By L Gordon Grovitz
Wall Street Journal
April 29, 2014
The Obama administration still
doesn't seem to understand the whirlwind it reaped with its decision to give up
stewardship of the open Internet. The first Internet governance conference
since that surprise March announcement was held last week. The State Department
issued a statement before the conference urging everyone to avoid the issue:
"We would discourage meeting participants from debating the reach or
limitations of state sovereignty in Internet policy."
But deciding who gets to
govern the Internet was precisely why many attendees from 80 countries came to
last week's NetMundial conference in Brazil.
The host country's leftist president, Dilma Rousseff, opened the
conference by declaring: "The participation of governments should occur
with equality so that no country has more weight than others." The Russian
representative objected to "the control of one government," calling
for the United Nations to decide "international norms and other standards
on Internet governance." Last week Vladimir Putin called the Internet a "CIA
project" and said "we must purposefully fight for our
interests."
Authoritarian regimes want to
control the Internet to preserve their power. "National sovereignty should
rule Internet policy and governance," the Chinese representative said.
"Each government should build its own infrastructure, undertake its own
governance and enforce its own laws." The Saudi Arabian delegate said:
"International public policy in regard to the Internet is the right of
governments and that public policy should be developed by all governments on an
equal footing."
Even nominal supporters
of the existing multi-stakeholder model embraced the end of Internet
self-governance. The delegate from India declared a greater role for the
world's governments "an imperative that can't be ignored." Neelie
Kroes of the European Commission said: "The Internet is now a global
resource demanding global governance."
Philip Corwin, a U.S.
lawyer who represents Internet companies, noted that 27 of the first 30
speakers at NetMundial were from governments or U.N. agencies—at a
"meeting supposedly conceived to strengthen the private-sector-led
multi-stakeholder, consensus-based policy-making model."
The conference produced a
"consensus" document that asserts: "The respective roles and
responsibilities of stakeholders should be interpreted in a flexible manner
with reference to the issue under discussion." Carl Bildt, Sweden's
foreign minister, offered this translation: "Governments are more equal
than other stakeholders when it comes to policy."
The Internet ran smoothly
for 25 years because the U.S. ensured that the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, known as Icann, operated without government interference.
Authoritarian regimes can censor the Internet in their own countries and jail
their bloggers, but until now had no way to get control over the root zone
filenames and addresses of the global Internet. Handing over control could
allow them to undermine the open Internet globally, including Americans' access
to U.S. websites.
Some open-Internet
advocacy groups realize it is light-handed U.S. control that has allowed what
political theorists would call the "ordered liberty" of Internet
self-governance. "Part of the strength of the Internet over the last
couple of decades has been that the technical aspects have not had direct
political or government interference," Thomas Hughes of the human-rights
group Article 19 told the BBC.
Michael Daniel, special
assistant to President Obama, declared without apparent irony that "from
the U.S. perspective, NetMundial was a huge success." But it's no
accomplishment when countries that have long sought power over the Internet
embrace the U.S. invitation for them to seize it.
The NetMundial conference
was politicized from the start. It was held in Brazil as a favor to President
Rousseff after she objected when news broke that the National Security Agency
had listened in on her communications. But Sweden's Mr. Bildt pointed out at
the conference that "the issue of surveillance in no way relates to the
issues of the governance of the net." He added: "I'm stressing this
point because sometimes the debate on surveillance is used as an argument to
change the governance of the net."
Under bipartisan pressure
in Washington, the Obama administration was forced to backtrack during
congressional hearings earlier this month. Officials testified they won't
necessarily stick to their original September 2015 date for giving up protection
of the Internet. Officials said the issue could be pushed to 2019 and thus
decided by the next president. Many in Congress want an up-or-down vote on
ending U.S. control of the Internet, knowing lawmakers would reject the idea.
President Obama should
revoke the plan to abandon the open Internet. The ugly spectacle of countries
jockeying to control the Internet is a timely reminder of why the U.S. should
never give them the chance.
