Internet governance: don't count on mainstream media for the story

Susan Crawford blogs from Cape Town, South Africa that she hasn't seen any U.S. journalists at this year's annual meeting of the internet's governing body, ICANN.  The issue of internet governance is currently at a critical juncture, with major debates raging over whether the "greybeards" who invented the internet and have been running it so far should relinquish more control to a more international group -- and the extent to which that international group should include representatives of world governments. Enter stage right the U.N.'s Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

I am no expert on this debate but Joi Ito (who is also at ICANN) says "there is a lot at stake that affects every layer of the Internet being discussed here and at WSIS." 

James Seng also blogs from Cape Town: "ICANN is in this critical junction: with WSIS Tunsia in less then a year, with a proposed independence from US DoC. Over the next 12 to 18 months, ICANN must demostrate itself as not only as a viable independent organization that government can trust but also one that Internet community feels they can trust."

But no meaningful mainstream media coverage so far. Maybe it's not as easy to understand or as exciting as the FCC, but isn't it just as important (if not more so) for our global communication future?  Or am I just turning into a total geek???? Or both????????

So anyway, if you care about the future of internet governance, watch Susan, Joi, James, and others (I'll update them here on this post as I find them.. if you know of others, please let everybody know in the comments section).

Susan also has a report at CircleID.  BTW they have a good collection of articles on internet governance issues. Also see the ICANN/internet governance research page put together by my Berkman Center colleagues.

..and of course: there's a del.icio.us feed for ICANN.

Note to self: If I ever get a chance to run my ideal online participatory news organization. We will take the internet governance story seriously. We will find a way to make it interesting and relevant by covering it in an interactive and participatory way. I can understand why traditional media coverage methods would make the ICANN vs. WSIS story seem arcane and deathly boring... maybe I'm too idealistic and way too over-optimistic, but I still believe that participatory media offers new and creative ways to get people interested in things that ultimately really do matter.

Comments

[Frankenstein]

There's also the problem that ICANN has, in the past, been somewhat less than effective (or, at the very least, has been perceived to be so), and thus has fallen off the radar of a lot of tech types.

For example, the ICANN story nowhere to be seen on Slashdot or BoingBoing right now...

[Andy Carvin]

Interesting post, Rebecca... Unfortunately, Internet governance is rarely seen as a hot topic amongst most media outlets. Similarly, other major policy discussions that are taking place leading up to next year's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis get little coverage as well.

I was at the UN ICT Taskforce meeting in Berlin last month and saw little to no coverage in the US press; you had to read civil society sources like Worldsummit2005.org and APC.org to get any detail as to what's going on.

I'm thinking about setting up a WSIS bloggers website that would aggregate all the feeds of bloggers and civil society journalists covering WSIS. At the last WSIS there were only a handful of us blogging but I'm sure the next time around it'll be a much bigger event, including the two major planning meetings (prepcoms) set for this February and September... -ac

[Rebecca]

Andy, I think that's a really great idea. If you blog about this please remind me to link and make a big deal out of it. :-)