The first phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) requested the United Nations Secretary-General to establish a Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The WGIG is asked to present the result of its work in a report "for consideration and appropriate action for the second phase of the WSIS in Tunis 2005."
The main activity of the WGIG will be "to investigate and make proposals for action, as appropriate, on the governance of Internet."
The WGIG is asked, inter alia, to deal with the following issues:
The WGIG (not yet constituted at the time of writing these notes) will meet at the United Nations in Geneva on 23, 24 and 25 November 2004. Open Consultations will be held on 24 November.
“governance” is a badly chosen term since the beginning: it is very generic and has the same lemma of “government”; this led to several misconceptions and subtly induce that the governments should assure that the Internet is “governed”. Actually governance has to be interpreted as the management and coordination of aspects of the Internet.
The Internet was born as a set of protocols to enable remote computers to exchange files and execute jobs remotely. Then the most popular services spread out, mainly e-mail and the web; as a consequence, the Internet is today perceived by the users and the media more for the services that makes available than for the underlying infrastructure. Often in the press the Web is assumed as the essence of the Internet. Today we are talking of the Information Society and the Internet has to be considered the underlying engine. The governance is a term that was “invented” to indicate the management of the unique identifiers that are the “glue” of the multitude of networks that form the Internet.
If we accept to enlarge the definition of governance to various aspects of the Internet phenomenon, including the pathologies, including the e-everything, I would like to introduce, in addition, the social importance of contents. What about the content quality control, the research engines, the data directories, the multi-lingual aspect of the content, automatic translators, etc.? It is clear that the flooding of uncontrolled information is a social problem and is getting worst, as time passes.
I intend to stress the fact that, if we enlarge the meaning of “governance”, we could go very far. My opinion is that the WGIG should keep as strict as possible to the governance of the core of the network, with some attention to a few aspects that are worrying the governments, like the security and stability (that is in part dealt also within ICANN), the spam (that it is dealt within IETF for the technical aspects), the IPR (that it is dealt by WIPO and not only) and the privacy protection (that it is dealt already by the governments). If we will not go beyond this, I see some good chance that the WGIG will honor his task, considering the limited time available (9 months of work in order to be ready for the Tunis Summit).
A direct answer to the question is:
Statement 1 “The Government needs that the Internet is governed”
Why it needs now and there was almost no interest/attention only a few years ago?:
Statement 2 “The Internet is recognized today as a “critical infrastructure”
due to the involvement of industries and service providers in the market place and to the large penetration of the Internet in all the sectors of the society. For this reason, the Government is called to assure:
Statement 3 “Availability, reliability, security, stability, etc.”
This implies that the Government is engaged in establishing:
Statement 4 “A regulatory framework able to protect users and to facilitate competition and fairness among the providers”
While doing that, the government should:
Statement 5 “Avoid the temptation of controlling the Internet and/or to manage some parts”
What then the governments should do?
Statement 6 “Intervene to help prevention and limitation of the “pathologies” of the network”
By pathologies I mean all the bad utilizations of the network caused by misbehaviors of the users and/or the providers and illnesses caused by external factors that are connected to the scaling of the network. The Government has also another role that is more sensible especially in developing countries:
Statement 7 “To act as facilitator for helping the market to develop and the user base to expand”
But how to play the defined roles and with whom? The Government should establish:
Statement 8 “A private – public alliance, aiming at a co-regulation rather then to a unilateral regulation”
The Government, in consideration of the trans-national aspect of the Internet in engaged in
Statement 9 “pursuing international cooperation”
Last but not least, the Government is engaged in
Statement 10 “adopting measures to alleviate the digital divide”
Diversity of the approaches
Each country has it’s own history in introducing the Internet, its own sensibility, legal system and organization of the Local Internet community (LIC); therefore there will be no two models of public – private relations that are equal.
In Italy we are not in favor to hand out the management of the unique identifiers that characterize the Internet to an intergovernmental organization; we think that the ICANN model (multi-stakeholders, bottom up, driven by the private sector) is still in an experimental phase and we should work to improve it.
When talking of the private-public alliance, I desire to stress the fact that the government representatives and the technicians should establish a synergy and take advantage of the skills of the other part, in order to proceed to the above mentioned co-regulation, only when it is really needed. Certain themes that are in evolution at present times are not easy to be technically understood and any co-regulation has to be carefully examined; sometimes it is hard to establish the boundary that separate the technical questions from the policy aspects.
ICANN will evolve positively under certain conditions:
There is the need to constitute a group of wise persons that gain a global view. In my view none of the existing bodies that are dealing with various aspects of the Internet have a global view; therefore there is the need to assemble experts from different organizations. The governments should be involved for raising the public policy aspects. Perhaps the discussions in the framework of WSIS might favor the creation of a summit of excellence to discuss the aspects of the Internet that are multidisciplinary. It is my opinion that we should distinguish two levels of policy; one level that is more operational and that is, in any case, delegated to the bodies that are in charge of specific aspects of the Internet and one higher level that takes care of the interrelations of the various sectors of the Internet galaxy and of the international aspects that deserve intergovernmental agreements. WSIS could help to organize this second level.
Stefano Trumpy
IIT – CNR
Italian representative to GAC - ICANN
President of the Italian Chapter of ISOC