I posted the video of the United Nations’ representative Sha Zukang losing it about a week ago but forgot to stick up a blog post about it.

It was a remarkable thing: Egypt’s first lady had inserted her own agenda into the Internet Governance Forum’s schedule – which caused no end of problems as everything had to be reshuffled. But also her visit brought with it some over-the-top security precautions: no mobile phones; extra invites to be allowed into the building; restricted access; and – the big issue – everyone being locked down in the main room, unable to leave, while she wandered around in the “village” of booths outside.

Anyway, after the First Lady’s little segment about protecting kids online and a panel of “experts” forced to find some way of tying the IGF into the youth of today and protecting kids online — which was a complete waste of everyone’s time, to be frank — she wandered off but left everyone stuck in the main room.

Not everyone was happy about this. Many people wanted to just go to the toilet having been in the room for several hours. The UN’s head honcho – a very prickly Chinese man called Sha Zukang – was also unhappy as he had trouble getting back into the room to chair the next session on the future of the IGF itself.

As you can see from the video below, Sha was annoyed with the fact that lots of people were standing at the back waiting to be allowed to leave. But even when the situation was explained to him, he was already too wound up to care and came out with an extraordinary outburst.

Considering this has only been one or two minutes, it was really too much – and everyone commented as such. Of the many comments I heard at the back of the room, and that evening, the most common description of the short-fused Zukang was “prick”. The event also sparked a few UN old hands to recall other similar outbursts.

Anyway, here for your viewing pleasure is what happened:

I was at the United Nations in Geneva last week to watch what was happening to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) as it prepares for its third outing, this December in Hyderabad, India.

Actually I was there for a different reason – an ICANN consultative meeting on the future of the organization the morning before the UN meeting – but it seemed daft to fly all that way and not check out the day of open discussions about the IGF. Plus I have a real soft spot for the IGF and the people that have worked extremely hard to make it a success.

I was a witness to the IGF’s creation, on paper, at the World Summit on the Information Society back in 2005, and then followed it all the way through various preparatory sessions as a reporter.

At the inaugural IGF in Athens, I was asked to be the conference’s “blogger-in-chief” – a position that, ironically enough, my current employer tried to veto. As a semi-official part of the IGF, I also got to see behind the scenes, and was impressed with the hard work, dedication and calm handling of what was an enormous and risky experiment. A lot of people at the time confessed to turning up just to see what would happen – spectators to what could have been the biggest diplomatic car crash for a decade. In the end, despite the odds, it shone through.

Her name was Rio

Inspired by the meeting’s efforts to find Internet-style solutions to some very big problems, I also helped set up one of the new “dynamic coalitions” – for “online collaboration”. The extremely limited resources the IGF team had meant that their Internet options were extremely limited – and this at a time when everyone was talking about Web 2.0.

By the time the second IGF came around, this time in Rio de Janeiro, I had made the unusual choice of taking a job with ICANN which unfortunately put a whole different complexion on things. The Brazilian hosts were making it very plain they intended to make ICANN a central discussion point of their meeting – and not in a positive way. ICANN instinctively went into a defensive crouch, and you can hardly blame it considering the organisation was nearly torn limb-from-limb during the WSIS process.

As a result, I stepped back from helping out the IGF organizers – something I still wish I could have avoided. Although since I helped ICANN to become more open and forthcoming in Rio, I am content with the belief that I helped ensure that the IGF didn’t come to represent a place of combat rather than a location for collaboration and open discussion.

The Rio meeting also saw the collapse of the dynamic coalition I had worked hard at. Partly it was due to the fact that my new job left me with no free time, but more so it was thanks to several people trying to use the credibility that had been built up behind it as a political platform for their personal agendas.

I explain all this because from a personal perspective my natural bias would likely be to see the IGF as going down the tubes. It has only a five-year mandate from the UN Secretary-General and the Rio meeting saw a lot of people pondering whether they would bother to attend the next.

It’s not as if there aren’t already 1,000 different conferences about the Internet. Governments appeared to be stepping back from the process; the fight-fans who had hoped to get ringside tickets to a global Net bout felt cheated; what were the dynamic coalitions actually achieving anyway; and, what exactly was the point of going to India? What would you miss if you didn’t go?

Muffled movement

I’ve not followed the progress of IGF 3, so I have to say it was a delight to see that, far from it falling apart, the whole Internet Governance Forum seems to be coming together.

Don’t get me wrong, if any normal person off the street walked into Room XIX in the Palais des Nations last Tuesday, they would have been overcome with the sense of self-interested individuals having an incredibly long and incredibly boring discussion about something that should somehow be exciting and riveting but very clearly wasn’t.

The IGF process remains the domain of insiders, geeks, paid advocates and people with too much time on their hands. A significant number of the Meeting Advisory Group (MAG) that makes most of the decisions surrounding the IGF don’t even bother turning up to the open consultations. I was tempted to do a headcount but for some reason my natural trouble-making inclinations failed me.

So if it was the same old rigmarole, the same people talking to the same people saying the same things in a heavily padded room through little plastic ear cups, where does my optimism come from?

Almost entirely I think from the IGF Secretariat. The UN staff has been given some stark assessments from headquarters in New York. It is fortunate that the IGF hardly costs the UN anything, relying instead on voluntary contributions, but it is still a big show put on by the United Nations so it has to show its value, and show it soon.

A review of the forum has been ordered and despite efforts to socialize the idea among the great and good gathered in Geneva, it is going to start at the Hyderabad meeting whether people like it or not.

The IGF has to show progress, it has to start carving out its own role, demonstrating its value, and produce something of real originality. Otherwise it’s a goner in 2010. And the IGF Secretariat has started work on that, very carefully and cleverly and with all the diplomatic nous that its main figure, Markus Kummer, is renowned for.

The most significant example of this is in the colour-coding of workshops that will take place in Hyderabad. The emphasis of the IGF has always been on multistakeholderism, which means, basically, getting governments, business, the technical community and civil society talking together.

The workshops are supposed to be multistakeholder i.e. have someone from each group, but this has been frequently ignored, or given lip-service to, or somehow not quite managed in the past. This year, the workshops were listed online and given a colour code – green for fully multistakeholder; amber for not fully multistakeholder; and red for more work needs to be done.

The pressure is then placed on the organizers to get to a green status. And this process has also had the effect of getting people to work together to merge different workshops in order to get the full quotient of people. It has forced people to work together to a common goal. And it has worked in large part. I counted 88 workshops for a possible 98 spots with 1 red, 15 amber and the rest green.

Officialdom

There will be three main issues at the 2008 IGF, and they are:

• Reaching the next billion
• Promoting cyber-security and trust, and
• Managing critical Internet resources

For these three, there are two “official” workshops each, and the same gentle pressure has been applied as with the other workshops – albeit with less success – to get those jostling for position to work together.

This is a step forward from last year where the workshops often proved more valuable than the main sessions. By getting egos to clash over workshops, it may be that the main sessions aren’t dragged down through bureaucratic compromise.

There will still be the need for people – especially government ministers – to have set pieces, but there have been requests this time for moderators to be expert in the field, rather than simply expert moderators. And that shows that there is a hope for more in-depth discussion of the issues this time around. A depth that you get from policymakers, not politicians.

Dead dynamics

The IGF seems to be finding its feet and becoming more structured. Panels in the morning will “distill lessons” that will then “focus the debate” in the afternoon. It won’t work like that in reality of course, but the stated intent is there and everyone agrees with it, which is a clear step forward.

The IGF website is also far more organized. It still looks horrendous, and it is difficult to find material, but the amount and quality of information has taken a big step forward – particularly the inclusion of carefully edited MAG list emails. Only a handful of people will ever read them, but it is the act of having them that is important.

There was also an effort by Nitin Desai – the UN-SG’s special representative – to press the dynamic coalitions into coming up with the goods. Those coalitions that haven’t produce reports on their activities have been threatened with being “archived”. The IGF Secretariat was very careful not to come across as making demands but it is clear that a clean-up is underway (to arrive at a “reasonably tidy house”, according to Desai) – and rightly so. That the coalition I formed (and resigned from just after the Rio meeting) is more than likely to be swept up with the broom can only be a good thing.

It is also worth noting that one or two governments and businesses are also taking a bit of a punt of the IGF and have contributed significant sums of money this time around, lifting at least some of the pressure off. The Canadian government in particular is said to have donated a couple of hundred thousands dollars just to allow for increased participation in the Hyderabad meeting.

The prep meeting

So, what actually happened at the all-day Geneva meeting?

Well, from my perspective, there were five things of note:

1. The usual prepared statements were fewer in number – thank god
2. The governments seemed to be taking less of a public role – not a good thing and also the explanation for why there were fewer prepared statements
3. The Brazilians have decided to use the emotive issue of child pornography to political ends. What political ends people will find out in December, but the cynical powerplay is disheartening
4. The IGF Secretariat were larger, more prepared and more confident
5. Some people – notably civil society – still don’t get it

On the Brazilian thing: the Brazilians, who I very much like on a personal basis, flew over a Senator who has been heading a drive against child pornography at home. He then provided a very loud, almost-ranting political speech about the subject, claiming that Brazil was three years ahead of the rest of the world.

I have a very significant distrust of anyone using child pornography on the Internet as an argument for doing anything with the Internet. As a UK citizen, I have seen my Parliament’s main committee on the Internet completely overrun by zealots for all sorts of controls using the emotive shield of child porn to deflect perfectly reasonable questioning. I have seen efforts to introduce ridiculous laws written through the distorting lens of child porn. And I have seen upfront and in person the lives of innocent people ruined because political pressure opened the door to flawed police investigations.

Every time someone raises the issue of child pornography online, they come armed with a rhetorical question: why aren’t we doing more about this? And then proceed to outline a series of measures that would see them laughed out the room if they were discussing any other subject.

As such, when I hear a Senator boasting about how his country is so much more advanced on fighting child porn than anyone else – which, incidentally, is exactly what the UK claimed last year – I become immediately concerned. My prediction is that shortly after the Brazilians outline the fantastic work they have done removing this repulsive (and extremely niche) activity, they will then outline how everyone else can do the same. And that it will just so happen that those methods fit perfectly with their political goals.

Debate and dialogue

But onto the fact that some people just don’t get it. The most notable case is an academic who I’ve known for a number of years and who I know from experience never tires from railing against imagined malignant influence.

There was a semantic argument at one point in which someone asked for the main sessions to be called “debate and dialogue” rather than just “debate”. The idea being that people don’t necessarily want to just argue with one another, that there should also be some sharing of ideas and experiences.

It was a fairly harmless proposition, subsequently agreed to by others, but in the eyes of some the suggestion represented something far more grave and sinister. And so a false debate started on the issue of debate. The proposition was that the word “dialogue” be added to the title, but it was misrepresented as having been put forward as a sole replacement – and then furiously denounced as such.

The issue of debate thus became that day’s controversy, and speakers, bored from having flown halfway across the world to sit in a huge beige hall, found something to fight over. It was a complete waste of everyone’s time but it does demonstrate that some people still haven’t got it.

Got what? That the IGF’s unique selling point, it’s original nature, its very value and essence comes in getting people from different backgrounds and cultures to overcome their suspicions and differences and find a solution that they can all agree on in furtherance of an Internet that everyone benefits from and which no one can control. And a big part of that process is people letting go of the chips on their shoulders.

Civil society, for example, wants public policy debates where advocates thrash it out, firing facts and figures at their opponents, uncovering misdeeds and through this approach define the best way forward.

What it fails to realise is that the people that actually make those decisions in the real world – governments mostly, but also industry actors in democratic states – don’t use that approach for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. All you end up with is bold but unworkable statements from parties that are now in a confrontational relationship. It’s the opposite of arriving at policy decisions. Fine in a courtroom; pointless in a drafting office.

The people’s representative

It’s not just civil society that still has problems adjusting. Governments have terrible trouble grasping the idea of being an equal stakeholder rather than the decider. They failed miserably when the MAG was being readjusted to provide non-government actors with more power and insisted on retaining their majority position. Likewise, government representatives still can’t bring themselves to participate in the debate, preferring instead to read prepared statements or react only to statements for which they know the official line.

Government representatives also rarely mix with the others in the room. Many shun public meetings altogether. And they provide only a minimum of interactivity with the IGF’s flagship products: workshops and dynamic coalitions. Their placid behaviour in public is, sadly, matched by petulant and unreasonable behaviour behind closed doors.

But it is all very much better than it was. Three years ago, no one trusted anyone else. As the IGF processes have continued and no one has “lost” anything, so the focus has gradually drawn into the issues and solutions to the issues.

There is still paranoia and its flipside, plotting, but what the Geneva meeting demonstrated through its glorious tedium was that the multistakeholderites are just as content planning a meeting together as they fighting with one another.

The longer the IGF continues in the same vein – finding a way to avoid pressing one another’s buttons – the more this understanding will be allowed to foster. And then we will really have a forum worth visiting. It won’t be sexy, it won’t be good TV and it won’t be particularly interesting but it will get some serious work done on an enormously complex subject – namely, figuring out how to deal with this Internet thingy.

Nominet held a meeting over the IGF on Monday which has attracted a fair amount of attention, most of it revolving around Nitin Desai’s remarks at the end, picked up by the BBC.

I have grabbed the audio from the meeting and produced a series of MP3 files which you can download and listen to here. I will also post them on the IGF200.info blog. All files below:

• Opening Panel: Emily Taylor (Nominet), Alun Michael MP, Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (22 mins)
  
  

• Security Panel: Jean-Jaques Sahel (DTi), Mark Sunner (Messagelabs), Dave Evans (Information Commissioners Office), Guy Hosein (Privacy International/LSE), Richard Allan (Cisco)
  MP3 file (35 mins)
  
  

• Child Abuse Panel: Peter Robbins (Internet Watch Foundation), John Carr (NCH), Camille de Stempel (AOL/ISPA)
  MP3 file (22 mins)

• Openness Panel: Andrew McLaughlin (Google), Dr Yaman Akdeniz (Cyberliberties UK), Prof Jonathan Zittrain (OII/Berkman)
  MP3 file (34 mins)
  
  

• Emerging Issues Panel: Howard Williams (Worldbank), David Harrington (Communications Management Association), Malcolm Hutty (LINX), Chinyelu Onwurah (Ofcom)
  MP3 file (42 mins)
  
  

• Closing remarks by Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (10 mins)
  
  

I have also done a file combining just Nitin Desai’s opening and closing remarks, which you can grab here (mp3, 20 mins).

I should add that I was hoping to post videos of each sessions but have been thwarted by the combination of video formats and video editing software. I have a (very large) grab of the whole event in .asf format but have given up on editing after wasting hours trying to get it into a more usable format and only ending up with out-of-sync pics and audio.

Hopefully Nominet will ask the webcast company to do the split and post them in .avi or .mpeg files. The pictures are not that important anyway and are huge files so the MP3s are more useful and shareable.

So Nominet held a big meeting in London on Monday covering the new Internet Governance Forum that will meet for the first time at the end of this month in Athens.

In some ways, it was a sort-of mini IGF in that it took the same free-ranging panel approach and that it explictly held two panels on two of the four main themes of the IGF – “security” and “openness” (Nitin Desai pointed out that had the meeting been in a developing country, the panels and debate would have been on the other two themes – diversity and access).

It was also similar to the real meeting in the role that I have been asked to play: “chief blogger” – meaning scouring the Internet for interesting comments and reading them out to the room. Actually, this term “chief blogger” has led some to ask whether I’m some of kind of official IGF blogger, which I certainly am not, so I will refer to my role as “blog watcher” from now on.

The general feeling is that the meeting was a success. The room will filled with people who know alot about Internet issues – and for once it wasn’t dominated by the political issue of US control but rather the question of what problems the Net has thrown up and the best way of dealing with them. Moderator Sarah Montague of BBC fame did an excellent job of keeping the discussion moving, not allowing people to get away with platitudes and, crucially, not allowing discussions to slip into jargon.

In fact, the only part of the meeting that fell down was my part. The interaction from online users was pitiful. As such, this post will cover that element of interaction with online users, and I will cover what was actually said at the meeting in a different post. But I want to tackle this issue of interaction because it strikes me that there are serious issues here and it needs some good brains on the problem to figure out how to make it work.

There was an early success with the wireless router I brought from home (the building staff were unhelpful about such matters apparently) which I had pre-configured at home, plugged in, and managed to supply the room with Net access. Although my decaying laptop failed (yet again) to smoothly link to the network so I had to borrow one from the webcasting company and rebuild all the editorial web connections I needed from scratch.

This was the essence of my role: scour the blogs for any information about the meeting and interject it as and when asked. Since this was only a small and short meeting, there was never going to be blog coverage so an addition was a question tool, used at the Oxford Internet Institute IGF meeting a month ago. The question tool was rapidly deployed at the last minute with the aid of Jonathan Zittrain and enabled people to post questions online, plus vote on posted questions, thereby pushing them up the list, and so registering wider interest in the question being asked (you can see the end result of this here).

I had done a story for The Register in the morning covering the meetings and encouraging bloggers to interact, and this was picked up by one of the biggest blogging sites out there – Boing Boing – so I was fairly confident of some interaction. It was not to be. Some work colleagues look in on the meeting and posted a question or two, and Jon Zittrain also contributed one or two items but apart from that, the whole process attracted only three people.

Feedback

As a result the feedback I was able to supply to the moderator was minimal at best. And, with some irony, the one time I had an excellent question, supplied by Glyn Wintle, and indicated to Sarah Montague I had something, she couldn’t see me above the lights and ended the panel discussion before I had a chance to jump in. In the break, we worked out a system between me, the webcasters, and the moderator but very little else was forthcoming. Many of the people in the room were only aware of the online element because it was explicitly referred to by the moderator and also it was possible to bring up my laptop screen on the screens either side of the stage and on screen built into the panel’s desk.

Interestingly, some of the questions on the question tool were usefully answered by others within it – i.e. there was a parallel discussion going on online.

So what?

Well, a big element of the IGF is – or is supposed to be – interaction and involvement from people outside the room. After all, we are talking about the Internet Governance Forum. There has been a lot of talk of collaborative software, much of which has been ignored or poo-pooed by governments, but the IGF really is an opportunity to get these new technologies working and show their value.

Of course the great advantage of this type of interaction is that people don’t have to physically travel to the meeting to find out what is going on, plus there is the opportunity to have input into the meeting. This is particularly useful for people from developing countries who simply can’t afford to travel to Athens, even if they had the time and inclination.

Not everyone is happy about the idea of these tools being used to produce input into the meeting. And it is now my considered opinion that at this moment, this year, real-time feedback and input from the Internet is not going to work as a formal interjection. The input is too inconsistent and it requires intelligent filtering. I found in the Nominet meeting that listening to what was going on, plus checking out what people were discussing online, combined with attempting to boil this information down into something that could be interjected into discussions at the appropriate point was frankly too taxing. It is simply impossible for one person to do it by themselves and requires a team of people.

Talking fast

Discussion in a room actually moves incredibly quickly so the time that it takes to get feedback from people online, filter it and supply it to the room produces a delay that stilts real discussion. As such, the best method of including web-produced questions and content is to make it a separate cut-off from discussions. The moderator drawing a distinction. In the same way that on some TV shows, they make a point of “going to the phones”. Phone technology and, more importantly, humans’ comfort with phones has increased to such a level that you can now have conference calls, but even so they are not the same as face-to-face interaction. With most people still uncomfortable – or even unaware – of the new Net collaboration tools, perhaps it isn’t surprising that this divide exists.

But all that aside, I was still expecting between 10 and 20 people to be online during the Nominet meeting and they simply weren’t and that raises some important questions now only about why, but also about how you can encourage interaction.

These are my thoughts and ideas and I welcome anyone that has other input. First, reasons why the interaction from online was so low:

1. Very few people knew the meeting was going ahead (The Reg and Boing Boing stories appeared only hours before the actual meeting started)
2. Most of those who knew about it before then were in the room
3. Very few in the room had laptops and so could not interact online (I counted three people)
4. People couldn’t get the webcast or were not able to watch live (apparently, the controls didn’t work in Firefox so any new entry to the webcast started at the start of the meeting even as it was still going on).
5. People didn’t know where the interaction was going on – or even if there was any

The more technological and social reasons:

• The system was not friendly or simple enough – people were put off interacting
• People couldn’t see the point in interacting (after all, the questions made weren’t actually asked in the room in the end)
• People don’t want to interact (most people in a conference room don’t ask questions)
• The system wasn’t made clear – what would happen if you did type something in?
• The system was confusing or set up in a way that didn’t work – most people are not journalists and/or used to framing precise questions

Now, there are some things that separate the IGF meeting from the Nominet meeting:

• More people know the IGF meeting is going ahead
• The IGF is larger, so even if the small interaction is scaled up, there will still be enough people online for it to have value – especially since these people are likely to be more motivated to interact
• The IGF meeting is worldwide, meaning that there will be more people who know of the meeting that can’t physically attend – making online interaction more attractive
• More people at the meeting itself will have laptops and/or Net access

But that still leaves a number of hurdles:

• Making the interaction simple enough
• Making clear to people the point in interacting
• Trying to find a way to pull the online interaction into the ongoing real-world discussions
• Letting people know exactly where and how they can interact online
• Finding a way to filter and condense information into a form that has real practical use

This job will be made harder by the fact that I’m not sure it will be possible to bring up the online interaction on screens in the IGF conference room (I will have to ask Markus Kummer if this is possible), and by the fact that alot more information makes it more difficult to pick out useful material.

These then are my tentative conclusions from the Nominet blog watching experience into how to make IGF interaction better, wider, and more useful.

1. Get the interaction areas up online as soon as possible and allow people to start using them so they can get comfortable with the idea
2. Encourage free and open use of the system by as many people as possible both inside and out of the main meetings
3. Make the system as simple as possible
4. Explain how the interaction will work
5. Have a team of people watching and working with one another to help flag and fasttrack interesting comments
6. Try to get agreement for screens in the venue that can be switched to the online interactions when appropriate (this still leaves the issue of making whatever content is important fill the laptop screen so it can be viewed by people a distance away)
7. Expect for most of the useful interaction online to work in parallel to the actual ongoing meeting rather than within it (and find a way of connecting the two without disrupting either)

I’m sure there are others, but those are my thoughts at the moment. I hope they strike a chord with someone out there.

There is a big meeting on the future of the Internet in London tomorrow, run by Nominet, where I will be acting as the “chief blogger”. As such, I need your help.

In fact, I am the official chief blogger for the Internet Governance Forum itself in Athens at the end of this month. That basically means that I will spend a good chunk of the conference reading what others have to say about the meeting online and I will occasionally be asked to summarise to the room what is being said by the rest of the world. At which point I will read out the most interesting and incisive blog posts to the assembled masses.

I actually see this as a vitally important role as it gives a voice to the people that haven’t flown to Athens and who have nothing more than a Net connection and a good point to make. That’s why I accepted the role and now I need your help to make the most of it.

Update: You can now see exactly what is happening at the IGF meeting, and simply and easily interact with events there through a website at IGF2006.info.

The role of a chief blogger was actually created by IGF head Nitin Desai when he attended the We Media conference in London in May and they had a chief blogger there (Alf Hermida, the BBC’s online news editor) reading out people’s responses from the wider Internet.

The advantage that We Media has over the IGF though was that We Media was very much a media event since media companies had invested large sums of money in it. And media folk love nothing more than writing about themselves and their friends in the media. The IGF however has been notable by people’s reluctance to provide money and does not have any big media companies in tow so the ready availability of bloggers is in question.

The IGF is in fact incredibly and wonderfully important – it is the first time that governments, business and everyday ordinary folk will sit down as almost-equal partners in something that hasn’t been pre-decided. It is a vast experiment and everyone is watching to see if the chemistry either creates an incredible new compound or blows up.

I think it’s important enough to involve myself a little deeper than I am usually comfortable with since I like to remain an independent observer. But then no one else appeared to be able to get stuck in and be in the middle of things, reflecting what the wider world things of United Nations discussions.

To get very rapidly back to my point – Nominet is having an IGF meeting tomorrow. The agenda is here [pdf], and it will be webcast here. I implore anyone who is interested in this area (i.e. anyone who cares about where the Internet goes) to check it out and to write their feelings about it – and then make me aware of the those feelings so I can tell everyone in the room.

To this end – and for the bigger IGF meeting in Athens, I have set up an open blog which I hope will serve as an interesting discussion point. You can find it at http://igf2006.info/blog/, and the site itself (http://igf2006.info) will soon have a range of interesting collaborative tools.

Get involved. Listen to what people have to say, then write what you think, and I will do my best to make sure that everyone knows what it is.

Well, it’s 3.15pm Geneva time and the afternoon session of Sub-Committee A at PrepCom3 of WSIS at the UN in Geneva will start in 15 minutes.

What does all that mean? That for the next few hours a group of around 100 people in a room will start making fundamental decisions about how the Internet will run forever more.

These sessions were getting behind. In fact there was only supposed to be one of these a day but a slow start last week has seen them running two a day and possibly three, with a third tonight.

It was pretty much doom and gloom right up until yesterday. Factions have built up and fallen down. The US and Canada – who always stick to give in the world politics stakes, mostly it must be said because of a pretty similar world view – have started edging apart.

Meanwhile, a group calling themselves the Likeminded group and containing an oddly anti-US Brazil contingent, as well some of the African countries and assorted others has started gathering pace.

I am told there was an OECD gang but that appears to have fallen apart. And the most stubborn so far are Iran and Cuba – quite possibly because the US is being pretty solid in its view that the UN shouldn’t have control of the Internet, and there’s nothing that annoys Iran and Cuba more than the Yanks laying down the law.

However, I had a quick interview with the US Ambassador, David Gross, as well as with the Sub-Committee A chairman and Pakistan ambassador Masood Khan, and both of them are quietly confident that a deal may be struck – no matter how unlikely it looks at the moment.

The Chinese – vital in any agreement – despite having put out a very strong statement earlier in the week which was a barely disguised attack on the US and ICANN, has not been as forthright as you might expect and so with both the US and China appearing to be willing to concede some points, if that agreement is made, the others could well be brought into line.

So what?

Well, while it’s not vital that everyone agree on a system for Internet Governance, if one isn’t reached, it is going to be the ten-ton gorilla in every important discussion regarding the Internet from this point on. And, as you can imagine, that’s going to be pretty often.

So agreement is definitely preferable. Or at least an initial agreement on who should run the Internet, who should decide where it grows and how it grows and how what already exists works with the rest of it.

I will get the interviews with the Ambassadors down on an MP3 with some commentary from me hopefully tonight and doing a broad, clearly story for The Register than this quick blog, but that’s how it stands at the moment in Geneva.