Summary of ways to participate in Best Bits

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 16/10/12 18:46, parminder wrote:
> I remain sceptical of how this exercise is going to be done and
> concluded. for a long time I believed that we were looking at
> substantive Internet principles but now I see we are only taking about
> procedural principles for IG. First of all I think we need to do
> substantive principles first

This doesn't necessarily count against using the APC/CoE document rather
than the IRP, as both of them have procedural and substantive elements
to them, just with a different emphasis.  And as you say (and as I also
recently argued myself with a private sector stakeholder, Peter
Hellmonds, in a Facebook exchange), procedural issues are never
substantively or morally neutral - so I'm not sure that either is
necessarily "easier" to agree upon.

Rather I think it has to do with breadth; the more we try to cover,
whether the issues are procedural or substantive, the more divisive
issues we will encounter, and - without wanting to prejudge anything -
your example of neutral public funding for IG institutions may be one
that several participants at Best Bits may speak against, and therefore
one that would end up being omitted if we are to agree on anything at all.

Of course, this is nothing new to you, because within the Internet
Governance Caucus when I was coordinating it, there were statements to
which almost everyone else agreed, that IT for Change could not, and
this is why you didn't even try to get the IGC to agree on your most
recent "joint civil society" statement to WSIS (which I supported, with
reservations), but assembled a group of southern NGOs, some of whom
hadn't previously worked on Internet governance, as the signatories.

Nothing of the above is any kind of criticism of you or IT for Change as
you know (I hope) that I have the highest respect for you and that I
personally agree with you on many or most issues.

But I just make the point that it may be that the document that we end
up with at Best Bits may not be one that meets all of your expectations
of it, precisely because the group is so diverse.  If anything it's even
more diverse than the IGC, as we have some US-based NGOs who are not IGC
members, and at least one of which has a more free-market approach than
what you do.

To take another example, we will have some Muslim participants at the
meeting, so there may be differences of opinion on the extent to which,
if at all, the distribution of videos such as "The Innocence of Muslims"
is a legitimate subject of Internet regulation at either the national or
supranational level.

Does this mean that we will be unable to agree on anything meaningful? 
I very firmly think not.  I have confidence that we will be able to
reach a wide (though not full) consensus on something that is both broad
and also meaningful.  That's one of the main reasons I'm doing all this.

> Jeremy, can we have a list of people on this elist, and those who are
> now confirmed to attend the meeting. Thanks.

For the people on the list, visit
http://lists.igcaucus.org/review/bestbits and log in with your IGC
credentials, and if that doesn't work let me know and I'll send the list
by reply.

I'll send a separate message with those who are now confirmed to attend,
because some people may have stopped reading by now (tl;dr) and I want
to make sure that everyone sees it.**

-- 

*Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer
Consumers International | the global campaigning voice for consumers*
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