[governance] enhanced consultations - further inputs

[Lee W McKnight]

First,

Since I seem to be taking the unpopular positions of late - allow me to defend the ITU's honor : )

1st international organization (you'd think the postal folks would have started to cooperate first at international level, but no, the techie telegraph operators led the way.)

And you all like your GSM or 3G or 4G mobiles right, which work pretty well across borders these days? Ever hear of GPS? You can either thank the US air force or ITU for that, depending as it does on orbital arc allocations...and oh yeah someone to launch the satellites. Anyway, point is in spite of ITU's interminable processes, they work reasonably well for...190 countries; and lots of users. Leaving aside for now how they may be improved in a multistakeholder manner.

Now back to the question at hand, can we do better than that for global democratic processes around Internet governance? Of course.  See there's these Internet protocols which make it trivially easy to go from local to global...ok yeah more than that is needed but scalability is NOT the problem.

Being afraid to even broach the subject is the surest way to make sure it never happens.

So definitely that should be a talking point for David A., however it is wordsmithed between now and 12.14, starting from Parminder's pretty reasonable draft.

Lee
________________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.cpsr.org [governance-request at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Roland Perry [roland at internetpolicyagency.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 05, 2010 11:45 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] enhanced consultations - further inputs

In message <4CF9CFC6.6080508 at itforchange.net>, at 10:51:10 on Sat, 4 Dec
2010, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> writes
>
>On Friday 03 December 2010 07:46 PM, Roland Perry wrote:
>  In message <4CF8C38E.8030507 at itforchange.net>, at 15:46:46 on Fri, 3
>  Dec 2010, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> writes
>    Dear Roland,
>    At least I have mentioned it several times why it doesnt meet my
>>    approval (and that of most developing country actors) . Let me
>>    say it
>>    again - I and my country are not represented in CoE/ OECD
>>    initiatives.
>>    Do you think this is not a good enough reason? Does democracy and
>>    global democracy count for anything?
>
>>  That depends whether or not there's anything fundamentally wrong
>  with the initiatives.
 >
>Who decides what is wrong or not?
 >
In the context of the initiatives mentioned - the countries who would
sign up to them (or not).
 >
>The corresponding question - since I
>asked if democracy counts for anything - is how does lack of democracy
>in a country matter if 'things are working well', whatever it means.
 >
The decision processes within those countries is a local issue. I'm not
sure that we can assert that the need to have a democratic policy
development process for Internet Governance, is enough to overthrow the
local systems which already develop policy on thousands of other issues.
 >
>For a global civil society group, the lack of enthusiasm for global
>democracy here worries me a lot.

We've seen what happens when you try to organise 190 governments into a
global telecoms policy development process - it's called the ITU. With
that many people potentially having an opinion, and many issues to
discuss, no wonder the result is 3 week meetings with 2,000 attendees.

I don't know an easy way to scale that up to include multiple
stakeholders from 190 countries. There's a danger of inventing a
decision-making IGF, and I don't want to impose a discussion about that
upon the list.
--
Roland Perry
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