Wednesday was the open public consultation preparing for the second meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, which will take place in Rio de Janaeiro on 12th-15th November. Although the inaugural Athens meeting was widely deemed a success, having largely stayed off the dread topics of wresting control of DNS from ICANN and IP addressing from the RIRs, the usual suspects were back demanding that these topics be added to the agenda.

Last year’s agenda was in four parts:

• Access (meaning, how can the Developing World afford it?),
• Diversity (which is mainly about adding non-Latin character sets to the DNS),
• Openness (meaning freedom of speech - a nod to Civil Society stakeholders) and
• Security (meaning, well, everything from selling firewalls to restricting freedom of speech, depending on who is talking at the time).

Much of the plenary consisted of worthy speeches, mainly from governments but also civil society, with relatively few contributions from industry.

However, alongside the plenary, were a great number of workshops, which brought participants together in discussion of much more specific subjects. Arising out of these workshops, almost spontaneously, was a new kind of multi-stakeholder group known by the new jargon term “Dynamic Coalition”. These Dynamic Coalitions are largely the continuation of the workshop on an ongoing basis: the new terminology is there to allow governments to participate without having to be in charge, something governments usually find difficult, especially in organisations that might make something that looks like a policy statement. Dynamic Coalitions are the real valuable fruit of the IGF, being a mechanism through which participants can work on issues co-operatively without devolving into an interminable intergovernmental political negotiation.

The group of countries that wants to greatly extend (inter)governmental control over the Internet, starting with critical technical resources, haven’t gone away. At the preparatory meeting in Geneva they led off the discussion en masse, sitting together and taking the floor first. One by one Brazil, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia set out the case for rolling the clock back three years and focussing not on what stakeholders can agree to work on together, but on issues where the Internet community, industry and major Western liberal democracies are fundamentally at odds with the aspirations of less liberal regimes to reinforce their “sovereign power” over the Internet. A casual observer would recognise these demands as being what they were saying during the World Summit on the Information Society, which ended up creating the Internet Governance Forum as an agreeable alternative to their desire to vest greater, decision-making power in a United Nations institution such as the ITU. But hardened cynics would think it naive to expect them to move on merely because they lost the argument.

In trying to reopen these old issues, China and its allies had two objectives:

• to get the management of critical internet resources added to the agenda for Rio;and
• to move the IGF from a open multi-stakeholder forum towards becoming a international policy-making body, with governments in the decisive role

The first was fairly easily achieved: the Regional Internet Registries did not speak at all, and speaking for ICANN Theresa Swinehart did not attempt to argue that such topics were outside the intended scope of the IGF, as it had previously maintained. Score one for China.

The second objective was always going to be harder. With an open membership, the Internet Governance Forum has no decision-making process. IGF Chair Nintin Desai has always maintained that it cannot even form such a process, there being no mechanism for approving its creation. As such the Internet Governance Forum is simply a forum, and cannot become a corporate body with its own decisions and policies.

This limited view of the IGF’s mandate is not shared by China and its allies, but the most most detailed attack upon it came from a civil society body called Eurolinc, an organisation founded to promote multilingualism whose website is exclusively in French. Eurolinc’s submission argues that the Tunis Agenda which established the IGF calls for the creation of a “Bureau”, which is United Nations jargon for a kind of Executive Board. Their two items [PDF] of closely argued legal analysis [PDF] depend on a tight reading of specific aspects of the Tunis Agenda, which may be a tactical mistake since everyone knows that the Tunis Agenda is full of language designed to support any possible interpretation - that’s the only way it got agreed in the first place.

Interestingly, Eurolinc’s call for the recognition of not just the three stakeholder groupings identified at WSIS (Government, Industry and Civil Society), but add a fourth, the “Internet Community”. However if they thought to win any support from old hands like the Internet Society they would have done well to avoid such apparently disparaging references to the “so-called Internet Community”. In any case ISOC, the RIRs and their friends would be unlikely to support a move which is designed to give leverage to governmental interests hostile to their role: indeed, the Civil Society Caucus felt moved to dissociate itself from this proposal from one of their own, as any Bureau would ultimately reduce their own franchise.

The Canadian delegation weighed in with the minimal legal fig-leaf needed to support the idea that any mention of a Bureau in the Tunis Agenda isn’t to be taken literally (it’s worded with a lower-case “b”, so it doesn’t mean Bureau in the UN-jargon sense), and then won the Chair’s redoubled appreciation with an actual offer of cash: $100,000 to assist participation from developing countries. From that point we heard a simple chorus of approval from industry, civil society, the Internet community and friendly national delegations in favour of the open, multistakeholder approach of the IGF, all drawn in contrast to the tortuous political negotiations of the WSIS and ITU-style practices. Such support made it easy for Chairman Desai to annouce that he had no intention of creating a UN-style Bureau, nor could the IGF ever become an intergovernmental negotiation. Score one for the Internet community.

In conclusion therefore, all sides could leave the day thinking they had achieved something by showing up, and were left with both positive and defensive reasons for needing to participate in the main meeting in Rio. Which probably means the real prize for the day was won by Chairman Nintin Desai; well, you don’t get to his position without showing some rather extraordinary diplomatic skills.

This post is a personal view of the IGF Preparatory Meeting from Malcolm Hutty, LINX’s Head of Public Affairs