What does one conclude when a government document (here) states in the same breath that internet governance has no universal definition, but ICANN nonetheless “governs” Internet through a “successful” multi-stakeholder model? A reasonable person will deduce that government policy itself is either half-baked; or, at any rate something is not right; and the reason for that is because U.S. plans for Internet do not square with some of the rest of the world in connection with privatization, otherwise called “openness”.

Internet is global. But ICANN’s governance model is provincial. The governance puzzle has two heads.I pointed this out in a previous post. Head number one, the rhetoric, slants to “fundamental values” (Breton, 1977) which universally means “the community”. But head number two is about cowboy capitalism run amok. According to Mueller, there’s a “clash between two models of global governance; one based on agreements among sovereign territorial states; the other based on private contracting among transnational non-state actors, but relying in some respects on the global hegemony of a single state [meaning USA]”.

It’s Also About Control

The surface account for the “clash” is the stuff of domestic political drama, delineated by authors Goldsmith and Wu (2008) as well as in a formal historical sense by Mueller (2002). The former chronicles the political shenanigans of Postel, Cerf, Crocker, Internet Society, and their antagonist, Ira Magaziner, meaning U.S. Government, in an informative and entertaining narrative, but with a serious purpose behind the antics, which was control of the so-called root. Those initial skirmishes fueled by ideology have had real world consequence.

By looking back on the antics one gets a sense of the antecedent template that might partially explain ICANN. The concept of “control” is key. Policy and politics go hand-in-glove. Control denotes power, and primacy, however defined. For example, The Economist newspaper (23 November 2013) attributes to Walter Russell Mead four kinds of U.S. power: military, economy, values, and hegemony. The fourth definition, hegemony, is not well understood, especially in terms of governance. Hegemony is a large scale phenomenon running alongside history which requires consent, not only from those who are directly governed, but also from peer institutions, including other governments.

While control in ICANN’s domestic arena amounts to struggles between those with claims to entitlement, or privilege derived from money, the hegemony concept provides a tool to pinpoint via feedback governance models that presume to speak for civil society, but actually reflect the voice of the hegemon. That voice, even at this relatively early stage, is already a control intimation derived from the marketing jingles and double-talk which discloses the ambitions of economic elites.

Those intimations are real and possibly determinative. In the realm of real politik large canvas hegemony can be readily viewed on television in the form of daily domestic altercations in various countries, mindful of Strindberg’s allegorical Dance of Death. Reduce that to discord about fundamental values against the politics of control and it is feasible to start making sense of ICANN.

The struggle isn’t really about economic fabulism or libertarian delusions that Internet sooner or later will eliminate sovereign statehood and therefore openness trumps whatever imaginary enemies are out there waiting to slip intrusive government into the mix. Those particular intimations are real, but they are side shows. The drama behind the struggle as applied to ICANN is survival. ICANN is trapped. American internet policy was not born from principled compromise. The historical evidence points to the ideology of the empire of business which is America’s gift to the world and therefore the hegemon’s principal advocate. This obtains even while government claims that U.S. policy is “to preserve and advance the successful multi-stakeholder model that governs the Internet”.

Therein roots the dilemma. ICANN could not and can not reconcile the public interest with the self-serving proclivities of business. If, as Goldsmith and Wu observe, that government knows: a) privatizing Internet eliminates accountability; and b) that government control is anathema, at least in its own mind; it follows c) that ICANN does not know to whom it belongs and, thus, the key to the kingdom is financial independence from both ideologies, arrived at through a lemming like leap into an ocean of privately owned gTLDs.

It is as if previous wars about governance, (meaning gTLD-MoU, ISOC, CORE and the rest of it described by Goldsmith and Wu as an “attempt to take root [zone] authority”), have predisposed ICANN to its survival mentality. And, if so, this mirrors the dysfunctional governance predicament that seems to emerge from the U.S. in the three (above-mentioned) policy objectives.

Survival

Accordingly, it is time for non-state entities, regardless of affiliation, to begin thinking about internet governance mindful of the age of new network thinking and new governance models. ICANN’s present model mirrors survival. It chose to be guided by laissez faire, the best and perhaps only road to its own endurance. That particular blunder, although tactically understandable, sharply contradicts ICANN’s stated “policy process [which aims to] efficiently and effectively to benefit the global Internet community”.

No reasonable person will conclude that the monopolistic marketing capers of the gTLD beneficiaries are aimed at anything other than lining their own pockets, and by default ICANN’s pockets, through generic TLD and domain fees, amounts to reasonable governance. What an alternative model (and perhaps many other alternatives from different sources) can do is highlight and compare ICANN-style governance with a peered networking model where lateral governance replaces the bottom-up delusion by testing on a small scale the efficacy of ICANN governance against a more progressive oversight model. At the minimum this will expose the smoke screen that deflects our attention from the present framework that drifts somewhere between state sponsored hegemony and hell bent profiteering.

To begin that exposure I intend in Part 3 to start looking at the little and sometimes seemingly insignificant “intimations” that disclose the predisposed character of governance in ICANN.