By George Sadowsky (Message to Dave Farber)

Having just returned from the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio, I must say that the contents of Jack Chang’s article do not adequately characterize the event or the audience.

There were 1300 people who showed up, from 109 countries. Many of the were governmental and NGO representatives. The IGF is not a planning body, as Chang asserts, but a forum for discussion, and it must stay that way. It was set up as a compromise result of the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) conferences in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005. The negotiations over the summit statement and the terms of reference of the IGF were not the friendliest. Continue reading →