Deliberative polling for multistakeholder internet governance: considered judgments on access for the next billion

ABSTRACT

Multistakeholder Internet governance aspires to fulfill democratic values in a process of dialogue producing results that can be considered for possible action. How can these goals be accomplished when the participants in these processes come from entities as varied as corporations, governments, civil society and academia drawn from countries all over the world? How can such a multistakeholder process embody democratic values? How can it be based on dialogue? What kinds of results can it produce? This article applies Deliberative Polling as a possible solution to this problem by using a stratified random sample of netizens, citizens of the Internet, drawn from all the relevant stakeholders of the Internet Governance Forum, engaged together in dialogue and with opinions collected in confidential questionnaires before and after deliberation. This pilot application focused on the topic of Internet access ‒ policy proposals to increase access for the next billion users. We believe it demonstrates the possibility that deliberators drawn from all these sectors can participate in substantive dialogue weighing the merits of issues and coming to specific conclusions. The pilot was limited in its duration and scale but produced, nevertheless, results that strongly support the conclusion that this approach to multistakeholder Internet governance is promising.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative democracy
• deliberative polling
• internet access
• multistakeholder governance
• internet governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University, where he is Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Professor of Political Science. He is also Director of Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy. He is the author of Democracy and deliberation (Yale 1991), When the people speak: Deliberative democracy and public consultation (Oxford 2009) and other books [email: [email protected]].

Max Senges is a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and works as a Research Program Manager at Google. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the Information and Knowledge Society Program at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona as well as a Master’s in Business Information Systems from the University of Applied Sciences Wildau (Berlin) [email: [email protected]].

Eileen Donahoe is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation, where she focuses on Internet governance, global digital policy, human rights and cybersecurity. She is also an adjunct professor at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. She served as the first US Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, and was Director of Global Affairs at Human Rights Watch, where she represented the organization worldwide on human rights foreign policy [email: [email protected]].

Larry Diamond is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University. He is also founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford [email: [email protected]].

Alice Siu is the Associate Director at the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. Siu received her PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, with a focus in political communication, deliberative democracy and public opinion, and her BA degrees in Economics and Public Policy and MA degree in Political Science, also from Stanford [email: [email protected]].

Notes

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1340497.

1 The advisory committee members were: Vint Cerf, Janis Karklins, Hartmut Glaser, Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Urs Gasser, Jeremy Malcolm and Yurie Ito. Our thanks to Kathleen Giles of the Center for Deliberative Democracy for her tremendous contributions to this project.

2 In addition, other leading experts offered comments on drafts of the materials. These experts included: Ang Peng Hwa, Dan Werner, David O’Brien, Deniz Duru Aydin, Eli Sugarman, Eric Jardine, Fen Hampson, Fiona McAlpine, Gordon Smith, Justine Isola, Nico Sell and Rebecca MacKinnon.

3 The three proposals were: ‘leave it to market to increase access,’ ‘encourage advertising funded (free equal rating) access for Internet services’ and ‘place limits of intellectual property costs for smartphones and other access-enabling technology.’ On the first two proposals, participants and non-participants were on the same side of the scale rating the proposals as low priority; on the third, participants and non-participants were both modestly above the mid-point. Overall there were limited attitudinal differences between participants and non-participants on the policy proposals.

4 We have examined the subset of participants who worked, to some degree, on the access question and their knowledge gain was substantial.

Additional information

Funding

The project was supported by research funds from the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University.