[governance] Reposting Workshop 2: Successes and failures of Internet governance, 1995 - 2010, and looking forward to WSIS 2015

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 13/04/2010, at 3:56 PM, William Drake wrote:

>> This workshop will compare the changing institutional and procedural approaches that have been applied to the problems of Internet governance over the last 15 years, and facilitate the sharing of various perspectives about the effectiveness and legitimacy of each approach.  
> 
> Could someone provide some examples to clarify the focus here?  What institutional and procedural approaches to which problems of Internet governance would we be talking about?  Only actually existing or also proposed?  Is the idea to consider the relative merits of, for example, intergovernmental vs. MS vs. private sector arrangements?

Existing past and present approaches, ranging from very informal decentralised arrangements for governance of Usenet, more hierarchical private approaches such as the RIRs and IETF, the evolving private management of the DNS (in the shadow of governments) through ICANN, multi-stakeholder experiments such as CGI.br, purely governmental such as the OECD... you can think of as many examples as I can.

> If so, a comparative assessment would probably be better if one could identify issue spaces to which the different models were applied, e.g. intergovernmental vs PS approaches to privacy rules, rather than comparing apples and oranges.

I agree with the desirability of not drawing too many close parallels across different governance domains, would think that we can drill down to that level once we have selected the panelists and begun to brainstorm with them about the exact content of the session.

>> In each case reference will be made to the WSIS process criteria which recommend the full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society, and international organizations in Internet governance arrangements.
> 
> Would this be the criteria for making judgements as to which is a success and which is a failure?  In which case everything that's not MS would be deemed a failure? (!) Or  would there be some other criteria?  If so, could we have an illustration or two of successes and failures and the basis for the judgement?

No that would be too simplistic.  I probably wouldn't be a panelist, so my opinions aren't worth anything, but I would say that there are privately-run ccTLD registries like SIDN, Nominet and (to a lesser extent) auDA that have largely been a success, whereas clear failures to date have been the ITU-led process around the ENUM standard, and the RIR-led migration to IPv6.

>> In parallel, the workshop will also look back to the period of 2003-2005 when the first meetings of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was held, and forward to a future meeting in 2015.  Questions to be asked include, would the same decisions about Internet governance that were made in 2005 have been made today,
> 
> Is there any reason to believe they would not be?

I'd have thought so... look back at Wolfgang's comments on the thread about the Secretary-General's report on the IGF and the CSTD.

>> are the WSIS process criteria due for revision,
> 
> Clearer and more precise, operational language on transparency, democratic, full involvement, etc would certainly be useful, and one would think a strong workshop could be organized on these and their application across cases.
> 
>> and how will the role of private actors differ between the two summits?
> 
> Don't understand what this is getting at, even if we replaced "will" with "did."


It means between WSIS 2003-2005 and WSIS 2015.  Maybe I can find a clearer way of expressing that.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Project Coordinator
Consumers International
Kuala Lumpur Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East
Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 7726 1599

CI is 50
Consumers International marks 50 years of the global consumer movement in 2010.
Celebrate with us as we continue to support, promote and protect consumer rights around the world. 
http://www.consumersinternational.org/50

Read our email confidentiality notice. Don't print this email unless necessary.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20100414/66e39ca9/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t