Milton Mueller opened the second session on "'Enhanced Cooperation' and Interaction among Stakeholders in Internet Governance", and spoke about the significance of the topic. ICANN, he said, is not as central to Internet governance as people assume. Many policy issues are more important than DNS, which may include copyright, access costs, and so on. But ICANN oversight has become central because it raises a clear need of global coordination, and because rather uniquely, policy authority was delegated to a non-state actor which derived its legitimacy from its bottom-up representation of stakeholder groups (with the USA retaining unilateral oversight authority).

ICANN answers the problem of global governance in one way, but there are three alternative models. A unilateral sovereign is one, another is a multilateral agreement, and the third is a non-sovereignty based solution. The problem is, nobody seems to like any of the three options. During WSIS, the EU tried to come up with a middle ground called "Enhanced Cooperation" which would set a new division of labour between states and non-state actors. The US effectively blocked this proposal, yet the EU and US both claimed victory. In any case, there is a need for globally applicable principles on public policy issues to be developed with respect to critical Internet resources.

Bernard Benhamou from the National Foundation of Political Science in France began his presentation by saying the Tunis Agenda was framed broadly in terms of the "new model of cooperation" put forward by the EU in September. Three principles that had long been agreed by the Internet community but which had never been endorsed by governments were intrinsic to that model: interoperability, openness and neutrality (the end to end principle). One EU country has since explicitly endorsed these; the Dutch parliament which passed a resolution unanimously affirming them a few days ago.

Bernard said that it is important in governance of the Internet to heed these principles because the Internet was founded on them, and the Internet could yet be destroyed from within if they are foresaken. The Dutch parliament's action is an example of self-restraint on tha part of governments, with the good of the Internet as its justification. This will become increasingly important as the Internet mutates into another kind of network connecting not just computers, but other objects, using RFID tags. This ONS (Object Naming Service) will in the future connect not only bar coded objects, but also potentially people through their passports, to the Internet via the DNS system. This prospect only highlights the importance of the three principles mentioned above.

I then spoke on "'The Sovereign Right of States': Why Multi-Stakeholder Policy Development is Possible and Necessary". I said that the received wisdom was that the IGF was a forum within which for governments to consult with stakeholders, and that it was not possible for it to have a deliberative capacity by reason that it did not have a defined membership. However, there was no transnational polity which could legitimate the actions of the IGF's membership even if it were closed. Rather, its legitimacy arises from principles like those mentioned by Bernard, and also discussed in the literature on cosmopolitan democracy, including accountability, transparency and inclusion. Although in such a context voting is not possible, decisions can still be made by such a body by consensus. I raised the IETF as an example of this in practice, and denied that its decisions did not engage public policy issues.

That public policy authority is the sole right of states can be disputed on four grounds: that states' actions often spill over beyond the scope of their sovereignty, that non-state actors already broadly make public policy decisions and that states accept this (for example, in the case of international commercial arbitration), that policy development by states alone is ineffective, and that in most cases states retain ultimate power anyway (or can share it, as in the case of co-regulation). I also mentioned the literature on deliberative democracy which teaches us how multi-stakeholder policy development might occur, and pointed out that bodies such as the London Action Plan already illustrate its potential.

Next, Meryem Marzouki spoke on "Distributed Internet Governance: A Chance or a Threat to Democracy?". She asked whether multi-stakeholder Internet governace could be achieved by the invisible hand of "enhanced intergovernmental cooperation". The EU objective, illustrated by the EC's statement on the US DoC-ICANN JPA, is for full private sector management of the Internet. Meryem called for transparent transitional arrangements reflecting the involvement of industry and civil society. She drew attention to one possible analytical framework, that of Benoit Frydman, who identified five main features of a new model of global governance:

1. The shift from institutional regulation to economic regulation;
2. A correlative shift from public regulators to private actors;
3. A shift from primary substantive rules to secondary procedural rules;
4. Increasing involvement of technical devices to implement regulations; and
5. Rhetorical emphasis put on basic human rights and fundamental liberties.

The IGF, she said, is a way for governments to escape direct confrontation and revise the balance of powers. But who is the IGF? We don't yet have sufficient information, interaction or transparency in the forum which is a real problem. We need ways to assess its success. Who is to be held accountable?

Finally Wolfgang Kleinwächter spoke on "The Future of Enhanced Cooperation", speaking of the WSIS conflict on Internet governance as a conflict between broad versus narrow conceptions and private versus government control. Kofi Annan said to the WGIG that you cannot wish away history, but you can be as creative as the fathers of the Internet were in deciding upon new governance arrangements. The WGIG thus adopted a broad definition of Internet governance and stressed multistakeholder leadership.

In Tunis, the USA declared four principles which it believed should prevail, China shifted from promoting a global model of governance to concentrating on national interests (eg. IDN), and the EU put forward its new cooperation model for governmental leadership on the level of principle, and private sector leadership for "day-to-day operations" (though without clearly explaining the separation between the two).

In the end, instead of the "new cooperation model", an "enhanced cooperation process" was agreed: there would be no fixed model, but a flexible process which allowed bottom up coordination within a framework of general principles. This is to be "enhanced" because coordination and communication is to be improved. Cooperation could mean procedures and formal or informal arrangements among key players (moving from substantive to procedural). Looking into the future of enhanced cooperation, ICANN could be a model. This would however require ICANN itself to enhance its procedures, as for example between ICANN and its GAC, and perhaps even by making JPAs with other countries besides the US, allowing the diversification of approval of root zone file changes. As names and numbers are a public good, shared sovereignty must prevail.

During questions to the panel on whether enhanced cooperation is viable and desirable, others including Meryem indicated that they considered talk of multiple JPAs and consensus to be rather optimistic at this point. Other issues raised in this time included:

• As to how the dominance of the US in control of the DNS root might be overcome, the importance of this role was questioned.
• This was not to say that issues of name resolution and IP address allocation were unimportant, merely that they had dominated discussion so as to squeeze out other important issues.
• The panel's preference of rhetorical vigour in favour of academic rigour was questioned.
• The enhanced cooperation spoke of in paragraph 71 of the Tunis Agenda: has it happened yet? Nitin Desai has attempted to engage governments on this since May, but with limited results so far.
• Bernard challenged the assertion that the EU had failed to voice its objections to US (or ICANN) unilateralism in areas such as the UDRP and the .xxx domain.