The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Can you hear me? Is the mic working? Yes, it is now. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. In our third panel for the Annual GigaNet Symposium. I am Marianne Franklin, the Chair of GigaNet. I am asking everyone to join us at the table, perhaps on the side.
The topic for the third panel today, Actors and Policies in Internet Governance. We had two very substantial panels this morning. I am absolutely sure we will have a third substantial panel this afternoon and to follow. We have three papers, four speakers. I will introduce each paper and speaker in turn. The speakers will be giving a presentation of 12 minutes, so that we have plenty of time for discussion and they can expand their ideas during the Q&A.
When you want to, if you want to make a comment or question after the Panelists have finished, please indicate your name for the record. It's something I continually forget to do myself.
One final announcement, at the end of the day after the fourth session after the break, we have a very brief final session where we will be reporting on activities from GigaNet. After that, we have a reception, otherwise known as the GigaNet party, at 8:30 in the evening at a lovely little bar called Mi Lola. If you go to the GigaNet Web site programme information you'll find it is very, very close to the Grande Fiesta Guadalajara Country Club Hotel. It is on Via Providensia and two blocks from the hotel.
Moving from those announcements to the panel. Our first speaker today is Jeanette Hofmann. The title of the paper, The Founding of the IGF From a Field Theoretical Perspective. Jeanette, you have around 12 minutes. Thank you very much.
>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: Thank you. I have been a participant of the WSIS process that made the decision to found the IGF. Ten years later I decided that I want to write a paper about it.
And what doesn't happen often is the developing a theoretical framework to sort of retrace the experience really changed my impression on what was going on during this time when the IGF was founded. I will now give a brief overview of that. I start with the question of: What are the sort of common explanations for the founding of new global organisations? Usually one could distinguish three different forms of explanation. The first one is perhaps the most common one. It is functional planks. New organisations according to that explanation emerge because of coordination problems that require constitution can.
The second one is more normative. New organisations are founded to sort of secure peace, to increase participation, improve integration, welfare, transparency, you name it. These are more normative explanations.
The third type of explanation is what I call endogenous. They look at the process that brought about new organisation. We see issues here such as opportunities to founding a new body, compromises between competing forces, but also contingencies. When we now look at the literature on the IGF that we have so far, and ask ourselves what are the common explanations for the IGF? We don't see any functional explanations, sort of coordination problems. We don't see any normative explanations. We see endogenous explanations that sort of brought it about. We see such functional explanations when it comes to ICANN. For example, in the rule book would give a functional explanation why it was necessary to found ICANN. But with the IGF we don't find that. There is no reference to sort of problems that needed a new body to solve them. People look at the process, they look at the discussions taking place during WSIS that ended up in founding the IGF.
Let me say something about the argument made in this literature. What we see is, for example, both Hans Klein would say we were stuck in this fight and founding the IGF was the low hanging fruit. Or Mr. Mueller would say there were so many administrative problems, that was the compromise everybody could agree upon and it wouldn't diminish the role of the U.S. government or something.
What you see in these narratives is that they make, that they make the process appear very strategic and rational. I think it was not. It was neither strategic nor was it rational. In fact, there was no master plan for founding a new organisation. These are the free empirical -- three empirical points I would make.
First, on the WSIS agenda there was never any idea of founding a new organisation. The decision to found a new forum was made a few months before WSIS ended.
Second, founding a forum was the brain child of civil society, which at that time was actually the weakest of all actors participating at the WSIS.
Third, the really powerful actors, at least powerful from the way I see it, the U.S. government and the technical community were very much against founding a new organisation. So the constellation of actors that we saw during WSIS would actually make it very, very unlikely that a new body such as the IGF was founded.
So I would say that it was very unlikely that we got the IGF, and the IGF could as well not have been founded. I can only stress this point again and again because it has an impact on the kind of explanations we give, and also on the kind of questions we should ask. If it was so unlikely to found the IGF, what actually made it rational? It was not a given thing. When we look at the IGF today we very much regard it as a given, almost a natural outcome of the WSIS process. It seems sort of like a linear development. First we got ICANN and then we got a few problems and then we got a new forum where we can discuss these problems.
So I use field theory to sort of get away from this naturalized understanding of the IGF and try to conceptually detach myself from my own experience.
Now, about field theory, it goes back to Pierre Boudreau and has been expanded and developed by other people, first in the understanding of the author, an analytical tool, but also empirical reality. Empirical reality in the sense that when there is a fear that makes an empirical difference. It has an impact on what people think and how they act and what they regard as rational.
So fears, according to Boudreau, they emerge around conflict. It is actors coming together who take an interest, find the conflict really relevant and begin working with each other. What they do when the fear forms is that they form oppositions. There is always two leagues, two camps fighting against each other. Underneath these oppositions, there has to be a common understanding. Otherwise they cannot fight. So they need to share something. And what they share at least is what is at stake. There is something that is so relevant that they keep arguing with each other. These arguments over time change what they see, what they regard and how they sort of actually assess certain things.
So fears, according to Boudreau are shaped by two types of struggles. First there is the substantial conflict. At the same time they do struggle over the rules that shape the fields. These rules again reflect asymmetries in terms of resources. One outcome of these battles is what Boudreau calls spaces of the possibles. The actors in the field define a corridor of what is rational, what is unthinkable, what are sort of solutions that one can agree upon and what seems completely irrational. That is what Boudreau calls the space of the possibles. Now, let me apply field theory to WSIS, the World Summit.
The World Summit, I would say, has every sort of characteristic of a temporary field. It was formed by actors coming together with really opposing understandings of what Internet Governance is and how the Internet should be governed.
The opposition, what is at stake is the control over what they called Critical Internet Resources. That was the common thing. Everybody during WSIS found that really relevant. The opposition formed was between the camp that favored private regulation and that favored a public regulation. Sort of a UN-based multilateral process. What they struggled about among other things during WSIS is the mode of participation at WSIS. Who actually has the right to be at the table and speak? And who do these people represent?
So by battling over Internet Governance and the modes of participation, they created what I would call discourse I have products. These discoursive products is the multi-stakeholder approach, a concept that existed in other parts of global policies, but not in the Internet governance space. It was if you want an introduction or translation from a concept from environmental policies mainly into the Internet Governance world.
And another product that was produced here is a broadening definition of Internet Governance. The technical community always saw it as a narrow technical thing about making, keeping sort of the technical system interoperable. That for them was the main thing. Lots of people thought that Internet Governance is something much broader.
The third thing that was introduced was the policy dialogue as a term to talk about these issues. So I would say the idea IGF became a thinkable outcome, sort of. Be part of the space of the possible through these three discoursive artifacts. Multi-stakeholder approach was something between private and public regulation. It seemed to define a common ground. By broadening the definition of Internet Governance and accepting that there's policy issues, it is not longer the technical community that governed the space. If there are policy issues, you legitimate other parties, other experiences to be part of the game.
Policy dialogue was sort of the term for sort of creating the path towards the Internet Governance forum. So during the process, the IGF became something that seemed not completely irrational anymore. By changing sort of the semantic space of the WSIS. Now, my conclusion because my time is up. I think field theory allows us understanding a semantic transformation that took place as a byproduct of this battle over private versus public technical versus nontechnical aspect of Internet Governance. It sort of defined the middle ground between these two camps without changing the power of relations or without one of them sort of giving up. So the opposition between the competing camps was still there. It delimits a space of the possibles, sort of creating a narrow corridor for what is allowed and still leaving a lot outside.
So there are lots of Options that were excluded. The IGF was something people could agree upon. And what I think what we can show with field theory is how very contingent, if you want arbitrary this outcome of WSIS was. There was no sort of master plan behind the IGF. That is something we define today. We give meaning to the IGF in its own right over the ten years we have been coming to this event. But its origins are completely contingent. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks, Jeanette. Lots to think about.
I would like to turn to the next paper by Efrat Daskal and Anya Orlova. Very important question: Does the World Belong to the Young? The Role of the Youth in the IGF. I don't think it's a rhetorical question either.
>> EFRAT DASKAL: Thank you for the lovely introduction.
(Lost audio.)
>> EFRAT DASKAL: Now? Do it the old-fashioned way.
Okay. Now you can hear me?
Let's give it another try. Can you hear me? Yea! I know these are difficult hours after lunch. Please grab your bottle of water and begin. Jeanette taught us about looking at the field of the IGF from the outside. Now I am inviting you to join us and to enter the field to go inside IGF. So this project is actually the result of cooperation between two people, my name is Efrat. I'm from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Anya Orlova from CDN. Following our session yesterday you can call it cooperation between academia and civil society.
Okay. So from JFK to Nelson Mandela, from Barack Obama to Whitney Houston, the future belongs to young people. But do we allow them to influence the future. This is the question that guides our research as we try to unveil two things: First, we want to understand what is the role of youth at IGF? And using this case study of youth at IGF we want to understand a bigger question. We want to know what are the characteristics of the IGF representation system.
Now, it is important for us to say that what we will represent today is a work in progress. We are still collecting data and still analyzing it. As a matter of fact, IGF Mexico is one of our field sites as well. So you have any comments, suggestions, ideas concerning the rest of our study we will be very happy if you can share it with us. And further, I pass it on to you.
>> ANYA ORLOVA: Hello. So the most prominent outcome of WSIS was the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum, as we just learned from Jeanette. A new platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue on policy. The forum is not a decision making bold but still the most attended political discourse dealing we Internet Governance. Applying a multi-stakeholder approach to the IGF held within it the promise of bringing together a divorce range of actors representing the interests of all stakeholders involved in Internet Governance. However, as a reality has shown us, there appear to be at least three major barriers preventing people from participating in IGF meetings, therefore diminishing the idea of multimodal. We define three main barriers: The lack of awareness, education, and money. And the nontransparent and often biased selection process in between the stakeholders and the members.
Taking all of these obstacles together, the people who eventually participate in the meetings construct to a certain extent portion participation that usually excludes minority groups on who want to take part in IGF. One of those groups is young people. Children and young people are no longer perceived as vulnerable actors who need protection. They are actors who contribute to society. Thus all around the world we are see examples of youth serving as Members of boards of Directors and key advisor groups working on various issues such as programme development, hiring community outreach, advocacy, and so forth.
The same process happened at IGF as well. Young people who have been participating at IGF decided to institutionalize their status and their activities by establishing the youth Coalition on Internet Governance. And this happened during the fourth IGF which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2009. By doing so they declared that young people as a unique stakeholder have the right to participate in processes of making decisions about Internet Governance within the existing IGF structure. They took action to establish that right.
Now we arrive to our research question, which is: What are the characteristics of youth participation at IGF?
>> EFRAT DASKAL: In order to answer this question we used three research methods to produce a description of youth activities. The first is content analysis of all youth related materials from IGF meetings. We managed to collect 35 documents so far.
The second method is in depth interviews with past and present key activists taking part in various youth organisations within IGF. We conducted some of the interviews so far and plan to conduct some few interviews throughout the following week.
Finally, participatory observation of several meetings in IGF 2016. Basically starting from tomorrow we are going to be in every possible session of youth, trying to understand the real dynamic that goes on behind the scenes and behind the transcripts as well.
Now, the results of our methodology, the results of our analysis will be presented according to three major themes. The initial vision of youth at IGF, the difficulties youth has at IGF and the future of youth within IGF.
Okay. So the vision. I have a dream, at least according to the YCIG declaration. After analyzing the Declaration we managed to find out three major points. The first one is why should youth even participate or be considered as a stakeholder? Well, the main justification for youth becoming a stakeholder relies on the fact that the Internet is a world of the young. This is a direct quotation from the Declaration. This idea can be interpreted in two ways. First of all, that youth are the largest group of Internet users. Second, youth have more experience in Internet-related issues. Now, why this interpretation and this argument is a little bit problematic because as we all know, young people eventually grow old and it is not only young people who have experience with the Internet. This argument actually provided them with the certain legitimacy they needed within the world of IGF.
The second important point of this declaration is what topics. So according to the Declaration, young people's involvement should be confined not only to youth related issues like literacy or protection from harmful online content but all aspects of Internet Governance. This is a quote from the Declaration. By defining this these topics they are actually challenging the common context of youth and Internet related issues. They are distinguishing themselves from children.
Finally, they are branding themselves as independent social actors. Finally, probably the most important point under the Declaration is the voice of the youth. According to this declaration, the involvement of youth should be genuine, not tokenistic. In the sense that we should really allow the authentic voices of youth people to be heard in this framework. Remember, bear this in mind for the rest of the presentation. But when we come to realising a dream we all know that living out the dream is not as easy as it seems. Again we manage to identify at least three main difficulties. The first one is Anya mentioned earlier is the lack of financial and educational resources. Now, these obstacles apply in this case just as well, but even become more critical because when we are looking at young people we are looking at people which by default are least financially stable and least knowledgeable about IG or IGF. In order to get money, activists approach organisations such as Internet companies, such as government, and more established civil society organisations in order to get financed. Yet going back to the desire of YCIG to allow young people to express their authentic voices, this type of sponsorship might be problematic and diminish their ambitious. One of the interviews implied this is indeed the situation.
The second obstacle is the lack of opinion, as we call it. Thank you. Acquiring money is only the first obstacle. The second obstacle is how to educate young people about IGF. One of the interviewers told us we want them to formulate their own opinion. If it isn't possible within the sphere of IGF because after reading all the transcripts, it seems to us that the ideas are being repeated again and again and we don't see the existence of any new young voices.
Finally, as for representation of youth around the world, as one of the participants said in YCIG2010, youth activists do not consider themselves young representatives. They consider themselves normal representatives just like everybody else. We asked the question, what does it mean when we talk about youth representation in this context?
Finally, for the future of youth activities. We all know that youth is a temporary state. What about YCIG? From analyzing the transcripts week see the themes and discussions remain the same throughout the years. What is the mean of being a youth representative? Why is it important for young people to participate at IGF? This discussion fits people who arrive at IGF for the first time. What about the older younger people? The people who return to IGF? For them it seems YCIG does not provide much guidance or assistance for them to become more involved in IGF. Looking at the activities throughout the last few years there were hardly any meaningful activities, only those that seem to maintain the functionality of YCIG within IGF. None creates relevant mechanisms within IGF for young people. This comes down to a transitional space, a bubble in which young people can participate in decision making mechanisms, establish their voices, grow up professionally. While it is important, we ask: Is it enough?
The final point I wish to make concerning the politicisation, they are currently revising the charter of the YCIG. The leadership of the coalition will be elected from the following regional groups, talking about Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, western Europe and other groups.
By doing so we are basically bringing back the geographical boundaries between countries and between regions. We are breaking this global bubble of youth engagement. How will this influence the legitimisation of youth as a stakeholder? While our time is up, I am aware of it, I point out these last concluding remarks for you to think about and to ask questions in the following discussion. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. We will now turn to our third paper, Keisuke Kamimura and his papers entitled Policy Oriented Evaluation of the Expansion of Top Level Domain Name Space. Thank you very much, Keisuke.
>> KEISUKE KAMIMURA: Hello. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to present my paper. My name is Keisuke Kamimura, associate Professor at a University based in Tokyo. This is my second GigaNet presentation. After six years I guess I went to President Montreal Symposium, workshop, then Brussels and after that I was silent. Maybe I'm almost a newcomer here, but I will -- that's me.
And my presentation may be somewhat different from those of the other earlier two presentations. I'm trying to look at gTLD explanation from a user behavior point of view. I am not talking about policy, discourse or other qualitative analysis, but I would try to look at this issue from more quantitative point of view.
And I will skip this. As most of you may know quite well, top level domain name space keeps expanding. Here I mean the number of TLDs rather than the number of registrations under each TLD. But you can see how fast the Top-Level Domain has expanded over the past several years. So this is where I am trying to look at. What kind of problems do we have now? Because of the expansion of the Top-Level Domain name space? First of all, you can see the cost of IPR management. I remember I met a guy who used to work as assistant CTO of Microsoft Japan explained about the expansion of the domain name. He mentioned that for them, IP management became more costly because they have to take care of many TLD name spaces. And another issue is security concerns. And you can also be concerned about user confusion. And but the expansion of Top-Level Domain name space has sort of a mandate for ICANN. ICANN was incorporated because of -- incarnated in part because of the expansion. If you are close enough to the ICANN, the expansion of the Top-Level Domain looks very good. If you are not so close, for them ICANN looks like giving out many problems, unnecessary problems.
So what I would like to do is to evaluate the expansion appropriate or the expansion was readily appreciated by the user.
Another issue. This is a somewhat local case in Japan. We see a positive change in 2015 when the government revised the Telecommunications Act. Under the new regulation, registry operators of designated TLDs such as JP and other significant TLDs are now subject to accountability and transparency reporting to the government. They are now regulated in a sense.
This regulation was introduced because of the recent ICANN policy change in gTLD or TLD name space. So this policy change is quite very much related to the expansion of the Top-Level Domain. The question here is whether it does not impose unnecessary burden on the registry operators and eventually registrants.
So here I came up with my research questions. First, do the domain name users respond to a variety of offerings at the top level in an equal manner? In other words, do they see any differentiation across the Top-Level Domain names? The second, does the expansion benefit the users at the expense of confusion, cost, and risk?
And the third one is domain name regulation, particularly that in Japan justified against the nature of the user behavior on domain names.
So I would like to see the answer to these questions. An existing studies -- for this, please refer to my paper on the Web site, but I can point out that existing studies on domain names are two fold. One is technical and the other is too much oriented on policy or organisational analysis or institutional design. So they do not look at enough at user behavior, particularly in terms of price and their response to price change.
So what I tried to do is regression analysis on new gTLDs where the number of registrations is the dependent variable. And the registration fee and the type of gTLD are independent variables. For some new gTLDs, geographic ones, I looked at the effect of population and per capita income that is related to the geographic entities.
And I also tried to draw policy implications based on the results. Here is the data I used. I do not look into the details, but these data are taken from ICANN public sources and NTLD stats as of January 2016. And the number of TLDs that I analyzed was 418 in total.
An this is the results of the regression analysis. But I also skipped this. This is far better presentation of the results, I guess. Here the -- excuse me. The caption is in Japanese. I should have corrected it into English. The horizontal axis shows the registration fee level. And the vertical axis shows the number of registration level.
And the red line shows the geographic new gTLD. The solid black line shows the generic new gTLD and the blue line shows internationalised ones.
As you can see, generic new gTLDs, the number of generic gTLDs goes down as the price gets higher and internationalised new gTLDs, the number of internationalised new gTLDs also goes down as the price gets higher. But can you look at the geographic red line? It goes up as the price gets higher. So this is quite interesting, I suppose.
The line means that with geographic gTLDs, when price is ten times higher, the number of registrations goes up by two times. So this is quite funny or interesting.
And I also have done a closer analysis on internationalised new gTLDs. You can see the internationalised labels. The blue points. Almost half of the new internationalised new gTLDs are in Chinese and some are in Arabic, and a few in Russian or Cyrillic. Only one new gTLDs in, written in Japanese characters.
So I better skip this. But here is the details of the internationalised new gTLDs. You can also see this in my paper. So please refer to it later.
And you remember the geographic gTLDs goes up in number as the price gets higher, but if you look at this more closely, geographic new gTLDs can be divided in two groups. One is a group with higher income level and another one with lower income level. And with lower income level geographic gTLDs, goes down in number as the price gets higher. But with the higher income group of geographic gTLDs, the number goes up as the price gets higher. So you have the two groups in geographic new gTLDs.
In summary, with generic new gTLDs, this is quite natural, an increase in registration fee means a decrease in number. But gee with geographic new gTLDs, an increase in registration fee translates into an increase in number, but this true only in the higher income group. And with internationalised new gTLDs, increase in registration fee translates into decrease in number, but the rate of decrease is significantly lower than with generic new gTLDs.
And another point you can point out with internationalised ones is that they are favored in Chinese over other language or scripts.
And conclusions? New gTLDs form distinct groups in terms of user response to the price. This finding is corresponding to my earlier finding with CCTLD versus gTLD. So CC or geographic gTLDs, they are all related to geographic names. So people see more value in Top-Level Domain with geographic labels. That is my interpretation.
Another point I can make in conclusion is that the expansion of the TLD successfully provided registrants with name spaces segmented by varying degree of necessity. You can choose new gTLDs depending on the needs you have. If you need more geographically oriented gTLD, they choose it even though they may be higher compared to non-geographic names.
And the third point is that considering that geographic new gTLDs are less elastic to price and less likely to be substituted by other new gTLDs, and that they are endorsed by local authorities. A certain form of regulation may be justified, meaning that the 2015 revision of the Telecommunications Act in Japan may well be justified in this sense.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks very much to all three Panelists also for keeping to time and to giving us three very different papers, in many ways. They are all so similar in the sense that they are dealing with actors as policies and actors as fields and actors as adults, want-to-be adults.
There is a lot we can talk about here methodologically because we have regression analysis in the third. The second paper we had a mixed message approach to how youth see their own role in their own words and we had in the first paper the beginning of historical reconstructions of the structure of the Internet Governance Forum from a particular perspective which is also from an insider's perspective as given forward.
We have method logical and theoretical issues, I hope, to perhaps discuss. I would like to take some questions from the floor.
Okay, just let me get a sense here. We've got Hans, Milton and Xianhong and Izumi, of course. I'm just thinking ... let's do it one at a time and see, let's hear the points first. Hans, Milton, Xianhong and Izumi.
>> AUDIENCE: Jeanette, I read your paper. I think about constitutional design and I'm familiar with Milton's work. I'm more favorable to functionalist arguments than you are. So I wrote with WSIS was essentially a functionalist argument. What was happening at WSIS, what was the meaning, what was the function of that institution?
I think the IGF in important ways continued some of the functions of WSIS. In fact, so WSIS created, what were the functions of WSIS? It brought parties together.
The word coordination, I never liked that in functionalist theory. You have the idea there's actual specific actions taking place, but there's communications coordination taking place. You created the capacity for large groups of people to coordinate with each other. That's essentially what a forum does. It is a communication space for collective communication.
If you don't have a forum, it is hard for groups to communicate collectively. So the function of a forum is collective communication. Collective communication itself is a building block for important other functions.
Part of it is collective learning. So that people can have a collective dialogue. They can learn, explore issues, and sometimes just stop at that.
Sometimes it goes further than collective learning. It goes to collective formulation of norms. There's a design process, a forum, one of the functions of a forum it can host a design process as well that produces collective norms.
Finally it may possibly make possible collective authorization, in which case you are really entering into the realm of governs because you are designing norms and giving them authority.
WSIS did all three: It allowed communication, design and at the end of the day produced the WSIS outcome documents.
IGF when it came out of WSIS, I think there was a sort of debate over how many of these functions it would perform. At the time I even felt a naive debate that IGF could design norms and possibly somehow authorize them and it would be a maker of global public policy. I'm glad that didn't happen. I'm not sure it was even possible for it to happen. So IGF did not become a forum for governing. It didn't even really become a forum for producing collective norms, to a significant degree as far as I know. But it has been a forum for collective learning. That is a vital foundation function, to get all of us together to exchange ideas, learn from each other and you need a forum to do that. That's a functionalist argument for why IGF is here. It's a valid one and starts right from the get-go, it was anticipated it could perform a function from there.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks. This is important because the minute we write histories of something, there are alternative narratives to deal with.
Before Jeanette responds, I'm sure that Boudreau would love to respond whether he was a functionalist or not. He is oh he not with us any more.
Any other comments for Jeanette before we have her respond? It was Milton next. Keep it short, please, Milton and Xianhong.
>> AUDIENCE: I'll definitely keep it short. I think my own work on this was basically overlooked. You cited ruling the root, but networks and states has a whole chapter with the alternative theory of the formation of the IGF.
First of all I'm not a functionalist actually. I believe it is a bargaining model for me, how institutions are formed. It has a big role for contingency. I like your emphasis on contingency and path dependency is something we always emphasize in this particular school of thought. The bargain as I characterized it was that the state actors who wanted a stronger role for states, you had the civil society groups who wanted their own voice and participation to be legitimated. You had state and private sector actors who are uncomfortable with U.S. control of the Internet. And you had the U.S.-led private sector business interests and the U.S. government, some of whom you are correct were against the forum in the initial stages. But the U.S. government was definitely saying: Hey, if we can take all the pressure off of ICANN and put this dialogue aside into the IGF, this is a great acceptable bargain. Everybody got something out of this bargain. That's basically my model.
I would love to see you critically assess that model, but I don't think you did in this paper.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks, Hans. That's two alternative explanations that Jeanette needs to think about and respond to. I'm sure she will. Xianhong, go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, Marianne, for organizing this interesting panel. Yes, I have a short question to Jeanette. Thank you for your interesting ... okay. Jeanette, thank you for your paper. And now I wish you can hear me better.
And thank you, Marianne first for organizing this very interesting panel. And also GigaNet representatives. I am very interested in one point in the paper of Jeanette about the mentioning of the multi-stakeholder approach which I understand makes IGF very much distinct from other policy forums, being quite inclusive process. I also appreciate your study into the history. My question is about the future. What do you think about the future for the multi-stakeholder approach, which is put into practice or good for a success story from this forum? What do you perceive the weakness and the challenges to it? And because it is a very crucial, looking at the investment in the future of the IGF which is the spirit of the forum. What is your take on that? Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Jeanette, off you go.
>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I do have a --
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: There are so many coming this way. Let her respond and then Izumi we'll come to you.
>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: Hans, I think you confuse the role that the IGF today plays with its origins. I think when the sort of rationality, the sense of a forum was discussed, that function wasn't quite obvious yet. On the contrary, it was so contested, the need for a forum was a contested issue. That is what functional arguments are not well covering. If people do not agree whether that kind of function is necessary, it cannot easily be the reason for founding a forum. I can only remind you how strongly ISOC and the technical community repeated the argument: Don't fix what isn't broken. That's what they kept saying all the time. ISOC, when the decision was made, still disagreed with it. It is all in the minutes. I can also find a quote from, there was a meeting after the Working Group on Internet Governance had presented its text in June 2005. They are not easy to access, the documents, because the index is not online.
The U.S. government makes the same point. In June 2005, the U.S. government said it doesn't see the need for creating a new organisation. There is no need. That is also what they said before. And even to me at that time when I would say the technical community and the U.S. government said we have had these discussions now for three years, we don't move one inch. The opposition was so firmly locked during that time that everybody except for civil society who could consider extending that kind of discussion and institutionalising it, they all thought we were mad. That was the kind of mood that was around in summer 2005. A few months before the forum was decided.
So in summer 2005 it was by no means obvious that it would be founded. That is the point I want to make. Let's not forget how unlikely it seemed that we would get such a forum. And it was civil society, the weakest of all -- actually, the least legitimate player before the concept of multi-stakeholderism got institutionalized, who came up with this idea of a forum. That's the only thing I want to say. It was by no means obvious.
Now, Hans' question about the future. I would say one of the possibilities that was excluded from what I called the space of the possible was sort of linking the discourse function that the IGF today has and the decision making. We have no direct link between what ICANN does and what the IGF does. We have no formal link what would matter also is sort of the discussions on cybersecurity, the discussion on trade agreements, sort of all these forums that make binding decisions are completely disconnected from the discussion that we have in the IGF.
And this sort of missing link sort of makes IGF sort of limited, sort of limits the power, limits the influence. And at the same time it keeps all this decision making places less transparent as they could be. So they are so far apart I think is one of the big problems.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Izumi?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Before, if the Chair allows, asking Jeanette my questions, may I ask a question to the whole audience? A simple one.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Just a minute. Audience, a question is coming your way!
>> AUDIENCE: I just want to ask a question. Especially having heard Jeanette's presentation, how many of you feel that you are very much knowledgeable about the foundation process of IGF? Do you feel that? How many of you feel a strong tie or engagement to understanding of the formation? How many don't really know or it's a new finding?
So how many feel it is very new and interesting? So that's the question. I appreciate it that you reminded us of the sort of genesis of WSIS/IGF formation. Then my question to you and all, and myself is, as already discussed a little bit, what are the real reasons why we do have IGF now? What are the problems we need to solve by having IGF?
Since it didn't become a regulatory authority at all and there is no binding decisions we can make, although there have been several suggestions or to make some outcome, output which hasn't really been so successful, in my view. Why do we need to bother to come here and still discuss, do we have new things that IGF in particular is good to solve that? That is my basic question.
And I don't know how I can answer that question myself.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: That links to Xianhong's question about the future. As we have had a paper enlightening us on what the youth participants over the years would like to say, perhaps our two presenters, Efrat and Anya, would like to talk about the future in light of the question: What is the point of carrying on? Do you think it is worth, the IGF has been here around ten years. There is research being done on its origins. There is a question to the floor as to what good does it have now and into the future.
>> EFRAT DASKAL: I will attempt to give a short answer to this question. Concerning the concept of youth, Anya, feel free to join in.
So after reading all those transcripts, throughout the entire years, after reading different thoughts and ideas of youth, I cannot -- we cannot give up on IGF. We cannot give up on IGF as a concept, a forum, despite the limitations, despite its problems.
There is too much that the forum provides for people and I'm not kidding about it, especially young people, despite the limitations. It is still an important venue for young adults to participate to voice their -- to find their own voices. However, it does need to be better. It does need to be improved. By looking at the concept of YCIG and youth organisations, it has to be better and provide more than just the first step for young people.
It has to provide them a more significant ways of engaging with IGF not just in the international IGF but the national IGF as well. It has to provide them more education and more mentorship than it does currently.
So IGF should definitely remain, but it should become better. That's my thought on that.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. Well, it is.
>> ANYA ORLOVA: Well, it is my third IGF that I'm attending. I do see a lot of familiar faces, people who do come to various IG foras and a certain rep petition in the rhetoric, in the discussions, in the topics. What I was finding interesting at the ISOC today, many mentioned the participation of youth in Internet Governance and IGF in particular, which is an interesting signal. I think we should not ignore it. However, I do see through my own participation and interacting with a number of youth organisations and NGOs that there is a certain bubble, there is a certain bottleneck through which only a particular number of youth do get access to IGF. I'm speaking English right now which is another point that on top of many other issues, language barrier and culture are also playing a big role in the access. So I do believe that IGF should continue, because it is one of the unique spaces where actually I can come and speak on behalf of civil society or youth and everybody can participate in the discussion, even though we don't take decisions, but I can be heard.
However, I think as Efrat said, there should be certain reconsideration of how do people access this forum and what representation actually means in this context. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Keisuke, I wonder if you have comments on this question before we address questions to you specifically.
>> KEISUKE KAMIMURA: Well, if I get some numbers of data to be -- if I can have data that I can trace their behavior, that would be great for me personally.
But as I listen to you answer, I wonder how many of the youths in IGF come back to IGF after they are grown up? Do you have that kind of numbers? Yes, returning. And so how they were selected as IGF youth in the beginning? So those two questions, please.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Perhaps you can answer that, yes, please.
>> ANYA ORLOVA: Go ahead.
>> EFRAT DASKAL: Okay, as for the numbers about returning youth we don't have the exact numbers. Since we read the transcripts and we are keep data of the people who participated we can see that some people are returning over and over again. If I have to give you some sort of estimation, what are we talking about? Twenty percent? That's it. Nothing more than that. Most people eventually, they leave the IGF, they leave -- I mean, we don't see them again at IGF throughout the years.
So going back to the bubble, going back to the only specific people are returning.
As for your second question, what was it?
>> KEISUKE KAMIMURA: How they were selected.
>> EFRAT DASKAL: How they were selected. Would you like to answer that?
>> ANYA ORLOVA: Well, through our research, we are seeing a certain dynamic that in the beginning of the IGF there were more, I would say, politically active young people coming here with their own particular agenda. Then engaging between themselves because they could see take there was a very strong trend of advocating on behalf of children and young people, not actually asking young people and not bringing young people to the discussion.
And these were the people who were standing at the establishment of YCIG at the beginning, yes. Now we can see all around the world the formation of youth IGFs. It is actually a project within the IGF itself which was dormant for some time, but during the last two years the youth IGF initiative has been popping up all over the globe, not just in the western Developed Countries.
What we can see also is that these people who are coming now are entering through this Internet Governance summer schools, through the youth IGF initiatives. It has a little bit different perspective. They are not really that much active in the field of digital activities, more other fields of advocacy. But they are more approaching it to learn about Internet Governance and also from the academic educational side, I would say.
>> EFRAT DASKAL: I want to add two things. Those of you who are interested in different youth IGF initiatives, keep track of NRI, which is the framework within IGF that encourages the creation of youth IGF. And throughout the years you can see how NRI actually encourages creation of youth IGF.
Second, and this is just an hypothesis, so I'm not sure about it. What strikes me is the difference between the first generation and the second generation is that the first generation was indeed idea logically motivated and it was politically activist before coming to IGF. When we are talking about the second generation, it feels as if they are much more professional IG activists in a way in the sense that they are of course driven by ideology, but also by, how should I say it? Self-interest as well.
>> ANYA ORLOVA: In a way, their interest not completely is shaped by IGF, but directed in a very, a lot. We are not saying that there are no grassroots activists that don't come, no, they do. If we look at the initiatives of summer schools and youth IGFs, it seems like these activists are being kind of educated how to do activism. This is the big difference in understanding how to do IG as well.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you very much. That is very instructive. We have a question from Daniel?
We also have a remote participation question. We will do that first.
We can't hear you.
>> (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> AUDIENCE: This is from ... she says I work as advisor to the board and so I am in Brazil. I had to stay in Brazil. I would like to ask the others on the paper, do they have a notion of the demographics of the population of youth they are studying? It would be very important to understand the characteristics of that in order to contrast the abstentions and theories of political and participation of young folks.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks very much.
(Loud noise.)
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Now it's working.
(Chuckles.)
>> EFRAT DASKAL: Thank you so much for your question. We are still collecting data about the demographics of the different participants. This is part of the second stage of the collection and analysis of the data. And of course, eventually we will publish it. It will be for everybody to see.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you. Turning to Daniel, your question, please?
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Thank you, Marianne. I have actually two questions. One is regarding the youth participation paper and the other one regarding the TLD policy paper.
Yesterday we had the event of GigaNet and IPO and we talked about a similar issue. I remember you were also present. I think what is important in context when we think about youth participation, next generation participation is not just what they are doing at the IGF but what they are doing between this IGF and the next year, the will following year, the IGF.
How is actually the work, the knowledge, the contacts that people gained through these kind of programmes so that they can participate for a week at the IGF, how does that affect actually their work, daily work? How do they apply it in the local communities? How does it affect actually how they work on these issues, so they maybe stay on it or they don't? So this is one comment or question. Maybe you have something about this.
And the other question or comment is regarding Keisuke's paper about the TLD policy and I was wondering, this new gTLD is a very interesting topic, especially right now as there are a lot of evaluations going on, how the programme worked out and how future programmes may work out if they are going to take place.
And so I was wondering if you maybe took a look also at the question of awareness when it comes to why certain TLDs are registered more than others. For example, you said that the geographic TLDs, I think the price goes up and the registration goes up, while in the other cases the registration numbers went down when the prices went up.
When I think about a new gTLDs and also geographic TLDs, I'm always wondering how much awareness plays a role in this case, how our youth is actually aware about what domain is available now and what is not.
So therefore, for example, some regional TLDs are that making awareness campaigns for ten years and others are still not really or did not really start to tell people hey, we have a new TLD now for this region. Maybe this could be an interesting aspect for your paper as well. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks. As we are nearly out of time I would like to suggest that Keisuke request respond to this as his final point and Efrat, a very final point and Jeanette a very brief final point so we can take a break before the final session.
Keisuke?
>> KEISUKE KAMIMURA: First question from Daniel, I do not really look into quite the details of how, why some new gTLDs are favored over others except that geographic, generic, and internationalised are quite different in adoption. So I may need further study in this respect.
The second one, the elapsed time of the gTLD? So if one gTLD is active longer than others, they may be a more -- they may be exposed to the users more. Actually, I tried to incorporate that it as a variable, but actually it did not have any significant impact on the number of registrations. So I dismissed it from my model. That's about it.
>> EFRAT DASKAL: Okay. Thank you, Daniel, for your question. I will get back to the concept of first generation of young people attending IGFs and the second.
So when we were interviewing the first generation, so to say, people who were standing at the establishment of YCIG, these were basically people who came to IGF driven by their own agendas and they started into the foundation of youth coalition to create their role as youth stakeholder. Basically what we observe, they were driving or carrying on the Internet Governance agenda in their other activities, in their other fields of fears, whereas when we talk about the second generation this implies as we said a certain lack of time because most of the people are students, lack of mobility, lack of financial support. They have to act within the framework of the organisations that support them.
This is kind of predefines also the agenda they are working in and also their actions. So I would say that again coming back to the example of YCIG, at least this formation or entity within the IGF proved to be nonfunctional during the year. And the only activities that we observed appear just before the next IGF, when they have to either define the topic that they will be talking about at the youth forum at IGF and to make sure that this --
>> ANYA ORLOVA: Reports to the secretary?
>> EFRAT DASKAL: Various reports to the secretary that reference the continuation of the YCIG within IGF which gives voice to members, but per se it doesn't show any point to activism or any activities that go beyond the formal institutional concept of YCIG.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay, thank you very much, everyone, for being with us this afternoon. We take a short tea break and resume at 4:00 p.m. for the final session. Thank you. Fabulous. Thank you very much to the panelists. Big round of applause in wishing them all the best in their research.
(Applause.)
(A short break was taken at 15:50.)
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to this last session. We are going to start the fourth panel now. The fourth panel is on Emerging Economies and Crisis.
Before we start this panel I would like to remind you that after this last panel we have the GigaNet business meeting here. You are free to stay here. We are going to discuss recent developments, future ideas. We are going to look for your input, ideas and suggestions about the future of GigaNet.
So please, stay hereafter this session. And, of course, at night we have the reception party. We have mentioned it a couple of times already. You can find it on the programme and on the Web site. So right now we start with this last session. Emerging Economies and Crisis. We are having three presentations on the Internet and Colonialism by Kimberly and the Marco de Civil Law and Crisis in Thailand and we also have Alison Gillwald here from South Africa who will comment on the presentations.
I give the floor to the first presentation, please.
>> KIMBERLY ANASTACIO: Good afternoon. My name is Kimberly -- (audio difficulties.)
>> KIMBERLY ANASTACIO: Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Kimberly. I'm from the University of Brasilia. My paper is called A View from the Cheap Seats: Internet and Colonialism. We would like to talk about explanations of power. I should define what digital colonialism yet. Bear in mind the colonial approach to Internet issues echo stronger a social as well as in racial studies. I will introduce post-colonialism and present broad applications of the broad idea and conclude my presentation and I will try to run.
Generally speaking, post-colonialism is a set of ten technical assistance changes which gives power to the relationships in the north and south and understanding the contemporary word. Post-colonial thinking limits modernity and focuses on the Occident which means the prominence of the west. Here is not attached to the geographical position and just to give an example, just as feminism which has been trying to absorb non-theories and ideas and revisit analysis, bear in mind gender issues, post-colonial issues look at canons from authority. Understanding the persistence of modern or colonial structures in the post-colonial period. It is important to understand post-colonialism beyond geographic imperialism. It is like understanding Internet between binaries, north and the south because of global governance. In a sense it became a government that the everyday argument translates transnationally, in public or private spheres, but nevertheless, governance does not forecast the appearance of states and national governments nor roads and orders. In fact, global governance highlights the scope of governance activities of all kinds, proliferation of regulatory activities, actors that show an explosion of rules and reordering that is not blind to hierarchies. As long as global governance and actually colonialism should not be understood as a single phenomenon for everyone it is necessary to pay attention to a structure inequalities in the system and critically understand global governance, shedding light on how the machinery balances and hierarchies of influence, wealth, and knowledge are reproduced even in the Internet Governance environment.
One thing that is important to highlight, imbalances are all around the globe and even, in and between Developed Countries, they may be greater between the centre and periphery, the holders of primacy and the rest. It should be reinforced by a paradox that is if on the one hand the Internet can democratize the spaces and give voice to minorities, to empowerment and things like that, on the other it can enforce these views. The paradox is at the heart of digital colonialism, comprehensive access to these resources, disparities remain, who is who and who is not integrated in global society. So based on that, on the paper, I discuss a bit of monopoly and English prominence on the Internet and I'll skip that and go to the Facebook example. Facebook mounted Facebook in India in 16 and mobilized services in the country and later on that year the telecom regulatory authority banned this and other zero rating programmes after public consultations that instigated intense feelings in the country. After the ban, venture capitalist wrote on his Twitter this capitalism has been terrible for the Indian people, why stop now? Everybody started talking about the Facebook initiative and colonialism. This does not discuss if zero rating programmes may not be useful to solve access problems. Rather it aims to demonstrate only a specific point regarding the debate, how digital inclusion in under Developed Countries have much to do with who may control the Internet and how the Internet is spread by western initiatives. So just to state one thing, the programme is focused on the Global South. Reinforces the real existence of a north-south division, being said because Facebook is focusing on the south that is indexed in the global environment.
The programme is implemented in India similar to the programme adopted in other countries with many meetings and travels to India and to the U.S.
So a month later after basic was launched in India, another telecom company launched its own initiative and following that there was public consultation that ended up banning zero rating initiatives. Here I put just a mention to two girls that write a paper on that, that is published in the Internet policy review. You can check on that to follow up what I'm saying here.
So overall, the debate polarized into two distinct opinions there in India. Some in favor of pricing innovations as a creative solution for the Internet to pay for full access. It was in this context that the statement was, Zuckerberg said he was troubled by Anderson's remark, but the debate in India -- then the debate in India was upended by a concern over who was being left behind? Technological advancements and how much the gap is addressed. Without labeling all as patronizing, post-colonial approach states that the globalised access logic manifested in western programmes that might induce a certain Internet model to those still not connected might also diminish complex issues such as cultural autonomy and economic control by baking a solution alone in a premade solution.
Another point is that ultimately Facebook might depoliticise its debate by not recognizing the background and economic interests and by using its discourse in a poetic language that aims to diminish critics, hiding interest behind the expertise. The depoliticized Facebook, here I use a myth, for the end of the digital divide has the dual advantage, it hides the existence of winners and loser, simultaneously capturing the imagination and mobilizing people to support it.
Here there is another thing to be said. Why initiatives like Facebook focus on its humanitarian aspect rather than discussing deeply with other stakeholders, both the programme's benefits and harms, leading the publics fierce to divide to extremes without addressing criticism directly. It politicized in a certain way the debate about zero rating. The public sphere measures strong public consultation.
Then I go along and talk about digital inclusion. The digital inclusion matter is public by nature and so it should be debated, contested and spread over policy processes to generate solutions that are well thought and all encompassing. Once we are in a position of privilege in a country that struggles to provide basic rates, or should you label your opponent as morally wrong which has been said in India, it is underestimating the people you are targeting. Free Basics approach demonstrates it is an issue I have to build specific solutions for specific societies, something that post-colonialism also talks a lot.
So it is monolithic. States that the forum is open for local producers.
Here I talk about what SPIVA can say, the colonial -- silence is the sober terms of the words, those who were excluded and peripheral, cultural, academic and social experiences were considered. In this case, it represents a lucrative person initiative by partnering and making slight adaptations along the way, moving people away from the Internet, giving a voice that is not that autonomous. Here the west identifies a problem, the lack of access that is very different from its own reality. It creates solutions for in problem without understanding it. It may show that the solution is already established. The question that remains, why should the experience of the periphery be measured in accordance with the practice of the centre?
And this is a bit more what I have been talking about, Free Basics. I move along to multi-stakeholder. I am not going to discuss a lot about the transition, with I do a bit in my paper. I guess everybody here has been listening a lot about it. And I'll just go to the whole point about the ICANN and the post-colonial criticism. Even if ICANN stakeholder community is not confined to the United States and indeed is composed by many stakeholders, it may even unconsciously and for representativeness issues propagate a western view since there is a presence of westerners compared to others. Here I need more data. The data that I found is not that good, but still I am using it.
And because for a long time ICANN was partially subordinated to U.S. oversight. Now that we have the IANA transition, one of the things I discuss in the paper, how can we use multi-stakeholderism and the global community to address the issue of full participation and of representativeness in ICANN. So decision taken by ICANN are not necessarily unsatisfactory, due to the lack of balance between parties. As the gap -- all stakeholders in the global community. Because it is in a multi-stakeholder discourse where there are many positions, there is constant risk of undermining the features from the Internet sustains. Participation is not necessarily only between stakeholders. For example, for civil society, who is who in multi-stakeholder arenas and even in science representatives matter.
So in the paper I understand that ICANN is not neo-colonial empire which because it deals with a nor owe aspect of the Internet. Just to say the necessity of the multi-stakeholder model to invite plural participation with all rules an authorities turns Internet Governance into an unstable environment, and that should not persist. The potential of opening space does not guarantee the effectiveness, given how power is distributed among stakeholders.
As of right now the IANA contract expired and the management of the Internet is privatized in the hands of the volunteer ICANN community. ICANN can propagate the notions of legitimacy and other areas that are not limited to the Internet.
Presence in this organisation could occur in the expansion of overall Internet policies. This community has a challenge to balance and accommodate interests and work with the definition of multi-stakeholderism that is not blind to power or cynicism of that includes all arguments.
The multi-stakeholder modeling offers benefits including plural participation and global governs mechanisms. Developing the model does not mean diminishing its flows. Multi-stakeholder is present in some Internet Governance spaces may concentrate rather than disperse power. It may reinforce legitimize existing power relations rather than disrupt them. Thus it may reinforce existing powers dynamics that were already established since the beginning of model, privileging western countries, in this case most specifically the U.S. government and the private sector. Post colonialism has been there a long time.
I am going to conclude.
I call this part calling for further debate because I really think that with this criticism, we have now the challenges as not showing only how the Internet can propagate colonial relationships but also how it can dismantle them. Maybe the next step for the research is to show how the Internet can be a tool to dismantle colonial relations rather than just showing that it may reinforce them. I also think that I got improving my empirical evidence, I do believe, for example, in the ICANN diversity, I need more data. And expanding the analysis and show other areas of the Internet that needs to be addressed and maybe that would be nicely addressed under the post-colonial criticism, namely Internet architecture, Internet balances and maybe algorithms. Overall, that's it.
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Thanks a lot, Kimberly. Very interesting presentation, very interesting topic. And now we go on to the next presentation, and down to the third, and after that we discuss and take questions now from Soraia, who will talk about the Marco Civil Da Internet.
>> SORAIA SOUZA: Good afternoon for all. And I am Soraia Lima. Soraia Souza, married name. I'm trying to get used to it.
(Laughter.)
>> SORAIA SOUZA: I am going to present a paper. I am from a doctoral student from the University of Sao Paolo and also a Professor at Sanaxco, also from Sao Paolo. In 2014, the law 2009, the law 2009-65 known in Brazil as Marco Civil da Internet, collaborated with the use of digital platforms. It is the law that establishes the principles, rights and duties of Internet users. So in May 2015, we have the promulgation of the law after one year of discussion. But it wasn't enough time to Brazilian society to think about it. And in September 2015, we have the regulation of the law, and once more the Minister of Justice decided to discuss the law and more specifically its regulation.
Then in January and February of this year, we have a debate also using digital platforms about the regulation. This paper presents some of the analysis of the Ministry of Justice, Facebook per file, until July 2016.
In order to understand how Brazilian users participated during the development of the law, I did a literature review. I sent some authors who could provide things about identity, citizenship and all these concepts important to comprehend why only 0.005 percent of Brazilian people participate of such critical debate. Will you no doubt the most significant authors of this research were cast eels because it has substantial research about citizen networks and social movements and also which showed the difference between click active Vietnam net activism and politics. Brazilian government established three digital platforms. So citizens can discuss about the law. There were eDemocracy, a chamber of the Web site where users can discuss laws and government projects in Brazil. Cultural, digital culture, a digital platform of Minister of culture that debate different issues about digital culture, and public debate, a portal developed by the Ministry of justice to elaborate collaboratively some law projects and discuss the effects of the laws in Brazil. And in the paper I explain all of them, but I emphasize in the last one the public debate. This law is about the main parameters of Internet use, privacy rights and duties of the users, service providers and apps. It considers mostly four aspects: Internet neutrality, freedom of speech, privacy, and Internet providers' obligations.
I analyzed the debate over the regulation during February and May 2016, and then the Ministry of justice portal. There were 339 issues and more than 1,000 comments.
There are more data in the paper, but what I want to talk about is that according to the secretary of communication, the Brazilian Secretary of Communication known as Sys Com, more than 100 million Internet users are the current numbers in Brazil. So why they didn't participate of it? I think it is a concerned part, the fact that during this research. The Brazilian rules users are also well-known as hard users of social media. So I studied the Facebook profile of the Minister of Justice during two years in order to analyze the data and think about if things were different, the numbers were different in social media.
But I collected the data using net weeks and analyzed them using software called Geffe.
As you can see the numbers weren't good as well. There wasn't enough engagement, so can't even achieve quality or quantity. The users did mostly click activism or net activism.
Then the analysts always showed, the analysis also showed that most participants were weak links and did unique interactions in social media. This compromised also the spread of the debate in the Internet. This graph shows the interaction during 2015 and the second one shows the interaction in 2016. The first one, the green cluster shows strong bounds within the users. It is about a YouTube video posted by a Brazilian private institute called Funda Da Vargas. It explains what is (non-English phrase.) in the second graph the green cluster mentions about the law and the Ministry of culture Facebook profile. But it wasn't as significant as the first green cluster. This research is still under development as a part of my Ph.D. thesis. But during these two years of research I noticed that technical political practices are still far from being done in Brazil. Cyberspace is still finding political and technological barriers. Most Brazilian users are not prepared or simply doesn't want to see these places as democratic platforms for discussion.
Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Thank you very much, Soraia. And let's continue with the third paper on the Internet Landscape and Crisis in Thailand by Adam and Irene.
>> IRENE POETRANTO: Hello. Is this on?
Hello? Okay.
Sorry, I didn't mean yell at you. Hi, everyone. Thank you to my Fellow Panelists. Thank you to Marianne and Daniel and our discuss ant, Alison. My name is Irene Poetranto, and I am here with Adam Senft. And we are from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and we are going to present the results of our paper on Internet Governance in Thailand. I will start with a brief overview of the Citizen Lab. It was founded in 2001 by Professor Ron Deibert in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. And the mission of our group is to conduct evidence-based and impartial research on human rights and the digital space. We conduct research on a number of issues on cybersecurity such as targeted digital threats against civil society groups, telecommunications transparency, research on surveillance and censorship tools. The focus of our discussion today will be research on events-based research and controls.
What do we mean by that? We hypothesized important political moments may serve as catalyst as actors, not injuries government, to disrupt, monitor or manipulate information or information services. These political moments might be like the Olympics or World Cup, coups like the one we are going to talk about like Thailand or anniversaries like the Tienanmen Square massacre, for instance.
In the paper we examined the case of Thailand and given the number of coups that have taken place in the country, the could you please that took place was the 19th coup since Thailand ended absolute monarchy in 1932. How has the crisis impacted the ways in which the Internet is governed in the country? Just a bit of background on Thailand. Why did we decide to conduct research on Thailand to begin with? We have been conducting worldwide researching that the Citizen Lab founded with the Burkman Klein Centre for Internet, and the group is based in Ottawa. So we are testing in 74 countries around the world and found around 44 of them do implement some measure of censorship filtering including Thailand.
So we have had partners in Thailand as part of this project since the early 2000s.
And again just as a quick background, those of you not familiar with the country, Thailand transitioned from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarch in 1932, but the monarchy since retained governs over the country by having connections to the military and government elite, or known as network monarchy. The king is highly revered. The pictures you see are from when he passed away recently. So the King in Thailand is considered to be above the fray of politics and politicians and the royal family, broadly defined, is protected from criticism or insult by Article 112 of the Penal Code also known as the Lese' Majeste' provision, one of the harshest in the world. The punishment for violating this is three to 15 years of imprisonment per count.
Very briefly, on the two coups that are the focus are our paper, in 2006 there was a coup that ousted the junta and all the constitution and replaced the Parliament with his own, junta appointed legislature. The first legislation was Computer-related Offenses Act, also known as the Computer Crime Act. Since then there have been three elections which further entrenched the deep divisions among Thai people.
So we published like I mentioned as part of open net report on Thailand which you can read there, the URL is on the slide. The 2014 coup occurred, but the difference between the 2014 and the 2006 coup is that the junta this time around had a more specific agenda about how the Internet should be controlled. Not too long after the coup we published a report detailing all the steps that the junta had taken.
These are quickly some of the changes that the junta implemented, the ICT ministry now called the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, they are planning to pass a Cybersecurity Act, revising the Computer Crime Act. They did a referendum on a new constitution and now my colleague will take over from here to talk about the arrest that the junta have done.
>> ADAM SENFT: Thanks, Irene. In addition to the legislative and structural changes that Irene described, the most notal development has been the increase in the use of Article 112. Which although there was an increase after 2006, in 2014 we see a dramatic increase with individuals arrested for photos with them wearing black clothing on the king's birthday, and content insulting the king's dog, literally posting a one-word post on social media. They are tried in military courts with harsh punishments. Two examples, individuals sentenced to 28 and 30 years for content that they posted on Facebook.
Now, it is not just the individuals who host this content, intermediary liability is also a concern. We actually have someone in the audience who has very first-hand experience, I would like to acknowledge them, who in 2012 was charged and convicted after a user posted content insulting to the king and she was deemed not to delete it quickly enough. We are happy you could be here to reflect on that.
In addition to Article 112 we also see a dramatic increase in censorship. It is very clear that the junta realised from day one this would be a significant concern. They issued four separate edicts on the first day of the coup, which targeted online activity prohibiting distorted media reports and anything that may provoke resistance to the junta mandated that ISPs monitor activity that may include distorted or provocative and they prevented mass media from publishing content which may cause confusion or persuade individuals to assemble to oppose the government.
Hundreds of websites were blocked. They summoned ISPs in the country to assure that these ISPs would be able to block any Web site within an hour of a request. They attempted to summon providers like Facebook and Google and Twitter, who sort of didn't show up to the meetings, providing a bit of embarrassment I think to the junta. They did then escalate content removal requests. Facebook in their transparency report you see a dramatic increase in requests to remove content deemed objectionable. Of which Facebook took down some but not all of that content.
Notably Facebook was blocked for one hour, which of course is always big news. It is not clear why it was done for such a short period of time. This may have been some sort of test for future use.
In addition to censorship, the junta launched a number of initiatives to increase its capabilities and capacity for performing surveillance. Leaked documents showed they created a committee, tasked essentially with attempting to intercept all SSL encrypted traffic in the country which is a very bold claim. They also targeted line, which if you are not familiar, a mobile messaging platform similar to we chat, which is popular in Thailand. They could easily perform surveillance on all user, to which the developer of line denied immediately. Necessity said we will add you as a friend on the application line, the junta officials, law enforcement officials, we are going to add you as a friend to monitor your activity. They used it for their own ideological purposes. The picture you see is a list of stickers that they released like emoji stickers you could use in the line app which promoting 12 Thai values that they were including modesty, hard work, respect for the king. And in addition they reinstated the dormant programme called cyber scouts in which children are recruited to monitor and report on illegal content online, focusing primarily on content deemed offensive to the monarchy. These are not exclusively government driven events. Citizen groups, pro-royalist groups who organised online to identify people for content online and then report them to the police. And since the death of the king in October, this has escalated tremendously. So it is definitely an area of concern.
On the note of surveillance one of the most notable, the single gateway plan which was a proposal to reduce Thailand's international network linkages from six or seven to one single government-controlled link.
Although they argued this was simply a method of technical efficiency, it was clearly seen as a possibility for increasing their capacity for performing censorship and surveillance. This is a rare area where civil society had an impact. Opposition to the proposal was large. They collected will 100,000 signatures on a petition for relatively obscure technical issue for the will average citizen. And the group anonymous launched a large campaign of D-DOS attacks against the government and was able to take down a number of min industries in response to the plan.
This seems to have been shelfed for the time being. Thank you.
So one of the cornerstones to our approach to studying this phenomenon is essentially crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, combining policy and legal analysis with empirical technical data. This is particularly relevant in Thailand. As I mentioned the junta made grandiose claims, being able to monitor all SSL encrypted traffic in the country and break messaging application. They brag about the number of websites that they blocked. And I think in many cases these claims warrant further technical scrutiny. So since the day that the coup was launched we have been performing network measurement techs using IC Lab which is a measurement lab of which we are a partner and we have been running tests on six ISPs throughout the country, essentially running a software client on the ISPs, attempting to list the sensitive content, we try to find instances of deliberate filtering.
Since the coup in the aftermath, days and weeks after the coup happened in May of 2014 we saw a dynamic regime of censorship, if up. The messages being displayed to users changed literally on a daily basis. Sites would be added one day, gone the next and back again. The page that is presented to users which you can see on the slide on the right moved one day from a Thai ISP to being hosted in Chicago and hosted on a new Thai ISP the next day. We think this is ISPs responding to the junta's frequent edicts for them to increase monitoring and censorship and essentially responding as best they can.
We have also identified the types of content. I listed some here. It is too numerous to mention each Web site, but targeting international news, Guardian and Daily Mail for reporting stories about the king and Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, the new king, Human Rights Watch and Political Prisoners of Thailand, a domestic news, Project Thai, academic groups targeted. Enlightened jurists, legal scholars have their Web sites blocked and the Facebook pages of groups who use Facebook to organise in social media are blocked -- assuming they don't use the HTTPS -- and gambling and pornography is also blocked. We think this is a choking effort to block basic types of content.
So this is very much an ongoing research topic. And there's a few key issues just within the next year. As we mentioned, the new King of Thailand came to power on Tuesday, last week. And given as Irene described the essential role that the monarchy plays in stability, or instability, it's hard to over state how significant the change is. The previous king was highly revered and well respected. I think it would be an under statement to say that the new king is not nearly as well respected. If Article 112 is used to prosecute individuals for insulting the monarchy during a period when where the monarch was generally well liked it is unclear what is going to happen in a situation where the monarch is very disliked, to put it lightly.
The new constitution having been adopted, the junta promised elections before the next year. Given the crackdown in online dissent seen immediately after the coup in 2014 and during the constitutional referendum period it is not at all a bold prediction to suggest that the election period will be marked by severe crackdowns and Internet censorship will be a concern during that election. The ongoing development of the Computer Crimes Act and Cybersecurity Act will likely increase the legal authority for the state to engage in censorship and surveillance as well as arrest for the individuals for their online activities which will have significant impacts on Thai Internet users.
There are some stickers. Thank you.
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Thank you very much, Adam and Irene. Now I give the mic to Alison who is going to comment on the three papers and after that we open up for discussion.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much for that. And thank you for three very, very interesting papers. My name is Alison Gillwald. I'm from Research ICT Africa, and the Policy and Practice Center at the University of Capetown. I'm going to contextualize what I am going to say in terms of that. We run an ICT policy and regulatory research network across 27 African countries. That is essentially trying to build some of the evidence that you've all acknowledged is so lacking from the empirical sides of your papers which we also struggle with enormously.
Directly to policy to assist with technical assistance in country, the idea of developing the doctoral programme at the school was precisely to move beyond the kind of descriptor statistics and the figures that you are quoting from the ITU, move beyond those to understand on site use and patternisation in order to develop regulatory strategies in order to meet some of these equity issues that you've all dealt with in different ways.
I just mention that because that's kind of the way I'm coming from. I'm very interested in the theoretical and academic and intellectual positions you've come from. Because of the topics that you are all dealing with I'm also interested about potential solutions, more pragmatically about what it means once we've discovered those things.
So I'll just try to stick to five minutes for each of your papers although it would be very easy to speak a lot more about them. I'll start that way, seeing as we just finished with that.
So just to say that this is a very, very detailed paper and as all of them I would urge you to read it. Very fascinating context in which the censorship and Internet Governance is exploited by the military junta or government changing over periods of time for basically their own interests. Basically the paper is extremely descriptive. It really sort of begs for some analysis. I think that would be my, it is descriptive and I understand who the red and yellow shirts and what they are doing and when. But it begs for some analysis. That's a little bit true of all the papers, but in this one in particular it seems a little bit of a disconnect between the very detailed political context and then the quantitative study, and not proper linkages made between the conceptual points that you've made in the political description really, because I think that lacks analysis.
So essentially you argue that you are going to do three things: Going to look at context of the political economy, I suppose really, although it is lacking some of the political economy concepts that would have helped you describe that. You will be looking at the structural change, particularly the changing regulatory environment as the military sort of comes and goes. And then you are going to look at these technological impacts as well.
And you say you are going to do this in across-disciplinary way because that is required to get a holistic approach. In fact, there is a lack of cross-disciplinary analysis. You say that it will be primarily a legal and policy one, but as I said even from a legal description point of view which is how it is kind of unfolded in terms of different legislation, there is not really an analysis of that.
So I think in order to really understand the impact of the political crisis, the way that the limitations are used in order to produce these different outcomes, really requires some explanation of how and why. So you simply have got this party came into power, they did these things to the Internet, then there was the military coup then somebody else came in. But we don't know why that is. We don't understand, there's clearly very interesting convergence of telecom interests, for example, or the institutional arrangements around telecom and the extension of that into the Internet environment. So just some identifications of power relations and interests and the underlying interests in the institutional arrangements as they change. I think they are very nicely spelled out there, but you don't actually analyze the relationships between them. Why did the institutional arrangements change then? Why did they move to a converged regulator at that point and why did they pull it apart with the constitutional change later on in order to control the Internet?
So I think trying to explain these things would also explain the convergence that you get around particular interests at particular times. They actually justify it quite differently. So the telecom company will say: Well, you know, a single gate, I'm not sure that was the actual thing but a single gate will make us more competitive in the region, et cetera. Whereas the military seems to be quite openly saying well, it will be easier to monitor and surveil, things like that, which are things you don't get, for example, in some of the examples that are being used in the other papers where countries have a commitment to democracy and to citizen rights and those kinds of things. It's a nice example which I'll come back to when I deal with your paper, Kimberly.
Let me leave that there, although there is so much more. As I said, I think one of the other big issues is the sort of tacking on of the data analysis, the quantitative analysis. I think really pulling that together and showing what about that censorship was significant about it happening then. It is self declared so we know that it is happening. What about those sites? What is the foreign sites being looked at? Why are those being closed down or blocked in relation to local groups? Are there groups that are working with the local groups being done?
There are so many things surrounding the political situation in Thailand. The use of the royalist, it's extraordinary and actually used by certain public forces, citizen forces and democratic forces who self regulate and take this on and report it. These kind of coalitions or just alignments of interests I think would be really enriching for the paper.
Then to, let's go to yours next, seeing as you're there in the middle. Again an enormously rich paper. It is again worth a read. Again I think there is a very nice strong literature review and analytical literature review that sets up a whole lot of concepts, particularly as sort of critique of what are possibly just sort of ordinary eGovernment kind of services and how ePlatforms were really used by governments to mobilize and create interest. These are very interesting comparisons compared to the use of public plaintiffs by social movements against governments. So I mean, I think an extraordinary thing happened in Brazil with the use of these platforms. Ineffective as you claim, or not as fully effective as you claim they were, I think that you've got even those levels of participation, even in a big country like Brazil, even those levels of public participation are quite high. You know, there are enough people who care enough about this so that people just want to be on the Internet.
So I think sort of looking at those in terms of the positive outcomes, that is not to say you should be dealing with it uncritically. I think the distinction of e citizenship as opposed to the way it is just used when governments connect their citizens, et cetera, is very critical to the analysis. The things you highlight about digital inclusion, about the timing of their having to come together, the people had to be online, they had to be committed to digital inclusion. That is not enough. eCitizenry requires, and in this useful analysis of the location of the person in the techno-political or something more than simply click activism and those kinds of things.
I think that's a very useful analysis, but again there is a kind of disconnect between that and the quantitative analysis that you do. So you kind of raised these things that are just calling out for some kind of theorization and generalization, just some sort of really comprehensive conceptual framework that you can look, use as a lens for that data. But then the data is a bit kind of -- after all that.
So as I say, I think it is because of sort of a lack of the integration of the conceptual framework and in the carry-through of the concepts. Some carry through quite nicely but others aren't. I will finish these and hopefully we will get time for each to respond.
I think what is really important about the conclusions that did come out, it would have been nice of those illustrated through the data. That was the issue of sustainability. You know, mobilization around political events often physician else out and even in this initiative to systematise and formalise this platform, by the time they go to the second review there's a drop in interest. I think that's a real challenge for mobilization in general, but particularly by using ePlatforms for that.
And then the final paper by Kimberly, again such a rich paper and such a deep analytical literature review that I also again sort of felt it was set up that there wasn't the data and possibly the two case studies that were used were problematic.
So the Free Basics case, whether that is, I'll present examples. Whether that can be best explained in terms of digital colonialism I have questions around and then your conclusions around ICANN kind of conclude it is not really digital colonialism, this deep theoretical or conceptual setup that you get, in the studies there's a disconnect there that doesn't pass through. It attempts to with limited data to sort of apply these concepts.
So just to come to the concept of digital colonialism which I personally have a lot of trouble with and I have been working with it for a very long time. Not digital colonialism but post colonialism and out to the digital world. I'm sure many of you are aware that we have been having student protests in South Africa and closing down our Universities and a lot of it is rejection of Colonial curricula and that sort of thing and the arguments that in fact all western knowledge needs to be removed from the education system, and that essentially you cannot have mathematics and physics in the curriculum because these are western notions.
And I suppose as a scientific rationalist I struggle with that. I think there's an incredible danger, reactionary in these kind of post-colonial analyses. I think there's a lot of value in the conclusions reached around inequality and we need to address those, but I wonder whether digital colonialism or post-colonial analysis is the correct framework for that. And as I say, this is something that really troubles me. I like the way you try to grapple with it. I wonder whether the things you're describing with the Free Basics and even with the concentrations of power and power relations within ICANN, and in relation to the U.S. and to the state, are not actually better described as manifestations of late capitalism and contradictions, intentions within late capitalism that would in fact also better explain the core periphery dynamics because they are not just north-south. They are not even centres within the south-south. They are really around, arise out of global markets and out of global governance systems that emerged in order to deal with those global markets and of course the incredible unevenness of that globalisation in terms of equality and even development that could be harnessed for that.
So I just think it takes -- I think it takes you to the point about, if you are suggesting that this is the result of neocolonialism, what can be done to can he that? I think there are a number of tensions in the paper. So I've written work, for example, that argues that net neutrality and the Free Basics is actually an adoption of the western concept and that application in under Developed Countries, that application of a concept that is really about negative discrimination of pricing in relation to quality, in conditions of abundance to the positive discrimination on price in an environment in which access is actually the issue, not quality, actually has negative anti-pro quo outcomes and stripped people of choices, not gave the poor choices.
There is evidence of this in some other work.
Just primarily, if we are not going to have this global governance system that is pegged on western values, on globalised markets and globalisation, et cetera, et cetera, which is clearly flawed and needs fixing, what are we going to do? The idea that states, which is a kind of a subtext, but the idea that states can manage these public goods or these public utilities better and should be responsible, you know, means that countries like Thailand, for example, or lots of other countries have the control of the Internet Governance condoned and accepted. So there's a problem with that outcome.
So where we got predatory or fragile states, how do we condone state control of Internet Governance or Internet access?
Anyway, they are very rich and there's a lot to say there. Thank you very much.
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Thank you very much, Alison, for your comments and deep analysis of all three presentations.
I would like to give the presenters the opportunity to answer on these comments. And after that, we have a few more minutes for discussion.
So if you are interested in commenting, please take the mic.
>> SORAIA SOUZA: About the difference between the theory and the practice? I would like to say that Brazilian people are hard users of social media. It is a fact. Digital inclusion is, therefore, more than 50 percent of the population, but their opinion was only effective if it was done in the official digital platforms. And they didn't use it. They discussed the law, but in nonofficial social media. This opinion could not be considered during the development of the law. That is why the numbers were so different. And this is the third part of my research, in my doctoral thesis. I want to know why people don't use effect five opinion in the rightful places. So they can really do the change as a political movement. Technical political movement. So Brazilian people are learning how to use social media for social movements and they use a lot. For example, I just know that the Chairman of the Senate was banished from this Chairman, the Chair because we had yesterday a social movement that gained the streets and people talked about it and asked why the government isn't doing anything about it. So we got it.
But not in this analysis. So I analyzed the official channels and in the official channels they don't speak. So they can do the difference.
>> KIMBERLY ANASTACIO: I thank you very much on your comments. I really think they were great and I do believe you were right in many of the things you said.
Precisely because it is very hard to deal with post-colonialism. This type of theory is more an intellectual exercise than a basis for empirical research. I tried here to bring specific cases precisely to make the theory more understandable, not because the people from this area actually use empirical evidence, because they don't. So it was actually very hard for me to figure out what to bring here to discuss post colonialism. I think I need to improve my empirical evidence and maybe my examples. You mentioned, for example, I know there are these people who defend and states as a solution for the better serve the public interest. I'm not from this line. So even though I do agree with many of the people owe post colonialism, I am not the one who is defending multilateralism or something like that. I'm very pro multi-stakeholderism. That's why the paper became a bit of a paradox. That's why I believe I have to improve it.
Still bearing in mind the post colonialism criticism, why that? Because post colonialism is something we are discussing a lot in the south. I believe that spaces like GigaNet need to bring what we from the south are discussing or else we are always going to be here discussing which don't sound with me from what I have been reading and talking about in my local university. That's why I tried to bring this topic here, not because I do agree with everything on it or because I think my paper has a perfect examples, because I know they don't, but because I think it is a great introduction to a topic that I think we should be discussing not only in GigaNet but in the IGF as a whole, which means our local context, how the place I live and the things I feel and how I see the world for the badness I have in my country, actually affect what I write and how I see Internet Governance. That's why I try to bring post-colonialism criticism here, but overall I do thank you for everything you said and I'll definitely try to ...
(Lost audio.)
>> IRENE POETRANTO: Thank you, Alison, for the detailed comments. We appreciate it and realise we could add a lot more analysis, I guess, to the situation that has been happening in Thailand. We were writing the paper as the situation was unfolding continuously updating the evidence and contextualising it, which is very challenging. That might help explain why it is very descriptive, but yes, thank you again for your feedback and we have taken notes and we will continue to improve it as it is a work in progress. Thank you.
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Thanks a lot to all the presenters. I now would like to open up the microphones for questions from the audience.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm from Thailand. I did have like a comment additional. As Irene says, it is an unfolding situation. Just listen to your presentation, it is so depressed and it is actually still have the latest development of the situation, which is more depressed.
But I want to respond to the point that Alison made which is I agree on the point that we should bring some kind of political and economic aspects into the paper. And it is so how to say, it is ironic for the Thai government also. Right now they are just like, they are transformed from the Ministry of ICT into the Ministry of Digital Economy. So they also use the rationale of the digital economy to promote the economy in Thailand. At the same time digital economy is just by name. In practice, it is still under control by the government and the government per se is military government. They have kind of like powerful to intervener interfere in the practice.
So it is so irony that when they talk about the digital economy it should not be about restrictions. It should be open for creativities or many kinds of things. But in the reality, the practice is not to go in that way. The latest situation that I want to share with you, there was just a few days ago the student activists, he was arrested and charged with Article 112, and Computer Crime Acts because he shared the news from BBC Thai, which is translated from BBC world news about the biography of the new continuing. That's it.
And luckily he will be released on bail. Our situation is just like if you are released on bail, that is luckily still. So I don't know, but in terms of the economy, should be one thing that can be opportunity that we can get away from these kinds of situations because I believe Thailand, the Thai civil society and business sector, actually we don't want to live under these kinds of situations and the complaints a lot come from the business sector that the situation is already made the Thai companies, it cannot compete or cannot be a competitor in the regions or even in the country. The one thing that is interesting, the way that the government enforced the law compared between the domestic company or the local company and the international company is different. They know that there are limits of the enforcement. So I think if the international company stands firmly to protect the human right issues, then this will be kind of like the backup or the biggest support for the situation in Thailand. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you for this presentation. My question relates to this statement as well. My question is to Adam and Irene. I'm curious if you've come across in your research, if the citizens of Thailand have been applying, because you mentioned that they collected signatures as part of civil society and anonymous did an intervention as well, but I was curious to know if you have seen other practices of anti-surveillance technology spreading or other strategies that citizens have been employing to try to go against these surveillance practices.
>> ADAM SENFT: Yes, I mean there is a vibrant civil society as we have an example here. They are most certainly working within an extremely constrained environment, especially in the immediate aftermath of the coup. There was a crackdown of public gathering of a certain, five or so people or more, strictly intended to stop these types of activities.
Junta officials frequently break up academic conferences. This would not be happening within Thailand. So they are working within a very constrained environment.
The single gateway plan was very interesting. As I said, I feel it is less obvious to the average citizen but seemed to get enormous public support which is interesting and I can't entirely explain.
But there has been a whole sort of rash of leaked documents that have come out. There's, I have been trying to think of other examples. There isn't a lot because people are often immediately arrested -- the first month after the coup there was a summoning of academics and journalists who were all forced to report to the junta and imprisoned if they didn't. I think probably obviously as a means of intimidation. I think that is limited to some extent. Off the top of my head I can't think of other great examples. I don't know if you have any. Yeah, I think that's a work in progress.
It's hard to say with the indiscriminate use of legislation for absolutely trivial acts. It becomes very, very challenging for individuals to speak out.
>> AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> ADAM SENFT: Sorry?
Yeah, I mentioned in the paper and I don't know if I mentioned it here. There was a leak of documents, another document of the internal emails of the hacking team, a large seller of surveillance malware and the Thai government was one of the purchasers. That predated the coup by a couple of months. The Prime Minister authorized that purchase before he was Prime Minister. We know they have these capabilities. As far as we know there is no evidence of this being used yet. It is not certain if they would know or not. So far I haven't seen any evidence of that, no.
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Do we have questions from the remote participation? No?
So are there more questions from the room?
If there are not, I would like to thank everyone on the panel for their presentations and also Alison for her comments. We close this session now. Then we go over to the business meeting, GigaNet, what has happened and what is going to happen in the future. I hope you all stay here and we are happy to have your comments on that as well. Thank you.
(Applause.)
(The session concluded at 1715.)
Thanks for bearing with us for 20 more minutes. It has been a very intense day. This is the Internet Governance Forum academic network. We have a very brief summing up of our year's activities and a chance for you to give us some feedback.
Stay or forever hold your peace is basically the plan. We won't hold you too much longer.
It would be great if people could come up to the table. So those of you sitting on the side, perhaps briefly join us at the table. There won't be anything to do. Just thanks very much.
I just want to check if the slide ... right. I don't know what, oh, we've got light switches in the middle of it. Great.
Let's begin. Thanks for staying. Thanks for a wonderful day. I think we have had an extraordinary Annual Symposium which is very fitting for the opening of our second decade of existence. In fact, I would like to thank all the panelists.
Once again I'm Marianne Franklin, the Chair of GigaNet. Next to me is Daniel Oppermann, who is the brain and energy behind this year's Annual Symposium.
Come back, take a look it will be our new logo. It will be back shortly because the live streaming will be reestablished. This is our new look voted by members who took part.
All right. I would like us to give a big round of applause to Daniel and the organizing Committee in an send is that. Big round of applause and thanks. We will allow Daniel to make a brief statement about his two years as programme Chair because he has been overseeing two annual symposia. I will give you a brief statement on what we have been doing, unfortunately on behalf of our absent treasurer and we will have a few minutes of feedback. Daniel, over to you.
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Okay. Yeah, thanks also from my part for all your presence here and for the participation as well as the 11th GigaNet Symposium. We had a lot of interesting paper presentations and discussions. Also thanks to your contributions. Marianne has already mentioned that we do a lot of effort to prepare this. I want to stress, of course, that the Program Committee has a very important role. I want to thank all the people, all the volunteers on this Program Committee who are constantly supporting the preparation of this Symposium.
And so for the next year I would also like to mention that everyone can participate in this Program Committee. Every year when we start preparations for the new Symposium, then we send out a message for volunteers, asking for volunteers to be on the Program Committee. I would like to encourage every one of you who is interested in participating in this preparation, please step forward when we send a message on the Internet mailing list. You can all be part of this. It is very great if we can all work together. Thank you.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks. Now, let's turn to the last year. It has been a very, very busy year for GigaNet because the Steering Committee has been developing the work in several areas. Let me also underscore that our Steering Committee is elected. We have annual elections, and half of our officers serving on the Steering Committee are either standing for reelection or step down and new people step forward.
This is entirely voluntary work. I just want to stress that.
I want to thank everyone who has put the time and work into this year. Basically we have decided that at this point, at this point ending the 11th year, the GigaNet understood to have a higher profile as a scholarly community to exchange research and findings and debate as today, but also engaged in a policymaking community, particularly in the Internet Governance space and through the hosting of our Annual Symposium by the IGF which is very important.
So we have worked very hard this year in reaching out and searching out collaborations with a number of other networks and initiatives. They have been asking us to take part in helping them out.
This is also means taking socially our social media and online presence. Even though we are all very pussy with social media and online press we created a GigaNet profile. That means basically getting going on Twitter and creating up to date content on our Web site. I'll get back to that in a minute.
This reaching out included this year a number of very important initiatives, pre-conferences that have been cosponsored with GigaNet and other organisations, particularly before the international communications association conference that was in Japan this year. And the Association of Internet Researchers in Berlin. We had a very, very good workshop, collaborations with others.
Yesterday we had a new initiative, the Annenberg Schools of Internet Policy, got together a number of computer scientists doing important Internet Governance related work but don't often talk about their work in this sort of setting. We look forward to continuing that another year.
It is clear simply making an effort to reach out, be visible, vocal an engaged with a larger community we have become a larger partner and constituent member of this space. And also we have been doing some simple stuff. Academics may or may not underestimate the need to create a visible, viable presence that is up to date. So we took a look at our logo and talked to Roy Berlist who had been our logo design designer a few years ago and asked to refresh. Could I see the low goal briefly? I don't need to see me talking. This is the new look. There was a poll. Thirty-three members voted. A number noted that the three Options were similar. That is true. Because they called for contributions in a competition. There were no candidates. We approached a professional graphic designer who happens also to be a lecturer at Kings College, London. And Zina Feldman gave us a number of options. We looked at those as a Steering Committee and came up with the top three. That's what we presented to the membership for the poll.
And this is what we have. The new GigaNet -- which one is it? GigaNet is the new orange, if I get it right -- no, orange is the new GigaNet, if I may say. Orange is the new GigaNet. This is a very exciting way to present ourselves from here on in. For that reason we are also looking to move our current content from NG which has been our Web site to a Wordpress based Web site, so we purchase posting and work out straightforward but as yet -- some necessary forms of governs at the very nitty gritty end of what we do and how we do it. We are on to that now. There has been a little bit of issue around how we finance these things, but we are on our way to improving our web content and look.
So we are now a public-facing, publicly engaged community as well as an academic network that takes seriously the fact that we are working online and offline. We are happy with that. Very important outcome. We are thrilled about it and it's clear on the list serve, after a lot of effort we managed to get ten years of annual symposia papers up on to the SSRN network which has been kindly supported by the Internet Governance project at Georgia Tech. This has been an enormous amount of work. Ten years of symposia papers had to be retrieved, reordered and literally uploaded one by one. They are up there now. We have an archive for researchers to research about how we have been framing and talking about these topics today. And so this year's symposia papers with the permission of the authors will be easily uploaded quickly, and that has been an extraordinary feat, I think.
The second name, the name, the issue is money and money makes GigaNet go around. Without financial support is a lot of things you cannot do. We have been hearing about this today in other ways.
We currently have 4,000 odd pounds, not exact as yet because we are working between three currencies, but our treasurer, who unfortunately is not able to be here, will finalize the currency part, but we have a solid baseline we never had before in our own name to move the work forward to pay for our own web hosting, support our own SSRN subscriptions and owe hopefully as that money grows from other sources to create some sort of support with due consideration for scholars to come and present papers here or to be here in other ways.
This is very exciting.
The treasurer's report will be online as soon as we've worked out the currencies.
Our thanks to ICANN who will be supporting the party tonight. As well as the Symposium work. And also to ISOC Latin America region, who have given us a substantial injection of funds. So we've come a very long way in ten years, absolutely. It takes time to build a community. It takes time to sustain a community. But I'm very proud to say that the Steering Committee has come a long way this year in moving us forward and to become a more professional organisation that we hope can support all our members in a professional way. So there's a set of decisions to be made about managing ourselves professionally.
We'll get back to you on that. We do consult the membership. If you are not a member already, please apply. There is an application to be a member. Go online. It is not as scary as the looks. If you have questions you can contact our Membership Chair once the elections are over. Joanna Kulesza is standing again.
Thanks for everyone staying and I would like to open the floor for any comments about today or any of the things I raised at this point. No?
Oh, yes. Of course, there are elections currently going on. If you are a member of GigaNet, you are on the list serve. Dmitry Epstein sent a reminder and will send another reminder. We would like to have as many people taking part in this poll as possible. This is one form of participation. Please take a look. Even those of us standing again, we need to do that appropriately. We all have statements. Take a look and have your voice heard.
I think I covered everything.
Okay? Open to a few minute of discussion and feedback? And Daniel will take notes if he doesn't mind.
(Chuckles.)
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Any comments about today or any other measures?
Alison?
>> ALISON GILLWALD: I am not sure this is the appropriate point in your agenda, but I want to pick up on some of the discussions yesterday. Can you hear me? Yeah?
I wanted to pick up on some of the discussions yesterday about broadening the participation of Delegates. You did mention that you are hoping to expand participation through supporting scholars. I was wondering, is that papers that are presented? And is there any kind of target audience for those scholars?
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: I think that is definitely a point that needs to be discussed with the membership and established. The first assumption, but I cannot speak for everyone, is that these are to support scholars from areas where funds and the ability to get to these meetings are particularly difficult. So yes, that is all to be decided.
I don't want to speak too soon. We have 4,000, 5,000 pounds, but yeah, that's the plan, Euros, pounds, basically the same these days.
Sadly for me, earning in pounds.
But the point is well taken, Alison. That will be the next item to deal with. Thank you.
Any other comments?
(There is no response.)
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: If there are no further comments from the floor, if you have any, please let us know either off list or on list. We have had an amazing day. We'll see you later in the nice little bar around the corner on, what is the road again, Daniel?
>> DANIEL OPPERMANN: Yeah, right, in case I haven't mentioned it we are going to have a party tonight, reception. It is going, you can find the address on the programme paper on the tables and also on the GigaNet Web site. It is going to be in the restaurant Mi Lola in Via Providensia, which is a couple minutes from the Grand Fiesta Americana Guadalajara Country Club Hotel. We were there yet. We start at 8:30 and we hope to see you there, have a drink, have a talk and have some fun, yes.
>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: No further ado I declare our 11th Annual Symposium of the GigaNet Symposium closed. The IGF officially started, but we started it already. Thanks very much, everyone. Thank you.
(Applause.)
(The Symposium concluded at 1735.)
(CART provider signing off.)