EuroDIG Speakers Oppose Major Changes to Internet Governance

STOCKHOLM -- “The multi-stakeholder self-regulating system of Internet governance … has served the system and the world exceedingly well,” said Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt Friday at the European Dialogue (EuroDIG) conference. Bildt pointed to the success of the Internet and the parts that organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) played.

"I would argue to not meddle too much with it unless we are damn certain there is a better alternative,” Bildt said. He was referring to expected challenges to the self-regulatory system of Internet management from countries like China, Russia and Iran in the upcoming World Conference on Telecommunication. He was not convinced by proposals from China, Russia or Iran in that regard, he said. The recent proposals of the European Telecom and Network Operators on new ways to charge for Internet traffic was discussed heavily in the hallways of the EuroDIG.

Marietje Schaake, member of the European Parliament for the Liberal Party, said the bottom-up empowerment that resulted in movements like that against the Stop Online Piracy Act in the U.S. or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in Europe were wake-up calls in established political circles. “The more multistakeholder initiative, the more self regulation we seek, the less Democratic oversight, there could potentially be,” he said.

Panelists on the trend of extraterritorial enforcement of national laws -- from seizures of non-U.S. domain names by the U.S. to the planned extension of privacy rules to U.S. companies doing business outside the U.S. said help from civil society was needed. Instead of waiting for governments to embark on attempts of global minimal standard harmonization, citizens should test cross-border enforcement of laws against them before the courts, they said.

A strong call to European member states to stop the export of “digital arms” was made by the Vice President of the European Parliament Alexander Alvaro. While the Parliament recently had passed an initiative report on this issue, “such a report has now legislative effect,” he said.

Bildt said there certainly were no exports to countries like Iran or Syria and, while export control for software would be very difficult to do, he saw an ever-wider proliferation of networks as the best antidote: “It is the American thing of connecting the dots,” he said. “They have machines completely clogged with dots, but they cannot connect them. It is just very difficult to even try it.” But Schaake said: “We don’t trade conventional weapons to certain countries and we shouldn’t trade digital arms.