and epistemic (or expert) communities provide various kinds of information that are relevant to the pursuit of collective goals.

Even when it comes to governmental representation, governance of the Internet requires more stakeholder support than just the diplomatic and bureaucratic representatives of nation states that make up the multilateral system.  The process needs the representation of the variety of governments stakeholders, including regulators, privacy protection, law enforcement, parliamentarians and others.

For humanity’s interests to be truly represented, we need a multistakeholder framework for participatory democracy that includes all people and organizations who have a stake in the subject at hand (in this case the Internet) who care to participate; each participating with their own special perspectives and roles; with roles and responsibilities that vary depending on the task at hand but which, in the larger scope are equal, just as Palau is equal to China in the UN.

Whether it is NGOs that represent the needs and interests of the people they serve, the technical community in their role as the creators and maintainers of the technology, or the academics who attempt to understand the dynamics of the social systems within which we live in this highly interconnected world, all of the stakeholder groups have a place at the table where they can discuss the issues and decide on solutions for Internet governance on an equal footing.  Anything else leaves some interests without representation, and thus leaves the populations who feel and express these interests unrepresented, at least in that respect.