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CHAPTER FIVE 

Mobilizing for Net Rights
The IRPC Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet
m. I . FRANKLIN , Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom




MEDIA REFORM STRATEGY 

The IRPC Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet (IRPC Charter) is the outcome of a cross-sector collaboration between civil society orga- nizations, human rights experts, scholars, and representatives from the intergov- ernmental and private sector to provide an authoritative, human rights–based legal framework for decisions around Internet design, access, and use. Essential to this project’s success was an early decision to anchor the work in precursor civil society initiatives and international human rights law and norms. The coalition- building strategy that underpins the IRPC Charter brought a range of actors together, face-to-face and online, in the spirit of web-enabled collabowriting.
Since its launch in 2010/11 the IRPC Charter has grown steadily in stature, play- ing a formative role in key policy outcomes, landmark UN resolutions, and increasing awareness of the interrelationship between human rights issues and Internet policy-making at the national and global level (Hivos 2014, INDH 2013, Council of Europe 2014, NETmundial 2014, UNHRC 2012, Cultura Digi- tal e Democracia 2014, Green Party 2014). A commitment to forging alliances and cooperation across diverse sectors in order to ensure human-centered Internet policy-making has been a key factor in the success of the IRPC Charter to articu- late a viable framework for rights-based agenda-setting in a policy-making ter- rain dominated by powerful techno-commercial interests and competing political agendas.
 
The IRPC Charter emerged under the auspices of the Internet Rights and Prin- ciples Coalition (IRPC), one of the “dynamic coalitions” that constitutes the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the 2006 successor to the ITU-hosted World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This chapter reconstructs key moments in the IRPC Charter process and points to the wider context that frames where and how Internet policy-making and agenda setting takes place. These are institutional and online spaces populated by oﬃcial, and self- appointed bodies of experts, intergovernmental organizations, business inter- ests, and emerging multilateral institutions where civil society participation is now a given rather than an aspiration. In this case the UN’s brokering of “mul- tistakeholder” consultations on Internet governance is one such space. Along with a brief reconstruction of the main points along the IRPC Charter’s timeline the chapter looks at how the IRPC itself got going, how we completed the charter, promoted it, and then kept the project relevant and responsive to new arrivals and major developments in Internet governance discourses and the wider power relations in which this sort of coalition-building work has evolved. The chapter aims to show that having a concrete object to work with, in this case a legally recognizable human rights framework for the Internet, is just the start. Awareness, recognition, and implementation are diﬀerent moments in the time- line of this long-term, coalition-building project. This longitudinal approach diﬀers in principle and practice from a single-issue campaign even as it deploys similar sorts of established and newer media strategies to get oﬀ the ground and then stay not only viable but also visible.

WHERE , WHAT, HOW,  AND WHO 
The IRPC Charter as a project went hand in hand with the establishment of the IRPC in 2009 (IRPC 2013, 6; Franklin 2013a, 154 passim). As a rights-based strategy within the Internet Governance Forum the IRPC Charter project tapped into ongoing civil society advocacy on how media freedoms (of the press, the safety of journalists and bloggers) are also at stake online as well as individual rights and fundamental freedoms such as freedom of expression, or the right to privacy, education, and assembly. The intent of the early years (2009–2011) was to develop a document, hence the term charter, that could reframe disparate agendas and so revision a range of legal, technical, and political projects for the Internet’s future development (e.g., social justice, sustainable development, and environmental considerations) into a more com- prehensive, coherent, and recognizable legal framework anchored in interna- tional human rights law.
The underlying rationale for this ambitious approach was twofold. First, that existing international human rights law, although arguably suﬃcient to cover most online scenarios (debates on this continue), did need more explicit ren-
 
dering for online situations, particularly in the relative absence of case law (see Benedek and Kettemann 2014). Second, that the historical and institutional disconnect between Internet policy-making constituencies, such as the IGF or ICANN, and international human rights institutions and advocacy (e.g., at the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International) needed bridging. These aims underpinned the decision to make the IRPC Charter project part of a collaborative, writing, and thinking process in order to (1) articulate which aspects of existing human rights (e.g., freedom of expression) need to take fuller account of web-based, Internet facilitated scenarios (e.g., freedom of expression online in light of hate speech or cyber bullying in 24/7 communica- tions); (2) raise public awareness about how our rights online, and on the ground, can be undermined through cumulative changes in Internet design, access, and use on the one hand and, on the other, the deployment of digital tools in illegal or disproportionate ways that threaten civil liberties. Taking international treaties and covenants as a working model was settled on, after some debate, as the most sensible way to focus the work. The argument being that this would generate a document with some legitimacy and legal clout and, thereby, one that had more chance of being accepted by policymakers working in ﬁelds where Internet services, human rights obligations, and public service commitments converge (e.g., Internet access in public libraries and schools). The ﬁnal outcome after two years of drafting and feedback was version 1.1 of the IRPC Charter, a document modelled on the UN International Bill of Rights (UNGA 1948, 1966a, 1966b). The table of contents in Figure 5–1 shows how the charter reiterates human rights treaties but also points to how these articles relate to the online environment.
Alongside the full IRPC Charter two other projects have contributed to its
development as a wider collaboration to change attitudes in technically arcane Internet policy-making circles around social issues, such as human rights. The ﬁrst was the “Ten Punchy Principles” campaign in late 2010 just prior to the charter launch. This project, the work of a smaller working group, was set up to make the legally complex and high-level language of the charter more palat- able to lay audiences and students, as well as help engage newer arrivals to the work more conversant with the idioms and methods of digital activism. The second was the IRPC Charter Booklet project from 2013. This brought the ten IRP principles together with the full charter and contextual information in booklet form, with a new design. The IRPC Charter booklet has been a great success, as a reference point and resource for the IRPC itself and those who the charter project has been aiming to reach. Figure 5–2 shows how the charter looks today, available in eight languages. In-between these two milestones, the IRPC contributed to successive Internet governance events such as the annual IGF, the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG), regional IGF meetings in the United Kingdom, Latin America and Asia-Paciﬁc, ICANN meetings, and UNESCO-hosted reviews.
 

 
FIGURE 5-1. Contents (excerpt) of the IRPC Charter.
 
 	 
FIGURE 5-2. Cover of the IRPC Charter booklet.


HOW THE IRPC CHARTER CAME ABOUT 

So how did a loose network of individuals and organizations, existing largely through a listserv, alongside a website and the usual social media accounts, manage to achieve these outcomes in a domain characterized by the spirit of previous attempts (Hamelink 1998), incumbent civil society campaigns (APC 2006) and intergovernmental initiatives (OECD 2011) and then maintain a foothold as rights-based projects mushroomed in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations? One reason is that the IRPC Charter as a whole goes a lot further and deeper than others. For despite earlier eﬀorts from civil society, some stretching back to the 1970s (Frau-Meigs et al. 2012; Hamelink 1998; Jørgensen 2013; Murray 2010; Musiani 2009), the notion that human rights are integral— not just a “clip-on”—to how the Internet functions as well as to how it is run—had not yet been expressed in such a consistent or comprehensive way, nor in an authoritative legal idiom. The key to its success and durability in retrospect was an approach that generated the most internal debate at the time (Franklin 2013a, 164–169), namely by following the established, albeit old school, format of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This approach paid oﬀ as the UDHR worked well as a working template. Its length and format allowed participants to take each clause in turn, along with
 
those from ensuing international treaties and covenants such as the Interna- tional Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). In the spirit of a policy-hacking exercise, people divided themselves along each clause, debating not only lan- guage use and legal formulations but also substantive technical and legal points. For example, how “the development, promulgation and monitoring of mini- mum standards and guidelines for accessibility” (IRPC 2013, Articles 2 and 3, 14–15) for persons with disability imply research and development investment and governmental support for tailor-made technologies, training, and access to enable those with disabilities to fully enjoy the possibilities oﬀered by the Inter- net. Figure 5–3 is a snapshot of the IRPC Charter’s rendition of the aforemen- tioned UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Moving this sort of collaborative eﬀort from rough draft to meet international legal standards requires legal expertise, knowledge of the UN system, and writ- ing skills. For some observers, the enterprise itself also implied some chutzpah to even consider policy-hacking one of the twentieth century’s most iconic documents. Nonetheless, the IRPC Charter took shape through this collabora- tive eﬀort between experts and lay people. The current version was reﬁned with the input of an expert working group to craft the ﬁrst full draft into an elegant, readable, and appropriate document for those working at the intersection of Internet policy and human rights.

A R OCKY R OAD WELL TRAVELED :
A BRIEF TIMELINE 
The Internet is a global resource which should be managed in the public interest.	Rights that people have oﬄine must also be protected online in
accordance with international human rights legal obligations.	(NET-
mundial 2014)
While the Internet has brought along substantial new possibilities for exercis- ing and protecting human rights, the possibilities for human rights violations have also grown exponentially. (Benedek and Kettemann 2014, 18 and 19)
The above two quotes encapsulate the explicit role now being attributed to international human rights law and norms for policy-making on Internet design, access, and use, nationally and internationally. When the IRPC began work on formulating a comprehensive framework that could connect human rights advocacy with Internet policy agendas at the UN Internet Governance Forum, and in a way that could speak to government, business, and civil soci- ety interests, this was not the case. UN-brokered global Internet governance consultations, and other agenda-setting venues such as national legislatures or technical standard-making bodies, have habitually made sharp divisions between the techno-economic dimensions of contemporary media and ICT,
 
 
FIGURE 5-3. IRPC Charter, Article 13.

concerns about Internet use and its role in society, and the respective “roles and responsibilities” of stakeholders in decision-making domains (ITU/WSIS 2005; WGIG 2005). Events in 2013 did much to crystallize increasing public awareness of human rights issues for the online environment, but work was well underway before then as the IRPC Charter work and its precursors show. The above statements also encapsulate a sea change in policy-making and social
 
movement domains toward the Internet itself. In this case, the Internet (includ- ing here the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 services) is object, means, and medium for the project, which is distinct from how advertising or activist campaigns can and do use Internet media and technologies. The Snowden revelations of mass surveillance online in 2013 notwithstanding, the IRPC’s contribution to this human rights turn in how public Internet policy is discussed is testament to how this work brings together NGOs, grassroots groups, socially engaged scholars, IT, and human rights lawyers, as well as intergovernmental organizations, to get human rights onto global Internet policy-making agendas. When the idea of such a charter was ﬁrst mooted at the 2008 IGF meeting in Hyderabad, India, it was conceived more as an aspirational and team- building exercise, to ﬁnd some common ground and provide focus for those engaged in a plethora of crosscutting political, economic, and sociocultural agendas across the Internet policy-making spectrum. While there were already prominent civil society eﬀorts in this area (see APC 2006), the argument this time was that a fully “multistakeholder” eﬀort (i.e., not conﬁned to one sector or another) could go further in bridging the gap between stakeholder groups and their respective viewpoints on the role and responsibility of governments on the one hand and, on the other, the private sector in how the Internet is run. The underlying rationale, diverse motivations, and political aﬃliations not- withstanding, was that, like the Internet itself, policy-making agendas straddle local, national, and international institutional settings (IRPC 2013, 6). By 2009, at the Sharm el Sheikh IGF meeting, the IRPC had been inaugurated,
developed a governance structure, and devised a work plan.
When the initial drafting got underway in 2009, online discussions about content, phrasing, and organization (e.g., which article comes ﬁrst) saw early caution predominate; experienced digital rights activists and experts noted that the charter was entering a deeply contentious and complex geopolitical and techno-economic domain (Franklin 2013; Vincent 2010, 32 passim). Taking care not to convey the impression that the aim was to create new rights in light of how fragile existing human rights on the ground remain, supporters of tak- ing the IRPC Charter project up a level—that is, to revise the ﬁrst very rough draft to have it comply with international human rights language—argued that this was no reason to hold back. For instance, contentiousness around freedom of expression and freedom of information had already come to the fore in light of national security arguments during the Wikileaks controversy, and the dan- gers that dissident bloggers and mobile-phone users ran during the Arab Upris- ings was headline news in spring 2011. Meanwhile in the Internet’s heartlands, media, and civil liberty watchdogs were also raising the alarm about the impli- cations that changes in Internet functionalities (e.g., prioritizing transmission according to commercial or other priorities), or disproportionate levels of data- retention, have for fundamental freedoms such as freedom of information and privacy.
 
By mid-2010, a legally dense and ever-lengthening document had taken shape with three possibilities; to be an awareness-raising tool, legal instrument, or broader policy-making framework. One document was turning into three, not counting accompanying notes and umbrella statements. At this point the aforementioned side project took shape, to distil the larger charter’s twenty-one articles into Ten Internet Rights and Principles that could be used for cam- paigning and educational purposes. While uncertainty over the purpose and eventual shape of the larger charter dominated discussions in 2011 and 2012 the “Ten Punchy Principles,” launched online and in print as a ﬂyer (see Figure 5–4) almost eclipsed the release of the full IRPC Charter at the time. This social media campaign, modest by today’s standards, was an important learning point about the amount of time and eﬀort—and ﬁnancial resources—needed for online campaigning for those from the old media school of social movements. The ten principles remain an eﬀective advocacy and educational tool (Hivos 2014) and key resource for subsequent high-level eﬀorts to codify “global inter- net governance principles” (NETmundial 2014). The strategic point here being that these principles were derived from the charter, not the other way around. The charter’s ﬁrst success was the role it played, substantively and through IRPC members’ involvement, in a 2010 Council of Europe initiative to com- pile an overview of existing rights law for the Internet, one that has led to the Guide on Human Rights for Internet Users (Council of Europe, 2014) and ensu- ing analyses of human rights case law for the Internet (Benedek and Kettemann 2014; INDH 2013; Jørgensen 2013). This shift from being positioned as pre- dominately a civil society-cum-academic project underscored moves at the UN level with the publishing of a landmark report by Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression (La Rue 2011) and an early supporter of the IRPC Charter project. La Rue’s report stipulates, for the ﬁrst time, that freedom of expression, and with that other human rights and fundamental freedoms, count online as well as on the ground. It paved the way for the UN Human Rights Council resolution the next year recognizing the connection
between human rights law and the Internet (UNHRC 2012).
In hindsight, given the wake-up call of the Snowden revelations and current power shifts around who should call the shots in future Internet governance agendas, the above narrative sounds very neat and tidy, with consensus about the means and ends self-explanatory. This was—and is not—the case as diver- gent opinions about points of law as well as sociocultural and political aﬃlia- tions characterize this sort of undertaking. Moreover, once completed, such a document needs to be communicated, translated, and taken up by a range of signiﬁcant others. Neither was the ambition of including anyone who was interested, and doing so by moving the sort of nitty-gritty of drafting legally coherent and politically acceptable documents from relatively closed settings to open-access ones online. What did make it possible to get the IRPC Charter
 
 











FIGURE 5-4. IRPC ﬂyer 2010 (left)
and 2013 (right).



ready for public launching boiled down to several factors; ﬁrst, an institutional setting that could provide legitimation and an oﬄine space for getting partici- pants, representing conﬂicting priorities and interests within these sectors let alone between them, to get together face to face. The Internet Governance Forum enabled this space. Second was the continual work achieved that kept civil society organizations keen to make their own mark in this terrain engaged, those others with expertise able to contribute, and those others motivated to undertake translations of the ten principles and the full charter into other languages. Third was a conscious decision to have the process be, as much as possible, an exercise in open discussion and participation that could take place online and oﬄine across time zones and national borders. The decision to convene a group of legal experts to develop the ﬁnal draft for a ﬁnal round of consultation before the charter’s public launch in 2011 diverged from this approach, but ensured a high quality outcome that lawmakers could recognize and engage with (CLD 2011; INDH 2013; Murray 2010,). In this sense, the IRPC Charter succeeded in applying a bottom-up, policy-hacking approach to getting online rights on the agenda within the opaque and expert-driven set- tings of UN-based consultations, thus moving past the dominant narrative of Internet governance as narrowly deﬁned decisions around technical functional- ity and resources.
 
UNFOLDING E VENT S AND CHALLENGES :
CONTEXT MAT TERS 

None of these eﬀorts and outcomes was happening in a vacuum. Indeed, this whole project has taken shape during a crucial period in not only the Internet’s history but also in the geopolitics of its incumbent and emerging decision- making institutions. The latter are uneasily and unevenly distributed between UN agencies such as the ITU and UNESCO, private corporations such as ICANN, standards-making bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and lobby groups and networks such as the Internet Society. Along with the political import of social media uses during regime change in the Middle East and North African region and the emergence of cybersecurity dis- courses and policy priorities in the wake of 9/11, other events have contributed to the change in mood toward human rights for the online environment.
The ﬁrst was really two events in tandem; the ﬁrst beginning with the glob- ally organized mobilization against three bills in the US Congress with interna- tional repercussions for trading partnerships and digital copyright. The anti-ACTA, PIPA, and SOPA protests around the world in 2012 made a feature of social media and web campaigning tools, and did much to underscore just how integral the Internet had become to cross-border political and social mobilization, public commentary, and direct actions. These protests saw major corporations join forces with a range of activist, consumer, and com- munity groups, and new political parties based on free and open source soft- ware principles (e.g., the Swedish and German Pirate Parties) to successfully lobby against the bills. The second was taking place at the heart of the UN itself. ITU was hosting the World Conference on International Telecommuni- cations (WCIT–12) at the end of 2012 in Dubai as this wave of mobilization around “net freedom” gathered steam. The agenda, to renew and update 1980s international telecommunications treaties, belied the historical and now tech- nical interrelationship between imperial and Cold War–era telecommunica- tions architecture and that of the Internet that now overlays this older architecture (Franklin 2013b, 195–199). While updating telecommunications treaties between UN member states looked like a done deal, the subtext was all about an emerging geopolitical standoﬀ between the Internet’s heartlands and non-Western powers with their own, national and unapologetically interven- tionist, approaches to Internet access and content provision to their citizenries: China and the Russian Federation in particular with India and Brazil staking a claim in deciding where and how to regulate, and build Internet provisions on their own terms. A campaign, spearheaded by groups self-identifying as digital natives and their ﬂedging global networks, was based on the slogan “The UN is trying to take over the Internet” (Access 2013) and with that the (hash) tag- line of “net freedom.” Taking place shortly after the 2012 IGF meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, marked by controversies over poor human rights and press freedom
 
record of the Azeri government, the WCIT–12 meeting and its UN host came to epitomize all that is wrong with intergovernmental approaches to Internet policy-making (Goldsmith 2012; cf. Singh 2012). Sophisticated (social) media campaigns pushed the narrative of an Internet “born free” of state support and in doing so elided an ongoing debate about the historical role of government funding in the Internet’s history, and that of the World Wide Web as well. This standoﬀ between supporters of neoliberal models for the Internet’s “self- regulation” and those advocating other variations of governmental regulation marks a move to pit multistakeholder models against multilateral ones for future decisions around the Internet. As UN member states make international law, this ongoing divergence of views has implications for human rights mobi- lization for the online environment that looks to states to also set the record straight.
Third, this positioning of the UN as “bad guy” and all governmental regula- tion as ipso facto antagonistic to Internet freedom was well under way by the time the news broke in 2013 of the US government and its allies’ program of mass online surveillance that included US citizens and those from other coun- tries. Ongoing revelations about the extent of ﬁrst mass online surveillance and, second, other governments’ complicity in the NSA aﬀair have raised the proﬁle, and the ante for human rights advocacy for the Internet. The IRPC Charter in eﬀect now straddles a position that underscores states’ legal obliga- tions under international human rights law and the view of powerful (US- owned) ISPs and standard-setting authorities like ICANN (still US-based at time of writing) that the way forward is self-regulation. The political implica- tions of the Snowden revelations for Internet governance as a UN-hosted concern have also heralded the emergence of powerful counter-narratives from other UN member states who have the techno-economic means and know- how to set policy agendas on their own terms. Here the BRICS powers of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have been ﬂexing their muscles in public meetings alongside the aforementioned ITU summit in Dubai, through to Seoul, Belgrade, and on to São Paulo. But this is not all. As the Internet becomes a part of US foreign and trade policy (Clinton 2010), a new silver bullet for the world’s developmental woes and endemic poverty (UNGA 2000) it is also the linchpin of an increasingly digital arsenal against suspected cyberterrorists in a period still deﬁned by the post-9/11 global war on terrorism. These shifts in context have been a ﬁllip to human rights mobilization for the Internet. At the same time, they raise new challenges as powerful actors— states and corporations—look to control the narrative. Taking a step back in history though for a moment, contemporary mobilization around human rights online has its forebears in a pre-Internet age. Rights-based aspirations and mobilizations have been integral to media reform movements throughout the last century (MacBride 1980). While the IRPC Charter is not the ﬁrst ini- tiative looking to bring the predominately techno-legal and economic approach
 
to Internet design, access, and use in the same frame as sociocultural concerns and, with these, human rights (Hamelink 1998; Jørgensen 2006) it is easy to forget in the second decade of this century just how far-fetched it seemed in 2008, let alone earlier, to suggest that the online environment is a domain where the fundamental rights and freedoms encapsulated in international human rights law do need to be protected as well as enjoyed and that these protections implicate computer engineering and software design. The ﬁrst point has been made. The second one is where rights-based coalitions are now starting to focus their eﬀorts (IRPC 2014; NETmundial 2014).
Within this changing techno-historical and geopolitical context, the IRPC Charter work has come of age in what we could call a post-Snowden decade, one in which the Internet itself is under closer scrutiny along with incumbent governance agencies such as ICANN. While the IRPC Charter project has achieved its primary goals, the outlook is still far from clear. First, because cyberspace is being monitored and patrolled by nation-states who are also the guardians of human rights in disproportionate ways, without due process or rule of law, or respect for international human rights norms. Second, because breaches of certain high-proﬁle rights (e.g., freedom of expression, privacy) belie the obstruction of others (e.g., rights of persons with disability, cultural diversity, of children online) that also occur through poor design, unchecked practices of digital monitoring, ad-tracking, and data retention by the world’s major Internet service providers, as well as governments asserting national security priorities. These practices also require closer scrutiny and forms of legal redress, all of which the IRPC Charter presaged. Now being picked up by NGOs working in these regions where Internet access is booming and imple- mented as campaigns to raise awareness and educate new populations of Inter- net users about their rights online (Hivos 2014; INDH 2013), the IRPC Charter work has taken on a new impetus and relevance.

LESSONS LEARNT 
This section covers some of the key lessons learnt during this project; a project that has to keep its bearings in the fast-changing and politically volatile context of human rights advocacy and networking for the Internet today. This is a project in which state actors are making a stand, private sector interests are holding their ground in the battle for the hearts and minds of the world’s netizens as more revelations about state-sanctioned and corporate inroads into our online lives continue. It is also one in which the rights-based activism for Internet policy-making needs to consider how to implement such rights in a domain presaged on a post-Westphalian model of global and thereby Internet governance.
The ﬁrst lesson is to recall that Internet-dependent communications have become the rule rather than the exception, and with that time spent online, in
 
cyberspace, part of our everyday lives (Franklin 2004, 2013a, 2013b; Lovink 2012). Hence, the substantive content of human rights—in legal, moral, and political terms—have acquired online, cross-border, and computer-mediated dimensions. These developments also point to emerging new rights, such as that of access, because this “right underpins all other rights” (IRPC 2013, 13; see also Benedek and Kettemann 2014, 73 passim; Franklin 2013a, 169–171). But in these Internet-dependent contexts, governments are not the only power hold- ers, nor the only arbiters of rights-based issues that occur in spaces that evade and confound national jurisdictions, rule of law, and media ownership models. The agenda-setting power of the global corporations, predominately registered and based in the USA, who own and control the lion’s share of the Internet’s critical infrastructure, consumer services and products, has added another layer of techno-economic and legal complexity to how governments fulﬁl, or fall short of their role in upholding human rights and fundamental freedoms in the online world. Further complicating things is the increasing activism and orga- nizational skills of civil society organizations, large and small, professional NGOs and ad hoc networks working to be accorded a seat at the table where not only decisions about the current Internet’s design, access, and use are made but future agendas are also set in motion. Cyberspace, where people and their avatars go when they access the Internet or use the Web, is now a means and an end in the ﬂourishing of rights-based media advocacy. But this state of aﬀairs is relatively recent, and increased awareness of how civil liberties can be enjoyed, yet also undermined, online has been even more recent; peaking at the time of writing as governments around the world stand accused of generating a “chill- ing eﬀect” on the Internet as a free speech, democratic medium.
The next lesson is about where to draw the line between rights and principles.
As the inclusion of human rights and principles in the IRPC Charter title implies, there is a distinction how Internet design, access, and use has implica- tions for individual human rights on the ground and online and identifying how these rights relate to the underlying principles that govern Internet decision-making to date, let alone in the future (IRPC 2013, 2). It is a ﬁne line but a distinct one that has to be trod, for principles and rights are not inter- changeable terms. There have been in the past, and could be in the future, operations such as terms of access and use that do not “support human rights” (ibid.). Lesson three is on practicalities once the point has been made. Much territory still needs to be covered between the aspirations of longstanding rights-based advocates for the Internet and implementation at the intergovern- mental and corporate level. Moreover, oﬃcial recognition that human rights do matter puts the legal role and responsibilities of governments in upholding human rights law squarely back in the picture. This “return of the state” (Franklin 2009, 2010; Giacomello and Erickson 2009) to Internet policy- making discourses and scholarship is all the more contentious given that the global corporations, taskforces, and think-tanks that oversee how the Internet
 
functions all came of age under the aegis of neoliberal governments’ commit- ments to (media) deregulation, privatization, and commercialization. It also separates US-based debates and mobilization around the relationship between regulation in the ﬁrst instance and, in the second instance, human rights and fundamental freedoms online from those in Europe, the Global South, and the Asia-Paciﬁc region.

CONCL USION 
The IRPC Charter staked its claim in a domain dominated at the time by an “if it ain’t broke, don’t ﬁx it” rhetoric in the face of arguments about there being a need to address human rights online and thereby Internet policy-making. Since 2013 but presaged before then, the rhetoric has shifted to “the Internet is broken, and whose fault is that?” While the jury is still out on who is ultimately in charge, human rights are now on that agenda. Since its entry into the Internet Governance Forum and Human Rights advocacy domains the IRPC Charter project has gained traction in key intergovernmental and civil society venues where the future of the Internet is the focus. In these forums, but also further aﬁeld at grassroots level, the IRPC Charter and the IRPC behind the work have remained viable, beyond expectations and without structural funding or full- time staﬀ. A major achievement has been the formal recognition of all three strategic aims of the IRPC Charter project (IRPC 2013, 3), in landmark UN and IGO reports and resolutions (Council of Europe 2014; La Rue 2011; UNHRC 2012) and evidence of human rights issues moving up Internet governance agen- das and civil society campaigns (Hivos 2014; NETmundial 2014), into the mainstream media and, on going to press, the heart of democratic political processes (Cultura Digital e Democracia 2014; Green Party 2014). The IRPC Charter’s sustainability has also accompanied shifts in national and global media policy discourses in the wake of the Internet’s impact on national polities and legal norms. It has also echoed and looked to respond to increasing public awareness, and with that media panics over the threats to freedom of expression and privacy in light of recent events. Cognizant that from the outset the owner- ship and control of the Internet—that is, its design, access and use—have been politically, economically, and socioculturally skewed in favor of vested com- mercial interests and incumbent political power in a post–Cold War context, the spirit and intent of the charter from the outset was to re-vision legalistic and technically arcane discourses into more human-centered idioms. Its indebted- ness to international human rights law and norms, criticized at the time for being overcautious, was a conscious tactic, based on the conviction that funda- mental rights and freedoms, as both “hard” and “soft” law, need translating for their protection and enjoyment online.
The IRPC Charter has survived, and is now thriving precisely because of its
legal idiom and UN-based institutional home in the ﬁrst instance. In the sec-
 
ond because it is based on a coalition that has forged a document that can speak across sectors and narrow interests in order to look to the future rather than focus on rectifying past wrongs. In addition, its recognition of precursor initiatives has helped it gain traction in domains that merge established and emerging institutions and organizational cultures where diverse state, and non- state actors converge—and diverge—on Internet policy-making agendas that by deﬁnition straddle the local, national, and transnational frames of reference and traditions of political legitimacy. These agendas concern an array of techni- cal, economic, and political concerns that fall under the rubric of Internet governance but have been traditionally and strategically treated as separate, autonomous domains for decision-making and mobilization based on the premise that technology, social justice, and politics do not mix. The IRPC Charter has managed to articulate just where they do intersect and how even technical standards (e.g., Internet protocols, the domain name system), trans- mission architectures (server hubs, packet switching), and software codes impinge upon and are beholden to human rights standards.
Based at the newest of UN institutions, the Internet Governance Forum which is reaching the end of its second ﬁve-year mandate (up for a second renewal in 2015 having survived studied indiﬀerence from the corporate sector and getting by on a shoestring budget from the UN General Assembly), the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition has shepherded a document set that articulates the past, present, and future of the Internet from a rights-based sensibility, and does so in substantive moral, legal, and political terms. Volun- tary labor, crowdsourced funding, growing endorsements, and increasing numbers of language editions from dedicated translation teams, with respec- tive sources of funding have all sustained this project and its achievement as a sustainable, long-term strategy for reframing the terms of Internet governance debates once ﬁrmly framed by techno-economic rather than sociocultural prerogatives. Seeing the IRPC Charter become a source document for pio- neering and innovative principle-based laws and remedies has confounded the sceptics and provided hope and sustenance for the optimists in the IRPC who have contributed to getting the charter this far and who continue to support the work, in spirit and in deed.
The question remains though; the IRPC Charter—like its predecessors and all the digital rights manifestos, declarations, and resolutions that have been mushrooming lately—consists after all only of words, aspirations rather than actions. This tension is borne out by the diﬃculty of enforcing human rights when those charged with upholding and protecting them—UN member states—are also perpetrators of human rights abuses. Nonetheless, before action or at least hand-in-hand with strategies that develop the means and tools to implement these rights online, there has been a need to articulate more coherently how Internet design, access, and use are not mutually exclusive domains to those covered by international human rights law and so relate these
 
concerns directly to the responsibility of all power holders to uphold rights online as well as oﬄine. This recognition and implementation of the IRPC Charter at the local and national levels (Green Party 2014; Hivos 2014) raises the ante in a world where the Internet has become “ordinary” (Franklin 2013a, 35 passim). Through the IRPC Charter the IRPC has succeeded in articulating a human-centered vision of Internet policy-making and continues to keep working with others to ensure that this vision is one that underscores agendas for a sustainable and equitable Internet that is accessible and aﬀordable for all, now and in the future.