Please find this statement issued by the IAB today.
On behalf of the IAB,
Russ Housley
IAB Chair
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IAB statement on the NETmundial Initiative
The IAB thinks it is valuable to develop tools to support communities
that can share solutions, expertise, and research related to Internet
Governance. We welcomed the initial NETmundial meeting as an additional
way to foster the development of a broadly based community engaged in
supporting the Internet's distributed systems and methods. We believe
that the recent NETmundial Initiative
(https://www.netmundial.org/press-release-1) to develop a long-running
dialogue on these topics, in the form of a web site and collection of
materials, may be a valuable addition to the overall community efforts.
We are concerned, however, that the creation of a highly structured
coordination council for the Initiative may impede the development of
broad participation, and so may be premature. Because the coordination
council members appear to be the responsible parties for the effort, the
effort may not foster the sort of community engagement that we believe is
fundamental to the Internet's distributed nature and the NETmundial
principles (https://www.netmundial.org/principles).
To make the Internet work, many people with unique perspectives of the
Internet and from different communities must cooperate. We believe a
broadly based dialogue among all these communities is necessary, and
support any effort to enable this dialogue. The permissionless
innovation given as the goal of this effort is better served by first
enabling technical infrastructure to further that cooperation; that
might require some lightweight administration driven by community
consensus. No coordination council is needed now, and therefore the IAB
will not participate in the council at this time.