RE: United Nations International Telecommunication Union World Conference on International Telecommunications Conference and Scientific Forums

Philosophy of the Web Community Group,

Greetings.  I agree that that adage was applicable to the ITU WCIT conference.  The Web and numerous organizations stewarding specification processes and discussion areas, public, transparent scientific forums, have done so well for decades.

Though some of the ITU WCIT conference meetings were non-transparent for regulation, we can attempt to address each claim and rationale of conference participants, for example the topic of spam (http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/asrg/current/msg17271.html, http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/asrg/current/msg17291.html).  Those opposed to regulation indicated that state approaches to countering spam were a slippery slope to state censorship or that technologies for countering spam, utilized by states, could be utilized for censorship.

On another topic, facilitating the participation of non-English-speaking scientists and technologists in public, transparent, scientific forums (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2012Dec/0151.html), in addition to being a good idea in and of itself, can be phrased as addressing some of the concerns that those advocating regulation might have had.

We can analyze the arguments and rationale of ITU WCIT conference attendees about regulation, in detail, to better understand the situation.  Some parts of the discussions at that conference, however, were not transparent.  From the transparent parts of the ITU WCIT conference, we can attempt to glean various claims and rationale for regulation and we can address each, adding to arguments against regulation.  Additionally, some scientific topics can be indicated as having solutions arriving from science and not from regulation.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski