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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(The session will begin momentarily. Please continue to stand by.)
>> Good morning, everyone. We will be starting in five minutes. I ask for a little more of your patience. Thank you.
(Please stand by.)
>> ANNOUNCER: Everyone, please, you are invited to join us at the table. This is a discussion for everyone. We want to talk to everyone. So, please come.
(Standing by.)
>> MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our session. It is Hands-On Youth-Driven Internet Initiatives. I would like to thank everybody for being here on Friday, in the morning. I know it's tough, but thank you so much for joining us. We are hoping to, first of all, present some projects and opportunities that we have been able to carry forward, such as -- as a matter of example of what can be done. We would also like to hear from you about projects you may have, ideas you may have to replicate these programmes and your local situation.
This is supposed to be an Open Forum, but we want it to be very dynamic. What I am going to propose is this: The main language will be English in consideration for the people on streaming and so on. But you can express yourselves in Spanish, Portuguese or English if you care. We will translate it very quickly so that you can feel comfortable speaking in your language. If you speak another language, I feel very deeply sorry. We can try to understand as well.
Welcome, everyone. My name is mark Datysgeld. I'm specializing in Internet Governance. Today we have a lot of other youth here representing different projects and regions. We are introducing them. The format will be as such: Each will speak for five minutes about our projects and initiatives. Then we will open the session for debate, discussion, questions, ideas. If you guys want to talk to us, you can join in. If not, we'll talk among ourselves, whatever works best.
First of all I would like to introduce my own project which is actually kind of our communal project called governance primer. It happened, it started when I went to my first ICANN meeting in the ICANN Next Gen scholarship. I thought there was a problem that needed to be addressed. Institutions such as ICANN, IGF, so forth, they say that they are very inclusive, that they are meant for everyone, but there is a barrier there. It is very inclusive for engineers. It is very inclusive for people on social sciences.
But people who don't have that specific knowledge can't simply join in the discussion. They don't have a lead to start following to understand what Internet Governance is. When I came back, I devised a programme that is basic Internet Governance for everyone. We have people, we have made four additions so far. We have had people of different ages and it has been working out fine.
And what I did was, I went to ICANN and asked for funding. Like: Fund this project! It's as simple as that. Of course, I insisted a lot, but it has been working.
I think this is one way of addressing this gap. We talk a lot about different ways of addressing gaps. I mean, why don't we work directly on addressing the gap instead of relying on solutions and keeping on discussing this?
So it is an open project. All the material is open. Everything is available for everyone that asks any of us. So they can replicate in their own region. I think this sort of initiative is one of the ways we can move ahead and start not only being youth and that sort of thing, but being actual participants in the Internet environment. Like we have the resources available since we are here. We have been receiving all this knowledge. Some of us are here under scholarships. I think this is a very available opportunity. For sure, we do have things to impart. So out of my programme, I don't want to advertise my programme. I would rather say when you go back home there is a way to share this and expand this. You can give classes about what you are learning. You can give informal lessons. It doesn't have to be formal. You can try to ask for funding. Even I got it.
So there's a way to keep going and keep going moving forward as youth, right? So from starting here, I would like to give word to look at the -- he has been in the Next Gen programme as well. The trio has been -- I have been working, showing that you build -- Lucas was her Ambassador and we are all building this community. It is very organic. It is because we care. I would like Lucas to talk a bit about his projects and what has been happening to him so far. Please, Lucas.
>> LUCAS MOURA: Good morning, everyone. My name is Lucas Moura. I'm a member from a private company from Brazil. And my project actually, I faced a that is in the perspective, we can not call anyone a victim of cybersecurity. I started to develop a workshop that tried to teach kids, but before I tried to teach kids how cybersecurity works or how to be safe on the Internet we must teach them how the Internet works.
So basically I developed a workshop that uses ways to teach kids about cybersecurity. Before that we teach kids how the Internet works. We play games and we try to use a not so technical language. I'm a engineer, so it's quite complicated to make the translation from the protocol to the end user level. But this is working on progress.
So basically we also want to share about the funding. So to fund this project I asked for my company that I work for and they support me sponsoring the project. After that, I published the project in the project of the workshop in creative comments. Right now anyone can have access to the project and replicate. Right now we have a project working in one of the states in Brazil. Intel is the national institutes of communication. There the project is funded by the government. And also we will be in January, we are going to have a workshop running in Bangladesh funded by an NGO. The same project is funded by a government. Then we got funded by NHO. I'm not the project owner. I just created the project and published it in creative common. So I can get the project and try to, if you went to apply in your city, your town, your community, your village, you can get access to this project.
Please, reach me if you have interest about this. And you can replicate and maybe I can share with you some ways to have access ton funding or maybe you can use, I don't know, the community to fund it. The project can be even he crowd funding. It is totally open. And I think this is my part. Maybe I don't have space to talk too much about the project, but basically it is a project that teaches kids how the Internet work in an analytical way. We play games and we create a network and they have to make the packets, make the traffic between each of them and then this is it, I think.
I think I will pass my time to Augustina, who will be the next speaker.
>> Lucas, just a question to you first. I think that one of the, we talked about why youth-driven matters. I think one key difference is that we have this willingness to do it in creative commons and open source and we have this mindset. Do you think this is something that can differentiate youth-driven projects from other projects?
>> LUCAS MOURA: If I understand the question --
(That was Mark.)
>> LUCAS MOURA: Open Internet works the way it works. It is open, resilient, stable. We can start thinking about our projects as open and resilient and we can get resilience and get funding from different sectors, from different stakeholders. So we are not dependent on one stakeholder. You can get the openness based on our projects, like in creative commons. Because creative commons is a license. You have different ways of licensing. But I think the philosophical idea of creative commons is amazing. A lot of projects, which PJ and we are soon going to talk about the Wikipedia project. The way that they work and the way that they keep going on I think is a show case about the a must. I think in driving a project, I think we can do this because we must do this. We are born almost -- I am not born and raised on the Internet, but most of the people here were born and raised on the Internet. If they get access to a lot of projects, they will use it. Everybody here uses sometime, for example, Wikipedia to make a school project or homework.
So we are already receiving the benefits of openness and from creative commons, for example. I think it is meaningful for youth-driven projects.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much, Lucas. I like now to pass the word to Augustina who is besides me. Please, if you can?
>> AUGUSTINE CALLEGARI: Good morning, everyone. My name is Augustina Callegari. I am from Argentina and I am 20 years old. Maybe I am not too young for so long, according to the UN. I think I'm the only one at this table. I know Mark is younger than me.
So I'm part of the youth ISOC Observatory which I have to thank for bringing me here, first of all. Back in Argentina I am working as Head of the Internet policy at the Ministry of modernization of the country. But here I will be speaking in my personal capacity.
For the first part of this panel I would like to focus on two points. Firstly, in the programme that first introduced me to the Internet Governance ecosystem he, Mark has already mentioned this programme, but I would like to focus a little bit more on this. Secondly, I will be talking about the main challenge I am facing as a young woman working as a stakeholder in the Internet Governance.
The Next Gen programme is a programme running by ICANN that focuses on the future, on the next generation of Internet leaders. This next generation is made up of young people between the age of 18 and 33 from all over the world, and the programme seeks to bring them together on a regional scale so that they can engage in the ICANN ecosystem.
To that end, the programme gives participants an opportunity to learn about ICANN topics and engage with the ICANN community. Application opens before each ICANN meeting and the condition is to live in the same region as the meeting is being held. So you maybe know that ICANN holds three meetings per year. So you have know when the meeting is going to be to be able to apply. And then you have to make a public presentation about a topic you are interested in or about a project, as Lucas commented before.
So why I am talking about this programme? Well, to make a long story short because this Next Gen programme brings me to my current position at the governance in Argentina. And there my main project is to strengthen the dialogue among stakeholders. We are in a brand new office about Internet policies and we are focused on developing the multi-stakeholder process. I have to say that the office is integrated, but most young people, most are women. So I think that's the point there.
And so my current initiative right now is creating a Working Group like a multi-stakeholder group to approach different Internet policy issues. But the main challenge that we are having here is how to explain Internet Internet Governance to other people who are working inside the government, but they are not aware of what is important with this kind of initiative.
So as Mark said before, we are working a lot to teach Internet Internet Governance to young people but we have also to focus on people who are not going to be involved in these kind of discussions, not going to be here today or in the next IGF meetings, because we have to be able to explain to your mom, to your friends, to your boss in the stakeholders at the government, why this is important, why this matters and why they have to develop youth initiatives. Not youth initiative, youth connected with the Internet Governance ecosystem.
So I think we have a lot of work to be done there. Even though we are here speaking the sale language, other people are not able to understand us in the way we want to be understood. This could be a barrier for looking for funding too. So I think we have to work a little bit harder on how to communicate these issues and to stress the importance of, they think that we are really interested in but other people are not seeing that.
Thanks. Next.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you, Augustina. It is interesting that you noted that the ministry in Argentina is being largely assembled by women. We also have another representative here -- wave!
(Chuckles.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: It is very interesting. Do you think this is a reflection of an intentional thing? Or do you think it just represents that women are really emerging very strong within the Internet environment? Because they are.
>> AUGUSTINE CALLEGARI: No, I think that even though there is a lot of work to be done to get more women involved in this ecosystem, we are going in a very good path way. We have a lot of women here at this table and we are working more to get more women involved.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you. Next in line, thank you very much for being here. He is from the host country, Mr. Ivan. I very much would like to hear what you have to say about Wikipedia.
>> IVAN MARTINEZ: Hello, everyone. Hola a Todas. I will speak in English for my presentation. Thanks for the opportunity to share our experience. Let's driven from the experience working with Wikipedia here in Mexico.
I will start next, please. Well, there is a huge which can media movement around the world. If you have the question about what is the difference between Wikipedia and Wiki media, Wiki media is the social movement behind Wikipedia. This is greater, it is corrected, edited daily by hundreds of people around the world. We are an organisation behind Wiki peed I can't in Mexico. We are an organisation born in 2011. We are entirely volunteer basis organisation. We don't have paid staff. We work basically in good faith and trust and good will of the people in Mexico by citizens in an NGO.
And we are basically in Mexico City, but we have supporters in three Mexican states. Next, please. We work primarily with the wiki media, which you can see on the screen. The most famous is Wikipedia, but we have other projects based in the free knowledge principle.
As you can see, we are really young people organisation. In fact, I am the elder of the organisation
(Laughter.)
>> IVAN MARTINEZ: Because I have 32 years. Next, please. That is the picture with the Guinness record that we achieved this year by --
(Applause.)
>> IVAN MARTINEZ: It is the longest Letha a than. It is like hackathon, but for Wikipedia.
The range of the people who are involved, it's 26 years -- it is 17 to 24 years is the range,. You need to know that the which can peed is the main thing, but Wikipedians, only one is a woman. A shaming situation. Mexico has a specific strategy to tack em the gender gap in wiki media movement. In fact we are one of the most active in the gender gap. So doing some actions to have more women and girls involved in the chapter. We have 60 percent of women in the chapter and 40 male. That is not -- that is not the standard in the wiki media movement. In fact the board of the wiki media foundation is a male board. So we have students in the majority, but we have lots of other people in a long range of participants.
So what are some of the experiences based in this organisation? Wiki media chapters are based on a free basis philosophy. Wikipedia is very important, the openness. The more important is the freedom experience. Some things can be open, but it is more important foreman kind take it can be free. We are basically collective intelligence. The same open basis in the organisation. We take a quote for the Zapatista (Spanish phrase.) everyone at their own pace, their own way. We request from people their time and skills, but at their own pace, your own way. What are the things that you do better? That's what wiki media Mexico wants from you.
The next, please. How we can guarantee that we will increasingly have open, working, financial support. We are an organisation that doesn't have all the answers. We are taking collective decisions and collective consequences, of course. We are encouraging to act, the same volunteers to solve peculiar issues. For an example, for the authorities of Mexico, when we face the bureaucracy of the chapter, the authorities from Mexico told us: What are you doing? You are encyclopedia? You sell books? No, it's Internet. Okay, you are enterprise of Internet. No, we are in the middle because they think we are a enterprise so you pay more taxes than NGO. No, we are Wikipedia, encyclopedia of the Internet.
This can be solved by young people because we started six years ago in Mexico. It was more junk in that moment. Well, I think it is all for my participation. Thanks for listening.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much, Ivan. You did mention a point that is interesting. Wikipedia seems very suited for students. I used to be a very active Wikipedian back when I was in high school. Is that an engagement point that we should try to address more? Should we try to approach schools directly and make more projects that engage them within content creation?
>> IVAN MARTINEZ: That was our decider. Because in this generation, we are more, we have more customs to be involved in the creation of content. The five rules of Wikipedia is be bold. Change everything. If you have a good idea, you can change all Wikipedia rules, all the contents. The people's rule encourage the people to change everything that is not correct in their own perspective.
So we are always telling people: If you don't have, or you are disagreeing with some rule of Wikipedia or in fact we are in strong disagreement of the situation that doesn't have women involved in the movement, we are taking actions, being bold.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much. And now we would like to talk a little bit about the movement you may have already heard a bit about. Yeah, it's the Youth Observatory (Spanish phrase.) youth SIG and a lot of other names that you guys have. Please, Sarah.
>> I'm Sarah from Guatemala. The Youth Observatory, also known as youth SIG is a nonprofit organisation founded in September 2015 and joined the Internet Society as an special interest group since this year.
It is for mostly formed mostly by young people between 18 and 25 years from different countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its principal objectives are the same as ISOC but with big emphasis on the training of young people in the knowledge of the ecosystem and Internet Governance in order to increase their participation in these spaces. The disclosure of the importance of these topics in academic research. The Youth Observatory was an idea born in the youth IGF last year, left by the CGI and the Internet Society from Brazil. We tried to increase participation of of youth in Latin America and the Caribbean.
It was formed by more than 100 young people from the region.
This was not the formal date of the launch. The idea of making the Youth Observatory was evolving during this problem. At the end of September we had already decided the name of the organisation and its main objectives. At this stage, the major first collaborative project was the writing of the publication the youth declaration, a document written in Spanish, Portuguese and English, that expressed our concerns and wishes about the participation of youth in the areas of discussion of Internet Governance. Copies of this documents were delivered to the different personalities at last year's forum.
The first physical meeting of the youth observatory members was held in Brazil last year during the tenth Internet Governance Forum where they were panelists. They asserted their responsibilities and channels were set up to undertake to formalize the organisation. This process was ended in February of this year when we received the approval of ISOC and we were recognised with the status of a Special Interest Group. At that moment we had the chapter included, logistical support to achieve our goals as well as we can supported by the organisation with global reach. Currently the youth observatory has more than 80 young people from different countries with membership and very active in the various Working Groups. The organisation has a solid structure and rules and regulations that enable us to grow. So I think that the interesting thing about the youth observatory is to actually engage and empower the youth from Latin America and the Caribbean. We actually are trying to get more people from the regions. It is really interesting in this group. You should join us. You can go to the Web site and you will find over there the steps to join.
It is really interesting to have interesting discussions with new faces because I think all of the people here, like new faces for the Internet Governance ecosystem and that's like really interesting. For me, it is cool to know a lot of young people that are really passionate with things that we are doing, like really cool stuff. Like these guys over here. It is really cool. Thank you.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Sarah, thank you. Can you talk about one cool thing you guys did, which was the youth ACL IGF. We were there and it was pretty awesome. I never saw people doing exactly what happened there. Can you talk a bit about that? Sar.
>> Sarah: The youth ACL IGF, -- youth LAC, part of the work we have been doing with ISOC, one of the programmes or events which is part of the programme, we presented a project to create and original in the, to form LAC IGF. This project was focused mainly on discussing the same issues that were discussed at the LAC IGF but from the focus of young people. Previously it has been heard that there are issues of exclusive interest to young people such as security in the use of publications, but we believe that before talking about youth issues, we should approach the Internet Governance with youth approach that reaches the dialogue. First we proposed to ISOC to perform this previous event for them. We were really committed to comply with these rules that apply to these kind of forums. For example, it is not commercial, transparent, open to multi-stakeholder, et cetera. We contacted Jengo who supported us to meet these requirements. We think that the fact that multi-stakeholders when we try to put it in practice does not necessarily imply that all the parties are represented, and others are under represented. Moving that to a group of young people is really difficult.
In addition, the logistics itself is really complicated and also carry out consultations to discuss issues, et cetera. However, ISOC and ICANN, too, because they give us some money to promote this programme, trusted us and decided to fund the project. In July we were able to carry out the first LAC IGF. This was attended by more than 100 people between young and non-young. We were able to offer scholarships to people from the Latin America and Caribbean. Also I think that a point that I have to highlight is the fact that we didn't do the normal panels that the IGF environment is like used to. We made the (phrase.) a new format in order to actually have a rich dialogue, an active participation and engagement with all the youth. It was for me really interesting to younger people than me talking about access to the Internet, why privacy is really important and security. And they were really concerned about these issues because they were born with Internet and the Internet is like a really important thing to them. Well, to all of us.
Listen to all these point of views, seeing new faces and to actually, they were really empowered and it was really interesting.
Also we have gender balance in the panels and in the participants. It was really cool. So we are trying to achieve these programmes for the next year so it will stand up. Thank you.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much, Sarah. Now for a very, very very special guest, I her in three minutes before the session started. So that should qualify her as a special guest. June, please, if you may?
>> Good morning. Sorry, I have a sore throat. But I will try to be brief.
Closer? Okay.
Okay. Good morning. My name is Jentesi from Kenya, young lawyer in private practice and I'm a youth ISOC Fellow this year. I'm a member of Next Gen in ICANN and I worked on the multi-stakeholder for our national IGF in Kenya. I'll tell you about the project also we're working on in Africa and specifically in Kenya for youth in Internet Governance. We had youth com. What happens is, we get together young people from the ages of about 17 to around 24, 25. We gather them together and train them on Internet Governance issues. We did this in, we have done this in Africa and Franco phone Africa also. They are our source of funding, ICANN. That's where we got the funding from.
It is a one day conference. We talk about IGF and all IG issues that attach to Internet Governance issues. For the youth com, the Kenya one that we had, we got funding from ICT regulator, the communications authority of Kenya and we also got funding from our CCTLD, Ken-NIC, those who have the .KE registry. Those are good people to identify for funding.
The other thing we are doing right now is we are starting to have youth IGFs in the recently. We had one in Chad. Most of the countries haven't taken it up yet, but we are working towards it. The way forward for us as in the region, trying to get more collaboration between the young people in Africa. So we work together and have a close knit network of people interested in IG to get more youth engaged in this space. We are also working on trying to partner with ICANN and ISOC to have remote participation hubs. So any time there's an IGF meeting or there's an ICANN meeting or any IETF meeting we will have remote participation in the country, probably at the ICANN office. But we probably get funding from ISOC or ICANN or one of the partners. Thanks.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much. The three of us had the pleasure of meeting you back in Morocco. It was an important experience in the sense that I'm not sure people are aware of just how engaged youth in Africa are in Internet questions. We expected there to be people, but there were ... people! A lot of people. Really interested, committed, and asking us questions. Do you feel this is something that has been increasing in the region? Something that you can actually feel and quantity if I?
>> It is. Like I said was said earlier, Internet affects all of us. We may not know what IG is, but as soon as you block some Internet in Africa, a discussion pops up. We will make hashtags and tweet against certain entities. Yes, there is a growing interest in IG in Africa.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much. Now, to move forward we have two different Options. If you guys want to first talk about your projects, or make comments about these projects and ways we can move forward, ways of improving this sort of initiative, we can do that.
Or we can start discussing other issues. We have a small list of questions. Yes?
Does anybody want to talk here? I give you the floor.
>> AUDIENCE: My. This is Manuela, Dominican Republic youth IGF 2016. I would like to talk to you about a project that the Latin America community from the youth IGF 2016 has been involved in. We are just, the project is called em bass doors of the Internet. It is in Spanish now. And we are just a group of Latin America people that is from the youth IGF 2016 and the reason why we are talking about this project is because we are really interested in young people from our countries, all Latin America, and in the future we believe that all the world will be able to know about the Internet Governance issues.
Now we are just starting. So we created a couple months ago. We just made a great community within the Latin America course that we took about Internet Governance. And we were lucky enough in order to have this course that ISOC just developed for us. But not all the people, not all the young people in the Latin America community know about this. So this is important that we as a community, we just are getting involved and if you would like to know about it, I know that we have been talking a lot about this project.
And if you would like to get involved, we also can talk to any of us and you can go to another web page that is called the AmbassadorsdeInternet.org. You can see and everything. We personally believe that our world can improve if we improve the world for everybody.
(Speaking in Spanish.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you very much. In summarizing what she said, she said the project is really cool.
(Chuckles.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much. Please, don't be shy to involve us and talk to us ... yes? Oh, she will talk. I know she will. Please, feel free to talk to us. I think a big difference is that we all want to work together and instead of creating little silos and our own little spaces. If you guys ever want to share and talk, please come to us.
I give the floor to the young lady here.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Maureen. I was part of the IGF Ambassador last year. Sorry for my voice.
I want to highlight a few key things you said. First, Wikipedia and wiki media. We have all used Wikipedia, Mark, and we need to give back as well. Wikipedia has been asking for a few years now, we have to give back a little bit what we take from them. If we don't have enough money, if we cannot do it, well, let's try to strengthen the platform by helping on the concept. There are a lot of things that need to be verified. We can be actively participating on this. Wikipedia made our lives very easy at some point. Let's start here, but not thinking that everything will be for the rest of our lives as it is being right now. Wikipedia can disappear. The Internet can be shut down. As impossible as you think, it is not that hard.
We need to be really actively engaged on it. So why do we want to be a part? Why do we want to be a part of these discussions? Okay? Because you are or we are the most valuable outcome of these conversations. What we need to do is take back to our places, our colleges, our towns, our lives what we are discussing here. We need to be Ambassador or protectors of what we have. The Internet is a scientific experiment. It is not easy to programme what they did to make these networks work. They give it to everyone for free. Open. Now we are having all these different initiatives trying to regulate what Internet is and trying to change things because people feel they are not in control of the Internet. It's true. No one is in control of the Internet. It is our job. We were born with the Internet. Let's try to keep it ours and for the people that is coming behind us.
>> LUCAS MOURA: Thank you, Maureen. I think this is a good point. We must think that when we return home, when we return to our communities, we must be the protectors and Ambassador of this topic. And not the owners. The Internet has no owners. We will not be the owners of Internet in the community. We must share, because there is a place and must be a space for everyone. Besides, we if we don't share this space we start to have fragmentation and start losing important institutions.
Also I would like to add a point. When we return home and return to our communities we must think a little bit as a rebel. Like the Internet was born in some kind of rebellion. I don't know, but there are two guys very important, I will not say the names because one is maybe, he will be around. But they get in the shoulders to get in the University campus and to get access to computers and somehow maybe 20 years later ICANN was born. Like this guy got in the campus, so this is the thing like, don't stay too attached to the institutions. Be a little bit of a rebel. Think if I, if my government does not give me funds, I will just stay here and wait for the next opportunity. No. I am from Brazil and the government is not supporting too much the Internet initiatives. Look for opportunities. I'm sure here we have people from different countries that face the same issues, sometimes from the government. Even NGOs and sometimes private sector.
So think about this, think to be a protector and Ambassador and think a little bit as a rebel.
Dangerous advice, Lucas?
Do we have a mic, please?
Technical issues. Just adding to the point? Can you stop interrupting me, Lucas?
(Chuckles.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Just to add to this point, the wiki media foundation also has drives for funding. Yeah, I think that maybe that is one way for us to go as well. I haven't heard yet of any of us trying to get things done via collective funding. I'm thinking this is one way forward. Maybe that is one way we can move ahead. What do you think, Ivan? How do you think this sort of thing pans out?
>> IVAN MARTINEZ: I think the collective intelligence is one of the main keys of the future of the Internet. Something that I learned in the wiki media movement is that we are always working on projects or ideas with just one or two people alone. We don't have the tradition of sharing what we are thinking with others. I think a good project needs to be shared with other people. We are very individual in this society. We are always trying to hide our ideas because we think that the others will steal our ideas.
But I think no, one of the best methods of having a good idea is to convince your best friend because your best friend will be honest. Same thing with Wikipedia. The people consider that Wikipedia is very nice and a good thing. Most of the donations received around the world came from individuals, not corporations. It's people who donate $20, and I think 20 or $30. Yeah, in December we are running our fundraising campaign. Please, give us some bucks, please.
>> LUCAS MOURA: Now we have remote participation. If you can hear us, you can start to talk.
(Pause.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: You have to turn on your mic. Your mic is off.
We have too much background noise and the Webex is muting.
We will keep going. You get to participate, even if you can't make it via streaming, you can type out your question and stay there. We will talk to you, engage with you. Please, everybody is welcome to talk.
On the floor right now do we have any more interventions? Good, because we do have a few points we would like to discuss and raise.
One issue that came up is whether youth-driven initiatives are important, because they are for young people or whether it is about the fact that we can't get funding because we are still studying and overcoming the issues of paying for our education and trying to make a living.
So I would like to ask my panelists how they feel about that. Is it that we are young or that we just don't have the money?
>> AUDIENCE: I think it goes both ways because yes, we do have to get sponsorship. Especially in Africa. We have to work with different entities and get funding from ISOC or ICANN or the African Union. It is that we are not able to engage on site, on the ground. However, we are trying to build capacity as well so we are able to engage informatively. You can engage, but if you do not know what you are talking about that is not constructive than engagement. This is a new space for us, so we need to get more experience and learn as well. I think it's both ways.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: I think personally it's more about the money. No, it's good. A lot of us are here because we are given the opportunity by different institutions. It happens that there are not that many. We rely a lot on ISOC and ICANN and we are grateful for them.
At the same time, I do feel that we lack the backing from private sector.
>> AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: I would like to know where the private sector is. Lucas, you're from the private sector. Where are these guys?
>> LUCAS MOURA: Okay, yeah. I am from the private sector, but I come here to work for you. I did not come here funded by the private sector company. It's a different point, but at the same time I think the funding issue is maybe we solve this with transparency. I don't mind to say, for example, in November I went to the ICANN 57 on a Fellowship. I received a scholarship from ICANN. Sometimes it is something obscure. How did you get there? And funding is not about just traveling and go to the Internet Governance events. Funding is much more related to have our own projects and have our projects running in our communities. It is much more important for the community to have access to the Internet and in a secure way, than for me to go to every Internet Governance event. I feel like the fundraising is not just about traveling and going to events.
I know that is important for networking and things like this, but at the same time we maybe can solve this with transparency. If I am transparent about how did I get there, maybe more people can replicate and maybe we can make some kind of forum for best practices to go and also share our best practices.
For example, if I receive funding for my project, how did I manage it? How did I get this funding? How did I share this with the private sector? How can I reach each stakeholder? I know that sounds a little bit, could be political what I just said, but we must think about this as youth-driven, not just youth going to every event. I think that's important, but we have to think about this with a broader mind.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: If you don't mind, Lucas, I would like to add this to the list of suggestions coming out of this panel.
You have a point. We don't have this best practice advice about how to get funding. We are all scrambling for funding like mad but not stopping to document how we are doing this. I propose this as one of the main points of this session, how to build a best practices guide in that sense, which is a very good idea. I support that fully.
We also have another question which is how do we guarantee that youth will keep on having networking Options? Because that is also one of the main points, right? You can't ask for funding from ISOC if you don't know somebody from ISOC. You can start a project with somebody from your government if you don't know somebody from your government. Here it is easy. The good part of being at the IGF is having free access to all these people all the time. We do engage in that a lot.
But how do we make sure that those opportunities are available for all their youth in their own countries. Does anybody have thoughts about that? It can be not exactly from the panelists but does anybody have a thought about that?
>> AUDIENCE: Hole low, my name is Juan Pedro, from Portugal. Quick thoughts on your question. I hadn't thought about that until you asked.
It has been brought to the table that perhaps making young people an actual stakeholder would allow that to continue. Also I think, personal opinion, it comes with freedom of expression. The networking will be involved in such a way that you can't really block it. I hope so. At least it's our right to be here and to speak.
With that said, I don't see a way they can really shut us up. And I hope so. I hope we keep on doing the things we are doing here. The initiatives we brought here and take them back. Thank you very much.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Would you like to share a bit with us the situation of Internet Governance in Portugal? We are sibling countries and I am not aware of it. Can you share with us?
>> AUDIENCE: No problem. In Portugal we have our own problems, at least from where I've seen in our eyes, they debate their own problems in such a way that can bring powerful messages to the global IGF. Still, there is not much involvement of young people. I participated myself, but I think in at the end of the day there weren't more than five young people in the room.
And the Portuguese IGF was done in such a way which is highly, how can I put it? Interactive, with small sessions about specific topics. I participated myself in one about young people having access, very related to European policy. But still, I really enjoyed listening to what is happening in your countries. Thank you very much.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: I would like to encourage you to come talk to us later. We do have an entire course written in Portuguese that is freely available. We would be really glad to be able to share this and get something going. Ivan, you want to make an intervention?
>> IVAN MARTINEZ: Yes. One thing I learned when I joined the foundation of the Mexican Chapter of wiki media, people from the wiki media foundation told us, are you concerned about you are leading project that needs to be successful in time? I don't have that thought at that moment that I will be at IGF in five years. So one of the issues that young people is facing is the lack of persistence. I think that people, the young people from, younger than me, have the issue that they can't establish long-term ideas. Or they are not willing to tackle strategies of five or ten years. For many people who shared ideas with me said hey, what a good idea! I think it's good, but you don't have sustainability, any strategy over there. So I think not only in Mexico, but young people want to have immediate results and have success immediately. And I think that is not a good idea.
Wikipedia is successful because it is a long-term idea. I think it is one of the things I want to put on the table.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you, Ivan. We are about to close-up this session. I would like to give the opportunity for Sarah to talk. Is that it? Yes, if you would like to.
>> Sarah: Well, okay. I believe that the youth-driven initiatives need to work. Please, first someone to fund them, obviously, which is the big issue for us. Also that there is an experienced group that can support the implementation of this initiative. Like people that actually believe in our work. Let's face it, also we have very young people here with a lot of interest in changing this world of Internet Governance. How many young people in the world are really interested in Internet Governance? How many know that what this thing is?
Also perhaps for us Internet Governance is a very sexsy thing. It is not soap for other young people. How do you get to them and drive them to the good side of the forest?
Here are some ideas. Put aside the jargon usually used in the, ICT, ccTLD, jargon is important for Internet Governance, but we understand only those where we have spent several hours a day dedicated to knowing what it is. You know, a lot of letters are difficult to learn. Let's use simple universal language to make us understand. Identify other problems that are particularly affecting young people and find their relationship. Find it, not force it. Between these problems and the Internet. Go from the local to the regional. Many dynamic coalitions here have done an excellent job in sharing experiences and best practices. Let's not be pretentious. Let's gain experience and then let us come to these forums to talk about how it was that we achieved and what things did not go so women. Also I invite you going to the room in DRhipultipec to have a drink and have more discussions in a friendly and chilled environment.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: To close off before we have close the time. There are countries here that haven't been mentioned here. Do any of you want to share the State of Internet Governance and youth in your countries before we move to closing considerations?
No?
I'm so sad.
Let's move to Maureen and then final consideration.
>> Maureen: Quick comment. Sometimes it is hard to think what we can do to bring these conversations to our local places. If we think, in truth it's not that hard. I don't have any funding. My country is not very well economically. I cannot afford IGF, but I did fund Internet and Society centre on my college and I already left my college, but hopefully, I hope that will be a place where young people can come and keep being involved with Internet Governance. Each one of us can have some sort of Internet Governance centre in our organisations. That's a great idea to keep moving forward.
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you so much, Maureen. We do have to wrap this session up. I would like to invite you to join us in the coffee break below downstairs. Maybe we can talk some more and people who didn't want to talk in the mic can talk. We are very accessible, if you see us in the hallways, let's talk. Thank you so much for being here, guys. It was a great pleasure.
(Applause.)
(Closing remarks in spanish and Portuguese.)
>> MARK DATYSGELD: Young people, do you want to get a collective photo, right here, right now? Yes! Come, come, come!)
(The session concluded at 10:10 a.m. CST.)
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FINISHED COPY
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2016
ENABLING INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
GUADALAJARA, MEXICO
09 DECEMBER 2016
DC ON ACCOUNTABILITY
10:15 CST
Services provided by:
Caption First, Inc.
P.O. Box 3066
Monument, CO 80132
1-877-825-5234
719-481-9835
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This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
***
(Please stand by for the session on D.C. on accountability.)
(Standing by for the Internet Governance Forum session on DC on accountability.)
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Hello, everyone. We'll start the session now. Welcome to the dynamic Coalition on accountability. My name is Farzaneh Badiei. I'm one of the coleaders of the dynamic Coalition on accountability. What we are going to do today in our session, we are going to -- this dynamic coalition was created in 2014 and it was supposed to focus on ICANN accountability, but we need to have a discussion on broader issues and other Internet Governance organisations as well, now that we are kind of at the p end of our discussion about ICANN accountability.
What we are going to do, in the first segment of this session we are going to discuss what has been done with ICANN accountability, what issues have been covered and how these issues are related to the other Internet Governance organisations.
And in the second segment of the session we are going to talk about what we are going to do with this dynamic coalition, what is the focus of the dynamic coalitions. Those who are not members should become members of the dynamic coalition. I'll go to Milton and start with the broad accountability and ICANN accountability in specific. Thank you.
>> MILTON MUELLER: Thank you, Farzaneh. So as you know, ICANN has just gone through a major reform process, as part of the IANA transition. Many of us are relatively pleased with the reforms that we got out of that, but there's also an implementation problem. So we have to engage in a lot of detailed follow-up work in order to make sure that the reforms are implemented in a way that will work.
So there's a whole range of different activities going on in what is now called work stream 2. For example, there is an implementation of the rules for the appeals process, the independent review process. There is a human rights Working Group which is trying to implement a framework for interpreting ICANN's commitment to respect human rights. There is some questions about how ICANN's accountability is affected by jurisdictional issues. Am I forgetting any major follow-up? Oh, there's the accountability of the SOs and ACs. And there is transparency Working Group. There's six or seven, nine different subgroups working on work stream 2, implementing the various accountability reforms.
As a general comment I would want to say that in terms of the, if you look at the Internet community as an autonomous self governing community, which I think we should, independent of nation states, we can claim in effect a big victory in that these implementation reforms are taking place. Of course, as Spiderman says, with great power goes great responsibility. We have all kinds of burdensome follow-up duties to make sure that these reforms are actually implemented in a way that works.
And that's where the rubber really hits the road. We really have to follow up and make sure everything works.
Now, I'm going to give you one example of an area where I think we have stumbled a bit in our work stream activities, and that is with the independent review process. One of the key aspects of the independent review process is to make sure that ICANN has what is in effect a judicial appeal system where if ICANN does something that is violating its bylaws or it is creeping out of its mission and trying to become too powerful, we can challenge it, just like you can challenge a government in a constitutional court and say you are violating the law.
So this is very important. In particular, many of us fought for, in civil society many of us fought for kind of an ICANN First Amendment, if you will, which says that ICANN shall not engage in content regulation designed to keep ICANN in its narrow technical coordination mission.
Now, when writing up the implementation rules for the independent review process, there was, the lawyers wrote up something and it was pretty good. We noticed there was a very short time limit on challenging these decisions or policies. And in particular, there was a 45-day limit. You must file a challenge -- if you think you have been harmed by one of these rules or policies, you have to challenge it within 45 days when you become aware of the harm. That's a bit short, but it is not terrible. Maybe that should be extended by a month or so.
Excuse me.
But the real problem came in that there is a hard one-year limit on making any challenges to anything, so that if something happens a year later, nobody can challenge it. When this was first proposed there was a big discussion on the list. Everybody said, you know, this is too short. We need to change this. But somehow those changes were never made. Now ICANN has put out for public comment a document with these rules which contains this 45-day one-year limit. One thing I would hope is that all of you become aware of this and your organisation can file public comments calling for an extension of these time limits, or if not an extension, for example, it is not clear to me why there should be any limit on any fixed limit. It possibly should be a time limit in which if you are aware of the harm, you should have a limit within which you can file an appeal, but the idea that there should be an overarching one-year or two-year limit seems to me to be unsupportable given the nature of the appeals process.
Its purpose is to limit what ICANN can do to make it stay within the boundaries of its bylaws and its mission. I see no reason why there should be a time limit.
Anyway, my organisation, the Internet Governance project, will be following up on that. I know that several others will be. If yours can, I encourage you to file public comments in that proceeding. Let me quickly pull up.
The closing date for public comments is the 10th of January. They are called the updated supplementary procedures for independent review process.
Comments were opened on the 30th of November, so we have 39 days, in every part of the world part of a holiday period, to file these comments.
Internet Governance is a never ending struggle, accountability is a never ending struggle. I hope we can stay on the ball here.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you, Milton. We go now to Tatiana. At that time at that time thank you very much, Farzaneh. I will start from the broader perspective. I think that we still don't know what human rights mean. From the perspective of the accountability of the international organisations. If you have a look at the human rights international instruments, they are for governments only. So is the duty of the governments to protect human rights and enforce human rights. The question is, what does that have to do with Internet Governance organisations?
Well, if we have a broader look, there are some other instruments, like the so-called overriding principles. The UN guiding principles for human rights. These were developed for the big supply chain businesses to make them avoid violations of human rights, for example child labour, slavery, torture, and so on.
They were not developed with organisations that are dealing with policymaking in mind. So the question is, what kind of obligation, what kind of commitment these IG organisations which are dealing with Internet Governance have with regard to human rights?
Apparently this would be the obligation to respect human rights, the obligation to take human rights into account in policymaking. Apparently this obligation has to avoid inclusion of the enforcement of human rights because it is still the duty of the governments. I don't think any of us want a private judgment, a private enforcement because the limits of such enforcements are unclear.
So what does respect for human rights mean for IG organisations? Well, we have one example and it is kind of the process of accountability already mentioned that we have human rights in the work stream, too. We are working on this in work stream 1. It was clear with the U.S. government going away, there is no hard stop for any human rights violation, that organisations -- ICANN as an organisation will not be accountable in case if human rights violations will happen. So in the work stream 1 we developed a human rights bylaw. We wanted a commitment but it was accepted as a core value for the respect for human rights. We are trying to figure out in the framework, what it means to have respect for human rights.
We are struggling with the overriding principles. There is a debate whether these principles are for ICANN. They are for supply chain businesses. We decided, this is in the first draft now. It is out for the consideration of the bigger group, we decided that human rights for ICANN will mean that ICANN will take human rights into consideration in the policymaking processes. Of course we are trying to draw the fine line between respect for human rights and enforcement of human rights. ICANN will not be able to, for example, use human rights as a tool for content regulation because we know that copyright is a human right. So there are different human rights that actually have to be balanced. This is why we also have it not as a commitment but as a core value.
So this is one of the examples. And this story has not come to its end yet. We are still figuring out, because later maybe in the framework of implementation of this commitment there will be two different streams for human rights. One of them would be to take human rights into account in the policy development processes and the second one would be to avoid human rights violations in the operations. That's where, I don't know, that's where we might consider some of the overriding principles. I can definitely say I don't think they are applicable to the Internet Governance organisations. I think ICANN can set up a perfect example how to develop these this commitment without, how to say, boring the principles or the obligations which were developed not for this type of organisations. Thanks.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you very much, Tatiana. Now we go to Steve Del Bianco about the stakeholders groups and decision makers accountability.
>> STEVE DEL BIANCO: Thank you. I worked extensively on this transition. As you know, the stakeholder groups that were defined in ICANN's bylaws have specific representative communities and, therefore, they are creatures of the ICANN bylaws. In ICANN, only in one incidence did it reach out and recognize an existing body, the IETF. They created the stakeholder community and assigned different responsibilities and roles to those communities.
In this transition, I think for the first time we created a structure where the organisation ICANN is more accountable to the stakeholder groups in the bylaws. Prior to this instead of ICANN being a membership organisation such as the one I run, net choice, and many of the civil society groups are nonprofit organisations that answer to their Members. In the case of ICANN it was explicitly not a membership organisation. There was no way for the members to exercise routine accountability powers such as blocking a budget, changing a buy law or spilling the board of directors if they felt they had gone off the rails.
Two years later we have in fact succeeded at creating accountability by which the stakeholder community can hold the corporation far more accountable than we ever have before. That's definitely an outcrop of the transition, but it was not anticipated in the transition. The IANA functions wouldn't have said anything about accountability, about but we came together and used the leveraging to get the accountability we never had. We'll call it accountability to the stakeholders traf there is a second layer of accountability that we are exploring in work stream 2, 1 of the nine projects that Milton Mueller discussed a few moments ago. That's the project on the SOs, the stakeholder organisations and AC, the advisory Committees, trying to understand the extent to which they are account able to the communities they were designated to serve.
My own group is the constituency groups at ICANNment we are to serve business users and registrants or the domain name system. The question that we have to confront is: Are we open and transparent to the business community that we are supposed to serve? Are we inviting to new members when they attempt to join the VC? Is eligibility ever in question? Are we accessible, affordable, welcoming? More importantly, do we actually do outreach to communities that are poorly represented on the BC? That could be certain sizes of business, could be geographical and linguistty diversity that we need to get representation.
Another question is, how are we with eligibility for Officers in elections? Do we have procedures that affect how we make decisions, conduct polls? Are we accountable for sticking to those procedures? Can they be appealed by one who feels they were wrongly excluded where a decision was reached without following the rules? Each SO, stakeholder organisation and advisory Committee in ICANN is currently undergoing a self examination as to whether it is truly accountable to the stakeholder groups that they were designated to serve.
We won't finish that work for several more months, but out of it I hope that we can make recommendations for how each of the groups can perhaps improve its accountability to the group they were designated to serve. I hope that gives you the kind of overview you were looking for. I'm happy to follow up if there's more you wanted to learn.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Great. Thank you, Steve. Lee, would you like to make an intervention now?yes, like the broader perspective?
>> Thank you very much for the invitation to this my name is Lee Hibbard from the Council of Europe. We have 47 Member States. It serves over 800 million people in the Pan-European area.
It serves those people and it is, if you like, accountable to the Member States in that construction what is very important is that we are accountable to assure that we have human rights protection and safeguards, the rule of law and democracy. With regard to cutting to the chase, regarding the Internet, I think the reason why the Council of Europe is here in the IGF, here in Internet Governance space, is here in ICANN, for example, working as it works is to assure that as we go forward with our understanding of democracy with human rights and rule of law that we ensure they are not just theoretical and illusory but practical and effective. These are living -- these are living documents and that's the role of the European court of human rights is to assure that those are modern and effective and dynamic.
I think to be very short is that we are here to assure that these individuals have rights and freedoms. As we have become more and more online, we live our lives more and more online, those rights and freedoms follow us. They don't become more and more distant.
And I'm thinking of nondiscrimination. I'm thinking of integrity, et cetera. That also includes the accountability of other snugs. As Tatiana said in terms of ICANN, it's still being worked out about what human rights means in that context. We are part of that process trying to work it out. We try to provide inputs. We just produced an independent report on community top level domains to help as an input to the process, to help us on how communities can, you know, their requests are processed with regard to human rights dimensions.
I think to conclude, we feel very much like one of the actors trying to work it out, like we all or. As the fast pace of technological change makes it incumbent on us to be accountable, dynamic and effective. Does that responds to your needs? Thank you.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thanks, Lee, for that. This microphone is working, yes.
Matthew, if you can tell us more about the ICANN accountability as a whole? Then we can just wrap up this segment, thank you.
>> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Farzaneh, Matthew shears, centre for technology. Like many here and at the IGF, I was very much involved in the accountability and transition work. Steve covered a lot of this but I want to pick up a couple of point and perhaps broaden the landscape a little bit.
One of the great lessons from within the Working Group itself is that we have to be accountable to each other. That accountability to each other is at the foundation of some of the things that ensured that we could work together. We had an accountability within the Working Group and to each other to be cooperative, to be willing to compromise, to be flexible. Yet there was, of course, an understanding that the work in that Working Group, we would still have our respective views. Those views would be upheld.
So that accountability not only is vis-a-vis the board, it is not only vis-a-vis the communities within ICANN, but it is also in the Working Groups and the work that the communities do together. That is an important kind of dynamic and very small concentration of another sense of accountability.
The interesting thing about the accountability work at ICANN, it has gone through such an incredible review process and we really turned overall the stones as much as we could. We assessed all the ways in which ICANN the organisation should be accountable. Now as Steve said we are going through the same thing with the supporting organisations and advisory Committees which raises an interesting question in my mind. I'm happy that there is a dynamic Coalition on accountability. We can put it to interesting use. If we expand this notion of accountability and we look a little bit more broadly beyond ICANN, because at the end of the day the interlinkages between the organises and the overlapping spaces that these organisations have within the Internet ecosystem actually do dictate in a way that we have similar levels of accountability or indeed similar accountabilities. I think that's an important factor for us to consider as these dependencies probably are most likely to grow when we are addressing things like IETF standardisation an protocols and addressing things like RIRs and if we can push the ecosystem further out. Of course it depends on how we define the ecosystem, but we might find that the interlinkages overlap to such a agree, we have to push that out further.
There is an interesting concept we may be able to address. That's one of the things that Farzaneh is going to tee up in the second part of this. What do we mean by accountability within an Internet space as a whole? We've done a lot on ICANN, but what about some of the other players?
I think the value of doing that is that we could possibly learn something from the other organisations and the Internet ecosystem as to how they address accountability. That will strengthen our overall accountability. That is another way of looking at what we've done in ICANN and taking it and looking at it more broadly and possibly looking at the ecosystem as a whole. Thanks, Farzaneh.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thanks, Matthew. So now we can move on to the second segment of this session, which is about what should be the will scope of this dynamic coalition? What should we focus on? And what should we collaborate on? Which organisations, what processes?
So to give you an example, during last year we, with the dynamic coalition members like around, we received around ten comments on the MAG, multi-stakeholder advisory group at IGF. That is one of the very small issues we took up. We came up with a couple of comments and recommendations. But the question now is, where are we going? And what is the scope of this dynamic coalition? What do we want to do with it? Do we want to work on RIRs? Do we want to take what we have learned from our involvement with ICANN accountability to other processes and discuss them?
And so this is an open question for the participants. If anyone has comments, please? If you don't have comments I'm going to call on you and you are going to make a comment. Okay.
Yes, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, I do agree with Milton that this time limit doesn't have any reason to be. I know that some subgroups will finish in this time limit, but there is some subgroups who will not finish their work. And if we make them high up, perhaps the result will not be the best.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Sorry, are we talking about ICAAN accountability here?
>> AUDIENCE: I am talking about the subgroups, work stream 2.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Okay. Yes, subgroups of ICANN in WS2, yeah. Basically my aim here, the goal that I was trying to achieve here was to kind of broaden the scope and not to be specifically focused on ICANN and see what else we can work on.
For example, I think Lee suggested we can also look at the processes at even intergovernmental organisations.
>> LEE: Thank you. I think that, I'm speaking freely here, but the world multi-stakeholder, of course, is used everywhere here. That is a big word for people, loaded with things, but I think the intergovernmental organisations are trying to understand what multi-stakeholder means in their own processes. There are circumscribed procedures with very circumscribed actors, in particular Member States but not only. There are observers, et cetera. So it is, it needs to be worked out exactly to what extent multi-stakeholder features in the functioning of the intergovernmental organisations.
Speaking to different colleagues, they are here because they are interested to find out what that means. I hope they take it back to their spaces.
From any organisation, the Council of Europe, multi-stakeholder has been written down in texts that have been adopted by Member States, which means to say there is a recognition on paper of the fact that multi-stakeholder dialogue on Internet Governance is important. Therefore, there are ever efforts being made to be multi-stakeholder. That means I can tell you that currently opening up to companies, for example -- this is an intergovernmental organisation which has Member States, governments primarily at its heart. We are looking to engage in regular dialogue with companies in order to assure that there are practical and effective respect and protection of human rights. So it is work ongoing. I think it is very important that we are here to try to engage with that. But it is still an ongoing process and I don't think we have a clear, yet a clear understanding about what that means. But I think it will come.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Okay, thank you, Lee.
So Jan wants to make a comment and we have Jeremy, a remote participant. Thanks.
>> JAN SCHULT: Thanks. I think the idea of taking the coalition broader is promising. There are a the look of things that could be done. As several speakers said, ICANN is unfinished business. I wouldn't leave ICANN behind. Work stream 2 has so much to do and accountability is never finished. It's a bit like democracy: Always pursued, never achieved.
Other places where you can go? The IETF certainly within the core Critical Internet Resource institutions, the IETF tends to be quite self congratulatory about its accountability arrangements and having a critical look at that. Everyone should be open to critical examination. That is certainly a place where one could look. RIRs, I know that P.A. NIC did a big review in recent times so one could look at that and see how that could be taken into the other RIRs. The intergovernmental organises, they tend to fobbous off. Oh, we are governments, therefore we are accountable. I don't think that follows by any means. A lot of my past work was done on wood institutions and there was a lot of work done on transparency and correction and so on and so forth there.
Another place where one could look, in the academic literature it is called transgovernmental networks. Transgovernmental networks is global governance by governments but not clow Intergovernmental Organization but through informal, the GAC is a good example. The GAC has no status in international law. But the GAC is, it's people from ministries coming there. Ministerial officials. They are not's lekked. Their accountability to Parliaments, officials, legislatures, so on and so forth is not clear at all.
Looking at the OECD on issues, looking at the GAC, the transgovernmental officials, they get away from it. We are governments, therefore we are representative and accountable. Therefore, their accountability to officials is by no means law. They are not under international law, so it's hard to hold them up to law either. One can go on and on and on.
The question that Matthew raised about the accountability of the space as a whole is intellectually very interesting but I wonder practically how one would do it. I have a little bit of --
This is my four by four on the various, acronyms, not written out. All of the different institutions involved from global to local, public, private, and hybrid involved in Internet Governance. Looking at these collectively and saying how is this all accountable? I don't know. A Nobel prize is waiting.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you, Jan. Jeremy is remotely attending and would like to make a comment.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Can you hear me?
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Yes, we can hear you.
>> AUDIENCE: Great. Thanks for inrighting me to the meeting Farzaneh. I have a couple of suggestions. I think I would like to see some more work done on the IGF itself and the MAG. I have been in touch with Jody from the centre of Internet Society or formerly, from India when she wrote, she was employed there when she wrote a paper called mapping MAG, an analysis of the membership, 2006 to 2016. I found this really useful and I think something that we could use and maybe publish as an output of the dynamic coalition if we were to update it. It shows very clearly that the MAG is unduly dominated by the industry and government stakeholder groups, and there is a lack of transparency in the way that the selections are made.
Some of the statistics that she came out with in this analysis are really striking. The technical community has only 5 percent of representation on the MAG over the period that she studied. Industry has about 40 percent representation. Governments also about 40 percent. She also looks at the gender balance, which is very bad. And her conclusion -- I'll read out a couple of short paragraphs from her conclusion because it is interesting. She says the opaque and vague selection criteria for the MAG members and the lack of clarity on their scope and remit led to a deficit of trust. The lack of trust significantly curtails MAG's legitimacy as an effective body for steering the IGF towards developing solutions. Historically there has been failure in documenting the selection criteria for membership, and limited transparency around MAG's decision making process.
The data shairld by the IGF Secretariat confirmed that there were no records of the nomination procedure and that the membership list was missing for a year -- which is incredible -- further there was some confusion on the organisational source that the nominees were representing while serving on the MAG. This opens up glaring questions. One, on what criteria are members selected and rotated? Two, is an objective evaluation undertaken or are representatives hand picked by criteria and priorities defined by the UN?
Three, is there sufficient information on what the UN Secretary General is looking for in candidates? These issues are well-known and documented but there has been no progress on finding solutions. IGF and MAG will benefit from clarifying the issues. Increasing transparency in the procedure and MAG working and decision making will be a huge step towards strengthening and building trust in this unique multi-stakeholder mechanism.
That is just the conclusion of her paper. I would love to be involved in some more work on this. And if we could set aside some of the dynamic coalition's attention to this issue and maybe publishing something as an output, that would be really great. I notice that this dynamic coalition wasn't one of those that participated in the publication of outputs and the issue survey this year, but I would have love for us -- would love for us to do that next year as well. These are some of the things I would like to suggest.
Also I would note that earlier in the early days of this dynamic coalition, there was some question about whether the will accountability of trade negotiations or trade agreements would be within scope. Since then, we have had a lot of attention paid this year to the issue of trade in the Internet. And a number of stakeholders came together to say that they would like to form a separate dynamic Coalition on that topic. So I think that's probably good news in that we can complement the work that each of the dynamic coalitions does, and I think having one that is dedicated to trade in a broader sense, not just accountability but including that, would be able to draw on the work that this DC does and vice versa. Maybe we don't need to devote too much of our own attention to that issue but we can complement the work that the new dynamic Coalition on trade will be doing.
I think that's all I have. If there are questions or comments, I'm happy to respond.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Okay. So I think we are getting a little bit, we are talking about too many things here and maybe we should be more focused on what we really want to do. If we want to pick an issue, for example transparency. Or I don't know, some kind of issue that we can look at with all organisations or do we want to look at one organisation for a period of time and then take action and be involved with that organisation?
So that is what I think we should think about. Corrine, you are next and then Milton.
>> CORRINE CATH: Hi, Corrine here. My capacity is a student at the Oxford Internet institute.
I think obviously the work of the dynamic coalition is super timely. The work on ciefn is a good example. I did research on the Internet task and ran into some of the issues that Jan mentioned. RIPE set up a task force on accountability that I'm on. There's a lot of people in the ecosystem who are worried about this right now. In terms of focusing on one specific organisation or one specific topic, I think it might actually be more interesting to get lay of the land by inviting different individuals to come and speak and have them talk about how they see accountability because it is very clear that there is no one definition of it or one way to procedurally do it. Something that I would be very worried about is saying we are going to focus on just transparency or we are just going to focus on you human rights, because I feel to a large extent sometimes these concepts either get conflated with accountability -- I see the same thing happening with multi-stakeholderism. Some people say we have multi-stakeholder models, hence we have accountability. These are not the same thing.
It is important that we structure the conversation where we understand these are the different actors in the ecosystem. These are the different ways that they approach accountability. These are the different concepts and procedures that go into it when they do it. Then say this is what we can learn from it. On the basis of that, build a next step to move forward on how to ensure accountability for Internet Governance. Just my two cents.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you, Corrine. Milton?
>> MILTON MUELLER: Yes. I think the concept of a dynamic coalition has always been a bit vague. I think it was the attempt of the IGF to assist with something that actually had outcomes that would not be part of the forum. I'm not sure exactly.
What I hear here is not a very clear conception of what the coalition should do. I hear a lot of different ideas. I don't think it's feasible to follow up on all of them unless you come up with a better way of operating.
So I do think it's a mistake to say oh, we only do ICANN accountability here or only do IGOs. The we should be willing to do accountability about any issue that affects any institution within the Internet Governance environment. However, just to go back to the example I gave you about the IRP process, to really know when an accountability issue exists, you have to be deeply involved in these organisations. So when I say, when I hear people say we should cover ICANN, the World Trade Organization, all the RIRs, the IGF itself and seven other institutions, we are clearly in the realm of a not feasible demand on our time and resources.
So could there be some working mode in which we setted up a process by which people report back to us who are interested in different things, and then we focus our efforts on priority issues? I really think we have to grapple with the allocation of resources. I would note that the chair, convene or of this accountability dynamic coalition is a volunteer. This is not part of her job, day job. And it is not part of my day job. I think maybe Matt could be drafted into running the thing.
(Chuckles.)
>> MILTON MUELLER: It's a question of practicality. What are we going to focus on? What are concrete tangible objectives that could be done within the resource constraints that we have?
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you, Milton. Yes, did you have some ideas on what we can focus on? Thank you.
>> I have, but I think it was already in the queue.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Sorry, I didn't see you. Ivan, and then (indiscernible) and then Matt.
>> My name is Kovan, I'm part of the ciefn board but I speak for myself. So so to give some guidance and I like Milton's take on finding priorities. I think one part which -- it is very importance tan to go for the highest value target. We can not look at all of these organisations. I think there is something which should be clarified. And it can be very useful for this developing country to think about, is the -- owe for this DC to think about, it is the value change of how things happen. I will use an extreme example. There are so many less extreme ones happening on a daily basis. Say IETF. If they decide today to say any resolver, which looks up names, after it doesn't find some they should go look at a second registry which will be set up as defined in RFC. That will by pass everything that has been said in work stream 2 and the whole ICANN setup and everything. It can happen in theory.
As it has happened in many, dot Onia happened because IETF put in a special use and they did that because actually a if you, had an implementation which has millions of users.
There is a high value chain, a few browser implement tears, chrome, Firefox, if today they decided to use dot browser for their stuff, it will be there and people m start using it. IETF will add it to special use after some time and it will by pass all of those mechanisms set by ICANN and others. It will be wise to first of all understand, and if you think it's valuable to acknowledge the role of these technical people and this model, and then decide if you want to do something about that, let's think about -- I mean, this should be from various perspectives. Should we hold browser people accountable? Should we hold IETF accountable in a different way? IETF is accountable for themselves an have good measure for that, but IG people don't have any input to that directly. Do you want the channel there? Is it possible to work at IETF, to come up with ideas.
So I think this is the highest value target in this chain which has been ignored for many, many reasons. Biggest reason being ICANN and the names industry are being very visible. Yes, they have a lot around them, but to be honest from my point of view, the reason is because there's a lot of money in that industry. What ICANN does, the importance of the names is not higher than numbers or routing or any of the other technical parts of the Internet. And most of the focus of these Committees as I observed mostly goes to names because the ICANN structure is there.
I I this it is wise to look at wider, like the real role of the technical community and do we want to hold them accountable or not.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you, Kovan. Adam?
>> ADAM: Good morning, Adam peek. First, I think talking about ICANN seems a bit just duplicating something that is going on elsewhere and potentially leads to confusion rather than anything particularly helpful. You bring people into that process but don't have two parallel conversations. I was confused walking in a little bit late and hearing Milton talking again about accountability. It's the third time.
I thought the purpose of this dynamic coalition when it was established and that was some years ago, was really it was about looking at organisations and venues involved in Internet Governance and their different processes and policies, are they accountable, are they standing up to the standards that we think are appropriate? We do have some new standards we worked on, because I did work on ICANN accountability and has moved that sort of thought forward.
I thought it was looking at other bodies working on Internet policy and trying to decide, mapping out what those might be, what their procedures are, what their policymaking processes are. Are they transparent and accountable and looking at people working on them and where are their opinions coming from? What weight should they have and should we trust them?
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thank you. That needs a lot of research, a lot of resources. And we are trying to kind of find out how we can do things with limited resources. I don't think we are -- Matt, do you have a comment on this?
>> MATTHEW SHAOERS: Yes. Thanks, Farzaneh. I actually think Adam is absolutely right, but as you came in a little late in fairness to the panelists we were using ICANN accountability as a point of departure. But I think you're right and that should be the purpose of this dynamic coalition. That is also what we are here to discuss and to talk about.
One thing that might be helpful when we think about how do we understand accountability across the ecosystem is perhaps to look at ways that we've addressed this in the work stream 2 work that Steve was referring to earlier on, where even within the ICANN community the different SOs and ACs, supporting organisations and advisory Committees have different communities and in some ways similar or differing accountability neck nymphs. It might be useful to follow the the work that work stream 2 did, sending out a series of questions, what are your accountability policy and processes? That might be an initial way, maybe we select a smaller group of organisations within the Internet ecosystem and take that kind of approach. It shouldn't be too consuming, but it might be at least a start in the direction that we want to go. Thanks.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: So we draft questionnaires and send it to organisations and they will never answer.
(Chuckles.)
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: But I think that's one way to go. No, I'm just trying to see where we can go. But yes, that is one of the ways, we can put that as a way forward.
Jan, you wanted to make a comment?
>> JAN SCHULT: Yes. Jan Schult.
People raised the question what would the purpose of the dynamic coalition be, looking for a way going forward. You want to do something that others aren't doing and do something that is useful, important. I can think of three possible things. One is, as was already done earlier in regard to the MAG, a venue to highlight accountability problems in the Internet ecosystem wherever they might occur. This would not be the place that actually invests them, it they might identify the problems and suggest that other people do something about it. That's one thing.
Another thing, what IGF is particularly good for is comparing practices. This can be a place where different people from different institutions and different accountability processes, come together this year and say I'm involved in the RIPE and other people are involved with the ICANN. People can talk to each other and learn from each other and help each other forward.
The third thing that comes to my mind, and perhaps excuse me if this is maybe a little bit more academic, but I don't think so. I think it's an important political point. Not necessarily to look at accountability of the ecosystem as a whole in the way that Matthew was saying before, but there is an interesting investigation to say what work is accountability doing in the Internet ecosystem? What is this practice? What is this discourse? What is its role and significance in Internet Governance as a whole? If I can be -- I sometimes wonder, for example, that I never, very rarely hear or much less often larches to democracy in Internet Governance. Sometimes I even wonder whether accountability is almost a kind of proxy or substitute for democracy. But then it only highlights only aspects of democracy, and other things get more shunted aside. Does or do our preoccupations with accountability and they are almost object receive I have sometimes, do they drain attention away from potential attention to questions of justice of various kind? Because we are so wrapped up in all the accountability discussions, so on and so forth.
This may be me as the more critically inclined academic, that's the work that I'm supposed to do. I don't know if something like that is interesting for a panel at the next IGF an get people involved in the accountability processes to reflect on what work in a deeper sense of politics this accountability is doing. I'm trying to identify things that this coalition can do that are not being done elsewhere and those are the three things that come to my mind.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Great. That's helpful. Thank you.
Until now we have discussed having questionnaires about accountability mechanisms of different RIRs or Internet Governance organisations as a whole. So we approach them and also comparing practices as Jan suggested, and also the significant -- also we can look at the significance of accountability of Internet Governance institutions and why it is significant.
Nigel, would you like to speak? Sure.
>> Sorry, if I could make one, Nigel Hicks from ICANN. I think that looking at the accountability of organisations is actually very interesting and important as well. Because I think what we often hear is organisations talking about their mull credentials -- multi-stakeholder credentials and how they take the views of stakeholders into account. There's a lot of difference between taking the views of stakeholders into account and actually working with stakeholders to produce results.
So I am not suggesting that one can do a comprehensive study on these issues necessarily, but I know union sco is doing -- UNESCO is doing some work on this as we speak. There is a real difference here. It is not just Internet Governance organisations. It is organisations that are doing work on Internet public policy. So whether they are UN organisations or whether they are other sort of regional organisations. I think it's quite important to look at that. Thanks.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thanks, Nigel. That's a very good point. So we should look at Internet Governance policy processes. Okay. So the name of this dynamic coalition is the dynamic Coalition on Internet Governance organisations. We changed the name. We can focus on like policy.
Yes? Sure.
>> Okay. So I guess the response to my concern about having too broad a scope and too many things to do was to multiply it to include all Internet policy processes? No, come on! This is the Internet Governance forum. We are going to focus on Internet Governance institutions at a minimum. We cannot be looking at everybody who does public policy. Then you get into 192 nation states. We are not going to be evaluating the accountability of national governments. I don't think we have any standing to do that. I mean, we can all have opinions about that, but that's way beyond our scope. So again, where are we? We need to define a procedure for these dynamic coalitions. Obviously they meet annually. There might be a call for reports or something where people compare and contrast, or people who are following different institutions address their accountability issues or something like that.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Okay. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to compile the suggestions that are being made here in this session and then I hope you will join our mailing list if you haven't joined already. We can start the discussion there and see what we can do and what would be the way forward based on the suggestions we received today.
Are there any other comments?
(There is no response.)
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Okay. So for the past year, let me tell you a little bit about the accountability of this dynamic coalition, because the accountability of the dynamic coalition is normally at the Internet Governance Forum there are three people working on a paper and they come out and say oh, we have this paper recommendation by the dynamic coalition. So I thought since we are the dynamic Coalition on accountability we should not do that. So we have not really worked a lot on any kind of document because people are not active.
So there is not going to be much, like a lot of traffic on the mailing list, but it would be good if we want this dynamic coalition to move forward to follow up and respond to emails and also pick a recommendation and see where we are going. Even if we see that no one has time, we can make it inactive. And later on active again.
So I think we are done now. In an hour? Other comments? Thank you very much. This was very helpful for me. And the dynamic coalition. Thank you, bye.
(Applause.)
(The session concluded at 11:16 CST.)
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FINISHED COPY
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2016
ENABLING INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
GUADALAJARA, MEXICO
09 DECEMBER 2016
ANALYZING THE CAUSES & IMPACTS OF INTERNET SHUTDOWNS
12:00 CST
Services provided by:
Caption First, Inc.
P.O. Box 3066
Monument, CO 80132
1-877-825-5234
719-481-9835
***
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***
>> Hello?
>> We will get started with the panel since all of the speakers are here and we can wait for more people to trickle in as it progresses here.
Thank you, everyone, for being here for this discussion. We have a great panel, I'm Arjun, an I work for a nonprofit organisation that works on civil liberties in the Internet and for awhile now Internet shutdowns have been one of our core areas of work. India is in especially the heart of Internet shutdowns in this context.
To give you a brief introduction. Our Director was originally supposed to be here and chairing the discussion, but she has taken rather ill and had a couple of other commitments and had to fly back to New York. She asked me to convey her apologies for not being able to make it. I'm sure we'll have a great discussion with all the people who are here.
Just a a very brief introduction of our work. Can we have the slides?
(Arjun Jayakumar, software freedom law centre, India.)
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. So as I said, so we have been tracking the phenomenon of Internet shutdowns in India for awhile. You can see on our home page there is a box on the right that contains an Internet tracker, an interactive map that cat on logs where Internet shutdowns have taken place in India before and the frequency of the shutdowns and the reasons behind the shutdowns so people have an easy place to go for this information.
We also have broken up our research snoot separate data sets. We have the info graphics, frin, which represent what kind of Internet was shut down over the course of these years. As you can see there has been a definite increase in the number of shutdowns and it is mostly of the mobile Internet networks. There has been almost no shutdown of the fixed network in India and both are occasionally shut down on occasions. Durations have been increasing. We have seen there have been more and more shutdowns that last for a very long period of time. And we have even this had a couple of shutdowns particularly in the State of Kashmir which is especially prone to political attention, we have shutdowns that lasted for months all together and most of these shutdowns are seen to be reactive in nature in the sense that once a certain event occurs, they go ahead and shut down the Internet to prevent the possibility of vie leeps that breaks out after this event.
We will be launching a new Internet shutdown tracker soon, a stand alone Web site from the international tracker which also givings people an Option to report these shutdowns in a better way. Let me not take any more time of yours in explaining my work as I'm sure we're all here to hear from our eminent panelists.
Today we have Brett sol man, Executive Director of access now and access has been running a successful campaign called keep it on, which has done tremendous work to draw momentum to this issue of shutdowns and got more people talking about the whole issue.
We have Jisella Perez de Archer, public Director at digitals, recently written a paper on shutdowns during shutdowns in laincht she is well placed to talk on this. We have Nanjira Sambuli, who is advocacy member and World Wide Web foundation. She spoke on Kenya's crack down on the Internet in the past. We also have Nicolas side ler, a senior policy advisor at ISOC. At ISOC he focuses mostly on Internet Governance and human rights.
We have Amos Toh, the special advisor to the Special Rapporteur and the U.S. has condemned shutdowns in the past and we are eager what he has to say. We have Mr. Rajan Mathews, the Director General of the oarpts of India and he can tell us how the ISPs are handling the situation and what it means for business in India.
And we have Hibba who is a senior policy analyst at Google, one of the Internet's most widely used platforms, Google probably experiences the most amount of flak from Internet shutdowns. You can also comment a lot on this issue. Final lip we have Jan Rydzak, with the global initiative and he has spoken and written on international shutdowns and written a paper which will be published soon by GNA.
That is our panelists. The format will be there will be five-minute window for each panelist to make their opening remarks following which we will proceed further with the discussion and I'll pose a couple of questions to the panel that we can take up for discussion.
If we can just start from the end of the table since we have no particular, can we start with you, Brett?
>> BRETT: Hi. Thanks a lot for the invitation to join this great panel. And I might start off with a definition if that's okay. It is important that we understand that we are all talking about the same thing. So last year at a multi-stakeholder group got together to formulate text that would capture the concept of what an Internet shutdown is. We are still in in norm development stage, like understanding what is the kind of legal frameworks, what is the wording, the nomenclature that could describe what the words that we should use to describe an Internet shutdown. So we pulled together a group that actually developed this definition. It is not necessarily the definition, but it gives a good sense as we started to develop norms, what they are. An Internet shutdown is an intentional disruption of Internet or electronic couples rendering them inaccessible or effectively unusable for a specific population or within a location often to exert control over the flow of information.
So we could spend a couple of hours looking at each word there, but we have started to see that sort of language used at the Human Rights Council and other entities as those norms get developed. So that as we name this and shape this we also work out what causes it. For the title of this panel, what the impacts are, how to ameliorate them. I want to go directly to Gambia, that is the most recent shut down that I think we have seen. In fact, the end of a subpoenaed and its a successful kind of response to a government attempt to shut down the Internet.
The cause related to an election. I think one of the things we have seen at access now, we've started to audit and track Internet shutdowns over many years, but most recently over this year we've tracked more than 50.
Elections and moments of heightened political activity are definitely precursors to Internet shutdowns. In response we saw an extraordinary amount of international pressure from civil society, from operators, from platforms and from political pressure from governments to respond to this shutdown in Gambia. I think people probably, many people know here an better than I that Gambia, a country of 2 million people, it only has one Internet exchange point, one point of entry. It makes it easier to shut down the Internet.
Really, pleased to announce that it was, the shutdown was designed to end through to last Saturday. The Internet was back up on Friday. A good test there of the way in which all of us work together to try to respond to this threat.
I want to touch on the kind of economic impact, and I think others will more broadly, or more deeply.
The consequences of Internet shutdowns are not just related to human rights. For us as an organisation, we do focus on the right to freedom of expression, opinion, association, privacy and the right of secrecy imparting information, all directly and bluntly impacted by an Internet shutdown. There is also an economic impact. If we start to see some of the documents that have come out over the last month or so, two key documents. One from the GNI and the other from the Brookings institution, looking at the cost. India alone, sneered shutdowns cost $960 million to the economy. If that is an argument enough? Add to all the human rights implications, then we need to start to think about why this is happening and how we can actually respond in a way that brings in the finance sector, that brings in the banking community, that brings in the emergency services and so on. To say this is a multifaceted impact can activity and that activity should come to an preafnld the point we would like to make as part of the coalition, around 100 civil society organisations, is that we should not take Internet shutdowns into our Internet future. We need to relegate them to the past. If we think about land mines, for instance, land mines have been kind of out lawed under international human rights law. It is a similar kind of thing with Internet shut downs. As the Internet becomes such a significant part of every single one of our lives from healthcare to education to water provision to all of the civil and political rights, this taking away of the Internet or taking away of connectivity needs to be relegated to the dust bin of history.
And as part of that and in the process as we do that I think we need to think about measurement. We need to think about how we actually measure an Internet shut down.
There is a growing consensus that we need to develop ways in which we track these disruptions. There is currently no agreed-upon -- sorry about the reverb -- there is no agreed upon sense of how data is collected, where it is collected, the criteria that is used to assess an Internet shutdown.
So we are part of a community that is trying to urnal all different parts of the broader sector, from Google to Facebook to other companies that are measuring Internet traffic to be able to collectively pool that data so that we are able to review when an Internet shutdown takes place so we are able to respond to it.
I'll finish by mentioning the campaign that we have been working on, which is -- sorry about that. Maybe someone who is in tech, can you just ... there's a bit of reverb happening. Don't shut it down
(Laughter.)
>> BRETT: So I think we need some creative solutions in response to Internet shutdowns. Access now partnered with a company called lush, a cosmetics company some of you may know, over the last month or so they and us have produced believe it or not a bath Bank of America, which is what you see when the Internet is shut down. They have a thousand stores around the world, 14,000 staff. Every shop window has an air owe 404 Bank of America on it. We raised thousands of dollars and we dlieferred 5,550,000 signatories to the freedom online coalition. It is that kind of creative partnership around all of us around the table and others, too to put an end to Internet shutdowns once and for all.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you so much, Brett. Nick La,.
>> Hi, nick La from the Internet Society. We are a global NGO advocating for the growth of the Internet and I think like most of us around this table, we have been extremely concerned about the rise of full network shutdowns, partial shutdowns or Web site blocking.
I think during this discussion we will talk about the human rights impact, the economic impact, but just as I know, food for thought for introduction I wanted to introduce the notion of the impact of shutdowns on trust. Trust is a really foundational pillar of the Internet. One facet of trust that I think is essential is the expectation that people, companies and other Internet users have that. You expect the Internet to be sort of always on and available at all times, bearing a few exceptions.
And really, on this assumption that the Internet will be on, people trust their careers on the basis that they will be able to commune eight online. Companies -- communicate online. Companies spend money in countries where they trust they can operate those services. Countries themselves trust that they will be able to conduct trade and eCommerce between their countries and other countries.
And I think that what is true for those sort of economic examples are very true for the social and personal investment that people make in the Internet as well.
So I think the idea I want to leave here is that one single Internet shutdown is enough to plant the seed of unpredictability. One single shutdown can introduce in people's minds the idea that's, well, my Internet connection is maybe going to be cut off on an arbitrary basis. As the saying goes, trust is really hard to get and easily lost. I think one of those occurrences is the pathway that could lead to an enterprise not to be created, a relationship not to be formed, services not to be used. I think that as Brett mentioned there have been economic studies which are extremely useful. I think that they can help advocating in the space. But these are only the direct and short on costs of those shutdowns. I think the loss of trust of people create what we call opportunity costs when it comes to the Internet as well.
We will be happy to discuss further on measurement as well if that is raised. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you, nick La. Can we now have Amos?
>> AMOS TOH: Hi, thank you so much for the invitation to this panel and putting together such a great panel. Thank you too also to Brett and nick La for kind of highlighting some of the, not just the challenges around shutdowns but the gravity of a single shutdown as you mentioned.
I want to maybe just go into, I just have two overarching comments on shutdowns that I think will be elaborated as the event goes on. One is that I think we need to start moving away from this motion, this popular notion, maybe in not in the human rights community but certainly in the general public that a network shutdown only occurs when the telecommunications and the Internet networks are completely cut off throughout the entire country. I think that's what access' definition captures well, the nuances in how shutdowns actually happen and the Human Rights Council resolution passed recently has a far more nuanced and comprehensive definition of a shutdown. Shutdown can be both blanket and surgical, triggered not just for elections and preliminary security reasons but incredibly pedantic ones. We have seen the phenomenon of shutdowns being used as a way to prevent cheating in examinations in many countries. Technically speaking I think states are more creative in initiates shutdowns that evade scrutiny.
So I think these are some of the elements of shutdowns that we need to be more aware about, and we need to increase awareness about. We saw that shutdowns targeting Ethiopia, for example, targeting the Oromo region, we saw shutdowns targeting one small region in Bahrain. There were Internet services in Chad, it is also a shutdown when we see there is intentional disruption to laughs that are so widely use that they constitute significant aspects of the Internet for many users.
I think one thing that needs to be fleshed out more is also the difficulties in detecting shutdowns because sometimes it is not just cutting off access. We have received reports in our office of the truncating of networks. In Dhuraz -- I'm sorry, not problem nobsing -- 4G and 3G networks was disabled and it is an elaborate office effort. It is difficult toll detect. Sometimes the only way you are able to see, you realise you have been able to only send one tweet in an hour as opposed to usually the very many tweets that you send.
Maybe that is a more complicated landscape we are dealing with and a much more challenging landscape.
I will end with these two challenges. One is, one of the key challenges I think is wreaking to what I would term flash mob shut downs. I think that we see shutdowns, most of the shutdowns we see last for a couple of hours or a couple of days. We have certainly seen significant shutdowns that last for months.
But we see kind of these flash shutdowns. It is sometimes very difficult, at least from the mandate's ability to react. By the time you have a meeting or talk to a reporter, it's over. There needs to be accountability and international pressure for a time after the shutdown happens. I think access certainly does a good job of that. The groups around the table have certainly done a good job of increasing accountability. I saw today that the observatory of Internet interference, which performed technical analysis of the shutdown in Gambia last week which provides a key historical analysis point for future shutdowns. My question is, what do we do with the shutdowns that last for protracted periods of time but taken in aggregate can be still really harmful.
The second thing is, the conference, one of the running themes has been the interdependence of civil and political rights and economic and social rights. And this is no more evident, no more concretely evident than in the phenomenon of shutdowns, right? And I think the Brookings institution report has really done a good job of talking about losses to GDP and overall economic growth, but perhaps it's time. Maybe this is already being done, but we need to amplify these voices. Programmes it's really time to talk about how shutdowns affect the individual's right to education, to housing, to health, cuts off emergency services in a way that violates the entire suite of economic and social rights.
So maybe that is something that we can work on together in the future, if it's not already being worked on.
I leave my comments there. Thank you very much.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you so much, Amos.
We now ... (Speaker away from microphone.)
From Google, thank you.
>> Thank you so much. I'm very, very happy to be here, but part of me is a little sad because that means that Internet shutdowns are still a huge problem and despite the amazing work by a lot of folks in this room we have a lot of work to do. That said, I agree with a lot of my co-panelists that bringing together folks from various sectors to come together and think about how we can more cleerm and persuasively articulates the way in shutdowns hamper growth and development is critical and the only way forward on this issue. To brainstorm the ways we can address and collaborate on -- I don't want to speak for everyone, but all of us have a common goal of an open Internet that enables social and comibl froalt and free expression globally. The Internet these days is linked to so many other rights and arenas, it is becoming critical.
Before going into why gule cares about this issue and how we are approaching it I want to reiterate the importance of what some of my panelists have mentioned, which is that I feel like some of us here are very invested in this issue, but for folks not here, they generally hear about shutdowns once every year or every two years when there is a blanket shutdown for an extended period of time. Addressing the issue in a more granular way to include expect shutdowns of blog services, mobile SMS, whatever, I think is an important sort of awareness to help people understand that.
The Brookings study and the global network initiative report have done an amazing job. Some of the numbers in both of those reports are staggering. The Brookings reports 81 shutdowns in the year between July 2015 and June 2016, which is much higher than even I was aware of. Pretty important.
So in addition to working with a lot of the folks in this room and working through the global network initiative, one of the biggest things we as going do to address this issue is supply as much of our own data as we can. We are very, very transparent about when we see disruptions on our services. We show realtime traffic on our transparency report site. If you go to Google.com/transparency/-- sorry,/transparency report/traffic you can see recent and ongoing disruptions of traffic to Google products around the world. You can review current disruptions, browse documented disruptions, break out data by geographic region and product. One of the most useful things you can do, you can export raw data in various machine readable formats so that developers and researchers can take that information, revisualize it, overlay it with other data points to test and draw new hypothesis.
I'm looking forward to this conversation, very, very open to hearing other metrics, other data points that you think would be helpful that we could provide.
I do think that, I can talk a little bit later during the conversation, thinking about different ways in which investors can play a role in this sector and some of my panelists hinted at this, but the social and economic and rights-oriented impacts are interconnected, addressing all of that holistically is critical. The numbers of the costs are very impactful and important, but we need to think about this as, the impacts of this are very, very interconnected.
So I started out on a bleak note but I do think there is real progress on this issue, there's phenomenal work being down. UNHCR's commitment to this is amazing, access now has a great campaign. This is an issue that we can tackle if we continue to have conversations like this.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you so much, Hiba. We have Mr. ...
>> Yes, thank you my name is Rajan an Mathews representing the mobile operators, most of them in India. Let me just give you a few data points before we get into some of the causes. First of all, remember that in India we already have one major network which is the mobile network. In most other countries you have at least five networks. You have a robust land line, you have a mobile network, satellite network, you have a two way cable network, private networks, you have government networks. In India you have one network which is the mobile network: Land line network is only penetrated five to 7 percent, losing share every month.
We have 1.1 billion connections. That's pretty significance can. So this becomes the dominant network by which the government conducts its business an commerce is CCTLD conducted and everything else. That is the context of the role of the mobile network in India. The second point we need to consider, in India and I speak specifically in the Indian context, all mobile speakers and ISP providers are licensed by the government. That means that you stand in the shoes of the sovereign. So you are a representative of the government in terms of the exercise of what you do on, in terms of running your network. So that is the second point.
The third point is one of ethics. I hear a lot of this nuance in terms of when do you shut down and when you don't. Let me give you the 101. When you are studying business ethics, there's a situation that is presented, right? A run away train is on the track. There's a side track and a main track. If there is one person working on the main track would you as the person who had the lever switch it on to the other track? Most everybody said of course I would switch it. The next scenario, there is one person there, a group of people there. Would you then pull the lever? You know, the question most people said of course, I would in order to save the group offer the one. And the third point is, what happened if that one person was your daughter or son? What would that do? There are nuances in terms of making choice.
The fundamental question we have to ask when stannelling in the shoes of the sovereign, what are individual rights and what are societal rights? I think we need to begin to answer this question because I have a great deal of sympathy for the poor chap on the ground, the government, who is called the district magistrate. He by law is required to maintain social order. And there are laws in India which are very, very expansive. Anything that creates societal unrest, religious or ethnic ground or any other grounds, the district magistrate has the right to ensure that there is no societal disorder. All right, so there's wide powers granted in order to be able to do this.
What are the causes in which in India we have shutdowns? First of all, it is for security reasons. If you saw the map of India, you notice that a lot of the shutdowns are in the border areas with Pakistan, China. The other, we have insurgent activity areas, folks who have for whatever reason cause against the government and for that reason conduct various things. Of course, since this is the dom nenlt network, all of that activity happens on our networks.
All right? So that's the security issue.
Mob control. If the person finals out that there is mobs being created as a result of SMS or things going environmental, then of course this is an issue. Let me give you an instance in point. There was an instance of a rape situation in Delhi and all of a sudden there was a mass out pouring of sentiment. And the government and the local police found that they would not be able to cope with the mob response. So they asked operators to shut down SMSs. So we were then in a situation on the government ordering to shut it down.
Another instance, a community issue was a question. In the state, one of the southern states, all of a sudden there went a environmental message which talked about the ethnic not Eastern community taking away jobs and creating problems. All of a sudden there was mass violence that is spreading against the northeast community and the government, of course, then realised it was spreading environmentally as a result of SMSs and all of the other social media. They said please, shut it down.
Third point, another cause which has been suggested or pointed oits cheating, right? Yes? In India, just about access to any major government job or institution is accessed through public exam. All right, so these are strenuous, these determine your future and they determine the future of students and there's massive instances of cheating, most of it conducted by virtue of access to some social media, some messaging service or something on the Internet.
So these are instances when the government, for example shut down vast areas of the Internet shut down because of these types of concerns. These are the areas in which government has used.
Now, what is our response? The community, the operator community said can we be more surgery? Unfortunately we haven't developed the instrumentality on the Internet to be more surgical in terms of what we shut down and what we can leave open and how to control this on a more refined perspective. We are looking for those types of tools as a community to help us to be more surgical as opposed to being so broad based in terms of not saying your only recourse is to shut down messaging or social media or vast access to the network.
The second one is one of law. This is, what do you do if you as an operator are subject to the laws of the country? You are Staning in the shoes of the sovereign. You do have these governmental laws which are on the books. These are acts of the government, where you are responsible for maintaining peace and law and order and societal peace and all of these things. These are difficult issues and any help you can give us, we're always open. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you so much, Mr. Rajan Mathews. Now we could have the views of insurance Nanjira?
>>NANJIRA SAMBULI: Sure. So it is great that we've goop in that perspective and we have been piling on it because now I think we can turn it around and talk about the political situation. This is all very political. The Internet increasingly accepted as a tool for economics, governments respond well to the potential and the economics but the idea of trying to separate civil and political rights. When we start talking about that, even offline it's like okay, let's just calm down these discussions.
The idea that our rights can be strung along in different ways is part of the problem here. These are problems that need political solutions. The question becomes then when the teleco is approached and it's a security issue, the same thing as Kenya, I imagine. We are hypothesizing what kind of situations we have. We have similar contexts. The question becomes in terms of insurgency or in the case of electoral or conflict outcome, are we then fundamentally saying yes, we should be you shutting down the Internet? The name of international security. There are threads here that could risk being normalized the more we engage especially with trying to pull out some of the actors in the political, you know, the political community to understand why that must be the way. It reminds me of an exercise at the Internet freedom forum where we did scenario mapping. You are a politicians who calls the teleco, where is the civil society who should be asked. They are throttled where the civil society actors are. They can't register concerns or protest. How do we get the political community to be involved? I think I am willing to wager we don't have anyone from government.
Okay, great! Or somebody more like from the executive even who would give that order to understand the psychology of why you give that order and why you feel that's the case. Now, the risk we are seeing now is that the risk in the name of national security, shut it down. It is normalizing. My question becomes to a teleco, is there any point of resistance there that they can take on? I understand the law, I absolutely understand the challenges here, but I worry when I hear we should look for tools that would help us with the surgical shutdowns. There's something being normalized. Today it would be insurgency. Tomorrow when I don't like something that somebody is doing and there's a surgical solution, I shut it down. Keeping people off, the divides we have been trying to reduce, we would -- we will have forever lost that battle and the Internet will become where you follow the political spectrum.
As we discuss solutions, how to go forward, the political element is not lost. This is deeply political. I even had a government official to tell me it is their right to defend themselves as a government when they feel the people are attacking them. That kind of rationale, we need to question where is the space to question it. We need to take the discussion to the people ordering it.
And I don't know if I have any offered any solutions, but this is a challenge I felt strongly must be put in context and not lost in the technical discussions. Thanks.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you, Nanjira. Those are some very important points. Giselle, if we could have your views?
>> Hi. Thank you very much. I really like going after Nanjira. I feel you contextlized exactly what I was wanting to say. And I am going to give two very quick examples on Internet shutdowns in two very, very complicated political context. In Venezuela and Ecuador, these are very similar. They started with the hacking of the Presidential or candidates' Twitter accountings. That was the antecedent, but it seemed like power was responding with a shutdown or shutting down certain sites over others with an executive order. It is striking that two of the most authoritarian countries in South America have the same pattern. They have no judicial oversight. In both countries you have an antecedent of Chavez and core raia censoring television and press and the media when they didn't want certain facts going out.
I'm wondering if Internet shutdowns, and they effectively are in these cases, total censorship. It is direct and indirect censorship. Has chilling effects as well. If hacking the Presidential Twitter account, could that be an act of protest? Is it a legitimate act of protest? If I see that somebody hacked it maybe I will be deterred from hacking it again, right?
I'm going to tell you how it went in both countries and to finalize with some reflections in terms of what we could start imagining in terms of public policy. So Nicolas Maduro, the interim President now in Venezuela. He was a candidate. They hacked his account. The Internet across the country was down for 20 minutes, according to users, but only three minutes according to authorities. This was executed by CAM TV, the patent monopoly owned ISP. There we have the first problem, monopolistic state-owned ISPs. That is, we have a lot to discuss there in Venezuela, right?
So that left 90 percent of the population with no Internet, of course, because then you have a monopolistic teleco that is closely linked to the government.
Then another problem, the different physical layers in Venezuela are controlled directly by the central government too. Access to the majority of the pages was reestablished after awhile especially for news and social network sites. That is closely linked and directed to censorship. This is very funny. The vice-president tweeted: Fellow country men, there is no problem with the Internet. Calm down. It was just a brief maneuver to preercht conspiracy hackings from abroad. Yes, Venezuela has electronic voting. The question I really, like this pops into my mind. Are Internet shutdowns a proportionate measure for protecting elections? A, why do you have electronic voting, right? I mean, the electronic voting is complicated as it is, about you that's another topic. Let's not go there with the United States election. It was very -- it is being really controversial, too. Let's leave that aside.
Two, is an Internet shutdown a proportionate measure to protect the electoral process? Probably not. If you are living leaving 90 percent of population with no Internet at all. Aren't there better solutions to make the electronic voting more secure, transparent or whatever? Why were you shutting down the Internet? This is not an acceptable excuse.
Also in Venezuela as sord, protests were escalating, hundreds of blogs and websites were reported as blocked, also Twitter and the associated platforms.
In Ecuador, it was very similar. Somebody hacked in 2014 the Presidential account of Rafael Correira -- I probably shouldn't be saying that, but I think his relationship to Twitter is funny. He is a bit like, I don't know -- he just says what he likes on Twitter. He has a personal relationship to Twitter. He has no community management over there. I don't know how it works. That Twitter account is very important in Ecuador because it is sort of like a direct relationship to the President. And he even replies to trolls and citizens that criticize him.
So the next day hackers post the personal emails from the country's spy chief on a Google hosted blog which contained the classic a none news YouTube protest videos.
Hours later Internet users in Ecuador reported not being able to access Google and YouTube. This is not a shut down itself as it was in Venezuela, but still very concerning that these sites were blocked after a political act and after political protests online.
Also in these countries and in Mexico as well, online protests are increasingly important, given the physical repression that we suffer from policemen when we go out and protest on the streets.
So I am going to leave it there. I could talk also about the what's app blocking. This is not executive order but a judicial order. It is really -- sometimes we just say oh, judicial oversight and Internet blockings or shutdowns, but not really, right? When you have judges that don't understand encryption and how it works and arresting the Facebook's VP for Latin America, there's another problem.
Lastly, in Mexico, we knew with the hacking female emails, the email infiltrations, I had to go through all the Mexico ones. So I knew a lot of juicy gossip. One of them was that they blocked the entire nextel network to block it for their political opponents during the elections in Puebla in the neighboring state. That is not proportionate. It is surreal and out of control. How do you block the entire network so your opponents can't communicate with themselves.
I say we should think about regulation. We can not have state owned telecommunications monopoly. The law problem that was raised before is also problematic. Laws in Ecuador force blocking certain sites given an executive order. How do we harmonise this in terms of a human rights standard that is applicable to enterprises and maybe push them to push back, right? If they are going to get in trouble within national law but is there an incentive we could create so they get in trouble with national law but they prefer to get in trouble with national law rather than human rights law?
I don't know if what I'm saying makes sense but we should think in terms of that. Thank you very much.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you.
>> Hello, I'm Marta from Ecuador. Thank you for the
(Overlapping speakers.)
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Excuse me, ma'am? We do have one final panelist left. So probably can we have your remarks after the final panelist speaks?
>> AUDIENCE: Sorry, I just wanted to comment on her, but never mind.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. We'll just get back to you. Very sorry to cut you off. We final have Jan Rydzak, if you can please --
>> JAN RYDZAK: Hello, everybody. Thanks very much for convening this panel. It's a very good trend that there's more than one panel on Internet network shutdowns at IGF. I think it is a very good sign that this issue is becoming more and more prominent and it is jumping on to the agenda of not just one category of stakeholders, not just NGOs but also state representatives, academics, investors. So it is very important that SFLC should be organizing this panel given that you are a local voice. We have a lot of discussion on the global level, but knowing how the reality of sheds works on the -- shutdowns works on the ground is important. One of my favorite parents of the previous session on shutdowns was optimistic where several participants mentioned some positive trends that we have seen in shutdowns. Of course, the most recent case is in Ghana where President Mohama decided the that the shutdown that was announced fore told to take place would not actually take place. This is to me the most important thing about this particular case is that it highlights the crucial nature of having world leaders who understand technology. President Mahama previously worked in telecommunications if I'm not mistaken. Capacity building in terms of how state leaders view the consequences of their actions is extremely important.
Now, I can go through a few trends that exist in Internet shutdowns. Of course, it's always hardest to go last. All the good chunks have been taken. I'll go through them quick. Is it -- we are seeing more and more shutdowns happening in democracies. It is not a monopoly of nondemocratic countries. The momentum of development of Internet access is stronger in the developing world and in nondemocratic countries, but it is certainly a worrying trend that we are seeing an explosion of shutdowns in countries like India and countries like Brazil.
Fortunately in many of these cases we can count on some counter veiling pressures. If there is a separation of powers and system of checks and balances, hopefully we can at least keep the damage of these events to a minimum. I think a case in point is Brazil here where the shutdowns were ordered by regional judges and quickly reversed by higher authorities. I think that's an important thing to note.
Of course, we are also seeing more prefnlttive shutdowns around such varied circumstances as elections, protests. There was a shutdown, I believe, in Gujurat which was before a wrestling match that takes place annually. So the fact that governments consider it possible to predict the incidence of violence is a worrying trend because it is no longer just reactive to incidents that already have taken place, but it is impossible to predict the future. Even governments do not have the capacity to do this.
Third, shutdowns are becoming more surgical rather than widespread country-wide shutdowns like the Egyptian case are rarely seen and when he do take place like in Gabon, they tend to have a certain property such as being implemented only in certain hours, right? It was 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. in the case of Gabon.
But I think one thing we haven't mentioned yet is that shutdowns are increasingly legitimized by the law of each country. This includes democratic countries. I was reporting a few months back on the inclusion of shutdowns as a possibility, possible reaction in two situations of national security in Poland, my own home country. Many of these clauses kind of slip into new law without being noticed because while there are many, there may be many other controversial clauses beyond that and many times the fact that the government has taken it upon itself to legitimize shutdowns in cases of national security is very worrying.
Of course, the fact that we have a category of shutdowns that don't fit into any other categories is extremely worrying because it is testament to the fact that we are observing more and more arbitrary shutdowns. The example here is the shutdown drill that took place recently in Bangladesh following the attack at the cafeteria as a means of testing the government's reactions in cases of danger.
I think one more thing that we should probably look into as well is the fact that we are talking about overt measures of restricting action. Inaction and inertia are also forms of restricting access. Recently there was a report that it was actually an Article published in the journal of science that demonstrated that marginalized ethnic groups tend to have weaker Internet access to begin with around the world.
This is something that is not captured by current measures because we are only looking at dips in access in places that are used to having it and not those that never have it to begin with. So in this case we must support investment to expand access in these areas which are marginalized on several leafs.
And then one more -- on several levels.
One more thing that wasn't mentioned yet. We probably have several representatives of telecommunications companies in this room. We should also take into account that in many of these restrictive regimes, telecommunications companies are bound by the law. Whether they are state-owned or foreign companies, they are subject to the law of the nation. And in many cases, at least in the interviews I have conducted in the past few months, many telecommunications companies have reported instances of direct threats to the wellbeing of their workers. This is very important to consider this because they are, those who are actually on the ground, whose physical and psychological wellbeing is also implicated in these cases and they are almost always bound to compliance. The most that they can do is typically to request a formal demand from the government to shut down access. So many of these requests are given by phone. And the most that any telecommunications company can do is really to request a written request to have it in absolutely -- to have direct proof that this request has taken place. This creates a chilling effect for other companies.
Finally, I guess I'll wrap up here. We should also, I think it is also time to take a critical look at international law on this issue because there sometimes there is little we can do about national laws, but if we look at Article 19, paragraph 3 of ICCPR, we, one of the -- this Article defines acceptable restrictions to freedom of expression. And it has been recently applied by the UN Human Rights Council to the Internet as well.
One important aspect of that often ignored by governments is the fact that there is a proportionality principle embedded in that Article that has been verified many times over by international bodies. Restrictions must be proportionate. So far we have seen very little evidence that countries actually adhere to this norm.
If we try to pursue greater enforceability of both international law an court rulings on the national level perhaps we will see more action in this respect. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. Thank you, Jan.
So those were a couple of very great remarks from the panel. Before we open it up to the floor for questions I would like to leverage my position as moderator and ask a couple of questions to the panel, actually one question to the panel. So we have seen that Internet shutdowns happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is politically motivated and people want to restrict the possibility of violent protests during elections. Other times, like the Internet shutdowns as shown in India, it is for reasons far more trivial, things like cheating in the examinations given as grounds for shutting down the Internet and also wrestling matches with very loud fans.
These are just figures that represent the number of times the Internet as a whole has been shut down. So I guess my question then to the panel in general is -- the panel in general is at least in India since the enabling factor behind these shutdowns was seen to be the existence of the provision of law which allows the government to take any action to prevent public disorder in times of turbulence like this, do you think that the ideal responses to Internet shutdowns should then look at reviewing and remedying existing laws that probably enable actions like this? Are we looking at some sort of broader action that is not entirely legal centric but is also more about the mind set that permits Internet shutdowns?
Anybody from the panel if you would like to take it up?
>> I'm fascinated by the idea of legal reform because coming where I'm from in Kenya, for instance, it is just something to check the box. If the fundamental software in, the mental software of how the state interacts with its citizens is still flawed, it doesn't matter how many times we amend laws. Preceding the idea that laws that need to be reformed because privacy and security laws are being revised and giving government such Wyatt Bert of what they can do, where can we have discussions proactively. What we are being cornered to is reactive responses and engagements. How do we get the government to engage on why that is how we should proceed, if we are. If they are going to talk about laws and reforming of laws, it is because we have challenged the political thinking. Else we will be here trying to find resolutions in the next IGF, but the fundamental issue has not been addressed.
I feel that the cart does need to be put before the horse. But let's not forget about the political horse that is problematic to the core.
>> I couldn't agree more with that. I do think there's a lot of work we need to do to pave the way for laws to be able to be changed. I don't think we are there yet. I don't think any of us could go into our countries and ask for change on that level. I think there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to link the free expression impact of this with the economic impact of this. I think that we often think about free expression as a nice thing to have, and economic growth is -- yea, everybody agrees on it!
But the fact is that making a convincing and compelling argument that a free, open Internet does lead to substantial economic growth within your country is something we need to do. One of most compel things, if you look at the World Bank's doing business survey and if you look at the freedom and openness reports, you'll see that the cans that are good on respecting human rights are also more conducive to businesses being there, economic growth. That ledgage, I think, is something we need to exercise rather than having siloed discussions about impact there and free expression there.
>> One of the things we've noticed is, people raise their voices only when there's a problem, right? I'm convinced that in India certainly when there was a mass out pouring of anti-governmental sentiment, the government did respond. And it happened over social media and over the Internet and over these public forums.
I'm saying that the old adage, right, eternal vigilance is the price of our freedoms. If you're interested in our freedoms, civil society and our processes must begin to address it in the process of forming niece laws. Or in the proves being involved in changing these laws. Wait and wish that they are going to go away and something magical is going to happen in government giving us access, unfettered access to the Internet is a pipe dream (Rajan.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. Giselle?
>> Sorry. I just want to quickly point to actually the American convention of human rights of the OES has a very explicit note on the, it says Article 13, the right of expression may not be restricted by indirect methods or means such as the views of government or private controls over equipment used in the dissemination of information.
It is very interesting because it will start off, this was drafted in a pre-Internet era, as we know it. But the problem with this again is enforceability within the region. So at least we have a very clear text. As least we know it is contrary to free speech very, very compleerl. How we land that in national laws is the complicated step, politically and legally.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you. Just one final question from my end. So this I think is directed to Brett in particular. Since we have a strong campaign, like keep it on, which is creating great moment around Internet shutdowns, I want to ask: What would be the steps that we take to counter the problem of Internet shutdowns, say in the next three months? Are there concrete action items we are looking at? Technical measures to circumvent? What are we looking at in terms of responses?
>> BRETT: Thanks. Obviously there's a whole lot to do and I'm really glad that the Fellow panelist from India is here because I do think we need to address the national security threat that happens on the Internet. Like we can't just wish it away and pretend there is not a problem. It's true that there is activities that governments and operators need to respond to.
So I just want to acknowledge that. I don't think that civil society actors here are operating in, or thinking about this in a bubble. It's a real threat. It's a question of how we deal with it.
I want to touch on the point around the legality of Internet shutdown stop sign. To note that many of the laws that are actually being used, if a law is being relied upon, in India, for instance, is back from 1885. I mean, that is -- the law that the U.S. President, the new U.S. President incoming will have the power to shut down the Internet based on a law from 1934. And I will add with the U.S. government, it is pretty much a unilateral power that he has in the context of national pearl or war.
And so owe pore I will or -- pearl or war. Laws that have been passed in other environments are then applied in this situation today is rather frightening. The new legalities, the new legislation, the new bills being proposed. Sometimes we see them they are in second or third rating stages in Parliaments before anyone assessed them.
In the terrorist age, having that kind of absolute power is frightening without it being discussed by civil societies or citizens.
Keep it on, those who would like to join, it's a coalition of civil society organisations, around 100 around the world. It's like an alert network where we all advise each other on bills, on shutdowns as they take place in realtime. It's excellent. Come see me afterwards.
One more thing. Many of the operators and ISPs and telecom companies are dealing with this on their own, dealing with the situations where the government asks them to shut down the Internet. One of the things that the keep it on coalition is doing is pulling together a best practices document. Don't just show it in writing bow how do the sectors stand together, to stand up to shutdowns as they take place. ISPs don't want to shut down the Internet either.
We are developing a kit for people to respond, letters to the editor, letters to regulators, mechanisms, arguments that work in response to government and ISP shutdowns, so that we can learn from each other on how to make sure, as I say, Internet shutdowns are a thing in the past in the context of nationality security threats and other threats taking place.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you, breath. Do you have a comment, Amos?
>> AMOS: Two responses. I want to emphasize the point that seems to be emerging from the panel that shutdowns really is a technical means of censorship, right? It is just good old fashioned censorship. And it is just good old fashioned repression and no different from shutting down a demonstration or shutting down a protest.
So I think that framing is incredibly important because then we have to examine the legal and political environments and factors that create and ib sent vice censorship. If there is lack of respect for human rights in other areas, shutdowns are far more likely.
The second thing, on the practical issue, I want to make sure that it is conveyed that the mandate, the Special Rapporteur's mandate not just freedom of expression, but that of human rights defenders, certainly freedom of association, we have open channels of communication with governments and so basely we write letters to governments about raising concerns about allegations of human rights violations. Not just individual cases of shutdowns which we have done so in the past but also legislative proposals that could be conducive to shutdowns and raising concerns.
The good thing about the second group of communications that we publish those communications immediately after we send it to the government in the hope that they can be used by civil society and other stakeholders in pushing back against concerning legislative proposals. So I would like to raise that as another avenue for practical realtime reactive action.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. Thank you. So that was a great discussion. With that I think I would like to open up the discussion to the floor. Please, put up your hands and I will call on you as I see them. I see a lot of hands.
So since I did cut off Madam at the end there in the middle, can we have your comment first? Keep it as brief as possible. We don't have much time.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
I am from Ecuador. So I want to comment to ask is it useful for us as citizens to know when a teleco has been sent notification of shutdown? Maybe they have to comply, but they should notice the citizens that they are doing so. Because in the case that was already exposed here we realised that that had happened because there was a whistle blower from a client of a teleco, a big client of a teleco who had complained for the shutdown. They have the letter of the teleco telling them that it was an executive order, not just to the teleco which was tele-fonica, but to all the association of Internet providers are in Ecuador. Sometimes you feel you're a bit crazy because you think you cannot connect, that you cannot reach some places. At least one of the good practices should be if they had to comply with the governments, if they seem to be forced to do that to shut down, at least to let the people know. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you. So I think the gentleman that had a question. So can you?
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, my name is -- I'm representing the telecommunications industry dialogue. Before my invention, maybe a response to the lady from Ecuador. Maybe not, I don't know about that specific case. But in general as someone said here, a teleco is never pro a shutdown because communications is part of our business and we also have a will to respect and promote freedom of expression of users.
So it might be so that the operator that received the request is bound by confidentiality, right? Cannot say, cannot comment on the shutdown. So it might be so that the operator in a case could contact its biggest client to tell the world about the shutdown.
I don't know if that was the case here, but that might be a scenario.
So when we discuss these issues on network shutdowns, they are complex already here in the room, but I can assure you that many times they are even more complex when there is a situation. Maybe Talibans on the border or whatever.
Most specifically so it is complex and very sensitive for people locally in that country, which includes the colleagues, my colleagues locally in these countries.
So what is important in the cases of major events like this is that there is an escalation procedure within the country so that the decision is not taken only locally by those colleagues and management that are under pressure.
It has been discussed that the most important for us is to find ways before there are requests for shutdowns, such as multi-stakeholder collaboration, good new laws, procedures, policies, et cetera.
That is the most important. But what to do in the specific case. Well, there are things that can be done. Seek transparency, seek to delay, ask for clarification, call for a meeting, reach out to peers, reach out to other stakeholders, point to the costs.
Here is my conclusion then. We have all the -- I mean, many of us have policies. We have a multi-stakeholder collaboration with the industry dialogue and the GNI, et cetera. But what might be needed in the specific crisis situation is a one-pager to the local decision maker to will telecom minister or whoever is in charge. Maybe in the next case it is not a telecom minister who is IT savvy an knows about these issues. It might be someone who needs the arguments on a one-pager. Maybe that is an action point for us all, to create a one-pager that can be handled over to the decision maker in the moment of crisis. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you, sir.
I believe, yes, ma'am?
>> Thank you, everyone. Good morning. My name is Priscilla and I'm a terld prosecutor owe formed prosecutor from Brazil of the. I have the blessing or quote, I don't know, hard to balance to work with child online porn and hate crimes through the Internet and I think what we are talking about and I don't have a question, just wanted to share with you guys what happened in Brazil recently with the shutdowns of what's app. We are in the middle of this. So what happened is that when you have, I think it was nick La who told about trusting the Internet. I think it is totally true, with trusting the Internet, with using the Internet, but I think what we are talking about are the bills of privacy, of security, bills from both sides.
Unfortunately, it is not everyone that used the Internet that had that trust. Sometimes the abusers who commit crimes and damage very severe crimes against children. And what happened in Brazil, we have a law called (Spanish phrase.) that predicted some penalties when the ISPs don't collaborate with in investigation. Under law, under judicial orders. I want to clarify the breakdowns, the shut downs was judicial in Brazil. There were three recently in the last few years. What happened is that for initializing an investigation, we need this information. I am not talking about cryptography now. I'm talking about metadata, sometimes it's true what you said. The judge, I don't want to be unfair with all of the judges in Brazil but the fact is the majority of them doesn't understand about the Internet. Imagine about cryptography.
What happened is that when we can't investigate a crime and there is a judicial order not responded by ISPs, there are some penalties. Our vision, the prosecutors of Brazil as has a vision for not prejudicing, all the people put in prison, the whole society because of one criminal, someone that abused the privacy and trust in the Internet. We prefer and we are trying to train some judges and policemen and law enforcement about this. Please, use the economic block. If you have something, it is against -- not against, I could not say against ...
(Off microphone.)
>> We still have some problem, let's deal with the foundation of the problem, not the society. When it works, the financial block, when it works the penalties against some firms, against the ISP, it's okay.
And if they don't answer, there is a law in Brazil that obliges the services that is in Brazil to follow niece rules.
But in what if? I would say it is personal, I would say it is over measure to shut down even judicially. If I do the same question for a mother who has a child raped and abused and there is this on the Internet, if I ask the same question to the mother, do you think it's over measured to shut down to save our child p and gather this information? I don't really know the answer. I just want to finish. Sorry, I'm over, passing my time here. I want to say to you there is a public note from the federal and state prosecutors in Brazil. It will be in our Web site. I'm open to you. You can Google it, public note of prosecutors in Brazil. All I'm saying is that we indicate presm and preferentially the economic block. Let's not prejudice anyone. This is what I want to tell. I'm totally open to some solutions.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you, ma'am. I believe, ma'am, you had a question? You in the glasses? Yes, sorry.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. Okay? I am from Venezuela and I want to make some comments on her invention and also somebody here was talking about economic shutdowns. I want to comment on that. Regarding the 2013 shutdown, it lasted about 20 hours indeed for the electoral Council Web site. It was unavailable for about 20 hours from overseas. And it lasted about 35 minutes in the country. And the important thing I want to point out, it happened at the moment the polls were supposed to cloassments people were announcing the government, pro government activists were taking over the poll to stop from getting closed at the moment. So there was some violence, taking over the polls at the moment and there was a lot of conversation about that in Twitter. That was the exact moment that they took down the network.
And the Vice-President in an official statement, because it was broadcast by all the national public media say it was because they received threats from European hackers who were threatening to shut down the national Council Web site. That is his allegation of the reason why he made the decision. By the time the Vice-President was the, these were high level decisions for someone who is not in charge of telecoms or Internet. Just for clarification because it wasn't that precise in the information.
And regarding the comments people were making about old-fashioned shutdowns, I want to point out we are getting updated shutdowns. In 2015 and 2016 we are see what you are talking about here. In the recent years, 2015, 2016, what we are seeing is not exactly complete shutdown. But very localized shutdowns in very specific areas and with demonstrations or happenings and somebody talked about flash mob shutdowns. We are seeing those happening. In the last five minutes, ten minutes in a place with a demonstration, with police abuse. We also are seeing something that is kind of different, but it is giving the same effect. It is trunk -- when it is a, it is not shut down so it is not reported by Google or anything else, but it is working. But it is so slow, nobody can use it.
(Throttling.) we should take into consideration those kind of techniques when we are talking about shutdowns. They are getting more sophisticated and the conversation is getting behind what they are doing right now.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Yes.
>> Thank you. My name is, I work for the media in Zimbabwe. I have two precise questions. Firstly what is the role of the regulator in this whole Internet shutdown dilemma that we have? Should they be playing a part especially in the terms of accountability? When you look at the case of Zimbabwe when we had our Internet shutdown there was no accountability. We didn't know who was supposed to account for it and so I just wanted to be find out that.
Then the second thing from an African point of view, there have been so many Internet shutdowns in Africa, but we don't seem to be having a regional reaction response to it. What should we be discussing in terms of a global or regional strategy? What are we saying in terms of accountability at regional and global level? We've come for this particular forum and we have had quite a number of sessions on Internet shutdowns, but what are we saying?
Then the last one pertains to the Special Rapporteur's report on the role of the Internet service providers in respect of human rights. And I have been listening with interest in terms of the ISP, telecoms, service providers. Do we feel take we should actually be holding them to account, and how? Especially given the dilemma of compliance provisions within their existing legislations.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. Can we collect maybe one or two more questions and then have the panelists respond to it? You want to state yours, and your question?
>> AUDIENCE: All right. My name is Moez from Strathmore University. We have been tracking what is happening especially in the region. I want to raise the question of data sources. I really have to commend Google for their public facing transparency report on traffic. It is usually a go to place to check what is happening in that country. It is a challenge to other companies that have presence in most of these countries that are experiencing this. They can easily, you know, openly avail that data because actually most of them are the ones who gain when the Internet is on. There ought to be that sense of responsibility to the citizens that we can offer this data.
Hopefully, even taking it further, instead of just giving the national level traffic, maybe a heat map of the country so people can see without necessarily giving that.
Point number two has to be the work we do at Strathmore with open network observation. It has UNI -- ONI. We try to have probes in the country to see what is happening beyond just the on/off question of having the network Internet. Even when you have the Internet back on, you have issues of censorship of websites, regional problems. If there is anyone else maybe from Africa or other countries who would want to actively help us have the probes and plug it into their country, that would be really great. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you. Can you please keep ... keep it very brief? We have literally five minutes.
Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I'll be brief. My name is (gives name.) I work in this field in Venezuela. I measure and document government censorship. The main difficulties changing in the field because of the changing motivations and impacts of how governments are doing censorship. I'll just refer to one, which is how many of you commented about the shutdowns now are becoming, pages to the point where they are no longer useful for the intended purpose. You may be able to load the Web site or the app may have somethingb but the purpose of the Web site is not doing what it is meant to do. It hard to know if the -- the services may know they are being throttled or see a difference but from the ground it is hard to measure. Often times the companies that run niece appliances or services are not as interested in sharing this information as openly, frequently and fast as the civil society could. They have conflicting interests when, they don't want to go out and say we are being blocked and damage their relationship or reputation with governments. I commend Google on their efforts in sharing their traffic transparency, but even hard it is gather this information yourself and compare it with their services to know whether that actually is going on or reacts faster. Build it into a more cohesive measurement strategy like what Moez was talking, where you can gather all of that information. How can we convince these big companies to measure that? Even if the governments had the, the companies have the best intentions, I want to share everything as fast as possible, you might not be able to detect when that censorship or that shutdown is happening in a small community because the percentage is too small in the whole big scheme of things.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you. So I think that's about all the time we have for questions. If anybody from the panel would like to respond to the questions, the role of the regulator and the regional responses?
>> So very quickly from the operator's perspective, in India the regulator is an arm of government, right? So no regulator is going to take a position contrary to the dictates of the government. They are two separate arms of the government. There's very little that you can hope for from a regulator (Rajan.) going outside of the arms of government. So the regulator is not going to go to the judiciary. The operator is going to have to go to the judiciary as an independent arm.
Regional responses, I don't know. I will have to talk with -- I'm a little touched by this notion that censorship is something new. We have been faced with censorship from age old domains. I think we ought to say yes, of course, the Internet is a different kind and in terms of expansion. But I think we have to be a little more nuanced. It is the middle we are concerned about, not the extremes. We need more finite responses in terms of the middle. We agree that shutting it down completely is bad and leaving it open completely is not viable. So what are the nuances between the gray and the gray.
>> I will pick it up from there. I am excited about the keep it on coalition, but if we are going to be talking to the politicians they will not listen. To Kaliba's question, it is about the power dynamics. He is great aims us, but with the people who are going to take the phone, place the order, and it's happening, where are they? If we don't take the conversation to them. It is not going to be pretty. You know, it is not an easy discussion to have. To understand why they are doing it that way, we will keep coming back here. It is not surgical but it is the context we are operating in.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Okay. I think then ...
>> Thanks a lot. First of all, I think it is amazing to see the expressions we had actually in the audience today. It is a great testament to the diversity of the IGF.
Two quick final thoughts. When we talked about governments and especially capacity building of judges, that is a very important thing. The Internet Society is going to invest in the LAC region to educate judges, what are the implications of decisions that affect the way the Internet works. I think that's a very important thing to do. Still on the government side I think taking sort of the whole of government approach in advocacy strategies and in particular I think we should reach out more to economic ministers and trade ministers, for example. They may have interests that are much more in line with keeping the Internet on than other services.
So I think that's an interesting approach as well.
Finally well talked about data coffers sources and traffic, when traffic goes down. We haven't discussed much here attribution. How do you know that the shutdown is a government decision, is it a DDOS attack? An electric outage? That is something that four advocates is important to be able to have that information and find good second resources that can validate one way or the other in a timely fashion so they can respond. And there might be strategies that go from monitoring social media to actually one of the most effective ones is the network of people on the ground who are able to gather information. That is a very important aspect to invest in.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: Thank you. So we have been told that we have one minute left.
>> I'll take 45. So two quick points. One is (Amos.) I wanted to collar, I don't think there is any gray area when it comes to shutdowns. The Human Rights Council itself has condemned unequivocally any restriction of the of information. I don't think there's anything such as a proportional shutdown. There is a clear outcome here that we need to work towards. Second, on the question about the UN Special Rapporteur's report and the responsibility of telecos, stay tuned to 2017, when we will conduct a deep dive analysis. I want to say companies in the TID and GNI have shown some level of welcome commitment in sharing strategies. Those need to be social ltd behind their own members. The second thing I want toed a, it is not just telecos and ISPs. We have to look at the responsibilities of network equipment providers, Internet exchange points and submarine providers. Thank you.
>> ARJUN JAYAKUMAR: I would like to thank all the panelists for this wonderful discussion. We have learned about shutdowns for many regions, many reasons, and parts of the equitable snerms including disruptions this is a clear and arduous effort. And I hope you join us on keeping the Internet safe and open. Thank you all for your contributions. Thank you.
(Applause.)
(The session concluded at 1333 CST.)
***
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FINISHED COPY
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2016
ENABLING INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
GUADALAJARA, MEXICO
NEWCOMERS TRACK
09 DECEMBER 2016
13:30 CST
Services provided by:
Caption First, Inc.
P.O. Box 3066
Monument, CO 80132
1-877-825-5234
719-481-9835
***
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***
(Standing by.)
>> ANYA: Hi, everyone. This is my last kind request. For those of you who will attend the Newcomers Track, please take your positions at the table. Yes, please, also you. If you could join us and take one of the chairs? So as you know, -- please, go ahead.
(Pause.)
>> ANYA: Hi, everyone. Let's officially start. I know it's the last day. Many of the participants already left the venue. But I would like to thank you for staying until the very end with us.
This session is probably more important to us than to all of you because it is a feedback session. We wanted to hear from you what do you think about the Newcomers Track and should we continue with this practice for the next year? And if so, what should be improved.
So if you don't mind, I am going to suggest to start immediately with you giving us feedback. So please, tell us your name at the beginning, your affiliation and then some concrete proposals and feedback on how we should improve this and should we in any case continue this? Maybe from Sebastian. He's with us from the very beginning.
>> SEBASTIAN: All right. Good afternoon. My name is Sebastian Pensus. I'm here with Euro Dot, the EU domain registry. I would like to thank an I can't and bang for the tireless work they've done. Coming to my first IGF was a little bit nerve racking. Wondered how I would navigate such a large event. The cafes allowed me to meet with people from civil society, private sector and doing so in a smaller setting allowed for interesting discussions to go on alert when I ran into them either in other sessions or just walking down the hall.
The world of Internet Governance is really large and complex, and having this Newcomers Track for me at least has been a very valuable tool towards helping me find my footing and gain confidence in order to interact in the larger sessions during the week.
I would love to see this continue at the future IGFs. As an idea for last year I would like to propose a Newcomer cafe where the Newcomers talk to each other. Giving them the opportunity to ask or answer questions and to begin their IGF participation by getting into the flow of things and knowing their peers would give them some confidence to step up to the mic a little bit later.
I heard a lot of of discussion during this IGF about how we can get the youth encouraged and involved in the participation of sessions, and I think that the first step to do is to give them a forum where they can find that first footing and the courage to get the first intervention at the microphone out there. Thank you.
>> ANYA: Will thank you so much, Sebastian. I will have a couple of questions, but later after this round.
>> BIANCA CHRISTINE HO: He also made his first invention, a first intervention at a main session, just now.
>> ANYA: Okay! Can we move now to ...
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, everyone. My name is Sabrina Anhaga. I come from France and represent IGF in France.
I participated in the organisation of the youth IGF forum in France with my colleague, Ted here, who will present after. It is my first IGF. So I had a lot of expectations and now I am also come here to deliver the youth message from France. Thank you.
>> My name is Ted and I'm not going to repeat what Sabrina just said. I could say exactly the same thing. I totally agree with the idea of Sebastian. I think because me and Sabrina are new in the Internet Governance systems it is difficult to step up and having more confidence with something like that would be a great thing, I think.
Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Raquel Marcos and representing the global foundation with my colleague Victoria. We unfortunately couldn't make it before. We just a whiffed r riffed yesterday. I can't give you much feedback about the Newcomers Track. This is our first time at IGF. Yes.
>> ANYA: You with respect not part of the Newcomers Track but this is your first IGF. What is the most challenging thing for you about participating at the IGF?
>> AUDIENCE: Well, we don't come from the Internet community. So we are just here to learn really. So everything is a challenge.
As someone was saying in the main session, reshaping Internet Governance, all the acronyms are quite challenging
(Laughter.)
>> ANYA: All right, thank you. Carlos?
>> CARLOS GUERRERO: Hello, everyone. My name is Carlos. I'm Mexican, come from here as well as -- I think this is very importance tan, the Internet Governance. I'm a creator of Homochie that hook the mind to the cloud computing, cloud sers s. I'm here to see how is the Internet going to be like all of those topics about fragmentation and privateisation of the Internet, how there is going to be security of the information. I think those are very important topics. Thanks.
>> ANNA: Thank you, Carlos. I will wait for the colleagues to take their position. We'll move to the other side of the table and come back to you.
>> ANNA: I don't know the name, but I can say ... no, the colleague at the beginning of the table.
>> I'm Anna come pa nick from the Internet private enterprise in Washington, D.C.
>> I am eel Jan rids Rydzak from the University of Arizona.
>> ANYA: What do you think about the Newcomers trag and do you think it's needed at the IGF? For the first time coming participants?
>> JAN RYDZAK: Is that a question for me? Oh, for both of us? Well, I guess do you want to start? Yeah.
>> It is actually the first Newcomers session but I am particularly interested as a Newcomer. The conference was obviously interesting and rich. I'm interested in what are the ways of staying connected in topics we are interested in between events. That's the main reason I'm here.
>> JAN RYDZAK: I guess I have a similar line of argument. This is the first time at IGF and also my first day at IGF and also my last. One of the things I'm interested in since I represent academia and civil society to an extent, I would be most interested in how to engage with other environments outside of academia. Because I'm used to an extremely academic approach to conferences and I think the greatest value in IGF is really the combination of different stakeholders and so just kind of reaching across the borders is what I'm interested in.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello? Is that working? Yeah. My name is Sophie Tomlinson and work for the international Chamber of Commerce which is a world business association with members in over 130 countries. It is cross Seck tomorrow, all different sizes of business. When we participate at the IGF, we are working through an initiative called business action to support the Information Society, which is the initiative of ICC.
And bang and an I can't invited me to participate in the private sector Newcomers Track, I think it was on Tuesday. And I am just here to give some general feedback on that. It is my third IGF. I am not a Newcomer but I still feel relatively new. There are so many people who have done IGF from the start. I thought that session was great to have that kind. Knowledge cafes. At ICC we are always trying to bring different business partners together at IGF. It was interesting for us to see who from business was participating, who is not one of our members and see how we could collaborate.
Going to the point that you said about, you know, when you are not from the Internet Governance or technology sector, across all different stakeholder groups, it's key at IGF that we try to get people like you here. When we are, when there are panelists on main sessions and things like that, keeping in mind that there are people in the room who aren't in the kind of close knit Internet Governance circles. When they give their remarks, putting things in context and in the big picture outside of the IGF why these things matter.
I'm wondering as a general question, have you got any Newcomers about the remote participants? That's also we are probably seeing a lot of participation.
>> BIANCA CHRISTINE HO: We open for remote every day. Not many people join. But one thing we have used to communicate is the mailing list. Other than this forum where we can share our thoughts, we will send a survey a little later for the remote Newcomers. That's also an area that we want to address in the future.
>> ANNA: Thank you. Sophie, can we move on now?
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, everyone. I am Gassia, coming from the Republic of Congo. This one is my first global IGF, but it is not my first IGF because we had an African one and I was a Fellow for the African school of the IGF. That means that I was already familiar to some terms related to the IGF.
But what I'm going to talk about is maybe the fact that I am coming from a French company, Francophonal country. It is not easy for us when we are coming here to, even in the African IGF it's the same thing. You have translator maybe just in the main room. And in the other rooms you don't have it.
I have a background helping me to understand things according toe freedom of expression, according to human rights. So when it is coming to technical discussions or meeting, I am kind of being lost. Even if you are explaining something because, for example, here we are all going to speak in English. The panelists they are going to speak in English. The time I'm going to understand what they are saying because it is not in my background, it is not easy at all when you are a Newcomer.
And it is also the same thing, for example now I am going to say I'm the only one Congolese here. When you talk about remote participation, trying to talk to your friends in the Congo saying I'm in Mexico, you can follow us on the net. And they are just saying yes, you're right, even now you can even see it.
I'm speaking, it is in English and even on the Internet, it is just in English. So it is not easy even for people in our countries to follow us. So that is what I can say for the moment.
>> AUDIENCE: Good an, I'm Maria Madura, I'm from the yiewrt of galled and I'm Mexican. This is my first IGF. It has been a great experience from the day zero I have been here.
And I have to admit, I had no clue what is this going to be about. So I was just like open to all experiences and it has been really interesting. It changed totally my perception of the Internet and of some organisations from around the globe. So I can say that I am very grateful for this opportunity. I thank you because you make us feel like we are part of the group, part of something, inside of this big event.
So my recommendation for next year would be to give more diffusion or more publicity to these kind of events. Many people from many different sectors would be interested incoming to these meetings. You can learn a lot. You can meet a lot of people and you can get in touch with important organisations around the world that may enrich each other. Thank you very much.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. I'm Victoria. As rack El said we work together at the global challenges foundation. We focus more on global catastrophic risks such as climate change, but we are here to learn from the innovative Internet community on how to approach the problem of forming a multi-stakeholder framework. And global governance in general and how you tackle this.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, all. My name is Maria, I'm from France. I work at orange, the orange company, the teleco. It is my first IGF, of course. My believe is that this proposal to be continue is a very good idea. It is a very good idea to meet new people and to try to create this feeling of -- of what?
(Laughter.)
>> AUDIENCE: -- of being together and understanding how it works. And then I think really it is a very good idea.
I have seen that you have put a direct link to the Newcomers on the Web site. This is a way to let people be aware of that, on the fact that it is interesting. And it means also there is a means to communicate on it. I rather feel it is, concerning the issues that are dealt with here in terms of public policy because it is my job. Then that's okay for concerning this point.
But what I'm trying to do is to understand IGF, how it works, because my objective is to contribute as much as I can in the future. Thank you very much.
>> AUDIENCE:
>> Michael is not a newcomer, probably a well-known name. He is helpful to the IGF and involved in our prossments I invited Michael basically as our guest here to share his experience because he used to be a Newcomer. How did you engage with Inter-Sessional work of the IGF?
>> Michael: Thank you very much, ania. I'm an ISOC returning Ambassador. So this is my second IGF and it ipse kind of funny because I am highly involved now in the Internet Governance ecosystem but I didn't even know what Internet Governance was until last August, let's say. I always joke with, now, for instance, this is the second year I have been involved with an initiative, the best practices forum on IXPs, which is Internet exchange points, sorry for the acronym. I also didn't know what an IXP was at the beginning of last September. So one thing that I found when I first started getting involved was that the community was largely very welcoming. They were quite happy to see new blood, new energy coming into the IGF. It wasn't just me. It was many others.
With that said, I remember quite well how, because other people were looking out for me and trying to get me involved, I felt much more encouraged to do so as well. So something take Anya wanted me to talk about was the Inter-Sessional work. What we have to understand is that the IGF, at least the global IGF, actually regional and national initiatives as well. It's not just one meeting where people come and we discuss things and go home. The fact is, first of all, everybody has a different perspective to bring to this. The Internet is not just the technical functions. It is not just how it affects something like net neutrality. It affects everything. I was happy to hear that you all work, Raquel and Victoria, you work on global issues. I have been going ovulately, but talking a lot lately about climate change and how the Internet and energy are relevant to the climate change discourse, something that we don't talk about here, but we can.
The point is everybody has a unique perspective to bring to the table, whether it's a youth preace, whether it's relevant to -- youth perspective, whether it's relevant to user location, that you're from Congo, and I don't know anything about Congo, so it's good that you are here and you have a lot to contribute. You probably have a lot more to contribute than you realise.
On that note, let me talk about the Inter-Sessional work. Like I said, the IGF r IGF is not one meeting. It's a process. Think of the IGF as being the culminating experience, in the sense that we neat once a year. We actually are meeting in many ways to talk about some of the developments from the past year, but also in many ways to have that physical meeting to discuss the work that we have been doing.
What I mean by that, I'm sure by now you are familiar with the best practice forums and familiar with the dynamic company legislative proposals. I don't know want to talk down to anybody. That's what I mean.
So this work that is done, it's meant to be building on addressing problems that are relevant to the community and finding multi-stakeholder solutions that then can address these problems. For instance, I'm involved in two of the best practice forums.
By the way, please understand about my background, like I said, I didn't know Internet Governance. I have a bachelors and masters in sociology. There is a piece that somebody had written a long time ago, they said the advantages of being useless. Basically, I was never really anything, but because of that I was able to find my place in this community. For instance, I am not technical in nature, but yet I do a lot of the proof reading because I used to work as an editor. I do a lot of the proof reading on the best practice forum documents.
What else do I do? I do a lot of consulting, but the point is that I found a way to contribute. Then by doing so, I actuallien up learning. So it kind of builds on itself.
I wrote about this recently. I wrote an Article and published it in Diplo Foundation called I am not a technical person, but I don't need to be.
When I worked with the best practice forums, I kept getting such good feedback from others -- by the way if I talk too fast, let me know. I get excited.
So the people that were technical in nature, I kept getting feedback from them saying we really appreciate that somebody that isn't familiar with the acronyms, somebody that is not familiar with border gateway protocol and IPv6 can read the document and understand what they are talking about because the fact is it is our job, it is part of our job to make these issues ones that are digestible for the general public. That is not done through jar done gone and technical speak and what not. It is dlown language and engagement and interaction. Whenever -- if there is a topic that interests you, get involved. That is the best advice that I can give you. I will do my absolute best to make sure that you feel welcome and feel included. If there is ever -- I'm sure that so many others in this community will do the same. I hope that my experience can reflect yours, because the best -- we get so excited when somebody that we don't know starts getting involved. They are like: Yeah, what can I do? Not everybody here is a youth, but especially youth, I always try to tell people: How can those of us who have a lot of time to use on meaningful things help those without that time. I don't have a family. I don't have a lot of commitment. Most of my commitments of Internet Governance, meaning I have that flexibility. Many of you do as well. That means we can really have something to offer those people that have families, that have a lot of commitments already. In turn they can offer us mentorship which is so important. Not just knowing a face at the next meeting but knowing that you are committed to these processes, knowing that you are going to learn and knowing that we are all investing in the same process. We are here to make the Internet a better place, something better for humanity. So that takes work, but it takes a lot of -- it does take time. But I mean, I can't believe that I know as much as I do now about Internet Governance and it has just been a year and a half. Like I said this is my, my last Internet Governance Forum was last November.
I do encourage you to get involved and stay involved. The Inter-Sessional work is open to everyone. That is the dynamic coalitions, the Internet practice forums the policy groups for connecting the next billions. We need your voices. I am eel telling you we need your help. We can't do it our sells. Many of us are spread thin with our personal and professional commitments.
With that I'll give it back to the chair. Sorry if I talked too much but I care about this space and home you care about it as well if you don't already.
Thank you.
>> BIANCA CHRISTINE HO: I think the beautiful thing, you might be a Newcomer now, but next year you're not. You can totally do the same thing that others have been reaching out to you. That's something that you can carry on. I wanted to make that quick point.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
>> ANYA: Thank you for your feedback. Me and Bianca were taking a lot of notes.
Let me talk about what Michael said, the IGF Inter-Sessional work. What is the process for engaging with the Inter-Sessional work for next year's IGF. After that I will come up with one complete proposal that last night came to my mind. Michael mentioned the best practice forums. Day zero we explained the logistics, dynamic coalitions, the NRIs, connecting and enabling the next billion project. Let me not go through the lonl is particulars of those Inter-Sessional activities but concretely say how you can engage. The dynamic coalitions are fixed. They don't depend on the MAG, which means that the MAG doesn't decide, they are not part of the Inter-Sessional programmes as such. There are 16 dynamic coalitions on many different subjects. If you any of you are interested in discussing and engaging on experts on child online safety, libraries, gender, block chain technologies, human rights, different kinds of human rights perspectives that are represented, under 16, the dynamic coalitions, everything you have to do is contact the IGF Secretariat and we will put you in touch with the leader of those groups. They are expert groups, expert teams gathering different organisations, different stakeholders and working on kind of reviewing what is happening on certain topics and presenting it here at the IGF. The DCs had yesterday in the main session. I don't know whether you attended but in any case they were presenting their work.
If you are interested to be engaged with any of the national or regional or youth IGFs that exist in your countries, there are 79 of them now. They are all listed on the Web site. Everything that you need to do is contact the IGF Secretariat again and they will put you in touch with the organisers of the NRIs. They are a wonderful world in Internet Governance that exists in different countries, regions. And they are doing what we are doing here, just on a national, regional level and they have their own Inter-Sessional activities. To me, I have been working very closely for almost the last two years with the rights, what you don't see at the global IGF, you see a tangible output and the change because it is on a lower level, more specific.
>> BIANCA CHRISTINE HO: You can also engage with --
>> ANYA: The best practice forums depend on the MAG. The MAG every year, when it is organised they decide on whether they will go with the best practices and if so, with what kind of topics. This year we had the continuation over the last year's best practice powrms. We had four best practice forums that I mentioned on day zero, but there is a variety. There is some of them are more kind of oriented on the technical side. Some of them are oriented on the on the grounds side. If you are interested in Jeb der and abuse of -- gender and abuse of women online there is a best practice forum on it that is gathering a lot of contributions and drafting the recommends and the output document that teals -- all documents are available on the IGF Web site.
To any of the best practice forums please contact the IGF Secretariat. We will put you in contact with the Coordinators for the best practice forums. They are all being led by the IGF Secretariat's consultants mostly which are the experts on certain topics.
There is one very interesting project I think which is, I think they had yesterday or today, the session. Connecting and enabling the next billion. Last year we started this project to deal with access and connectivity from the perspective of the global IGF. We were reaching out to different stakeholder groups in different countries and regions to see what are the problems with connectivity and with access. Then we were gathering the contributions, putting it in one document and presenting it last year in Brazil.
It was so welcomed by the community, the work has been continued this year, but it was somehow inted through the NRIs, which we all liked because we were consulting certain countries, certain regions to see what are the issues with the under connected, with the non-connected and you can see it in the outcome document. The colleagues working on pulling everything together in one document had a lot of challenges. The issues are so different.
How you can engage the CNB has its own work teams as the best practices. You can contact the Secretariat and we can put you in contact with the organisers.
For the next year, we still don't know who the composition of the MAG. As soon as the MAG is established they will have their first meeting and they will decide on the annual programme it self. That is your first step, just to kind of keep yourself informed, following the IGF Web site, see when the mag is forward and see what the outcomes of the first MAG meeting and contact the Secretariat.
Just send an email and we will put you in contact with the organizing team. For the DCs you can do it right now. They are continuous. They work throughout the year and they will just welcome new colleagues and new participants.
This is something that I wanted to say. If you -- do you have anything to say?
>> ANNA: I know we are running a bit out of time. I don't want to leave the Newcomers Track without us having something concrete. We received a lot of feedback. There is an agreement within the group that this should be continued. But obviously we need to improve it a bit. I think what you now told us is so coble and easily, we can easily apply it in any case.
I'm thinking now if you are interested to stay in touch with us through the Newcomers mailing list, maybe even to start a Working Group or something like that to put our inputs and to try to improve this for the next year. So this is kind of my proposal that comes and I would really like to hear your feedback on this whether you would be interested.
I think it will be so valuable to us because you now have the experience with the Newcomers Track. You see what has worked well, what didn't work well, how we should improve. You have the advantage compared to the colleagues that didn't attend the Newcomers Track from the very beginning. Can I briefly hear your feedback on this so I can bring inputs to my team? Sebastian?
>> Sebastian: Yes, I am eel really on board with that idea. I'm happy to helping to develop the Newcomers Track. I think it's an initiative that is important to all of us here. It would be cool to see it grow.
>> AUDIENCE: Good evening. I will try to speak some English and Spanish because I am agree with she from the Congo that it is very difficult to, who don't manage the English and we have every good exposure to someone like Michael but he's so fast.
We are patient.
I'm from Argentina ...
(Continues in Spanish.)
ICANN is multi-stakeholder only but ICANN only knows about names and numbers. This is my first time here in the IGF ...
(Continuing in Spanish.)
We don't meet yet with the Internet. Ten years ago we have questions.
(Spanish.)
We still have these questions. But now more people have these questions because ten years ago when the conference, they weren't so many government involved, many corporations involved and in this kind of meeting ...
(Continuing in Spanish.)
We can be in the same workshop with the President of ICANN. I know him because of your name, but not face-to-face. (Continuing in Spanish.)
We think that today more people is taking the same, asking that we have lonely, if we have the same questions, we can build the solutions. We are, with the proposals, with the goal of the new connections from 1.5 billion, but we think that first every human must have water, must have work. We must join that goal. Everyone connected. With that, they are no more hungry. There is no confrontation between us (continuing in Spanish.)
Because of that, we are here.
I'm grateful to meet you face-to-face. Anya, I see you in the webinar. I know some people of the IGF. Sala from Fiji was working with us from the ICANN (continuing in Spanish.)
Our experience with the the gap between families, not only the digital gap, the family gap. Some child in the school have your net book. Some programmes. (Continuing in Spanish.)
We need to work on this gap. My country is so huge, like Mexico. And we have several districts and we have any of us were working, networking. And in each place we try to make something. (Continuing in Spanish.)
For little that there is, talking in the school, talking with the family, like say Michael, this is our engagement with the IGF. We will continue working. We know how to work into the Working Groups. It is similar like ICANN, but here we are agreed that here we can work with another things more than names and numbers. (Continuing in Spanish.)
Thank you.
>> BIANCA CHRISTINE HO: Thank you so much for your comments. One thing, I think it was not well advertised. There are these badges with -- slightly different than yours. It has a native language. So some of them -- these are the mentor badges. Maybe next year we make it a different color. I say I speak Chinese, because I do. Others speak Spanish or Swahili or other languages. Like that. I understand like for people who don't speak English as their first language this would become difficult. I thit it's good for you to rely on mentors like this. Next year we we'll do a better job of promoting. Thank you again for your comment.
>> AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.)
But I'm really glad that we have here Raquel and others. I will play a video and you speak at the same time and explain to us what it is about.
Can I start now?
(Music playing.)
>> NARRATOR: The shape of a system will always determine the outcomes it achieves. The shape of our global governance system was decided after the second world war when the world was very different.
Is it the right shape to tackle climate change? And extreme poverty? And global conflict?
These challenges are global, not national. The way the world works together will dictate. It is time to explore new operations to future-proof our world, new lines, new voices, new ways, a new shape. Take part in the new shape prize.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, again. Thank you so much Anya and -- sorry Bianca, increase, for allowing us to introduce the global foundation new shape prize. I'll be super short. So first I will speak a bit about the global challenges foundation. The global challenges foundation new shape prize is aimed at spiking fresh ideas on how to better handle global challenges such as the ones we mentioned before: Climate change, conflict, extreme poverty. I will try to speak more slowly.
And the prize will award $5 million to ideas that remodel global governance for the 21st century. The foundation aims, or we aim to deepen understanding of global catastrophic risks that are threatening humanity. And we believe that flesh thinking is needed to be able to address the scale and gravity of these risks. Which have out stretched the international system's ability to deal with them. The prize will have an impact by stimulating a global debate about how the world manages the global risks that threaten humanity. By producing ideas for more effective global governance that could be taken forward.
Internet Governance is an inspiring example of innovation and global governance and we encourage you and people in your networks to take part in the prize competition.
We are here as we would love to hear your insights on these issues. If you want more information, you can visit our Web site: Globalchallenges.org. We also brought some brochures that you are free to take. If you have any questions about it, just let us know.
>> ANYA: I will wrap up here. I want to thank you so much. I finally enjoyed this because I was so busy these last days, working with the private sector, but I want to thank you all.
Carl is here. I want to thank him for supporting us and Sophie, and thank you also, and thank you also to our key speakers. The biggest thanks goes to all of you. Michael, thank you for sharing our experience.
>> Michael: I wanted to encourage you, I don't know if you're familiar with the Internet Society, ISOC Ambassador programme. If you really enjoyed your time here and want to contribute more, I highly recommend you apply next year. The applications open, I think in July. They are announced, the Ambassador are announced in August. It is a great way to be able to have sponsorship to come back to the IGF to participate and get to know the ecosystem better as well.
I encourage you to apply.
>> Hello. My name is (gives name) Net Citizens of Venezuela. Actually a LAC member. This is a community in Latin America and the Caribbean islands within ICANN. I would like to invite all of us to work together, to try to take this opportunity that inside ICANN with improving our efforts for 2017 IGF. That's all. Thank you.
>> BIANCA CHRISTINE HO: Thank you, everyone. Again we will send out a survey to collect more information. We really appreciate that you are here today. And for those who haven't had lunch, go ahead. The lunchroom is closing soon. Thank you again for coming.
(Applause.)
(The conference concluded at 1426 CST.)
(CART provider signing off.)