Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance

6. The Internet Governance Forum

6 At the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, the United Nations responded to the institutional innovation of ICANN with an innovation of its own, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). IGF has been described as if it were a pathbreaking innovation in global governance.1 It has also been dismissed as a meaningless talk shop.2 Whichever is right, the IGF constitutes a clear departure from sovereignty-based forms of international organization. In creating the forum all the WSIS signatories, including the most hard-core authoritarian governments, agreed to abandon a privileged and exclusive role for themselves and to participate in Internet policy discussions on roughly equal terms with civil society and business participants. The IGF thus has made the multistakeholder principle one of its key legitimating claims. This chapter takes an extended look at the politics of the IGF. It examines how its institutional design and processes have been shaped by the networks of contentious political actors who have converged on it. The Political Bargain behind the Forum The IGF is described by the Tunis Agenda as a nonbinding, “lightweight” organization. It was made financially dependent on extrabudgetary contributions rather than funded through the regular, assessed budget of the UN. There is no guarantee it will exist beyond the five-year time period mandated by WSIS, although at this time it looks as if it will be renewed for another five years. The mandate of the IGF is set out in paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda. The subsections of that paragraph empower the IGF to, among other things: The Internet Governance Forum 1. Malcolm 2008. 2. Zittrain 2008, 243. 108 Chapter 6 • “Discuss public policy issues related to key elements of Internet governance ”; • “Facilitate discourse between bodies dealing with different cross-cutting international public policies regarding the Internet and discuss issues that do not fall within the scope of any existing body”; • “Interface with appropriate inter-governmental organizations and other institutions on matters under their purview”; • “Facilitate the exchange of information and best practices”; • “Identify emerging issues, bring them to the attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and, where appropriate, make recommendations .”3 This arrangement is the product of a bargain that reconciled the political positions of four distinct parties involved in WSIS. First, there were state actors from the developing world who wanted dramatic, state-centric changes in global Internet governance arrangements. Second, there were state and private sector actors from the developed world who were sympathetic to an amelioration of U.S. unilateral control, but unwilling to let traditional intergovernmental institutions take control. Third, there were civil society actors who wanted to institutionalize their voice and participation in international communication policy. Last, there were U.S.-led state and private actors who wanted to keep other governments away from the Internet and deflect political pressure away from ICANN so as to preserve the essential features of the pre-WSIS status quo. All of these groups found that they could agree on the desirability of creating an Internet Governance Forum with the stated purpose of promoting “multi-stakeholder policy dialogue.” To the U.S. government-led group of stakeholders, a forum under the auspices of the UN was a grudging concession to intergovernmentalism and to other countries. By accepting it they intended to preempt what they saw as larger, less desirable changes demanded by actors questioning the legitimacy of U.S. oversight and the private sector institutions in control of critical Internet resources.4 Creating the IGF was also a way of forum shifting to an arena where the power of the states arrayed against the United States and its private sector supporters would be diluted by the addition of civil society and private sector actors, who tend to 3. Quotes taken from paragraphs 72a, 72b, 72d, and 72g, respectively. 4. Nick Thorne, a diplomat at the Tunis summit, said the IGF was devised as “a fix to stop the bad guys controlling the Internet.” Quoted in Richard Sarson, “ICANN makes a very British compromise over Net policing,” The Guardian, May 29, 2008. The Internet Governance Forum 109 support keeping the Internet independent of traditional intergovernmental institutions. A discussion forum such as IGF allows the status quo interests to acknowledge the existence of problems and discuss them with the rest of the world without committing themselves to anything. At the same time, it does not prevent governments from engaging...