[governance] Indian proposal => "IGF improvements"

[Milton L Mueller]

Bill makes some excellent points here. My comments:

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).

[Milton L Mueller] Actually I was relieved to see the CIRP focused on that. I mean, what else could they legitimately do? If you're going to have national govts and an intergovernmental system trying to govern the Internet, it might indeed be better for them to address global IG in this universalistic, more balanced and more transparent way. In that respect I fully understand and mostly agree with the point Jeremy and Parminder are trying to make. But...

What we have now are various clubs or groupings of governments. And that very point underscores the weakness of the CIRP proposal: USG, EC and other more developed states will continue to go their own way if it suits their interest. If CIRP is miraculously created, govts will behave strategically and bring to it the things they want other states to agree to, and try to obstruct it or ignore it if states they don't like try to use it to do things they don't want done.

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.

[Milton L Mueller] Strongly agree. This is yet another example of states behaving strategically. If India and other states are not willing to use the IGF platform now, and will completely ignore the feedback they get from a MS forum, what makes anyone think that a CIRP will be different?

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.

[Milton L Mueller] I would go further. As I said in my recent blog post, CIRP and IGF are, in the long term, mutually exclusive platforms. They cannot both attract a critical mass of states and other stakeholders. Either IGF is a redundant and subordinate "feeder" to the CIRP or it is its own game. If it is the former, its redundancy with the AGs and the CIRP process means that it dies a slower or faster death, depending on how vigorous the CIRP becomes.

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.

[Milton L Mueller] Agree, and a very important point. Either IBSA governments move to strengthen the IGF, or they give up on it and propose a CIRP. It's clear which path they have chosen.

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