Everything is rosy in the IGF echo chamber, ok?

Starting tomorrow and for three days, a self-selecting elite of Internet governance specialists will meet in Geneva to review what happened at September’s Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi and decide what should happen at the next one this November in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The group will tell its personal echo chamber, located in Room XVIII at the Palais des Nations, that things are progressing well. And it will tell itself that improvements can always be made but that the IGF serves an extremely useful purpose in the overall governance and functioning of the Internet.

The truth however is that the organization has no money, it remains leaderless, and it continues to wilt under the angry gaze of its United Nations overseer.

The other sad truth is that those in a position to reverse the decline will this week expend more energy protecting their special status than in developing ways to save what was once looked like a possible future of global decision-making.

Money problems