Politico
Magazine
By
NANCY SCOLA
June
02, 2015
While
ICANN is often the poster-child for what’s gone wrong with the Internet—and
it’s difficult to find anyone, even within its own ranks, who thinks ICANN is
perfect—ICANN’s job is fairly narrow: It is more or less the switchboard
operator of the Internet. It doesn’t tackle cybersecurity, or legal disputes on
Facebook, or concerns over how Google deals with privacy. The U.S. position is
to keep aiming to reform ICANN while handling those other matters on a
case-by-case basis.
But
that approach can be complex and few outside the U.S. have the wherewithal to
navigate it. “To some degree,” admits Sepulveda, “it’s unsatisfying to a
regulator or public official in the developing world to say, ‘You have a
problem with commercial privacy, you should go to the U.N. Human Rights
Commission or UNESCO to talk to people about that,’ because you’re not going to
get an immediate solution.”
Hovering
over that discussion is the specter of Edward Snowden. How often do the
revelations of digital surveillance by the National Security Agency come up in
the course of his work? “All the time,” says Sepulveda.
Brazil’s
Rouseff was particularly angered by the seeming revelation that the NSA and
other intelligence officials in the United States were tapping the Internet,
perhaps in cahoots with U.S.-based tech companies like Google, Yahoo, and
Facebook. Before the U.N. General Assembly in the fall of 2013, she
suggested that perhaps the Internet needed a “civilian multilateral
framework”—diplo-speak for the notion that the U.S. had abused its exceptional
role, and other world powers might need to step in as a counterbalance.
To
some in the U.S. government, the spirited debate here over how far digital
surveillance has gone serves to justify the U.S.’s prime place as the
Internet’s apparatus. “Russia’s not having that discussion,” says Painter,
State’s cyber coordinator. “Others are not having that discussion.” Some
countries, particularly in Europe, have reacted to the NSA revelations by
building their own national email systems, as in the case with Germany, or by
creating a local “cloud” for storing digital data, as in France. A 40-page report
from the Open Technology Institute warns that “without greater nuance, other
governments could use the proposals to justify their own actions, including
those that do not protect, but violate, human rights.”
Sepulveda
has been praised for steering deftly through those murky waters. Some see that
as a marked change for the U.S. Google, for its part, has reacted to the U.N.
push with a “Take Action” campaign, with the slogan, “the Internet was
designed to be free and open. But not everyone wants it to stay that way.” Some
outside the U.S. heard Google’s message as screechy or preachy, but
pre-Sepulveda, it fit the black-or-white tone the U.S. had often taken. “It was
a fight between good and evil,” says one tech-focused foreign diplomat who has
often worked beside Sepulveda, “which might or might not be true, but isn’t
good on the diplomatic scene.” (The diplomat asked to remain nameless because,
well, diplomacy.) Sepulveda, says the diplomat, manages to be firm but tactful
at once.
Sepulveda
has re-engineered the messaging to be a positive statement of U.S. values, and
he has championed, to some receptive ears, the idea that citizens of poorer
nations can gain a sort of power their countries lack in old-school
government-to-government relations. To grow individual participation around the
world, the State Department has put more than a $100 million in the last few
years into such programs as finding ways around China’s Great Firewall or
training foreign journalists on staying safe online.
But
with two billion people living on less than two dollars a day, how are they
going to get online? U.S. Agency for International Development has taken the
lead with its Global Broadband and Innovations Program to those in the
developing world connect. State Department officials also point to the work
being done by the private sector to expand access, including Google’s broadband-by-balloon project called
Loon and Facebook’s nascent bid to deliver
digital data through drones. U.S. officials are also nudging other
countries to adopt the “universal service fund” where fees on, say, some
customers’ telephone lines are used to pay for Internet access for those who
otherwise couldn’t afford it. In mid-December, President Obama also loosened
restrictions on I.T. trade with Cuba. And in late March, Sepulveda led a U.S.
delegation to Havana focused on telecommunications issues, including the steps
necessary to increase Cubans’ Internet access. But, says Sepulveda, “it’s not
like there’s a Best Buy, and you can just buy whatever phone you want” in
Havana. The Castro government is amenable to opening up the market, says
Sepulveda, but making that real for Cubans “is going to be an interesting
conversation.”
That’s
a conversation that U.S. tech companies are eager to have, which highlights one
of the strengths of Sepulveda’s portfolio. “It’s obviously the easiest for us
when our national interests align with those of companies that reside in the
United States,” he says.
Sepulveda
and others like him still have some convincing to do back in the U.S., where,
in March, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it would begin the
process of giving up a Clinton-era contract that gives that agency oversight
over ICANN’s role in handing out and keeping tabs on the online world’s
Internet protocol addresses. Turning over that function to the rest of the
world has been in the works for decades, and supporters frame it as a bit of
administrative housekeeping left over from the Internet’s early days.
But
that move to transfer power has riled up some, especially Republicans in
Congress who have tried, but thus far failed, to figure out how to slow or
defund it.
Texas
Senator and Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has, for example, rallied
against the transition, arguing in an op-ed in November that “the likes of Russian President
Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Chinese President Xi Jinping
should not dictate what can be read, written, distributed, bought and sold on
the Internet.” The current House Republican budget attempts to defund the
transition.
The
counterargument? That letting go of this function strengthens the U.S.’s
position that the Internet should be ruled by its users, not governments.
Danielle Kehl, senior policy analyst at the Open Technology Institute, calls it
“hugely strategically useful to the U.S.’s long-term interests” to finally pass
that job over to someone else. By giving up that last measure of official
control, the U.S. can prove that it’s not pulling all the strings. This
development could be useful as Sepulveda and others argue that the Russias and
Chinas of the world shouldn’t be allowed direct access to the strings, either.
That,
really, is the tension at the core of this debate: keeping too tight an
American grip on the Internet isn’t politically palatable to much of the
international community, but letting go completely also includes some risk.
“The
Internet is the United States’ gift to the world,” says Sepulveda.
But
some gifts are easier to give away than others.
Daniel Sepulveda just might be the closest thing the United States has to an
“Ambassador to the Internet.” And the 42-year-old is in the middle of a tricky
battle.
Some
countries, including behemoths China and Russia, as well as smaller countries
with few resources, are starting to argue that the loose way the Internet is
run leans too heavily in the U.S.’s favor. Their solution: Shift regulation of
the Internet to the world stage, perhaps to the United Nations, where they
might have more control.
That
runs counter to the official position of the Obama administration. And that’s
where Sepulveda comes in and what keeps the deputy
assistant secretary of state and U.S. Coordinator for International
Communications and Information Policy airborne much of the time,
flying to Dubai, Costa Rica, Cuba or South Korea as the administration’s pitch
man.
The
Internet’s evolution should be decided “organically, by participants in the
network,” Sepulveda argues, “as opposed to by governments or intermediaries.”
He’s
willing to acknowledge that the current, somewhat ad hoc system of
regulation—where geeks, not governments, get to vote—needs reforming. But it
mostly works, as it allows for what Sepulveda calls “as little friction as
possible” as information and ideas move around the world. Binding the future of
the Internet to the U.N. threatens to upset a way of doing things that has produced,
in the Internet, a global force unlike the world has ever seen.
The
complicated part, though, is that Sepulveda and his colleagues have to sell
that government-hands-off-the-Internet policy while also being high-ranking
appointees of a government which has been accused of using the Internet to
allegedly spy on its own citizens, as well as on world leaders such as
Germany’s Angela Merkel and Brazil’s Dilma Rouseff.
Asked
whether the U.S. should have any sort of exceptional role when it comes to the
Internet, Sepulveda answers quickly. “Uh, yes,” he says, and it’s only his
diplomatic training, perhaps, that keeps him from adding, “Duh.”
The
Internet “came out of the United States. Our companies, our firms have led in
both its deployment and use throughout the world,” he says. It’s only natural
that, a few decades later, within the borders of the U.S. exists a tremendous
concentration of people who know what makes the Internet tick. That, Sepulveda
insists, “does not mean that it’s designed that way.”
In
other words, he says, the game isn’t rigged. Americans are just really good at
it. If only he can convince Vladimir Putin to see it that way.
***
Sepulveda
had a chance to make this pitch last October at an 18-day meeting of the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU), a technical body of the U.N. that has, since 1865, made sure that the
world can talk amongst itself. He spent nearly three weeks in a massive glass
conference center in the South Korean city of Busan coaching the 100-plus U.S.
squad on how to spin dozens of other nations that the Internet works well as it
is.
Not
an easy task. In some places, governments have already taxed the cost of going
online, censored social networks, or otherwise regulated the Internet. In many
cases, citizens protested. Hungarians, for example, took to the streets of Budapest in
October over Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s plan for an online access fee; Orban
relented.
“It’s
a pushback against the desire of incumbent power to reassert that power through
the Internet,” says Sepulveda. “You’re seeing it throughout Latin America, and
you’re seeing it in parts of Africa.”
Spreading
the U.S.’s views is a team effort, one that includes Catherine Novelli, the
Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment;
Scott Busby, Deputy Assistant Secretary and “Internet freedom” point person;
and Christopher Painter, State’s Coordinator for Cyber Issues. But it often
falls to Sepulveda to persuade other governments’ tech ministers to leave the
Internet to what Painter brands “The Internet wise guys”—the thousands of
network engineers, civil society leaders, tech industry representatives and
power users who have been debating the future of the Internet as long as it has
existed, many of whom live in the United States.
In
Busan, Sepulveda said that his delegation’s mission was to “make sure people
remain free to build on those networks: free from interference, free from
censorship, free from centralized control.”
But
that can often be easier said than done. “The U.S. has a real history of having
those kinds of private-public partnerships,” Painter says. “A lot of countries,
particularly developing countries, don’t have that history and tradition.”
In
the middle of the debate sits Sepulveda, an Emory-educated native of central
Florida, the child of Chilean immigrants, and a techno-optimist with a long
Washington résumé. He’s worked for Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer, John
Kerry and Barack Obama. He’s put in time at the Labor Department and as an
assistant U.S. trade representative. He joined the State Department in 2013,
and was given a mandate to fight those who hunger for “a fragmented Internet
that divides us rather than unites us, that minimizes the voice of people and
maximizes their ability to cloud the truth,” as then Secretary of State Kerry
said in a video-streamed speech to the Freedom Online Coalition
Conference in Estonia last year.
And
so, what happened in South Korea?
The
official read-outs from the three-week session are maddeningly opaque. But what
is certain is that the gathering never held a vote to expand the UN’s purview
to include governance of the Internet. “We were very successful in making it
clear that that’s just not going to happen,” says Sepulveda in late January,
from a fourth floor meeting room in the State Department’s Foggy Bottom
headquarters.
Maintaining
the status quo on regulation may have been a victory, but it’s not the ultimate
goal. Sepulveda would like to bring “the most revolutionary communications
network that has ever existed” to every child and every community in the world.
A connected society that includes Bangalore and Belgrade and Brasília is more
productive and with greater opportunity, including for women, the thinking
goes, and it’s good for the U.S. if free speech and the free flow of
information flourish. “This isn’t a zero-sum game,” Sepulveda says. “Every
additional person added to the network adds value to the network.”
Beyond
that, “a challenge that we’re trying to embrace,” says Sepulveda, “is to say,
‘You, the developing world, should not just be consumers of Internet services,
and the Internet itself, but producers in that marketplace.’”
And
what if the developing world makes choices for the Internet that aren’t in U.S.
interests?
“Maybe
not every decision is going to be a decision we’re going to like,” Sepulveda
says. “That’s, you know, life.”
***
At
the moment, sitting at the center of the
Internet governance question is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, or ICANN. The Los Angeles-based non-profit was created in the late
’90s, part of the Clinton administration’s push to make the Internet, then wild
and woolly, safe for commerce. (Until that point, handling the naming and
numbering of websites was the side project of a southern California computer
science professor named Jon Postel.) ICANN, with an annual budget of $170
million, has been criticized as opaque, money-hungry, and overrun with Americans.
Governments are invited to participate, but only as advisors.
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