from icannwatch -- UN/ITU vs. ICANN

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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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