 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Paraminder Jat Singh from IT for Change which works on the internet, global governance and other similar issues. Paraminder, good to have you with us. Thank you Praveer. A lot of issues have come up with the past regarding internet governance, the fact that the U.S. controls the root server, the fact that ICANN is really the one which decides the registry of domain names, is really located in the U.S. or largely U.S. base, the domain registers. Do you think this is a big issue for people in the third world or countries in the third world? Yes and no. It by itself may not be that big an issue because people do really think that, well, it doesn't matter, I get my domains all right. At this point of security, nations think there is an issue because the critical infrastructure has certain choke points which are controlled by one country. And essentially ICANN is under contract with the Department of Commerce and therefore is really subject to its control entirely. However for me, the principle that U.S. controls it is a bigger problem because it started a kind of a practice and a kind of model of privatized governments in the whole internet regime which extends to much and many more areas which are closer to our lives and influences our day-to-day lives much more. And therefore for me the problem is that we are now into an age where U.S. or couple of countries friendly to the U.S. control an infrastructure and along with privatized realms of governance. So yes, it is an issue and it is a huge issue. Developing countries have been consistently been arguing that there should be a system under the U.N. or a new system which is democratic globally which starting with the critical internet resources which is the kind of things you are talking about ICANN etc. should not control the internet but govern it in public interest. And I think there is a huge difference between the two especially at perception level because moment you talk about global governance people are afraid somebody is out to control it kind of you know limit people's freedoms. One part of it is really the fact that the U.S. government can shut down all every site in the country but just stopping it if it wants to. Dot IN if for instance U.S. wants it can stop all dot IN sites in that sense. It is actually a slightly complicated issue but you know what happens internet would not really because much of the traffic moves within the system and as long as the addresses are resolved internally you still will have an internet which will keep on degrading. So the fact is internet is so complex that nobody can really tell you what will happen but yes there are key choke points where influence can be exercised in critical times that can be problematic. It is rumored that just before the Iraq war dot IQ or whatever is the Iraq's domain was pulled out. So yes there are those fears. This is one part of it. The physical threat of degrading a country's internet infrastructure by being able to stop the domain all the domains because root servers in the U.S. is only one part of it. The second part of it we are referring the privatized governance of the internet if you will is the fact that this entire internet shall we say real estate which is created which is what the domains really are the wealth of that flows all into certain companies in the United States wouldn't that also be a major issue? It's a huge issue. The fact that the wealth completely goes to certain countries and moving from what was the model of internet as it was created it was a public model. It was an open infrastructure which was governed in public interest even if we call ICANN kind of a non-profit in public interest where different people could create applications and they would link up we have even gone worse than that. Right now internet is a few big applications. Most of the people who are on the internet are within private spaces of a few applications. This was not there like six years or seven years back. You were still on the internet and then there was a problem that who governs the internet and U.S. has disproportionate power but we have gone into times when actually people say what's the big about domain names because while you're inside Facebook space or inside Google space, resolutions take place by Google's architecture not by the internet's domain name architecture and increasingly young people have mobiles where they only do Facebook and Google. Increasingly mobiles are being sold, telecom companies are selling packages where for a certain amount you can only have Google and Facebook and perhaps one or two things Twitter and you really are inside those private domains so you're going into worse directions and when you are in those private domains obviously it's simply the company's policy which controls and governs you. So effectively two sets of issues. One is the creation of the real estate which is privately owned, one part of it. The second part of it what you're discussing right now is the fact that even you are becoming now captured in some sense by large corporations within whose application you really are. I call it the mall model. Earlier it was the public street, the shops were on the street so you had private spaces on a public system but now increasingly it's a mall. The shops are inside the private space and that's what is happening to the internet. So you basically have your Facebook account so you are on the Facebook and the Facebook account therefore is what you are, not the domain order. You're not on the internet. You're not on a public internet. You're inside that space for all and you're in private space. They can do whatever. Now this is one part of it but this seems to be developing in a way that we, meaning people in the third world, countries, people, whatever it is, we don't seem to be able to do anything about it at the moment. Are there countervailing measures that can be taken or people are taking or the moves against it? Because all that seems to be happening is a kind of isolation or policing model by a state that well we will not let you do ABCD things on this internet space or we will pry with some of these malls for instance. Now is there something else that can develop in this? Yes. So you're coming to the key question that increasingly internet dominates good parts of our social economic, political, cultural lives. Are they subject to good rules, regulations, public interest-based government systems because we need to be safe. We need to be protected. We need to be positively enabled in many ways the typically public functions. So what happens in these spaces? So right now, no, nothing is happening and there are a couple of reasons for that. One, technology is so fascinating. You're getting so much. You really don't want to do anything at all since you're getting a lot. You say, we're getting it. So why would you interfere in that? Goodies, you're getting daily new goodies. You start getting new mobile phones. You discover new things which you never thought were possible. And therefore the system is working. And it is working beyond people's expectations. So if you try to convince somebody in that kind of a situation that you want to do something, this is why. Why should I do it? Novelty of the things you're seeing overcomes the underlying problems. Novelty and you're actually getting new goodies and they're useful as well. It's not that they're just novel in that stimulating manner, but many of them are very useful. Google gives you Google applications. Google gives you a document which you can do online rather than offline. They are structural problems with it, but it's so convenient. You don't want to do anything about it. I mean, I get a model of, I saw a cartoon's long back and I vaguely remember it's about two chimpanzees who are getting a lot of foods and they're choosing what to eat and strategizing and taking it. At the same time, golden-edged cage is being built around them, but they're completely ignorant or you don't want to look at it because they are looking at the goodies being made possible. So in the same sense, we are getting the goodies, we are not looking at the structural changes which are happening around us, which in a long term would create problems for us and that becomes a governance issue. It's not an issue which each of us would separately ever want to do anything about, but as a society, as a collective, somebody has to take the responsibility to do something about it and that's not happening. I mean that this really is a larger issue that internet that we have created is really outside domestic governmental control in various, except perhaps in the United States where the ICANN is, where the Google, Facebook companies are and so on. For most, it's really outside domestic governance control and we have really no international structure to either govern or regulate the internet, except the laws of the United States. Is that really an issue that we need to address? Yeah, that's the central issue. I think when people have critiqued economic globalization and then you look at what should be done and any thinker, I really probe any thinker on that, the final person says this that you can't have a unified economy without having some kind of unified quality. That's the simple thing, you have to go towards. You want to take the advantage of being together economically, you have to give up certain power to a collective which is global and therefore have to have a quality and otherwise that wouldn't work and that's many times true in the internet where internet is inherently global. It's not global because the pieces got put together but it was global of which pieces we see from our local spaces. This being inherently global, for me the proposition is simple. If you want to take the advantage of being a globally connected society, if you really like it and everybody seems to like it, then you need to move forward and say we need some governance but the problem immediately comes that people think that that would be a typical UN-ish governance where certain authoritarian countries dominate and it's raised to the bottom looking for controls and the governments would agree to a high degree of control over the internet which nobody seems to want. So you are stuck there really. Effectively we have to think about new structures of governance, cooperative regulation if we will for the future which is the network to cite and that's really the crux of the issue. The nation-state structure is no longer capable of really addressing issues like this and by default at the moment it gives almost the sole power of governance to the United States where it really at the moment, the hub of the internet seems to be. Yes, theoretically that's what we need to do but our organization is struggling at the global level to see what actually can you do but when you really come to what actually you can do you need to be more pragmatic. You need to move from A to B and there has to be a path from A to B. You can't be at B because that's theoretically the best thing to do and I agree internet creates a new public and therefore there is a new public governance system which is the present one which is a combination together of those number of countries which we have is not adequate. Once theoretically we agree to that we still have to move from what we have now and have a path of progression towards that and we have given a lot of suggestions to have a new kind of system where you would have intergovernmental system the first time you have some people who are from outside and what powers they would have what soft powers would they exercise then there is an institution called UN Internet Governance Forum which is just a place where people can come and talk we have said that this should be empowered in a certain manner which gives policy directions but not policy outcomes which then should be something else so we have to look at new institutional possibilities. Now people accept the theoretical point but once you have to start then you have to make trade-offs and people are not ready to make trade-offs not making trade-offs comes the mother question of all the political economy question the political economy question has two sides to it one is that the rich countries like the US even when they know that certain ways internet is functioning is not good for their domestic public interest but it's so good for their companies that and the companies give them so much that they are ready to keep their eyes shut and be connived with those companies which is I think almost understandable domestic compulsion because when you don't have a global system then every country would work for their short-term gains and for US they know that many things about intellectual property they know is not good for the people people don't like it but they know that they are earning so much money the new model of global domination is based on technical architecture and on IP no technical architecture for them is important and that is built by Google and Facebook so one the big countries who are most sophisticated in their policy analysis of forward planning looking at what would be the public interest are not eager to you know put public interest their private interest of their large corporations over and over and they do earn so much money globally for them but probably even in some ways the people are better because they have more money being earned from outside it's a debatable issue basically what you are raising is that for the pharmaceutical companies interest overrides the interest of the people for public health like in the United States this could also be a similar example but the bottom line is that we have two problems I would say the second one I was saying two parts one is that the big countries who have big role in shaping global forums have this issue and the second is that the dominant forces increasingly in developing countries is that middle class which has new confluence of interest outlooks and therefore politics which is much more prominent than the majority people's politics there it is even more prominent on the internet so this group we should have brought the alternative politics is of course not going to bring it because this interest is the dominant model they are more liberal, they are more afraid of control aspect rather than on the socio-economic issues because of these two factors things are not going in the direction they should go but to sum up really two central questions that we have to address where do we want to go and what is the path to be followed and I think this is something that we will have to work out over the next few years otherwise we are going to get the situation that it is not going to be the interest of the public either defined in a larger public interest or even the new public as you were talking about thanks a lot this has been a very interesting discussion and we hope to have you more as you go further in the trajectory and towards the end point whatever that might be thank you