STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Freedom for all, and all stakeholders speaking out with equal voice, on how to govern the Internet. Internet Freedom. Internet for Freedom.
These issues drive the two-day Stockholm Internet Forum 2013 (SIF13) that opens today, May 22 in this country that ranks top in the world for leveraging the potentials of the Internet, according to the latest Web Index.
The forum focuses on two themes — Internet Freedom and Security, and Internet Freedom and Development. Policymakers, netizens, techies, activists, and business and civil society representatives from 93 countries are participants.
(The PCIJ is attending the conference on invitation of the forum organizers, namely, the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, .Se or The Internet Infrastructure Foundation of Sweden, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency or SIDA.)
At the reception for delegates on Tuesday, Fadi Chehade, president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), called the Internet “a free gift for all the people.” It would thus be wrong for any one party, organization, or government to propose to control or govern it by itself, he said.
While some countries like the United States have played a big part in developing it, Chehade notes that even the US acknowledges that there is need everywhere for this “great resource.”
“No one organization, no one country, no one government, no one, period, can control the Internet,” he said. “And we must respect it and govern it like that.”
However, across nations and regions of the world, he noted that some parties have done “a pretty miserable job” of managing the Internet.
“The conundrum’ that confronts governments, civil society, academia, and business is precisely how to manage “this resources that spans the planet and crosses borders.”
The one and only one answer, he said, is that, “together, together” all stakeholders must do the job.
Yet, “it’s not just about multistakeholders, multiple parties coming together to work on an imopt resource.” More importantly, “it’s about multi-equal stakeholders. It’s having everyone at the table with equal voice participating in the governance of this resource.”
After all, the peoples of the developing world form the bulk of the Internet community. According to Chehade, of the 750 mllion people on Internet by 2005, 75 percent came form the developing world.
By 2015, at least 2 billion people are forecast to be on the Internet, and with over 70 percent or the next billion coming still from the developing world, he said.
Sadly, Chehade said people from less affluent nations are not yet fully engaged in managing and governing the Internet, even as “it something that they deserve… how to govern together the internet.”
Some governments seem to think that it is a task they must do. Chehade said a recent conversation he had with the leader of a Latin American country seems instructive.
“He told me: ‘It’s this simple, the Internet is very powerful, we are government, we love power, so the conclusion is we need to govern the Internet,’” Chehade said.
Still, the person was probably one of the more honest government officials he has met. Chehade said he was not speaking out to attack governments but “not all governments are created equal… (and) there are governments that do not understand multistakeholder development.”
For its part, ICANN has ceased being “just a money collector” and recently launched efforts to “change the DNA” of the organization.
ICANN, he said, now operates from Los Angeles in california, Istanbul in Turkey, and in Singapore, in its effort to grow into a global organization, and not just a US entity. “For too long,” he said, “ICANN has remained mostly a start-up in its mentality.”
“We are also pushing an internationalized domain name system and (to) diversify the domain name system,” he said.
In the same spirit of the Stockholm Internet Forum — Internet Freedom for Global Development,” Chehade said, “iCANN must embrace its public responsibility… be a publicly responsible organization” and “not just a money collector.”
“We have a role in enabling many parts of the Internet, and not just sit back and collect the change,” Cheahde said. “The new ICANN must embrace its responsibility to the public and to the developing world.”
Because he said he grew up “in places where freedom was not there… and lost many friends who spoke their mind,” Chehade said he realized early on that “freedom to choose is the most important thing.”
“The Internet has become the most powerful weapon for people to choose what they want,” he said. The Internet is “not only about democracy; it’s about allowing people to choose.”
Freedom from want, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the Internet enables all these and more freedoms, he said. “We have a responsibility to enable these freedoms close to the everyone in the world… let us all be leaders.”