Interesting Stuff from IGF

The UN’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF) held in Athens, Greece just ended. There’s some interesting blogs that discuss the happenings there, including one from the BBC and from my colleagues that were there in attendance, Jonathan Zuck and Steve DelBianco.

There was a lot of talk – but that’s ok, this is what this UN-created forum is all (and thankfully only) about. There were sessions with such broad topics as “openness” and “diversity” and “access.” Basic access to infrastructure for Internet connections is a problem for many people, especially in Africa. We think all youngsters know about MySpace? Think again (from the BBC blog):

A representative of the Council of Europe was made to look a little foolish when he asked the panel of young people about the growing use of social networks by young people and possible over use of such things as MySpace.

A young Nigerian told him: “If you ask a person in Lagos ‘What is MySpace?’ he is going to stare at your face.

And regarding “openness” I invite you to check out the ACT blog where, among other IGF entries, Jonathan writes how the phrase “no one has a monopoly on knowledge” has been a popular refrain at the IGF:

While it certainly sounds good, it is being used to justify everything from tweaking copyright law to outright theft. Many from the audience of a plenary on Openness brought up the topic of patents and copyrights as barriers to the broad access to “knowledge” regardless of what it took to come up with that “knowledge.”

Now it’s true that a lot of material that is paid for by the government, especially if they are not paid back, and stuff for which the term of patent and copyright have passed should all be in the public domain and there’s some work to get them there. That’s a far cry from simply taking entire sectors of innovation, like software and security and declaring them public goods whereby the moment that innovation is developed it must be shared by everyone for free. In market economies, copyright and patents provide the incentives necessary for investment in innovation, and declaring any innovation of value a “common good” and giving it to the public will cripple that system.

Steve writes how “the Diplo Foundation questioned whether market forces can be trusted to preserve free flow of information on the internet. Those same market forces helped create an explosion of freedom and diversity in information and communications on the Internet, and the private sector continues to be the driving force at ICANN.”

Interesting stuff from the wide wacky world of internet governance.

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