I have to confess I attended no other sessions today than The Role and Mandate of the IGF, due to work commitments and an early departure. This session was chaired by Lee McKnight of the Internet Governance Project, who had earlier caused scandal by taking a vote (shock, horror!) at the workshop on The Future of ICANN: After the JPA, What?. So this was bound to be a controversial session - and my paper the most of all, at least according to my spies in the audience. But is anything that I said really that controversial? Read below and judge for yourself.

Background to civil society's involvement in the IGF

My organisation Consumers International represents over 220 consumer associations throughout the world, and is therefore a segment of the larger stakeholder group that we know as civil society. Civil society is an extraordinarily diverse group, because really its only defining criteria is that it does not include governments or the private sector. It is so broad in fact that in the IGF we have taken to carving out the Internet technical community, from the civil society and private sector groups, into its own stakeholder group. What we are left with is a group that includes academics, activists, and ordinary consumers amongst others.

Yet despite this diversity, it is possible to generalise in saying that of all the stakeholder groups, civil society is the least likely to consider the IGF has fulfilled its mandate from the Tunis Agenda. I propose to spend a few minutes discussing why this is.

Part of the reason is that it was largely civil society that developed the idea for an Internet Governance Forum in the first place, within the Working Group on Internet Governance. In fact much of the IGF's mandate comes directly from the Working Group's report, including the paragraph about identifying emerging issues, bringing them to the attention of the appropriate bodies and making recommendations. The Internet Governance Caucus was one of the strong supporters of the Working Group's proposal, and published a response in which it suggested that the IGF would be empowered to develop soft law instruments such as recommendations, guidelines and declarations.

So when the World Summit on the Information Society accepted the Working Group's recommendation, over the early objections of the private sector and the Internet technical community, not to mention the United States government, civil society naturally believed that it had scored a surprising win. Granted that it was the product of a political compromise with the United States over oversight of ICANN, but even so, what we believed we had achieved was the establishment of a soft policy-making forum in which civil society could participate on an equal footing to governments and business.

Bait and switch

Three years later, with the IGF more than half way through its initial term, what we appear to have ended up with is not a policy development forum of any kind, soft or hard, but simply an annual conference. It is natural then that some members of civil society feel that a “bait and switch” has been pulled – because this is not what we bargained for! It certainly doesn't place civil society on an equal footing to the powerful governments and business interests who currently dominate the Internet governance regime – and who are therefore quite adamant that the IGF should not disturb the status quo.

There is good reason to think that civil society has got its work cut out for it in making any meaningful changes to the Internet Governance Forum. In once sense it is easy just to blame the Secretariat and the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for developing structures and processes for the IGF that are ill-suited to the fulfilment of its mandate as a policy development body. But of course the Secretariat and the MAG are themselves products of a larger political and economic system that will naturally resist any redistribution of power over Internet governance.

So what are civil society activists to do? We could concentrate on changing that larger political and economic system, as in part the American people began to do on 4 November, and as civil society has been doing on other fronts for many years, in advocating for reform within bodies such as WIPO and the WTO. But it seems to me that a more direct approach would be to develop proposals for reform to the IGF that will increase civil society's voice in policy-making, but without unduly challenging the existing authority of governments and the private sector.

My proposal

How would we do this? Well I've explained one approach in a paper that I wrote for this year's IGF meeting that has been distributed by the Internet Governance Project, and which was in turn very loosely and partially based on the conclusions of my doctoral thesis. Without going into two much detail, I will endeavour to describe my basic proposal in four simple points:

1. First, the MAG needs to be made more representative and accountable by being appointed by the stakeholders themselves, perhaps through a randomly-appointed nominating committee as in the case of the IETF. The Secretariat, in turn, should be accountable to the MAG.
2. Second, the IGF's plenary sessions need to allow for intensive multi-stakeholder deliberation on policy proposals that are developed by the grassroots dynamic coalitions and workshops. For this to work, the participants must be supplied with balanced background briefing material, be divided up into small but diverse groups, and be assisted by facilitators to discuss the proposals in depth, with each participant treating the others as equals.
3. Third, the output of these small group discussions should be brought back to the plenary forum for further discussion, at the conclusion of which the MAG will be in a position to document any consensus that may have emerged, and if appropriate to begin to formalise it as a recommendation of the IGF.
4. Finally a recommendation may be issued only with the approval of each of the stakeholder groups represented within the MAG. This is key in order to diffuse the concerns of governments and business that the IGF will challenge their own authority. At the same time it also increases the relative authority of civil society by giving it the same right of veto over recommendations as the other groups.

The IGF's review

To wrap up, some of us in civil society have been feeling for a while that particularly the plenary sessions of the IGF are a bit of a waste of time, and this November the ITU's Secretary General said exactly that. Leaving aside how disingenuous that may or may not be, it does show that the IGF's success is being questioned by others with more clout than civil society has, and that will bear on the outcome of the review that is conducted before its five-year mandate ends. My opinion is that the IGF's best hope for salvation is to go back and look afresh at the reasons for which its establishment was proposed by the Working Group on Internet Governance in the first place. If it can recapture that original vision, then in my view the IGF should have a long and fruitful future ahead of it.