[chapter-delegates] Latest ISOC WGIG statement

[Vittorio Bertola]

David McAuley ha scritto:
> Dear Chapter Delegates:
> 
> As you know, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and its
> Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) are engaged in a process that is
> gathering steam. The importance of this discussion should not be
> underestimated.
> 
> In that regard, I would like to draw your attention to ISOC's latest
> statement to the WGIG. You can see it at:
> http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/wsis/documents/ISOC_WGIG_Commentary_200
> 50418.pdf
> 
> We commend this document to you. Please be sure to pass it on to your
> members, create links to it, bring to the attention of your partners and
> other organizations you work with - in brief please use this and related
> ISOC WSIS and WGIG materials for your chapter activities to inform and
> energize support for sound Internet development continuing into the future.
> ISOC will remain engaged and we will best do that with your input.

David,

being an officer of an ISOC Chapter and a civil society WGIG member, 
please let me express my personal concerns with your communication.

I will not enter too much in the substance of the document; I agree with 
many (not all) of the statements that are made, but it seems to me that 
you are preempting what the WGIG thinks and putting words in its mouth 
so to then criticize and delegitimize it. I would rather expect ISOC to 
make constructive suggestions to possible solutions to the problems and 
concerns that were posed by some stakeholders, rather than just saying 
"everything works fine, go away".

However, my main problem here is that, basically, you are trying to 
exploit the Chapters to promote your own positions, without even asking 
them whether they agree with them. As far as I know, there was never any 
consultation on this list about what ISOC should say in regards to the 
WGIG process; it seems that, according to HQ, the only role that 
Chapters have is that of amplifying and promoting a document that was 
drafted autonomously at the HQ, as if they didn't have the right to have 
a say in the official ISOC positions on the matter.

To make an example, are you so sure that, say, the Internet communities 
in the world agree that "The continued expansion of the Internet to 
developing countries will be greatly aided in the future by a more 
competitive telecommunications environment"? How can you say, if you're 
not from a developing country and you didn't ask your developing country 
chapters? That looks to me more like the position of the big American 
telcos - the same ones which ask developing country ISPs to pay 
impossible amounts of money to get Internet bandwidth towards the rest 
of the global net - than like the position of the global Internet community.

Moreover, while I do support the idea that the current ICANN model is 
definitely better than the traditional IGO one, I think that it has 
significant problems of accountability and inclusiveness. ICANN is the 
organization that has just re-awarded the management of .net to 
Verisign, notwithstanding the damages that it brought to the stability 
of the Internet with its SiteFinder service 18 months ago; and that 
steadily refuses to implement any level of privacy for individual 
registrants of domain names, even when mandated by law (e.g. in Europe), 
carefully servicing the interests of the intellectual property industry 
of the United States. How can you say that this kind of governance is 
"bottom-up" and "close to end users"?

So, I would much like to extend to the list the discussion that we have 
on these and other matters in the WGIG, so that ISOC could perhaps make 
an informed and collective decision on what positions it should be 
supporting. I am sure I could gather a lot of interesting comments and 
ideas to be then brought back into the WGIG. Unfortunately, it seems to 
me that HQ is not interested in this, but only in defending the status 
quo and pushing a business-oriented agenda.

Regards,
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...