[discuss] Contributions to NETmundial

Tue Mar 11 11:06:58 UTC 2014

Hi Milton,

On 3/10/14, 8:23 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>
> Constance
>
> As one of ISOC’s policy staff, I would like to know your reaction to
> the European Commission submission to NetMundial, specifically those
> portions of the comments that call for forms of oversight to make IETF
> standards conformant to public policy concerns.
>

I'm not Constance, but I know something about the situation.  There has
been a healthy dialog with someone from the Commission on the
internetgovtech list (anyone can join).    Government participants at
RIPE, for instance, have the roundtable, something that IETF leadership
participates in from time to time.  At ICANN they have the GAC.  There
are a number of governments that participate in various IETF working
groups (PAWS being a current example that is about to produce a standard
on a database for provisioning of available white space).  In addition,
ISOC has a "policy fellows" program, that I have personally found quite
enjoyable.  But perhaps that is not as structured as one might want.

The IAB talked about doing a roundtable so that governments have an
opportunity to hear what is going on and to have at least a little
guidance as to how to get engaged.  One challenge is finding the people
who would be interested in a given topic or group of topics.  The IETF
is not the same as an RIR in this regard.  With an RIR, the issues tend
to revolve around (shockingly) addressing and whois, and so one might at
least envision the participants and their briefs not changing all that
much.  I think this largely holds true for the GAC as well.

On the other hand, as standardization topics change, so too do the
participants.  The same people who are interested in white space are
generally not interested in, say, broadband access point measurement
(e.g., the lmap wg), and so there is both a lack of continuity. 
Outreach can also be challenging. 

Since you asked the question, tho, turnabout is fair play ;-)  I'd be
curious of your thoughts about this.

Eliot
<speaking only for myself>
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