Having been mandated by the Tunis phase of the United Nations World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS), the first day of the consultations on
the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is coming to an
end in Geneva.
The first day was generally devoted to an open debate and exchange
of views, and showed how fundamentally different the various
participants see the IGF. The range of opinions goes from a purely
discussion oriented series of 3-day conferences to be held once a
year, to a perpetual process to set global public policy on
cybersecurity, cybercrime, terrorism, spam, privacy, protection of
personal information and data, multilingualisation, consumer
protection, capacity building, and domain names.
In comparison to these issues, the Microsoft antitrust case is extremely limited,
with a clearly mandated body to take care of competition issues, the
European Commission, and a clearly violating company,
Microsoft.
Taking that experience, in particular the fact that Microsoft
simply ignored the European Commission for years now while trying to
appease them with useless gestures (see today's press release), one cannot help but feel
sceptical about the potential effectiveness of such public policy
setting.
Code often establishes de-facto governance, and in the case of
proprietary software, that governance is generally intransparent, and
in the hands of the proprietor of the piece of software.
Free Software allows for public review and consensus, but has been
largely marginalised in the entire discussion.
At the moment, noone really seems to hold the answers to many of
the fundamental questions that arose in this room today -- and the
open discussion is far from over, so it will continue tomorrow
morning.
Meanwhile, if you wish to know what was discussed, the
transcriptions are put online, so you can take a look yourself: morning of day one, afternoon of day two.
In case you're interested in some more perspectives, Thiru
Balasubramaniam of CPTech has also followed the
event in his blog.
