The afternoon was taken up with two workshops and the long-awaited panel session on Critical Internet Resources. The latter was something of an anticlimax. Of course, there was the expected posturing on both sides: Vint Cerf (and the new ICANN Chair, Peter Dengate Thrush) on the one hand emphasising ICANN's multi-stakeholder character and the important public policy input of its GAC (Governmental Advisory Committee), against long-time ICANN critic Milton Mueller who questioned the GAC's very existence.

But where were the voices clamouring for authority over naming and numbering to be wrested from ICANN altogether and placed elsewhere? They certainly weren't on the panel. Even from the audience, the strongest questioning came from a Chinese member who asked quite meekly about ICANN's programme for attaining full independence from the US government. (Mueller and Carlos Alfonso outlined their proposals for this to occur, to which none of the other panelists raised much objection.)

Until it became apparent that there wasn't going to be much of a fight over ICANN's role, some of the ICANN-friendly panelists attempted to define "critical Internet resources" over-expansively to include resources such as electricity, though Mueller effectively countered this by pointing out that there is no need for the global governance of electricity supply, or at any rate not by the IGF. As he stated very frankly, everyone knows that the phrase "critical Internet resources" has long been used as a codeword for ICANN issues. And in the end, it was on such issues that the panel focussed.

My particular interest in the discussions in Rio is more procedural than substantive. On this count, some progress was evident from the plenary panel sessions in Athens. First, as expected the panels were smaller, though they were padded out with a handful of "discussants" whose role was to pose prepared questions to the panelists, in much the same manner as questions are posed from the floor. This seemed successful, given that enough questions from the floor were still received.

Less progress was evident in the arrangements made for remote participation. Email addresses to be used for questions by remote participants, and indeed links to the webcast streams, were only provided after the opening ceremony had commenced, yet the Advisory Group member monitoring remote participation claimed surprise that no such questions were received. This can hardly have been unexpected when the facility for remote participation was so poorly promoted.

Further, one might have expected that the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition would have been consulted on the arrangements to be made for receiving remote participation, and even invited to help. This did not occur, and again this year despite my requests to the Secretariat to publicise the availability of the IGF Community Site as a mechanism for remote participation, this was also refused. As a fall-back, I have had to resort to using the printers in the Internet lounge to run off copies of a flier promoting the site.

As a final example of a missed opportunity to facilitate remote participation, yesterday I was given a preview of a new chat forum developed by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture that was designed to allow remote and in-person participation to be integrated much more closely and effectively by displaying chat comments in near real-time on a large projection screen at the venue (subject only to light moderation). This implemented a suggestion that I had made earlier this year. But so far at least, this facility has not been used, and the chat forum has been accessable only over the Internet.

Moving on briefly to the two workshops I attended today, the first was that on "Openness of the Internet: Protecting both Freedom of Expression and Security", to which the Council of Europe and UNESCO were amongst the contributors. During her presentation, Anita Gurumurthy from IT for Change took the unusual line for a civil society activist of opposing network neutrality (at least in Milton Mueller's extended sense), which went to demonstrate again, as discussed at GigaNet yesterday, that there is very little consensus within civil society on some fundamental substantive Internet governance issues.

The most provocative speaker though was Bob Boorstin from Google, who defended the company's role in determining how its search results should be filtered. He argued that Google's cultural bias towards the promotion of freedom of expression often results in the company defending its users' rights against the impositions of governmental and private sector stakeholders. For example although much criticised for censoring search results from its Chinese search engine, Google at least tells the user when there is a missing search result and that this is as a result of its compliance with government regulations.

The second workshop was not really one at all, but a Best Practice Forum to which the Council of Europe and the APC contributed, on "Public participation in Internet Governance: Emerging issues, good practices and proposed solutions." I attended this because of my interest in the analogy drawn between multi-stakeholder Internet governance and the Aarhus Convention for International environmental governance, which draws upon multi-stakeholder principles in promoting democratic public participation within the environmental governance regime.

Whilst WSIS is often considered as the genesis of the multi-stakeholder principle in global governance, in fact principle 10 of the Rio Declaration which largely encapsulates that principle was adopted in June 1992, a full decade earlier. Anriette Esterhausen of APC suggested that the Aarhus Convention could be used as the basis for a soft-law agreement to which different institutions involved in Internet Governance, both public and private, could become signatories.

Day 1 concluded with a cocktail event to which all stakeholders were invited by the host country. I was a bit disappointed that we couldn't have had the in-fighting between government departments that resulted in two competing cocktail functions being held for attendees in Athens. At this point, it looks as though tomorrow's dinner will be two-minute noodles back at our room.