[governance] JNC position on article 35 of the Tunis Agenda (was Re: Towards an Internet Social Forum)

[David Cake]

My apologies for the delay. I blame ICANN, and the ICANN cold/cough that followed many of us home and has proven to be quite debilitating.


On 7 Feb 2015, at 3:09 am, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:

> Dear all
> 
> Just a quick clarification, as I currently lack the time that would be
> required to enter this debate substantively:
> 
> There has not been any "JNC position at WGEC", as JNC has not been a
> WGEC participant. In fact when WGEC was constituted, JNC hadn't even
> been formed yet. However, to my best knowledge, what Parminder (who
> participated in WGEC, although not as a representative of JNC) actually
> said at WGEC is nevertheless fully consistent with JNC's positions.

	A relevant clarification, thank you. Though if the position is the same as the position that JNC would take on currently, then the distinction may not be that significant.

> 
> This cannot be said in regard to how several others have been
> characterizing JNC's (and also Parminder's) positions: There have been
> several public mis-characterizations that are full of assertions of
> strawman positions which are very easy to disagree with.
> 
> 
> The actual position which JNC has adopted and published in regard to
> this matter is the following:
> 
> "Just Net Coalition agrees with the spirit of paragraph 35 of the Tunis
> Agenda in that that governments have specific public policy roles and
> responsibilities, and other stakeholders cannot claim a similar
> position as governments in this regard. However, we consider that the
> description of the role given to civil society in this section is
> inadequate. While the text does speak of an important role that civil
> society should continue to play, this is inadequate because the
> exclusive mention of 'community level' and not 'policy level' gives an
> unbalanced view of civil society's role. While community level work and
> linkages constitute the key legitimising factors of civil society,
> civil society also has a strong role to play at the policy level in
> terms of 'deepening democracy' whereby it brings to the policy table
> representation of otherwise under-represented voices."
> 
> (This is the content of note 5 in JNC's October 14, 2014 Statement to
> the 2014 Plenipotentiary Conference of the International
> Telecommunication Union.)

	This is a valuable clarification, but the JNC backing the position that :
	• Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States.
Is still problematic to me, and I would presume many others. A situation in which ultimate authority for public policy issues must always rest exclusively with states is still very problematic, and still raises the same problematic issues of JNC by implication wanting to move to more intergovernmental and state based policy fora.
	But it is appreciated that JNC is happy with the status quo of civil society participation in policy issues, and does not specifically desire to remove civil society from policy discussion beyond the community level. .
Would the JNC then agree, or disagree, with the NetMundial Principles statement that:
The respective roles and responsibilities of stakeholders should be interpreted in a flexible manner with reference to the issue under discussion
	which would imply that public policy in general would be a matter of state sovereign authority only for some issues?

	Regards

		David


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