[Ecommerce] Report from ITU spam meeting in Geneva, from William Drake

[James Love]

-----Original Message-----
From: William Drake [mailto:wdrake@ictsd.ch]
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 11:32 AM
To: Governance
Subject: spam and IG meetings in Geneva

Hi,

Two notes for anyone interested.

1.  The 3-day ITU WSIS thematic meeting on spam was interesting but
inconclusive, just the start of a dialogue.  Many speakers reiterated a
standard set of points, e.g. the need for a multipronged approach
including technical, self-regulatory, national legislative, and
international cooperative measures, and the absence of a "silver bullet"
solution.  On the core issue of what kind of international cooperation
may be advisable, the discussion alas failed to get into any sort of
focused consideration of either substantive principles and norms or
alternative institutional arrangements (i.e. regulatory harmonization
vs. mutual recognition, MOUs, etc).  But it was pretty clear that many
developing countries, and a few people from industrialized countries (it
was unclear whether they were really speaking of personal preferences or
a settled position of their governments) favored the idea of a global
MOU under ITU, which of course ITU would welcome.  On the other side,
the EU rep repeatedly said international cooperation is key, and as
usual they might like a global approach that reflects and extends what
the commission is doing in the 25,  but what that means in practice was
left vague.  The US of course would not want to see any kind of
international cooperation that involving real rules that obligated it to
do anything about US-based spammers, who are the main source of the
problem but are politically connected, and it's not eager to see the ITU
taking on new functions, even when this could make sense (BTW, I'm told
that the direct marketers and the Republicans on the hill are currently
pushing through legislation to effectively repeal the legal ban on junk
fax---anyone surprised that CAN SPAM was a sham?).  That said, it is
easy to imagine that the sort of approach recently taken by the
US-UK-Australia MOU being scaled up to an OECD-wide instrument.

The open question of course is where that would leave the developing
countries, who really need  help.  There's quite a lot of frustration
that the industrialized countries keep telling them that adopting
e-government, e-commerce, e-everything is the key to development, but
when they move in that direction they become awash in all the spam,
viruses, and other crap pouring out of the North over the net, which
they're frequently not prepared to deal with effectively.  An African
delegate I chatted with said a lot of people in his country are getting
discouraged from entering further into the e-world by dialing up
expensive and slow connections and finding 90% of the mail to be
garbage.  Expecting that they'll all become power users and keep up to
speed with the latest user side filtering and MS security patches is
unrealistic.  Much more can be done at the ISP level etc but there
greater international technical assistance is required.  Not
surprisingly then, many developing countries want strong international
rules etc. backed up by an institutional arrangement they can work with,
i.e. ITU.  ITU-D can certainly do more on the assistance side within the
existing political mix, but has its limits.  BTW it doesn't appear that
the US FTC and parallel agencies in other OECD countries have much of a
working relationship with the developing countries, many of whom lack
similar agencies; part of the problem.

Main point of relevance here are that there was a pretty clear consensus
that international cooperation on spam is regarded to be very much a
part of Internet governance. Nobody contested that point.  The question
is what if anything the UN WGIG can say or do in this terrain given the
nascent state of the wider dialogue and the North-South divisions over
what cooperation should entail.  At a minimum though I'd think it could
recommend a significant increase in North-South technical assistance,
which of course is far less controversial than suggesting actual
solutions the US won't accept.

Should the caucus at some point manage to put out some brief position
statements as WGIG inputs, that angle might be something on which
everyone can find common ground.  A user/CS voice is needed here.

The meeting report is at
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/spam/chairman-report.pdf

2.  The director of ITU-T is organizing an informal consultation on
Internet governance and the role of ITU therein for next Thursday July
15.  This was originally for heads of delegation but is now open to
anyone, if you'll be passing through
Geneva.http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/md/01/tsb/cir/T01-TSB-CIR-0243!!MSW-
E.doc

Cheers,

Bill

******************************************
William J. Drake
Senior Associate
International Centre for Trade
and Sustainable Development www.ictsd.org
Geneva, Switzerland
wdrake@ictsd.ch
http://www.citi.columbia.edu/affiliates/wdrake.htm
******************************************