It’s 11 am, and big-name tech bros queue behind Icelandic Pirates, fleece-wearing engineers and back-slapping lobbyists. There are diplomats, activists, authors, spies and politicians. One by one, they step forwards to take a shot of tequila. Vint Cerf, one of the net’s founding fathers, breezes by.
Welcome to winter heat of Guadalajara, Mexico, and the annual meeting of the (IGF). It is an occasion when the internet’s many tribes meet and talk (and drink), where they try to find common ground to confront the global network’s most serious problems.
Last month, I flew here from the UK to find the heart of the internet, its nerve centre. But I soon realised what I was looking for didn’t exist.
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It is fitting that the IGF has no ruler and that everyone is invited. The IGF is global, open, transnational, but also less optimistic amid growing threats to internationalism. The world in general is retreating behind borders. With the election of Donald Trump in the US – who threatens to rip up international trade treaties – and the UK bolting for the European Union exit, there will be pressure on the messy, inclusive globalism that the internet, and the IGF, represent. The fear is that some states want to impose their own vision of the internet, one that has little to do with freedom.
But let’s rewind for a moment. The rules of cyberspace that we have evolved are so seamless we don’t notice them. From the hard engineering of fibre optics to the deep philosophy of what the net stands for, internet governance covers the norms, principles and policies that make it what it is. These are all decided by someone and are, more or less, universal.
The perfect oxymoron
In any other context, that “someone” would be a central authority. But, of course, the internet has none. It is both standardised and decentralised – the key to its success and why it is so different from almost every other part of life. Standardised and decentralised is almost a perfect oxymoron. So how does any internet governing ever get done?
Cue the IGF, set up in 2006 by the UN. Within it, all those norms emerge and spread via soft power: its annual meeting is a four-day dance of consensus-building, diplomacy, favour-currying, backstabbing and backroom deals, all amid a multilingual hubbub of coffees, stolen words, private meetings and workshops. It’s intended to be a crossroads, a place where far-flung parts of the internet can meet: the tech giants; the people chasing drug dealers hiding behind encryption; those who have had friends murdered by brutal regimes for what they’ve said online; and the unsung engineers trying to keep the whole thing running.
The IGF is an experiment in international diplomacy that only the internet could have spawned. It is not just for officialdom, elites, CEOs or celebrities – provided you could get to Mexico, you’d be welcomed. Sure, government representatives turn up, but so does an alphabet soup of international agencies and companies and staunchly globalist civil society groups. It is civil society, not governments, that runs most events here.
If there was an underlying theme at the IGF, I failed to find it. States expressed nervousness: how do we extend the rule of law online? How do we have a secure internet as well as an open and global one? There was urgency from the international development community: internet access is a right, so how do we get the next billion people online, how do we make it more accessible to people with disabilities, to women, to the marginalised? Then there was the issue of hacking, the internet of things, and transnational online extortion and ransomware.
What you never see at the IGF are binding decisions. There’s no power in the IGF itself, only in the people who attend. So to the cynic, it’s a talking shop, a PR exercise, a sideshow. People can come, sound interested, and go away to do whatever they had planned to in the first place.
Shutdown at gunpoint
Tech giants can, with a flick of the proverbial wrist, change swathes of the internet that are their own preserve. Governments can take matters into their own hands, passing laws to force internet companies to do their bidding or filtering content within their countries. At their most sophisticated, they can try to re-engineer the internet within their borders. At their crudest, they can shut off the internet at gunpoint. The latest from the Washington DC-based watchdog Freedom House tells a dark story of online oppression.
It is not just the IGF that is looking to set the agenda. Another three-letter acronym waits in the wings: the (ITU). It hashes out the same issues and also under the UN banner, but with a crucial difference: it’s pay to play, with member states deciding strategy. China, some countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, and parts of Africa, a worried diplomat told me, have a completely different vision of how the internet should be governed.
Which is why the IGF is so important. It is in a world of threats and power plays that the chaotic talking shop of the IGF forum is our best bet. What everyone I spoke to could agree on was that the most important thing to come out of the IGF were the human connections that it enables.
As the banners were taken down and the music faded, we weren’t left with any communiques or votes. But leaving Mexico were people who understood each other a little better; a powerful contingent squarely behind an internet with the same rules and standards everywhere.
That free, open, universal internet faces a horror show of challenges in 2017 and beyond. No single person or group can protect it. But the connections born out of the meeting of people who basically want it to succeed look like its best hope.
