<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><sigh><div><br></div><div>How about this. Could we all assume that the phrase:</div><div><br></div><div>"the source of all of IG is WSIS"</div><div><br></div><div>Does not appear in my comment? It is completely, entirely irrelevant to the point I was making. I wish I had instead said:</div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-family: OpenSans;">"On a larger point, I have to ask - plead, really - for everyone to ask yourself: WSIS' goal was and is the use of technology to make people's lives better and close the digital divide etc. Is all this hostility over the form of words at one meeting leading anywhere on that continuum?"</span><br style="font-family: OpenSans;"></div><div><br></div><div>Again, I thank George once again for realising what the main point was.</div><div><br></div><div>Regards, Nick<br>
<br><div><div>On 9 Mar 2015, at 20:07, Milton L Mueller <<a href="mailto:mueller@syr.edu">mueller@syr.edu</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple" style="font-family: OpenSans; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div class="WordSection1" style="page: WordSection1;"><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">>Clearly the point is being missed here.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">><o:p> </o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">>"Internet Governance" as a phrase in international policy is a creature of WSIS.<o:p></o:p></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">I would disagree with that, Nick. The ICANN/DNS root debates, known as ‘Internet governance” debates at the time, preceded WSIS by 6-7 years, and actually involved the ITU from about 1996 (as Suresh has intimated). In fact WSIS represented little more than many of the world’s governments waking up to the fact that the Internet existed, was important, and that a new set of private sector-led institutions had been created that they had a very diminished role in. It was literally a reactionary event.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">My book on these early battles (Ruling the root), published in 2002 and written before WSIS, used the term “internet governance” in the title and everyone knew what it meant. True, WSIS politicized Internet governance more than it had been and attempted to bring it into the multilateral system, but that is not the same as saying that the topic and controversy was a “creature” of WSIS.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">WSIS actually started as an attempt to promote telecom infrastructure development; ICANN and IG were unintended and emergent agenda items as it developed. That history is recounted in Networks and States (2010).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">In terms of whose lives we are helping, it’s an unfortunate fact of reality that people who build things and make them work at some stage of the game have to deal with forces and people from the political realm who want to control them or feel threatened by what they do. Thus, simply fending off these efforts can help a lot of lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">--MM</span></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>