-------- Original Message -------- Subject: An Assessment of the WGIG Report Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 23:40:57 -0400 From: Milton Mueller <mueller@private> The Internet Governance Project, a consortium of academic experts on international Internet regulation and policy, has issued a response to the recently-released report of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). The IGP praises the report for providing a "useful" consensus definition of Internet governance and for "identifying a range of important public policy issues." The IGP singled out two policy issues mentioned in the report in particular : 1) A call for moving beyond unilateral U.S. control of the domain name system, and; 2) A recognition 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. However, when it comes to the WGIG's other mandates to "define the roles and responsibilities" of governments, civil society and business, and to make specific proposals for action, the Report provides less guidance. The IGP was forced to respond "none of the above" to its 4 proposed models of institutional reform. The IGP supports WGIG's call for a new, open global Internet policy forum that gives equal status to citizens and governments, but says that such a forum will not succeed unless its efforts are focused on a particular objective. The IGP suggests that the new forum focus on preparing the world's governments to achieve binding agreements on the basic principles and norms to guide Internet governance. The UN WGIG Report itself can be downloaded at www.wgig.org The Internet Governance Project's response can be downloaded at www.internetgovernance.org or at http://dcc.syr.edu/miscarticles/IGP-quovadis.pdf ### _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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