[Chapter-delegates] PICISOC submission to WGIG report

[Franck Martin]

This is the draft submission I have asked our members to comment on. As 
the deadline is close I cannot wait for their answer before requesting 
comments from other chapters and ISOC. So please send me your comments 
and I will merge with our membership comments.

Thanks.

-----------------------------

The Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society has read the report 
from the WGIG and would like to make the following comments.

The Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society (PICISOC) covers 22 
Pacific Islands Countries and Territories with 300 individual members. 
PICISOC fully supports the statement made by the Internet Society in 
response to the WGIG report 
(http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/wsis/wgigcomments.shtml).

PICISOC, based on its local expertise in the region would like to add 
that it does not support the creation of an additional UN body or forum. 
If you analyse the participation of Pacific Islands to the WSIS process, 
you will see that it is very limited. It is not for lack of financial 
resources as several sponsorships were available for least developed 
states, but because having yet another government official attending a 
series of meeting overseas put an enormous strain on the public service 
resources in country.

PICISOC would like to see more virtual participation as it exists in 
ICANN, IETF, APNIC, where representatives can fully participate from any 
location in the world. Audio or Text streaming of the meetings allows to 
intervene at appropriate time. The preparation of meetings via mailing 
lists is a great form of participation for all stakeholders.

In summary we do not encourage the formation of a body that will call 
for more international meetings, put a burden on the finance of the UN, 
and put a burden on the tax payers in developing countries to ensure one 
of their representative is present. We would rather see delegated the 
task to current UN bodies to properly run public awareness sessions on 
the Internet Governance and bring these questions into existing forum, 
if it needs be to the UN General Assembly with full stakeholder 
participation (government and civil society)

PICISOC would like to make a short comment on the statement on the 
limitation of the 13 root servers. While factually true, we find this 
sentence detrimental to the WSIS process. We would have hoped that the 
group would have moved on from non-issues as any country in the world 
can have an anycast root server. The original root-servers are now only 
identified for historical purpose and not anymore for the stability of 
the network be it physical or political.

PICISOC would like however to congratulate the WGIG for bringing 
awareness to all countries on what is Internet Governance is and obliges 
all bodies to define their real interaction with each others. I think 
many people and government have a clearer picture on the politics of the 
Internet and where policies are really created and how they do make a 
difference.

-- 
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Franck Martin
franck at sopac.org
"Toute connaissance est une réponse à une question"
G. Bachelard

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