The panelists in the Opening Ceremony spoke in every case very true to form. Whilst (as noted in a previous post) I had considerable difficulty with wireless Internet access in the room, and therefore lost a number of the gems that I had entered into the chat room, all of the government speakers clearly insinuated that as far as they are concerned civil society and the private sector have no effective power within the IGF.

For example, Kofi Annan (through Nitin Desai) stated that "while the forum is not designed to take decisions, it can identify issues that need to be tackled through formal intergovernmental processes," Yoshio Utsumi from the ITU claimed "the future of Internet governance is inevitably local rather than global. This is because the best approach is different for each society and economy," and Viviane Reding from the European Commission said, "The IGF does not replace negotiation between governments or the enhanced cooperation model".

There was only one token speaker from each of the private sector and civil society stakeholder groups, as against government's six speakers, and their remarks, whilst also predictable, were not particularly illuminating.

The technical community (who are not even officially a separate stakeholder group) did better with two representatives, but Bob Kahn betrayed his (forgivable) misunderstanding of the process by setting out his agenda for the IGF to consider a number of esoteric technical solutions to public policy concerns, such as the establishment of an Internet-accessible metadata database.

Does he not understand that the governmental stakeholders are not interested in the potential for new applications of Internet technology, but only in hammering existing Interent technologies into conformity with policy developed in closed governmental and intergovernmental negotiations? After this mornings session, that's certainly something that I am coming to understand better than ever.