[governance] IGF financing

[Norbert Bollow]

Bertrand de La Chapelle <bdelachapelle at gmail.com> wrote:

> Should I consider myself not cautious or clever enough :-) for
> daring to utter an idea like : "a multi-stakeholder forum
> could/should be financed in a multi-stakeholder way ?" And remember
> I indicated with appropriate rules of transparency.
> 
> I'm afraid your reply is not of the same tune as my modest
> contribution and the tonality is a bit harsh, as if I were
> suggesting something horrendous.

I'm very glad that the idea has been brought up for discussion and
careful consideration.  Certainly the idea itself is not horrendous.

However I believe that I share Parminder's concerns about this idea.
Implementing this idea comes with very real risks of truly horrendous
results, some examples of which have aready occured during the WSIS
process, see e.g.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051130185547876

While it is true that it might be possible to establish appropriate
rules and procedures to avoid these risks of multi-stakeholder
financing, I feel strongly that I would much rather work on substantive
issues (such as achieving full accessibility for persons with
disabilities of all e-commerce processes) than on rules and procedures
for "multi-stakeholder financing".

Also, I would claim that any and all financing that comes from
the U.N. budget or from governments is in fact in a way actually
multi-stakeholder financing because it's ultimately financed by
taxes.  The citizens, other residents and businesses in each nation
have delegated to their government the task of using their tax money
for purposes of the public interest.

Money which comes from civil society people and from businesses is
still perfectly good money after it has been collected by governments
as taxes; I see no problem whatsoever with using that money for
financing the IGF and other internet governance functions.

By contrast, opinions and perspectives of civil society people and
businesses cannot reliably be "passed through" via any third party
into the internet governance process; therefore there is no real
alternative to internet governance discussions being directly
multistakeholder, with government representatives speaking in
the name of their respective government organizations (but not in the
name of their country in its entirety) and with the voices of civil
society and businesses also being directly represented.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                    http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG  http://SIUG.ch

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance