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

Lee W McKnight lmcknigh at syr.edu
Sun Oct 30 20:57:28 EDT 2011


Hi,

If I may take a slightly different tack than my fellow OECD-friendly champagne-sipping colleagues (actually I skipped the champagne for red wine while hanging/kissing-a** @OECD/ICCP last week, but I digress ; )

1) the OECD as intergovernmental talk shop has done some good things over the years eg bring information privacy and information security forward as issues governments - and rest of us - needed to take more seriously than was the case in the 70's; so....no need to apologize for its existence, it sometimes does usueful things.

2) ipso facto, if other aggregations of governments find it helpful to have secretariats do studies and organize meetings, eg ASEAN, APEC, Arab League, and gasp, possibly, India, Brazil, and South Africa, that in and of itself should not set off alarm bells.  Especially since according to my rough calculations those 3 nations together account for a majority of the world's citizens represented by democratically elected governments, so if they have something to say - even on our turf of Internet governance - maybe we should listen.

3) Now turning very realpolitik - the General Assembly is not the Security Council. Those 3 nations have a very practical reason to wish to get whatever they are proposing to the GA asap. Since realpolitik 101 means - USG can't stop that hearing from taking place. And neither can ICANN, IETF etc; or the International Chamber of Commerce, none of whom have standing there.

4) Hence, and thus my suggestion for a different approach on the part of CS than has been suggested heretofore -

a) yes do focus on strengthening IGF asap; if that had been done already maybe the IBSA initiative would not have gained steam quite as quickly as it has. (Hence my advice for those now hoping to slow the CIRP: then do try to strengthen IGF, since its recommendations would of course in the first instance be fed into the existing bodies such as ICANN etc, which could perhaps make a show of welcoming IGF input to seek to undermine CIRP...whether that will work or not too soon to say; but limiting IGF from evolving I suggest, plays into the hands of those suggesting something more is needed.

b) IF a CIRP gains traction between the IBSA governments and the GA, where (cough cough) at the OECD ICCP meeting last week all the major multinationals were projecting 80% of the growth in demand for - their - products would be coming from (emerging markets) over the next X years...well to make my hint explicit, there is a changing balance of power and simply objecting to - emerging markets - having more of a say in future; is basically, irrelevant to the most Realpolitik game of all, in world markets.

So to return to CS interests in navigating these tidal forces...simply sticking to our champagne or red wine @OECD...and suggesting to the rest we already live in the best of all possible Internet governance worlds....is the opposite of being in touch with reality.

(NOTE: I am not endorsing any specific line of anything proposed thus far - I'm just saying - it would be foolish for CS not to fully engage in the next stage of the game, wherever it leads...even possibly to something....new in Internet governance. Whatever it might be called, and however well or poorly CS is treated there. Since if we don;t play, we already know we are out of the game, and will not be treated well.)

My 5 cents.

Lee
________________________________
From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [governance at lists.cpsr.org] on behalf of Marilia Maciel [mariliamaciel at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2011 5:28 PM
To: William Drake
Cc: Governance List
Subject: [governance] Re: Indian proposal => "IGF improvements"

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<mailto: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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