[IP] from icannwatch -- UN/ITU vs. ICANN
http://icannwatch.com/print.pl?sid=04/02/29/1711228
ITU Workshop: ICANN's "we don't do governance" line falls flat
Date: Sunday February 29 2004, @07:01AM
Topic:
<http://icannwatch.com/print.pl?sid=04/02/29///www.icannwatch.org/search.pl?topic=28>ITU
February 27 might be marked as the date ICANN officially lost control of
public discourse on Internet governance. On those dates an
<http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/forum/intgov04/>ITU workshop brought the
Internet folks (root server operators, RIRs, ICANN staff, ISOC, W3C, former
ICANN Board members, ccTLD representatives and Robert Kahn), and the
academic policy analysts following WSIS and Internet governance into direct
contact with the traditionalist national government representatives of
China, Brazil, and Syria and some of the political leaders of the WSIS
process, notably Swiss "e-Envoy"
<http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/forum/intgov04/bios/kummer-bio.html>Markus
Kummer.*
If the workshop had any lasting effect, it was to lay to rest the ICANN-
promulgated myth that the Internet is currently free of governance and thus
any discussion of it needs to be avoided or short-circuited.
As <http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/forum/intgov04/contributions.html>speaker
after speaker called attention to the policy implications not only of the
ICANN regime but also of several other Internet-related international rules
(e.g., Council of Europe Cybercrime Treaty), it became clear that the
intergovernmental system is not going to obligingly go away if ignored.
Participants largely dismissed ICANNs (now halfheartedly made) claim that
it only does technical coordination, and directly confronted the issue of
how technical issues and policy issues can be interrelated. The eerie
coincidence of the VeriSign lawsuit only reinforced the point. ICANN is now
legally and officially accused of being a rogue economic regulator.
Politically, the meeting reinforced the momentum created by the World
Summit on the Information Society, which succeeded in inserting
"traditional" intergovernmental institutions back into the Internet
governance debate. It did this by coopting an energized civil society, a
nontraditional factor in the international system. WSIS attracted hundreds
of active NGOs and freelance communication-information policy activists,
many of them, like Izumi Aizu, people who had become active first around
ICANN. These actors seem to feel that they are getting more political
traction through their WSIS related activities than through participating
in ICANN. (My cynical take on this is that many cyber-activists prefer the
WSIS and ITU forums because they can talk about euphonious terms like
"participation" or "the peer production of governance" and avoid the tough,
tedious, mud-wrestles over policy that happen when they actually are
included as participants.)
ITU staff members Richard Hill and Robert Shaw successfully courted civil
society participants by giving them a platform and showing that, if nothing
else, the ITU can give them access to governments and IGOs and treat them
as equals. More broadly, ITU showed that it can succeed in bringing
together parties that normally talk past each other for a dialogue. Serious
questions can still be raised about the superiority of the
intergovernmental system over the ICANN-self governance regime, however.
This type of workshop is not typical of how governments make real treaties
or policy decisions. And as the interventions of the Chinese delegate
proved, many governments still don't welcome civil society participation.
China, (apparently disturbed by a snowballing discussion of "netizens" and
online democracy) opposed allowing any of the workshop materials to be
included in the official report, seeing it as merely an information session
that could be utilized (or not) in a future meeting of member states.
Interestingly, some European governments, notably the Danish, took the same
line, although for different reasons (they want EU, not ITU, to take the
lead).
The ITU is now rather overtly positioning itself to inherit or take control
of certain Internet governance functions that seem to require multilateral
agreements among governments. However, this positioning is coming more from
corridor discussions and over-beer ruminations - there was no discernable
manipulation of the program (indeed, the author of this piece complained to
Shaw and Hill that the ICANN panel contained only pro-ICANN speakers).
*Kummer surprised many in the audience when he noted that he had been
approached about chairing the yet-to-be-created UN Working Group on
Internet Governance.
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