'I'm begging you to join' – ICANN's NetMundial Initiative gets desperate

Plans to create a new internet governance body have grown increasingly desperate … and confusing. A conference call [MP3] between the organizers of the "NetMundial Initiative" and business organization the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) earlier this week saw ICANN's CEO Fadi Chehade pleading with the group to withdraw …

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a lot of quotes to block out why I object to this hijacking but the very last line of the article puts it most succinctly. It's just not the way things are done on the internet. ®

[Ole Juul]

not the way things are done on the internet

These guys come from somewhere else. In fact they sound like sales people with only one goal in mind - get the sale.

[Trevor_Pott]

For $600,000 a year I will provide you a space - physical as well as virtual - to discuss the governance issues of the internet. I will even provide top quality technical content to help kickstart discussions as well as the manpower to moderate discussions and even edit proposals.

That doesn't take a "council". It doesn't take politicians or chairpersons. It takes an accountant, a devops team, some writers, an editor and an ombudsman. With some money put away to rent a conference room for the annual meeting.

The difference is that what I propose would be focused on generating ideas towards actual solutions. Kickstarting discussion with thought leadership content, a trained ombudsman to work through disputes and an editor to make sure that proposals turned in by special interest groups are actually comprehensible and even engaging to the populace at large.

With $600,000 I could pay the full time salaries of people who would be dedicated to those goals. A hell of a lot more would get done than NetMundial, let me tell you.

What's needed here isn't a council, it's a professional magazine aimed at governance issues. Turning ideas into viable proposals then bumping those back to the various other organisations that work on internet governance and letting them vote on them, lobby for them, or otherwise do what they get paid to do to make the internet go.

Screw captain cockwombles and his band of merry council misfits! Give me Timothy Prickett Morgan and a gaggle of technosphere support staff any day.

[nematoad]

"And do the organizers intend to spend their $600,000 flying 25 VIPs around the world...?"

"And do the organizers intend to spend their $600,000 flying 25 SIPs (Self-Important People) around the world...?"

There fixed it for you.

There does seem to be a lot of talk about "multi-stakeholders" in these discussions. And their description of these "multi-stakeholders"? To quote:

"Yes, governments walked away from 1net because they said they couldn't participate…"

So, governments are in, then look at those organising this. The WEF (that well known inclusive organisation) and ICANN so we have got big business and vested interests onboard. Where are those people and organisations who actually made the internet? Not only conspicuous by their absence but actively rejecting this proposal. And what about the people who actually pay for all of this, you know, the users i.e. you and me. I don't see anyone in this group being offered a seat. No, this is a self-aggrandising bunch who want to impose their views on something that others have developed and judging by their actions thus far, they won't tolerate dissent or criticism.

[I ain't Spartacus]

It's alright. It turns out that Net Mundial is a multi-stakeholder organisation. There are plenty of the more sane internet organisations out there, including many that refused the offered seats, and they're all holding stakes, ready to drive them through the heart of this organisation, so it can be buried at the nearest crossroads...

[Jonathan Richards 1]

You'd run a mile...

...from getting hooked up with someone so dim as to think that two organizations "funding each other" could possibly be, well, possible. Funding in accounting terms is as heat is in thermodynamics. At the bottom line, it only flows one way. Seems to me that NMI is just hastening the heat death of the universe.