Why they're talking about Internet governance

The question should be - why aren't we talking about it? So far, Caribbean input has been: The CIVIC mailing list had a quite robust discussion on it, and submitted comments to the WGIG report. CARICOM had a multi-stakeholder forum on IG in September. The Commonwealth ppl and UWI Cave Hill (Roderick Sanatan) had a meeting in Antigua and one in St. Kitts. Currently, the CTU's Spectrum conference ongoing in the Hilton has had some discussions on it. But in general here, we talk about our regulations and projects and plans in splendid isolation of what's gong on in the rest of the world, and as such miss out on a lot. Best practices, global regulations, etc. It would be great if IT people in Trinidad took up the mantle to inform, and then we could ourselves participate in the debate over international IG, regional IG and thus down to local/national IG. However, the article http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8147 focuses (as does most press recently) on the issue of ICANN, ITU and the "ownership" of the root. This is not the major issue in Governance, but ti is the political hot button, that has derailed all efforts to truly focus discussion towards solutions on the other 40+ IG issues as elaborated in the WGIG background report (www.wgig.org). Most of the other issues are the ones that are vital and relevant to developing world nations, especially small island states such as T&T. The author also does not put Wolfgang's views on IG into the proper context. He has written a LOT on IG (as we all have in the past 18 months that we've been on the Working group), and simplification is really not doing justice to a lot of his reasoned and thoughtful analysis.