[governance] ITU Broadband Commission

[John Curran]

On Apr 4, 2012, at 7:46 AM, parminder wrote:

> John,
> 
> Thanks for your engagement. However, as you suspected, your assertions are indeed controversial/  problematic.
> 
> Your advice is not to go into formal aspects of a governance/ policy mechanism but only focus on the output side. I would come to the output side but lets first deal with the importance of formal aspects. To those who protested against Mubarak's regime, would you have advised that instead of fighting for democracy against authoritarianism, they should look at and argue by the work and outputs of regime, and not its formal qualities.

I have no knowledge of the conditions in that area, but I expect it would
not be difficult to find numerous examples of folks who tried to participate
and either had no option to do so, or suffered significant consequences as 
a result of participating by providing inputs that were _not_ well received...
i.e.  it should be relatively straightfoward to show that there was not a
meaningful system that allowed multi-stakeholder participation.

> Closer home, since apparently you believe in multistakeholderism, would you agree to a governance system that is not open, participative, transparent etc although it seem not to have any particularly disagreeable output?

If someone is asserting to provide system of policy development which allows 
for multi-stakeholder participation, but in fact doesn't actually consider the inputs, 
that is a major problem.  The only way to truly determine this is to actually 
participate and judge the results.

> Do you really think that it is  a good/ acceptable idea to have telecoms dominate a policy body on telecom?

Domination of telecom representatives may not be ideal, but I do not believe
it is safe to assume that the results are completely predictable, particularly 
when there has been specific efforts to accept inputs from any and all parties.

> Would you accept it in your own country? Would your compatriots accept it in your country? On the same logic, would you accept a health policy body dominated by pharma companies - at your country level, and at the WHO?

Alas, I live in the USA, and hence am quite aware that US policy formation 
in many areas is already dominated by the related commercial concerns...    
The best we can do is hope that the processes that allow for open input are 
actually functioning, and raise strong objection when we can prove otherwise.

> Simple direct questions going very much to the heart of the issue which I hope you will answer. 

Of course.  I do hope that discussion of this topic doesn't distract from IGC's
important work, but felt that it is worth noting how objections to these steps
by the ITU toward multi-stakeholder processes might be perceived.  I'll be the 
first to admit skepticism, but recognize that these are actually major changes
for a 100+ year old organization.  Dealing with everyone in good faith would 
lead me to believe that one must exercise these mechanisms first before 
condemning them as closed and non-participative.

/John

Disclaimer:  My views alone. Reading this email may be hazardous to your health.
                  Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating the contents can be 
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