[governance] Landmark decision by ITU Council on proposal for public consultation and open access

[Milton L Mueller]

Wow. Any comments for IGC to react to this decision? Welcome statement?
Further plan of action?

[Milton L Mueller] I wouldn't say Wow. It is a good and interesting development, but not as major as it may first appear. Here is a response I sent to another list, which some of you may have seen already:

This is both a victory, in that the ITU is responding to our pressure, and a clever move by the ITU. The combination of online public comment and many national consultations would in effect enhance and support the importance of the ITU and the WCIT process, which is what ITU wants.

If the ITRs were in fact a major move to take over the Internet, then investing a lot of time and effort into these national consultations would be worth it. Since the WCIT almost certainly cannot do that and does not pose the kind of threat some people think it does, I worry about the misdirection of resources implicit in such a major nation-by-nation effort. I also worry about legitimizing and strengthening ITU's role in Internet governance by encouraging people to look to ITU as a place where it happens.

A key question for me is whether the ITU website, which the press release says will allow "all stakeholders [to] express their opinions on the content of the latest version of TD64" will regularly update TD-64 as it is amended during the negotiations, or whether it will just post the current version of TD-64, which we already have via WCITleaks.org. [snip]

The key question is whether the online public platforms continually update the information about what is being proposed, and whether proposals are identified as they are placed there. The latter is not impossible, but I would not get your hopes up too much about that; the idea that ITU will suddenly move to a fully transparent process during its negotiations seems uncharacteristic.

Another issue is whether national delegations will actually read the comments; governments tend not to be very good at that, generally, especially the worst ones. Even ICANN's Board is not so great at that.

The national consultations could be useful if properly handled by civil society; i.e., if participants actually know what is being proposed by their governments, target their opposition on a few things, explain clearly why they oppose it, and have alternatives. IF on the other hand they go in with a grab-bag of demands that don't relate specifically to the ITRs and (worst of all) actually reinforce the importance of the ITRs by turning them into a WSIS-like declaration of how the world's governments can lead us into the promised land of the "knowledge society" then it would really backfire.

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