 everyone. Hello and good morning. Wow, we were just saying backstage how this has very much the feelings of a kind of rock concert. So good morning. Thank you so much for joining us. We know how packed the schedule is, so we're very grateful that you chose to spend your time with us. I'm Zoe Tabri. I'm the tech editor at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, where we cover technologies impact on society and on human rights. And I'm delighted to be your host today. Regulating the internet and by extension content is a hotly debated topic. There's been must distinction recently of the possible harms of the internet and or rather of content from kind of children's safety online, to kind of cyber attacks, to copyright infringement, but what have those internet regulation efforts looked like and crucially have they come at a cost, both kind of current and existential, potentially risking the integrity of the internet as we know it. Today we're going to explore how best to approach regulation and where we might have gotten it wrong in the past. I'm joined by two fantastic panelists to discuss those issues today. For this, to my right, we have Sally Costerton, who's an experienced global leader and is currently serving as the interim president and CEO of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. And she's also the senior vice president for global stakeholder engagement. And just to my right, we have Andrew Sullivan, who's CEO and president of the Internet Society, a global nonprofit dedicated to building, promoting and defending the internet. He's going to tell us a little bit about the work they do to keep the internet an open resource for all and warn how misguided kind of regulation and polities could threaten to fragment it. We don't have much time today. We've got about 25 minutes, so we'll dive straight in. There will be no direct question to the speakers, but do please feel free to come grab us at the end to carry on the discussion. And of course, keep us trending on X with a hashtag Web Summit. So Sally, if I could come to you first, is there such a thing as kind of good regulation of the internet and indeed, can and should it be regulated at all? Thank you, Zoe. Well, to anybody in the Internet world, if you mention regulation, they go, oof, like this. And I think it's important to recognize that, of course, governments need to regulate. It is a natural and important role of a government. So, what is critical is for us, as I can particularly and for our technical community that Andrew and I work closely as part of, is to help regulators understand how the internet actually works. Because the risk is unintended regulation will harm the infrastructure, the technical foundation of what the internet stands on. The content is, if you like the house, the technical underpinnings, the foundations. And if you don't understand how the foundations work, you can damage the foundation with unintended regulation. And eventually the foundation collapses and it brings the house down with it. So our goal is to make sure that those and it's a very engagement driven goal. It's events like this. It's the IGFs working inside the United Nations, working with individual governments and government organizations. It's striving to do everything we can to help them to understand how it works so that the regulation that they want to put in, is maintains that global, interoperable internet and they don't accidentally break it. That's a really good point because I think we very often and we'll come back to this one, kind of take the Internet for granted without perhaps realizing how it technically works. If we can take a step back and come to you, Andrew, about how and when the Internet was designed by Tim Berners-Leave and surf and kind of others with the good chaps principle in mind. So the idea of we're all good chaps here. We don't need to have anything kind of written down, not necessarily with kind of bad actors in mind. Andrew, have those kind of conditions for an open and kind of interconnected internet, do they still exist? How has it changed since when the founders designed it decades ago? Well, I mean, Zoe, it's clear that the early Internet was designed by people who knew each other, right? It was a tiny research operation that escaped the lab and now we have this global thing. So, yeah, the conditions were a little different, but it's still the case that the Internet is made up of these little pieces that all fit together. They're made out of little building blocks and those building blocks can be stuck together in different ways and that's one of the ways, one of the places that we put the various security operations and so on. The tricky part is that if you try to regulate that too carefully, what you do, as Sally was saying, is you might cause damage and you might do this to the infrastructure, you might do this to the fundamentals of the Internet, you might do this at any layer whatsoever and those things prevent the innovations that many in this community here are eager to implement. So I think what we need to do is analyze, does this thing that we're about to do, does it cause problems for the Internet and you can analyze that just like you do an environmental assessment when you build a dam, you can do an Internet impact assessment in order to test whether the regulation that you're proposing is going to affect the Internet in a better or worse way. That's a very good point and we'll come back to kind of how to evaluate those risks and often kind of unintended consequences of regulation. Sally, I'm gonna come back to you and taking a more recent look at the kind of Internet. How a kind of politically fragile do you think it is, but also has it become more politicized? I'm thinking especially in the context of global conflicts, kind of Israel, Hamas, Ukraine and kind of Russia, how does that kind of threaten the Internet as we know it? Well, yes, the world has become much more politicized in the last few years, much more polarized. This is very known. In fact, geopolitics are hugely important in their own right because, you know, we are dealing with a very difficult time in world politics. The Internet has become essential for the world. And if the world didn't realize this before the pandemic, they certainly do now. So I think what we have to do in the technical community particularly is remind the world that the Internet, the underpinning of the Internet, the system that supports it, the IP infrastructure is secure and safe, providing you keep it global and interoperable. And it's never gone down in 30 years. It's year can run. And that's what it meant during pandemic. We talk about an ICANN, the single sustainable interoperable Internet. Well, now no, everyone knows what sustainable means because when everything else is gone, literally nothing else, we could rely on the Internet. And if we hadn't had it, would we have found a vaccine for COVID? I don't know. Would we have found it in time, for example? So, but we have to be careful to be practical in the Internet space, not to be too inside our own little worlds of people who know each other. Kind of we have to reach out to new people like everyone here. You're trying to run businesses online. We I'm afraid I need to tell you, don't assume it's always going to be there for you. You can change that. You can take action. But the reality is, because largely of the politicization of the world, it is under threat. And the example you used in during when Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian top level country domain name, we call them CCTLD, organization that runs the Ukrainian top level domain, came to ICANN very publicly and said, take the Russians off the net. Are you? Take it off. We have been invaded. This is a hostile act. And we said, no, we can't do that. We literally can't do it. And ICANN has to be, it is, it's in its mission, it is politically in uninvolved, we are neutral. We can never take sides because the Internet cannot be politicized. And the people like Andrew and us and our colleagues who run the technical infrastructure, we have to stick to that. Because if you could do it, you, you start to break it. Literally, you take it off a centralized system, you break the trust, and you break the channel by which the, the protocols actually move the data around that makes it sustainable. So that's a real to recent example of where that threat is real. And this is how organizations that ICANN provide guardrails by being politically neutral. Yeah. But, but you know what? We need everybody to understand that we all own this risk. We can't just say, hey, ICANN, it's your job to keep us safe. Can you do that, please? And we'll just get on with running a business here. We need to also be aware, as Internet users, particularly business people, that we have to protect it. Quite. And so the kind of whole system is based on trust. Andrew, do you also feel, is that kind of trust weakening? Where do you see that threat coming from? Well, I mean, it's weakening in some sense. So, so the Internet is technically astonishingly robust. We built a reliable system out of unreliable parts. This is like engineering magic. And yet, politically, it is fragile because it depends on the idea that more connection is better, that the ability to use this system from end to end is a good thing, and that the, the power in your hands is a good idea. And, and we see actually people moving away from that. We see regulatory moves that are really cementing the advantages of very, very large organizations that are, are essentially controlled. And that is bad for the rest of us. It's bad for, it's bad for startups that want to, you know, compete in this environment. It's bad for users who don't want to do whatever the cable television, you know, model of the Internet is. And so I think that that's a risk. But it's also the case that because of the way the Internet is made out of these little pieces that can be put together, we have the technical capacity to build trust mechanisms through the Internet. We actually have that ability so long as we preserve the interoperable Internet that allows this kind of innovation to happen. If we regulated in such a way, or if we cement the advantages of very large incumbents in such a way that they have all the control, then we don't have the freedom to build those trust mechanisms anymore. And that would be a shame. Yeah. And how, I mean, you know, talking about this kind of the global nature of this debate, a lot of those regulatory efforts, including those with unintended consequences as you flagged, are happening at a country level. We ourselves kind of reflect that global nature. You're a Canadian, British and kind of French. How receptive an audience are you finding? Can there be a sort of global dialogue or oversight or rather in this kind of debate? And how, where do you see kind of governments and policymakers going? Are you seeing efforts kind of tend to restrict it, fragmented, kind of regulated more? Or are you starting to hear a more receptive audience to what you're both saying? Either. I mean, for me, the concern is that we're in a period of nationalism, right? We seem to have entered a period where international cooperation is much less interesting to people politically than sort of nationalist tendencies. And we hear a lot about national data sovereignty and so on in a way that we didn't used to. This is quite risky to the internet. It's risky to have an idea that, oh, this stuff is all going to live within my country, because the internet is totally not designed around country borders. And that's part of its resilience, right? If this country has a problem, you can go around it. That's what makes it robust. But if you turn that off, you lose that feature. And we see countries pursuing that. This is why, for instance, at the Internet Society, we have a platform called Pulse that tracks internet shutdowns. And they're on the rise. We see things being shut down because people are trying to be nationalist. So I'm hopeful that we will be able to change that direction. But I'm really nervous. I think you've both touched on a really interesting point there, which is the kind of very real and perhaps most obvious. We as the kind of global public or even the media kind of threats see to the internet, right? Shutdowns. You no longer see it on your phone. You don't see the direct impact to you. But I feel that what you both are touching on is a more existential kind of threat to the internet. And Sally, I want to come back to a concept you had mentioned, which I think sounds fascinating, the risk of fragmentation to the internet and the risk of it becoming isolated digital islands. Can you touch on that? Yes, I think, thank you, to your first point as well, which is linked. Andrew, I'm afraid is totally right about the rise of nationalism. You know, I wish that he wasn't, but he is. And the way you combat that is that you bring global stakeholders together. And what we do in the internet space, and it is unusual, and it is, if we call it bottom up policymaking, as opposed to top down, government top down, and an ICANN and an ISOC and in all over and in the IGF, which, you know, we've just had a huge internet governance forum in Japan, the biggest they've ever had. They had 6,000 people in Kyoto from every conceivable kind of internet user group. So governments in an ICANN meeting, a government minister will stand in a line at a microphone with a civil society activist, with an IP lawyer, with a businessman, with an academic, and they will all stand together and they will work together on the policies that, through using a bottom up process consensus based on the policies that make this sustainable. Those are the rules. So the way that this is not regulation in a top down sense, but these are the rules in which the domain name system, the infrastructure I talked about, the foundation and because so many people have their hands on that, because it is truly, we use this term multi-stakeholder, as in all stakeholders that are internet users. It's an ICANN's mission that we bring the internet users of the world to the policymaking process. That is part of my job, literally written in the ICANN mission. And my board and my stakeholders hold me accountable for that. And that means that we do everything we can to balance the risk of nationalism, really, by the presence of this enormous global community, online, offline, we had to go online during Covid, so now we're really good at it. And that's brought users in from countries who couldn't go to meetings. Absolutely. And so the presence of that, now how does that help fragmentation? Simply put, the more awareness and participation that is in the world of how to do this using that multi-stakeholder process, the more you push back. Yeah. Because the risk of fragmentation comes from individual governments accidentally or intentionally damaging that infrastructure. Now, the more knowledge there is of how risky that is, and the consequences, and you know what, you fragment it, you break it, you probably can't fix it. This is not a bicycle tire. Irreparable damage. Oops, we broke it. I tell you what, here's the fixed kit. Let's stick it back together. We probably can't do that. Which is where we're talking about this more existential. And that is the digital island risk. And it is understandable where a government looks at its citizens, and what they are saying is this. Yeah. This is the content. That's what governments want to regulate. That's what people can relate to. Because they say, I don't want, I want to know who people are. I don't want abuse. I don't want child abuse. I don't want spam. Nobody wants those things. But the risk is that if you just say, I'll just do it in my country, because I'm the good guys. We're a democratic government. We get elected. It's okay for us to do it. But the problem is, it isn't because it's not designed to work like that, which is what Andrew is saying. And this is the education process that we have to keep going through. So that the regulators and the governments understand this properly. And the more pressure we see coming from internet users who after all, vote in these governments ultimately for better and the less risk it is. And so on that point where you do have those efforts and you know either top down at a country level or hopefully kind of bottom up, want to mention a term I think you Andrew had said, which not particularly sexy of impact assessment, but that I think is important here. How can you evaluate or kind of predict or assess what those consequences unintended or not may be when trying to regulate it? Well, I mean, the internet society has created a toolkit that is literally designed to evaluate these things to look at, okay, well, here's the policy that we want to adopt. We call it the Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit. But whatever the name is, the trick is you analyze what are the consequences for the rest of the network? And it's not just, you know, what are the immediate term things, but also what are the long term consequences? How does this encourage flows versus discourage them and so forth? You know, does it tend to affect the infrastructure layer and the like that the challenge with all of this is that people think like, oh, there's a place where I can, you know, plug into the internet and here's the place where I can the regulatory socket. But there isn't a regulatory socket. There isn't a place to do this. People talk about the layers on the internet. Only the problem is it's not a very good model. It's all mingled together. One thing is inside another one. And what we see is that people think, oh, there's this very simplistic model they want to, they want to use in order to evaluate this. So that's the reason that that toolkit exists so that you can understand, oh, how do I unpack what it is that I want to do? And, you know, can I actually make progress in the plans that I have? There are some things that are just a bad idea to do. Internet shutdowns are just a bad idea. They're always a bad idea. They actually harm your own goals. But there are other things that, you know, maybe there are different alternatives for what you might want to achieve. Right. Now we're about 20 minutes into the discussion and we haven't yet addressed AI, which we take collectively as an accomplishment in and of itself. But we'd be remiss not to address it. And of course, the internet is often kind of conflated with content. But I want to take a moment to ask you both how you see the AI kind of revolution in the past, well, really, past kind of couple of years, affecting the internet. And do you see a risk of it being weaponized by bad actors to kind of threaten the internet in any way, either of you? Yes. It's absolutely something that we have to talk about collectively because, you know, if I look at the agenda for this web summit, it's everywhere. It's the topic du jour. Should we put it that way? And it's not immediately in the sphere of our technical ecosystem today. But I think that there are a couple of areas where it's going to affect us. And the first one is trust. If we feel we don't trust the people that we are dealing with because we don't know who they are anymore, trust is the foundation of what has made the internet successful. It is the biggest factor in its success in the last 30 years, bar nothing. And we need to re-energize that with a new generation of internet users. Now, these are the same generation that are going to be dealing with more fake news, more uncertainty about who people really are. So I think at a trust level, the internet community has to really engage with this. That's the first area. So it's here with us now. There are enormous opportunities that come from some of the tools that we have available to us that we have often, in fact, have existed for a long time, but are now being made much more easily available and more usable. So it is not all bad. And we also have to be careful not to demonize technology. We mustn't be a luddite. We're in the technology world. And many of the people in this room will see this as an enormous business opportunity. So it's about being kind of careful and safe, but still taking advantage of the benefits that it brings. I think it's where we are today from an ICAM perspective. Right. And I think we also, by the way, the media have a huge role in responsibly to play in that and kind of presenting the debate in a kind of fact evidence kind of based way as opposed to polarized. Andrew, would you kind of agree with that on it? I certainly would agree with that. I also think that there is a problem in the discussion around AI which parallels the discussion around regulation of the internet. And it's the shiny, right? What happened is we've had years and years and years of development of various AI techniques, large language models, statistics and a hat. I mean, there's a whole lot of different things that go by the name of AI. But what we got was, oh, chat GPT's here. And suddenly everybody was like, oh, this is really scary because you could see it. So we had many, many years of development of this technology. Now suddenly I can see it and so I'm going to panic. And the same thing has happened with the internet. Oh, I'm going to blame it the internet for, you know, humans are bad. Humans are trying to be scammers. Humans are trying to do these things. You know, people have been lying to one another or creating misinformation or whatever since language was invented. And the basic idea that you have to blame the internet for misinformation is a strange one. Similarly, you have to blame AI for misinformation. It's a very strange one. That's not really the source of this. What it is is somebody attempting to manipulate this system in order to fool one another. Legislating against bad human activity is really hard. We've been trying to do it for as long as human history. It's very, very difficult. These tools make certain activities a little bit easier. But that means they make activities that are drudgery easier. They make certain kinds of things better. You know, spell checkers are better than like having a bunch of spell checkers, you know, humans. And similarly, we should, you know, we should take advantage of those opportunities. And that means we need a very, very deft touch if we're going to try to regulate this stuff. That's the real risk that we're just going to respond with a knee jerk reaction and we're going to break things. We're going to break opportunity that is there for everybody. So that's the concern that I have about the AI regulation or anything else. I think that's an interesting point kind of on regulation specifically that, you know, you can, from what if I'm hearing correctly, you're both saying you can, well, regulate the tech but which is almost nonsensical because the tech is in and of itself neither good nor bad. You can attempt to regulate the use of it but then that's to be done with very, very careful consideration for what you might break kind of into the process and done with the kind of right actors at the table. We have just a few seconds left. I want to have a very, very quick fire. Final question to you both in just one sentence. Do you think the world has taken the internet and is taking the internet for granted, Andrew? Totally. Sally? Yes. Do you people here in the audience raise your hand if, based on what you've heard here, think you either may have taken the internet for granted or the world has? Raise your hand if you do. That's interesting. I'm seeing about kind of 50% of the audience. I'm not quite sure we'd have had that much at the start. So I'm hoping this has given you some food for thought. Thank you so much for being here. Both Sally and Andrew are still speaking, I think, tomorrow at the summit. Research their name on the website. You can find the right stage for it. And for now, let's please give them a round of applause. Thank you. Thank you.