[Chapter-delegates] Today's Chapters meeting is a great opportunity to bring "multi-stakeholder" to ISOC itself.

[Livingood, Jason]

On 8/4/16, 3:31 AM, "Chapter-delegates on behalf of Dave Burstein" <chapter-delegates-bounces at elists.isoc.org on behalf of daveb at dslprime.com> wrote:

> The change to a more bottoms-up, chapter and member approach isn't happening. 

[JL] And why is that? Have there been many Chapter advisory committee meetings that resulted in concrete, consensus-based recommendations to the Board to do X or Y?

> We seem to have rough consensus on two essentially modest proposals.  We can, and should, resolve any remaining issues and advance them today.  They have both been extensively discussed in April and since. 

[JL] If there is consensus on something then the Chapter advisory committee should advance them IMO. And I would suggest something more concrete than ‘we want money’ is appropriate. Everyone wants money; that is insufficient and gets the process backwards. Instead, something like “There’s a goal for each chapter to achieve X by undertaking Y actions/events/activities/outreach/education/etc. To do so each chapter estimated their financial need, which varied widely by region due to cost of living and Internet penetration differences. In sum to achieve this goal the budget is US$XXX,XXX, with a by region and by chapter list attached. The Chapter Advisory Committee proposes an oversight structure whereby each funding proposal will first be reviewed by an independent working group of the committee, and chapters will be asked to report back on a monthly/quarterly basis to report on progress and receive any additional funding. A report to the ISOC Board will be made quarterly to report on the same information.”

> The first is to allow our chapters to allocate 3% of our $50M budget to local actions, from paying non-profit accounting fees to local events. 

[JL] See above. 

> We can send as many people to ITU Study Groups as we like as a sector member of ITU.

[JL] Why would you want to increase engagement with the ITU when it does not develop open Internet standards and is quite the opposite of an open, multi-stakeholder model that the Internet Society has so long advocated for, and given our long efforts to keep open Internet standards with the IETF and other similar groups?

> The most important group to attend if we want lower access costs is 3GPP, which makes the 3G/4G/5G rules, the most common way people are connecting today. It has no public interest presence and is only corporations. A very hot issue there is the line code choice for 5G. Royalties could be half the cost of a low end smartphone, something which should be as cheap as possible. Qualcomm, Nokia and Huawei, each smelling $B or more in royalties, and trying to win the standard. They will probably come to an agreement so that each collects and phone prices go up. Not good for poor people.

[JL] That group produces technical standards. It is not clear how non-technical participants making non-technical (economic/social policy) arguments would make any progress. It seems to me the only way to lower costs is via external market pressures, in creating competitive alternatives that force prices down. For example, current/future WiFi standards that use unlicensed spectrum. That, perhaps coupled with action on a per-country basis to influence how the policies are setup for spectrum licenses.

> We also should be strong at the Wi-Fi groups, including IEEE 802.11, which is an open group. I believe that Wi-Fi will be the right access for village. India, Thailand and others are building backbone fiber to tens of thousands of towns. Wi-Fi is the natural local connection. The telcos want to take as much as  half the Wi-Fi spectrum for their LAA service. I care because I want a public interest presence.

[JL] This sees better than 5G. But again, these are purely technical bodies. So why would they act on non-technical, economic/policy proposals? Perhaps instead the chapters could figure out how to creatively apply the use of WiFi in local areas, in the village as you say. Such as grants for equipment, training in how to set it up and maintain it, local expertise to go around installing it, suggestions on services that local residents could establish to make the network economically self-sustaining, etc.

- Jason Livingood