By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch
Multi-stakeholder “dynamic coalitions” of the UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) are pushing to have privacy, intellectual property, open standards and freedom of expression on the agenda of the second meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil next autumn.

At a 13 February IGF stocktaking meeting in Geneva, several of the coalitions formed at the first IGF (in Athens in October-November 2006) presented short progress reports. Agenda-setting, the role of the coalitions, the IGF as a whole and the IGF output are still to be debated. IGF activists and organisers also look to New York where the new UN Secretary General has yet to make his first comments on Internet governance issues.

The dynamic coalitions so far are the most visible and practical outcome of the IGF in preparation for the second IGF meeting in Rio. The 50-member IGF coalition on privacy sponsored by the governments of France, United Kingdom, companies like Microsoft and Cisco Systems, and data protection officials from various countries, met on Sunday before the meeting.

According to Ralf Bendrath, expert in privacy policy at the University of Bremen, the Privacy Coalition will publish issue papers shortly on privacy and identity, privacy and development, and privacy and freedom of expression. An Italian government delegate announced a meeting for discussion on an Internet Bill of Rights this summer.

The A2K@IGF Coalition, another large dynamic coalition, aims at coordinating participation and awareness of access to knowledge (A2K) activities at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), including proposals for a Development Agenda and an Access to Knowledge Treaty at WIPO.

”One focus of the coalition is setting methodologies or best practice norms for the implementation of laws dealing with technological protection measures (TPMs) and digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, which have been shown to present serious impediments to access to knowledge and the free flow of information,” said Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, which is instrumental in the coalition.

Gross said coalition member Franklin Pierce College Law Center was for example checking on the effects of free trade agreements. Strong interest in the issue which was nearly untouched at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was shown by the growing partner list of the coalition. “Ghana has joined the coalition and I think more countries will follow,” said Gross. Key deliverables for Rio, according to Gross’ statement, are development of best practice norms for DRM technologies and anti-circumvention laws.

Nitin Desai, senior UN official and IGF chair selected by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, said with regard to IGF’s role on intellectual property issues: “We are very well designed in providing a space for discussion.” The IGF’s non-negotiating role might help to “look for some common ground.” Any resolution on a recommendation or official output naturally would have to be taken at the WIPO level, he said.

IGF Executive Secretary Markus Kummer said, “The IGF is a neutral environment to discuss these issues.” Kummer also referred to another aspect of the IP problem that he said would stay with the IGF: the question of open and non-proprietary standards. The IGF was criticised during the stocktaking phase for relying only upon proprietary formats. “There are no easy answers,” said Kummer.

The role of the IGF as a pure discussion forum - “a neutral, non-binding and non-duplicative process” as the EU presidency put it - was intensively discussed during the stocktaking meeting. While hailed as a “liberation” of the bounds of classical diplomacy by some, several governments and NGOs asked for a more formalised output.

”As for the results it is important to have some kind of written conclusion or concluding statement that could be a reference for the meeting,” said the head of the Brazilian delegation. “In fact, the mandate given to the IGF in paragraph 72 refers to the possibility to make recommendations.”

Without a more formal role accompanied by more dialogue between governments, “we risk entering into a course whose result will be the lack of interest for the IGF process,” he warned. Several civil society members as well as government delegates said they did not agree with Desai’s point of view that formal decisions or votes were made impossible by the non-member nature of the IGF. Ideas like “rough consensus”, “messages from the IGF” or other compromises were put on the table beside the “recommendations” mentioned in the 2005 Tunis WSIS agenda. But US business and many Western governments warn against a mission creep of the IGF.

What the final agenda for Rio will look like had to be left very much open. Procedures for next steps still have to be cleared by the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The future of the IGF Advisory Committee that was tasked with the preparations and programming of the first IGF still is not clear. While he would recommend keeping the advisory group, Desai said, the final decision lies with him.

An update on another hot issue, the so-called enhanced “cooperation process” also had been delayed, said Desai, because of the change in New York. Several governments urgently asked about the outcome of bilateral consultations Desai held over the last month. Enhanced cooperation was agreed upon by the WSIS as a complementary process to the IGF. Its target was - at least as some interpret it - better cooperation between governments and relevant organisations on Internet governance.

Whether or not the management of Internet infrastructure resources should be placed more prominently on the IGF agenda was a second issue of debate at the stocktaking meeting. A strong appeal to tackle it came from the non-governmental Third World Network. “The issues of root servers, domain name servers and Internet Protocol are among the most important issues in Internet governance,” Riaz Tayob urged participants. “If they are absent from the agenda, the core issues are absent.”

Tayob complained that while the IGF was mainly established because these issues had not been resolved, it had been kept off the agenda. “Supporters of the current governance model should not try to preclude discussion, and the IGF should not be a party to such censorship,” he said. Brazil’s representative recommended to at least invite Internet governance organisations like the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) or UN International Telecommunication Union to give an update at every IGF session.

Patrik Faltstrom, former member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), said he personally would reject discussion on issues like root servers at the IGF as long as the questions to be answered were not more specified. While there might be aspects of the technical system that could be discussed at the IGF, so far questions had been very vague.

In a way, Gross told Intellectual Property Watch, the infrastructure issue and the IP issue were related as both were facets of US attempts to have a certain control over the Internet. The IGF had to tackle both issues. The IGF should not, said Bendrath, “shy away” from the most controversial issues and be satisfied with simply being a multistakeholder-model accepted by everybody.

Monika Ermert may be reached at info@ip-watch.ch.