Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance

4. World Summit on the Information Society: The State-centric View

4 The rise of an Internet centered in the United States was a disruptive event in the system of international relations formed around communication and information policy. It is only natural that such a disturbance would provoke a reaction and adjustment. The United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) provided the institutional vehicle for the reaction. This chapter describes the politics of WSIS. It is portrayed as a clash between two models of global governance: one based on agreements among sovereign, territorial states; the other based on private contracting among transnational nonstate actors, but relying in some respects on the global hegemony of a single state. After analyzing how this conflict played out, the chapter assesses the impact of the WSIS process and explains why it can be considered an important turning point in the history of international communication. The Liberal Internet What made the Internet internationally disruptive? The story originates with profound changes in the political economy of telecommunications. Starting in the 1970s, the United States began to introduce competition into its telecommunication (or “telecom”) industry. In the 1980s, the United States broke up the AT&T system, which it ruled a monopoly, and unbundled the public network into separate but interconnected elements to spur even more competition, innovation, and new entry. Other major developed economies followed suit, starting with Great Britain and Japan.1 World Summit on the Information Society: The State-centric View 1. The United Kingdom privatized British Telecom in 1981 (Brock 1994) and imitated the U.S. deregulation of value-added services with the issuance of the VANS General License in October 1982. See Smith 1985, 41–45. 56 Chapter 4 Concerned with its trade deficit and international competitiveness, the United States pushed telecom liberalization to international markets. One of the most important policies enabling liberalization generally, and the rise of the Internet specifically, was forged through the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Computer Inquiries.2 Anticipating the convergence of computers and telecommunications, the FCC moved to separate “basic” telecommunication services from “enhanced” or “valueadded ” services that involved data processing and networked computers. The object of this separation was to create a free market in information services independent of the huge AT&T monopoly, which at the time dominated voice and other telecommunication markets. Basic telecommunications would continue to be regulated as a common carrier while value-added information services and data processing would be left unregulated and open.3 This regulatory distinction diffused throughout the developed world in the 1980s, alongside the broader process of telecommunications liberalization. The combination of a competitive telecommunication infrastructure with the separation and deregulation of value-added information services proved to be revolutionary in a way that was not anticipated by policy makers. Together, those policies created the ideal platform for the unrestricted spread of the global Internet. As a software-based protocol that moved packetized data among computers, the Internet was classified as an information service. Thus, market access was wide open and providers relatively unregulated. Thanks to trade negotiations, this classification was applied not only in the United States, but almost everywhere else in the developed economies.4 2. Regulatory and Policy Problems Presented by the Interdependence of Computer and Communication Services, Notice of Inquiry, 7 FCC2d 11, 8 Rad. Reg.2d (P & F) 1567 (1966); Tentative Decision, 28 FCC2d 291, 18 Rad. Reg.2d (P & F) 1713 (1970); Final Decision, 28 FCC2d 267, 21 Rad. Reg.2d (P & F) 1561 (1971). 3. The FCC defined as telecommunications a situation when the content of the message is transmitted over the network with no change in the content or form of the message. Data processing, on the other hand, was declared to involve “the use of the computer for operations which include, inter alia, the functions of storing, retrieving, sorting, merging and calculating data, according to programmed instructions .” That distinction proved to be slippery, because as the network technology became more digitized the function of basic conveyance involved signaling and switching functions that relied on data processing. 4. One reason value-added information services escaped trade protectionism was that well into the mid-1990s they constituted a tiny portion (around 1 to 2 percent) World Summit on the Information Society 57 From 1993 to 1996, as the Internet was opened to the public and the Web browser made its use easy and popular, tens of thousands of commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) rushed...