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<p class="MsoNormal">>Clearly the point is being missed here.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">>"Internet Governance" as a phrase in international policy is a creature of WSIS.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D">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></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D">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></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D">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></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D">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></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D">--MM<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="_MailEndCompose"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></a></p>
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