[At-Large] Fwd: Board appointments to fill 3 non-commercial seats on the new Council

[Milton L Mueller]

Well done, Bill. I had not seen your message before writing my previous message on this topic. 
I was under the impression that the appointee was from the Australian TUG, not INTUG, but now you say it is both, so I assume you are correct. Again, no animosity toward Sinclair, and in fact I blieve that INTUG often played a very progressive role in the 80s telecom liberalization debates, but this is NOT a representative of noncommercial interests. 

> In the event anyone's not familiar, a wee bit of background on the  
> group of which she is the Chair of the Board, the International  
> Telecommunications Users Group.  INTUG was established by a bunch of  
> large transnational corporations back in 1974 to advocate the  
> liberalization of global telecom markets.  They were, in effect, a  
> sort of issue-specific International Chamber of Commerce.  In 
> parallel  
> with other big business associations, they lobbied 
> governments at both  
> the national and multilateral level; I dealt with some of 
> their folks  
> in the 80s to mid-90s in the ITU context, and still have some of the  
> docs they submitted to ITU and OECD from those days.  They were  
> especially active in advocating the loosening of regulations on the  
> international private leased circuits used by financial and other  
> corporate users to construct closed private networks 
> bypassing public  
> switched networks for global voice and data transmission (pre- 
> commercial Internet), but also pushed for the reduction of  
> international calling rates (fixed and mobile) under the accounting  
> and settlements system.   Thereafter, if I recall correctly, 
> a lot of  
> their early members bled off into other industry lobbying 
> groups;  the  
> current membership http://intug.org/members/our-members/ seems to  
> comprise national associations, some of which are not entirely big  
> business, e.g. the membership of ATUG (which she also heads)   
> "consists of 1/3 from the Top 1000 trading companies in 
> Australia, 1/3  
> from the Small to Medium Enterprise sector and 1/3 coming from small  
> business, consultants, educational organisations such as TAFE and  
> local government."
> 
> In the Internet era INTUG's been less visible (at least to me)  
> relative to other industry lobbying groups so I'm not aware of its  
> positions on most ICANN issues, but it's a founding member of the  
> Alliance for Global Business, which has taken stands on some 
> relevant  
> topics.  For example, you can read the AGB's Global Action Plan for  
> Electronic Business here 
> http://www.witsa.org/papers/3rdEd-GlobalActionPlan.pdf 
> .  Some quotes of interest:
> 
> *WTO members should recognize that specific WTO agreements governing  
> trade in goods, trade in services, or trade-related intellectual  
> property apply to electronic transmissions...Business will work to  
> encourage all countries to implement effectively the TRIPS 
> agreement.   
> Business will also continue to develop and deploy technologies that  
> prevent IP infringements in the online environment.
> 
> *Business should have a significant role in the formation of policy  
> for technical management of the domain name system and the 
> development  
> of policy. Through the various Supporting Organizations of the  
> Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and in  
> particular the Business Constituency of the Domain Name Supporting  
> Organization (DNSO), business will continue to work to ensure  
> continued stability and security of the Internet, as well as  
> appropriate protection of intellectual property. The protection of  
> intellectual property (especially famous names) and efficient 
> ways of  
> dealing with cybersquatting remain priority issues for business.
> 
> *Governments should recognize that the Internet is a new medium  
> providing new opportunities and challenges. Existing regulatory  
> systems must provide consumers with useful protection of their  
> personal data and at the same time guarantee the free flow of  
> information needed for the information society to produce the  
> anticipated benefits. Governments should also recognize that self  
> regulation may be a more flexible method of achieving data 
> protection  
> than government regulation. To that end, governments should: * work  
> with the private sector to adopt interpretation of existing 
> regulatory  
> solutions based on the criteria in the paragraph above; * recognize  
> the validity and adequacy of effective selfregulation 
> augmented by the  
> use of privacy-enhancing technologies; and * educate the 
> public to use  
> such privacy-enhancing technologies properly.
> 
> And so on...
> 
> I look forward to working on issues of common concern with the INTUG  
> Chair and the other board appointees in the new SG for noncommercial  
> users.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Bill
>