WIPO PCDA1: Second FSFE statement, on Friends of Development proposal

Posted on 23. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The Friends of Development proposal is currently up for discussions, and NGOs are being asked for statements. Since Free Software disappeared from the Friends of Development proposal in the latest revision stage, it seemed prudent to criticse that: 

     Mr Chair, since you have now once more taken over as chair for our session, let me first congratulate you on your election as chair and your effort at trying to reach a substantial outcome. We greatly appreciate the chance to give some insight on the excellent proposal by the Friends of Development, on which we would like to commend them. The Free Software Foundation Europe fully supports most of the notions expressed in the proposal. In particular we wish to highlight the importance of a need for policy review and evaluation on the policy-making level and a possible Treaty on Access to Knowledge. We also are strongly in favor of protecting the public domain from re-privatisation. As was pointed out by the majority of delegations, the WIPO toolset is supposed to serve the public domain by allowing a limited monopoly in return for expanding the reservoir of human knowledge that is the public domain. That said, it seems the notion of Free Software is now sadly lacking from the Friends of Development proposal, as it is lacking from some of the other proposals. We believe that authors of Free Software have no less right to publish the result of their work under a copyright license of their choosing. We also believe that software authors around the world should have the full information about their licensing options, including releasing their software as Free Software, which is an enormously successful model in the social, political and economic sense. It may seem counterintuitive to some, but Free Software under licenses that provide the freedom to use the software for any purpose; the freedom to study the software to learn how it functions; the freedom to adapt the software to the needs of any person or group; and the freedom to distribute that software in both the original and modified form; have greatly contributed to humankind in the past 20 years. These freedoms provided by Free Software were central in bringing about the internet and have enabled people around the world to train themselves and others. These freedoms allowed people to adapt the software to their language and culture, to support and accomodate their disabilities and gave them the power to make sure that they would be the ones who controlled their digital infrastructure. Free Software will be doing this in the future. And while it is true that people and companies contributing to Free Software are useful for all of society, companies large and small around the world also prove the economic success of the Free Software model. All software developers around the world deserve to be fully informed about their choices, and WIPO should include Free Software in all its activities. WIPO should further not de-facto mandate use of proprietary software by member states or other organisations it interfaces with. Authors and users of Free Software are no less entitled to make their free choices of license, and WIPO should therefore not exclude them on the grounds of their legitimate choice of copyright licensing. We therefore find it necessary to explicitly include Free Software in the proposals and future activities. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
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WIPO PCDA1: Morning of day four and statement by the FSFE

Posted on 23. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The third day of the Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda (PCDA) for WIPO started with the Brazilian delegation further taking apart the US proposal. Most of the morning session then went to the further discussion of the proposal, during which some interesting statements were made.

Argentina pointed out that violation of limited industrial monopolies is not just “endemic” in developing countries, and quoted an article from Le Figaro of 22 February 2006 about counterfeit products, or “product piracy” in New York.

Nigeria rightly pointed out on behalf of the African group that the US proposal is very internet heavy, which might be of limited use to African countries, which often do not even have electricity, much less internet.

Things then got a little heated when Romania and Brazil got into a slight row about who said what about whom regarding some statements of Romania in which they referred to Brazil.

These were when the NGO statements could finally take place, and I gave the following statement on behalf of the FSFE, which will also be permanently online at http://fsfeurope.org/projects/wipo/statement-20060223.en.html

     STATEMENT BY THE FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION EUROPE (FSFE) FIRST SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COMMITTEE ON PROPOSALS RELATED TO A WIPO DEVELOPMENT AGENDA (Geneva, 20-24 February 2006) Mr Chairman, I speak in my capacity as president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, a European non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free Software, as defined by the four fundamental freedoms specified in the Free Software Definition. We operate in a network of sister organisations in Latin America, India, Europe and the United States, and work in close cooperation with the global Free Software community. Mr Chairman, let me first congratulate you on your chairing this session, we are hopeful that you will help this PCDA process to come to a concrete and conclusive outcome for the next general assembly. We would also like to congratulate all member states on their excellent proposals, even if our comments are in particular on the proposal of the United States. A typical cycle of sustainable activity is characterised by three major columns: planning, action, and analysis. Ideally, action follows on planning, analysis follows on action, the results of the analysis provide the grounds for further planning. In the WIPO context, we could also describe these as norm-setting, implementation, and review. Like all cycles, the WIPO cycle breaks at its weakest link. That is why we cannot agree with the expressed US opinion that WIPO has no need for analysis, and that studies only need to be done on a national level: there is need for review on national levels, but review also needs to be conducted at the level of norm-setting and implementation. As a result of this -- in our view incomplete -- understanding of the process, the US proposal focuses on very concrete, mainly implementation oriented aspects. We believe this is not necessarily a bad starting point for building consensus. Many member states made statements about WIPO activities greatly benefitting from a more participatory approach. Language ranged from including "views of all stakeholders, with special emphasis by public interest groups" to the United States proposal, which asks that WIPO "[...] should aggressively seek out potential partners in other intergovernmental organizations development agencies, as well as international and regional development banks, NGOs, the private sector, academia, charitable organizations, and other institutions [...]" This is an excellent and possibly consensual notion, which we could build on quickly and in a concrete way. As also discussed during the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, physical participation in such events substantially depends upon infrastructure and resources often not available to public interest groups in particular. The problems remain similar, so may be the solutions. Therefore please allow me to briefly share some experiences from the WSIS. Last week's deliberations on the Internet Governance Forum under mandate from UN secretary-general Kofi Annan were the most advanced in terms of incorporating the WSIS experience. All statements were transcribed live and projected on a screen above the chair, facilitating better understanding during the session and making it easier for participants to do justice to all statements. After the session, the transcripts were put online in a matter of minutes, making all statements of the session immediately accessible to all who were absent or had to leave the room while the meeting took place. Additionally, Free Software volunteers streamed the entire session live in an open and accessible format that allowed all computer users with sufficiently fast internet access to follow the session while it took place, possibly getting in touch with those present in order to have them incorporate their views and comments in the statements. The recordings usually go online a few days later, making it easy for people to follow the session after it took place. More could be done, but these two concrete steps have already done much to ensure that all stakeholders, including member states, have an easier time following all the proceedings and help improve the effectiveness of the overall process. Mr Chairman, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be a wonderful tool to facilitate universal access and wide participation beyond cultural, geographical and financial barriers. In order for them to do so, it is important to use them wisely and choose formats and protocols that do not exclude any business model, stakeholder group or operating system. All WIPO online activities, including the "WIPO Partnership Database" around which the US proposal is built, should be conducted through open standards and accessible formats. Open standards in this context mean publicly documented and freely accessible formats for which at least two implementations exist, one of which should be Free Software so others can take it for reference and study, as well as adapt it to their needs of multilingualism and accessibility. The format should be available on all three major families of desktop operating systems used today. Additionally, it is necessary that no such format actively mandates the use of proprietary software, so as to not exclude people who wish to maintain control over their own information infrastructure, an issue of increasing importance for many member states. Only the Open Document Format (ODF) fully fits this bill in the realm of office applications, it should therefore be used for all future activities. FSF Europe gladly offers its expertise to WIPO for more in-depth elaboration of these issues in this and other areas. Mr Chairman, all proposals seemed to share common ground in wanting to make concrete improvements in this area. It is on these grounds that we hope to have provided the basis for a small step towards consensus of all member states. Maybe such a small, but visible sign of finding common ground will help us on our way to the next general assembly. Thank you, Mr Chairman. Statement by Mr. Georg C.F. Greve  Free Software Foundation Europe, President UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Civil Society Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks (PCT) Working Group, Co-Coordinator First phase Civil Society representative, German Governmental Delegation

Presentation of the Friends of Development proposal was then delayed somewhat by some procedural discussions about how the secretariat should proceed to somehow bring the proposals together, possibly clustering them by issue to form one proposal that could be discussed substantially.

As the meeting will soon break for lunch, not much more is likely to happen after the Argentine delegation is done presenting some of the outlines and background of the proposal and Development Agenda process.

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Provisional Committee on a Developent Agenda for WIPO, Day Three

Posted on 22. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The third day of the Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda (PCDA) for WIPO ended right in the middle of the Brazilian statement on the US proposal. After Brazil had already spent 25 minutes of detailed disassembling, the session was closed for the day. But first things first.

As day two ended with the African Group proposal coming up, day three started with substantive discussion of the proposal. The atmosphere was actually moderately positive and constructive, although not very detail-oriented.

So after some discussion and a lunch-break, it was time for the Colombian proposal. This proposal was the odd fit in the group of all proposals, as it mainly dealt with WIPO providing better online access to patent databases, in order to “keep patent quality high.” So its connection to the Development Agenda was much more indirect than for any other proposal.

How much this proposal would really change for developing countries can be considered with some scepticism. Especially when considering that patent review does not work very well in industrialised countries with all the information available, and hundreds of evaluators at their service. Patents are often written to be as broad and obfuscated as possible in order to provide the most far-reaching scope, with some interpretation room in court to maybe extend it even furter.

The result is that no automated system can compare two proposals in a reliable fashion, and that humans are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number. So even if we neglected connectivity issues, standardisation problems and huge costs of database maintenance: How much would developing countries really win from such a database?

It seems more likely they would spend years and lots of resources trying to build it while they could have used these resources for other, more sustainable activities. But since all countries at WIPO are always in favor “more effective online tools” to “facilitate access to IPR information” regardless of whether it is feasible or useful, the discussion was rather consensual and quick.

Naturally, similar questions arise for the US proposal, which in substance seems to have moved from “a Webpage” to “a really cool Webpage”.

Anyone who has ever set up or maintained databases is going to cringe at the idea of setting up a global “WIPO Partnership Database” that will involve all sectors, such as government, academia, private sector, NGOs and so on to bring together “those that have ‘IP'” and “those that need ‘IP'”. Indeed, for most countries TCP/IP is going to be the first fundamental problem: We are apparently talking about an effort in a size category not totally unlike Google. How are they going to have sufficiently broad access to that database? How many local mirrors will be needed to ensure access in case of bad connection?

Overall, the US proposal is centered on a massive technological project that would bring significant cost for questionable benefit with many ways in which it is likely to fail. That does not sound too good.

While there are some other parts of the US proposal that may be useful, it is mainly implementation oriented, it only seeks to increase the effectiveness of WIPO activities. In other words: it makes the silent assumption that both norm-setting and analysis at WIPO are as they should be, that no improvement is possible or necessary. So WIPO should essentially continue to mainly serve the interests of the US and EU rights-holding industries.

This is obviously not very popular with the Friends of Development, which seek to give WIPO both hind- and foresight for its activities, both in the practical and norm-setting sense, such that WIPO would consider the impact of its activity on all of humankind.

And that is why Brazil has spent the last 25 minutes of today taking apart the US proposal piece by piece, and may continue doing so for another 20 minutes tomorrow.

Special notice

Besides these mainstream activities, two things seemed noteworthy today. One is a followup on Mexicos statement on day two (see yesterday’s blog entry): It seems Mexico did not like being told that people were confused about their apparent change of mind on where Free Software and such issues should be discussed and they clarified that “they meant they wanted WIPO to go to WSIS to discuss it there.”

As you know, I was in the German governmental delegation during the first phase of the WSIS, and was such able to go to the closed working groups in which Free Software and limited monopolies like Copyright, Patents and Trademarks were discussed. I also saw and heard Mexicos statements in these working groups, which usually sounded much like those of the United States.

And I witnessed how the WIPO representative was sent outside the room after being able to deliver a short introductory statement. So WIPO was not part of that discussion at the first phase of the WSIS where most of the Free Software language was drafted. I’m sure Mexico could have asked to involve them on these subjects, but cannot recall them doing so, and I am sure I would remember.

The other interesting occurence today is only vaguely related to the WIPO in so far as it concerns use of Copyright and Patents to form and abuse a monopoly to leverage it into other market areas and prevent competition on a fundamental level: I’m talking about the Microsoft antitrust case.

This morning, a conglomerate of Corel, IBM, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems filed a complaint with the European commission about Microsofts behaviour in the antitrust case and asked that the antitrust measures also be applied to other areas. That sounds like a very good idea.

More information

If you want to read more about what happened at the PCDA at WIPO so far, there are various sources. Of course you should have a look at Karstens blog. The EFF are again trying to provide more complete protocols, so you can now read the summary of day one. There is also another article at IP-Watch.org that you could check out.

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ECIS: Microsoft antitrust ruling should apply to all areas

Posted on 22. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The Microsoft antitrust case has received a lot of attention from the press, as you could also see in JJ’s press review. And yesterday, David Gow published an excellent piece on the case in UK’s Guardian, titled ‘A question of anti-trust‘. If you can only read one article about this case, make it this one: It is contains a good analysis and even includes potential dangers for democracy in a digital age.

This morning, European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) filed a complaint with the European Commission against a range of Microsoft business practices that threaten to deny enterprises and individual consumers real choice among competing software products. In case you wish to understand the economic interests behind this complaint, current ECIS members are: Corel, IBM, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems.

You may notice that ECIS contains several of the companies that lost its interest in the case after reaching individual agreements and monetary settlements with Microsoft directly, so this may seem contradictory, but indeed the ECIS complaint builds on the case and goes beyond it: 

     The ECIS complaint asks Europe's antitrust authority to put an end to
     practices that reinforce Microsoft's existing monopolies and extend
     its market dominance into a range of existing and pre-announced future
     product areas, beyond the two that were the focus of the Commission's
     2004 Decision.

 

In other words: ECIS asks to take the antitrust decision of the European Commission and apply it also to other areas in which Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly in market-hostile ways.

One might think it important enough that interoperability of desktops and servers, the central component of the case, affects all major users of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), such as almost all companies with more than two employees, governments, intergovernmental organisations and NGOs.

In fact, the ECIS complaint demonstrates that the significance is even greater: This is the most successful antitrust case against Microsoft to date, and it has the potential to establish future rules of what is acceptable behaviour in the IT industry, and what is not.

That is why FSFE has been working on this case for many years, from the original investigation, over the 2004 decision, to the European Court case where it is now one of two remaining original third parties on the side of the European Commission. In the best Free Software tradition, it has done so in a joint work force with the Samba Team, which has provided the technical expertise about Microsoft Desktop and Server interaction.

I only hope that more companies will help us defending their interests in this — to this date, FSFE has received virtually no support for this case from the industry. Consequently, all the credit belongs to the Free Software community, including in particular the Fellows of the FSFE.

If you wish to help, join now.

update: inserted "original" for clarity in the history of FSFE’s work, as indeed two new parties (ECIS and VideoBanner) joined later in the case, at the same time some applications to support Microsoft were denied.
 

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Provisional Committee on a Developent Agenda for WIPO, Day Two

Posted on 21. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The second day of the Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda (PCDA) for WIPO is now over, and despite the voiced concerns of many people I spoke to, it did enter substantive discussion.

Theoretically the proposal of the African group was supposed to be discussed first. But as they needed some more time for preparation, Chile agreed to present its proposal first. The Chilean proposal is indeed quite a good read, and contains some very strong insights on the public domain, Free Software and policy assessment. In short: the public domain became the subject of the day.

Although economies like the United States were initially founded on ignoring the Copyright of others, effectively turning all their material into a kind of public domain, some countries — including the United States — tried to argue that the public domain did not encourage economic growth and investment. Raising this as a point against the importance of the public domain is not only economically nonsensical, it also demonstrates an amazing blindness to non-economic values of culture.

It seems that working at WIPO has cost many people the ability to see culture and knowledge as anything else than economic value. The inspiration drawn from the history of humankind, the sparkle of human igenuity, the fundamental feelings, the social groups that form on the basis of certain cultural exchanges, all this appears irrelevant.

Indeed: many people were entirely dumbfounded by the phrase "protecting the public domain" because the term "protection" to them only meant "monopolisation", which obviously makes no sense in the context of the public domain.

It took an excellent statement by Brazil to clear up that confusion and explain that indeed the public domain needs to be protected from being propertised, from encroachments on the public wealth for the undue benefit of a few.

My personal two surprises of the day were the statement by Mexico, which spent 90% of its time on Free Software, arguing that it should not be discussed at WIPO because it was already discussed at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This sounded rather familiar, because at the WSIS they seemed to be saying that it should rather be discussed at WIPO.

But seriously: Free Software is to the largest part based on copyright, it is an alternative copyright-based model, if you will. So if WIPO is not the place to discuss copyright issues, what is? Fortunately, that rebuttal was indeed made by Chile somewhat later. And in any case it was interesting to see so many countries making points about Free Software — it was obviously on the minds of many delegations, which is good.

The second surprise was the frequency with which people kept bringing up the WSIS process and its results at this meeting. At the IIM process last year, I seemed to be the only one making those references — suddenly the entire room appears to be overflowing with them. The Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) even made it into the African Group proposal.

That proposal is what will start the discussion tomorrow, possibly followed by the US proposal, but only the chair knows that for certain.

More information

If you want to read some more, I recommend today’s CSC statement, IP Justice statement, TWN statement, 3D statement and of course all the other information sources and blogs, in particular: Karsten Gerloff’s blog and the IP-Watch article for the day.

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Provisional Committee on a Developent Agenda for WIPO, Day 1

Posted on 20. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

Day one of the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Provisional Committee on a Development Agenda (PCDA) for WIPO is over. It started rather slow because the selection of the chair turned out to be highly controversial — the majority of industrialised countries favored the Romanian ambassador, the majority of developing countries were in favor of Paraguay chairing the meeting.

Until 12:45 it looked as if the meeting would break for lunch before it had started, but just before the lunch break at 13:00, the Romanian ambassador took himself out of the race, breaking the deadlock and allowing Paraguays represenative Rigoberto Gauto Vielman to be elected as chair to the meeting.

That the selection of the chair was such a controversial issue shows how serious the countries take this meeting — that so many ambassadors from developing nations showed up is another. So this week could become very interesting. 

The afternoon did not bring many surprises, though: First came the general statements of the regions and groups of countries — it is normal to group in regions or grade of industrialisation to form common positions in order to allow a "bundling" of interests in the UN context. Then came the presentations of the various proposals by the groups that had put them forward.

While this held little surprise in terms of positions, it was still good to see some substance discussed on the first day. Also, some of the statements were interesting. So a very small amount of optimism may be warranted, but only in small doses: the blockade position of the United States still seems rather identical to the one they took throughout the past year of negotiations. They seem to have moved sideways, but not really forward.

Other Reports on the Event

As usual, several people are following this event in their blogs, including our friends from the EFF and CPTech. While the EFF will only put their things online tomorrow, Thiru should put his entry online soon in his blog. There is also the IP-watch article about the first day.

Update: In case you can read Portugese, you can also read this article on Cultura Livre.

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Internet Governance Forum, End of Day 2 and Conclusions

Posted on 17. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The second and final day of the consultations on the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) that was mandated by Kofi Annan following the conclusions of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), is now over. If you wish to know what was said, you could go and read the transcripts of the morning and afternoon.

Issues

There is a broad range of opinions and suggestions that Chairman Desai will report to Kofi Annan for further consideration. Let me try to summarise some points that I guess will find their way into this report:

Although several delegations asked for more meetings, it seems unlikely that they will take place for lack of time and resources. So the next meeting will be the 1st Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) around October 2006, with the exact dates to be determined. The meeting may take the shape of a four day event starting on a Tuesday to allow for thematic working group discussions and common position building on Monday.

Because there will be no more meetings, further consultation will be conducted online and multiple delegations asked for the creation of a “multistakeholder group”, also called “steering committee” or “program committee” in some interventions. Chairman Desai wants to give everyone time to think whether this group is necessary, and if so, comment on the form, shape and composition. For this he is planning a 10 day consultation period, so roughly until end of February.

For the year 2007, Brazil already offered itself as host country for the 2nd Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio de Janeiro, which would have to be decided at the IGF in Greece.

So, for the moment this is where we are. If there are comments on the “multistakeholder group” and its composition, they should be sent within the next ten days to Mr Kummer, who is the responsible executive secretary.

Fun

As far as United Nations conferences go, this one was very relaxed, informal and, well, funny. Sometimes the fun was somewhat involuntarily caused by technology, such as the transcription system, which was clearly not “German professor proof” as Wolfgang Kleinwächter proved when explaining the true nature of the internet: 

     It's a "terror incognito." [ Laughter ] >>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: I said -- I'm sorry. It's my English pronunciation. It's a terra inCOGNITa. [Applause] >> Speak English! >>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: It's not English? I am -- I'm sorry for that. But as a German researcher, sometimes you use Latin terminology.

And sometimes the fun was created by the outstanding skills of Chairman Desai, for instance when he was faced with the impossible task of summarizing the first day of consultations: 

     >>CHAIRMAN DESAI: I think I'm not going to summarize. But I think I will just leave you with a story from a person in India and also central Asia. Mulla Nasrudin was asked to make a speech on a subject he knew nothing about. And he went to this meeting, and he asked the people, "do you people know what I am going to say?" And everybody in the audience said, "No." So he says, "How can I talk to people who don't know what I'm going to say?" And he walked off. [ Laughter ] >>CHAIRMAN DESAI: Mulla Nasrudin came the next -- again. And this time, they had prepared themselves. So Mulla Nasrudin says, "do you people know what I'm going to talk about?" And everybody said, "Yes." He says, "Then I don't need to talk to you anyhow." [ Laughter. ] >>CHAIRMAN DESAI: So they said "now what do we do?" So they called him a third time, and they planned. They said, "half say this and half say that." So actually when he said, "do you know what I am going to say?" Half said, "no," the other half said "yes." He says, "fine. Those who know tell the others who don't." [ Laughter. ] >>CHAIRMAN DESAI: That's exactly what I am going to do. Go for a wonderful reception which the Swiss are giving. As for tomorrow, let's get back to this. And it'll probably be in this the spirit.

or his refreshingly direct response to a rather lengthy intervention by Adam Peake: 

     >>CHAIRMAN DESAI: Adam, yes, I think it will be -- your intellectual contributions will be very nice. But hard cash would be even nicer. [ Laughter ]

Final note on Free Software

One of the nicest things to see about the IGF Consultations were the Free Software activists of the Politecnic University of Torino, though, who volunteered to use their Free Software video streaming software to stream the entire sessions live, and who will be offering recordings of the sessions online.

They received some travel subsidy to be able to come to Geneva, but did all the work on a voluntary basis, making the IGF accessible to everyone with an internet connection — thanks a lot, guys!

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Internet Governance Forum Day 2: More discussions and a statement by FSFE

Posted on 17. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The second day of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva has started just like the last day has ended, with an open discussion on where, how and in which form the IGF should take place.

After hearing what has been discussed here throughout the the last one and a half days, I decided to raise a few points. In case you are interested, here is my statement:

     Thank you, Mr. Chair, I speak in my capacity as president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, a European non-governmental organisation dedicated to all aspects of Free Software, as defined by the four fundamental freedoms specified in the Free Software Definition. We operate in a network of sister organisations in Latin America, India, Europe and the United States and work in close cooperation with the global Free Software community. We have been following the discussion with great interest and in the interest of moving forward would like to offer a few comments on what we heard so far. Firstly, though, let me congratulate and thank you and Mr Kummer on the meeting and the open and inclusive spirit in which it was convened. We hope this will be maintained for future sessions. One of the terms we heard rather frequently in this debate was multilingualism, alas, we are somewhat at a loss as to the concrete definition of this term. Private discussions throughout the past day and a half seem to have turned up various meanings and definitions that had little in common and were in fact at times contradictory. In the field of software, most people would probably understand it as localisation of the software itself in order to make the software talk to each of its users in their own language. Since Free Software and in particular its freedom of modification permits all groups to adapt the software to their own cultural environment, this has been a major driving force for adoption of Free Software in many parts of the world, especially many developing countries, which are often not considered interesting enough markets for major proprietary software vendors. You will thus not be surprised if I of course fully embrace the importance of multilingualism. If we plan for the IGF to come to concrete and successful outcomes, it does however seem necessary to come to a common understanding of what that term is actually supposed to mean. Spam is another issue on the minds of many delegations. In our experience, spam is not so much a technical, but fundamentally a social and economic problem. Most of the technological remedies we have seen proposed in the past would do very little to address the issue of Spam, but raise a serious issue of interoperability. Several delegations pointed out that the internet has a close relation to the principles of interoperability and freedom. The connection between Free Software and its principles and the internet is indeed not circumstantial: if one takes a look at the history of networks, one will find a list of proprietary approaches to build something like the internet, which failed without exception. It took Free Software to make the internet work. Spam remedies we have seen suggested by major industry vendors require discarding the very principles that made the internet possible, and it would be tragic indeed if attempts at regulating Spam were to undo what we all have come to depend on. We therefore consider it necessary for the IGF to establish for itself a set basic principles that will uphold and strengthen the foundations on which the internet was built. These principles should in particular ensure freedom and interoperability on a fundamental level, as a common ground on which to implement the principles agreed upon during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Regarding the tools discussed to continue the forum online between sessions, I wish to emphasise the importance of practicing what we preach. All IGF online resources should be fully accessible to all users, including those with disabilities, and put effective use of bandwidth high on its list of priorities to avoid excluding participants in regions with limited internet access. The Free Software community has a long standing experience in ensuring participation and collaboration across cultural, language and connectivity barriers and gladly offers its expertise to the process. As a final and very concrete remark, let me suggest that for future sessions on the IGF, the very basic and necessary facilities of those who wish to use the internet will be provided in future sessions. I observed a serious power struggle going on in this room, and it is not about politics. Thank you, Mr Chair.

Right now the Chair is summarising where the statements seemed to be consensual, and where there was dissent, which he will then summarise in his report to secretary general of the UN, Kofi Annan. In the afternoon, the plan is to come to a slightly more concrete outcome, but it seems unlikely any conclusion will be reached today. There may be more meetings ahead before the first official IGF in Greece.

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Internet Governance Forum Day 1: Many discussions, few conclusions

Posted on 16. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

Having been mandated by the Tunis phase of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the first day of the consultations on the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is coming to an end in Geneva.

The first day was generally devoted to an open debate and exchange of views, and showed how fundamentally different the various participants see the IGF. The range of opinions goes from a purely discussion oriented series of 3-day conferences to be held once a year, to a perpetual process to set global public policy on cybersecurity, cybercrime, terrorism, spam, privacy, protection of personal information and data, multilingualisation, consumer protection, capacity building, and domain names.

In comparison to these issues, the Microsoft antitrust case is extremely limited, with a clearly mandated body to take care of competition issues, the European Commission, and a clearly violating company, Microsoft.

Taking that experience, in particular the fact that Microsoft simply ignored the European Commission for years now while trying to appease them with useless gestures (see today’s press release), one cannot help but feel sceptical about the potential effectiveness of such public policy setting.

Code often establishes de-facto governance, and in the case of proprietary software, that governance is generally intransparent, and in the hands of the proprietor of the piece of software.

Free Software allows for public review and consensus, but has been largely marginalised in the entire discussion.

At the moment, noone really seems to hold the answers to many of the fundamental questions that arose in this room today — and the open discussion is far from over, so it will continue tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, if you wish to know what was discussed, the transcriptions are put online, so you can take a look yourself: morning of day one, afternoon of day two.

In case you’re interested in some more perspectives, Thiru Balasubramaniam of CPTech has also followed the event in his blog.

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Following the Consultations on the Internet Govenance Forum (IGF) in Geneva

Posted on 16. February, 2006 by Georg Greve

The United Nations premises in Geneva currently host the preliminary consultations on the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) which came out of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

 Right now the discussions mostly focus on the question of defining this new forum, and find out what it should be concerned with, and in which way. If you wish to follow these discussions, there is a live stream run with 100% Free Software available at
 http://streaming.polito.it/IGF-live

 The meeting will soon be adjourned for lunch and informal discussions and then resume in the afternoon today and all day tomorrow.
 

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