Digital infrastructure politics and Internet freedom stakeholders after the Arab Spring.

• Author: Hussain, Muzammil M.
• Position: Media and Technology

This article presents a brief characterization of the transformational consequences of the Arab Spring for global policy frameworks and democracy promotion efforts regarding Internet infrastructure. To do so, we begin with unpacking the battle that took place in Dubai in December 2012 at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) between competing state powers, technology policy regimes, and civil society activists jockeying on the global stage to promote Internet freedom. Particular emphasis is placed on the discourses and controversies carried over from the Arab Spring surrounding Internet freedom as democracy promotion, including the growing importance of transnationally-organized and tech-savvy civil society activists who have joined these opaque policy debates. The next section focuses on highlighting the new practices and ideologies of this particularly novel "community of practice" comprising transnational tech-savvy activists who have joined the Internet freedom proto-regime. The final discussion elucidates the policy innovations and frameworks born from the interactions of this diverse stakeholder network since the Arab Spring, and contrasts them with those of the state and private sector stakeholders who traditionally hold sway in shaping information infrastructure policies. We conclude by outlining the opportunities and challenges facing these policy entrepreneurs and the democratic interests of global Internet users.

INSIDE THE INTERNET FREEDOM PROTO-REGIME

How consequential were digital media and supporting information infrastructures for the popular movements of the Arab Spring in 2011 to 2012? Weighing multiple political, economic, demographic, and cultural conditions, it is clear that various components of digital media may explain the causes behind fragile regimes and successful social movements during the Arab Spring. (1) But the more important lesson of the Arab Spring has been that in order to understand both the successes and failures of digital media in these cascades of political change, we must also unpack how various digital infrastructure stakeholders (e.g., civil society leaders, state security forces, and Internet service providers) continue to treat digital technologies and Internet infrastructure as politically consequential. In other words, digital media and information infrastructure may have influenced the Arab Spring, but their future political and democratic capacities depend now on the policy battles being waged and technological affordances being forged by transnational infrastructure stakeholders. How effectively have advanced democratic states, including the United States, made progress on Internet freedom and democracy promotion efforts since the Arab Spring? Which new international actors and transnational activists must we also engage and understand to secure these so called "technologies of freedom?" (2)

Technologies are more than just sometimes socially shaped and perhaps politically consequential. Based on the lessons learned since the cascades of 2011, information technologies are continuously being engineered with a variety of political affordances and risks, sometimes by their designers, increasingly by their users, and certainly by the policies and standards enforced on them by states and regulators. Ultimately, opportunities for technology use are structured by the infrastructure providers and regulators, who in many authoritarian cases are the repressive states themselves. In advanced democracies, these infrastructure providers are private sector owned (e.g., Comcast Corporation), or in the case of some European states, are jointly owned by the state and private enterprise (e.g., TeliaSonera, owned by the government of Sweden and private investors). But perspectives that shine light on the globalized and transnational political and economic conditions of infrastructure politics are still limited. Nonetheless, since the aftermath of the Arab Spring, international activism and global debates surrounding digital infrastructure policymaking have become highly visible and contentious at the international level. This has in turn had a transformational impact on how democratic states have coordinated with one another in shaping their democracy-promotion efforts after the Arab Spring. Simultaneously, developing and authoritarian states have also been actively coordinating amongst each other to bring global north-anchored Internet infrastructure under their influence.

In responding to these critical challenges after the Arab Spring, the United States and supporting advanced industrialized Western democracies have coordinated since 2011 in launching and financing several initiatives which represent early formation of a multi-stakeholder Internet freedom proto-regime (e.g., the Freedom Online Coalition, the Digital Defenders). This Internet freedom regime is a "proto-regime" because state actors, technology providers, and digital activists are all using contrasting norms and interests with respect to managing global digital infrastructure. The meaning of working to promote "Internet freedom" and whom they intend to serve in so doing has not been defined clearly or consensually; however the number of states purportedly supporting Internet freedom continues to expand. For example, the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC) began with the joint sponsorship and seed funding for projects by the Netherlands, the U.S. Department of State, and civil society organizations. (3) As of this writing, there are now over twenty democratic states that are official coalition members of the FOC.

These programs and the involved negotiations are novel and important because they provide significant new additions to existing forums and arenas that encased Internet governance long before the Arab Spring (e.g., International Telecommunication Union [ITU] and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN]). The ITU was adopted in the late 1800s to regulate standards for the information infrastructure of the time, namely telegraph infrastructure. In the 1990s, governance expanded to include organizations like ICANN to regulate information infrastructure standards of more recent times, namely Internet infrastructure. Currently, with the growing importance and complexities of international and political challenges intersecting, Internet governance broadly has become a site for contesting state power and demanding civil liberties. This growing complexity has involved old actors with new ones, including nation states, infrastructure providers, and political activists.

Between the period when major protests of the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan revolutions concluded (during and after October 2011) and when the ITU convened in Dubai, at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) in December 2012 to revise its quarter century-old global telecommunications treaties, there were at least ten major stakeholder summits organized by Western democracies focused on defining and promoting Internet freedom with the help of technology providers and political activists (see Table 1). These efforts were often sponsored by member states of the Freedom Online Coalition but attended by multi-sector stakeholders, including dissidents and activists from repressive political systems active during the Arab Spring and similar movements. (4) Who are these new activist stakeholders and what has been the consequence of their involvement? How effective have states and activists been in coordinating with private sector and multi-national technology providers to address their democratic needs and threats?

While the new rounds of policy debates and forums have been brokered by the foreign policy offices of key Western democratic nations, new partnerships have also been forged by important technology rights organizations (e.g., Access, the Electronic Frontier Foundation) as well as major technology corporations (e.g., Google, Facebook). Internet freedom promotion since the Arab Spring has been a contentious site for multi-sector competition and negotiations. For example, in the years after the Green Revolution of 2009, Access has been an influential civil society organization behind Internet freedom promotion in Iran, and following the Arab Spring, in Egypt and Tunisia as well, in the form of raising awareness and funds to support Internet freedom, specifically by doing original technical detective work tracking the sales and acquisitions of surveillance and monitoring technologies by governments. (5) Such successes can be attributed to the fact that Access has balanced political activism alongside policy innovation initiatives. After the Green Revolution, Access pressured several prominent technology companies to stop selling software tools to dictators, with some success. The organization then continued its efforts on behalf of promoting Internet freedom by lobbying service providers to keep digital networks open during Egypt's national Internet shutdown in 2011. Following these transparency activism and policy innovation experiences, Access has now assumed an international leadership role in organizing policy networks and communities of civil society activists around issues of Internet freedom. In October 2011, Access launched its first Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. Though organized by an activist organization, this event was sponsored and funded by Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, AT&T, Mozilla, Skype, and others, and brought together corporate leaders and foreign policy officials from several democratic nations to design policies for corporate social responsibility (CSR) with respect to international human rights.

Similarly coordinated activities have also been organized by state powers. Breaking with convention, the governments of the United States, the Netherlands, and Sweden publicly followed suit in the activities of this Internet freedom protoregime...