INTERNET GOVERNANCE:
TOWARDS VOLUNTARY MULTILATERALISM

KEYNOTE ADDRESS by
Dr Pekka Tarjanne, ITU Secretary-General

Internet Domain Names: Information Session,
Meeting of Signatories and Potential Signatories of the Generic Top Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding (gTLD-MoU)

ITU, Geneva April 29th-May 1st, 1997

 

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Members of the Internet Community,

It is my pleasure to welcome you to Geneva, the birthplace of the World Wide Web. More specifically, I would like to welcome you to the ITU which, if not quite the birthplace, is arguably the spiritual home of the telecommunications community. Perhaps in future years this meeting of the Internet community at the home of the telecommunications community will be recognized as a historic coming together of the two cultures.

Without prejudging history, it is clear that a meeting of this nature could not have happened even a few years ago. In the recent past, the ITU has been as guilty as its membership—the public telecommunication operators, manufacturers, regulators and users of the world—of neglecting the Internet. We can not afford to do that now; unless we want Geneva to become the "last resting place" of the telecommunications community! My hope is that ITU will play its full role in promoting the development of the Internet and ensuring that the benefits of Internet technology are extended "to all the world’s inhabitants", to quote from the ITU Constitution. If we were among the laggards, we intend to be among the leaders.

Over the next three days, you have a daunting task ahead. But I would congratulate you for the work already achieved by the Internet Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) in such a brief space of time. It is little short of remarkable. I do not want to pretend that the work is finished; there is still a long way to go to create consensus in the industry about the approach you are taking. Indeed, I am half expecting the lawyers to be waiting for me when I leave the conference room! Nevertheless, I want to assure you that you have our full support in the work ahead. We will offer you every encouragement to complete the work you have started in a democratic, timely and efficient manner.

In my remarks, I would like to talk about two related issues: First, to provide some historical context to the work you are doing, I would like to share a few thoughts on how the work of multilateral organizations such as the ITU has evolved over the last few years, and in particular to describe the emergence of a new way of working which I will term "voluntary multilateralism". Second, I would like to explore how this principle of voluntary multilateralism might guide your discussions over the issue of Internet Governance. I choose that term advisedly because I feel that what you have been doing through the work of the IAHC has implications that go beyond the Domain Name System (DNS) and may set a precedent for how future issues relating to Internet Governance will be handled. And let me assure, if you think that finding a resolution to DNS problems is hard, just wait until you see the problems lurking around the corner associated with electronic commerce and Internet content!

Towards voluntary multilateralism

Next month, ITU will celebrate its 132nd birthday but, in the interests of brevity, I will fast forward through the first hundred or so years of our history and bring us to the 1970s. At that time, an earlier generation of fresh-faced engineers met at ITU, probably in this same room, to lay out the fundamental principles for a technical standard they were sure was going to change the world. They called it ISDN, short for "Integrated Services Digital Network". Then they sat back and waited for the colleagues in the marketing department to dream up the killer application which would bring ISDN to every home in the land. They grew old waiting for that to happen. Only now, when that generation is on the point of retirement, has the killer application which vindicated their earlier efforts finally arrived: it is called the Internet. During 1995, there were more ISDN lines installed and sold than during the previous twenty years put together.

The reason I am telling you this story is because it shows that you may have to wait some time to see the fruit of your labours, but more particularly because the case of ISDN illustrates the way in which international agreements were reached at the time. Effectively the standards-making process consisted of engineers sitting around a table, each with a good idea of how to solve a problem, and then slowly reaching a compromise. With ISDN, a compromise was fudged between a 56 kbit/s transmission rate in North America and a 64 kbit/s transmission rate in Europe. The process was not driven by markets but rather by the search for technically optimal solutions. Customers were rarely given the opportunity to choose.

I would term this approach "compulsory multilateralism". By comparison with what came later in the 1980s, the 1970s were a period of high productivity. When the engineers of the 1980s gathered here, they brought with them their friends who were lawyers. As many people have realized to their cost, lawyers work on the principle that the longer something takes, the more time they can bill. This principle is well understood in the telecommunications sector where Public Telecommunication Operators are past masters at the practice of charging their customers by the minute, by the mile and by the megabyte. As the legal and economic stakes in the industry rose during the 1980s, the process of "compulsory multilateralism"—creating prescriptive standards and legally binding agreements—became ever harder to sustain. For instance in the ATM standard, the cell size of 48 bytes which was finally agreed was an arithmetic average between two competing proposals. The technical merits of the two solutions took second place to industrial politics.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and there is a growing realization that the phase of compulsory multilateralism, achieved through exhaustion, is now coming to an end. The commercial interests in the telecommunications sector are now so strong that it is necessary to look for alternatives to binding agreements if the process of standards-making is not to be left behind by the pace of technological change. Today’s breakthrough is already on tomorrow’s scrapheap. The timeliness of a standard takes precedence over its technical excellence. For that reason, I see a new paradigm emerging, which I would term "voluntary multilateralism". This process consists of identifying communities of interest who can come together on a voluntary basis to solve problems, and then letting the market decide whether or not they got it right. Sometimes those communities of interest may use the services of the ITU. Sometimes they will use other bodies such as the WTO or the OECD. Sometimes they will form around a special purpose group, such as the IAHC.

The chosen tool for this new era of "voluntary multilateralism" is often a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), or a set of voluntary principles. Here at the ITU, we recently hosted a meeting of signatories of an MoU concerning the free circulation of terminals for Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite (GMPCS). The GMPCS community faced a problem: how to ensure that handheld satellite telephones could be carried by users from country to country without being expropriated by over-zealous customs officers. By creating a community of interest, we were able to come up with a voluntary agreement which is open for signature by manufacturers, operators, regulators and others on an equal footing. The beauty of an MoU is that it first establishes a broad framework of consensus in order to focus on problem solving. Too often in the past, the multilateral process has been hijacked by countries or companies that have a specific interest in failing to reach a solution or in wanting to slow down the process. But a "voluntary multilateral" approach to problems selects first those parties that are committed to a particular course of action, and lets them sort out the details later.

In your continuing discussions, I would strongly urge you to look for areas of common interest, and not to focus on the inevitable areas of disagreement.

The gTLD MoU

What relevance does all this have for the MoU on generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and more broadly for Internet governance? Let us think for a moment about the problem which the Internet community is trying to solve. You are lucky to have inherited, from those halcyon days of the 1970s when an engineer’s word was law, a domain naming system which works well. Indeed, the problems creating by trying to "fix" it may turn out to be greater than the problems of leaving it as it is. But it is clear that the processes of internationalization and commercialization which the Internet has been undergoing in recent years call for a fresh approach to the problem. The main criticisms of the current system are that:

Given the problems outlined above, there are two possible approaches to the problem: the creation of additional registries or the creation of additional gTLDs. The IAHC has wisely chosen to do both. Beyond that, the necessary database information for a particular gTLD can either be shared or it can be fragmented into a series of mini-monopolies. The approach taken by the IAHC, that of shared databases, is not the easiest route. As any two-year old will tell you, sharing is not a natural part of human nature. But I strongly believe that this is fundamentally the right approach from a multilateral perspective. It avoids the problems of private ownership, and arguably manipulation, of name space. Furthermore, the IAHC proposals put in place a comprehensive set of safeguards that seek to promote the principle of competition while still preserving network efficiency and integrity. I am conscious of the criticism that the IAHC was put together hastily, without the involvement of governments, and may lack legitimacy. But I am persuaded that the process by which the IAHC has carried out its work has been open, representative and transparent.

The IAHC proposals give a number of tasks to the ITU to carry out. Specifically we are required to:

I am fully aware that ITU cannot expect to be awarded this responsibility by right but must be seen to earn it by undertaking the tasks efficiently. I intend to ensure that we do. The ITU already has a proven capability:

I can assure we intend to take our new responsibilities as seriously as we take our existing ones.

As you undertake your work over the next three days, the eyes of the Internet Community will be upon you. Whatever you decide will not necessarily meet with universal approval. At the ITU, we have been "learning by doing" as we engage our membership in new tasks and responsibilities related to Internet Governance. We do not have the answers, and we do not pretend to have them. But we are committed to working on them together in a spirit of voluntary multilateralism. Good luck!