[Editors Note: CDT Policy Director Jim Dempsey is in Athens this week, participating in the first global Internet Governance Forum (IGF). He'll be blogging about the experience throughout his stay. Check back regularly for updates.]

The Internet Governance Forum opened today in the rainy seaside Athenian suburb of Vouliagmeni. “Internet governance” has always been a subjective term, and it’s pretty clear from the opening remarks that much of the discussion here will be driven by how various stakeholders define it. There have been enough divergent comments thus far (often coming from the same speaker) to both appease and rile advocates on all sides of the debate.

So far, there has been broad agreement that the Internet is essentially a good thing, or has had essentially good effects, but comments about applying technology cautiously and adopting the “correct” legal and policy framework are subject to multiple interpretations.

Key themes so far include dialogue, multi-stakeholder, the Internet as a global resource, diversity, the needs of users, security, stability, protecting children, multilingualism, free flow of information, diversity, and development.

Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer and chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) had a thoughtful comment today in response to calls for more global Internet governance. As he explained, there is already a lot of governance in the system, and, suggested that we should ask which parties need to be governed and for what purpose. To this, I would add, since governance need not always mean governments, what is the best kind of institution for implementing that governance? For service providers, the question may be is there enough competition. If not, we may want to regulate it. Higher up, there are different players, different interests, and different institutions may be appropriate.

There seems to be an assumption that the IGF is here to stay as an institution. The sites of the next three events have already been selected:

Brazil 2007
India 2008
Egypt 2009

The transcript of the morning is now available. Vint Cerf’s morning remarks (second to last) are worth reading in their entirety.

More to come…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 1:17 pm and is filed under International, Standards & Governance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.