Today's highlight was the panel discussion of Arrangements for Internet governance - global and national/regional. At first it seemed that the purpose of the discussion was to reinforce a revisionist understanding of the meaning of "enhanced cooperation" that was coined in the Tunis Agenda. According to the UN's Haiyan Qian, this term refers simply to any formal or informal multi-stakeholder process within an Internet governance institution, which set the scene for Richard Beaird from the US State Department to claim with a straight face that this included the ITU's work on next generation networks and cybersecurity.

Parminder Jeet Singh injected a note of sanity into the discussion by taking us back to first principles, and explaining that to be properly so described, enchanced cooperation must involve three elements: doing public policy (in the narrower sense that excludes technical coordination), doing so globally, and doing so in a socially and politically inclusive way. On this account some of the examples given by other panelists did not qualify as examples of enhanced cooperation in action; for example, although the OECD brought in other stakeholders in its recent ministerial discussions, they were not adequately representative of global constituencies. Similarly ICANN's GAC, although an example of global governance, does not possess an adequately legitimate structure.

Another example of illegitimate global governance that Brazilian Everton Lucero raised was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that is currently in negotiation between an elite club of governments. This was discussed in much greater detail later that day by Eddan Katz of the EFF during a meeting of the A2K Dynamic Coalition. As he explained, the ACTA sets a developed country standard for intellectual property enforcement that the signatories aim to export to the rest of the world, practically wiping out the nuances of copyright exceptions and limitations.

Other interesting workshops that I attended today included a workshop on The protection of personal data and privacy in the information society: towards an international instrument with a global reach?, which had the distinction of including an interesting and factual presentation from Microsoft - about its digital identity card framework that has since been implemented in an open source version.

The other events that completed the day were Consumers International's covert lunchtime launch of its Access to Knowledge projects which I am coordinating (covert only because the Secretariat wouldn't list it on the official agenda), and an OECD seminar on Digital Content Strategies and Policies at which I presented the consumer perspective, stressing the need to rebalance the rights of content creators against what are usually expressed as the "interests" (in distinction to the stronger "rights") of consumers. The crowd was kept entertained by my clash with a free market absolutist over the need to correct for market deficiencies in providing copyright exceptions for disadvantaged users such as the visually impaired.

Also today piles of books on The Internet Governance Forum: The First Two Years appeared around the venue, as the Secretariat had earlier promised. I haven't had time to have much of a read yet, but there doesn't appear to be anything of mine in there, so it could be that the editing has been rather selective against IGF reformists. This would accord with my observation that the fliers about my book that I have been leaving around the venue have been mysteriously disappearing, more quickly than if it were only because people were taking copies for themselves.