‘Watershed Year’ for Multistakeholder Internet Governance Should Focus on Including Developing World, U.S. Officials Say
The year 2014 “may well be a watershed year for the multistakeholder model of Internet policy making,” and the U.S. plans to continue to continue defending the model while encouraging it to evolve, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling during a speech Tuesday. Strickling and U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy Daniel Sepulveda said at the State of the Net conference that multistakeholder bodies that have governed Internet processes need to evolve to become more inclusive of stakeholders in the developing world.
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An independent, ICANN-formed panel on the future of multistakeholder Internet governance that began meeting in December (CD Dec 2 p6) is among several ongoing efforts to address the multistakeholder model this year, Strickling said. The U.S. particularly hopes the ICANN-formed panel “will provide ample grist for follow-up discussions” on how to improve the multistakeholder model at global meetings scheduled for this year, Strickling said. Those meetings include a Brazil-sponsored global multistakeholder meeting on Internet governance, April 23-24 in Sao Paulo. The multistakeholder model will also be a major topic at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, which is Oct. 20-Nov. 7 in Busan, South Korea, as well as at Internet Governance Forum and ICANN meetings this year, Strickling said.
The U.S. believes “it is especially critical that these discussions engage nations of the developing world to build a global consensus on the importance of the multistakeholder process,” Strickling said. Sepulveda echoed Strickling’s comments, saying the U.S. believes it’s important to trumpet the success of the multistakeholder model, but “that doesn’t mean we oppose change” in the model. The U.S. hopes making multistakeholder groups more accessible to the developing world will convert some people who would be in favor of a multilateral, government-centric Internet governance structure into multistakeholder supporters, he said.
Sepulveda said he doesn’t believe the U.S. has lost any moral authority on multistakeholder Internet governance because of controversial NSA surveillance programs. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said at an earlier State of the Net session that he believed the NSA programs had undermined the U.S.’s moral authority on Internet-related issues. President Barack Obama’s efforts to examine those programs through the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, as well as his public statements about the NSA programs, are evidence that the U.S. can still be a moral leader on Internet governance issues, Sepulveda said. “There will be people who will try to conflate U.S. intelligence practices with other issues” in order to gain a competitive advantage and negotiating leverage on Internet governance in order to “achieve a policy end that has nothing to do with intelligence gathering, he said.