--On Monday, May 28, 2012 18:38 +0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer
<bortzmeyer(_at_)nic(_dot_)fr> wrote:
So far, fortunately, the Internet Governance Forum
Hold on, the Internet Governance Caucus I was talking about (a
civil society loosely connected group) is not the Internet
Governance Forum (an intergovernmental body).
But that makes Tim's original question about who these people
are far more relevant. You've answered part of that question
above, but it may be relevant to note that many of the
participants are self-selected (perhaps no worse than the IETF),
self-defined, "experts" on Internet technology and the
"governance" models that might rationally be used with it. A
subset of the group is rather self-interested in that they
believe that the Internet is best trusted to themselves rather
than to other groups or bodies. A different way to put that is
that they are no more interested in a true collaborative and
balanced multistakeholder model than the worst of the
"governments, preferably my government, should be in charge"
folks -- they just have a different opinion about which
particular group of stakeholders should be in control of things.
Another subset consists of academics and "governance"
theoreticians who are interested in using the Internet as a
field for their particular sociopolitical experiments. Since
most of that group doesn't believe their ideas could possibly
fail, they don't have to worry about the consequences of such
failures, whether there is an escape or backout path, etc.
And that is probably even more politically incorrect than
Brian's comment.
john