[Mmwg] Reviewing the discussions

[Milton Mueller]

>>> Vittorio Bertola <vb at bertola.eu.org> 1/25/2006 10:19 AM >>>
>procedures, while the Council sits and waits. The Chair of the working
>group calls consensus, and sends the document to the Council for
>approval or rejection. In this latter case, the Council is required to
>state valid reasons for rejecting and starting one more iteration.

Notice how the Plenary and its deliberation and discussion have disappeared from your proposed process. Oversight? Freudian slip? :-)  But that is exactly what would happen. Plenary debates would become meaningless. All the real action would take place by lobbying and cultivating the Bureau (er, Council) members. Only a few hardy fools, like me, or the people who populate ICANN's GA list, would bother with the Plenary.

>Not at all. The WGIG was actually drafting, not just acting as the final
>checkpoint, nor it had open WGs. In fact, I am just proposing to adopt,
>almost verbatim, the IETF/IESG model.

One thing you persistently seem to forget is that the Forum does not adopt standards or in any other way set policy. Indeed, in one of your earlier postings you came out and said that the Forum would "agree on policies." It won't. It will issue reports. The reports MAY contain recommendations, but in most cases probably will not. Those reports can be ignored. Unlike the IETF standards, it does not even have any real coordinative authority. Therefore the bar for approving reports need not be bumped up to a higher authority. The real value of the Forum is the deliberative process, the results of which can spill over into other institutions and perhaps lead to authoritative actions. Your concept of an all-powerful Council will eviscerate the deliberative aspect.

>I think that one key point in which we differ is that you think that
>more formalization leads to more capture, while I think that more
>formalization leads to less capture.

OK. Let's be empirical. Can you give me one example, in the current context of international institutions of ICT policy, of when and how the absence of formalization led to "capture?" Just one, please. Who captured it and how?

I can, in support of my side, note that EVERY structure that has been formalized in the way you propose has become rigid and subject to paralyzing politics, and insider deals if not outright capture: ICANN's Board, its GNSO Council, ALAC, the WSIS CSB, etc.