AW: [governance] Re: [IGP-ANNOUNCE] IGP Alert: Reforming ICANN

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 08/02/2008, at 7:30 PM, KovenRonald at aol.com wrote:

> One of the attractions of the Internet Governance Forum is its more  
> or less amiable anarchy. Imagining its transformation into some sort  
> of Internet oversight body strikes me not only as nightmarish but --  
> worse still -- as unmanageable.

Nothing more is suggested than that it be transformed into a body with  
the capacity to fulfil its mandate, inter alia to "[i]nterface with  
appropriate inter-governmental organizations and other institutions on  
matters under their purview", to "[p]romote and assess, on an ongoing  
basis, the embodiment of WSIS principles in Internet governance  
processes", and to "[i]dentify emerging issues, bring them to the  
attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and, where  
appropriate, make recommendations".

Forgive me for continuing to parrot the Tunis Agenda, but whenever  
Parminder, the IGP, myself and others are accused of seeking to expand  
the IGF's role and to transform it into something it was never  
intended to be, it boggles me that the IGF's original mandate seems to  
have been forgotten.

> Universal bottom-up democracy seems chimeric. Bottom-up democracy  
> works in relatively small territorial entities. It is hard to  
> imagine a kind of world government based on that model.

It's a bit late to be having second thoughts on this now.  WSIS  
decided that the future of Internet governance was to be multilateral  
(later, "multi-stakeholder"), transparent, democratic and inclusive.   
The IGF was to be a central institution in the evolution of the  
existing regime towards that model.  Part of its mandate is to  
coordinate with bodies holding formal authority, such as domestic  
governments and international organisations, not in order to usurp  
their function, but in order to elevate them to greater levels of  
democratic legitimacy.

This is not a form of top-down accountability at all.  Rather it is a  
form of network or peer-to-peer accountability, in which the IGF acts  
as a peer of ICANN in the Internet governance regime in assessing its  
compliance with the WSIS process criteria and making recommendations  
"where appropriate".

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'


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