In a public call to action released on 13 February 2006, Annette Muehlberg, European member of At-large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and co-chair network new media asked for public support in building up a regional structure to represent individual's interests and concerns.

The petition with the title "Help to strengthen Civil Rights and Consumer Protection in ICANN's policies! " considers that:

"The question of how Internet Governance is shaped is one of the central sociopolitical tasks of the coming years. It will be a matter of how consumers and Internet users can become involved in the policy making of ICANN.

There is, nevertheless, a civil society element in ICANN, the At-large Advisory Committee (ALAC), composed to represent Internet users, five regions in world each providing 3 representatives. At this point these

Following the agenda of the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) in Tunis in November 2005, the stakeholders will attend a meeting in Geneva, on 16 and 17 February for consultations regarding the convening of an IGF ( Internet Governance Forum) for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. The meeting in Geneva is meant to deal with the scope and priorities of the Forum, its programme and character. The Forum will be hosted by the Government of Greece sometime in 2006, probably in Autumn.

The Forum was proposed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to solve the mostly argued and controversial subject of Internet governance occurred in Tunis WSIS. ( see EDRI-Gram 3.23)

Although the Forum has no binding or decision-making power many expect it to bear a large influence and to result in solutions and best practices to

The day before official opening of the summit, delegates finally reached an agreement on the sensitive issue of global internet governance. Both the US and the EU claimed victory at the creation of a new Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The forum will be set up next year and decide upon public policy issues for the internet. It will be made up of governments as well as private and civil society, but it will not have power over existing bodies. There will not be any new oversight on ICANN. Governments will continue to discuss policy desires within the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN.

Today, e-zine The Register reports that the only dissonant came from ITU secretary-general Yoshio Utsumi. At the closing press conference he said that while it would continue to discuss issues in the newly created

A broad coalition of human rights organisations has announced they will organise a Citizens' Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, from 16 to 18 November 2005, to coincide with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Citizens groups, civil society organisations, national, regional and international institutions, government delegations and all other interested parties and individuals are invited to participate in the Citizen's Summit on the Information Society.

The CSIS program will consist of a series of panels and conferences addressing main WSIS issues from the public perspective. CSIS aims to first of all send a strong message of support and solidarity from the international civil society to the local civil society and citizens in Tunisia. Secondly, CSIS wants to offer a specific civil society perspective on the main issues debated at the WSIS. In the first phase, in Geneva in 2003, thanks also to constant pressure from civil society, the conference focussed on human rights and social justice as cornerstones of the Information Society.

The sixth edition of Swiss Big Brother Awards ceremony was held in Zurich's Rote Fabrik on 29 October 2005. The Swiss jury received 100 nominations in four categories: government, business, workplace and the special life-time achievement award. The financial services branch of Swiss Post, Postfinance, was awarded the business award for the illegal transfer of bank transaction data to the United States. The transfer became apparent after a Swiss man tried to transfer an amount in US dollars to a Cuban travel agency based in Switzerland. Both bank accounts were registered in Zurich. Although the man assumed the transfer was purely domestic it turned out that Postfinance uses its US partner Western Union for all transactions in US dollars. The man was notified that the US Department of the Treasury had confiscated his money because of the US embargo against Cuba. Postfinance advised him to send a protest to the US authorities in order to get his money back. So much for the Swiss bank secrecy.

Apart from important budget/audit matters, there were three substantive issues discussed at the 2005 WIPO General Assemblies. The last few days were spent in closed "informal" sessions to hammer out agreements. All agreements were formally adopted by WIPO member states on 5 October 2005. With the report EDRI was also adopted as accredited observer to all the WIPO meetings.

1. How to proceed with discussions on a development agenda for WIPO.

A new committee, known as the Provisional Committee, will take charge of completing discussions on the outstanding proposals relating to a WIPO Development Agenda. The Committee will have two one-week sessions and will report to the General Assembly in September 2006. The deadline for submission of any new proposals shall be the first day of the first session of the Committee.

The third Preparatory Committee (PrepCom-3) of the Tunis phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) closed its doors Friday night 30 September 2005 after what ITU describes as "two weeks of day and night sessions that saw agreement on large sections of the Summit text, but ultimately disappointing progress on a raft of contentious issues."

A lot of international media attention was given to the debate about Internet governance between the EU and the US. After the Geneva phase of the WSIS, accommodating the claims from many delegations of the developing world for new management and oversight mechanisms, a multi-stakeholder Working Group on Internet Governance was set up. While the US remained firmly in support of the status quo, on 28 September the UK delegation, speaking on behalf of the European Union, tabled a radical proposal to create a new, multi-stakeholder forum to develop public policy. The proposal specifically addressed the need for international government involvement in the policies for allocation of IP addressing blocks and procedures for changing the root zone file to provide for insertion of new top-level domain names and changes of country-code top level domain name (ccTLDs) managers. With eight proposals now tabled, informal consultations – excluding the participation of civil society, will continue to be held from now until the prior-Summit meeting in Tunis.

A number of civil society groups present at the WSIS PrepCom in Geneva have written an open letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "Since we learned that the second phase of the Summit would take place in Tunisia, we have expressed serious concerns over the violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Tunisian authorities. Today, shortly before the holding of the Summit, we unfortunately must note that there has been no improvement and that we have recently even witnessed a serious deterioration of fundamental freedoms."

The letter sums up an impressive number of human rights infringements in Tunisia recently and asks the Secretary General to do everything in his power to make Tunisia respect international human rights standards.

The letter is signed by over a 100 civil society organisations, including many EDRI members. The letter states: