[WSIS CS-Plenary] 7th Unofficial personal report of Internet Governance working group, PrepCom III, WSIS

[Chun Eung Hwi]

Yesterday, Izumi Aizu sent out one short report regarding Internet 
Governance working group. For the sake of avoiding duplication, I did not 
write my report. The action items newly proposed by Chair, which was 
referred to Izumi san's report, had got different responses. The U.S, 
Canada, and EU were opposed to that. And even Brazil also opposed to the 
newly proposed action item because they wanted to work on the already 
written text on the Action Plan document. Today, the Chair's proposal was 
not discussed. Most delegation seems to oppose to deal with that proposal.

As usual, civil society members and non-governmental participants all were 
kicked off from the meeting place. Short speech were given by Izumi and 
Wolfgang. Izumi mentioned that the rules of procedure is confusing because 
yesterday they could be in and that in last intersessional meeting, the 
presence and contribution given by civil society members were beneficial. 
Wolfgang also emphasized that the presence of civil society members 
depends on each meeting and remarked that multistakeholder including civil 
society should be involved in internet governance related policy making 
process at all level from global regional to national level. There was 
some ping-pong talks among governments whether observers would be allowed 
to be in, but Chair finally requested observers to leave out. After almost 
one hour, I came back to the meeting room and confirmed what happened. 

What I could confirm is that there was no change of the deadlock among 
countries, but the U.S delegation proposed new action item for action plan 
document as follows.

-	A private sector led body should undertake the international 
management of the Internet with governments serving in an advisory 
capacity with respect to limited public policy issues.
-	The policy making processes for both the technical and public 
policy aspects of Internet governance should be open and transparent, 
developed through a bottom up policy making process which takes full 
account of the needs and views of the global Internet community.
-	Government cooperation and coordination with respect to the 
international Internet related public policy issues should be done on an 
ad hoc basis and not through the current intergovernmental structure of 
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The first sentence implies the Government Advisory Committee of ICANN. And 
the second sentence is one principle of ICANN policy making. The most 
impressive sentence is third one. It explicitly says No to ITU regarding 
any public policy setting role concerned with Internet. My impression is 
that this is not a proposal but a "counter punch". 

I was told that the U.S. wanted all internet governance related action 
items would be taken out if it could not reach any consensus. And some 
other countries proposed to leave those phrases as square bracketed. But 
China strongly stick to their position that all those phrases should be 
discussed and concluded here and if it is postponed, developing countries 
should be in bad situation during the postponed term. The above U.S. 
proposal was brought in after such a remark of Chinese delegation. The 
whole impression what happened behind the curtain is that the emotional 
tension is much more deepening.


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Chun Eung Hwi
General Secretary, PeaceNet | phone:     (+82)  2-2166-2205
Seoul Yangchun P.O.Box 81   |   pcs:     (+82) 019-259-2667
Seoul, 158-600, Korea  	    | eMail:   chun at peacenet.or.kr
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