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Back from the grave, the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation

By terminus - 9/11/2012 So the big news from the Baku IGF is that the United States will, after all, be supporting the creation of a CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation, as the quid pro quo for India and Brazil dropping their wacky proposals to the ITU's WCIT for the revision of the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). (Well OK, that last part is just scuttlebutt rather than news, but it is doubtless true - it explains, for one thing, how puzzlingly bad India's proposal to WCIT was: it was all just a gambit after all.) Politics, eh?

Smooth talk at the civil society bilaterals

By terminus - 7/11/2012 I feel uneasy when governments start sounding reasonable. The thing is, I want to believe them - and sometimes I do - only to be proved wrong, when their actions don't live up to their words.

Freedom of expression at the IGF dies a little more with censorship of anti-censorship postcards

By terminus - 6/11/2012

Today was another dark day for freedom of expression at the IGF, with the heavy-handed intervention of a UN officer to remove postcards with an anti-censorship message. Indonesian civil society organisation ICT Watch was asked to cease distributing the postcards them on the basis that they might upset certain governments, and that any materials distributed at the IGF must be approved by the UN or the IGF committee.

A pick of the litter of workshops for IGF 2012

By terminus - 30/10/2012 Without any attempt at being exhaustive, here is a chronological listing of some interesting (for me) IGF sessions that you may have missed, mostly around intellectual property, freedom of expression and multi-stakeholderism:

Where did the mysterious CIRP come from – A short alternative (almost sub-altern) account of its history

By parminder - 28/10/2012 The famous multistakeholder (MS) Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) identified 'unilateral control by the United States Government ' of root zone files and system as one of the highest priority issues that needed attention. Incidentally, US, the shining beacon of MSism today, refused to join this MS initiative on global IG, I mean, the WGIG. WGIG also identified a set of global Internet related public policy issues that needed to be addresses. It gave four possible alternative institutional structures to deal with global IG imperatives for the consideration of the Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Of these, three alternatives sought a new inter-governmental global Internet policy body, with non government participants in advisory or observer roles. The fourth alternative was more or less staying with the status quo, except for creating an IGF (a common feature of all the four alternatives), which, significantly, was supposed to inter alia issues analysis and recommendations on key global IG issues.WSIS mandated the creation of an IGF, and, due to inconclusive negotiations, gave somewhat unclear recommendations on the needed mechanism for global Internet related policies. Basically, the unmistakable mandate was to discuss this issue further, with specific assertions that something that addresses the imperative of global Internet policies is certainly needed. The Tunis agenda is clear to this extent.

Hell freezes over, and in other news from the IGF Secretariat...

By terminus - 11/10/2012 The IGF's Secretariat has always been one of the most regressive influences on its development. In a previous post I criticised Markus Kummer's part in this, but Nitin Desai was just as bad. Even before the IGF's first meeting, Desai had sounded the death knell for its capacity to conclude recommendations, claiming that "there's no way it can ever become a decision-making body".

Who are those who have never rotated off the MAG?

By terminus - 6/8/2012 Whenever the IGF's Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) is renewed, one third of each stakeholder group is requested to step down. Since the first MAG was appointed in 2006, that means that everyone from that original group should have rotated off the MAG by now. Right?

Picking up where the IGF left off: our role in the future of Internet governance

By terminus - 4/7/2012 Internet governance is reaching a crisis point. Internet-related public policies are being shaped by governments behind closed doors, sparking global street and online protests over agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Other governments, excluded from these fora, are taking recourse to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), or threatening to create their own Internet ghettos governed in a more closed, government-led process. States are using malware to wage cyber warfare, at the same time as the use of such malware by criminals is taken as justification for new incursions on personal freedoms. They are also putting forward new laws and regulations, such as SOPA and PIPA in the US and the Indian Internet Intermediary Guidelines, that seem to contradict their own public statements on Internet freedom, and could seriously impede global information flows.

Recommendations on improvement of the IGF a missed opportunity

By terminus - 24/5/2012 - 1 Replies The Report of the Working Group on Improvements to the Internet Governance Forum has been presented at this week's 15th meeting of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), which also considered a more hastily-written report of last Friday's (18 May) open consultation meeting on enhanced cooperation.

India's proposal for a UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP)

By terminus - 29/10/2011 India's proposal to the UN General Assembly for the formation of a UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP) - reproduced in full below, in lieu of an official version - has predictably sparked the same knee-jerk responses about a "UN takeover of the Internet" that prevailed at WSIS, thereby maintaining the US government's sole oversight of Internet naming and numbering functions.

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