[governance] Ad hoc Best Bits strategy meeting tomorrow lunchtime

[Milton L Mueller]

This is a perfect example of why I've been warning you to focus in on things the IG community actually knows something about and can do something about, such as the IANA contract and ICANN accountability, rather than posing as a global parliament and thinking that you can legislate across 27 different sectors of the economy, taxation and even national security.

Any meeting, in Rio or elsewhere in 2014, that takes on the agenda suggested by Parminder below, will get nowhere. Not just because the issues are too diverse and there will not even be a suitable knowledge base, much less consensus on policy outcomes, but also because any such group would totally lack the authority required to address such issues. Lacking such authority, the meeting will be NO DIFFERENT from an IGF. So why do it in Rio? Why not the IGF?

----
Parminder's agenda
>global public policy development in substantive areas like norms/ guidelines/ legal frameworks
>for privacy, net neutrality, taxation issues around cross border e-com, competition issues, and
>the so many other areas of public policy areas....
----

(I myself am eager to work on the "many other areas of public policy areas")

Ironically, here in Washington I also heard the ICANN representative talking about how the Rio meeting should address many new, "orphan" issues such as.....wait for it.....cybersecurity! Yeah, that's a problem that's going to be solved by a one off meeting with 1000 people in it, for sure....

I can explain this absurd position in two possible ways: first, it may be that the I* orgs would prefer that Brazil, other governments and everyone else waste their time chatting about "global public policy development" (i.e., duplicating the IGF) rather than actually solving ICANN's accountability and IANA problem. After all, we've seen what IGF has accomplished in 7 years. A neo-IGF will do the same, but might manage to maintain the illusion for governments that something new is happening.

Another, slightly less cynical explanation is that they want this Rio meeting to pre-empt the ITU plenipot, as some states still want the ITU to do cybersecurity. So apparently these people are so irrationally afraid of the ITU that they would rather push vital areas of policy into hastily thrown together and poorly designed multistakeholder processes just so they can say that the ITU doesn't need to do it.






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