The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the annual program of issue-oriented interactions hosted by the United Nations, has formed a stable and solidaristic community. IGF is still the most diverse and relatively open, bottom-up vehicle for converging a global community focused on digital policy issues – and it has become clear to all that the scope of issues encompass all aspects of the digital ecosystem, not just “Internet.” The 2024 IGF, held in Saudi Arabia, just concluded December 19.
The IGF’s status as the flagship institution for global multistakeholder policy cooperation has been tarnished in recent years by the introduction of hierarchical status tiers on the participants. For example, at this IGF there was a certain room coming off the main hall of the conference building. When I tried to walk in it, I was stopped and told, “only for VIPs.” For those of us who are “not very important,” whatever happened to the ideal of “equal footing” for all stakeholders? VIPs also got sleek black SUVs to drive them from the hotel to the conference venue; the rest of us rode clunky shuttle buses. To be considered Very Important, persons had to be Government Ministers, members of the High-Level Leadership Council, etc. Why does this happen? The IGF’s lack of funding resources means that it must sell the rights to the annual IGF to the country willing to pay the steep cost of hosting. This year, it was Saudi Arabia. (Next year, it is Norway – but it was almost Russia.) Along with these host country contracts come strings. More hierarchy was clearly one of them.
What about Saudi Arabia?
A few years ago, nothing would have seemed more unlikely than an IGF in Saudi Arabia. By hosting one, the Saudi government, once an ardent state sovereignty advocate, has signed on to an avowedly multistakeholder institution. It spent megabucks on the project, providing food and lavish surroundings (but not enough toilets!) to the participants. There were some serious glitches: e.g., the workshop rooms had no ceilings, the ambient noise forced all discussion to be mediated by headphones and badly performing wireless mics. The spirit of the thing, however, was good. The Saudi Minister of ICT was one of the featured speakers and made it clear that KSA is on the way to being digitally transformed. Along with the usual cant about “closing all divides”, we heard him call for closing the gender divide – a stunning commitment to make in one of the world’s most gender-segregated societies. In this way the Saudi leadership is aligning itself (I wouldn’t say completely buying into) the more liberal vision of the digital age, trying to cast its lot with multistakeholder, not just multilateral, institutions.
How much Saudi Arabia itself will be transformed along with its digital transformation is another question. For example, a journalist accessing the IGF online was twice kicked out of sessions for posts related to Saudi dissenters. She was shut out of the opening session meeting chat after posting the names of the people Access Now has campaigned for in their open letter to the Saudi government. While welcoming the steps of authoritarian governments in the right direction, we should not overlook their repression.
Another notable feature of the Forum is the growth of national and regional IGFs. The network of actors formed around ICANN, WSIS and the IGF has expanded into many national and regional fora, replenishing and renewing its values and expanding the network.
The IGF (Geneva UN) vs the GDC (New York UN)
Compared to its early days, the IGF attracts less media attention and fewer private sector leaders. Oddly, one of the biggest challenges to the IGF’s pre-eminence has come from within the United Nations system. The office of the Secretary General and its “Tech Envoy” have tried to create new initiatives that would allow their offices to manage UN activities related to digital governance outside the IGF. The Global Digital Compact (GDC) describes itself as a “comprehensive framework for global governance of digital technology and artificial intelligence.” The overlap with the remit of IGF is pronounced. Widely criticized as a bureaucratic empire-building exercise, the GDC process lives uncomfortably with the implementation, follow up and review processes stemming from the ITU-managed World Summit on the Information Society. While some of us favor declaring the WSIS process finished after 20 years and bringing it to a close, the new rivalry with the GDC has made many advocates of multistakeholder internet governance more devoted to continuing the WSIS process than ever. They fear that ending WSIS would allow the GDC process, which is less open/multistakeholder and more directed by the UN hierarchy, to overshadow the IGF. (For my take on the GDC see this video.) It’s clear that the GDC promoters see “AI” governance as a space left open for them by the “Internet” governance community, even though (as noted during our workshop on AI governance, both Internet and AI governance should be redefined as governance of a digital ecosystem that includes Internet, data, software and semiconductors.
Workshop on Digital Public Infrastructure
IGP sponsored a workshop on “Emerging Norms for Digital Public Infrastructure” (DPI). DPI has become the name of choice for platforms or services that mediate key processes or functionality essential for operating in the digital economy, notably digital identity, payments and APIs related to government.
The panel focused on definitional issues as well as policy issues. It discovered that the term is not really used in Europe and that there is not a clear consensus as to which services get labelled DPI: social media? e-commerce? e-government? Some advocates see DPI as an answer to big tech dominance, and Brazil developed in that direction, but others pointed out that national regulation could raise issues of protectionism and interoperability. IGP’s Jyoti Panday, the workshop organizer, noted the national security roots of India’s “universal” biometric ID system. Would an emphasis on digital sovereignty mean we could be replacing one monopoly with another? The DPI Panel was recorded and can be seen on the IGF YouTube channel (some sound glitches will occur)
The debate over “multistakeholder” rhetoric
Day 0 of the IGF is known for the Annual Symposium of GigaNet, the organization of academics interested in IG, which formed out of WSIS civil society. GigaNet featured a discussion/debate on “multistakeholderism,” with Wolfgang Kleinwachter playing the role of its valiant defender, Milton Mueller cast as the challenging disrupter, and Alisa Heaver of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, playing herself.
Milton Mueller began by reiterating the arguments he made in The Hague about why multistakeholderism (MS) is a bad “brand name” for the organic Internet governance institutions. Opposition to MS as a label, he said, does not mean he is against the so-called MS institutions. On the contrary, he supports those institutions and thinks the conceptual confusion fostered by the MS word weakens them. Branding them as MS obscures their distinctive feature – a shift of governance authority away from national governments and into the hands of non-state actors. Mueller noted that the creation of ICANN was intended to be the primary implementation of that policy, but its status was compromised by the exclusive oversight role played by the United States government. The IANA transition jettisoned that baggage, making ICANN a true instance of governance by non-state actors. That was the notable governance innovation, not “Multistakeholderism.” Mueller also argued that continued use of the term is creating problems. It claims to be a governance model but says nothing about decision making processes, decision making authority, or representation structures. It is so imprecise that it can be and has been claimed by Intergovernmental Organizations such as UNESCO or ITU.
Wolfgang Kleinwachter disavowed the ”ism” part of the MS label, but did insist on its value and appropriateness. He recalled Kofi Annan’s statement during WSIS, that we need governance innovations. In Kleinwachter’s mind, the 2004 definition of Internet Governance promulgated by the WGIG, and the 2005 Tunis Agenda, the political agreement that emerged from the World Summit, represented such an innovation and he thinks we should stick with it. In his opinion “all” stakeholders need to be “involved” in governance, “in their respective roles.” Multistakeholderists don’t give a lot of thought to how stakeholder groups are defined and how consequential that is, but they do know that governments are a stakeholder group. According to the Tunis Agenda, governments have a superior role. They make policy/law, the rest of us take policy/law. Surprisingly, Kleinwaechter openly acknowledged that assigning different “roles” to different stakeholders precludes the involvement of all stakeholders on an equal footing.
He praised the ISOC-ITU gTLD Mou of 1996, in which the technical community allied with multilateral institutions ITU and WIPO to attempt to set up a new DNS governance institution with ties to multilateral institutions. He asserted that government, private sector and civil society are so intertwined that multistakeholder and multilateral institutions are “two sides of the same coin.”
Alisa Heaver began by thanking Giganet for allowing a government representative to have a voice in this debate. She agreed with Wolfgang that governments were stakeholders who deserved to be represented. She recounted her experience in ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee. When it had differences with the board, negotiations ensued, and she thought it was a good thing to have those negotiations. But she agreed with Milton that final decision-making authority over the DNS rested with the ICANN board, and this was a unique aspect of the Internet institutions. She directly disagreed with Wolfgang’s statement that multistakeholder and multilateral institutions are two sides of the same coin, emphasizing the important differences between the two. One regime gives decision making authority to any and all stakeholders and one that only assigns representation and votes to states. Heaver expressed some dissatisfaction with the whole debate, however, saying that debates over labels were less important than debates over substantive policy issues or approaches.
Mueller said that the current trend toward digital sovereignty means that this debate does have powerful implications for substantive policy. Digital sovereignty is an attempt to bring decision making authority back into the exclusive remit of national governments. If we don’t understand the unique status of the Internet institutions as policy making by nonstate actors, they will not be able to resist the sovereignty push.
The IGF is UN hosted. Many in the democratic world do not want UN multilateralism imposed upon their nations by UN selected panels that are totally unfit for purpose: i.e. Human Rights Panels occupied by members of brutal dictatorships, Women’s Rights Panels occupied by members from misogynist regimes, Security Panels with members from the likes of Putin’s regime. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn your IGF panel consists of a majority who want nothing more than the shut down Elon Musks ‘X’.