Is Another Internet Possible? The ‘Global Battle for Control of Cyberspace’

This paper examines rights-based mobilization for the internet as its corporatized geopolitics gathers momentum. Drawing on five years of participatory research at the UN Internet Governance Forum (Franklin 2013), the paper reconstructs the drafting of a Charter of Rights and Principles for the Internet. The ‘multistakeholder’ coalition behind the IRP Charter worked together as ‘speaking, writing, and thinking’ participants coming together to “collabowrite” a document outlining the human rights of internet users online that addressers wider publics. Based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the IRP Coalition was “conjuring into being” transnational, digital publics and by association counterpublics (Warner 2002: 49, Calhoun & McQuarrie 2012) as a result. Since the IRP Charter’s launch in 2010, governments, corporations, IGOs, and NGOs have been promoting various rights-based initiatives. Theoretically this reconstruction does two things: argues (i) that this initiative illustrates transnational, digital publics in the making (Warner 2002, Hauser 1999); (ii) that these need to be understood within a critical reappraisal of Foucault’s governmentality paradox for multistakeholder contentiousness around the internet’s future. 2012 the ante was raised as competing interests used conventional and ‘digital activism’ lobbying and campaigning to wage a ‘war of words’ about internet freedom, highlighting diverging visions of how the Internet should be run, and of what sorts of existing or emerging rights are paramount. Which agenda predominates informs a 21st century Internet governmentality paradox namely an emerging “triangle, sovereignty - discipline - government, which has as its primary target [transnational and digital) populations and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of (cyber)security” (Foucault 199:102). In this case those mobilizing around the idea that another Internet is possible need to take into account that i) how people use the internet has made the internet itself a game-changer and ii) how rights-based speech can be captured for competing ends.