W3C Input to the United Nations "Enhanced Cooperation" Study.
Foreword
This report was prepared by the W3C staff (World Wide Web Consortium) as input to the United Nations Under-Secretary General, Sha Zukang, who invited us in March 2008 to provide an annual performance report on the steps our organization has taken toward "enhanced cooperation" on public policy issues pertaining to the Internet. You can see online a similar letter received by ISOC.
W3C has no reporting duties to the United Nations or any of its agencies, and in this context, the goal of this memo is only to share our understanding on the role we and other standard making organisations play regarding some important Internet Governance issues facing society today.
Main Points
Each professional community (techies, gov, civil society, industry) should do what they are best at, and cooperate with other communities that have different expertise.
Engineering communities should continue define and develop technologies. Governments should define and enforce laws, and everybody need to understand the new technologies as they are developed. Engineers need to better understand social and ethical aspects of the new technologies being developed. All communities should keep in mind an overall mission of promoting the human rights of access to information and freedom of expression and communication.
Here's a summary of the situation as we see it with respect to Internet and Web Standards.
The technology infrastructure of the Internet and the World Wide Web has
developped out of an open collaboration process in a
multi-stakeholder environment, with participation from academia,
industry, government (through funding orientation, not architecture
orientation), advocacy groups (e.g., in the area of accessibility), and
end-users (public review, quality, etc).
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops the Web (HTML, CSS, XML, Web Services, WAI Guidelines, etc.). The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops the Internet (TCP/IP, DNC, Email, etc.). These organizations have different but related technical focus and expertise. W3C and IETF developed the HTTP protocol together and some other XML-related technologies, but there is generally a clear separation of technical responsibilities for both organizations. Other consortia, like Unicode, are equally important.
The IETF and W3C are not “industry consortia” and, in fact, work in
most ways like formal standard organizations. IETF and W3C are unique,
non-for-profit global coordination bodies, in which experts from
industry, academia, government and non-governmental organizations develop
open technical standards. This work is given freely to the world, implemented
by the industry and the open source community for the benefits of the
public at large.
These technical standards have been, and are still, developed in a
multi-stakeholders way, with an open and participative bottom-up style, based
on simple principles such as interoperability (i.e., it
should work on any hardware, with any operating system, and from any
software), and universality (i.e., it should work
irrespective of culture, language, character sets used; and it should be
accessible to people with disabilities).
Governments should play an important role as sponsors and users of the Internet technologies, but not as network architects. Governments and civil society need to create enabling environments. No matter the brilliance of the technology, its benefits are unevenly distributed and ultimately depend on wise policy action to ensure an equality of access all around the world.
Recent activities
The most unique challenges base technology providers (e.g. ICANN, IETF/ISOC, W3C) face to is to develop a shared infrastructure of resources and standards dealing with issues that have significant social impact, but at the same time require technical expertise and operational consensus in order to be effectively addressed. We need to allow for flexibility and innovation, and at the same time focus on functional requirements, not technology-specific rules, business, political, social, which means a rich cross-layer coordination is required, and for a small structure like W3C, this is where most of our limited "policy" time is spent.
At the same time, we're trying to continue pushing the agenda of Open Standards by participating more actively in the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards, DCOS.