[governance] The Bled Declaration - a new internet, or a

[Milton L Mueller]

Thanks for this valuable report, Wolfgang. 
As other scholars can attest, there is a long history of regional standards competition in telecommunications and media -- US v. Europe v. Japan -- involving such things as color TV, High Definition/digital TV, and mobile telecoms (GSM vs. CDMA). The Internet was in a sense lucky to overcome this fragmentation, but it did so by global dominance of a single nonproprietary standard originated in the US. Current competitive efforts to come up with a "new" "clean slate" Internet are more likely to revert to the pattern of competing regional standards, in my opinion. Quite apart from the control issues. 

Milton Mueller
Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
------------------------------
Internet Governance Project:
http://internetgovernance.org
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kleinwächter, Wolfgang 
> I was in this conference (as a member of an EU FP 7 project). 
> This was an official EU meeting which took place under the 
> Slovenian Presidency and united a large number of Internet 
> research projects financed by the FP 7 programme of the EU. 
> This was not an academic but more a political conference. It 
> was more presentation. http://www.fi-bled.eu/programme.php. 
> First day from political leaders and other non-European 
> projects, including FIND, GENI and AKARI. Second and third 
> day presentations by individual members of the FP 7 projects. 
> There was no real discussion. But what I observed was a deep 
> a split. Some groups are enthusiastic about "clean slate" 
> (mainly supported by the telcos) , other are more than 
> sceptical. The whole conference was dominated by engineers. 
> The so-called "socio-economoc dimension" was not included 
> into the agenda on a prominent place. My impression was that 
> the EU Commission wanted to position itself as a "big player" 
> in NGN discussion between the US (FIND, GENI) and JP (AKARI 
> etc.) projects. Also the idea of the proposed "European 
> Future Internet Assembly" is rather vague. I proposed to link 
> this to the proposed "European Internet Governance Forum" (by 
> the European Parliament), but EU Commission officials said 
> this are two different things. However, I discovered in the 
> final "Bled Declaration" that the IGF is now mentioned. 
> Hopefuklly this can be seen as an invitation for a 
> cross-disciplinary dialogue. The text of the "Bled 
> Declaration" was not discussed or negotiated in Bled. It was 
> just prepared by the Commission.  Robert is right that the 
> document gives the impression of "re-invention of the 
> Internet". BTW this was also the case during the recent ITU 
> Caleidescope conference in Geneva, May 12 - 13, 2008. 
> http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/uni/kaleidoscope/programme.html 
> There timeline is 2020. And again, these groups are not 
> linked to the IG folks grouped around ICANN, IETF, IPv6 and iDNs. 
>  
> Best regards
>  
> wolfgang
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