Defense of Multistakeholder Net Governance Challenging Despite Positive WSIS Review

The WSIS+10 outcome document adopted Wednesday largely tracked with a draft outcome document circulated in advance of the U.N. high-level meeting that endorsed the multistakeholder governance model. The U.N. outcome document recognized that “effective participation, partnership and cooperation of Governments, the private sector, civil society, international organizations, the technical and academic communities and all other relevant stakeholders … has been and continues to be vital in developing the information society.” Internet governance “should continue to follow” WSIS outcomes agreed to during the 2003 Geneva meeting and the 2005 Tunis meeting, the U.N. said. It addressed the need for continued work to address “significant digital divides,” particularly in developing countries and other states facing barriers to digital advancement, along with divides along gender, racial and other geographic lines. The U.N. also reaffirmed its commitment to the spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a human right and extended the Internet Governance Forum’s mandate for another 10 years, as expected (see 1511200063).

The WSIS+10 outcome document “charts a clear path for the expanding role of [ICT], including the Internet, as drivers of development and indispensable platforms for the exercise of fundamental freedoms and human rights,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement. “It is yet another important step toward ensuring that our modern information society is people-centered and inclusive.” The final outcome document is a “substantial improvement over earlier drafts,” due to substantial diplomatic work by State and other stakeholders to ensure the outcome document “reflects the views of many that this was to be a review of WSIS rather than a renegotiation of the original WSIS outcome documents,” said Wiley Rein telecom lawyer David Gross.

“Overall, we think the outcome document is quite positive,” said Internet Society Senior Director-Global Internet Policy Constance Bommelaer. The reaffirmation of the multistakeholder model “really echoes the Tunis agenda,” which is “very important to us because the multistakeholder model has been a foundation of the Internet both technically and economically for many years,” she said. U.N. renewal of the IGF’s mandate is also important because the IGF is “really an example of the bottom-up approach to policy formulation in the Internet governance space through sharing best practices and other policy discussions," Bommelaer said. “That for us is an illustration that multistakeholder governance can function, is able to deliver solutions to emerging policy issues.” She noted the “central” placement of language on human rights. “For the past 10 years we’ve been talking mostly about the technical governance of the Internet, and now we’re moving into a new dimension as the Internet increasingly impacts our social lives and more centrally figures into legal issues,” she said. “That’s really the challenge ahead of us.”

WSIS+10’s positive outcome “seemed to be overshadowed” by a Chinese government-sponsored international Internet policy conference in Wuzhen and statement made by Chinese President Xi Jinping during the conference, Gross said. “We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber development,” Jinping said during the conference, which ended Friday. The WSIS+10 high level meeting had no heads of state in attendance like the China-sponsored conference, and “it will be an interesting and a challenge for everyone to integrate the messages coming out China with the messages coming out” of the WSIS+10 meeting,” Gross said. A number of countries at WSIS+10 themselves seemed to view multistakeholder Internet governance as including national governments to a greater degree than the U.S. would prefer, said TechFreedom President Berin Szoka, who attended the high-level meeting. “Everyone’s trying to use the same language, so when you're hearing something that sounds like agreement you may be missing crucial differences behind those words,” he said.

Clashing messages coming out of WSIS+10 and the China conference “doesn’t mean we’re at a stalemate” in the debate over whether multistakeholderism should remain the dominant Internet governance model, Gross said. “I think we will need to work hard together to move things forward. It sounds like the vision coming out of China is materially different than the vision coming out” of WSIS+10 “and which visions will prevail over the next few years will require a lot of work by many actors.” All Internet governance stakeholders “have the risk of fragmentation in mind as security issues emerge but experience shows that you absolutely need everyone around the table,” Bommelaer said. “If you have a fragmented space, then you lose the benefits of an open Internet both socially and economically. This is a discussion that needs to continue and needs to be global.”