From Milton Mueller's ICANNWatch blog/site:
http://www.icannwatch.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/18/226205&mode=thread
(apologies for crossposting)
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The Forum MAG: Who Are These People?
posted by Mueller on Thursday May 18 2006, @01:05PM
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan established an Advisory Group to
manage the new Internet Governance Forum Tuesday. If anyone was still worried
about a "UN takeover" of ICANN or the Internet, they can rest easy. If the
composition of the Advisory Group is any guide to the politics of the Forum,
ICANN and the traditional internet community are doing just fine in global
governance debates, thank you. Indeed, they are on the march. Let's take a look
at the composition of the multistakeholder advisory group (MAG) that meets in
Geneva this weekend.
The MAG's size was set at 40 people. Of those, 20 positions were set aside for
governments, and 20 more for a combination of private business, civil society,
academic and technical "stakeholder" groups.
Surprise number 1 is that of the 20 non-governmental positions, all but a
handful are directly associated with the ICANN regime. Two (Alejandro Pisanty
and Veni Markovski) are sitting ICANN Board members; one (Theresa Swineheart) is
an ICANN staff member; two more (Nii Quaynor and Masanobu Katoh) are former
ICANN Board members; two (Chris Disspain and Emily Taylor) represent ccTLD
operators; two (Raul Echeberria and Adiel Akplogan) represent Regional Internet
Address Registries (RIRs). Even the public interest or "civil society"
representatives are long time players in the ICANN sandbox: Adam Peake of
Glocom, Robin Gross of IP Justice, Jeanette Hofmann of WZ Berlin, and Erick
Iriarte of Alfa-Redi are all associated with either ICANN's At Large Advisory
Committee or its Noncommercial Users Constituency (or both). To that one can add
an IETF representative, Patrik Faltstrom, often utilized by ICANN as a
consultant, and the Internet Society's public policy advocate (ISOC is the
corporate parent of the IETF and the owner of the .org registry).
What are we to make of this? Obviously the views and perspectives of these
ICANN-related actors are far from homogeneous. ccTLD operators, especially
Nominet UK and Australia's Disspain, are known for their independence of ICANN
central. RIRs are also wary of ICANN itself and relatively autonomous. And the
ALAC and NCUC participants are known as much for their opposition to ICANN's
policies as for their participation in the regime. I am particularly happy that
Gross, Hofmann are Peake are on there; all three have public interest-oriented
policy positions and a wider view of the role of civil society in the global
governance debate. Of course, I have to issue the disclaimer and note that
Hofmann is a partner with me in the Internet Governance Project.
But the over-representation of direct ICANN agents, via Board members and staff,
is troublesome. Three people from the same organization is too many. Indeed, no
other international organization or organization of any type has three
representatives on the MAG. And that's not counting the ISOC and IETF guys, or
the former Board members. It's clear that if the results of WSIS did not signal
overall acceptance of ICANN's legitimacy and current structure by the
intergovernmental system, the initial results of the Forum's MAG selection do.
One cannot avoid mentioning in this context the $200,000 contribution ICANN made
to the Forum. That probably didn't hurt.
Surprise number two: Michael D. Gallagher, currently working for a Washington
law firm but just a few months ago head of the US Commerce Department's NTIA,
which supervises ICANN and protects us against Internet porn er....instability,
is on the MAG too. Now in some ways this is a good sign. It shows that the
powers that be in the United States are not ignoring the Forum. Indeed,
Gallagher has to be considered a semi-official appointee. It was Gallagher,
after all, who issued the two most notorious documents in recent Internet
governance history: 1) the June 30 statement by the US government that it owns
the DNS root and has no intention of giving it up; and 2) the August 11 letter
to ICANN regarding the .xxx top level domain, which constituted the first overt
political intervention in ICANN by the US government. In some ways it is great
that Gallagher is going to be sitting around deliberating in an unofficial
capacity with some real techies from Europe and Africa, government ministers
from Africa and the middle East, and civil society advocates. If he is a
flexible and intelligent man he will learn a lot. And his presence signals
buy-in from "Important" people.
Surprise number three was much less pleasant. The MAG names were not announced
until Tuesday, only a few days before it was supposed to meet. The delay, we
hear from the grapevine, came from political wrangling among governments,
especially the G77 governments. Indeed, it was mainly the G77 that insisted on
such a large and unwieldy MAG, as it wanted a large enough number to accommodate
all the political and regional differences among its members. As one of my
colleagues has remarked, that too is a sign that the governments are taking this
seriously, and thus could be interpreted as a positive. But that kind of
wrangling can also be crippling, and may signal that governments view the MAG as
a source of power rather than as a purely advisory group meant to faciliate --
not control -- the Forum. But then, the same criticism could be made of the
ICANN/ISOC crowd, which obviously went out of its way to gain positions.
In general, the large size of the MAG empowers the Secretariat of the Forum, run
by Markus Kummer and Nitin Desai; this group will be too large and diverse to do
much on its own and will rely quite heavily on the Secretariat for organization,
agenda-setting, and results. But it will be able to veto and block people, ideas
or notions that are offensive to a given faction. Not the recipe for innovative
governance.
Longer term, let's hope the Forum comes up with a better mechanism for selecting
people for its positions, one not completely dependent on patronage and
lobbying.