[governance] Indian proposal => "IGF improvements"

[William Drake]

Hi Marilia

Since you and our other reps will soon be in Geneva for the WGIGF meeting, it seems timely to circle back to this thread.

On Oct 21, 2011, at 4:18 PM, Marilia Maciel wrote:

> I would like to focus on what Bill has mentioned. I believe it is a very important topic, given the fact that we are close to the CSTD WG meeting and "outcomes" will be an important topic:
> 
>  
> This is a barrier I wish we could somehow overcome.  As long as developing country intergovernmental efforts on EC and in the ITU appear to have intergovernmental control as their end game and the IGF is getting tactically linked to this as you noted, one imagines the TC, business, and a lot of governments will remain wedded to the fear that an IGF that does more than meet and chat once a year would necessarily get leveraged to advance that agenda.  And CS proponents of more intensive, structured and "outcome" oriented dialogues will remain isolated and frustrated.  If intergovernmental control could be taken off the table, at least outside the ITU, that might help to make "IGF improvements" a less divisive topic.  
> 
> I think we should separate the two topics, IGF improvements and enhanced cooperation. They are related, but they are different topics. And I personally think that a more outcome oriented IGF would be beneficial with our without the implementation of enhanced cooperation.

I wish it were otherwise, but they have been very closely related since CS first started advocating an IGF in 2004 and will be more so going forward. We were told by several people here that nobody should be concerned about the Rio proposal because it was just a draft and of course the 3 governments would be fully taking on board the opposition voiced by virtually everyone who spoke to it in the Nairobi CIR session.   I therefore asked why the Tshwane Declaration didn't just come out and take the UN oversight body concept off the table if that was true.  Now we have the answer—it wasn't.  

Irrespective of any stakeholder views, the Indian government has ploughed ahead and formally proposed almost precisely what the "just a draft" said (actually it's worse—the Indian language adds to the list of functions, "Facilitate negotiation of treaties, conventions and agreements on Internet-related public policies"…this to be done by 50 governments that meets for two weeks a year for ten six hour days).  And they did this in a purely intergovernmental setting where stakeholder views are duly ignored.  One might add that I asked the indian representative twice on stage whether/when a proposal might go to the GA and got evasive answers.  Since this was done a couple weeks after Nairobi, one has to assume that they'd already decided and just weren't going to say it in a multistakeholder setting where people might raise questions, which strikes me as rather indicative of how we can expect all this to be handled going forward.

So now we have been allowed to see the Indian proposal, and it says inter alia that "An improved and strengthened lGF that can serve as a purposeful body for policy consultations and provide meaningful policy inputs to the CIRP, will ensure a stronger and more effective complementarity between the CIRP and the IGF."   So let's no longer pretend that the two issues can be viewed separately.  The Indian proposal for IGF improvements that you and some others have championed here has been directly linked to the establishment of a UN body for enhanced cooperation by the Indian government.   To me this is a pity, because the former does have some good ideas that if decoupled from an intergovernmental end game on EC would have made the IGF more useful and closer to what some of us hoped for back in 2004.  But the linkage has been spelled out, and I strongly suspect the Indian IGF improvement proposals are now dead on arrival.  Why would all the actors that oppose intergovernmental control support IGF proposals that are designed to enable IGF to feed into an intergovernmental control mechanism?  India has given away the game that these actors always insisted was really being played behind the scenes.

We are probably now in for an unproductive WGIGF process.  I suspect that for the next half year we'll be getting frustrated emails from you and our other reps about how the TC, business, and non-G77/China governments are blocking this or that proposal for more structured dialogues, working groups, outputs, etc.  It is unclear that CS will be able to articulate some sort of third way that would make the IGF more than an annual chat fest without this being viewed as part of a larger and more important battle, especially when some of our representatives are closely identified with the intergovernmental agenda.  At the moment i'm not too hopeful, but would be interested to hear discussion of ways in which this could be done.

Cheers,

Bill






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