 So, this is a free-form, just final 20-25 minute discussion with our four panellys and really just two sets of questions and observations and if any of you than then have any final thoughts or observations to them, please do ask them. Maybe Abela, if I can start with you. Just really, what have you learned from this morning from the report and from the discussions and what do you take on and most importantly where do we all go from here? I think I'll start with where we go from here because I think, so at Yahoo, my job is very much centered on what we do to protect our users' rights of freedom of expression and privacy, so this is what I do every day. And I think sometimes what frustrates me is that a lot of the conversations about this issue dance around the central problem. And I think that unless we really look at some of the hard problems, we're not going to come to any specific and practical solutions. So specifically, and it's been alluded to before, I'll start with a couple of things. One, as a company, first of all, the ICT sector is very large. And if you talk about what the motivations for companies are or what the levers are for companies, it's different for different companies. So if you're looking at a company like Google or Yahoo where your whole business model is centered on the freedom of expression and the free flow of information, you say that there's very much an alignment between what we do as a business. Some people are asking, well, what's the character? There's a very strong alignment between what we do as a business and the ideals of GNI. So if you take that as a given and you think about what the problem is, so we are actually dealing with it. I think we dance around this a little bit too much. So yes, a company like ours can do human rights impact assessments. Yes, a company like ours can try and organize our operations in terms of jurisdiction and try and avoid repressive regimes, but when it comes down to it, if a company is subject to a particular law, that company is bound to obey that law. And I think solutions need to address that. Solutions can't pretend that it's collusion. Of course there are some cases depending on what sector you're in where there's an issue of collusion. But when you're talking about this particular issue, that's not what you're talking about. So what I'm really looking forward to and what I think a multi-stakeholder organization like GNI is best at is figuring out what specifically should companies do. Yes, you should do human rights impact assessment, but when you're faced with it, when you're faced with that particular law, what is the specific solution for companies? And that's what I hope that organizations like GNI and events like this will do and will focus on. Specific solutions for companies that are actually interested in doing the right thing. Thank you, Rebecca. And at that point, what companies do, if you can maybe talk a little bit to the report or anything that has been discussed today as a framework for progressing just that point. Right. I thought I was later in the agenda, but I was still working on what I was going to say. No, but to pick up on some things that have been said that also deal with this kind of forward-looking question where we go and sort of what do we need to be doing more of. And one of the things that came up in the last session was just how important it is to get the activists on the ground, the people who are affected through the use of the technology, communicating directly with the companies. And how do we facilitate more of that in a way that obviously companies have to do their work. They can't spend all their time meeting with human rights activists from every single country on earth. But how do we get more communication between people who are using technology whose rights and whose relationship with government is being affected and mediated through the use of that technology? How do you get more discussion feedback? How do you ensure that people in the companies, both in headquarters and in different parts of the company, really understand how things play out? Because they're not higher based on their ability to understand how their technology plays out for users in Syria or something. But how do we get that communication going? What role can the NGOs in GNI play in facilitating that dialogue to a greater degree? How can we be helpful also or what kind of mechanisms do we need to enable companies to digest and absorb the information and concerns of how things are playing out all over the world in a way that can then be operational? And I think there's a lot of very specific things we can be thinking about. On a very practical note, and this has come up in our internal discussions yesterday and at other times, is how do we just diversify the number of NGOs that are involved with GNI from around the world and also make sure that they are participating actively, that we have mechanisms for them to participate actively and bring concerns from the communities where they work in and bring that to the company. So I think there's a lot of work that can be done and it doesn't all have to be done by GNI itself, but by civil society organizations more broadly interfacing with GNI in different ways. So I think that I'd be very interested in hearing what people here in the room today think about ways in which this kind of information sharing and communication could be better facilitated because that struck me as one of the more powerful things that's going on. And I'm sure Ibella has more to say about that. And then one other point, again just to sort of pick up on what I've been hearing, is the gentleman who's not here anymore from the engineering community who was behind developing what went on to be Tor, I think he made a point that I hear quite a bit from the technical community which is, and the technical community is, I think he's right, it's not well represented within GNI, that the technical expertise within GNI is really all coming from companies and I think there's an interest in question whether we should have sort of people independent engineers and developers, members of the developer community that are not affiliated with specific companies involved with GNI in some way as well. But this whole question, you know, you could actually, engineers point out, you could have a much more secure router than you do, but then law enforcement would, you know, I mean things are engineered in a certain way because of both law enforcement demands and because companies want to retain data for commercial reasons. They don't, companies, you know, from a complete human rights standpoint, of course, you wouldn't retain, you'd retain extremely minimal data and you'd secure all communications so that there'd be nothing to capture. But we're not doing that, both for commercial and law enforcement reasons and there are, I think, some really interesting technical questions that we've not explored about do we need to be thinking outside the box technically also a little bit more. So kind of throwing out those two big ideas for brainstorming in terms of kind of where I see, you know, just answering this question of where do we go from here and what are some of the tough questions, those seem to be two and, you know, one should go on. Leslie. So I'm not sure I agree with Rebecca because I think the problem with a new organisation is that everybody pours a variety of visions into it and it starts to very quickly move beyond a core mission. And I think that we're really at the cusp of being able to move forward our core mission. And I think the first thing we ought to do is say what we've done. There's, I think, an enormous focus on, well, if you don't have more companies, you know, what have you done? So I think it's really important to stop and acknowledge that six years ago when we all first met, and some of us had the southern principles and the people who had been involved in the labour had a different... The perception of what the problem was was extremely narrow. It was Yahoo in China. The attention of companies to this issue was really minimal. And the global discussion about how companies should behave didn't exist. I think GNI should own what it has done to change that, you know, before we take another step forward. There are, you know, companies may not be in the room, but they're all undergoing assessments and developing principles and looking at how they behave. It simply would not have happened without GNI. And, you know, it amuses me sometimes to hear the very companies who won't join GNI for a variety of reasons are at the same time pretty aggressively taking the practices of GNI and the policies and trying to figure out how it applies. So one, we need to own it and we need to own what our impact has been. I think we're only beginning to do what I've always believed is the critical part of GNI, and that's to figure out how we focus on collaborative learning and take the results of that learning and turn it into products that are useful for companies and advocates who we will never meet. And, you know, I'd like to see us start with transparency and start with how do we start to describe from the information the companies have and perhaps other companies in a way that doesn't necessarily say, Yahoo is experiencing this and Google is experiencing that and Microsoft is experiencing something else. How do we start to be able to put out information that really gets people to understand? What is it companies are being asked to do? We do a lot of description of what the laws are that govern and I think we can all agree that the laws are getting worse everywhere and implicating broader sectors. But I'd really like to see, and it does move in part from the Google transparency report, but really start to be able to get a better handle on for the people in those countries. What are we being asked to do and under what circumstances and how often do those demands comport with the laws that have been passed? So I would like to see us do that. I would like to see us do more events that lead to things like our report on takedowns in social media and the impact on human rights and best practices. If we're going to see the global standard, we have to start getting very operational about what it means. So in some ways I think I'm saying the same thing that you did. I think we can do that with companies that are in GNI and companies that are not and create those products. I'd love to be able to figure out how you create those products with the kind of outreach to companies that we don't normally reach and may never reach to have that subject matter and do the outreach around the world in small private meetings that allow us to really understand the on-the-ground situation in a way that it's very hard even for big western companies to know who have a different set of resources and lawyers to bring to bear. So I think the hard work, we've spent a lot of our early days on the accountability of our own companies who are involved. It's critically important. I think I'm starting to see a life at the end of the tunnel of sort of putting that together. But both in terms of bringing the GNI message globally, we've only begun to do that. In that message I mean our goal to seed the global standard really needs to become global and it needs to be carried by civil society and investors and others who are not in this room. And then we need to start actually putting some practical best practices and experiences on the table for people to understand. Thank you. We're running quite short of time then as you've made a couple of contributions to the floor just in a couple of sentences. Two minutes. I want to actually bridge a point that Rebecca made in Leslie's and Rebecca's first point in Leslie's semi-descent. Look, I love thinking and talking about the structure of mechanics of GNI but I'm going to get big picture here for just a minute or two. While there is nothing more important in my opinion than for GNI to do now and for the long term than to have its company members and I hope ever expanding number of company members demonstrate their implementation of the GNI principles. There is a larger mission, vision and potential goal within reach here and it goes back to a point that Dan Baer made a couple of hours ago about the focus for GNI for similar efforts in the ICT sector and broader efforts in other sectors around business and human rights are almost always motivated by trying to address risk, risk to reputation in particular, social license to operate. I think that that is largely true. Certainly my experience with extractives, footwear and apparel and a number of other sectors. But I do think that there is a distinct if not unique opportunity in this industry around these issues to posit a positive outcome that will enhance the brands of companies identified with an initiative like GNI but more importantly enlarge the scope of freedom way beyond just addressing risks and maintaining social license to operate. Now look, I have absolutely no illusion and I'm going to be very direct about this. I know why GNI came together, why those conversations that Leslie played such an instrumental role in convening six years and a couple of months ago now. When you had Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Cisco evisirated by the late great Tom Lantos in February of 2006, this was about brand management. But I think brand risk, social license to operate and it's still largely about that. But if we can connect to the freedom agenda here in ways and connect with activists around the world in ways that Rebecca alluded to in her own work beyond GNI is doing so much through Global Voices and other channels as are others in the room trying to, then I think we're on to something. Take a look at Yahoo's business and human rights program at Baile Runs in the Women in Diversity Conference you convened a month ago. The Liberty and Internet Conference that Google had here in town what, two or three weeks ago. The efforts that Google makes to support politically and funding-wise internet freedom activists, users around the world I think that there's just an extraordinary opportunity here for these and other companies I hope to come to stand up for privacy, for expression and I want to, in my day job as an investor I hope other investors will join us at the NGO community and most important millions and millions of users around the world recognize and reward companies trying to do the right thing. It's not just about compliance and implementation it's about protecting and respecting and ultimately enlarging in the internet era a 21st century of transparency and accountability I hope, the scope of freedom. Thank you. We've got time for five minutes or so of observations, challenges, questions and most importantly I would say suggestions from the floor about the way do we go from here and I would say let's keep it sort of big picture where do we go from here on the big issues that GNI addresses who would like to contribute some thoughts. Sorry, yeah. No one else. No, it's on, it's on, it's on. We need to own where we have come so we've done that all day and we've been doing that so I think we can now move on we have to leave our company something else so I think we're done. But I do think looking ahead it was a fair amount of discussion earlier in the past five, six years that we had different views within GNI of how to strategically choose our opportunities in terms of developing and I think what has prevailed was a prevailing view that we not take on the hard cases, plural. So I think one thing we need to start thinking about as first of an internal conversation is how do we want to think about the implementation of the GNI or how do we think about outreach but all of the different activities in a difficult country and difficult not meaning Pakistan or India or Iran, I mean difficult meaning difficult country coupled with huge business market opportunity and that's what makes it difficult I think. No we don't use the word China we say North Asia or we say something like that but I think that's part of the half joke so one thing I think we need to think about is two suggestions going forward we need to figure out a way to leverage the really substantive experience and the strategic experience and the advocacy experience of the NGOs both within GNI and not within GNI I think the NGO community we need to think the constituency within GNI how to do better and more strategic thinking about our outreach so we can build the NGO constituency to bring greater diversity to GNI. The second thing is the gentleman who left on the question about technologies is that we also have to keep in mind that NGOs like mine we've been working for 23 years with technologies as partners and so we have that experience of working with technologies and frankly in our view the solutions are never just technology the solutions because the problem of freedom of expression and advancing and protecting these rights is not a technical problem it's a legal, political, social, cultural and technical problem and so the solution requires all of us to think about it as all the pieces so I agree that we need to bring in more of the technologists that are not affiliated with business or companies but I also think we have to recognize that many of us have been working with and talking to technologists and hacker community etc and actually who are very helpful to our work and then the other thing I wanted to add is on the business case is I thought Mike did a terrific job of articulating the business case and I want to just add two things to that because that's where we go it is very important to have business leaders and CFO stand up and say what he said not NGOs because we're like talking to the converted or something it's really and so in answer to John your question but why doesn't business think about that I was saying well look at what business has wrought it's not like business community always makes the most reasonable decisions and it's not like they make decisions that are in their own best interests with the financial crisis we are now in the business community will not always make decisions that are in the best interests of anybody so I think that's one thing to keep in mind the second thing is users the users, the market when Google decided to move its server to Hong Kong the one country two system solution it got a big bump in the Chinese internet users community which should be recognized and that when you talk about a market that's going from 100 million to 500 million which is what it is that's their future customers and they thought good for Google so I think we have to think about that too we've got a few questions as ever people are shy coming forward now they're all coming forward we're literally running out of time and there's one good Twitter question which I was hoping somebody would ask does GNI fully embrace a multi-stakeholder model if it does not have member states as its own members in other words the role of government on that right, let's we'll try and fit in as many really really please can I urge when people say I've just got one thing to say and then sort of 18 points later can you really really keep it to one point please okay the two guys there next to each other, yep thanks so Dunstan Allison hope from BSR and I had something to do with the founding of the GNI a while ago but I'm spending a lot of time advising companies who are not members of the GNI and one thing I'd say is I wouldn't underestimate how influential the principles and implementation guidelines are because they're actually being used and applied by companies that are not in the GNI and this is my key point we've mentioned the telecoms companies and the documents that they've been circulating one of the things that I would really like to see is even if there is separate organisations pursuing their own avenues that there's much more continuity between what the principles actually say because I've seen in other initiatives other sectors competing codes of conduct competing principles and that's a very dangerous road to go down and so even if we are going to see these other initiatives I would love to see greater continuity in language great thank you next to you the next question is from Foley Hoag since I'm sitting next to Dunstan I have a very similar comment which is that we've seen how influential the GNI principles are in companies that don't appear to be technology companies financial institutions other kinds of companies that deal with large volumes of data crossing borders they've taken the lessons of the GNI to heart and are seeking advice to do it so they don't fit into the mould but the precedent is there thank you behind you and then here and then I think we'll close if you're a user you don't work in the internet space you're an internet user and you start to notice these issues and you want to get involved what can GNI do for you and what can you do for GNI that's a really good point the interface with the users Danny do you want to point right here wait for the mic so I think I just like to follow up slightly so the technologist who came and his technologies underlie not only a lot of what financial systems use for digital cash but a lot of the encryption systems that protect all of us and so I think it's sort of significant when somebody like that wants to get involved and can't find a good way of doing it but I think it also works vice versa in that there are a lot of there's a lot of expertise within GNI and there are a lot of arenas that actually have quite a substantive power to influence how the net works which are actually predominantly technology led and I'm thinking here in particular of international standard technical standard organisations and if GNI and the groups in GNI aren't there as a presence I know for a fact that there are people looking at those at those venues as ways to sneak forth through surveillance and restrictions on privacy we're there we're there but we're almost the only civil society so this is the IETF the international engineering task force and the W3C and also sort of ISO standards and one of the ways that technology was profoundly affected in repressive countries was because the technical standards for lawful enforcement devised by very well meaning people in in more stable democracies had no provision for technically restricting mass surveillance and I think that's somewhere that GNI can represent themselves in a way that makes sense commercially and also makes sense for human rights defenders Thank you, I mean this is very interesting we haven't even discussed the government question but obviously governments are quick quick word on very quickly on that and then I'd just like to ask people what little one-liners to take away before we ask German to speak seems to me a fundamental conflict of interest to have government sitting in the room when you are trying to make decisions about how to deal with governments therefore we don't have governments and can I just add that really quickly the other thing is that given who would join the types of governments who would join you would end up having it would look like a US-led initiative against the rest of the world and that's not something that helps companies it's not something that helps resolve the issue either so it's a fair question but I think that there are very real and valid reasons why that's not the case and also if you could just quickly either of you for just very very quickly address these questions of opening up if that's the right term for users and for technologists Bennett you go first I'll just follow up also on government having been like Bob, ex-government look Bob's absolutely right that said GNI has been undertaking some advocacy with governments we've developed a particularly rich set of relationships with European governments we're beginning to move well beyond that our board chair German Brooks was just in Thailand a couple of weeks ago meeting with senior officials there we're going to be doing even more of that in the coming months and a couple of years I could envision since this is future oriented some kind of structure mechanism within several years I can't really foresee it before then that would be a sort of GNI dialogue forum but way beyond the frankly easy relationships we now have in a transatlantic context we need to engage some of these governments and it's tough for individual companies to do so but one of the key contributions that GNI can make is to serve as a platform for companies to come together with one or more governments on the same set of issues Rebecca on users do you want to say I think we have some challenges in terms of how we how we interact with the world when we have a staff of two and to what extent this is a more distributed approach rather than a GNI does everything and maybe it's here are the public facing non-governmental organizations that are members of GNI that you as an internet user can get involved with and also there's some interesting organizations that are cropping up there's a startup that's just about to launch in a week or so that's meant to be a mechanism for people to report on when their content gets deleted on various social networking platforms and so I think there's also an interesting question of what other types of organizations could help interface with GNI rather than saying that GNI as an institution has to manage all of it Leslie very briefly But having said that GNI's own founding documents does include a commitment for an interaction and it is something that we are working on both the question of to what extent we deal with complaints as GNI as compared to a distributed model but also is there a way for people through our website and elsewhere to give comments I think for a small organization the question is if when you operate in the internet and you're not talking about will people report in from sweatshops you're talking about what do you do if you get 100,000 people commenting and do they all expect to comment back so there's a scale question given what we're doing that yes requires a distributed response but we're also going to have to test out to make sure we don't promise things we can't deliver and Bailey just to raise our sights give us the single thing to take away in terms of the big challenge that Yahoo is now going to take away from this and this brave new Nirvana we're about to tackle I think I already said it I think this is a very hard problem and it lends itself to solutions that are very operational I think what keeps me up at night is that even if we do everything right so if we do human rights impact assessment if we make sure that we've adjusted the jurisdiction so that's in the right one a government can still imprison someone unfairly and I think that's the problem and I think all of our companies are trying to solve and I think that's the problem that GNI is trying to solve and I think solving that problem requires multi-stakeholder engagement and it also requires looking at a hard problem and figuring out operational solutions okay Mayor thank Rebecca, Bennett, Leslie Annabella I'm now going to swap places with GNI's independent chair German Brooks to close this morning session thank you well thank you very much indeed and I'd like to thank particularly our moderator John Camffa who has done a tremendous job keeping all of our brilliant speakers on topic and very interestingly so I found it quite fascinating and another thing and just a couple of reflections on this first forum that GNI has ever held so congratulations to the organisation congratulations to Susan and particularly to David for having put this together David Sullivan but some reflections so we call ourselves the global network initiative and there's a very important word there global and many of us feel that we're not really filling out that particular element of our name very well but I think what we were demonstrating in this forum was our growing globalness both our speakers who are three speakers because we had Maraica Sharker as well on her video have shown the growing international membership and the growing international interest in what we're doing so I think that is a very important element which is coming together from this forum and I was asked only about 10 days ago in the Netherlands where will the next forum be it may well be in another part of the world and again demonstrating the focus that I think GNI needs to have the second point is I felt very proud of being part of GNI both because of the speakers who are already members of GNI particularly also the board members who spoke to us at last but also those others who have contributed very greatly to the input in this forum because the standard of the debate the intellectual calibre of the expertise which is coming from those discussions is really quite extraordinary there is no other organisation which is able in our particular area to pull together that level of expertise and that leads me really to the fundamental issue which is that as we come together as a multi stakeholder group of experts around major issues of how do we prevent illegitimate censorship and surveillance of the users of the internet how do we really make a difference there because the overarching aims of GNI is going to be our ability to speak with credibility as a multi stakeholder force when we're engaging with international governmental organisations with individual governments to help move the inevitable concerns which governments and international organisations have around the regulation and governance of the internet and hopefully we can avoid too much of the inevitable consequences in a very fast moving environment of the unintended consequences of much legislation and I don't know whether you've all picked up a copy of the latest annual report the 2012 annual report we say about ourselves that we're about protecting advancing freedom of expression and privacy so I won't go into the argument about whether that is or is not an appropriate use of language and whether it's in line with the rugged principles or not but I would just perhaps turn it round the other way and say are we actually doing that and both outside and inside GNI we ask the question are we making a difference and protecting those two very important principles and the way I answer it is by looking first of all at the micro level at the level of individual companies we heard Bailey from Yahoo talking a minute ago from this chair saying that we needed lots of practical ways operational ways of making our commitment under the GNI principles effective and I think we're already doing that I was very very impressed by Mike Newman's comment and his use of the phrase were all caught by the prisoner's dilemma so someone's got to go first or if there's not someone who goes first you've got to have collective action in other words you get strength through working together and I think in fact in that particular case that he cited by going first he was then able to get collective action from other members of that particular part of the ICT industry and we tend and I agree there with Leslie's comment about the need to say more publicly about what we're doing I was very impressed where we were approached by a non-GNI member company who said we've just now had these demands in Country X and we really don't know how to react to them and literally within hours we had put together a 10 point programme for that company how to deal with that particular request the information the expertise the experience is there but we need to be better at telling people that we've accumulated that expertise and there's real value there and then at the macro that's the micro level how individual companies deal with the problem and at the macro level increasingly as you've heard from a number of the comments made this morning GNI is increasingly active and is increasingly recognised not just by the US government who have been absolutely tremendous and those of you who have heard Hillary Clinton speak on the subject of freedom of the internet and protection of user rights she's a fantastic speaker on these but she always says and GNI is at the centre of this effort so please if you can speaking to a company audience please if you can think seriously about joining that effort that initiative to make it even stronger so I'd like in concluding to thank you all very much for coming it's been I think for certainly me watching the progress that we've been making since I've been on board certainly not the six years that we were talking about with you today and it has been already just in the one and a half years I've been involved tremendous progress we have a fast moving environment where we're trying continually a new to implement successfully our principles and to influence both companies and governments and all others to come together to find right solutions to the fast moving environment that the internet represents so thank you all very much have a join us for lunch if you're able to stay and I'd like to thank again particularly John and all of the speakers for a tremendous morning thank you very much