Hi all

This may be of interest to some, an interview with
Jeanette Hofmann who is described as a German policy
expert. I assume it is available online somewhere, but
for the moment I only have this version courtesy of
another mainling list I'm on.

Cheers
David


Open Ends: Civil Society and Internet Governance
Interview with German policy expert, Jeanette Hofmann
By Geert Lovink

Berlin-based researcher Jeanette Hofmann is a key
player when it comes to German and European Internet
policy. Late 2000 she briefly reached international
media fame when she got elected as an ICANN at Large
member. Besides her busy international agenda she is
also a professor at the University of Essen where she
is teaching governance-related issues. In this online
interview Jeanette Hofmann talks about her ICANN
experiences and her current involvement as a civil
society member of the German delegation for the World
Summit of the Information Society. I got to know her
work in the mid nineties when Jeanette worked on an
interdisciplinary research project that mapped the
Internet as a set of technical, cultural and political
arrangements.

GL: You recently published a paper (in German) called
'The Short Dream of Democracy on the Net.' Your
conclusion is a rather sombering one. How would you
describe the current situation related to ICANN? You
state that nothing has been learned from the failed
At-Large Membership experiment. Would you even go that
far and see a backlash happening right now?

JH: The argument of my paper goes as follows: In the
last decade, a growing number of international
organizations has established cooperative
relationships with NGOs. There are two reasons why
international organizations are willing to talk with
NGOs. First, NGOs provide specific expertise. Second,
international organizations are struggling with a
widening democratic deficit deriving from the fact
that international agreements are out of reach for
most people. Those affected by international policies
are unable to participate in the decision making
process. Likewise, international organizations are not
accountable to the people. Diplomats cannot be voted
out of office when they act against the peoples' will.
Cooperating with NGOs, however, makes international
bodies appear more open, fair and thus legitimate.
Civil society groups, on the other hand, are eager to
get involved in international policy making because
participation is seen as a first step towards
substantial changes in international policies. 

What looks like a win-win situation for both parties
turns out to be problematic for civil society.
Evidence from most policy fields shows that
participation of NGOs so far doesn't lead to
significant policies changes. ICANN's five At Large
directors, for instance, had hardly any impact on
ICANN's DNS policies. While cooperation between
international organizations and NGOs may improve the
reputation of the former, it clearly creates
legitimacy problems for the latter. As soon as civil
society organizations assume formal roles in
international forums, their representativeness and
legitimacy are also called into question. Ironically,
NGOs are charged with the democratic deficit they once
set out to elevate. 

ICANN has been an excellent example of this mechanism.
After the At Large directors' elections in 2000,
ICANN's inner circle successfully challenged the
legitimacy of both the At Large membership and the
elections. Thus, most people today recall the ICANN
elections as a complete failure. The elections were
regarded as a disaster because they lacked, guess
what, representativeness. Of course, the elections
were unrepresentative! It is impossible in global
environments to hold representative elections. As far
as I remember, nobody ever expected the ICANN
elections to globally representative. Not even the
governments in ICANN have succeeded in establishing a
representative body with all nations participating in
the Governmental Advisory Council. The same holds true
for the Internet industry and the technical community.
By and large, it is a tiny minority which really cares
enough about Internet names and numbers to participate
in ICANN. However, the lack of representativeness has
been raised particularly as an issue with regard to
individual users. The At Large membership was the only
group of stakeholders which was critizided and finally
disqualified on the grounds of a lack of
representativeness. Once disqalified as illegitimate,
the remaining stakeholders happily agreed to kick
individual users out of the ICANN board. 

ICANN's organizational reform in 2002 thus put an end
to the original idea of fair, equal participation of
individual users in ICANN. A majority of stakeholders
chose to get rid of the weakest stakeholder in the
game. As a result, representation of individual users
on the board has been reduced to one liaison person
without voting rights. Seen from this perspective,
ICANN's reform constitutes a backlash –for Internet
governance in particular and for the notion of a
democratization of global politics in general. 

GL: Could you imagine that Internet governance will
have to be drawn up from scratch? Are ICANN, but
perhaps also bodies like the IETF beyond repair? You
and others have tried so hard to reform ICANN from
within. If you got a chance how would you start again?

JH: I have watched both organizations for several
years. In my view, ICANN and the IETF are very
different beasts. (I don't know enough about the
Internet Society and therefore won't say anything
about this body.) One crucial difference refers to the
fact that the IETF is not a formal organization, it
lacks any exclusive boundaries or membership criteria.
Unlike most other standard setting bodies, the IETF
regards itself open to everyone who wants to
participate. There are no membership fees or similar
means to select participants. By contrast, ICANN has
spent a lot of time on defining its boundaries
consisting, among other things, of admission and
decision making procedures. While the IETF depends to
a great extent on bottom up processes, ICANN at times
seem to regard them as inevitable noise which lowers
efficiency. The IETF cannot develop standards without
active participation of its members, the Internet
industry. The IETF thus needs to motivate those who
are affected by its norm setting function. ICANN, on
the other hand, works on the assumption that
democratic bottom up processes are unnecessary. It is
just technical coordination what ICANN says it is
doing, not political decision making. Even if this
were the case, it makes one wonder why technical
standard setting bodies go through some effort to
create legitimate decision making procedures. 

As a result the reform efforts of ICANN and the IETF
followed very different strategies. ICANN started with
a reform proposal by its president, tasked a board
member with its implementation and pursued a top down
approach. The IETF chair founded a working group
instead which was open for everyone to join. While the
IETF initiated a process that sought to involve the
whole community, ICANN followed an exclusive approach.
To be sure, ICANN's supporting organizations were
invited to comment on the various proposals put
forward by the reform committee but the status of
these comments remained unclear. The reform process
failed to create more trust in the ICANN structure.
Without trust, however, there is not much motivation
for voluntary participation in a process such as
ICANN.

GL: So much in the current debates over global
governance seems to go back to the issue what place
governments and individual nation states have within
global governance. What has been your ICANN
experience? Ideally, what would be the place of the
state? Do you believe in a federal structure? Should,
for instance, bigger countries, in terms of its
population, have a great say?

JH: The role of governments touches upon two contested
issues, national sovereignty and transnational
democracy. Both issues have evoked fierce debate at
the preparatory conferences of the World Summit on
Information Society. Developing countries in
particular have pointed out that the spread of the
Internet affects matters of national sovereignty. An
international regime would enable more political
control over both infrastructure development and data
traffic. This is why many developing countries would
like to see an UN body such as the ITU assume a more
responsible function in the area of Internet
management. 

Among the driving forces in this process are new
communication services. The revenues of national
telecommunication monopolies are threatened by the
advent of Internet telephony. In addition, the digital
divide, problems such as spam, worms and viruses are
mentioned as reasons for an intergovernmental approach
to Internet regulation. Interestingly enough, the
debate on Internet regulation was initiated in the
context of WSIS, not of ICANN. ICANN's Governmental
Advisory Committee used to predominantly reflect the
world views of OECD countries, not those from the
south. 

The second issue, transnational democracy, has been a
matter of extended debate in the academic world. One
of the central questions is whether democratic
procedures, which were once designed for territorial
nation states, can be adapted for transnational policy
fields. According to the skeptics in this field,
democracy doesn't work outside of the nation state.
Democracy, from the skeptics' point of view, is a
national institution, and the transnational sphere
fails to meet the basic requirements for it to work.
Foremost among these requirements are a common
language as foundation for a public sphere, solidarity
among the people as a condition for "redistributional
policies", and a clearly defined constituency as a
precondition for majority ruling. Since none of these
criteria are met outside of the nation state,
democratic world politics are but a utopian idea. 

The advocates of a democratizing world politics argue,
however, that democracy should not be treated as a
static concept but rather as a contested, open-ended
process. Instead of referring to and hiding behind
established democratic routines we should keep in mind
the huge transformations the original concept of
democracy has undergone since its inception.
Originally designed for Greek city states, democratic
principles were thoroughly rethought in order to apply
them in differing ways to the emerging territorial
states. So, why should it not be possible to revise
democratic principles once again in order to adjust
them to transnational settings? 

Some preliminary suggestions have been floated in
recent years. Among them is the concept of
deliberative democracy, which proposes to replace
majority ruling by persuasion, consensus and
compromise. Since it is impossible to establish
majorities beyond the nation state, it is necessary to
use other means for legitimate decision making. The
concept of deliberative democracy suggests
strengthening discursive capacities such as reasoning
and negotiation, which are already supposed to play a
major role in political everyday life. Some observers
expect that new schemes of deliberative democracy
might evolve along the lines of given industries and
policy fields rather than regional divisions. The
transnational public sphere would thus be structured
primarily around problems, industries and
organizations. Experience with ICANN shows, however,
that such models can only work within a framework of
minority protection and additional democratic
achievements as layed out in the constitutions of
nation states. 

While the nation state attaches rights of
participation to citizenship, the post-national world
would grant those rights to people who choose to
participate in certain policy fields. Transnational
policy fields would be populated in a tripartite
manner by government, industry and civil society.
Governments would thus be an important stakeholder
among other important stakeholders. Governments do
already cooperate with the private sector in many
policy fields. It is now about time these public
private partnerships get extended so that also civil
society interests are taken adequately into account. 

No matter, what such policy arrangements would
ultimately look like, a crucial point seems to be how
the exercise of power in the transnational sphere can
be restricted and its abuse prevented. What we need,
it seems, is a Montesquieu for information society who
devises a modern model of power division taking into
consideration the leverage of digital technology. Such
a model of power division would limit and disperse the
amount of control enabled by both the Internet's
architecture and the structure of the Internet's
industry. 

GL: In the case of the Internet, the status of the US
government is obviously a special case. One can think
of a historical claim, but also in general about the
sheer size of its economic, military and political
power. How do you look at this? 

JH: To be sure, the current unilateral management of
the DNS root is unacceptable on principle grounds. In
the long run, policy authority over the root, the
address and the name space must be divided among
several bodies each of which should be composed of
multiple stakeholders consisting of civil society,
industry and governments. On practical grounds it
could be argued though that the present situation
constitutes a pretty stable and more or less
acceptable arrangement. In my view, the US
government's power over the Internet has been to a
large extent a theoretical concern. The US government
would never dare to disable a major country code Top
Level Domain such as .fr, .jp or .de. Because the US
government's control over the DNS root has been
strongly criticized and closely monitored by many
stakeholders, it can be assumed that the DOC makes
rather careful use of its power over the root. If I am
right, it is quite a challenge to devise policy
authorities that are not only structured in legitimate
ways but can also be trusted to act with the same
caution as the USG does today. Within civil society
the idea of an intergovernmental root convention has
been aired. Such a convention would basically
establish a national right to an entry of the
respective ccTLD in the root server file. No single
government would have the authority any longer to
decide single handedly over the existence of Top Level
Domains on the Internet. 

GL: You have been visiting WSIS as a member of the
German delegation. Could you share some of your
personal impressions with us? Did you primarily look
at WSIS as an ICT circus for governmental officials
and development experts or what there something, no
matter how futile, at stake there?

JH: For observers, UN world summits may indeed look
like a circus with people traveling around the world
for the sake of traveling and doing nothing but
producing papers the gist of which remains obscure to
outsiders. Yet, from a participant's point of view,
the world summit is not primarily a circus but an
opportunity for negotiation. What makes UN world
summits special is the diversity of people both in
terms of cultural or geographic origin and their
functions and competences. Representatives of
governments, civil society and private sector
organizations from all over the world meet for several
weeks to discuss the proper meaning, their visions and
the challenges of a global information society. This
is both a laborious and an exciting effort with
lasting effects on most participants' world views. At
a minimum, you become aware of the extent as to how
your political opinions reflect the common sense of
your political culture. 

More specifically, the WSIS process has been relevant
for procedural as well as substantial reasons. The
first aspect refers to the world summits' rules of
procedure. In the case of WSIS, the rules of procedure
turned out to be a bone of contention because
governments had different opinions on the status of
NGOs and the private sector. For example, should
non-governmental actors be granted an observer status
and if so for what type of meetings? Should they have
the right to speak to the plenary or at working group
meetings? Should they be supported with travel grants
as their governments are, etc. etc. 

Each world summit has to decide anew on its rules of
procedure. The interesting point is that these rules
evolve over time or perhaps even from summit to
summit. The formal status and the political weight of
NGOs in particular are increasing. For the first time,
NGOs got meeting rooms on the conference premises.
Likewise, speaking slots for civil society and private
sector at plenary meetings become institutionalized.
Civil society in turn decided to set up a formal
structure consisting of an international civil society
bureau which represents a broad variety working
groups, caucuses and families. The international civil
society bureau forms an interface between NGOs and
governments and facilitates communication between
them. It seems rather unlikely that subsequent world
summits would discontinue these structures and
processes. 

Worth mentioning in this respect is the fact that a
growing number of governments accepts civil society
people as official members of their delegation.
Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and Germany are
among the pioneers of this new form of cooperation
between government and civil society. Hence, WSIS
clearly marks a step forward towards exploring new
modes of interaction between governments, civil
society and private sector. 

WSIS has been an important process also with regard to
our political understanding of information society.
The fact that the ITU of all UN organizations was
charged with organizing the summit led to a conceptual
framework which focused primarily on information and
communication technologies. The summit thus started
out with a fairly technical understanding of
information society. Now, the first paragraph of the
December 2003 WSIS declaration affirms the commitment
to "build a people-centred, inclusive and
development-oriented Information Society". Also, the
declaration emphasizes the "universality,
indivisibility, interdependence and interrelation of
all human rights and fundamental freedoms, including
the right to development, as enshrined in the Vienna
Declaration." Democracy, sustainable development,
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are
described as "interdependent and mutually
reinforcing". The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights is mentioned as "an essential foundation of the
Information Society".

It is safe to say that civil societies' persistent
interventions have had a significant part in the
changes of the declaration's underlying concept of
information society. Thanks to civil society's
participation, the WSIS declaration has stripped of
its technocratic approach and reflects now a more
political notion of information society. Political in
the sense of that information society is put into
context. This implies a notion of communication as a
basic human need and a fundamental social process. It
also implies awareness of the unequal access to and
benefits from information and communication
technologies, and it implies a serious commitment to
capacity building and social empowerment in order to
overcome the various forms of digital divide. 

The main insight I gained from participating in the
WSIS process concerns the fact that information
societies depend on the right to freedom of opinion
and expression. Without adherence to human rights and
basic democratic principles, information society is
but a sham. This might sound like a trivial point.
However, the declaration's paragraph on human rights
proved to be one of the most contested ones. The WSIS
process shows that respect for and compliance with
human rights can never and nowhere be taken for
granted. The vision of a people centred information
society thus implies necessarily a commitment to
defend human rights. 

GL: Cynics knew at forehand that WSIS would never have
any outcome. The United Nations together with the ITU
seemed such an odd coalition, doomed to meaningless.
On the other hand, WSIS, together with Verisign do put
up serious pressure on ICANN. There is a 'Kofi Anan'
initiative to come up a new framework for ' global
Internet governance'. Will the libertarian US-led
engineering class, which still dominates Internet
decision making bodies, allow alternative proposals to
be further developed? They seem happy with the status
quo.

JH: Your question seems to assume that there is one
group of stakeholders, which is able to effectively
control the governance structure of the Internet. I
don't think this is the case. I do not even see that
any of these groups has a clear, comprehensive vision
of the Internet's future. I see Internet Governance
rather as an open-ended search process with different
groups pursuing more or less contested short-term
goals, some of which may contribute to the groundwork
of a long-term regime for the net. Part of this search
process is an ever changing composition of key actors.
The active involvement of UN headquarters is just the
latest development in this process. Again, I don't
think it has been anybody's explicit goal to get the
UN involved. The founding of the UN working group on
Internet Governance is the compromise between
conflicting government interests. While most OECD
countries believe in self-governance with little or no
government participation, many developing countries
would prefer an intergovernmental regime for the
Internet. The UN was chosen as a neutral and
legitimate organization to host a working group being
tasked with developing a definition of internet
governance, identify public policy issues related to
that definition and finally developing a general
understanding of the respective roles and
responsibilities of governments and all other actors
involved. 

Due to its narrow time frame, we can hardly expect the
UN working group to come up with ground braking new
ideas. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the
symbolic import of the UN working group. For the first
time the meaning of Internet Governance is not just
taken for granted but subject to political
consideration. I think it is good to have a public
debate on the question as to who should do what in the
field of Internet Governance. An actual example is
spam. Spam has become a threat to the most common and
important Internet service, email. Should this problem
be tackled on the national or on the global level?
Will there be technical solutions available in the
near future? Do we need new regulatory tools in order
to ensure compliance with national laws? I think it is
a step forward to discuss these questions in a
systematic manner within an inclusive, transparent
framework.

We need such debates because it is less and less clear
how the freedom of all individual users worldwide is
best served. I used to believe in a strict hands-off
approach opposed to any government intervention on the
grounds that governments would impose a national logic
on the first transnational communication
infrastructure and thereby transforming it.
Furthermore, like many other people I suspected that
government intervention would suffocate the Internet's
innovative pace. Today, I find it less obvious that
self-regulation is able to maintain in the long run
what we like most about the Internet, the freedom of
communication. 

The UN working goup is important also with respect to
its composition and working methods. It has been
stressed during the process of setting up of the
working group that the overall acceptance and
legitimacy of its outcome depends to a large extent on
its composition. It can be expected that in addition
to governments and supranational organizations civil
society and the private sector will also be
represented. Such modest experiments in creating
legitimacy in global politics are very important as
each of them forms a milestone for other people and
organizations to refer to. Despite the sceptics' view
in democracy theory, there is in some organizations a
growing willingness to work on more inclusive
approaches to international policy making. It remains
yet to be seen whether such tripartite models will
have any substantial impact. Now, coming back to your
question, I pursue a non-cynical approach to the WSIS
process as you can see. 

GL: Besides policy work you started teaching at the
University of Essen. What do you teach your students,
how do they respond and what have been your
experiences so far?

JH: I've been teaching "politics and communication"
for two semesters. I usually do a course on Internet
Governance. There are not that many people in social
sciences who look at the Internet as an evolving
social space. In Germany and perhaps in Europe in
general the Internet is predominantly seen as a mere
tool that people have to master in order to use it
effectively. I thus see my classes as an ongoing
attempt to refute such reifications. In my view, the
net is still a very dynamic place with its technical
and social norms being subject to constant
transformation and reinterpretation. So, one of the
things I try to teach my students is that even the
mere use of Internet services has repercussions on its
further development. Think of Anthony Giddens concept
of "structuration" where structures and agency
mutually constitute themselves. I guess my main point
is that I want my students to understand that their
behaviour actively shapes (network) structures instead
of passively using them. 

A second course I taught this year revolved around
globalization and democracy. The last third of the
course discussed the draft treaty establishing a
convention for Europe. The punch line of the whole
exercise concerned the contested majority rule. As
I've mentioned earlier in this interview, democracy
can be regarded as a pretty dynamic enterprise. It is
actually quite ironic: while most people associate
democracy with majority ruling, the composition of
majorities itself is everything but a clear-cut
procedure. The negotiations surrounding voting rules
and the weighting of votes in the European council
exemplify quite well that constitutions do not consist
of a fixed set of politically neutral procedures.
Rather, they reflect the configuration of key actors,
their political traditions and beliefs as well as the
power balance between them. 

At the same time, we looked at the EU convention as an
attempt to create a working confederation as apposed
to a federal state. It remains true though that the EU
itself couldn't become a member of the EU as it
doesn't meet its own criteria of democracy! 

So, I guess I try to share with students what I find
personally interesting about politics. What I do find
interesting doesn't depend so much on the subject
matter but on the perspective. Politics get
interesting when you look at them from an active
citizen's point of view, somebody who cares about and
feels responsible for society. Now, most students feel
comfortable with the idea that they are mere victims
of a more or less corrupt political process and
therefore really couldn't care less about its details.
So, how do they respond to my preaching approach? I
think I succeeded when I convinced them to look at
political challenges from a politician's perspective
who faces a million dilemmas but has nonetheless to
make decisions and bear all the consequences. One of
the students made it know in the last meeting that he
had now subscribed to a newspaper and seriously
intended to read it. This is something I won't forget.

---
Jeanette Hoffmann's homepage:
http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/people/jeanette/index.shtml


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