 All right, so this topic is an interesting one. It's a new one, I think, for us and hopefully a little bit for the community. We titled this, what can we learn, the space community, if anything, from internet governance? And we asked that because we've been struggling in the space world with how to deal with some of these governance challenges and problems we talked about this morning. We're talking about a lot. And there have been some studies that have looked at other domains. There's a lot of comparisons to the error domain, the maritime domain. But we hadn't seen a lot of discussions of how things are done on the internet. And we thought that was a really useful thing to focus on. And in particular, the governance challenges with how do you deal with the growing number and type of space actors, which include governments and industry and civil society and all the end users that are not only carrying out space activities, but are also impacted by things in space. They're end users that are reliant on the data even if they're not flying satellites. Traditional space governance fora in the UN and elsewhere have some mechanisms to bring in some viewpoints from other stakeholders but are mostly government centric. And it's been challenging to figure out how to kind of broaden out that model. And then to narrow down a little bit further for a kind of our focus, this key aspect of space situation awareness data, the stuff we use to know what's happening in space, there's sort of a growing recognition we have to share that between actors, we have to co-olate it, we have to fuse it. How do we do that? How do we put in place the standards in our operability to do that to them able to go towards space traffic management? And so we're gonna talk in this session about not only how that's sort of done today in the space world, but how some of these similar problems are addressed in the internet governance and specifically organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the ITF and we're gonna talk more about what those are and what lessons they hold and maybe not, this comparison is not saying it's 100% ideal for space governance. So joining us to talk about this, starting at my left and working our way down the stage, we have Richard Dalbello, Director of the Office of Space Commerce in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association or Site Administration, which is in turn part of the US Department of Commerce. Rich has a lot of experience both inside and outside government on space policy matters and in his current job is responsible for developing civil space situation awareness and space traffic management capabilities for the US government. Next up we have Mallory Nodal, she's the Chief Technology Officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology and is a member of the Internet Architecture Board and the co-chair of the Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force and as you can probably guess, she has extensive experience in internet governance bodies and mechanisms. Next up we have Bruce McClintock who's the lead for the Space Enterprise Initiative and a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation where his research focuses on the sustainability, safety and security of space for the new space era. Next we have Charlie McGillis, Senior Vice President, Government Relations and Strategy at Slingshot Aerospace, a company focused on improving space safety and optimizing orbital operations through space situation awareness, data and services. And finally we have Claire Otto, Senior Policy Analyst at the University of Virginia, National Security Policy Center where she contributes research on topics ranging from deterrence to domestic extremism. Notably for this discussion, Claire was an SWF Research Fellow last year and did a report for us on polycentricity and space governance. We're gonna get into what those actually mean in a minute here. A reminder for both our in-person audience and our virtual audience that we will be taking questions as we did for the previous session through the Hoover Platform. Please make sure you're on the right session in the agenda so I'll be able to see those adding your questions when I'll be working those in throughout the discussion. We also have a poll that's been open in Hoover asking about the role of industry and space governance. We'll be getting to that a little bit later in our discussion, so please get your answer in already if you haven't and we'll be looking at those responses about halfway through. So Claire, I'd like to start with you and start with sort of the broader context for this shared governance approach to space. As I mentioned in your intro, you did some research for us on what are known as common pool resources. Can you talk about what those are, how they relate to these questions about space, especially comes this monitoring activities thing that we've been talking about. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much first off. Really excited to be participating and this is a very interesting topic. So polycentricity, as you mentioned before, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It's just the concept of multiple levels of governance all over the same area, area of responsibility. So we see this in most governance systems that we have right now. With that, and it's very related to common pool resources and the global commons. Space, there's the other secure world foundation fellow from last fall, Daniel Patton, did a whole report on if space is a global commons and you can read the report, but he found that it's complicated. He looked into common pool resources and looking at common pool resources and governance of the commons, you find that Eleanor Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning work found that there were eight principles for managing a commons, maintaining sustainability in common pool resources, which most of them end up with having an efficient polycentric system, having an efficient system of shared governance. Shared governance, polycentricity, allows for multiple levels of people to have input and modify rules when they need to, allows for conflict resolution at lower and higher levels and is just generally more flexible and responsive. It does present a little bit of a challenge with defining clear boundaries and interoperability that I think in my research we found with data sharing and space situational awareness sharing, but generally speaking, it allows for the flexibility and the multiple sources of data coming together to produce a more robust system. So Charlie, I wanna turn to you since Slingshot is involved in kind of how things currently work with SSA. So can you kind of briefly summarize how SSA sharing is done today between the different data providers, satellite operators and governments, as well as what existing standards exist or don't to enable that? Yeah, so thanks for, it's great to be in here. So it was mentioned in the first panel, the Iridium Cosmos Collision in 2009 and that's actually where the US strategic command SSA sharing agreement started. So it started in 2009, actually arrived at the command later that year, but it's actually from a US centric perspective, it's actually in law that the US may not provide or may not provide SSA data or services unless a non-US government agency enters into an agreement. So, and I'll get back to that. So if the DOD system is being used to produce data, then you have to sign an SSA sharing agreement in order to use that data. So there's three levels of services that the Department of Defense offers today. There's an emergency service, like there's gonna be a crash, we have to get all of you, let's do it. But there's also a basic service which actually includes what we call TLE or two line elements that data. And we call this kind of the general catalog. But it's just TLE data and I think we would all agree that that is not the way we should be making decisions. And then the other one is more advanced services and this actually uses what we would call the special perturbations catalog, it's a higher level catalog, it does take covariance into account but that covariance is not shared. And so when those messages are put out, we call them conjunction data messages, that isn't probably sufficient for owner operators to make those decisions. And being part of the commercial integration sale when I retired, that was one of the things we tried to work on to get DOD to actually share that information. And so at a high level, DOD shares this information, owner operators can put information into the space track dog org as it is called today. But it is, an owner operator gets to decide if they want to share that information with anybody else. There are two examples that I know of that do that and that is Orridium shares their information freely. So Walt, thank you, and also Maxar. So that information is shared and that is a great best practice. But the other thing is, so then owner operators submit that, they can get it, you can get maneuver recommendations but it takes time, it's a DOD service and so as Rich takes over that, right? I look forward to how he is going to take that law and be able to actually enact it or change it which is a big ask, right? So commercial providers like ourselves, that data is not included, it is not integrated into that system today. I know they're working that but it does make it not persistent, right? From a data kind of perspective, they don't have the best data and then you get into the what is the truth data as I would call it, who validates that and what are the standards for doing that which I think really will be interesting of how we track that from a standard perspective and I'll stop there. I think there's a lot of things we can pick up on those as we go through this. So Mallory, I want to turn to you next. You've got a lot of experience in the world, the internet governance and how things like TCPIP and packets and stuff that we don't even think about happens behind the scenes and for a lot of us space nerds and we might use that word on one of those, right? We don't really know how that works. So if you could share a little bit about how the governance of the internet works specifically to sort of the technical standards and the interoperability and who gets a seat at the table. Well, I too am a nerd. So thanks for inviting me. This is a new domain for me but yeah, I do a lot of internet governance. That's the main part of my job and of course I can talk about it for a very long time. I'm gonna keep the intro part short and try to hit the high points that I think can set us up for maybe some more discussion about the crossover or potential for thinking of internet governance as a model for space sustainability. So I think it's useful to maybe think about, because you mentioned TCPIP, there's a really great, very visual person. So you could go on the internet, maybe look for the imagery of the hourglass model of the way the internet works. This is meant to demonstrate that while you have on the sort of lower end more of the hardware. So this is where the mandates for standards coming out of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers might come out. The satellites would be down there as well. Undersea cables, the real infrastructure in our, you know, the network cards in our phones. And then at the top, you have things that are much more user facing, the applications, the platforms, the connective tissue between all of these different uses of internet communications that then interoperate. In the middle part, the small narrow waistband is where TCPIP lives. That's the thing that connects it all. That's the thing that makes something internet or not internet. And the really interesting part about that band is it's narrow because it's one protocol, first of all. But it's also narrow because it is the only thing that you really need to use in order to connect to the rest of the network. So while we think of the internet as one internet, and I would agree, it's also, the internet is a network of networks. So there's not too much overthinking when it comes to how one builds their own internet and then connects to the rest of the internet. That can be relatively bespoke or have its own certain quirks. We can still, you know, connect in most places all over the world using TCPIP. And so then the governance that follows from that is really the sort of padding, I guess, around that protocol, how you take just a technology but then support the use of that technology. And that has sort of been a whole story and a whole saga that we could go into. We can start storytelling in the early 80s. There have been some interesting milestones in the early 2000s. But really what it's all built around is this desire to connect all these different networks. And so some of those networks have been built from the ground up. Not all networks are driven by companies. In the early days, a lot of them were driven by governments. And even still today, I have some dear colleagues that are building entire networks in hard-to-reach areas that are ostensibly community-driven efforts. They're folks who've pooled their money together to buy a mobile antenna. They're using walks for can-tennis. I mean, so it's a very sort of diverse space when you're actually talking about network operation. And then to the governance question, which I think the main question here is because you have all these different stakeholder groups actually doing the work, putting in the work, innovating and plugging things in, then you have a lot of people who have an opinion about how the network evolves or how you deal with thorny issues, such as spam or resource allocation or the placement of new infrastructure. And so it may differ in a lot of ways at this point from space because there's still a need to proliferate. And so one stakeholder group, one government, one effort by one centralized entity just would not be able to achieve that. One of the things that, one of the milestones I have in mind to share with you was something called the IANA transition. This was when the US government essentially gave up control of the global registry of the names and numbers allocation to a global multistakeholder process. And so IANA still functions, but it functions on its own and it functions in between the ICANN group, which you've already mentioned the acronym, so I don't have to repeat it again, and the IETF, both of which I also work in. In fact, ICANN is meeting right now in Washington, DC for the week. It's their second meeting of the year out of three. It's their policy meeting. So for folks interested in that, you can of course watch all of those things online because ICANN, like the IETF and like many of these bodies are fully open and free for registration. Their proceedings are available, their documents and their standards are all published freely. And so of course that's an interesting one that facilitates that governance. So I actually think I should stop there for now and maybe if there are questions or other things you wanna dive into, I can get further. One real quick follow up. So as I understand it, the couple of words you mentioned, ICANN is the organization that decides the dot com, dot net that we call the top level domains, right, and who gets to operate those. And the IETF, they design the technical standards, right, and the protocols. Exactly, and there are so many acronyms I could go even beyond those. But yeah, the ICANN serves, ICANN with INF serves this really important function of the naming and numbering so that we can share this one resource and it's interoperable. So it's a very critical interoperable functionality. And in fact, ICANN is more of a policy organization where they overlap with the IETF and that the domain name system, which is the TLDs and the IP addresses and everything, the technology that backs that is actually determined by the IETF. They write the protocols for how it works. ICANN manages the contracts because you don't actually ever own, you know, dot org or dot gay or whatever. You are essentially renting it from ICANN. You have a contract with ICANN and there are certain terms under which they could revoke that contract. The only exception to that, and this is maybe interesting for space context, is country code top level domains, which have been allocated to every country in the world. And they are exempt from essentially every ICANN policy because there's a, and this is an interesting UN quirk where at some point the UN kind of gave ICANN this mandate, right, acquiesced and allowed them to do that. Unlike the telephone system, which is clearly managed by the ITU, the country code top level domains and something called the governmental advisory committee are both sort of vestiges of governments having a different role than everyone else in the management of these resources as a way of sort of trying to replicate as best they can the big tent of the UN process where governments do have some degree of sovereignty over their jurisdictions. And that was how the internet works, great, okay. And so Bruce, I want to turn to you. Your team at RAND has recently done a study, I think we had some copies out front, comparing space governance to governance and other domains, including the internet, but also several others. Can you kind of talk about the major findings, how it relates to this discussion? Yeah, thanks very much, Brian. And thanks to you and Secure World Foundation for hosting this summit. It's a really important part of what we do together to maintain space sustainability and improve on it. And RAND's proud to be a sponsor of this event in particular. So as Brian mentioned, we've got a report that we published just prior to this event intentionally. And we talked about the future of international space traffic management. One of the things that we did, and you'll see it, it's the catchy headline that the time for international space traffic management is now. I want to qualify that, that's the top line up front. That's in RAND timelines, okay. So to put it in RAND perspective, our very first space related report was our very first report and it was written 11 years before Sputnik launched. And it predicted that it was possible to launch a 500 kilogram satellite and that in the future, that all the things that we take for granted now would be accomplished through space. Satellite communications, navigation, Earth remote sensing. RAND thought about all those things 11 years in advance. So to say the time for international space traffic management is now, you'll hear later where we talk about maybe within 10 years, okay. But I want to be clear that we do believe that we are at a tipping point. And I actually have several of my RAND colleagues here in the audience that were part of the team. So thanks to them for that effort. If you have feedback, please give it to them, or me as well, because we want to hear this. We want to be a part of this discussion for the long haul, because this is a long term effort. So what did we do just very briefly and then we'll get to some of the insights and recommendations. So what we did is kind of like Brian mentioned, there have been a lot of studies in the past about a future space traffic management system. So we scooped all those up, we analyzed those. There's a lot of error domain comparisons, there's a lot of analogies to the maritime domain as well. And we said, we're gonna take at least one or two steps further. And we're gonna look at other governance structures like ICANN. We briefly look at ICANN to analyze its approach. We also looked at the Swift banking system. And we also looked at ITU, which people mentioned as well. And then we went a step beyond that and we did a lifecycle analysis of international governance organizations to figure out which ones survive and which ones die, which ones thrive and which ones fail, if you will. To come up with the best constructs or the best characteristics for those IGOs that really stand the test of time and actually serve the purpose that they're designed for. And then once we took all that into account, we came up with a couple, I'll just hit on a couple, key insights and key recommendations. The first one, I'm preaching to the choir here on this and we've heard it all morning long, but specific to space traffic management, we conclude that the world is approaching a space traffic management tipping point. The congestion is growing, the lack of coordination or rules of the road is such that we're getting to the points where the collisions that are now rare but have happened already, satellite on satellite collisions are going to become more frequent in the future unless we come up with a system that coordinates across those enterprises. And by the way, you have to have an SSA system before you have a space traffic management system. So glad to see that Rich is here to talk about that as well. We also conclude, this isn't Rand speak, but to put it simply, it's time to stop admiring a problem, okay? Over the past 40 years, there have been more than a dozen very significant reports and studies and analysis done on exactly this topic about space traffic management or international space traffic management. And we cite them all in our report. So it's time to stop just admiring the problem and actually doing something about it. So what should we do about it? The top two line recommendations from Rand are first and foremost, we recommend an international space traffic management convection be convened within the next five years and establish an implementation plan for the next 10 years. So again, that's that now from Rand perspective so that we actually have an international governance system that allows the different stakeholders and we include all the stakeholders. We include industry, NGOs, governments of course, in that conversation so that we can come up with a system that gives us a sustainable space for the future. I wanna point out, you can read it in the report as well. We don't explicitly advocate for the UN to be the host for this event. We do model off of some other UN activities, but we wanna point out, there's a lot of times when the UN, it's a little bit harder. We did hear some encouraging things this morning from our first keynote speaker. It's harder for the UN to take in this multi-stakeholder approach sometimes. So I was encouraged by what I heard this morning about other approaches to that. The other, I'll touch on one more recommendation from the report and it goes to exactly the point of this panel. We talk about learning from past successes. So we essentially say, don't just template, don't say, well, we need an IKO for space or we need an unclos for space or we need ITU to take on the mission of space traffic management. We don't believe that's the right solution. The right solution is a best practices approach that takes into account all those characteristics that we outlined in the report. Many of which come from ICANN, a system that started as an NGO and then as you mentioned, transferred to an international structure. So there's a lot to benefit from there and that's why we give that five and 10 year period of time so that we can get the stakeholders together to build off the best practices that already exist, not just from air and maritime domains and come up with a system that will stand the test of time. So I'll stop there, Brian. Well, that's great. So I'm gonna turn you to Rich next because you're tasked with leading the US government efforts on solving all of these problems. So we're gonna need an update on that, please. Yeah, we gotta solve the control. But so Spindley, I mean, so far the top question of the audience is what is an update on how that is all going but also how does this discussion so far relate to what the problems you guys are trying to tackle and what you're working on? What about this? Do you find useful? This is a bunch of us, wonks here talking in general or how relevant is the challenges your office has on civil as a say and the international coordination piece of that. Okay, there's actually a lot going on globally but we need to, I mean, I agree with Bruce and Rand in the broad strokes but there's so much detail and granularity to get to any of those conclusions. So where are we right now? We've just come out of a period where really the only true source for it, the only globally available source for SSA was the US Air Force, now Space Force. That was metered out in different levels of, the information was metered out in different levels of clarity, depending on who you were with very general information given out and very to the public but very specific information to some people. What that is spawned is not an internet like coming together but what it is spawned is as all nations have great mathematicians and theoretical scientists. What we're seeing now is the proliferation of SSA systems. The EUSST is, I think, is now up and running, offering services. As we go around the world, obviously China and Russia already have their own independent capabilities. So what we're actually seeing is not a coming together but an atomization of the SSA marketplace. Within the US, because there's sort of hyperactivity because we have not only is the government involved but we have a number of really capable US companies involved including Slingshot. And so what we are getting now to the point where there are a number of answers out there that you can drive in countries are feeling comfortable saying, oh, we have our own system. The problem is is that the math doesn't work. That we don't today have a way to compare the results of two independent systems and no truth and to be able to define truth. And so we have right now, I think, not to make this about China, but China is a good example of a country that has a very sophisticated space program. They also have very smart engineers and they are able to do SSA at a very, very sophisticated level. They have declined to share information with the rest of the world. So we do have issues where US providers including Planet, we just heard from Mark about Planet's commitment, but Planet and others like Starlink have by the China's estimation come close to their human space station. We say they didn't, they say they did. We're in, again, we're in a world where everyone has their, we're in a world where everyone has their truth today. So if you ask me, are we coming together? The answer is no, we're going apart. And well, okay, then if you accept that, then what do you do? Well, then you have a lot of hard work to do because first of all, the bunch of stuff that already had happened in the internet has not yet happened. There has to be a coming together on standards and best practices. Best practices are more at the UN level. Standards are more at the IEEE or ISO or other levels. So we need to drive a conversation which is okay, realize we all have our own truth today, let's agree on how we get there. So what are the standards for data, for data storage, for data transfer? And then there's an entirely separate conversation that has to happen between the people who are running those systems, whether they be governments or commercial entities. There has to be a separate dialogue with satellite operators, the people who are actually flying the satellites. So not surprisingly, not all satellite operators are created equal. There are sophisticated operators and there are unsophisticated operators. There are new and experienced operators. All of those people have different levels of practice and some of them know where their satellites are and some of them don't. So what we have to have as a dialogue with both- Some both think they know where their satellites are. And that is even worse. So we have to have an international dialogue where we agree on not only what are standards, the critical standards for SSA, but also what are the best practices and also from an operator perspective, what can, what do governments need to require from satellite operators in terms of information? As it was pointed out previously, some companies are already sharing their satellite information widely. Some don't. Some companies who are prepared to share their information, we're not sure if their information is that good, because this gets back to how good is the operator at knowing where they are. So we have layers and layers and layers and as I always say, we're pretty good at something that we need to be consistently excellent at. And so we are all on a journey, not just the commercial sector and the operators, but the governments. We're on a journey to get better and but we are not yet good today. We're not good enough today. If you think about air traffic control, when you're landing in a crowded airspace like JFK or Dulles, you actually don't want them to be guessing where the other planes are. You'd really like to know that they know where everything is and we'd really like to be there, but honestly, we are not there today. So in terms of governance, I think there are some elements of what is going on in the internet realm that I'd like to replicate. The coming together, the agreeing on standards, agreeing on the agreements around operator responsibility, I'd like to see those things come together and we're gonna do everything we can to encourage those things. On other things, I think the government is gonna have to have a heavier hand, both in providing the service, the initial service and also setting up the first rule set. And just quickly, give us a kind of a quick summary of where you guys are with tracks and the effort at the Department of Commerce to try and address some of these things. Well, we got our first real budget this year, so we were super excited and we were able to start moving out. This summer we're gonna have, we did some initial pilot work back last Christmas, which was really informative to sort of baseline where our commercial sector is. We also have a pilot program with the European, the EUSST on data sharing to understand how their system looks to our system. So that's in and we are reaching out to other countries. So two levels of things. This next month we're gonna be doing a series of meetings with satellite operators to have a dialogue about what should be required for high quality SSA in terms of data that we need from operators. We're also gonna be doing a series of meeting with SSA providers to understand the basics of what they believe the fundamental requirements for standards are for data and for other things. So we are very much in the, we need to start pulling people together. There will be a international element to our work and we're just at the very beginning of it right now. So Claire, I wanna go back to you. So you talked about sort of the high level concepts based on your research. So what do you see as the main challenge we should be working on to get at this question of coming together on a collective, we know what's going on in space, answer. What are the key characteristics of a SSA data sharing governance framework that need to be there for it to be successful? Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be reductive I think after all of this discussion but I think the first thing really is to prioritize and decide what level decisions need to be made at. There are multiple levels which there's this great article by Maryl Borowitz at Georgia Tech who looks at the SSA networks now and kind of where partnerships are and where decisions are and she does in some of it highlight that a network of capabilities of SSA capabilities or data sharing capabilities where different entities cover different gaps. There may be commercial data that can provide a little bit of a different look than government data can be a benefit. But I think before we get to that part, before that that's useful there needs to be decisions about what standards need to be set at a higher level kind of productively but before we can decide where to set norms the government needs to decide which ones are for international bodies, which ones are for national bodies and then which can be decided among commercial providers or smaller sort of sub-national entities. I'm actually interested in with the internet governance if the international bodies have much discussion amongst each other. You had mentioned like ICANN, IETF, and IANA. I'm sorry, I don't know if I'm allowed to ask questions now, but. We'll get around to that. That's part of what our next question to her is. Okay, okay. So then I think defining what level is best to drive connections and what level is best to decide what the standards are. I think kind of relatedly and this personally I believe is something for a higher body, like an international body or a national kind of leadership would be just clear definitions of standards, clear definitions of, you know, you had mentioned like there's no way to really define what truth is now. That seems like something to me that is the first step before you can really talk about how to organize anything, so yeah. So I wanna bring up our poll results because that really gets to sort of the next part of this question. Because to me as I look at the way the internet is organized and the governance piece, to me the big difference with the space world is that it's not just governments having a say in the rules, right? We talk of this word multi-stakeholder I'll ask you to explain a little bit more what that means Mallory, but where governments and industry and society all share responsibility and have a shared say in establishing some of the things on the internet. So we asked this poll question for what it comes to space, should companies have equal say to governments in at least some aspects of space governance such as a data sharing? Because this is really a big change for the space world. So as we heard about in the first panel this morning the United Nations is a government only body and while some private sector entities are allowed to come and are brought by delegations to provide comments and input, the decisions are all made by the governments. So that's why I wanted to focus on this and I think it's pretty interesting and there's a little more a yes than no but it's certainly not overwhelmingly one way or the other and the question was definitely posed a little bit posed to make that a little more difficult question or challenge. So Mallory I want to turn to you and sort of would that be as controversial in the internet world or the internet world sort of say yes they should have a role there and what are some of the challenges and shortcomings of how the multi-stakeholder internet governance bodies evolved that we should be thinking about in the space world if we're going to go maybe a similar path. Sure and it would be very controversial to say that only governments get to control the internet and in fact a lot of my work so I also should self identify as part of civil society and I've never actually worked for a company or government so I'm 15 years working for human rights organizations and things like that and I have a technical background and increasingly you see international human rights organizations hiring digital technologists just because of the risks of AI and like other things so it's becoming more common but back when I started it was not common at all to have a human rights organization hire an internet specialist but anyway so yeah even now a lot of our work is in fact to think about the mandate so this goes to Claire's question mandate does become important there's certainly there's territory right and some of it's like pretty well staked out but there's always going to be overlap and there are liaison ships for that so ISO for example has pages upon pages of liaisons they get very fine grained every single task group or working group has liaison to something else the IETF in broad strokes has the major ones they want to organize with the ITU to the least extent possible actually they want to organize a little bit with 3GPP it's useful for them to know what's happening in the Wi-Fi standardization at the IEEE et cetera et cetera and so I think it's important that those overlaps are reinforced it's not actually a good thing if liaisons aren't talking to each other it might just mean that there's not a lot to say over the course of a few years but ideally you have a tighter loop so that you don't I guess have different standards that end up conflicting with one another or at the very least confusion over who really has ownership over a thing so the ITU and the IETF probably work as closely together as they need to on that and then I think the companies having a say is really goes back to this question of capacity, capability we also imagine the governments are not the same they're not monolith, there's a lot of countries especially in the global south that have less capacity to engage in internet governance than say my organization of 40 people so we have to imagine that even if you think about a government only space you're going to have a lot of very different engagement from different parts of the world and that matters quite a lot I mean also because as far as I understand I do have a degree in physics that the satellites that you'll be delivering communications are only for a certain part of the world and for other parts like are rather negligible because they don't necessarily work there I just think that those complexities are really important to uncover the different capacities and different roles are actually something that we should embrace and not be too worried about or over index on who's doing what and I can only say that because of these hard problems more is more and so companies having an opinion you might even imagine most affected parties that maybe wouldn't be aligned with companies or governments also having an opinion from time to time that actually that is only helpful and additive to the deliberations that you might encounter and that's definitely something that I talk a lot about internet governance space where yes I might be working for a non-profit organization but in fact if you consider end users or the public interest whatever standard you're working on will be better for it so please let us sit down at this table and talk with you all. Charlie I want to go back to you Slingshot is one of the companies looking to build a business model in part of an SSA data and services what do you think about this maybe shift to a multi-stakeholder approach? Does that fit into how you guys see things evolving? What are your perspective on that? Yeah so we would be a company that would support that companies should have as equal say as governments because we want to be a part of the solution and so our concern is that it's gonna take too much time hopefully not run time to get something going right I mean the time is now and I think we all would agree to that and so as we've built out our platform and have ingested our data we want the best possible data to be available to operators and for people to make decisions the best decisions right and so we calibrate our systems we ensure that that data is the best that it can possibly be and so as we get owner operator from Mercedata into our platform we check it so there should be standards set Slingshot's opinion Charlie's opinion that we know how to supply that data ingest it into other systems like in the track system that Richard's gonna build right we want to make sure that that data goes in there there is a standard for that is it kilometers is it meters everybody's using that same standard everybody agrees to that and so for us it is about making sure even our covenimates the other SSA providers out there DOD has the data is good data and that it can help in that decision making process and so there are things that we can do we wanna check the data we wanna make sure that it hasn't been tampered with it is secure and that there I call it a fingerprint like if data comes in analytics are performed on it I wanna know what data was used to do those analytics and so fingerprinting that data and make sure it carries through and there are technical systems today that it's not rocket science I don't think the technicality of it isn't what's gonna get us it's the governments and the standards and setting that up that's gonna and everybody agreeing to it there's a question here from the audience that I think hopefully Mallory can address which is how this stuff on the inner side is funded like how are the ICANN IT I think is funded but I'll let you answer that but also Bruce you said you looked at sort of the life cycle of some of these organizations if you can maybe chime in on how that funding monetization is done in some of the other domains once Mallory talks with the internet piece Sure, they're all differently funded and that does have an impact on the way their processes work so the World Wide Web Consortium is membership only so if you are a browser or a large advertising network you would pay annually to be able to be part of the standardization process the IETF you can be there's no membership you can just show up on mailing lists and all of that engagement is free but if you want to come to a meeting you have to pay they meet three times a year you pay for your attendance in the meeting essentially and they also use companies to sponsor the meetings and they're working meetings so they aren't panel presentations if you're in an IETF meeting people have their laptops out and their wordsmithing documents the entire time I can is I can print money because they own the domain system so absolutely they don't have any problems with money whatsoever so yeah there is they would probably be curious to be saying that but it is absolutely true compared to the rest of the internet so if you have a finite resource and you can anyway I'm just kidding but yeah so they all have really different models I know the ITU because you know it is government only that has a different model it has different funding challenges I was even just like checking my recollection of the World Summit for the Information Society which was hosted by the ITU that really kicked off the way the internet's governed today about 23 years ago or so and I looked at how it was funded it was really interesting the US didn't fund it but Sweden or sorry Switzerland and Canada really kicked in a lot and there was some surprising show there was some surprising show from global south countries as well so these things are often there's no one tried and true method Bruce anything to add from what you guys looked at yeah just a couple of comments so first of all very randesque I'm gonna parse the question that you asked and I think it was probably written in a provocative way but to say have an equal share is nearly a non-starter frankly okay because there's things like the Outer Space Treaty out there that assign responsibility to nation states for owner operators but I think we would agree that both owner operators so that is commercial entities NGOs and nation states should all have some say in the process right so a little bit of a parsing of the question but I think that might be why you got some ambiguous results there doing some random analysis from here so what I would tell you is I'm gonna quote a couple of statements from the report on the IGO piece to get back to your question and then there's a lot more work to be done here why I do think it will take time before I do that I will say there's already excellent in my opinion this is not part of our specific research work underway I'm gonna throw compliments to Space Safety Coalition I know that Sling Shot's a signatory to that they just released in May some best practices for sustainable space behaviors and there's some specific details in there exactly the kind of things that Charlie was talking about right we don't we can't wait on governments who are doing hard work at their domestic levels to come up with these standards because there's too much going on out there right now so coming up with those specific standards is it kilometers or miles or nautical miles or what's a safe separation distance what are rules of the roads those are all examples of things that we saw in our analysis over the course of history in other domains it's usually starts with the commercial entities because they have a financial stake in the situation and they are the ones that want to turn a profit they want to survive as a business and they need to move out quickly and that's why going all the way back maybe not all the way back to Grosius but to the Hanseatic League of the 1100s where they had arrangements about okay how much are each of us gonna pay for insurance claims on a ship and it's gonna be based on weight if a ship sinks you know so that level of detail governments didn't do that industry did that right so I'm all about we are all about the fact that it needs to be a multi stakeholder approach but a lot of those details aren't fleshed out yet some things are fleshed out based on our analysis quote successful IGOs are cooperative collaborative inclusive and their creation and design should be based on consensus to ensure legitimacy one point I'd make consensus does not mean unanimity right so this is one of the things that we would strike out from like the UN approach to the system okay most of these successful governance structures that we found like ICANN like some of the other ones like SWIFT they have board structures they have different working group bodies and things like that that actually contribute bottom up for the standards and then they get to a structure where they actually say okay well everybody gets a vote but just because you veto doesn't mean that we're not gonna move out on this specific standard so that's an important trait there another important trait lasting intergovernmental organizations IGOs need data information and measurements that are reliable and trustworthy to ensure situational awareness and form decision making and help resolve disputes that seems obvious but as Rich pointed out it's not always clear right so I might again parse words a little bit there is in fact truth in space where an object is is a fact right different people sense that in different ways so they have errors in their sensing right where we start getting into more of a gray area where it's very different from ICANN and SWIFT right the SWIFT banking system wouldn't work if different entities came in and said well I believe that that transaction was you giving me a million dollars and you believe that that transaction was you giving me $30 right you have to have an established set of facts that everybody's working from where we run into some challenges for space that's true in other domains too which kind of touched on this is the predictive aspect of space traffic management that doesn't come up in ICANN right it's a system for passing specific data but there are other systems that address this and I like to use the hurricane track analogy right so visual learner too right when you have hurricanes or tsunamis in another part of the world there's multiple tracks because you have multiple sources of people trying to predict where this hurricane is gonna go right and nobody is gonna get it 100% right because they're trying to predict the future and you can't predict whether 100% accurately and especially the further out you get that's why those tracks widen right but all those tracks come together in some kind of a database or repository that pulls the best breed from all of those and there's ratings for that too right so if in the future China's system is lying all the time well they're gonna get an F grade and they're not gonna get as much weighting in a future system as say the European Space Agency system because it's much more accurate but maybe it's not as good as the United States system however the United States isn't as good about always sharing stuff that they don't want other people to know about either so they don't get an A grade either right so it's that kind of weighting system that contributes to this consensus driven inclusive approach to governance. Well thank you for that Bruce and yes the question was deliberately a little bit provocative on that is this issue of in the space world the Outer Space Treaty gives states the responsibility for national space activities to provide authorization and giving oversight and I don't think there's anything exists like that in the internet world right there's no such kind of foundational thing so that is one unique aspect of space that maybe means we can't entirely copy exactly what's going on so thank you for bringing that up Bruce that addresses that question. Rich there's a couple of questions here that I want to bring to you one is if you could talk a little bit more about how the information from solid operators and commercialized providers is gonna be brought into tracks or how you guys are thinking about using that and also if companies wanna participate in these dialogues what do they need to prepare for? Okay so start out really quickly with who are the, what are the different interest groups cause I think this is relevant cause it's also not like the internet so we have a group of people who are actually doing something, satellite operators their communication services, remote sensing systems that the purpose of their whole business is to create a product to sell something in a marketplace okay those peoples are the primary and there are of course a lot of government activities in space but let's put that aside for now so you've got this broad robust commercial space segment they don't produce the SSA data right so right now we started out with a singular source which was the government of the United States and now governments as these systems proliferate so when you first question of who pays for this right now the governments are paying for it cause the operators we could pass the burden if we could get global agreement we could pass the burden to the users of space and say well we're just gonna tax all you we've all agreed that if you're a user of space you get taxed for safety you know like you get taxed on gasoline for road safety that is not a preferred method right now and I think would go badly if we tried to do that but so as the world gets more complicated and there are more and more SSA providers the issue of who pays will be one which continually gets battered around and there are analogies to this in a more sophisticated way in air traffic control where you have some countries that actually privatize their air traffic control networks and other countries who regarded it as a government responsibility so I just wanted to get that out there of these different groups and they have different interests so how are we going to work closely with the commercial sector that's part of the reason that we've kicked off this these what we're calling operator engagement sessions where we're gonna be working closely with the satellite operators themselves and then the SSA providers themselves the commercial US SSA providers separately because we wanna hear the voice of the satellite operator distinctly and we want to understand what they're willing to do what they're willing to share and we wanna push them a little bit on sharing because we think there are some better practices that are currently done and so it is our goal to work directly with the people who are the satellite operators to understand what stresses are they under what's working what's not working there are these products the US data products from the US military but also from the EOSST where are those falling short what doesn't exist that they'd wanna see we do get a lot of calls for something that all characterizes kind of a concierge service which is people particularly young companies want someone they can literally call and talk to about how to do this kind of stuff more sophisticated companies don't need that they don't wanna talk to anybody they just want things connected by API so they get data machine to machine machine to machine they don't wanna talk to people so one of the things we have to come we have to wrestle with is how do we deal with this diversity of users some of who want really hand holding and some who just want data and please get out of the way and so part of that is we have to start talking and that'll be a domestic dialogue initially then a broader international dialogue. So we have just a few minutes left here one more honest question I wanna get to and it's this question of how do you do with bad actors which we talk about all the time in the space community and now I wanna ask you to talk about first how do you deal with bad actors in the internet governance system that may be kind of doing things that are irresponsible and then if anybody else wants to weigh in on how the space world should think about that in this context but Mallory please. Yeah it's really challenging I would just affirm that. That's why you haven't solved this problem. No not by any stretch of the imagination. We have issues we also think let me start again we have a moment still that is maintained but for how long we don't know where connectivity at all costs is fully aligned with human rights more connectivity free flow of information people online all good we all agree censorship is bad we agree surveillance is a problem etc. So there for the most part is kind of two issues one is like kind of a more minor but completely proliferated issue of spam right that's definitely a bad actor we have entire governance structures just on the problem of spam there's something called MOG it's a bit of a weird acronym but it's M3AAWG they meet three times a year to deal with spam on the internet. Then there's the big problem which is states so states different approaches to jurisdictional control over communications varies wildly right and that you can see a big milestone a big moment around 2011 when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and with the government of the Netherlands sort of spun up a lot of infrastructure and funding around internet freedom helping people in places where there is more repression be sort of free and protected from that repression and tries to some level the playing field either by giving folks who are at risk of repression via digital means more tools to circumvent those tools of repression or get around them or maybe more focus I would say should happen but that's changing around this sort of top-down diplomatic approach to smoothing some of that over it's not going well as you'll see China's in the news a lot around the big talk and the great firewall and all those things but it's happening sort of at those two levels and so yeah it just requires an enormous amount of patience but cooperation is encouraged it's the antidote to a lot of this and so that's actually a good thing because it's something you can fix. Bruce you want to chime in? Yeah thank you. Sorry Bruce I've never met you. Oh sorry go ahead. Yeah so just very briefly of course you are the expert on ICANN but I definitely agree there are other systems out there it's the enforcement that becomes the biggest challenge at the end of the day right and so Always is. One of my colleagues Doug Lagora who's here would say that you know that's why we need treaties rather than norms I tend to come from bottom up there are mechanisms it's not built into SWIFT but I'll give you an example SWIFT the banking system we just briefly studied it but there are sometimes you just actually have to like pull the trigger and do things like start cutting people out of the system like the United States and other nations have done with Russia given what they're doing in Ukraine right so it comes to that we hope it doesn't come to that we didn't get a lot of time to study it but as you were mentioned some people referred to it as tax we like to term the orbital use fees or tradable satellite performance bonds specifically that's an area that we believe warrants more study because what you do is you now have not just a fee on the fact that you put a satellite on orbit but your fee is based on your behavior and how sustainable your behavior is right so it's like this this gradated kind of rewards for good behavior it's kind of like the insurance company that says if you're a good driver you get a good driver discount right if you're a good satellite operator you get a good satellite operator discount but if you're a bad actor you're actually cut out of the system now how do you actually cut somebody completely out if they have things on orbit that's the really hard part but not complying with a space traffic management mechanism it's easier to do that because now you can hold them accountable and there's so many other data sources out there it's not a single actor or a Cold War-era approach anymore there are a lot of providers for that kind of information so and there is global accountability so it's not a perfect system but there are ways to address it so we're out of time but Rich do you want to chime in with the last just quickly to say the tool set for U.S. regulators is relatively modest right now I mean pretty much the most active tool that we have would be the FCC license when you have to have a license before you even launch the satellite to space the FCC has in the past with bad actors threatened to yank that license really really kind of a dull tool for a very complicated problem so going forward we need to the governments are gonna government our government and governments are gonna need a better tool set well this was just the beginning of this conversation you see there's lots of other things unpack and discuss I know we'd securely be interested in exploring this further but please join me in thanking our speakers