On Thursday 10 March, 87 signatories put forward a proposal for the creation of a multistakeholder body that would discuss and coordinate the imposition of Internet sanctions such as blocking of IP addresses an domain names in times of humanitarian crises. Such sanctions are to be enforced by those entities who choose to subscribe to the principles of the body's manifesto. You can find it here along with the list of the signatories.
The document received considerable press coverage and triggered discussions among internet scholars, policymakers, and activists. One such discussion took place (and as of the publication day of this post is still taking place) in the mailing list of the Human Rights Protocol Considerations Reserach Group of the IRTF whose work I happen to follow.
Below is my contribution.
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
_________
Hello all,
This is also my first time participating in the HRPC discussion so bear with me.
Overall, I can see the logic, motivation, and goals of the initiative, but I am sceptical about its ‘procedural legitimacy’ and scope. I understand the initiative as an attempt to institutionalise the resolution of internet-related issues and disputes in times of crises. In principle, I believe this is good. Internet governance is by design comprised of highly technical, bottom-up decision-making processes which cannot afford flexibility in times of humanitarian crises. As a result, decision-making on, or enforcement of sanctions lies at the discretion of corporations (as it happened during the Russian invasion). This reality creates a ‘legitimacy gap’. We do not know how such decisions are made, how to challenge them, who is vouching for their proportionality, or whom to blame if they are deemed (by whom?) as disproportionate.
However, legitimacy gaps are resolved by state actors acting under the rule of law and by following a particular process of national/international consultation and political deliberation with civil society. On the contrary, crises, overall, make bad law. Rules, vocabularies, and institutions created during such times tend to stick around for generations. In such a context, ‘multistakeholder’ cannot be a substitute for ‘legitimate’ or ‘democratic’. It can, of course, stay only ‘multistakeholder’ and as such, as Mallory mentioned, it does not need anyone’s approval or support. But if it aspires to transform to something more than an association of people with good ideas and intentions, then being ‘multistakeholder’ may only be just one of the many ingredients it requires.
Now, in terms of scope, I am concerned with the risk of problem fragmentation. Blocking is blocking regardless of whether it occurs at the infrastructural or the content layer. Addressing the latter may go beyond the scope of the initiative and indeed that of the HRPC, but creating something only to view the problem from an infrastructural perspective will fractionate resources, intellectual and political power while also risking the normalisation of measures across layers. Even more so, if we want to use the ‘legacy’ of the open internet in shaping the discourse and governance landscape of the OS/content ecosystem.
Overall, my fear is that if we rush into creating a -by necessity- hastily conceived multistakeholder institution, we will spend political capital in an endeavour that may end up rationalising or legitimising insufficiently explored political measures. I do believe that we need something new; something that will create the political pathways for challenging and changing infrastructural (internet) and architectural (OS/app layers) configurations pursuant to the global/public interest (whatever this might mean for a particular historical time). But the constitutive conditions for such creation cannot be properly discussed during a war.
Finally, FWIW I also believe that this is the place to have such a discussion (at least from the sense I got from following discussions in this mailing list) as it raises important research questions particularly around 1) the role of consensus in times when the ‘human rights’ stakes are high and 2) the clash between multistakeholder and democratic legitimacy.
Apologies for the long message.
Petros
