The forum has largely been overtaken by discussion of ICANN’s move to organize a new Internet governance coalition. ICANN representatives have had both open- and closed-door meetings to push the proposal, but there are still many questions that have not been adequately answered.
One important question is about the private discussions that have led to this. The I-stars came out at least nominally aligned on this issue, though there is speculation that they are not all totally unified. Over drinks, I mentioned to an ICANN board member that it rubs a lot of people in civil society the wrong way that the I-stars seem to have coordinated on this in private. He replied that I was probably assuming too much about the level of coordination. If that’s the case, then I wonder if we will hear more from the other I-stars about their level of support for ICANN’s machinations.
More basically, we still don’t know much about the Rio non-summit. It will be in Rio, it will be in May, there will be some sort of output document. But we don’t know the agenda, or the agenda-setting process, or even the process for setting an agenda-setting process.
And strategically, we don’t know how the Brazil meeting is going to affect all of the other parts of the take-over-the-Internet industry in the coming year. The CWG-Internet happens next month, and they will take up Brazil’s proposal from the WTPF. But since Brazil is positioning itself as a leader in this new process (and aligned with ICANN now), what will they try to get at the CWG? WTDC is in March-April. And of course the Plenipot will be in the fall next year. If the Brazil summit is perceived to have failed in any sense, will that make the battle at Plenipot even more intense?
Also, whose idea was it to have a gala without alcohol?
As expected, today at 1pm there was a packed, off-the-books meeting facilitated by the “I-star” organizations (ICANN, ISOC, IETF, and a bunch of groups that don’t begin with I). The purpose of the meeting was to build support for a new Internet governance “coalition.” The argument is that because of the NSA’s global surveillance programs, the US is losing support for its perceived leadership on Internet governance. In order to avoid greater governmental or intergovernmental intrusion into the Internet, the technical community, as signaled in the Montevideo statement, must go on the offensive and create an alternative to such intrusion.
This argument is controversial, to say the least. To what extent does the “offensive” entail creating a top-down institution to deal with Internet policy issues? Neither the technical community nor civil society wants government to be in charge of the Internet, but the technical community (especially ICANN) seems much more comfortable with top-down non-governmental control. I worry that ICANN is going to become increasingly government-like. In any case, we are witnessing a small but historic rift between civil society and the technical community, which have always been on the same side in the war to keep governments off the Internet.
Even if ICANN’s argument makes a kind of sense, it may be reckless to pursue it in the proposed way. It’s now looking like there will be a don’t-call-it-a-summit in Rio in early May, hosted by the Brazilian government, to discuss these issues. Even if ICANN has good reason to believe that Brazil is negotiating in good faith, there is always the possibility that Brazil gets what it wants in the end. They are not likely to just roll over.
I’m open to the idea that we need an affirmative answer to the question of Internet policy institutions. But I’d feel a lot more comfortable if such institutions evolved bottom-up rather than emerging from a grand push, organized secretly by some members of the technical community, to create an alternative. Hopefully with the creation of the new coalition mailing list, everything can be done out in the open from here on out.
Day 1 of the Internet Governance Forum is in the books, and everyone is talking about what will happen on Day 2. Brazil recently announced that it will host a meeting on Internet governance in April. Tomorrow, ICANN is hosting a meeting at 1pm to explain how the April meeting will work.
Everyone that I’ve talked to in the hallways has brought up the meeting in April. No one is quite sure what to expect.
On one hand, Brazil has been part of the coalition that is pushing to do more Internet governance at the ITU. On the other hand, ICANN seems to be a willing participant in Brazil’s scheme. The recent “Montevideo Statement,” issued by various Internet organizations, called for globalizing the IANA function, which means at a minimum removing the US’s special role of maintaining the domain name system’s root zone file.
ICANN wants independence from the US government, and Brazil wants ICANN to be independent from the US government (and possibly dependent on the ITU), so this makes them allies for now.
Bizarrely, NSA surveillance continues to be cited as a reason for Brazil’s actions, although of course the IANA function has nothing to do with surveillance. The IANA issue is mostly about status. Other governments seem to feel slighted by the US’s control of the root zone file.
In any case, tomorrow we may know slightly more about ICANN and Brazil’s schemes.
The New York Times reports:
The Russians, who with only minimal success, had for years sought to make these companies provide law enforcement access to data within Russia, reacted angrily. Mr. Gattarov formed an ad hoc committee in response to Mr. Snowden’s leaks.
Ostensibly with the goal of safeguarding Russian citizens’ private lives and letters from spying, the committee revived a long-simmering Russian initiative to transfer control of Internet technical standards and domain name assignments from two nongovernmental groups that control them today to an arm of the United Nations, the International Telecommunications [sic] Union.
It’s not immediately clear to me how moving Internet standards and DNS from IETF and ICANN to the ITU is supposed to stop the NSA from spying on Russians, so the smart read is that this is retaliation pure and simple.
Brazil’s foreign minister, Antonio Patriota, for example, a week ago endorsed the Russian proposal to transfer some control over Internet technical standards to the United Nations telecommunications agency.
While these are not major changes in policy positions, the NSA’s surveillance programs seem to be galvanizing those who want the ITU to take an active role in Internet governance. It’s time for the USA to practice what it preaches on Internet freedom.
Next week, I’ll be in Geneva for the 2013 World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum, better known by the acronym WTPF-13. This is the first major ITU conference since the WCIT in December, and the first real test of whether what some are calling the “post-WCIT era” really exists, and if so, what it means. For those just now tuning in, the WCIT was a treaty conference in Dubai in which some ITU member states pushed hard to make elements of the Internet subject to intergovernmental agreement, resulting in the refusal of 55 countries to sign the treaty. I published a retrospective account of my experience at the WCIT at Ars Technica.
The WTPF will be different than the WCIT in several important ways: Continue reading →
My piece about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce event last Friday on U.S. intellectual property attachés giving a report, and taking a hard line, on the enforcement of U.S. intellectual property, overseas, is now live on ip-watch.org.
Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:
WASHINGTON, DC – Nations ranging from Brazil to Brunei to Russia are failing to properly protect the intellectual property assets of US companies and others, and international organisations are not doing enough to stop it, seven IP attachés to the US Foreign and Commercial Service lamented recently.
Meanwhile, an industry group issued detailed recommendations for the incoming Obama administration’s changes to the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The problems in other nations extend from Brazil’s failure to issue patents for commercially significant inventions by US inventors, to an almost-complete piracy-based economy in Brunei, to an only-modest drop in the rate of Russian piracy from 65 percent to 58 percent.
The attachés, speaking at an event organised by the US Chamber of Commerce and its recently beefed-up Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC), blasted the record of familiar intellectual property trouble zones like Brunei, Thailand and Russia.
But the problems extend to the attitudes and omissions of major trading partners like Brazil, India and even well-developed European nations, said the attachés.
[more at http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1387….]
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