Subject: Re: [iucg] [governance] Re: Who is Civil Society?

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 03:47:22 +0200

At 23:03 18/09/2013, Daniel Pimienta wrote:

This definition does not solve
perfectly the issues of conflicts of interests and domination by the
powers (no one does) but it does reduce considerably the areas of
ambiguities and may allow a more meaningful
gouvernance.

Daniel,

This is definitely true. This is one of the RFC 6852 issues with ISOC. Up
to now, IETF was outside of the WSIS multistakeholderism, while OpenStand
is within the definition of the private sector and is involved in FRAND
considerations with IEEE, W3C, and ISOC who have paying members. This
raises the issue of the IUCG@IETF, which is established as an IETF civil
society body.

The only real Civil Society power is to establish its own specifications,
requirements, best practices, and frames of reference. If the ISOC denies
us, as IETF participants, the capacity to constructively challenge
OpenStand documents we will then know that OpenStand business
stakeholders want a radical monopoly on the internet that, as Civil
Society, we cannot accept. This is why we would then have to challenge
such a monopoly.

The problems that we have now are:

1. the Civil Society has eroded down to individual activists, a situation
we have to accept as intrinsic because every grassroots innovation will
have a bootstrap of one or a few persons. This is why we need to consider
a P&P architecture and relational space.

2. the US citizens among us seem to consider their own government as
their enemy and their own laws as tyranny; and they want to involve us in
their concerns.

2.1. This should be a purely US national issue that they discuss in their
Congress and elections. As non-national civil society organizations, our
interests are related to civil life and rights in the most appropriate
use of the international network infrastructure to address people's
direct and indirect needs.

2.2. We know that all Govs and marketing organizations spy on us, that
Govs help their national industries to compete with the industries of
other nations; and that the USG is the most active at this game, trying
to cybercolonize us
(http://export.gov/advocacy/)
in locking us into their statUS-quo normative “internationalization”
strategy; and that this strategy includes influencing us in feeling and
being directly concerned by their projects, laws, and national actions
along their language and culture.

2.3. We resent this strategy and Brazil, Peru, etc. have started
expressing it. We trust our Govs to protect us from these normal facts of
international life, to possibly retaliate if it goes too far, and in turn
to spy on others to better defend us and help us. Our primary target is
not the US development but the millennium objectives that in turn require
the development of every country including the US.

2.4. Our best interest as citizens, users, and persons from civil society
is adequate innovation and civil right protection, everywhere – USA
included. As such, we oppose attempts of innovation freeze, technology
tempering, and standardization control as the USG could have done it.
This is why my appeal to ISOC concerning RFC 6852 is a key test because
it will tell if the new internet normalization paradigm (under the name
of OpenStand) allows or disallows this control to be challenged through
an open process.

If not, it will mean that:

- the OpenStand network technology and practices are under USG and/or US
industry influence and cannot be trusted as being neutral.

- an alternative neutral standardization source (or multiple source)
is/are to be found, or a standardization enhanced cooperation is to be
organized within the IGF framework (i.e. with the full participation of
the USG and the US industry that would be able to introduce a possible
revamp of the OpenStand modern paradigm description if it was open to new
and/or architectures, technologies, propositions, and services other than
the thirty year old internet ones, and subject to technological reviews
from anyone under the sun).

Question: why is that Americans make it so complicated for the world to
help them best survive?

Take care :-)

jfc