[governance] ITU: Travel All The Way To Dubai... And Then We'll Decide If You Can Attend Our Meeting On Internet Governance

[Dr. Alejandro Pisanty Baruch]

Fahd,

thanks for the very specific pointer to this question in the ITU WCIT FAQ.

Civil society and multistakeholder organizations still wear the scars of similar rulings in the past.

In particular during the WSIS process they were left outside the room more than once. In some occasions they were admitted grudgingly.

And even then, they found the room already stuffed with "astroturf" organizations which impeded any meaningful participation. The most memorable of these occasions was in a PrepCom for the Tunis stage in which Tunisian organizations did this trick in Geneva.

(For non-US English speakers now) "Astroturf" means artificial grass, first used in the Astrodome stadium of US American football. Its political meaning refers to organizations which appear to be "grassroots", i.e. bottom-up, self-organized popular representations, but in fact are created or facilitated by those they oppose, such as big companies or especially governments. Traces of that behavior may appear for example in organizations which are nominally opposed to their governments's conduct but go around pushing governmental agendas, write papers for their governments without disclosing the funding, consulting, or other arrangements, etc.

The suspicion that some organizations may be astroturf is very painful in the multistakeholder environment. Some serious analysts (I'll quote you some authors if need be) consider this lack of proof of legitimacy a serious weakness of NGOs. I've certainly gone through some processes in which anti-ICANN "NGOs" or "CSOs" or "think tanks" have been established and then disappeared without trace, and you can see a few of those operating in the new-gTLD environment.

Back to the issue at hand, civil society and multistakeholder organizations would do well to press for guarantees of admittance and a real chance to speak in WCIT, if that is ever going to happen, before buying airplane tickets to Dubai.

Another angle, of course, is to take precedent of a recent ITU meeting, the meeting of Plenipotentiary Ministers in 2010, in Guadalajara, Mexico, known as PP-10 and immortalized in the Twitter hashtag #PP10. In that meeting, a small number of rapporteurs from Sector Members and the press, as well as in national delegations, tweeted from the meetings. The reactions in the backchannel were significant enough to cause Dr. Touré to warn the meeting at some point that they risked becoming the laughing stock of the world if they didn't make more progress.

We will always have Cyberspace.

(apologies, Dominique, for leaving your comment aside; it goes to a different point of Fahd's conveyed message.)

Yours,

Alejandro Pisanty


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________________________________
Desde: governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] en nombre de Fahd A. Batayneh [fahd.batayneh at gmail.com]
Enviado el: domingo, 26 de agosto de 2012 15:02
Hasta: IG Caucus
Asunto: [governance] ITU: Travel All The Way To Dubai... And Then We'll Decide If You Can Attend Our Meeting On Internet Governance

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120821/21460320121/itu-travel-all-way-to-dubai-then-well-decide-if-you-can-attend-our-meeting-internet-governance.shtmlv

Another interesting move from the ITU... Whatever that means!

Fahd
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