[governance] scope of "internet governance" discussions (was Re: Fwd: Why do US and EU trade negotiators hate the Berne Copyright Limitations and Exceptions...)

Norbert Bollow nb at bollow.ch
Wed Feb 20 10:47:21 EST 2013


> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:09 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian
> <suresh at hserus.net> wrote:
> > Hi, is there an internet governance angle to this that I somehow
> > missed?

There are different understandings of the term "Internet governance".

WGIG gave us the following working definition:

  Internet governance is the development and application by Governments,
  the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of
  shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and
  programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.

On the basis of this it is possible to take the position that copyright
law as a whole, especially international copyright law, is a shared
principle and norm that today contributes to shaping the evolution and
use of the Internet.

I have personally for a long time preferred this kind of very broad
interpretation of Internet governance. A strong contributing factor to
this preference was that discussions at the IGF, say on the topic of
copyright, have, from my perspective at least, been much more
interesting than what was going on at other WSIS followup activities
such as WSIS Forum.

I'm in the process of slowly changing my view on this however, at
least in regard to our Caucus, and I now tend to think that it would be
beneficial to somehow bifurcate our "civil society" conversation into
one that is really focused on aspects that specifically refer to
governance of what makes the Internet work, and another separate
conversation on broader "information society" topics.

With "separate" conversations I mean that there would be two mailing
lists and somewhat heavy-handed moving of conversations that emerge on
the wrong list to the list onto which they belong -- I think that that
kind of action is necessary in order to make such a split work in
practice. Someone would need to do the work of forwarding messages to
the right list and then "killing the thread" by means of announcing
"this thread has been moving" and then preventing it from continuing in
the wrong place by means of a Subject: based rejection rule at the
mailing list server.

Any such approach involving "killing threads" certainly has
the disadvantage that it could lead to complaints about "censorship",
even if in reality it of course should not be censorship, but rather a
matter of moving conversation threads to the forum where they belong.
Of course everyone who is interested in both types of conversation
threads would be on both mailing lists, so really no-one should really
have a lot to complain about.

The key disadvantage in keeping the broad society-oriented
conversations and the more specifically Internet related conversations
on the same list is that in the current situation, some people with very
significant expertise (but no interest in participating in both kinds
of conversation) are very dissatisfied, some to the point of no longer
actively contributing.

I explicitly don't want to take any position yet on how this would be
addressed at the organisational level. (Should this Caucus have two
discussion mailing lists with an overlapping subscriber base but a
different thematic scope? Should this Caucus somehow create an
"Information Society Caucus" as a spin-off? Should some group of us,
perhaps together with others from the WSIS+10 community, formally
independently create a new caucus with a very broad thematic scope
covering all WSIS topics?)

I think that if this idea evolves into a concrete proposal on what could
be done, that will probably involve changing the Charter, and
therefore the decision-making process would be handled according to
the rules for charter amendment proposals. So procedurally, even if
very broad agreement were achieved that such a split up is a good
idea, in view of in particular the quorum rule, it might still be very
hard to get the decision made.


McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> replied to Suresh, in reference to the
contributor who forwarded the message titled "Why do US and EU trade
negotiators hate the Berne Copyright Limitations and Exceptions...":

> He has confused "3 steps" with "3 strikes".

I understand that this kind of remark may be interpreted as being funny,
but I think that it is not funny at all when in a group there are a few
who are again and again targeted by this kind of remarks.

Greetings,
Norbert

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