Web Forum Odds & Ends
The first day of the Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was not without controversy. Read Technology Daily's PM Edition for details. We can't give away the best stuff on the blog, which is free to read, but here are a few odds and ends…
▪ Paul Twomey, who heads the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said during the opening session that the Internet community as a whole should be proud of its accomplishments. There are more than a billion people online around the globe and trillions of dollars are being made via Web-oriented businesses.
"With this extraordinary change also comes challenges," he said. "That is what this forum is about -- bringing together people to talk, review, discuss and hopefully solve some of the issues that are before us."
▪ Anriette Estherhuysen, executive director of the Association for Progressive Communications, said the Internet is "a public good and should be governed as public good [and] that governance should take place in the public domain."
Removing barriers for some potential Internet users is important, she said. "Why should blind people pay more for interfaces to read text because they're blind and because someone owns a royalty on making two applications talk to each other?" she asked.
▪ Internet Society President Lynn St. Amour said the forum's work can be summed up by the phrase "think globally, act locally." "A healthy and robust Internet requires local conditions that support it," she said.
Such an effort is essential to "bringing the next billion online and the billion after that and the billion after that." The IGF provides all of its stakeholders with "the unique opportunity to catalyze local change … free from pressures of negotiations," she said.
▪ The forum, which held its inaugural meeting last year in Athens, Greece, is guided by four themes -- access, diversity, openness, and security -- but a new category called "critical Internet resources" was added this year.
An afternoon session examined issues that fall into that fifth basket. Discussants included Carlos Afonso of the Brazilian nongovernmental organization, Rede de Informações para o Terceiro Setor; Alain Aina of the Africa Network Operators Group; Google's chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf; Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller and others.
▪ Other breakout sessions on Monday included: Interoperable Multilingual Directories and Solutions Provided by the Semantic Web; Regulatory Frameworks for Improving Access; IPv4 to IPv6: Challenges and Opportunities; Freedom of Expression as a Security Issue; Internet Users' Voices on Internationalized Domain Names, and more.
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internet governance
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