 My name is Jim Lewis. Welcome to CSIS. We have a great panel this morning. We hoped that this could be more of an interactive session, so the panelists are going to talk for five or 10 minutes. I think we told them 10. And then we want to get an exchange going with the audience. So feel free to throw in your questions, your remarks, your comments. We'll do that up here as well. What I'd like to do now is ask David, my co-conspirator in this event, to talk about the chapter. Hi, my name is David Villorist. I'm the co-convener of the Washington DC chapter of the Internet Society. How many of you are familiar with the Internet Society? Very good. Then you know that the Internet Society is a global organization on the forefront of maintaining a free and open internet amidst very significant challenges to that model. The DC chapter, we see our role as where the rubber hits the road in DC, and taking that message, and taking those things and advocating for that in DC. We'd love to get more people involved. We'd love to have any of you involved in the chapter. I'd like all the people involved with the chapter to raise their hands now. Great. Come and see any of us, if you're interested in being more involved. And I'll turn the discussion back over to Jim. I know, it's been a long week, hasn't it? I can't wait for the three-day weekend. I'm really glad we're doing this, and we started talking sort of among ourselves. That was the genesis of this idea, because I go to meetings now where I hear sort of a common refrain, and I was talking to Mike Nelson at the beginning about this. When the US started thinking about commercializing the internet, we kind of split governance and security in some ways. And what's happened is they've come back together now. And some of the ideas that we had for governance from the 1990s, unipolar world, the end of conflict, everyone would be a market, democracy, borders were going away. Well, it's turned out not to be right. So we're working with a 1990s construct that many other governments aren't comfortable with. And that's part of why we're here. Why are they uncomfortable with it? And when you talk to them, there's a whole set of reasons, which I'm sure the panelists will discuss. But we have a problem. So the benefits, there are benefits. This will be strange for me to say. There are benefits to the multi-stakeholder model, right? We need to figure out a new way to make the case for that. The old case is no longer persuasive. And this isn't me saying this. This is what I hear from other governments. So how will we change? And how will we guide change? How will we survive change in a way that preserves the good features of the multi-stakeholder model and preserves the built-in commitment to human rights that you see on the internet? Because there are people who have an alternative model for governance that would produce some very different results. And to complicate the story, I know some of the panelists will talk about this as well. Phil certainly knows this very well. We have new players. We have people who weren't present 20 years ago, the Brazils, the Indias. They have different views. They have different attitudes. So change is unavoidable. I don't think we're talking about a new narrative here. I've been guilty of saying that, like everyone else. We're not talking about a new narrative. We're talking about a new model, right? So what does that new model look like? How do we guide change? What do we want to see as a good outcome? And with that, let me just briefly introduce the panel. David, you already know. He and I will co-moderate, which means that when one of us looks dozy, the other one will give him an elbow. Phil Verveer, who is a true leader in the field, former US coordinator at the State Department and did a great job. But then escaped, which is always a good thing from state. We're very happy to have you here. Vanny Markowski, known to most people. Vice President for Russia, CIS. Do they even use that phrase anymore? CIS in Eastern Europe for ICANN. Jane Coffin, who we're very happy to have here. Director of Development Strategy at the Internet Society. Development turns out to be really crucial. And development turns out to be where the swing votes are. So when you talk to the, you have a Western block and you have an authoritarian block. And the middle group is the biggest. And what they care about is development. So important to hear about that. Bill Smith, technology evangelist at PayPal and a long time veteran of these discussions, even longer than me, which is really startling, right? And finally, Laura DeNardis, who's a professor at American University and specializes in these fields. And Laura, we're very happy to have you here today. So with that, why don't we go down the row? Each of the panelists will speak, as I said, for about five or 10 minutes. We'll start with Phil. And then we'll open it up to discussion. Well, thank you, Jim. I've been asked to try to describe a little bit the present geopolitical context for issues of internet governance. And as you can appreciate in the course of 10 minutes, I'm going to engage in a lot of very crude generalizations, none of which are intended to insult any of the entities or countries that I might mention in the context of this. Obviously, we begin, as you all know, with a multi-stakeholder history that goes back now, at least to the commercialization of the internet, and perhaps before. It has the very decided attractive aspect that has been extremely successful. But from a pragmatic perspective, it is something that has worked very well. It also happens to correspond with something that's happening very decidedly in the wider world of geopolitics. And that is the great significance of non-state actors, the importance of international corporations, of NGOs, other academic institutions that are now spreading beyond their initial national origins, and also some considerably less benign international activities, international criminal activities, and, of course, terrorist organizations. So it turns out that this aspect of the significance of non-state actor is one of the very, very significant contextual things that we have an opportunity to talk about. That said, the foundation of international cooperation continues to be the nation-state. We have adhered to the agreements that were reached in Westphalia in 1648. We continue to do that. It is not something that's going to go away anytime soon. It is certainly the case that from the standpoint of many of the kinds of things that we're going to have to address with respect to internet governance, that we are going to continue to rely very, very decisively on the nation-state. But when it comes to international organization or nations organizing themselves, it's also important to recognize that the United Nations and the architecture that the greatest generation left for us, the one nation, one vote architecture, is something that we have to also incorporate when we think about changes in internet governance. This is something that's extraordinarily important because for many countries, as I'll try to address very briefly, the United Nations and its organizations are the central place where they want to go to resolve any kind of important international matters. And the one nation, one vote aspect of that is not so incidental in terms of their interest in it. Let me just reflect very briefly on this multi-stakeholder process. It creates challenges of the kind that Jim mentioned. It is a kind of interesting and important top level proposition, but it is very important to try to get to the level of detail. We really don't have a definition of the multi-stakeholder process. I tend to think of it as a kind of ethos of inclusivity, which doesn't provide much other than guidance in terms of the notion to the extent that inclusivity is possible. We ought to try to achieve it. But there are a lot of specific contexts where we have to try to come to a much clearer, much better understanding about how we're going to enable participation and what the limits of broad participation may be. Now, I want to sort of conclude by talking a little bit about some of the issues that I think are raised in the context of internet governance, the specific issues that are raised, and why we're sort of brought to the point where this is going to have to be a significant part of our conversation going forward. When the United States advances what is essentially a status quo preference in terms of internet governance, the following kind of suspicion pervades the discussion. So whenever I in the past represented the United States in issues of internet governance, my interlocutors, whether they were hostile or friendly, almost certainly were thinking the following. I understand what you're saying. The United States created the internet. The United States controls the internet. The United States corporations profit disproportionately from the internet. And United States security services have privileged access to everything that traverses the internet. Now, it is a very serious mistake for us to go into any discussions of these things without recognizing that that is a reality that is one that, as I say, is something that I think probably is an important reflection for both those who are very friendly to us and those who are less friendly. Secondly, we have to recognize that the internet has become a mechanism of overarching importance to every country in the world, both in terms of its economic activity, of course, but also in terms of social, political, and cultural considerations. And yet, for many countries, there's no reliable modality that permits them to influence, let alone control what happens. And in this regard, you often will hear controversies involving ICANN being raised by other countries. And the continuing Commerce Department contract is something that often comes to the fore. Third thing to consider is that the content conveyed over the internet largely reflects US legal and cultural sensibilities. And these sensibilities, to understate the case, are not universally shared so that there is certainly, in many societies, a sense that our, from their point of view, very permissive attitudes about content are things that they regard as utterly inappropriate for their societies. And fourth, cybersecurity is a large and growing problem. And there's very substantial uncertainty on the part of many countries about how to address the cybersecurity issues. Now, let me finish by just kind of quickly summarizing what I think the positions, broadly speaking, of the countries that are in the debate happen to be. For the Western countries, and Japan, Kenya, and others, there is a preference for the status quo. That preference is based on the desire to continue the organic growth of the internet, its evolution pursuant to technological change, to changes in business model, to changes in consumer preference, and also the commitment that these countries have to freedom of expression, the free flow of information, generally a desire to permit free speech to avoid political repression, things of that nature. Secondly, however, there are countries that regard the internet as an existential threat, literally as a threat that is immediate to them. In this regard, the lessons of Tunisia, the lessons of Egypt, whether in fact these are correct lessons or not, are at least correctly interpreted lessons, are things that are very much in the forefront of the imagination of many regimes around the world. It is literally an issue of the existence, the continuing existence of these regimes. Third, there are countries, and here most notably, probably Russia and China, that cannot reasonably regard the internet as any sort of an immediate existential threat, but nevertheless regard it as a threat. Now, if you're going to be, I think, try to be fair about this, part of their concerns reflects a deep-seated anxiety about disorder in these societies. And part of it obviously reflects, again, the notion that regime change or impinging on the prerogatives of the regime are something that will be regarded as very unwelcome. And in this regard, then, Russia and China, in particular in terms of many of the internet governance issues, take a leading role forth. There are countries, as Jim mentioned, like Brazil, India, that have a whole set of concerns about the internet. They need it. They want it to work for them. They, however, also feel, I think, rather acutely, that they don't have nearly as much influence in terms of how the internet may evolve as their position in the world entitles them to. These are countries, among others, that have a strong preference for bringing issues to the United Nations, having them resolved within the framework of the United Nations. And that creates, as I said, in part because of the traditional architecture of the United Nations, creates some significant challenges, especially for the multi-stakeholder proposition. And finally, there are a lot of countries in the world for whom the big issue really is development. It is the question of whether or not there are ways that can be ways we can approach internet governance that will help them in terms of extending their broadband networks in terms of being able to improve their cybersecurity environment, a whole range of development issues that they would like to see improvement, or they'd like to see improvement occur. So I think that, to some extent, then, I hope, gives us some notion of the broad geopolitical environment. I look forward to our discussion. Thanks, Phil. May I please? Thank you. I'll take the last words of Phil to make a couple of comments, actually, before I get into the details. So first of all, yes, I am the vice president of ICANN for Russia and CIS, but we are here in Washington DC. So don't take my words as relevant to the situation in Washington. And my background is that I was born in Macedonia and raised in Bulgaria, so I moved to the US recently, relatively recently. But I hear completely and I agree with the development wording about what the internet is about. And I'll share some experience with you just so that you know. And for the folks here who can choose between their internet provider, between the phone company and the cable company, you may be interested to know that in developing country, Bulgaria, there are more than 2,000 internet service providers for seven million people population. So you basically choose between those 2,000 providers, not between two. The result is that you can buy one gigabit connection at home for $15 a month and not one megabit connection for $50 that you do at Capitol Hill in Washington. But we did it because we did it for two reasons. We did it because the government did not interfere into the internet business. They tried. Back in 1999, they introduced licenses for internet operators and that made us very unhappy. We were the internet community, the internet society of Bulgaria, and the internet operator. So we challenged the government in the Supreme Court and we won. And as a result, since then, Bulgaria is given as an example to any of those ITU slash UN related meetings as how the internet could actually develop. Now with regards to the geopolitics of internet governance, I don't know how many people here speak other languages, but the term governance in some languages cannot be translated, including, by the way, in the country of Russia where I'm working a lot. So we have a serious issue of explaining what internet governance means to people who affiliate governance only with government. We also have a problem with explaining what multistakeholder means because we talk about the internet is being governed in a multistakeholder way, but it's very difficult to explain what it means and how is it possible that the government, the private business, the academic world, and the civil society can actually work together. I mean, in some countries around the globe, some of those words are actually almost like a verdict. Now, going back to some of the items that were mentioned and some of the items that I'm sure my colleagues here will also talk about, we believe, when I say we, I mean basically the broader kind of non-Western community, we believe that education is key, but education and development not only bringing the internet into the rest of the world, after all, only two billion people are online, some of the estimates are, and that means five billion probably have never used the internet. Education and development means also to go and educate governments what the internet is, not only governments, but also intergovernmental organizations like the ITU. We have had some anecdotical examples, and I can share with you because I've been sitting on the Bulgarian governmental delegation for the last 10 years at the ITU. There is some anecdotical evidence that even within the ITU, the people who come there are not quite familiar with what the internet is about. Some of you may be aware that the internet, most of you write Google.com or whatever you write on your screen and you visit the website, but some of you know that there is actually numbers behind this name, IP addresses. They are called internet protocol addresses. So there is a version which is expiring already. There are four billion plus IP version four addresses, and there is a new protocol developed, which is called IP version six. And it's huge. It's so huge that if you put all the IP addresses from the old version into a space, which is as big as a tennis ball, the IPv6 addresses will be as big as the sun. So that's the relation between the two. So some people, and I'm not going to mention names or countries just because it's not fair, but some people have said that they want the ITU to become to distribute such IP addresses. And they said, well, let's give the ITU one trillion IP addresses, which it can distribute to developing countries. Now when you compare four billion to one trillion, clearly it's a big difference. The detail that was known then was that you cannot actually have one trillion IP addresses because the smallest segment of IPv6 addresses that you can get consists of 18 million blocks, and each of these blocks has one trillion addresses. So this is when I talked about education. This is what we need to do and what the internet community as a whole needs to do. We need to basically bring our knowledge. And for some of us here, it's like, oh, but it's obvious. How can you not know that? But there are five billion people who have never used the internet. And for them, the whole concept about the internet is not known. They don't know what this is. And even for the two billion who are using the internet and for governments and countries which are far ahead of everyone else, like I can name my favorite Estonia, which is using the internet not only in their daily activities, but they do their elections online. And for some reasons, unknown to me coming from Bulgaria or to anyone here in the US, we don't do that. We don't really have online elections. And whenever I've been raising this issue, there are always people who say, oh, you don't know. It's going to be so much fraud and some hacker from an unknown country may hack into the system and change the result of the election. And I said, well, what happened in 2000 in the US? Wasn't this in a way with no need of a hacker to do it? So I think, I mean, with all my respect, because I don't know really the history. I only know what I see in the movies about this year 2000. So I think the problem that I see about the geopolitics of internet governance is that there are several groups, and Filipe Vivier mentioned some of them. There are several groups of countries slash societies which think about the internet one way. And then there is another group which is thinking about the internet in a different way. Where is the agreement between those? I don't know. But what I know is that the only way to reach some kind of agreement is to sit and talk. It's been amazing to see how people who don't know, for example, what ICANN is. And they have been coming to me in the beginning. The first time I went to Russia in 2006 as member of the ICANN board back then. And people would come and tell me, so who in ICANN controls the button that can shut down the Russian internet? And today when you talk to people in Russia, they actually know there is no button. They know that no ICANN or any other organization can shut down the Russian internet. They know already there are examples of other countries shutting down the whole internet for the whole country and doing it in the name of national security. Or actually there is a much easier example. Your country is somewhere where you only have one connection going outside of the country to connect to the internet. And somebody cut this line. There was a case in Georgia a couple of years ago when an old lady digging her garden cut the cable. I mean, nobody could have expected it. So to end up, and I'm hopeful that there will be questions, I think there are so many perceptions and so many thoughts about what the internet is and who controls it that people forget often that something which actually a Russian journalist wrote in one article in 2007, that the question is not who controls the internet. The question is what controls the internet? Because then he was making a case that it's the protocols and the standard that actually controls the internet. Thank you. Thanks, Fanny. Go ahead, please. Good morning. I was in Armenia at the time when the cable was cut by the little lady who was during the gardening and the internet did go down for a week. Also construction projects used to take the internet down and I would be asked often by my colleagues at the regulatory body, what happened? And I think, how do I explain this? So the debate back then and now is different and broadening. And I am startled like Jim. I was at the 1998 Plenty Potentiary in Minneapolis where resolutions 101 and 102, which have floated around for many, many years, were created. And at that moment, the debate was not with the countries that Ambassador Revere has articulated. A little bit with some of the former Soviet republics, the CIS, and Russia. It was the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada fighting over the word gestion, which in French is management of the internet. It was a fascinating debate at that time because we were just trying to keep the discussions manageable at that time. And as many of you know, the debate has broadened. And as Kathy Brown from Verizon said last week in Geneva at the WTPF, the World Telecom Policy Forum, the debate has matured. But to tag on to a point made by Ambassador Revere, have we matured our education and our outreach with those countries? Recently, I was in Macedonia, Tunisia, Columbia, and at the WTPF almost in that order. It's been a long four weeks. But in Macedonia, I was at a meeting that run by the regional internet registry for Europe, the CIS, and the Arab states, ripe. And we were talking to southeastern European countries about the need for internet exchange points, keeping local traffic local, bringing down costs, all part of the WISIS Tunis agenda paragraph 50. How do you broaden out the international internet connectivity, but through your local connectivity as well? I'm a keen advocate of internet exchange points and focus on that at the internet society. Some of my colleagues from ripe and I were chatting about the debate being almost a debate that was had 15 years ago with some of our colleagues from southeastern Europe. That is not to say that these are not highly intellectual, intelligent people who know how to build infrastructure. The debate is, as our Ambassador Revere and Veni has articulated, we have a vernacular that we've been using since 1998 that has grown up, the multi-stakeholder model. A word that, quite frankly, as a colleague of mine in Thailand has pointed out, that the government there would not understand. By the way, what is the stake? When I lived in Armenia talking to the Armenians, I'd say, well, the stakeholders. And they'd look at me and say, are you talking about food? Or are you talking about stakes, the things you put in your garden? We have a vernacular that we've developed as certain debates have matured about internet governance. But are we now excluding countries who have matured their own debates in their countries? Columbia, the reason I bring it up, the minister from Columbia was at the meeting that I was at, noted that the internet was so important to him that it's a poverty alleviation device. It's a way to create jobs. It's a way to level the playing field. He wasn't going after technology. He has left that to the technologists, to the regional internet registry at the meeting. I was at the LACNIC meeting in Columbia. How is it that we have governments in South America who are now focused and perhaps have a more sophisticated approach than we might have about building the internet, working with stakeholders or collaborators, if you will, coordinating, collaborating, cooperating, trying to build their infrastructure but realizing that they too want a role? The Brazilian government wasn't at the meeting in Columbia, but the Brazilian registry, CGI.br, NIC.br, very sophisticated internet exchange point development. They hand out the IP addresses in Brazil, an incredible force in South America and in the OAS groups that we participate in through governance and discussion of amplification of infrastructure, building that infrastructure, the debates about IPv6 IXPs. Brazil, at the WTPF last week, the government was there. They want a role at the table. They're probably the US's fifth or sixth largest trading partner. They are a huge force to be reckoned with, highly sophisticated, working closely with the internet, technical community in Brazil, building out undersea cables to Africa. How are traffic patterns gonna change? Will Brazil now be a hub? Have we thought about this? Those are geopolitics of traffic management, of the internet, of money, quite frankly. Let's talk about, let's be honest. Is Brazil now asking us, we wanna seat at the table? I would pause it absolutely. Look at the opinion they put forward. A role for stakeholders, a role for government, a role for the ITU. The discussion about internet governance is hot wired into the ITU fabric right now. There is a working group in the ITU council, which is all about internet public policy issues. So are we being a bit naive to say that the debate can't, we can't discuss the internet? We're not supposed to talk about internet governance at the ITU. And are we bypassing very key trading partners, geopolitical partners? Brazil is one of the most sophisticated cyber security teams in the region. They've done a lot to build out cyber incident response teams throughout South America, Caribbean and Central America. Do we partner with them? And do we try and listen to what they have to say? The WICCIT, the World Conference on International Telecommunications, where much of this hit the road, was very difficult debate. WTPF continued that debate but in a more sophisticated fashion. The ITU tried very hard to include more stakeholders. So I will pause it, a couple of questions just for us to think about as we discuss among the panel a bit more. How does the ITU continue to attempt to include stakeholders? How can they do that through the fabric of their policy and procedures? Is it as robust as some of the, we're a non-state actor at the internet society. We've been involved in development of infrastructure policy and governance for 20-something years, a lot of people don't realize that. How is it that we can encourage the debate and as Fanny has said, continue an education that is inclusive. This is not going to stop. We also have the UNGA where the debate will continue over the next two years. We have something called the World Telecom Development Conference in March or May, I think in Sharma Shack. Countries will come together at the WTDC to prepare for what is known as the Plenty Pot, the Plenty Potentiary Conference of the ITU. And I'm focusing in on the ITU because I was just there. I've been involved in it for many years. I've stepped out of that role, quite frankly in the last couple of years, but it came back full force last week. We can't ignore it. We can't ignore that debate. We can't ignore the fact that it is an inter-governmental organization where there is a mandate to have this discussion. How do we have the debate with governments as well? Well, we don't create them. The idea that the internet is a shiny object they must control and manage. I say shiny object because I, again, preoccupation with internet exchange points, helping develop them around the world with my colleagues. They have become a shiny object. Oh, they're fascinating. We should control them. There's D-Pag inspection going on at all Xs. I'm like, no, no, we X, okay. We're talking about local traffic, local. We're talking about building out infrastructure. D-Pag inspection is not part of the fabric of what we're doing at internet exchange points from the internet society's perspective. That may be happening in other countries, but to Vinny's point about V6, which Bill and I had to fight off in the ITU years ago, how do you explain it to someone that doesn't know what an IP address is? Numbers, it's very confusing for some people. And they think, well, I want some. And you think, okay, great. You can have some. You've got to go talk to X, Y, and Z. But where do you get these addresses? How do we create the debate, a fashion the debate so that there's an understanding about the important role of ICANN, an important colleague of the internet societies and the I-STAR community, the regional internet registries? And as Ambassador Rivera has said, we can't keep bypassing this debate about almost stepping back and saying, we have created this vernacular. We've created a world around internet governance. But are we being a bit, I don't want to say rude, but are we being obnoxious and not stepping back and saying these developing countries, emerging markets have a role. They need to be included in this debate. How do we do it? We're very keen to go out and build infrastructure at the internet society, but we have realized through our chapters, and thanks to David for this great exercise here, but also Vinny, who's with the chapter in Bulgaria, for the WICAT and the WTPF, the internet society broadened its own process. We are trying to figure out how to have better to work with our chapters. We have 94 around the world, how to work with them to speak with governments at their level about the local problems, the international challenges, and what this means in a broader fabric. It takes a lot of time. This isn't a debate or a discussion that can be had in five minutes, five hours. It's a continuing debate. I would just also posit that perhaps we do need to listen more to what our colleagues are saying around the world, and we just can't expect them to take the OECD principles. Sure, great, they're these internet principles. Okay, should we take them? Thank you very much, but we didn't adopt them, create them, have a role in making them. So why would they adapt them? We have to help them work through that. Is that something we can do? Same with other principles we know to be core to what we're doing at the internet society. We know we have to broaden the debate. We have to find better ways to do it, and we have to include other stakeholders. Thanks, Jane. Bill, please. So I'm gonna probably repeat a number of things as I've already been said. I'm gonna talk about internet governance on the world stage, things that have happened recently. This would be acronym SUP. You've heard most of them already. So in December of 2012, we had the wicket. We had WTPF last week. We have the ITU Polina Potentiary in the fall of 2014. And for those of you who haven't brushed up on your Latin, planet potentiary means all powerful. So whoever shows up there is all powerful for their government and can decide anything. And then the internet governance form or the IGF, that happens this fall and every fall. Each of these, either directly or indirectly, derives its authority from the TUNAS agenda of 2005, or so it's claimed. The reason you'll get, you'll see why I say that. And as Phil mentioned, we don't have a lot of time, so I'm gonna be pretty blunt in my approach here, though that's my normal way anyway. Computer scientists and engineers prefer very precise terms. As in RFC 2119, terms like shall, must, may, should. They have very definite definitions. You can understand them. Diplomats prefer ambiguity and interpretation. That's how they reach agreement. You'll see that with phrases like where appropriate. Okay, that will be inserted before something where somebody wants to do X, and somebody says, well, no, I don't want you to do X, but we don't have time to figure it out. So, well, we'll put where appropriate then. And then we'll debate that later. The TUNAS agenda is a diplomatic instrument. It is 122 paragraphs of diplomatic language and it is open to significant interpretation. I believe it's actually not the root of the problem we have for internet governance, but there are issues back in there that have never been resolved. As an example, the roles and responsibilities for the various constituents. I'll try to avoid stakeholder. Government, civil society, private industry, the internet, technical community. Our roles are not specified in there, except governments are supposed to decide international internet public policy. But that phrase isn't defined either. So we don't know where that starts, where it stops. And as we know, policy bleeds all over in the internet. I'll get to that in a bit. There is one and only really one organization that's named in the TUNAS agenda and that's the ITU with respect to internet governance. It is mentioned three times. The IGF, as a concept is introduced or it's carried over from a prior document. The ITF, ICANN, IANA, the RIRs, ISOC are all notably absent. They are not mentioned. The ITU relies on this, I believe, to claim a preeminence in this space and to say we're mentioned, we are the intergovernmental agency responsible for doing internet governance. To the point that in 2011, I believe, I think it was 11, the ITU council, which is the governing body between plenipotentiary conferences, established the internet group that Jane mentioned, and they're gonna discuss 12 things in internet governance, sorry, internet public policy. Multilingualization of the internet, including internationalized domain names. They have nothing to do with domain names, but this is, they're going to discuss it. International internet connectivity. They have a role to play here. However, if they have a role to play here and connectivity is lacking, who is to blame? Well, that would be the ITU, because that is their role. International public policy issues pertaining to the internet and the management of internet resources, including domain names and addresses. Again, this is not their space. Those discussions should happen at ICANN. The security, safety, continuity, sustainability, and robustness of the internet. There are organizations that in fact do this. There are a number of certs. There's an organization called FIRST. Again, this should more properly occur elsewhere, in my opinion, combating cybercrime. We have the Budapest Convention. We have the Commonwealth Nations have put together things. Again, other places to talk about these issues. These are law enforcement issues. These affect private industry. The ITU does, has no expertise in this space. Dealing effectively with spam. This came up and was a huge issue with the wicket. It's been dealt with in any number of ways outside of the developing world. As Jane points out, we need to educate people about this. We have not done an adequate job there, but spam can be dealt with. We will never make it go away, okay? But no amount of language in an international treaty will make it go away either. So we have to educate. Talking about it at the ITU is not gonna help. There are active things that we can do. Issues pertaining to the use and misuse of the internet. Now there's a broad term, right? I think they really mean misuse. Availability, affordability, reliability, quality of service, especially in the developing world. Again, this is something the ITU is, in its charter, is supposed to focus on. If there is an issue here, they'd only need to look within themselves to find the root cause. Contributing to capacity building developing countries. Again, developmental aspects of the internet. Again, it's the ITU. So these are appropriate. Respect for privacy and the protection of personal information and data. I don't know of a working group inside or a study group inside the ITU that actually works on this. They have no privacy experts. It is, I believe, largely inappropriate to have this discussion going on there. Protecting children and young people from abuse and exploitation. I will be the first one to stand up and say that we should be doing things to protect children from abuse and exploitation. I don't know that the ITU is the best place to do it. They have a program ongoing there. It's, I think it's fine for them to do it, but there, again, this is an issue not of the internet. It is an issue of the people who create this material, who abuse the children, et cetera. That's where the focus needs to be, not on technology. So if we're going to really have a discussion about moving forward on geopolitics and internet governance, I agree we have to engage at places like the ITU. They clearly want to discuss any issue related to the internet. And the internet community goes there. We fight basically a rearguard defensive action against what is happening, and largely to ensure that no harm is done. But we need to be more proactive with a more forward-looking strategy. And I'd like to recall Phil's description of the perception of the United States with respect to the internet, that we have a controlling somehow, the United States controls what goes on in the internet and its governance. That perception is, in fact, it's not real, but perception is reality. So from the other side, that is reality, regardless of what any of us who work in this space believe. I'm gonna suggest that there's something that ICANN can do and governments can do with the affirmation of commitments. The affirmation of the commitments is a set of promises made ostensibly between the United States Department of Commerce and ICANN. So superficially it's a bilateral document. It reads like an agreement. It says that it's an agreement. However, if you deconstruct it just a bit, you find that it's really just two unilateral covenants. The Department of Commerce is making a set of promises and ICANN is making a set of promises. They happen to be in the same document. And I suggest, I submit, that this could become a multilateral or multiple unilateral instruments where multiple governments sign up and make a set of promises to ICANN as the Department of Commerce and the US government did. And that ICANN in return makes the same promises back to those governments and to the community. Now by doing this, we could at least start down a path where we get governments saying, yes, that ICANN is a recognized institution for names and numbers. And we agree with the principles, the processes that are used, and we are going to ensure, along with the United States government, that it continues and is successful. Thanks. Thank you, Bill. Laura, you get the last word. Thank you very much and good morning, everyone. My name is Laura DeNardis. I'm an internet governance scholar and a professor at American University in Washington, DC. And I'm very happy to be part of this panel on the geopolitics of internet governance and appreciate the invitation. Thank you. I spent the last two years writing my latest book on internet governance. It's going to be called The Global War for Internet Governance. And it's coming out later this year by Yale University Press. What I tried to do is examine and describe the levers of internet governance that already exist. Sometimes, while these kinds of dialogues go on, we forget that the process of internet governance is going on operationally in various institutions and through the private sector. I also tried to lay out some of the current debates and decisions that I believe will be setting the future of internet innovation and internet freedom in the years to come. So I'm delighted today to discuss, I think I'll make three brief points this morning that will be a follow on to some of the things that have already been intimated. The first point I would like to make is that internet governance conflicts are the new spaces in the 21st century where economic and political power is unfolding. And what I mean by that is that the debates sometimes are a proxy for other forms of political and economic conflicts. The debates are sometimes not actually about internet governance, but about other things that are going on in the world. So this is a very highly technical area. But it's one that is politically potent because it inherently involves the technical mediation of the public sphere and, in many cases, the privatization of conditions of civil liberties. Technologies of internet governance intersect and mediate conflicting values such as freedom of expression and issues such as public safety. Think about Google's decision and deliberations. They decided not to acquiesce to requests from 17 governments to take down the innocence of Muslims video in the wake of violent protests and rioting. Internet governance is entangled with national security in many ways. Far too many to itemize here, but you can think about Stuxnet, which probably does exemplify this kind of entanglement, and the technically concealed and mediated nature of what we can term modern warfare. Internet governance technologies are also now viewed as a very efficacious way to conduct intellectual property rights enforcement. If you think about how traditional intellectual property rights enforcement is not really that effective. If you go after content or sue individuals, it's done very little to stop piracy. So not surprisingly, interest has turned to various mechanisms of infrastructure and internet governance. So there's a turn to the domain name system, for example, for IP enforcement. There's a turn to graduated response in infrastructural approaches that cut off infrastructure and many other mechanisms, even blocking transactional and financial flows. Why is this? So corporate media content providers have in some ways lost some control over the monetization of their own content. It's similar to how governments around the world have experienced a loss of control over content. And in particular, regimes with restrictive information policies to contain things like media accounts have lost this control. So they are moving into infrastructure and into technologies of internet governance. So this is a proxy. Certainly the Egyptian internet outage exemplifies this in the most clear way. So despite the physical geography of the internet and the diversity, it's decentralized in terms of physical geography. There's a diversity of institutions. There's the acronym SUP that Bill mentioned of institutions that oversee this infrastructure. There are centralized points of control. This is just a reality. Some are virtual. Some are physical. Some are virtually centralized and physically distributed. But all are increasingly recognized as points of control over internet infrastructure and therefore over content. The second point I'd like to make is one about the privatization of internet governance. Sometimes in a discussion, there is an overemphasis of the role of governments or intergovernmental organizations. But internet governance is not about governments. It's about governance. I'll say governance again. Governance is traditionally thought of as the efforts of sovereign nation states to regulate behavior and activities within national borders or across national boundaries. And certainly governments have a very large and critical internet governance function, whether you're talking about antitrust, computer fraud and abused, identity theft, protection of children, enacting privacy laws. There are many, many roles for governments. But most internet governance functions, this is a point I would like to emphasize, have not been the domain of governments but of private ordering, the design of technical architecture, standard setting activities, the roles of new institutional forms, all enacted in historically specific contexts of technological and social change. Private companies like Verisign, for example, that serve as domain name registries running very vital internet governance operations. Private telecommunication companies that make up the majority of the internet's backbone and can join via private contractual arrangements at these IXPs and interconnection points that Jane has worked so hard on that very vital in the developing world in particular. We have not-for-profit corporations doing critical internet resource work. We have private companies carrying out policy in these various areas. And it's appropriate in many of these areas. But they also are actors responding to political, a political stage that is much broader than that. They receive, there's delegated censorship and enforcement. These private corporations receive requests from governments to remove defamatory material, to take down links to hand over information about subscribers. So delegated surveillance, delegated censorship, delegated copyright enforcement, and delegated law enforcement in general. For better or worse, this has shifted to private intermediaries who fund many of these activities, who carry these things out without any compensation, and have to figure out the many different statutory environments of different and different regulatory environments in different countries. So these companies do assume a challenging task of arbitrating government requests. They also set policy in and of themselves in areas like privacy, reputation, freedom of expression, and other areas that are related to civil liberties. So the bottom line is that much internet governance originates in the private sector in private ordering or is delegated through private ordering from governments. And then a final point I'd like to make is that internet governance, and this is a very important point, is not one system. I often get asked the question, should the United Nations control internet governance versus the United States or versus ICANN or versus some other entity? Now that question in its first instance makes no sense whatsoever, because there is such a mosaic of internet governance that whether cybersecurity, interconnection, standard setting, critical internet resource management, it's distributed. So the internet is governed, but this is a complex mosaic of coordination that is beyond the bounds of these kinds of questions in the various entities that have already been addressed here. And that does include international treaties, it includes the laws of traditional governments within national boundaries, but it's far, far beyond that into the realm of technical design, into the realm of the policy role of private intermediaries and these other many institutions in the acronym SUB that's been mentioned. So a constantly shifting balance of powers between private industry, international technical governance institutions, governments and also civil society has been necessary to create the rough conditions for online economic and expressive liberty and has kept the internet operational for many years. This balance of powers is called multi-stakeholderism in the internet governance landscape. So a point that I'd like to leave with you is to not think about multi-stakeholderism as a value in and of itself. Why is that? It can't be applied homogenously in a monolithic way to the set of keys that controls the internet. It just doesn't make sense to say that. The question is what type of oversight is necessary in any particular context in order to achieve and promote economic and expressive liberty. In some cases, private agreements among corporations have produced the most open results. In other cases, there's an expectation that governments have been responsible and but in some other areas, like critical internet resources, there has been a great movement towards multi-stakeholder bodies with the input of civil society, private industry and governments. So the same type of governance is not appropriate in every area but if you look at internet governance as a whole, grassroots rather than top-down multi-stakeholderism has worked and has helped promote internet freedom. I become very concerned when I hear about top-down discussions of how do we impose multi-stakeholderism because that's exactly not how the internet has been successful in the past. So this interest in top-down regulation and imposition of multi-stakeholderism, it really is a significant shift against the historical norms of multi-stakeholder governance that have been around really since the late 1960s. Internet governance is not fixed any more than internet architecture is fixed. It's constantly evolving. It's constantly in a state of flux and it's not a stretch to say that as goes internet governance, so goes internet freedom. These are very important issues that are being discussed here today and it's very vital that the public and policymakers be engaged in these debates. So I'm very glad that we're discussing this today and I appreciate the opportunity to be part of it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Laura. I think David and I get the privilege of the first question and then we'll throw it out. I'm gonna ask a question that looks at something that everybody kind of brought up and kind of mentioned, but governments want more control, right? So this title, this is geopolitics. Governments want a bigger role and they want more control. And governments remain the most powerful international actors to quote one of our friends, how many battalions has Walmart, right? And the answer is they don't have any, right? I've had this discussion with a lot of IT companies who will say we have the same capabilities as governments. Really, you have nuclear submarines? That's so cool. So you have the most powerful actors in a system who are unhappy with it and the GTLD debate is a good example. How are you gonna accommodate this political desire by many states, shared by many states, probably a majority of states? Where does the UN fit in on this? And then to Laura's points, how do we distinguish roles where it's appropriate for government to have a bigger responsibility or a bigger sphere of action? How do we keep those the way that should stay out? So that's the thing I see when I talk to other governments is they want a bigger role and they intend to get it. So what are you gonna do? What, wanna go down there? Do you wanna start with Vanny in there? Thank you, I think the, I mean, it's fascinating. On the question about the nuclear submarine though, this 14-year-old kid sitting somewhere in the middle of nowhere with his laptop and he's laughing at this question and he's thinking, oh, okay, let's see how fast this submarine is gonna sink, but... I'll take a bat with you on that, Vanny. I'll take a bat with you. I don't, because I care about the people on the submarine. But I think the question is that the government actually are the ones who initiated what Jane mentioned about the plenty potential in Minneapolis when they started debating the internet and the WSA is the World Summit on Information Society. And I'm sorry, we use abbreviations. In case you don't know any of those, you can just ask us afterwards. There are so many. So the governments initiated this, and we mentioned the ITU a couple of times here, but the ITU actually turned down an offer to run the internet back in 95. They said, oh, the internet has no future. We don't care about this. We want to do radio and frequency and satellite management and stuff like that. So I think once the governments let the process run and the WCS, I'm even forgetting, WISIS, the WISIS. The World Summit on Information Society. We'll put a glossary online. Yeah, it allowed, and this was the first time ever that I know of, it allowed actually civil society to participate in the discussions about all this related to the internet questions. Now, we have to remember all these documents that were produced, the Tunis Agenda, the Geneva Declaration, they were actually written by governments. But the civil society, and I was on the governmental delegation back then, but as chair of ISOC Bulgaria, we did have something to say in this debate. So once the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, it's gonna be, it's now very difficult to say, but we the governments have to have more control than you, whoever you are. So I think it's important that we understand as the governments have a stake to play, but also have the other stakeholders, and that's why it's multi-stakeholders. I'm persuaded, but we'll go down the panel. I'll just quickly say, with respect to government control, in what context and where? It depends on the debate. Again, the minister from Colombia, perfectly happy to allow the internet technical community companies, public-private partnerships to flourish. He has other preoccupations for his country, and that's in the broader country, political, geopolitical, social, economic perspective as well. When he came to Geneva last week, he was highly complimentary of the work that the internet society had done. There's a robust chapter, chapters, many of our chapters around South America and Central America, why is it that certain government officials are embracing the internet society? And I can, and the regional internet registries, I think for many of them, they realize, this is something we don't need to control, but why is it perhaps at another forum if they're at the UNGA, and this would be an interesting question for Ambassador Riviere, why does that shift so quickly? And I think it's often, are you in a room with your colleagues at a table sitting behind them or in front of them, and you're not really engaging in a debate like we are, but you're having to speak for your country and your country as a different being or thing or entity, how is it that you position your country? So last week in Geneva at the WTPF, we had Brazil saying, why isn't it that other governments can't come to the table and talk about this issue? And one thing I would say is that a way that the internet society is trying to equalize the debate is through our chapters, through the work of our regional bureaus, through people like me when I go into a country, we've got to speak and talk to governments so that they don't think that what we're doing is something mysterious and bad that they need to control. And so it's broadening that debate and sometimes it's broadening the debate outside the ministry of communications and the regulator. The Ministry of Economy cares about the economy, right? The Ministry of Finance in some countries wants a role, wants trade to flourish. Are we letting equipment in? Are we letting the infrastructure develop? So when we say government control, how do we shift the balance where we are in a forum where it is only a government body, the ITU, where the ITU is trying to let in other stakeholders as appropriate to their mandate and their treaties, as Laura has indicated? But at an internet society meeting, we invite all stakeholders and welcome the different perspectives, but no one's trying to take specific control but to grow that infrastructure. So just to add to the debate there. Okay. So I'm well aware that as you point out, anytime I talk to government representatives, they want more control. What's interesting is, I'll make a couple of points up front, but control is antithetical to the permissionless innovation that is the hallmark of the internet and without it the internet will in fact collapse on itself, I believe, because we will stop seeing new things and we will be left with whatever services we currently have and this is gonna look an awful lot like the telephone system of old where we had exactly one service and that was voice. So the innovation is essential to continue, so the illusion of control or desire to control in fact will cause the collapse of the internet. So I throw that out there. Second point is in reality, no one controls the internet. If you take any piece of the internet out, somebody else is gonna step in either and replace that or it will heal itself and work around the problem area. We have seen that as well. We've had brownouts on the internet, but we have never really had a full blackout where the internet goes down in large measure. So I think that control sort of in the large where the government said we wanna control the internet, that's never going to happen. It just, it can't. Now, we may not be able to make the case to them that that can never happen, but I think that is a fact. However, what we could look for is control in the small. Areas where, and I think to Laura's point, where it's more appropriate for governments to have a larger role, let's say, than other stakeholders. Let's find those areas and bring them in, allow them to do what they do best as governments and get on with it. Give them the perception of control at least and again, perception as reality. And I think we can find examples. I threw the AOC out as an example, a small example, but it may have some value where governments can say, we actually sat down with ICANN. We talked to them, we negotiated, we better understand we're willing to make promises, they're willing to make promises. That gives us a seat at the table but a little more than we have at the GAC. So I think that and perhaps other things. And let's find some. We're talking about global internet governance. And the truth is that a lot of governments don't have an excellent track record in this area. They have repressive information policies that restrict the flow of information and enact surveillance on citizens and stop access to knowledge rather than promoting it. So the same exact technology is that can increase freedom of expression and economic expression can also be used to restrict the flow. So it's just important to say that that more governance with governments is not necessarily good. Second point is that governments are accountable to citizens. So if you look at internet governance processes in general, where do you find the legitimacy? If distributed governance is happening across private ordering and across institutions, the question is where does that legitimacy come from? And it comes from a number of different places but one is transparency, one is accountability, and one is participation. So you look at an organization such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and they have openness in participation and that all voices can be heard. There are a lot of barriers such as technical expertise, money, all those kinds of things but voices can be heard. It's open in its development of the standards. It's open in its implementation in that the standards are actually published and another company can take the ball and run with it, citizens can read it, there's accountability. And it's openness in its use in that multiple competing products can come. So this is just an example of how there are many different ways to find the kinds of legitimacy to have this multi-stakeholder governments without government interaction necessarily. And I'll just leave it at that. I have a few other points I'll make later. Well, I guess I've already indicated I don't think that we're going to see any great derogation of sovereignty anytime soon that governments will continue to be the major players in these areas. So it seems to me that the most important questions come down to this. It is the question of whether or not there are gonna be agreements with respect to intergovernmental activities that will be controlling or will some ways deflect or affect the internet. And you can find things that governments, only governments can do, that they're going to need to do. They're gonna need to either continue to do or do in the first instance that will have very large effects on the internet. The first one is to try to figure out some set of arrangements that will improve the cybersecurity environment. This can only be done by governments. It is something that is absolutely imperative. And frankly, if we don't make some progress on it soon, it will be very unfortunate from a standpoint not just of the internet, but everybody on the face of the earth. Secondly, there are things like trade, international trade, international agreements of all kinds that affect the internet. And here we have to acknowledge that when we say internet, we're not really talking only about the technical architectures and all the rest. We're talking now about essentially everything that traverses the transmission systems. So there are trade related things that governments can do. Attention of government should be directed that way. The same thing can be said with respect to crime, criminal activity. We have formally and informally arrangements that permit law enforcement organizations to work with one another. These need to be improved. There are things of that nature that we can do. But we then get to, I think things that are less precise, but are very important. And they are essentially the view of countries that given the importance of the internet and given their own importance, their own emerging importance, that they deserve a place at the high table. And that part of the desire to get there may well involve essentially imposing costs on the internet and its efficiencies and the rest, just for the sake of being sure that they've secured that place. And here I can say there's a phenomenology that I'm certain exists and that we need to be somewhat conscious of. It really depends on who is in the room with respect to the two governments. To engage in a very crude generalization, the foreign ministry of most countries is going to be very concerned with the stature of the country with respect to status, with respect to things of that nature. Whereas the technical ministries, the Ministry of Communications, telecommunications and so forth, may be much more alert to questions of the efficiency of the transmission systems development, things of that nature. So that you have these internal differences, these internal struggles, and while I'm on the subject, you may take this as a little bit of an advertisement. I've just finished reading a new book that I think is absolutely brilliant on this point. It's a book called The Sleepwalkers. It is about the how Europe ended up going to World War I. Not the why, not who is at fault, but the how of it. And over hundreds and hundreds of pages, the author makes an excellent point of the fact that the internal rivalries, the uncertainties, the confusions within individual governments contributed enormously to this kind of a phenomenology. Now what that suggests in this particular context to me anyway is, again, that we have to keep, we the United States, we anybody who is interested in the continued progress of the internet, have to be as fully engaged as we can be with our government counterparts around the world. My friend, Chris Painter, who handles the cyber related matters at the State Department, is very focused on trying to suggest to other governments that what we need is a whole of government dialogue. In other words, who Chris believes, we want to get everybody from our counterpart government in the room. And we want to have all of our relevant players from the United States in the room when we talk about these matters. And I think as a kind of practical suggestion, this seems to me to be something to be very, very useful to try to pursue. We already have a couple of questions. We'll, I see we have four, we'll go down. Could I ask people to stand up, introduce themselves, and then ask your questions? So we'll do one, two, three, four. Go ahead, and five. Okay, can you hear me? My name is Andrew Mack. And I am with AM Global, and I am mindful of how complex this task is. I've been to 17 ICANN meetings, four or five IGF meetings, and I'm still learning the language. So if it gives you any kind of sense of how complex it is. And English is my first language, and almost everything happens in English, and it's still pretty baffling. What I'd like to ask the panel to do is to complete two sentences or complete two thoughts that you've touched on already. The first one is that we do a lot of work in emerging markets. And a big part of the problem when we're talking to emerging markets governments is that they say, well, we're not entirely comfortable with the system as it is, but at least the IT was talking about our issues. Bill, you mentioned, you mentioned spam, and we've talked with other people who talk about infrastructure. They talk about some of these issues. Nature abhors a vacuum in the absence of the rest of the system talking about what are perceived as being emerging markets issues. I think those of us who believe that the system as it is makes sense, risk something by not addressing that. How can we address that more effectively? And the second question is, you've all kind of danced around the outside of the big tidal wave that's coming with the new GTLDs. That's gonna have a major effect on the world internet community. That's gonna have a major effect on the way that governments are at least perceived that their citizens are gonna be asking about that. So what, if anything, do you think we should be prepared for in that? To my earlier point, right? It's generic top level domain. So .com, .net, .org, these are GTLDs. So fair to say that no one knows this is coming. Jump in on spam, which is not, I wanna, for the record, indicate that this is not something that we normally are involved in with the internet society itself. Obviously the internet engineering task force with the organizational home of the ITF deals with many issues related to cyber security-esque issues. But within the internet society, we do often get questions about cyber security. As Bill has indicated, the wicket revealed there were many issues that governments were interested in talking about. Spam was one of them. To answer your question, one of the ways we can engage in the absence of X, we can engage. We are setting up workshops through the internet society to go to countries, we're focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, to engage and debate about spam. What is it? So that we demystify what spam is. Some thought that US companies were sending spam on purpose for financial reasons so they could recoup more money. Well, there are a lot of other things that happen with spam as well. There could be botnets, malicious code, other. But the question is, why wouldn't we engage? In the absence of the lack of engagement, we must engage. And I think across the board, and to Ambassador Riviere's point, at a level that's appropriate, government to government, stakeholders to stakeholders, we're going in and working with our colleagues in the bureau in Africa that we have, who are rock stars, for my opinion, and asking them, who do we talk to in government? Where are we, who do we target in the internet community? And how do we engage and broaden that dialogue so that it's a more mature debate? But it's also not something that we say, no, you can't talk about it. Because if you say to governments and others, perhaps at the wicket, no, you can't talk about it, they're gonna say, well, we wanna talk about it. Just because. So they think there's something there. And by not engaging, we're actually making it more difficult for ourselves to actually get on with the work, to build infrastructure. And this is one key thing, and I wanna focus on this for a second, and I'll stop talking in a minute. We've seen at the internet society three pillars that have led to development over the last 21 years, plus human, technical, and governance infrastructures being developed in the bottom up manner that Laura was talking about. The internet has thrived through this engagement through permissionless innovation, as Bill has said. How do we encourage that to still happen, engage in the debate so we don't have a standoff, a checkmate, because we don't wanna checkmate right now. That won't do anything to encourage the debate, engage with others, and facilitate the development of the infrastructure, which is so critical. Thank you. Bill, Laura, are you gonna add something? You don't have to. Okay, we'll just, we'll do Bill. Okay, Bill, I'll go first. Thanks, I'll be really quick. Anytime you discuss spam, you're discussing content. That is an issue. And so what we have seen in a number of international discussions is that sometimes when there's a discussion of spam, is that a proxy for some other kind of content regulation? And when you think about how you actually enforce something like spam in a centralized way, as opposed to at the edges of the network, such as in an email platform, you have to do deep packet inspection and inspect the content. So I just wanted to raise a caveat and ask the question, is that something that we want for the inspection of packets across the internet to be looked at for spam? So I just wanted to raise the caveat. On the generic top-level domain expansion, for those of you who are not familiar with this, I can just authorize the development of many, many more generic top-level domains. The proposals have been very interesting. There have been some debates about which ones should be allowed or not. But I think that there's no technical reason to do this, but it will serve a purpose of providing more spaces for innovation and branding and marketing. The bad side of that is that it creates much more of a trademark problem for a trademark holder. So there are some good points to that and some bad. I mean, can I just interrupt on that one? Because this is a crucial point in some ways. And I'm going to tell you something I heard from a Southeast Asian minister who said, hey, these GTLDs, you know who made that decision? We weren't involved. It wasn't a governmental decision. Who is it that is, here's something that affects my economy, my security, my citizens, and I had no rule. I don't like that. What do you say back to him? And it should not be the wonderfulness of it all. No, but since I'm the only one from ICANN, I guess I have to respond to that one, even though I made a disclaimer in the beginning. And I think the answer is that actually for those of you who are not familiar with the new generic top-level domains, it's at the moment you basically have everything that you know after the .com, .info, .bis, or .country code. The new generic top-level domain program will introduce thousands of new top-level domains. So there will be, for example, .nyc for New York City or .berlin for Berlin, .mosco in two languages for the city of Moscow. So the reality is, Jim, is to answer to your question, is that the governments did participate in this program. They did it through a governmental body which is part of ICANN. It's called the Governmental Advisory Committee. And even though it's called the Advisory Committee, and some people say, but I don't want to give an advice, I want to have a veto power or something. The Governmental Advisory Committee actually has a pretty big influence upon the decisions that the ICANN Board takes. And what happens is that in this new world of the internet, there are always new things happening, and we need to adjust. The same way we adjust to the fact that when a government as an internet operator, which I used to be back in Bulgaria, when the police comes and says, we want to know this IP address, who it belongs to, we say, do you have a court order? And they say yes, and we have to give it because it's part of what you do outside of the internet world. So the same way, I think government also adjusts to the fact that the internet was developed as something different than what we know. And to that point, I mean, there is this cliche which says the internet was created so that it will sustain a nuclear attack. If it was created for that reason, which I know it wasn't, but anyway, if it was, then it will survive any attack that anyone can think of, whether that's a government or a 14-year-old kid sitting in the middle of nowhere. Let me do two things here. First, if the online audience wants to submit questions, they can do it through the Twitter hashtag. So we'll get them if you send them in. Which hashtag are you using? Which hashtag are we using? Hashtag is GeoWebgov. Yeah, so we're looking forward to those. Second, in the interest of time, maybe we could compress both questions and answers a little bit. Yeah, I think we had one question here and then Dave, you had a question and then we had two more in the back, so. Okay, sure. Hi, good morning. My name is Carolina Rossini. I am a lawyer and law professor from Brazil. So I want to thank Janey for the very kind words. I worked on this for 12 years and now I am the project director for the Latin America Resource Center at New America Foundation. We think the internet governance and human rights is a very long name. So my question is, and I think Jane tackled this a little bit, is how we build capacity within this new generation that's coming out, right? You tackle a little bit, the generation that's already in the debate, that still has questions, right? But we have a huge new generation coming and we need to build some type of curricula to address those issues and to address those needs and to create capacity also in developing and emerging countries to deal with that. So my question for you is how, and I like a lot what Lara said about the grassroots smooth stakeholderism so how we can, with that ethos in mind, create some partnerships and create, because we cannot go to every country doing workshops, right? Like I'm exhausted of traveling and you probably are too. So how we do that using technology to reach out to this new generation and also how to address, for example, this new generation to understand the complexity because as David mentioned, we have internet governance issues being discussed in TPP, in ACTA, in all those ones and not everybody's paying attention to that. So how to address that complexity, thank you. Sure, so partly glib, but partly truthful answer is we have this thing called the internet. So if we produce material in an acceptable form, it can be delivered through web browsers. We can do webcasting. It is a problem, as you pointed out, to get to every country on the planet. There are roughly 200 of them. And to do capacity building on that scale is difficult. I would point out the ITU has that ability, but it is chosen, in my opinion, to not educate, not do the work that it claims it is supposed to do with respect to the internet in terms of educating people. So we ended up at the wicket with spam as a problem. That's also a shame on us because we didn't recognize that as a problem, but we did sit down with people and listen to them and we know now we have to go out and do the hard work. But I would really strongly suggest that we begin looking at ways to educate people remotely. That also plays into sort of development goals. The UN is doing some things at myworld.org. And the top three things, no matter what region you look at, country you look at are education, healthcare, and open government. And the internet can help with all of those. So I think we should be focusing on those things is how to bring more people in remotely, when we can, and educate them about things like the ITF, ICANN, et cetera. My co-moderator has a question. Thanks, Bill. Although, Bill, you're so mean to the ITU. You're making me look good. I mean, it's really... David, please. Yet to follow up on that. A lot of people in the ISOC community view the ITU and the WICCIT very adversarily, to put it mildly. And Jane, you spoke well about the need to be more involved. And Bill, you said some interesting things about transferring some of the protocol DNS IP functions that the ITU is trying to tackle to ICANN and getting governments more involved than ICANN. How realistic is it to get greater government to try in participation and for ICANN to become that form instead of the ITU? One quick thing. Partnerships are key. And that was one thing the Internet Society is actually working now on something we're calling a learning management system, a platform where we can hopefully be an aggregator and not try and be the one and only. Be very clear about that. But bring in information for training purposes. We do this through chapters as well on the ground. 94 of them through our bureaus. And it's not just obviously the Internet Society. ICANN is doing amazing work. They've expanded their reach. They're putting in new offices around the world. I think it's through partnerships and I can also articulate factually, we're working closely with the World Bank now. They've got programs around the world, Internet Exchange Point, infrastructure development. It has to be a conversation that's broadened, working with governments as well and with the ITU. Let's be clear there were challenges and the WICCIT was tricky to use a colloquial word. But recently I was asked to provide a presentation and my colleague Sally who's watching from home who is supposed to be here versus me will find this a bit of a surprise because I was just asked yesterday to participate in ITU development sector meeting. We can broaden the debate that way. You know, one of the people always talk about electronic Pearl Harpers and I usually call the WICCIT a digital Dunkirk because we didn't win but we were able to escape. Can you hold up your hands if you have questions out there? Oh, goodness. Well, while we're getting microphones up. I wanted to respond to David's question. I think the key issue here is actually leadership and we have seen in the last few months, I mean, inevitably when people talk about internet governance they talk either about the ITU or ICANN. For some reasons they kind of avoid all the other structures which I'm sorry, Jane, me also being with ISOC. But people talk about ICANN and the ITU like 99% of the time. And I think the leadership has shown of the two organizations in the last probably six months actually starting from the WICCIT. I think no matter how we call WICCIT and who won, who lost, I think I hate the idea about comparing this to winning and losing. What we saw at the WICCIT when the first time the CEO of ICANN spoke and then at the WTF he spoke, we saw there was an amazing picture and you can Google it and find it on Flickr where the Secretary General of the ITU, Hamad-Unture, put a blue helmet at the opening of the WTF and said, well, people say that we want to take over the internet. I'm here to tell you we are not gonna take over the internet. And I think that's a little change. Now we have to be aware that next year there is a plenty of potentially meeting at the ITU and there will be a new Secretary General elected. And I think the biggest challenge that we are facing as community, as internet geeks or internet users is that there are always opportunities to improve or not. And if whoever is running on this could run on a platform that the ITU is doing a great job and should do a better job in capacity building, radio or whatever, or they can run on the WICCIT platform, so to speak, and say, well, the ITU is not doing enough in the internet so we need to do more. And clearly that will bring a lot of heated debates and I'm sure that this will, I mean, we'll see it in the next 18 months if everyone here is healthy and alive, but I'm fascinated by the thought that a couple of people just sitting together and talking to each other can say, you know what? I'm inviting you to speak at this conference and I'll come and speak at yours, so you know whatever. Okay, Mike. And then we've got some in the back if we could get in a microphone, so you're next then, Mike, go ahead. I'm Mike Nelson with Bloomberg Government and I'm also very involved in the local chapter of the Internet Society, a couple real quick points. I want to start right now the campaign to get Bill Smith elected head of the ITU and Jane Kaufman, deputy director. Second, I want to point out something very important that ISOC's doing tomorrow. For those of you who are members, we have a conference call on the results of the forum that you've all been mentioning and that's available to all members. There's also a great paper by David Clark that everyone should read called Control Point Analysis. If you wanted to understand all the acronyms and how this all works, it's a very clear academic paper that David Clark wrote for TPRC. But I have a question, real quickly. Here in Washington we say all politics is local. I actually don't believe that. I think actually the economics is as important and only one of you really talked about money. Laura talked about the flow of money and none of you talked about the flow of dirty money. A lot of what's driving these countries to do what they're doing is because they're corrupt politicians who are skimming off large quantities of money off their telecom operations. And when we come in and tell them to open up their markets and let American companies make money, they see that as a threat to the money they're getting and putting in their Swiss bank accounts. Is there anything we can do to change the role of corruption in this whole debate? Don't all leap forward. Well, Philip is thinking. I can say that taking the, you mentioned Bulgaria and people didn't hear it online. There was this conversation, we just have a new parliament there and there is this conversation between a just appointed young member of the parliament. He said, you know, our leader is talking about corruption and fight with corruption. I don't know what corruption is. And the other guy says, you know what driver is, right? You take the money, you do the job. Corruption is the same, but you don't do the job. Okay. Phil, Laura, Bill. Yeah, I'll go quickly. Corruption is something we deal with all the time. Okay. I certainly don't talk about it because there's really nothing we can do about it. It's part of the resistance. If you look at sort of those who want to see a free open generative internet and argue for it forcefully and those who sit on the other side, if it's two sides, you will have people who are corrupt because they want to keep making the money the way they might make it. And there are a bunch of other aligned groups as well that do, it's an alignment of convenience rather than anything being architected this way. But so the corrupt agencies are part of that. You will have those, the authoritarian regimes will also be aligned and other things. And they're the areas, and as I think was mentioned before, they're sort of the less aligned group. And they're the people we have to not necessarily target but educate, help understand why it's beneficial to them and their economies because it will be beneficial and especially if we target the things that they care about, education, health care, and open government. Open government's not gonna work on the corrupt states though. We had a question over on the right side. I'm Judith Halasim with the ISAC chapter in DC and we have a couple of questions from the remote participant. We are having a very active debate there. One of the questions is, can be summarized, has been asked by a couple of people is what is your opinion regarding IP protection on the internet and how it relates to content regulations and what suggestions you might have for proceeding? And then the second question is for Veni and it asks about what do you think the discussions and the negotiations will go and how they will be conducted? Are they gonna be with ITU, ICANN, IGF or anywhere else and who's gonna moderate them? Phil involved in that one too. Anyone wanna touch IP protection? Go ahead Laura. That's a really important question and it actually involves two parts. So one part is the intellectual property rights that are embedded in the actual internet infrastructure and in technologies of internet governance. It's a very complicated area. There are three parts of that. One is standards-based patents and we see a movement around the world away from royalty-free standards towards proprietary approaches which I think is a little bit of a problem that I'd like to flag. The second area is the whole quagmire of domain name trademark disputes that are occurring and there's a global system called the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Process that takes place kind of within ICANN that so far has been effective in dealing with that but it's constantly evolving and changing. And then the third part is the issue of trade secrecy in information intermediation such as the algorithms for search engines and the relationship of trade secrecy and this openness and transparency that we've been talking about. The other side of this is the issue of content regulation in dealing with intellectual property rights infringement of movies and video and video games and other kinds of protected copyrighted information and I would like to make one point about that. I recommend that we not increasingly use the domain name system for that because this is a system that has what, at least 100 billion transactions per day and it's doing enough just trying to keep the internet operational and translate between IP addresses and domain names without also going into IP enforcement. So rather than doing that, which can tamper with the stability and security of the internet, I think that approaches that are more targeted even if it gets into access, infrastructure, transactions and payments that that has less of a collateral damage to the overall technologies of internet governance than using the domain name system, thank you. The question I wrote down was IP protection so we might just wanna note that there's a trade and law enforcement aspect to that as well. So I don't know who, Phil, of any, do you wanna do the negotiation there? Thank you. They asked me but I think Phil can respond more diplomatically than me, let's put it this way. Let me see if I can't combine and say something about the two questions combined. It does seem to me that we have an opportunity at the moment that may be an unusual one with respect to efforts to negotiate new trade arrangements both in the context of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, trade discussions been going on for some time and now the new so-called TTIP, Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that would be in essence an EU or European US free trade agreement. This, I think these trade agreement negotiations may be the thing that gives us the best opportunity we've had in a long time to make some progress in terms of international agreements, understandings, mutual understandings about how to proceed with respect to a whole range of subjects that are very important to the internet. The question of intellectual property protection, the question of transnational flow of data, privacy, a whole range of things like that. And I think if we're talking about, particularly talking about formal international negotiations, these may be the two most promising things that we have on the agenda right now. Hello, my name is Paulette Lee. I'm an international development communications as in marketing, not as in IT person and therefore have understood only about a third of what you said because of all the acronyms. So I would, first of all, I'd like to suggest that on the program you might wanna print the acronyms that are frequently used. My question is I'm concerned that I'm not hearing some perspectives vis-a-vis geopolitics. I'm not hearing the perspective of, it was mentioned a little bit, but I'm not hearing the perspective of an autocrat. You know, let's say somebody, a leader in Iran. And I'm not hearing the perspective of somebody of a future. I'm not hearing the perspective of someone who doesn't have, someone who is, let's say, the 14 year old. I'm not hearing the perspective of the person who doesn't have access readily to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa where I worked extensively. I'm hearing a Western, white perspective and I'm wondering if you could put some other hats on and speak to a different perspective. Thank you. So the Ayatollah Murakowski will address. Well I've lived 21 years under communism so I guess I'm the only one on the panel that is considered non-West. But I actually have made it, it's on my nose here that I should have, somebody, I think Laura mentioned something about freedom of expression and that reminded me of the fact that if you don't know the communist constitutions were the most democratic in the world. And we had freedom of expression and as the Polish say, yes we did, but there was no freedom after using this freedom of expression. So I completely understand you when you say that. However, what I noticed was that in the context of internet governance, not always the ideas that we think are the right ones come necessarily from the West, so to speak. There are many ways when ideas come from non-Western countries. And this division West East, South North, I find it not quite true in the internet governance context. If you go and talk to, if you go and participate in one of the say internet governance forums, the IGFs, you will see there are like a couple of thousand people from around the globe and they talk about, they exchange ideas and I think that's the beauty of the debate that we are talking about, not necessarily governmentally driven. Because as we mentioned, when you have the foreign ministry, it's one thing. When you have the telecom ministry is a different thing. Well, guess what happens when you have people from Brazil who are coming and talking about copyright, but not about the copyright we know but about the creative commons. Which was created by an American, by the way. But it's now around the globe and Sweden is the country that has the most licensed works under creative commons. Is this beautiful, it is. Is it good to share information or it's good to control it? Now, if you talk to an American company though, you will say no, no, no, copyright creative commons is bad, we need to have like the MPAA and the RIAA, they will be all over you. And this is a debate which I think should not be framed in the context of naming somebody authoritarian or not and to use the opportunity because people often think about Russia being authoritative and Putin trying to control. There is this famous dialogue now, it's famous. Two years ago, Mr. Putin then as Prime Minister visited the ITU and had a conversation with the Secretary General and they talked about a number of items. Now, what was not known is that the first five minutes of every meeting of the Prime Minister or the President of Russia, they take minutes and they put a stenogram out on the website. So to the astonishment of many, the discussion about the control over the internet was driven not by Mr. Putin but by the Secretary General. And nobody knows it, if you read the Western media you'll see Putin wants control, it wasn't the case. So I'm always very cautious when we talk about it and I always wanna hear about the people at the IGF and other for us, wanna say. Jane and Bill, did you have quick follow-ons? Super quick. With respect to the internet governance forum, the IGF, key place for discussion, there is a youth forum there, there is often very robust debate. I'm gonna try and channel some people that I met with in Johannesburg last year about 21 internet exchange point coordinators, network operators and managers. Again, well, we may be here in Washington and that's why you see the people that you see up here. We have many people around the world that we work with very closely. If I were to channel some of those peering coordinators, they'd say internet governance. I'm trying to interconnect the network. I'm trying to channel local traffic around the country. Governance for them is how to maintain the lock on the door, the air conditioning unit, the electricity as you're saying. For them it's also, do we create a committee to run this IXP when we mature? So there are very nuanced levels of debate from the technical perspective, as Laura is saying at the internet engineering task force, where people come together from all over the world in many ways to talk about the infrastructure. And so it's very difficult to pinpoint exactly how I can articulate it for you, but there are people around the world who are having this debate, but they're having it at different layers. Technical, human, economic, political, as an ambassador viewers are articulated. And I'm not trying to represent all of their views, but we do know very well how things have succeeded over the last 21 years from the human, the technical, and the internet governance infrastructure development. But we can continue the debate with you offline about some of those aspects, if you'd like. Maybe we should take the question, Bill, is that okay or do you want to? I just want quickly on the, so I want to follow on Jane's point, the 14 year olds, that absolutely they show up at the IGF, they talk to people like Vint Cerf, Bob Pepper, okay. So they are engaged, you don't see them here because they aren't actually involved in the governance of the internet. And the reason you see a lot of middle-aged or older white men is because we're the ones, and there's some women, I know, I know, but we're the ones actually that, at least in Washington, had a lot to do with the internet in the early days, and they're on. Also CSIS is the home of old white men, I'm really surprised that I know that. Exactly. Give me a break. And I think the last point on this I would want to make is that what we are doing in terms of the internet and internet governance is not just for our children, we have to, we have an obligation to look beyond them and see what their children want to do with it. And for us, what we hear generally is, I think, is keep it free and open. We want to be able to do things with it. We don't know what, but we want to be able to do things with it. We had a question over there, and then one on the internet, and then one in the front. Yes, hi, my name is Limerie Thompson, and I'm a member of the ISOC DC chapter. We have two questions from our Twitter feed, GeoWebgov. The first from Andrew Mack, a Brazil as an internet power in cyber security infrastructure. Will we see new cables in Brazil to Africa and what would change? And the, that was a statement. Okay, all right, so that's not a question. And then, so we could touch base on that, and then the other... Limerie, we'll be taking questions from Twitter in a minute. We want to take a few more from the audience, and I got them up here. You got them? Great. Thank you. My name is Joe Moss. I am a digital media internet freedom fellow at USAID. So my question is actually for Ambassador Revere. If we could take a sort of step back, a more macro look at how the United States government is structuring its approach to internet governance in terms of communicating across agencies to formulate policy and perspectives. How can, just to drill down a little, how can USAID engage at the mission level, for example, on issues of development as it relates to internet governance and furthering the United States position in this area? It's a very good question. I think sort of briefly there are sort of two things maybe to be said about it. First is that the normal interagency process applies to almost all of the internet related policy questions that we pursue. And it is something that consumes an enormous amount of energy and activity as the discussions between them of all relevant agencies take place, normally take place or at least in some sense under the auspices of the White House, but also a little less formally. Secondly, the point you make particularly about our missions and about the development activities is something that I think is enormously important. It is something that frankly we work at or we did at least during the time I was at the State Department in a somewhat informal way. It is something that needs to be stepped up. We had regular liaison discussions with USAID here in Washington, but these are discussions that have to involve ideally many, many other players, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, others that are also participants in terms of the important development possibilities. And it's an area where there's a lot of opportunity for improvement. Thank you. I'm David McCauley with Bloomberg B&A. And I have a question about the name and address space that I, Anna and I can't take care of. It's an important discreet part of the internet governance. And it has to do with the Governmental Advisory Committee which seems to be morphing rather quickly. And so I'm asking if anyone would like to comment on how GAC is interacting with ICANN and how ICANN is going to respond to the GAC as the GAC seems to be exerting a little bit more influence and broader power. And are governments waking up to what the GAC is and what their participation is in the GAC? Thank you. There is somebody who can respond actually more properly to that question. I'm Jamie Hedlin. I'm with ICANN and have dealt a lot with the board and the GAC on exactly these issues. And I think ICANN has actually, there's a great story behind ICANN and the GAC's involvement. As far as I know, it's the only multi-stakeholder organization where there's an institutional role for governments within the organization. Under the, there's a governmental advisory committee and now has 124 member states or 124 governments who are members and about 25 IGOs who are observers. It has grown in leaps and bounds over the past few years. It was highly effective and influential in shaping the new GTLD program. Before it was launched, there was a board GAC consultation. The GAC had 12 topic areas divided into 80 issues and the board and the GAC reached resolution on 90% of them. Most recently coming out of the Beijing meeting that we just had in April, the GAC as many of you may have seen sent their communique, which has 11 pages of advice, additional advice on GTLD strings. And that process is making its way through. So I think ICANN is a great example of governments working in their capacity and on advising on matters of public policy, having an effective role that's guaranteed by the bylaws which requires the board to consider GAC advice. So it is a model that can work that is not government only, but in which a lot of ICANN's credibility hinges on the governments having an effective voice within ICANN. Okay, why don't we take two questions from Twitter? Okay, we have a few questions, two short questions. Atlora DeNardis, looking forward to your book, can I pre-order? I love that question. I think you can pre-order it on Amazon now. So the answer is Amazon? Yes, Amazon.com, thank you. And will someone please let me know where I can find David Clark's paper, tprc.org. Okay, moving on to another... Oh, pardon me. Okay, who do you think are the current, this relates to the question Mike asked earlier, who do you think are the current kings of the flow of money in the internet and how do you think it might change in the future? Whoever knows the answer can approach me after this session. Yeah, okay. Cypress, we'll take one from the four and then we're gonna, that'll be the last question. Did we have one? We had one in the middle back there. I'm Jose Pardo, I'm a lawyer. Question for Laura. One minute, we need the microphone. Jose Pardo, I'm an attorney. Laura, you touched on the subject of non-democratic governments and I'd like to know what your perspective is on youth, young people who are more attuned to the internet and their role with states that rule propaganda in all control of what people know as the view of the world as it happened in the Soviet Union before it collapsed. One of the things I always feel when I talk to Chinese officials is some of them live in a pink bubble because they're reading people's daily and so they don't know a lot of what we would know and it makes it very difficult to have a discussion. Now there are other officials in China who clearly know exactly what's going on and you can have good discussions with them but Laura, I don't know if that... Thank you, that's a really important question and I think that when you look at media narratives around the subject and discussions of Arab Spring and the possibilities of social media to enact change, what's forgotten in that whole narrative is the fact that there are real identification requirements in social media and ways to, an entire ecosystems of identity extraction in which governments can find out who people are. So it's a constant cat and mouse game between technologies of dissent and technologies of repression and I think that a lot of the answers here are in technologies and particularly ones that can provide some anonymization. I don't really have a great answer to this question except to say that it's an important one because the narrative about the prospects for democratic change through the internet do not capture the reality of these kinds of identity infrastructures and repression that do occur and people are in jail right now because of the exact issues that you're talking about. Why don't we go down the row and just any final thoughts from our panelists because this is a pretty knowledgeable group here. Sure, so my final thought is around the GTLD space, the new GTLDs and the GAC advice in particular. I think we're at a, with ICANN, we're at an important moment, especially following on from the wicket, which was, I think was a seminal moment for the internet. At that time, it became clear, 54 to 89, that there are a set, a large set of member states that want to see a free open and generative internet and there are another set that would prefer something different. And I think a large number of those may not know why they want something different, but that's where they are. ICANN has an opportunity here with the GAC advice in the new GTLD space to actually pay attention to the GAC advice. Much of that advice, having read through it, may not be considered favorable by many within the community, but it is advice from governments. And it was very carefully considered, I know I've spoken with the people who have helped produce it. I think the board will go against that advice, not so much at its own peril, but it will raise issues in the larger debate on the geopolitics of internet governance. This is an important time. This whole process is being inspected. I've said in a meeting in Beijing in the business constituency meeting back from the 70s, the whole world is watching. If you remember that time period, the whole world is watching what ICANN is doing at this point. And the decisions that are made are going to have an impact going forward. Jane. How do we broaden the debate as the internet technical community with government effectively? It's an important discussion that the internet community should have with it, among and with itself and with the broader global community. We work very hard to try and build internet infrastructure to promote the protocols that run that infrastructure. How do we educate and how do we have those conversations better? Because this isn't an us versus them. This is a collaborative discussion. We need to have that and think about better ways to do it. Thank you. Veni. Thank you. Having sued the government of Bulgaria 12, 13 years ago. That's why he lives here. Yes, yes. You shouldn't have said that because now you're ruining the moment. Everyone was thinking, oh, and he's alive. I have to tell you two things which I learned back then because again, the government said, we're going to license the internet service operators because we can. And yes, they could. And nobody, and I still remember people from the government telling us, but why don't you want to have a license? It's so nice. You're going to put it on the wall in your office and your service will be much better. And we kind of, we couldn't click what's the relation between having a license and providing fast and cheap internet. But one thing the then prime minister said, which I still remember, he said, guys, if you want to, by the way, he joined the internet society later and became a member together with the president. So he said, if you have a problem and you want the government to solve your problem, you have to make your problem a governmental problem. And that's what we did. We sued them, we brought them to court, we had more than 300 publications in a period of 10 months against them. And we even had the German chancellor Schroder who visited Sofia and had a lecture with students to say, I see no political or economic reason to license the internet, for which the German friends from ISOC were like, wow, we wish he said that in Germany. So I think we understand this issue about internet governance as necessarily a problem. We say somebody's going to lose, the current model's going to lose if governments are involved. No, governments should and have to be involved because this is part of the infrastructure. And no government can say, I don't control the internet in my own territory. There is no such government. The US controls the internet if they want, as we know from past experience, they could go and the Congress can issue statements or they can subpoena somebody and then they will control whatever they want. And the Russian government or the Bulgarian government or any government has control over the national legislation and that's what decides what happens within the borders. But Philippe Vir mentioned the Westphalian model and there is a very nice article and I recommend you guys read it from a guy who actually spoke at the CSIS last year. He's the Estonian president. So if you go to president.ee and go to his speeches of June 8th last year, just find this speech and read it because it's the essence of what the internet could be. Thank you. Ambassador, you get the last word. All right. Well, I think the, in one way, the single most important issue with respect to internet governance is to try to prevent the internet from falling subject to intergovernmental control. It's quite clear, as Vinnie just said, it is subject to national control in every nation but it is to try to prevent it from falling subject to intergovernmental control. Now this seems like a very defensive and kind of status quo proposition in terms of policy. But the point, I think, is to provide more time, more space for the internet to continue to develop, to continue to evolve in an organic way. And I think as that happens, the advantages of it, the material advantages, the cultural advantages, the social advantages and so forth continue to expand out to all the people on the face of the earth. And over time, I think it's going to make it much harder for authoritarian regimes, regimes that, for whatever set of reasons, are fearful about the free flow of ideas to basically assert control.