A CircleID post by Alexander Klimburg takes aim at my article, “The Power to Govern Ourselves,” delivered at the Gig-Arts conference in June. That speech, available here on the blog, argued that:

“Multistakeholder does not describe a governance model. It never has. It was always a compromised Public Relations concept,” one that muddied the distinction between governance by state actors and non-state actors. What really made the Internet institutions unique was their break with sovereignty. They created a global governance regime rooted in non-state actors. We need to understand and defend that.

Klimburg is offended by this. He argues that multistakeholderism is the great “legitimizing principle” of Internet governance. But he ignores all the arguments I made about why the term is not a meaningful description of a governance model, and not the right label for the Internet governance institutions.

I agree with Klimburg’s statement that “persistent misunderstanding of the phenomenon of multistakeholderism is a potentially lethal threat to the future of the Internet.” His own version of multistakeholder ideology, however, is one of those persistent misunderstandings, and, as I will argue below, his version is what poses a potentially lethal threat to the global Internet if not countered.

Klimburg “gets it” that Internet governance is unique and good because it consists of “a vast number of actors interacting in a web of largely non-hierarchal relationships.” What he doesn’t get is that the reason these relationships are non-hierarchical (and globalized) is that key forms of authority over the Internet were taken away from nation-states. Instead of traditional sovereignty-based institutions, the Internet community created privatized governance institutions rooted in transnational civil society, business and the technical community. The IETF, ICANN, the regional Internet registries are all organized around private-sector nonprofits. Privatizing governance was necessary to achieve the freedom and global cooperation required to achieve universal interoperability. If the governance function was provided by nation-states, they would be dominated by the interests and tensions of territorial states, which are not conducive to a global infrastructure.

The representational structures of the Internet governance institutions are highly varied (indicating once again that there is no “multistakeholder model”), but they all have one thing in common: decision-making power is vested in non-state actors. The ITU or UN are not in charge. National governments are not in charge. This is what sets the Internet governance institutions apart. This is why we need a better word for it than “multistakeholder.”

In the statement attacked by Klimburg, I argued for replacing the term “multistakeholder” governance with “Internet community self-governance,” “governance by non-state actors,” or “privatization of governance.” My argument was not that what we now call “multistakeholder” governance is “bad” or “dead” but simply that “MS” is the wrong label for Internet institutions. Disappointingly, nowhere does Klimburg address that simple argument.

The blueprint for what Klimburg wants to call “multistakeholder governance” was the Clinton Administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce. The Framework set the tone for the next 20 years of digital governance. But you won’t find it mentioned in Klimburg’s screed. Perhaps because the word “multistakeholder” doesn’t appear anywhere in that 1997 Framework. It is all about delegating authority to the private Internet community and to the market. The Framework rejected top-down governmental regulation and proposed a globalist, bottom-up path for the governance of the Internet. It relied on private law and private contracting in a transnational space. It insisted that DNS governance be done by a private-sector nonprofit. Klimburg steadfastly ignores these basic facts about Internet history. Well, he has to—they don’t fit into his narrative.

All he can do is use CTL-F and look for the word “stakeholder” in the 1998 White Paper. Voila! He discovers that the White Paper mentioned “working with all stakeholders.” Well, so it did. But how did it go about institutionalizing that commitment? It bypassed governments and ushered into existence a private sector governance institution based on the principle of “Internet community self-governance.” It gave different stakeholder groups specific voting rights in Policy councils. It excluded governments from the ICANN Board and made the GAC advisory. Eventually, after a long delay, the goal of liberation from states was fully achieved in 2016, when the U.S. ended its supervisory role. (The original designers of ICANN wanted the U.S. to get out 16 years earlier—that is also in the White Paper. Why that didn’t happen sooner is the subject of my new book, which will come out in April.)

In short, the participation of multiple stakeholders is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the revolution in digital governance.

Like so many other people in the Internet community who have made multistakeholderism their battle flag, Klimburg interprets any questioning of the term as opposition to the Internet institutions. And that’s where he really goes off the deep end. I was not attacking “actor plurality.” I was not attacking the decentralization of power that (sort of) characterizes the Internet and its governance institutions. I was arguing for a more accurate label, a more accurate understanding of what they are. And I did that because I am trying to save them.

Failing to recognize the true nature of Internet governance—the way it is rooted in non-state actors—is the real threat to its future. If we don’t understand what makes these institutions unique—indeed, if we don’t understand how and why they were institutionalized the way they were—then they cannot be properly defended and will be less likely to survive.

Klimburg himself provides a great example of this threat. He is so pleased with the Tunis Agenda’s use of the word “multistakeholder” that he rationalizes away its attempt to give governments a monopoly on policy making. He praises the May 2024 U.S. State Department International Cyberspace and Digital policy strategy because it throws in some multistakeholder rhetoric, even though it’s a blueprint for a state-led digital Cold War. He is thrilled because the absurd noun “the multistakeholders” became “a specific actor category during the Ad Hoc Committee negotiations on cybercrime,” even though that treaty was a purely state-led process that has been described as the “weaponization of international law by Russia” and most human rights advocates are aghast at it. He even comes up with a rationalization for the European NIS2’s interference in the Whois debates, a case in which intellectual property interests bypassed the multistakeholder policy process and lobbied for a special deal from the politicians. In Klimburg-world, just throw the word “multistakeholder” into a document, and all is well. He is actually reinforcing my point that multistakeholder rhetoric obscures rather than clarifies governance realities.

And that may not be accidental. Klimburg’s article contains an odd but very revealing contradiction that indicates his true colors. On the one hand, he wants us to believe that “the multistakeholder model” faces a “potentially lethal” threat. He never really says what that threat is (maybe it’s me?). Most of us see that threat coming from the encroachments and pressure from nation-states. But, as noted above, Klimburg is fine with all kinds of governmental interference in Internet governance. 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 reigns supreme, all the things that private sector-based Internet governance achieved are at risk. We will replace global interoperability with jurisdictional fragmentation. We will replace the free flow of information with hard digital trade barriers, export controls, and sanctions. We will replace a civilian cyberspace with a militarized one. We will replace transnational cooperation with clashing national interests. The interests of civil society, the technical community and business interests will be overridden by the interests of the state.

Klimburg’s approach allows any intergovernmental organization to call itself “multistakeholder” because, well, they let “stakeholders” participate. But he ignores the most important question: after all that input, who makes the decisions? Who has the power? Is it governments only? Unless there is a clear delegation of policy-making authority to the Internet community, in the form of independent institutions with real power over policy decisions and resources, as there is in ICANN and the RIRs, both national governments and the UN system can ignore public input and make decisions based on their geopolitical interests and alliances.

As a veteran of ICANN before the transition, I learned the hard way that participation without accountability is easily abused, and often meaningless. Don’t speak to me about “input legitimacy.” I have 20 years of experience with providing input to Internet policy-making organizations with no accountability, both in ICANN and in the UN system. The IANA transition and its associated accountability reforms constituted a decisive rejection of that nonsense in the ICANN environment. ICANN is now accountable to its community, not the U.S. government, and while its policy-making regime is far from perfect, it’s a hell of a lot better than it was.

Participation is meaningless unless the public participants have real decision-making authority and/or the decision-makers are accountable to the public in some way, such as an independent judiciary of the sort ICANN’s independent review process provides. Mere “input” by a “plurality of actors” does not give non-state actors authority or accountability. That is why my speech advocated Internet community self-governance as a better label than “multistakeholder governance.”

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.