Why global 'internet stakeholder' meetings fall short

The Kenya Internet Governance Forum held its sixth annual meeting at a Nairobi hotel on July 31.

The local gathering was held in advance of a regional meeting scheduled for October 2015 in Dar es Salaam or Kigali, before the global meeting takes place this November in Brazil.

On its website, the global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) proclaims its mandate as bringing people together from various stakeholder groups as equals, with a view to discussing public policy issues relating to the Internet.

While there is no negotiated outcome, the IGF informs and inspires those with policy-making power in both the public and private sectors to come up with workable solutions to the challenges of an evolving internet.

It was no different this time, with the local edition of KE-IGF convened by the Kenya ICT Action Network and its partners. Senior government officials, and industry players, media, academia and human rights groups, amongst others, were present to discuss the evolution and development of the internet.

After protocol was observed stakeholders quickly got into the packed agenda for the day.

The first item dwelt on enhancing multi-stakeholder cooperation in the development and evolution of the Internet. It was noted that decisions regarding the Internet, and how it is evolving, are largely determined by the developed, global north, with very little input from developing countries.

Furthermore, at global level, the same active participants from developing countries tend to contribute repeatedly, with little or no opportunities for new blood and new ideas.

This does cast doubts about the merits of "multi-stakeholder" approaches, given that, ultimately, they tend to be dominated by the same actors – be they in industry, civil society, government or academia.

Clearly, there is need to interrogate and expand the multi-stakeholder principle in order to align it properly to its ideals.

DOUBLE CHARGES

One other item that came up during the morning session was the issue of Net Neutrality, which has attracted little attention from policymakers in East Africa, even if it is a burning issue in advanced economies.

In the developed North, net-neutrality has been framed as a battle between content providers such as Google, YouTube, Facebook and Netflix, and telecommunications companies, who make their infrastructure available for content distribution to consumers.

The telecommunications companies feel that content such as YouTube is creating undue traffic congestion on their networks, and needs to be compensated separately – over and above monthly payments for access. 

They also feel, the telecom providers feel the advertising revenues that content providers are enjoying should be shared equitably in order to compensate for the traffic congestion triggered by content-based websites.

Of course, the content providers do not want to hear about sharing advertising revenues, They argue that infrastructure providers are already compensated through the standard bandwidth access payments, and that further that charging content providers more for access would mean treating their content and access differently and unfairly, thus violating the fundamental and founding principles of an open and neutral Internet.

Locally, telecommunications companies seem to be reacting to net neutrality differently, by providing free internet access to content sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Internet.org amongst others. 

Whereas this may look like a generous offer to speed up the uptake of Internet services, it inherently favours foreign content providers over potential local content innovators wishing to compete with similar content.

To conclude the morning session, the issue of cybersecurity was discussed. Human-rights stakeholders were particularly concerned about the deliberate moves by government to curtail citizen freedoms and rights to privacy under the pretext of national security.

UNCOORDINATED RESPONSES

Security laws that allow security agencies to intercept citizen communications were cited as setting a worrying trend. Whereas the need to enhance national security by governments was acknowledged, contributors felt it was necessary need to observe an appropriate balance between security procedures and citizen liberties as enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of rights was necessary.

On a positive note, stakeholders were informed that the government has created a national Computer Incident and Response Team (KE-CIRT), hosted at the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), to ensure that Kenya’s cyberspace remains safe and reliable for citizens.

A similar initiative by industry players called Cyber-Usalama, hosted by the Telecommunication Service Providers of Kenya (TESPOK), is also active and has the capacity to anticipate, detect and respond to cyber threats within the region.

Participants, however, raised concerns as to how these two initiatives were working together, and more importantly, how they interface with national security organs such as the NIS, the CID, the Central Bank and the Judiciary, among others.   

In the absence of a legal framework to shape a coordinated cyber-response between stakeholders, Kenya is likely to remain vulnerable to cybercriminals and their activities.

My next blog post will cover the discussions on e-commerce, the AU cybersecurity convention and the management of critical Internet resources by ICANN.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya's Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu email: [email protected]