The future of Internet governance

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting-American Society of International Law, Annual, 2007

I think that is interesting because if you were to walk down the street and ask 100 Americans what they think about this, I would say about 99% would look at you as if you were crazy. Why an international organization makes what I do legitimate or illegitimate is a strange view for Americans, who, I think, are less concerned about that issue. We have to recognize that for the test of the world, that is an important role for international organizations and that is what animated part of the discussion at the world summit. In discussions with government officials, almost all of them would say that having a role for the ITU of the United Nations of some other international organization, of changing ICANN into some treaty-based organization, would be a source of legitimacy. However, the other extreme that they are most fearful of is having no government play a role regarding the Internet. And I think this is what animates a lot of the concern.

The other side of ICANN is that the only thing that scares governments more than their own government not having some sort of control is if no government has control over something that affects their peoples' lives. And one of the examples I use is the Brazilians. In their interventions, for example, Brazil raised a legitimate and serious issue. Their question was: "We, the Brazilian government, rely tremendously on the Internet. We basically use it for tax purposes; we use it for our government services. When mad if the Internet goes down, if we have some catastrophic event, are our citizens going to look to us, the Brasilia government, to be responsible for fixing this problem, mad to whom do we go? Do we go to some international organization? We know how to go to the United Nations. Of, on the other extreme, do we go to some California non-profit company and say 'What's up? What are we supposed to do?'"

That is not a role that very many governments are comfortable with. Which means that if they could not win the argument to go all the way to a multilateral organization, virtually every country is comfortable with having at least one government, namely the U.S. government, having a role. They know how to come to us; they know how to deal with us, even if they do not like us. To use ma old analogy: they have a number to call, and they know that someone is going to answer that call and try to deal with those issues. And in fact the irony is that countries are in fact more comfortable with the U.S. government involvement than with no government involvement.

MS. DYSON:

I just want to raise another irony: Governments are actually a very small part of the world, even though they putatively control most of it. But in fact the real constituency of ICANN is the users, all around the world, many of whom are treated shabbily by their own governments. You go to these international meetings, and you see people who tend to be the cousins of important ministers living very nicely in expensive hotels in Geneva, spending days on useless meetings. They are not doing any real harm, but they are sucking resources out of the treasuries of those countries. That is why I find a lot of this obsession with ICANN offensive: Not because anyone's doing anything evil, but because they are wasting not just money but talent that could be better applied.