 For those of you new to New America, welcome. As you know, we're a nonpartisan think tank and civic enterprise dedicated to the renewal of American politics in the digital age. And I think therefore there's really no better conversation than to have this evening about governance in the digital age, internet governance and the rules of the road and whether we need a digital Magna Carta. I'm particularly delighted this evening to be co-hosting this event with the Consulate General of Switzerland, Ambassador Schaller and colleagues. Thank you for coming and thank you for joining forces with us. It's a real treat for us to be able to do this. The discussion tonight will be led by Stefan Verhust. Welcome back, Stefan, the philosopher, king of internet governance at the GovLab prior. That's excellent, all right. GovLab at prior head of internet governance at the Markle Foundation has been teaching on the subject for more years than there we've had in the world. But I'd love to hand off this evening welcome to Ambassador Schaller. Thank you very much, George. Good evening, Bonsoir. Good evening, dear participants, together with my team from the Consulate General of Switzerland, I'm really delighted to be here tonight with you at the New America NYC. And welcome you to this panel with leading experts on internet governance. Switzerland and the United States are close partners in innovation. Our two great countries rank amongst the top 10 in the latest global innovation index. And basis of that achievement is the use and creative development of the internet as part of the digital revolution. And we are just at the beginning. You know that better than I do. And the internet of things will offer many more exciting possibilities and opportunities. And we all know that opportunities do not come without risks. And that's where good internet governance comes in. The discussion on internet governance is at its start. It's still very fluid. And therefore, it's very timely and important that we exchange our views and our also experiences, best practices amongst partners, United States, Switzerland, European partners. And I'm eager to hear from you, remarkable group of speakers, your thoughts, your ideas, your exchange. From Switzerland, we have Dr. Johan Kovalja with us. He will contribute to the exchange. He is founder of the Diplom Foundation, which is supported by the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And he recently published a study, Switzerland and Internet Governance, which was commissioned by my ministry. At the same time, Johan is the founder of the Geneva internet platform. Geneva is positioning itself as one international hub for internet governance. Let's not forget that it was in Geneva that the internet was invented by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN, European Organization for Neuclear Research. I meant to introduce our moderator, Professor Stefan Verhulst. But he was already portrayed as the king of internet philosophers. So without any further ado, I want to thank our partners, you, America, NYC, very much for teaming up for this event together with us. And please, do also enjoy the Swiss wine. Switzerland is about innovation, but it's also about tradition. Traditional Swiss hospitality, we usually call that high tech and Heidi. So please, do enjoy also the Heidi. Now, safe out over to you for Heidi. Thank you very much, Ambassador, for this kind introduction and for a enlightening positioning of Switzerland. We could go through a whole range of how Switzerland is known, ranging from the chocolate to the cheese. But now, of course, the internet is one of the key features that, and especially the focus on internet governance, is the key features that positions Switzerland and Geneva on the map. And to a large extent, of course, it's to a large extent also thanks to Joven's efforts and the efforts especially around the Geneva internet platform that has made this happen. Today, we're going to try to scratch the service of internet governance. And as was already mentioned, I've been teaching internet governance at NYU for the last seven years or so. And each time, at the beginning of class, I asked my students, so what's up? What happened? And seven years ago, it was like a timid kind of exchange of, well, this happened this week and this happened that week. And the last few years, it's an avalanche of mentionings and an avalanche of reporting backs on this happened this week. And so we see actually a steady increase of the importance and also the developments in internet governance. If we look at what happened this week, for instance, we can already point to several events that happened across the globe. Meaning, I just have here, thanks to Sam, who is sitting there who is also producing for us a weekly scan on internet governance. For instance, some of the headlines that we see here is that the Europeans warn its citizens that if they use Facebook, then they are not saved from the NSA. So that's clearly one development that focuses on the safe harbor questions, which is a key question of internet governance. In India, a major decision was made by the Supreme Court of India that looked at, to what extent is it constitutional to block internet content and to what is it constitutional to even have some kind of a protection from law enforcement if you post information on the internet. There's a whole debate in France. And I've got to point to some of the speakers here. To what extent it is scarier, whether you block terrorism or whether you actually allow terrorists to use the internet, which is clearly an internet governance issue and as the debate is ongoing. There's an ongoing debate to what extent you can actually bridge the global digital divide by having global operators, such as Google and Facebook, develop infrastructure in Africa, to what extent that actually would hamper freedom of expression, or to what extent it actually would support access to the infrastructure. There was a whole debate in Manila, to what extent you can actually protect intermediaries from liability this week, and led to the so-called Manila manifesto with regard to internet liability, and so on. So just a few examples to showcase that internet governance is alive and well. And that, unfortunately, it's not only alive and well, but it's also an area of growing tension. And it's an area of growing tension because we really don't have a good understanding or a good consensus around how to go about some of the challenges that are presenting on a daily basis with regard to the internet. And that's why Tim Berners-Lee, where I just learned was Swiss, who obviously worked in Geneva at CERN and developed the World Wide Web, why Tim Berners-Lee called for this digital magna carta, and why others are calling for a new social contract for the internet, because there is this need to actually have a set of principles that could apply across those examples that I've cited that were examples that just happened this week. And so that's, to a large extent, what we're going to try to discuss today, which is what is internet governance and how is it evolving? And do we need principles? How do we deal with this growing medium that is becoming more and more global and is entering into legal jurisdictions that are different than where the internet emerged, such as Switzerland and the US and the rest of the world? And to what extent do we actually really need new principles? And so these are some of the questions that we are going to explore in a conversation mode. And the partners that I have here, which are the best that you can have with regard to internet governance, are people that have worked on the issues for many years. And I'm delighted to introduce all of them. And so why don't I start at the end with George Sadovsky, who has been a leader on internet governance for many years and is currently associated with the Internet Governance Forum, but especially is also known as a board member of ICANN, which is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names and quite often synonym with internet governance, to a large extent. And I think what we hope to do today is to actually indicate that it is broader than ICANN and the domain names. But that ICANN means we can have a whole debate about the mandate of ICANN, but the concept of internet governance obviously is broader. Then we have Constance Bommelard, who is the global policy person at the internet society and has also a longstanding history and passion on internet policy initially at the French government, but now at the technical committee and is also a person that has clear practice on multi-stakeholdership, especially for the technical community within the OECD. Then we have Jovan, of course, who already was introduced. But Jovan and I met many years ago when he was founding Diplo Foundation, which is one of the most innovative organizations that tries to look at how can you actually change the way we do international affairs using technology and how does foreign policy-making change once we have actually technology. And then, of course, became an important member of the internet governance community. It's mainly known, or the Diplo Foundation is mainly known for the great work that they produce that always has some kind of a graphical representation, including a house of how you should think about internet governance and is also the author of the most outstanding work on internet governance, a book that he published a few years ago, and that now has several translations. And last but not least, we have Olivier from Fordham University, where he is a professor working on a variety of issues related with internet governance, both global but also domestic here in the US, and has just finished a paper on another important internet governance topic that happened here in the US, which is, of course, the whole net neutrality kind of debate and ruling of the FCC. With that, I hope I impressed you that we have a great panel here and that we are ready to start. And I would like to start with a question that quite often is not posed in this debate, because when we look at internet governance, quite often we look at the risk and the harms and the tensions of internet governance. But I always feel that we have to go back to basics and really think in terms of what is the value of the internet and what is successful around the internet. Much of the debate about internet governance is about what is unsuccessful and how to fix it. And so my question to the panel here is what is particularly successful with regard to the internet and what is particularly worrying? And once we have that established, then we can start looking at, so how should we go about it? How should we go about protecting what is specifically successful and even promoting that? And how can we go about what is particularly worrying with regard to the internet today? And why don't I start with Constance? Because Constance and the internet society just actually finished a survey, not on that question, but also a survey with regard to actually why should we go and have internet governance as such. But Constance, so what is exciting about the internet today and what is worrying from your point of view? And then I would like to go to George, Jovan and Olivier and then go to the next question. OK, thank you very much. I think many things are exciting. And one of the reasons why we're here today is probably to talk about the concerns. You started the conversation by saying that there is an appetite for new principles and that the framework of the discussion today was about norms and principles. I think perhaps we can start there. In one of the questions you said, do we need new principles? I would argue, and as you've just mentioned, we just conducted a major consultation, the survey on internet governance. And interestingly, we saw that, the respondents, instead of saying we need new institutions, we need new principles, they indicated that they needed more information to understand the internet governance ecosystem. They also pointed to specific threats, such as cybersecurity. But the primary appetite was really for additional information to better understand internet governance issues, information to better participate to the institutional dynamics that are there to resolve issues. So interestingly, I think this question of principles, do we need new principles? That question, I think, is debatable. You also started the discussion by mentioning the different kinds of interventions you have from your students. I would say all the issues you have raised actually relate to different sorts of principles. There are very high level principles, human rights. There are best practices, norms, laws. All these different types of principles are at a different level. And then maybe I would add that I think the question is more on the applicability of existing principles than necessarily rushing to creating new principles. Maybe we do need new principles, but certainly the first question should be, how do we apply existing principles such as human rights to the internet? The Human Rights Council a few years ago in a very important resolution said absolutely that human rights needed to apply online as they apply offline. And a few weeks ago, there was an important conference at UNESCO that will feed into the WISIS process. Very interesting discussions. Not only human rights need to apply, but they need to be effectively respected online. So again, I think the question of whether or not we need new principles can be discussed. That was the question that will follow. Absolutely. And so to think you're going to ask. I'm sorry for challenging that. I think you're very skilled in addressing this question. So what excites me? Why should we care? So if you would say, if you're in a conversation, and say, well, we need internet governance, right? And so quite often it's about, because anyway, we want to prevent something, but what do we want to promote? And so what is the, so George, why don't you go? I know this is quite often the question that is never posed. And that's the reason why the hardest one is this panel probably. But George, what would you say? Why do we care? I mean, what is so exciting? What's the success story here that we should seek to promote? Thanks, Stefan. First, I want to say that everything I say tonight is not necessarily the opinion of anybody I've ever worked for, or who's worked for me. But it may be, we don't know. Second, I've spent a long time in this industry, and my brain is full at this point. So you'll understand if I occasionally look at my notes to remind me of the points that I want to make. Well, what's exciting? What's exciting is that half the world is on the internet. That's really exciting. And it's been, it's taken place in 20 years, and it's going to get better with the advent of cell phone technology and greater cell coverage in areas where we've normally not had the penetration rates, South Asia, Africa, and so on. So that's terrific. The second thing is to see the new business models come out, the ability to make life easier and to have new kinds of businesses form. My friends, when they want a taxi, they just hit the Uber button on their cell phone. When they get to the airport, some of them don't even reserve hotels overnight. They get to the airport and they push hotel tonight and they decide where they're going to stay. And those are just two small examples of the way in which the internet and the services that are exploding on the internet, especially on mobile, are affecting our lives and much for the better. There's a third thing which I think trumps both of those and that is that now it's possible for everybody who's on the internet to have what is essentially an increasingly level playing field with regard to access to knowledge. I did a lot of work in Africa in the 70s and the 80s. When I went to a university library, it fit on two bookshelves that didn't go above this height and the books were 20 years out of date. And that was typical. Now, with the internet, we have the possibility of teaching people how to go after the knowledge they need, when they need it, and to find out what they need at the same time to create linkages with people in other countries who can help them. This is a major step toward increased rate of development. Now what worries me, what worries me is that it's all about malicious misuse. Vint Cerf said at one point that the internet was a laboratory experiment that escaped the laboratory. It was done among friends. Everybody was on the internet was a friend. And so security was not an issue. And we are paying for that in spades right now, retrofitting things, trying to introduce a culture of security among the internet users which now number half the world. Remember, that's a lot of people. And the issue is, and I think the cyber criminals are ahead. I don't, I think we need to catch up. I don't think we're putting enough of an investment in it by any means. The sentences that people are getting are out of proportion to the damage that they are causing in the aggregate among people who are affected. And what can I say? It's one of the problems with this is that if we can't solve the cyber crime or the malicious use problem by ourselves with the current institutional structures of the internet, the governments of the world are likely to want to take it over. And multi-stakeholderism will be under very drastic challenge for multilateralism. Thank you. Great, thanks. Jovan, what excites you about saying why do we care? Well, Stevan, I think it's good that you started with this question because we sometimes, we tend to take it for granted what internet brought to the society. It's definitely a great enabler. I think beside the great facilities that George mentioned, we have to care because of our dependence on the internet. We depend as a society, as individuals, as organizations of the internet. And it is basically main concern. You mentioned your students and I can recall what's my story of the increasing interest for the internet. When in 2004 I tried to explain to my friends what I was doing as the working group on internet governance, which George and I belong, they usually called me to fix their printer or to install a software. That was maximum, you say. You do something with the printers and they don't have a paper or toner. Okay. I was usually participating in that accident. Then five years later some parents started asking about filtering for their kids. Now as you can see I lost my voice because I had yesterday three presentations. Today I had quite a few meetings and we had a big Asian tour trying to explain what the internet is about and what Ambassador mentioned, how to balance tradition and innovation. And I will just answer this my concern with two metaphors. Since we cannot use the PowerPoint and drawings, which is good, I am against use of PowerPoint. That's great. Okay. First metaphor is my visit to the US Supreme Court. Yesterday I went to Washington to visit Supreme Court and I don't know how many of you are aware of this fascinating bronze door with eight palettes, eight basically depicting the main developments in the history of law. From the ancient Greek, Greece, Rome, Magna Carta up to our days. And then when you stand in front of that door, which is really fascinating by itself, you start thinking about uniqueness of our time. And obviously we live in this time and era and we are excited. We think it's the best time, the most exciting. It's natural, but then you get a bit humble and you realize that this court, US court and our predecessor were addressing more or less similar issues throughout the history. And what was fascinating on that palette describing the Magna Carta, you had King John, I'm sorry, and Baron basically standing next to each other, King George putting the royal stamp on the Magna Carta and Baron standing with his sword on the other side. And that image is really telling. It tells quite a few messages for our time and for digital Magna Carta. It is basically, it was balance of power. It was matter of the trade off between King John and Baron. And I think this is the first message that we can get from that door. Then on my way from Washington to New York, I heard about this tragic event in France, the crash of the German wings airplane. And again, the door was the key. And that door worried me more than the great door on the US Supreme Court, because one solution which was introduced by this special lock, the doors to prevent the terrorists of coming into the cockpit created a problem as well. In this case, with the tragic consequences. I think that second door is probably great lesson for the internet and what basically worries me that we may create new problems by finding solutions for the immediate problems. And that's a great concern. We have to handle with great care. And net neutrality discussion is definitely one of the examples how messy internet governance is and internet policy. We have to be humble. We have to handle the whole policy issues with great care. This is basically the most impressive metaphor which I gathered over the last two days. One really great historical metaphor of the door of the US Supreme Court and the other one, which is rather tragic. But telling for our discussion on internet governance. Great. Olivier? Well, I wanna thank the organizers for having me. I feel like an outsider for a conversation that's been going on between people for a while. To be clear though, I have been thinking about this for a while. And I appreciate and agree with many of the comments that others have made. I mean, in terms of the promise and the great wonder that the internet has brought, I think about a statistic like the one George gave regards to the internet's ability as an inanimate thing to have brought other people in the conversation with regards to policy, cultural production in ways that were not possible maybe before. So that is certainly the great promise. And this story about Africa and Facebook and Google's recent interventions, zero rating phones is on the one hand promising, but on the other hand, this is what I'm also concerned about and I expect we'll talk about. And that is that there are so many people that do not have the full range of affordances. So the Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa who are getting cell phones and mainly access the internet through mobile and wireless devices clearly do not have the range of affordances that those of us here do. And for me, this is a central challenge. And I think really removes the internet from this exceptional category where we have this fascination with the internet as this thing that makes us different from the past. But in truth, it's one of these resources that we are fighting over for the same problems with regards to distribution of good resources. So. Great, great, thanks. And so now that we have established some kind of valuable position, I think, which is always the first thing that one should do when things about governance, because otherwise if we start with the risk, you might end up in a closed door kind of environment. The question is of course, well, what are the kinds of principles that guide to how you go about protecting the valuable position or dealing with the risk that are real and that were expressed as well? And so clearly we started off by saying that some indicate that there is a need for a new Magna Carta, which basically spells out principles of how to go about the balance of power to a large extent, but also how to go about the way to address certain kinds of issues. But to a large extent, many of us who have been part of this environment have been on this quest for principles for a while now. I mean, I still remember in 2012, which was labeled the year of the principles of internet governance. Meaning we had the OECD trying to come up with principles as they did. We had the UN looking into kinds of principles and we had every kind of organization that was working on internet governance contributing to this debate about principles. So my question to the panel is, do we actually still need new principles or do we have principles that we can build upon or is there another problem? I mean, we have principles, but somehow we cannot find consensus enough to really build upon those principles. And so the question, and Constance, you started, I don't want to put you at this spot again, but you already sort of answered that question. But perhaps you might answer the question, do we, anyway, do we actually still need new principles? And if so, what is missing today? Why don't you start and reflect and build upon what you started off? Okay, absolutely. Well, I think I started a little bit earlier with this reflection around the idea that we already have existing principles and maybe the challenge today is to find how to apply them effectively. Perhaps we will reach a point where we will decide that we need new principles, but my intuition at this point is that we are rather in a process where groups, institutions, the Human Rights Council, WIPO, UNESCO, the different entities in charge of applying and developing principles are adapting to the new era of the internet. It seems a little early to rush to the conclusion, although perhaps we will get there that we necessarily need new principles. If you allow me to, I would like to bounce a little bit on this image that Jovan described earlier on openness and on this idea of door, because openness is one of the very important principles of the internet. It's a principle, it's a technical principle that has allowed the internet to flourish very rapidly, but it's also a governance principle. And here there is something new that perhaps we need to build or enrich or strengthen. It is how we organize the principles in terms of participating to discussions. You know that at the end of 2015, at the end of this year, there will be the 10 year review of the World Summit on the Information Society, the WISIS proposed important principles on how to organize the Information Society. Over the past 10 years, the technology has evolved, the way people use the internet has also changed. And the question is, how do we involve these people in the discussions that will happen? Something very important in my view, the WISIS is organized by the UN, it's a UN process. Can you explain the WISIS? The World Summit on the Information Society that was the first phase was held in Geneva in 2013, the second in Tunis. And we have this year organized at the level of the General Assembly, the UN General Assembly, the 10 year review process. And one of the critical questions for our community is whether or not we will be allowed to participate to the negotiations. We know internet governance, the definition of internet governance is about involving all the relevant stakeholders, not just governments. And for us, the critical question will be, will we will be allowed to participate to the discussions? Great. OPA, do we need new principles? Well, so it's a fine question. I mean, to answer it in two different ways. One is, you'll forgive me, I'll play more of a, I guess this is a professorial approach, but the question is, well, it's an interesting question only because I think people are seizing on this technology as an opportunity to assert that we need new principles or that we need to reaffirm old principles, right? And in which case, I would say, depending on the audience, right? I would say, yes, we need to articulate these principles loudly and firmly, free speech, privacy, security, whereas these have always been things we care about. So I agree with Constance on the one hand. I think though that this technology presents us with an opportunity. Joe Van? Well, we did recently some analysis of the number of the principles that you have. There are 18 different sets of principles. And even we contributed with one set of principles. I don't think, well, 18th, one Geneva message on internet governance. There is inflation a bit of the principles and you know how it works with inflation. Whenever you have inflation, inflated object is reducing in its importance. And more or less those principles repeat few similar lines, openness, inclusiveness, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that we will need new principles. They will be settled somehow. What I'm seeing as a sort of a complimenting process is a reaction of the country's population to the challenges of internet governance. European Court of Justice had recently had a hearing on Facebook yesterday and had the right to be forgotten judgment last year, which is the major one. There were people are trying to find a solution and they are losing patience with the discussion on principles. I think that this dynamics, time wise, it will be very, very interesting. And I'm afraid that there will be rush for the concrete solutions and the general discussion about principles may lose its importance. That sort of general, again, I'm putting my professorial hat and making that distinction. Definitely, we don't need a new principle. There are existing principles. We need to codify what already exists. And they will emerge through this interplay. It won't be the Magna Carta where the King John of the digital era will put his royal seal or will sign the agreement. It will just emerge out of the practice which is happening in China, with Europe, with the United States and the other countries. If you can forgive me, George, I wanna say something about this. And I think it's a very nice point that Jovan makes that is sometimes these principles that matter really make themselves clear after we've done the hard work of solving the problems. So multi-stakeholderism, for example, is the sort of thing, the sort of word that people use now to talk about internet governance, but maybe George can correct me if I'm wrong, but when this sort of thing was being discussed, it wasn't called multi-stakeholderism, right? It was representation, participation. So as a matter of principles, I think we'll know what they are the more we work at it. Right. Well, George, you wanna go on the principles before we go to the multi-stakeholder? Yeah. It's all yours, a principle. Right. Multi-stakeholderism isn't a principle, Olivier. It's now a religion, and we'll get to that a little bit later. Yeah. So I was confused by the... We're practicing... Well... We're practicing people from the religion. We'll convert that. I don't know what the conversion ceremony is. Let's see. I was confused by the term Magna Carta, but it clearly was successful. It brought you all here. It's a lousy analogy, and the better analogy is a constitutional convention, because we're really spending a long time, unless you wish to be the king who has the seal, as was mentioned earlier. We're really dealing with some pretty fundamental issues here, both on the internet and off, and they're fairly weighty, and it's gonna take a long time, just like constitutional conventions do. We have lots of sets of principles. In addition, we have all the holy books, the Bible, the Quran, all of the great documents of history, we don't need any more flying over the landscape at 50,000 feet, looking down and saying, oh, here are the basic ideas. There's privacy, there's access, there's intellectual property, and so on. We have done that. We have done that ad nauseam. What we need is a way of understanding internet governance better, understanding what the issues are that can be worked on, implemented, and according to those principles, and get the implementation done. Now, in order to understand that, we have to understand internet governance a little better. If you read Jovan's excellent document that he presented to the Swiss government ambassador, you've got your money's worth. You'll find Jovan's picture of internet governance, that's a building that looks like it's falling apart, but not really, and there are people on ladders doing things, building the structure. If you looked at the PowerPoint slides that I wanted to show you tonight, but couldn't, we have an analysis by David Souter, an Englishman who's a very good student of internet governance, where he has these six basic areas laid out, but then in the next slide, you overlay what the real issues are, and there are something like 70 or 80 of them, and then you overlay that with the people who are concerned with the problems, and you overlay that with the institutions that think they have something to say with the problems, you will be confused. It's a confused, because the internet is mirroring real life, and that's what we're looking at, a picture of real life. There's one distinction that's worth making, and I've commended to you above any other one, and that is governance of the internet versus governance on the internet. Governance of the internet means keeping the packets flowing. Governance of the internet is a technical thing by and large. Governance of the internet demands that you obey fundamental principles of physics, electronics, all the rest, the sciences. Governance on the internet refers to problems which have existed prior to the internet, but which have taken new forms and migrated to the internet, and that's almost all of human behavior at this point. So the litmus test is, did this problem exist before the internet? If the answer is yes, it's governance on the internet, and that's the domain of policy makers, it's really the domain of citizens, generally. If it didn't exist before the internet, then it's governance of the internet. The problem comes when policy makers try to solve general policy problems by saying, oh, this is a problem of governance of the internet, and therefore if we make a technical change, rather than understanding what the problem really is and how the various methods of solving it, that'll solve our problem, and I'll mention three right now. And by the way, Leslie Daigle just authored a paper in the CG series, CIGI number seven, which really has a wonderful analysis of this, and I recommend it. The three areas are putting national borders on the internet. It doesn't work with the technology. Making IP addresses country-based, it violates certain rules of the technology. Data localization, making sure your data are in your cloud, in your country. All of these things can be done with the internet, but not without wrenching them, wrenching some of the principles of the internet apart, and providing problems in the future. Okay, let me stop there. Great, well, that was a great distinction of some of the issues. Now, I do wanna come back to the religion that you pointed out, and to a large extent I feel like guilty of being part of the initial creation of the religion when at the Michael Foundation, we were part of something called Digital Opportunity Task Force, which was a task force to the G8 when Japan was in charge of the G8, and I think that was in 1999, and they created a task force, and George knows it very well, which was aimed to bridge the global digital divide, and the innovation of the task force was to actually bring the different sectors to the table, i.e. in that context was civil society, industry, and government, and the real innovation was that everyone would have an equal vote with regard to how to address and how to go about the global digital divide, and it was a very successful undertaking led to a series of commitments by both industry, civil society, and government to start overcoming the digital divide, and it was also the first time when really what was called at that time multi-sectoral governments was tested in the space. Now, the UN at that time, which had no internet governance agenda, became concerned about the ICT, and the Secretary General, both of you at that time, started something called the UN ICT Task Force, and the UN ICT Task Force was really an attempt by the UN to start looking at who in the UN is actually working on ICT, and how can we then also address the concerns of digital divide, and they started, and they looked at the digital task force, the global, the GDOC or GDOC, whatever, GDOC, Digital Opportunity Task Force, and they said that model of multi-stakehold, a multi-sectoral is a model we should follow for the UN ICT, and that's how ultimately multi-stakeholdship was somewhat born in the context of the internet governance, which then led to the World Summit, which was initially hosted by Switzerland, where they did an attempt to actually replicate some of the multi-sectoral representation, and now of course, we have multi-stakeholdship as being the model of going about internet governance, but the concern is exactly as was already raised on said occasion, is that it has become a mantra to a large extent for going about solving the problems, and while the principles of participation and the principles of making sure that those who are affected actually take part are those principles that are essential to democracy and essential to good governance, multi-stakeholder confuses some of that, and so the question that I have to the panel here is not to fully critique, but it's to say, what should we do to actually make governance of the internet responsive to those that actually are affected by the decisions that are being made, and multi-stakeholder is quite often being suggested as the solution, it could be the solution, but how should we go about this? And Jovan, I know you have been thinking about that a lot, and of course the Geneva internet platform to a large extent was created to bring around the parties that are affected and have a stake to a large extent, so how should we go about making sure that internet governance is inclusive and to a large extent provides for the different stakeholders to the play of it? Sure, well, as it was indicated, it is becoming mantra, ideology, or religion, and basically you have to decide if you are on one side multi-stakeholder on the other side of, let's say, scope of intergovernmental group, basically more or less, and I think it is very dangerous and very risky, and this is the reason why during the Geneva internet conference in November last year, we try to bring some sort of swissness into discussion, which means a practical approach, analysis, and we try, I would say, quite successfully to decompose the concept of multi-stakeholder approach and see what are the building blocks, and as you indicated, it is inclusion, it is check and balances, transparency, subsidiarity, and other elements. Multi-stakeholder approach has been quite successful in the internet governance so far. It has been, certain challenges are obvious, especially since internet is becoming more relevant for the more relevant as a public utility. Therefore, one way is to decompose the mantra and to say what is useful, what works, what doesn't work, how it can increase the inclusiveness, democratic principles of modern society, and other related core values of modern society. This is, I would say, one approach that we should follow the other, which we can call it the diverse geometry, is that in some fields, some players and some actors should have the leading role. For example, in the field of cybersecurity or fight against cybercrime, we, it's in a way natural to have the leading role of governments. Therefore, we cannot apply the same sort of multi-stakeholder criteria for all internet governance issues. When it comes to infrastructure governance of the internet, multi-stakeholder related to ICANN issues and related issues has been proven as a successful method. But in other fields, cybercrime, cybersecurity, we may have a slightly different model. Therefore, those are two principles in order to advance discussion. One is to decompose the mantra and to see what works, what doesn't work, and second, to use diverse geometry and to see where multi-stakeholder approach can be effectively utilized. Great, I'm happy to add a little bit on that. I think absolutely multi-stakeholderism is not a principle. Transparency is a principle. Accountability, openness are principles. First of all, multi-stakeholder, multi-stakeholderism. I think we need to understand that you have various forms. Sometimes it's about consulting stakeholders. Sometimes it's about decisions on an equal footing. Those are two different things. When I look at the role of multi-stakeholderism, and when we say it's been a mantra, yes, perhaps we need to go beyond and recognize that it should not be, it's not a principle, it's simply a methodology. This said, I do think that the central role it has played in people's discourse has been useful because over the past 10 years, different stakeholder communities have really learned to work together. 10 years ago, the working habits to collaborate public-private partnerships in this field were less natural. And I think we've reached a stage today where because we have this community of experts with people from all different sorts of stakeholder communities, they do effectively work together. So the mantra has had a very useful role and perhaps today it's time to go beyond. Great, so one last question and then we're gonna go and open it up for using the principle of openness, open up the floor here. But so George started off by saying that part of the success story is exactly the amount of people that are connected to the internet. And so we have around two billion plus internet users these days, but clearly the next five billion are located in countries that are non-Western countries. That quite often are coming from a different legal jurisdiction and are quite often not part of the current decision-making process. So the question that I have is that how do we anticipate making internet governance more global if that is a need? Because that might be a constant pressure as we have more and more people joining the internet community coming from countries that traditionally were not part of the debate. And so concretely that of course is reflected in ICANN and that you don't have to go there, which of course is a big debate about how can we make ICANN more global, which is currently being debated. But it applies to many other fora and I see George has a clear opinion about that. So why don't we start with you, George, and then what's your reaction to that positioning? Well, I have several reactions. First of all, this happens all the time in internet governance discussions. Internet governance somehow gets equated either totally or partially with ICANN. And it is just- I just want to do that, I mean that was not my hand, but it happens to be today now. It is dead wrong. It is dead wrong. If you look at Jovan's building or David Souter's diagram or Constance's ISOC diagram, the infrastructure, governance of the internet is about one-tenth of it. And governance on the internet is about nine-tenths because that deals with social problems, social issues. The issue about what do we do about internet governance is or what do we do, sorry, what do we do about multi-stakeholders and how do we regard multi-stakeholderism is not a valid question unless you say governance of what? You're starting with a means and not an end. What's the problem? Given a problem statement, then you can go to is multi-stakeholderism the best way of solving it? And Constance brought up a very valid point. There are different flavors of multi-stakeholderism. Which is the right flavor for this? Who should the stakeholders be? Do I really want any arbitrary group to be a stakeholder on how the packets are run from one place on the internet to the other? No, I don't. I want that to be limited. Do I want, when I take my bus home to Vermont tomorrow, do I want the way in which the buses run to be a multi-stakeholder decision? No, I don't. I want the bus driver to drive the bus. Let's start with goals. The goals that I see in terms of internet governance are of the internet, let's make sure it technically works. Let's make sure there's no roadblocks to the extent we can, to the extent that national sovereignty concerns don't enter in with censorship. Let's make sure that things work. With respect to governance on the internet, let's take cyber crime. Let's make sure that our judicial system knows how to deal with electronic preservation of evidence. Let's make sure that judges understand how to judge these cases. Let's make sure that all functions of the judicial apparatus of government function well in cyberspace, as well as they do outside of cyberspace. And that's true with respect to every one of these areas, with respect to governance on the internet. For the most part, forget I can't. For the most part, forget the, getting the packets from here to there. Let's solve the societal problems. And I think this is what I think Olivia, you mentioned that the internet is a way to revisit issues that have been with us for some time, but now up here in a new context. And it's time for us to address them and solve them. And that's not done at the 50 foot level, 1,000 foot level. That's done on the ground. Thank you. Great, Olivia, quick reaction to the globalization of the internet and whether that has an impact on how we go about governance. Well, I mean, I'll start by saying, let's just assume that the internet is not different. And if it isn't different, and we have to disaggregate it and think about the different problems that arise, it looks much more like all the other resources that interested groups fight over. And if that's true, and we have conventions to resolve these problems, why aren't we considering them? And this is a touchy question, right? I mean, part of the reason it's touchy is because many of us in the West value the purported technological principles on which the internet is based, openness, for example. But these are now political questions. And how do we resolve that? I mean, that's a tough, that's a challenging problem, particularly since so much of the world is not yet persuaded that openness is necessarily an important value. I think there are four for that. And the four for that are things like the United Nations. I know that in a world where there is some real resistance of thinking that technological questions should be left to the United Nations, but there are spaces for that. And I take up the metaphor that George mentions about the bus, although I want you to get home safely, to be sure, but bus drivers are licensed. And those are decisions that states make. The pilots on the airplane that Yvonne mentioned, these are questions about how pilots are certified. And those are questions that nation states make. Those are not questions that pilots, apart from the conventional rulemaking, lawmaking processes make. Nor do I think many of us want that. Great, so let's open up. There might be questions. So why don't we start at the back? Do we have a mic? Just shout out, shout out. Like a shout? Yeah, yeah. It's being webcast, so you need to repeat the question. I will repeat the question. Right, okay, so as we move forward and there is some type of internet governance, my question is, what direction of balance do you see basically voluntary, you know, adhesion to principles that internet governance bodies would set up, as opposed to mandatory or technical solutions from which basically there is no effective, you know, opportunity to go against them? So the question, as I understand it, is, to what extent do you see, on the one hand, the preference for voluntary rulemaking and enforcement versus mandatory imposing kind of rules that the internet community should follow? Does anyone wanna, Jovan, you gonna address that? Maybe on very concrete example, which is data protection and privacy. Just not to have the abstract, abstract. We have two possibilities. One possibility is to have proactive self-regulation by, in this case, internet industry. Or if it is missing, then there is a reaction by courts, international organization, and other players. And this morning, the UN Human Rights Council adopted the resolution. I would say historical resolution of introducing a special rapporter in the UN terminology, it is important, but it is basically body and person who can go to a specific country and check the level of the privacy protection, data protection, and other issues. This was established this morning. He will be nominating all the next few months. The way you have one position is to have the self-regulation according to the certain principle, in this case, privacy protection. Or if it is missing, then you have reaction of international organization, in this case, the Human Rights Council. Or what is happening increasingly in Europe of the European courts. And it is interesting development because Europeans still trust the courts. They don't trust politicians, generally speaking, but with the exception of Switzerland, I would say. But in many European countries, many European countries, they basically don't trust politicians, but they trust courts. And they address their issues to the European courts, European courts of justice, in the case of right to be forgotten, now in the case of the Facebook and the Safe Harbor Agreement. This is in a way, if I'm balancing, I can notice that internet industry, at least based on the discussion they had over the last two weeks, is realizing that if they want to create sustainable business model, they have to take into consideration this concerns of privacy and data protection. General Mantre is the less privacy protection, better for the new business model where the data can be mined and the profit can be made. But now there is a shift towards more sustainable business model and attempt to take into consideration privacy and human rights concerns. Right, so I actually wrote a book on internet self-regulation. And after 300 pages, I came to the conclusion that it works when there is a carrot and a stick. And the most important stick in internet self-regulation is actually the shadow of government. The fact that government might step in at a certain point in time, actually made self-regulation happen and also made actually this whole concept of free ridership limited. And so we do actually need both in place who is actually sending in an interest from government and you do also need to have an interest by corporations if they wanna adhere to some kind of self-regulatory principles to actually comply and adhere to them. Yeah, next question. And then here in front, so yeah. And pose a question, right? So I don't know if you would always pose a question. It's an open meeting. It's an open meeting. It's a transparent. Then you throw the soft culture in the camera. So no, it's a good question. When we talk about governance, you understand that in many countries this term doesn't exist in their language governance. But also in the European context, you're on a spot in the European part and it's understandable. We live in Europe. The court is respected. But the European laws regulate only stuff which is dangerous for the life or the health basically. I mean, everything else is more or less loose. But what would be your thinking and maybe George should be the one to respond actually because you came with the different governance, open governance on which makes it even more complicated to translate it in, say, Hungarian or Russian. But what do you think would be the right balance on regulating what is there a need for regulation at all? Yeah, go ahead. When I was working on the GIPI project 15 years ago, one of the comments that the CDC folks said was if you go to a developing country and if you meet a regulator and you ask him what his job is, his job is to regulate. And therefore, if something new comes along, his job is to regulate it. So the issue is why regulation? And that's an issue going back to the goals. What do we want to accomplish by regulation? So there's no good answer to that outside of a context, a specific substantive context. Dr. Sadovsky's point in the beginning, we were so excited about this company. So I thought we were on the dimension of others. And I share your excitement from a consumer perspective, right? And now over the last few months, I guess we also learned that physically, certainly hundreds of thousands of workers on the other side of the equation are impacted by that, by global consolidation by companies and by people of this whole sector, by Amazon, Mechanical Turk, by crowdflower, crowd sourcing industry, all of that actually creates quite miserable conditions for workers worldwide. Well, there are some shades to that, right? It's good that India is listening to our state. But nevertheless, it's like, why is there an issue? Why are labor issues, labor concerns, an issue at a time when companies like Amazon and Google act increasingly like labor companies? So why is that? It seems to me that you're pressing. I think it is an issue, but others might have a different perspective. I think that's part of the kind of thing of internet governance is that, as Jovan said, to a large extent, we moved into a dependency relationship with the internet and it's being used for healthcare, it's being used for digital labor, it's being used for a variety of other practices, daily practices, and as a result, the aspect of internet governance has boomed to a large extent because now it has to also deal with actually healthcare issues because it impacts healthcare, but it has to deal to a large extent with labor issues because it impacts labor. And of course, there is a whole debate that how far do you go, right? And to what extent is it essential to internet governance, but you cannot ignore it. And I think that's becoming more and more of an issue, but Jovan, I'm sure you have somewhere a graphic that explains the entry point of labor into the... Probably the ultimate fight in the internet governance battle, whatever you call it, that could be an idea for the one panel here. Uber versus taxi drivers. Uber is a fast-growing company. Taxi drivers, at least in my part of the world, are very interesting part of society, social group. They are social networkers by nature. They're in gray zone between criminal, milieu, politics, economy. And if Uber manages, for example, in the Balkans to win the battle against taxi drivers, then I think that battle is won on the global level. As a matter of fact, we are organizing panel in Geneva with taxi drivers and philosophers. And we are inviting the representative of Uber discussing the deeper social issues. The Tura is the question of labor, the question of taxation, the question of the utilitarian aspect. Therefore, around that question, taxi drivers versus Uber will have quite a few core issues related to internet governance in broader sense, not internet governance of the internet, but governance of the internet. Labor issues, economic taxation, standardization, you name it and you have it. So Olivier, you have a response, and then George has a response, and then I suggest we enjoy the Swiss wine that was brought and have the discussion going on. But somebody has to get up and say, the emperor has no clothes, and 60%... I presume you're gonna do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Did you do it? Frankly, 60% of the people on the internet, and I speak with having been to Busan talking to the Africans and the Asians, think that the discussion in frontier is irrelevant and is missing your point and is ignoring the most important issues of internet governance, which are based on how do we get the other five billion on how do we keep the United States government and its friends happy? Now, I don't have time to go deep, but I think that belongs to you. Great. I guess we have the emperor without the clues, and George, you want to address that? Very quick response to you. What prevents the current taxi drivers from signing up with Uber? The response to you is it's not an either or question. And you're making it a dichotomy, and it's a false dichotomy. We're doing both. We're pushing for the next, by the way, not the next five billion, the next three billion, the next three billion or two billion. We're doing that at the same time that we're moving forward, or that the U.S. companies are moving forward extending services. Would you argue that we should stop the U.S. companies from moving forward? Most people would. It's called the GAFA argument in Europe. When Facebook comes in and gives you free access if you voted Facebook, that is not promoting the internet that's promoting an international monopoly. When Verizon charges for internet traffic so much that the African countries feel they're being totally ripped off, and it's a key factor in why the internet costs so much in Africa, we don't want to support Verizon's point of view on that if we want to get to the next five billion people. And that's the voice that isn't being heard here. Great and has been heard now. So thanks for doing that. So Olivier, you had a response? Well, I was gonna make a response through the comment of Uber. The only thing I would say is that, I mean, so, I mean, this is a contest that is being waged in courts now in the United States as to whether or not medallion owners in California and in New York are monopolies. And I think George, you suggest whether or not a caddy can just become an Uber person. So crowdsourcing like this ostensibly creates new opportunities is the argument. Though, of course, but the problem is that there are a whole set of other consumer-oriented considerations associated with what Uber does. And there are, you know, and I'm gonna sound like a law professor here, and there are conventions in law that are meant to address it. So this is for me not about internet governance but about the industry of taxi and livery services. As to whether or not we have talked enough about whether the other half of the world has gotten the internet, I mean, some of us have talked a bit about it. And this is a serious concern. I mean, one of the questions that I think Stefan was interested in talking about is what we would do in the next, what if we could do anything in the next year? What would be a priority? Maybe one of the priorities would be to shift and think about ways in which deployment could be encouraged. But that's a contest that has to be waged in conventional spaces for that resolution, right? Legislatures, courts, and other international governance regimes. Great. I'm sensitive to the time and I'm sensitive to the eagerness for you all to talk with the panelists. And so with that, I suggest that we open the Swiss bottles of wine and Comingo, which is a sort of art within the American nation. Thank you very much. And thank you.