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

[Harold Feld]

Allow me to suggest an addition:

5. Access to number space in a manner that fosters non-commercial access
and is competitively neutral.

Harold Feld

At 11:38 AM 9/5/2004, Milton Mueller wrote:
> >>> "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