 Our final conversation of the morning is can we govern our way to a more perfect internet? And our moderator is Christine Rosen, who is the senior editor of the always thought-provoking journal, The New Atlantis, where she writes about the social and cultural impact of technology, as well as bioethics and the history of genetics. She's a Schwartz fellow here at New America, where she's working on her forthcoming book, The Extinction of Experience, and she's an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Notice I didn't use the acronym. Thank you. Well, I want to give a brief introduction to our panel. You've met a few of them already, but to my immediate right is Derek Cogburn, and he is, he directs the Center for Research on Collaboratories in Technology Enhanced Learning Communities, and is chief research director at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, and also teaches the School of International Studies at American University. Rebecca McKinnon, who a lot of you know, and I think on whose work many of the questions we're debating today comes from. She's a senior fellow here at the New America Foundation and works on projects that hold technology companies accountable to universally recognized human rights standards. She's written Consent of the Network, a book that I'm sure many of us enjoyed and that I think will provide a good basis for questions. And you have met Jonathan Koppel, and we're glad to have him here today. And in the limited amount of time we have left, we've been tasked with this wonderfully existential question, can we govern our way to a more perfect internet? And so if we could, I'd like to step back a little bit from some of the details of governance that we've been discussing so far, and ask each of our panelists to give us both a utopian and a dystopian answer to that question. What is your ideal governance structure for the internet, and what do you think would be the least ideal structure? Well, I think it's really important that we think about this particular discussion that's positioned between the IGF in Baku and moving towards the wicket coming up soon. There's a historical perspective that I think, I think Milton probably talked about a little bit, but these issues have been debated for a long time. And the IGF is a continuation of the multi-stakeholder discussions coming out of the World Summit on the Information Society. And the World Summit on the Information Society was an amazing opportunity, even though it was criticized by some people of why even get this group together to focus on these issues. But it was a world summit looking at bringing together multiple stakeholders when the UN General Assembly approved the WISIS. It was about bringing multiple stakeholders together to be able to debate and discuss these issues. Internet governance was a critical part of those discussions. And in the first phase of WISIS, when there was no resolution of the internet governance issues, a working group on internet governance was formed in the interim between the two WISIS processes. And one of the things that that working group on internet governance asked was, what is internet governance? And many of us in international relations looked at this question and we said that there are lots of theory we can draw in to help us understand global governance and internet governance in particular. So internet governance really should be drawn on a mechanism for developing a set of shared principles, norms, values, decision-making procedures, and enforcement mechanisms around a particular issue area. And I actually find it interesting when some of us are saying, well, why do we even need this governance and so forth? Again, international relations helps us to understand this idea of an anarchy problematic. If we have an issue that is transnational in scope, you know, people are saying, we just want it to work. But that doesn't mean just have it work in the United States. It has to work globally. It benefits companies and civil society and governments to have this work around the world, not just in the United States. So the fact that just to say, well, it just has to work, well, how does that happen? And what are the mechanisms for facilitating that kind of global dialogue is what we're really, what we're wrestling with. And so we look at the second phase of WISIS that continued, the WIGIG ended up with the definition very similar to international regime theory to answer the question of what is internet governance. And when WISIS ended in 2005, these issues were still not resolved. And basically, the sort of short version is that we are in what I've called an interregnum between an old governance structure and some kind of new governance structure. So Andrew talked this morning in a very forceful way of challenging the ITU's role. The ITU played a central role in the international regime to govern international telecommunications. That is clearly eroding for a variety of reasons that go back to the WTO's agreement on basic telecommunications, which promoted liberalization and privatization around the world. A whole range of other issues that have eroded the ITU's role. I like Milton's discussion this morning about the ITU trying to claw itself back. It is trying to make itself relevant. But if we think about a new regime to govern this period of communications, we have to think about what are the institutions around which that regime will be based. And, you know, if not the ITU, where? So is it the IGF? The IGF promotes a continuation. So the IGF was given birth after WISIS ended in 2005. We've now had seven IGFs with an eighth plan for next year in Bali. What's interesting about the IGFs is that the way they were structured, it was designed not for people to bring their government hats and their private sector hats, but to get all the right multi-stakeholder actors together to try to facilitate a dialogue and a discussion around these issues. And so you have all these workshops, all these dynamic coalitions where there's a requirement of multi-stakeholder participation to try to put ideas on the table. So from a regime theory perspective, the IGFs are in fact can contribute to a sharing of principles and developing a set of principles, norms and values. And it's not a decision-making venue, although some people would like it to become more of a decision-making venue. But it is a vehicle for promoting these sort of shared principles and values. And one other last point is that when we talk about where does this happen and how somebody mentioned this morning about how expensive it is to get to these various decision-making fore. And so if you look at WISIS, for example, you had the WISIS itself, which was two days, but you had preparatory conferences and regional conferences and so forth. These are expensive propositions to get involved in global governance. And so that means that developing countries have much more challenges getting to these kinds of meetings. You know, if you look at the World Telecommunications Development Conference I went to in Malta several years ago. I lived in South Africa and I went on the South African delegation. The U.S. delegation had 87 people. And it was a big delegation of government, private sector, civil society, academics. The South African delegation was 12 people. And the Jamaican delegation was one. You know, it's a difficult proposition. Much less, how do you get civil society involved in these kinds of meetings? Who from civil society can afford to go to Geneva and Paris for two weeks at a time negotiating the text of a document? And so remote participation is one of the things that I've promoted for many, many years going back to before WISIS about how do we enable active participation in these processes? So some way of effective knowledge and capacity development and remote participation in something like an Internet Governance Forum I think is critical to governance of the Internet. Rebecca? Yeah, well, we are most certainly in an inter-regnum period. And I mean, this is one of the problems that, you know, sort of in the pre Internet age, we had a basic understanding sort of surrounding based on sort of the nation-state geographical model of how to organize power, how to hold it accountable, and so on. But in a globally interconnected world where you're trying to make things work across global networks, make things connect, how do you both sort of balance everybody's interests, have representation and hold power accountable in a way that actually works and is fair as David was pointing out, we're very far from figuring that out. But I want to return to sort of a hybrid of what Milton and Andrew were saying earlier about there is no grand solution, I don't think. And another thing that Andrew was pointing out was, of course, when in these debates about the ITU and the UN's role in Internet governance, one of the arguments that's made by many developing nations is kind of this equity argument about we represent the people of our nations and our interests are X, Y, and Z. But then when you kind of take that apart, you often realize that the interests of those governments is not the same as the interests of Internet users in those countries or that, you know, whose interests they're really representing is very unclear. And I think as we saw from Sunil's comments on Skype, that, you know, the Indian government really hadn't done its homework on sort of who it was representing and what interests is what representing at all in Internet governance processes. And so this whole issue of who's representing whom the problem is, is that you don't want people like, you know, Americans like Andrew saying that you, the Brazilian government, are not a legitimate representative of the Brazilian Internet users' interests. Doesn't work so well. You've got to have Brazilians saying that. And so again, when you have a situation where it's very difficult for civil society to participate in these debates globally, how you empower civil society voices, Internet user community voices to be stronger so that when this argument is made by, you know, developing world governments that, you know, you Americans or, you know, don't represent what the rest of the world wants and we represent it, but then, you know, you have civil society voices that can come out more strongly. And some processes are starting. I mean, I think I'm optimistic that over the next five to 10 years, there are movements, more coordinated processes that are beginning to happen. Civil society groups, a colleague of mine who could not be here today because he's traveling, Gene Kimmelman, represents a UK based organization, Global Partners here in the US and Global Partners has been doing a lot of work bringing together civil society organizations from the global south to really build capacity on this issues and strategize about how to have a stronger voice in these processes. And so we are starting to see more awareness. I think in civil society, and, you know, if one can generalize about the global south, which I don't think one really can, but sort of in the non Western rest of the world, you know, people are in an ideal a lot with activists, organizations in a lot of different parts of the world through my work with global voices. And people are so tied up with fighting day to day battles about people getting arrested for what they wrote on the internet, you know, state level censorship, all kinds of crazy censorship and surveillance laws that are being passed at the nation state level. And they are so tied up in fighting these, you know, very national level battles, it's really hard to have the time to get involved with these more global issues or to even know who in their government is participating in the international processes. But I think the good news is, is that these groups are starting to pay more attention, starting to get more involved, and they're starting to be more kind of foundation money and kind of aid money that's going towards supporting greater civil society and involvement from a broader set of countries. So so that I think is is hopeful that maybe we will see stronger civil society participation. But the other issue sort of around governance is and I really do agree with both Milton and Andrew that there's not one organ over arching sort of internet governance process to to deal with all kind of internet related issues and policy around all those issues that I think it likely is if if we are going to meet kind of two goals I think of governance on a global scale. One is rules that need to be set in order for the internet to work for people to be able to use the internet and and you know the coordinating fund the technical coordinating functions to happen. And that these rules are set and technical coordination happens in a manner that does not further the abuse of power by either governments or corporations or other group powerful groups or entities and that there's a mechanism to hold that power accountable. But I think with each problem you're trying to solve the way you approach holding power accountable or avoiding abuse is different you know so so it makes sense that you would have kind of a particular problem that needs to be solved let's say okay cyber security right that I think we're all pretty much agreed in this room that the answer to cyber security problems is not a global surveillance treaty or something like that about it you know among governments. But there is an issue there's a legitimate issue with security and there's a legitimate concern about abuse of surveillance and so you know kind of what mechanisms might emerge around that driven by civil society hopefully driven you know less by Washington but but but by people around the world with sort of basic human rights values. It is going to be messy it is going to take a while to work out. But I think there is you know coming back to this my my previous point there is I think a growing movement of civil society actors of internet users of NGOs who agree that they share common principles on free expression on basic right to privacy particularly around through the right to freedom from abuse of political surveillance and that unless these issues are dealt with the internet is going to erode in its value and that there needs to be some way of pushing back and that a lot of groups are coordinating globally to try and strategy to strategize both at the national and global level. It's going to take a while I think for again different processes looking at different questions figuring out how to hold you know those exercising power over these mechanisms accountable sufficiently. So I think Milton and some hybrid of Milton and Andrew's model of you know you're going to have focused I don't think you'd even call them organizations necessarily network processes around management of certain problems and solutions and coordination and that you have enough kind of public awareness globally and enough participation globally to prevent abuse or to mitigate against abuse going beyond certain boundaries without consequences you know and making sure that there is you know consequence for abuse and and that's I think where it's going to go but it's going to be kind of messy and it's it's not going to be some kind of thing where you can draw a clear chart or chart you know with the whole global governments process kind of neatly mapped out it's it's we're just going to have to be able to tolerate a lot more messiness. Jonathan. So I've got a lot of disjointed thoughts on a lot of this stuff but so I'll try and be brief and just throw some stuff out there so I'm my interest in internet governance when it was emerging actually led me to look at other types of global governance organizations and a whole bunch of different spheres and one interesting thing about this conversation is it's it's a similar conversation that's been had in a lot of other arenas over the last 100 150 years and they're and the the the sort of the sort of placing of the ITU as a boogie man is sort of interesting to me if you want to look at the sort of common conversations about global rulemaking bodies there are three sort of things that everybody says one global governance organization X is incompetent and ineffectual and it nobody cares what they say or do to global governance organization X is tyrannical and autocratic and is going to rule our lives in ways that we don't want three which you could just argue as a corollary of two global governance organization X is profoundly undemocratic lacking transparency and doesn't provide opportunities for participation what's always interested me is if one was true why would you care about two and three sort of I mean it sort of reminds me way the criticism of you know President Obama is this power-mongering horrible dictator who by the way is incompetent and can't get anything done well if he's totally incompetent then who cares whether he's a pet right what difference does it make I think that I think that the the reality is that many of these global or global governance organizations are stopped cold when they try to do things that the people whether their organizations whether their states whether their companies don't want them to do I'm sure people in this room I remember I can't remember the year I think it was in 2004 2006 the universal postal union asserted itself as the potential governor of the internet is interesting thing I think maybe because the name sounds more anachronistic than the international telecommunications you remember people sort of snorted at that and said yeah right and they sort of went away and they this went on for a couple months there was you know it was very similar they were up you meetings on what an internet governance it looked like and it's not crazy if you think about you know that at that time the internet was people focused on email and so it looked sort of like mail and had the word mail in and we will envelope logos on our computer and say well who's to say the universal post union but everybody sort of laughed at them and they slunk away and said all right we're done with we're done with the internet nobody was terribly afraid of the up you taking over the internet it's it's it's interesting to me that this has been placed as a threat and I'm not going to answer this question but I would pose as a question who benefits from the framing of the ITU as a threat to take over the internet I think there are answers to that question but but I'll put that I'll put that aside the question so let me come back to your question of what what governance of the internet look like and I will firmly fall in David's lead and say I'm not going to answer that question I don't know the answer that however what I can say is any what I could say is a couple of things based on looking at other organizations that that do this so one of the one of the things that I think is interesting about governance in this transnational space generally is and and what and I think it's important when we talk about global governance think what makes global governance different than domestic governance and it's a sort of interesting question that we that we don't really focus on to my mind the biggest difference is that in the domestic sphere you basically have no choice but to fall under the powers of the government it's pretty hard to avoid now now we tell a story that says why do I follow the law why do I stop at the stop sign why do I obey the speed limit that says well it's because the government's legitimate okay there's some truth to that it's also because you don't want to get a ticket right it's also because you don't want to end up in jail there's this coercion that coincides nicely with the legitimacy of the system it's good and so we don't much think about what happens if you take away the one without the other in the international realm for the most part and I can's an interesting exception to this for reasons I'll get into in one second just it for the most part that coercion doesn't exist right if you choose not to if you country X individual why or or or company Q choose not to submit to some international order then you you don't go to jail right so ISO some of an organization many people familiar with they create standards on all kinds of things like so nobody says you have to make your watch battery conform to ISO standard three six seven four two the only problem is if you don't you're not going to sell any watch batteries right but you're but you're free in some sense you're free to ignore the global the global rule-making regime what does that mean it means that if the global rules are not or the system of global rules are not in the interest of the people who are supposed to use those rules they simply walk away and so one of my one of my feelings about the future of the governance of the Internet is that if the constituencies the users of the Internet and we can talk about what that means in it I think that's not that Internet of itself is not a straightforward term right if the people who must adopt the rules produced by whatever global rule making entity is out there do not find it in their interest to implement adopt these rules then it doesn't matter what organization is creating rules because those rules only matter if people are using them right I realize that's sort of a that may be sort of an elliptical way of saying it but I think it's really important no organization whether it's the ITU or anything else has the ability to force people to adopt their rules now here's what makes I can interesting right I can's interesting precisely because it's completely different than what I just said because and it has to do with the origin story right because it controlled these servers and controls that sort of metaphorically people like to call it a phone book or a directory or whatever if you wanted people to find you on the Internet you had to play by I can's rules period right that's really unusual right in the global in the global governance space and it allows them to it allows historically allowed them to do sort of what they want to do and I agree with David's point basically the check on I can was the US government could step in any other regime right so an ITU regime doesn't have that check it just doesn't and and as much as we might sort of fear a global government there's all kinds of ways that these international organizations are set up precisely to stop them from being able to do that doesn't matter whether you're talking about the world customs union whatever every one of these organizations has a series of what I call safety valves but you can call them circuit breakers or whatever that allow you to stop bad things from happening and by bad I mean things I don't want right as an aside the Seychelles or Lesotho or whatever doesn't have the same power to stop things as China or the United States so I do think and I don't want to digress too far I do think the one country one vote thing is a little bit of a it's overstated as a threat but I don't want I don't want to I don't want to spend too much time on it so so my so to answer the question or to sort of wrap wrap this up my answer is it's and it's maybe sort of a reverse Panglossian in the sense this no internet governance regime will emerge that is not fundamentally viewed as being in the interest of some set of users and adopters and implementers of rules that people don't that don't want because that's so logistically impossible there's no way to impose such a set of rules unless the people who would adopt them want to adopt them right now the who is and there's all kinds of loaded elements of that right so I realized that we could parse lots of pieces of that but I think that that's interesting now will that will that be more just that will whatever emerges be more just or more representative or all the values that were articulated not necessarily because who who the who the who the adopter and implementer of those rules are is not the citizenry it's not the internet individual users of the world right and that's a genuine that's a genuine problem if your view is that that's where authority ought to be located but I do think it's I do think it's important to sort of look at what other organizations are out there and see what has emerged over time in other spaces before we leap to a conclusion about what is the worst case scenario what might emerge well okay well no this is very helpful although none of you took the dystopian route I was hoping for so in the few minutes we have left is anyone have a question for the panel that might keep it existential if possible oh good give her the microphone thank you for this panel my name is Laura like Kelly I'm here at open technology Institute can you hear me on this the question I have regards the role of the public sector in internet governance but particularly the role of militaries and the reason I ask that is that here in the United States there's been a trend for a lot of foreign policy or global issues to migrate into the defense department and the latest one is critical infrastructure and internet systems they're they're going to defend domestic civilian systems instead of the Department of Homeland Security and I think it's a capacity issue and a competence issue but I do think it's really problematic and do you see this trend in other countries because I guarantee you it's going to be a different set of negotiations and outcomes if the sort of primary actor in governments is in uniform and I have having kind of a friendly fight with a lot of my friends in uniform right now and yesterday I put this forward I said you know I actually I have a problem with this as a civil military imbalance and and he said this in the context of the dismay over the privatization of a lot of the military's roles he said listen I'd rather have a competent person dedicated to the greater good in uniform doing this kind of work than somebody who's incompetent from for example the private sector I just thought that was an interesting tension and I don't know if civil society can catch up to the competence that already exists inside governments and particularly in militaries in governments and I'm wondering is this a trend that you've seen anywhere else and is anyone talking about it because it's certainly happening here I think you really have to go country by country and really kind of look at you know in terms of how infrastructure you know like the relationship between the telecommunications ministry and country X and their relation with the you know law enforcement versus you know military and how much separation there is between military and law enforcement and you know and just what kind of system it is and you know it's kind of hard to generalize I guess you know like so what is the Indian military's involvement in internet policy I have absolutely no idea the Brazilian military's involvement I know in China there's very heavy involvement and there's been a lot of column mentions written about that but that's that's you know China is a country that views kind of like the United States views the internet as a theater right of global power struggle going forward and has a systematic view about its need to you know be active in that theater on an economic level on a military level and so on but I mean I think a lot of countries don't have a coherent strategy at the government level or a lot of coordination going on between different parts of governments about what they're doing related to the internet so they're all kind of you know the law enforcement people are doing one thing and you know other people are you know doing other things and there isn't a lot of coordination but I think you pose an interesting question about whether in you know whether militaries will become more active in the sphere more broadly and it's certainly something to be thinking about very hard and I'll take one part of the second half of what you described you talked a little bit about more public sector involvement and and that the expertise you said can civil society's knowledge and expertise rise to the level of the public sector and in many countries around the world the expertise actually sits in civil society and not in the governments many of these if you look at the the national level delegations that go to some of the meetings and are debating and negotiating some of these issues they're stretched out across multiple issue areas they don't necessarily have deep expertise in the areas that they're negotiating on and so better involvement of civil society is one of the ways of getting that expertise into the process I think there's also another element Rebecca that's that's quite interesting about the importance of a multi-stakeholder environment in the traditional state centric negotiating environment you you would have the US government going to a conference and you'd have the South African government going to a conference as if there was a coherent whole they would present a US government perspective the interesting thing about a multi-stakeholder environment is at the same conference you have these subnational fractures and so you have different views from the US and from South Africa or from Brazil being raised at the same conference and I imagine from a governmental perspective that's got to feel a little uncomfortable perhaps you know to have all these alternative perspectives being raised yeah a lot of governments don't want to go to an international meeting and have their civil society people contradict publicly what what they're advocating when opposing you know joining together with civil society groups from other countries and opposing what their government is advocating and you know that happens you know it's starting to happen increasingly and you know governments have lots of self-interested reasons to prevent that which is one of the problems so just one quick thought first of all I don't think it's a theoretical matter I mean the United States has not viewed it as a theater they operate in that theater I mean the Stuxnet sort of showed that quite clearly and I think they're they're probably people in this room know this far better than I but many American policy positions relative to what an optimal regulation of the Internet should look like I think reflect a desire to make it possible to do Stuxnet type activities in the in the years ahead or at least it's it's so alleged I don't I don't actually understand it's something that's quite technical and I don't I don't quite get it so but but I think that that's that's a really good illustration of American values are not necessarily the same as American policy with respect to the Internet it's one of the reasons why people are sort of skeptical that just leaving the Internet in the United States is hands we're all good is precisely for that precisely for reasons like that so people talk about multi-stakeholder participation and so on in these organizations just want to be clear so first of all Derek's point is well-taken that you listen to the cities that we rattle of oh we're going to Bali or did you go to Baku or you know where my who can participate in these things I mean this is not this is not you know Joe Internet users sitting there you know in in in DACA who says wow I really I really would like to participate in the Internet governance form I think I'll go to Baku or Malta I mean you're talking about a very small sampling of the universe that gets to participate through these multi-stakeholder engagement mechanisms the other thing to say is I think we can also lose sight of the degree to which different stakeholders participate through these inner governmental bodies so I actually was just as I was sitting I was looking because I mean I knew it to be true but I was just curious if you look at the ITU they call most these organizations have groups that work on particular rules or standards no ITU calls their study groups look at who participates in the study groups right some of them are government representatives but the vast majority are corporate representatives and and and in some cases there are civil society groups that participate in the study groups right so we shouldn't have the we shouldn't have the picture in our mind I'm not saying that it's perfect but we shouldn't have the picture in our mind that when you have an ITU or choose any other UN type organization that it is government officials only it's just not it's just as a as an empirical matter it's just not how they work for better or for worse I mean I'm not we can say that that should be how they work but that's not how they work what interesting thing I wanted to a point I wanted to make as well is if we talk about what institutions can help facilitate this governance regime if we look at the last at least since the late late 1990s look at the role that the ITU has played as a convening power and and you can say we're better or worse as a result but the ITU convened the WSS it was because of the ITU that WSS came about and we had this you know multi-year multi stakeholder process to discuss a whole range of these issues look at what's come out of it which is the IGF secretariat the IGF secretariat has I think two paid staff members and maybe a couple of consultants it's enormously understaffed and and very small to be able to take on the role that it has so one thing if we don't look at the ITU as a boogeyman and it is trying to search for a role rather than killing it and decapitating it Andrew and knee-capping it slashing it maybe dismembering it one of the things might be to use the tremendous infrastructure at ITU to become a convening body to help bring the right groups together to provide support for the kinds of discussion for and all the multi-faceted specific discussion for that need to take place I mean maybe that's a way to sort of promote that as a as a positive outlook on ITU. Hello my name is Timothy McGinnis some of you may know me as mctim I have a couple of pedantic technical corrections perhaps when you said that I can control these servers that's just not the case there are 12 organizations that run the 13 root servers and there's an intricate system of processes between I can and the verisign incorporated and maybe Andrew can tell us about this because he was working at I can when they negotiated this in 2001 and the United States Department of Commerce so there is a set of checks and balances there and the other thing that you just said was but I do understand that the study groups and there are sector members and I'm a member of some organizations that are sector members but I'm also working in the technical coordination field for example this week there's a meeting in cartoon of the African Network Information Center which is completely open completely transparent completely bottom up consensus-driven decision-making and the point about the ITU is it goes part partway there but then at the end of the day during the ITRs it's a one government one vote so I know which one I clearly prefer thank you so just quickly I wasn't saying that it controls this in administration but it had a gatekeeper it had a gatekeeper power which was incredibly potent in the big into why people accepted I cans authority yes so just to just to echo what what mctim was saying the discussions about I can't always get really weird to me because there is this this thing that's evident to engineers that's not evident to the outside world and I don't know I candidly don't really know how important it is but from the engineering perspective it seems really important and that is that the only significance the only source of I cans authority truly is that the ISPs that actually deliver packets point their resolvers at one or all of 13 machines that mirror a file originally published by I can and if I can blows it right does something really dumb like publishes a file that drops dot CN out of it or dot TW for some reason then the ISPs will stop referring to that as the authoritative file and everything kind of goes down there is this incredible value in the uniqueness of naming and uniqueness of number and numbering and so on the one hand maybe it's like well who cares that they could stop they never will so I can does in fact have the authority that you attribute or people might attribute to it as a gatekeeper but on the other hand there is the self-corrective function on the internet which happens by the way every time that like a Pakistani ISP as seems to happen every two or three years tells the world it's YouTube and suddenly black holes and shuts down the Pakistan internet because of the vast flood of YouTube queries that start coming to it because of the way our routing system trust-based routing system works well then the internet corrects for it and the ISPs no longer treat what's coming out of Pakistan is true and ad filters and so anyway there is this I never really know exactly how to think about that because there are these inherent self-correcting mechanisms in the distributed decentralized nature of the internet that actually dramatically diminish ICANN's ability to do something genuinely stupid so that it's not just the U.S. government's ability to spank ICANN that act as a corrective mechanism you know where else would you point where were the ISPs point to if not to the ICANN I can informed servers eleven of the root server operators just hypothetically speaking could say we've agreed amongst ourselves to publish a file and it's going to be this different file and maybe we're just going to keep publishing this other file until ICANN gets its act together or somebody else comes along or we're going to let the ITU do it or they could do that and the ISPs would be like well that's an acceptable solution our DNS infrastructure is configured to point at these machines anyway and it sounds like they've got their act together will keep doing it. So it really comes down to whether you think that's a credible credible that's why I say I don't know how to think about this it just that there is there is this feeling in the engineering world that a lot of the politics dumped on ICANN are overblown because we collectively when we meet in cartoon among the Africans or in you know Amsterdam among the Europeans or in rest in Virginia among the American ISPs like we talk to each other we know each other and we have a mechanism to deal with these breakdowns in whatever it might be policy technologies it never it it people say it never happened it actually does happen that they're constantly correcting for things that get screwed up but just they haven't been correcting for a massive screw-up at the top but they could I'm going to take in the back here yeah I like the fact that Andrew said he didn't know how to think about this process but there is a name for it it's called network governance I'm Milton Mueller at Syracuse University so there is a name for it it's this process of voluntary linking delinking filtering which collectively does solve an amazing amount of the governance issues on the internet today already from things like spam and routing security which he mentioned and even to some extent it botnets and things like that the thing though about I can I think Jonathan is right to be somewhat skeptical about how credible the threat of mass defections of ISPs are is number one when you do have an increasingly entrenched and established institution there is a danger that there will be political pressure on people to to not point away from the I can route and we might remember that when John Postel tried to organize the root server operators to point away from the verisign route I think he was visited by either Ira magazine or the FBI or both but something like that did happen and he was suitably intimidated and there was no other talk about diverting the route so there's a political dimension here that you can't ignore particularly when somebody economic interests have a vested interest in retaining the kind of centralized control that I can provide. We're going to leave that as the last word and we want to thank our panel today and Joel, do you have one more thing to say?