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Should standards-setting
groups be required to be transparent, inclusive and
accredited?
November 11, 2007
By Janna Quitney Anderson, Director of Imagining
the Internet and Assistant Professor of Communications,
Elon University
 Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil - The Internet Governance
Forum doesn't really begin until tomorrow, but many
people traveled here early to participate in pre-forum
conferences that concentrated on Internet standards and
academic studies of the primary issues.
Walking the hallways and stopping into sessions, it
was easy to spot many of the top leaders of civil
society, non-governmental organizations, the United
Nations, major corporations, technical organizations
and Internet-regulating groups already engaged in
serious dialogues and panel discussions.
Policy leaders from Sun Microsystems, IBM and
Microsoft spent Sunday with academics, technology
people and NGO representatives talking about Internet
standards in a conference that was kicked off with an
introduction from Markus Kummer, director of the UN
secretariat for IGF.
"What we stand for," he said, "is to
make life a better place… There are economic
arguments. There are political arguments. These are
difficult to brush aside. But people come here (to IGF)
and meet under one roof and find that cooperation is
possible."
Today's technology tools are complicated marvels.
A single device – for instance, a cell phone
that also plays music, works as an internet browser and
captures and sends still photos and plays video –
is a product developed with an eye toward meeting
hundreds of standards.
Cooperation is the key to success in trying to find
ways to encourage innovation and creativity and allow
maximum access to knowledge while also establishing the
kinds of standards that allow us to efficiently and
securely use technology tools to accomplish global
trade, national security, disaster response and the
management of all of the digital files and packets we
wish to share with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Standards are complex, multi-layered governance
structures with far-reaching influence. Panelist Laura
DeNardis of Yale University's Information Society
Project said they are critical to success in
communication, and there is a need for more public
participation in the processes behind the
standard-setting, because when only the interests of
business and government are being considered, the big
picture gets lost and serving the public good is often
forgotten.
DeNardis suggested that standards organizations should
include fair representation of all stakeholders in
their decision processes. They should make the
processes visible to the public –
"transparent." And they should be held
accountable for their decisions, perhaps even going
through an accreditation process at occasional
intervals during which they are assessed to assure that
they are truly representative and that the work they do
is transparent.
The event was eloquently started and finished by the
engaging John Gage, chief researcher and vice president
of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems.
Smooth and smart, he talked about the ways in which
public health concerns and the challenges ahead in
biotechnology and genetics have many parallels to
Internet issues. He pointed out the fact that many of
the same questions we must answer when dealing with the
complexities of the Internet can also be found in
dealing with networks like the path that a worldwide
outbreak of Avian Flu takes and the "biological
issues" inherent in gene-mapping and
"tinkering with the very stuff of life."
Panels at the Standards Edge conference, produced by
the Bolin Group, covered:
1) Digital Inclusion (a new, more positive phrase for
attacking what has been referred to as the
"digital divide"), with Georg Greve of the
Free Software Foundation Europe; Cezar Taurion,
director of new applied technologies for IBM; Rishab
Ghosh, a professor and senior researcher for United
Nations University, Maastricht; Carlos Affonso Pereira,
of the Centre for Technology and Society at Fundacao
Getulio Vargas School of Law; Jorge Villar Guijarro,
Centre of New Initiatives, Regional Ministry on
Infrastructures and Technological Development
Extramadura.
2) Increasing Accessibility of Services and Social
Programs through Open Standards, with Marcelo Zuffo of
the University of Sao Paulo Laboratory of Systems
Integration; Giovanni Moura de Holanda, director of the
National Telecommunications Foundation of Brazil; Dr.
John Gill, chief scientist of the Royal National
Institute of the Blind in London; Reshan Dewapura, COO
and program director for information infrastructure at
the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka; and Djalma Valois,
director of ITI, Brazil.
3) Balance Representation in ICT Standardization, with
Carlos Afonso, director of planning for the Information
Network for the Third Sector of Brazil; Rogerio
Santanna, president of the Department of Information
Systems Integration in the Brazilian Ministry of
Planning; Descartes De Souza Teixeira, vice president
of Softex; and Laura DeNardis of the Information
Society Project at Yale University.
4) International Market Influence, with Susy Struble
of Sun Microsystems; Robin Gross, director of IP
Justice; Richard Owens, director, Copyright E-Commerce,
Technology and Management Division of the World
Intellectual Property Organization; Thomas Vinje,
partner in the law firm Clifford Chance; Thiru
Balasubramaniam, director of Knowledge Ecology
International.
Audio and written reports from this session will be
available online at the Standards
Edge site soon.
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