Quote:
Where are we headed?
The global Internet governance fight that is coming to a head has been brewing for six years, when the last major discussion over how to manage the Internet took place through the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
Despite serious concerted efforts, the reality is that the Internet has grown in importance faster than multi-stakeholders have been able to develop robust and secure decision-making processes.
ICANN has failed to step up to the challenge, having devoted far too much attention to itself, and looks dangerously like a creature that can only act when under threat of imminent demise. Even though the organization can expect to survive this latest round of argument, even its supporters are beginning to consider variations or alternatives.
Other multi-stakeholder efforts are flourishing but still in their early stages. The Internet Governance Forum – which will be host to many of the discussions surrounding this topic next week – is the most mature and has proven robust enough to survive concerted efforts to pull it into an inter-governmental context.
But then the IGF does not have the ability to make decisions so while it represents the multi-stakeholder model, it does not demonstrate an alternative to traditional decision-making structures.
Which leaves as the poster child for effective multi-stakeholder decision-making as a number of proposals making their way through the US government on privacy, cybersecurity, the free flow of information, and online copyright protection. That process fits multi-stakeholderism within a sandwich of legislation at the front and government agency enforcement at the back.
With the spotlight starting to fall on how precisely the world decides the next few decades of Internet expansion, it could well be that the United States government is again the organization left with the task of carving out a path for the Internet to follow.
|
I don't agree with everything he writes, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff in there.
cliff notes:
* 3 groups (US/EU, Brazil/India/South Africa and Russia/china) have different idea's of how the internet should be run.
* ICANN has been acting irresponsibly again.