[Chapter-delegates] PICISOC Submission to WGIG report [take 2]

[Franck Martin]

All,

I remembered a discussion I had with several people outside and inside
PICISOC, and I just added a new chapter to this submission.

Let me know what you think (time to name a cat, a cat)

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


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.

While the WGIG has been focusing on the operation of the various groups
forming the Internet today, it has failed in a sense to describe the
paradigm shift which has happened in recent years from the creation of
the Internet. The Internet has brought a new form of participation that
allows all stakeholders to enter a system regardless of their
affiliation to certain structures. The IETF is an individual member
organisation that creates technologies standards freely available to
all. The standards are such because they answer a need by the people not
because they are a compromise between competing industries or
governments. If you look at today's Internet, it is technologically
driven by two bodies the IEEE for the hardware and the IETF for the
software. ICANN relies on IETF for implementing its policies. The shift
in the telecommunication industry to anything on IP, shows the role more
predominant of IETF. This can be put in parallel with the Free and Open
Source Software movement. For instance in VoIP, the failure of h323 of
being adopted by the public and corporations to be replaced by either
SIP (IETF RFC) of peer to peer systems, shows that the old system for
creating standards inside the ITU is no longer adequate. In that sense
the WGIG has failed to study the relevance of ITU in the Internet
standard making process and its form of governance by restrictive
selected participation.

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.


-- 
Franck Martin
ICT Specialist
franck at sopac.org
SOPAC, Fiji
GPG Key fingerprint = 44A4 8AE4 392A 3B92 FDF9  D9C6 BE79 9E60 81D9 1320
"Toute connaissance est une reponse a une question" G.Bachelard

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/private/chapter-delegates/attachments/20050811/e02a1db1/attachment.htm>