Twenty years after multistakeholderism helped save the Free Internet and present-day Internet governance from a potentially existential crises, the term is again triggering some strong emotions. There are very real questions around definitions, accountability, participation, and even legitimacy in all multistakeholder models. Within Internet governance, there are declared enemies of the multistakeholder approach—especially in Russia and China, but also in the West and Global South—who often reject outright the very premise of the non-state led Free Internet. But within the liberal democratic Overton window, there is not much argument if the term actually exists, merely if it is good or bad or even morally just. But then there are the multistakeholderism discontents - those who suggest the whole thing is a terrible idea and should just vanish and become something else.

In a speech in The Hague, Milton Mueller, a veteran of the global academic Internet community, showed his strong discontent with multistakeholderism and asked us to “shed” the rhetoric around it and simply declare for Internet “self-governance.” In the CircleID article “Internet’s Two Bodies” I challenged Mueller’s facts, but also logic: the very term multistakeholder had already served our common mission well, so why abandon it? Mueller replied to my position with an “energetic” article entitled “Why we need to discard the word multistakeholder” which often misrepresents my position and forces me to go through his philippic argument by argument. To spare the reader the pain of wading through the entirety of our sometimes-turgid-but-probably-amusing academic bar fight, I will, however, try to concentrate on new content wherever possible. Getting the history right is a first step.

In March 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan seemed worried. He was right to be so. The first part of the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) had concluded in Geneva, and it was hardly an unmitigated success. Despite the fact that the original 2001 UN General Assembly Resolution 56/183 had specifically stated that the private sector and civil society needed to be involved in the summit, some governments were clearly not ready to accept the non-state actor lead in Internet governance, proclaiming it above all else a matter of national sovereignty. As Markus Kummer put it “there was no real debate on issues, but a confrontation of two visions of the world, or two schools of thought, and at the first phase of WSIS it proved impossible to bridge the gap between them. One salient feature of the negotiations was that the Governments remained in charge and the Internet professionals who run and manage the Internet were locked out.” Few observers were happy with the outcomes from Geneva, and it looked possible that the WSIS process would fail—effectively denying the existing Internet governance mechanisms and institutions any kind of legitimacy in the international system. There should be little doubt that we would be in a very different world today if that had happened—one where ICANN and many Internet institution would have little or no standing at all.

Before this looming crisis, Kofi Annan seemed to plead for new thinking, saying “Clearly, there is a need for governance, but that does not necessarily mean that it has to be done in the traditional way for something that is so very different.” The Working Group of Internet Governance (WGIG), mandated at Geneva, tried to find this new way. Drafted in an open and inclusive format that allowed all stakeholders to participate on “equal footing”, the WGIG Report became the basis for much of what would be agreed upon in 2005 in Tunis. But not only did WGIG help find a “compromise” between the non-state-led Internet (which was given the lead on “technical matters”) and governments (which were given the lead on “public policy”), but also, through their new working process, helped meet Annan’s challenge to find a “policy innovation”. Some stakeholders considered the WGIG process itself the greatest innovation, “a watershed in international cooperation”. According to one WGIG member, Wolfgang Kleinwächter, the WGIG built bridges between the US private-sector leadership view and the Chinese-backed government-leadership view, and showed that multistakeholderism was not so much a “model” but a “methodology” on how to organize collaboration of different stakeholders to the benefit of the global community. As Bill Drake pointed out, the broad working definition of Internet governance the WGIG established, the working together of the various actors “in their respective roles” would make Internet governance synonymous and inseparable from the multistakeholder model. This was effectively the marriage of the Free Internet to multistakeholderism in Internet governance, and in 2004 and 2005 the spirit and the letter of it helped save the first consensus on the management of Internet resources.

My argument is that the complexity of the digital age calls for the involvement of all affected and involved stakeholders, and that this realization has been building for many decades and defines the legitimacy of all governance efforts in this domain. I believe the current multistakeholder Internet governance system really is the “obvious miracle” in policy that matches the obvious technical miracle of the Internet itself, and those striving for a non-state-led Internet should be happy that we have such a powerful normative tool as multistakeholderism on our side. The inevitable proliferation of interpretations of the en vouge policy term means that it is critical that those supporting a Free Internet double down on its strongest asset, and make sure our definitions stick. ICANN is a critical fulcrum in this fight, but recently has struggled badly and even embarked on an engagement strategy completely at odds with this goal. Ultimately, as Avri Doria but also many others have pointed out, there is no single multistakeholder model, and that’s fine. The Chinese government regularly invokes “democratic” principles, that doesn’t mean they are being successful in redefining what democratic means—only that they understand the power of the term.

Mueller’s basic contention is, in effect, that Internet governance was “immaculately conceived” free from governments, has drifted away from this Eden via WSIS and other side-steps, and needs to be “returned” to a completely government-free state. Mueller portrays invocations and rhetoric of a multistakeholder model (the dialogue of which I call multistakeholderism or just MS) as a plot to bind Internet institutions to one side of a Digital Cold War that the West is waging, rather than simply rising like a Phoenix above it. This is somewhat perplexing, of course, as many authoritarian governments think instead that the current Internet institutions themselves represent a plot to keep West-aligned proxies and businesses in positions of power. But Mueller is very American-centric in his outlook; while he vociferously criticizes the US and Europe for what he seems to believe are their threats to an Internet governance model that they effectively helped create and maintain, he obviously does not think other governments matter at all—at least, they are not mentioned in his two posts. In his world, the *only* struggle is between hostile or incompetent US-led governments and the self-liberated Internet institutions that are threatened by them; and in this the MS narrative is just a tool of the useful idiots favoring government action. At the end of the day, Mueller prefers a “one stakeholder model” for different parts of the global Internet governance ecosystem. Although he invokes civil society, and sometimes technical and academic communities, the arguments he brings are reminiscent only of a basic 1990s private sector liberalization and telco deregulation of the Internet. That world is long gone.

Some of our respective perspectives are likely due to backgrounds. There is the difference in scholarly fields—Milton is a professor of Communication Studies with obvious strong libertarian bent, while my social science background is heavily influenced by the complex interdependency theory of International Relations, which since the 1970s has looked beyond hard power and governments as the only factors in the international system. Milton sees himself as a “veteran of ICANN before the transition”. In contrast, since my first (virtual) IGF in 2011 I have largely seen myself as a “tourist” within the Internet Governance ecosystem. I worked as a member of various think-tanks with governments, but also with companies and Internet institutions on international cybersecurity issues, from the hacker, technical national cybersecurity level up to legislation, norms and nation-state power doctrines and dynamics. Internet governance has a very special role in this field—sometimes as closed zone or nature reserve that needed to be protected and tended, sometimes as a crucial policy resource that was to be occupied and ruthlessly strip-mined and drift-netted.

In his effort to refute my CircleID text Mueller often misquotes and/or misrepresents my argument, so it is necessary to revisit some of his statements at length: “Klimburg…argues that multistakeholderism is the great legitimizing principle of Internet governance”. Not quite, and the distinction is small but important. What I repeatedly said in the article was that accepting the reality of actor plurality (i.e. the sheer number of players involved) was the legitimizing principle of the mode of working with the cyberspace regime complex—and the label we have attached it to this mode is the multistakeholder approach. In past writings and in The Darkening Web I have defined the cyberspace regime complex as being much larger than just the Internet governance “cluster”. The cyberspace regime complex includes other clusters as well, e.g. the international cybersecurity, counter-cybercrime, and incident response clusters, to name but a few—and while many of the clusters overlap most of these actors do not work with Internet governance at all. Joesph S. Nye first adopted the term “regime complex” for the Internet in an article in 2014, largely based on the work of his longtime collaborator Robert Keohane and his article on the climate change regime complex. While only Nye specifically invokes the term multistakeholders, most of the global governance scholars using the term regime complex since the late 1990s would recognize it as a form of institutionalization of non-governmental actors in transnational processes—a trend in political sciences that goes back to the 1980s, as I pointed out.

Mueller seems also confused by his own source material. In his rebuttal, he seemed irritated that I brought up the 1998 DNS Green Paper and White Paper as an example of how stakeholder-based thinking was clearly present in Ira Magaziner’s thinking. He says I intentionally ignored the document he referenced, the 1997 Clinton Framework for Global Electronic Commerce. According to him, the document:

“provided the governance architecture for what became ICANN. ICANN would institutionalize the IANA functions by allowing a “global Internet community” to govern itself by forming its own policy-making institution for DNS and an organizational home for IANA.”

Of course, the Framework itself does no such thing—none of these key words appear, even indirectly. No Internet community is mentioned at all, and DNS is mentioned only as a sub-component of the paragraph on Intellectual Property. All of the things Mueller attributes to this document are instead sketched out in the 1998 Green and White Paper which operationalized the respective mission in the Framework—itself only sketched out in a single sentence under the subsection “Domain and Trade Names”. The Framework clearly stipulates a thoroughly 1990s liberal vision of the future global “electronic marketplace.” It talks a lot about marketplace and private sector leadership. It does not mention Internet community, civil society, technical community, or academia—not directly, or even really indirectly: this aspect would only become apparent during the Green and White Paper. The Framework basically is a US-enforced free-trade agreement on the new “electronic marketplace,” one which the US could also, therefore, hope to dominate. For this to work, it says a lot of US government involvement on the international stage would be necessary. Overall, the Framework supposes that the US would have to engage in international agreements in nine specific areas in order to realize this vision. But just as private-sector leadership was baked into the debate, so was the understanding for the need to engage the many other stakeholders.

The Clinton Framework was based on the National Information Infrastructure Initiative (NII) which was presented by US Vice President Al Gore in 1993. According to Kleinwächter, Clinton himself said that the administration did not have a clear concept how to manage the new challenges of the coming Internet age. The conceptual work was done to a high degree by the NII project at Harvard, led by Brian Kahin and other groups under Charles Nesson at Harvard Law School. For most of those involved in the debates it was clear that a new approach was needed, one which had to go beyond a purely governmental approach and even supersedes the private-sector-only ideology prevalent at the time. Roots of this can be seen in Ira Magaziner’s invention of the civil society “At Large” Community, written by him into ICANN’s original bylaws. While there was a lot of confusion at the time of what ALAC meant, in the 2004 WGIG discussions, according to Kleinwächter, its relevance was suddenly clear: it made ICANN itself a multistakeholder organization. That, of course, remains so today—with both the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and the ALAC (and other non-private sector groups) with important roles to play.

Mueller does not believe in the usefulness of multistakeholder collaboration, or working with government at all. He says:

“It’s interesting that the same people who are so fearful for the future of MS governance are also the ones who seem to be joined at the hip with ongoing intergovernmental processes, where the autonomy of Internet institutions is being eroded. They want us to “participate” in the Global Digital Compact. They want us to “participate” in WSIS, WSIS+10, WSIS+20, and WSIS+50 no doubt. They want us to ally with U.S. and European-led governmental interference in the Internet’s freedom and access. One gets the impression that multistakeholder rhetoric is becoming the icon of a self-replicating religion. Time to pop that bubble.”

There is a lot to unpack here, and there is an urgent need to do so as well. Mueller seems to imply that there is a world where “we” (he identifies himself with the Internet institutions) can not only completely ignore all governmental endeavors in all aspects of the Internet, but also that these intergovernmental initiatives will not have any consequences on how the Internet (and the cyberspace it is but a part of) will develop. This is not only wrong, but also dangerous: away from an academic debate, it provides sustenance to some actors in the private sector and Internet institutions themselves to take a misguided and potentially dangerous path. By arguing for hiding away from these often misplaced but nonetheless increasingly prevalent intergovernmental discussions (and all the dreary work that it entails), Milton’s argument could lead much of the non-state Internet institutions into oblivion and irrelevance. We have seen this with ICANN, where its New York office has inexplicably and repeatedly stated that the best engagement of the Internet community on UN policy matters was through national governments, rather than through ICANN. As I pointed out in my article, this approach not only led to the unfortunate public lecturing of the Global South governments by Western government as to why they should like ICANN, and with all that this implies. It also diminished the voices of the Internet community as a whole, with its strongest public actor relegating itself to a lobby group working in the shadows and thus undermining its own legitimacy.

Ignoring the normative power of states sorely underestimates their ability to wreck mayhem on the Free Internet, and with a stroke of a pen undue what decades of non-state actors have created. All major international Internet discussions since 1999 have involved some kind of attempt to subtly or not-so-subtly redesign Internet governance per se, and it was only through a lot of effort on part of many individuals that this has been effectively resisted. From the very start, the dilemma for Free Internet advocates in government but also civil society and the private sector has been to what extent these “infringements” needed to addressed, or simply ignored. For well over two decades the answer has been that to ignore these threats would be perilous, and that engagement in intergovernmental discussions did not mean automatic acquiescence or agreement to their stated goals. This kind of dilemma isn’t completely novel. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), for instance, learned long ago that it had to be present in all discussions that could impact its core mandate of safeguarding International Humanitarian Law. This meant that they had to be at every meeting taking place that addressed the issue, even if they completely disagreed with the discussions taking place at all. In the real world we don’t always get to choose which discussions take place, and simply ignoring them can backfire heavily. Sometimes, furthermore, bad initiatives can have good outcomes: the Russian government proposed what became known as the UN GGE discussion, and this ended up being a win for liberal democracies. The also Russian-initiated Ad Hoc Committee on a UN Cybercrime Treaty, which Mueller incorrectly insinuates I supported, was widely acknowledged by civil society as having produced a “caveated win” for non-state actor participation—even though “we” are worried about the result and are hoping against UNGA adoption.

Mueller’s befuddlement with the role of MS in the “digital cold war” reaches new heights with the following:

“What Klimburg seems to be doing is trying to lure civil society and the independent internet institutions into the digital Cold War the U.S. is leading. Yet the securitization of cyberspace is the biggest threat to the independence of Internet institutions. We are witnessing a systematic attempt to reassert state power in the name of national security at the expense of other stakes and other stakeholders. When national security reins supreme, all the things that private sector-based Internet governance achieved are at risk.”

When I first wrote of Internet comparisons with the Cold War in 2013, Mueller admitted he had a “visceral reaction against it “—although in the same article he seems to admit that it made sense. It’s, therefore, doubly unfortunate that Mueller still gets confused as to what the actors involved actually want. Aside from any justified discussion on the question if the US has abused its dominant cyberpower to implement an overbearing global surveillance regime (something I have indeed argued, inter alia, in research commissioned for the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission), it’s a bit head-scratching to say that the United States and the West are trying to “lure” the Internet institutions into taking a side in a geopolitical showdown over Internet governance. The opposite is the case: over the last twenty-five years, since Russia’s 1998 UN General Assembly resolution 53/70 on Information Security, there has been a proactive attempt to overturn the existing non-state-led Internet governance structure. From the point of view of the “Cyber Sovereignty” nations, it is indeed all about security, as their core proposal, the 2015 International Code of Conduct on Information Security makes abundantly clear. And for the United States and the like-minded governments (to say nothing of many civil society activists and private sector actors) defending against incursions into MS Internet governance the stakes associated with “securitization” have been clear as well: the “Line to take” has been to resist attempts by the CyberSov faction to use cybersecurity incidents as an excuse to drag Internet governance (safely parked in the “mostly harmless” UN ECOSOC system) into the all-important 1^st Committee of Peace and Disarmament, which connects to the UN Security Council and its legally binding resolutions. For good or for ill, the Internet institutions are allied with liberal democracies, who have tirelessly (and sometimes ham-fistedly) fought for their existence. This admittedly Faustian bargain is necessary as the Internet institutions (and especially ICANN) have refused to become fully fledged members of the international system, as, for instance, the ICRC has become. Just like humanitarian law has a non-state guardian rooted deep in the international system, the current MS Internet governance system needs a public champion as well. Because there should be no doubt that the current MS Internet governance system has powerful enemies trying to turn it, and the Internet itself, into something completely different then what we have today.

From 2008 to 2013. the ITU and key CyberSov states heavily invested in a now-defunct organization, the Malaysian-based ITU-IMPACT. IMPACT, with hundreds of staff and limitless ambition, floated ideas like a “global DNS CERT”—itself first proposed by Rod Beckstrom, quickly abandoned by ICANN, and then eagerly scooped up by IMPACT. On the international stage it was being positioned to take over all the roles (especially IANA) that could be detached from ICANN via political pressure. This activity was evident: you couldn’t go to an OSCE, OECD, and especially UN meeting without running into their eager staff and their implied ITU mandate for everything Internet-related. Overall, their mission was given a massive boost with the Snowden revelations on US cyber practices, and in my personal experience even some high-ranking US tech executives saw the “general transition to the ITU” as all but inevitable. In 2014 two factors suddenly combined to halt this development in its tracks: the stunning and for Russia and China unimaginable announcement that the US government would finally enact the IANA transition, and the trifecta of the Brazil Netmundial Process, ICANN’s (over) government-friendly leadership, and the Montevideo Statement by the I-Star community. In one swoop, the entire Internet governance discussion changed, and even for some diplomats, was considered “solved”. For a number of years there was also less urgency in the discussions: firstly, authoritarian governments were seeing increasing technical success in “nailing Jello to the wall”, to recall Bill Clinton’s comment on Internet censorship, and content control. Second, due to efforts by MS initiatives like the former Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace the term multistakeholder was increasingly accepted within the international system. Thirdly, the CyberSov nations could increasingly hope for a direct route to address their overall security concerns: the proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty probably was aimed at facilitating the global notice-and-takedown system that both Russia and China so desperately wanted. Fourthly, the ITU is not so committed to one side as it was under previous leadership. In 2019 the UN declared an “Age of Cyberinterdependence”, with half a dozen new topics of digital discussion interconnected, and it seemed that there was indeed a new period of cooperation on the horizon.

Then, in-step with Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the situation changed again. The flood of different digital policy topics seemed to combine with the UN’s Tech Envoy’s steering of the Global Digital Compact and a largely-absent ICANN to create new versions of not only what multistakeholder means, but also blur the lines between technical and public policy Internet governance responsibilities. In the run-up to WSIS+20 the CyberSov message that the current Internet governance system is unrepresentative and unaccountable is increasingly landing with nations of the Global South, and the likelihood of a West-versus-the-Rest showdown in 2025 continues to rise. And finally, the BRICS+ grouping is striving to position themselves as an alternative to the Western-backed current global order. A key rallying topic of this is Internet use: while a separate BRICSNet remains unlikely for the immediate future the increased sharing of best practices and technologies to surveil and censor the Internet is in effect fragmenting the Internet in a distinct way. It should be clear that real or perceived security concerns are not the only driver for how state’s want to shape Internet governance, but struggles over visions of political power: a liberal-democratic rules and market-based order, an authoritarian state-first view, and a weary anti-neocolonial remainder whose concerns are often ignored or hijacked.

Mueller’s obsession with the “right or wrong” label of multistakeholder leads him to ignore not only what it stands for, but also what is has already accomplished and what it yet can still do. As I pointed out in my previous article, the entire notion of “multistakeholder” arises out of four decades worth of liberal-inspired reconceptualization of political power away from governments. While dreams of a world free of “the weary giants of flesh and steel” (Barlow) may have been uplifting in the late 1990s, they are at, best, quaint today—and besides dangerous, also simply illogical. Governments have an obvious moral responsibility to involve themselves in some Internet matters, and they certainly cannot be wished away.

The best argument to ensure that non-state actors remain in the lead in technical Internet governance is that the complexity of the subject makes it unlikely that governments alone could manage it, and also that the current system works pretty well. This is different to the message that many liberal democrats would like to use, namely that human rights concerns make it important for non-state actors to lead. This “utility” interpretation of MS has also led to it being adopted by other actors, including various BRICS members—as a Chinese official once said, “It is against the trend to be against multistakeholder.” Unsurprisingly, these forces now try to reinterpret MS towards their ends—one where states’ prerogatives to decide alone remain untouched. This interpretation, very much the minority, could only have success if Internet institutions would completely reject their relative domination of the term—and basically hand the key legitimating it to those actors who wish to shoulder them aside completely.

Instead of abdicating such a clear win, those in favor of curtailing of state power should advance the multistakeholder models not only within Internet governance and even international cybersecurity, but also other fields as well. Afterall, if ICANN is a representative of a multistakeholder organization, where governments (in the GAC) have limited but nonetheless real powers—shouldn’t the opposite apply to public-policy Internet government issues? Or even all digital policy issues? One option of how this could be facilitated is in the Sao Paul Multistakeholder Guidelines, which seems to connect to work Bill Drake did back in 2011 on different multistakeholder “types” and could provide indications of how non-state actors engagement could be classified. And finally, the Internet institutions themselves must proselytize the multistakeholder approach more actively, and absolve the Global North governments from this role and from thus from invoking a neocolonial halo around the Internet institutions. And this is urgent: the political shift in the United States might well lead to the new government re-capturing Internet governance as an overt tool of national policy. The Internet institutions will only be able to protect themselves if they speak themselves, and help define the narrative.

When Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents in 1932 (the superior English title coined by Joan Riviere), Europe seemed to be lurching towards authoritarianism everywhere, including in his native Austria. It prompted Freud to sketch a world where civilization was defined as the attempt to overcome the individual’s three most basic psychological sufferings. The most profound suffering arose from the fear of other human beginnings, and one of the most earnest wishes of mankind was to isolate themselves from others in their own respective group. Civilization, therefore, was marked also by the ability to overcome the desire to stick with one’s “own” (stakeholder) group—and the wider one could do that, the better. It is no different in multistakeholderism. There can be no success if we commit to only working with our own stakeholder group—there will not be just a civil society, private sector or (fingers crossed) a government-run Internet, but there will also not be public policy for the Internet made only by governments, or technical standards made only by the private sector.

The multistakeholder narrative, said Jeanette Hofmann, does not only represent reality, it also gives rise to expectations, objectives, new categories and benchmarks. Twenty years after the Free Internet was saved by a multistakeholder model we should celebrate and build on its success, and develop the term further. The multistakeholderism journey is still young and many critical questions have yet to be sufficiently addressed. Surely it is better that those who believe in the befits of a non-state led Internet lead in the discussion, rather than surrendering the advantage to its discontents.