[Lac] Interview with Jeanette Hofmann - miembro del icann

[Diego Saravia]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: <nettime> Interview with Jeanette Hofmann
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:00:03 +0000
From: geert <geert at xs4all.nl>
To: Nettime-l <nettime-l at bbs.thing.net>

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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-- 
Diego Saravia 
dsa at unsa.edu.ar