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

[William Drake]

Hi

On Oct 1, 2009, at 7:21 AM, David Cake wrote:

> At 11:31 AM +0900 1/10/09, Adam Peake wrote:
>>> From: Denise Michel <denise.michel at icann.org>
>>> To: Cheryl Langdon-Orr <cheryl at hovtek.com.au>,
>>> 	At-Large Worldwide <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
>>> Subject: [At-Large] Fwd: Board appointments to fill 3 non- 
>>> commercial seats
>>> 	on the new Council
>>>
>>> Dear Community Members,
>>>
>>> The Board has appointed the following individuals to serve as Non- 
>>> Commercial
>>> Stakeholder Group (NCSG) representatives on the new GNSO Council:
>>>
>>> Mohammed Rafik Dammak - Tunisia
>>> Rosemary Sinclair - Australia
>>> Debra Hughes - United States
>
> 	It is my recollection that Rosemary was at the NCUC meeting in  
> Sydney, and seemed very sympathetic to NCUC at the time. While I  
> would assume she has been lobbied by Consumer Constituency folk, it  
> is my hope that she will be sympathetic to NCUC arguments.

Hope so too.  I suppose it may depend on the argument we're making...?

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