[governance] Re: Indian proposal => "IGF improvements"

Sun Oct 30 17:28:55 EDT 2011

Dear Bill,

This linkage you said that the indians have made between the two processes
(EC and IGF improvements) is not at all new. The relation between the
processes have been largely discussed in IGF workshops this year and has
been mentioned in CSTD WG before. Evidently, an outcome oriented IGF would
be a good way to feed discussions into any other organizations/bodies,
including a mechanism of EC, if it comes into existance.If an EC mechanism
is created, I would never want it to disregard IGF's inputs, would you?

My point on my last message was that in any given scenario, and regardless
of what happens to the EC proposal, having a more outcome oriented IGF is a
good thing. If you disagree with that, could you comment on how outcomes
could be negative on the 3 scenarios I mentioned?

Another point: to affirm, as you did, that indian proposal tabled on the GA
killed the possibility of a more outcome-oriented IGF in CSTD WG is not
logical. EC does not derive from a more outcome oriented IGF. EC may happen
without any improvements to the IGF (which would be the worst scenario
ever, in my opinion). So both processes are connected, but, I repeat, they
are different processes.

If actors start to block discussions here in geneva because they did not
like indian proposal in the GA, I am sorry, but they are the ones that will
be hampering improvements, and they are the ones that will be killing the
future of the IGF.

I have just arrived and I am really tired, but hope this message is
understandable ;)

Hope to have (good) news tomorrow.

Marilia

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 7:16 AM, William Drake <william.drake at uzh.ch> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade
FGV Direito Rio

Center for Technology and Society
Getulio Vargas Foundation
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
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