Atanu
Garai, OneWorld South Asia
The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), set up by the United
Nations to review and recommend appropriate proposals on the governance
of Internet by 2005, has been unable to reach to a decisive conclusion
on how the Internet should be governed.
WGIGs Final Report, released on 14 July 2005, has finally laid down
four rival models of Internet governing before the governments and
other stakeholders of the World Summit on the Information Society.
|
Since
September 2004, with a consultation on the setting up of WGIG in
Geneva, the independent working group met four times between November
2004 and June 2005, while consulting with various stakeholders. Under
the chairmanship of Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the United Nations
Secretary-General for WSIS, WGIG produced reports on a wide range of
Internet governance issues, undertaken consultations with the
governments, private sector and civil society organizations to produce
its final recommendations to the WSIS Secretariat. |
In a press release, WGIG has commented, the Report identifies a vacuum
within the context of existing structures and notes that there is no
global multi-stakeholder forum to address Internet related public
policy issues. It therefore proposes the creation of a global forum for
dialogue among all stakeholders such as governments, the private sector
and civil society, to address problems linked to Internet governance,
including spam and cyber crime. Since it was unable to agree on a
single model, the Working Group in addition sets out four possible
models for the conduct of global public policy and oversight of the
Internet.
Commending the work of WGIG, Markus Kummer, the executive coordinator
of WGIG, categorically underlined the success of the Group as it had
succeeded in creating an aura of trust among the stakeholders.
"Internet governance is not just names and addresses," Kummar said,
possibly to offset the unease after failing to recommend the next
course of action for the global community. Kummar mentioned of other
issues - multi-lingualism, data protection and interconnection
costs that are being dealt within the ambit of Internet governance.
The release of WGIG has attracted mixed political and technical
responses from various governments, private sector, academia and civil
society. In its response to WGIG, the Internet Governance Project, a
consortium of academic experts on international Internet regulation and
policy, said that, WGIG has been successful in making a call for moving
beyond unilateral U.S. control of the domain name system, and
recognizing that existing Internet-related treaties around intellectual
property protection are controversial, and may need to be reviewed to
be better balanced with values such as fair use, free expression,
privacy, technical innovation and economic development.
Creation of a permanent forum to steer the process of Internet
governance debate forward has been proposed. The new, open global
Internet policy forum will be mandated to give equal status to citizens
and governments. Supporting the forums ideals, IGP comments Such a
forum will not succeed unless its efforts are focused on a particular
objective
the new forum focus on preparing the world's governments to
achieve binding agreements on the basic principles and norms to guide
Internet governance.
Links:
WGIG
Press Release
WGIG Report
IGP Comments
