I arrived a little late at the StopSpamAlliance meeting due to some necessary souvenir-hunting, but this meeting hosted by representatives of the London Action Plan, MAWWG, CAUCE and others presented a very frightening picture of the state of the war on spam.

In particular, the speaker from CAUCE spoke of Spam 2.0 as having moved beyond unsolicited email to the blended threat of phishing, spyware, malware and botnets controlled by organised criminals - big, scary men with guns (who also very smart people, making lots of money).

He revealed that about 10% of the world's computers are now zombies (this is a smaller percentage than I have previously heard), and these are available to rent, not only to send spam, but to launch DDOS attacks. Although so far these have typically been launched to extort money from gambling sites, there is no reason why international terrorists could not also launch attacks against top level domain servers, thereby potentially bringing an entire country's Internet connectivity down.

It was reported that the US and China are now the top spamming countries, with South Korea, Poland, Germany, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, the UK, Italy and India trailing behind. It may not be coincidental that Australia, with one of the toughest anti-spam enforcement regimes in the world, is absent from this list.

Of interest probably only to me for my doctoral research, the reason for forming the StopSpamAlliance as a dynamic coalition of the IGF was described as to reduce duplication of work between its members, and allowing the industry to speak with one voice to the global community.

I next moved over to the morning's reporting back followed by the Openness plenary session. The latter brought home to me again how ill-suited the panel presentation format is to a forum for policy dialogue. For the full first half of the session, the panelists did not engage with each other; they simply read prepared statements, directed to nobody in particular and without inviting comment. In contrast, the democratic deliberation that ought to take place within a multi-stakeholder policy forum is designed around the direct engagement with diverse other stakeholders as equals, with the aim of producing consensus.

Even after the panelists had finished their presentations, the floor was then given to the pre-selected "discussants," leaving the ordinary users in the room disenfranchised and belittled. By the time I had to leave for the next workshop, prior to the end of the session, there had been nothing even approaching an open and pluralistic grass-roots debate; rather, a high-level, carefully wordsmithed, dry delivery of platform positions, incapable of connecting with anyone on a personal level, and thereby possibly pursuading them to reconsider their preconceptions.

For the IGF to fulfil its mandate to produce policy recommendations, the panel format of plenary sessions needs to be radically rehauled. A much more useful format is the use of table groups, whereby each group is given one or more policy issues to discuss and debate with the assistance of a facilitator, and the output of each group is collected and returned for presentation to the plenary forum, where any areas of consensus can be identified. The Secretariat's short-lived plan to schedule "speed dialogues" for the Rio meeting would have been a welcome step towards the trial of this model. As it stands, it is a sadly missed opportunity.