We’ve had the pleasure of the past couple of days of hosting Markus Kummer, the coordinator of the Executive Secretariat for the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) at the United Nations. Mr. Kummer has given us the chance to hear about his plans for the WGIG over the next several months (he expects the Working Group to be named by the end of the month and to convene first in November). He listened intently to our suggestions about how legal and other academics and the technology community be meaningfully included in the process. We gave him an update on some of our research as part of the Open Net Initiative, along with researchers at the University of Toronto and University of Cambridge, on internet filtering, and on our Net Dialogue projects in particular.
We were joined by Dave Clark and Hal Abelson of MIT; Mema Roussopolous of Harvard’s computer science department; Scott Bradner of the Harvard Provost’s office; and Eddan Katz, executive director of Yale’s Information Society Project, as well as many of the Berkman faithful.
Much of the discussion hinged on the interests of developing countries in the World Summit on the Information Society process and beyond. As Michael Best stressed, the WSIS and ICANN process points are, at a minimum, proxies for other, broader inequities in the world’s balance of power. Overall, the WGIG promises a process that is “open, transparent and inclusive.” (Where have we heard this before?)
Mr. Kummer and his colleagues have a tough challenge ahead in terms of responding to the real need to involve developing countries, as well as non-governmental stakeholders, extensively and meaningfully in whatever process lies ahead.
For more on Markus Kummer’s thinking, our friends at the OII have a 4-page speech of Kummer’s posted here, which describes his mandate and early work of the WGIG.
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