AW: [governance] WSIS III

Fri Feb 19 04:06:20 EST 2010

Hi Yehuda

WSIS III will probably become an issue at the forthcoming ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Guadalajara (October 2010). ITU hosted, on behalf of the UN, WSIS I & II. The WSIS process started with an ITU Resolution adopted by the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Minneapolis (October 1998). The ITU resolution of 1998 was send to the UN and the UN adopted the WSIS project in 2001 by giving the mandate to the ITU. 

This could become a model for WSIS III. If the ITU Plenipoteniary Conference in 2010 adopts a resolution in favour of a WSIS III, this could go to the UN and the UN can decide in 2011 or 2012 to convene a WSIS III in 2015 under similar conditions as for WSIS I & II. 

Whatsoever, something has to happen in 2015 because the Geneva Plan of Action points to 2015 as the target date. This coincides with the Millenium Development Goals (MDG). So it is very natural that the MDG & WSIS processes will become closer interlinked. Against this background it is of some interest that the GAID was recently restructured and that UN Secretary General Ban Kin Moon himself accepted the role of Honorary Chairman of GAID (with Mr Tarek Abu Gazaleh as the Chair and Sergey Kambalow as the Executive Secretary). It was Kofi Annan himself who played a crucial role in the making of WSIS and he stood also behind the UNICTTF, the pre-runner of GAID. 

ITU has another option: To organize something at "world level" to celebrate  "WSIS 10+" during its own Plenipotentiary Conference in 2014. But this would be - as Houlin Zhao, ITUs Deputy Secretary General said recently in Geneva - "only ITU". For ITU it is much better to have the UN as the convener and the ITU as the organizer. Insofar the planned "WSIS Forum" in May 2010 in Geneva, organized by the ITU in cooperation with UNESCO and UNCTAD, has a certain strategic meaning. BTW, the format of the "WSIS Forum" is copying the IGF, but gives intergovernmental organisations a much stronger role. There is no MAG which prepares the WSIS Forum. It seems at the moment that "multistakeholderism" is just "lip service" there, but this can be changed. The legal basis for all this is the UN Resolution from 2001 which has introduced (although in vague terms) the idea of the principle of "multstakeholderism" which became then more elaborated in the WSIS process itself and which constituted a basic foundation for the future of the Information society in general and for Internet Govenrnace in particular in the Tunis Agenda in WSIS II (2005). 

How the "WSIS Forum" and WSIS III will affect Internet Governance processes and the IGF remains open. So far the two processes - WSIS Follow up and IG - were seperated. And Internet Governance is not an issue at the forthcoming "WSIS Forum" in Geneva in May 2010. But I could imagine that some governments would be not against "to harmonize" this again under the leadership of ITU, embedded in the UN machinery. 

BTW, it is interesting to look back into the negotiations in Minneapolis in 1998. There were, among many others, two controversial proposals on the agenda: One was the Summit proposal (tabled by Tunisia) and the other one was the ratification of the Memorandum of Understanding on new gTLDs of the Interim Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) which gave ITU the role to become the host of the MoU and to get a certain hand over the management of some critical Internet Resources. The MoU, which was signed in May 1998 by ITU Secretary General Pekka Tarjanne, was fundamentally rejected by the US government which was also against a "Summit" (fearing that the failed UNESCO debate on the New World Information and Communication Order of the 1980s could be revitalized). The Minneapolis ITU Pleninpot ended in this point with a compromise. The US got the recognition of the principle of "private sector leadership" for Internet Governance (in the ITU resolution 102), that is that the new IAHC gTLD MoU  was not ratfied, rejected and disappeared (and ptrvoked ITU to come back again and again with the idea to have a crucial say in IG). On the other hand the US government removed its opposition against holding a World Summit on the Information Society and so the WSIS process, as described above, could start. Some observers have speculatesd that the acceptance of the start of the WSIS process was the price the USG was willing to pay to get ICANN ratified and the IAHC/ITU approach killed. Ten days after the end of the ITU Pleninpot in Minneapolis, US Secretary of Commerce, William Daley, signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ICANN and authorized the establishment of ICANN. The first meeting of the new Interim Board of Directors of the new established ICANN took place just two weeks after the end of the Minneapolis conference in Cambridge/MA with Esther Dyson as the new first ICANN Chair.

Looking towards ITU Pleninpot in Guadalajara it seems that again there will be some controversial issues on the agenda which "invite" for some "horse-trading behind closed doors". ITU wants to get the right to allocate IPv6 addresses to "National/Local Internet Registries" (NIRs), with other worsds, to become something like a RIR.  This is opposed strongly by a nunber of western governments.  ITU wants to play also a role in iDNs, ccTLDs and some other CIR issues. It seems that Guadalajara will become another interesting battlefield. 

Best wishes

wolfgang

________________________________

Von: Sivasubramanian Muthusamy [mailto:isolatedn at gmail.com]
Gesendet: Fr 19.02.2010 07:24
An: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Yehuda Katz
Betreff: Re: [governance] WSIS III

Hello Yehuda katz 

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Yehuda Katz <yehudakatz at mailinator.com> wrote:

	Hello Wolfgang,

	Could you please Cite your source(s), regarding WSIS III.

	re.:http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/arc/governance/2010-02/msg00300.html

	>There are now plans to have a 3rd World Summit on the Information Society
	>(WSIS III) in 2015, to evaluate the implementation of the Tunis Agenda
	>and to work towards a WSIS 2025 strategy.

The ITU Webpage http://www.itu.int/wsis/implementation/2010/forum/geneva/logo.html  features a WSIS logo that says "working together towards 2015" and  "Turing Targets into Action". This is an indication that there is a definite plan to host a WSIS in 2015.

	-

	Bertrand,

	As you were behind WSIS I, can you do some investigating and shed some light on
	the possibility/plans of WSIS III please.

	Thnx

	-

	P.S.: If there is to be a WSIS III, then all this letter writing to the SG is
	really not necessary, the WSIS platform is a multi stakeholder forum.
	____________________________________________________________
	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

____________________________________________________________
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