Emerging Issues
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Full Session Transcript
Internet Governance Forum Hyderabad,
India Emerging issues
The Internet of Tomorrow Innovation and the Evolution of the Internet
6 December 2008
Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during
Third Meeting of the IGF, in Hyderabad, India. Although it is largely accurate,
in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or
transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings
at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me repeat
that we made a small change in program. The main session this
afternoon will start at 3:00 and not at 2:00. And this session will run
into the reporting back. We have gained an hour of session time. We
have our interpreters until 1:00. So this session will stop at 12:30,
and then we will provide an opportunity for organizers of national and
regional IGFs, and maybe also of dynamic coalitions, to report in.
But, please, these reports should be short and concise. And when I say
short, I do mean short. We talk about two or three minutes. And you
can say an awful lot in two or three minutes if you prepare it well and
if it is concise. And I would also ask those who would like to report
to come to the secretariat corner of this hall and announce so that we
have a list of speakers. And we'll be able to manage the session. With
that, can I hand over to our moderator. Where are you, Jonathan?
Please, Jonathan, take on the floor.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Markus,
thank you very much. Indeed. Welcome to our session on emerging
issues. What we're going to discuss in the next three years, we are
here until 1:00, is what are the issues that are really going to
dominate in not just the next year, but the next few years, issues some
of which we may have discussed over the past few days, issues that we
haven't discussed. And what we're looking for from you is for you to
come up with lots of bullet points. We want you to raise your hands,
or you can also perhaps write down your question if you want, and send
it to the front. But we prefer it if you just raise your hands, and
we'll bring a microphone to you, and you can make your points. We're
looking from this session for a lot of bullet points, things that can
go on to the Cairo IGF next year, things that can be considered over
the coming year. Now, those are partially going to be things that fit
in with our five themes, of course, the opportunities and challenges
associated with the growing popularity of the social networks and
user-generated content, the impact of policy frameworks on creativity
and innovation from a entrepreneurial perspective, the policy changes
and frameworks in ensuring an Internet for all, the impact of the
global nature of the Internet on jurisdiction and legislation, policy
changes to providing an environmentally sustainable Internet. The five
areas that were raised during the preparations for our meeting here in
Hyderabad. But then there are other issues in there. Let me throw a
couple out now. We all know there is a credit crunch up. What is that
going to mean for the Internet? What's it going to mean for
investment? What's it going to mean for the new era of regulation? We
seem to be over the past three months have moved very swiftly from a
free-market capitalist era to one where governments are talking more
and more in various areas of the economy about regulation. Is that new
mood of regulation going to affect the Internet? That new mood amongst
some governments. There's an emerging issue maybe. Maybe you think so.
If so, you can add to that. Maybe you don't think so. You can also
say that. What about content? We've talked a lot about all sorts of
issues here in Hyderabad. Content is a big issue. What are the
emerging issues for Internet, for digital content? I'm a broadcaster.
I come from the BBC. I represent a lot of broadcasters here, the EBU,
the World Broadcasting Union. We're pretty sure there's going to be a
growing demands and it can demand for high quality for the sort of
material that only broadcasters with their resources can provide. But
other people, the UGC is the only way forward. How are these issues
going to work out and are the broadcasters right, as we think we are,
when we say we think people want professional material on the Internet?
That's one thing they're going to continue to be very keen on and
perhaps increasingly keen on. These are all the issues. Think of your
bullet points. We're going to try to be a little structured in this
debate. We are going to try to steer it in a logical form and try to
make your points as succinctly as possible. As Markus said, you can
say a lot in two or three minutes if you think about it. I'm going to
introduce our panel as we go along. I won't introduce them all now.
But let's start by hearing from our chairman today, who is S.V.
Raghavan. He has been involved in digital issues in India for three
decades now. He's chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee for the
National Knowledge Network for the government of India.
>>S.V.
RAGHAVAN: Thank you, Jonathan. It's been a long journey for me
personally, looking at interconnection not in a machine sense, but also
in a people sense. Because way back in the beginning of the '80s, that
India started thinking about introducing communication, as any other
country would. And then came up with the ubiquitous e-mail system that
came into work as the first application. Over a period of time, as you
all know, as technology advanced and bandwidth became available at
every place in the country, things started moving from simple
electronic mail to the current social networks and exchange of
information in all digital format between people. Many interesting
things happened during this time. There are commercial concerns, there
are societal concerns, there are cultural concerns, there are legal and
environmental concerns. There are also the sustainable ecosystem that
you need to develop to not only establish the network as it exists, but
also to grow and be in tune with the requirements of the people, as
well as the possibilities that technology provides. In the '80s, we
thought we had a grand challenge and we have solved it. We were wrong.
In '90s, we thought it was a grand challenge, introducing the Internet.
We were wrong. In 2000, the new millennium, we thought we have solved
the problem. Here again, wrong. What is happening today in Indian
terms, if you look at Ghandian type of cooperative investment in the
bandwidth, it costs one cent per person per day of investment -- one
cent, U.S. cent, per person per day of investment -- to get gigabit of
bandwidth to every hut in every village. That's all it costs. The
question is, really, who will do it? It's not a social obligation,
explicitly stated. It is not a commercial venture that will be
possible because you put things up front. So you look at capitalist
economy, and -- one is a cooperative, the capitalist is a commercial,
the other is a cooperative venture. You find that you drop in one cent
every -- regionally for ten years, you find you have fiber. Technology
makes it possible. Bandwidth is no issue. Now, managing this bandwidth
is an issue. You find the local county or district, as we call it, or
the state, or the federation, or the country, the sovereignty, if you
look at it, the legal systems, the cross-boundary interactions, whether
it is a commercial electronic transaction for electronic commerce, or
for content being made available elsewhere, these become serious issues
all of a sudden. And the legal system has to catch up with it. There
are several types of systems other than the functionality. The
bandwidth is only the functionality part. Then the users establish the
usage part. And then the utility of the whole thing. Then the legal
part comes in. Then you have the digital forensic part, in case of
disputes. And then the resolution, with the judiciary system,
everything gets into place. And when it crosses boundaries, especially
the sovereign boundaries, issues become more complex. So these are
issues that are emerging, because the possibilities are also expanding.
On the content side, human beings haven't had experience of two things.
One, simultaneity of events. The second, collapsing of distance. We
have no way of comprehending. We are limited by the 120-degree right
in front of you comprehension. That's the ability human beings have
developed over time. Suddenly, you have the ability to see things
which are beyond this horizon, beyond what we are trained to find. So
that makes a challenge for an individual, a growing population. So ten
years from now, what we want the population to be across the world will
become an issue. We have to think about what kind of content we make
available and how effectively do we make available. I am saying this
especially because, most of the discussions center around how
effectively to use the bandwidth and how effectively to use the
technology and how high resolution things can be done and transported.
To me, as a technical person that has become a nonissue. If you want to
teach 10,000 people simultaneously, there's a pedagogical issue. I
haven't learned the art of teaching 10,000 people simultaneously with
interaction. The BBC kind of people have mastered the art of reaching
100,000 people, 100 million people simultaneously. Not interaction. It
is that interaction and the pedagogical model that's going to make a
huge difference. Because only when do you that you are reaching the
last citizen, which we talk about in the Internet world in terms of
access. Technology is not the serious issue. There are -- more and
more will become available. Wireless will become gigabit-capable. The
fiber will become terabit-capable. The cost is not the serious issue.
The way you utilize the entire thing will become the serious issue.
The way you enable the utilization will become a serious issue. The
way you make it sustainable by making the successive generations
understand and progress and think will become a serious issue. I would
like the panel to deliberate on these things and then see what should
be our far-reaching legislations, our far-reaching policy directives,
our far-reaching community understanding in driving the Internet the
way it is to the way it should be in our perception. I'll come back and
intervene at appropriate points in time. Thank you, Jonathan.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, indeed. Mr.
Chairman, thank you. And an interesting point there particularly on
this issue of interactivity, the big challenge for everyone on the
Internet. My co-moderator is Stephen Lau, chief executive of EDS Hong
Kong. He was also the first privacy commissioner in Hong Kong. And
what Stephen's going to do is give us a bit of a synthesis over the
next three hours of what we've been discussing here during the past few
days. And we're going to split this into three bits. We're not going
to give it to you all at once. And that -- but we're going to do it
day by day. So, first of all, Stephen, the first day when we were
dealing with these whole issues of, for example, how to reach the last
billion.
>>STEPHEN LAU: Thank you, Jonathan, may I first say a few
words of introduction. I'm new to IGF. And it's honor to be here.
I'm a new kid on the block. I found this a very unique experience,
having the opportunity to meet up with the multistakeholders with
respect to Internet governance, from government representatives,
private sector, civil society, academic, technologies, and all that.
And I also have been exposed to issues which I don't normally get
exposed to, because I'm a businessman. I'm in ICT sector. I'm also
involved in data privacy. So I have been exposed to issues that I'm
not normally exposed to. Particularly coming from a small place like
Hong Kong, pretty well developed economy, but little diversity and
little multilingualism. And talk about Hong Kong. Let me just take 30
seconds to do a little bit of info commercial for Hong Kong. You don't
normally hearing about Hong Kong sort of infrastructure statistics
relative to this particular forum, because we are not a U.N. member.
We are a special economic zone in the People's Republic of China. So
you don't know much about us. But let me give you a 30-second info
commercial. Hong Kong, we have just close to seven million people. Our
GDP per capita is, U.S. dollars, 31,000. Our telecommunication,
external, is second only to Japan. In terms of our broadband
penetration, it's 100% to all commercial buildings and 75% to all
residential buildings. As far as households are concerned, it's 77% for
Internet penetration. And as far as mobile phones are concerned, it's
an astonishing 157%. So this is for your reference. So end of
commercial. End of commercial. As I said, you know, it's a whole new
experience for me here. And I'm going to provide a synthesis of the
first day -- to stimulate discussion and to stimulate your bullet
points in terms of emerging issues. I just want to say because of my
co-moderation here, I have been spending all my time in the main
sessions. And open dialogues. I have not been to all of the
workshops. I've only been there fleetingly, like domain name tasting.
So I actually had some workshop tasting. And I really find the
discussion very much in depth, very stimulate, and according to some of
my colleagues, as compared to past IGFs, you know, the level and the
depth and the level of collaboration between the multistakeholders has
been astounding and has progressed enormously. So let me just go to the
first day, synthesis for stimulation. We had an opening ceremony, upon
which we had, really, top officials from India and from international
organizations, to open the conference, which provided and attached the
importance and the perception of the importance and the significance of
the IGF conference. And I distill from that three points. One is that
the presentation highlights the equity of Internet is achieved through
local contents, universal access, and affordability. And the success of
this model must depend upon collaboration of all multistakeholders,
governments, business sectors, academics, and technologists. In
general, compliments were paid to IGF being a unique entity, a platform
upon which free flow dialogue and discussion from all multistakeholders
is taking place. It can do what intergovernmental platforms may not be
able to bring about as it brings together all the stakeholders without
preconditions and stances on an equity basis. No need for a negotiated
outcome to discuss sensitive and sometimes issues of seemingly
conflicting interest in an open and in a frank manner. Though not per
se outcome- and decision-based, the intended and achievable outcome for
IGF is that the discussion would possibly influence those who are
decision-makers. Our first day was -- the main theme is, reaching the
next billion, realizing a multilingual Internet. The highlights
included discussing this multilingual issue. It was noted that India
has 40 million Internet users. The vision is to get to 250 million.
Though with 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, India's
overwhelming contents are in English, but not that much contents in
other languages, due to its ICT boom, global needs, and global
outsourcing export. So the need to tackle multilingualism is, namely,
the needs of the availability of search engines for local languages,
the availability of IDN, international domain names, progress in local
scripts and hardware able to use those scripts, and local contents that
not necessarily mean written languages, as some languages are oral, so
audio and video parameters are important. And there's also a general
inadequacy in numerical and digital literacy of people. There was a
relevant discussion -- observation that development of multilingualism
should not be what are to be provided, but necessarily what are to be
provided should satisfy what are essentially required by the end user.
So there was a call for effective framework for such development and
the common technology for commonality and to be backed up by successful
case studies. In the main session, once again, on reaching the next
billion, but focusing on access, it was noted, it took 20 years for
Internet to reach one billion users, whereas the second billion is
expected to only take four years. And access does not mean just access
to Internet. It's talking about an access ecology. This includes
access to power sources, access to education, access to localized
contents. And, generally speaking, there are five -- observed that
there are five inhibiting factors. And we need to overcome that to
enhance access. Capacity, including spectrum allocation;
affordability, sometimes due to lack of competition; insufficient local
exchange points for local traffic, such that overall costs are
minimized; and there's a general business focus on e-commerce to drive
growth and demand on Internet and sufficient push for community needs
such as e-health and e-conservation. And, finally, the relevant human
capital, human talents in developing economies sometimes tend to
migrate to developing economies. Apart from these supply perspectives,
access from the supply perspective is, how do we increase access? We
need competition to provide better choices in prices. We need to
enhance the awareness and people of technology. And we need to provide
services which satisfy the need of the end users. And in the open
dialogue, there were questions raised, like, should we have tiered
service, tiered services and pricing for urban and rural areas, the
affluent and the less-affluent? Should we focus the next billion on our
children, our next generation? How can we learn from a country like
Finland, where the building of capacity and Internet penetration is
highest within the E.U., European Union. It's achieved through light
regulations, deregulations, and partnership with private sector to
provide effective networks and services. And, finally, there's a
striking and memorable reminder that the issue of multilingualism and
access, reaching the next billion, is not just globally reaching the
next billion, but a national vision for each economy to reach the last
billion of its citizens. So we are talking about taking into account
the changes in the demographics, topology, not just increased consumers
in developed economies, but empowering the uninitiated, the
underprivileged, the indigenous, the socially and the fiscally
challenged. And such empower and empowerment requires access. And I'd
like to stop there.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Stephen -- thank you very
much, Stephen Lau, for setting the scene in the first of your
synthesis. And we'll here some more a little later on. Stephen talked
there about reaching the next billion. My next spirit is Ian Peter, who
is coordinator of the civil society Internet Governance Caucus. he's
also an Internet analyst and management consult. Ian, I think you want
to talk about reaching the last billion as an emerging issue.
>>IAN PETER: Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody. I think it
helps in examining subjects like this to, as best we can, pull
ourselves away from your immediate environment and, as best we can,
look into the future, and see if we can identify some of the issues and
some of the factors that we are going to address. So, to me, the next
billion is going to happen, and happen very rapidly. It will be over
perhaps by the time we meet again. But the last billion, well, it's
going to take some time. The first billion took 20 years, as was
pointed out. I think by the time we get to the last billion, we have
some order to difficulties and that might take us out another 20 years.
So in order to do so, I'd like to welcome you all to IGF 2028. The IGF
2028 meeting is taking place in Reykjavik, Iceland. I'll explain a
little bit why we're there in my introduction here. I'm participating
virtually from Australia for various reasons. And I'm on
high-definition conference link from Australia, being able to
participate from there. So thank you for the opportunity. The other
piece of news I must relate 20 years enhance is, Australia has just
beaten India in the cricket for the first time in 20 years. So that is
a great thrill for me. Thank you. When I'm talking about the last
billion, I should say that we -- that there are some people who are,
obviously -- we're not talking about the last billion of the world's
population. I think we can leave out everybody who arrived yesterday
and/or probably everybody under the age before three. But we do start
to pick up at the age of about three or four, as I know from my
grandchildren, who hop on the net and play games. So we do have three-
and four-year-old users. I guess there are a number of people who
simply don't want to have anything to do with that. So that's okay,
too, I'm excluding that. I'm including in the last billion people who
see there is advantage for their family, for their children, to be
connected here and all the advantages that other people have from the
Internet, they want them. So they're in and we're trying to deal with
those. Let's get a profile of where they are, as best we can. So let's
get of profile of where they are, as best we can. And let me say that
quite a few of this last billion are in developed countries. They are
in rural pockets, which have not been connected and are very hard to
connect, in countries like Australia it could be the remote indigenous
communities. Who are amongst the last billion. So we certainly have
pockets still in developing countries. And we have urban poor in
developed countries who also will be part of that last billion. But to
a large degree, the last billion will be those who are slower in
adopting, at this point in time, will still be so. And that will be
the case. So there are areas on the planet that will need higher
concentration than others in order to bring the equity that does derive
from all of us from having access to this thing. Quite a few of the
last billion won't be able to read or write. That won't be a problem
for them because a lot of the uses they will have will be around gaming
or around downloading, downloading videos, downloading music, these
sort of factors. So that's not a problem but it is an interesting
factor because then the tool for literacy that exists with the Internet
sort of becomes a very interesting thing that starts to come to the
fore. So these are the things that are happening. And the other factor
that comes in with the last billion that's very interesting for us is
multilingual. You ain't seen nothing yet. But the time we get to the
last billion and some of the languages we have to deal with, it starts
to become quite complex. Let's talk about the devices we use with the
last billion, and very few of them are going to be computers. Most of
them are going to be mobile devices. We are going to be in a mobile
world. And some of these devices will be mobile phones, some will be
sort of what we used to call PDAs and all sorts of smaller devices, but
the computer won't be amongst the dominant devices at that point in
time. That raises fairly interesting issues, and we will come back to
those as we start to talk about infrastructure and so on. But as I said
before, the dominant -- some of the dominant media we use at this point
in time will not be the dominant Internet media with the last billion.
The concentration will be more towards what our kids do, which is the
downloading, the texting, the games. All these things come into this
space. There's a ramification of these things with mobile and we will
get to it. Let me talk about some of the issues and try and structure
this a little bit. And I am not going to paint the whole picture, but
perhaps raise some questions and some ideas which are a part of the
picture for you to fill in yourself and see how you think we ought to
address some of these things. Now, why are we in Reykjavik, Iceland?
We are in Iceland because Iceland is the fastest growing Internet
economy on the planet. Iceland, the basket case economically of the
great depression of 2008 has jumped ahead because of the major project
under way to create the carbon neutral Internet. Iceland's vast
geothermal resources have been put to use, and major server farms -- in
fact, most server farms in Europe, most major locations in Europe, a
lot of government data centers in Europe have all relocated into
Reykjavk to get near the geothermal thing. Other areas of the world
with good renewable energy resources have also jumped ahead, too. So
there is a great new economy and a great number of new possibilities
arising from this. Some of the other features that we'll see is most of
us will have our biodegradable mobile phones. We have started with the
carbon neutral Internet to start to address the major problems of junk.
And I know one of my fellow panelists is going to raise this issue
later but in 20 years' time we can start to look at it. In getting to
this carbon neutral Internet we have started to create a vastly
different architecture and start to really use the way that the
Internet works in a vastly different way. Let's talk about the
infrastructure for this, because (inaudible) get to the last billion.
So it's probably maybe about the infrastructure, probably about six
times what it would be at the moment. That would be nice. One of the
factors that's interesting to look at is the high end users of Internet
bandwidth at this point of time are using 10,000 times the bandwidth of
the normal -- of the low-end Internet user. So there's a vast
discrepancy. And what is going to happen is more of us are going to
move to this bigger group, the 10,000 -- sort of 10,000 times normal
usage pattern of Internet usage, and this will happen more and more as
sort of Internet TV downloading, Internet videos. And this will happen
more and more, particularly in developing countries. So I don't think
we will have anything like 6,000 times. We might be looking at 60,000
times the current capacity is needed. I would say conservatively we
are definitely looking at 10,000 times the current capacity by 2028.
That has a number of ramifications for the way we do things. He I
mentioned video. We ever not just talking about the recreational video
and YouTube downloads, we are talking medical video, the high-image
conferencing which allows me to participate from Australia. These sort
of things are all part of this too. This creates a number of issues.
One of the issues here is shared infrastructure. Is everybody going to
roll out, ever telco, every ISP, going to roll out parallel
infrastructure to across every country to try and do this or are we
going to look at shared infrastructure models to create efficiency and
to create this global network which we need. How are we going to cope
with this vastly bigger issue? And what's this going to look like?
Let me give you a couple of ideas. First of all, we are looking at the
mobile Internet to a very large degree. And as I say, the dominant use
will be mobile. Now, back in 2008, the mobile device was a strange
hybrid. It used non-Internet standards when it connected by voice, but
some of them did, but in fact some of them, the cheaper ones went over
to what is called Internet standards to use this and then there was
Internet standards for dial-up and other standards being introduced and
there was quite a bit of mess. Now, I think this eventually, to deal
with the expansion of all of this, led rise to the new standards
institution which was created in about 2010 which was the IETFTU. The
IETFTU looked to harmonize all the standards which were going on in the
Internet area and telephony area to create this big globally connected
network. The major work of the IETFTU was the workshop which was trying
to reduce the number of standards to less than 10,000. And this was
consuming a lot of energy as people started to try to get this to a
workable number of standards. However, there was the new organization
which has just arisen and I ask you to think about how strong it was
and this is the III. This is the Internet intersect initiative. This
was sort of like the WWW. Sort of figured that these are the guys that
were never going to cope. The IETF was far too old, far too staid.
The IETFTU didn't get it, and a lot of innovators have moved to the
III. The III was looking at a clean-slate approach, and it had taken
place, and many of the users were starting to use the III standards and
the new III network. The III network had all these wonderful
applications and became the platform for innovation because the other
platform had got to the stage where innovation was becoming more and
more difficult. And some of the people there remembered the thoughts
of Robert Kahn at the IGF way back in 2007 who started to say the
Internet standards and the Internet standards body are starting to
ossify and become not capable of handling new areas of innovation. So
that was an interesting fact that came in. I should wrap up fairly
quickly but I do have to talk about governance because this is an
Internet Governance Forum. So what does our governance look like in
2028? Well, it would defy all known management logic if the current
structures in their current form were able to cope. They won't. By
2028, things will have been changed. Things will be moving very fast.
I think the new motto which, because of the pace of all of this
adoption, will be if it's about to break, fix it. And that will be the
dominant motto by which we sort of start to look at the emerging
governance models. One of the interesting questions around this is
going to be jurisdiction. It will still be an issue. And we are
living in lawyers' paradise. Internet is the lawyers' paradise where
various countries all think they have jurisdiction of various thoughts
over the same domain name. Where privacy issues and sort of issues as
to who should do what are all out there. We have industry
self-regulatory regimes start to go spring up, but governments are
also, in their own way, setting up their regimes. Do we have an
industry self-regulatory regime dealing with most of these issues or do
we have a government regime separately? What is the structure that is
going to deal with these tremendous emerging issues around intellectual
property and privacy and individual rights and human rights and sort of
the content that's offensive in one country but not offensive in
another. How are we going to deal with all of those. So as I say, I
think we are in lawyers' paradise as we start to deal with these
jurisdiction issues. That's about it, I think. I hope 2028 provokes you
to start to think. If I just summarize that very quickly, the areas
where I think we have issues is how we deal with climate change and
environment issues, how we deal with infrastructure, how we deal with
access, how we deal with ossification and standards and how we deal
with governments as we go forward. Very interesting, and I hope I
provoked some thinking.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Ian, thank you very much,
indeed, for painting a very vivid picture of 2028, and also Iceland
will be happy you have given them hope in their hour of need. What
about issues from the commercial point of view? Let's now here now
from Herbert Heitmann who is director of global communications, head of
global communications at SAP. And, obviously, the commercial world
sees things often very differently to the open society world. But
maybe we can get some common ground here. Herbert.
>>HERBERT HEITMANN:
Thank you, Jonathan. Maybe, also, do a quick introduction of myself
because I am also new to the IGF. And since you stress that in my
normal life I very much focus on communication, multilingualism and
access got a new meaning entering this building here and listening to
the presentation because you have to develop your own language which
requires probably for many others who want to have access some sort of
translation to understand why this really matters and why it's of
relevance. And I would strongly urge all participants to, moving
forward, focus on those kind of translational efforts so all the people
who might be interested have a chance to participate and contribute,
also, in our discussions here. In my comments today -- And maybe the
other point is I am invited to the IGF not so much because I am in
charge of communication for SAP but because I am chairing the
commission for e-business, I.T. and telecommunication of the ICC which
is the voice of business around the globe. Emerging issues from a
commercial and business perspective, we discussed about this next
billion, last billion, this whole forum is about providing Internet for
all. But business usually go after the low-hanging fruits and they
will be more likely among the next billion than the last billion. On
the other side, innovation, creativity requires changes. And these
changes clearly are in the field of the last billion. While I do
believe there is kind of a constant exchange between new efforts,
research, and approaches to reach the very last billion, I think it's
important, I don't recall who said this, that it's the last billion who
want to have access to the Internet. We don't want to force anybody to
be happier than they are. But here in this area, I think there is
certainly lots of need for creative approaches which can only be done
in an environment similar to this here where all different kinds of
stakeholders come together on an equal footing and first of all can
share the challenging and collectively work on a solution here. These
solutions for the last billion, that I am convinced of, will heavily
contribute to even more affordable and proper and stable solutions for
the next billion. This is the usual way how innovations push and
influences the mainstream here. But there is another area impacting us
probably even stronger and this is what you mention, global crisis.
Right now it stills more like a virtual crisis. I am concerned that
when we come together at the next IGF in Cairo it's a real crisis, real
recession, because right now it's, quote-unquote, just the cash that
doesn't flow. When the demand is gone, we are looking into a
completely different picture here. This is therefore most likely that
private investments in ICT and other areas will rather decline than
grow. We come out of a double-digit growth environment, and this is
very new approach for us. At the same time, we can see that -- and it's
not a surprise, we need to be very careful, is that regulation,
protectionism and to a certain extent nationalism is quickly getting
back into fashion, which I think is a very, very concerning
development. Those who looked in the New York Times yesterday and saw
that Berlusconi suggested to put Internet regulation on the G8 agenda
is just the latest evidence that something is happening here that we
all together need to very carefully watch. However, I think the public
sector has a unique opportunity in this situation. In the previous
years, I often referred to the ICT readiness index, that the World
Economic Forum puts together once a year, and you can see here there is
a huge gap between the ICT readiness of governments and the businesses
in the different markets. We have mature markets where the government
is heavily lagging behind the economy and we have emerging markets
where the government is leapfrogging. This is an opportunity,
particularly for those who are lagging, to catch up, and to not only be
an enabler user but also an examplar, to use the ICT for all the
benefits we know, are aware of. And I think here is an opportunity and
it will also buffer the effort of this crisis that we are somewhat
concerned about. And business will have to explore new business models.
We'll also have the opportunity to explore new business models that in
the past were very challenging because of the very same financial
system that is now creating this problem was extremely reluctant to
support, move into new models. What I am talking about this is this
whole notion of on-demand, consumption-based business models. Just to
give you an example, SAP is a company which is pretty highly valuated
by the investors, and the triggering factor is how much software
license we sell, which is up front license sell, and that determines
the value of the company. And the moment where we slightly try to
change anything, there is an immediate concern and the value goes down
so nobody touches this. Now, value of our and many other companies of
today is very significantly different than what it was prior to
September. There's an opportunity to explore new business models there
because you cannot get hamped and punished so heavily like it was in
the past. And it's also the customer certainly who in these times have
much more interest in the kind of an on demand, ongoing
consumption-based pricing model than these kind of up-front
opportunities. It's not just in the ICT industry. We see this in our,
to use another terminology, old economy customer, the manufacturers.
Hilti is a producer, the global leader of drilling machines, very
heavy-duty materials. They, since quite some time, tried to move into a
business model where they, instead of selling drilling machines, they
sell hoes, and that means they serve their customers more, that they
sell them or want them to invest in drilling machines. With the
exception of a few private men, I think nobody has a desire to own a
drilling machine, but many people need hoes for construction, and this
is what the want to sell. But to sell this, they need to become a
service provider. And to do this on a global basis, they need to create
a network far beyond classical supply chains. This network will be in
constant transformation. This creates ecosystems of small, medium
businesses at the local place of the customers. And all these kind of
things very much depend on I.T. infrastructures, on the Internet, the
Internet of things that was mentioned here, but also the Internet of
service. And in academic terminology, I think it's the semantic Web
which will heavily spur these kind of developments. This is the big
thing that from a business perspective we are waiting for. We are
looking into, we are investing into, but also I see that the different
government institutions are putting strong emphasis on this. This is
clearly the way to go from our perspective. And convergence which was
a pick topic at the OECD ministerial conference, which was and is a big
topic here, is another adding element here. Critical is cybersecurity,
than more than ever before. Affordable access and reliable networks, I
think this is not a given but I trust that this will be a given, but
it's needed. That goes without saying. And then what are the other
emerging topics? Sustainability is something which already today moved
out of the marketing departments into the office of the CEO because it
combines a couple of really important issues which affect us, but
affect every business, every corporation. Compliance, the most risky
way to be thrown out of business, and therefore, not having a
sustainable business will be noncompliance, so this is a must.
Education and access to talent is another critical element. And then
this whole, depending on how you want to describe this, green notion,
environmental aspect that in some industries play a more prominent role
than in others. It is very obvious that the public and also the debates
here are very interested in green I.T. I personally believe that even
higher relevance is what I.T. can do for this planet to become green.
The whole impact on efficiency, on careful use of resources by using
I.T. cannot be underestimated, and always needs to be put into
perspective when we discuss green I.T. And last but not least, because
this is mainly why we are coming together, on the policy framework
side, the classical elements of policies, making the cash flow, credit
affordable, taxation, appropriate also for industries that are new
coming in the space of ICT, in the context of the stimulus packages, is
a must. Intellectual properties rights will become more critical
before, and mainly for the small business. When you have this
ecosystem, it's not the big giant who is establishing the ecosystem.
That's the thousands of little partners who sit on that platform who
depend on a proper protection system for the intellectual capacity and
investments here. And I think this requires a collective effort and it
needs to be done in a much, much more harmonized fashion around the
globe here. We certainly, from a business perspective, cannot stress
enough how important it is to continue to foster compare competition
all around the globe. And last but not least, what I want to stress
here, even if this is the first IGF that I have participated in, but it
was enough for me to experience, and I sense it needs to be
experienced, that only such kind of a format where all the different
stakeholders come together on an equal footing, and its changed, not
with the intention to have by everybody agreeable declaration at the
end of the event but really to have an open discussion, to learn from
each other. And I have discovered so many new things by just
participating in workshops and listening to discussions that this, in
itself, I think gives a tremendous value. And I only hope that we can
continue this and further advances. And with that I would like to
conclude my issues inventory.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much,
indeed. And let's stay with one of the subjects you touched on there
which is sustainability. Our next speaker is Heather Creech who is from
the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Obviously,
it's the big, emerging issue as we look toward the next billion and the
billion after that. How are we going to make it sustainable? Heather.
>>HEATHER CREECH: Thank you very much. My institute, ISD, has been
around since 1990 which isn't that long a period of time when you are
in the business of changing frameworks and mindsets globally. And so
it's actually wonderful to sit here and listen to my two fellow
panelists actually talk about everything that I'm about to talk about.
You have, in fact, said many of the things that need to be said today.
So forgive me if I go over some of the same territory, because it does
need to be reinforced, I think. Many of you will recall in Rio that
sustainable development was identified as an emerging issue for the
IGF. Here in Hyderabad, there has been a real focusing-in on --
particularly on climate change as a driving issue for many of the
people who are in attendance here. I think we are all in agreement that
the Internet is the most important piece of infrastructure of our time
and that it underpins our economies, our cultures, our communities.
And it is also beginning to underpin our governance, how we understand,
how we need to interact with each other in a much more networked way
around the world. How the Internet is beginning to break down the
silos between sectors. How you have governments talking with each
other across regions. How you have governments working with the
private sector, the engagement of civil society and so on. Many of you
may not be aware, in fact, going back to the early '80s, that the
Internet was the key force in really unpacking the whole climate change
challenge. This was a very interesting piece of history that is known
in the climate change community but perhaps not so well-known here.
What happened was that the scientists were beginning to do their
models, recognizing that there were some potential real problems in
terms of our greenhouse gas emissions and what that might do in terms
of global temperature change. They started using the Internet that was
available to them within the university networks to share the data.
And it was the possibility of sharing these massive data sets and
running these massive models through the Internet that actually led to
the creation of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Without
that, we would not be where we are today in terms of trying to resolve
the problem. The second thing that happened was the emergence of the
storing forward email systems, the old Fido nets of the world. When
civil society, when the NGOs began to listen to the scientists and pick
up on the data, and when this started to become an issue for
governments to negotiate around, it was actually the civil society
community, the NGOs, working with the scientists who had better data
than the governments themselves. And the governments acquiesced to the
science community, to civil society and said, yes, you are right.
Clearly, something is happening here. And that led to the negotiation
of the U.N. framework convention on climate change. We need the
Internet. I think what this community here at the Internet Governance
Forum perhaps could benefit from is moving beyond grappling with the
immediate issues that it faces, institutional arrangements, technical
issues around infrastructure, the issues of rights and privacy and so
on, to really grappling with why do we need to resolve these. What is
the bigger picture here? What happens if we, in this room, don't get
it right? I'm tempted to put forward an alternative scenario to what my
colleague mentioned, one which is rather more bleak called VIP net,
which is a world in which we have lost the battle on environmental
issues, lost the battle on climate change, we've lost the economic
battles, and the world has become restricted to a few elites using
their own proprietary network to talk to each other and maintain their
status. And outside of their little fortresses we have suddenly a
world underwater, a world without clean water, a world with new
diseases, a world with higher rates of infant mortality, a world of
people trying to get by with basically nothing left, and the elites
themselves restricted, with the elites themselves controlling all of
the resources. That's the dark side. So what is the role of this
community in terms of ensuring and supporting those in the world who
are trying to grapple with climate change issues, with issues around
biodiversity, natural resource management, sustainable economies. First
of all, one of the things that I have noticed emerging out of this
forum is a growing appreciation that these issues facing the IGF should
be treated in a more integrated way. There is an incredible potential
with the Internet of things in terms of building sensor networks that
will allow us to monitor how we are using our resources, what climatic
impacts we're starting to see, how to monitor our flows of resources
and so on. But we can't get to wireless sensor networks without having
the transitions to new Internet protocols. We can't get to engaging
every single citizen in monitoring their immediate environment unless
we have access right down to the last person; the last citizen, as our
Chair phrased it at the very beginning today. We have to get this
right. I think the second observation that I would make is we need to
look a little bit beyond the green ICT debate. We actually talk a lot
about first-order effects, second-order effects and third-order
effects. First order effects are direct effects, direct impacts, things
that the industry itself can deal with in terms of getting energy
efficiencies, in terms of managing electronic waste, those things that
are directly within the control of the ICT industry. And industry is
beginning to take this, quite legitimately, quite seriously. The fact
that the ICT sector is moving sustainability into the office of the
CEOs is an incredible sign of ownership and responsibility of this
sector for its direct effects. But then we need to look at the second
order, the indirect effects, and the role of the Internet community,
the ICT community, in terms of looking at how it supports other
sectors: Energy, transportation, other infrastructure. How can we
help those sectors become far more efficient, more environmentally
sustainable. And then we have last the third-order effects, the real
transformation of society. How does the Internet community, the
development and deployment of the Internet, how can that serve to
really begin to look at a (stating French term), a wonderful expression
in French which means making this a project of every citizen in the
world to take ownership of their environmental footprint. The last
observation I would make is the IGF is a wonderful forum, but from time
to time it does feel a little self-reverential. And I think there is a
need to take these issues and move them into other fora. There is a
certain naivete in other fora about Internet issues. There is an
assumption the Internet is simply going to be there. And we all know
that there are risks and challenges as the Internet evolves that may
change this. I think one of the things that we need to do in terms of
moving our issues into other fora, in part, I'm thinking particularly
of the climate change fora, is that we need to ensure that those fora
get the incentive structures right, get the regulations right, that
allows this community to innovative and to expand, and to ensure that
this infrastructure is working in support of long-term sustainability.
And I think I'll end there.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Heather, thank you
very much, indeed. [ Applause ] Well, in a moment, it's your chance to
put your hands up and give us those bullet points on emerging issues.
We're going to be making a note of exactly what you say, so every word,
every bullet point you put forward, they're going to go for
consideration in Cairo. They'll be things that, obviously, will you
take back as well to your companies, your organizations, and your
academic institutions. Before we go to you, I think our chairman has
just got a couple of things that occurred to him as a result of the
speeches that we've just heard.
>>S.V. RAGHAVAN: Thank you, Jonathan.
We heard, to our right, the summary of what happened until now in a
very succinct form. And then Stephen, in his own informative and
entertaining way, explained what to expect a couple of decades from
now, followed by what are the business opportunities and models that
are likely to emerging and how this will be sustainable. And climate
change is an example of collaboration. I'd like to point out that there
are a few things that we do with Internet in an abstract sense. For
human beings, entertainment, health, education are the three important
things, in that order. Normally, I would like to -- entertainment
includes gaming and cinema, as we see it. That's most visible usage of
Internet. Followed by health, because I worry about what needs to be
done about my own well-being. If I am happy, if I am healthy, then I
go for education. Anything else, and social networking, including
e-mail and other types of collaboration, forms the other part. If we
look at the media growth, both in the electronic and digital form,
entertainment forms something like 85%. Education formed about 10%.
And health, anything else, and social networking, formed about 5% in
the past. When it came to digital and Internet world, entertainment
forms about 50%. Health forms about 20%. Education is about 10%. And
social networking and anything else is about 10%. Even though we
personally feel a lot of things are happening. In terms of accuracy of
recording and accuracy of transmission and able to reach, as 2028
scenario put it, lots of things will get generated. But there are
individual administrative domains through which these have to pass.
And what we traditionally refer to as a quality of service is a
necessary prerequisite for making sure that this direct visibility and
distance happens when you do remote interaction. The quality of service
is a well-understood term in technical terms, terminology in technical
terms, but very difficult to practice by service providers and across
administrative domains and across sovereignty. So what we need to look
at are two types of management, one called regulatory management.
Another one is called enabling management. In the enabling management,
even providing an infrastructure as a proactive measure by the state is
an enabling measure. Some people try to do that. In India, we are
doing what is called a national knowledge network, establishment of
that which is multiple 10gigabit network at the core, moving to 100
gigabit next year. And what we call is a power line, minimum
connection speed that you can have is one gigabit to come into the
system. Climate change was the driving force for this particular
application, because the kind of data that was exchanged. The second
thing was high-energy physics. But soon what is happening is,
collaborative research is picking up. So new paradigm is emerging,
tapping the synergy across the nation in what is called collaborative
directed basic research. The body of people who will generate
tomorrow's technology, they'll do basic research. But what is getting
done is that they are directed. They're not doing on their own, but
they are working towards a cause of a better tomorrow. Climate change
is an ideal example. Nano science is an ideal example. They are
working towards creating knowledge or a gadget or a device of tomorrow
in a collaborative tomorrow. That requires this kind of
interconnection. That requires across the public and private
institutions. IPR becomes an issue, individuals become an issue, the
ID becomes an issue, and all those things. The second thing that is
happening is, the innovation opportunity lies with people. The more
and more individuals who come up with brighter and brighter ideas and
they would like to practice them at large and convert them with
appropriate business models. So combining innovation, which is resting
with individuals, for the benefit of the society, and translating it
into financial terms, that is again becoming another challenge which
countries are looking at. And when we talk about green I.T. most of the
literature talks about when to start and stop the CPUs or the disks and
so on and how to consume less and produce more. Another thing that's
happening in green I.T. is, when you have these kinds of innovation put
in, if I take this sheet of paper and apply pressure somewhere in
between, that information is immediate and all of us can see it. But
to show the same thing on a computer requires a huge finite element
package to run on several CPUs and a huge amount of bandwidth to be
transported and a huge, high-definition projector to show it in real
time. You and I can see it incidentally. There is physics, there is
engineering, there is major processing, recognition, rendering, all
types of technologies are put in. That is what we are trying to
achieve. If we can reach a level where these things become possible, I
think that the real benefit to society comes in. That's where the
innovation which is resting with the individuals, by and large, if it
can be harnessed together for society's benefit, that will be a
challenge. Nobody knows how to do it. Limited environments, like
corporates, they know how to tap the potential, how to package them in
the current I.P. regimes, copyright regimes, and regulatory regimes.
What is the new regime that is required to spur this innovation in
every individual for the benefit of society is also a challenge. A
forum like this, when it is summarizing what has happened in the past
three days and then hand it over to the next IGF for deliberations, it
would be ideal if we can come up with some solutions on how this
innovation, individual synergy and collaborative directed basic
research can be brought together for a realization of the 2028 of our
friend Steve.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
Okay. Your turn now. If you put up your hand and you want to say
something, then we'll bring you a microphone. We've been talking so far
about environmental sustainability. We've been talking about the
issues with companies. We've been talking about multilingualism, the
whole issue of semantics and where we're going with that. But there
are many other emerging issues. And we want your bullet points. Let's
start with the gentleman over there. Would you get him a microphone.
And if you could say your name. And we'll bring you a microphone.
Stay where you are, we'll bring you a microphone. Say who you are and
where you're from.
>>:Hello. John Carr from the U.K. Children's
Charities Coalition on Internet Safety and the European NGO Alliance on
Child Safety Online. I think sometimes in this forum child protection
or issues around child protection have been perhaps poorly understood
or even at times misrepresented, I think, as being in some kind of
necessary antagonism or opposition towards freedom of expression,
privacy, or some of the other fundamental human rights with which the
IGF is absolutely properly and entirely correctly concerned with. I
don't see it -- that antagonism or that opposition as being intrinsic
or necessary at all. We -- I work with children's organizations that
strongly support exactly those same rights, freedom of expression,
rights to privacy, and so on for children, just as much as we do for
everybody else. And my suggestion is, and my concluding point, is that
an emerging issue, hopefully, that we can take up in a sharper and more
focused way at Cairo is finding a better -- developing a better
understanding and a way of integrating the focus on children's rights
to the same degrees of privacy and freedom of expression and so on into
the broader agenda that the IGF is properly concerned with.
>>JONATHAN
CHARLES: John, thank you very much, indeed. Yes, perhaps give the
microphone to the lady with her hand up.
>>:Sorry. It's Margaret
Moran, I'm a member of Parliament with the U.K. IGF. I want to
re-emphasize the point that John made, but also go on to a slightly
different point. One of the speakers referred to the fact that some
developing countries will jump over the technology. We can see it here
in India with the mobile penetration that will soon become broadband
penetration. That, I think, is introducing new vulnerabilities --
child protection is the obvious one -- where we have the technology but
not necessarily the social policy or protections needed. And it could
open new markets, which is a horrible word to use, to make our children
vulnerable. And I just think that this is an issue that the IGC needs
to look at to see how we can cooperate and support each other to make
sure that where those policies and protections are in place, we can
help each other. The second point was to pick up on a point that you
made, which was to do with media and the information. The wonder of
technology is that, of course, we have unmediated media now. I'm a
cofounder of something called Women's Parliamentary Radio in the U.K.
which is actually a Web-based radio. And it's great, because it means
that I don't have to rely on you, the BBC, to translate what I'm doing
and my colleagues are doing in parliament to a wider world. Fantastic
opportunity. The other side of that is what we saw in -- recently with
the terrorist attack here in India, where Twitter was setting the
agenda. What does that mean? We haven't touched on any of that at
all. And I think there's a really big debate here which the IGF has to
seize on.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Margaret an interesting issue. Miriam
Nisbet from UNESCO, you have an issue on that. Perhaps get a
microphone over here. If you can just tell everyone who you are,
Miriam, and then --
>>MIRIAM NISBET: Thank you, Jonathan. I'm Miriam
Nisbet. I'm with UNESCO, the communication and information sector. I
wanted to mention, it's not a new issue, it's not necessarily an
emerging issue, but it is an issue that picks up on a number of
comments that have been made throughout the last several days and this
morning as well that I would really like to see a stronger focus on,
and that is -- and it comes from the -- one of the action lines, access
to information and knowledge from the World Summit on the Information
Society. And that is access to public sector information, and
particularly access to scientific information. Certainly we can all
appreciate the importance of that with regard to climate change,
environment, health. But, additionally, it's been recognized, very
well established, that access to scientific information, particularly
publicly funded information, data that's been produced, is important
not only for the public to know about, but it stimulates research and
development. It stimulates entrepreneurship and innovation, all of the
issues that we've been talking about today. It also, I might add,
really picks up on another theme that we've had, which is the
multilingualism. What better way to get local content out there and
available on all of these issues, but for getting the public sector
information out there and available.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Indeed. Lady
over there. We'll get you a microphone. Hold on. The microphone is
coming to you.
>>:Thank you. Hello. I am Rabia Abdelkrim-Chikh. I am
from Algeria and for a long time working in Senegal. The organization,
NGO international, name is Environment Development Action. I'm going to
try with my little English to summarize two points. I support and I
agree with all was what said this morning and other session. But I
have a big frustration, because I want to ask us, how is it possible
for us to talk about governance of Internet without linking with the
conjuncture right now. Why the conjuncture? Because the inequalities
are becoming structural. Because they are becoming structural, they
are now a big obstacle for the small processes we have started in
slums, in area completely outside the flow of information. Because
this, the situation -- we have to know that the situation is going
worse for billion and billion and billion of people. We have to take
this as background of the strategies we want to develop. The second
point for me, it's not only a concern, is a worry, because, I'm sorry
if it is not very polite for all, but I feel that we are producing
exactly the same paradigm of balance of power. What do we think about
people, the social movements, not all people? Are we thinking that we
put Internet, will change the paradigm? If there is no political
vision, strategic vision, not political as politics, but vision of a
new world, if we don't listen to the majority of people, because they
are not blind. They are not stupid. They have visions like us. And
all that couldn't have success if we don't try with big effort to have
those we are talking about, the last billion. I think that we are
missing the part of the reality forces, the changes coming from the
financial area, but will have an impact on our life, and, particularly,
for the last billion we want to reach. I think that we have to put our
visions and will in the reality. In one hand, the forces dominant are
always inventing new situation and stopping this big dynamic coming in
the 90, 90, for us. I am from Senegal. And the other forces who are
silent, because we have not given attention to them, to the capacity to
give vision for governance of Internet. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES:
All right. Thank you very much. That's structural inequality.
Interesting point. Ian Peter, what do you think, is it becoming
structural?
>>IAN PETER: You think, it's something that having
reflected on what was just said, I wish I had spoken about more in my
introduction as one of the realities that will still be there in 2028.
I think there is structural inequality. I think there are issues to
look at here. I think the Internet as a tool for development helps to
overcome that. There are issues that need to be overcome that are
outside of the constraints of what we can do within the field of
Internet and Internet governance. But I do believe we can make a
meaningful contribution to that. And I hear what was said. Thank you.
And I should say that these are issues that are very much raised with
the Internet Governance Caucus. and people who wish to sort of involve
themselves in that, it's IGcaucus.org. And we would love to have the
voices. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Just very briefly, that was
something you touched on, actually, in your opening remarks in a way,
wasn't it, the inequality?
>>S.V. RAGHAVAN: The whole subject comes
under what is called inclusive growth. The "inclusive" can refer to
financial, geography, it can be literate levels, it could be cultural.
All those are under "inclusive growth." Whatever policy directives that
one attempts or suggestions to policy directors one attempts have to
keep all these factors in mind. Because the difference in perceptions
and difference in abilities will continue to exist. If the five fingers
are not like this, we can't grab anything. If you want to grab growth
opportunity, they have to be like this. Then only you can do the
moving forward action. So I think the basic idea is to define things
which are inclusive in nature. That will be my reaction personally.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much. More questions from you?
Put up your hands, and we'll get you a microphone. David. David Wood
from WBU, EBU. Let's get you a microphone somewhere.
>>:Hello. David
Wood from the World Broadcasting Unions. We began this week looking at
the five and a half billion people who don't have access to Internet
and asking how we can move to a situation where a lot more of them do
access it. And part of the hypothesis is that by providing them with
Internet access, we can help them with their material well-being and
their life. I guess I just have a feeling in the back of my mind that
things are not so simple as that. I think if you look what's happened
in the last few months, you see how very important, actually, financial
infrastructure is in all societies, in the west and the east. So I
suspect that rather than having a circumstance whereby you bring
Internet and that helps, as it were, to add financial infrastructure,
you might have to add the financial infrastructure first. So it may be
that it's not a simple matter of just talking about access. The real
-- the overriding, the umbrella issue is how we can improve the
financial infrastructure, the availability of credit, and so on. This
is something which is done in India, but in many other parts of the
developing world, not so. I just have a hypothesis, Jonathan, that we
shouldn't forget, that financial infrastructure, credit arrangements
and so on are absolutely fundamental to all societies. And without
them, it may not be possible to bring Internet to those next five and a
half billion people.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: David, thank you very much,
indeed. I have to say, I'm an economist by training, and I come from
that background. And I think that's a big issue.
>>S.V. RAGHAVAN:
Quick intervention. You must have an economics expert as your prime
minister, and the problem will be solved.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: If only
it was that simple. All right. Yes, gentleman there. Let's get you a
microphone.
>>PETER HELLMONDS: Thank you. Peter Hellmonds from Nokia
Siemens Networks. I want to comment on the gentleman who said financial
system is very important. It's true. Financial system is important.
But, in many parts of the developing world, it's clearly nonexistent.
Or it may exist in the capital city and not much farther. And I think
what ICTs can do, and the mobile world, which is quite strongly
proliferating, even in areas where you don't have a functioning
financial system, is allowing micropayment transactions, what we call
M-banking. And I think you need to look at that as well as a future way
of implementing a financial system in the absence of a banking system,
okay? So that's my contribution. Thanks.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank
you very much. And we'll take some more comments on this. Because in
the end, what have we seen over the past decade of the Internet
development? We've seen banks willing to back what were often, on the
surface, quite marginal projects in the hope that they would come good,
and they could afford to do that. And I suspect those are exactly the
sort of projects that have boosted the Internet over the past decade
that are going to find it very difficult now. Every banking gamble is a
risk. You never know which horse is going to come home. And they have
been willing to back a lot of horses to come home and I think that is
diminishing. Bertrand.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Good morning. Just
a brief contribution for the list of issues that could be put on the
agenda of next year's IGF, because it's also one of the useful outcomes
of this session. First of all, to say that I fully support UNESCO's
comment about the item, access to public information and access to
scientific information and data. This is very important. The second
thing, Herbert mentioned the notion of convergence. I think we should
pay more attention to the policy implications of convergence, including
in the different type of tools and devices. And, finally, we are moving
from the Internet -- we have moved from the Internet to the Worldwide
Web. And when people talk about the Internet, they mostly mean the
Worldwide Web today. The emergence of social networks is actually
bringing us to the next stage, where we have the Internet as an
infrastructure, the Worldwide Web as the connectivity of databases, and
the social net, which is the interconnection of groups. And the
convergence between groups and feeds, like Twitter, that sort of thing,
is bringing the social net. I want to raise this because there is an
issue that could be formulated as the governance, slash, social net
interaction, which means governance of the social net. We had a few
items about child porn. And there is IPR questions and so on. There's
the governance within the social net. What are the rights of the
members of the social network when you have 100 million? And how are
those rules established? Like the right to retrieve your data. And,
third, which is something very interesting for the forum itself, is
governance through the social networks. How can the social networking
tools help things like the Internet Governance Forum work better,
exchange and interrelate between the different forums that are emerging
to deal with those issues? So --
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very
much, indeed. Don't worry, you'll get your chance. The lady there has
been waiting. We'll get you a microphone.
>>:My name is Jayalakshmi.
I work with an NGO called Center for Science Development and Media
Studies in India. And my concern is to see more active consultation in
the next IGF on three areas. One is trying to define what the commons
are for the public. And when I mean that, when there is Internet, when
there is infrastructure available, what is the kind of content that
becomes accessible to the community that is useful for them to
bettering their lives. So that's the first area we think that there
should be more consultation, more discussions. The second area where I
would like to see more engagement is looking at the accessibility
question, the people with different abilities and the way they are not
very consciously part of this -- I mean, they're not able to be part of
this governance space, although they are -- there are technologies,
there are tools to try and bring them on board. But I think there is
more discussion required on that subject. The third area that I would
like to see more engagement and discussions is about the local
communities being creators of knowledge. Today, many of the users of
the Internet are actually receivers of knowledge. But there is a lot
of knowledge that comes in. And I agree that there is the space that
has been created through social networks. But it's important to see
how we can enable communities, who are the next billion or the next
billions, to become contributors of the knowledge within the Internet.
So it's the access to the knowledge and contribution to knowledge that
will redefine, perhaps, how Internet governance will be structured in
the future years. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much.
I'm aware of other people who want to speak. We'll get to you in just
a second. Let's have a quick reminder of other things that we've
discussed here at the IGF in the hope that it will spur some more
debate. Stephen, I think, you can tell us about data where we
concentrated on, cybersecurity, openness, privacy, these issues.
>>STEPHEN LAU: Thank you, Jonathan. I think we just now had some
very good intervention which actually cut across or actually go beyond
the first day, which was to do with multilingualism as well as access.
But, however, keep them coming, because all issues are interrelated.
And just an appeal to you is that in focusing on a certain issue which
is of importance to you, and therefore for this forum, I think that
there are enough experts in the IGF, and the stakeholder, a lot of
these issues are keenly being aware of. I hope that when you bring the
issue, if possible, bring some measures, suggestions, action that could
bring us further down this road towards the stakeholders' discussion in
IGF. Now, with that sort of supplement, let me just talk about the
second day to provide further stimulus in terms of your participation
and your suggestions. The second days was dealing with promoting
cybersecurity and trust. And in a session on mapping issues and our
current capabilities, we talked about dimensions of cybersecurity and
cybercrime. We were reminded that innovation by cybercriminals is
increasing. And with the Internet not originally designed with
security in mind, so we need to prepare and really be prepared, you
know, for maybe worse or for the worst. And we did talk about
cybercrime, the different types of cybercrime, like the traditional --
not traditional, but usual, like money laundering, prostitution, child
pornography. Then we have new or newer forms of cybercrimes, like
hacking, DDOS attack, denial of service, critical infrastructure
threats. And we move on to the increasing use or the more noticeable
use by terrorism using the Internet for propaganda, fund-raising,
recruiting, launching threats and coordinating and logistics.
Obviously, the community, it was pointed out, has fought back with
cybersecurity networks, SIRTs, we call them, security incident
reporting teams, at various level, corporate level, national level,
regional level, coordinate and exchange information. But these efforts,
as pointed out have their challenges. Noticeably, the crime scene is
unlike traditional. Is geographically and global spread, exacerbated
with over 200 countries connecting to Internet. Technological advances
also create further complexity, by the elusiveness and location of IP
addresses. Many legal problems, as well. Jurisdictional, extradition,
different legal laws, and provisions. And there's also the emergence of
cyber havens as per tax havens. I think that the initial community
should somehow take a grip of what constitutes cyber havens. How could
it come about? Why they are perceived as such? And to be able to do
something about cyber havens. And also, with so many CERTs, you know,
now, as I said, regional, global, national, and regional and corporate.
And there was this interesting issue about like the Ghostbusters. In
times of emergency, which one to call. The experts are also keenly
aware and painfully aware of the complexity of the problem of locating
crime scenes and so on and so forth. And demands coordination in a
labyrinth of legal maneuvers. So a lot of discussion for how long to
provide for such complexity and reduce it to more simple form. There's
also an issue pointed out, observation, on developing economies, the
creation of deterrence and SIRT in themselves pose problems because of
cost, lack of talent, and also lack of awareness. So therefore it is
welcome that the ITU has created the Global Cybersecurity Agenda, which
is familiar to most of you, establishing a global expert group of
stakeholders on a way forward. Five pillars working on: Legal
measures, technical and procedural measures, organizational structures,
capacity building, and international cooperation. A lot of talk,
discussion, has ensued. Now it's moving on to action. And the primary
project as a global common cause, the protection of children. And I
think this is laudable. And the question now to you is, you might like
to consider, which cybercrime should be a suitable one for the next
focus of attention? In discussing the session on fostering security and
openness, there was a strong focus on child protection with the
following risks, content, contact by predators and harassment.
Harassment, commercial offers, or children's addiction to surfing on
the Internet in exclusion to other activities which was viewed as a
negative influence and also privacy as well, whether you have true
consent in terms of data acquisition. One very interesting,
particularly to me -- I just want to mention, this is sort of my
personal synthesis and distillation. So if I have certain omissions,
please excuse me; all right? And I'm sure you can bring them up just
to ensure we have full coverage. The issue of cybersecurity for
ensuring women's rights. In particular, sexual rights of women, in a
critical space where their well-being, respect, freedom of
discrimination and fear should be protected. Internet should provide a
secure platform where the access to sensitive information -- for
example, safe sex, abortion erotica, sexual well-being, et cetera,
sexual preferences -- should be kept private. So how can we do better
to improve this aspect? Privacy and personal data protection is another
serious issue. With new forms of Internet usage, social networking,
profiling, identity theft, pervasive application, like RFID, intrusive
application like body implants, for positioning and tracking. It was
referred by Professor Rodotà as the digital tsunami. So obviously there
is tension between security and protection and privacy, though the two
could be optimized through interoperability. I think it's a new term
for such optimization that's introduced by my colleague, Joseph
Alhadeff from Oracle. And Assistant Director General from UNESCO Mr.
Abdul Waheed Khan, went a step further to seek for synergistical
convergence of openness, privacy and security, and reminded us as well
that accountability accompanies the source of the flow of information.
And just a few more points about the open dialogue on cybersecurity and
trust. The business organization is reminded, as well as, in turn,
organization also assure that they would protect the privacy, data
privacy, for their employees, for their customers, because it not only
is a matter of protection of rights of individual or compliance with
law; also be viewed as a business imperative, a differentiation and
competitive advantage. There was a good discussion on who is
responsible or accountable to tackle cybercrime. Some argue that it
should be the person who is aware of the danger should be the one
responsible. Some argue it should be the government that we're dealing
with. As we are dealing with law enforcement issues, some argued it's
a collective responsibility for the multistakeholders with everybody
having a role to play. (saying name) also pointed out that cybercrime
should include not just those commonly perceived. The suppression of
information flow and freedom of expression and the suppression of
sexual preferences and treating them as crime should be regarded and
considered as cybercrime. The final two points is a colleague from
Microsoft emphasizing that balancing cybersecurity, openness and
privacy should not be a zero sum game. Technology and other measures
could be used to provide optimization, like authentication for
anonymity with identification, and also the provision of choice in our
dealings in the cyber world. A sober reminder that a tension between
security and privacy is not just about security and rights, but
security and responsibilities. The example in the developing economies
is a lack of awareness or lack of resources rights. Rights sometimes
cannot be exercised. And finally there was an interesting intervention
that international Web sites dealing with adult contents deemed
pornographic, while making millions in profits, have caused big
expenses and costs in other countries that have to provide filters to
shut off access by the citizens. I hope my summary of the second day on
cybersecurity and trust provide another further stimuli to stimulate
further discussion.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Stephen, thank you very much.
We will come back to you just a second. First of all, I think the
chairman wants to make a comment.
>>S.V. RAGHAVAN: See, when we talk
about ICT, information communication technologies which go on the
Internet, we hear a lot of possibilities, experiences, and a lot of
desire for social change. These are the three heads under which lots of
articulations can broadly be classified. If you look at directing them
in some way, the governance can have three basic connotations. One, a
technology governance, content governance, and behavior governance.
Like, for example, when he summarized about security, privacy, and
responsibility, it comes under behavior governance. So technology
governance, content governance, and behavior governance need to have
high-level articulation, and they will, in some sense, will be domain
specific, culture specific, what is allowed in one may not be allowed
in another and so on. The results of what we do, it has to be
translated and provided in languages, so multi language a technology
that's there to stay. The second type of governance which is required
which is related to all the three is security and privacy related
governance. There has to be global understanding on what one means by
terminology associated with security or privacy. One simple example is
health record. I have been asking my medical friends and also the
secretaries in the ministry of health to whom does the health record
belong. Is it belonging to the patient? Is it belonging to the doctor
or the hospital or the insurance company or the laboratory which does
the test? It's unclear. Or the service provider who holds it. We
don't know. It's unclear to whom does it belong. An international
understanding on whose health record is held by whom, and then all
technologies about opening up specifically for one doctor and another
will come into play. In insurance we have the term called second
opinion. Here is a health record which is in public domain more or
less. Everybody sees this public record other than me in the hospital.
Where is the question of second opinion? It is only relate to go the
monetary transaction and nothing else. Whereas it has to relate to my
health record and my well-being and my interest in it. So these kinds
of issues I'm sure, in other areas, there are related issues which talk
about ownership establishment which also leads to privacy of
information. This is one articulation of governance. It requires
international understanding. More and more that we do, this practice of
ICT in the large, what is happening is the entire infrastructure,
whether it is technology or content or practice, the business practice,
the whole thing is becoming a critical infrastructure for the
stakeholders. That critical infrastructure protection, if you type CIP
in the Google or Yahoo!, whatever, search engines today, it will first
take you to the U.S. articulation of critical infrastructure protection
and President's Advisory Committee's recommendations and so on. These
are the order it is coming up. I have been watching for the last one
year whether there is any change. This is in some sense an
understanding of what is a critical infrastructure. They talk about a
physical infrastructure. There are also other content infrastructure.
They are all becoming part and parcel of your life. The entire health
information system is part of a critical infrastructure. Any innovation
into that is a serious problem to the stakeholders. So how do we
govern? What rules will govern that? How do we articulate that? How
do we make a position paper, worldwide, after consultation, can be an
issue. If you look at security and privacy and technology terms,
universal ID, authentication, and access to information in a specific
form is going to be the sequence of flow. But if you take ID by
itself, I don't know how many nations have multi-purpose national ID
cards, and how many international multi-purpose ID cards are available,
whether it is required or not and how an understanding can be reached.
And how across sovereignty, across administration, authentication can
be done. There are technologies available. When you talk about
governance, it also talks about the understanding, appreciation, and
business ability to carry on day-to-day work. In practicing those
technologies, tools will come into picture. I'm sure the elite
audience will be able to reflect on this. Once you do all these things,
logs are created and information has to be extracted for evidence
purposes, has to go to courts of law. So what will that mean? What
route will it follow? There is no federated information infrastructure
which can compose evidence which are digital in nature assuming all the
digital evidences are structured in their format. There are many which
are unstructured. They have to be collated. So that's another serious
issue where governance makes sense. And of course the ownership, like I
gave you the example of health record. These are some of the governance
issues which are the emerging issues, when you talk about technologies,
possibilities, experiences, and social change. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN
CHARLES: Mr. Chairman, thank you. And Stephen.
>>STEPHEN LAU: I
wanted to make a minor observation from what the chairman said, just a
small point. The chairman talked about the ownership of who owns the
medical data. Is it the patient? Insurance company? The doctor? The
clinic? And all that. Let me say that -- and obviously we can debate
afterward, whatever. As a former privacy commissioner, to me, the
answer is short and sharp and unconditional. Medical data, being so
sensitive to one's well-being and so private, ownership must be the
person, the patient. All the rest, whether it is an insurance company,
it's a clinic, a doctor, whatever, they are just the custodian of your
data. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Stephen, thank you very much,
indeed. Okay. Lots of hands and lots of people have been waiting.
Let's start here, a gentleman. We will get you a microphone. Can we
bring a microphone down to this gentleman here. If you could say who
you are.
>> Yes, I am Guru from I.T. for Change. It's an NGO in India.
The gentlemen previous spoke in a previous intervention about inclusion
being a key issue and emerging issue as well. He was only quoting the
Geneva WSIS Declaration of Principles which is actually the goal of
IGF, to build an inclusive, people-centered information society. I want
to say from an emerging point of view, when we talked over the first
hundred thousand people on the nee Internet, the first million, first
hundred million, there was a particular way the Internet grew. And the
challenges that the growing Internet faced were of a different nature.
You know, we had the Moore's law. Because of connectivity, kept coming
down, technical advances, make sure that more and more people could get
connected faster and faster. I suspect that as we go along and as we
are looking at the remaining six billion and looking at the more and
more marginalized and poorer sections of society, it is not going to be
the technical issues that are going to be the key problem. It is going
to be the socio-political issues that are the issues. And I'll take a
(inaudible) to the (inaudible) dedication which also the U.N.
conference worked on, the 1990 Education for All. And when they said
Education for All, they were very clear that it's not the technical
part of setting up a school that's at issue. It's how do you get
children of poor families, whose parents are working, who are belonging
to families that have been exploited for generations who coming in. So
I suspect when you are looking in Cairo -- and I suspect the fact that
the IGF is happening in Hyderabad this year, Rio last year, Cairo next
year, is the global community saying that development and the needs of
the last billion are very critical. I think the power of education is
very clear. To reach education for the last million or last billion,
in India it's not enough for the schools to be set up by the
government, but India for example has a free meal program because they
know children won't get meals at home. The textbooks are given free to
the children who are poor, free uniforms. There is a very strong
public policy, public investment that is happening in education to make
sure everyone is part of the education process. And Article 26 of the
universal -- United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the 60th
anniversary of which we will celebrate next week, very clearly says
it's a fundamental right. So if you are looking at an inclusive
society where everybody is connected to the net, I hope in Cairo and
over the period of the next one year, we are looking at crucial
socio-political issues that come into connectivity, what public policy,
what all of us in a multistakeholder environment can work together to
achieve that.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: For the sake of clarity, you think
there's an element of social engineering required here.
>> Absolutely.
It's a developmental issue. And I think the gentleman spoke about
social change. That has to come to the front of the agenda because the
challenges are going to be socio-political in nature and not only
political.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much. Two gentlemen
have been waiting over here for a long time. First gentleman in the
dark jacket. We will get you a microphone. Brown jacket.Jean-Jacques
Subrenat. I think it should be working. Hold on.
>>JEAN-JACQUES
SUBRENAT: Hello. Yes.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: If you could say who you
are.
>>JEAN-JACQUES SUBRENAT: Jean-Jacques Subrenat, now a member of
civil society but also a member of the board of ICANN. Speaking here in
a private capacity. I would like to make a proposal. I submit to this
forum for transmittal to the next IGF, if this forum thinks it's
worthwhile, a proposal for a movement, or perhaps a sort of
international initiative which could be called ILFP, Internet Liberties
and Freedom from Predation, or predatory practices. Among all the
things mentioned I would like to take up something Mr. Stephen Lau
mentioned in the second day, in the morning. He put a very valid
question, and I'm not confident that the proper answer, complete answer
was given to him. Mr. Lau asked specifically, in combating predatory or
cybercrime practices, what is the weakest link in combating this. I
remember that. I'm not sure you got the answer. So I would like to
take an analogy from public policy and from multi-lateral experience to
submit to you, Mr. Lau. Say, for instance, disarmament policy. It is
only efficient if three conditions are met. First of all, that it is
inclusive. That means that people sign up that are really members and
parties to that. The second is that the regime or the process has to be
verifiable throughout the chain. And the third element is that it must
be subject to sanctions. And that is often the breaking point or the
weak point. Now, I would suggest that because the things we are talking
about, especially cyber criminality, is taking up a huge amount of
resources. For instance, someone mentioned that Spam accounts for
about 80% of traffic today. That isn't tolerable, especially in the
context that Jonathan Charles was mentioning earlier today, which is a
crisis. It's a crisis not only for the financial institutions.
Underlying that is a much deeper crisis of resources, energy, et
cetera. So I think it is all the more our duty to address that in the
larger picture of resources and economy. Now, to be practical, I would
suggest that if such a proposal were to be taken up in Cairo next year,
it would have to look at the following points. The idea is to -- or
would be to create or to suggest some sort of overall global code of
conduct. Pieces exist. In fact, very good pieces exist, whether from
UNESCO, Council of Europe, the ongoing work in ITU is very valid. But
I think that each of these has a great contribution, but perhaps not
yet the global contribution. ITU, for instance, is government centered,
understandably. So is UNESCO, et cetera. Council of Europe, I heard
some remarks from friends from other continents that, yes, of course,
but we're not Europeans. So in a way, they don't entirely subscribe
not to the ideas but to the fact that it has a label which says Council
of Europe. So we have to get over that. I think the idea would be to
establish, and where else than IGF, a platform of agreed principles
which could be subscribed to on a voluntary basis, not only by
governments but also by industrial groups, by NGOs, by representatives
of civil society, et cetera. Now, I come back to -- And that's my last
point -- the problem of sanctions. As I mentioned in my answer to Mr.
Lau, the weak point is generally sanctions which are non-operative. I
think the great thing about Internet is that it is shifting the notion
of responsibility, but also the notion of influence away from
government only to the global view. And the public view, the public
perception is an element of reputation and influence. So I would
suggest that for lack of a proper system of sanctions in the system I
am suggesting, we should have a system of score board where there would
be a sort of rating which could be submitted to the public appraisal.
Because ultimately, I believe that now we are in a world not only of
sanctions, because influence is more through example than through
force.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much, indeed. And before we
come to the gentleman next to you to ask his question, the Council of
Europe were very active, obviously, as you mentioned in coming up with
a variety of policy responses to these issues. And they can't be here
sadly, today, the Council of Europe because they decided not to come
because they have sent us a video contribution. Jan (saying name) is
the director of the Directorate General of Human Rights and Legal
Affairs of the Council of Europe, and this is what he sent to this
conference. We can see it now. (Video):
>> The Internet is a resource
for freedom of expression and for the right to seek and impart
information and ideas, regardless of frontiers. Access to it is
essential for our everyday, professional and private lives. Without
it, we are in a way homeless and senseless to many things around us. So
much so that we are now hearing cause for a right to the Internet.
Access has become a necessity rather than a luxury. Wednesday, December
3rd, the Council of Europe deputy Secretary-General launched an idea
for a new multilateral treaty on certain minimum principles and states
undertakings including positive obligations to ensure the ongoing
functioning of the Internet. This idea was also raised in respect of
critical Internet resources in an IGF workshop earlier this week. It is
also reflected in Spain's priorities as the new chair of committee of
ministers of the Council of Europe. The sense of the deputy
Secretary-General's idea is that despite the ownership and the control
of the machinery which brings us the Internet, there is a need for
states to assure shared responsibility for the functioning of the
Internet. This is to ensure, for example, that malicious acts within
the jurisdictional territory cannot block or significantly impede
Internet access to or within fellow members of the international
community. A new treaty would promote solidarity and cooperation
between states, to improve the quality of life and general well-being
of all citizens. It will also underline the public value of the
Internet beyond commercial interests, in full respect of international
law, including human rights law. In conclusion, access to the Internet
and the security, privacy, and openness of the Internet are a shared
responsibility. Signing up to a new multilateral treaty which ensures
the functioning of the Internet would be of fundamental importance to
keep the Internet open and free in the interest of ours and future
generations.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Jan (saying name) from the Council
of Europe. I see lots of hands over there. Let me deal with the
gentleman waiting over here first of all to ask his question.
>>CARLOS
ALFONSO: Thank you, Carlos Alfonso from Brazil. I would like to
comment on two basic issues. One of them I think is an old issue
already on the Internet, which is the overselling of upstream bandwidth
to downstream users. And it's old and it's present. It's a big
problem. But the other problem is that the control of the stream, in
which providers of bandwidth, of broadband also, are linked to media
interests. And they provide preferential treatment regarding streaming
for their service, regarding streaming for other services. And this is
increasingly becoming a problem. I think in the future, it will be even
more serious. And also, this goes on with controlled interactivity.
Internet as we knew it was completely interactive. We could treat
ourselves as peers when we were interacting with the Internet. And
increasingly, there is a control of this interactivity, and in many
cases, Internet is becoming just a broadcaster of multimedia. What is
going to lead us in the future? So what is, I hope, some of these
questions which relate to net neutrality and the quality of service
which is provided will be considered fraud in the future and be treated
as any serious white-collar crime. But today, they are not, and we are
in the hands of these big providers. And this is a very serious
situation which we hope in the future will change for the better, not
the worse. The other question is the Internet of things, which will be
also the Internet of persons becoming things, like Stefano Rodotà told
us, and Professor Lau already described. But Professor Lau already
explained it, so I don't need to elaborate.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank
you very much, indeed. Let's take some comments over here. Gentleman
over here. If we can get a microphone over here.
>>:Tony Vetter from
IISD. I just wanted to expand on the issue of cybersecurity, to look at
it from the perspective of cyber warfare. I'm just wondering if there's
a role for the IGF community to look at the issue of the Internet as a
global commons and treat it in a similar way that it has been treated
for outer space. The U.N. has declared the space treaty, the
militarization of space.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Interesting thought.
Thank you very much, indeed. Gentleman there. We'll get you a
microphone. Okay. Gentleman behind you first and then you.
>>:Yes,
(saying name), international federation for information processing. I
will speak in French. I'd like to go back to two opposite presentations
of (saying names). To some extent, looking at them, you see what was
achieved in 2028 or what would be, or, on the one hand, on the
contrary, of the I.P. network. So the question is, how can we manage
this? What kind of governance will we adopt so that we don't fall
incorrectly or badly into the (inaudible). What can we do so that we
don't go by the wayside in that direction? So, no doubt, there's a
certain amount of political willingness to step up that is necessary.
We are all players in this, and we have to realize we're all involved
in the policy. So I think if we can agree on this, we need to be given
elements of assessment so that we can be sure that certain rights are
respected, the right to access. That's been underscored. Right to
access to the infrastructure. Right to local content. And that
corresponds to people's needs. The right to security, as Mr. Lula
underscored. And also bearing in mind perhaps that there are some
shared resources -- shared responsibilities with regard to the delegate
from Gabon said that it's possible that cybercriminals in the future
might end up being in the developing countries. And those countries,
developing countries, won't have the means to be able to combat on
detect these cybercriminals. So we have to at that point think about
sharing resources as well as the responsibility in order to be able to
provide for all these rights. So right to security, right to inclusive
participation is the last right. I think we're all thinking about
multistakeholders, and we're looking at it philosophically, which is
very interesting, and it's entirely new. And that's the whole issue of
participatory democracy, a deliberative, deliberating participation. So
the focus, I would suggest, for our next meeting, might be more in the
area of verifying where we are, where do we stand vis-à-vis these
rights. And as the former commissioner of the data in Hong Kong will no
doubt agree, it's not just about focusing on cybercrime, but we need to
focus on what rights need to be protected, what rights need to be
guaranteed and ensured. I think these are the positive links of the
chain of governance. Many have already been underscored and were
underscored in the Rio meeting.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: -- comment there,
how do you stop falling into this VI PI network idea.
>>IAN PETER:
Absolutely. And I'm sure Heather will have a thought or two on this
one so that we can respond to these scenarios. I think one of the
things that -- a lot of the comments I'm hearing from various people in
the room around the whole idea of principles rights and the area of
principles and rights --
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: (inaudible).
>>IAN
PETER: Yes. In the area of Internet, we've done pretty well in terms
of having structures in place that deal with technical coordination.
We haven't done very well in terms of the structures that deal with
principles and rights. And I hear the idea of a treaty has come up.
We've certainly got a dynamic coalition on principles and rights, and
suggestions that this become a major theme next year. And I think this
is very important that we find a way to do this, and then we find the
way to, having placed some sort of -- be with a statement of principles
or whatever, we have some new initiatives in this area, such as the
global network initiative, where a lot of the businesses have started
to come up with some common principles. That's important, as one
response. But overall, on a multistakeholder basis, I think the whole
idea of coming up with some common principles and rights is important.
I think the other thing that's important to avoid the disaster
scenarios is that we start to, as we look at Internet governance in the
Internet Governance Forum, look at the issues which are beyond
technical coordination. We tend to focus on those areas. So let's look
at the issues beyond technical coordination, which it does include
these principles and rights. And what do we need? Is this industry
self-regulation? Or what is it? But we need something. There's
obviously big gaps here that need to be addressed. But at the same
time, in the areas where we have technical coordination, we need to
look at what are the policy implications of this. It's almost a no-no
within business for technical to make decisions without business
involvement and without looking at, you know, the implications of this.
So what are the policy implications around what we're doing? So I
think there's a few areas to address. So we need to find the way to
link policy and public policy into technical-only coordination. But we
also need to look at how we deal with these whole issues of principles
and rights as the Internet goes forward so that we do get these common
agreements in place. And then I hope we can avoid -- I won't call it
your scenario, but the one that you described.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES:
Heather, maybe you want to say a few words on that.
>>HEATHER CREECH:
Yes. Just quickly, I'd like to pick up a little bit on some of the
very early comments around the need for access to scientific
information. I'm struck by the difference between the protection
issues, protection of personal information, but the absolute
requirement to have full public access by everyone to environmental
information. And we need somehow or other in constructing a sense of
principles and rights and responsibilities that responsibility to make
information about our environment, about our resources available to
everyone, that we really need to look at these issues in the larger
context of how we're managing the world in general.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES:
And, Herbert, just -- obviously, you've been listening to us. From
the commercial point of view, what are your thoughts that you're
formulating after what you've heard?
>>HERBERT HEITMANN: Very
briefly, I think in business we have a tendency not to fix what is not
broken. So I would recommend that we work on what works and what's
existing. And there are things like the U.N. global compact which has
been put in place many years ago. And I think it's a tremendous
example of success. And I would encourage all participants here and
others to look at this and see how this can be used to address the
problems that we are hearing and that are real and serious but not
invent new approaches without having seriously explored the existing
ones and their effectiveness.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: All right, Herbert.
Thank you very much, indeed. Gentleman with the microphone. Have you
got a microphone? We'll bring you one, if not.
>>:Hello. I'm (saying
name) Patel, commissioner with government of India with the Department
of Customs. Now, I want to make one observation. When we are looking
for ten years ahead in future, to learn the lessons, we need to look
back what we learned from ten years back down the line, what we learned
from the past experiences last ten years. What I have observed is, I
had net access for last ten years now. What I observed is that the
lack of specificity, lack of qualification, lack of definition in the
precise qualified terms which establishes the rights, liabilities, and
responsibilities on various multiple multistakeholders, let us say in
ten years back, we never had terms like attack or phishing, we never
had words like this thing. Now we are negotiating a treaty like
cybercrime treaty. Do we have any definition of what is cybercrime? So
unless we have a precise, qualified definition and a precise term in
whatever authority it may be, international consensus or national
authority, whatever treaty or whatever you are going to be using, let's
-- for example, I will tell you one thing. In WCT, WIPO, there is no
definition for the technical protection measures, TPM. And since there
is no definition of TPM in the first place, we -- all these two
conventions, WCT and WPP, these almost fail at ground level. Any
person with a copyright will know this thing. At the ground level come
to the (inaudible) right level is almost like a failure. Because if we
never define in the first place what we mean by technical protection
measures. So in the future also, when we define, any forum, (inaudible)
we define what exactly in specific terms qualifies in (inaudible) or
law. So when you establish this right in talking in a vacuum, it leads
nowhere. Qualify, first thing. In the coming ten years, in Cairo, next
IGF, or whatever meeting you are meeting, first qualify whatever the
terms used which establishes right, liabilities, credibility. This is
one part. Now, coming to the second part, what are the challenges
before us? Now, the generations, we are not -- by the time we are 20
years, will be in old age homes or maybe in our graves. But last night
I was watching -- I have a son, eight-year-old son. He was watching TV
on geography, hatching process for an extremely poisonous snake in
Arizona and America. And he was asking me, after watching the program,
he was asking me a question, he is an eight-year-old son, he was asking
me a question that why chicks come so quickly out of eggs and why
snakes take so long time to come out of egg. So I tried to answer him
that chicks have two legs, so they just jump out, okay. Snakes don't
have legs. He has to roll out slowly. But the point is that he was not
able to understand. He said, "No. What are the babies? What are the
babies? They should take same time to come out of the respective
eggs." So these are the kind of challenges, these are the kind of
generations which we are facing in the next period of the Internet in
another ten or 20 years down the line. So we need to have that kind of
content or that kind of technologies who can satisfy the children who
are now eight years, ten years or kids like that.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES:
Just clarify on your first point, when you talk about codification,
under what jurisdiction would you imagine it taking place? How do you
see jurisdiction in this?
>>:That's not easy. When you talk about
jurisdiction, jurisdiction is artificial term. Before that, you have
to look at the sovereignty. What is meant, sovereignty? When you say
France, what is meant by France? Or when I say India, what is meant by
India? Is it a geographical boundary or international boundary? Or a
culture? Or a people? Or a state? Or a government? Or individuals?
So what exactly mean by it? So first, when you ask a question about the
jurisdiction, jurisdiction is artificial concept. It can be
(inaudible) also. By law, Indian Penal Code provides provision for
exterritorial jurisdiction. So jurisdiction, let us say not rely on
jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is an artificial term. It doesn't -- no
value (inaudible). So first talk about sovereignty. Okay. So that is
what I want to say.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much, indeed.
Let's address gender balance. The lady has been very patient over
there. If you could say who you are.
>>:Thank you very much for giving
the word to a woman. I just want to follow up with -- pick up on Jan's
last comment and follow up on Dr. Rodotá's comments about the rights of
privacy in digital world. I just want to make sure that it's important
the need to discuss the organization, the data protection legislation
based in those international standards that already exist, and act
respectful of the rule of law that are based in democratic
institutions, and that least, but not last, that are respectful of --
last, but not least, that are respectful for fundamental human rights.
Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much, indeed. More
hands? Gentleman here would like to say something. We'll give you the
microphone.
>>:My name is (saying name) Sonare. I am representing
Ambedkar Center for Justice and Peace, a global Internet organization
specifically focusing on India. My question is, we are talking about
the next billion. But most of the people of the next billion are in
India. Total population of India is more than a billion. And 81.4% of
people of India, they live in the countryside, they live in the
villages. It means about 850 million people that are in the villages,
that are in the countryside. And it does not exist today Internet. It
does not exist. And of these 850 million people, about 250 million,
they come from the untouchables, and the tribals, they are so poor and
marginalized and neglected, and their earning is less than a dollar.
And for the UNDP 2005 report, India had 44% of population who is
earning below a dollar, below a dollar, not even 50 rupees. So how a
person, a family earning 50 rupees or a dollar spends half a dollar or
rupees on Internet cyber café. So the question is about basic
fundamental rights. We have been demanding since 2005, our
organization participated in Tunis in 2005, so we wanted that all the
countries should make a law that all the citizens, whether it is --
their citizens are poor or rich, irrespective of their income source,
it should become the fundamental right. Otherwise, it will become the
property, Internet will become the property of only the few people, the
rich people. If it is the case as in today in India, it is today a
luxury. If anybody says the Internet is called in this manner, a
(inaudible) it should not become. And this forum is a very great
forum, Internet Governance Forum, and we are proud to be part of this
forum. So these 850 million people, they also constitute about 120
million child labor and 60 million bonded labor. With all these people,
they are also the citizens of this world. So they should also have the
right to the Internet and accessibility. So IGF 2003 and next IGF in
Cairo, they have focus on this accessibility and at the same time
affordability. It is not only accessible. Somewhere the Internet may
be accessible, but people are so poor they are not able to afford it.
So we should find out some way of how these poor people have the
accessibility, they are able to make use of it. So this is my question.
And thank you very much.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: A fundamental right,
Mr. Chairman, I suspect you've spent a lot of time thinking about this.
>>S.V. RAGHAVAN: I did talk about inclusive growth, financial,
geography, literal, and cultural sense. I also mentioned in my opening
remark that our study shows it costs only one cent, American cent --
maybe it's about -- less than a rupee -- to connect at a gigabit rate
every hut in every village. That's the study. There is a political
will that's required, administrative will, NGOs, companies, finance,
research, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, to come together to make it
happen. Technology is in the pocket. That's only 5%. The rest is to
make it happen, 95%. There are several factors in the society which
contribute towards any benefit that is found by humanity to reach every
part of that humanity. More of that governance. We have been talking
about principles, rights, accountability, responsibility, and fixing
liability. These are issues that have to be very precisely, succinctly
defined. Because all these things are -- tomorrow, somebody has to
dispute and resolve the dispute in a court of law. Everything has to
be precisely defined. And these have to be within the administrative
domains of sovereignty of nations or whatever. I agree with the
gentleman, "jurisdiction" is an artificial term, like company is an
artificial entity. You create it; you can destroy it. In all these,
what we missed out in the discussion, in my personal opinion, is
information assurance. How do I know what information I am seeing on
the Internet is correct information? Who is endorsing it? I believe
that it is correct information. So there has to be credibility rating
that is accepted across the world which can be associated. We have
just taken the baby step in that direction, saying that I go to the Web
site, I look at it. Because I see Verisign certified. So I can also
cut and paste that in my Web site and say Verisign certified. When I
have Internet, most often the browser says "not recommended," blah,
blah, blah. And I click on it and go ahead. Not on a single occasion
I stop to observe what is normally considered necessary in discussions
like this. How do I change my behavior? What is information assurance
as a subject? It's not security, it's not privacy, it's not
protection. Whatever you are seeing is the right information, who is
going to say that? Whose responsibility is that? No matter how we
design a system of governance, let's say we all come to the conclusion
the whole world is saying, "This is the way to do it," all of us agree,
6.5 billion signatures on paper. The whole system should be observable
and controllable. Otherwise, it's not a system. And it has to be
stable. It has to perform. If it does all of this, my life will
depend on it. It has to be reliable. If it is reliable, my life
depends on it, it has to be available 24 by seven. So all these will be
additional things which one has to worry about. What it takes to get
the respective countries and national resolve in respective countries
to make it happen, how can a common firm -- I mean, common gathering
like this, which is the Internet Governance Forum, can act as a
catalyst, can act as a motivator for doing these things? These are the
issue worth looking at. I think we are trying to get a system of
tomorrow. And that system should be observable and controllable.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Mr. Chairman --
>>S.V. RAGHAVAN: And that
requires precise definitions all around.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Yes,
indeed. Gentleman there. Get you a microphone.
>>DAVID APPASAMY:
David Appasamy from Sify Technologies. I am really coming off what my
fellow Indian said here. He made an impassion plea for those 850
million people and also what our chair had to say just now. Rather
than a multilateral kind of agreement, as recommended by the Council of
Europe, perhaps it's time for the IGF to think and to reflect and
recommend to the U.N. that they add to the declaration of human rights,
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that access to Internet should
be a human right, and that in future, whenever countries perhaps are
rated according to the human development index, access to Internet is a
primary part of that. Only then, I think, will there be the political
will or the resolve to make it happen. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES:
Thank you very much. I'll take some more of your comments in just a
second. I note the gentleman there at the back. But first let's have
another synthesis of where we stand the past few days. Stephen, really
the third day's discussion was all about the management of critical
Internet resources in the Internet.
>>STEPHEN LAU: Definitely.
Before that, let me make a couple of observations. In the open dialogue
about privacy and openness and cybersecurity, I actually made
intervention about, you know, in looking at the complexity of enforcing
and investing, creating cybercrimes, due to the complexity, I said the
strength of a system is as strong or as weak as its weakest point. And
about this complexity, I was asking, where are the weakest point or
where is the weakest point upon which we can focus and upon which we
can make remedial measure. I did not include it in my synthesis was
because there were so many other significant things I wanted to convey
to you or remind you of. And I think -- lack of time, I think I gave
myself the courtesy of not including that. But I was so glad that the
ICANN colleague who provided, you know, some observation in a personal
capacity and for which I thank you. Second observation I want to make
before I move on to the third day was, another intervention reminded me
about Internet of things. And I remember that in my inaugural lecture
as a veteran professor, I did talk about -- my lecture was on privacy
and its implication on the Internet of information, meaning where we
are now. And then Internet of things, which have to do with RFID and
devices hooking up on the Internet and very much emergent scene. And
then the Internet of people. Are you talking about implants for
locating and tracking of people. And it's interesting, because it led
me to remember that, recently, the World Future Society, at its annual
or this year's prediction of ten most important or expected predictable
technological phenomena within the next ten years, and among one of
those was, you and I, everybody in this room, within ten years, will
have your own I.P. address. Not devices. You, as a person. Okay. But
with those two observations, let me just move on to the -- yesterday
was the last day. We had a session on critical Internet resources. The
first theme was talking about the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Now, as
I said, this is a personal statement and a personal summary. I
understand IPv4 and IPv6 in terms of what is required and all that.
It's not my strong suit. And I apologize if I do not give this session
justice in my rather short summary. And I'm sure my colleagues from
that session and experts in this room will eloquently and knowledgeably
express their views on relating emerging issues. Suffice to say that I
gather that there are challenges with coexistence of the two protocols,
challenges to methods and standards for coexistence, the preservation
of investment in IPv4, and the cost to upgrade networks and application
services, which for some do not match with the benefits from upgrading
to IPv6. In fact, some question what are the benefits of IPv6. But to
me and to many also the depletion of IPv4 addresses really offers a
vital scenario. When it runs out, you need to move on. And despite
assurance from technical experts, there are still apprehensions or
possible failures of this technological promises of IPv6. There is also
this issue of the black market and legacy space of IPv4 addresses.
This is a controversial issue. And also there's respect to how big or
how small this legacy space is and whether a transfer market should be
resisted or should be allowed. And a very succinct and very relevant
observation is that IPv6 is not a technical issue. It's more of a
business and a social issue. So, therefore, given the two protocols,
offering a pressing issue of time and deadline, your views on emergent
issues and how to tackle or minimize such potential problems are
definitely welcome in this session. The second session on the managing
critical Internet resources had to do with global and regional and
national arrangements. It was a very, very lively discussion. In
fact, it focused -- in fact, almost focused straightly on enhanced
cooperation. Enhanced cooperation in global Internet governance, as
originally proposed in the WSIS Tunis Agenda for the information
society which led to the creation of -- one of the major contributing
factors that led to the creation of IGF. And we had lively discussion.
We had a panelist from Brazil who gave a good example of enhanced
cooperation from the country, particularly on the protection of child
-- in terms of child pornography, good examples internationally, ITU
and UNESCO, and nongovernmental would be IETF and the W3C. But he did
make an observation about ICANN, though not for profit, is a
market-driven and revenue, and there's a lot of revenue for domain
names, and the fact that it is sort of perceivably under one
government, he raised an observation, a concern over that, either it
should be no government or should be all governments, all right. And so
-- and also mentioned that GAC, the GAC, the Government Advisory
Committee, within ICANN is an advisory body and underrepresented by
developing economies. And so he raised that sort of concern. The
panelist from the U.S. talked about two drivers, the two major drivers
for enhanced cooperation. He noted the very uneven distribution of
mobile connections in the different continents, and so a lot of work
needs to be done there. And the second driver has to do with
innovation. And he also gave examples, the ITU as a good example for
international enhanced cooperation, that is, on standards, and global
cybersecurity agenda with regard to telecommunication. And OECD is on
the more kind of economic engine for global -- and also he mentioned
about IGF as a good example of enhanced cooperation. The representative
from -- the panelist from Latin America talked about the ingredients of
enhanced cooperation. Major one would be the technical
responsibilities, talk about technical policies, talk about public
policy, as well as should be a globally based policy. In the open
dialogue, in the open dialogue -- oh, before we end, in open dialogue,
Emily Taylor, the eloquent moderator for the session in the synthesis
of the session particularly on the enhanced cooperation, to her, there
was a different flavor of the meaning of "enhanced cooperation" by the
various panelists. And through references and interpretation of
different paragraphs and provisions of the WSIS Tunis Agenda, so there
seemed to be a gulf or chasm or differences of such interpretation and
approach thereof. And she used the term, very interesting one, there
seemed to be a parallel universe in action here in terms of the
perception and practical implementation. And I think this enhanced
cooperation should be and likely to be of continued discussion in IGF.
In open dialogue, China, representative from China, echoed Brazil's
concern about the governance of ICANN. And on being challenged to the
Brazil panelist by the floor, the lack of government involvement in
ICANN, lack of involvement from governments in ICANN, the Brazilian
panelist leads that better interaction between the ICANN board and the
GAC would improve things, that currently there is not enough
interaction or relevant interaction, and also inconsistent interaction.
There were also remarks that there should be more parliamentarians to
come to or attend IGF matters. And also more senior executives, CEO
and equal basis should be involved and engaged in IGF. And
parliamentarian from U.K. was concerned the term "enhanced
cooperation," because, as a politician, he suspected there's a sense of
-- inclination towards institutionalizing, in some ways behind this
term, and we could, kind of control government or legislation, or
regulation, which, to him, is not an effective tool. Okay. Finally,
there are general good comments on the work of IGF. While there are
general good comments on the work of IGF, I understand from the
intervention there's a letter from 91 individuals and organizations
expressing concern that IGF has largely failed to address key public
interest and policy issues in global Internet governance, in particular
including that of this term "democratic deficit." In dealing in global
issues and in most multistakeholder environments, I like to believe
that such difference of opinion should not be unexpected. And further
exploration of such sentiment and discussion should be part of the
ongoing consideration. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Stephen, thank
you very much, indeed. We are going to run this session for about
another 10 minutes because I know Markus has something after that.
Gentleman in the back.
>> Hello, I am (saying name) representing the
Internet observatory of Belgium, which is the multistakeholder platform
for Internet governance in Belgium. I would like to build upon a few
statements that have been made this morning concerning social
networking sites, but also the protection of minors on the Internet. In
several workshops, we have discussed the difficult triangle, the
difficult relationship between security, privacy issues, but also
business opportunities of the Internet. And we have discussed the
shared responsibility of governments, of businesses, but also of the
Internet user. However, this responsibility of the Internet user
presupposes knowledge, knowledge about the purposes of the databases
wherein personal data are included. This responsibility presupposes
also knowledge about the business models that are used in social
networking sites, and also other very popular and very interesting ICT
applications. We have observed, unfortunately, in our research that
there is a lack of transparency of several Web sites concerning their
purposes, what they are doing with those personal data. And this
transparency is also, in some Web sites, and there has been tremendous
good work done by some major Web sites and social networking sites, but
maybe a proposal for our next IGF could be to discuss not only
legislative initiatives, initiatives of self-regulation, but also
technological tools. And maybe discuss the concept of privacy by
design. Namely, that you include privacy as a USP, as a unique selling
proposition, when you are developing new tools, new interesting
platforms on the Internet. So privacy by design in a technological
sense, but also by providing information that is understandable for
consumers, because a lot of privacy statements on Web sites are written
by legal experts for their colleague legal experts, and not for
Internet users and not for teens or kids. Finally, I would like also to
propose for next IGF discussions, mutli-disciplinary discussions about
social networking sites, other popular applications, but also another
phenomenon. Namely, the blurring boundaries between entertainment,
information, and commercial purposes. For instance, in the context of
online use by teens, the Adver games that are very important and very
attractive for teens and sometimes tempting minors to give personal
data. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude also for several
organizations that have presented their very good work on informing,
educating teens in their countries, empowering teens by giving them
information about how to deal with certain risks online, and how to
make the good decisions, how to make a balance between risks and
benefits. So I hope in the next IGF that we will have
multi-disciplinary discussions about those topics.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES:
Thank you very much. If you could just pass the microphone to the
gentleman they rows in front of you. And if I could ask you to make
your point very swiftly because we are running out of time.
>> I'm
sorry, the context of the emerging trend, I would like to say one
thing, very specific things. That what we are seeing in the devices
that give access to the Internet are already visualized long back,
nearly a hundred years before us by mathematical (inaudible), a
gentleman from Italy, Neil (saying name). He visualized all these
devices: lap desktop, lap hand-top, whatever you want to call it. And
he could not design a particular term how to describe. But nearly 100
years before, he visualized such things will come in the future. So
when talking about emerging trends, he designed a term like a complex
numerical symbi-organisms. He designed a term for this instrument,
describing these equipment or devises a complex numerical
symbi-organisms. And he said these complex numerical symbi-organisms
will come in the future, and he was discussing whether they are living
or dead. So maybe there is a case, a strong case to revisit the work of
Neil before the next IGF.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Let me stop you there.
We have a few minutes. I would like to give each of you 30 seconds to
a minute to sum up what you take away from this. Ian, I ask you to
start now.
>>IAN PETER: I have to speak very quickly.
>>JONATHAN
CHARLES: You do anyway.
>>IAN PETER: Let me come down to two areas
of issues that sit for me. One is around a lot of the interventions
around the whole area of what might be public policy, principles, and
rights where we don't seem to have structures at the moment. There are
many suggestions, treaties, a bill of rights, statements of principle,
self-regulatory regimes. All of this needs to be discuss. And perhaps
that area is the future of this particular forum. I think that needs
to be interestingly looked at as we go forward, as the public policy
issues as they arise from the nature of the Internet. The only other
comment I would make is on the nature of the only mobile as we go
forward. Is my mobile in 28 going to be one where I can choose my
search engine provider or is it going to be one where my provider tells
me what I can see. Have I got the openness and access that I have got
now. Do I have the interoperability across platforms I have now. These
are the critical issues for me in that space. And I do look forward to
seeing you all in Reykjavik in 2028, and I look forward to the report
of the working group on defining enhanced cooperation.
>>JONATHAN
CHARLES: Thank you. Herbert.
>>HERBERT HEITMANN: Thank you very
much. I think it is important and the discussions here this morning
show again to really be open and aware of all the multiple issues here.
I haven't sensed a single individual in this whole forum who didn't
show appreciation for raising awareness for issues. But I would also
like to remind all of us that we wouldn't be where we are with this, do
we have the next billion or not yet, but this already enormous amount
of billion citizens on this planet to have the access and having the
capability without businesses, small ones, medium ones, large and super
large ones investing in this. There is no reason not to trust they
will continue to do this and therefore drive these kind of developments
which all (inaudible) in the right kind of direction.
>>JONATHAN
CHARLES: Heather.
>>HEATHER CREECH: Thank you. I agree with all
that has been said already. Just a couple of thoughts of my own,
particularly around the very vibrant discussion around the idea
treaties and agreements and so on. In my opening remarks, I talked a
little bit about how the IGF with move itself and its influence into
other fora. And I am actually more interested in how one strengthens
the existing agreements and treaties that we have now rather than going
down the road of creating yet another treaty. Many of you may not be
aware that we have over 70 multilateral environmental agreements alone.
And the challenge, of course, is not having another treaty. The
challenge is making the treaties that we have now work. So that's one
of the things that I would put on the table, especially around the area
of rights and responsibilities and so on. And the last comment that I
would make is just encouraging the IGF as a model in itself rather than
being sort of a formal structure, treaty-oriented forum. A forum
that's trying to find a new way of networked governance, soft
governance to come to agreement outside of some of the traditional
silos that we tend to get into when we talk about treaty processes.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Thank you very much. Stephen.
>>STEPHEN LAU:
Okay. I will be very, very short. I pick up two particular points
here, or two particular words or focus. One is sustainability. I think
for us to reach the next or the last billion, sustainability in terms
of access to information, sustainability in terms of respect of the
information flow and human dignity. Sustainability in terms of
cybersecurity and privacy. And all this sustainability, what it points
toward is how the people use the net. At the end of the day, that's
one word: Trust. If you don't have trust, you can forget whatever we
said so far in all fora. The final point is people use the word silo.
Once again, I like to borrow Emily Taylor's point about parallel
universe. If you look at all our stakeholders, multistakeholders, be
they academic, be they civil societies, governments, technologies and
business entities and all that, they have been parallel universes, but
then a portal opens up. That portal is IGF. And that portal is now
actually providing increasingly conduit, channels, gateways, upon which
these parallel universes are communicating, having dialogue,
collaboration. And I like to believe that there will be more gateways
to be opened up for further elaboration. Maybe there will be more
parallel universes out there. We should be -- then call into it, and
hopefully in the foreseeable future in our vision that all these
universes would be integrated for the overall interest, in the overall
interests of ourselves, our world and humanity. Thank you.
>>JONATHAN
CHARLES: Let me give the final brief thought to our chairman.
>>S.V.
RAGHAVAN: First of all, let me acknowledge and appreciate the
fantastic work that IGF is doing, and allowing me to share some of my
understanding and the excitement I went through in the last 30 years.
In a nutshell, what we are discussing are, as I said earlier,
technology and content behavior governance. And we are interested in
ensuring that security and privacy in a form is understood and
practiced by people. And because it is a critical infrastructure,
information infrastructure, protecting it is in the interest of
everybody. So we come up with ideas of governance which help you do
that. So the process of doing it, we are going to define principles,
rights, accountability, responsibility, liability, so on, and create a
system. And we should make sure that that system is controllable and
observable. Like Heather said, there can be any number of agreements
that are signed. Coming from educational institutions, we have 349
Memorandum of Understanding which are signed with sister educational
institutions around the world. If you look at what is operating, maybe
10 or 15 of them. And that because of one passionate individual behind
each one of them. So we not only create these formalisms and
structures. Let's also find passionate individuals everywhere in the
world inside every stakeholder -- the government, the NGOs, the
business, whatever -- who believe in what we are saying and what we are
discussing. And to put it in Lau's words, what we are trying to do with
the technology is a business transaction in a trustworthy environment.
So trust, technology, transactions is going to be the paradigm for the
IGF. So that has to be reiterated. I'll end my remarks with a simple
Sanskrit sentence which says, (speaking in language other than
English.) Everybody in the world, all. Everybody in the world, let
them be very happy. That's all we are looking at. Thank you very much.
>>JONATHAN CHARLES: Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Thank you to
our panel, thank you to you. I would like to call on Markus now, who I
think has quite a few words he wants to say to you. But thank you very
much for being involved in this session. Markus.
>>MARKUS KUMMER:
Thank you, Jonathan and chairman and all the panelists. We said we'd
give half an hour to the reporting of the various initiatives we have,
so we have basically ten minutes left, but I have asked to see with the
interpreters whether they would kindly do some overtime, maybe add
another 15 minutes. I know I have the representative of Switzerland who
would like to report on his -- the European initiative on Internet
governance. Please come to the microphone. Do you want to come forward
and do it from here? The panelists, of course, can go back to their
seat and sit comfortably. Tomas.
>> Thank you. Actually, it's not my
initiative. The good thing about our initiative is it's not owned by
any particular entity. This initiative that I'm talking about is
something that emerged in the last few months in Europe. And
basically, since Athens, there was discussions whether or not, and if
so, how to organize a discussion on Internet governance on European
level. But until June 2008, nothing concrete showed up, so that at the
ICANN meeting in Paris in 2008, a group of people sitting there having
a beer in Paris realized that if we don't do anything, nothing on
European level is going to happen this year. And this group of people
were a few government representatives, a few business people, a few
people from civil society. We set this together. We were calling it
something, I forget the name, organizing committee. We were looking
for a name for an event, and Wolfgang Kleinwächter had the beautiful
idea to call it EuroDIG, European Dialogue on Internet Governance. We
decided to fix a date in October and we started the thing without any
structure, without any resources. And we were very happy that the
Council of Europe offered to give us his premises in Strasbourg at our
disposal and join the team very actively in order to make this event
possible. We, after the summer break, we developed a program that was
based on the points to be discussed in Hyderabad, but we tried to focus
on the European perspectives. Not with the aim of having agreed
principles or something, but something that would reflect European
approaches and also the diversity of the European approaches. In the
center of that was the notion of fostering security, privacy and
openness on the same time. That means not only go for maximum of
security or maximum of openness, but to increase quality of life of
which all those three elements are a part of. The interesting thing
about this event was that we had three months' time to organize it, and
we had no resources, but the thing more or less spread by itself. And
when the event was held in October in Strasbourg, we had almost 150
participants. From Spain, up to Iceland down to Turkey, from all
stakeholders. And it was a very interactive dialogue. We also tried
some new formats. We tried to go even further than the IGF. We were
trying to avoid panel discussions and putting the speakers in the
public and test whether and how it was possible to have kind of most
interactive discussion, with diverse success. The outcome of that event
was we wanted to have an outcome in a written form, but we didn't have
the time to negotiate. We didn't want to negotiate, so we called this
"Messages from Strasbourg." They are available on the Website,
eurodig.org, and it's messages that the organizers played the parole of
editors in saying that these are the messages that we have heard. It
doesn't mean that these are the only messages. They can even
contradict each other. This is the way we tried to come up with
something that you can have in your hands. And we also had
participation from the European Commission and the European parliament,
which also are planning to get more active in this issue. And we have
-- there was a meeting at the European parliament in November where
people met and decided to go on together and try to do things together
the next year to reinforce this European initiative. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, TOMAS, short and concise and having no
resources ring a bells. Sounds like the IGF itself. The representative
of Italy would like to report. Please, would you like to come up here.
>> Thank you, Mr. Kummer. My name is Claudio Lenoci. I am speaking on
behalf of the Italian delegation. I would like to take this
opportunity to thank the organizers for the fruitful discussion that we
had in these days. And after participation to some workshops in the
last days, we can say today that we share the positive outlook of this
initiative. And we would also further underline the importance, as
Internet Governance Forum. We had during some sessions speakers
speaking about Internet not as an event but a continuous process. We
totally share this vision. We think also the enormous relevance of
Internet in opinion of Italian delegation is to put more emphasis and
more attention on the principles and the rights of Internet. Someone
spoke about principles and the rights of the Internet. And our opinion
is that this aspect of governance of the Internet must be underlined in
the next months in the future, looking ahead to the next IGF meeting in
Cairo. We consider important to have -- and this is also from the
discussion in some sessions -- that the problem of principles and the
rights that are linked to the principles and the rights of human rights
of humanity must be linked more to United Nations' role and to the
United Nations', also, effort. And we ask also a major leading
responsibility from the United Nations. We want to remind that Italy is
strongly committed, as we did in the last two years, to reinforce the
process. We had the first dialogue forum in Italy, in Rome, on
Internet rights in 2007. We had the second edition also in Cagliari in
the Sardinia region some months ago, centered on the aspects of this
issue, Internet and principles of rights. As reported during the
sessions which participated our representatives, I remember Professor
Rodotà, but also other representatives of our delegation, we launched a
proposal that is -- all proposal must be agreed by the others. This
proposal regards convening of all dynamic coalition in an event that we
would organize in Italy -- this is Italian proposition -- to organize
in Italy in the next months before the next meeting in Cairo an event
with all the dynamic coalitions participating in order to sum up
proposals and to express this proposal to the meeting of Cairo. This is
-- we would make this in the context of the G8 Italian presidency of
next year, during this we will analyze also the problem of how to
overcome the digital divide. Italy is presenting in these months
before the G8 presidency a special proposal to force the emerging
economies, developing countries, for e-governance for development. I
would like to conclude, thank you, Mr. Kummer, for giving me this
opportunity at the end of the morning for the fruitful work you carried
out. And we wish to consolidate and strongly commit to this process in
the future.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Are there other national,
regional initiatives. Yes, you're going to report about the meeting you
had in the LAC region in Montevideo last August.
>>:Thank you, Markus.
Good morning. I will give you a short report about our activities in
the LAC region, the Latin America, Caribbean region. My name is
(saying name) from LACNIC. And we had the meeting in Uruguay,
Montevideo, Uruguay, joined with APC from Brazil and LACNIC, with the
support of IDRC. And we arranged this meeting, because we talked that
we need to involve more the Latin American and Caribbean community into
the global Internet governance issues, and on the other side, to
contribute with the global discussion from our perspective to this.
This meeting was arising following the forum of this meeting, the
Internet Governance Forum of Hyderabad. And each panel has four or
five speakers, from different sectors, private sector, civil society,
and governments. And open mike space, like these discussions. At the
end of the day, we had a final panel to summarize the discussion. And
the chairs of the panel prepared a summary, a paper to send to the MAG.
We had, of course, remote facilities, facilities to allow remote
participation, webcasting and chat rooms, live translation on the
floor, and a fellowship program to participate. The figures for the
meeting, we had 100 attendees, 36 women and 64 men, from 17 countries
from our region. Participants from governments, like Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Uruguay, Venezuela.
ISP associations, private companies, civil society organizations, and
other, academic, too. And we hosted some other activity from other
organizations, like a talk with the ITU and an ICANN consultation
meeting. And from the ECLAC, that is the Latin American organization
who follow up the regional Internet society plan, ECLAC. But as the
time was short, we decided to organize an online debate during the 8th
to 11th of September. And we organized in four days the mailing list
to discuss the same panels, the same issues, connecting the next
billion, promoting cybersecurity and trust, emerging issues, and
Internet critical Internet resources. We have a summary in English and
Spanish to facilitate the discussion. And in this case, we have 91
persons who participate. And one-third of them was at the Montevideo
meeting, from 14 countries. As a result, I think one of the most
important output was the summary paper that was sent to the MAG as an
input for discussion to prepare this meeting. The Latin American and
Caribbean participation in these issues was increased because we had
several people that couldn't attend this meeting. And we are -- during
2009, we will have the next meeting, prepare for the Cairo meeting.
Okay. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Ernesto. And now the
U.K. experience, please.
>>:Thank you very much, indeed. And can I
congratulate you, Markus, on bringing this to the main stage, because I
think this is one of the most significant developments that we have
seen in the last year, that there are a series of national and
multinational engagements which I think is changing the IGF itself from
being just the place where things happen to being the place where
perhaps things are brought together. And yesterday, I think those of us
who participated in the discussion which Bertrand mediated to share
experiences I think were all encouraged to hear that so much was
happening from several places. Last year, you recall I asked for a
commitment space on the Web site so that we can make promises about
what we were going to do between that IGF in Rio and this one this
year. And I hope we'll follow that practice again so that we share our
intentions and the work that's done through the year in preparing for
next year event in Cairo. At that stage, we promise to establish the
U.K. IGF with the four partners, involving government, involving
parliamentarians, involving industry, in particular, and involving
civil society. We have done that not so much just as a preparation for
coming to the IGF, but now developing strands of work, for instance,
the development of a crime reduction partnership, and to put a big
emphasis on best practice. The Nominet best practice awards this year
were bigger and better and threw more ideas than last year. And I would
like to suggest that for next year, we promote the best practice ideas
and developments from all participants to a main stage presentation,
short ones, videos prepared in advance, so that we can concentrate,
then, on discussions, on lessons, on questions and exchanges. But there
is so much happening that that sort of exchange, I think, would greatly
develop the way in which we use each IGF to share experiences and then
take a leap forward. I do think that dealing with best practice, for
instance, in our case, parliamentarians became engaged with schools
through the Pitcom Awards, are worth sharing. I think we would like to
see things that other people have done so that we promote action
outside the IGF as well as debating the principles, ideas, and issues
that have come up during the course of today's debate so that there is
a consistency and a developmental process between principles and
practice.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much for this. Are there
any other national or regional experience to be reported? Yes. Adiel,
please. The CEO of AfriNIC.
>>ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Yes. I just want to
report two initiatives in Africa, briefly. One is the eastern African
IGF, which has been set up in Nairobi. And the main objective was to
take all of the team of the IGF locally and discuss with the East
African community on how to deal with those issues. There is another
initiative that took place this year in Dakar, Senegal, in October also
for west African country on Internet governance in general and the way
forward to IGF. Those two initiatives show that, in the region, people
are still feeling that the issue needs to be dealt with regionally.
And they have a lot more initiatives that are coming up for '09 to try
to address those issues and prepare for 2009 IGF, which will be,
actually, in Africa. A few recommendations and few promise has been
taken, for instance, in Dakar to involve more policymakers in Internet
governance discussion, both in Africa and globally, so that they can
use what they learn globally, like, attending IGF meeting, to solve
their problem locally, but also organize more shared experience events
in Africa with different countries at different levels can share their
best practices, can share how they overcome different issues to put
different stakeholders together and address the issues. So in 2009, we
are looking for having more regional IGF in all the identified regions,
reaches the results of the success of those two events, to have more
input and specifically prepare more for the upcoming IGF in Cairo.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay, Adiel, I think those are very promising
developments in Africa. Is there regional, national, if not, dynamic
coalition. Mikes here. We have to be short. I think we don't have
much time.
>>:Thank you for giving us the floor. Max Senges for the
dynamic coalition on an Internet Bill of Rights. We had two workshops,
one about mainstream human rights and the work of the IGF that we used
to do a needs analysis. We invited representatives from all the
dynamic coalitions to get together, because as you all know, human
rights are not divisible and they're all interrelated. So what we
heard in that needs analysis was that there is a need for a platform
for the different coalitions to exchange information and update each
other on what they're doing. So as a result, we invited a
representative from each of the dynamics, and the ones that we haven't
talked to, please step forward, and we would like to include you there.
So we have a special channel to coordinate a little bit and encourage a
dialogue between the different coalitions. Then we heard from some of
the coalitions that it will be important to find new ways to energize
the work of the coalitions. They have not been as dynamic as we would
like them to be. So this is something, I think, that would be
interesting to talk about, how can the IGF provide more support and
enable the dynamic coalitions to be as energetic and dynamic as
possible. Then we heard from a representative from the private sector I
think an important point, how to frame the contributions and the
participation of the private sector and of governments to speak in
their own capacity, to speak as representatives, how can that be framed
and made more easy to have this multistakeholder dialogue. And we're
looking into framing that and developing statements and framing that
membership in our coalitions. And then in the second workshop, the
yearly open meeting of our dynamic coalitions, we clarified that we are
in fact there to enable this dialogue or platform between the different
coalitions, to showcase the results and bring together the results of
the different coalitions so there is one place to see what human rights
actually mean in the context of the Internet. And that is the Internet
bill of rights. We also presented our new Web site that hopefully will
help to mainstream our work, where we developed a new graphical
identity so we can now go out and actually campaign for rights on the
Internet and become more of a -- campaigning in that sense. We had
Professor Benedict propose some interesting ideas on how to look at the
W3C and the IETF and their ways, and having a process to mature
documents and actually come up with results that are standardized
instruments in the theme of rights and their interpretation and
instruments online. We had Chengetai Masango from the secretariat
there to give us the perspective on what is within the mandates of the
dynamic coalitions. And we are happy that all our work is within the
mandate. And he agreed to help us to connect to other U.N. bodies, in
particular, the human rights bodies and entities within the United
Nations system, so we can establish a relationship and work towards
collaboration with them and report to them or have collaborations with
them. So some other results of this year's IGF are that we have a
representative from Switzerland who agreed to become a full active
participant in our coalition and a representative from France. And
we're also talking to other governments and looking forward to have
more than. Google joined the coalition and agreed to seriously explore
how we can link up to the global network initiative, which is a
self-regulating institution that was just created. And, of course, as
the representative from Italy already reported, there's an offer to
organize the midterm meeting on rights and principles on the Internet
in Italy. And we're definitely looking into how we can make that
happen. And a representative from UNESCO came up, so we are working
with UNESCO to look whether we can make it part of the biannual Genoa
conference. And last, but not least, I would also restate, as Peter and
the Italian representative has already done, that it would be great if
we could have rights and principles a main theme on the next IGF in
Egypt. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Well, we have the way
forward discussion this afternoon where we can address these issues.
Just -- we really have to stop now. Just two short points. All
workshops are requested, all dynamic coalition meetings, to file a
report, and with it state that when giving -- when allotting slots for
meetings next year, only those will be given a slot who have submitted
a report. So it will be in your interest, but I think it will be
uploaded. And when we produce next year's book, we will have more
space. So we will also be able to include reports from the workshops.
I think they deserve to be made available to a wider audience. Well, we
make that available on the Web. It's basically the usually, say what
you are, say what you discussed and who was involved. The last thing I
was going to say was, don't forget to make a comment on YouTube. We
have a booth in the IGF Village. There's still some time. It doesn't
need to be long, 30 seconds. Chengetai had something to say? To stop.
Yes. That was the intention. Okay. We meet again at 3:00. Enjoy your
lunch, and leave your statement on YouTube. Thank you very much.
