[Ecommerce] DCOS reporting back at Rio Internet Governance Forum

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

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I'm Susy Struble, representing the Dynamic Coalition on Open
Standards, or DCOS. Our  mission is to provide government policy
makers and other stakeholders with useful tools  to make informed
decisions to preserve the current open architecture of the Internet
and  the World Wide Web, which together provide a knowledge ecosystems
that has strongly  shaped the multiplier effect of global public goods
and improved economic and social  welfare.

I also represent Sun Microsystems.

Our multistakeholder coalition was pleased to hear the problems in ICT
standards
discussed often this year, from the opening discussion panel to
yesterday's panel on  openness. We believe these discussions will lead
to greater understanding of a system  that has profound power over
what we can and cannot do with ICTs and will ultimately  lead to
better decision making about what changes, if any, need to be made.

We hosted three sessions this year, and we also participated in the
A2K coalition's
workshop yesterday afternoon.

Our first workshop on Monday focused on the intersection between open
ICT standards,  development and public policy. Our panelists spoke of
the economic aspects of  interoperability as well as existing and new
activities in WIPO that are related to the  issue of standards and
intellectual property, such as the new Development Agenda and  new
work in the Standing Committee on Patents. They also spoke of how the
new trend  of bi-lateral free trade agreements, which are often
broader in their IP protection  requirements than WTO TRIPS, could
cause problems =96 this is certainly an issue for  policymakers to
understand. There was also some discussion of potential exceptions
and  limitations to IP law, such as for reverse engineering under
copyright and patent law for the purposes of ensuring interoperability
in a system in which the economic network  effect is so strong. The
European Committee on Interoperable Systems presented on the  role
competition law and policy can play in promoting ICT interoperability.

Panelists also discussed the political dimension of standards, how
technical standards  often actually set policy. If you don't have a
seat at the table .... well, most ICT standards  in the world are
actually created by private industry consortia, just as the Business
Software Alliance representative pointed out yesterday when he said
=93BSA members are  responsible for the development of the open
standards, all the technology standards, that  exist today.=94 That
might not be the worst model, but are there  characteristics that
these  organizations and their output should have that would give them
appropriate legitimacy?

Our last panelist presented on the need for every IGF dynamic
coalition to include
promoting accessibility in its work, and that's certainly something
our coalition will do.  ICT standards should have accessibility
principles built in from the beginning. The W3C  provides a model that
our coalition will explore more.

We had a working meeting of the coalition on Tuesday that actually
turned more into a  repeat of our Monday general session, but we did
spend more time there talking about  capacity building for developing
economies and the public interest in ICT standards  setting. We heard
how the IETF attempts to address this problem, and I think their
model  and others are something the coalition will explore over the
next year.

And lastly, on Tuesday afternoon we held a best practices workshop in
which the
government of Sri Lanka and a representative of the Extremadura region
of Spain spoke  about how their e-inclusion programs relied upon open
standards and why, and what  policies =96 such as government procurement
=96 were put in place to support greater competition and access and
lower costs.

For anyone who wants to get involved, we invite you to vist our web
site and join the mailing list at www.igf-dcos.org