[governance] ECTF - initial draft proposal online

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 11/07/2012, at 8:55 PM, Norbert Bollow wrote:

> Yes, that would be nice. Although at the current stage, when the main
> goal must be to convince some governments to support the idea, I'm
> not sure how much an endorsement from IAB and/or ISOC would help.

In my view endorsement by ISOC is even less likely than endorsement by governments, due to the "not invented here syndrome" that raises their hackles against any Internet governance innovation from outside of the technical community framework.  But that's why, as I mentioned to you privately some weeks ago, I supported you doing this by way of an RFC, because it would signal that this proposal is in the spirit of the Internet community's grassroots approach to Internet governance, rather than the UN approach of multi-stakeholderism shoehorned into an intergovernmental structure.  This way, irrespective of its content, it is more likely to be read by Internet community members, and less likely to be rejected out of hand, than if it was on ITU or UN letterhead or came from a government.  By coincidence, read what I wrote in 2004 in my PhD thesis proposal, which I only just rediscovered:

> The thesis may in fact decide that the IETF's RFC process should be used or adapted for the development of consensus-based model legal norms for the Internet. The recommendations of the thesis, which are expected to propose a collaborative style of Internet governance as a model for nation states to use in the drafting and passage of their own Internet legal legislation, may themselves form the subject of the first such RFC.

Convincing governments, of course, will also be hard.  I note that your proposal deviates from the thoughts that I had shared with you in this respect:

> The Committee shall attempt to make decisions by rough consensus.  If this fails, a meeting at which decision making by majority vote is allowed may be convened no earlier than 16 hours after the rough consensus process has failed.


Whereas my contention is that there should be a rough consensus not only within the Committee, but also within each stakeholder group that comprises the Committee.  Although that raises the prospect of deadlock enormously, and will make the job of facilitation of consensus more difficult (and more important), I feel that it is the only way that governments will deign to participate in a forum that could issue recommendations that a majority of them might disagree with (the same is true of the private sector and technical community, probably - whereas civil society are a trusting load of mugs and would be game to try overall rough consensus!).

-- 
Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer
Consumers International
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