Irish OSCE internet event a model for future conferences

KUDOS TO the Department of Foreign Affairs for taking a risk with its two- day meeting at Dublin Castle last week of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which focused on internet freedom.

Instead of the usual routine – a huge meeting at which government representatives sit at a big table and have a jaw about a particular issue, with input from non- governmental organisations – the Irish Government, which holds the chair of the OSCE, took a creative, challenging and productive approach to a conference.

This featured two big panels each day discussing and working through issues that could not be more topical, around how to keep the internet an open, global and public forum.

Themes included exploring governmental interventions, both overt and covert, the role and responsibilities of private businesses such as Google, Twitter and Facebook, and technology companies whose equipment can be used for surveillance, the position of internet service providers and telecommunications companies, copyright and how or whether to protect content, and how human rights activists need, and use, the internet.

Panellists included international figures such as blogger, author and Boingboing.comfounder Cory Doctorow, Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who is working to create the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative and who has been involved with Wikileaks, activist blogger Emin Milli of Azerbaijan and Tunisian journalist Afef Abrougui.

Then there was a wide range of high-level officials from the United Nations, Nato, various state governments, academics and business figures – truly an eclectic mix.

Each panel also had an adept moderator, all from intriguing backgrounds, to keep the talk flowing. Rebecca MacKinnon, for example, who oversaw the first panel on Monday, is a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation and author of Consent of the Networked: the Worldwide Struggle for Freedom.

The moderator of the closing panel on Tuesday, John Kampfner, is the former editor of the New Statesman, former chief executive of the Index on Censorship and now adviser to Google on expression and culture.

I would have been happy to hear the moderators give their own presentations, but they were admirably restrained in directing discussion rather than dominating it with personal contributions.

The format did not suit everybody. OSCE members are accustomed to being able to read out long statements regarding their own stance on the meeting theme and in response to what others have said. Instead, the Irish format meant that even though comments and questions from the floor were an integral part of the structure, the moderators stressed concision and brevity.

That was simply too alien for some. A delegate representing the European Union kicked off the morning QA with an interminably long statement. Amusingly, the OSCE’s official tweeter of the event managed to summarise the entire contribution in a single 140-character tweet, something along the lines of “The delegate from the EU has stated support for internet freedom.”

A Russian academic and some government officials from Azerbaijan also tried and sometimes succeeded in making a number of very long statements, primarily aimed at disagreeing with panel discussions indicating those countries were restrictive or oppressive of internet freedom.

Azerbaijani blogger and activist Milli, who spent 18 months in prison but was released after a co-ordinated international campaign for his freedom, fired back a startling response to one such comment from the floor, acerbically thanking his government for not killing him.

Many of the most pointed questions posed to panellists came from Twitter, from people watching the event being streamed live on the day, a reminder of how inclusive such an event, normally screened off from public participation, can be, thanks to the internet.

The main irony for me was that Ireland, which has one of the more odious electronic data retention schemes in the world and which recently kowtowed to the music industry by signing in a controversial statutory instrument on copyright, was hosting an event on internet freedom.

Video transcripts can be viewed at osce.org/event/internetfreedom2012/video