William H. Dutton

I have just finished a series of meetings in Lisbon around the World Internet Project (WIP). The first was an adjunct to the main meeting which we referred to as the World Internet Policy Project (WIP2). This was the first attempt to bring in colleagues not directly involved in the WIP, but also to open the WIP to more discussion of policy issues. Gustavo Cardoso took the lead with me in organizing this meeting. I think both objectives worked out very well. The difficulty of cross-national comparative work has been a consistent theme of the WIP meetings, but this is the second year (as with last year in Macau) that the practicalities seemed to diminish as a focus of discussion, enabling more attention to theoretical and substantive issues. I think that years of debate over the questions common to each nation has generated a level of consensus that permits a large degree of commonality as well as being permissive of each individual country’s approach.

Gustavo Cardoso at WIP2

Bill Dutton at WIP2