[governance] Substance: What issues should the WGIG focus on?

[Milton Mueller]

>>> "William Drake" <wdrake at ictsd.ch> 9/5/2004 12:23:56 AM >>>
>Can we identify five to seven leading issues and recommendations
>that we think are the most pressing with regard to IG?  These can
>be either individual issue-areas (e.g. management of identifiers is
>obviously one of them) or cross-cutting meta-level problems.

Our forthcoming report will clarify many of these issues.
We (the Internet Governance Project) will be able to release
it in a few days. At the moment we are still subject to a
vetting process. Unfortunately, some of the actors are playing
games, either strategically refusing to comment or commenting
privately but telling us that they are officially "not commenting"
(but still giving us some valuable insight into what they think).

Nevertheless, I can identify several areas that I think will
prove to be strategic:

1. Relationship of Intellectual Property Protection to
Free Expression and Privacy.
I believe that certain international organizations and
perhaps some business interests will attempt to claim
that IPR is off the table, and that it has nothing to do
with Internet governance. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The Internet has forced a complete
revision of global copyright and trademark agreements
In a variety of venues, including
WIPO and ICANN, we see IPR protection issues
coming into direct contact with free expression and
privacy norms and even some scientific inquiry norms.
These issues should not be worked out exclusively
in arenas such as WIPO, which are historically mandated
to serve IPR interests and see IP owners as their
constituency.

2. ICANN's status as a non-state actor.
This is a tricky one. ICANN is under attack on three fronts,
1) its basis in US Govt/law 2) its non-governmental nature
3) the degree to which it does "policy" as opposed to
"technical management" (which may be just an extension of
issue 2). There is no doubt that specific governments intend
to make an issue of this, and there is still the possibility that
it will overwhelm everything else. Imho, we need to defend
the multi-stakeholder, non-state governance of the regime
against the possibility that it will become more governmental
and regulatory, while recognizing (critically) that ICANN *does*
do policy and supporting efforts to find a model that
does not rely on US govt contracting. There are some even
deeper issues regarding the use of contracting as a global
governance mechanism, too much to go into here.

3. Relationship between security/surveillance on the
Internet and civil liberties.
Here again, the narrow, issue-specific regimes focused
on attacking terrorism/crime tend to override other legitimate
concerns. We could promote a broadened dialogue
that forces Internet surveillance and security measures to be
respectful of human rights in a globally uniform way.

4. Right to internetwork globally
The most fundamental issue is the hardest to convey.
Territorial governments must formally recognize and
explicitly accept the non-territorial nature of IP networking
and the Internet's architecture. No serious agreements about
Internet governance in any given area can be made until that
issue is dealt with. Either the potential of global networking
is accepted as a factual starting point, or governance
gravitates toward chopping it up into territorially-controlled
architectures and resource allocation procedures (thus
destroying much of the value of the Internet). It may be
too much to ask territorial governments to accept the
reality and salience of nonterritorial interconnection, but
that is really the choice they are faced with.

--MM