[governance] preparing for IGF 2008

Alejandro Pisanty apisan at servidor.unam.mx
Tue Nov 27 23:55:45 EST 2007


Milton,

something we agree upon and a proposal to move forward:

Indeed as it turns out there are very few Internet governance issues that 
are truly global or at least transborder, transjurisdictional enough to 
merit the construction of global systems, or systems that can be scaled to 
global.

A sobering exercise would be to make a list that excludes the coordination 
of the DNS, the coordination of policies for the allocation of IP 
addresses, and the coordination of registries of Internet protocol 
parameters.

Then at least as an intellectual exercise freeze the discussion of the 
already much-trodden ICANN terrain and see what can be done to make any 
progress on those others. Nothing more than a moratorium on that 
discussion to force ourselves to focus on what else exists - spam, a 
number of forms of crime, interconnection costs, and so on.

It may be that interconnection costs are dismissed once again as a purely 
telecoms issue, intellectual property issues remanded to a different 
forum, and so on.

At that point one would have a stark picture. Either some non-CIR issues 
remain (and as for phishing, we may find some people with real stakes, 
knowledge, and capacity to act are already doing something that can work, 
and for others there is a task to be done) or none are left, and Internet 
Governance is indeed reduced to the CIR field.

A lot of renaming and refocusing would ensue after that bifurcation.

Alejandro Pisanty


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      Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
Director General de Servicios de Computo Academico
UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
Tel. (+52-55) 5622-8541, 5622-8542 Fax 5622-8540
http://www.dgsca.unam.mx
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On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:25:12 -0500
> From: Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu>
> Reply-To: governance at lists.cpsr.org, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu>
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
> Subject: RE: [governance] preparing for IGF 2008
> 
>> From: Max Senges [mailto:maxsenges at gmail.com]
>>
>> As I raised before, the most important criteria for admittance should
>> be the proven relation and focus on INTERNET GOVERNANCE. There were
>
> Let me weigh in to support what Max is saying here, and add some emphasis of my own.
>
> Too much of the energy of the Forum and its participants is being thrown away on issues that are not global in scope, and have nothing to do with global governance of the Internet. We all must pay closer attention to the distinction between issues that are best addressed at the national, local or regional levels and those that truly require global coordination and global institutions. IGF should be restricted to the global. If the truly global governance issues are actually quite narrow and specialized, and don't include the issues that turn you on, so be it. If you are not interested in those issues, find a more appropriate venue for your activities.
>
> (One of the reasons we keep coming back to ICANN or CIR issues in IGF and this list is that it is one of the only fully globalized institutional structures and the issues it deals with, for the most part, require transnational agreement. Of course, there are other transnational IG issues or issues that have potential to be transnational.)
>
> Just as we must carefully distinguish between global and lower-level issues, we ought to distinguish more carefully between what is actually an Internet governance issue and issues that are more generally about ICTs. True, the Internet has become the dominant platform for most ICT activity, but there are many, many ICT policy issues that global governance of the Internet cannot remotely affect -- including, by the way, the financing and construction of physical infrastructure. (This is not to say that policy entrepreneurs cannot devise new, innovative ways to use global governance mechanisms to support physical access, but let's not expect the tail to wag the dog.)
>
> The disappointing thing about IGF 2 was that the dialogue was so cluttered with things that do not require or will never get international coordination or agreement that it was impossible to focus on the things that do.
>
> Another key point looking forward has to do with workshops, and their relationship to plenary sessions.
>
> First, workshops should not be ghettoized. The free speech advocates should not all be in one room boosting each others' egos while the avid content regulators discuss how to control Internet publication in the next room, in complete isolation from each other. Both workshops that IGP organized made a point of trying to cover the relevant spectrum of views. I discovered, to my shock, that that was the exception rather than the rule. Workshops must be diverse, and diversity of _policy viewpoints_ is in my opinion far more critical to IGF's mission than the geographical or "stakeholder" diversity that seems to command so much support, and is often little more than tokenism. IGF's MAG and Secretariat should make sure that panels include representatives of the different, clashing views that are defining the parameters of Internet governance debate.
>
> Second, workshops and plenary sessions should not compete with each other for audience. Workshops should be satellites revolving around all-inclusive plenaries where ideas are synthesized and outcomes are deliberated and discussed. The more I think about the fact that IGF had tons of workshops going on at the same time as plenary sessions, the dumber it seems. But it's clear why the plenaries are withering. If they actually are intended to be more than TV talk shows and do something, they present an organizational and political problem of enormous magnitude. Who gets to speak, how are motions made, how is consensus or even rough agreement found? But as difficult as this sounds, it presents an opportunity for further structural innovation which the IGF should embrace.
>
>
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