It’s been a busy time at IT Week central recently – or at least it has on the pages of the internet section. This particular corner of our humble magazine has seen a renaissance in recent months on the back of Web 2.0, a raft of new web-based threats and more innovations in the on-demand software market. It’s all welcome stuff, to be perfectly honest, because sending over a blank page to be sub-edited on a Tuesday afternoon doesn’t really endear me to the editorial powers-that-be.
The other week I drank deeply from the fountain of web news as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) kicked off in Athens. Sadly, IT Week’s travel budget would only have got me as far as Gatwick Airport, so I covered the event from the office. Launched at the most recent UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society last year, the IGF is a “forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue”, or a talking shop if you want to be slightly cynical, which, as a journalist, is my wont.
Now the problem with talking shops is that they very rarely achieve anything, in fact their whole raison d’être is precisely that: to discuss issues and have open, frank dialogue, to network and participate in the cross-fertilisation of ideas, and blah, blah, blah. But in the area of internet governance this can actually be an advantage.
As Emily Taylor of .uk registry Nominet told me after the Athens event, the IGF’s lack of a mandate to make policy is precisely its strength. It enables all stakeholders all over the world to share knowledge in a pressure-free environment. And there is blatantly a need for all regions to be represented at this level on the internet. We can’t ignore the fact that much of the spam clogging our inboxes and the malicious code bombarding our networks comes from less developed countries, for example.
Best practice advice in this area can only be beneficial, and the information-sharing focus might even help the navel-gazing West to act a little less like a hormonal teenager, selfishly obsessed with its own problems.
In the end, the IGF generated a bit of China-bashing, a bit of Google-bashing – no great surprises there – and finally the rather grand, headline-grabbing proposal of an internet Bill of Rights to protect the online rights of net users. Given that some internet watchers had doubted the event would ever take place, the inaugural IGF deserves a lot of credit for successfully bringing together representatives from enterprise, civil society and government.
There will be some involved in internet governance who will be itching to turn the potential of this forum into something more meaningful, to give it concrete decision-making powers. But it would be difficult to imagine an event in which Amnesty International could sit down to a debate with the Chinese government about openness on the internet – as they did – if the stakes were raised in this way.
