The second day of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was partially
strange, partially funny, and indeed quite productive.
The day began with a main hall session about "Openness", the whole
protocol of which is already online here. As one might imagine, a panel about
openness and transparency on the internet did create quite a bit of
China bashing, and while Mr Art Reilly, senior director of
strategic technology policy at Cisco Systems, had a hard time
explaining the exact dealings of Cisco with the Chinese government,
Vint Cerf made some clear statement for Google in terms of being
transparent about filtering on request of the Chinese government, but
trying to avoid to gather data that could be abused:
Let me also say that we also chose not to offer certain services in
China. We didn't offer Gmail. We didn't offer blogging. The reason we
did not do that is that we did not want to have materials on our
servers that the Chinese government could ask us or insist that we
reveal in order to identify individual parties. So we chose
deliberately not to offer certain services in order to protect the
interests of the Chinese people.
So when Mr YANG XIAOKUN of the Chinese mission in Geneva stood up
after a long discussion about the subject to tell the assembled
audience that China has no access restrictions of any kind, it
did draw some unbelieving looks, and then some boos. Here is that part
of the exchange:
>> NIK GOWING: Could I -- may I ask you a question? How would you
define, for those who are not familiar with your government's policy
and the detail of it, what is the principle on restrictions of
openness in China?
>> YANG XIAOKUN: We do not have restriction at all.
While it is justified to criticise China for their human rights
record, it is not like all Northern countries had such a fantastic
record themselves. The United States come to mind immediately, but
also European countries are not always the poster-children they'd like
to portray themselves as. So we could also have spoken about the
surveillance of internet traffic in Germany, the Patriot Act in the
United States, or similar things in almost any other country.
Dynamic Coalition for Open Standards
After the hardcore candy-bar lunch following on a skipped
breakfast, the day went on productively with a press conference on the
first so-called "Dynamic Coalition" at the IGF, which was started by a
group of organisations and companies, including SUN, CPTech, the
library of Alexandria, W3C, IP-Justice, the Yale Information Society
Project, and the Free Software Foundation Europe.
Talks are ongoing with other major companies and several countries,
as well as NGOs who have an interest in Open Standards. The goal will
be to define a common understanding of what constitutes an Open
Standard, practice examples of Open Standard implementations and
policy advice on Open Standards.
You can see some first press echo at Computer Business Reviw Online, with more to
follow.
