Towards an Enhanced Role of Academia in the Debates About the Future of Internet Governance — From Vision To Practice
This essay first appeared in the Internet Monitor project’s second annual report, Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World. The report, published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is a collection of roughly three dozen short contributions that highlight and discuss some of the most compelling events and trends in the digitally networked environment over the past year.
Academics, academic institutions, and academic values have played a key role in the development of the Internet as well as in its operation and in what we today call “governance,” especially at the logical layer consisting of technical standards and protocols. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine the Internet as we know it without the defining role academics have played since its inception in the 1970s. Similarly, core academic values such as openness, collaboration, and trust have inspired the early approaches to and initial modes of Internet governance, and have shaped its evolution since the 1990s. Important traces of these academic origins are still reflected in today’s multi-stakeholder Internet governance ecosystem, which has come under significant pressure since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 and 2005 and, perhaps most visibly, at the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12).
The contested policy debates that currently take place across various national and international forums — from NETmundial to the ITU’s 2014 Plenipotentiary Conference and WSIS+10, to name just a few — suggest that we have arrived at crossroads in the debates about the future of Internet governance. In the light of today’s heated debates, this essay argues that it is timely to reflect on academia’s role in the development and operation of the Internet over the past two decades and to renew its commitment to contribute systematically and from diverse perspectives to the Internet governance debates over the next decade. Second, it proposes an enhanced role of academia as we design the next-generation Internet governance model — a role that builds upon past contributions but is also based on a generalized vision and strategy regarding the importance of academic research, facilitation, experimentation, and education. Such an enhanced role emphasizes academic values such as independence, rigor, openness, and global participation. Before outlining the contours of an enhanced role of academia, let us turn to the question: why we should re-imagine the role of academia, and why now? The short answer is: because there is critical need, and because there are opportunities we should embrace.
Since the early days of the Internet governance, the world has changed dramatically, and so has the academic environment. When ICANN was founded in the late 1990s with the help of researchers at the Berkman Center, for instance, only a handful of academics were researching Internet and society issues. Today, Internet studies — or Internet science, as it is labeled in Europe — has evolved from an academic niche area (typically researched at law schools, given the porous methodological boundaries of law as a discipline) into an academic discipline in its own right, with emerging research methods, specialized journals, degree programs, chairs, and centers. We see more and more young people — master students, doctoral students, and so forth — interested in this growing field of research and work, most of whom share a strong interest in and commitment to interdisciplinarity. Similarly, it is no longer the stereotypical group of “white males in their 60s” actively addressing Internet governance issues, broadly defined, but an increasingly diverse community of scholars, researchers, and activists — many of them talented women and young people from the Global South. This generational shift, the increased diversity in terms of gender, orientation, and geographic representation, the commitment to interdisciplinary, and novel institutional support structures provide a unique opportunity for coordinated and sustained academic collaboration on issues related to Internet governance that we should harness, adding perspectives from other domains, incubating alternative approaches and models, and re-energizing the great work previous generations of academics have contributed.
It is not only opportunity, but also increased and pressing need that calls for a renewed commitment of academia based on a broader vision and strategy concerning its future role in the global debates about the future of Internet governance. It is commonly understood that the Internet now affects almost every aspect of life, that its governance has become more complex, and that the stakes are much higher than they were two decades ago. Controversies about multilateral versus multi-stakeholder approaches to Internet governance as well as the battles over a diverse set of issues (ranging from surveillance to intellectual property) are manifestations of the importance of the Internet as the core information and communication infrastructure of the digital age. In such a contested and highly politicized environment, it is vital to build upon, expand, and accelerate past academic efforts by broadening and coordinating the scope of inquiry, working towards institutional approaches, and developing global capacity. There is an increasing demand across all stakeholders for independent and rigorous research and scientific data, as well as for best practices and general principles that are created collaboratively and in the spirit of the academic values mentioned before. Viewed from such a perspective, academia can and should be more than a “stakeholder” in today’s Internet governance debates. It is well-positioned to play a constitutive role as we develop a new vision of a next-generation Internet governance ecosystem in a time when governance debates are often ideological, fragmented, and mostly interest-driven rather than evidence-based.
At this critical juncture and in the light of new opportunities and pressing demands related to Internet governance, what could an enhanced role of academia look like in practice? A concrete example and precursor in this context is a recent initiative by the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers, which was incubated by the Berkman Center, built bottom-up, based on international collaborations, and formally launched in 2012. It now brings together more than 30 academic centers with focus on Internet and society issues from around the globe, including nine members from the Global South. The network represents a broad range of disciplines, bridges many traditions and cultures, and engages many young as academics from diverse geographic backgrounds. As an evolving and learning network, it represents some of the key elements of the enhanced vision mentioned before, including the emphasis on institutional approaches and global capacity development, interdisciplinary research and building, systematic and sustainable engagement, and the engagement of new perspectives and talents.
In addition to these structural elements, an enhanced role of academia also calls for a concerted and sustained thematic engagement across the various layers of Internet governance research. Consider the following three questions as an illustration of the breadth of the issues that need to be addressed on different layers (others could be added):
- Data and research layer: What can we do, as a network of academic institutions, to create a global interoperable data platform to measure the Internet’s health, which could serve as an information backbone for Internet governance research and decision making, providing high quality and open data to distributed Internet governance groups?
- Normative layer: How can academia serve as a “protected space” to develop the necessary normative foundations of future Internet governance models and mechanisms and facilitate difficult value conversations among Internet governance stakeholders, working towards consensus, good practices, and general principles of Internet governance?
- Design layer: Building upon research activities and conceptual studies, how can we as an academic community work together — in interdisciplinary teams and across departments, schools, and centers — to develop new institutional designs, experiment with new tools, and create new code or Internet governance?
These three examples indicate not only the broad range of possible contributions, which together with other elements might serve as the foundation of a holistic concept of Internet governance, but also point to the different modes of academic engagement in the multi-faceted Internet governance processes. The envisioned core pillars to which the examples partly allude, but need to be fleshed out elsewhere, include research, facilitation, experimentation, and education (encompassing also skill building and practical training).
The partnership between the Berkman Center and the Network of Centers and the engagement of this institutional network in the current discussions about the future of Internet governance through a coordinated events series and a research pilot are intended as an initial step towards operationalization of the broader strategy and underlying vision as sketched in this essay. The Network of Center’s research pilot consists of a case study series as building blocks of a synthesis document aimed at deepening our understanding of the formation, operation, and effectiveness of distributed Internet governance groups. The research examines a geographically and topically diverse set of local, national, and international distributed governance models, components, and mechanisms from within and outside the sphere of Internet governance. With its initial focus on emerging lessons learned and (contextual) good/best practices, the goal of the research pilot is to inform the evolution of the Internet governance ecosystem in the light of the NETmundial Principles and Roadmap, the discussions at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and other forums, panels, committees, and initiatives.
In parallel to weighing in on these and related conversations about the next-generation Internet governance models and mechanisms, academia has a responsibility to re-envision its own future in this zone, reflecting and building upon the great contributions of the past. The months and year to come will provide a unique window of opportunity to further flesh out the proposed vision and strategy for an enhanced role of academia, incorporating lessons learned from current efforts and pilots. Contributions by the Network of Centers, as well as related efforts such as the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) and the Research Advisory Network (RAN) to the Global Commission on Internet Governance, are important building blocks in this respect. But working from vision to practice will require not only collaboration among academic networks around the globe. Success will also depend on longer-term commitments by leaders in the public and private sector as well as open participation of civil society actors. Realizing the promise of an enhanced role of academia is a shared responsibility as we build together an Internet governance system for future generations.
Additional Reading
DeNardis, Laura. The Global War for Internet Governance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
DeNardis, Laura, and Mark Raymond. “Thinking Clearly About Multistakeholder Internet Governance,” SSRN, November 14, 2013.
“Developing Meaningful Multistakeholder Participation Mechanisms,” IGF 2014 Best Practices, Internet Governance Forum, 2014.
Drake, Bill, and Monroe Price, eds. Beyond Netmundial, August 2014.
Dutton, William H., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. Brief History of the Internet.
Mueller, Milton. Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010).
“NETmundial Multistakeholder Statement.” Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, April 24, 2014.
Palfrey, John, and Jonathan Zittrain. “Better Data for a Better Internet,” Science 2 December 2011, Vol. 334 no. 6060 pp. 1210–1211
Radu, Roxana, Jean-Marie Chenou, Rolf H. Weber, eds.. The Evolution of Global Internet Governance. Principles and Policies in the Making (Berlin: Springer, 2013).
Waz, Joe, and Phil Weiser. “Internet Governance: The Role of Multistakeholder Organizations.” Journal on Telecommunications & High Technology Law, 10, (2012): 331.
Weber, Rolf H. Regulatory Models for the Online World (Berlin: Springer, 2002).
—-. Shaping Internet Governance: Regulatory Challenges (Berlin: Springer, 2009).
