Monday 28 April 2014

Netmundial moves Net governance beyond WSIS

Netmundial moves Net governance beyond WSIS | IGP Blog: "We are now in a post-WSIS world, an Internet governance arena that explicitly endorses a form of multistakeholder governance in which non state actors have rough parity with state actors. Indeed, while some civil society actors were disappointed with and somewhat petulant about last minute language modifications related to issues like net neutrality, intermediary liability and surveillance, these criticisms missed the point. The essential debate we were having was not about specific policy issues (which anyway are mostly handled at the national level) but about the overall approach to global Internet governance, the nature of the ‘ecosystem’ itself." 'via Blog this'

Sunday 13 April 2014

Kroes: thoughts on NETmundial and the Future of Internet Governance

My thoughts on NETmundial and the Future of Internet Governance - European Commission: "I found some of the language related to human rights unnecessarily weak. I refer in particular to the passage "Internet governance should be open, participatory, Multistakeholder, technology-neutral, sensitive to human rights". We have an obligation to respect and promote human rights, not merely be "sensitive" to them, and this should be clearly reflected throughout the outcome document. This includes, among a number of important issues, the protection of privacy and personal data protection, which should have a prominent role in the outcome document.

Secondly, self-regulation and self-organisation of different stakeholders are certainly to be preserved and promoted. However, this cannot be to the detriment of basic democratic principles. It is not sufficient that the mechanisms through which "different stakeholder groups […] self-manage their processes [are] based on publicly known mechanisms", if this results in the explicit or implicit exclusion of persons in a manner that would contradict democratic processes." 'via Blog this'