[governance] Milton Mueller comments during the consultation

[Milton Mueller]

For those of you not here:

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The Chairman did a masterful job of summarizing the discussion and placing some questions on the table. Many of the questions dealt with the specifics of institutional design. I note that IGP issued a paper that answers many of those questions. It proposed a specific structure, with defined role for Plenary, a "bureau" or "program committee" and a bottom-up process for recognizing topics for IGF activities. We envision IGF as an ongoing process with annual meetings as a capstone. 

I want to spend most of my intervention on one of Desai's statements. 

* "themes * there seems to be reasonable agreement"

I heard a lot of disagreement about appropriate themes or topics. It wasn't just that different people proposed different ideas, (spam, cybercrime, and so on) but that speakers raised fundamentally different principles regarding what should be considered a suitable topic. 

Some commentators would like the IGF to take on pub policy principles for coordination of Internet resources. Others claim that the Forum should not discuss divisive issues and that there should be no overlap with other organizations. 

A well organized forum is a way of bridging divisive issues and finding solutions to them. If we attempt to prevent the forum from discussing anything in the domain of another IGO, we will eliminate almost everything from its agenda. Instead of ms cooperation, we will invite constant struggles over turf. The IGF will simply become a proxy battle for intergovernmental turf wars. This would cripple it.

The WSIS Agenda settles this debate:

§	Discuss public policy issues related to key elements of Internet governance. 
It does not say "some" key elements of IG. Because the IGF has no decision making or legislative authority, there is no reason to prevent it from discussing anything.
§	Facilitate discourse between bodies dealing with different cross-cutting international public policies regarding the Internet
§	Interface with appropriate inter-governmental organisations and other institutions on matters under their purview

There is no reason to prevent it from discussing any topic in internet governance that a significant number of stakeholders think should be discussed.

If you can get good discussion, agreement, around key policy issues here in the forum, it will spill over into other forums. It will not harm or duplicate or pre-empt those other venues, it will help them. It's the only place to do it. 

Our job is to define a process, a generalized process, for establishing topics that the IGF will take up. The nature of those topics is clearly defined in the WSIS agenda. We must not allow specific topics to be suppressed. 


Dr. Milton Mueller
Syracuse University School of Information Studies
http://www.digital-convergence.org
http://www.internetgovernance.org



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