Abstract
The controversy surrounding Internet governance starts with its definition, and different definitions reflect different perspectives and interests. Is there a specific definition you would recommend? What is Internet governance in your eyes?
There is a definition of Internet governance in paragraph 10 of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG, 2005) Report:
Internet governance is the development and application by Governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.
I tell people that a simple definition of governance is “rules, and rules about rules,” meaning that it is about all the rules and also about how the rules are made: Who appointed the committee members? Who decided that it had to be a committee in the first case? and so on.
On the Internet, governance is about Internet regulations as well as the entire process of how the rules are made. And this is why there is a lot of concern about process, consultation, and involvement of relevant stakeholders.
Your emphasis on the importance of process reminds me of the multistakeholder model because it was intended and understood as being inclusive and democratic. But I remember that you critically analyzed this concept and provided an alternative solution, the deliberative system (Ang & Haristya, 2015). Could you please explain this?
Multistakeholderism is often understood as the embodiment of transparent, open, inclusive, and thus democratic governance. Lately, however, it has been argued in some quarters that multistakeholderism is a fig leaf for the bad old days of exclusion. After all, so the argument goes, a multistakeholder approach limits participation only to stakeholders. By excluding non-stakeholders, it is therefore inherently undemocratic. Such an approach could then be used by more powerful actors to strengthen their participation, voice, and influence in the governance process, instead of balancing the power among the different stakeholder groups.
I traced the origin of the term “multistakeholder” to understand its meaning and its relationship with democracy in the paper you mentioned, and posited that the deliberative democracy model appears to be best suited to global Internet governance. The model is open-ended in the sense of accepting participants. There are still questions of accountability of the stakeholder group and inclusiveness, but the answers that are derived through the process are more robust.
How do you see, from the perspective of communication studies, the differences and connections between Internet governance and other traditional kinds of media governance? I mean, what’s so special about the Internet and Internet governance? In one of your articles you noted that at first the way Chinese government treated the Internet is quite like its approach to the traditional media (Ang, 1997).
Because the Internet is seen as delivering content, it is to be expected that governments, not only the Chinese government, will tend to treat the Internet as a media channel. In the traditional mode, we only know two channels—broadcast or print. So very naturally, the initial approach is to treat it as a broadcast channel.
This means that there is a tendency to treat regulation in that mode, to put the regulator in charge of broadcast to oversee the Internet.
But we now realize that the Internet has much much broader application. And that there is a whole layer of transactions and communication that the Internet facilitates. It’s e-commerce, it’s hotel booking, travel, and so on. The Internet makes our economy efficient. It also brings in more business.
Therefore, regulating the Internet, even in the content component, can have spillover effects. Take e-commerce. There may be a need to describe or review a product or service. In Singapore, a restaurant owner wanted to sue a blogger for a bad review of his restaurant. A group of us stepped forward to say that the small person on the Internet needs some protection. Otherwise, an action like that can hurt the entire restaurant industry. If all reviews of restaurants are positive, who is going to trust the reviews and who will then want to try restaurants.
This is one layer of regulation—the national level. But there is also an international layer. And the reason is that unless one blocks the sites, it is possible to transact e-commerce across borders. China is an exception in that its own domestic market is large enough to sustain an online economy. (There is also a language issue.) But for most other countries, the population is just not big enough to be self-sustaining such that they can cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Of the 193 members of the United Nations (UN), half have a population of under 6 million.
Here is where there is international politics. All governments want to push their own sovereignty. But for the Internet to work well, governments must give up some of their own sovereignty. I have a paper on this point: that of globalization, sovereignty, and democracy, we can only have two of them in Internet governance (Ang & Pang, 2012). And because we all want globalization, the toss up is between sovereignty and (international) democracy.
In the paper, you extended Dani Rodrik’s (2000) globalization trilemma to analyze the possibility of international Internet governance. You conclude that the government would have to settle for thin globalization or choose between sovereignty and democracy. Can you give some examples according to this category to help us gain a better understanding?
So in globalization, there is the threefold tension. You understand globalization—everybody wants the same rule. So how do they arrive at the rule? Through majority votes. But this is where it runs up against national sovereignty.
Examples? Many. Take any issue. Say cybersecurity. Globalization of standards will make it easier for cooperation. But governments are suspicious that because the technology is from a certain country, there may be a hidden advantage to that country. So although the majority of the world may vote in favor of a particular standard, suspicious governments may not. So the result is what I call thin globalization. It is not uniformly globalized. This idea extends to censorship of anti-government content, hate speech, intermediary liability, and so on.
Would you please briefly introduce the history and evolution of Internet governance? And in retrospect, what issues and challenges have emerged during different phases of its development?
I cannot do it in this document. I have a presentation that I did at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) (Ang, 2015). The main marker that distinguishes the periods is the degree to which governments understand Internet governance. In the early days, people thought it was a technical matter. Then they realized it was not. There is a popular view in China that the resources on the Internet were going to the West and that China was being deprived (Global Business News, 2005). That is why China is stressing IPv6. It is also why it is called v6 after v4; somebody tried to hijack the name IPv5.
Today, there is an awareness that it is better for the more powerful countries to have the Internet “hang together,” which means that it is better that the Internet not be fragmented. If it is fragmented, then it is unlikely that it will be the same players having as dominant a role. Users also may suffer some loss in that they may have to switch systems or attempt another language. Overall, it is thus a loss to the community.
Of the top 20 sites in the world, 15 are American; the other 5 are Chinese (Alexa, 2016). Therefore, China has an interest to have the Internet hang together. There is more business potential with one global network.
The most challenging regulatory problem today is that we are finally encountering new services that challenge traditional services by apparently breaking old rules. Examples would be Uber, AirBnB. Some countries have banned them. I think it is a mistake. Because then the next question is, should we ban all innovations because they break traditional rules. There is a research project going on at the Digital Asia Hub in Hong Kong, which is the Asian “extension” of the Berkman Center of Harvard, to globally compare Uber regulation.
How do you see the potential impact of big data and social media on Internet governance?
Social media, especially if it is of the public variety, has a limited role in Internet governance. The reason is that to have influence and to change policies, one must study the area. It is not entertaining, not sexy.
Big data may have a role, but it requires good imagination on how to use the data. There are probably data out there that we can use, but we need someone or some group telling us how the data that we have are useful.
And there are also concerns about the potential risk of big data, or the misuses or abuses of big data, such as privacy, individual autonomy, and more complicated surveillance society.
All these questions have to do with the types of laws and regulations. Internet governance is really more about process. The precise nature of the law will change among different countries. The common factor is that the laws should be based on a multistakeholder model process.
While the dominant theme in scholarship is about policy-making process and the role of nations, organizations, and global institutions, in practice, especially in China, given the boom of social media, an interesting phenomenon is that a growing area of Internet governance work is social media–driven, such as the real name registration policy introduced by Chinese authorities to regulate its vibrant microblogosphere. I think maybe the influence of social media on Internet governance is more apparent on national level than international level.
Yes, I would agree with you. The result is that Internet governance at the international level is negotiated in a more formal setting. Social media means that there is social pressure by citizens on governments, who then have to respond or lose the support of their citizens. This dynamic does not operate at the international level.
You have done a lot of comparative research on the Internet governance in different countries, and in the meantime you are also an active practitioner in the global Internet governance. In your observation, what frameworks, approaches, and patterns are there in this field?
Here are two levels of answers—the international level and the national level. At the international level, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a good forum to raise and discuss issues, to see who the major players are. It is not a forum for regulation, but it is certainly a forum to begin the process. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) would also be a good forum for the more technical aspect of domain numbering and domain names.
At the international level, however, the process is much more Western and I would say American. For example, everyone from the floor queues up in front of a microphone to ask questions. I have seen ministers dressed in suits queuing up behind a pony-tailed T-shirt-and-jeans graduate student. This is very egalitarian but is also very uncomfortable for Asian high officials. The Asians among us have discussed and written about this, but it is a process that will continue to be used.
At the national level, local politics can and do intervene simply because there are local concerns and local dynamics. It is actually even more important that the national-level regulator be aware of these dynamics. Take Facebook’s “free basics” where users can access Facebook on their smartphones for free; the data consumed will not count toward the monthly bill. In India, it was rejected after strong lobbying by civil society groups. Privately, civil society groups have said that they did not expect such a “big” win; they thought that because it was backed by Facebook, there would be a lot of resources poured in by the multi-billion dollar company to counter their efforts. That turned out not to be the case. Now they question, privately, if they had gone too far?
The best safeguard—and it is no guarantee of 100% success—is to have wider public consultation. This too is not something many Asian governments are used to. But it is possible to “improve” on the regulatory examples set by others. If we take the Indian example, now that we know how civil society privately feels, we can learn from that and improve our approach to “free basic.”
As you said, international organizations and forums such as The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), WGIG, IGF, and Internet Society (IS) play important roles in the global Internet governance; can you briefly explain the functions, relationships (corporation/conflict), and evolutions of them?
Very briefly. The demarcation line is around 1992, when the Internet began to go public in the United States, and 1994, when it went public more or less globally.
The ITU is a UN agency that first regulated telegraph and now telecommunication. It was slow to come on to the Internet because at the time that the Internet was becoming mass public, telecom companies were developing a smart network called ATM (asynchronous transmission mode) and self-healing networks. Whenever I give a talk on this, I ask the audience, if we go back in time to 1992 and you have a choice between a smart network called ATM and a dumb network called the Internet, which would you choose? So far, no one has said that they would choose a dumb network.
The initial regulation of the numbering system of the Internet was done by Jon Postel, who was called the god of the Internet because he could determine who could go on “live.” His function became formalized under ICANN, a US-company under the authority of the US Department of Commerce.
The IETF was a standard-setting body formed by researchers even before 1990. This is the group that says agreement is reached through “working code and rough consensus,” not voting. The model has not worked in non-technical areas.
IETF members formed the IS over a roughly 2-year period from 1990 to 1992. Today the meetings of the IETF are supported by the IS.
The IS in turn is funded through being a Public Interest Registry (PIR) of dot.org. That is, it is the owner of the right to register dot.org. The IS was almost broke soon after 2000 when it held its annual conference in Stockholm. But today, the revenue from registering dot.org is almost US$30 million.
Although the IS is supposed to be a global organization, when it came to the WGIG Report, it seemed to reflect the position of the United States in rejecting the option of a single forum. The ISOC did not want a single forum to discuss Internet governance issues. Instead, it said it preferred to let things be—where issues were discussed in multiple fora. This was the same position as that of the US Government.
The WGIG Report did not say that this was the only option, and the IS’ comments do reflect this; the Report offered it as one possibility for the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) to decide, and the IS rejected this option. Some people hold it against the IS for being against the IGF. Now there is a 180-degree turnaround where the United States and the IS promote the IGF, but China, which had promoted the IGF at the beginning, now does not encourage it because it is only a talkshop.
Complicated but interesting! In considering different contexts, interests, and perceptions, it’s hard for countries to reach an agreement on Internet governance, as evidenced by many conflicts in ideas and policies out there. So how do you see this? And what are the principles and challenges of global Internet governance in this increasingly connected world?
This is a bit of whether a glass is half-full or half-empty. The main purpose of regulations is to help our lives move along. The Internet works for the most part. So the regulations at the global level for the most part work.
But we need regulations to protect the rest of us against those who may cause us harm. This is normal in every human activity. Again, for the most part, most people are not harmed by using the Internet. So again, the regulations work.
But we do have disagreements over what is harm. Is insulting someone’s religion a harm that should be regulated? Is insulting the prime minister, president, or king a harm that should be stopped? We vary here.
The most logical approach is to say, where we all agree it is harmful, let us regulate. And here is where the West has moved ahead. The cybercrime convention of the Council of Europe is an example where there is broad agreement that these are online activities that should be regulated. The West has also greater cooperation in such matters. For example, child pornography, the use of children in pornography, is a crime globally and the Internet makes it worse. The Europeans have an online association with a hotline to receive complaints and share information with each other and the police. Some children have actually been saved. We have child pornography in Asia too. But we have not taken steps to do what the Europeans have been doing.
There will be areas where we will have to agree to disagree. Media content issues are one area. There is culture and history behind them, so it will be difficult to get global agreement. But even so, there can be agreement on the process to handling such complaints, and some non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Global Network Initiative, are aiming to have some common approaches to taking down content.
As for the Internet in China, we always talk about the large number of netizens, 668 million by the end of 2015, and the rise of Chinese Internet companies such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and JingDong. How do you see the role which China plays in the global Internet governance? And what challenges do China face and what’s your opinion on the growing discourse power of emerging countries in global Internet governance?
I co-organized a conference back in 2000 with someone I met online and held it at the Rand Corporation. The meeting was to compare the printing press with the Internet to see what lessons we can learn. We had Korean scholars, a Chinese scholar. One very tantalizing conclusion, which of course we could not confirm one way or another, was whether the Chinese officials who knew of the invention of the printing press, also foresaw the potential impact. In Western Europe, the printing press undermined the authority of the church. It contributed to the rise of Protestantism. Yes, there were other conditions such as a corrupt church, but all the research strongly suggests that without the printing press, Martin Luther could not have spread his message so, to use a modern word, virally. In Korea, the printing press was confined to religious text and court documents. In China, it was confined to official pronouncements. So did the Chinese officials who were or are in charge of the Internet foresee how social media would in 20 years promote transparency and expose the corruption of government officials? And in so doing, take away some of the authority of the officials? As I said, it was a tantalizing and tentative conclusion.
Observers outside China see the Internet companies in China as being clones of the successful companies in the West with the Chinese language being a natural barrier to entry. I have come across a company in Germany that adopted a similar approach—take successful online businesses from the United States and then create a German equivalent. This German company is worth a few hundred million dollars today. So there is a commercial logic to imitation. The concern about China is that this is being done at a national level, that censorship is being used as a barrier to business entry, that the Chinese government ultimately wants Chinese companies to succeed so that they can be more easily controlled. There is also logic in this although here it is political logic—every government wants to be able to determine as much as it can. The question for the Internet and for China is whether this model is sustainable and whether it might actually stifle creativity in China.
To be sure, this is not to say that the Chinese are only good at making copies. Those of us who observe the information technology (IT) and Internet space know that there are many creative innovations from China. The issue is the larger question of governance of the creative Chinese space.
Because the Chinese government appears to have been successful in fostering Chinese Internet companies, imagine—the only companies that are close to challenging the US Internet giants are from China; the question is whether the Chinese governance model might be exported.
The other significant issue is the Chinese view of IP addresses as resources. This goes back to literally the last century. Because it was true that some universities in the United States had more IP addresses than China, and IP addresses then were finite, there was fear in China that the Internet would be denied to it. The problem has essentially been solved, but there are still the fears that should the Chinese run the Internet, it would make rules that would treat IP addresses as resources, something to be hoarded.
China therefore faces the issue of trust at the global level on Internet governance. Yes, the United States can also be hypocritical in Internet governance, and arguably all countries have some level of this. The issue with China is probably one of degree that is heightened by the issue of language.
Emerging countries are not the ones most vocal on Internet governance. If you look at the blocs, it is the United States, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa/Saudi Arabia). Many small countries do not feel that they can have an impact in this area.
Recently, China’s President has called on countries to respect one another’s cyber sovereignty at the second World Internet Conference. If we try to understand cyber sovereignty from a historical perspective, John Perry Barlow’s (1996) famous “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” reminds us that the early concern of Internet sovereignty is about the relationship between the real world and cyberspace, namely, whether or not the Internet can create an independent space that is free from terrestrial strictures of government, bureaucracy, institutions, and law. Now, these questions are quite clear, and we use the notion of Internet sovereignty in a sense to highlight the contention among the global, the regional, and the local, right?
I understood Internet sovereignty to mean national sovereignty of the Internet as far as it is practicable. As mentioned above, every government wants to push sovereignty as far as it can. So it does not surprise me that China would want sovereignty of the Internet. But it must be within its own borders. If we take it on that basis, there is little that one can quarrel with.
Also as discussed above, there is not the issue of dilemma but a “trilemma” in sovereignty, democracy, and globalization. One can only take two out of three, unless one attempts what I had called “thin globalization” where globalization is spotty—in some areas there is globalization, in some areas not.
There is an interesting interview of my late former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (Allison, Blackwill, Wyne, & Kissinger, 2013), in which the late Mr Lee says that the current generation of Chinese, having seen the wars, the starvation, the Cultural Revolution, will want a peaceful rise of China. But this generation’s grandchildren may flex their muscles if they think they have arrived when they have not. The grandparents will warn and advise the grandchildren, but grandchildren do not listen to grandparents. From this perspective, it may therefore be more important for China to stress democracy over sovereignty, against its natural instinct to do otherwise.
As for Internet studies, much attention has been given to the access to Internet, Internet freedom, censorship, and governance, so how can we re-define the freedom of speech in a networked environment?
Freedom of speech as defined in the United States and often in the West tends to be defined as the freedom to speak against the government. So some activities that are done by the government in other countries are done by the private sector in the United States. A good example is movie ratings. The US First Amendment of its Constitution does not allow the government to “abridge” the right to free speech, and therefore, it cannot issue movie ratings. So the US Government can say, very correctly, that it does not censor content.
In practice, it is not very meaningful whether censorship is by the government or by business. And as we now know, censorship by business can sometimes be more effective because it is now backed up by the profit motive.
So I think one of the things to recognize is that freedom of speech in the networked environment must include safeguards to exercise that freedom against business. So, for example, the Church of Scientology in the United States tried to block criticism by pursuing copyright claims against its critics, saying that publishing what they had written was a breach of copyright rules.
I think our rules concerning defamation should also change. In the Commonwealth countries, including Singapore, a statement is defamatory if on the face of it, it is defamatory, regardless of whether it actually caused damage. Because the Internet makes it possible for us to originate and circulate material easily, it is freer for us to express ourselves. But this freedom also means that people now take such material with a lot more salt, they do not always believe so readily. Which can be good or bad. But for that reason also, the messages are taken less seriously.
So greater freedom on the Internet also means the greater likelihood to be ignored or not listened to.