 Welcome to CSIS and our shiny new building which still has some little technical problems. So if your chairs collapsed we'll We'll give you an extra donut This is going to be a really good event we have a great lineup as you can tell The topic itself of course will assume I think just a higher profile over the next couple years Particularly as we see new countries and new entrants really try and reshape how the internet is governed You have bios available to you. They'll also be on the web What I'm going to do is I think turn it over to David for some introductory remarks. Is that right? Sure And then what we'll do is have ambassadors to pull over to speak He'll talk for a few minutes and then take questions And then we'll go to our panelists and have an open discussion. So with that, thank you for coming Hi, my name is David viewers, and I'm the co-convener of the Washington DC chapter of the internet society How many of you are familiar with the internet society? And how many of you are active in the DC chapter? All right, we need to increase that proportion. Would everybody active in the chapter raise your hands? Come and see any of us after the event to get more involved The internet society seeks to promote a free and open internet For the benefit of everybody in the world There's no given It's not a given that that will remain happening. So our chapter's Objective is to promote the kind of discourse that will advance the internet in Through significant challenges coming in the years ahead. Please join us. Thanks Thank you Okay. Thank you with that ambassador Sepulveda. Can I ask you to take the floor, please? Well, thank you very much and good morning Appreciate you all coming out on a cold day to discuss a very interesting and important topic I also appreciate the opportunity to open and frame and initiate the discussion for this panel I believe I know everyone on this panel and familiar with her work and it helps inform my own Let me start at the end and try to work backwards a little bit Last week FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn and I went to Mexico to do a number of meetings on Telecommunications and technology issues with a series of Mexican government officials During that time we took the opportunity to visit with a group of young entrepreneurs Who were using technology and the global internet as a platform for developing new businesses using the assistance and guidance Provided to them at Telefonica's tech accelerator program an organization called Wira in Mexico City So as government officials we were the only people in the room wearing suits and we raised the average age Fairly significantly, but we were thrilled to see what was happening and what these young Mexican entrepreneurs were doing They were working in innovative ways to better link parents with teachers retailers with customers and doctors with patients The ideas were innovative the energy was high and the enthusiasm was boundless as public servants those of us in this administration work with our friends and colleagues at home and abroad to create a legal and regulatory framework both domestically and Internationally that enables that kind of optimism and pursuit of happiness that we saw in Mexico among these young people Underlining the capacity of what those young people were doing to innovate and reach the world without having to jump through Regulatory hoops or ask anyone for permission Are two concepts that us policymakers and others seek to preserve and open internet governed by a broad range of decision makers including industry Governments and civil society as well as free market competition in telecommunications networks The subject of this panel is how to understand and help evolve the framework of internet governments to increase the inclusion of those Who feel that they are left out and to how to defend the concepts of diffuse multi-stakeholder governance from challenges to its legitimacy and from efforts to change the way the internet operates in a manner That would make it harder for those young people in Mexico and others like them in the world to succeed First let me address the NSA disclosures issues in the president's speech from Friday on the administration's review of US signals intelligence practices He made clear our commitment to respecting the privacy of all people regardless of nationality The reforms the president announced demonstrate how public debate occurs in democratic societies And how we defend security and privacy while limiting our intelligence collection to specific Priorities as the president said US collection is for a defined list of purposes The United States is not indiscriminately reviewing the emails or phone calls of ordinary folks The fact that we are taking steps to reform certain intelligence programs Demonstrates the respect that we have for the rights of individuals regardless of their nationality I believe that the president has made a compelling case to the world Some foreign observers have chosen to conflate the issue of intelligence gathering With the American position on internet governance posing new challenges that could disrupt the current multi-stakeholder system In fact these issues are not the same Nevertheless given this conflation the administration reaffirms our commitment to the open internet and the multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance We will redouble our efforts to strengthen and make more inclusive its policymaking standard setting and governance organizations The Montevideo statement as we are aware that some people I'm sorry We are aware that some people in the world are unhappy with the status quo of internet governance But we believe that any change should come in the form of more not less Decentralized and inclusive participation of people institutions firms experts private citizens and governments in multi-stakeholder institutions Last fall the leaders of the internet institutions including ISOC represented here today That are so vital to the reliable operations of the internet issued what is now known in our community as the Montevideo statement That statement noteworthy for its unanimity expressed by the technical community and useful for engaging an important conversation addressed four issues first The group expressed concern that recent surveillance allegations had undermined user trust Second they expressed a desire for a community effort to evolve multi-stakeholder cooperation to better address internet governance challenges third They called for accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions a set of activities related to the management of the domain name system Finally, they stressed the need for transition from IPv4 to IPv6 Helpfully and very importantly the Montevideo statement launched this conversation from the heart of the multi-stakeholder system Rather than from an intergovernmental body We appreciate the thoughtful leadership of the technical community and we hope their efforts will spur further consideration of how we continue can continue to make the multi-stakeholder governance system more inclusive while maintaining the stability of an open and innovative internet The internet governance forum is one venue that is fully open and therefore particularly well Suited to address these issues in the most global and inclusive fashion When the next IGF convenes this September in Istanbul, we expect that the internet community will further this conversation More immediately, Estonian President Ilves is chairing a high-level panel on global internet cooperation and governance mechanisms That will produce a draft roadmap for a way forward on these issues in a matter of months This panel includes a number of luminaries from government business and civil society We are hopeful it can constructively contribute to this year's conversation that is unfolding in multiple venues And we believe that any gathering on this subject should strongly consider the group's views in its dialogue One such gathering will occur in April when the Brazilians in coordination and consultation with the internet community worldwide Will host the global multi-stakeholder meeting on the future of internet governance Along with many of you we are following the developments of this meeting And we've been in touch with the Brazilian government as we consider the best potential role for the US government We're pleased to see announcements from the organizers that a multi-stakeholder Structure will plan and execute the meeting and from what we can tell the Brazilian government and the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee Appear to be reaching out to a wide range of stakeholders to shape the meeting itself. We believe these are good signs While there's still much to know about how this meeting will unfold and what its lasting impact will be I believe that it holds promise in advancing the global community's understanding of internet governance if one The agenda is developing a truly multi-stakeholder fashion To participation at the meeting itself is broad and inclusive and three any follow-on activity is guided by and ultimately Supportive of the multi-stakeholder system rather than an intergovernmental mechanism of centrally imposed regulations or mandates Beyond the conference in Sao Paulo and many other intervening discussions including the WTDC This fall ITU member states will gather in Busan, Korea for the quadrennial ITU plenty potentially conference During this conference the members will elect new leadership and establish the work of the ITU for the next four years It's a very important conference in many respects Including in areas of great interest to the United States such as global spectrum management and the ways in which the world can leverage communication services to promote economic and social development Beyond the plenty potential conference Affirming the vital role for the ITU in the world's telecommunications ecosystem We would also like to seek a greater role for the ITU in helping developing nations address broadband deployment We expect and recognize however that there will be a number of proposals at the conference on more controversial topics such as internet governance and Cybersecurity and we further expect that some of these proposals will be at odds with the multi-stakeholder Principles shared by so many in the internet community both in the United States and abroad Ultimately, we think it's better for the ITU to focus on what needs to be accomplished to increase affordable access to communications networks and Encourage the further deployment of this of those networks that is honorable Manageable and a tangible task Any attempt to use the ITU to revive proposals to resolve questions of internet governance that are better dealt with in Multi-stakeholder settings raises the possibility of divisive outcomes. It is our hope Sincerely that that will not happen We will oppose proposals that threaten the current internet governance model by limiting the input of non-governmental stakeholders or Substituting the existing system with one that only governments control We will also not support new centrally imposed regulations and we will work with countries that share our views to push back Respectively on any such initiative We would greatly prefer a conference where the ITU works within its mandate to promote the benefits of Telecommunication for member states and their citizens, especially those from the developing world Therefore we intend to develop a number of proactive initiatives that shape the debate and will help build a constructive agenda for the ITU The ITU can help nations put policies and programs in place to support the build-out of broadband networks It can advise and consult with nations on proper procedures to respond to natural disasters that destroy communications infrastructure And it can guide and help nations as they move through their analog to digital transitions and reorganize their spectrum management To provide for the for participation in the world's mobile communications revolution and there are multiple other initiatives We are eager to work with other nations and the ITU to ensure that the Union Continues to thrive and contribute to the prosperity and well-being of its member states and their citizens. I Believe that the direction our president has given us and that secretaries executing is to promote respectful engagement Combined with a vigorous defense of our national interests and values. We intend to work in that spirit on this issue going forward. I Believe that this year presents a perfect opportunity for all of us to work together until the story of the internet's incredible multi-stakeholder success and to ultimately preserve and strengthen an open and innovative internet as it continues to evolve To include all of the world's peoples and communities. Thank you very much. Happy to take any questions Thank you time for a few questions I Suppose you should wait for the microphone to all over this room right wait wait for the mic So I'm Mark McCarthy with the software and information industry association Mr. Ambassador, thank you very much for your thoughtful remarks I want to endorse the idea that the The International Telecommunications Union should be focused on a productive task, which would be Assisting developing countries in broadband deployment at an affordable level There really is an important task to be done there to make sure that that the vast majority of people in the in the world Are actually connected to the internet And I do think that for them to become involved in the internet governance issues would be would be a difficulty But let me Direct your attention and the attention of the panel to the work that a multi-stakeholder Group is doing right now in that area the Alliance for the affordable internet Which was recently set up last year run through the World Wide Web Foundation With the participation of many People in the internet community and many firms and trade associations I think that that kind of effort is the kind of effort that would be important to to endorse to further and to site as an Example of a productive way for the multi-stakeholder model to move forward Thank you for that mark actually I sit on the board of the Alliance for affordable internet It was an idea that originated out of the State Department and is now Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Foundation is heading up in coordination with I think 30 partners both Including governments and private sector individuals So we feel very strongly about the Alliance for an affordable internet and clearly the ITU by itself Will not be able to further the goal of broadband network deployment around the world but what the ITU can do is work in partnership with organizations like Alliance for an affordable internet to convene the regulatory and policymakers from the developing world to ensure that they get an idea of what best practices are and What other experiments are taking place around the world on The proper regulatory and legal environment to encourage investment and deployment in networks and to assure certainty for investors that their investments Will be secure in the in the in the going in the period going forward We actually I was at the AU recently and we're going to bring a group of policymakers from Africa to participate in a US TTI Program training on on a variety of things from analog to digital to we're partnering with Chris painters shop to provide cybersecurity assistance as well So these are all these are all important projects I think we do need to ensure that the developing world doesn't see our Support for the multi-stakeholder system as a disengagement from them. In fact, it's exactly the opposite What we want to see as I said in my speech is more inclusion And we believe that the multi-stakeholder system is an open It's not a perfect system it requires evolution, but it is an open system And we need more participation of developing world governments in the system, but not just developing world governments We need to ensure that there's a strong and thriving and growing in some parts new civil society movement in much of the developing world and we need to ensure that developing world entrepreneurs are connected to both their governments and the civil and the multi-stakeholder institutions that are governing the internet today I'm Garland McCoy with Technology Education Institute, but also in Venio and know the ambassador and some of the folks up on the panel I just wanted to strongly endorse this idea that it's sort of at a minimum high-handed to be making hard-fast Announcements, whether it's the IT or others when you have literally two-thirds of the global community yet having affordable reliable Access so inclusion into this Having met with the people of affordable the Alliance for affordable internet Sonya recently and others and seen their great work study in The course best practices, but I think one of the things that that I would offer is that we need more concrete experimentation That is going to this issue of open and and Internets at the price points that the that the Alliance for affordable internet and others have pointed out are necessary in Rural areas where the population is in developing countries. I think it can be done this experimentation on unlicensed and licensed Platforms and that having some concrete Validation of the things that you ambassador and your predecessors Phil Vavier and David Gross and even Ambassador Bradley Holmes and others have been talking about and and the private sector people like pepper and others But having more examples that we can that meet the price points that are open I think to sort of push back against the closed architecture that we're seeing creeping along in the in the developing countries would be a Good thing a good ammo if you will to have in a positive way going into the plenty pot, etc Just a couple of things on that in the first instance in terms of affordability out of the Department of State With a cooperation with USA ID. We have the global global broadband initiative Which partners with net hope and other non-profit organizations to do two things one is they go into developing countries and work with those Countries to establish workable universal service funds And then secondly net hope uses grant funding to ensure that NGOs around the world serve as anchor tenants for the deployment of broadband networks and rural communities in very very poor parts of the world We have a number of examples where that works in the broader sense Patrick Ryan at Google and some others as well as the Boston consulting group have done some work in looking at what the real Challenges are to last multi-ployment in the developing world and what various technologies there are for Ensuring that you can get some form of connectivity in in those in those communities And there is really interesting work being done by Microsoft and others using white spaces to achieve those ends And there's cooperation and work at the ITU on ensuring that there's sufficient spectrum available for these for these efforts We we haven't cracked this nut yet But at the very least we have to recognize that we've gone from in 2000 what was 400 million people connected to the internet to what is today 2.7 billion people connected to the internet? I would argue that that pace of connectivity Reflects extremely well on the stewardship of the deployment of the networks and the attractiveness of the networks to people worldwide And that that stewardship has been conducted by the internet community itself through the multi-stakeholder Governance system while there's an immense amount of work to do I would I think it would be unfair to fail to recognize the achievements today and As I said, we fully recognize that there are people around the world who feel like the multi-stakeholder system is Not adequate to their needs. It is incumbent upon us To recognize that to work with them to understand what those needs are and the degree to which the multi-stakeholder system or anyone else Can help them meet those needs and it's incumbent on them to participate actively in the system to engage the process And so that's that's the message we're carrying It really is one of increased openness increased decentralization increased diffusion and increased participation And we believe that And I'll tell you when I've been to Latin America now four times to Africa twice to Southeast Asia twice I'll be going again in the near future to each of those places And there's a real receptivity for a collaborative problem-solving approach to these issues Rather than an ideological debate Because at the end of the day what public servants want is the ability to have their their constituents at both Achieve access and have that done in a secure and safe way Thank you, Mr. Ambassador My name is Sam Philly Just one just one second. I'm gonna take this question Then we should go to the panel because these are very talented and knowledgeable people And I just like to let them get their their thoughts up. I Will I will stay until the end my name is a adult Philly The new and the newest member of Washington DC chapter. Thank you very much for accepting me I'm the new and the newest member Mr. Ambassador as a student in network and telecommunication studying here First I wish to express my profound thanks and appreciation to the people and government of Will bring me over here and educate you me Now I take my country like Sierra Leone. I Was a teacher but back in Africa and Sierra Leone in particular The internet is zero if this body Can help the government of my country and the continent of Africa to transform the network and telecommunication especially I'm doing a research on one child laptop project so that Laptops could be affordable to my brothers and sisters back home so that you'll be totally computer literate Do not be left behind As you took this great venture or like this body To help my brothers and sisters in the continent of Africa to be completely treated In the internet world Thank you I'm sure and I understood the question is it's if it's relative to and I think I understand that it's relative to the challenges of both access and Ability to use that access in Africa We are in in full agreement and as I said, I was just in the African Union. They had a In AU ICT week there to discuss a number of challenges that Africa is facing So again in the first instance the the current state of play in Africa is that about 16% of Africa's population Is connected to the internet, which is a woefully low percentage How do you drive down price of access and how do you ensure connectivity and then once connected? How do you ensure that people can use those tools? Those are all fair and legitimate questions in the first instance connectivity and price really we believe depend on competition And as you see more some more underwater cables reaching the edges of Africa You see that those price points dropping fairly dramatically and there were three New underwater cable landings lit up in the last just two years. I think Comparable to before where you had a monopoly system essentially of cable landings then within the then within the continent itself You have the challenge of bringing those connections inland and that's going to have to work through a combination of a strong system of internet exchange points As well as collaboration between governments to ensure that networks within one country can connect with networks in other country And all of that is it's not easy, but it's certainly doable And there are there are multiple technical assistance mechanisms that we're going to bring to bear and others ISOC and others are bringing to bear to ensure that regulatory and policy makers in the region have an understanding of how those Contractual relations can work and as well as how you can set up in internet exchange point and make sure that the information is brought closer to the individual at the endpoint thereby Decreasing latency and make increasing the usefulness of the service The digital literacy challenge is a somewhat more difficult challenge. It will take more time But if you connect schools and you connect libraries you connect health care systems at the end of the day Once the utility of the service is proven and people see it They use it and that's at least what we found in the United States that it's a combination of both Making sure that the service is affordable But that people see it's utility And and we found at least for low-income communities in the United States And this is probably going to be a function for low-income communities around the world that a mobile wireless solution is going to have to be a key component of of the overall solution as well as public spaces of of access so schools and libraries and just public spaces in general Using a combination of Wi-Fi networks and licensed networks as well as a strong fiber backbone But I fully take your point at the end of the day It is our goal to ensure that the internet and ICT in general is a force for bridging Divides is a force for ensuring that inequality doesn't grow It is in the interest of everyone on the network to have more people on the network it benefits everyone there is no self-interest in Either network operators or any country denying anyone access to the internet Everyone is actively participating toward that end We can and should have an honest and honorable discussion and debate about what the best mechanisms are toward that end how you Ensure that capital is made available for infrastructure investments. How you make sure that networks are secure And how you make sure that at the end point users are free from an economic and expressive perspective Which is actually a line I stole from professor Donard is about expressive and economic liberty and I use it all the time So thank you very much It's all of those things are critical to the work that we do But I ultimately my point is that we have shared ends and shared goals Because it is ultimately in the interest of all of us We have a communal and network interest in having everyone connected to the to the to the to the network itself Well, thank you, and I'm glad you can stay what we're going to do now is Turn to our panelists ask them to each talk for five minutes. There is a Significant Online community watching this event and so when we get to the Q&A Portion we'll try and take as many of the questions as we can from that community as well as the audience One of the things ambassadors of pulver has said that I thought was really interesting was he recognized that Many people around the world don't feel like the existing structure meets their needs and that certainly struck me as true We've recently seen some demonstrations of what an alternate system might look like which is yesterday China inadvertently made Wyoming the internet capital of the world and Previously, I don't know if you saw it. There was an article about Brazil's oil industry a couple weeks ago that pointed out that One of the reasons the boom hadn't taken off was that the Brazilian oil company is subject to heavy government mandate and To political interference and so there is an alternative out there and one of the questions I hope the panel can address is the alternative may not be as Efficient, but it might be something that has a little more political weight behind it How do we manage that transition that you were talking about? How do we move to a new model that preserves the strengths of the multi stakeholder? approach and yet also meets the political concerns of new internet users so with that I think the easiest thing to do is Go down the end and with Dave start with Laura and take it from there if you could keep your march to five minutes Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be here and I wish to thank the Internet Society and the Center for strategic and international studies for hosting this There is a very important Geopolitical debate underway about internet governance and infrastructure. We all know that and The first thing I want to say is that the design and the administration of the internet has been I would suggest Successful in some ways. We take this for granted, but we can't take this for granted what we're talking about is a very complex system not only of technologies but of institutions and entities and should be very circumspect and Careful about proposed modifications to the system The security and stability of the internet I agree really should rank Among other collective action problems on a global level whether environmental protection human rights or other basic concerns about infrastructural systems of water and finance and energy because we do have the technical mediation of the public sphere and This technology provides many control points that both affect our civil liberties and also that require Coordination whether one likes the word governance or not. I usually use small g governance rather than large g governance The internet does require administration and coordination at many layers My new book the global war for internet governance tries to examine the various layers of how the internet is already coordinated and What some of the debates are that are shaping the future of internet innovation and freedom? There really are layers upon layers of governance, you know, too lengthy to get into here Whether we're talking about the management of critical internet resources interconnection and routing cybersecurity governance standard setting the policymaking role of private companies and of course intellectual property rights enforcement These aren't necessarily neutral control points even though there's many of them are technological and a primary theme of my book is That internet governance conflicts are becoming the new spaces where Geopolitical power economic power is unfolding in the 21st century now Many of these conflicts are a proxy for other issues and other forms of political and economic conflict So they're entering into the internet administration debate, but often, you know about something completely different much of the work currently is done by private industry and institutions such as ICANN and the IETF much of this has nothing to do with traditional governments and as I said, it's working fairly well, but Several controversies have really as you know brought this issue into the public sphere Is it fewer than four years since we've had the WikiLeaks cablegate saga? we had Hillary Clinton's internet freedom speech and then you know several years later the the cognitive dissonance between that and the disclosures about the NSA's digital surveillance We had the the wicket. It's a lot of acronyms, right the world conference on international telecommunications raised concerns About a so-called United Nations takeover of the internet and concerns around that And we've had the Egyptian internet outages We had the online boycott over stop online privacy act I could go on and on and on Ghostnet the Great Firewall of China and too many distributed denial of service attacks to recount so I understand And appreciate and share the all of the attention to this. It's brought it into the public sphere It's brought it in front of policymakers So at the very same time that we have a complete dependence on cyber infrastructure We have a loss of trust in The stewardship of governments to some extent I'm trying to overstate this just a little bit But by default some loss of trust and concern in the private institutions that manage the internet whether found it or not so out of this loss of trust and all of these political Issues has come a a lot of political attention on internet governance And Danny did a great job of explaining what some of the upcoming events are and issues So one thing that I want to mention I think the main point I'll make is it has to do with this multi stakeholder issue I wrote a paper recently with a colleague of mine, Dr. Mark Raymond called thinking clearly about Multi-stakeholder internet governance and what I'd like to do right now is just to raise a few caveats about how this term is used First this issue is sometimes elevated as a value in and of itself Rather than as a possible approach to achieve actual goals such as preserving the internet's interoperability stability security or openness second Multi-stakeholder governance may not be appropriate in every functional task of the internet. I laid out in this paper about 144 Tasks of internet governance and there are more Now keeping the internet operational requires many different coordinating functions And I would suggest that some are appropriately relegated to the state others are appropriately relegated to the private sector and others are Appropriately relegated to multi stakeholder institutions such as ICANN and the IETF. So not every area needs to be multi stakeholder third the concept of multi stakeholderism sometimes and we see this increasingly Serves as a proxy for these broader political struggles that have nothing to do with internet governance You can see repressive information policies from governments advocating for top-down Multi-stakeholderism, what's the role of civic society in that? What is the role of the private industry in that you know to Governments trying to seek additional power. You can see companies and other actors who are have a vested interest in current arrangements Seeking to preserve that and possibly exclude new entrants a lot of the battles that are happening Don't necessarily have to do with the coordination of the internet But they're there nonetheless and often under the mantle of multi stakeholderism fourth caveat The term sometimes refers to discourses about internet governance Rather than the actual practice of internet governance So I always like to say that while we're busy attending all of these events such as the internet governance forum the actual practice of Coordinating and keeping the internet operational Something which I appreciate a great deal because I need my reddit and I need to be online a lot The actual practice continues to occur fifth and My fifth and final caveat is that the concern over multi stakeholder internet governance it often Focuses around discussions over the functions that are performed by ICANN Which is obviously a very critical issue because of the need to ensure Globally stable and unique names and numbers, but that these functions are really only part of the technical and Political coordination that is necessary for the internet's operation So I want to suggest that the phrase needs a lot of unpacking that multi stakeholderism is too often employed Uniformly part of this has to do with the view that internet governance is a single thing We get asked the strange non-secretary questions. Who should control the internet? I Can the US government the United Nations Google the question makes no sense on its face And it stems from the misconception that internet governance is a single thing rather than a multilayered Coordinating series of functions that keep the internet operational So the point the single point I'd like to make is that internet governance is not one system That it that multi stakeholderism in turn should not be viewed as a value in and of itself applied Homogenously to internet governance functions, but rather asking the question of the appropriate approach to Responsible and efficacious internet governance What what is optimal in promoting other values such as interoperability civic inclusion innovation free expression as Danny said economic liberty in any particular functional in political context So thank you very much for listening and I look forward to the other remarks Well, thank you very much Jim and David and thank like express my appreciation to the Internet society for this opportunity I find myself in a very comfortable position because I'm following ambassador Sepulveda Who's had I thought a rather remarkable articulation of US policy and I want to express my appreciation to him for that And then of course professor DeNardis who I have been following for some time her reading her writings So I'm in a very comfortable position to follow those two speakers to then indicate What I intend to speak about and that is the context if you will of The US government's position over time and then I want to draw certain conclusions from that as to what we may see in the next Five or six years all of it tied into the theme of the panel, which is the Internet governance It strikes me as I as I kind of reviewed a few things before this panel of the remarkable continuity over time of the US government's position and And it is a remarkable Continuity over three distinct periods that I will for the purpose of this panel in five minutes of presentation summarized as being the last periods of time over a hundred The United States government has maintained a rather remarkable as I say consistent position and During these periods which have been variously referred to as technology inflection points We can also in a geopolitical sense Certainly accept that But also combine that notion with something more closely related to a kind of diplomatic collision as a result In the 19 from the early 20th century up through the 1930s when the telegraph was preeminent United States held to a position Which was that? They would not sign the government would not sign the international telegraph convention why because we said We maintain a private telegraph Service and that Those who are signing this agreement Most often our government entities and that we do not Ways that we can enter into this agreement and obligate our private Providers so it was not until 1948 that the United States finally signed the treaty Related to telegraph there was another inch There was another a side story to that of course and which is that the United States was resisting What appeared to be by some the monopoly of Marconi and the United Kingdom on the transmission of telegraph Service, but nonetheless that notion that we provide telegraph And not government was the sustaining view Through that period and then finally in 48 as I say we signed it then in the 19 of moving to the telecommunications You see the same sort of consistency, which is the United States resisting Monopoly provision of telecommunication in this sense It was the United States again confronting the United Kingdom through cable and wireless who maintained a tight hold on all communications in and between the Empire the British And a price war with the United Kingdom and cable and wireless by offering under to undercut their pricing this resulted In ultimately the arrangement in 1945 call so-called Bermuda agreement with the US at that time As I say maintained a position of being anti-monopolists, but also Encouraging Competition, I will grant you there was some idealism in that there was also considered To the quickly to the internet era And I think that one of the points that I'd like to depart from in terms of explaining that position Is to also recognize that the United States did not sign the telecommunications annex Otherwise what ultimately became known as the international telecommunications regulations until 1973 And the reason was that it was essentially only for Europe You were able to do so and many countries did including China And India, but the United States chose a position which said that unless it's internationalized We will not participate. It started in a succession Conferences from 73 to 88 to the wicked in 2012 for the United States Road Other events and which influenced its position in those conferences Nations up through the 80s influenced significantly the US position in 1988 at the Watsi and Then of course in the wicket of 2012 the positions of the United States and Ambassador Sepulveda has so wonderfully articulated Influenced and informed the US position with respect to that conference now throughout this period There have been times in which the United States Of course of not signing treaties for purposes of principle I would also note that during this period of the early 80s the United States left UNESCO Essentially in protest to the New World Information Order and what was the issue there The issue was the movement towards giving states rights to access to communication and not individuals I want to note that because in That that was a major debate in which the United States indicated that it would not accept the shift the fundamental shift of International law from from individuals to states in terms of rights You will note that in the preamble of the final acts there is a reference to the right of states of access to communications and and that was Conclusions based on what I have seen in terms of the overall US positions First of all, I would assert that what we're entering into is an intensified period of diplomatic activity And I would also like to say that these conclusions in many ways reflect what has been the historical president over these three periods of There is eventually an intensifying diplomatic activity an attempt internationally to arrive at certain norms At the same time that there will be a variety of institutions that ultimately get involved in this activity This was true in all three Instances of what we refer to as multi-stakeholder is it seems to me as As technology expands the inclusiveness of those participating in the technology necessarily also expands the political consequence of that is you need to accommodate the new inclusiveness, so that's the second point I Would also say there's a third point and this was true It also in all three instances that national Was not too long ago that countries argued that you could not trade Telecommunications services because they were essential to national security the current national debate On issues of surveillance It seems to me are reflection of the fact that that nexus remains as to how to how to deal with national security as well as the evolving technology Surrounding the evolution of technology the technology itself continued to expand and the infrastructure Expand Undeterred by the politics of the moment and that's certainly what we're saying my colleague in the audience who reflected upon the low rate of internet access in Africa one must also say is about Line is low the greatest growth rates as anyone providing those services would tell you is now in Africa And then I would say my last point is this The reflection of the first two periods of history it was also beginning to be reflected in this third period Which is do not expect a Normal and the new normal is this period of collision of forces with considerable infrastructure build out, but if this will be The future but as in all previous instances there is ultimately Decisions made and agreements reached with respect to normal puzzle, but it cannot be Alone and in that context I would note that the President's announcement With respect on Friday of the January 17th It had to be noted that there was a reference to the creation within the Department of State a senior position That the Department of State which is the principal organization within the government that deals with international norms international treaties The protection of US sovereignty will play a very important role in this in this period of Intensified diplomatic activity. Thank you very much Very it's Vanny now. So it's a mixture between Vanny and Ivan I guess But thank you, I'm really honored actually to be here regardless of that spelling mistake. I also want to ask a beg for your pardon for my non native English speaking One talks about internet governance the word governance Cannot be translated in certain languages So when we talk about governance in certain countries, they think about government Because that's the organization. That's the body that actually governs something so When I say international I actually mean it is an international through the international organization if you look at The way it's organized and the way it functions. It's not an international treaty organizations like the some of the ones that Ambassador Sepulveda mentioned in the beginning like the ITU newspapers I Can and the ITU do have some good working relationship The president of I can spoke at the wicket This abbreviation which still is causing some people to raise their eyebrows and also at the WTPS We do also work with the business community and we may most of the people really outside of the narrow Registry slash registrar related to domain names. Most of the people really don't know that I can exist They really is not bad Because I think if many people knew that I can exist that means I can is not doing its job And it's almost like the phone company You never I bet you that you never call 611 or whatever is your Customer support and tell them hey guys We ended up in this debate without necessarily being willing to do so But we ended up also because as some of the previous speakers pointed out and I'm sure some of the next ones were also mentioned There is a certain person Doing debates offline not on the internet. You know that if you enter a discussion with an opinion It's inevitable that you will end the discussion with the same opinion It's very difficult to change somebody's opinion. And if somebody comes I'm not going to spain spend time explaining why I can is not a US government control organization But if somebody wants we can talk after the Con the session is over about it, but I can also say that Supporting organizations which actually are the ones that Keep an eye I can working and and the community the users the people who actually want to do some business in this Area they're the ones who create the policies Pated what I can does we reach out to countries organization and individuals and I mentioned some of the businesses that are within I can We also try to engage other organizations which are outside of the usual suspects outside of the box so to speak I'll give you an example with my own country Bulgaria There is a whole program within I can where we bring people from developing countries To I can to see what it is how it functions and it's a very open process It's going to a public consultation Etc. Etc. And there was a Bulgarian lady from a university a professor at the university who applied to get a Grand to come to one of the I can meetings so she she came and She was started to see all this you know like 2000 people in Beijing or 3000 people and talking about this internet thing and this was last year in March or April and Then in the summer she wrote me and said well, you know, I want to do something in my university I want to do something about internet governance and cyber security and I said that's fine You know we'll I'll support it whatever way I can and two weeks later. She sent me a description of a Program for the master's degree students in her university on internet governance And if I knew what I'm getting into I would have probably said no in the beginning But I ended up lecturing students in December and I brought more colleagues from I can and also outside of I can so that's where We showed what what it actually means to be part of this internet governance process now this 35 students or so if few of them decide that they will get into The debate about internet governance. That's actually good because these are new people from part of the world which is usually not Participating actively within I can many people think that I can is Kind of oriented towards business only it's not true business is only part of I can we also are looking to include Academia non-profit civil society and government there are currently more than 130 members of the governmental advisory committee of I can And one may argue that there are more coming and yes There are more government that are joining as we speak and we try to Show to the world that not only this multi stakeholder model by the way another word which is Untranslatable in certain languages multi stakeholder, you know, honestly, I can't translate it in English too but but We want to show them that it is possible for the government's the private sector the citizens to sit down on the same table and Reach to a conclusion which is good for everyone Like such a conclusion would be for example, what do we do with? Internationalized domain names. These are domain names that are written in Script, which is different from the Latin and I can tell you that in many countries And I know we take this for granted in this audience here and maybe on the web cast But in many countries people don't understand Latin I mean just imagine for a second and I'll end up with that if the internet was not created in the US By people like Steven Vincent and Bob Khan what if the internet was created in a country which script we I'm coming from a Cyrillic country script The people who understand Cyrillic or Latin don't get at all what it was in Japan or China or Korea Could you really write google.com in another script which you don't understand or would you ever able be to ever be able to Learn a different language just for the sake of writing a domain name So there are all of these new opportunities that are coming for the rest of the people you mentioned the number How many people are today online 2.7 billion? Well, there are 4. who knows 5 maybe more now billion who are not and perhaps a huge portion of those people Don't really understand English and we want to make sure that they can use the internet the same way we do So anyway, I'll be ready to answer questions at the end. Thanks I'm Michael Nelson. I'm a principal technology policy strategist at Microsoft and in my spare time for the last five years I've been teaching at Georgetown in the communications culture and technology program Even though I'm a physicist and a futurist. I'm gonna spend most of my time talking today about communication Not communications. I'm gonna talk about Communication that will help us explain what we're doing here and how we can develop a better system for internet governance Some of you were in the room a couple months ago when we did a recap of the internet governance forum in Bali This was another Internet Society DC event for those of you who want there weren't there this webcast is very good And it kind of talks about where we are today and what happened in Bali I Think this meeting is unique because we are trying to look ahead five six years to where we could be and I think there are some opportunities as Dick said as we go through this inflection to do things much better Then we have been and to get to a much more stable situation When I first got involved in internet governance I was a little frustrated because I felt internet governance should just focus on the internet layer itself that we you know And people kept bringing in all these other issues They wanted to talk about not just network issues and domain name issues They wanted to talk about web standards and cloud and apps and social media And I finally come to realize that there's no way we're going to separate the upper layers of things that run on the internet from the internet itself and that we are going to have this broad discussion about internet governance and As we do that we need to understand where the different countries and companies and institutions involved in this debate are coming from As technologists and policy wonks who are focused on internet issues Sometimes we miss the bigger picture And I think it's useful just to to realize that when you talk to a lot of the people at meetings on internet governance They're concerned about other things Often countries are motivated by money. How can they protect the network providers in their country? How can they make more money? They're certainly concerned about media The Arab countries in particular have seen how social media helps spur the the Arab Spring and China is very worried about how the internet can spread discord and Empowered dissidents We have a whole issue about national security which ambassadors of pulveda mentioned and a lot of countries are driven by their desire to Make sure that the information going over the network is secure and that the private and protected and then there's the concern about crime But what really drives a lot of politicians is what voters are telling them and so voters are complaining about fraud identity theft Pornography in many countries porn is the largest source of bits and it's seen as disrupting the traditional culture Lack of access high prices for internet is certainly very high among the items that people are concerned about But when you get down to it the overarching issue in country after country is jobs and economic growth And that's where I think we really need to do a better job of linking what we're talking about here to their number one priority Which is making sure? These countries can create the millions of jobs that are going to be needed to keep people off unemployment. I Think this is a very exciting time for the internet if we can change the discussion The old discussion has been Around the old model of media regulation You go to an ITU media and you hear well the internet's just like Telephones broadcast and it's maturing now, so it's time it be regulated like these old media That's the wrong frame We need to think about the internet and and the computing power that it provides and the information it provides as One of the raw inputs to the economy something as fundamental as the computer on your desk The paper you use to publish reports the talent you hire These are fundamental things that every sector of the economy needs and we can't Treat the internet and the cloud as just one more niche application When you look at the whole package right now, we're building on top of this wireless broadband infrastructure The global internet which is enabling the cloud which is enabling the cloud of things Which will soon have tens of hundreds of billions of devices and we're making it all work together in a seamless way Using better interfaces that allow anybody even people who are literate to access information So we're on the cusp of something that's even bigger than the web was in the 1990s or e-commerce was in the last decade and We isn't as a community need to do a better job of explaining to a broader community What this is all about and how the opportunities we're building and the decisions we're making are going to enable these new startups new innovation We talked earlier about getting a more diverse group into the debate and discussion about internet governance That's incredibly important, but it's also important to get a more diverse group of government policymakers in the room This has been a debate mostly Attended to by telecom regulators and people who work with them We need the economics minister in the room the finance minister the labor minister the education minister the research minister And it really would be nice if we had more prime ministers in the room Because these are the people who are going to look beyond the narrow needs of the telecom set industry and look at the real Impact of these technologies and we have to reach out to them explain to them what's going on And not just national policymakers, but governors and mayors They're the ones who are closest to the ground, and they're the ones most concerned about unemployment Let me finish by just giving you some homework first off Reminding you that we do have a hashtag for this event just ISOC DC And if you put at CSIS you'll probably get even more people to notice I have three things I'd like to ask of you one Our team at the at Microsoft of the technology policy group is working on visions of the future Explaining how these technologies are going to come together how they're going to solve people's problems I would love to hear examples of visions that you've read for five or ten years from now That could inform our discussion So find me on Twitter at Mike Nelson or you can send me email at mr. Nelson mr. Nelson at Microsoft.com second piece of homework is Several people in the room and on this panel are members of the MAG The advisory committee that's helping set the program for the internet governance forum in Istanbul this fall So put your hand up if you're on the MAG Give us some ideas Ideas for things that we should put on the agenda for the next meeting and in the last very easy piece of homework For about half of you join the internet society This is incredibly easy. It's free and you'll get access to all sorts of very interesting information on what's going on in this area Thank you very much Thank you. Might I add in the DC chapter? It's a great entree point I'm Sally Wentworth. I'm the senior director of Policy for the internet society I'm on staff of the internet society working on global policy issues and so I I do want to say a hearty congratulations to CSIS and our DC chapter for Putting this kind of substantive event together and encouraging this kind of dialogue. It's exactly The kind of discussion that needs to happen. I also want to note that Our chapters are made up of volunteers people who care deeply about the subject and deeply about the mission of a global internet and people like David and Mike and Vinny and Judith and others here have put a tremendous amount of time and to Strengthening the chapter and I just gonna make a plug for you to really do get involved It's it's an opportunity to to shape the discussion here in Washington And thinking about this it's difficult to come last you feel like you're gonna Just agree with what everything what everyone said before you and try to say it differently So I'll see if I can succeed in that As I think about this and the the question was what's the geopolitics of internet governance? You think back to 2003-2005 there was the World Summit on the Information Society Which really was sort of a first global international consensus on How the internet and how information technology can interact with society and While a lot of the focus these days on on thinking about whist is goes back to three or four Key paragraphs dealing with internet governance. I do think it's important to step back and look at the Tunis agenda Look at the Geneva Declaration of Principles and you will see a tremendous amount of optimism About what the internet means for? Politics what it means for? The economy what it means for competitiveness the challenges of bringing more people in and I was in the the US government at the time and what we Really saw and I think even within the US government itself was Governments trying to figure out how to interact with this technology that was shaping every aspect of their Their government to their their citizenry their economy But not quite knowing how to do it and being confronted with a whole series of new acronyms that made relatively little sense to them You know terms like IETF and regional internet registries and I can and All of these acronyms and and and thinking well it works But we want to understand this better and we want more of it That's a great thing and so if you look at whist as you saw an international consensus that was incredibly optimistic I think and and quite positive and with respect to governance. They noted that that's a relevant issue They noted that it should be inclusive and multi-stakeholder But I think they also left some questions about How to really make this inclusive how do governments really interact and Things like the internet governance forum were stood up in part to help think about that question further As well as other processes within the UN and elsewhere. I do know with the internet society the the idea of how How to answer this question of the interaction between policy and the technology shaped a lot of our activities following the whist is What does it mean for access prices to have a multi-stakeholder process when you set up an internet exchange point? Is this something that the government drops on its country or is this something that really does emerge from the community and These were hard questions That the that I think a lot of us in the community wrestled with as the internet continued to grow at a magnificent pace as The geopolitical situation Changed at the same time as all of this was going on. We had the emergence of new economies. We had Massive international research economic recession. We had some of the shocks to the system. I think that Laura talked about in terms of What is it wiki leaks and the sopa debate here in the US? More recently the wicket. I think was a real policy Shock to the system and then of course the revelations more recently I think what all of that tells us is and I truly believe that that optimism that we saw at whist is still exists But there's a question Again emerging and an opportunity for policy makers to use some of the traditional venues that they've used in the past that the ambassador and and Dick Baird spoke about of What to answer some of those questions that they felt didn't get answered in 2003 and 2005 and in part to respond to some of these shocks to the system that we've seen more recently and I think the question for for those of us in the internet community is How do we not lose sight of what we were what we're all trying to achieve here a global interoperable network of networks that enables innovation that enables connectivity free expression but that also recognizes the local Context and the local challenge and allows for that fluidity that allows for for people to move in and out of the ecosystem To affect it and and what's the policy environment in which that can happen? I think one of the things that concerns me as I hear some of the discussions lately is that we're talking about a New thing and and I think as humans We tend to want to put boxes up and and put people into boxes and say okay You live in this box go forth and do what you do in that box but the internet doesn't work like that the standards world interacts with The content layers which interact with the social layers It's it's a fluid system and the policy responses to that I think As as dick was saying I'm going to have to take that into account Going forward But how do we as an internet community not lose sight of that? That optimism and those objectives while at the same time recognizing that the as this panel Titles suggests the geopolitics of the internet are changing Maybe an interesting question is how can the internet continue to change the geopolitics? In ways that are positive and constructive Okay, great Dave has a question or two which we'll get to but I'm gonna try and summarize the panel in an inflammatory way So what what did I hear I heard that the the internet works pretty well and the Institutions we have now Do some things really well? But I also heard that there are some things it doesn't do really well and That there's a fair amount of the world's population That is dissatisfied with the current structure so we have Sometimes talked about competing narratives for what the internet should look like in the future Didn't talk about that here, but I don't know if there's competing narratives really there might be one narrative that is eroding or degrading and Other people thinking about what a new narrative would look like, you know the Russians the Chinese the Brazilians We didn't talk about what the role of the UN will be in sort of an easy trick in diplomacy is to say if there's a Set of positions pick the one in the middle right and that's probably where we're gonna drive So what are the positions? There are some countries that feel that government should play a stronger role and that internet governance should be Anchored in the UN system somehow. I would probably say that's a majority opinion, but not a complete majority There's other governments who rightly point out that the existing model has worked really well That there's risks to moving to a more government centric model not only political risks, but Economic risks and those are very legitimate concerns. I think they're actually right So what's the middle look like where do we end up with a new system that will and I think I don't remember It was dick or who will accommodate all these new users. I'll do a little self-advertisement here We're gonna come out with a report in a week written for the European Union on norms and International agreement that will touch on some of these issues My sense is though we have not yet figured out and in some ways you can't figure out until you start the discussions Where that midpoint is big countries don't give up. So we're not gonna suddenly say, okay, we surrender, you know, give it to the ITU Similarly the other countries that have differing views are not gonna say we agree the status quo Let's keep it. So what's that midpoint? That might be a good one for people to talk about I don't know how we want to do this Dave. Do you want to start with questions? We had a question in the audience I think we had a couple questions online Go ahead. I'll start with a question Our panel spoke brilliantly about the challenges to internet governance about what's been a comp What's been accomplished about the complexity of internet governance about how multi-stakeholderism is a value not always appropriate Our not always relative to specific functions and about how technology seems to evolve no matter what I'd like to ask the panelist to give a few examples of when institutions should get out of the way and let the internet evolve and A few other examples of when we need institutions to be active to guide the internet forward I'll dive in on that I'm glad you asked that question because I think this question of the narrative the example is really important And I touched a little bit on this in my remarks We need to tell people that this is a different system. I like to compare The internet to paper We don't have any paper governance organizations. Nobody's deciding how big your pieces of paper have to be there are norms Different countries have different ones, but no one defines how you use paper So I think we have to start looking for examples where a Unregulation approach has worked as with paper Here in the US. We used to have very strict rules on how much you could charge to move Freight from one place to another we had a huge bureaucracy down on Pennsylvania Avenue the interstate Commerce Commission, which was in the business of telling truckers how much to charge for moving freight and Jimmy Carter The great deregulator got rid of that Because they were able to show that by having Information posted on tariffs by having a competitive market. We could create a better governance system I think we can do that for a lot of places on the internet Whether it's domain names or peering or some of the higher-level issues I mentioned earlier more transparency more data Particularly with all the great big data tools. We have today Enable us to build systems that are self-regulatory or unregulatory So that that's it's a really Foreign idea for people who have made their whole career regulating things But we can tell that story and we can show examples of where the system has worked really well without creating big new structures like Sally said and Conversely Laura or dick Can you give a few examples of where? Institutions need to be more active Certainly, there are many Issues of internet governance that require a lot of attention One area is I'll just raise these in the form of a question The future of interoperability This has been a core value of internet design and We increasingly see a resurgence of proprietary values and proprietary technology So we don't have the same openness in newer applications including voice Including cloud computing that we've had in other areas. So I think that you know attention to interoperability Do we want regulation of interconnection and what will that do to the pace of innovation and growth? I'm concerned about fragmentation. We have a lot of national proposals to to create trenches and Demarcations what will that do to the universal internet the issue of privacy? This is not just about government surveillance either, but the large ID Infrastructure that is collected from private industry, you know, what is the future of privacy in this environment and Increasing calls around the world to go with IDs to get online. What about content regulation? I'm sure we'll see continued proposals for governments to regulate spam And other forms of content which requires deep packet inspection and looking at the actual content Is that the future that we want and of course the security of the infrastructure? I wanted to mention that Just yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos It was the official launch of a global commission on internet governance that is going to look at exactly these questions And there are other very good initiatives out there too to create dialogues around this The commission is going to be led by Carl Bilt Who is Sweden's current Minister of Foreign Affairs and includes a lot of highly respected global figures and just disclosure? I'll actually be surging serving as the research director for that initiative and it's being spearheaded by a couple of think tanks and Jim I know you're very familiar with this But so I just want to say even though the internet is working fairly well There are all of these issues that require attention whether privacy security interconnection interoperability and continuing the openness of the internet It's not guaranteed what the future of the internet will be so attention has to be paid to these issues I'm glad you gave us some good news Laura because that was five nightmare scenarios in two minutes We had a question in the audience and then I see we have a couple questions. So we have multiple questions Go ahead can Hi, my name is Donna Wells my background as I spent a lot of time researching and analyzing the Russian language internet as a separate entity I have a theoretical question about the nature of the internet and today the internet is comprised of several sub entities demarcated by the language in which the content is found these different sub entities have their peculiar nature they have different characteristics different dynamics So my question is do we think that over time the internet is trending toward more Uniformity are these sub entities losing their peculiarities or actually are these different sub entities such as the Russian language internet Chinese language internet? Actually becoming more peculiar in nature more divergent. Thank you I'll dive into that some of our students at Georgetown in the communications culture and technology program have looked at this question and one of the theses that I remember most Covers how web design Varies from Latin America to China to the US And it is it's it's fascinating to see how partly because of the structure of the language partly because of the cultural Antisens, they're very different approaches. It's not just the language It's the whole way that information is presented and all indication are it are that we're getting more diversity As more and more corners of the country of the world get connected if you look at What the percentage of websites in English? Over the last 15 years. It's steadily gone down Multilingual domain names make it easier for people to find content in non Latin scripts as Vinny said So I don't think we're we're not leading to the Hollywood Isation of the world. I think just the opposite people are going to be able to discover the joys of music from Chad or Sri Lanka and you suddenly have a global audience for culture that until that point was kind of segregated in its own little Cultural group with maybe a million or two million people speaking that language and understanding it Mike you're a futurist, so I'm going to interject here with a question I don't worry about this too much because one of the things that I think we've both thought for a long time is that Software cures all ills right and so You'll have a very diverse Internet with multiple languages Multiple scripts and we won't have to worry about it because there'll be some program that translates it into our native tongue So at the end of the day, we might end up it won't be next year It might not be five years, but I bet you'll be within ten years. We might end up back with no Technical or linguistic impediments to a single web and I say that because it appears to me that global demand is for that kind of Broad access you're the futurist. What do you think? I don't have to be a futurist on this one I can just visit the Microsoft research labs and we've got we've got some amazing stuff It's already out there and some even more amazing stuff that I can't talk about But it does make Siri look like a second grader. It's really It's very impressive technology, but I still and I ask that we strike that remark But I am also a cyber optimist and I do think that we're going to allow people to find some of these other types of content But we're also gonna help people learn other languages faster And there's some really powerful new tools for doing that, too One in the front and we'll go we'll have to write Good morning Philip Corwin and a question for professor. Denardus. I'm glad you brought up the Commission Many of us were surprised at that press release yesterday from Davos I wonder if you could give us some more background on What led to the creation of this commission the selection of the members I note that many of the members are One is very well associated with the upcoming meeting in Brazil Others are from also serve on roles on these high-level policy panel set up by I can but I guess How does it the Commission's work? fit into everything else that's going on in internet governance and do you feel Confident that the all these other fours in which these issues are being discussed will be receptive to The Commission's output what I notice is going to be a two-year program and will events wait on a two-year Commission with so much so many important meetings and and perhaps some decisions occurring in 2014 Yes, thank you very much for that question. I'll provide a little bit of background and then my Ideas about how it will fit into some of the other Initiatives that are happening right now. It is being spearheaded by two highly respected think tanks One is the Center for international governance innovation that's located in Waterloo, Canada And then the other one is Chatham house in London. So they are Facilitating the process. I mentioned that it's being chaired by Carl Bilt who has a lot of knowledge of these issues and a history of involvement and it's very difficult to Come up with a composition of a panel that is perfect So none no composition is perfect But in my opinion it does include a lot of really respected and knowledgeable people Not only internet governance insiders, but also people who have understand the high politics issues more and but certainly you know names that you would recognize like Beth Novak and Henriette Esther Hoizen from South Africa me quayner Dame Wendy Hall Joseph Nye, so a lot of really interesting thinkers What about the two-year time frame? This is not meant to be in contention with the other efforts that are underway, but actually has been In consultation and in collaboration and hopefully we'll take the ball and run with it With some of the short-term Initiatives that are going on so two years is a really long time in internet space But when you think about the need to have a very formal and deliberative public consultation about the issues That will you know, it's more of a long arc of getting adequate public Input and also hopefully and you know time will tell but hopefully provide some tangible more tangible recommendations rather than just Coming up with another set of internet principles or a to-do list So the two-year time frame is a long one in internet history. I'm optimistic that it will be you know very Will be a follow-on to some of these shorter term things that are happening all the players know each other and That hopefully the outcome will be some tangible strategic recommendations. There also is a Component of this that is interested in Further empirical research from the academic community about internet governance issues, so I'll just put that on the table that there should be a lot of papers and research coming out of this initiative as well to help Support in an empirical way some of the strategic visions And I think a little word and say it CIGI the Canadian institution has a series of papers on internet governance on their website that some of them are good some of them aren't I know that because I wrote one and so You can figure out which one mine falls into Probably the latter we had a question over here Thank you very much. My name is Andrew Mack. I Thank you for a great panel very interesting. I've heard you all speak before so terrific stuff The I'm a veteran of 20 some icons and IGFs and this kind of thing so Very familiar faces the question is this to me is really when we're talking about internet governance Which internet governance are we talking about? Are we talking about the internet governance that is about power? The talking about the internet governance that's about a vision of security and the relationship between the user and the state or the user and Corporates are we talking about an internet governance that is about? Economic development broadly speaking or employment development, which in many instances is a very different issue Especially when you talk about the global south I think where how we ask that question and what we which of those issues or which of those groups of issues we decide to Function it to focus in on really is going to depend on what we get out of the back of it And I was thinking about this especially in light of the coming Brazil conference And we now we got a lot of people who are new in this a lot of people who are newly newly active What do you expect is going to come out of the Brazil conference and which of these issues? Do you think they should take they should tackle thanks? I? Can immediately tell you what's coming out of the Brazil meeting just let's meet around 26th of April and I'll tell you We'll probably have a DC ISAC event about that question But but you are right that there are different aspects what we have noticed though is that there is a Substantive discussion going on in different circles about They I would use the term that is more broad. I mean kind of more commonly used internationalization of I can Many people understand this differently some people say that means I can should become a truly international organization Recognized by a hundred and ninety four countries and based in Geneva or something like that some say no I can should have more foreigners Meaning not new as citizens on the boat which I can actually has had for the last ten years or so But people just don't know it The thing is though that In certain areas and I think professor the notice mentioned that that the Question is actually not who governs the internet the question is what governs the internet? in other words people believe that I can is the one that can shut down portions of the internet and Jim's here in the beginning mentioned something about China where the internet was effectively pointed to a house somewhere in the Wyoming or whatever and Was effectively shut down without anyone having to do anything with root servers or I can or anything But the the reality is that we need a lot of educational effort reach out I mean people just some people just don't know how the internet functions and some people know But nevertheless, it's a good foreign policy thing to say that I can is not international enough Whatever that means, you know, you can interpret it in different languages differently It's a it's a very challenging task and one of the things where you've seen Like the Brazil meeting which came out of of a meeting between Farishehari and the Brazilian president or the fifth panel that is chaired by the Estonian president or Just the just noted and announced Other commissions and and bodies and structures that will be discussing that only shows there is a need for dialogue and It's it's really good that so many people are suddenly interested It would have been better if they have started to be interested in this topic as Sally mentioned in 2003 or 2005 Because by now we would have gone through all these discussions, but even now it's it's better to sit down and talk about these issues Okay, we have a couple more questions. We're getting close to the end though So if I could ask both people and panelists to speak quickly the one here in the Can you get this one here Nick? No this one. Thank you right in the front Hi, my name is Alexa Rod. I'm probably one of the veterans of being at many many I can meetings I found the panel very very interesting. There were two things. I took away one professor Laura DeNardis's comment about the fact that The internet governance is multi-layered and it's not just one thing and then Mike Nelson's comment about the fact that the the whole idea of It's melding between control of the infrastructure and control of the content so one of my question is as I Think about the geopolitical events and what has actually affected some of the debates that have come up here none of them have been fomented by companies or Stakeholders if you will in the traditional sense New star verisign PIR have you know stakeholders within I can or even some of the stakeholders within IETF Have not really fomented. It's been companies like Twitter The Arab revolution Was really forwarded by people posting on Twitter It was Facebook that the government of Pakistan wanted to shut down and then ended up changing some of the routing tables With the ISPs it actually caused a worldwide outage It wasn't calm or it wasn't any of the naming and numbering systems So it is these constituents or if these companies that are actually creating some of the questions that we're talking about both from a privacy And control debate right And also from a geopolitical debate how much control it should governments have and what kind of thing does it represent in Iran during the spring during the revolution green revolution in Iran a lot of the People were given away by Nokia's mobile switching by Nokia who agreed to give What sold mobile switching equipment to the Iranian government and then agreed to give away the mobile numbers of people who are posting on Twitter and their information Where's Nokia so in this new debate when we're talking about stakeholders How do you foresee some of these companies some of these applications that are not in the transport? Where we initially started from actually come into the debate Just two sentences my big vision for internet governance 2020 is a system that's really driven by user needs Both individual users and business users We don't have that in the internet governance arena today. I mean if I had my way the IGF would be 80 percent People who don't run any piece of the internet people who are on the receiving end What's exciting is that the technology itself is allowing those people a better voice? We've mentioned a few of the things like the SOPA revolt We're gonna see a lot more of that and I hope it's gonna be a lot more constructive. It's not just gonna be stop It's going to be Pushing ideas forward from the user community That's part of my vision of unregulation The idea that by getting bigger better data and by allowing people to react to that data We can build political force against certain practices and for other practices practices that are better for users Thanks for bringing some optimism into this Hi, my name is John gugill. I'm a PhD student at George Mason University School of Public Policy And I'm interested in the regional development Privacy and security aspects of the internet of things and I was kind of glad that Michael kind of raised that brief leak Since that in my mind is going to be the big thing that's going to be coming up by year 2020 You're gonna have billions of objects more objects connected to the internet. So I've I know that the IGF has a working group Multistakeholder working group on the Internet of Things I know that the European Union is a multi-staker stakeholder group Looking at the Internet of Things and I know that the Federal Trade Commission now is holding Working sessions with multi stakeholders trying to resolve What it seems to be the primary issue which is the side that is interested in privacy and security mainly driven by privacy groups and individuals and the Industry side which wants open Systems non-regulated. So I guess my question is with this of evolution of the internet to the internet of things Where does the panel see the bridge between those two very different sides? Because I see it everywhere within all the notes that I've reviewed Well, I hate to be monopolizing the answers, but this is my favorite topic Except I don't talk about the Internet of Things I talk about the cloud of things Because without an understanding of where all that data is going and how it's going to be processed in the cloud We really are only looking at half the system Some of very misguided policy recommendations have come from that kind of narrow focus on the internet of things or Just the things The dumbest policy proposal of the last five years From the European Commission the right to the silence of the chips It's kind of a cute phrase The idea was that everybody should be able to somehow disable everything that gets connected to the internet physically just be able to You know rip off the antenna or somehow push a button Makes sense if everything costs ten dollars doesn't make sense if it costs two cents So I think we need to look at the whole system We need to think about the data rather than the things and and we don't have to have a separate Privacy policy just for the internet of things We have to think about the internet of things in the context of our broader approach to get online privacy But thank you for so much for bringing those issues up. I think some of the other panelists are also involved in this I do think we should always be asking the question. How can the policies we're talking about today Influence this cloud of things that is going to be universal in 2020 This is actually an area of interest and passion of mine as well, and I've been working on it a fairly long time I think to some degree what you you're correct in the sense that the public Conversation about privacy and the relationship between the individual and the information that is collected about him or her Whether it be through use of things or directly in an exchange with a with a collector Is driven sort of through the press by how privacy advocates react to it and how consumers feel about it But I would argue that if you look at it from when I started working on the subject in 1999 to today What you've seen is industry really embrace the concept of becoming a good steward of people's information and From companies when I started working on this very few companies had a C level official that worked on privacy Now a significant number of companies do and it's not just tech companies You see it in companies like Walmart and GE and other companies so to some degree. I think this is a Conversation that is that is coming going in both directions and that there is a substantive response coming from industry on the subject And you're gonna see they're aware. They're very well aware of the of the potential Conversation that will occur around the Internet of Things and how it relates to an individual's privacy and dignity as you know or may not know other the president announced a Study by John that will be headed by John Podesta on big data and the relationship between big data and privacy as well as innovation And that will be an important study that will take place over the next I believe 90 to some number of days in which the administration is thinking very seriously about the very questions that you've just raised last question I think George Papian is from UNESCO and my question has to do with the freedom of expression and I Only heard may have missed it earlier in the earlier comments But I only heard Sally Wentworth bring it up and it seems to me that if we're talking about governance And governance issues the freedom of expression is an important part of that discussion and access to information Which I think was implied and in some cases in some of the questions that the young woman over here talking about Facebook being shut down etc. Is about freedom of expression and access to information I just want to get the panel if I could to Address the this issue in terms of the role that it plays in terms of this larger discussion about governance And a fabulous panel too. Thank you so much for bringing this together Why don't we start with Danny? The American government participates in the freedom online coalition which is headed by our in the State Department by our office of human rights and labor It expressive liberty as it's been presented by professor Donardus is a quick key Underpinning to what we want we the United States government want to see out of the Internet the ability to participate actively in Civic and political life and to do so freely And we believe that the Internet enables that but there is an effort to use What the professor talks about as as critical points within the infrastructure of the Internet to deny people that sort of access Then to deny that people that sort of ability And we actually fund programs that in that enable people to get around those those kinds of roadblocks And we will continue to fight the any effort to put some sort of international approval stamp on Practices that restrict people's ability to express themselves Yeah, I'll just add to that and I thank you for raising that question and the the issue of freedom of expression Underpins everything that we discussed here if even if not explicitly stated so in the area of cyber security We increasingly see distributed denial of service attacks that are used to take down human rights sites and suppress freedom of expression And you know take down many other sites as well in the area of innovation policy and no longer makes sense to separate Expressive liberty from economic liberty because in order to express ourselves online To some extent we need to have the technological tools that enable us to do that in order to express ourselves. We need a stable infrastructure and Connectivity so I see it as underpinning everything and then there is also this question of the privatization of governance in which companies who serve as information intermediaries make decisions that in effect determine freedom of expression and for example If a company like Twitter were to block a reporter's Account for for some reason that would be an example of a private company that Would it would affect freedom of expression? So policy role of private intermediaries Freedom of expression innovation policy related to freedom of expression I would also assert that privacy is closely linked because of the chilling effects on freedom of expression of Issues related to surveillance. So thank you very much for raising that point Just very quick point. Thanks for the question, of course But luckily in this particular case icon has nothing to do with content. So this is one of the things where this is another Kind of idea that people have that I can could shut down domain names or take off Content from the internet and we have spent an enormous amount of time explaining that no this is not what we do They should not come to us, but there was a question about where other institutions and I think one of the Issues is like with cyber crime. Obviously, you cannot rely on the private sector to do with cyber crime You need law enforcement. You need governments. You need cooperation, but that's another thing and that's where Private business can do a lot with the government. Thanks I want to thank you for bringing up that issue I touched on it in about one sentence in my remarks and mostly the fear that some governments have of freedom of expression We have to make a better case that not only is that good for political discord and for discourse It's also good for innovation and jobs if people aren't talking across Across national boundaries. They're not part of the global economy Georgetown I teach a class on what's shaping the internet and we do a series of case studies and one of them was on Censorship of the internet in Singapore and what happened in Singapore is very interesting They were the poster child of internet censorship in the 90s But over the years there's been this increasing pressure Mostly from the business community to get more access to more information and most of all to have a fruit more free And open society so that the best people their most creative people don't leave the country So I think we can we have to make the case that this is a fundamental human right, but we also can link Freedom of speech freedom of expression to other things that policymakers care about like innovation and jobs I should also add that to Microsoft cares passionately about this. We're very involved with the global network initiative I went 32 hours on a flight to Bali so I could talk on a panel about this topic So that's my personal commitment I just want to add to what Mike just said that there was a Boston consulting group report issued at Davos this week On the subject of the relationship between not just connected networks, but open networks Which includes the ability to express oneself and its relative economic benefits by looking at doing a comparative study of markets in which there are different levels of Freedom and you look at the and we actually commissioned the United States Department through our Chief Office of the Chief Economist Commissioned a similar report and which found the reach the same conclusion coming out of Yale and we'll be issuing that in a relatively near future dick Thank You Jim just very briefly One of the most difficult concepts to Convince people about it seems to me internationally when they say how do we form a silicon valley? And we've had this discussion at the OECDSE Barbara Warner out there at various times And and the concept is difficult for people to fully appreciate is you've got to find an environment in which universities the private sector and government Have entered changes an exchange of ideas and a freedom That encourages innovation when you give that to cut that view to countries They're almost stopped by it because it's hard for them to imagine how you take those three Institutions and bring them together, which is the underpinning of silicon valley and Then we need to and then as we emphasize that inherent to those three aspects of our society Encouraging innovation is freedom of expression Then that becomes further a very difficult concept But my point being is it may be difficult, but it seems to me we need to continuously repeat that especially in the internet space That deals with policy because if countries don't understand that And appreciate that then such things as employment and innovation will become very much harder and more difficult for them to to use to take them to to Deal with issues Fundamental issues of their economy and their society. Thank you for that question So I did you want to chime in? Sure, I also I think you know one of the the values that we've spoken about here And I think Laura really raised it was this concern about fragmentation and You know we there's tremendous value in a globally interoperable network of networks and part of that is that It's free expression not just within my own community, but between my community and another community So that you know there is a concern that you might have freedom of expression And I think your question went to this to some degree you have freedom of expression within a Community of like-minded or common language groups But what you really need for the for the network to be valuable is to encourage That that interlinkage so that you don't have fragments of communities just talking to each other and not Not across those communities, so I think freedom of expression is is more complex When we when we start thinking about How people divide themselves up? I'm gonna conclude with a prediction for you here because the title I've got of my thing is internet governance 2020 So I've it's a two-part prediction. The first is whatever internet governance will look like Six years from now. It will not be what it looks like now. So we are inevitably facing change The second thing and this one will probably be a little less Popular is internet governance is gonna look more like how states Interact and how we govern other big international Infrastructures and so that's the path we're on and defining the contours of that Will be very difficult But if you're a Western audience one of the problems is that that's uncomfortable because it means you're gonna be ceding some authority and When I think I'm gonna come back to Dick's remark and Ambassador Sepulveda's remark when we take into account the concerns of other countries They're gonna move in a certain direction We might want to think about how we shape that with that can I ask you to join me in thanking our panelists here for