[governance] IGF and Enhanced Cooperation

Norbert Bollow nb at bollow.ch
Fri Jun 1 02:28:32 EDT 2012


Marilia Maciel <mariliamaciel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that the questions you propose are good. Could you just explain a
> little further why you believe we should not separate CIR and non-CIR? I
> think that a neat separation would bring more clarity to the debate.

I don't have a very strong view on this, but i think that the
fundamental challenge of setting up a good institutional
framework for Enhanced Cooperation (including appropriate
working processes, appropriate principles to guide these
processes, and an appropriate oversight function of some kind
to ensure that the principles are followed in actual reality
and not perverted by means of powerful actors hypocitically
just paying them lip service while ensuring that something
different happens in reality) is pretty much the same
independently of the type of substantive issues (there's CIR
issues, non-CIR issues, issues with CIR and non-CIR aspects,
and issues where it's hard to decide into what category they
should be classified).

In my view, the key fundamental challenge is that any effective
Enhanced Cooperation framework will cause the power of some
currently overly powerful US companies, as well as the power
of the US government to act on behalf of the US copyright
industry, to be deminished. The US government as well as a
significant part of the technical community will be vigorously
opposed to anything with this effect, because they will
perceive any proposal to change the status quo as a threat to
what they perceive as "our ability to make things work right".

My main concern about the proposal of structuring the Enhanced
Cooperation discussion into a CIR and a non-CIR part is that such a
structuring might have effects like
* making it even more difficult than it is already to address
  that fundamental challenge, because what needs to be said to
  address the fundamental challenge may not necessarily fit well
  under either the CIR nor the non-CIR heading,
* dividing the people who are passionate about making Enhanced
  Cooperation happen, according to what subject area is where
  their main substantive concerns are, instead of allowing us to
  work united on establishing a good Enhanced Cooperation
  framework. I'd suggest that we should work together at the
  present stage and only go our separate ways to work on different
  types of substative concerns after the crucial first step of
  establishing a good framework for Enhanced Cooperation has
  been achieved.
  
Greetings,
Norbert

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