PRESS CONFERENCE ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE

                                                            25 March 2004

PRESS CONFERENCE ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE

With government, business and civil society representatives gathered at Headquarters for a two-day meeting to pin down a common vision on the complex issues surrounding Internet regulation, key members of the United Nations task force on information technology and development stressed the need to maintain the uniqueness of the Web’s current administration system, while making it more inclusive and legitimate.

Speaking at a press conference ahead of the close of the Global Forum on Internet Governance, Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive-Director of South Africa’s Association for Progressive Communications, civil society representative and member of the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force (ICTF), said the Internet’s unprecedented influence on nations and communities required stakeholders to consider technical, as well as socio-economic and developmental issues when setting new information and communications (ICT) guidelines.

She added that participants in the Forum were challenged to address not only developing country’s concerns about inequitable access to new technologies -- the “digital divide” -– but also the feeling that the poor were excluded from decision-making on how the Internet phenomenon would be managed.  An additional challenge, Ms. Esterhuysen said was to maintain the unique and organic way in which the current Internet administration infrastructure had evolved, while making it more inclusive and legitimate.

Organized by the UN-ICTF, the Global Forum, which began yesterday, is intended to contribute to preparations for a working group on internet governance to be established by the Secretary-General, an outcomes of the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held last December in Geneva.  The Secretary-General has appointed Markus Kummer of Switzerland as the head of a secretariat to assist him in setting up the working group, which will contribute to the second phase of the WSIS, which will be held next December in Tunis.

Joining Ms. Esterhuysen was Robert Kahn, President and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, who said that the Internet had been around for about 30 years.  Although it was hard to believe now, in the early days he and another panellist, Vinton Cerf, Senior Vice-President of MCI, had made virtually every decision about the Internet until the mid-1980s.  The Forum was addressing governance because the Web had become so vast and influential, he said, adding that going forward it would be important to avoid the bureaucracy that inevitably went hand-in-hand with government involvement.

He said that, owing to the almost counter-cultural way in which the Internet was originally conceived and monitored –- today there was almost no organizational involvement in setting regulations for the Web -– “we are probably less near a definition of Internet governance than ever before”.  That didn’t mean that there wasn’t a role for governments to play or things that needed to be managed or effectively coordinated.  Some aspects of the Internet were being run well, some weren’t.  Some, no one wanted to mess with, while

others were being completely ignored.  So, there was a lot of opportunity for future involvement of organizations, governments and private sector entities that could help deal with those issues.  He added that the important role of scientists and researchers, who had been there at the beginning, should not be ignored.

Mr. Cerf said that as the Forum neared the final hours of its work, it was clear that there were many differing views about what Internet governance really was.  “It may be that we don’t want to put too fine a point on [it]”, particularly since there were so many groups participating in one way or another in what was happening on the Internet, he said.  “I’m coming to the conclusion that this focus on Internet governance is really just a symptom of something else; that people were increasingly aware that they were relying on the Internet more and more everyday.”

In his discussions with representatives from developing countries at the Forum, one of their recurring concerns had been that, although their countries were going to be relying on the Internet, they did not know if it was reliable and neither did they understand the forces that maintained it.  So part of the answer might not be crafting some new Internet governance mechanism, but rather helping people understand what the mechanisms and forces were today which shaped the Web’s direction.  He said that every one of the nearly 1 billion Internet users today could certainly not be consulted about Internet governance, and probably wouldn’t want to be anyway.

“What they want is that the Internet works, that they get access to it, that they get faster access to it if they can afford it, and that it continues to provide new and creative applications for them”, he said.  It would be risky to focus on managing the Internet so carefully and so restrictively that it was no longer a place where innovation was supported, or was no longer the open environment it had been in the past, which had invited an enormous amount of investment and creativity.

“If we do that, we run the risk that by attempting to govern, we actually kill the value of the system”, he cautioned.

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