AW: [governance] Internet G8 meeting

["Kleinwächter, Wolfgang"]

Hi everybody
 
the Clinton administration introduced the Cyber-Issues into the G 7 and UN with its Global Information Infrastructure Initiative (GII) from 1994 (which enlarged the US National Information Infrastructure Initiative (NII) from September 1993. Al Gore himself presented the idea of the GII (which did not include issues like DNS management) to the ITU Development Conference in Buenos Aires in 1994.
http://habitat.igc.org/ics/gii-itu/wtdc-bad.html. 
 
Later Al Gore presented this to a G 7 summit in Brussels in 1995, where also a so-called "Global Business Round Table" took place in parallel (which led later to the establishmend of the Global Business Dialogue on eCommerce/GBDe). After the Brussels meeting the G 7 (later the G 8) continued to work on this issue which finally produced the G 8 Okinawa Declaration from 2000 when the G 8 established to Digital Opportunity Task Froce (DotForce). 
http://www.undp.sk/uploads/Okinawa%20charter.pdf
 
The G 8 DotForce Initiative was countered by an ECOSOC ministerial meeting in 2001 (a lot of UN member states felt excluded from the G7/8 process in Okinawa) and the UN established the UN ICT Task Force (UNICTTF). The Bush administration had the cyberissues not on its priority list so the G 8 DotForce became irrelevant and was later more or less integrated into the UNICTTF, which struggled after 2002 to become relevant in the WSIS process. UNICTTF did play a role in the beginning of WSIS, but lost its momentum later. The mandate ended in 2005 and it was substituted by the Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) which is nothing more than a paper tiger with no real identity and function. 
 
With regard to the forthcoming G 8 meeting in Deauville, this is indeed a top down, closed and exclusive event which irgnores totally all results of the Internet Governance debate of the last decade. This should be widely and loudly critisized. We discussed this with the French GAC representative in Strasbourg and he explained us that the governmental people in France doing ICANN and IGF issues, are widely disconnected from the sherpas, nominated by the president, to prepare the Deauville summit. This is a very serious point, at least in my eyes.
 
In the ICANN Studienkreis meeting last week in Budapest, the discussion went one step further, flagging the issue that there is generally a deep gap within (nearly all) governments between governmental agencies/ministeries dealing with Cybersecurity and departments dealing with the Internet Economy, with Human Rights in Cyberspace and generally with Internet Governance (ICANN/IGF etc.). As a result one and the same government talks with different voices and takes different positions in different bodies. 
 
One conclusion from this is to call for governments to bring their house in order and to reach a higher level of inter-agency coordination before they enter into a multistakeholder dialogue. Otherwiese they undermine the trust of the non-governmental stakeholders into governmental actions if one representative of a government supports multistakeholderism in one institution, but another body of the same government ingnores totally the multistakeholder principle when planning events like the forthcoming one in Paris/Deauville. 
 
We should not forget that the WSIS/WGIG Internet Governance definition, which gives all stakeholder a role and calls for shared policy and rules development and decision making, was adopted by the heads of states of 190+ UN member states in Tunis in November 2005. Governments of the world commited themselves to the multistakeholder approach in Internet Governance. The French government, host of the G 8, obviously ignores this. Somebody should tell this to the president of this republic. 
 
Wolfgang
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