7th Unofficial personal report of Internet Governance working group, PrepCom III, WSIS (fwd)

[Chun Eung Hwi]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 23:11:12 +0900 (KST)
From: Chun Eung Hwi <chun at peacenet.or.kr>
To: plenary at wsis-cs.org, ct at wsis-cs.org
Subject: 7th Unofficial personal report of Internet Governance working group,
     PrepCom III, WSIS

Yesterday, Izumi Aizu sent out one short report regarding Internet
Governance working group. For the sake of avoiding duplication, I did not
write my report. The action items newly proposed by Chair, which was
referred to Izumi san's report, had got different responses. The U.S,
Canada, and EU were opposed to that. And even Brazil also opposed to the
newly proposed action item because they wanted to work on the already
written text on the Action Plan document. Today, the Chair's proposal was
not discussed. Most delegation seems to oppose to deal with that proposal.

As usual, civil society members and non-governmental participants all were
kicked off from the meeting place. Short speech were given by Izumi and
Wolfgang. Izumi mentioned that the rules of procedure is confusing because
yesterday they could be in and that in last intersessional meeting, the
presence and contribution given by civil society members were beneficial.
Wolfgang also emphasized that the presence of civil society members
depends on each meeting and remarked that multistakeholder including civil
society should be involved in internet governance related policy making
process at all level from global regional to national level. There was
some ping-pong talks among governments whether observers would be allowed
to be in, but Chair finally requested observers to leave out. After almost
one hour, I came back to the meeting room and confirmed what happened.

What I could confirm is that there was no change of the deadlock among
countries, but the U.S delegation proposed new action item for action plan
document as follows.

-       A private sector led body should undertake the international
management of the Internet with governments serving in an advisory
capacity with respect to limited public policy issues.
-       The policy making processes for both the technical and public
policy aspects of Internet governance should be open and transparent,
developed through a bottom up policy making process which takes full
account of the needs and views of the global Internet community.
-       Government cooperation and coordination with respect to the
international Internet related public policy issues should be done on an
ad hoc basis and not through the current intergovernmental structure of
the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The first sentence implies the Government Advisory Committee of ICANN. And
the second sentence is one principle of ICANN policy making. The most
impressive sentence is third one. It explicitly says No to ITU regarding
any public policy setting role concerned with Internet. My impression is
that this is not a proposal but a "counter punch".

I was told that the U.S. wanted all internet governance related action
items would be taken out if it could not reach any consensus. And some
other countries proposed to leave those phrases as square bracketed. But
China strongly stick to their position that all those phrases should be
discussed and concluded here and if it is postponed, developing countries
should be in bad situation during the postponed term. The above U.S.
proposal was brought in after such a remark of Chinese delegation. The
whole impression what happened behind the curtain is that the emotional
tension is much more deepening.


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Chun Eung Hwi
General Secretary, PeaceNet | phone:     (+82)  2-2166-2205
Seoul Yangchun P.O.Box 81   |   pcs:     (+82) 019-259-2667
Seoul, 158-600, Korea       | eMail:   chun at peacenet.or.kr
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