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Report from UN spam meeting in Geneva, from William Drake

Posted at 2004-07-13 23:08:41 by Declan McCullagh
in Politech category "spam"

William Drake kindly provides us with a first-hand look at the recent United Nations spam meeting. Keep reading.

>
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: U.N. bureaucrats want to help you reduce your spam
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:54:32 +0200
From: William Drake <wdrake@ictsd.ch>
To: declan

Perhaps of interest...

-----Original Message-----
From: William Drake [mailto:wdrake@ictsd.ch]
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 11:32 AM
To: Governance
Subject: spam and IG meetings in Geneva

Hi,

Two notes for anyone interested.

1.  The 3-day ITU WSIS thematic meeting on spam was interesting but
inconclusive, just the start of a dialogue.  Many speakers reiterated a
standard set of points, e.g. the need for a multipronged approach including
technical, self-regulatory, national legislative, and international
cooperative measures, and the absence of a "silver bullet" solution.  On the
core issue of what kind of international cooperation may be advisable, the
discussion alas failed to get into any sort of focused consideration of
either substantive principles and norms or alternative institutional
arrangements (i.e. regulatory harmonization vs. mutual recognition, MOUs,
etc).  But it was pretty clear that many developing countries, and a few
people from industrialized countries (it was unclear whether they were
really speaking of personal preferences or a settled position of their
governments) favored the idea of a global MOU under ITU, which of course ITU
would welcome.  On the other side, the EU rep repeatedly said international
cooperation is key, and as usual they might like a global approach that
reflects and extends what the commission is doing in the 25,  but what that
means in practice was left vague.  The US of course would not want to see
any kind of international cooperation that involving real rules that
obligated it to do anything about US-based spammers, who are the main source
of the problem but are politically connected, and it's not eager to see the
ITU taking on new functions, even when this could make sense (BTW, I'm told
that the direct marketers and the Republicans on the hill are currently
pushing through legislation to effectively repeal the legal ban on junk
fax---anyone surprised that CAN SPAM was a sham?).  That said, it is easy to
imagine that the sort of approach recently taken by the US-UK-Australia MOU
being scaled up to an OECD-wide instrument.

The open question of course is where that would leave the developing
countries, who really need help.  There's quite a lot of frustration that
the industrialized countries keep telling them that adopting e-government,
e-commerce, e-everything is the key to development, but when they move in
that direction they become awash in all the spam, viruses, and other crap
pouring out of the North over the net, which they're frequently not prepared
to deal with effectively.  An African delegate I chatted with said a lot of
people in his country are getting discouraged from entering further into the
e-world by dialing up expensive and slow connections and finding 90% of the
mail to be garbage.  Expecting that they'll all become power users and keep
up to speed with the latest user side filtering and MS security patches is
unrealistic.  Much more can be done at the ISP level etc but there greater
international technical assistance is required.  Not surprisingly then, many
developing countries want strong international rules etc. backed up by an
institutional arrangement they can work with, i.e. ITU.  ITU-D can certainly
do more on the assistance side within the existing political mix, but has
its limits.  BTW it doesn't appear that the US FTC and parallel agencies in
other OECD countries have much of a working relationship with the developing
countries, many of whom lack similar agencies; part of the problem.

Main point of relevance here are that there was a pretty clear consensus
that international cooperation on spam is regarded to be very much a part of
Internet governance. Nobody contested that point.  The question is what if
anything the UN WGIG can say or do in this terrain given the nascent state
of the wider dialogue and the North-South divisions over what cooperation
should entail.  At a minimum though I'd think it could recommend a
significant increase in North-South technical assistance, which of course is
far less controversial than suggesting actual solutions the US won't accept.
Should the caucus at some point manage to put out some brief position
statements as WGIG inputs, that angle might be something on which everyone
can find common ground.  A user/CS voice is needed here.

The meeting report is at
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/spam/chairman-report.pdf

2.  The director of ITU-T is organizing an informal consultation on Internet
governance and the role of ITU therein for next Thursday July 15.  This was
originally for heads of delegation but is now open to anyone, if you'll be
passing through
Geneva.http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/md/01/tsb/cir/T01-TSB-CIR-0243!!MSW-
E.doc

Cheers,

Bill

******************************************
William J. Drake
Senior Associate
International Centre for Trade
and Sustainable Development www.ictsd.org
Geneva, Switzerland
wdrake@ictsd.ch
http://www.citi.columbia.edu/affiliates/wdrake.htm
******************************************

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