I didn't attend either of the main sessions today on Access and Diversity, since neither of these topics are areas of research interest for me. Instead I spent the day in workshops, the two reporting back sessions, and an open forum (and writing my presentation for tomorrow's OCDC meeting).

Many of today's workshops seemed to follow a theme, as yesterdays had also, due to the practice of scheduling thematic workshops before the plenary sessions to which they relate. For that reason, the first two workshops I attended today related to human rights, ahead of tomorrow's main session on Openness.

The first of these went by the lengthy title of "Fundamental Freedoms in the Internet Governance Forum: Protecting and Promoting Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Assembly and Association, and Privacy in the Information Society." Rob Faris from the Open Net Initiative at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard Law School kicked it off by describing its work in cataloguing infringements of online freedom of expression around the world.

The next two scheduled speakers, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Andrew McLaughlin, Google's Global Director of Public Policy, were unavailable for the workshop, but on behalf of Google Johanna Shelton described how governments and copyright holders place constant pressure on the company to make inroads against users' anonymity when using Google's services, such as when uploading videos to YouTube.

Matthias Traimer from the Council of Europe spoke of its endeavours to instill a multi-stakeholder quality to the management of human rights enforcement at a governmental and intergovernmental level. Lee Hibbard, also from the Council of Europe mentioned its recommendation on the "public service value of the Internet", which is the subject of a separate session, but which in brief accepts that everyone is entitled to expect the delivery of a minimum level of free (as in speech) Internet access.

The next workshop was on "Upholding human rights on the global Internet - Toward a unified industry solution," which provided an update on the endeavours of a group of NGOs to get industry to sign up to a code of conduct that would limit their complicity in the attempts of restrictive national regimes to constrain freedom of expression online. Those involved so far include Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodafone.

Bertrand de la Chapelle beat me to asking the question I had intended to ask about the exclusion of governments from the development of the code, which seems to run counter to the momentum that began at WSIS, and of which the IGF has been a part, for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. In particular, the code could easily have been taken to a workshop or dynamic coalition of the Athens IGF before being finalised.

The panel's response made it clear that this approach had been a conscious one, informed by the view of human rights NGOs that involving governments takes too much time and energy and rarely alters the outcome anyway. But only through the involvement of governments can this private initative extend across an entire industry, as well as avoiding obstruction from the national governments who were excluded from the code's development.

I then dipped into the Open Standards Dynamic Coalition meeting, but had to leave early to catch the afternoon's reporting back session, and finally moved on to the ICANN open forum. Probably the most popular workshop I've yet attended, the substance of the forum was however quite dry, beginning with a history lesson on ICANN and moving on to reports from its constituent bodies and a recitation of the current issues on its agenda.

The Chair failed to engage with the concerns of developing country governments and civil society activists about the organisation's lack of democratic legitimacy and accountability, to which ICANN is notoriously blind. Essentially, ICANN does not understand that its own conception of these concepts, largely derived from private sector management and government agency administration, is seen by civil society and the global South as outdated and inadequate in the post-WSIS age of multi-stakeholder governance.

For whatever reason, those who had been so vocal on these issues ahead of the Rio meeting, and particularly in the open consultation meetings, either stayed out of the ICANN open forum or kept quiet. In fact, the original call for questions to be written on business cards ended without a single card. This is bound to take the wind out of the sails of those who would agitate for the repetition of the Critical Internet Resources theme at the next IGF meeting in New Delhi.