incommunicado

From Avri Doria's blog: "While in a meeting with Board members, a member of my Stakeholder group had an opportunity to read part of one page of the Policy Staff’s briefing report to the Board from across the table (some of us read documents upside down better the we read right side up.) In this case it was all they could do to refrain themself from standing up and yelling “the staff lies.” Doria goes on to point out how inaccurate and biased these secret board briefings can be and how unfair it is that these critical messages are kept secret.

There is a vital structural issue here: ICANN's board faces too many issues and relies heavily on the policy staff to tell it what is going on. Unfortunately, during the past 5-6 years, the staff has chosen to take sides on policy issues and to favor some constituency groups over others. Often, this is caused by heavy lobbying of the staff by some of the professional, full-time lobbyists who can invest in constantly following and communicating with them. In other cases it is the staff's way of punishing those who were critical of ICANN, especially its policy staff. New CEO Rod Beckstrom has already made an important move to rectify this situation by replacing his policy vice chair with David Olive; it would seem, however, that lower level staff are still mired in the organizational culture established by his predecessor. There is a simple solution to this: make the board briefings public, with the usual exceptions for information considered confidential for legal, personal or personnel reasons.

What makes the Air Canada incident important is the way it relates to Fowlie’s campaign for imposing standards of “civil discourse” on ICANN participants. Fowlie’s decision to pursue a dispute resolution process showed that he believed that his behavior, which was neither respectful nor civil according to the people on that airplane, was justifiable under the circumstances. Fowlie lost his temper – and a dispute – over bad airline service. We wonder if he now has a bit more sympathy for the sometimes intemperate language used by people in the ICANN community who think that fundamental rights of free expression or privacy or consumer interests are being lost. The stakes are a bit higher than a missed meal. Unfortunately, Fowlie’s speech at the Nairobi meeting shows that he seems to have learned nothing from this incident.

The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) invites you to participate in its third scholarly workshop to be held in Montreal (QC), Canada, on 30-31 May 2010. This workshop is organized in cooperation with the Canadian Communication Association and Media@McGill, during the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS) 2010 Congress week in Montreal. Building on the success of its first two editions, respectively in Paris, France in June 2008 and in Brussels, Belgium in May 2009, the purpose of this third GigaNet workshop is twofold.

Intermediary liability has become one of the critical flashpoints of Internet governance. A few weeks ago, we celebrated an Australian court decision that denied a bid by copyright holders to make ISPs liable for copyright infringement by people who happened to be using their networks. Yesterday, we learned of an Italian court decision that seems to have pointed in the opposite direction. Google executives were convicted of a privacy violation because of a video that one of their millions of users posted. The decision raises major concerns as it seems to require Internet intermediaries to monitor user generated content, which would be a disaster for the freedom and openness of the Internet.

But there is more to this case than meets the eye. US news coverage, which concentrates solely on Google’s outraged claims, fails to take into account three broader issues: 1) the fact that Google itself has undercut its exemption from liability by implementing monitoring of copyright; 2) the weakness, vagueness and obsolescence of the EU E-Commerce Directive’s liability protection provisions; 3) the politics in Europe and the way privacy law can be used – for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons – to attack this large global corporation that threatens the business models of entrenched interests.

IGP note: This is a comment Professor Wolfgang Kleinwachter made regarding the future of the Internet Governance Forum. At the recent Geneva consultations, there was a disagreement over whether the UN Secretary-General's recommendations on the continuation of the IGF should be delivered through the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) or the Committee for Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) prior to the UN General Assembly receiving it to make a final decision. This seemingly obscure bureaucratic disagreement reflects a larger debate over how open and "multistakeholder" the IGF should be.

"My observation is that this is part of a bigger story to move backwards, to cancel openess, transparency and bottom up policy development and to withdraw from the principle of "multi-stakeholderism". It is aimed to get the Internet policy processes back under control of an intergovernmental regime and to silence non-governmental stakeholders, at least if it comes to public policy issues and decision making...."