Expert answer:The Future of Internet Governance
Solved by verified expert:In a minimum of 450 words, post answers to the following questions:What are the advantages and disadvantages of a multi-stakeholder approach from the point of view of nation states?Do Trinkunas & Wallace (2015) make a good case for why the U.S. should abandon a U.S. centric approach to Internet governance? If so, why? If not, why not?
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Internet Governance
Editor: Virgilio A.F. Almeida • virgilio@dcc.ufmg.br
The Evolution of Internet
Governance
Lessons Learned from NETmundial
Virgilio A.F. Almeida • Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Internet governance is a key policy issue in the world today. The growing
global dependence on the Internet increases the importance of its governance
processes. In this article, the author discusses a few lessons learned from the
process of preparing and running the NETmundial meeting, which discussed
Internet governance principles and a roadmap for the future Internet ecosystem.
T
he Internet governance framework is a distributed and coordinated ecosystem involving various organizations and fora. It must be inclusive,
transparent, and accountable, and its structures and
operations must follow an approach that enables the
participation of all stakeholders in order to address the
interests of all those who use the Internet as well as
those who are not yet online.1
In recent decades, the Internet has promoted
deep changes in standards of living, work, education, entertainment, political participation, and,
above all, how we interact with each other. The
Internet is a powerful engine of change, sometimes disruptive. With more than 3 billion users
worldwide, it’s become a general-purpose technology, a basic and essential element in the life
of almost every citizen, and a key component of
governments and the economy. According to a
recent Boston Consulting Group study, the Internet’s contribution to the GDP of developed countries varies between 5 and 9 percent.2
On the other side of the coin are challenges
such as cybercrime, security threats, attacks on
freedom of expression and human rights, invasion of privacy, espionage, transnational legal
disputes, and concentrations of markets and
wealth. Many of these issues are related to global
Internet governance — a term used to describe
the arrangements that organize the global network’s functions and resources to ensure its correct functioning in any part of the world. Due to
the Internet’s decentralized and multistakeholder
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nature, which involves governments, companies,
civil society, and academic and technical communities, the Internet can’t be regulated at only
a national level. Internet governance needs local,
regional, and global agreements.
In June 2013, Edward Snowden revealed files
showing a number of mass-surveillance programs undertaken by the US National Security
Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The two
agencies accessed information stored by major
US technology companies, often without individual warrants, and mass-intercepted data from
the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of global phone and Internet networks.
Further revelations indicated that the NSA had
monitored the communications of global leaders,
including Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and
German Chancellor Angela Merkel. These revelations reduced confidence in the current system of governance, undermined trust in Internet
companies and services, and created fears among
global Internet institutions.
In a speech to the UN General Assembly in
September 2013, Rousseff proposed establishing new rules for governance and Internet use.
Several subsequent international actions pointed
in the same direction, demanding changes. In
the aftermath of her UN speech, Rousseff met
with the president of ICANN, Fadi Chehadé, to
discuss Internet governance issues.3 As a result,
on 9 October, Rousseff announced that in April
2014, Brazil would host an international meeting
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Internet Governance
Table 1. Participation statistics for NETmundial meeting.
Opportunities for
participation
Outcome
document
Content contribution
Comments on first draft
Expression of interest
188
Attendance
Remote
participation
–
–
1,370
–
–
–
869
–
Attendees
–
933
–
Countries
–
110
28
Worldwide hubs
–
–
33
Cities
–
–
30
of government, industry, civil society,
and academia to discuss the future of
Internet governance. This basic chronology of events led to the onset of
the Global Multistakeholder Meeting
on the Future of Internet Governance,
or NETmundial, held in São Paulo,
Brazil, on 23–24 April.
A few months later, it’s still too
soon to assess NETmundial’s value.
Although its outcomes might inspire
some optimism, its benefits are
likely to be in less tangible, longerterm changes in attitudes and understanding of the Internet ecosystem.
Here, I discuss a few lessons learned
from the process of preparing and
running the NETmundial meeting,
which will shape other Internet governance fora and frame key issues
that will need follow up in the next
few years.
The Process Pays Off
The NETmundial meeting was organized by a partnership between the
Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and 1/Net, a global platform created to receive contributions
from those interested in improving the
Internet governance process.4 NETmundial had two clear goals: identify
a set of Internet governance principles
and draw up a roadmap for the future
Internet ecosystem.
The “NETmundial Multistakeholder
Statement of São Paulo” is the first
document to demonstrate a global
agreement between many stakeholder
groups and governments worldwide
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www.computer.org/internet/
on a set of specific principles for
I nternet governance along with a
roadmap of concrete actions for its
future evolution.
The term “multistakeholder meeting” generates mixed reactions. Critics
usually point out the difficulty different
stakeholders have in reaching a compromise. Sometimes, the term is misunderstood. In the context of NETmundial,
the multistakeholder style aimed to find
a broad consensus and compromise
between all involved stakeholders. For
the first time, all the key stakeholders,
including governments, got together
to reach a negotiated agreement at the
global level on principles and future
steps for Internet governance evolution.
A key element, as I’ll detail further,
was adopting a bottom-up and equalfooting approach that began before
organizers even drafted the reference
document’s first line. The organizers
also kept in mind the need to tailor
the event to the multiple stakeholders’
specificities, such as decision timing,
representativeness, and language. By
committing to these values, NETmundial earned an early vote of credibility
from the global Internet community,
and showed that the multistakeholder
decision process is viable even within
a limited time frame.
To prepare for and plan the meeting,
a multistakeholder board comprising
five cochairs created four committees. The High-Level Multistakeholder
Committee (HLMC) had 27 members,
set the meeting’s political tone, and
provided international visibility. The
Executive Multistakeholder Committee (EMC) had 19 members; it prepared
the reference document and meeting
agenda, designed the meeting format,
and invited attendees. The Logistics
and Organizational Committee guided
all logistical aspects of the meeting,
including media outreach, international communications, website design
and management, awareness raising,
the meeting venue, a traveler-funding
strategy, security, and remote participation. The final committee, the Council of
Governmental Advisors, interacted with
government representatives interested
in participating and contributing. During the two months that preceded the
meeting, the NETmundial board and the
EMC met weekly.
NETmundial’s dynamic process
included many ideas and proposals
that ended up in the reference document, which had two parts: the principles and the roadmap. This bottom-up
and equal-footing participatory process was possible due to contributions
from everyone willing to participate at
any level. NETmundial received 188
suggestions from 46 countries and 158
institutions during its initial round of
inputs (http://content.netmundial.br/
docs/contribs), which formed the basis
for the work the EMC and HLMC did in
drafting the reference document. After
that, another round of public participation received 1,370 comments, as
Table 1 shows (http://netmundial.br/
w p – c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 01 4 / 0 4 /
NETmundialPublicConsultationFinalReport20140421.pdf).
The meeting was open to anyone
interested in participating. Due to the
venue’s physical limitations, the maximum number of participants was set
around 900. We thus made a mechanism available online called “expression of interest” so that people could
indicate their intention to physically
attend. NETmundial received 869
applications, most from civil society
and the private sector. The majority of
applicants mentioned previous participation in other Internet governance fora
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The Evolution of Internet Governance
and their intention to contribute to
the meeting. The executive committee
then selected 500 applicants in a way
that would achieve balance in terms
of geography, gender, and multistakeholder sectors. Governments submitted
their applications directly to the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations.
Table 1 shows that 933 people from
110 countries attended the meeting
in São Paulo. Figure 1 displays percentages of participation for different
stakeholders.
Given this diversity of stakeholders and methods of input, just producing an outcome document reflecting
a rough consensus demonstrates NETmundial’s success.
Technical
community
Private
sector
Concrete Focus
From its inception, NETmundial was
planned with the idea of producing concrete results. This ambitious goal created
a mindset in participants for producing
an outcome document with international and multistakeholder legitimacy,
accepted by rough consensus.
Negotiation Process
We can also view NETmundial as
a global negotiation process that
included a phase for preparing the reference document, discussions during
the two-day meeting, and input from
remote participants. This negotiation
began two months before the conference,
when the NETmundial website opened
to receive contributions from individuals and institutions. This innovative and
dynamic process received 188 ideas and
proposals from all over the world that
ended up in the reference document.
Taking these contributions and generating the reference document was complex
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9.3%
Academia
17.1%
15.1%
Civil society
Other
3.3%
IGO
4.4%
Government
39%
Figure 1. Multistakeholder attendance at NETmundial. We can see the truly
multistakeholder and global nature of the NETmundial meeting.
Innovation Is the Name
of the Game
The ability to innovate and create
has been at the heart of the Internet’s
remarkable growth. Innovation should
also be part of evolving the governance
process. NETmundial introduced several
innovations.
11.7%
Table 2. Schedule for preparing reference document.
Date
Activity
14 Feb.–8 Mar.
Receive content contributions via NETmundial website
8–12 Mar.
Summary process (categorization)
12–16 Mar.
Summary process (writing summary document and drafts)
17 Mar.
Deliver summary/drafts to Executive Multistakeholder Committee
(EMC) and High-Level Multistakeholder Committee (HLMC)
22–24 Mar.
Drafting meeting for EMC members present during ICANN Singapore
31 Mar. –1 Apr.
Meeting at CGI.br, Sao Paulo, to conclude the document draft
3 Apr.
Submit draft documents to HLMC and board
9–10 Apr.
Submit feedback on draft document to EMC and board
11 Apr.
Publish draft document for public comments
and laborious. Table 2 details the steps
involved, which included multiple consultations with NETmundial’s different
committees and the stakeholder groups
that members represented. The reference
document’s final quality is another indication of NETmundial’s success. During
the negotiation process, we observed the
need to improve working methods and
tools as regards the multistakeholder
decision-making procedures.
Real-Time Global Participation
NETmundial launched a call for remote
hubs where individuals or organizations could organize a physical space
in which to participate and interact
remotely as a group during the meeting. Organization relied entirely on
volunteers from the Internet governance community, who responded
with a great deal of enthusiasm: we
received 33 proposals from 30 cities in
23 countries (Table 1).
The hubs were set up in institutional and company auditoriums to
provide real-time interaction with the
plenary sessions in Sao Paulo. Local
coordinators worked with organizers
to establish a tentative plan for sending questions and comments directly
to the session chairs, and during the
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Internet Governance
plenary sessions, CGI.br provided the
infrastructure needed for high-quality,
remote interactions via Internet video.
This combination of technology and
well-trained coordinators enabled harmonious, effective, and smooth remote
interactions.
Modus Operandi
Several innovations were introduced
to ensure that the meeting would
operate smoothly. First, we installed
a separate microphone for each of the
four stakeholder groups. Representatives of government, civil society,
business, and academic and technical
communities thus had separate channels for expression. As sections of the
reference document were put up for
discussion in the plenary meeting,
stakeholder groups and participants
in the remote hubs also had an opportunity to provide input. This let all
stakeholders, local or remote, participate on equal footing.
A second important innovation
was to implement drafting rooms,
where nightly sessions took place to
incorporate comments from the plenary sessions into the reference document. These rooms were open for any
attendee’s viewing.
NETmundial’s organizers sought
transparency for all conference activities. This helped us achieve credibility and legitimize the results section.
Multistakeholder committees prepared
the final version of the document in
the last two hours of the meeting. The
modification process for the final text
was exhibited on screens open to all
participants in the conference room.
HLMC and EMC members then discussed the outcome document in an
open session and presented it at the
plenary closing session for adoption
by acclamation.
Arena-NETmundial
Arena-Netmundial was an initiative from the Brazilian government
to establish connections between the
Brazilian public — young people in
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particular — and the topics discussed
at NETmundial. To strengthen the
link between the general public and
NETmundial, the government created
a public online platform with questions covering a simplified version of
the principles and roadmap described
in the NETmundial reference document. Basically, Arena-NETmundial
posed questions related to the evolution of the Internet to the public, such
as, “What Internet do we want for
the future?” This public consultation
lasted for 27 days; it received 281,529
votes on the main questions and 295
proposals. During the two-day NETmundial meeting, Arena-NETmundial
organizers opened a public space in
São Paulo where artists, public intellectuals, and personalities from Internet technical communities could
discuss the Internet’s future with the
public at large.
Paving the Way to Future
Internet Governance
NETmundial reaffirmed the importance of a more open, global, and multistakeholder-oriented Internet. It was
a considerable achievement to have
an open and broad debate between all
relevant stakeholders, including governments. Although broad agreement
existed on the views the final document put forward, a few discordant
voices took the floor. Among governments, Russia, Cuba, and India explicitly distanced themselves from the
“Multistakeholder Statement of São
Paulo.” Representatives from civil
society also demonstrated their unhappiness with the final document as
regards its lack of support for net neutrality and the language used in the
roadmap to address mass and arbitrary
Internet surveillance.
During document preparation, other
points of tension arose. One was the
nature and scope of Internet governance processes. Should Internet governance be restricted to technical issues
involving DNS servers, domain names,
and IP numbers, such as managing
critical resources? Or should it also
address important nontechnical issues,
such as privacy, censorship, human
rights, taxes, and so on? The outcome
document included controversial issues
such as stakeholders’ different roles and
responsibilities, jurisdiction, and net
neutrality as relevant points for discussion beyond NETmundial.
A Narrative for Global
Governance
The global Internet governance process needs a narrative. Human rights,
net neutrality, free flow of information, freedom of expression, and
a unified Net could help provide a
framework for creating narratives to
create global public awareness. Other
fields that deal with global problems
such as climate change and sustainability have managed to get their
messages across to the public. This
isn’t the case for Internet governance issues. Although NETmundial
had huge press visibility, with more
than 180 journalists attending the
meeting, the topics and discussions
are still basically restricted to those
directly involved in Internet-governance-related activities. It’s frustrating that the different fora don’t
manage to present to the public that
Internet governance is a fundamental process for evolving the digital
world and essential to the social and
economic development of all countries. It isn’t evident that NETmundial principles and proposals have
resonated with many people beyond
those directly involved or interested
in the subject.
N
ETmundial succeeded in producing an outcome document
with international legitimacy. The
two days in São Paulo were the
beginning of a revision process for
global Internet governance that’s
vital to strengthening cyberspace
and its use for all nations’ social and
economic development. To preserve
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The Evolution of Internet Governance
its dynamism, Internet governance
must continue its quest for innovation through an open, participative,
inclusive, and multistakeholder environment.
References
1. “NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement of
São Paulo,” Apr. 2014; http://netmundial.br/
wp-content/uploads/2014/04/NETmundialMultistakeholder-Document.pdf.
2. The Connected World: Greasing the Wheels
of the Internet Economy, Boston Consulting
Group, Jan. 2014.
3. M. Mueller and B. Wagner, “Finding a Formula for Brazil: Representation and Legitimacy in Internet Governance Retrieved
from Internet Governance Project,” Jan.
2014; www.internetgovernance.org/pdf/
MiltonBenWPdraft_Final.pdf.
4. W. Dickinson et al., “Enhanced Cooperation
in Governance,” research paper, Oxford
Legal Studies, forthcoming, 2014; http://
ssrn.com/abstract=2376807, http://dx.doi.
org/10.2139/ssrn.2376807.
Virgilio A.F. Almeida is a professor in the
Computer Science Department at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
His research interests include large-scale
distributed systems, Internet, social computing, and performance modeling and
analysis. Almeida received a PhD in computer science from Vanderbilt University.
He’s the Brazilian Secretary for Information Technology Policies and chairman of
the Internet Steering Committee of Brazil
(CGI.br), as well as the general chairman
of NETmundial. Contact him at virgilio@
dcc.ufmg.br.
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