Several governments in the global South, especially some of the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), have complained that, while the US gave birth to the internet, its status as a truly global medium makes even indirect US control inappropriate; consequently, they have argued that a new governance model needs to be explored that reflects the global nature of the medium. These complaints have intensified in the wake of the Snowden revelations as more countries become concerned about the US’s control over the internet being abused by the country to expand its global influence. This it could do by pressuring ICANN to create or remove online property. To its credit, though, the US did not use its influence to demand the removal of WikiLeaks’s domain name, presumably because it feared a backlash from countries that were already concerned about US control of the internet. While some of the BRICS countries have called for greater state involvement in internet governance issues and multilateral decision-making, others have even argued for greater UN involvement as an antidote to US and corporate control.
In an attempt to prevent attempts to control the internet by other governments, the US has committed itself to establishing ICANN as an independent entity, run according to the principle of ‘multi-stakeholder governance’. The race to establish such a model is on, as the US Department of Commerce indicated that it did not intend to renew its contract with ICANN for the management of the domain name system, in the wake of controversies about this institution. On the surface of things, this principle looks attractive, as it appears to offer a ‘touchy-feely’ form of democratic control, in which a global entity is established which uses open, transparent and consensus-building decision-making, and where internet stakeholders meet one another as equals. However, the multi-stakeholder approach is unlikely to deliver truly democratic control of the internet. While this model remains relatively vague, the ground rules set by the US government for relinquishing control will ensure that it adopts operating procedures and principles acceptable to it. The model will limit government involvement, and, where it does become involved, it will operate on an equal footing with other stakeholders, such as business and civil society. However, the US can afford to relinquish control as it will have approved the new body’s rules of engagement. Furthermore, the danger of a consensus-based model is that groups that have diametrically opposed interests (corporations and consumers, for instance) could block decision-making simply by refusing to agree, which may paralyse this aspect of internet governance. In any event, the de facto control of the US through its control over other internet governance organisations, as well as the world’s major internet companies, is almost certainly assured even if a new multi-stakeholder body is established.60 And if this happens, then the worldwide struggle against surveillance will become even harder.
CONCLUSION
In the dying days of 2016, the UK Parliament passed the Investigatory Powers Bill into law, despite significant opposition from digital rights and privacy groups. According to research conducted by academics at Cardiff University, in the campaign against the Bill too much attention was paid to specialist lobbying and advocacy work, and not enough to broader public awareness-raising and mobilisation. Organised formations and social movements that focused on a range of social justice issues were not engaged in the campaign, and consequently felt alienated from it. In spite of the fact that many activists expected to be subjected to surveillance, organised responses to surveillance were left to expert communities rather than being integrated into broader activist concerns.61 The mainstream press tended to be pro-surveillance, as they were dominated by the voices of politicians, and the public became resigned to security discourses as an inevitable feature of a landscape where terrorist threats were real and present. As a result, there was no significant mass opposition.62 This analysis suggests that anti-surveillance campaigns that are driven by specialists, and that eschew, or do not pay sufficient attention to building effective mass opposition, will be doomed to fail. According to Gus Hosein, the campaign against the Investigatory Powers Bill was inadequate for a number of reasons. In spite of the fact that the UK has a strong tradition of grassroots activism, and highly successful activism at that, privacy advocates did not reach out to parliamentarians and lobby them, and failed to engage the more conservative media in the UK. While The Guardian became the paper of record of the Snowden revelations, the issue was mostly marginalised in the media discourse. The narrowness of the media discourse was in contrast to the earlier campaign against the smart ID card, in which Hosein had been involved. This campaign engaged the spread of media across the political spectrum, leading to widespread cynicism about ID cards. According to Hosein:
We have to own some of the failure [around the Investigatory Powers Act], which is we made this entirely about intelligence agencies, we made this all about mass surveillance, we didn’t articulate a positive framing of the issue, we didn’t get into The Telegraph or The Times or the Daily Mail. This is in spite of the fact that the [Investigatory Powers] Bill contained similar powers, if not the exact same powers that two years before had been stymied by the lib-dems [the Liberal Democrats], and … yet the same media and the parties that admonished the government for these exact same powers in 2013, came out in support of it. When it was post-Snowden, and The Guardian took to owning the story, and with the chaos in the Labour party, there was no similar dissension on it.
It’s not easy to frame it [the Bill] positively. There were powers in there that you wouldn’t want any government having, apart from your own. For example we can frame the struggle as being one for secure devices, not just that government is trying to stop bad people. [We needed to say], you are going to be affected by this in the following ways. [In the campaign] we didn’t relate to the British lived experience. Privacy advocates and technology rights advocates in the old days were accustomed to not having any friends, so we worked really hard to get the message across. But now tech issues have become cool, we have our own media for crying out loud, we have our circuits, and we intermingle with each other. There isn’t the same sense of need to reach out. There’s a comfort in our worldview, a liberal NGO club that doesn’t attempt to get into the right wing media.63
For Hosein, a narrow approach towards the advocacy around the bill, where advocates focused on their own circles of influence, meant that they were unable to have a significant impact on the public discourse, which largely accepted the need for expansive counter-terrorism measures. Ironically enough, in spite of the increased resources that flowed to privacy work, especially in the wake of the Snowden revelations, their public traction did not necessarily increase. Advocates failed to create doubt in the public debate about the necessity of these measures. All the same, the approach of limiting surveillance largely to a specialist community did have its own logic, in that it was difficult for broader movements to focus on a wide spread of issues, as well as surveillance.
It should be noted that some real gains are being made in the European courts, but with the UK having decided to exit from the EU, it is unclear how much attention will be paid to European Court rulings in future. It is possible that the UK will want to embrace the court’s rulings in future to argue that it still remains part of the vanguard of international human rights law.64 According to the Privacy International legal officer, Scarlet Kim, there have been notable gains, but key issues relating to the lawfulness of mass surveillance still remain to be decided in a key European Court of Human Rights case. According to Kim:
What progress has been made post-Snowden? The most positive developments are around transparency and data and retention. These came from a lot of different places, and came about through court cases. The IPT started requiring additional transparency about the type of surveillance being undertaken. Of course, this had its limits as the agencies don’t have to give over information to the IPT. But they have released information in response to a number of our claims. They have also released a draft code of practice [on equipment interference]. We’ve also got some transparency about