Internet Governance and the Global South

Internet policymaking, which refers to making regulations for the management of the domain name system, IP address allocation, management of the root, and ensuring access to the Internet and Internet security, has been the most controversial issue in supranational communication in recent years. A US-based private nonprofit organization called Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages technical aspects of the Internet under the guidance of the US Department of Commerce. Since the Internet was invented as a project of the US Defense Department during the Cold War era, the US is the ultimate controller of the medium. The global south now claims its stakes in controlling the Internet. Transnational corporations and civil society organizations are also quite active in global Internet politics. Scholarly literature on this issue has been dominated by three themes: Internet governance, analyses of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), and the role of civil society in the WSIS processes. Internet governance literature covers three subthemes: some have discussed ICANN as a model of non-state governance;¹ some have pondered whether a network could lead to a new form of governance beyond the interference of the nation-states;² and some have argued that it is illusive to write off the state role in Internet governance.³

Although supranational communication policymaking began in the 19th century to deal with telecommunication issues, it accelerated after the creation of the United Nations. Many supranational communication policymaking bodies such as UNESCO and WIPO were created as parts of the United Nations system, and the ITU was adopted as a UN organization to deal with transnational communications issues. The US, a key nation-state and a victor of the Second World War, played the leading role in creating the UN communication policymaking bodies. These organizations stood as the main forums for debates and discussions among the nation-states in a bipolar world. One event, the NWICO movement—a clash between the West and the global south about the media content flows across the world—is one of the decisive moments in the history of supranational communication policymaking. During the debates over NWICO, the West under the leadership of the US promoted the idea of free flow of information while the global south, known as the third world at the time, demanded balanced and fair media content flows between states. The death of NWICO and the fall of the Soviet Union heralded the supremacy of the US in communication policymaking. The US, along with businesses, gradually transformed the UN organizations to give priority to market forces and undermine the nation-states. It created a new mode of global communication policymaking—the ICANN model of Internet policymaking—in which market forces make decisions with the consent of the US state.

ICANN, a private nonprofit organization which manages the most important aspects of a global communication medium, is different from other transnational institutions dealing with communication regulation such as the ITU, UNESCO, WTO, and WIPO. It is controlled by the US, while the other institutions are multilateral bodies. Different organs of the American state worked to create this new media regulatory body. This chapter will first discuss the creation of ICANN and then compare ICANN with the other institutions.

How does the world community treat the Internet governance model practiced by ICANN? The global south does not like this model, and chose the WSIS as a venue to register its voice against it. It identified the deficiency of the framework and proposed to expand its rubric by incorporating measures related to the digital divide, multilingualism, Internet security, and intellectual property right. It questioned the legitimacy of unilateral US control of the Internet root, and demanded equal participation in making decisions related to the management of the root. This issue engulfed both phases of the summit—the Geneva phase and the Tunis phase. This chapter discusses the conflict over the ICANN-led Internet governance framework at the WSIS and explains the causes of this conflict. It begins by discussing how Internet governance became a controversial issue, reviews the proposals for a new framework, and explains the outcome of the conflict. This chapter reviews the proposals made by the representatives of the global south in comparison to those of the other stakeholders. It explains the Internet governance conflict in comparison to the NWICO movement to understand the changes and continuities in terms of participation of actors and ideologies.

Although digital divide, the gap in terms of access to ICTs, sounds like a mere technological divide, it is a reflection of the existing socioeconomic inequality. Warschauer argues that political, economic, cultural, and linguistic contexts shape people’s experience with any technology, including the Internet.¹ Digital technologies have developed within a neoliberal political and economic context, which is inherently unequal and encourages individual well-being over collective well-being and profit over public service. The inequality that exists in terms of digital technologies is a socioeconomic divide. Digital divide exists across the regions, within a region, and within a country. The global north is far advanced in terms of digital technology compared with the global south. The availability of Internet bandwidth and number of users in a region or in a country are two key indicators of the digital strength of that region or country.

The content of the Internet is predominantly in English, as it was invented in the US. Of the 6800 languages of the world, only a few are represented on the Internet.¹ Since the Internet developed as a project of the US Defense Department, it learned to communicate only in English. Available data on web pages show the dominance of English. In the late 1990s, 82 per cent of the web pages were in English, with German as its nearest rival, at 4 per cent.² By the early 2000s, 68 per cent of the web pages were in English, with Japanese and German at 5.85 per cent and 5.77 per cent respectively.³ To have content in other languages, the Internet architecture needs to be modified and content needs to be produced. But the Internet architecture is designed in such a way that multilingualization of the Internet at the national level depends on the acceptance of multilingual character at the root of the Internet. The states in the global south consider having the Internet in their own languages as a matter of national identity.

The idea of intellectual property right developed in the global north with the development of industrial capitalism, and later spread to the global south. Intellectual property right (IPR)—the right of a creator to control his or her creations—is said to be the principal property of the information society. These property rights are organized into two categories: copyright and industrial property right. Copyright lends property right to the creators of literary and artistic works such as books, journals, essays, pictures, music, video, computer software, and so on. Industrial property relates to industry, commerce, extractive and agricultural industries, and manufactured as well as natural products. The main forms of industrial property right include patents and protection for signs transmitting information about a product or service to consumers, such as trademark, industrial design, geographical indication (GI), and integrated circuit design. Michael Perelman calls IPR a form of monopoly power given by state laws,¹ and by the dint of this power the right holders enjoy authority over the use of intellectual properties. IPR refers to two types of rights: patent rights and copyright. With the transformation of the Western economies into service economies, IPR has emerged as a far more important commodity. Big corporations have been extra vigilant to acquire and protect their IPRs across the world with the help of their respective states.

Cybersecurity refers to the security of users, network systems, and states. The Internet provides the base for many critical infrastructures in the information society. Data transmission, transport systems, and finance, as well as banking at both national and global levels, rely greatly on the World Wide Web and the Internet. The emerging mode of business termed e-commerce, as its name suggests, is based on the Internet. For all these purposes, a secured Internet is required. Providing security to its citizens and their property, and protecting territorial integrity, is a principal job of the state. However, different states have different understandings of threats and security. Despite their different sources of security threats, the state actors agree that cybercrime is a common security threat, but they differ on ways of ensuring cybersecurity. The global south wants to create a new international body to look after transborder Internet security issues, but the US wants the existing arrangements of Internet security to prevail. The apparent agreement between the state actors on Internet security masks the tension arising from the states’ individual notions of security. For example, the security of China, Iran, and Cuba is at least partly security from the US and broadly from Western penetration through the Internet, while the US is afraid of terrorism from the “terrorist” groups based in the global south. But all these different states have agreed to create a global culture of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity issues give them a cover for maintaining state control of the Internet and suppressing freedom of expression.

At the outset of this book we said our goal was to explore the role of the global south in Internet policymaking. Through this journey we wanted to deal with a key theoretical issue of transnational communication—the role of the state in transnational communication policymaking. We have documented that contemporary global Internet politics is fraught with a debate about the inadequacy of the Internet policy-making framework. The Internet policymaking framework—ICANN—is inadequate because it does not look after some important issues of Internet policymaking, such as digital divide, cybercrime/cybersecurity, and intellectual property right. ICANN is a private nonprofit organization which promotes private profit and is unilaterally controlled by the US. The global south challenged the unilateral US control of ICANN and demanded the creation of a multilateral framework or an organization similar to the UN organizations for Internet policymaking, in which all the member states of the UN will participate.