>>> "William Drake" <[log in to unmask]> 9/5/2004 12:23:56 AM >>> >Can we identify five to seven leading issues and recommendations >that we think are the most pressing with regard to IG? These can >be either individual issue-areas (e.g. management of identifiers is >obviously one of them) or cross-cutting meta-level problems. Our forthcoming report will clarify many of these issues. We (the Internet Governance Project) will be able to release it in a few days. At the moment we are still subject to a vetting process. Unfortunately, some of the actors are playing games, either strategically refusing to comment or commenting privately but telling us that they are officially "not commenting" (but still giving us some valuable insight into what they think). Nevertheless, I can identify several areas that I think will prove to be strategic: 1. Relationship of Intellectual Property Protection to Free Expression and Privacy. I believe that certain international organizations and perhaps some business interests will attempt to claim that IPR is off the table, and that it has nothing to do with Internet governance. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Internet has forced a complete revision of global copyright and trademark agreements In a variety of venues, including WIPO and ICANN, we see IPR protection issues coming into direct contact with free expression and privacy norms and even some scientific inquiry norms. These issues should not be worked out exclusively in arenas such as WIPO, which are historically mandated to serve IPR interests and see IP owners as their constituency. 2. ICANN's status as a non-state actor. This is a tricky one. ICANN is under attack on three fronts, 1) its basis in US Govt/law 2) its non-governmental nature 3) the degree to which it does "policy" as opposed to "technical management" (which may be just an extension of issue 2). There is no doubt that specific governments intend to make an issue of this, and there is still the possibility that it will overwhelm everything else. Imho, we need to defend the multi-stakeholder, non-state governance of the regime against the possibility that it will become more governmental and regulatory, while recognizing (critically) that ICANN *does* do policy and supporting efforts to find a model that does not rely on US govt contracting. There are some even deeper issues regarding the use of contracting as a global governance mechanism, too much to go into here. 3. Relationship between security/surveillance on the Internet and civil liberties. Here again, the narrow, issue-specific regimes focused on attacking terrorism/crime tend to override other legitimate concerns. We could promote a broadened dialogue that forces Internet surveillance and security measures to be respectful of human rights in a globally uniform way. 4. Right to internetwork globally The most fundamental issue is the hardest to convey. Territorial governments must formally recognize and explicitly accept the non-territorial nature of IP networking and the Internet's architecture. No serious agreements about Internet governance in any given area can be made until that issue is dealt with. Either the potential of global networking is accepted as a factual starting point, or governance gravitates toward chopping it up into territorially-controlled architectures and resource allocation procedures (thus destroying much of the value of the Internet). It may be too much to ask territorial governments to accept the reality and salience of nonterritorial interconnection, but that is really the choice they are faced with. --MM