[governance] Formal IGC response to IBSA proposal ahead of 18-19 Summit?

[Roland Perry]

In message 
<855077AC3D7A7147A7570370CA01ECD201F4E9 at SUEX10-mbx-10.ad.syr.edu>, at 
21:56:16 on Tue, 11 Oct 2011, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> writes
>[Milton L Mueller] I don?t understand why this restriction applies to 
>IGF but not, say, to IETF, ARIN, ICANN or APNIC. In other words, why 
>can a bunch of people get together at an IETF meeting, come to an often 
>difficult and painful agreement, and issue a standard, compliance with 
>which is completely voluntary, and the IGF can?t do the same? IGF has 
>no binding legal or regulatory authority, unlike ICANN, so what is to 
>be feared from allowing it to issue recommendations, as the WGIG did?

I've always understood that there are two sides to this.

Firstly, the IGF is sufficiently "close to the UN family" that people 
fear it could be become "too important to ignore" and be absorbed into 
the UN to become an intergovernmental institution, if it was producing 
recommendations with some traction.

(It doesn't really matter who is advantaged and disadvantaged by those 
recommendations, the risk it putting the collective head too far above 
the parapet)

Secondly, if it was producing negotiated outcomes (even if remaining 
"independent"), the process would rapidly move away from its current 
format of a relaxed place to meet and freely exchange ideas with people 
you wouldn't normally encounter, to a rather boring smoke-filled-room 
where people spend most of the week staring across the table at old 
adversaries, arguing over half a sentence in the output document.
-- 
Roland Perry
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