Despite my deep-seated differences with Nitin Desai, he is an incisive man and certainly not as naive as he often presents himself to be when uncritically extolling the IGF's virtues. At the opening ceremony today he surprised me by admitting that

essentially, this is a dialogue between two groups of people ... and we must face up to that reality. On the one hand, we have a group of people who feel that the present modalities of management of the Internet are working, will work, even in the future, who are afraid that any major change in the way in which these arrangements are set up would compromise the Internet in some form. And on the other hand, we have a lot of people who are dependent on the Internet for their activities, for the economic, social, political, whatever, who feel that they have to have a say in the public policy issues which affect how the Net runs in this manner. These are essentially the two groups who are in dialogue here.

On the other hand we all know in which camp Desai and his United Nations colleagues sit; the latest evidence of this came in the speech of Assistant Secretary-General Jomo Kwame Sundaram, in which the phrase "multi-stakeholder governance" had given way to the more equivocal "multi-stakeholder cooperation". In contrast one of civil society's speakers at the opening session, Graciela Selaimen, quoted me in stating "that the IGF ought to develop the capacity to more fully carry out its mandate, including the generation and communication of policy recommendations to other institutions and the general public.”

In view of the recent attack in Mumbai, security is even more evident at this IGF meeting than at previous meetings. For the benefit of IGF delegates, armed soldiers have been posted to each of the conference hotels - in our case, complete with a makeshift sand bag bunker! Guests are required to submit to security screening at three points - at their own hotel, en route to the conference venue, and again before being allowed to enter. Although this is all designed to make us feel safer, the scale of it has had more of an unnerving effect on me.

Once I eventually got through into the conference venue I found that the first workshop I had pencilled in to attend had been cancelled. Neither was the second workshop entirely glitch-free. The audio-visual staff were buzzing around the increasingly testy presenter for ten minutes after her presentation began, trying to get her slides to display on screen.

However once this was sorted out, the presentation, on Lessons Learned from Engagement and Facilitation of Internet Users into Policy Development and Processes within ICANN via the ICANN Board's At-Large Advisory Committee (which has to be a world-beating workshop title for length) was interesting and worthwhile. I even found myself being cited on one of the slides, which was unexpected but gratifying.

Due to timetable shuffling I attended a different workshop next than I expected; the Council of Europe on Beyond Universal Access - The Public Service Value of the Internet as a Goal of National Information Policy, in which the most interesting interventions came from the floor rather than the panelists. I particularly appreciated the point that "three strikes" proposals to cut Internet access to copyright infringers are quite incompatible with the ideal of "Internet for all" that is the overall theme of the Hyderabad meeting.

Next came the opening ceremony, about which I have already spoken. Some other news of note that we learned in the opening ceremony was that Lithuania had won out over Azerbaijan to host the fifth meeting of the IGF in 2010.

The final workshop of the day for me - for which I am about to depart - will be Knowledge Ecology International's Knowledge as a Global Public Good: How Fair Use, Open Source and ICT Standards Can Expand Digital Inclusion, which is perhaps the most relevant workshop of the entire week to my work with Consumers International.

I am glad that the IGF Secretariat has finally taken on board one of the suggestions that I have been making for a long time in gating the real-time transcription to a text streaming Web page, with much lower bandwidth requirements (and hopefully higher reliability) than the video and audio streaming. On the other hand it is deeply disappointing that the use of open standards for those video and audio streams have been abandoned in favour of reliance upon the proprietary Adobe Flash format. Similarly, for interactive chat, the open source application developed for the Brazilian meeting has been dropped and the proprietary hosted product Dimdim adopted in its place. Predictably, these changes have not been the subject of public discussion.