 Our next portion is what we love to do the most, which is having a conversation, and this is about RethinkingAmericas.com hegemony. The moderator for this is our very own Sasha Meinrath, vice president of the New America Foundation and director of the Open Technology Institute. He's an expert on community wireless networks, municipal broadband and telecom policy. He founded, most excitingly, the commotion wireless project, aka the Internet in a Suitcase and along with Vince Surf is the co-founder of the Measurement Lab, the MLab, a distributed server platform for researchers around the world to deploy internet measurement tools, advanced network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. Sasha. Thank you, and if the rest of the panelists could come up, that'd be great. Yeah, so MLab now we've got about 600 terabytes of data available for anyone that wants to use it for free, and that's growing by about 500 gigs a day, and Milton actually has done some research using some of that data. It is quite an exciting project. I'll give a little bit of background on each of the panelists, their reputations, proceed them. Depending on how you count it, I believe, Andrew was, I can, employee number one. First paycheck, but there were three of us. My belief is that mine was the lowest numbered. Gotcha. Check one. That's the Internet Corporation for signed names and numbers. They help. No, I didn't seem important at the time. I was just desperate to have some money in my bank account. That's right. And before becoming world famous at the White House, you had worked for a large search engine firm. I think we first met when you were bringing broadband ideas to African regulators. Is there another search firm out there? I mean, I should Google that at some point. And as of 1129 has now coined the NECAP, the ITU campaign with the whole, I hope somebody got a picture of that because that was pretty exciting. That is a very bloody metaphor that I now regret. Constrain Yeah, I think right. Excellent. Next, Andrew, we have Ellery Biddle, who is a policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology West and has flown in just for this. She's been working primarily on international projects with CDT and helping coordinate their West Coast activities with our Ganshu and headquarters out that way. And in particularly a focus on Latin America and a deep knowledge of what's happening in Cuba. She works with Global Voices Online along with actually Rebecca, who's in the audience and will be speaking later and covers a lot of the Cuban blogosphere internet policy affecting Latin America as well. And on her left, right next to me, is of course Milton Mueller, who has written a couple of books on Internet Governments, Networks and States, the Global Politics of Internet Governance, Ruling the Root, Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace, which for me was a seminal book to read back 10 years ago, I guess now, and really sort of documented for a lot of folks for the first time what was actually happening in a lot of these strange and at that time completely unknown spaces that were beginning to affect the very trajectory of communications in civil society. And Milton usually gives like the big thumbs up to the research analysis we do, but also occasionally throws the sabbat sort of the, well, that's just total crap, Sasha. And so I'm hoping that he will help keep us honest. This panel has a deep historical appreciation and knowledge for what's transpired in these spaces and a remarkable geopolitical acumen around these issues. But also a pinch, as we saw with Andrew, a pinch of feist to keep things interesting this morning. So why don't we get this started? We'll start with brief comments from each of them and we'll just go down the line. We'll have a bit of discussion in Q&A up here, and then we'll open it up for the remainder of our time for audience Q&A. So start thinking about what you would like to ask them or how you'd like to tell Andrew things about what he just proposed earlier. Milton, if we want to start with you then. Okay, how's the sound? Can you all hear me? It sounds like it's okay. Good. So I want to begin with a historical perspective. We have actually a long-standing problem going back decades in which globalized institutions that promote the free flow of information are seen as a cover for U.S. hegemony. You can go back to the 70s and the so-called New World Information Communication Order. You can go back to the World Summit on the Information Society, and now we have the Tempest in a teapot known as the International Telecom Regulations, which the same issue is being debated. So we are against ITU and UN governance, or so we say, because we think there's something inherently wrong with it, and Andrew articulated a lot of those reasons. But many people in the rest of the world suspect that we are actually against it simply because it means that we, and by we here I mean the U.S. government and some of its larger economic interests and corporations, are simply not as powerful in that context as we are in the so-called multi-stakeholder regime that's been built up around the Internet. And so they simply may not buy a lot of our arguments, and the ITU feeds on this by presenting itself as the alternative institutional framework for nation-states and developing countries who are resisting U.S. hegemony. Again, this is not new. And I think this is an argument we need to take seriously, and I think we have to deal with it primarily by being consistent about actually creating and building new, open, democratic, and multi-stakeholder institutions to govern the Internet. And that we, you know, our response to that concern is seriously undermined by the inconsistencies in the U.S. position. So let me just put it on the table here. I am against the hegemony of the U.S. government. I am for a hegemony of liberal values. And many people in this country confuse those two. They consistently, persistently make one stand in for the other. They view the U.S. as a steward of liberal values, and it's easy to do this because of course in the relative scheme of things we do have a fairly liberal constitution. But from a consistent and principled perspective, the U.S. is just another government. Okay? Indeed, as the world's most powerful government, it deserves special scrutiny and special concern with respect to its ability to intervene and exert power over communications. Now, Andrew attacked the ITU for fostering and facilitating communication surveillance. Well, that's a strange charge to come from the land of warrantless wiretaps. Who do you really fear in terms of surveillance and communications more? The ITU, which is fundamentally not that confident when it comes to dealing with encryption and things like that, or the NSA and the FBI. I just wonder, you know, if you had to worry about those two things, which ones you would worry about more? We complain that the ITU is centralized and hierarchical. But nothing could be more centralized and hierarchical than ICANN's authority over the domain name system. Indeed, because of sovereignty and the ability of governments to opt out of the treaty and to have it ratified by a nationally democratically elected system, in many respects, ICANN is more centralized. And once it makes a decision and implements it in the domain name system, it's done. You either have to create an entirely new domain name system or go with it. And as Andrew rightly noted, our own military industrial cybersecurity complex is pushing for certain forms of centralization. It was our people who declared that cyberspace was a national asset. Think about that. What does that mean? A national asset cyberspace? And we're pushing for new technical standards based on public key infrastructure, which also have the tendency to make things more centralized and potentially even more brittle. So here's my bottom line. This is a great opportunity, or at least it was a few years ago. We need to build new global governance institutions for the internet. And they need to be non-nation state based. And we need to leave behind nation states and intergovernmentalism as much as we can. So I fundamentally agree with the idea that not that we need to kneecap the ITU, but that we need to move beyond it. We need to be constructive in the sense of creating just and effective government institutions, governance institutions that are not nation state based. And unfortunately, we're failing in this task because no one seems to understand the need for these new institutions to truly be institutions. That is to have stable and predictable rules that people follow to have real processes that people followed. If I had time, I could give you two examples that occurred just yesterday of ICANN just arbitrarily making decisions that completely ignore their own processes. So let's get our own game in order and let's build these new multi-stakeholder institutions in a way that really simply leaves the old institutions in the dust. And we'll get a little bit of geek cherry springer up here. I can't employ a number one versus Milton Mueller fight. And the limbering up for the chair-throwing phase. That's right. Very good. And you, of course, will just be collateral damage given your position. But would you like to weigh in on some of these issues and what you've been working on with CDT? Yeah. So I think, Andrew, I guess I'd like to pick up or pick up really on points that you both kind of left off with, which is the, you know, if not the ITU, then what or then whom? I think many of us here agree that the ITU is not the right place to take these kinds of governance and internet policy questions. And I think that a lot of people in a lot of the world feel pretty much the same way, that they're frustrated by the lack of institutions or groups or bodies where they can take the issues that they're concerned about. I think in a lot of the discussions in the U.S. primarily about this issue, there has been this kind of talk about, oh, well, we have these great multi-stakeholder groups that you rattled off a bunch of them. They're just lots and lots of acronyms. I'll have to repeat them, but these groups are, you know, they work pretty well. We've gotten to a stage where there are little groups that focus on specific problems. They're generally expert driven. They're generally driven by a commitment to preserving and improving the technical efficiency of the internet. So that's really important. The thing about those groups, even though they are open, transparent, anybody can participate for the most part, is that they're not, I would not say that they are truly globally inclusive by any stretch of the imagination. Most are based in the industrialized West. The agendas there are generally driven by people from those places, and particularly from the U.S. There are language, huge language and cost barriers for people from a lot of the world to really be able to have true, legitimate, meaningful participation in those institutions where they're not just giving their two cents, but where they can actually sort of drive an agenda. So I think that that is sort of a big piece of the puzzle that we have to think about in a really serious way, not just say, you know, keep hearing over and over, well, we also need to worry about the concerns of the global south. We'll have to take that into account. I think it's a lot bigger than that. You know, the, if the internet is really a global medium, and we, and I think we all really do sincerely want it to be as free and open as possible in, as, you know, in, throughout the world. And we, you know, we already know it's extremely uneven. You know, the internet in one country is not the same as the internet in another. If those are really our goals, then there really has to be a much bigger, bolder commitment to an inclusive process and politics around the institutions that do exist. And then, like Milton said, I mean, I think that the idea of establishing new institutions isn't bad. I think that we have to learn a lot from what can go wrong with too rigid of a structure and learn a lot from ICANN and from, you know, other groups that have developed over time and, you know, and I think that the probably most successful examples are groups that have been flexible enough to kind of develop with the internet to be able to respond to issues as they arise and to actually change their process and structure in order to accommodate changes in technology. I guess the other sort of point that I think is important here just in the context of the upcoming ITU conference that I'd like to emphasize is that this is, and you brought this up, Andrew, the, the, what is happening at the ITU is that there are a number of sort of known kind of bad actor countries, countries that really are, they are interested in making policies that can control expression, that limit people's privacy, and that is all in the interest of political control. They're coming to the ITU not because they want permission to carry out policies that way but because they want them legitimized. They're going, these kinds of practices are going to continue no matter what. But if there is a UN institution that actually puts this into their treaty and says, sure, that is, you know, that's a win for those countries and, but it's sort of at a global scale. We end up with a norm that moves further in the direction of, you know, where all of our interests lie. So that's, that's a very troubling thing. Then there are also countries coming to the ITU that want policy changes and they're not coming there with, just with political control in mind. They're going to the ITU because they're not enfranchised in institutions that can help them or the institutions that could help them with their unique policy problems don't really exist yet. So that, that group I think is so important in all of this because they're the ones, you know, that people keep saying this is the fence sitter group. You know, these are the countries that we really, countries in Africa, Latin America that we really need to focus on, you know, winning their votes. But it's not, it can't, that has to just be the thing that wakes us all up to the fact that this, it has to be a much more inclusive global conversation. That's my two cents. Thank you, Alex. Andrew. So, so, so if I'm right that in much of the world, the normative interests, the normative liberal interests that I think Milton and I, LRE2 are committed to, which is to say freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, security and privacy, these kinds of values. And if I'm right that the internet is imperfect but uniquely powerful, at least in its potential to give real meaning to those values. And, and if, if, if, so from that starting point that these, these sort of normative objectives is what we're pursuing. And because so many governments are institutionally inimical to those values, so many governments are, for their own reasons, seeking to engage in censorship, control, surveillance and so forth. Then we don't love intergovernmental bodies making decisions. And frankly, as Americans, and I would argue with Milton, I mean, only in one respect, which is that whatever screwy our system is, it is one of the more rule-bound systems in the world. In other words, the rule of law, imperfect though it is here, is stronger here than it is in most places. And so not only should we as Americans have skeptical trust in our government to adhere largely to the rule of law. I think that is something that, as Americans were entitled to do, skeptically. But it's a good thing for the world that the internet came out of the United States, because much of the world is correct in placing faith in the United States to largely be a, an actor consonant with these normative values. So anyway, if intergovernmental, one country, one vote kinds of institutions are not the place to do internet governance. And if the existing multi-stakeholder institutions, like ICANN, let's say, are two U.S. oriented to live up to the billing as a global vehicle for consensus-based decision making, then, you know, what are we to say to the Brazilian, South African, Kenyan, Indian, Indonesian who wants to see these values vindicated and also wants to feel like their voice is equal to that of any, any American. And I think what Milton said is true. I guess, you know, we need more and better institutions to do the stuff that I'm talking about, which is to say this engage in these conversations. But I will say that I do believe that a little bit of sometimes you need some destruction, you need to burn the forest in order to grow the new, you know, the new pine, pine trees. And in the case of the ITU, I think it's very much the case that its day is gone. U.S. should formally commit itself to hastening that day. I'm not this angry a person, actually. Dismantle. Dismantle. That was the word that I stuck in my notes. I was like, don't say kill. Dismantle. Dismantle. It's much gentler. We just want to dismember you. It's not the same as killing you, you know? Anyway, but I'll leave it at that, which is to say that the sort of the paradigm shift in one's thinking that you have to, that you have to embrace, if you were to go from being, let's say, a telecom engineer to being an internet engineer, is you have to learn how to embrace what it means to have completely open relationships with the other actors in the internet. Right? So I've had friends tell me, you know, that went from like Bell Labs, you know, working on SS7 switches to, you know, learning how to configure a router for the internet. And I've said, like, you just have to completely change your mind to say, like, well, maybe today we're going to be paying you for transit, and tomorrow we'll be peering, and maybe we'll, you know, it's just a much different way of thinking about things from an engineering perspective. And kind of in terms of politics and governance, that same switch has to happen, which is that for an internet way of doing policy coordination, you have to accept that there will be lots of conversations happening in lots of different places, and no one body is the place where this is all going to happen efficiently and in a consolidated centralized way. And that's a hard thing to try to convey to my, you know, Indonesian friend to say, like, well, we're going to take away this thing where you know you get a guaranteed 10 minutes at the mic and a vote to move to a world where you're, you know, assured of nothing, you're, you know, you're one of everybody connected to the internet. So folks should now be moving their questions from the simmer on the back burner to the front burner. I'm going to ask a couple and then we're going to move it over to you. Adam, how much time do we have? We're good. We have a good time. Excellent. So one of the interesting things that I didn't hear is a whole lot of worry about an actual UN ITU takeover. Given that that seems to be the messaging that we keep getting, I'm curious, like, is this all a little hyperbolic, this notion of the UN ITU takeover? Like, what's really going on here? Is this like kind of Tom Fullery or maybe like the Uber geek red dawn where it's like, there's actually not going to be this giant invasion and there's not going to be a takeover at all? Right, there's the ITU is desperately battling for relevance. Okay, this is their death rattle. This is their grasping, you know, their hands are coming up above the water and saying, what can we grab onto here? Oh, my God, we've got the ITRs coming up. Maybe if we can stick something about the internet into those, you know, that's what's going on from the ITU's perspective. And the idea that they could take over the internet is of course, something that I've been arguing against for the last six months. Not that I don't think it was correct for Google and other corporate interests to mobilize civil society against the ITU the way they have. Because it's a very interesting phenomenon to have all of these people suddenly interested in global governance. I mean, he may be not in like the super geek discussion. Right, he was he was I can't employ number one, I feel like I was like civil society, internet governance advocate number one. And it's like, I didn't I wasn't joined by anybody until about four months ago. So suddenly, everybody's interested in global governance of the internet, they're beginning to understand the role of institutions, they're beginning to understand the distinction between intergovernmental institutions and non governmental institutions and the need to build multi stakeholder institutions. This is all great. But and if it was necessary to lie to people and tell them the ITU was going to take over the internet in order to make that happen. I don't know, maybe it's a good thing. I don't think it's such a good thing. I think I we've struggled in our sort of internal conversations about how to advocate on this issue. It is a lot easier to say, the UN is going to take over the internet than it is to say, well, there's a sub agency the UN and they have this treaty and they might be able to add some things in that might make a difference in the way some countries behave, you know, that's a harder sell as a message. But I don't, you know, like I was saying before, it's not and as as the ITU secretary is always emphasizing, it's all about the member states. They decide what happens and then they decide what to do with the treaty. So we're we here in the US. Yeah, we're sure not going to see, you know, any any changes in the way that our government makes decisions about the internet based on this treaty. But in other places, you might. I don't I am also sort of skeptical about how much is really going to get in there. It's hard to tell right now. I think there was a lot of hype around the ethno proposal that Andrew mentioned that would present a serious threat to net neutrality would create new charges for traffic moving through the internet and essentially could just be a huge blow to innovators and folks who are sort of trying new things with particularly with small amounts of revenue online. That appears like it's going nowhere. Some of the cybersecurity proposals are a little bit more concerning because they they have fair amount of traction in a lot of places and some of those are really about, you know, political power and others are really about sort of serious fraud problems that countries can't figure out what to do. And so they're bringing it here because they don't know what else to do. So I think, you know, as far as far as the end game, the UN isn't taking over the internet, but some changes could happen. And like I said before, I think it's, you know, it's a norm setting question. If there is this institution, however much, yeah, I mean, if they they really are sort of struggling for relevance, if some countries can take away from that a new norm that is less in the direction of openness and and freedom, then I think that that's something we should all be concerned about. So, so the the rhetoric that the UN is going to take over the the internet is is preposterously hyper inflated. I mean, it has no relationship to reality, right? There is no mechanism within the the ITU system for operational control, mandatory policy making, anything like that. That's not the issue. The reason to care about what's happening at the ITU, frankly, is is not so much as as Americans because we're big enough and powerful enough, we'll do whatever we want. And most big countries, it's the same thing is true. The reason to care about what comes out of the ITR process is that what it has the potential to do is accelerate through legitimization of bad practices, things that will be really bad for people in countries like Mozambique, Senegal, Malaysia and so forth. Because one of the things the ITU does is propagate practices. And that's one of the things I hate about it the most is that it has propagated a set of war and best practices for how incumbents can harden themselves into positions of persistent power and how governments can do, can use that kind of concentrated anti competitive, anti internet sort of infrastructure to engage in censorship and surveillance and so forth. There's these bad actor countries, right? Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, increasingly depressingly Russia. And then there's the US and Sweden and, you know, the Netherlands and a handful of countries on the other side that take a pretty hard line, you know, free speech and at least rule of law when it comes to surveillance point of view. And then you've got all these countries in the middle and where the ITU does its damage is in those countries in the middle when it spreads ideas for how to do this kind of thing. And through its legitimation alters the internal debates within those countries about the allocation of power and responsibility and the zone of what is acceptable for a government to do with regard to the internet. And that's the reason we should care about it. That's the reason it should be defanged and dismantled in my view. So I'm going to ask the audience a question out and also the panelists. Who's been to an internet governance forum? That's a good number of people. Is that the kind of, I mean, like, so I was at the last one in Nairobi and didn't really feel like I was really doing a lot of internet governance at the Internet Governance Forum. Are these the kinds of multi-stakeholder structures that you would think like could be empowered to take on that kind of role? Or do we need something completely different? What does the solution look like? Well, the IGF is dissatisfying because it's a hodgepodge of conflicting agendas trying to play out in one thing. It's a place that the U.S. government is kind of viewed as a safety valve. So give everybody one place where they can go once a year and talk about whatever they want that relates to Internet Governance, but it has no potential, like zero potential for actually radiating into intergovernmental kinds of activities like the ITU does. So if not the ITU then the IGF. But the problem is there are some people who want to actually talk about and do things that we would properly call governance. There are other people who want to stop those activities. There are some people who just want to get together and talk about how to build out and develop the Internet. So it makes it feel when you're there like there's no there there. I actually would like to see more smaller kind of like special-purpose conversations about particular problems. If you look at the development of technical standards anyway, you have these peculiar organizations like 3GPP or the UMTS forum or you know any of these very specialized bodies that say like okay what we need now is to add data over the wireless airwaves. And like how we do that, I don't know, but let's get together and they work towards sort of a defined goal. So it strikes me that this kind of grand IGF sort of once a year thing while definitely useful in the sense that it has built networks and allowed people to get to know each other and led to flows of information that I think generally are quite constructive because they're coming from Internet people rather than from regulate, you know, primarily around Internet people rather than regulators and their ilk. Lawmakers and their ilk. It still is probably not the most, it's not the end game for multi-stakeholder dialogue around the Internet. The thing I think we need to emphasize is the alternative forms of governance, one of which I like to call networked governance in which you have, it's a form of organization that's been explored in sociological theory and you have basically looser relationships among actors and I think the paradigm of network governance is sort of the relationships among Internet service providers in terms of how they interconnect and route traffic. There's no overarching hierarchical authority that says here's the rates you must charge, here's the standards and practices you must adhere to. There are standards, there are uniform standards, but they're voluntary. They're held in place by their working, you know, the fact that they work and they make people compatible. And we need a better appreciation of the concept of network governance and stop thinking that, you know, we're going to have a centralized governance institution and there's going to be multi-stakeholder or intergovernmental. We need these looser forms of governance and we need to understand and legitimize them. With respect to the IGF, you have to put it in the context of the World Summit. That's what it emerged out of. It was a compromise in which the whole world wanted to talk about the US control over ICANN. The US said we're not going to change that, but as a compromise we'll create this little space where you can talk about this problem and we'll have various code words for it. We'll talk about things like enhanced cooperation or, you know, critical internet resources. And so then for the next five years the people who didn't want to change anything in the status quo tried to stop us from talking about those issues in the forum and the people who wanted to talk about them pushed very hard to talk about them. Some of the governments started to say we're very frustrated with this. We're going to split off and form our own more state-centered internet governance forum. And the funny thing about the forum is, yeah, you go to there and you're kind of dissatisfied and you don't think it's quite doing anything. But then you start being confronted with alternatives like either we dismantle it and eviscerate it and ecap it and get rid of it or we get slashing and burning. Slashing and burn it. Or we create a government-centric one like the Indians, Brazilians and South Africans proposed. And then you look at those alternatives and you think, nah, it's better. Let's keep what we've got and keep going to that and keep having these dialogues. And some of the dialogues are really starting to gel in the sense that we're starting to not be so afraid about talking about enhanced cooperation and naming it what it really is, which is, to what extent does the US government continue to have a privileged position? To what extent do other states have a role to play or not? We're really starting to have that dialogue there. So I think it's something that should be retained. But is there something that could grow out of that that would be, that would move in the direction of actually making an actual policymaking? One of the ideas we had, for example, was when you have any affirmation of commitments, these reviews of ICANN, rather than having ICANN's own processes review itself, which is kind of weird, why not have that function performed by the Internet Governance Forum, for example? That would be somewhat interesting, something of a step forward. So I'm going to ask one more question and we're going to open it up. So get ready. I want to end with a bet. Like let's say we're all like figuring out like what the over-under is, the spread on the World Conference on International Telecommunications WICIT, which is happening next week in Dubai. It's perhaps one of the reasons why we're all up here today, at least as a catalyst for a lot of these discussions. What would you guys bet comes out of WICIT? Bet comes out of WICIT. What's your prognosis? More WICIT. I don't expect a lot to change in the ITRs, but a little bit might shift. I think what will happen actually is oh, we're continuing this conversation on to the World Technology Policy Forum, on to the next sort of series of meetings and opportunities for this kind of group to come together and continue these discussions. So I think it's no rest for the WICIT. Yeah, I think it is no rest for the WICIT. That shouldn't be funny, but that is. Sorry, that's so geeky. Yeah, no, I mean, I think we all, I think this is the consensus, right? Expectation is that when issues get too thorny and difficult, they get deferred. And so, you know, and I think what I think is interesting is whether Milton's earlier sort of point might be right, which is, you know, is if the ITU is, you know, a deploticus, like how can it grow fur, you know, like how can it mammalize itself, you know, confronting the to make this a painful metaphor, the meteor of the internet hitting the planet and turning, but anyway, but like it's it can it can't, you know, is there any chance that the dinosaur can turn into a mammal and survive in this new era? And if not, is the is the ever kind of present phenomenon of deferring the hard issues into the future and future conferences, is that just enough to basically achieve my objective? A kneecap into a slashing and a burning to now just annihilation of the whole planet. Evolution and evolution. It's not like I'm not having a bad morning, by the way. This is like, I don't know why I keep resorting to these terrible dire metaphors. But but what I actually so here's what I what I would view as a bad outcome and one that I hope we won't see is if the US negotiators come back and the US executive branch presents to the Senate a set of idea proposed ITRs for ratification that are an ITR stands for what it it's an international telecommunications regulation. But they're essentially they can be they don't have to be but they can be treaty level. They can be essentially amendments to the treaty. And so anyway, what I what would be a bad outcome would be a kind of like to me is like, well, could have been worse. You know, there's going to be there's some stuff in here that's sort of about the internet, but not directly. And, you know, we just we think we should just kind of suck this up because, you know, we need to keep the satellite coordination and these other things which are important to us. We don't want to completely burn the US government's ability to have influence at the ITU T and in the world, the work, the world administrative radio we want to preserve our heft in those for us. So we need to suck up some slightly distasteful, but not ultimately that damaging thing because we'll wrap it up in reservations. That's the usual thing that happens is we sort of end up with a kind of mushy compromise that in my view is a bad outcome because it preserves the life cycle of the dinosaur rather than, you know, moving us into into mammal world where, you know, where we're all going to be a lot more comfortable. Just to quickly add to that, I've argued that we should have as a US position taken the view that we don't need the ITRs anymore that they're basically obsolete. And actually I have heard although I don't have confirmation that certain people in Europe agreed with that position two or three or four years ago. And that somehow we came to the view that the ITRs were important and necessary and they needed to be retained and therefore we're now stuck with, you know, given that's the US position and that we've missed our opportunity not to slash and to burn but to simply say, sorry, that time is up on this treaty, we probably will get the outcome that he describes, which is this sort of minor modifications that aren't really bad but aren't really good and really open the door to just continuation of this long slow decline and open the door to certain kinds of trouble. All right, let's open it up for audience questions. Where is the microphone? If we can get right here in the middle. Mark McCarthy with Georgetown University and with SIA. A good discussion from all of you. I like the prediction of an outcome from Wicked is not too bad, not too good. But I'm wondering about the more basic question that is really at stake here, which is, do we really need international policy making institutions at all in this area of the internet? If you do nothing at all, nation states are making policy. This is the Tim Wu thesis from years ago on who controls the internet. If you want to go beyond that to a sort of single global policy in the area of cyber security or surveillance or free speech or censorship, do you need to go to an institution, a policy making institution at all? I know you rejected an intergovernmental kind of policy making institution, but do you need a multi stakeholder institution to sort of set international policy here or do you just leave it up to the nation states and they'll do their own thing? Is diversity a good thing here? At least at a micro level, right, there are like, there are going to be lines on the DNS root zone file table, right? Like there's going to be an IP address that defines a name server that correlates to .ru, right? And so, yeah, you know, there are some things for which a policy making mechanism is necessary. Similarly, like, you know, to have a unique number space for the PSTN, somebody's got to tell you what number you dial first to call Taiwan. So there are some things that need to be done. We've also found that this is not internet specific. This is more at the telecommunications layer, but but we have found it important to have some harmonization of uses of spectrum. That's good because if you're an equipment manufacturer, you want to tune your radio to a particular frequency and manufacture and be able to sell it in lots of countries. That's a good thing. You can carry your phone across borders. That's a good thing, too. So there are activities and the way that they are performed, you can call policy. But so anyway, to that extent only, they need policies for how they're going to make those kinds of decisions. And this is part of the sort of core argument against the structure of the ITU as it's been involved as it's as it's been in place for the last couple of decades because what the internet has opened up is a whole different way of doing communications that doesn't require state owned monopolies to connect their wires to get at the border using a particular size and kind of switch. Now you can simply rely on the abstract standards layer of, you know, I'm sorry, the TCP IP, you know, to tell you the minimum thing that you need to do to switch traffic back and forth. So in this new world, also in spectrum, by the way, we need to come up with something which is not as locked down, hierarchical and inimicable to new models of spectrum use that we have right now. So we do need some forms of centralization and policymaking just a lot less and a lot different than what we've seen before. Well, so I guess I would say, I mean, this raises a really important question about what is happening with the ITRs, with the ITU's treaty, which is that a whole lot of different kinds of policy are being taken there. And this I mean, what Andrew is talking about, you have to have technical standards if you want networks and devices to be interoperable are essential. So that there is definitely a need for that. And it is very useful to have global voluntary standards for that kind of thing. But then when you think about a completely different area like surveillance, what, you know, what are the standards that govern how a government decides to access your communications to look at what, you know, that the idea of even setting a global recommendation for that kind of thing. I don't know how I don't think that's we don't think that's a good idea. We have, you know, states are going to do what they choose. We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ICCPR and those documents we actually feel at CDT and a lot of our civil society partners feel the same way that you can really use those if you want to make strong policies that are protective of free expression and privacy, access to information. Those documents actually are sort of set an excellent baseline that can be kind of a great guidepost in making strong policies that way. I think it's, you know, it's really great that we have those documents. But as far as a global standard, I would not want to go further. Excellent. All right. Next question. I think this gentleman up here had his hand up right out of the starting gate. Thank you. Philip Corwin here on behalf of the Internet Commerce Association. But these remarks are solely my own. I think rather than asking who should govern the Internet, I think the right question is how much governance than the Internet really need. And it seems to me, and of course, my phone is ringing right at this moment. It doesn't need. It just has to work as long as it works, as long as there's consistent technical standards and it's available 24 seven. And when you send an email, it gets to the intended recipient. When you type in a web page or hit a search link, you get to the right web page. That's all it really needs, which, and I think once this meeting in Dubai comes and goes, and I agree, it's probably not going to it's going to be, you know, the elephant, you know, giving birth to a mouse. It's not going to be much of anything. I think it'll be good because it'll refocus everyone on reality. I think there's two realities that we do, which is one at ICANN. I don't agree quite with Milton on US hegemony, because I think in the last few years, the government advisory committee has taken a much more active role in the context of these new TLDs. And it'll provide a form, a context where people focus on the real issues in ICANN, which is, what is the role of governments within ICANN, which is very squishy and unpredictable right now, and what are ICANN's processes? I mean, they seem to be right now changing their definitions of what's policy and what's implementation and what's existing rights and new rights by the week. No one really knows what the rules are. So we can focus on that and then it will refocus everyone on the fact that the real legal, as opposed to government action, is in national legislatures on what's email privacy, what's the right of people using the panel to address. Well, are we focusing on the right question and what will we be looking at after Dubai comes and goes and not much happens as a result? Yeah, I think one potentially unfortunate aspect of the controversy over the ITU is that it diverts attention from the real problems, the real action and internet governance, which is happening both at the national level and in ICANN and the regional internet address registries and some of these other issues. It's the theme that I've been trying to make is that if we can't get those right and agreed, ICANN is not all of internet governance. It's not that important. It has a pretty simple function when you get down to it. If we can't get that right, how can we hold up new institutions as a model to beat down these efforts of the developing countries to assert the ITU as this potential locus of global governance? So we've got to get it right. So I totally agree with that. I mean, all I would say is to add to that is so you started off saying like how much governance do we need? And I mean one nice principle is that you should govern as little as possible. So you should do the least amount tackle the smallest possible problems internationally because it's so hard to get right. But like to be clear, when for example ICANN opens the door to the creation of a new top level domain that say could be .cashmere, like it or not, it's suddenly in the thick of the kind of geopolitical problem that wars get fought over, right? Or who runs the registry called .islam? I mean like that is to put it mildly explosive. And so namespaces like it or not sadly, I mean if you're a total inert and you know wonderfully if you're like a literature professor, namespaces involve these little packages of semantic meaning, you know words that are of profound geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, religious, social, tribal significance to many people. There are things over which people will go to war. And suddenly ICANN is in the middle of that. Now I think Milton and I probably may have like very different views but for similar sorts of reasons, you know like we're not actually all out of part in one sense although we end up in very different places, whether an organization like ICANN should ever put itself in a position to have to be making a judgment call with the participation of governments, not with the participation of governments through some mechanical where a .Jesus could be registered by somebody. And like it or not, that requires some degree of governance and all of the things that go along with that, openness, transparency, participation, representation and so forth flow from the need to make some decision about whether that character string ends up in the DNS root zone file. Well I would just urge anybody who has their internet open and on to go to Jesus.com. The last time I looked at that which admittedly was many years ago, it was some very handsome guy who addressed as Jesus and the whole website was basically a come on to women who might want to be saved by him personally. But Milton, but that is an argument to why people should relax. It doesn't mean that they will relax. I know, I know but the point is the reason that happened is because .com ran a registry where you just first come, first serve and they didn't care and they didn't try to apply policies as to who got what name. You're right and we agree about the problem. I think we disagree with how to handle it. You either have to be completely non-discriminatory and neutral at the core or you have to be incredibly, basically you have to shut down the system and say there aren't going to be any new top level domains which didn't seem to me like a viable option. It's not an easy choice I admit. We're going to almost throw down over GTD. We have time for only one more question. So let's go over on this side back here. Dealers' choice. There we go. I'm David Sullivan with the Global Network Initiative. My question for the panel, you know, it's this kind of remarkable moment where this group of activist groups, governments, companies have fixated the world's attention on this very kind of obscure problem in the grand scheme of things. And I just wanted to note, as we've been here this morning, word spread that the Syrian government has shut down the internet entirely. And I'm wondering whether we've got our eye on the ball and whether the sort of global community of people advocating for a free and open internet are focused on the right thing right now. And I'm just throwing that out as a provocation. Sobering question. Well, I mean, this is one of those questions though that's always like, isn't the thing that you're talking about dwarfed by other bigger, more important things? Like, sure, right? I mean, like actual censorship, actual surveillance that betrays dissidents, that is vastly more important than the content of the ITRs. Or people getting shot and killed in Syria as opposed to the internet being shut down, you know, that's, I mean, yeah. Exactly right. But fundamentally, I agree. I've been saying this for some time, is that the real action in terms of censorship and the worst forms of control is at the nation-state level. And that, you know, focusing so much on the ITRs was, again, it had some good effects, getting people focused on global governance. And now you have a better sense what could we actually do about Syria shutting down the internet? Answer, not much. But in a system of sovereignty, answer is not much. Maybe we should change a system of sovereignty. That's a pretty big task, but I'm up for it if you are. So, I will say that I think this is a chance for me to re-pimp my earlier argument, which is, you know, the containment, the ITU's constitution gives Syria that right, right? If they believe that their national security, decency, or sovereignty or territorial integrity are threatened, the constitution gives them the right to shut down the network. And so, this is why I think a containment strategy with the ITU is not enough. We have to engage in a Reagan-style rollback of the ITU's current remit. We should be pushing to change the constitution so that you can't shut down the internet under any but the most extreme and narrowly defined circumstances. Ellory, last word to you. Well, this is a question, but I'll just say it anyway. But how is that going to read internationally? I just, I don't understand. I mean, if the US were to come out and say, this is what we want to do, we have to make it so that the ITU can't get even close to this and we're going to dismantle it, shoot it, burn it down, whatever. Internet users, many of them worldwide would celebrate. They would view that as a positive move because their enemy is not the United States primarily, it is the government trying to repress them. And the ITU is a tool of that government. Right. But I do, I guess I'm not sold. I think as we've all agreed here, like governments are going to continue to do what they want to do and they, I worry that they will be even more angry at the US than they already are if something like that happens. And that ultimately leads to worse results for the people in those countries. I'm just saying we should ally ourselves with the users rather than the government's trying to repress them and that rolling back the ITU is part of that battle. And that would be smart, long-term national strategy for the US, smart long-term economic strategy for the world and a good way for us to try to live to the fullest the values that we espouse, however imperfectly as a country. That's my argument. And on that note, let's thank the panel for a frolicking good talk. Thank you so much.