[Ecommerce] Bill Drake's notes on State Department meeting on WSIS

[James Love]

     -----Original Message-----
     From: infosoc-admin@lists.cpsr.org 
[mailto:infosoc-admin@lists.cpsr.org]On Behalf OfWilliam Drake
     Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 4:12 PM
     To: Infosoc
     Subject: [Infosoc] Report on US State Dept. WSIS meeting, Feb. 10
     Hi,


     As there were a number emails on infosoc in advance of yesterday's 
State Department meeting saying someone from CPSR should attend, having 
done so I thought I'd pass along a few observations.

     State's International Telecommunications Advisory Committee (ITAC) 
is one of two AC's dealing with ICT-related issues (info at 
http://www.state.gov/e/eb/cip/c293.htm).  I've attended these meetings 
off and on since the 1980s, and yesterday's felt totally different in 
two respects, one of which matters.  First, because the US is on Code 
Orange alert for terrorist attacks, access to State was blocked off, and 
the meeting was held across the street at the National Academy of 
Science.  The forty plus attendees were seated in an auditorium that 
must hold 10 to 20 times that number while the three State reps were 
seated far away on a stage, so there was no real chance for give and 
take, as per when the meetings are around a table.  After introductory 
remarks from State, a small number of us lined up in the aisle to pose 
questions that were often dodged and that was it.  Determined follow-up 
in this context seemed pointless.

     Second and more importantly, while an attendance list wasn't 
provided, the usual suspects seemed to be thinly represented. 
Historically, committee meetings have been mostly attended by a group of 
corporate reps one sees at all ICT policy events in D.C. (noteworthy 
turnout by non-profit advocacy people and academics is a fairly recently 
development).  These folks usually come pretty charged up to ensure that 
their views are well reflected by U.S. policy, and when there are 
upcoming negotiations of consequence in ITU, WTO, WIPO or whatever, the 
conversations can be quite intense.  But in contrast, if US-based 
companies are keenly interested in or concerned about WSIS, it wasn't 
obvious yesterday.   One can't help noting in parallel that the official 
PrepComm 2 website shows pretty light turn-out by businesses; just 47 
people from "private sector entities"  (of course, there's some private 
sector people among the 552  "Administration" attendees).   In contrast, 
there are 643 NGO registrants.  The meaning of this should be clear enough.

     If the private sector doesn't think WSIS matters much---and none of 
the corporate people I know seem to feel otherwise---it'll be an 
absolute miracle if governments from the US and other industrialized 
countries eventually agree to make hard commitments to do very much. 
Look what happened with the global digital divide process and you have 
probably seen the future.

     Anyway, State's presentations were, um, brief.  David Gross, the US 
Ambassador, recalled that the US priorities are just 
three---infrastructure development, human capacity building, and network 
security.  And he reaffirmed that the PrepComm's task will be to agree 
language that draws on and reconciles any differences between the 
regional declarations and the Glion non-paper.  (In other words, those 
attending may be in for a two-week line-by-line drafting exercise. 
Having been on two US delegations to prior ITU conferences, held in the 
same room, at which 5-700 people spent days line-by-lining texts that 
had no impact whatsoever on anything, I predict that people are going to 
spend a lot of time networking in the hallways and at Cafe Roma.)

     Dick Beaird, State's very experienced lead guy on ITU affairs, then 
gave a very quick overview of the regional and sub-regional meetings and 
their outcomes.  He stressed the broad commonalities of focus and 
language that emerged from these.  In particular, he said that access, 
openness, network security, local content, and good governance were 
consistently mentioned as priorities.

     That was pretty much it.

     Then we played Q&A, sort of.  I pointed out that while the US 
government keeps saying it wants to consult widely etc., its actions 
leave at least some people with bad impressions of its intentions.  That 
the Bush Administration opposed doing WSIS in the first place and hasn't 
bothered to provide the WSIS website with a formal input paper or 
otherwise taken a positive, pro-active approach invites varying 
interpretations that might not be in the US' interest at this particular 
juncture. Hence, I invited them to clarify publicly two things: 1) What 
would the US like to come out of the process, and in particular are 
there any areas at all on which it would like to see hard commitments 
undertaken; and 2) what would the US like to avoid happening.

     Gross prefaced his reply by saying it would sound like a punt; at 
least he's honest about what he won't reveal.  He said that if NGOs want 
to understand the US position, they should look on State's website at 
the US remarks offered at previous meetings  (these say almost nothing, 
e.g. http://www.stategov/e/eb/rls/rm/2003/16762.htm). In terms of things 
the Bush Administration would like to happen or not, he reminded us that 
WSIS entails a pair of short summits at which high-level politicians 
will gather to express broadly-framed common views on a narrow range of 
issues.  It is not designed to agree on treaties, and it won't.  Nor is 
it designed to get into any particular issues in any detail, or to 
review and second guess decisions taken in other forums like the ITU, 
WTO, WIPO, ICANN, and so forth.

     This goes back to prior list discussions about Utsumi's speech.  As 
I said, absolute zero chance that this is going to happen, no new global 
regulatory regime with the ITU at its center.

     In short, the outcome envisioned seems to be something like the 
2000-01 G-8 summits' declarations regarding the global digital divide. 
Broad proclamations of concern and good will, maybe a few projects with 
little bits of funding attached (probably from Canada and the UK, maybe 
Japan if they don't back off again when the press lights go off), blah 
blah blah.  A bullet to be dodged, not an opportunity to be grasped.

     Further to the point, someone from the private sector asked about 
the progress benchmarks at the back of the non-paper, which she regarded 
as overly ambitious.  Was this just an ITU effort to build a new role 
for itself?  Gross replied that the benchmarks reflect a desire in some 
circles to have commitments to concrete and verifiable steps, but 
underscored that these were just informal ideas from the Glion group (I 
previously passed along some info about this).

     In a follow-up, I recalled that Gross had mentioned in passing that 
the administration hadn't been decided yet who would represent the US at 
WSIS.  Of course, how high or low the level of the delegation is tells 
you something about how seriously it's taken.  I asked whether the White 
House has been involved in the process, and if so specifically how. 
Gross replied that yes it has been but that's all he could say.  You 
have to wonder how this works, since nobody in Washington seems to know 
of anyone in the White House who has an interest or expertise in ICT 
policy matters, other than the security aspects (and even there, Dick 
Clarke's leaving).  Clinton era wonkery is just a distant memory. 
Accordingly, telcos looking to influence policy at the FCC (a nominally 
independent agency) and elsewhere have reportedly taken to meeting with 
Karl Rove instead.  Given that the WH is generally all politics and no 
policy, I suspect these conversations had more to do with calculating 
future campaign contributions than with total long run incremental 
costing models for interconnection.

     A few other highlights from Q&A.  Manon Ress of the Consumer 
Project on Technology asked about the US role in shaping the Tokyo 
Declaration's language on open source.  Beaird stated that the US wanted 
the softer language that OS should be "encouraged, as appropriate" to 
ensure that governments did not attempt to mandate a particular 
technological solution through an inflexible administrative edict. 
There are some cases where open source is the right solution and some 
cases where it is not, and it should be left to the market to decide 
this, he said.

     Someone from the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked why 
the US specified that it wants to ensure "network security" but not 
"information security," including privacy and the confidentiality of 
messages.  Gross replied that some people use the latter term as code 
behind which to hide restrictive policies toward content, so focusing on 
networks is safer.

     Other participants encouraged the US to speak up more loudly for 
freedom of speech (I added that the US could lead an effort to move the 
second WSIS from Tunisia---blank stares in response); asked what the 
future role of the ITU would be given it's due to take massive cuts in 
its budget and authority (response: TBD); urged the US to support the 
private sector, etc.

     In sum, procedurally, the Bush Administration and probably most 
transnational corporations are not wild about WSIS and are unlikely to 
undertake real commitments to many of the goals civil society groups 
might express.  Any strategic choices have to confront these realities, 
e.g. by building coalitions with the Canadians, Brits, and others who 
might agree to spend some money irrespective of what the US does or 
doesn't do.  Substantively, it might make sense to focus on the 
non-paper's benchmark proposals, and seek to preserve and expand those 
in the text for the summit.  How far beyond some new money for technical 
assistance and such things can go---for example, into enhancing 
developing country and civil society participation in global governance 
matters, or even thinking about the substantive policies of 
governance---is very unclear.  So we should think about where to spend 
what little capital we have.

     Basta,

     Bill


     **************************************************************
     William J. Drake
     Visiting Senior Fellow
     Center for International Development
       and Conflict Management
     University of Maryland
     0145 Tydings Hall
     College Park, MD  20742
     Tel:  (301) 314-7706  Fax: (301) 314-9256
     Email: wdrake@cidcm.umd.edu
     http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/people/wdrake.htm
     **************************************************************