<div>Dear all,</div>
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<div>President Karklins encoutered a strange roadblock during the Plenary this afternoon when trying to have his new GFC (Group of Friends of the Chair) formulation adopted as basis for discussion for Sub-Committee B.</div>
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<div>In several successive interventions, the Russian Federation representative strongly opposed the integration of the modifications negociated in the GFC (new paragraphs 10, 11 and 29), insisting on keeping the documents of PrepCom2 as the basis of negociation, the formulation in the GFC document being only considered as one proposition of modification among others.
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<div>The PrepCom President seemed genuinely surprised by this intervention and, expressing himself in russian, tried to point a contradiction : Russia was an active member of the Group of Friends of The Chair and as such had accepted - by consensus - that the present formulation be transmitted to the PrepCom to become the basis for negociation. But this was useless and the Russian delegate was obviously deliberate in his position. This single opposition, without any other comment by other delegations, was enough to prevent the necessary consensus for moving forward and adopting the present GFC text as a basis.
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<div>Upon proposal of the Chair, the Plenary then adopted the following formula : the document prepared by the Group of Friends of the Chair will be transmitted - among others - to the Sub-Committee B, and it would be up to this Committee to decide whether it wants to integrate the proposed modification in the draft - or not.
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<div>So the proposals are neither accepted nor refused; they remain in a sort of limbo up to the first discussions of the Sub-Committee B. This introduces in the mix and the issue an uncertainty that will make discussions even more complex.
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<div>This brief exchange and decision, coming after the two hours lost this morning on the "gorilla chest thumping" match between China and the US about the accreditation of Human Rights in China, and the fact that the Sub-Committee A will start its work on Internet Governance without a single document to base its work upon, do not bode well for the coming two weeks.
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<div>The reason for the russian position are unclear. My tentative interpretation is that russia is the Chair of the ITU WSIS Group and had made detailed proposals about the role of the ITU in the follow-up and the necessary reform of ITU in that context. Russia probably felt that the formulationof the Group of Friends of the Chair does not allow enough possibility for the ITU to play a major coordinating role in the follow-up process and that would hamper the impetus to reform. Therefore, opposing the new formulation is probably a way to bring back into the picture the previous architecture with the coordinating body, the multi-stakeholder teams and so on... and potentially the joint proposal by ITU and Unesco.
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<div>This new situation will force civil society actors to ask themselves which of the two architectures they want to support. And the choice may prove difficult because each can be good or wrong depending on how it is implemented :
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<div>- the initial architecture (multi-stakeholder teams along Thematic domains, supported by international organizations, and with coordination mechanisms) would be very good if the thematic Domains are coherent and mobilizing (and not just the present hodge-podge of issues) and the multi-stakeholder teams are really nimble, transparent and effective. But it could become a bureacratic nightmare if international organizations seize control of the system, set up MS Teams with "fully balanced geographic participation" (ie thirty diplomats in each team because diplomats cannot agree among themselves in regional groups to have less),and only produce annual reports through a heavy secretariat mechanism.
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<div>- similarly, the new proposals by the Group of Friends of the Chair is today weak, seems to lack any susbstantive commitment and even evacuates the "full and effective" participation of all stakeholders and it seems much worse than the first one in that respect. But, provided some smart changes are brought into the formulations and some more constraining commitment are obtained by governments, this architecture might in the end provide a much lighter system, allowing more bottom-up emergence of initiative and their flexible coordination.
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<div>The objective in all this might well be to find a set of rules that cannot go too wrong in implementation and provides the greatest flexibility and potential for greatness if it really works. </div>
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<div>Good work in perspective for the Content and Themes Group this evening.</div>
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<div>Best</div>
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<div>Bertrand</div>
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