Caribbean Internet Governance Forum

I'd been busy this Monday and Tuesday at the Caribbean Internet Governance Forum - the idea was to produce a document for the WGIG (Working Group on Internet Governance) - and thus, the WSIS. Here are some of the highlights as I saw from the cheap seats in the back, with laptop balanced on my knee and a teasing wireless connection which I couldn't get a login for.¹ Of course, this isn't something I will claim to be objective - you'll find this account is colored by my own personal opinions, but I make no apologies for that.

Ambassador Lolita Applewaite started things off with discussion of WSIS in Geneva (2003) - that many important issues were addressed, such as Freedom of Expression. She also pointed out the unresolved issues - Financing, internet governance. An interesting quote - 'IG is required to avoid fragmentation of the internet'. I don't know that this is true, as IG can also be the cause of fragmentation of the internet.

Some other quotes from Ambassador Lolita Applewaite:

• 'Sadly, the Caribbean response to IG is still being awaited...'
• 'This year has been declared as the year of the Single market (CSME)...'

The good news is that there is a Caribbean - or at least CARICOM- response to IG. Whether it's representative of the region is something which has yet to be determined, since the output document is not a consensus document. Process drove product.

The Caribbean Single Market And Economy (CSME) reference is interesting, to say the least. I look forward to hearing more about it - or simply reading more about the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, for that matter.

The Ambassador also thanked UNDP for making the forum possible. And Guyana Telephone/Telegraph company (GTT) for making the forum possible.².

Ambassador C. Trevor Clarke Barbados did the keynote address , and he quipped about the West Indies cricket team's need for better governance (referring to sponsorship issues). With a Powerpoint presentation up on the wall, it was appropriate that he should quote Bill Gates: "The Internet changes everything..."

He spoke of the history of the internet from a governmental/diplomatic perspective. Talks about scientists initially working without government intervention yet with government funding. Of course, many of these 'scientists' weren't 'scientists' but college dropouts - a point I made clear during a part of the forum.

He mentioned lengthy periods of resistance in WSIS from the United States - and that the US did seek to resolve the problem. He mentioned WTO and problems of goods and services and teased at intellectual property issues. Overall, a pretty well balanced U.S. government pro and cons talk as related to Internet Governance.

Ambassador Clarke also said, 'without governance, the strong will always exploit the weak'. Yet I also could not help but think that with governance, the strong also exploit the weak.

He went on to say that Caribbean involvement is required to look out for the Caribbean's interests, as well as working with Latin America, and that there is a need to build relationships with as many developed countries as possible. This is a very top-down approach, whereas the internet has been anything but top down. And also, I must point out - as Ambassador Clarke did in his pros and cons - that sometimes the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.

John Crain, the Chief Technical Officer of ICANN, started off by explaining the basics of DNS, Domain names, and other important things for the majority of people there who weren't aware of what these things were. It was really well done.

He spoke about [Root Server|Root Servers] a bit as well and clarified a few common misconceptions which I am afraid to mention for fear of propagating them. Basically, root servers don't have control over the data, they are simply pipes through which the data pass through.

ccTLD (country code top level domains) is an issue which ICANN believes to be a country's issue: ICANN does not consider ccTLD's as something that falls under their control. They simply administer the database(s). They coordinate a stable root server system. Mr. Crain went on to explain the managerial role for ccTLD's: Technically competent registry/name server operations and administration as a trustee for the local community - regarding laws, culture, customs, preferences, etc.

Afterward, I approached John about CARICOM having it's own ccTLD - something which the European Union did - and he said that it just has to become part of the ISO documents. Not that I think it matters, really, but that could be something that CARICOM looks at as part of the Caribbean Single Market Economy initiative.

John also brought up access issues - from internationalized Domain Names - IDN.ASCII and IDN.IDN. This is an issue for Scandinavians, French, Germans, Malaysians, and many other non-English people. 'People should be able to type in URLs in their own language' reminded me of CARDICIS, and it was good to hear the CTO of ICANN talking about such things.³

ICANN is not in control of SPAM, Content Control, or Bridging the Digital Divide... ICANN's role is to be neutral. Some argue it isn't neutral, mainly because of where it is funded from. Personally, I've yet to hear anything of substance regarding a demonstrated lack of neutrality. Bonus link: ICANN's comments on the WGIG report (PDF).

Mr. Brian Jahra of the Association of Independent ISPs of Trinidad and Tobago advocated treating internet access as a highway - a common area, and a necessary part of an infrastructure. He had lots of great slides, some of which I took pictures of.

Mr. Russell Davis (Director, Systems Engineering, GT&T) noted better 'defense' with 'Unix based systems'. Linux? FreeBSD? I never got him to clarify this, but as long as they aren't paying SCO, I'm happy. He also gave a great question - how will CSME approach Internet Governance? And that, sadly, isn't something we'll know any time soon.

Day 1: Outmeetings and Outnotes

Some of the best discussions are outside the actual meetings, as most people know - and aside from meeting lots of the faces that I have corresponded with over time and meeting new people who I shall correspond with, there were a few things that I learned. One such thing was that, while discussing banks in the Caribbean being less than sympathetic to eCommerce (an understatement), Jacqueline Morris pointed out to me that shipping is an actual problem - where a CD costs $35 to ship out of the Caribbean. That's a lot of money; the shipping infrastructure within the region is also a large handicap. I don't think that this was addressed at the meeting.

John Crain (ICANN) and myself ended up talking quite a bit, mainly about ccTLDs. I'm not a big fan of ccTLDs, and had thought that they were useless for anyone but governmental organizations. He widened my perspective a little on this, and I had to grudgingly admit that they can be useful.

Roosevelt King and I had discussion about the history of regional politics, which is something I don't usually discuss but, since the meeting involved a lot of people who stray/stay into the political field, I'd bouce some ideas off of my more experienced Bajan friend. I learned a bit from him as well.

Overall, many people agreed when I called this a 'speaker forum'. Because of time constraints, there was not much Q&A afterward, and a lot of things rushed by unchallenged because of it. Hypoglycaemia in such instances is a handicap. People need to eat, and before you know it the afternoon session has begun.

It also seemed odd that there were only 6 laptops in the room for an Internet Governance forum, and that's something I'll touch on in the notes of the 2nd day.

I also learned that I need to upgrade the camera, since to get close shots without being an annoyance in the forum requires a zoom which the old Canon A40 Powershot just can't handle. Thus the fuzzy pictures.

Day2

Ms. Jacqueline Morris started off with 'IG and economic and social development'. She did a recap of what had been said the previous day - the points she wished to emphasize in this context. In the context of economic development, she brought up the Millenium Development Goals of the United Nations, and said, 'differentiated access to ICT resources is reinforcing a 'digital divide'; a structural divide between developed and developing countries.'

The issue of rural and urban disparity with ICT was also a topic, and in some of the outmeetings I had explained to people that in Trinidad and Tobago, I live South of the 'Mango Belt' - a silly name for a silly problem; where North Trinidad gets better connectivity than South Trinidad consistently - disparity even within urban settings in the same country is a divide as well.

Of course, Jacqueline also pointed out that there were only a few women in the audience, and that's when a few people started looking around. There was one non-native English speaker that I knew of (from Suriname), but she was better at English than some people I know. This relates directly to CARDICIS. But there was another divide - a divide of people who used computers in forums and meetings. There were less people using computers at the forum than there were women! And they were discussing how people should be using computers in the future! There's something intuitively wrong with that, and I must admit that I felt a bit of a minority there.

Indigenous people didn't have any representation.

Jacqueline rightly made the point that women aren't always behind - in some cases women are ahead. She made the example of urban male areas where the males lacked basic literacy skills whereas females did not. Thus gender equality was really about... gender equality.

Mr. Lance Hinds followed Jacqueline by talking a bit about 'IG and e-Commerce development'. I think that, perhaps, this is the largest internet governance issue within the region because until the internet is given the opportunity to pay for itself in the region, there will be little or no movement in other directions. I regularly beat eCommerce issues to death on this website. Of course, this ties into patents, copyrights and trademarks.

Mr. Teni Housty, Attorney-at-Law (Guyana) discussed intellectual property in the region, and did a very balanced job of a difficult subject. The perspective he presented - thankfully without a PowerPoint presentation⁴. He brought up something I have to dig around for - the Revised Treaty of Chaguramas 1976, Article 66. This particular article requires the signatories to have compatible patent, copyright and trademark law. And of course, this is where I couldn't sit by quietly - it seemed like these issues were being treated by people with a certain disregard, and I simply couldn't have that. Thus I mentioned Hillary Rosen's rewriting of Iraq's copyright laws, TRIPs, GATT, the Enola Bean, and tied a lot of that to the effective brain drain through patents - where people work where they can because of who owns a patent.

A gentleman from Cable and Wireless pointed out that in Jamaica, his company is having a problem with people selling copies of the phone book which Cable and Wireless wrote. That's an interesting problem, but it's a rather clear copyright violation - if the courts uphold it.

Open Content and Open Source weren't mentioned much, but since the basis of these forms of allowing users rights (or freedoms) is based on the owner's copyright, the core of it was covered well. Most regular readers know that I can beat patents and copyrights to death because I often do. Bonus link: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig - a few people didn't even know about the book.

Mr. James Corbin (The University of the West Indies) followed up with the Security Challenges - cyber crimes and security of information systems. Of course, SPAM came up, and I made a comment to simply 'follow the money'. Thankfully, Mr. Corbin did clarify things so that some misconceptions could be cleared up for those willing to have them cleared up. Security is one of the least understood things related to the internet, and I personally believe that it has a lot to do with the dependance on inferior software. When people can spell Linux and OS/X, a lot of problems at a user level will disappear.

Conclusions

This was, in the afternoon, followed up with a form of collaboration for a document to present to WSIS. It seemed like process drove the product here, and I'm quick to point out that I do not endorse the document itself. As of the time of this writing, the document is not available for viewing (and I don't have a copy of it either).

As far as allowing networking of people, I think that the forum was a success. But when it comes to the document, I think that more time and energy could have been devoted to the document itself. The fact that the meeting did occur made it a success, but the degree of success in my eyes was not as high as it could be. Basically, it appeared that a few people drove the process to the ends that they wished to, and since this was not a consensus document they were allowed to do so.⁵

In all - it was a good experience, with really good people there who did have their hearts and minds in the right place. I'm just not sure that everything in those hearts and minds is well represented in the final paper that was created. At the end of the day, here's the real problem: We need an internet to govern.

¹Attendees who were hotel guests could login for $15 US/day. I wasn't a hotel guest. But it didn't matter too much because I only saw 6 laptops. At an Internet Governance Forum.
²It would have been nice if GTT ran an ADSL line in for the forum and set up some wireless access for attendees.
³This should probably be added to "Free/Open Source Software: Localization" KnowProSE Remix 1.0
⁴I'm not a big fan of PowerPoint presentations, and I think that they are overused. At the forum, they weren't - but they were handicapped by not being made available electronically beforehand. I'd like to follow at my own pace on my laptop, thank you. And save the trees!
⁵I don't think I ever want to be part of the creation of a document which is not a consensus document again.