Several years of experience attending meetings of various United Nations organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), has made us at IPI somewhat skeptical about the potential for good policy ideas to come from these organizations.
In fact, the least harmful thing that tends to happen is to provide a forum for countries to complain, and to try to deflect the blame for their lack of development onto the developed economies of the world, rather than accepting responsibility for the development of their own economies.
Much worse is the potential of these organizations to actually have a concrete impact on public policy. When public policy is based on false premises, the result will almost always be bad policy. We see this pattern repeated regularly at UN organizations.
The newest UN organization, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), concludes its 2007 meeting today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It’s fair to say that the ideas floated and discussed at the IGF ranged between bad ideas and really, really bad ideas (unless they were highly technical topics).
Some of the bad ideas include giving countries political control over Internet governance, following China’s example on Internet privacy and security, drafting an Internet Bill of Rights, doing away with copyright protection, drafting an international “Law of the Net,” and developing international funding mechanisms (taxes) to fund the expansion of the Internet in developing countries.
We need not be terribly worried about these ideas at this point, however, because unlike most other UN organizations, the IGF can’t actually do anything other than talk. By charter, the IGF can make no recommendations, draft no treaties, nor even can it publish a summary document which states conclusions from the meeting.
This is all by design. Having witnessed the way other UN organizations have been used to advance harmful agendas, the U.S. and other enlightened countries insisted on this limitation when the IGF was chartered 2 years ago.
But attendees at the IGF are frustrated by this limitation, and there will be a strong, constant push to expand the mandate of the IGF such that it can actually “do something” about the issues discussed. But this must be opposed at all costs.
Otherwise, the Internet, which has become a crucial part of our economic and social infrastructure, will fall under political control.
As currently structured, the IGF is a useful forum for the discussion of both technical and political aspects of the Internet, facilitating communication and discussion between interested parties around the world. It’s a useful institution, but the difference between the IGF being a useful institution and a harmful institution is the restriction on the IGF’s mandate—it’s the finger in the dike that prevents a flood of harmful Internet policies. It must be defended at all costs.