I thought that maybe you would like to see some brief notes from day one at the Internet Governance Forum here in Athens.

Opening Session excerpts (transcript here)

Kofi Annan’s message about the IGF, read by Nitin Desai: The forum is entering uncharted waters. New forms of global collaboration. Its so important that is impossible that governments will not enter into the debate. Voluntary cooperation, not legal compulsion is what the forum is about. Mutual learning, emergence of new partnerships.

Yoshio Utsumi - ITU - The Internet has now become a central part of everyday life, and cannot be treated differently from other things at the same level of impact on human activity (!).

Vint Cerf - 30 years ago we could never imagine we would be in Greece discussing the future of Internet with a packed room of representatives from all parts of the world… Writing domain name in the characters of non-Latin languages is a problem. Global inter-operability must be supported especially at this time when new languages are entering the network. It is technically necessary to permit only a selected set of characters to work as the identifiers.

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Originally published at Global Voices Online

The first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum - IGF, which aims to be a a place for a “multi-stakeholder policy dialogue”, starts tomorrow, going from 30 October to 2 November in Athens, Greece. The idea of the forum emerged during last year’s meetings of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis which sought to be an alternative to the stalemated debate about the future constituency and role of the all powerful ICANN, or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Approximately 1300 participants are estimated to attend the workings of the meeting, one third of which are state representatives (84 different delegations of countries), while the other two thirds consist of representatives from the civil society and the private (business) sector.
What Will Be the Outcome of the Internet Governance Forum Meeting in Athens? - CircleID

‘The Internet has become a global commons, providing a uniform platform for commerce, communications, debate and research for all nations. But, with the rapid rise in Asian Internet users, the Internet runs the risk of becoming balkanized’, Nitin Desai, chair of the U.N.’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF), warns. Speaking at a conference hosted by Nominet, the UK body in charge of domain names ending .uk, Desai pointed in particular to a problem that could lead Asian nations to break away from the current Internet structure and create their own, separate Internet: most Asians don’t know the Latin alphabet, the basis of all domain names. [mp3 files]
U.N. Official Warns of Internet Balkanization - IP & Democracy

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Originally published at Global Voices Online

There is something very different going on in the Brazilian media arena. It all started a week ago with a cover story published in the magazine Carta Capital, headlined: The Plot Which Led to the Second Round. The magazine is known as a ‘leftist stronghold’ and, with a modest circulation of 65,000, it normally functions to leverage for more balance in the political coverage performed by the mainstream media. The unusual comes from the attention that the article has attracted from the blogosphere, and how the debate has pushed the powerful Globo TV network and its executive editor of journalism to enter the online debate in order to post its counterclaims against the article.

On the tragic Friday afternoon that GOL Flight 1907 — which was expected to arrive in Brasilia at 6:12pm — plunged into the Amazon forest with 154 people aboard, this was not the important story in the Brazilian broadcast media. With two days left to the first round of the presidential election, the widely viewed Globo Network nightly news program Jornal Nacional placed greatest emphasis on showing pictures of the money captured by the Federal Police in the alleged election scandal called dossiergate. Strange as it seems, this news program which aired at 8pm did not say a word about the crash, and Brazilians were startled to be informed about the country’s greatest airline tragedy by cable CNN.

The story that Carta Capital’s reporter Raimundo Rodrigues Pereira tells in an exquisite narrative is how Officer Edmilson Bruno of the Federal Police illegally took pictures of the money and distributed them to journalists from Folha de São Paulo, Estado de São Paulo and O Globo newspapers and to the radio station Jovem Pan on the morning of that same Friday. The existence of an audio file of the conversation where the police officer demands of the journalists that the pictures of the money be shown on that night’s edition of Jornal Nacional was mentioned in Carta Capital’s article, and an actual copy of the recording was leaked to YouTube earlier this week.

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