GCCS2015 Part II: Government Influence is the Key Issue

(As published on Norse: Feb 5th, 2015)

As we noted in Part I: GCCS2015: Battlefield for the Internets’ Multi-stakeholder Coup, the next iteration of the Global Conference on CyberSpace (GCCS2015) will be held on April 16th and 17th in The Hague, the Netherlands this year. It is the worlds’ premier political conference on Cyberspace.

The Internet was founded on, and has ever since been based on, the multi-stakeholder principle. That is to say: the Internet does not belong to any government, it belongs to everyone equally.

In fact, aside from lending material support, governments have had precious little to do with the development, implementation and administration of the Internet. The brunt of the work has been done by civilian institutions such as the IETF, ICANN, IANA and a whole slew of similar civilian non-profit organizations.

But as time progressed and the significance of the Internet grew, so too did the urge to control grow at the worlds’ governments.  This is signified most clearly by the continued attempts of the UN to move this piece of internet governance away from US-based ICANN to the International Telecoms Union (ITU).

At first glance, the ITU seems innocuous enough. It has a membership of over 193 countries and over 700 commercial entities such as Apple and Cisco. However, the ITU is an agency of the UN and therein lies the rub.

The ITU is ultimately subject to the will of the UN charter members. They will face considerable pressures by many UN nations such as Russia, China and Iran, who are staunch supporters of ‘cyber sovereignty’.

The ‘cyber sovereignty’ camp considers the current state of affairs to be directly threatening their national security primarily because they have no easy way to censure content. They will no doubt push for measures stifling internal dissent and perhaps even for measures to censure content disagreeable to them.

In fact, they’ve pretty much said so.

Several blows have already been dealt to advance the power shift towards the ITU during the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), as excellently commented on by Alexander Klimburg in his article “The Internet Yalta”.

In his article he describes how China and Russia managed to sway most of the developing nations to supporting ‘cyber sovereignty’, and the whole issue devolved into essentially a bipartisan issue in which the developing nations aim for governmental control of the Internet, and the Western nations prefer to keep the status quo.

There does not appear to be a middle ground. WCIT was, in this respect, a political cloak-and-dagger event of almost Machiavellian proportions.

It had it all: the polarization of the voters, sudden ‘midnight votes’ that most parties were left uninformed about, and attempts at tricking voters into voting on articles that were thought to contain something other than it did.

Both the ‘code of conduct’ and the battle for the internet’s multi-stakeholder principle shine through in the Seoul Framework for and Commitment to Open and Secure Cyberspace that was drafted for the 2013 conference in South Korea.

It is this framework that will be the key talking point in The Hague this year. The Netherlands has already stated that it would support further work on this framework, but given its democratic nature and strong culture of international trade, this is hardly surprising.

In an earlier published flyer the official statement was made that the ‘self-organization of the Internet should be supported and is preferred to regulation imposed by states’.

It can only be hoped that all sides remain cordial and that political sleight-of-hand doesn’t catch anyone off guard. The result of such an event could very well mean the end of the Internet as we know it.