With the Internet Governance Forum kicking off in Bali, LSE Alumna Alexandra Kulikova took a close look at the programme and the participants. She explains why she is not optimistic about the IGF being an opportunity for a much needed international discussion of the privacy and surveillance issue. 

The Internet Governance Forum starts today and goes until 25 October, and it looks like the surveillance and privacy issue will still be an elephant in the room, just as it was at the UK’s IGF that took place just over one month ago. The UK, the US and the EU are undertaking investigations into the NSA and GCHQ surveillance practices. Many civil society and tech-community groups remain skeptical of the transparency and efficiency of these efforts and are campaigning for privacy assurances. However, a look at the IGF agenda and participants list does not look promising for meaningful debate on this issue.

The US no longer in the limelight

The IGF multi-stakeholder format would seem the perfect forum for the hard-talk. IGF Day 0 in Bali originally promised a ‘Big Brother became reality’ workshop bringing together NSA’s chief Keith Alexander, who is also stepping down from his post in a few months, and Snowden’s allies, journalists Jacob Appelbaum and Glenn Greenwald. This symbolic and promising kick-off for the forum was too good to be true and is apparently not going to take place as planned.

If indeed the US’ state budget disruption reduces its delegation, it is not only the NSA’s mass surveillance practices that will not get a meaningful discussion. It seems that the balance of stakeholders could be potentially changed this year in the wake of the surveillance revelations with the Internet founding organisations and other individual states, such as Brazil, gaining more clout.

The walkout of the four I’s on the US government that Chris Marsden recently commented on, suddenly provided a stronger footing for other states to step in and have a louder say in global Internet governance. On the one hand, this seems an historical opportunity to challenge what has grown dubious in the up to recently US-centric model, with the privacy versus security balance on top of the agenda. On the other hand, this unprecedented moral power shift into the hands of the countries that have been accused of attempts to balkanise the Internet, is also worrying for those who are weary of increasing the state presence in the Internet governance system. Eyes are on what the US has come up with in response, but at this point it looks doubtful the US delegation will be able to answer.

Missing civil society groups

The IGF could be an opportunity for civil society groups to have a voice and debate how crucial issues of the cyberspace fundamentals are dealt with from now on. While some of them have already shown support for the Internet separatism, other groups may have different  views.

It is, however, hard to expect civil society to be efficiently vocal if one considers how close the IGF was to being called off this year due to insufficient funding. With the ICANN and Google stepping in and almost doubling the contributions of the UN, individual governments, and founding Internet communities, sadly there can be few illusions about who runs the show. A quick look at the extremely busy workshop schedule shows that the MAG-approved sessions are mostly led by governmental organisations, academia, and the private sector (Google’s delegation is unsurprisingly the biggest of the corporate participants), while civil society groups are mostly invited for collaboration.

The list of civil society participants is impressively long but mostly consists of local organisations with little representation of influential Europe/US based groups (not least due to the high costs of travel to the event). The Association for Progressive Communications is running indeed a busy digital human rights agenda, but, for instance, Big Brother Watch and Open Rights Group, which together with English PEN and internet campaigner Constanze Kurz are currently challenging the UK government’s user data surveillance at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, are not listed among the participants.

Interestingly, none of the main human rights civil society groups came to the aid of whistle-blower Edward Snowden earlier this year as the states involved were defining their stance on the scandal and weighing out the cost of resisting US demands to hand over the offender. Wikileaks, which had been through a similar post-leak legal chase earlier, was more involved in offering some initial help to the ex-NSA contractor. None of its people are on the IGF participant list, either. The remote participation option requires registration, so it is hard to say who actually will be in Bali this week and how much virtual contributors will participate given the time differences in various directions.

Apart from the surveillance agenda, the IGF runs a vast range of workshops on human rights online, rights for disadvantaged groups, protecting children online etc. But these seem now somewhat secondary, since the privacy rights/surveillance crisis has already potentially changed the Internet governance ecosystem. With the importance of these changes in mind, it is also worrying that the list of registered media participants consists predominantly of regional media. If this indicative of the extent of the event’s global significance, and without those who could give substantial answers on how privacy and data protection online are truly handled as well as many of the major civil society watchdog groups active on the issue, the elephant of meaningful debate on surveillance and privacy will still be looking for a proper home.

This article gives the views of the author, and does not represent the position of the LSE Media Policy Project blog, nor of the London School of Economics.