[Air-l] Global Internet Governance Academic Network: Athens Symposium, 29 October

[Ralf Bendrath]

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Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)
First Annual Symposium
www.intgovforum.org/IGF_Platform.php

Divani Apollon Palace & Spa Hotel
Athens, Greece

29 October 2006

The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) is an emerging 
scholarly community initiated in Spring 2006. Its four principal 
objectives are to: support the establishment of a global cohort of 
scholars specializing on Internet governance issues; promote the 
development of Internet governance as a recognized, interdisciplinary 
field of study; advance theoretical and applied research on Internet 
governance, broadly defined; and facilitate informed dialogue on policy 
issues and related matters between scholars and Internet governance 
stakeholders (governments, international organizations, the private 
sector, and civil society). In this context, the GigaNet plans to organize 
symposia to be held on site prior to the annual meetings of the Internet 
Governance Forum (IGF). This event is the first in that series. Attendance 
is open to all IGF participants, no separate registration is required.

9:30-9:45 Welcome and Overview

Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Professor of International Communication Policy and 
Regulation, University of Aarhus; Denmark


9:45-11:15 Theorizing Internet Governance: The State of the Art

Chair:

Peng Hwa Ang, Dean, School of Communication and Information, Nanyang 
Technological University, and Director, Singapore Internet Research 
Center; Singapore

Panelists:

“The Need For Interdisciplinary Understanding”
Mary Rundle, Director, Net Dialogue, and Fellow, Berkman Center for 
Internet and Society, Harvard University and Center for Internet and 
Society, Stanford University; USA

“Cross-national Collaboration on Internet Governance: Critical Success 
Factors for Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Studies”
Nanette S. Levinson, Associate Professor of International Relations, 
American University; Washington DC, USA

“The Role of the State in Heterogeneous Governance Arrangements”
Jeanette Hoffman, Research Fellow, Social Science Research Center, and 
Partner, the Internet Governance Project; Berlin, Germany

“An Economic Rationale for Internet Regulation”
Filomena Chirico, Post-doc Researcher, Tilburg Center for Law and 
Economics, Tilburg University; The Netherlands

“Hybrid Regimes, Power, and Legitimacy in Global Governance: Insights from 
Internet Privacy Regulation”
Ralf Bendrath, Research Fellow, University of Bremen; Germany

Focus:

In recent years, scholars have begun to analyze Internet governance issues 
using the theoretical tools of their respective academic disciplines. 
While issues surrounding ICANN have attracted particular attention, there 
also has been significant work done on the international governance of 
digital international trade and intellectual property, privacy, security, 
speech, and other topics. Such research often has been rather specialized 
and geared toward the distinct audiences interested in each issue-area, 
which limited intellectual cross-fertilization. These topics are related, 
and Internet governance should be seen as a broad but coherent field of 
study that merits elaboration and support. Mapping the landscape of 
relevant theoretical perspectives is an important first step toward this end.

The purpose of this panel is to consider questions such as: What aspects 
of Internet governance are uniquely interesting and worthy of scholarly 
analysis? How has Internet governance been addressed by scholars in the 
social sciences, humanities, law, and other disciplines, and which 
theoretical approaches seem to be the most promising for which issues and 
dynamics? Do these efforts point to the emergence of a coherent research 
agenda and the cumulative development of new knowledge? Are there 
barriers—intellectual, institutional, and other—that might have to be 
overcome to advance that agenda? How can Internet governance develop into 
an interdisciplinary scholarly field that is taken seriously by academics 
and also capable of providing useful inputs to the Internet Governance 
Forum and other policy development institutions? What lessons can be 
learned, if any, from other fields defined by the object of 
inquiry/dependent variables rather than by shared theories and independent 
variables, e.g., “communication studies,” “information studies,” and 
“women's studies”? Are there national or cultural differences in the ways 
scholars approach these matters, and if so how might these be reconciled?


11:15-11:30 Coffee break


11:30-13:00 “Enhanced Cooperation” and Interaction among Stakeholders in 
Internet Governance

Chair:

Milton Mueller, Professor of Information Studies, Syracuse University, and 
Partner, the Internet Governance Project

Panelists:

“A European Perspective on Enhanced Cooperation”
Bernard Benhamou, Senior Lecturer for the Information Society, National 
Foundation of Political Science; Paris, France

“‘The Sovereign Right of States:’ Why Multi-Stakeholder Policy Development 
is Possible and Necessary”
Jeremy Malcolm, Doctoral candidate, Murdoch University; Perth, Australia

“Distributed Internet Governance: A Chance or a Threat to Democracy?”
Meryem Marzouki, Researcher, National Center for Scientific Research, and 
Computer Science Laboratory of the University Paris 6; France

“The Future of Enhanced Cooperation”
Wolfgang Kleinwächter, Professor of International Communication Policy and 
Regulation, University of Aarhus; Denmark

Focus:

In addition to creating the Internet Governance Forum, the Tunis Agenda 
calls for “enhanced cooperation” among governments. This language 
originated with the European Union's June 2005 criticism of US unilateral 
control of ICANN. The EU claimed that the WSIS statement constituted, “a 
worldwide political agreement providing for further internationalization 
of Internet governance, and enhanced intergovernmental cooperation to this 
end” and that, “Such cooperation should include the development of 
globally applicable principles on public policy issues associated with the 
coordination and management of critical Internet resources.”

The purpose of this panel is to consider questions such as: What are the 
causes of US-EU tensions over Internet governance? What institutional form 
might such a “new cooperation model” for deliberations among governments 
take? How viable is the distinction between “day-to-day management of the 
Internet and “public policy?” What, more generally, is the role of 
national governments in Internet governance in relation to other 
stakeholder groups? What implications might “enhanced cooperation” have 
for civil society and multistakeholder participation? How might such a 
philosophy lead to changes in the structure or processes of ICANN?


13:00-14:30 Lunch break


14:30-16:00 The Distributed Architecture of Internet Governance

Chair:

William J. Drake, Director, Project on the Information Revolution and 
Global Governance, Graduate Institute of International Studies; Geneva, 
Switzerland

Panelists:

“The Role of International Telecommunications Arrangements in Distributed 
Internet Governance”
Don MacLean, Independent consultant (formerly Chief of Strategic Planning 
and External Affairs, ITU); Ottawa, Canada

“Institutional Factors Impacting Participation in Distributed Internet 
Governance”
David Souter, Visiting Professor in Communications Management (formerly 
Chief Executive, Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization); University 
of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

“Striking a Balance in Guiding Principles for Distributed Internet Governance”
Qiheng Hu, President of the Internet Society China and Chair of the 
Steering Committee for the China Network and Information Center (formerly 
Vice President, Chinese Academy of Sciences); Beijing, China

“Best Practices for Internet Standards Governance?”
Laura DeNardis, Visiting Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society 
Project; New Haven, USA

Focus:

As the WSIS agreements recognized, Internet governance involves much more 
than ICANN or the collective management of naming and numbering. Internet 
governance also includes the development and application of 
internationally shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making 
procedures, and programs in a variety of other issue-areas, e.g. technical 
standardization, cybercrime and network security, international 
interconnection, e-commerce, e-contracting, networked trade in digital 
goods and services, digital intellectual property, jurisdiction and choice 
of law, human rights, speech and social conduct, cultural and linguistic 
diversity, privacy and consumer protection, dispute resolution, and so on. 
These activities take a variety of forms and are pursued in a 
heterogeneous array of settings, including governmental, 
intergovernmental, private sector, and multistakeholder organizations and 
collaborations. In parallel, the international regimes and related 
frameworks they establish vary widely in their institutional attributes, 
e.g. the collective action problems addressed, functions performed, 
participants involved, organizational setting and decision making 
procedures, agreement type, strength and scope of prescriptions, 
compliance mechanisms, power dynamics and distributional biases, etc. But 
while there is now broad recognition that the architecture of Internet 
governance is highly distributed, there has been little systematic 
scholarly analysis or policy dialogue about its precise nature and 
implications.

The purpose of this panel is to explore and clarify some of the lingering 
ambiguities, including questions such as: Which governance mechanisms are 
relatively more or less important in shaping the Internet¹s evolution and 
use? How well do these mechanisms cohere, and are there tensions and gaps 
between them? Are there crosscutting issues that merit consideration from 
analytical and programmatic standpoints? Are there generalizable lessons 
to be learned by the distinct communities of expertise involved in 
different issue-areas with regard to best practices and institutional 
design? Does the distributed architecture pose any challenges with respect 
to the effective participation of less powerful stakeholders and the 
global community¹s ability to govern in an effective and equitable manner? 
Looking beyond formalized collective frameworks, under what circumstances, 
if any, may private market power or spontaneously harmonized practices 
constitute forms of Internet governance? What is the current role of 
governance mechanisms for international telecommunications, and what might 
that role become in a future marked by convergence and potentially 
non-neutral next generation networks?


16:00-16:15 Closing of the Symposium

16:15-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-18:00 GigaNet Business Meeting

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Dipl. Pol. Ralf Bendrath
http://www.sfb597.uni-bremen.de/homepages/bendrath/
http://bendrath.blogspot.com