[bestbits] Re: [governance] Rousseff & Chehade: Brazil will host world event on Internet governance in 2014

[William Drake]

I agree with Adam that cross-posting multiple lists gets too messy, but then responding on just one makes the conversation more fragmentary and leaves out folks who are not multiply subscribed, so….FWIW below what I said on Governance <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>  

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Hi

On Oct 10, 2013, at 5:24 AM, Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:

> On 10/10/13 06:33, John Curran wrote:
>> On Oct 9, 2013, at 3:02 PM, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:
>>> Do I understand correctly: according to this the President of ICANN has just agreed with the need for external oversight of ICANN, and unnamed other organizations, involved in governance/management of the Internet, just as long as it is multistakeholder?
It's not clear we should assume at the outset that 'external' oversight is the end point in mind.  It could well be more along the lines of multilateralizing the USG role under the multistakeholder Affirmation of Commitments, which has been an ongoing low-level discussion in IGF and elsewhere for some time now.  Expanding internal oversight and buy in would seem institutionally a lot easier to organize.  

In any event, the one thing I think we can say for certain is that this is not Fadi floating out there all on his own as a free radical.  There's active coordination going on behind the scenes among key governments, industry groups, *I orgs…But putting him out front as the face of the coalition is a good move.
>> It appears to be a significant effort to address Internet Governance 
>> challenges, including acceleration of the globalization of ICANN towards 
>> an environment in which all stakeholders (including all governments) can 
>> participate on an equal footing...
> 
> It puts civil society to shame in how timid we, at large, have been in proposing similar advances on the status quo.  (I have not made much of a secret of the fact that I was disappointed in the number of endorsements that the Best Bits statement on enhanced cooperation (http://bestbits.net/ec) received, though in part I accept that this was because the statement was simply too long.)

I'm not sure how low we need to hang our heads. The caucus came out for globalizing the USG role in some manner in 2005, before WSIS PrepCom 3.  Since then that question's certainly been a leitmotif of discussions here and elsewhere, but imagining precisely what the institutional form and a broadly consensual path to change might look like has been no easier for us than for anyone else.   But it's not like nobody has tried…CIRP, expanded AoC, etc. 
> 
> This has also, in one stroke, determined the IGF's future.  Of course the writing has been on the wall for the IGF for a while now, but it has now officially become irrelevant in terms of its larger role in multi-stakeholder Internet governance as originally anticipated in the Tunis Agenda.  Of course it will continue to have a role as a discussion forum, but the momentum for it to fulfil a  larger role has moved elsewhere.

Why so glum, Jeremy?  Remember, the conversation is starting in Bali.  The MAG decided in February to invite Brazil to formulate a proposal for discussion in the first "Focus Session" (with apologies to Matt, I hate this term and preferred Main Session) on Day 1, "Building Bridges - The Role of Governments in Multistakeholder Cooperation."  At that point the thinking was an evolution from the aborted Opinion at the WTPF, but it'll obviously be different and less ITU-oriented now.  That discussion will undoubtedly feed into the FS on "Principles of Multistakeholder Cooperation" and the multiple workshops on Enhanced Cooperation, etc.  So I suspect people will talking about this issue all week in various ways, starting with Best Bits :-).  And then the conversation will move on from there...

Remember also that there's broad agreement in the MAG and beyond that from Bali forward, the IGF needs to be more "outcome oriented."  FCs and workshops alike are supposed to come to some identifiable conclusions that can be reported out, whether it's "messages,"  "sense of the room," or just some people felt this while others felt that.  That's obviously short of the WGIG/Tunis Agenda mandate for Recommendations,  but this is an evolutionary process, the next IGF is in Brazil, and Brazil will undoubtedly play a role in the agenda setting for that meeting.  So why don't we see where things go before declaring the IGF irrelevant?  Given the changed landscape, it's not entirely impossible anymore to at least imagine multistakeholder working groups under the IGF umbrella that generate outputs that feed into FCs or discussions elsewhere, or some other variations….So the "mere discussion forum" could become nested in a broader nexus in a way that's more widely regarded as useful and worth supporting. We'll just have to see...

> 
> It also neutralises the effect of the old guard of the technical community (ISOC mainly) at the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.  Whilst they can still oppose meaningful implementation of enhanced cooperation reforms, this opposition is now utterly token and ineffectual.  With Brazil (and ICANN!) having lost patience and are forging ahead regardless, this leaves anyone arguing against reforms at the WGEC looking silly and irrelevant. 

But the encouragement to Brazil to take a lead on the discussion in Bali was pushed by ISOC's VP for Policy.  And the Montevideo Statement from the I-orgs explicitly calls for " accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing."  So while there's obviously not great enthusiasm for an intergovernmental UN-based model with all that entails, I wouldn't just assume that the "old guard" has been neutralized or bypassed; I think they're in the middle of it.  You may be constructing a narrative based on a priori assumptions and inadequate information here.

Best,

Bill


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William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (w), wjdrake at gmail.com (h),
  www.williamdrake.org
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