[governance] Article: "Italy moves to place controls on Internet

Tue Mar 17 10:04:02 EDT 2009

""Kleinwächter, Wolfgang""
<wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de> wrote:

> What are the options fort a role of governments in Internet
> Governance?
>
> 1. an enhanced GAC. Makes no real sense if you look which government
> sends whom to the GAC (low level buerocrats with no real decision
> making capacity at home). Additionally as long as there is no
> solution for the China/Taiwan issue and Russia is only an observer
> GAC is not really representative.
>

You are describing what you see in today's GAC. You yourself mention
"an enhanced GAC". Would this not show a path to enhancing
participation at the GAC, improving some of the GAC delegates by 
asking
respective governments to do so? I am not so critical of the GAC
because whilst there may well be some "low level bureaucrats", I think
that there are also some very good people there who yield a fair
bit of incluence back home. Maybe we have to support them for them
to gain an increased voice back home?
We also have to remember that ICANN started out as an "experiment".
Ten years ago, governments might have seen ICANN's place as less
important than it is today.

> 2. an international treaty (as a result of the process of enhanced
> cooperation among governments as part of the WSIS process)
> negotiated within the UN system . Makes also little sense because
> such treaty negotiations would last for 15 years or more.
>

If negotiated within the UN system, you're entirely right. How about
negotiating *outside* the UN system? Is this at all possible?

> 3. OECD (is unlikely because it is not universal)
>

Agreed, although it is worth noting that the OECD's recent
internet-related publications were of very high standard.

> 4. An high level intergovernmental political body which inlcudes the
> major players and has the power to push various organisations which
> have negotiations power to start processes on an issue by issue
> basis.

[...abbreviated so save space...]

> But the world has changed since 2000 and the  G 7 would be todaz too
> narrow if it comes to the Internet. You need the G 20 which includes
> BRIC. The acronym which I propose for this would be IG 20. With an
> IG 20 you would have a gobal Internet institutional architecture
> where IGF, ICANN and IG 20 would be combined in form of a network
> where the various institutions act in their specific roles without
> subordination but with mutual respect. This would be one step int
> this new territory of unchartered water which is called cyberspace.
>

You proposition intrigued me. At the Mexico ICANN meeting, I mentioned
to several people that it was time for more respect between the
different "process streams" because the Internet is such a strategic
resource today, if we all worked together rather than against each
other, perhaps would we be able to be more pro-active in finding
solutions to the big problems that face us, like Spam, online criminal
behaviour (of all sorts), IPv4 address exhaustion, etc.
I am also a firm proposer that IPv6 adoption might produce the 
catalyst
in activity analogous to the DotCom boom in the nineties which will
create jobs and new income streams - and be one component
(out of many others) which will help us all out of worldwide 
recession.
But that's another chapter altogether, so let's go back to G20:

You mention using the G20 as a basis for selecting a subset of
countries having an internet institutional architecture. Is this
really so? How about using another selection process, say the 20
countries having the largest number of hosts?
Ref:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2184rank.html

which admittedly rules out any African or Middle Eastern country, so 
it
may not be perfect either.

Or how about the 20 countries having the longest history of Internet
connectivity, which admittedly amounts to more than 20 countries but
gives a couple more African & Middle Eastern countries a say?
Ref:
http://www.nsrc.org/codes/bymap/ntlgy/dates/da9311.htm

I am suggesting this because the G20 is heavily biaised against
Africa, whilst some countries in Africa had internet connectivity
before many G20 countries, and also against Middle Eastern countries.
Having a governance process relying heavily on G20 countries will, I'm
afraid, again favour the information haves against the information
have-nots. Is this what we would like to promote?

Now when you speak of mutual respect between processes, I am all for 
it,
but the roles will have to be distributed formally, otherwise we might 
well
see some rivalry between organisations. I am aware that if it was so 
easy to
do, we would have already done it - in some cases, I suspect that the
attitude of some individuals need to change with time...

Warmest regards,

Olivier

-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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