ICC-BASIS fourth intervention, Jeff Brueggeman

The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the 13 May 2009 open consultations of the IGF. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Thank you, Chair.

A few suggestions on the developing country issues.

One would be that there is a suggestion about roundtables, and I think some of us have questions about what that would be. However this would seem to be an area where to the extent that a roundtable means a more participatory exchange of information, that having a discussion about best practices and what is working and what the obstacles are ith developing countries, it would allow and facilitate perhaps greater participation by members from developing countries and also start to maybe gather in a more systematic way the information.

As well as at the main session, I think the access session would be the right way to perhaps expand the discussion and build on the discussion last year really focused on reaching the next billion and then beyond that and what are the accessibility issues. But to the extent that that could be linked into how can Internet governance and the structure maybe be improved and facilitate that, which would seem to be an excellent suggestion for the topic that we already have staked out in the access session.

And then I wanted to make an unrelated comment, which we haven’t talked about, is the session on the last day and wanted to propose that that would be perhaps an opportunity to really look forward, which is another, I think, important aspect of what IGF does is to keep evolving and keep looking ahead at what’s coming next and perhaps have a discussion about — from a technology perspective, maybe get a range of views on where the Internet is headed and then have a policy Internet governance reaction to that, saying, let’s look ahead at a longer-term view and then start to think about what are the implications and the issues that would flow from that as a way to really have a forward-looking element to the IGF perhaps on the last day.

Thank you.