WSIS Resumed Prepcom III

SubCommittee A, 12:00-15:00 13 November 2005

Notes by Jette Madsen, CONGO

The resumed PrepCom-3 began with a short organizational meeting, where the delegations decided that the resumed PrepCom-3 will continue in same fashion as the first PrepCom with negations in two SubCommittees as recommended by the Bureau. As in the first PrepCom- 3 Sub-Committee A Amb. Khan and deal with Internet Governance, and SubCommittee B chaired by Ms. Shope-Mafole will deal with all other parts of the outcome documents. Negotations will follow the announced Time Management Plan http://www.itu.int/wsis/documents/doc_multi.asp?lang=en&id=2226|0, but it might be changed depending on the progress of the negotiations.

At the first meeting in Sub-Committee Amb. Khan invited the delegations to make comments on the “heart of the matter”: The questions of oversight and a paradigm and a future mechanism for follow-up. After these 3 hours of discussion, they should go into negotiations and develop language.

Civil society decided to save their speaking time, but the private sector made three statements in the beginning of the meeting. In its interventions, CCBI stated that the discussions should not be on how to reign the Internet, but how to facilitate the continuing growth of it. Development should remain the main focus and the best way to achieve this is through an enabling environment that attracts investments. CCBI opposed the intervention of a new Internet Governance mechanism that could to risk undermine the stability and security of the Internet. Focus should be on evolution of the existing oversight mechanism instead of inventing a new, and the private sector was also against the establishment of new forum.

The delegations seemed to be generally supportive of the idea of a forum, whereas a great division is still apparent on the questions of oversight and management of critical internet resources. On one side, governments as China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia (Arab Group) and Iran wants an intergovernmental body to manage the allocation of ip-adresses, root zone files and the oversight of the Internet, whereas USA and Australia wants to preserve the status quo. At today’s meeting, UK (EU) did not address the issues in their intervention, but only said that they had looked carefully at all contributions.

However, there are some attempts to provide a basis for negotiations. One is the “progressive approach” in the proposal put forward by the African Group, which seeks to provide a middle-ground between radical changes and status quo. Uruguay and Canada both tried to direct the attention to the issues on which there is agreement. Canada listed four things that could characterize the way forward:

1) multistakeholder

2) evolutionary (improvements of existing institutions)

3) any government mechanism should be light-touch

4) desire for increasing involvement by government, but not in the technical day-to-day management of Internet

Singapore opposed the talk about a division between those who want to preserve status quo and those who want change, saying that all want progress but just disagree on how fast this should happen, and instead they should focus on the commonalities as a basis for negotiations. Singapore supported the Canadian proposal as a good basis and amb. Khan took up this idea and asked Canada to chair a open-ended negotiation group that should focus on finding the common positions among the delegations.

Besides this group, two other small negotiation groups were set up this afternoon. Ghana would chair a drafting group on para 71g) and Singapore a drafting group on paras. 61-66.

The first meeting was marked by major technical problems. Not only was there notinstalled microphones for observers, but also a whole row of government delegations (among these Uruguay and US) did not have microphones and the portable ones that were brought to them did not work probably. SubCommittee B was therefore postponed to 15.45 in order to solve the problem.