[WSIS CS-Plenary] FW: ITU IG meeting next week

[William Drake]

Perhaps of interest to someone outside the IG caucus...

-----Original Message-----
From: William Drake [mailto:wdrake at ictsd.ch]
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 1:22 PM
To: Governance
Subject: ITU IG meeting next week


Hi,

Since there has been some concern expressed about who is the ITU inviting, what's the hidden agenda, etc., people might be interested to know that in fact this all appears to be pretty loose.  Indeed, I got a call last week from ITU saying who are these people who've asked for invitations as experts (ITU says most approached them about participating, rather than the reverse), how do we use them, and what makes sense as an agenda?  So I spent a day over there with staff and a Swiss government rep helping with planning and really, if there is a hidden agenda beyond the obvious fact that there are ITU parties that generally would like to see ITU play more of a role, it sure wasn't obvious.  Utsumi told them to organize a meeting so they were rushing to do so with the relevant staff heading out of town and members being slow to reply to the invite.  Notably, at least at that point, most of the confirmed government representatives seemed to be people popping over from the Geneva missions, rather senior decision makers from national capitals---perhaps an indication of the significance they attach to this event, in contrast to say this summer's Council meeting.  Of course, this could change and maybe the concerned parties will try to organize a real full court press, but it's not obvious when over the two days this would happen and what it could entail.  If you look at the agenda that has just been posted,  http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/forum/intgov04/agenda.html, it's just one panel of speakers after another and then we're done---an ITU workshop, not a negotiation, just like the one I'm attending here today on spectrum management.  Also, it's worth underscoring that all of the CS IG caucus members in attendance now have speaking roles, so while we don't have a designated caucus rep speaking as such, we can hardly say that the sort of views held in this group will not be represented.

In sum, it's good that we'll be able to weigh in on the discussions, but in the end this seems unlikely to be of intergalactic importance.  Maybe some member reps will come away with different understandings of Internet governance, maybe they won't, but they will not be in a position under the ITU treaties to make any important decisions in either case.

Best,

Bill

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William J. Drake
Geneva, Switzerland

wdrake at ictsd.ch 

http://www.citi.columbia.edu/affiliates/wdrake.htm 

Director, Project on the Information Revolution

  and Global Governance

Senior Associate, International Centre for Trade

  and Sustainable Development www.ictsd.org  



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