[WSIS CS-Plenary] Considerations after the UN ICT TF global forum

[Vittorio Bertola]

I'm posting to the plenary list some comments that I made in the Public
Voice meeting a few hours ago, because I think they are important for all of
us.

These two days of meeting at the UN have marked some progress towards a true
multistakeholder approach, as finally all people from all stakeholder groups
were in the same room and were talking each to the other. The breakout
sessions were actually quite productive, given the small number of
participants in each of them.

However, I'd point out two major problems in what happened.

First, we did not have any substantive discussion on implementation of
general principles and on specific steps forward, such as the composition
and operating ways of the UN working group on Internet Governance. We
discussed plenty of principles and issues, flying from here to there, but in
the end I feel no practical advance was made; and I wouldn't like having
come here and lost a week of my time, just to discover that someone else
will decide these fundamental practical points in a closed room without
actually listening to us.

Second, it is true that this meeting has marked a progress in terms of
cooperation among stakeholders, but still we have significant problems.
There were some civil society people with reserved seats in the first rows
of the room and printed names, and with speaking slots and moderating roles
in sessions, and others (including myself) who submitted their name two or
three times for the speaking list, and were never given the floor.
Apparently, the Chairman of the session was picking who would speak and who
would not, regardless of the order of submission of the names - and of
course tended to reserve speaking slots for governments.

Fortunately, the civil society people who had a chance to talk were good
guys - this is not against them, and actually I feel that the distinction
between the two categories of civil society people was mostly done at random
- but I don't think we can accept a process where we cannot speak freely,
select our speakers, or make our points when we need to.

On the other hand, we now have a window of opportunity. Nobody in the
governmental environment seems to be sure about how to proceed, and the
responsibility to set up this working group is being dumped from one person
to another. Now, according to what we heard, Mr. Annan has appointed Mr.
Kummer as the head secretariat of the working group, and has asked him to
prepare a proposal for its composition and operation.

I think we should exploit this chance to come up with an unitary and widely
supported proposal on this, that ensures openness and transparency for all
the future working group process.

For example, I would stress the need to allow meetings to be webcast over
the Internet, and to allow people to comment and interact by e-mail, and to
have periods for public review and comment over all draft documents before
they become final. Of course I don't believe we will actually get to the
point of webcasting the closed door final negotiations among governments :)
but still there's much to be done in this field, and we should push for it.

And I would stress that there should be balanced civil society
representation in this working group, and that we should be allowed to
select it freely - or at least to present lists of suggested names.

I think it would be a big mistake if this process was to set rules to govern
the Internet, without giving the actual people who use the Internet every
day, all around the world, a reasonable chance at least to raise their
objections.

Finally, I think we should understand whether we want to push for this
working group to be narrowly focused (i.e., ICANN only) or broadly focused
(i.e. also other themes such as e-commerce, spam, privacy, free speech,
intellectual property over the Internet). Personally, I'd recommend to push
for this broader set of themes to be discussed - they are much more
important to the actual average Internet user than the legitimacy of ICANN. 

Possibly, we could suggest having a top-level coordinating group and then
one lower-level working group of experts per each specific issue - which
would allow to broaden the range of issues without risking to make the
overall process too wide and ineffective.

What do you think? Perhaps some of us could draft a document to be then sent
to Mr. Annan and Mr. Kummer.
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
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