[governance] FW: [IP] India proposes UN "takeover" of Internet

[Asif Kabani]

Anriette,

Good point, I agree with you that final decision with be General Assembly?

Regards

On 30 October 2011 21:48, Anriette Esterhuysen <anriette at apc.org> wrote:

> As we have seen from the OECD which has a similar mechanism for
> non-governmental stakeholder participation, ultimately the power remains
> with powerful. These are sometimes governments, sometimes commercial
> interest groups. Often government positions are assumed, particularly in
> the case of the US, based on lobbying from such interest groups in DC.
>
> Just giving other stakeholder groups the opportunity to give inputs is
> not enough and will not ensure effective multi-stakeholder
> participation. Good that there is a proposal to have a working group to
> discuss this.. but the overall structure and decision-flow proposed ends
> up with the GA and it is therefore by definition not multi-stakeholder.
>
> This might be OK for some of the decisions clustered in the rough scope
> of work for this committee.. but not for most of the work it appears to
> want to take on.
>
> I agree with Jeremy that the status quo is not working, but I don't see
> this committee being as open to civil society influence as you seem to
> think it might be. Similar modalities in the OECD is not achieving that
> degree of influence for civil society, and I don't see that this will
> either.
>
> Perhaps, with a much, much narrower and more focused scope of work such
> a committee could constitute an improvement on current
> 'intergovernmental' processes in the UN and the GAC.
>
> Anriette
>
>
>
>
> On 30/10/11 09:14, Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> > On 10/30/2011 03:20 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> >> People in civil society, such as Jeremy, who rightly see some of the
> >> hypocrisy underlying defenses of the status quo but who fail to see
> >> the far more serious threat of destroying the more open, organically
> >> Developed Internet Institutions (ODII) by sovereignty-based
> >> intergovernmental hierarchies are deeply out of touch with political
> >> reality on a global basis, or are letting their anger get the better
> >> of them and losing perspective completely. We do not have to choose
> >> between the status quo and the UN (an earlier, kruftier status quo).
> >> Everyone needs to write that on the chalkboard 50 times.
> >
> > In fact my attitude to this proposal is informed very strongly by
> > political reality. You might recall that the IGC's original response to
> > WGIG's IGF proposal was that the the IGF should be situated outside of
> > the United Nations, too.  If it had been, would it even still exist
> > now?  Yet the IGF is not the earlier, kruftier version of the UN that
> > the IGC perhaps feared when advocating that it be situated outside the
> UN.
> >
> > For the last few years I have taken heat for my idea that the IGF, if it
> > is to be able to make recommendations as its mandate requires, should
> > before allow governments (and the other stakeholder groups too) a power
> > of veto over those recommendations before they are issued.  That
> > position, and my response to the CIRP proposal,* are influenced strongly
> > by the same political realities.
> >
> > I am not one of those social democrats of whom you speak, who believe
> > that intergovernmental organisations represent the will of the people
> > (in fact, I don't even know any such social democrats).  But I do accept
> > that "enhanced cooperation" was never going to be just the IGF on
> > steroids: it was always going to be government-led.  As such, situating
> > it in the UN is not preferable, merely inevitable.
> >
> > The UN is, doubtless, as corrupt as the United States Congress or the
> > Chinese Community Party.  But to its credit, it does play such
> > plutocracies and dictatorships against each other, resulting in the
> > curbing of their worst excesses.  Consider for example, how much worse
> > the WIPO Copyright Treaties or ACTA would have been, if the United
> > States, EU and Japan had been able to draft these on their own.
> >
> > So even if the CIRP was purely intergovernmental, we might still expect
> > that its policies may be "somewhat less bad than the status quo". But
> > because of its multi-stakeholder character, we can hope for much more:
> > that civil society will finally have a and positive real impact on
> > policies such as those that are being developed right now, outside of
> > any transnational multi-stakeholder framework, that are destroying the
> > Internet as we know it.
> >
> > * http://jere.my/l/1t
> >
> > --
> >
> > *Dr Jeremy Malcolm
> > Project Coordinator*
> > Consumers International
> > Kuala Lumpur Office for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
> > Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala Lumpur,
> > Malaysia
> > Tel: +60 3 7726 1599
> >
> > Consumers International (CI) is the world federation of consumer groups
> > that, working together with its members, serves as the only independent
> > and authoritative global voice for consumers. With over 220 member
> > organisations in 115 countries, we are building a powerful international
> > movement to help protect and empower consumers everywhere.
> > www.consumersinternational.org <http://www.consumersinternational.org/>
> > Twitter @Consumers_Int <http://twitter.com/Consumers_Int>
> >
> >
> > Read our email confidentiality notice
> > <http://www.consumersinternational.org/email-confidentiality>. Don't
> > print this email unless necessary.
> >
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------
> anriette esterhuysen anriette at apc.org
> executive director, association for progressive communications
> www.apc.org
> po box 29755, melville 2109
> south africa
> tel/fax +27 11 726 1692
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-- 
Asif Kabani
Email: kabani.asif at gmail.com


“The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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