Response from Philip Sheppard

[Norbert Klein]

Norbert,

thank you very much for taking the trouble to give me some background on
your own activities and give me the chance to comment on the issue you
raise. I'm happy for you to communicate my reply more widely.

Its good sometimes to be reminded of the real-world challenges of the
digital divide and to hear from someone who is actually doing something
about it. My own time spent in the Middle East for some years gave me the
chance to travel to some areas of the Middle East beyond the relatively
wealthy Gulf Region, and to travel quite widely in the Far East, so I
understand exactly what you are saying. Your own treatement at WSIS seems
extraordinary - what was WSIS if not a forum to discuss such issues?


You are right of course that ICANN's mandate is indeed narrower than the
issues surrounding the digital divide. Even the intellectual property
issues you raise of open source software and copyright are also outside of
the intellectual property concerns most often raised within ICANN being
those of trade mark issues.

My personal belief is that on a number of issues such as music and video
the old industry has missed the opportunities that the Internet offered.
It cut across the old geographically-controlled distribution system of
physical objects (LPs, CDs, DVDs) and left an industry defending what
technology was rapidly making indefensible. Why today the major record
companies and the major film producers do not have absolutely huge
websites offering competitively-priced downloads of all their current
recordings and their huge historical archives, I find extraordinary.

I suspect the cost of Microsoft software today is a function of the market
power of the company and its policy of building in peripheral add-ons. How
many of the functions of Office does the average user use daily? So long
as suppliers fail to offer lower income countries alternatives that meet
the basic technical standard needed at an affordable price, software
counterfeiting will prevail. This is a double pity as counterfeiters in
general are neither model employers, nor do they pay government taxes!
Better the legal market offered products at a price the user could afford.

The Open Source movement is in part a response to a market need (read
poverty)and a belief that computing is too important to be left to a
dominant supplier.

I also believe that the Internet is too important to be left to a dominant
supplier - hence my priority on registry-level competition expressed in my
candidate statement.

I'd be happy to discuss these issues further when we next meet.
My best regards,
Philip

=

> Dear Phillipp,
>
> I am sorry, I had planned to write to you much earlier.
>
> Thanks for your mail ? I had also read your statement before the first
> round of the election, and I had intended to write at that time, because
> of what you said about fairness. This is, of course a very wide field.
>
> I would like to introduce myself a little bit more ? though we met often
> over the years, I am not sure if I ever shared with you where I came
> from when going to an ICANN meeting. I started the first connection to
> the Internet from Cambodia in 1994 ? from a dial-up system I created on
> a notebook, US$ 5.- per minute on a slow slow slow connection to San
> Francisco, and for three years I was the only provider in Cambodia,
> having about 1500 users by the time the first two big commercial ISPs
> were set up. - I am employed by a Cambodian NGO ? the Open Forum of
> Cambodia ? committed to facilitate and to foster communication in
> Cambodian society, not only by electronic means, though these were
> important to help break the decades of international isolation of the
> country ? self imposed or enforced from the outside, as times changed.
>
> Having done some ?pioneering? things in Cambodia, I was invited to join
> the non-commercial constituency of ICANN since 1999, and whenever I
> could find sponsorship I participated ? later as an elected member of
> the Executive Committee of NCUC (and its predecessor) and from there
> sent into the GNSO Council.
>
> Considering your candidacy for the ICANN Board, I do not want to ask
> some of the standard policy questions, but I would rather like to ask to
> kindly send some comments back about an experience I had recently. If
> you find the time to respond, however briefly or more in detail, I would
> like to ask for your understanding that I would like to share your
> response with the members of the NCUC. My experience relates to one
> concern of the NCUC ? how to maintain and possibly extend the field for
> open and unhindered communication. Many people living in more advanced
> economies think that communication is often in danger of being
> controlled politically (which can also happen); here it is restricted by
> our economic environment ? a high-school teacher gets about US$ 35 a
> month (thirty five ? I did not forget a zero).
>
> =
>
> I did participate in the two UN Summits for the Information Society, and
> also in some of the preparatory meetings for both. You know that they
> had been set up, by a resolution of the UN General Assembly, as
> ?multi-stakeholder? processes: for governments, inter-governmental
> agencies, business, and civil society.
>
> During the last preparatory conference for WSIS 2 in Tunis, in Geneva in
> October 2005, there were many smaller working groups feeding into the
> plenaries, and one was on Cultural Identity, chaired by an ambassador
> from Egypt. After all the nice things were said which Geneva WSIS 2003
> had beautifully formulated in the first paragraph of the Declaration of
> Principles, comments were invited about ?success stories? - how this
> really works.
>
> I offered to speak, the chair recognized me, I identified myself with my
> background in an NGO, and then I shared what we are doing ? after
> waiting in vain for years that the promises of a certain well known
> software company to make their OS and their main applications available
> in the Khmer language and script would come true. (I had been involved
> in finalizing the UNICODE standard for the Khmer script until mid 2002 ?
> and since January 2003 we had to readjust our expectations to July, and
> then to the next year, and so on ? until today: nothing.)
>
> So I shared that our organization had started to develop free Open
> Source software in the Cambodian language, based on the UNICODE standard
> ? we have now a browser, a mailer, the whole Open Office 2.0 suite, and
> a number of utilities. As the name says: Open Source software allows
> access to the source, and therefore the process of ?localization? - to
> change the user interface into another language, and to allow the system
> to handle a different script - is possible and legal. The National
> Information Technology Authority of the Cambodian government picked up
> our drive and is promoting it, the Ministry of Education got involved,
> ((by now we have trained 400 trainers)) and what we do is opening up the
> possibility for thousands of people who do not speak a foreign language
> to learn how to use a computer ? and to use it at the place of work ? in
> their own language, and without having to pay one full year's salary for
> the equipment of a computer with legal software according to the
> standard prices.
>
> While I spoke, a person in the room went up to the chair, I was asked to
> identify myself again. On the strong insistence of the intervener (I
> could not identify her institutionally, but I was told that this person
> was from the official US delegation), I was requested to leave the room
> - and I was told that my inference that Open Source software is more
> suited than commercial software for localization is wrong,
> discriminatory, and not acceptable.
>
> So much for the ?level playing field? in overcoming the digital divide.
>
> The gap is at present actually not so big, as almost all software,
> whatever is on a disk, is freely available on CDs for US$2 a piece ? but
> since Cambodia became a member of the WTO, there is a growing threat
> that ?piracy? will not be tolerated in future. But if this should
> happen, probably computerization in the field of education will come to
> a grinding halt for economic reasons (unless Open Source software is
> made the regular choice in procurement).
>
> Pirates ? as we know them from the movies ? are prepared to kill to
> achieve their goals. We know about piracy not only from the movies, but
> it happens also occasionally that a small cargo ship from Singapore does
> no longer carry what they loaded before entering the Mekong River in
> Vietnam and come upstream to Cambodia. I cannot explain to Cambodian
> friends why it is compared to a crime of brutal violence, when knowledge
> is shared.
>
> I know all ? OK, surely not all - the legal answers given by the IP and
> business representatives. I live and work with other people who do
> neither know much about these legalities, and who have difficulty to
> follow, when one explains. But they are more and more part of the same
> global information society, for which the WSIS meetings were held, and
> for which ICANN tries to provide a service in a limited field.
>
> I would appreciate some comments back which go beyond a narrowly defined
> ICANN mandate.
>
> Thanks for your attention ? if you read through my somewhat lengthy
> letter.
>
> And see you in Marrakesh.
>
>
> Norbert