 Thank you and good morning to all. I'm delighted to be here. At last I've been looking forward to this for a few months since hearing we had the chance to come and speak here and I think you know you call the net neutrality and privacy. I think I told Alan and the others that I wasn't going to focus so much on net neutrality and privacy but rather frame it in the wider context of governance of the internet and governance on the internet and talk a bit about the wider discussions and the wider developments in the global governance of these issues of internet policy and internet governance and so I think it's useful when we consider this to look back at a history of technology which did a feel for the scale of what's been happening. Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users. Television took 13 years. It's not bad. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people which is quite amazing when you think about that and today we have close to three billion users of the internet and I'm not even talking about the devices that are increasingly connected to the internet that add a few more billions and so in 50 billion if you believe some estimates. So it's no wonder in the face of this rapid growth that the internet has attracted so much interest interest from all of us as individuals because the internet touches on our everyday private lives increasingly and of course our economies our societies have been increasingly shaped or or enabled by the internet and so politically at global level we saw a rapid increase in the interest for ICTs and in particular the internet over the past 15 years or so and actually 2015 marks 10 years since the conclusion of a UN World Summit on Information Society, WUSIS or WSIS and that was one of the most notable manifestations of that growing interest in the internet and that summit produced a number of documents, a Chinese agenda, the Geneva Declaration, two phases over four or five years which covered a very broad range of topics to do with IT, telecoms and the internet and in fact the summit initially was very much supposed to be about bridging the digital development, developing countries that were saying that we just don't have enough connectivity and therefore we are further sleeping down and social compared to the developed world but quite rapidly within that summit the discussion started as they often do in UN settings to be a bit more on the political side rather than the economic or technical side and people started to ask well who rules the internet how can it be controlled, I imagine a bunch of governments talking about this and I was a civil servant at the time and negotiating this under the Irish presidency of the EU actually at one point and so it was interesting discussions you know how can we control this as a government who is the boss and the problem was that there was no clear conclusion on that and there still isn't because no one governs the internet as such in fact the running the core functions of the internet is coordinated rather than govern, coordinated is a better word and is coordinated by a very distributed collaborative ecosystem, different organizations, different processes, mechanisms and people that each have distinct remits whether it's organizations for instance that develop internet standards like the internet engineering task force or the worldwide web consortium that develop standards for websites or ICANN which we'll talk about in a minute which looks more at IP numbers and the domain name system or indeed it's international organizations like the ITU looking at telecom infrastructure or governments themselves or the EU in some of these areas. In the Q&A session for instance if you want to talk in more detail about net neutrality and privacy a bit more than happy to to go on that we can talk and there's a lot of activity to you level on that so it's a it's it might feel nebulous but in fact it's something that works quite well because we have a distributed system that makes a whole stronger you have fewer critical points of failure if you will. One of the reasons that we have this highly distributed system is it comes from the organic way in which the internet grew and also because of the nature the cross-border nature of the internet it's inherently cross-border so you can't really have a traditional system of governance that is dominated by governments that are bound by nation-state boundaries you have to have a construct which enables decisions to be taken at global level in a fluid manner plus you don't have governments as those kind of ubiquitous actors that dominate this whole value chain have a flurry of different actors that have an important role in this value chain from peering exchanges that centralize some of the connectivity to internet service providers to users themselves of course very important elements of this this value chain they to a large extent we users have driven a lot of the development of the internet thankfully I would say and governments of course have got their own remits and powers and interests so it's really a collective in that sense and that governance of the internet very much grew from how the internet was developed which was that in the late 60s you had a bunch of universities mainly in the US and funded by the US Department of Defense as they do because they fund a lot of fun things and the main probably the leading team was at the University of California Los Angeles at the time and they had pioneer the concept and they were about to launch it and before launching it they thought hold on maybe we haven't got this all very right by the way I'm completely departing from my script so pardon me but I think it's useful to look at how it grew and this concept of we know there's other teams that are working on very similar projects to create a new very resilient means or network of communications let's test our idea let's make sure that we're on the right path so rather than just compete each in our own ivory tower let's just share a little bit of peer review effectively but like in normal opinion or scientific research and try and get to a better solution and so they issued something that they call the request for comments and RFC which was basically a concept paper and they sent it out to universities like University of Maryland and the few others that were working on similar projects to try and get feedback and they got feedback and the ARPANET as it was now then known was created in about 1968 and that way of working that collaborative way of working of developing technology and making sure that it sort of worked that they could develop protocols that could talk to each other grew into the sort of governance that we have today which is that for instance in the standards world we have this internet engineering task force which I refer to when they agree standard the name for the standard is still called an RFC request for comment uh c1598 or whatever and and it's all developed from the bottom up i.e. anyone can come up with an idea then discuss it collaboratively with others and then it's agreed by consensus you don't vote you don't have a central authority that has to be a or may you agree by consensus and usually if you do that you have all this collective brain power different perspectives that come together to end up with a better result a result that can work for everyone rather than just from the dictate of one entity that might have missed a particular angle and we find ourselves with a very similar model what we've called now the multi-stake holder model in the way we govern a lot of what happens on the internet on the architectural side of the internet very much but the core plumbing if you will of the internet which is in our case and I can the domain name system and the IP numbers but I've also mentioned already standards for instance it's all done very much in this bottom up collaborative multi-stake column where where initially you had scientists with a few u.s. government officials at the back because they were financing the whole thing and then little by little more academics came in and then more international because international interest grew and others connected to the network and then little by little other governments came in and then representatives of the user community etc that's the model we have today so it's a very different model of governance from the traditional so best value and type of of model and I will try now to go back to my script to continue flow although it's all related and if there's a problem with password sorry about this and touch keyboard and now I think it's useful to just think about where we're at in terms of this internet I'm showing so let me just mention maybe maybe how it works within ICANN to give you a bit more of a concrete example of how multi-stakeholder governance works and what we do so at ICANN what we do is to our mission is to manage worldwide internet resources and one of the internet resources is specifically the domain names so .ie .com etc ip addresses which are attached to each device connected to the internet and the underlying internet parameters basically about 100 or so very technical standards that explain how you actually receive a certain type of file for instance how an mp4 file might be sent and how the protocol accepts it that sort of thing and that has to be globally coordinated for a very simple reason we all need unique identifiers so in practice how and I'm going to simplify this the job we do is still enables a very simple thing you're opening your computer you open your browser you type www dot at the level of id.ie earlier and your computer will send a message that will query a global database that will find the one computer the one device that actually is the id.ie that particular web page on that site put in that example and there should be only one because otherwise you could end up in id.ie korean equivalent or any other so we need to have unique identifiers and of course there's billions of those so we need a system that enables rapid growth in a number of of users or connected devices and that enables that resiliency we need to make sure that you can send as many queries to the internet as you want as many users we have and it doesn't fail and that system hasn't failed it's grown through close to three billion users and we've never had a failure of the domain name system and we still have a still few charges but we have we have numbers that work and we still have unique identifiers globally to find any other device anywhere in the world the way it works within ican is that all the decisions to do with for instance adding a new domain name or changing certain parameters are done by this multi-stakeholder model so we have structures dedicated to each of the main stakeholder groups and then some structures we can't cross stakeholder groups so for instance we have a government advisory committee where all the governments sit in and they can talk about any subject to do with the domain name system and we have a dedicated residency and security committee and then we have one who's specifically about generic top-level domain names like .com so if any policies for instance consumer protections need to be attached for any reason to those types of domain names gets discussed within that and within that particular structure we don't just have one set of stakeholders we have the registries people that actually operate for instance .ie or .com we also have the registrar which are the entities that sell the domain names but we also have what a wider business community ISPs for instance but not just we have for instance the head of the business constituency at the moment is that thing from HLBC UK because they have new domain names and because they're interested in intertrial poverty protection we have a wider constituency there and we also have a serious society an academia and all of these groupings actually each have their own representatives on the overall border background so we try to have a structure which enables that sort of cross-culturalization of ideas brings those people around the table again bottom up any of these constituent stakeholders can bring up an idea and discuss it with the others and get agreed by consensus that's how policies and procedures are agreed within ICANN so we've launched a couple of years ago a whole new program of so-called new GTLDs new domain names so you might have Dr London is one of the big new ones and that seems like .guru or .club which are quite successful and all the procedures for designing that program and the protections attached to them were devised by this range of stakeholders which doesn't come with it's not easy all the time it's still not easy but that that's how it works and what we find is that rather than slowing down the processes what it enables us to do is speed them up because we have people around the table objections can be raised earlier if something doesn't work the technical guys will tell us if something breaches freedom of expression the NGOs will shout if something could help cyber criminals we have no enforcement that's around the table as well they know how to be around the table um so that's that's really how it works and what we find that the overall approach it maximizes the internet's creative potential it just opens up avenues for both innovation but also enhancing the resilience of the system it facilitates cooperation but without over centralization so you have global coordination but it's not so centralized that it's uh over bulky if you will and it embraces globalization because it's a system that inherently can look beyond national borders because we have representatives from all over the world um uh and at the same time because we try to build into that multi-stakeholder model ways of reproducibility and balance it brings in uh accountability and inclusiveness in in how uh how this basic architecture of the internet is governed now it's a model that's worked well it hasn't failed it's grown as i've mentioned the numbers already i think you know i can was formed in in 1998 i can i can come back to its creation uh there were about 150 million users then well close to three billion users it's an enormously rapid growth and yet the underlying system has worked you've always been able to find someone at least our own part of it your isp might have had a problem i don't know but at the very basic global level we've had enough numbers we've had enough domain names and it's grown well but it's still fresh it's a new model it's a pioneering model which has evolved because very difficult to be a novel approach to governing in this in this cross-border environment so it's not perfect it's very pioneering it's a laboratory if you want in a new way of governing which i think from an international relations or foreign policy perspective is it's quite interesting i i think it's a model that deserves to be looked at not just in the internet context but probably more widely when we face so many cross-border challenges transnational networks and are created that we can't completely comprehend very well whether we're talking about for instance transnational terrorist networks or others um there might need to be new ways of governing in in our age and i think it's an interesting model to look at but it's not perfect it's it's growing it's maturing a bit like the internet itself and if we think about it internet became public only about 25 years ago um and it's still very very young there's much more happening um and clearly i think there's a lot of worries and that's where we could talk about all the tensions that are happening at the moment tensions over privacy uh our personal personal privacy or tensions about the protection of data with our data organizational data cyber threats of all kinds uh you know online censorship many examples of those recently and the challenges that are posed by the digital world to the traditional industries are struggling or some of them are struggling to adapt and then you know for others you know the dominance of a handful of giant internet companies uh scared of maybe not not so much in iron and certainly welcome from they're really worried about this um sometimes there's worries about the situation of those companies uh consistently forgetting about the fact that it's not just this sector that's trying to minimize their tax but anyway that's a completely different story uh and then of course you know it goes all the way to you know the geopolitical power plays which are reflective mirrored in the online world we see the very same dynamics in internet governance discussions as we see in international politics at the moment i'm happy to go into detail on that on qna but you can just imagine uh what the would be superpowers of this world are trying to do in internet governance world they're trying to have that and control the system as as much as they can for their own purposes mirroring what they might be doing on the ground uh in uh in certain countries or in un setting and with all these kind of worries these tensions and its increasing interest in internet in mind uh it's interesting to see that we're we're really at a juncture in internet i think it's really coming of age it's maturing it's not a charm anymore it's maybe still an adolescent i like to think about the other ascents you know full of doubts full of hope um but also a bit of a wickedness sometimes perhaps um and there's a lot of evolution happening um last year in april we saw one of the first manifestations of that that change with the president of brazil the amaruza who had been rather outraged by the uh mass surveillance issue organizing a global conference global multi-stakeholder conference on the future of the internet that was nicknamed the net mondial conference it was in april last year in south polo and gathered uh i think there was a capital of thousand people and uh there were people truly from every part of the world and from a lot of governments and from civil society and from business etc etc and they came up by consensus with a set of principles for governments of the internet internationally which started up with human rights and privacy went through a whole list of other considerations on innovation competition etc and also a roadmap for the evolution of internet governance which include a number of areas um for instance the need to tackle cyber security the need to look at let me try to we've got the concluding on it uh the need for ican funds to evolve um and a rough of other things so let me just say a couple of words about something uh with ican if i may uh both because this is very typical for ican as an organization it's worth knowing about and because it will have a direct relevance to island very soon i'll mention that at the end uh of maybe some of you might know anyone knows why it will have a relevance for island Barry you can't say okay we'll see later okay i mean it has direct relevance for island anyway but it's going to split it's a particular relevance for the hero band so the evolution that's happening within ican is it's quite an important one but mainly a symbolic one which is that i mentioned earlier that the u.s government's um department of defense um had funded uh all these projects that uh that matured into what was then called alphanat and became the internet and they kept the u.s government kept a link with all this this organization an overall oversight to make sure things were run well what happened up to the mid 90s is that if you wanted to for instance create a new domain name or add a new country code for instance i know the case in france was 1984 the french research institute for computing is called in ria and they wanted to operate the dot fr domain name so they contacted a professor at the university of california called john postel who was one of the professors who had been in the original team that created the internet and john was the guy in charge of managing the directory of the main names that directory that you go back to and uh there was an rfc that he had co-authored in the itf that explained what were the conditions for operating a domain name extension uh and the country code in this particular case he john checked and said yeah okay this looks like a bona fide institute and they look decent and they will promise to abide by certain quality standards in terms of the service delivery fine they can operate dot fr and basically john was in charge on his own pretty much with i think a couple of graduate interns of running this whole directory until 1997 when both his university which by the time the funny thing is that he moved to the university of southern california and the whole role moved with him uh and he still had the u.s government at the back he still had to check all the changes with your government so by the way i put this for instance in rhea came in and they want to operate dot fr followed all the procedures he said okay an u.s government would say yeah that's fine and by the way they never said no they would never request in 30 odd years um so he moved to the u.s here in southern california and that university together with the u.s administration at the time said look look this is the mid 90s you know the internet's really taking off we need something more sustainable than just john however nice he is i mean i don't know if it's the fact that he was a bit of a hippie with long hair and beard but they said we need something more sustainable so the kinton administration decided to set up a small task force and that was headed up by by algor officially and someone called uh ira magazine who is clinton's technology advisor and they created a structure that was ican effectively and in particular to administer functions that were called iana the internet assigned numbers of forestry which is basically i've got three main uh remit one is to manage the directory of domain names one is to manage the global pool of ip addresses that's now allocated to all computers uh connected to the internet and uh the other to officially sort of uh rubber stamp if you will the protocol parameters agreed by the internet engineering task force to support technically the this uh this setup and so it was replacing john by this iana function if you will and ensuring that there was an organization i can behind it that could uh run this but the u.s government decided to keep a tab on it basically the same look we create ican but um we'll keep an oversight especially on these core iana functions for a while and in a couple of years once it's up and running we'll just go away and if you look there's a white paper published in 98 by the clinton administration on this which said we'll create ican and i could have a date but i think i said within two years we'll exit and then nothing happened uh lots lots of discussions of this world summit happening the u.s was still in charge bush administration by then you make your own conclusions um in the u.s kept that historical link um now well uh obama's administration comes in and uh in march last year they finally announced that they intended to transition this historical oversight role to what they termed the global multi-stakeholder community so they tasked us ican to convene uh basically a consultative process and um that led to the creation of two parallel processes with dedicated working groups one is a process uh led by a group called the iana stewardship transition coordination group the icg we're very very good at acronyms i don't know we've got 250 i think but i can share with you if you want um so that this there's this process which is the the main one basically saying okay if we don't have this u.s government oversight to keep a tab on how the the changes are made to this crucial directory the things today how will this multi-stakeholder community uh be able to check that things are being done properly and if they're not being done properly to redress that and so there's been a series of consultations still happening at a moment and then there's a parallel trying to start it soon after because a lot of people were saying well okay well if i can is still in charge of running all this whatever oversight mechanism will create will i can as a as a structure as an organization have the relevance and the right checks and balances basically the good governance mechanisms in place so that indeed we can exercise that oversight properly you know if we think that the for instance the border by can takes a decision which is contrary to our uh our you know the global community's interests can be overruled so there's that parallel track on uh called enhancing i can accountability and governance which started in well in the second half of last year so these two are running concurrently there's been actually quite a bit of progress and i think a lot of us have been very pleasantly surprised because these these are groups which are formed which are multi-stakeholder so we're not talking about uh seasoned diplomats and policymakers who are used to creating institutions and new structures etc we're talking about registries registrar business people and users NGOs professors etc and they've done an immense amount of work i have to say so now we have proposals for the three main components of our numbers the names and uh protocol parameters there's still quite a few questions uh that that need to be answered especially on the naming path which is one of the more political because numbers and protocol parameters you know it's quite technical so most people find it be boring i think uh names where you can start you know start fiddling through with you know what is a proper name and what safeguards are associated with the name etc etc so there's still a few a few a few questions left but there's there's been tremendous progress the target date rather than deadline for completion of this process for having a a proposal for a new governance structure or oversight structure i should say is september this year because that's the end of the current contract between the u.s government and i can for the performance of designer functions so it could be delayed a bit that the contract could be extended a little bit if we need time and it looks like we might need a bit more time but the idea is that everybody's working to that date and that by uh around september we should have the u.s government approve a proposal by the global multistakeholder committee so by all these working groups for passing on their oversight of these key functions and i should i should have mentioned i was only looking at my script but there's a few conditions that the u.s government have put on all this they uh four main conditions they said that they will approve a new oversight mechanism only if it fulfills the following conditions first is to support and enhance the multistakeholder model so it has to be something which is multistakeholder and they'll come back to that in a minute it needs to maintain the security stability and resiliency of the internet's domain name system which is probably the one condition you need you know we still want to have a domain name system that works an IP numbering that works it meets the needs and expectations of the global customers and partners of the ionized services that basically means for like barrier guests um registries and registered other people that basically are directly that are operating the domain names that depend on this ionized function to work well to do the proper amendments of directory in time and properly and then it needs to maintain the openness of the internet that's a bit fluffy it's not actually openness of the internet in the sense of net neutrality it's more um that the idea that you know any person connected to the internet should be able to talk to another person of the internet they should yeah you should have a free flow of information and data broadly speaking they didn't really define it but that's that's the gist and importantly there's a condition which wasn't really in the list of four conditions but it's actually probably the most interesting of the most important they specified that they would not accept a proposal that replaces the US government's role with a government led or an intergovernmental organization solution so they're very clear if it's not us it's not going to be anyone else and it's certainly not going to be a UN type thing that others can overly influence or capture that's a little sort of subtext so it's a very interesting set of ideas and as you can imagine it's it's creating a lot of bars there's a lot of governments watching this a lot of governments that are used to the UN system and governments top-down control that I'm not very familiar with multi-stakeholder model a lot of them have have increased their understanding of how it works and and shifted and are far more supportive of the multi-stakeholder model including China for instance which which actually sent the internet minister to the London meeting of ICAN in June last year who made an opening ceremony speech where he said that China was dedicated to a global internet and a multi-stakeholder model which is quite an important move for a country that others might think might be much more UN linked there's still others in the world that would be far more comfortable with a UN setup not actually so much the UN itself funnily enough I think they understand that they can work collaboratively with organizations such as ICAN and others I think it's a good place there but there's a lot of geopolitical talk again related to the bigger question so who controls the internet well if you control the internet or if you can through certain setups into governmental setups for instance control the internet then it might help your political means elsewhere at global level so it's all about a very technical evolution but which people are relating to much bigger geopolitical tracks and we'll be lucky to hear I'm coming to the end of it but very importantly I've mentioned the target date of September that's where it becomes very interesting for Ireland so you know there's a lot of attention now on this process but there'll be even more as we come to the moment when a substantial proposal is is agreed by this global state called the community send it to the US government and that hopefully the US government approves it and then it's wants to do well so towards September next year or certainly the autumn we will be in a situation where we have an idea what will replace the US government's historical oversight role over these core internet functions and that happens to coincide with the holding of ICAN's ICAN holds three global meetings a year and as it happens we're holding one in mid-October in Dublin so we're going to have once again the eyes of the world seriously watching Dublin I'm not just saying that to to excite you it's going to be the case so people will be watching that meeting because it could be the one where either the solution is formally endorsed and or some of the final important tweaks are agreed um so it will be a big meeting uh Barry do you know the exact date is it 19? 19? 19 to 22nd of October so it will be basically a week of meetings here where we'll have uh probably just over 2,000 people again from all these state called the groups governments civil society business etc coming to Dublin normally for an ICAN meeting it's it's about you know just ongoing working groups to talk about fairly boring stuff to most of the world um but stuff that ensure the good functioning of the internet this time we've got this major new governance set up that will be somehow finalized um so yeah so it's going to be a big event in Dublin later this year which I'm really looking forward to so it is free to attend I should I should mention absolutely I should have made that yeah I mean ICAN meetings and and all working groups are free to attend they don't require any membership or very kind like that it's open to anyone so if you're an academic you've got a direct route if you've got a government you've got a direct route etc etc and it's all free in the Dublin Convention Center and it'll be in the beautiful Dublin Convention Center indeed so I'll just I'll just sort of conclude with a few questions just thinking about a bit of an international uh a first perspective since since we're here to do the INE and um and I've sort of related to it I mean one of the questions to me is how this multi-stakeholder model may not be relevant just for the internet sphere but more widely for international affairs and maybe not as some have said in the past to replace the traditional nation state model but maybe to give it a bit of a on the contrary but a useful compliment a new breath of fresh air if you will that helps uh address some of those new global transnational challenges in a novel manner because we need to have all sorts of different actors present you know we climate change is another one where we do need to have a stakeholders present on table you can't just have governments and they're doing that increasingly in UN summits on around climate change but often stakeholders are not actually in the room they might be reading a statement maybe they're listening but they're not around the table devising the policies and the procedures which is a case in the internet world so that's a bit of food for thought uh here um yeah so could that be a bit of a of a way to uh to avoid a cache of civilizations that we've been talking about for for a few other certainly Samuel Huntington um so I will leave it here um as I said I can talk about net neutrality and privacy quite a bit of detail because I spent the last seven years of my life uh at Skype uh championing net neutrality when no one wanted to listen uh and privacy of course is something that we all deal with so I'll I'll close it there thank you again very much for having me