[discuss] cgi.br release regarding Brazil Global MSM on Internet Governance

Sun Jan 12 16:13:01 UTC 2014

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> from the announcement.
>
>"The meeting is a partnership between CGI.br and /1net."
>
>So, John, do you still hold that 1Net is yet only a discussion space and
>it is up to its steering committee to make it what it wants to.... Most

Parminder, as I read this I wonder where you have been for the last three months. The political complexion of the Brazil meeting has been evident since October. All doubts were cleared up by mid-November, with the initial announcements coming from Brazil. In mid-November the IGP blog wrote: 

"The [organizational] structures [announced by CGI] show clearly how the meeting is a negotiated compromise between the Internet technical organizations and Brazil’s government. Both sides get to populate half of the four steering committees proposed. The ICANN/Internet side takes care of representation of nongovernmental stakeholders (business, civil society, academia and NGOs). The Brazilian side emphasizes representation of states."

Since the status of the Brazil meeting as a bridge between the technical governance organizations led by ICANN and national-states led by Brazil has has been obvious almost from the beginning of the process, I wonder what you actually expect to accomplish by a) pretending that this is a big surprise and b) beating this list and the 1net people over the head with what all of us already know. 

If we're going to have a legitimating and broadly inclusive meeting in April, someone had to kick it off, someone had to take responsibility for organizing it. Efforts have been made by both the Brazil side and the 1net side to be as open and inclusive as possible, though I will admit (and again, was 2 months ahead of you in noticing this) that the early stages of 1net were clumsy and needlessly untransparent. 

[snip]

>This is completely disregarding 4 key civil society networks who said at
>Bali - and then formally through a letter - that they were not going
>through 1Net but want to be directly involved in the Brazilian meeting.

Nice try. But for CS, academia and PS as a whole it is actually better to have a single, known, well-observed channel run by a reasonably neutral entity than to have a proliferation of unaccountable back channels. 