Thursday, October 5, 2017

The Man Stopping Vladimir Putin From Taking Over the Internet


Nancy Scola, Politico


[Sepulveda] image from article

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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