 So, the Russian election this last week, until December 4th, 2011, I think it would be fair to say that most Russians were getting most of their news from state-sponsored television. But as the election went forward, many user-generated videos were posted that obtained millions of hits showing ballots being corruptly written on by a single director of the election process or stuffed into ballot boxes or actual deals being made to buy votes from Russians to turn the progress of the election. And it is those videos posted online that brought people into the street. They saw the evidence of what had gone on in that election. That country, Russia, is one of the nations calling for control over the Internet by governments through the offices of the UN in a way that would not be good for the citizens of Russia or indeed for the rest of us. So that first anecdote about the role of user-generated video in the Russian election, I hope you keep in the back of your mind as I go through the rest of this geopolitical story. So here's the problem statement. There are many large actors around the world, governments as well as industry sectors that would like to see much more control over Internet transactions and access to further their own short-term interests, would like to in effect rebuild borders that existed in the physical world into the way that people access the Internet and the kinds of things they're allowed to do there. That's not good for our shared future. And I think this should surprise you that at the same moment that people around the world are using Internet social networks and video in order to discover the corruption of their governments, those same governments are working very hard to shut things down. Unaccountable governments and unaccountable businesses have a lot to do with this. And the worst of this is that some of this activity is happening in nominally democratic countries. So last year when an abjection activist who was put in jail under Mubarak was asked what democratic nations could do to help cyber activists in the Middle East, he actually said, I call in the world's democracies to fight the troubling trends emerging in your own backyards, to fight the trends which give our own regimes great excuses for their own actions. So here's some stories happening at different layers. First at the international global institutions layer. Last summer, along with 1600 other people, I was summoned to the Tuileries by Maurice Levy, who is in charge of Puebusies, the third largest advertising agency in the world. And he sent an email out to us saying that Mr. Sarkozy, who, the president of the EG8, had put the Internet on the agenda for the G8, very portentious stuff. And he called for all of us to show up and he said this is the very first time that information technology formally takes a place on the agenda of a summit of heads of state. And we were all curious, so we found ourselves in a beautifully branded EG8 tent with high security on the sands of the Tuileries. And all these men in pointy shoes were facing front and listening to what seemed to us to be a 1999 rerun. The speeches were sort of, oh, the Internet's coming and it's really scary and it's going to disrupt businesses right and left. The Internet is changing things. Sarkozy opened the conference with a rambling speech, or perhaps some of you were there, about industrial transformation and revolution. He was really trying to establish his digital cred and making the speech. And, but then sort of almost without being able to help it, he slipped into the language of government needing to be in charge of content, particularly on the Internet, sort of the very bureaucratic inability to see the wealth that can be created online by citizens themselves. And at one point in his address, he said, well, we're going to take this issue to the EG8 and then to the G20 and then to the U.N. was his direction. And the little notice that came out from the G8 said that we'd like to see enhanced cooperation within and between all international fora dealing with the governance of the Internet. Now enhanced cooperation may not mean much to you or certainly not to the general public, but I was on the ICANN board for several years and this is code speak for, we'd rather have the U.N. where only governments have a vote and especially the ITU in charge of the resources of the Internet. Like the IP addresses, which are essential for the atomic units of the Internet and also domain names. That the forum that should be in charge of allocating those resources and deciding what conditions of speech attached to them should be the International Telecommunications Union, part of the U.N. which for years has been looking for new territory. They handed out telephone numbers in the past. They see the Internet as just the next step in their progression. This is in contrast to the current way that those names and numbers are allocated and for which policy is made. Right now that's done by this group called ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Somebody in this room hasn't heard of them, so let me explain. Maybe most of you have. It's a private nonprofit organization that has an international board and operates on a multi-stakeholder consensus-based process where government has a say, but also civil society advocates and businesses are present as well. In the ITU only government has a vote. So, Sarkozy, Whittingly or Unwittingly and the EGA are being enlisted in calls for greater governmental and intergovernmental top-down, one-size-fits-all control over the Internet. And if these trends continue, they risk balkanizing the Internet, which is not a good outcome for all world citizens, has high costs in economic opportunity and also the realization of human rights. This came into sharp relief a month after that EGA meeting when President Putin met with Hamadun Toure, who runs the ITU, and the transcript of the first few minutes of the meeting, subsequently published by the Russian government, said, that Putin apparently said, we're thankful to you for the ideas that you've proposed for discussion. One of them is establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunications Union, ITU. So, establishing international control sounds to those of us worried about the future of the Internet as exactly this march towards heavy-handed intergovernmental control. And there's a big challenge coming up in 2012. At the end of the year, the U.S. will participate in the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications, yet another acronym, Wichita. During that meeting, we expect, the government expects, that some states will try to say that regulations should be rewritten so that the contributions of organizations like ICANN are left out, and instead that governmental control should be put in place. Now, I hear myself talking and it sounds heavy-handed and extreme. Actually, this is a real battle. There are two different mindsets here. The Internet was built by consensus adoption of a few very simple protocols that allow it to operate. Right now, the essential resources of the Internet, names and numbers, are provided without regard to the speech that may be made possible over them. The U.S. has been a pretty good steward for speech on the Internet. And to remove ICANN's role with names and numbers would serve as a precedent for allowing content controls concerned over criticism to be flowed down with people who wish to use the resources of the Internet. So it's critical that during this next year, the private sector and governments work together on figuring out how to extend this multi-stakeholder model, make it stronger, make it operate well. Because right now, many countries are roaming around saying that we really need to have only governments in charge. So that's a battle at the intergovernmental area. There's another battle going on in national governments right now, spurred on by law enforcement, national security concerns in some countries, by content worries in other places. Many governments are digging in, getting worried, and joining with allies to see what they can do about regulating Internet content. Obviously, we've seen recently nations cutting off citizens' access to the Internet and mobile networks in times of crisis. This has happened in Egypt, Libya, Iran, China, Nepal, Burma, in San Francisco. The actor there, the people who run the municipal transit authority, wanted to cut off mobile access during a time of unrest without any due process. And when the iPad toting opposition protesters gathered in central Moscow this weekend, they were surprised to find a lack of mobile Internet access. And the guessing is that this was also provided affirmatively by the Russian government. So straightforward access is obviously a problem. And where there are very few connections to the Internet in any one country, they can be easily cut off. But more subtle than that right now, national laws regulating content and national actions, filtering content, are on the rise, are accelerating right at this time. So again, in Russia, the FSB, the Federal Security Service, asked the Russian social networking site to block the online activities of opposition groups, challenging those election results. And the Russian government appears to be trying to sow discord in social networks by having fake users and massive hacker accounts, hacker attacks, posed towards social networks. But other nations, South Korea on December 1st said it would start reviewing social networking services to remove offensive or immoral content. And the Ministry of Communications in India said it would develop a way to screen information on the Internet and remove content on offensive or incendiary content on social networks. The Thai government is removing Facebook remarks that are critical of the king. The Turks are filtering. So while efforts by China to censor the Internet are relatively well known, there are many, many other democratic nations that are taking similar steps. And this deepens alarm among free speech and human rights advocates, even if the intent is to regulate harmful or illegal content, the spillover effects are great because they demonstrate the possibility of constraining Internet use to suit the particular government's needs. And in the US, one of these attacks on the Internet is going forward right now. It's a proposed bill now in the House called the Stop Online Piracy Act. And it has all the nuance of taking target practice with a shotgun. You may hit the target, but everything else in the general vicinity is left in shreds, too. It's a bill that might have major collateral damage to the Internet if passed, an online free expression. So the idea is that any intermediary would be treated as a theft site if it either, quote, facilitates or, quote, avoids confirming infringing acts by users. So in effect, imposing an affirmative policing obligation on intermediaries. And so this puts any site in danger if it allows anybody to post their own content to its servers, makes them potentially liable. And the bill calls on ISPs to reroute domain name requests for targeted sites, which is exactly what China asks its ISPs to do when censoring. It shifts the onus of filtering onto intermediaries, so they lose the safe harbor they've had under US law. And it would give a private right of action to sue to anyone who felt affected. So far, this really is a major battle in the US right now. And the content side is doing very well on the Hill. And Google has so far been isolated as a large company against the bill. And so a lot of smaller companies are trying to gather together to say this is a really bad idea. And flooding the Hill with phone calls. We'll learn more this week about what happens. But to see the US also marching down the path of filtering content for particular, to serve particular industry's desires is a very dangerous sign from my perspective. OK, this could become a playbook for how national governments may manipulate critical aspects of the internet to enforce local laws. There is an approach to help the content industry in the US. You could cut off payment mechanisms to infringing sites that are carefully identified as puddles of infringement and nothing else. So there's a way to get through this, but it's going to take a lot of negotiation to get there. So the real risks here, and our Secretary of State Clinton said recently that when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the internet is diminished for all of us. And she added, there isn't an economic internet and a social internet and a political internet. There's just the internet. So our foreign policy is very clear that an open internet is important for all democratic nations. So things aren't stable. Something needs to change, and we need principles. We need quickly a global creation of principles that would condemn filtering for anti-competitive or critical reasons, emphasize the importance of an open internet, condemn actions that would re-instantiate borders online, and embrace a reliance on cross-border multi-stakeholder groups where many different actors have a say. We need governments to step up quickly to protect the future of the internet. The Dutch government is taking the lead at the moment and is really determined to step up its efforts to aid cyber activists around the globe. They want to raise freedom online bilaterally and multilaterally time and time again in their negotiations. We also, though, need a social movement. The US has been particularly passive in this regard. We don't march in the streets. We don't say anything when our freedoms are limited. And it really is time for governments and companies and ICT experts and the academic community and civil society to join efforts. We've seen the Occupy Wall Street movement take on a certain weight in the US. And I saw your small operation in Dublin. Glad to see that. It's a year where we're seeing some watershed change in the public approach. But telecommunications policy with all of its acronyms and steep learning curves and insider baseball feel should be part of the mainstream discourse. And it isn't yet, really. So my cause in life is to try to bring this issue home to people who don't want to be seen as stupid or not quite understanding. We've got to simplify it. We've got to make it a voting issue for people around the world. In other words, to take the lesson of online organizing and somehow bring that to this set of policy issues. Collaboration is itself a new form of power. It's not held by any one person or any one place. It's emergent. And leaders can learn to unlock and guide it. It's a very internet-y source of power. And we have to bring it to bear somehow in this set of issues. Without a robust global movement and without genuine commitment by governments and companies to keep the internet open, I'm concerned that the internet will grow increasingly inhospitable to democratic discourse and dissent. Thanks very much.