[governance] [Fwd: Internet Governance 2010: Future Of The IGF, Competition Among Institution]

[Parminder]

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog -

Internet Governance 2010: Future Of The IGF, Competition Among Institutions

By Monika Ermert on 15 January 2010 @ 3:39 pm

The future design of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF), 
the role of the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 
internet governance and the ability of the Internet Corporation for 
Assigned Names and Numbers to resolve issues from new generic top-level 
domains to further internationalisation - these are the top policy 
issues in internet governance in 2010 and they are all linked to the 
question of how many governments and how much “multi-stakeholderism“ 
effective internet governance needs.

The self-regulatory approach adhered to by the internet technical 
community might have been too optimistic in some regards, for example 
net neutrality or cybercrime issues, said internet governance expert 
Jeanette Hofmann from the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and member of the 
Internet Governance Project. But will this lead to a backlash against 
the more multi-stakeholder institutions like the IGF or ICANN?

For network neutrality, regulatory steps seem necessary, Hofmann said to 
Intellectual Property Watch about the big issues ahead. The same is true 
with regard to cybercrime, she said. “All this private blacklisting was 
pretty awful,” she said. Yet while she expects that competition between 
more private style governance approaches versus more public oversight 
approaches will continue for years, she sees the governance framework 
developing toward some relatively well accepted criteria. “Transparency, 
participation, accountability and legitimacy seems to be what will 
substitute for national regulatory approaches,” said Hofmann.

Future of the IGF

The future design of the IGF to be developed before the forum’s next 
meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania (14-17 September) that will end the first 
five-year mandate of the experimental UN body might give a hint about 
the current state of the play, said Hofmann. “Is the IGF allowed to stay 
as it is, heavily driven by private stakeholders, or will it be made a 
much more governmental institution?”

A lot of strings are being pulled behind the scenes with regard to 
possible changes for the IGF 2.0, say experts and observers including 
Hofmann. Even how and by which UN bodies (the Economic and Social 
Council (ECOSOC), Committee on Science and Technology Development (CSTD) 
or the plenary) the reform should be developed is under intensive 
debate. Hofmann warns that a more bureaucratic structure might result in 
freezing further development of the body as a whole and “everybody 
labels standstill as failure,” she said.

Proposals for organisational changes to the IGF model range from mere 
cosmetic to not-budget-neutral ones, according to IGF Secretary Markus 
Kummer, who said that some countries would prefer to align IGF 
procedures much more with regular UN procedures. “One idea is to 
structure the IGF alongside the G77 model used for the World Summit on 
the Information Society (WSIS), setting up bureaus for governments, 
business and civil society respectively,” he said. The current 
Membership Advisory Committee (MAG) integrates all stakeholders groups 
in a more informal way.

China has recommended a more official “bureau” to organise the IGF, 
while the European Union and the United States want to keep the more 
lightweight secretariat, managed by Swiss diplomat Kummer and one 
additional employee.

One of the non-budget-neutral proposals came from the normally rather 
quiet one-man German IGF delegation who recommended setting up a 
database collecting internet governance best practices. Such a database 
might serve as a reference output, while at the same time avoiding the 
much more authoritative “messages from the IGF” that some governments 
like Brazil would like to see.

ITU - Bigger Role in Governance Wished by Some

A year ago, the ITU secretary general was highly critical of the IGF, 
pointing to deficiencies with resolving the dispute about core internet 
resources - domain names, IP addresses and the system of central root 
servers on the domain name system (DNS). This year, the organisation did 
not call into question the extension of the IGF mandate, but instead in 
a paper to the UN secretary general for his report on what is called 
“enhanced cooperation” to ECOSOC recommended itself once more for a 
bigger role in the internet governance arena.

As the organisation is preparing for the 2010 ITU Plenipotentiary 
Meeting in Veracruz, Mexico (4-22 October) the ambitions while not new 
deserve a closer look. The plenipotentiary is the main decision-making 
conference of the ITU, taking place once every four years. The 2006 
plenipotentiary in Antalya, Turkey, paved the way for more involvement 
in internet governance, so the 2010 plenipotentiary might see another 
round of discussions between member states that want the ITU to do more 
and those who want it to keep to its original task that is more focused 
on the classical telecommunications industry.

That the ITU has an appetite for additional tasks has been made clear in 
the summary contained in the ECOSOC report and has already led to 
discussions between the secretariat and member states, said one ITU 
expert. “An improved governance framework could be formed within which 
all countries would have an equal say in internet-related public policy 
issues and in the management of critical internet resources,” read the 
summary of ITU comments in the UN secretary general’s report. “An 
intergovernmental organisation such as the [ITU] … could play a leading 
role in the creation of such a governance structure.”

The ITU ECOSOC report summary lists the management of the 
cryptographically signed root zone of the domain name system - currently 
underway under the aegis of ICANN and US company VeriSign - the 
management of generic top-level domains (gTLDs like .com), and the 
management of internationalised country-code TLDs (IDN ccTLDs) as issues 
to be dealt with by an “intergovernmental body.” ITU representatives and 
consultants in addition have at a recent ITU Council meeting been 
pushing for the set-up of an alternative registry for next generation 
internet (IPv6) addresses at the ITU.

The plenipotentiary also might talk about a proposal on a “Global 
Protocol on Cybersecurity and Cybercrime” presented by the chair of the 
ITU High Level Experts Group (HLEG) on Cybercrime, Norwegian Chief Judge 
Stein Schjolberg, during the IGF. A convention or a protocol at the UN 
level on this issue should be a “global proposal for the 2010s,” 
Schjolberg wrote in the preface to the document. He recommends a 
“combined initiative” by “organisations such as United Nations Office of 
Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the ITU.”

Institutional Competition Will Go On for Years

The big appetite of the ITU is eyed with some suspicion by other 
international organisations and intergovernmental organisations. At the 
Council of Europe, Alexander Seger, who also is a member of the ITU HLEG 
said to /Intellectual Property Watch/ that the UN Crime Congress in 
April might look into the issue, yet the European Union in its new 
Stockholm Programme on Freedom and Security had just committed itself 
once more to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime as a global 
standard.

“In my opinion, it makes sense to first look into implementing existing 
legal instruments, instead of developing a new one of which you do not 
now how it might look in the end,” said Seger. New negotiations might 
delay implementation of legal measures in many countries and also divert 
resources for implementation, not the least in developing countries, he 
said.

The Council of Europe, too, wants to step up its work on internet 
governance not only by putting resources into taking over a permanent 
secretariat role for the EuroDig, the European regional IGF movement, 
that will have its meeting in Madrid (29-30 April). According to Lee 
Hibbard from the Council’s Media and Information Society Division, the 
experts in Strasbourg are preparing a more coordinated approach to 
internet governance issues inside the Council, but also in the IGF 
regional and global forum discussions. In an interview, he described a 
more “holistic approach,” for example with regard to cybercrime, data 
protection and freedom of expression.

The Council also would work on critical internet resources, namely from 
the human rights perspective. “Cross-border aspects of freedom of 
expression,” said Hibbard, are on the Council’s agenda, and even a 
protocol like IPv6 that could hamper access for a country without IPv6 
connection is seen as more than a technical issue. Privacy in sensor 
networks, cloud computing or social networks also are among issues that 
rank high on the wider internet governance agenda, he said. The Council 
of Europe, according to Hibbard, hopes to finish a Council 
Recommendation on Profiling during the year; a fifth draft version is 
already under discussion.

Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 
(OECD) this year celebrates the 30th year anniversary of its “Guidelines 
on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data.” 
There will be several meetings to look back on the last decade and 
changes in privacy protection, said Sacha Wunsch-Vincent at the OECD in 
Paris.

At the OECD, top issues include: the “smart recovery” from the economic 
crisis, green IT, sensor-based networks and ongoing analytical work on 
intermediaries, and the contribution of the internet and related ICTs as 
a driver of innovation as commissioned by the 2008 Seoul Declaration on 
the Future of the Internet were top issues, Wunsch-Vincent said. The 
Seoul Declaration will be revisited in 2011, he said. The OECD has been 
quickest with regard to adapting to the multi-stakeholder model by 
opening up a new Civil Society Information Society Council for the Seoul 
Declaration.

Alas ICANN!

Much of the IGF and multi-stakeholder development originates in the 
narrower battle around the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and 
Numbers which again has a bumpy road ahead of it for 2010 with meetings 
in Nairobi in March, Brussels in July and Latin America at the end of 
the year.

ICANN, the global, private, but US-overseen domain-name system manager, 
made a little step forward answering to longstanding complaints about 
the privileged US oversight of its work. It got rid of the Joint Project 
Agreement in 2009 after more than ten years of extended contracts to the 
US government, and replaced it with an “Affirmation of Commitments” (AoC).

Public consultation about how four review teams will be composed and 
selected by the ICANN Board chair/CEO and the ICANN Government Advisory 
Committee (GAC) chair started immediately before the New Year. The first 
review has to be finalised by the end of 2010 and checks on ICANN’s 
status in “ensuring accountability, transparency and the interests of 
global internet users.” This is the one review team where the US 
administration kept a special seat under the AoC. The reviews on 
security, stability and resiliency, on promoting competition, consumer 
trust and consumer choice, and on the much-debated and privacy-related 
Whois policy will follow with review teams bringing together six to 
eight people from the various ICANN constituencies.

Yet governments on other continents well mentioned at the late 2009 IGF 
in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, that while they welcomed the AoC they saw 
room for further internationalisation. The US administration’s role in 
controlling the function currently undertaken by ICANN through the 
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) secures US control over the 
root system, the core infrastructure of the DNS. IGF Secretary Kummer 
said that the IANA question might become a “hot topic” in 2010 as 
signalled, for example, by a statement by the Egyptian Communication 
Minister during the IGF. On the other hand, experts expect that there is 
not a lot of leeway to let go of the root on the side of the US 
Department of Commerce despite the change of government.

ICANN has ample opportunity, too, to get in more trouble this year. 
After years of discussion, it seemed so close to finalising the 
procedure for introducing new generic domains last year. But currently 
aspirants calculate it might be 2012 before they even can apply for 
these. While ICANN is hardly to blame for the push by the US government 
and the technical community to first introduce the new more secure DNS 
security extensions signatures to the root zone - the start of serving 
the longer, signed zone from the first root server has just been 
postponed for two more weeks - the just published proposal about a 
pre-application process called “expression of interest” looks somewhat 
unfriendly to less developed countries or smaller TLD applicants.

Kieren McCarthy, who has left ICANN as a communications manager, 
commented on ICANN’s public participation site: “The logic of making it 
compulsory for people to sign up to a process before that process’s own 
rules have been finalised is also questionable. Expressions of interest 
should not be compulsory for the first round of new gTLDs.” McCarthy 
also criticised the application fee for the expressions of interest of 
US$55,000 dollars, which is the non-refundable part of the later 
application fee of US$185,000, calling it “a self-selection exercise 
within the existing ICANN community.” ICANN has a “duty to look beyond 
the few thousand individuals, companies and organisations it frequently 
interacts with and serve the broader internet,” he said.

Trademark owners, many of whom complained during the last year about a 
too broad opening of the domain name space, might push to get the bar 
even higher. For ICANN, it will be difficult to please them all: the 
only question is from whom they have most to fear.

Categories: Access to Knowledge, Copyright Policy, Development, English, 
Features, IP Policies, Information and Communications Technology/ 
Broadcasting, Language, Subscribers, Themes, US Policy, United Nations, 
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