[governance] The German Federal Internet Commission Report (Der Spiegel)

[Jeanette Hofmann]

Hi,

as you imagine it is impossible to summarize the reports. All in all the 
12 project groups of the enquete commission produced nearly 2000 pages 
in 3 years.

Enquete commissions have a long tradition. They exist both on the state 
as well as the federal level. As the Spiegel article said, 50% of its 
membership consists of members of the parliament and 50% of experts 
appointed by the parliamentary factions, depending on their relative 
size. Thus, the enquete commission is clearly a multi stakeholder 
endevaour that has been around before the term was coined. Btw, among 
the 17 experts were at least 5 former WSIS participants. The Internet 
enquete also experimented a bit with integrating the public into its 
work. One form of integration was the 18th expert, which allowed 
observers to ask questions during public hearings. Another form of 
integration was "adhocracy", a platform that allowed people to suggest 
issues and recommendations and also evaluate suggestions by fellow users 
of the adhocracy platform. Adhocracy wasn't as much as expected, and it 
was introduced a bit too late to substantially influence the work of he 
enquete.

The general idea is that enquete commissions should work on topics that 
are not presently addressed by the parliament so that typical party 
politics do not permanently interfer with the work of the commission. In 
practice, this hardly ever works, and the enquete commission on internet 
and digital society was no exception. Still, some of project groups 
managed to have a constructive debate by strictly compartmentalizing 
assessment reports from recommendations. The project group on copyright 
that I co-led worked well until we had to draft recommendations. So, 
depending on the controversial nature of each topic some of them have 
many minority votes expressed in footnotes or addenda.

The German internet community is divided in its judgment over the 
enquete commission's work. Not unlike the IGF, the rule of thumb is the 
more involved people have been in the commission the more gentle there 
final verdict may be. Observers, on the other hand tend to be critical 
and many regard these 3 years of work as a waste of time. Personally I 
think it is too early evaluate the relevance of the enquete commission. 
The Green party that appointed me as an expert just hired somebody to 
comb through some 400 recommendations and select those that are worth 
taking up in the next legislative term. I would hope that other factions 
plan to do the same.

In our last meeting we have agreed to get all 12 reports translated into 
English. The president of the parliament dismissed this decision on the 
grounds of the costs. I tend to agree with this decision since not all 
reports are worth a translation. Sadly, the report on international 
internet governance is one of them. That group started too late, had not 
enough meetings and members. Internet governance does not enjoy much 
interest among both politicians and civil society people in Germany. In 
any case, some of the reports are like to be translated.

best, jeanette





Am 21.04.2013 23:22, schrieb Lee W McKnight:
> Very interesting material.
>
> Link to final report: http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/125/1712550.pdf
>
> Perhaps IGC's own Jeanette Hoffman who participated, might summarize the
> 1200 pp full report, and suggest implications for global internet
> governance? : )
>
> Lee
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org
> [governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] on behalf of michael gurstein
> [gurstein at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Sunday, April 21, 2013 4:07 PM
> *To:* governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> *Subject:* [governance] The German Federal Internet Commission Report
> (Der Spiegel)
>
> In Germany.
>
>
>
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/special-commission-calls-for-internet-commissioner-in-germany-a-895412.html
>

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