CircleID

Patrik:
The Whois debates have revealed a similar need for inter-agency, transnational, multi-stakeholder cooperation and deliberation. The current working group on Whois now includes some people, such as a small number of law enforcement agencies and bank representatives, who were not previously involved directly in ICANN processes. When we talk about how best to respond to phishing sites, many of the same issues as ccTLD DDos attacks are raised.

My questions to you are: how exactly can the IGF help achieve the kind of cooperation you are seeking? How is IGF better than direct intergovernmental negotiations and conventions? What processes or mechanisms within IGF can leverage its advantages over those other processes?

IGF?  Not by itself.  It certainly doesnt have a mandate to do anything of the sort.  However, getting all the relevant people together in the same room tends to speed up the process, if at least through backchannel contacts first. 

Mutual negotations between individual governments tends to take rather longer, and conventions are typically negotiated at a ministerial level - a far higher and more formalized level of interaction than inter agency cooperation, which is what is going to help much more in this case.