The Remarkable Internet Governance Network—Part I Understanding How a Global Ecosystem Can Govern
25
grown, and how stable it is. Growth has been explosive, both in numbers of users on the Internet and in an unparalleled richness of applications. Twenty years ago, there were probably fewer than 500,000 users and they were primarily in academic environments. Today, there are 2.5 billion users worldwide from every walk of life. As Vint Cerf put it, “It works…and they [the governance ecosystem operators] have done it for 20-plus years—30 years— and they’ve done it well.”
Is the Internet Governance Ecosystem Legitimate? The Internet governance ecosystem meets every one of the above criteria. Still, there is something of a subjective quality associated with legitimacy. As Barbara Ridpath wrote in a paper for the Global Solution Networks project, “Legitimacy, like beauty, appears to be to a large extent in the eye of the beholder.” As such, there is really no definitive way to “prove” whether the ecosystem is legitimate. Nevertheless, three of the above criteria stand out when evaluating whether the ecosystem is legitimate: rule-making, conferred legitimacy and effectiveness. Bertrand de La Chapelle considers that “this is the core and the foundation of the legitimacy of the multi-stakeholder process, and it is very revolutionary. It is very audacious. Internet governance has worked from the onset with this notion that if you are a stakeholder, if you have a stake in an issue, you can participate, and this is a very, very far-reaching notion. To be frank, it breaks the current foundation of the international system, or at least it challenges the current foundation of the international system, which is based upon representation by governments.” Tim Berners-Lee agrees that efficacy is key to legitimacy, arguing that one reason the multi-stakeholder model currently governing the Internet is viewed as legitimate by its stakeholders is because the model enables extraordinary expertise to be brought to bear on problems, making it more effective. Stakeholders recognize that and grant it the status of being legitimate. He tells an extraordinary story about how the W3C lost legitimacy in one area for a while. “W3C lost its legitimacy because it didn’t move fast enough to HTML5 and stakeholders, in particular the browser manufacturers, thought it had become too stuffy.” So the browser manufacturers started a competing consortium, perhaps as a cry for help and to emphasize their complaints that the current system wasn’t working. The W3C was able to get its legitimacy back by stepping up and being effective, convincing them that they had a better process to build the standards required for HTML5. Berners-Lee conceded that his personal reputation as inventor of the Web was probably important in winning back the legitimacy of his W3C, showing how legitimacy can be conferred from one party (Berners-Lee) to another (W3C).
© Global Solution Networks 2014