Dialogue Forum on Internet Rights
Rome - 27 September 2007 (a personal account)

The Internet Governance Forum in Athens did an admirable job setting up a number of instruments for remote participation at the meetings. These include web casting, a discussion forum, live text chat, email, SMS, blog aggregation, and even submissions via video!

The effort was admirable — just the mere fact of the existence of such possibilities in Athens brought new elements into the process. But we could observe also that the remote participation procedures in Athens did not raise much interest. This is a serious problem if the IGF wants to project itself as a new kind of open framework for dialogue on Internet governance.

It’s not like there aren’t important topics being discussed: freedom of expression, cyber-crime, multi-lingualism on the net, surveillance, spam, etc. Certainly there are lots of potential interest, expertise and experience out there that could be integrated into the discussions.

In my view, the problem is that the “if you build it, they will come” approach doesn’t work for remote participation. It requires more.

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The global debate on Internet governance will once again gather people from all over the world at UN’s IGF, this time in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The process was started last year in Athens, when more than 1,200 participants focused on discussion of the overarching issues tied to the future of information and communications technologies, including control over the Internet architecture and numbering and naming system, security, intellectual property, openness, connectivity, cost and multilingualism.

The IGF’s innovative multi-stakeholder format, designed to grant governments, NGOs, and commerce an equal seat at the table, was praised by many as an evolution from the bounds of classical diplomacy. But the role of the IGF as a pure discussion forum — “a neutral, non-binding and non-duplicative process” as the EU presidency put it — and the absence of a more formalized output were intensively discussed by several governments and NGOs, Brazilians included. Blogs report:

Great expectations and a good dose of self criticism will surely be present at the Second Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will take place in November in Rio de Janeiro. The occurrence of the IGF in Brazil was the result of a big effort of the local government, and the discussions will focus not only on the conventional issues related with the virtual environment, but also on the foundational purposes of the IGF process. In a significant evolution from its last meeting in Athens — which was characterized by the absence of deliberative power — the IGF in Rio will position the present Internet governance model and the IGF’s mandate as central themes of the forum.
II Forum de Governança da Internet - Dialógico

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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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