If history teaches us anything…

…it’s that history teaches us nothing.  Reading the European Commission’s six papers on Internet governance this week was like flipping back in time to the bad old days of the World Summit on the Information Society, when it looked like the management of the domain name system would get sucked into an intergovernmental agency, and the technical coordination mired in geo-politics.
 
Eight years ago, governments decided they were worried about the Internet. It was having an ever-increasing influence over their societies, and causing a number of significant and previously unknown problems. The trouble was: they couldn’t find out which government department was in charge of it.
 
The most tangible entity that was eventually discovered was an obscure organization of 50 people located on the third floor of a building overlooking a marina in Los Angeles. That clearly wasn’t good enough, so the World Summit on the Information Society was created.
 
Even accounting for the fast pace of the Internet, 29 September 2005 isn’t all that long ago.  That was the day when David Hendon of the UK Department of Trade and Industry (then BERR, now BIS), woke up to find that he was in the centre of a media and political storm, all because of a rather bland diplo-speak EU statement on Internet Governance the day before.

Reading the EU statement now, it seems hard to believe why it caused such a firestorm.  A lot of the ideas and text is quite close to the final text in the WSIS Tunis Agenda.  The “crime” was that it called for a “new cooperation model” for Internet governance, with “international government involvement”.  The US, Argentina, well, everyone really, interpreted the EU as calling for an end to the United States’ sole oversight over ICANN.  
 
But this wasn’t just a squabble over the rather dry subject of Internet infrastructure.  The real damage that EU statement did in 2005 was to strengthen the position of authoritarian governments, like China, Syria and Iran, who wanted (and still want) greater control over choke points in the Internet – to restore harmony whenever messy old freedom of expression gets in the way.
 
In the end, good sense prevailed, and somehow there was a realization that new systems were need for a new medium. A new form of collaborative governance was created – multistakeholderism – and the technical coordination of Internet addressing remained where it was, because it worked.
 
But history teaches us nothing. So, as Tolkein would say, “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”  This year has seen extraordinary reactions against the freedoms afforded by the Internet from the most unlikely sources:
 

• The British Prime Minister responded to the recent riots in the UK by announcing that he’s looking at banning people from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.  At the same time, the post-Mubarak Egyptian government is considering how to protect its citizens from a repeat of the Internet switch off that happened earlier this year.  Has the world gone upside down?
• A UN report in 2011 stated that Internet access was a human right, described the “chilling effect” on freedom of expression of technical measures such as blocking or filtering, and condemned the erosion of intermediary liability (which protects ISPs)
• The same report praised Chile and Brazil for enacting legislation that demanded due process – a court order – before cutting people off from the Internet.  Just as Nominet, the .uk registry, has brought forward proposals to cut off the domain names on the say-so of law enforcement without due process.

 
This insidious erosion of Internet freedoms has crept into the dry world of Internet governance.  In the 6 years since WSIS, it seemed that the concept of multistakeholder governance had become universally accepted.  The G8 and the OECD in 2011 stated that it was the only appropriate way of developing Internet policy.  Ironically, the UN body appointed to review the Internet Governance Forum (which invented multistakeholderism) decided to exclude non-governmental stakeholders from the review, and only later reluctantly invited them in as guests, not full participants.
 
But a history lesson on WSIS might remind Western governments why multistakeholderism is in their best interests when it comes to the Internet.  In the United Nations, Western governments are always outvoted.  The most powerful group within the UN is the Group of 77 countries (confusingly, numbering 131 members) and China.  But in a multistakeholder environment, Western governments can generally rely on the support of business and (mostly) civil society to counter the authoritarian instincts of the majority of governments.
 
So, why is the European Commission doing this?  Why is it effectively proposing that the IANA contract become the “new cooperation model” that the EU was searching for back in 2005?  Perhaps in the rarified world of the EU, comprising Western democracies, it thinks that all governments behave in the same way?  Maybe it believes that a bilateral deal between the US/EU providing oversight of Internet addressing will be acceptable to other governments?  
 
The answer, of course, lies in the acts and omissions of ICANN itself – the enfant terrible of Internet Governance, which has shown itself disdainful of government input.  Inevitably, those Western Governments who have taken the painful route of supporting ICANN over the past 6 years, can no longer pretend that an obscure organisation on the third floor of a building overlooking a marina in Los Angeles is the answer to global Internet governance.
 
The shame of it is that in cutting ICANN loose the European Commission is once again playing into the hands of governments whose values it should not share, and – as Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden, put it in 2005 in an article on WSIS – will bring it “enthusiastic applause from Tehran, Beijing and Havana.”  It seems that, so far as the EC is concerned, “history is bunk”.