Unaccountable? Check. Pointlessly bureaucratic? Check. Blocking reform? Check
It’s March again so it must be time for an annual checkup on the Internet Governance Forum – the United Nations body that is tasked with working through the complex social, technological and economic issues associated with a global communications network, and runs an annual conference to that end.
Around this time every year, the IGF’s organizing group the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) meets in Geneva to decide how the annual conference will be structured and what topics it will cover, and to set the rules for how sessions and the conference itself will be run.
And we are pleased to announce for another year, the IGF remains a circus, an unaccountable and pointlessly bureaucratic organization that goes to great lengths to pretend it is open to everyone’s input and even greater lengths to make sure it isn’t.
At the two-day meeting, the IGF’s three core issues again took pride of place at the event:
- Fantasy of democratic representation
- Opaque decision-making and finances
- Bureaucratic blocking of any efforts at reform
Let’s take a look at each:
