India changes its internet governance position — backs away from UN proposal

29 Oct 12 | Digital Freedom, India

Following outrage from India’s civil society and media, it appears the country’s government has backed away from its proposal to create a UN body to govern the internet. The controversial plan, which was made without consulting civil society, angered local stakeholders, including academics, media, and industry associations. Civil society expressed fear that a 50-member UN body, many of whom would seek to control the internet for their own political ends, would restrict the very free and dynamic nature of the internet. The proposal envisaged “50 member States chosen on the basis of equitable geographic representation” that would meet annually in Geneva as the UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies (UN-CIRP).

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Indian parlimentarian and critic of the proposal, said: “CIRP seems like a solution in search of a problem”. At present, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a non-profit with ties to the US State Department, serves as the platform for internet governance, using an organisational structure that allows input from the wider internet community and not just governments of the world.

Sachin Pilot, India’s Minister of State for Telecom

However at the 4-5 October Conference on Cyberspace in Budapest, the Minister of State for Telecom, Sachin Pilot, indicated that India was moving away from the “control of the internet by government or inter-governmental bodies”, and moving instead towards enhanced dialogue. Pilot has now confirmed the change to Index, saying that the Indian government has now decided to “nuance” its former position.

The sudden move can be explained by India’s decision to now develop its own stance, claiming that it was initially just supporting proposals made at the India, Brazil and South Africa seminar (IBSA) on Global Internet Governance in Brazil in September 2011. However, there are indicators that the country might have played an active role in pushing for the new body.

The government representatives present at the IBSA seminar drafted a set of recommendations focused on institutional improvement, which pushed for the UN to establish a body “in order to prevent fragmentation of the internet, avoid disjointed policymaking, increase participation and ensure stability and smooth functioning of the internet”. The proposal was to be tabled until the IBSA Summit on 18 October 2011, but according to a Daily Mail report, Indian bureaucrats publicly discussed the proposal at the 2011 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kenya, saying that the move “was criticised across the board by all countries and scared away both Brazil and South Africa.” The report also alleges that the Indian government only consulted one NGO — IT for Change — in drafting the proposal presented in Brazil, despite repeated offers from other participants to pay for members of the country’s third sector to participate in the seminar. India’s proposed UN-CIRP was slammed for moving away from multi-stakeholderism and instead opting for government-led regulation.

Whatever the truth behind the Indian government’s motives in proposing UN-CIRP, its new and more “nuanced” position is a welcome move. It remains to be seen if India will maintain its new stance at the upcoming IGF, which will be held from 6-9 November in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Mahima Kaul is a journalist based in New Delhi. She focuses on questions of digital freedom and inclusion

Who controls the internet?

28 Aug 12 | Digital Freedom, Uncategorized

December will see the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialised UN agency that sets standards for international telephony. The Dubai-based conference will bring together 190 nations and, while members have been meeting behind closed doors, various policy proposals have been leaked by activists on the website WCITLeaks.

There are huge decisions at stake over the future of internet governance, with the battle lines being drawn between governments that see the access to information as a matter of human rights, and others that consider the control of information to be an issue for the state.

Russia and China have been putting forward proposals to regulate certain areas of the web — citing the old axioms of crime and security, for one. These are areas which are currently unregulated due to, as Rebecca MacKinnon writes, a “lack of international consensus over what those terms actually mean or over how to balance enforcement with the protection of citizens’ rights.” Of course, this is not the first time these two nations have banged that drum against Western domination over such institutions or asserted their national sovereignty over cyberspace.Nor is it just authoritarian regimes with patchy human rights records that are citing these as justification for national control of the web. A year ago, Brazil and South Africa called for a global internet governance body to be located within the UN system.

Opponents believe such proposals encroach upon the free and open nature of the internet. If the governance of the internet were in the hands of a UN body, this trend of individual nations exerting overt censorship will be strengthened. Russia’s creation last month of a blacklist of websites that promote drugs or suicide or contain porn or “extremist” materials is just one example of a trend in which free expression is continually chilled. China, a country of 500 million internet users, also finds sophisticated ways of censoring the web (see Dinah Gardner’s thorough explainer here).

Yet the current multi-stakeholder approach is not without its problems, either (MacKinnon gives an illuminating rundown of the current governance ecosystem here). As Katitza Rodriguez of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted at a panel this summer, “a large part of the world’s population feels excluded from international Internet policy making venues.” While this is certainly the case, this exclusion is exacerbated when restrictive internet policies are imposed on the world by a handful of governments pursuing a national agenda.

A major challenge will be diversifying the multi-stakeholder model to include more voices who are not only the most affected by but also vulnerable to repressive internet policies, as MacKinnon has highlighted.

But as actors work out which governance model suits the web — and freedom of expression — best, December’s conference, as Index trustee John Kampfner writes, marks “just the start of the battle between those who wish to keep the internet (relatively) free and those who will do everything in their power to reverse the process.” More power games lie ahead in the fight for online freedom.

Marta Cooper is an editorial researcher at Index. She tweets at @martaruco