[WSIS CS-Plenary] [governance] Post mortem and next steps on IG

[Jeanette Hofmann]

William Drake wrote:
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> Hi v,
> 

>>For example: why don't we formally put together a "civil society
>>delegation", composed by a few people (3-5) entrusted by this Plenary,
>>and send a letter to Karklins saying that we would like such delegation
>>to be formally included in the open ended negotiations? After all, the

If they are open ended, every government can attend. Why would we want 
to limit ourselves to a few people?
> 
> 
> You're welcome to try, but it won't work.  Karklins and all others are
> undoubtedly fully aware that we are deeply unhappy with the approach taken,
> and they have taken it anyway.  I would think that decision is final.

It might still be worth to express our opinion on this issue.
> 
> 
>>I am pissed up by the fact that our contributions are not included in
>>the compilation of proposals. I am wondering whether we should not
>>produce (in a few days!) our version of section 5, i.e. actual language,
>>and submit it to Khan and Karklins, asking for it to be included in the
>>proposals transmitted to the resumed session. At least, we could reuse
>>that language for the (now apparently likely) CS declaration :-)
> 
> 
> I remain skeptical that we could come quickly to a shared position in the
> caucus, much less CS more generally, on the oversight question due to
> varying views on the proper roles of governments. 

I agree with Victorio. As far as our diverging positions are concerned, 
we just do it like the governments. We become vague or refer to general 
principles were we disagree. I think the one aspect we probably all 
subscribe to in the context of political oversight is the need of 
accountability. Who or whatever will be in charge of names and numbers 
should be embedded in in some form of check and balances. What we 
disagree about is how tight this structure should be and whether or not 
governments should play a role in it. Would you agree?


[...]

>>Of course, I can't tell you about the internal dynamics of the EU, but
>>it is definitely surprising that the representatives of some governments
>>that generally have a pro-deregulation and even pro-US foreign policy
>>were among the strongest supporters of not moving towards the US. 

The Internet Governance caucus had a short meeting with the EU Troika to 
discuss the EU proposal. Towards the end we discussed two options of 
moving forward from the present unilateral regime. Control by one 
government could be replaced by a many-governments model or by a private 
non-governments model. When we asked Martin Boyle from the UK about the 
reasons why the EU chose the first, he asked back: Do you REALLY believe 
it would be possible to run the Internet without any government 
involvement? (this is non verbatim, I don't recall his exact words) I 
left this meeting with the impression that the EU is much more serious 
about their proposal than I thought. This was more than a mere strategic 
intervention as some of us suggested.


This
>>might be due to the fact that not all EU countries had Foreign Ministry
>>officers participating in the discussion - actually many of them have
>>delegations composed of relatively technical people. So if the level of

My impression was that the larger countries had people from at least two 
ministries in the delegation. Plus there are always non technical 
mission people involved.
> 
> 
> I do think there was a principles and agents problem going on with the
> delegations, which is part of why I expect some backtracking. 
But again,
> it's remarkable to think that after years of preparation, any EU government
> representatives could have been operating under less than crystal clear
> instructions from their capitals and ended up joining in on a position that
> went notably beyond their previous pronouncements.

At least in Germany, there is nobody above the members of the delegation
who would instruct them. Internet Governance used to be a rather 
irrelevant policy field that didn't get much attention outside the 
ministerial units directly involved.
 From what I heard the EU has at present no intention to change its 
proposal. This could well change of course :-)
jeanette

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