Dee Dee:

I was surprised at the recently expressed hostility towards Net Mundial. At the very least the Brazilian initiative was a successfully wide-reaching example of a global discussion of internet governance via historic use of technology for interactive exchange.


This is the confusion that NMI plays on. Far from being hostile to the NetMundial meeting, I was a huge advocate of it, I was there, and I was even a strong defender of Fadi Chehade’s role in initiating the April 2014 meeting in Sao Paulo.

What we opposed was the later effort to institutionalize it from the top down and turn it into an unnecessarily centralized platform for leadership across a wide range of IG issues. We simply don’t need that kind of centralization, and the only reason for doing it was for the small clique of people close to or approved by Fadi, CGI and WEF to capture some kind of leadership role for themselves. Anyway, they failed so the issue is moot.

Dr. Milton L Mueller
Professor, School of Public Policy<http://spp.gatech.edu/>
Georgia Institute of Technology

Internet Governance Project<http://internetgovernance.org/>