IGF issue index (6 Jun 12)

IGF MAG Meeting

Thursday, 17 May 2012

Geneva, Switzerland

The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Multistakeholder Advisory Group meeting of the IGF, in Geneva. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

[ Gavel ]

>>ELMIR VALIZADA: Dear colleagues, good morning. Please sit in your place while we start our morning session. We welcome all. I think today we will have good discussions. This is our second day of our work, and I hope today this morning we have some results, some maybe improvement in our discussions. And, therefore, now we will receive some reports by you, by moderator of group. And after, we will discuss other issues related to our forum which are indicated in our agenda.

And I want to give floor to Secretariat, so Chengetai can give you brief information and inform us about our activity.

Please, Chengetai.

901 applications accounted for; 999 to go

Details of the 1,900 applications for new gTLDs have started to emerge

A huge collective sigh of relief waved across the Internet industry on 30 May as the registration system for new Internet extensions finally closed.

Having faced years of delays over the process to liberalize the top-level of the Internet, new gTLD applicants had been cruelly denied their moment of pleasure six weeks earlier when on the day it was supposed to close, domain name overseer ICANN announced it had found a "glitch" in its software and was taking the whole process offline.

Two to read, three to watch, three to note

Watch out! It's 15 working days until the next ICANN meeting

Three times a year ICANN floods the Internet community with documents. This Monday 4 June was one of those days. The next will be on 24 September.

The reason behind the flood is quite simple: it is 15 working days until ICANN's meeting on Prague and according to the organization's Document Publication Operational Policy [pdf], staff is obliged to provide documents before the cut-off if they want them to be discussed at the meeting.

The seventh annual IGF meeting will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 6-9 November 2012. The proposed theme is Internet Governance for Sustainable Human, Economic and Social Development.

The focus is broadly similar to those of previous years, which have looked at Internet governance and development. Last year's meeting in Nairobi centred on "Internet as a Catalyst for Change: Access, Development, Freedoms and Innovation."

What will the meeting cover?
The deadline for submitting workshops has passed and confirmed sessions are available on the IGF website. There are also a number of "pending" sessions awaiting further information from organisers before being confirmed or rejected - we will update this article as more workshops are accepted. The confirmed sessions follow specific themes and are as follows:

Access and Diversity

Key issues: native languages, women and the Internet, inclusion and public access.

The Obama Administration took a highly unusual decision to admit that it had played a significant role, along with Israel, in the production of the highly sophisticated computer worm called W32.Flame. The worm specifically targeted computers in Iran and was designed to act as a cyberspy, passing details of files back through the Internet. It was strongly suspected that the US and Israeli governments were behind the worm although an explicit admission surprised many and led to concerns about the diplomatic impact. The reason for the admission, many feel, is that the US is in an election year and President Obama is likely to be attacked for not taking a harder line with Iran. Claiming credit for the cyberattack may provide a shield for such attacks.

What is the IGF? And what does it actually do? Here's what you need to know.

1. The IGF is an open forum that has no members.
2. It was established by the World Summit on the Information Society in November2005.
3. It is financed through voluntary contributions.
4. It's the leading global multi-stakeholder forum on public policy issues related to Internet governance.
5. Its inaugural meeting took place in Athens, Greece in from 30 October-2 November 2006.
6. Host countries bear most of the expenses of the annual meeting.
7. It supports Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The 2012 IGF host country is no fan of dissent

The former Russian republic has a long history of silencing free speech. Credit: Human Rights Watch.

When Azerbaijan was announced as the host of the 2012 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) on the last day of the 2011 forum in Nairobi, it took a little less than an hour for civil society representatives to take the microphone and point out the country's poor human rights record.

That concern fed into the last preparatory meeting of the IGF in Geneva last month, with frequent questions and requests for more information over Azerbaijan's plans taking up several hours of planning discussions.

Such interventions are of course largely pointless and all too frequently slip into self-righteousness, but with freedom of expression one of the more abiding traits of an open and global communications medium, it is a question that any IGF host can be expected to face, and be expected to answer.

A draft resolution on WSIS was an exercise in frustration

You'd never know it from the disproportionate amount of time spent discussing Internet governance during the drafting of the CSTD resolution [pdf] last month, but the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was about a lot more than Internet governance.

It includes action lines on media, cultural diversity, capacity building, and ICT applications (including e-health, e-science, and e-agriculture).

But just as the original summit process in 2003-5 became about finding a replacement for ICANN, so many countries continue to try to find ways to advance their cause in the texts of UN agency resolutions.

Polar opposites

Given the global reach of the Internet, many Member States have serious concerns about the concentration of Internet management related activities in the USA, particularly the possibility of the US government withdrawing country code top-level domains or revoking IP address blocks through its IANA contract.

Sky has joined other major UK broadband providers in blocking access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Last week, the organisation cut off access to the Swedish site following a court order, filed under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act and obtained by the British Phonographic Industry. Sky follows Virgin Media and Everything Everywhere in barring access to the site. O2, TalkTalk and BT are expected to do the same. The ban is a win for the entertainment industry, which started targeting broadband providers after legal challenges to the file-sharing websites themselves failed. The decision about The Pirate Bay follows a landmark ruling about a similar site Newzbin2 last year.

The controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been rejected by all three committees that advise the European Parliament's International Trade Committee (ITC). The Civil Liberties Committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of rejecting the agreement which aims to protect intellectual property rights but has been criticized for having been decided in secret and for infringing on basic rights and freedom (36 votes to one but with 21 abstentions). Votes in the Industry Committee and Legal Affairs Committee were closer (31 to 25, and 12 to 10 respectively). The Committees' decisions are not binding on the ITC which will make its determination on 21 June. It will then pass to the full European Parliament. The agreement is not expected to pass.

After receiving heavy criticism from a number of determined users, Facebook agreed that it would put changes to its privacy policies to a vote from its users. Changes include the ability to keep user date for more than 180 days, as well as use that data to provide ads on third-party websites. Austrian law student Max Schrems claimed credit for Facebook's decision. Votes have gone against the proposed changes but the exercise will be largely academic: Facebook said that any change would need a 30 percent turnout of active users to be binding, equating to roughly 270 million users. With over 150,000 votes so far, there is still two days for the remaining 269.85 million people to turn up.

A breakdown of who sits on the IGF's agenda-setting body

The IGF MAG has had a difficult couple of years. The UN has failed to replace former special adviser Nitin Desai who acted as its chair, and also chose not to perform the annual rotation of members in 2011, leaving the previous year's members in place and in limbo.

The 2012 MAG was supposed to be announced in time for new members to attend the first preparatory meeting February, but delays in groups submitting nominations meant the 2010 MAG was called on once again.

Finally, on 25 April 2012, the UN announced the composition of the new MAG for 2012, just in time for all the new members to find flights and accommodation in Geneva for the second preparatory meeting, 16-17 May 2012. So who are the new MAG members whom the Internet governance community waited so long to finally have announced?

Composition

The 2012 MAG comprises:

The US House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on "International Proposals to Regulate the Internet", covering in particular the WCIT conference to be held this December in Dubai by the ITU. A series of US government representatives including a current and former ambassadors, FCC Commissioner, as well as Google representative and "Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, and former State department official, now ISOC representative Sally Wentworth all explained why they felt the WCIT conference posed a threat to the open Internet. The House Committee agreed. The hearing is just the latest in a determined effort by the US administration to build up support for a strong negotiating position in December.

IGF Open Consultations

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

Geneva, Switzerland

The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Open Consultations of the IGF, in Geneva. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Can we please sit down?

All right. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the second open consultations for the Baku -- IGF Baku meeting 2012. I will hand it over to Vyatcheslav Cherkasov, who will -- from UNDESA.

>>VYATCHESLAV CHERKASOV: Okay. Chengetai, thank you very much. Your Excellencies, Honorable MAG Experts, Distinguished Experts, Ladies and Gentlemen:

IGF Open Consultations

Tuesday, 15 May 2012, Afternoon

Geneva, Switzerland

The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Open Consultations of the IGF, in Geneva. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

>>JANIS KARKLINS: -- President Clinton says everyone who comes to this event must tell what they have done in concrete terms to help improve the state of the world. Drawing parallels from these differences, one can think whether IGF could not hear or compile -- Secretariat could not compile information what decisions had been made as a result of IGF, first of all, in five years of existence or six years of existence of IGF and to make it kind of an annual information of all participants of IGF, what has happened in between, what decisions have been made not at the IGF but in other organizations as a result of discussions which have taken place in IGF.

FTC chair Jon Leibowitz wants to see simpler privacy statements on mobile phones i.e. for apps. "They have to be like a nutrition guide on the side of a cereal box," he said at the D10 conference. He also push the FTC's principle of "privacy by design" as well as the voluntary "Do Not Track" approach. The same day, Microsoft announced it would have Do Not Track turned on by default in version 10 of its Internet Explorer browser.