[governance] FYI

[Milton L Mueller]

-----Original Message-----
From: Vittorio Bertola [mailto:vb at bertola.eu] 

>As one of the people who are working on this, I would 
>like to see comments that are a bit more constructive 
[snip]
>
>It is a bit depressing to see that whenever some people 
>try to roll up their sleeves and work on real advances 
>for human rights, there is much more support from some 
>governments than from fellow civil society 
>participants.

Vittorio:
I think it is constructive to raise and discuss these issues. I also
have doubts about the Internet Bill of Rights proposal. My concerns are
not about outreach, but about substance. First, I think it was Meryem
Marzouki who at one point raised serious questions about encouraging
governments to redefine basic human rights for the Internet, in that we
could end up losing not gaining. Those fears, which I at first did not
take too seriously, were reinforced by our exprience with the "Keep the
Core Neutral" campaign. I noticed that you actively opposed efforts
within ICANN to prevent ICANN from exercising "content control" over TLD
strings. You advanced instead a communitarian approach that would not
recognize any specific right to freedom of action but only a right of an
institutionalized community around ICANN to suppress whatever
expressions, via TLD strings, it did not like. (Let me know if I am not
stating your position correctly, but it is recorded in the transcript of
the puerto rico meeting).

I am curious to know what a "bill of rights" means to you when you do
not accept what seems to me to be a very simple, basic and
straightforward right to freely choose a TLD string that expresses a
concept. It appears to me that a group of activists within ICANN "rolled
up their sleeves" and worked very hard to advance human rights in that
context. Not only were they not supported by you, they were vocally
opposed by you. 

There is also a practical issue. The language of Article 19 in the UN
Charter is very broad, and can easily be applied to the Internet. Yet
daily, governments ignore and violate those guarantees. I would like to
know how a new Internet Bill of Rights moves us beyond that. 



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