[WSIS CS-Plenary] Re: IGP: Internet Governance Forum Takes Shape

[David Allen]

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Definite thanks to IGP for the wrapup on consultations.

Below, comment on one element:

At 10:48 AM -0500 2/21/06, Milton Mueller wrote:
>Internet Governance Forum Takes Shape After Geneva Consultations
>...
>
>... business and Western governments urged the IGF to avoid anything 
>controversial or anything that intersected with the activities of 
>existing international organizations. They tended to favor spam and 
>cybercrime as focal topics. ... It became apparent that efforts by 
>the EU and Australia to keep the IGF away from those topics was 
>motivated by their attempt to resolve the unfinished WSIS business 
>by means of private, bilateral, government-to- government 
>negotiations with the United States. ... if the truly important and 
>controversial issues were removed from the Forum ...

On one side - Steps to prosecute the 'unfinished WSIS business' 
through bilateral negotiations and not via IGF, if not surprising, 
are important to be brought out into the public air.

On the other - Some, if not a lot, of the search for less incendiary 
lead-off topics/themes appeared to follow a different motivation, to 
wit:  Since the whole process has been born fraught, so that 
prospects depend on some care in design, let's start where there may 
be at least a little possibility for commonalities.  Then, with any 
success and some practice with new protocols, perhaps we can progress 
to the dicier stuff.

That strikes me anyway as having some merit.  But - It seems that any 
theme/s selected will prove, like it or not, a vehicle to bring the 
root conflict back into play.  Indeed, comments even in the 
consultation time and again put the same old struggle on the table - 
it was business as usual.  (Nor, likely, was anyone much surprised.)

In a frame, posted in my contribution at 
<http://intgovforum.org/contributions.htm>IntGovForum, there is 
reason to see how most of the themes we might suggest - regardless of 
whether benign - will indeed carry on the 'unfinished WSIS business.'

Only one example is Multilingualism, at least if that is defined as 
ML.ML in the browser address bar.  A particularly hot potato at the 
moment, ICANN is most belatedly headed in one direction, while 
several significant language groups with non-Roman scripts are firmly 
underway with alternate roots and a quite large swath of users, 
already.  The mooted balkanization.  Here is a topic (really most 
pressing - 5 billion users at stake) seemingly without the fireworks 
attached - but actually it is the old, unfinished business.

And actually, isn't that just what we want?  A topic with bite and 
global impact, where so far there have been few pyrotechnics - but 
where we can indeed carry on the unfinished work.  Why else go to all 
the trouble, unless we can actually get on with what has lain 
unresolved for at least (a lot more than) five years ... ?

But - To do so surely means getting at the underlying differences in 
approach; let's call them underlying frameworks, almost always 
unstated but also utterly determinative.  That is what, so far, by 
and large, has not happened.  Now is our chance.

In this regard, Bill Drake suggested cross-cutting topics as one good 
bet.  I for one would benefit from learning more of what Bill sees to 
define 'cross-cutting.'  Of course my  hope is that such might be 
opportunity to bring unstated assumptions to the surface, the ones 
that keep us apart.  That is where we must concentrate our work, if 
we have a hope actually to see results.

Only when we are brave enough to get at the deep assumptions that 
separate us, then will we have the chance to cobble together more 
explicit, practical bridges.  IMHO.

David
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