IGF 2023 – Day 0 – Event #112 Global Internet Governance Academic Network Annual Symposium

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to many of the people here.  This is the Global Internet Governance Academic Network Annual Symposium which has tradition has been going since 20008 ‑‑ 2006!? The first I did was 2008.  Since 2006 at the IGF.  We're very grateful to the IGF essentiality for facilitating this meeting and getting us into this jam‑packed Programme for this year.  We have lots of exciting panels going on.

We have a very exciting conference for you today as well.  Happy to see so many faces in the room and quite a few online as well.  A summary of background of this year's symposium.  We were informed of the date of the IGF and went through rigorous academic procedure for selecting abstracts that, merged as a result of a call.  We had 59 or 60 abstracts submits to the workshop and we could accept only a small number of these.  Thank you very much to everybody that participated in the whole process of submitting an abstract.  Thank you very much to the members of the Programme Committee that reviewed the abstracts.  It is not easy to do this.  Thank you to you as well.  Thank you to the presenters for actually making their way here or staying up very late or getting up very early during today.  Since we're running a bit late I will cut my presentation there.  (Background noise)

But I will also ‑‑ I'm sorry.  Somebody else ‑‑ did somebody else want to say something?  No?  Also acting as the Chair and discussant for the first panel.  Which is taking place right now, I have a list.  We have four presenters, two of whom are here in the room and two of whom are on‑site. 

We will start with a paper by Yik Chan Chin from IDDC Normal University and also a member of the Steering Committee for the GigaNet association.  So Yik Chan Chin will talk about the right to access in the digital era.  Afterwards, we have a paper that is presented by Vagisha on what PKI and the trust on the Internet.  Vagisha is from Georgia Tech.  And the third paper will be Internet fragmentation and the environmental impact a says study of satellite broadband to be presented by Berna Akcali Gur from Queen Mary University in London, sitting on my immediate last.  The last paper presented in this panel will be ICT standards in the environment a call for action for environmental care inside Internet Governance, it be presented by Kimberly Anastacio at American University in the U.S. and online.

Without further ado, I will pass the floor to Yik Chan Chin.  You now have your 10 minutes to describe your paper and we'll move into the next paper immediately after that.  Okay?  Thank you very much. 

>> Yik Chan Chin: Thank you very much.  (Audio skipping)

Can you hear me now?  Hello?  Thank you.  Yeah, this is Yik Chan Chin from Beijing Normal University.  But I'm in London, this is 2:00 a.m. early morning London time.  Okay.

So my presentation actually is about right to data access in the digital era, the case of China.  First I would like to contextualize the debate of data access in the Chinese context. 

First of all, we talk about why the debate of the access and the dissemination of data become the center of the academic debate and policymaking in China.  Three factors contribute to this discussion.  First of all, it is the Internet and data are perceived as the important driving force for economic development and in China.  Second is the report development (audio skipping) and also the mass production of data has raised in the Programme, storage, transmission and use of data in China.  Thirdly, is the role of digital social media platform in data access and dissemination has strengthened the public demand on Government acts on protection of the right to information in China.

For those reasons the debate and national policy of access is heated, center will of policymaking in recent years. 

Also, we found that the conceptualization of right to access to data in China and the formal and informal rules, which is the related legitimacy of the (audio skipping) right to data.  That is why I focus my study on the relation between the digital access to digital data and anxiety right.

The data used in this data is the national Government policy regulation and also secondary data. 

So what is the epistemic right?  This is a right that is closely linked to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.  It is not only about being informed but also about being informed (audio skipping) the relevance of information and acting on its basis for the benefit of themselves and the society as a whole.

This is a concept established.  And also the epistemic right is emphasized such as equality of access and availability of information and knowledge.  Equality in terms of obtaining critical literacy information and communication.

So also we need to understand concept between data information and knowledge that are interrelated concepts.  Data is the set of symbols and representation of the raw factors.  The information is organized data and the understood information.  So this is interrelated.  So therefore data is the form of knowledge to create social forces.  It is a kind of social construct.

Therefore it is interesting to see how the social agents participate in the construction of the access right to data as part of the creation of the social knowledge.

So in my paper (audio skipping)

So I'm not going into details because time limitation.  So I define the right to access to data to include two element.  The first element is a right to access to public information which is recognized as individual human rights by many jurisdictions in the human rights body.  The second asset is inclusive right for all member of society to benefit from the availability of data.  So this is the designation to access to data in my paper.  So in Global there is different right to access to data.  For example, Academia recognize the data as not a public good but a resource.  But we also get (audio skipping) from the ORRIA in Oxford, which define data as a level of information and public input.  And it is open to open access.  And we have like European Commission and World Economic Forum s that provide different strategy to how to access data including data access for all strategy or they want to play (audio skipping)

Therefore the right to access the data can be traded in open, efficient, and accountable way.  So therefore it is tradeable.  Data is tradeable and can be managed by platform provider.  European Commission is more like access for all strategies and business Government data have different requirements.  And important data space for important areas as well.

So look at Chinese debate.  The Chinese debate is interesting.  Because the trade the right to access to data as an independent right but as a part of the right to information and also treat it as data as a property right in China.  Data is not treated as a right to information.

It is not treated as an idea right but treated as a right to information or property right debate in China.

So ... in terms of the public information, if the data is owned by Government, there is a different approach.  Why is that?  This is the public data, which is public good.  It is belonging to all people.

The second approach is public data should belong to the state.  And nonpublic data like personal data should be subject to personal protections. 

But there is no debate about how ‑‑ what is the right to access to the personal data.  It is not expressly discussed.  And also the equality nature of the right such as equal to access and viability of information and knowledge has not much Chinese debate and attention as well.

So data access right in China is a treated as property right discussions.  Okay?  So they want to formulate (audio skipping)

So the data can be traded to generate value.  That is their approach.  And this kind of definition actually is also treated and supported under the utilization of big data.  Chinese academic have policy driven in a sense.  This is the debate.  And the position of Chinese Academia is to have it treated by the Government policy and policy driven as well.

So few of the academic support public good nature of data and support the data sharing to be the default position and control of access to data requires justification because data is a natural public good.

Therefore, we can see the debate is pretty different from the other side in the Global law.

So there is the policy, the Chinese Government's policy regarding the data, how the access of the data.  From 2015 to 2020, there is a different action plan and big data plan and the most important is opinions on building a better market allocation system and the mechanism for factors of productions.  And also this building data space system for (audio skipping) as a factor of production.  If you find data property right has three rights.  The property right of data has three rights.  One is access right, process right, and exchange right.  So the property right is divided into three rights.  In the Chinese context.

In here, we want to look at the definition of the how the data provider provide different data.  For example, the public data, this is a data generation (audio skipping) enterprise and institution in providing duty or public service.  The access of policy strengthen the data aggression sharing.  You can access to this data but you need to authorize and also there is a conditional free access.  But also for particular data you have to have and the service not original dataset.  You cannot access the dataset but access to the portal or surveys.  Generated based on public awareness data. 

The second is personal data and it is personal information.  And so they process ‑‑ they can collect and host on the use of data with the authorization but the personal data has to be organized to ensure the personal and privacy.  The data subject to a copy and transfer of the data generated.  So you have a right to access this personal data but you can only obtain a copy or transfer the data generated from one platform to another platform.  This is the right offered to access to personal data. 

For the enterprise data, data collected in the process for the market in production and the basic activities, the data do not involve personal information or public interest.  So they recognize and protect enterprise right to process and use of data.  And protect right of data collector to use data and obtain the benefit particularly to process data in commercial operations and also regulate the data collector for third‑party and original data is not shared or released but access to data to analyze as shared.  So Government agents can obtain and issue data in coordination of law and regulation in order to perform duties.  This is the right to access to enterprise data.  So the conclusion is that first of all, access to data is not (audio skipping) the right but in Chinese context they have similar considerations.  (Audio skipping) they're more from the sociological nature and creation of dissemination of information knowledge. 

The normal equal access of ability of information, knowledge and use for the benefit of individual and society as a whole.  So data is treated as a form of knowledge.  It is a public good for benefit of all.  Therefore open access and sharing of nonconfidential data is proposed.

In the Chinese context, the right is not drawing any attention of the Chinese (audio skipping)

So the concept to the academic right is the right to information.  But this right to information is approached from a legal perspective rather than from the sociological perspective.  They're stressing on the commercial right and also the public right to information right to the public data.  So data is defined as one kind of factor of protection for the national economic development.  This is tricky.  In the Chinese context data is defined as a factor of production.  There is four factors of production.  Labor, lands, and capital.  But data is defined as a fifth element of capital protection which is very unique.

Therefore, the data is in this sort.  (Audio skipping)

But they do not.  (Background noise)
Data cannot be circulated in the nature and the data is not to be mainstreamed in the Government policy.

Because of this, the public good or equal access dissemination of data are not mentioned in the public policymaking.  So under this kind of premise, therefore data collection analyze in the process aim at unlocking the potential commercial value of data especially for enterprise data (audio skipping)

The focus of the debate and policy contextualization.  The data in the data debate in the Chinese policy and academic debate.  The focus is the right and interest of data enterprise and not of the individual right.  The power imbalance between the individual and population and the benefit of the data from the individual use and data subject is not being addressed.  I think that is all my presentation.  The argument of my paper.  Thank you very much.

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Thank you.  And very close to time.  So we're starting off well.  We'll move ‑‑ thank you very much.  I hope you can stick around for the discussion afterwards.  We'll move to you now.  And I will share the slides. 

>> VAGISHA:  Hello, I will talk about Webb PKI and the private Governance of the trust on the Internet.  And it goes to Dr. Mueller and Dr. Grindal and me the lovely PHD student to have around.  We would like to appreciate the generous grant for the ISOC Foundation for the research.  I will tell you the story of Internet security.

     Like all good stories this starts with a tragedy.

There was a security breach, this company issued 500 certificates on the web.  It was identified as middle attack by arena hackers.  The Dutch Government intervened.  It was found out because one of the misissued certificates was for Google.  What is Diginotar?  What is the certificate? And why is this a significant plot to what I am talking about today? 

We have seen the little lock sign that means it is secure.  The browser still needs to identify the server client is in fact who they're claiming out to be.  It is done using digital certificates.  Digital certificates authenticate clients on the web, issue certificates to website operators upon request.  Before issuing certificates they're supposed to verify the identity of the entity making the request.  And the certificates then act as a recorded authorization that the holders are who they are claiming to be.  PKI is a company that supports digital signing, and document encryption such as certificates using the public key cryptography or asymmetric cryptography.  Before we get into the details of that I will layout what we are trying to do in the paper.

There is a bunch of literature out there from the technical community and the workings and security lack thereof provided by certificates and certificate authorities. 

Looking at it from Governance perspective.  The question commonly held ideas of public good and the mechanisms.  Public good is often provided by the Government.  Private goods provided by the market.  And we are situating the Governance of PKI within the framework of public good provided by private actors.  We argue the production of public goods and some public goods require collective action but not necessarily state action.  Governments are but one vehicle of providing the goods, not the only one and definitely not the most efficient one out there.

The paper offers an innovative perspective on the dynamics of public production of private goods in the context of Internet security. 

We use the framework of institutional analysis.

We identify the public good in question, then we identify the stakeholders, talk about if they cooperated or compete to achieve the said public good.  Did they overcome known barriers to collective action?  And describe the risk in which the stakeholder group is deinstitutionalized and collect data to assess the efficacy in achieving the desired result, enhanced security.

Shifting gears again.  If there are only two parties communicating over the web, as long as the two parties can authenticate each other the use of encryption on the web doesn't need an institutional action.  The hard part is the authentication process with multiple servers and clients required.  It requires a reliable interest for the mapping of the private key holder to the public key.

?  ‑‑ in this ecosystem, the digital service is a public key during a secure connection set up, the client can verify a certificate's authenticity and trustworthiness.  Split key cryptography reduces the need to transfer keys over the networks, but it creates a solution problem and certificates solved for the better.

A mismatch between the two, that is the private key and public key enables an attack that is something we saw in it incident.

This brings us to the question, how do we trust a CA to not be a bad actor or worst yet a compromised actor? 

There is a chain of trust that enables us to trust the subsequence CA or intermediate has to qualify by the browser.  This is maintained by the operating system and has to go through a complex vetting process to be included in the root stone Programme.

Now, we have established the authentication is public good.  Let's spend a minute understanding why collective action is required.  The ecosystem as a whole needs effective authentications across the board.  The compromised certificate or certificate authority has the potential to effect any website or users across the system.  We have the incentives to provide it themselves and can be motivated by several factors.  Browsers cannot be responsible for screening every website on the web.

The digital ecosystem depends on the trust to work and send the mechanism to be applicable everywhere and thus needs collective action to be in force.  Yeah.

Who are the stakeholders in the ecosystem?  We identify four.  Security risk are most concentrated in the top at root stores in the browsers and have diminishing effect as you go down.  The certificate authorities, subscribers with the certificate and end user and devices that rely on the certificates for authentication. 

According to the report collective action is costly.  The coordination and communication costs and the bigger the group the more the coast rise.  The institution solutions to the collection action for web focus on the top of the hierarchy, the browser and CA and it does not try to directly involve subscribers.  The root stores act as a proxy for end users and certificate authorities act as proxy for subscribers. 

We identify three institutional vehicles.  The main character of our stories here.  The certificate authority and abuser Forum.  Which will be talking about in a minute in more detail.  The certificate transparency Internet security standard for monitoring and auditing the issuance of digital certificates through decentralized logging and ACME, automatic certificate environment between the CA and user servers. 

Okay.  So the certificate authority in the browser Forum.  Remember the digital slide, it might have been completely honest when I said the story started with that tragedy.  It start aid ‑‑ started a little before that.  Narrator privileges.

There were no governing rules in place.  The certificate authority in the Forum was founded in 2005.  In 2012 is when the Forum started actively making rules for the system.  Since 2012 the Forum has produced a set of baseline requirements for tackle the convergence of expectations between the browsers and the series in issuing items like identity wedding, certificate content and profiles, certification mechanism, key sizes audit requirements Delegation of authority.  The baseline requirements are revised about every six months by means of form app balloting approving amended text. 

The second part of our methodology involves studying the CA browser Forum in particular.  We first collected data from the Forum meetings, this included attendance records, meeting minutes and interviews.

To capture the market share we used Rwanda ‑‑ random sampling across the database.  It was a place for root stores to coordinate so they don't create conflicting policies and get feedback from the CAs.  We see on the chart there are more European Thane U.S. members, U.S. participants are more active when it comes to participation.  We track the activity of different stakeholders in the Forum.  You can see increase in participation following 2017 which was because of the addition of new Working Group.

Between 2013 and today, the browsers have become more active.  And we also note the active participation of either U.S. federal PKI.

The many economic conflicts between browsers and CA.  We can see from the analysis of the working records in 92% of the ballots majority of both stakeholder groups voted or opposed the proposal.  Only a small percentage did they oppose the proposal from the CA.

The data was collected in February 2023, we see that a Civil Society effort to encourage the use of encryption and to automate the issuance of certificate is dominating the market.  This didn't use to be the case before, but it clearly showcases how automation has led to increased adoption of the certificates.

If externalities caused by CA practices are the main drivers of collective action we should expect to see the gradual homogenization of root stores across browsers OS produce over time.  We see substantial overlap in which they admit the root certificates into the trust store.  And see a gradual reduction in the number of trusted certificates in the root store, over time.

The measure of efficacy is interesting.  We see the encryption in the web has increased significantly over time.  We see most issued certificates have decreased over time.  While the Global issuance rate is low, this is due to the large authorities this issue certificates without error.  The three largest CAs identified in the market share, signed 80% of the certificates and have near zero misissuance rates. 

Now, perhaps the most important finding.  Why have private actors taken the lead in security Governance in this case?  Well, Governments are politically structured so they can't represent a Global public interest or produce public goods easily.  The authority is fragmented and there are numerous versions, especially in cybersecurity.  There are greater alignment with the users than national Government.  And in secure web environment hurts their business interest while Governments are not directly harmed.  Often they have a strong enter in undermining inscription and surveillance purposes.

There is an elaborate web of technical interdependency, security measures, cost on all four stakeholder groups, those directly involved in the implementation of the standards are in a better position to assess the cost and risk of the trade roughs and make rational decisions.  The Government is not absent.  We see the organizations participating actively and have observed from the meeting minutes and interviews, that EU is pushing for the regulation on this ecosystem.  And see involvement of national CAs mostly from Asia representing interest in the Forum.  Why should you care?  A lot of times when it happens on the web the blame is put on the users because they engage in unsafe practices.  You remember the always proceed option that is available for the certificate mismatch.  This is not a perfect system.  There are compromises that can happen because of misaligned incentives.  Or just oversight because of redundancy of the process.  Sometimes they could be intentional like sell little bad data certificates but it is better to know more.

All of the good things about the Internet relies on this ecosystem.  For example, in showing there was indeed a link to a secure server they claim to be when you are suffering the web.  The topic is under studied within the Governance Committee and would be relevance to the scholars present in the room.  We will have sequels.  We plan to do a study about how Governments intervene and in more detail would like the measure of effectiveness of certificate transparency we mentioned in the constitutional vehicle part and maybe checkout if the impact of automations or the ACME on the system.  That's all.  Thank you very much. 

(Applause)

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Thank you very much Vagisha.  You did the timing well.  We now move to Berna Akcali Gur.  I will set up the slides on the computer.  In the meantime, I give you the floor. 

>> Berna Akcali Gur: We focused on the jurisdictional challenges to the mega satellite constellations to the Global Internet infrastructure.  The ... yes.  So the report resulting from the study can be found on the website I'm sharing in our PowerPoint.  There you can see the link for separate project on the satellite connectivity.  They had it from the policy perspective and joined forces in the report as well.

As we were conducting that study, the satellite broadband industry picked up pace.  More and more applications have been filed at International Telecommunication Union for the mega projects.  There is a certain degree of excitement about them the scientists have raised their voices about the impact of the projects on space sustainability and space environment.  So we decided to analyze attention between the competing interests at our universal broadband connectivity for Sustainable Development and cyber sovereignty on one time and use of sparse resources from another and from a policy presence, which inspired this paper.  It is still a draft so we welcome any construct of feedback. 

What is new about satellite connectivity?  We know space technology satellites are long a complementary part of the Global communication infrastructure.  Most often, they have provided last‑mile solutions in the areas such as islands or villages and mountains because these areas are not easily served by terrestrial networks.  And also we shouldn't forget we still use them for when we are in transportation such as ships and planes.  Communication satellites are not new.  The idea of multisatellite systems, the constellations are not new either.  Earlier constellations in the low earth orbit emerged in the 90s, and we have a few examples constitute a smaller number of satellites and provided narrow bandwidth data.  They were not viable for mass consumption, expensive projects and couldn't compete with the speed and capacity of the terrestrial networks.  So they didn't really receive much attention.

Recently advances in communication and separate space technologies and dramatic reduction in cost and the Sector and ever‑growing broadband demand drove a second wave of the ventures.  They are projects with increased need of satellites.  Some examples are those planned by the U.S. provider Starlink.  13,000 satellites planned by Gawong and 648 for the India web.  Newness is in the scale of the projects.

So how do these ventures relate to Sustainable Development Goals?  As you know, for most social and economic functions, the use of applications enabled by the law of latency high bandwidth connectivity has become even more essential.  Latency is particularly important for the web‑based applications that require high speed.  Some applications that I can mention are in things video conferencing, video games, the new constellations are able to match this requirement because data travels much faster when the communication satellite is in the low earth orbit, simply because of the distance is much shorter. 

So the promise of broadband connectivity with minimal infrastructure is miraculous from connectivity as an enabler of SDG perspective.  That is why the emergence of the satellites are met with enthusiasm in the context of potential contribution to bridging the Global digital divide and Global development.

How does a system work?  Are these satellites infringing on the territories by providing Internet from the skies? 

We should first understand the technicality behind this to understand how the domestic regulations work.  The ground stations act as a gateway to the Internet or private network and Cloud infrastructures, currently the distance between the ground stations is required not to exceed one thousand kilometers.  The second component is the user term by which the users connect their devices to receive broadband services.  These are provided by the satellite company operating the system.  Additionally satellites need an assigned frequency spectrum, limited natural resource as the satellites communicate with the earth through the radio waves.  The user term will leave the satellite in close proximity which may be different in the consolation at a given time.  That will be connected to other satellites of which will have a connection to the ground station.  Then there is a Cloud infrastructure.  The satellite companies will use Cloud infrastructure, which is a mutually beneficial relationship as the Cloud infrastructures benefit from the connectivity as backup to the existing set up. 

As I said the provision of satellite services within a particular country is subject that the country's laws and regulations.

These are called landing rights.  The countries decide the terms of landing rights for themselves for example, the ground station, for that the companies will need authorization from each jurisdiction.  And need to obtain a license to use the frequency spectrum.  If they provide their services directly to consumers they would also likely need an Internet Service Provider license.  What is more the user terminals would be subject to import requirements of the national authorities. 

So the provision of satellite broadband service by a company is subject to wide range of laws and regulations of the host country.  For example, Russian Federation and China have declared they will not allow broadband by foreign service providers.

For countries with space capabilities thought it would be better if the existing domestic control mechanisms were complemented by ownership and control of their own mega constellations.  These are frequently referred to as sovereign structures.  Competition is intended to benefit markets and end users.  At first glance, it seems like more of a good thing.  With more choices for all, business models will mature and that should be celebrated.  You look at the reasoning behind the investments the Governments emphasize their strategic value and significance of sovereign alternative infrastructure for digital sovereignty and cybersecurity purposes.  The vicinity of the ventures isn't certain.  There isn't much emphasis on that.  The sovereignty and cybersecurity concerns require they align infrastructure and control along their borders.

I'm looking at Milton, because he coined the term alignment as fragmentation.

So investment in the ventures are manifestations of the ongoing fragmentation.

Okay.  So foreseeable harms of the new competition to space, particularly the orbital environment are grave.  From launch emissions to orbit debris the framework is simply not sufficient to tackle the problem if time.

In time, is the operative word here.  Due to exponential increase of space objects, space traffic is more challenging to manage and collisions are anticipated.  The space environment is more prone to cascading, which means a certain threshold is reached.  The total volume of space debris will continue to grow.  This is because collisions create additional debris leading to more collisions, and such an effect.  It is the law of orbit and almost all space resources inaccessible for all, even future generations.  Because there was a competition among powerful Nations to each have as many constellations as they could afford the orbital environment could be unusable for any service including connectivity and travel.  Future generations may be locked in trying to clean up the orbit and restore them. 

Space resources are limited resources orbital space is already congested, space traffic is difficult to manage and there is a risk of collisional cascading.  There is the multiplication of space based Internet infrastructure worth the risks being imposed on space environment?  May I have one more minute.

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: One more minute.

>> Berna Akcali Gur: It is known that advancements in most information communication technologies are proceeded in terms of the potential impact of Global power structures.  Mega satellite constellations are deemed strategic investments in terms of space presence and control over the Global time in infrastructure. 

I will skip this part in interest of time.  So the efforts have been deemed to have significant impact on the openness and usability of Internet.  The same can have an impact on antifragmentation efforts are deemed to have an impact on the openness and unity of the Internet.  The same can have an impact on the sustainability of space resources. 

So we argue that the impulse to compete in the earth's orbits is space that is congested should be mitigated in the conservation of orbital environment for future generations, environmental efforts of Global multistakeholder platforms could inform the environmental outer space Government efforts especially as related to space based infrastructure.  Thank you. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Thank you Berna Akcali Gur.  And yes, the timing was perfect.  I will now move quickly to Kimberly.  Kimberly, you are online.  Yes, you are online.  Can we make Kimberly Anastasio a co‑host?  The floor is yours.  We can hear you.  We heard something. 

>> Kimberly anastacio: Can you confirm everything is working properly.  Hello everyone, and it is my pleasure to be here talking about a project that is part of the dissertation research at the School of Communication at American University.  And this project addresses the intersection of information and technology and ICT and the environment focusing on ICT standards.  It is at the IGF and the Internet Governance Forum set this as the main thematic track for 2020.  It is not alone for Internet Governance organizations.  There are plenty of organizations that are establishing rules for how ICTs work and how information circulates on the Internet.  There are also turning their attention to environmental concerns and working on the creation of what they call greener Internet protocol.  This paper I'm presenting today is the first step towards this broader research project on the ICT standards, in which I talk to people working on ICTs in relation to the environment on the implementations that standards can have for enabling and containing environmental rights.  Meaning here the right to healthy, clean, safe, sustainable environment established by the United Nations environmental Programme.  And this is a research that is rooted as part of the communication field called environmental media studies that has overlapping spheres of environmental issues and production of new media, including ICTs. 

But still among the research there is environmental media studies, focused to be more on data centers on AI, on the things that are more closely visible to Internet users.  And one niche but fundamental part of ICTs is usually overlooked is ICT standards.  So I'm joining two infrastructure standards that deal with the more hidden layer of ICTs.  Moreover we know that Internet Governance scholarship has been examining Internet standardization processes by seeing ICT standards as things not just technical but things that are political.  But when you look at the values and politics that can be inscribed into Internet Governance, artifacts such as protocols focused on the rights more closely related to the digital world.  Like freedom of expression or privacy and data protection.  But environmental rights should be considered as just another example of how politics and rights are embedded into Internet Governance and how ICT standards may be another venue where the politics around the environment are enacted. 

The broader research is an analysis of both the International Telecommunication Union and the Internet engineering task force and the work they're doing related the environment.  For this paper I relied on some in depth interviews with 18 interviewees that are experts that have advocated for environmental concerns about the Internet and its infrastructures.  Or that have done this or are currently doing this. 

So when I talk to the people that are already working on this umbrella between environmental rights in the context of ICTs, I asked them about their knowledge about standards.  And their perspective on where ICT standards could fit the broader Agenda.  And despite most of them mentioning they have very few knowledge on standards, their answers ended up echoing what was said on the (?) and on echo some standards that organizations are already working on for a while. 

So I coined the literature situated this debate about ICTs in this environment in the two parallel understandings of the technologies.  On one hand, digitalization Laurel indicating us to enable a more sustainable economy.  So ICTs being employed to tackle climate change and on the other hand, focusing on the negative aspect of digitalization, how it can be an impact, be it busy or negative on the environment by itself.  Most noted in the intersection of the ICT and environment one should account for both things.  How the standards can help the Sector be more environmentally friendly by enabling other things to happen among other Sectors.

But also how environmentally friendly the ICT technologies themselves can be.  Then when it comes to establishing what roles the ICT standards could play in enabling to account for both the two things.  The promises and pitfalls of digital technologies, the experts highlighted two main areas of action.  Establishing a common language or parameters for dealing with the issue.  And also establishing mechanisms for accountability.  So in both of these things were mentioned in relation to the standards that would help us avoid carbon emissions in other Sectors but also in standards that are trying to account for or cut down the environmental impact of ICT themselves.  In this intersection or the role of standards in this case, it is basically just necessity for quantification in addressing the materiality of ICTs.  And also the fact that this conversation that we're starting to have more on the standard setting organizations are kind of leading the game and they come in context in which the mind‑set of the ICT Sector is one of evidence and consumerism.  Quantification is a vital part of standards, be they ICT related or not.  Standards define the procedures and regulate behaviors and create accountability.  To measuring ICT from any perspective, software, hardware or networking.  This is not an easy task.  This means that even when people do recognize the physicality of the Internet and the impact that ICTs can have, there is no simple way to quantify its relation to the environment.  Be it from again, the carbon footprint, energy consumption, the natural resources extraction, disposability and things of these sorts.

But one thing that we have to keep in mind is that materiality is more than just a palpable thing.  As seen on the slide, materiality refers to the shape and affordances of the physical world and social relations that are part of our reality. 

We address my ICT as something physically located and situated in the environment.  Although it is surrounded by the forces of immateriality.  But to act on the issue does not necessarily mean we should be stuck if we are not capable of precisely measuring the entanglement of ICTs in nature.  Or that we should stop at the measuring phase alone.

Precisely because we recognize ICTs as something relational.  And this responded to something similar when they identify what they believe to be the root of the problem. 

The root of the problem being not environmental impact of the separate devices, products, services, the separate standards themselves.  But the socioeconomic model behind how society deals with ICTs.  One interviewee said standard setting is important because it allows for environmental Best Practices to come in and enter its way at the technical level.  But that would be in direct competition with the business as usual business model of the entire Sector.

But some SSO are engaging in environmentally related discussions by creating standards that relate to the environment and as organizations themselves engaging in these discussions in other settings.  And the two organizations that I'll be studying further for my dissertation as I mentioned is the ITU.  And then the ITF.  The ITU has already more than 140 standards related to the environment.  Has one Study Group called environment and Circular economy that is dedicated to dealing with these issues.  The mandate is to work on the environmental challenges on ICTs.

And the idea is something that is more recent since the ITU has been following the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals for a while, the IETF is catching up on the issue as well.  It has almost 20 standards that are more closely related to environmental issues and it also created recently a group that is dedicated to addressing sustainability issues in relation to ICTs among them.

Just to mention a couple of examples, the IETF is dealing with a protocol for Bluetooth to turn Bluetooth less energy consuming from the perspective of Internet of Things.  The ITU has such measurements on the ICT Sector.

As I mention, the scholarship have established that the standards are political things that can incentivize or constrain certain behaviors.  Two important standardization organizations that are engaging on environmental matters and the next step for this research is to delve into the work they're doing and try to investigate what areas they are trying to tackle.  What interests are also being addressed there.  And how can we move forward with this Agenda beyond the two organizations and further down on the standardization processes and Internet Governance too?  Thank you very much.  I'm available for any questions or comments that you might have. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Thanks very much, Kimberly.  Right.  We have a few minutes ‑‑ and I will abuse my position as Chair and hope that the next ‑‑ you don't mind starting a couple of minutes later?  Just so that ‑‑ because we started late. 

Right so, I will first of all just make some comments on the papers that we heard.  And the papers that we received from you.  Thank you very much for those.  Before I go with leading questions.  If you have questions in the audience start thinking about how to formulate them and pray I don't raise them first.  I'm sure I will. 

Okay.  I will go through the papers in the order presented.  And Yik Chan Chin who is still online, congratulations.  It is 4:00 in the morning or something.  So congratulations.  Very interesting paper.  The fact it is already published means my comments are moot.  I was thinking of how to take it further.  There is lots of many interesting statements in your paper.  And the way you actually position the debates around this and almost show the similarity between the different approaches that you see in the different Regions of the world that you looked at.  Very interesting.  I would love to have learned more about your understanding of the reflection of the data knowledge and so on and see how it fits in.  One thing that touched me is how you explained the differences and similarities come out. 

I was happy to read that.  It stimulated a lot of thought in my head at least.  However I would have liked you to be more argumentative in that sense.  You laid out some of the conditions and you showed that there are differences and there are similarities.  And it would have been nice to see how that plays out in different policy debates that are going on.  Because I know that the EU has its data for strategy ‑‑ (mumbling) strategy for data.  You could do an interesting policy analysis on that.  That might be a next step that you want to go for to actually try and unpack how these reflections on the epistemic rights and so on actually play out in the policy field. 

That might be really kind of interesting to see how that comes out.  Because of course, on the one level, there's a lot of conflictual discourse around the different approaches.  But what you show is that there are some fundamental similarities as well.  And it might be interesting to do that. 

I was also thinking there are maybe other Regions in the world that have different approaches to data in that sense.  It might be interesting at some point to also reflect on that to maybe, you know, in the paper, in the next publication to have a section that looks at Global approaches.

I know in Japan they have a different approach to data, to treating data in that sense.  That might be interesting. 

VAGISHA, your paper and Milton is in the room as well.  I could definitely see the questions around the Governance of this.  And congratulations for that.  Because it is I think also in the paper as I read it, I felt that you were not struggling with it, but it was something you said okay, I want to look at this as a Governance question and not a technical question, but I need to spend lots of time explaining the technical issues in order to understand the Governance.  So although you focus on the fact of doing a Governance paper as I was reading it, I felt a lot of the technical knowledge that was useful, right?  But actually left little space or mind space for the reader for those bigger Governance questions, which are really interesting.  Right? 

I was thinking about how you addressed and talked about your narrative prerogative and how you addressed the story from 2019 first, that was maybe the problem that made the context and issue visible, right?  So maybe that is how you do that?  You don't have to say you lied.  I was wondering, you mentioned that there were different voting, you said that actually the platforms and the certificate authorities agree on a lot of thing, right? 

I was wondering the process leading up to the votes that would be really interesting to understand of course you mention the private organization dealing with public goods, I ask what you asked us, can you explain how Governments are involved?  They're not explicitly involved but they are involved.  That would be interesting to see because there are multiple dimensions to the stories.  I would have liked to have heard more or teased you a bit more in that sense.  Berna Akcali Gur and Joanna, thank you very much for your paper as well.

When I first read the title, I thought that you issue doing a lot.  Low earth satellite, cybersecurity and quite a lot was covered in the paper.  I found that ‑‑ first I was thinking wow how will they do all this?  But you managed.  So that was good. 

I was wondering a bit when I looked through the paper.  I felt that the ordering was sometimes ‑‑ there was some bits that could have gone earlier.  In order to help me understand the flow of the paper.  I will give examples later.  But for example, you introduce the concept of mega constellation and I didn't know what it was until I read two pages later.  Things like that, in how the argument builds up, section 4 may be more interesting than section 3, vice versa.  You mentioned the security concerns.  I was wondering what ‑‑ there are also the security concerns and the sustainability concerns actually crossover quite a bit, I think, if somebody were to shoot one out to the sky and cascading effect happens.  I was wondering, you treat them as two separate things.  It might be interesting to also show that there are direct connections between those two.  The international Union is trying for a long time with the Space Policy to develop things.  I didn't keep mention of that too much?  It might have been interesting to bring in.  That addresses the questions that you had.  Raised for the national and Global.  I would be interested. You talked about sovereignty and States using sovereignty to say we need our own mega constellation.  In the end, it needs a coordination effort.  Unless they want to knock each other out of the sky.  It was something you might raise in the paper a bit more.

In terms of sustainability, it might be worthwhile to clarify at the beginning of the paper what you mean.  I was also thinking oh, is it more environmentally friendly to put satellites in low earth orbit and to have whatever data centers on the planet earth.  But you meant something else.  Okay.

Kimberly, rushing, environmental rights thank you very much for this paper.  Really worthwhile effort.  Part of a broader project, I would love to know more about how it fits in.  That could be a bit clearer in the paper.  You focus on the standards authorities and you look at the IETF and ITU.  I was wondering in your reflections do you actually think about the normative biases that are built into these actors?  You mention the work that is done by other scholars to unpack those?  But right now you have gone through the interviews and looking at those quite literally.  I was wondering if you do that.  I think there is also quite a lot of work maybe not just Internet standardizations but standardization bodies as a whole.  I know the literature is looking at sustainability and standards.  But there may be some work also quite a lot of work in the 1980s and 90s publishes in this space.  That might be interesting to look at.  I was also thinking you do explicitly mentioned it in the presentation the environmental rights in the human rights context.  I think that was very interesting as well.  One of the things I am looking at standards.  But another area there is quite a lot of reflection is on the implementation of data centers and I wonder if some of those might be interesting.  I was too long.  Hopefully, useful comments.  I would like to see if there are any questions from the floor?  Microphones have been put out.  So if you want to raise a question.  Go ahead.  Stand behind the mic.  Otherwise to the presenters for a quick response.  Milton is going to the mic. 

>> AUDIENCE: You talk about the mega run constellations and fragmentation.  Is it hard to combine the environmental Global commons tragedy and the fragmentation aspect of the paper?  I will focus on fragmentation.  What are they doing?  Proposing not to allow other satellites to distribute signals to the country?  What is the leverage for doing that?  And they will set up their own?  Why do they need to set up their own mega constellation to do that if only concerned about their own territory? 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: If there are no other questions we'll go back to the panelists?  Should we go back in the order.  Did you want to mention something, Yik Chan Chin? 

VAGISHA? 

>> VAGISHA: Thy for the comments.  Because of lack of time I won't address all of them.  The process you asked about was interesting.  We were going through the ballot readings and everything.  Also it is interviews.  What we learned about was that a lot of formal language that goes toward is already agreed on the mechanism that is presetting the language itself.  That could be one of the reasons why a lot of these words are nonconflicted.  But it is still interesting to see how sort of CAs or browsers react to the process itself.  Do you have a specific question to answer? 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: No, given the time we have. 

>> Berna Akcali Gur: Joanna may reply, I think she's still online.  I agree, we're trying to address a few topics in that one paper.  And I'll take a look at your recommendations.  But EU Space Policy, I think that the EU Space Policy and fact they're trying to deploy their own satellite constellation may be a contradictory move.  Because I think there was a paper an EU research paper represented to the Parliament saying EU doesn't actually need to own a mega constellation for purposes of access.  But they still thought it was important from a strategic and security perspective.  I should maybe add that to the paper.  And for about the question from Milton.  From what I understand ‑‑ from my understanding of fragmentation, there are different manifestations of fragmentation.  One manifestation is through Government policy and regulations where the goal is to try to establish control over infrastructure and the components used for that infrastructure.  Decoupling at the 5G infrastructure for example, was an example of that.  Whereas in the groups of countries have refused to use each other's technology for cybersecurity reasons and deeper geopolitical motives behind that as well. 

So when I look at the Government papers, justifying investment in these mega constellations which are elaborate infrastructures, the Governments defer to them as sovereign infrastructures that are necessary for cyber sovereignty and cybersecurity reasons.  It is from their policy papers that I see that they see the infrastructure, although they're not terrestrially located within their control of the infrastructure is still by the companies that are located within their territories.

So they are very much seen as a territorial infrastructure from those that can deploy these ‑‑ deploy these constellations.  What about the others?  The previous research we had done, those that don't have their own mega constellations but plan to use them see data Governance as a major concern.

So for example, the gateways to the Internet.  The ground gateways to the entire ground infrastructures that need to be and have every one thousand kilometers.  The countries were saying if you are going to authorize services of the mega constellations maybe we would like to require them to have a grand station within our territory even if they don't need one, even if there is one within one thousand kilometers to control the cross border data transfers.  It is the intention is to control cross border data transfers and to maintain a control that they already have or extend that control in accordance with their policies that are still developing as the geopolitical tensions intensify.  So ... I hope that was ‑‑ that answered your question.

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Joann, did you want to add something? 

Nothing further from me.  Okay.  Perfect.  Kimberly? 

>> Kimberly ANASTACIO: I will try to be fast and say thank you for the comments.  Three things I'm currently working on which we think is very appropriate as feedback.  And yes, I am trying to now situate my study better among studies that deal more with standardization as a whole and not just standardization from an ICT perspective.  And also just to explain further this project, the bulk of the project is based on the methodology that involves the context analysis ‑‑ content analysis of the almost 200 standards approved or rejected in the two organizations I'm analyzing.  And interviewed with the participants of the organizations.  The ITU members and IETF members.  In order for me to properly understand the work that the two organizations are doing in light of the possibilities for the ICT standardization Sector as a whole, I thought it was needed for me to come up with a framework of action not only from the literature on the environmental impact of ICTs, but also from the perspective of those working on the ground trying to build this Agenda in international organizations and spaces like that.  So that is where this smaller project feeds the broader one.  It is to help me come up with this framework of action through which to analyze how the organizations are participating in this matter.  Thank you very much, I will wait for the further comments on the paper.  Thank you all. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Right.  Thank you very much for all of the interesting papers.  And hopefully this has ‑‑ I think this has been a great start to the symposium.  Thanks to all of the speakers and all of the paper writers.  Everything like that.  Thanks a lot.  Focal Point.

I will now ask you to leave.  Can we just leave it here?  Yeah?  You will take it from me.  All right.  Danielle.  I think given the interest of time we won't have a five marked for identification minute break and move straight to the second panel?  Is that okay with you Danielle?  I will be timed.  If you need a couple of minutes, use a couple of minutes otherwise we'll get back to you straight away. 

Okay?  I was going to say I will sit down there.  You don't need me, do you? 

(Break)

>> MODERATOR: I'm Danielle and I will be chairing and discussing this session.  Today we have Nanette Levinson presenting on institutional change in cyber Governance.  Jamie Stewart on women peace and cybersecurity in Southeast Asia.  Camesh G. On making design utilization of generative AI technologies ethical.  Basically everybody gets 10 minutes to present, after which I will give five minutes of feedback.  Nanette Levinson.  Is Nanette Levinson here? 

Okay.  Go ahead. 

>> Nanette Levinson: Can you hear me?  Hello to everyone, whatever time you are on.  The papers in the first panel set the scene beautifully.  Fantastic papers, wonderful discussion.  I am going to share my screen now.  I believe that's working.  Excellent.  I'm going to share with you some work from the past year of a project that I have been working on for the last four years.  I have been researching the United Nations open‑ended Working Group dealing with cybersecurity that began in 2019 to 2021.  And the second rendition continues now, and actually it is due to go until 2025.

As we all know, this has been a particularly unusual time period punctuated by a pandemic and the war in Ukraine. 

What I'd like to do in my presentation is focus just on this past year, 2022‑2023.  I'm going to share with you a few of my key research questions.  My major findings, several of them.  And just briefly some thoughts on the future research in this arena.  I want to highlight three research questions.  I have been thinking about the field of Internet Governance for a number of ‑‑ at least several decades.

I wanted to have a chance in this paper to take a long‑term view thinking about institution change, using various disciplinary approaches.  I was particularly interested in what could be called deinstitutionalization processes in cyber Governance, the organization on which a focus within the discussions at the open‑ended Working Group is a proposal for something called a Programme of Action, which involves a more regular way to include other stakeholders, stakeholders other than Governments as a part of regular institutional dialogue related cybersecurity at the United Nations.

In the paper, I formulate a cross‑disciplinary approach to the analyses and I ask the question, how do you findings from this longitudinal study of the open‑ended Working Group relate to work on institutional change? 

And further, I ask, what possible catalytic factors could be at work related to such changes?  In order to do that, I look at work with institutional change indicators.  I want to highlight three of them first in the incipient change is the absence of authoritative analogy or the presence of inconsistent isomorphic pulls.  Second is change in legitimacy of an idea and change in the rhetoric related it. 

Third indicator, they're not sequential, they're a chaotic continuum.  The third one is the emergence of a new variety of organizational arrangements consistent with a new idea. 

And all of this, all of the indicators are looked against the setting, the backdrop of increasing uncertainty and turbulence in the environmental setting of the open‑ended Working Group and indeed major geopolitical pulls.

Here are a few of my findings at a glance.  My early work on the open‑ended Working Group from 2019‑2021 noted the presence of what I called an idea galaxy.

What I mean by that is simply a cluster of specific words that appear near one another and the subsequent positioning of the words next to or very near to a value or norm that is already more generally accepted.  So ... in 2019‑2021 I discovered the following words.  Human rights, gender, Sustainable Development, international development or developing country and less frequently non‑State actors or multistakeholders and often were linked in both oral presentation and in written submissions.  I use content analyses on all of these.

Most often linked to sections dealing with capacity building.  Interestingly, the 2021 open‑ended Working Group final report, which was adopted by consensus and again, this echoes some of the discussion about consensus in standards organizations highlighted in the earlier papers.  Interestingly those words were adopted by consensus in that 2021 open‑ended Working Group.  But what has occurred in the past year, 2022‑2023 is a fascinating development.  The same idea cluster appears in many submissions, many oral presentation, many informal sessions with other stakeholders but there also appears another cluster galaxy that I term a dueling idea galaxy.

I will say more.  The idea cluster accepted by consensus in 2021, this appears in much of the discussion and was going to appear and did appear in draft versions of the annual progress report that was supposed to be adopted by consensus at the fifth substantive session just ‑‑ oh, a couple of months ago in New York City at the United Nations.  However, interestingly, a dueling idea cluster was introduced on the very last day of that discussion in opposition to accepting the report with those words from 2021 in it. 

As a consensus agreement.  And instead, the Russian delegation along with a guess the Chinese delegation, Belarus and maybe four or five other countries proposed or said it was not going to go along with consensus, it strongly wanted and had a rationale I put it in italics that their idea cluster were wording such as Convention or Treaty.  This really signified the commitment to the development of new norms in the cybersecurity area. 

And it also signified opposition to this Programme of Action idea as a part of regular institutional dialogue.

I do want to point out that the idea for a Treaty was not new in 2022‑2023.  It appears throughout discussions.  But what is new is the placement in direct opposition to the first idea galaxy above.  The one that was adopted by consensus in 21. 

These dueling clusters reflect the presence of catalytic factors, especially the war in Ukraine and provide indications of potential institutional change and increasing turbulence.  Possibly marking the end of a long cycle of Internet Governance trajectory even though appropriate roles in certain terminology in non‑State actor stakeholders. 

So let me conclude and talk about future research.  The outcome that I just alluded to of the 2022‑2023 discussions in terms of ultimately getting consensus on the annual progress report of the open‑ended Working Group that was just submitted to the General Assembly I guess in September, went down to the very last moments of the very last day of that final fifth substantive session.

The only way that the consensus was achieved was by the open‑ended Working Group Chair Ambassador who took a suspension and went around to do informal negotiations and solved the dissensus by what he termed in his words technical adjustments to assure the consensus.  The Delegation had termed his technical adjustment as what is known as diplomacy quickly.  The Chair crafted two independent footnotes.  Call it balancing the dual idea galaxies.  Each of the footnotes gave a small amount of recognition to each of the idea clusters and set the stage of course for further discussion in 2023 to 2024 open‑ended Working Group ahead.  There are many dates set ahead in discussion to this topic.

In sum, there are intentional institutional change.  My project will continue to identify emergent or disappearing galaxies.  These relate to the conflicting isomorphic pulls I began with as indicators of institutional change.  I hope to use now that we are primarily post pandemic a more mixed methods approach to capture the more individual level idea entrepreneurship in the turbulent times.  Times that continue to catalyze change processes.  With that I am going to turn the floor back to our Chair.  Thank you. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Nanette. 

I will give feedback now and then come back to it.  I like it because it addresses big questions in Internet Governance and looks at recent developments in institution namely the open‑ended Working Group.  I have two feedback points.  One of theory and the second on empirics.  On theory, a number of things to be further clarified.  You use a lot of concepts, especially with the different indicators of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization and stages of deinstitutionalization.  Do you meet the concepts such as habitualization, objectification, sedimentation.  Many of the concepts don't come back in the analysis.  I would focus on those what you need in the analysis and define more clearly what you mean.

You use institutionalization and deinstitutionalization as binary.  And what about count institutionalization?  There are authors emphasize regime creation, shifting, so there is more than just making and breaking of an institution.  For instance, parallel regime creation.  Like the open‑ended Working Group is an alternative to the UNGGE.

Institutions can gain relevance or lose relevance or become zombies.  So it says binary may be too limited.

With regard to empirics, the findings address three main categories in emerging technology, crises and idea galaxies, where do the categories come from?  Why did I pick these and not others?  Are they're theoretically related institutionalization?  I think the section about idea galaxies is the most elaborate.  It is clear here which topics you focus on.  However, I think you can elaborate more on why you focus on certain ideas and not others.  For instance, you focus on issues such as gender, human rights, Sustainable Development but not on democracy and equality.  I think this empirical section could be a paper of its own.  Consider focusing the paper on idea galaxies only and thirdly setting out your theory and operationalization and things like emerging technologies and crisis could function more as scope conditions to competing idea galaxies.  Thank you.  I give the floor to Jamie. 

>> Jamie Stuart: Hello, I hope you can hear me well.  Wonderful thank you very much.  I will start my presentation.  Thank you all for having me here.  I do deeply apologize for being remote.  I was hoping to be there in person but was unable to make it.

I'm Jamie, I'm from United Nations University and senior researcher and team lead there.

I will talk about something closely related to the presentation of Nanette, but it is a little bit of a different focus and different focus from the other papers here as well.  Which is particularly on gendered orientations towards Cybersecurity and particularly within Southeast Asia.  I will talk about the intersection of Internet Governance and equality and human rights.  But this is more from a person‑centered perspective rather than from the legal Governance itself.  It is perceptual in many ways.  First off, to situate the work, this is situated within the concept of human‑centric cybersecurity.  Human‑centric cybersecurity is used in a variety of different ways.  The term itself has to be unpacked by understanding it is not an opposition to technocentric cybersecurity, which have a focus on protection of technical systems and networks.  But rather it is about extending the focus to go beyond the technical expression of the cybersecurity and ensuring human rights particularly around freedom of thought and associations.  So those things the prediction of cybersecurity is the prediction of computers networks and information that are essential to cybersecurity, regardless of which level we look at it at national or individual level.  These things that it should be treated as a mechanism for which to achieve human security and protect human rights. 

In this work a piece of research done in partnership with UN Women either Office of Asia‑Pacific, we centralize the concepts of safety and well‑being and look at how cybersecurity practices particularly within Civil Society and those working human rights defense can threaten or disempower uses of technology.  This is working beyond human factors within cybersecurity which indicate to us that people and their behaviors, thoughts, feelings are important for cybersecurity practices.  That is component here, but not an essential element.  The essential element is the protection of people and human rights is the function of cybersecurity.

This is really nicely supported by the associations for progressive communications which have come out with a definition of cybersecurity that are centralize human rights and suggests that these are cybersecurity and human rights in and of themselves, a complementary and mutually reinforcing and interdependent and we will pursue them through freedom and security.  We can take now the Foundations of human‑centric cybersecurity and then we need to ‑‑ then what we did is add a gender lens on top of that.  What we're interested in, in cybersecurity is the function of the WPS Agenda and how to support women and girls in the context of peace and security.  I mentioned, the cybersecurity research people focus on the technical.  And we are interested in taking human factors into cybersecurity, but that is both understanding psychological behavioral factors that shape cybersecurity and a focus on human rights, harms safety.  Alongside the two critical elements, we also recognize that gender fundamentally shapes cybersecurity.  Excuse me.  And that is because for a few major reasons.  The first is that there are gender differences in access and uses of technology and interactions in online spaces.

All of these influence cybersecurity posture and cyber resilience.  We also know from a lot of work that has been happening within the genders and violence space online is that online gender dynamics tend to perpetuate power relationships that are prevalent offline.  The masculine norms and how they influence social relationships replicated in online spaces.  And we also recognize that one would experience distinct types of online violence and these types are more persuasive for women than men.  This is all alongside the gender Digital Divide which we will talk about more.  What does cybersecurity look like in Southeast Asia?  The rapid expansion of technology in the Region and variance in terms of Internet connection across different connections and development across different countries brought about in theory a lot of challenges.  What we see is that there are some countries in the region that are highly prepared and doing a lot of really critical and novel work in terms of Governance in that area and others that are not.  The OHCHR this year released a report on cybersecurity within Southeast Asia and what they found, they suggested that the regulatory instruments that are being developed within the Region where there is a high‑level of surveillance, and in particular, increasing what they consider to be arbitrary and disproportionate restrictions on freedom and privacy. 

There were key items that were relevant for the region.  I will not go through in a lot of detail.  There is a lot to cover in the presentation.  But what I will suggest is that these critical elements are spreading of hate speech, coordinated attacks, technology surveillance and restrictive frameworks, criminalization and Internet shutdowns.  I suggest those who are interested read this report.  It is very enlightening.  As I see, this is quite aligned to the conversation that the discussion of Nanette, where we talked about broader conversations that might be in opposition to human rights.  One of the things that had come up recently is the General Assembly have expressed concerns over these broader consensus that is thinking that cybercrime in this legislation might be misused against human rights defenders and endanger human rights more generally.  We see this a lot in the recognition of what is happening with journalists around the world and their freedom of speech. 

Sorry I'm running through things relatively quickly.  I know I don't have a lot of time.  We focused on women Civil Society and Civil Rights defenders in the Region.  This group are disproportionately affected by cyber-attacks.  That is because of working with marginalized groups it is sensitive politicalized topic and not well informed of regulations.  They have little say in the laws and regulations.  And we know this from direct case study work that are actually used the laws and regulations used to directly harm them.  And they face a gender Digital Divide meaning that the least represented within the cybersecurity field and technical roles and therefore least likely to take that into the issue.  We want to look at resilience with the right of promoting human Digital Divide rights of women and girls in Southeast Asia.  We wanted to review the national and international context.  Did an online survey with those who are employed in Civil Society organizations, advocating for women.  And we interviewed a whole range of women human rights defenders, but specifically those working in the space of digital rights as well.  And we conducted a cyber audit.  I'm not going to talk about all of this.  The report will be launched probably recall next year so those who are interested can contact me about that. 

I wanted to briefly go over something I think is of quite a lot of importance.  This is not comparing it to other Regions around the world.  This is legislation that are happening in Southeast Asian Region and types of legislation, the aim of legislation within cyberspace that is happening.  So you can see there in terms of the top figure, the year, there is a large increase.  15.  This is collapsed across countries.  Of new legislative and regulatory frameworks that came about and they were five in 2022, but the count is based on research.  There is legislation happening in this area.  Some of it looks positive.  But may not be necessarily used in the same way for all people.  What we know about the laws in Southeast Asia the laws happening to allow surveillance, search seizure and variety of case studies around this, targeted monitoring including CCTV cameras, collection of biometric data.  The surveillance of protestors and taking the photos.

>> MODERATOR: Have you two more minutes.

>> Jamie Stuart: I will rush through the end.  The using of the technology to target human rights defenders.  So we know that all of these I won't go through in detail have a lot of impact specifically on human rights defenders.  I won't go through it.  I wanted to say more generally from this data is that there are ‑‑ as I said variance in the way that gender equality and Internet freedom is enacted and freedoms of cybersecurity they don't work in the same way for WCSO and WHRD.  Needless to say, in our research we found technology is the heart of the work that Civil Society engaging in like our life or the life of our work, suggested by women.  And the social media was a critical asset that for their functioning, which was also a place where they were directly targeted.

They faced a huge variety of cyber threats and we did do some comparison to say that there was highly online harassment misinformation cyber bombing and huge number of samples of false information spread about them.

We also found that there was cyber resilience amongst the organizations than we hoped.  That half felt prepared respond and recover and half did not.  What we found is we need to decentralize the constant new things that actually allow many people to use the features of digital technology in safe and secure ways.  The content in the cyber attacks that were faced by WCSO and WHRDs were highly gendered.  I have some quick case studies here.  Photos taken without consent, fabricated deep fakes and used to dehumanize and discredit human rights defenders. 

There was an idea that the human rights defenders should expect to experience violence online and harassment.  There were deep threats and discrediting of feminist movements and silencing and removal of safe spaces for discourse.  I really wanted to focus on the last recommendation before I must finish, which is that aside from some of the organizational level recommendations that we're putting forward, we also need to ensure what we're recommending from the work is gender responsive needs to human‑centric for recourse against cyberattacks and threats made difficult in the context where there is the perpetrators of the cyber attacks may likely be state actors or coordinated attacks that are sponsored and highly or well-funded.  So we need to make sure our frameworks are aligned with this.  And where we're endorsing Global frameworks take this into account.  Thank you very much everybody for your time. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Jamie.  I think it is super important and interesting research, it is a piece I can relate to a lot personally.  I really appreciate it.  I basically have three feedback points.  One is the scope of the concept, one on actors and one on future steps.

With regard to scope what do you include in the notion of threat in the research?  In the introduction you speak of cyber attacks, later you also talk about digital literacy, misinformation and these are all different kinds of threats, right?  The mechanism about defending yourself against cyber take such as doxing or stalking is more direct or immediate than reducing misinformation.  Should you not make a categorization of the type of threats and how this impacts marginalized communities?  How does the causal mechanism of threat difference here?  By extension, how does it call for different types of regulation?  At the same time, how far do you think regulation can actually reach?  Like at some point you made an interesting point that cybercrime legislation is being like misused to target human rights defenders.  So I think this is a very relevant and interesting point and I think you can make a similar argument about harassers sometimes weaponizing antiharassment tools built into digital platforms basically to harass other people or pick platforms with the most limited options for moderation.  How effective is regulation?  And what is the alternative? 

And on the second point about actors, it remained unclear to me who the actors in this piece really are.  For instance, it would help to give examples of women in human rights defenders, women Civil Society organizations.  Also maybe anecdotes that could help the reader understand the cases you're talking about.  And similar thing applies to threats.  What actors are we talking about here?  There are trolls and coordinated attacks by groups, maybe political groups.

How does this affect policy recommendations? 

Then finally on future steps, currently, your recommendations are quite broad and I think you can make it a bit more concrete.  For instance, you said that social media is a critical tool for operations but increases risk exposure.  What instances of risk exposure on social media did you see?  How would you recommend tackling this issue?  Thank you.  I give the floor to you. 

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>> I hope I am audible.  Thank you to the Chair and GigaNet for hosting us today in Kyoto on a lovely morning.  Thank you to Camesh for making it just in time.  Unfortunately, he had to miss his flight.  But he got a new flight today and made it in time.  That is great to see.  First of all, quickly introducing myself.  My name is Kazim P. We are the dialogue, a think tank out of India.  We work on issues and one is AI.  We're excited to present this paper, that is authored with Camesh and his colleagues that are in point, and likely enjoying their Sunday morning unlike Camesh and me, but we're having a better time presenting this paper.  Content want to waste time.  The objective and what we're trying to do here.  You see in the titles, this is looking at enabling responsible AI in India.  We have come up with principles and these are principles which we believe need to be implemented at different stages.  The uniqueness about the paper is the principles cut across the development stage of AI, the deployment and usage by various actors and consumers.  I think that is where we have the paper and that is what we're trying to do.  This has been discussed in India and that is the idea to work on this paper. 

Move to the next slide, go through the outline quickly.  I think in the last year or so we have been accustomed to hearing the word AI more.  With the idea of the applications, most of you in this room and listening to us online are having a direct interaction with some sort of model.  And what we see as researchers is that the technology is moving from just B to B to B to C technology where consumers are directly interfacing with AI models to help with daily tasks, and et cetera.  (Muffled microphone) the ecosystem in social media, education, finance.  A lot of what we see today is driven by algorithms. 
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You cannot live without them.  They make or create the structure of the Internet which is the model Internet of today and the services provided.  So for example, I have a house and on social media I see different options to buy different food for the cat.  He's a very handsome cat.  He eats specific food.  If you go to social media and there are pictures, you will be, getting, you know, different type of suggestions and interventions.  So it is really taking over in terms of giving you ideas, giving you inputs.  From the music you listen to, it is places in the visit, it is everywhere in the life.  So while it is doing good things, there are certain challenges, that is the focus for us has been.  If you go to the next slide, what we tried do here in this paper is understand the challenges, and identify what are the implementing frameworks Governments scholars, developmental organizations, multilateral organizations, tech companies have to work towards as well as Civil Society.  Right? 

So that is the focus for us.  And what we have done is we sort of mapped out certain specific ways of identifying responsible AI. 

Maybe we can move to the next slide.  Yeah.  So in this paper, we have mapped impacts and harm.  And what we have done is looked at AI at the development stage.  So the design and development at the algorithmic development model stage where we analyzed what are the harms which could take place when you're designing the technology?  When you are reporting it and sort of coming up with algorithms and collecting data.  What kind of data you are collecting?  How should you collect the data?  What is your intensity, et cetera?  That is one stage which we have understood.  The second stage is a harm stage, that is the postdevelopment deployment stage, when the technology is deployed by industries, it could be, you know, horizontal industries such as finance, education, even environment sustainability, social media, whatever industry is using the technology, there are certain harms present over there.  So how do you protect ourselves from those harms?  These are the two stages which we have come up with.

Again, this is a unique approach because most of the principles that you will see, be it the OCD or UNICEF or different multilateral or bilateral principles mostly focusing on the deployment sort of stage and this is something that we have sort of figured out that design and deployment and development all these have to be met.  That is the focus for the paper.  So go to the next slide.  Pretty much summing up what we are doing.  Three stakeholders the developer.  And you have the deployer.  The end user, the end population, what are the principles for the end policy as well?  If you develop a help desk application, there are principles for the technologists, the coders who designed the application.  There are principles for the hospitals, clinics, doctors who are using the technology.  And there are principles when it comes to, you know, how consumers are interfacing with the technology and how do you protect them as well.  These are the three stages in the stakeholders.  So then we have really marked the harms across the AI life cycle.  Camesh if you want to look at the mapping of the principles and what those are. 

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>> Camesh: I hope I'm audible.  I am.  Thank you for setting the context for the paper.  Coming from where you left, it is like what the paper is trying to do and why this is a unique way of looking at things.  It is basically most of the ... yeah.  Basically most of the time when we're in most of the frameworks that are available outside there other like overly concentrated on the risk management which comes at the developer level.  What we have been doing is like looked into the 360 degree approach where we wanted to move beyond the developer and ask a question like about if at all the developer is designing a technology ethically, does that mean that like, you know, when the technology is not used there will be no happening.  To answer the question as well, we have come up of the principle of ecosystem approach.  And the model is basically talk about as mentioned, mapping all the principles for various stakeholders that come within the ecosystem itself.  Selectively we could actually ensure that some of the adverse impacts that we map doesn't happen.  So firstly, what we have done is come up firstly took five adverse impacts and we chose exclusion, false prediction and a copyright infringement and concerns and why these five?  Because these are the most top five aspects which are like talked about when it comes to AI implementations.  It is not an exhaustive list.  This is a start of what we're doing.  Then what we went about doing is as mentioned, we looked at impact and harm.  For us impact and harm is this impact is just a construct of like a harm that could happen later.  Like how much you are aware of that.  And harm is obviously like exposed itself and the harm maps.  When we talk about inclusion, all any of these adverse impacts.  We don't really look at from the granular level, different stakeholders in all of the different stages of the AI life ISOC itself.  Or the different levels which accumulates into something like an exclusion happening.  So we went about like mapping all of those impacts and harms.  Which are the different stages of them.  You know, the life cycle of the AI itself. 

One important aspect here looking into the slide is two important additional stages that we have added the gray, the action operationalization, the deployment level and then the event of doing the direct usage, which is what was mentioned about no B to C implementations coming into the picture. 

So ... next slide. 

Yeah.  I think we skipped one.  Yeah, now it is working.  It is working.  Yeah.  Now it is working.  Ha‑ha‑ha.  So ... yeah. 

Yeah.  This is the one.  Now that we know impact and harms are mapped, what the paper goes about doing is like, you know, mapping various principles that could be followed by different stakeholders at the different stages of the life cycle.  And here if you could see these are like some of the principles that are extracted from Globally available frameworks like OECD, EU and other stuff and India is like the G20 Declaration that speaks about the principles.  Unless to that research we suggested new principles.  So after principles what we go about doing is that is the operationalization.  Here the unique aspect of the paper fly tries to do is when we talk about human in the loop as a principle, most of the times like we just use the term as pass by.  When it comes to operationalization, the principle means in the life cycle.  That is what we want to bring out from the paper.  For example, if you can look at this at the planning build and use stage, that is you want to engage with stakeholders.  And the actual operationalization stage it means you have to give a human anatomy to people subjected human anatomy to take positions against whatever the decision is given.  So broad differences into the picture.  But then the operationalization.  Now, the impact is done.  The operationalization, principles are mapped, operationalization is done.  Finally the paper to give a holistic approach we talk about the implementation that comes from the Government.

Here, because like research is extensively in Indian context.  We were looking at what can be done by the Indian context in implementing this framework.  Looking at domestic coordination that is important in the legislation and international cooperation is important because various aspects are happening at the different you know, institutional level and jurisdictional level and bilateral level. 

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>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Good afternoon.  I hope your lunch is agreeable.  I have not transformed into Andrea.  But she is missing!  No, Andrea just contacted me to say his train has been delayed, which must be a first in Japan and could only happen when someone had to be a discussant at this panel.  So I will start.  This is a team effort, we are counting on everybody to fill in Andrea's shoes.  He's assured me he will sent you comments on your papers.  So we will start the process here.  Okay.  So it is my pleasure to launch the afternoon session of the GigaNet annual symposium.  We have three papers to are introduced.  I will introduce all three straight away.  So I don't talk in between.  We have Vladimir that will present on AI policies on research domain, preliminary findings of patent analysis.  Secondly, on my extreme left we have Robert, who will be presenting a paper on European rule, European tools, mapping the institutional cultures of EU platform formation.  And we have Sophie who will present her paper a new social contract for data.  Question mark.  I will pass the floor to Vladimir to present your paper. 

>> Vladimir: This study was conducted by me and my colleague, and we tried look at the artificial intelligence policies and agencies as a research domain, if there are any specifics, specific feature of this research domain, any trends in these studies.  I will share the preliminary findings of this analysis. 

First of all, I try to understand better the literature on AI policies and we did it in three ways.  We developed a descriptive analysis of papers, Articles and authors in order to determine some trends.  And AI policies, what does it mean, and what are the main directions of research domain.  Secondly, we analyze the conceptual structure of this research domain.  We developed the framework for using the bibliometric analysis and create a map of main and highly important topics studied.  We have analyzed and ground the topics and we tried to suggest some future research directions. 

So we tried to answer two research questions.  What is state‑of‑the‑art of AI policies reflected by most cited papers.  Articles, most important authors, sources, countries, et cetera.  And what are the case topics and concepts in the literature on AI policies? 

So the workflow consist of five steps, five stages.  First one is develop the study design.  We have selected database.  Google Scholar, because of reasons of accessibility of the database.  And the second step was the data collection, we have searched Google Scholar based on the research strategy.  I will go to the next slide.  We have expected the format (audio is distorted)

We expect as a collection in Excel format.  So total we have 1545 publications.  So the search was conducted by country name and keywords.  You can see these words on the slide.  AI policy, strategy, initiatives, regulating, governing, legislation, et cetera. 

Excuse me. 

And the third stage was data analysis.  Screening titles in Google Scholar, deleting irrelevant records.  We have excluded the preprints, forewords, et cetera.  And we have left only items in English.  We have deleted number of publications, for example, agriculture, education, health, et cetera.  And we have left only 178 publications.  So the final collection is uploaded to Biblioshiny.  And we use the software of this Programme to visualize the data. 

And the interpretation.  So we can say that (distorted) the ‑‑ was recently but increasing stopped during ‑‑ during last three years.  So we can state that the research domain achieved some major point so the most relevant source so we can see the collaboration of the authors and we can state that work together.  And title work, the thematic map that consistent of quadrants, niche topic.  (Audio is adjusting) and interpret the such topics as artificial intelligence policies and China are increasing, emerging topics, at the same time such topics as AI policy evaluation is not elaborated enough.  We would like to see the further development of this topic for example.

So as far as limitation of the study, so we should note that the choice of keywords was limited by our initial knowledge of the topic.  So this determines findings, and we can see this on this.

So we used only Google Scholar and traditionally Scopus is used for these purposes but at the same time Google Scholar index the books.  But the at the same time Scopus and Web of Science are better and more diverse. 

And the conclusions, we can state that such topics are not studied enough as AI policy effects and so what are the outcomes of the AI policies?  They're negative or positive what is AI policy per say.  There are a few studies which represent the question. 

There is many platforms and on the perspectives of AI policies.  So the institutional approach is dominated, dominating in these studies.  AI policies previously started during the periods of certainty, but at the same time, there are some crisis such as pandemics, conflicts, sanctions, environmental crisis, so we need to study domain in the contemporary conditions.  So that's it.  Thank you for attention. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Thank you, Vladimir.  I will move to Robert who will give his paper now.  Robert, you don't have slides we will look at you on the big screen. 

>> Robert: Oh, my goodness.  I don't know if I have before been in such high‑definition before.  Hi everyone, nice to be here in Kyoto.  I'm grateful to talk about the work in progress I'm undertaking with my colleague, the legal scholar that is at northeastern.  How is it looking out there?  I will go old school with no slides.  Apologies for this.  Get ready to be extremely bored.  I will try to sprinkle jokes in to keep you on your toes.  That was the first one.

We'll talk about European digital policy, which again, dry topic, but is one which is really important at the moment, I think.  We have all probably heard conversations about the many different overlapping things that European countries and European Commission as an actor are pursuing from the Digital Services Act and AI Act and other regulations.  And we heard about The Brussels Effect and the way things EU is doing because of the market size are having national and transboundary impact.

It seems clear that at the moment, a lot of commentators are picking up, the EU is portrayed as the leading tech regulator of the moment.  This project, which is very much a work in progress, so I'm looking forward to hearing comments and feedback on this was born out of a bit of dissatisfaction with some of the current work that we're seeing in the space.

At least as far as the lack of good, centralized resources that one can look at, that try to provide a more holistic assessment of what the EU is doing.  For example, even if you are looking at a subset of tech policy in the EU, and you want a single resource that looks at the regulation of online content, so‑called platform regulation issues or other broader related issues, I think it is difficult to find something like this.

And there's a reason for this, I think.  There is a number of challenges that we as a research space are dealing with, I think.

Part of it is just the nature of the rapid development of EU policymaking in this space, even for people like me that are theoretically supposed to be following this as my day job, I can barely keep up.

We're seeing a huge amount of policy efforts being developed across the Internet stack and from the Internet infrastructure to now more kind of assertive industrial policy relating things that talk about supply chains and semiconductors and manufacturing processes of ICTs as well as the top of the stack, all sorts of different content related regulations that are kind of at the application layer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly with all of the mobility, we're seeing a lot of disciplinary fragmentation and data protection law, scholars are doing their own thing.  The intermediary scholars are doing their own thing.  It is repeated from child safety and other issues.

I come from a more political science background and there are big debates in the EU policymaking and bigger shift in the policymaking in things like semiconductors.  A lot of folks in the room have worked on digital sovereignty debates and the role it might be playing when it comes to Cloud platforms like Gaia‑X.  On top of the movement, we're seeing some structural features, which make this a complicated space to navigate, which is how complicated the European Union is as a multilevel political actor.

Even if you just look at the European Commission, the main policymaking bureaucratic arm of the EU, there is a lot of complex politics that are kind of inside the hood that people don't see.  And this actually makes it really kind of puzzling to understand what is going on.  Because there is different parts of the commission that have different Agendas and are pursuing what oftentimes seem to be contradictory policies. So the project we just embarked on this summer and it is early stage.  It is probably a bit too ambitious for a single paper and might become two papers, has two main overarching goals.  The first thing is we're trying to understood EU digital policymaking as a political project.

Whether or not it is actually coherent political project, that remains to be seen.  We are trying to do an institutional mapping of all the different parts of the Agenda and what is going on.  Relatedly part two is trying to look at what is going on from that descriptive point of view.  And try to map it on to some of the theoretical lenses that are being proposed in different disciplines, different parts of this conversation to kind of explain the changes that we're seeing whether we want to call them logics or political mechanisms.  I will go into those a little bit in depth maybe starting with the first kind of bucket.

So what we have been doing in the project that we have started is we're taking a kind of institutionalist and political economic perspective of trying to think of who the key actors are and what is their policy toolbox.  We have been focusing specifically on the last four years of the wonder line Commission.  One actor one Commission in a time of seeing huge change.

Part of this is basic descriptive work mapping out the ecosystem of all the different parts of the commission that have digital policy competency.  Again, this is interesting because sometimes they're not actually formal competencies, if you look closely.  There is Director Generals, parts of the commission examples of relevant ones are DG grow, DG connect, the classics, DG justice which is working on issues like online hate speech and disinformation.  DG competition working on competition issues.  And then also ones like DG home, which is the kind of security focus actor of the commission and interestingly has been getting more involved on issues like child safety and terrorist content online in recent years.  Maybe that isn't part of the mandate. 

After doing this mapping we have been trying to list and map out all the different policies that these DGs have been spearheading looking at formal and informal regulatory tools.  And also, finally we have been trying to figure out the institutional features of the different policies across the different DGs, basically how did they do what they do from a functional organizational perspective.  This is really interesting and really complicated, famous for involving complex networks of different regulators.  And different enforcement mechanisms and legal justifications and institutional design at play here.  We're trying to understand that from a descriptive way in a more coherent mechanism. 

One of the things we're seeing here is something I already alluded to, which is basically a lot of divergence in EU digital policy seems to be partially explained by the different actors that are driving them and the different interests that we can assume those actors have.  So there is some interesting news today, for example, about the news European Union media freedom act.  You might say hey, don't they have an interest in combating disinformation.  There is arguments being made that it is contradictory to the goals of some of the things they did under codes like the disinformation code of conduct. 

Again, part of the simple institutional analysis here is that discrepancy at least makes partial sense when you continue is different parts of the Commission.  Different actors, motivated by different pulls.

Again, that only goes so far.  We're trying to just understand also which parts of the Commission prefer different types of institutional arrangements.  So for example, DG home substantively has been delegating stuff through technical solutions, like automated automation, through the CSAM and terrorist content, DG justice and voluntary codes of conduct.  We can talk about this.

Part two of the paper, I'm almost at 10 minutes already.  I will be really quick.  Basically this is I think the perhaps more interesting piece for the room.  And it is something I would be interested in talking with you all a little bit about is basically trying to map these types of descriptive analysis on to some of the major theoretical lenses and approaches people have been advancing to try to explain what we're seeing in EU policy.  A line of scholarship that is coming out especially of European legal circles is the resurgence of European digital constitutionalism, we can talk more about that. 

We have public policy scholars that are looking at industrial policy.  And thirdly, I think we have a third broad bucket of critical scholars that are looking at digital capitalism, digital neoliberalism and these are big generalizations, but basically we can think of these as explanations that are shifted or based around norms, geopolitics and markets. 

And we are working on this part of the project, what is interesting is all of the different lenses have different strengths and look at different pieces of what is a very big digital policy ecosystem. 

Quickly the structural analysis of digital capitalism provide helpful explanations of what's going on in terms of interactor perspective and capture struggles of the political actors and capture the internal struggles within the EU policy and it is trends.  I guess it is internal struggles between market delegating mechanisms that have been part of the single market project to kind of more interventionist efforts to curb the excesses of the market.  We then have industrial policy approaches that I think make a lot of sense when we're trying to explain certain geopolitical or geo economic policies relating to the reshoring of supply chains, digital sovereignty projects like Gaia‑X.  Those types of analyses are less good at explaining the minute details of the procedural bureaucratic frameworks that the EU is developing.  Or other parts of the EU are developing for online content for example.

That is something that digital constitutionalism scholars are doing in the EU describing new layers of rules that are layered on top of industry behavior in the area of content moderation.

What I think is interesting here, this is not fully developed yet is that there are a number of kind of interesting contradictions between the different approaches and also some weaknesses when you compare them in this way.  So for example, something like digital constitutionalism, coming at it from a political science point of view.  There is an argument that it underplays actor Agency in terms of how policy change happens.  Maybe it overrelies on judicial actors in agents of change in policymaking in the EU.  Maybe it treats markets too abstractly and isn't engaging enough with the broader political forces like geopolitics that are inherent in the policy approach.  That is a very high‑level birds eye view of what we're trying to do in this project.  It is still in the early stages.  I think the move we will make towards the end is basically trying to see whether or not we can argue for a more kind of synthesizing framework that pulls insights from all of these different frameworks in terms of thinking about digital (audio skipping) in the EU across the kind of scopes of norms, markets and geopolitics.  Thanks so much.  Excited for the discussion. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Thank you, Sophie, you are a co‑host, right?  Hello.  Could you please, Sophie, co‑host. 

>> Sophie: I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Brussels and at CRIS.  I want to talk about the paper I'm working on in the social construct in relation to data and likeliness for this to occur.  I kept seeing different actors talking about the need to establish a new social contract in relations to data.  For example, the World Bank in 2021 had published a report data for better life in which they not only reflected upon the need to establish a new social contract but also propose a specific mechanism for data sharing.  But I also found similar debates in Academia and also among journalists.

This raised the question for me at least, we're talking about it, but is there a possibility of such a thing to occur.  And if currently those conditions are present. 

I would like to talk about what a social contract is, to make sure everyone can follow.  Social contract is often perceived as written agreement geared toward the installment of political authority.  With the purpose to foster social cooperation.

The document must raise the community out of state of nature.  Meaning prior that was none or not a sufficient overarching political authority.  And thirdly, members of the community need to enter voluntarily.  I think most of us think when we think about social contract you think about the nation‑state of course, we are often familiar with the works of Locke, Rousseau and Kant.  We often refer to the myth of the social contract as people struggle to find any empirical evidence of such a social contract to exist, which is described by Durkheim who said the social contract has no relation to the facts.  The arguments against this is a social contract exists but we can't find it on a nation‑state level.  But we can find it in subnation level and global levels. 

When it comes to social contract in relation to the digital square we see people writing and proposing in relation to the digital realm in general or specific parts of it. 

This is often considered to be a result of the fact that you can see it on the quote on the slide as well.  That sometimes the digital realm is described as an undeveloped frontier, which is the Lockean state of nature, meaning we need to establish or need to establish a political authority. 

So we currently are seeing in Academia many are proposing social contract in relation to virtual worlds to privacy, to AI.  And for data, of course. 

This for me raised a question, okay, we're talking about these things.  Is there a possibility for this to arise?  In the tradition of social theory, there is not much being paid to the conditions.  However, one theory that I used in my paper.  This was proposed by Alexander Fink.  He described ‑‑ he looked at the cases of social contracts that we can see.  And empirically and he drafted this theory.  For according to Alexander Fink for a social contract to arise we need a community with similar preferences in relation to public good.  Secondly, the members of the group need to share common social norms for them to be able to come together and draft such a document.  And third, he focuses on the size of the group.  The smaller the group the likeliness of the social contract to occur will increase is because there is lower decision‑making and monitoring costs.  What I have done in the paper is I structured alongside the three conditions that Alexander Fink has proposed.

I will keep it brief because in the paper I go in depth, but I would like to not bore you with all of specifics.

First I looked at the first condition.  The community made a similar preference.  Of course, this is where a Global social contract becomes difficult because the communities are so big that we can identify different preferences in relations to public good.  Such as commercial and security.

However, we can identify some parts ‑‑ some data.  So not all data, but some parts of data where we can identify actually many actors do have the similar reference.  This is what I found mostly about data to use for the betterment of society.  This is also following the digital public goods Alliance that made a distinction between all data and community data.  As you can see, on the slide, community data refers to data that can be useful for the fulfillment of human rights and Sustainable Development Goals.

So to conclude on the first condition, I found that if we follow the theory of Fink the community of course has very different preferences in relations to all data, however we can identify some similarities in treatment of community data.

The second condition that I reflected upon is the fact that the members need to share a common social norms.  Again, because of the size of Global community, we can identify various social norms.  I looked at difference of collectivist and individualist societies.  The definition of a common good, if we say we want to use data that helps the betterment of society we need to find consensus of what that means, which creates obstacles.  The third one, regards to privacy, you can also identify the privacy is highly contextual.  Norms are highly contextual.  Fourth the familiarity with the concept of the social contract also impacted likeliness of people to be aware of what a social contract is and also make plans to create the social contract.

So to conclude, I would say that the different social norms could hinder the creation of the global social contract, however, we could look at maybe not immediately go on a Global level, but maybe focus on regional initiatives or data, topic focus.  For example, a Global social contract on health data.  There is progress on that field already.  The third condition is the size of the community.  And of course, according to Fink the lower the decision‑making costs are.  I agree with, but especially because of the fact that data ‑‑ the Internet and digital realm actually makes us to be so much more connected with each other.  That is the way that I still think it would be possible.  And of top of that, if we would be able to make something like this on a global level, we would have a lot of resources in terms of people and money to do so. 

To conclude, I have reflected upon what are the conditions needed according to Fink for a social contract to arise in relation to data.  What I found is not very surprising is now it seems too ambitious to ‑‑ it wouldn't be ‑‑ I'm sorry. 

It would not be very likely that in the following years we will see the creation of a global social contract in relation to all data.  As I said earlier, in terms of the community data, I do see possibilities and it is important to reflect upon this as we could use this step to protect full potential of data for the betterment of society.  Thank you for listening. 

(Applause)

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: I need a second.  I'm in the head of Andrea.  I will go through the papers one by one with a few comments.  And trying to kind of push disorders the discussion with the audience.  And Vladimir thank you for the paper you presented.  It struck me as a very promising reflection on looking at this from the literature perspective.  Looking at this on what people are saying about AI.  I found that entering.  The methodology is intriguing.  I would have thought that the methodology worked on larger numbers.  You spent a lot of time reducing the numbers.  I was wondering about that.  Because I think that, you know, there is some element of qualitative research that you could also bring into a smaller number, I think.  You said you got down to 170 in the end, yeah? 

That is one thing.  The second thing is it would be useful, probably and this is boring geeky talk, but it would be useful as you mention to also look towards Scopus, which I think you can still access for free.  Okay, you can't.  Okay.  I do it through University.  But it may be interesting to expand the database list that you have.  I was a bit struck by something you said, when you said I removed all literature related to agriculture, education and health.  Most when they write about AI they write about AI and a field, agriculture, education or health.  I thought why did he take them out, and not leave them in and put even more in.  That leads to the biggie question, which is about the choice of code words or choice of keywords.  AI is not ‑‑ not everything that is called AI is AI.  And not everything that isn't called AI is not AI. 

There you go.  A serial comment from a discussant.  I remember a big discussion a few years ago, why not call it cybernetics?  What is ‑‑ why are we using this term artificial intelligence to describe this when actually the things going on the machines, the concepts are actually used by different scholars in different disciplines to mean something else.  So ... that might be something.  That limits the words you use in the paper.  That limits the scope of the discussion that you can have.  Which also reflects on the choice of journals.  I'm glad that you chose our flagship journal for telecommunication policy that we have a special issue with over on the list.  I was also wondering, you know, what was the rationale for the choice of the literatures.

That is some thoughts.  I have everything from my notes.  Good.

Second, Robert, thanks for this paper.  Makes me realize that I should have written more.

(Chuckling)
It's really interesting to see you map out the European Union's digital policy space.  I wish you all the best.  I hope you do it. 

(Chuckling)

There is one other thing that struck me that actually a lot of EU policy, full stop is now dealing with digital.  So your mapping might turn out to be okay, what is the EU doing as a whole, right?  Because I find that even if you focus on one DG, you find out they're involved in other projects.  It might be interesting to look, when you look at just the commission to look at okay, how does this would be really interesting.  How does DG connect get involved in interservice consultations?  How do they try to push forward the sort of research Agenda and policy Agenda from that perspective?  That might be interesting. 

Obviously, you have the tensions across different DGs.  Right?  In the sense that there are different approaches, different understandings of what we mean.  And traditionally, DG connect has been very tech oriented.  And DG justice and so on, a bit more legalistic, of course.  That kind of interaction is evolving very much.  I think also one of the things you probably want to look into because you focus on the ‑‑ although you said the EU, you focus or talk a lot about the European Commission.  I think the European external action service is doing quite a bit in digital policy now, engaging across.

You do have the Parliament's role in this.  And you know, you can also say something about the Council.  Sorry to all of those that aren't involved in EU stuff.  That is one of the consequences of this.

So the other thing I talked about the EU as a tech regulator in the introduction.  That seems to be a kind of least discourse that is emerging in the mainstream.  I would like you to critically also look at that.  I mean, Milton and I were at a workshop a couple of weeks ago that was trying to look at the role of the U.S., China, and other powers in manip ‑‑ in shaping the way the EU looks at this.  It is clear the EU wants to be seen as the tech regulator and maybe it does take regulatory decisions to that level.  It might be interesting to actually critically look at that as well and see how much of this, due to the way the EU works in terms of policy formulation, may be based not on tech regulation, but on interest representation in the development of tech regulation.

And therefore, I would kind of ‑‑ this is me not arguing against you doing the mapping because it needs to be done, but it is saying, you need to look in these specific cases, and maybe it would be good to think about one or two specific cases.  Policy, maybe one of an obvious policy and less obvious policy.  It is quite a lot there.

Also, you mention that you only want to look from 2019 onwards.  You are obviously aware there has been a massive shift since that period.  That is a good thing to do.  I think there is a history and legacy to all of this.  It is important to kind of bear that in mind.  It does have implications for this.  It is very much there.

I will leave that there for the moment.  We will go on Sophie.  Of course, we talked briefly about this paper before.  My comments won't come as a surprise.

(Chuckling)
So first of all, thanks.  I was wondering, you have drawn this on the literature of social contract.  I was wondering at some point during your presentation, I was thinking about you mentioned there has to be a vacuum.  There has to be nothing, a void before a social contract.  Obviously, we live in a period of social contract.  We have to rewrite it.  For me, the contract you can always change the contract.  I was wondering how that reflects, you know, on your reflections there?  Because we have social contracts that do exist.  You want to put a functional social contract in there.  So I was wondering about that.

I also thought ‑‑ so I mean, this is not a comment to you, but a comment to Fink and I wonder whether you thought critically about how Fink looks at the issues of size and functionality.  Because for me, the question of size is obviously incompatible with what you were describing.  You know, a social contract is not between a small group of people, in your case, but it is over a larger scale.  And in terms of function, it is also vice versa as well for you.  I was wondering whether you would actually write a response to Fink first, rather than going into this because I like the idea of you reflecting on what the World Bank is doing, so on, so forth.  But I wonder if before you do that you need the theorizing up to speed.  So rather than saying okay, let me talk about Fink, criticize Fink and then go on and do a justification for what the World Bank is doing.  Rather say let me just spend time reflecting on the critique of the social contract.  Okay.  Are there questions from the floor?  There are.  Organize yourself in an open mic fashion.  Thanks. 

>> ATTENDEE: I am from London University.  Question for Vladimir, thanks for that very much.  I was wondering if you could do an assessment of what you found.  In other words, when you look at the trends did you find certain things which are encouraging?  And are there certain aspects which worry you?  To give one example, I think you said most of the literature you found was looking at national responses and national strategies.  So is the academic literature not looking at regional and global strategies for example? 

Question for Sophie.  Can you tell us why ‑‑ I'm not saying it is not the case.  But can you be more explicit why one would be more concerned looking at a social contract?  Why is it important?  Why is it interesting?  Would we necessarily expect a social contract in this sphere to take the same shape as the traditional state centered constitutional kind of form?  In other words, the fact we don't have a United Nations Charter or a national constitution, does that mean there is not a social contract?  Can you have in this sphere a decentralized social contract for example, because Governance is looking different?  Thanks. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: Since Romero standing up, might give him the mic? 

>> ATTENDEE: I have a question similar to the one Jamal posed in terms of the selection of terms.  By selecting AI something you have selected an acronym.  And I think that decision you are discarding the period in which people did not talk about AI because it was not a thing yet.  I wonder if that was a conscious decision to sort of control the sample that you would get to get only the policy related stuff?  I mean, when I read your paper my intuition is I would have included artificial intelligence for example. But perhaps have led you in a different direction. 

Question for Robert, you mentioned the political issues within the Commission.  Are you at a stage that you can share that with us?  Do we have to wait for it?  This is coming from ‑‑ I work in a research center in the Global South trying to look into the DSA because of the obvious impact it will have in the world and in Latin America.  It has already been used as an inspiration to help builds in Costa Rica and Chile.  The mapping you are working on is essential to us.  I wonder if you can share with us little bit more about the political issues.  Thank you.

>> ATTENDEE: I'm from the center for national media assistance in Washington, D.C.  My question, may be identical to Romero's question.  I will give it anyway.  You mentioned the contradictions in the sort of EU constitutionalist perspective that is playing out in the regulatory approaches.  You used the contradiction in particular between the disinformation code of conduct and the media freedom act as an example of that.  Which is of particular interest to our organization and our work.  This is where Romero and I are asking a similar question.

Can you say a few words with the constellation of actors and different perspectives and how you account for the contradictions including the one you see in the code of conduct and media freedom act.  That analysis would be interesting to many of us.  Thanks. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: I suggest we go in the order of presentations. 

>> Vladimir: Thank you for your questions.  I will start with the second one, about the keywords.  Yes.  This was limitation of our approach.  The initial choice of keywords was by the initial knowledge.  The strategy should be developed.  Thank you for your suggestion.  And as for the second, first question, my order, about the status on Global strategists on AI so, yes, there are few studies on this topic by the same time similar studies we work with big information.  In order to find this ‑‑ to analyze this approach we work individually these Articles.  So this is a direction for our further research.  Thank you for your suggestion. 

>> Robert: Thank you for your questions.  I fear I don't have that much to reveal in terms of concrete findings.  Part of that is we're still kind of diving into things and collecting data.  This also relates to your question Jamal in terms of getting a better picture in terms of what the commission is doing.  This is really complicated.  A bunch of the other work I'm doing is freedom of information requests and getting internal emails.  I used that and past work on the development of national platform regulatory projects like the German nets DG to get a better picture of the contradictions, not just in terms of what the different parts of the commission are telling to each other in things they hopefully didn't redact when I requested them.  But also getting a bit of a vision of the different institutional vita points, especially in terms of the negotiation of application of the policies between Member States and the commission.  Which is really, really key. 

This is conjecture in the work I'm doing and the feeling that a lot of the platform regulation Agenda is about kind of adding tools to the toolbox.  And then these get used down the line, strategically by specific actors in certain situations. 

I think this is bang on about the respective human rights impacts of certain legislative approaches.  Think about the upload filters conversation or the conversation that thankfully has slowed a little bit.  But the conversation around embedding for example, rapid takedown times into a lot of the content regulation that the EU is doing.  And contrasting that with the actual application of what is going on, on the ground, where hopefully this is not actually used, it is more of a potential cajole that can be used, theoretically.  That doesn't hearten folks that are worried about human rights impacts to know that this is a tool that hopefully a regulator that is normally constrained will use.  I think it is important part of what is going on.  Just that there are a lot of tools and the outcome is going to be politics.  I know that isn't helpful for folks dealing with the issues on the ground.  I would love to know more about what you are seeing. 

>> Sophie: Thank you for your comment kind of reminds me of the comment you made Jamal about the already existing social contracts.  Indeed, I think we could keep it the way it is and it is in a decentralized way.  In the literature, to be honest I don't have a personal opinion yet.  I just reflected.

What I found in the literature is there is a worry that the data is ‑‑ if we leave it up to the analog social contract, if I call it that, the potential risk that we don't use the full potential the data can have for example, the Sustainable Development Goals or other goals that kind of cross borders.  So I think that is an argument that you can make that perhaps we should establish and also mentioned community data.  Not maybe all data, but data to identify as this is useful for the Global community.  And yeah, that is what I found in the literature, something we're arguing that we need to establish that.  It kind of ties into the debates that we see in digital comments where people are trying to, I think put a frame or reconstruct data as a public good.

And not only as a public good of one nation or of a company in one nation, but that we might need to think about it as a Global public good.  And for that, we might be the social contract to build a mechanism for that. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: I see that you would like to ask a question.  Please go ahead. 

>> ATTENDEE: I'm Michael Nelson with Carnegie endowment for national peace.  This question is for Robert.  A colleague has written a new book called digital empires.  Builds upon her first brook, The Brussels Effect.  We have been having discussions about the lack of digital leadership.  And in particular, how both in Europe and U.S. Congress and some of our state legislator legislatures you have a process where the goal is to regulate AI and deal with hate speech.  Everybody has the way to do it.  Everything is thrown into the draft.  Nobody actually makes it into a coherent hole.  I started my career in Washington, working in the U.S. Senate in 1988.  Back then, there was a real pride of authorship.  The draftsmen writing legislation wanted to make sure they wrote consistent legislation.  If they didn't, the people in the administration point out inconsistencies because they have to implement it.  That seems to be gone on both sides of the Atlantic.  We're getting pieces of legislations that are a series of aspirations and no one seems to notice that they directly contradict themselves.  I notice it, you notice it.  The Parliamentarians don't notice it.  Is there any optimism to change this tide and force people to build a coherent, consistent whole rather than throwing together a lot of things that make them feel good? 

If you want to see more on what I had written on this.  I am Mike Nelson.  When policies collide.  Dozens of examples from the U.S. and Europe. 

>> ATTENDEE: I'm Lee McKnight from Syracuse.  I am happy to follow Mike around.  Sophie in particular, your hope that there might be a chance for getting social contract around the community level.  I'm wondering if you thought at all about community networks per se as perhaps the instrument or vehicle in which there could be data Governance regimes embedded.  That could be either upgraded generally or specifically by the community?  That is something that has come to mind.

I have to do like Mike, my advertisement.  Left behind, in data and development we'll discuss the issues in particular as we work across community, Internet and community networks in Africa with my colleague Professor Danielle Smith who I promise to embarrass by putting on the spot. 

>> Sophie: Wait one minute.  Community network in that they make a community makes a network themselves? 

>> ATTENDEE: Yes.

>> Sophie: We need to work on parts of the world that is in need of betterment and society the context and overlay.  Some community might put emphasis on other aspects than another.  Yes, I think that could be very much a possibility.  However I think the combining of the datasets after that, like after establishing that is so vital that I think it can work in tandem, doesn't have to be either or I think.  I will attend your session. 

>> Robert: One thing that came to mind when you were speaking earlier, maybe it is not in the language of social contract, but there is interesting work looking at procurement at the public level and municipal Governments.  So right the Barcelona model where they had in theory the companies that came in and provided transportation platforms would have to share the data with the local community.  Maybe that is a form of social contract.

>> Sophie: Maybe we can stack them on top of another, it is important to share among each other. 

>> Robert: Thanks so much to the questions and Mike for your question.  I mean, two parts.  First of all, I had a chance to ‑‑ I met Annette Bradford earlier this year at NYU and talking about the new book that I didn't have a chance to read yet.  It looks interesting.  In a way, part of what we're seeing and trying to explore in this project, so she idea types, the U.S., EU and China as a market driven, rights driven and state driven or security driven vision of tech policy.  And I think much of what we're seeing is kind of all three of the modes inside each jurisdiction probably and contestation between the things.  I think what I guess we're seeing in the EU is a lot of contradictions that are driven by different actors with different interests in different camps like this.  I can pint to Henry Pharrell and Abe Newman's work, looking at the data protection in the EU.  I think this is another good example, if you look at for example, the quite controversial child sexual abuse material regulation that the Commission is working on.  You know, look at that, where critics are writing this will have a profound issue on user rights, user privacy and encryption, which another part of the commission is working on through the Digital Services Act.  How do we think about that?  I think it is about actor Coalitions.  One of the things interesting about the regulation is the main actors that are driving that are U.S. actors that have seized the EU as a Global regulator through The Brussels Effect and are trying to hijack this.  I have a loftier piece on this that I can share.  And there is interesting analysis of the journalism NGO recently about thorn, a start‑up slash Civil Society organization started by Ashton Kutcher to lobby on child protection issues.  They're a major actor building Alliances in the EU for this kind of policy.  They know it is easier and probably more effective to do so than at the U.S. federal level.

But on the second part of the question on matters for optimism, I don't often have a lot of optimism, I think if there is something to come back to, it is the fact that we're seeing so much change in a relatively recent period of time.  And just from a bird's eye view, if we look at content regulation in the amount of transparency and resources handled by industry to handle this now, it is a completely different ballgame from 2016.  I think the outcome there has been probably good for users. 

I think there is some reason for hope, given how new this regulatory field is.  Maybe. 

>> ATTENDEE: (Off mic)

>> Robert: It might be muddled but hopefully there is a long‑term trajectory long‑term.

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: I heard from the commission that a lot of they're aware of the inconsistency, but they say we wait for the Courts.  As you said.  Yeah. 

When it issue legislation dare I say.  With the EU where they deal with it.

Are there any last questions? 

Are there any last comments you would like to make to each other? 

Good luck.

(Chuckling)
Okay.  Excellent.  Brilliant.  We're back on time and we even have time to grab coffee that is just around the corner, if somebody needs to go to the bathroom, grab a coffee.  Be back in three minutes to start the next session.  Thanks to all of you and all of the questions. 

(Break)

>> MODERATOR: Hi, everybody.  Good afternoon.  Welcome to the fourth panel of the GigaNet symposium.  This panel will discuss digital sovereignty, colonialism and original mechanisms in the South with Latin America, Asian‑Pacific, and African experience.  I have a few preliminary notes.  I want to applaud the work done by Jamal, just in the back right now.  Was in the previous session.  Jamal has been leading the work of the Committee.  It is a huge effort.  Great leadership with highest efficiency.  Thank you Jamal.  I want to take the time to applaud you.  And then second preliminary note is an arrived at Kyoto at 1:00 a.m. from Brazil.  It is 3:00 a.m. there I don't know how much coherent I will stay on the panel.  But anyway, keep my responsive‑type ‑‑ without further ado.  I would like to have on the screen.  Can we make him also his video.  We have Adio.  A participant on Zoom. 

Is it possible to pin his video? 

While they're sorting this out, I might start with Dennis.  I will introduce them.  They're going to present their paper about regional Internet Governance and postcolonial constructors.  I'm not coherent at all.  And analysis of the African Declaration on Internet rights and freedoms.  I have here on‑site Dennis and online is Adio and they will co‑present their paper.  Dennis, please start. 

>> Dennis: Thank you for having us and organizing this panel.  We look forward to sharing our paper that is a work in progress but relatively far progressed.  We'll talking about regional Internet Governance and postcolonial consciousness, particularly in the in the critique of African Governance.  The democrat of Internet rights and freedoms. 

What brought us to this paper, what is the origin story essentially, Adio is working with digital labor and works on AI on platforms on digital infrastructure and expert in digital sovereignty particularly with respect to Africa.  I work on human rights online.  Internet bills of rights.  And what we heard earlier, already the concept of digital constitutionalism. 

In my dissertation we worked on a number of the initiatives.  And when Adio talking about the African Declaration of freedoms there is something to analyze to bring our different perspectives together.  That is why we do this paper.

The research questions are descriptive and more analytical.  We ask how the document came about, what were the reasons to draft it in the first place, what sets it apart from the other documents, what is the content, how does it work, how does the impact, if we can ever in political science measure the impact of something.  What kind of impact does the document have analytically, interested in questions of is it really a pan‑African document and what does it mean to be a pan‑African Declaration.  Why is it important to a document on human rights online pan‑African, specifically and how does that all relate to African digital sovereignty?  This project, disclaimer, acknowledgment is partly funded small part funded by an EU project.  The REMIT, I need to mention it. 

What we will talk about in the next eight or so minutes we will give key terms, conceptual framework, empirical strategy and limitations for future research.

On the right‑hand side, you see the core thinker we adopted for this paper.  We'll talk more about him in a little bit.  The general three concepts we tried relate for this paper are postcolonial critique, the thinking of Nkrumia and the principles to digital environment and the digital bills of rights in recent years, thirdly African digital sovereignty.  I'm going to hand over to Adio now. 

>> Adio: Can you hear me? 

>> MODERATOR: Yes, we can hear and see you on the screen.  Welcome. 

>> Adio: Thank you, all right.  Thanks for that.  Quickly moving to the postcolonial critique.  He was a towering figure when we talk about the movement as a hole. Nkrumah, he laid out the vision for true African independence.  Because of his ideas in African dependents in independence, in this day when we talk about Internet freedom and rights and digital sovereignty, there is no suitable thinking from the African continent to think about than Nkrumah.  What he is saying when Africa is free but under the hedge money of colonizers, they do it through culture and many African Governments are dependent on the former colonizers.  I hazard when we look at the colonizers this extends to the other countries.  However Global powers, extend this particular hegemony.  China and U.S. come to mind.  Western aid was one of the tools to coalesce African elites, particularly to acting in a certain way that is more beneficial for the former colonizers than the African continent.  What he spoke about is warning about how this whole situation of we see.  And we think about the digital sovereignty we think about the organizations such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.  We talk about colonialism, and many African States shake off the shackles from the '60s to what we have now where foreign powers and entities, both state and private players actually exerting influence over African digital norms, digital rights, technology.  So when we talk about digital colonialism and talk about sovereignty.  Sovereignty refers to how a state can have control over its own critical digital systems.

And quickly I will mention without getting into the depth of this, digital sovereignty is manifested, for example, data sovereignty, where is the data kept?  Is the state in charge of the data generated from their territory?  Is it kept there?  Tech sovereignty, the tools that this particular state is using.  Are they for the state?  Are they made by the state?  I don't mean is the Government making them, but are they made in that particular country and serving the interests of those people?  Town policy sovereignty, who is determining the policy directing the particular developments in a particular country?  Basically these are ‑‑ this is part of the framework that we're going to focus on.  Dennis, I will give it back to you. 

>> Dennis: The constitutionalism, in the context of dill societies.  It is in contrast to constitutionalism, it focuses on multinational corporations, not just nation States, as it used to.  Digital bills of rights are the documents that come out in kind of a set of documents that came out to articulate a set of political rights, Government principles and norms, limitations to drive forward this movement of digital constitutionalism.

I'll speed up a little bit in terms of time.  There are at least five of the digital rights bills of rights that have come out of pan‑African or African national processes.  There is a large database of the digital constitution network.  With 308 documents.  Those are focused on Africa.

Among them the African Declaration of rights and principles.  What we did is literature review all of publicly available materials we could find and in depth interviews with so far four members of the African Declaration Coalition.  We're in the process of finishing up more interviews. 

What did we find?  Why was the document created in the favorite place?  One of the interviewees said it is important to have African voices in the process and lead a normative African initiative, where it comes to human rights protection online.  Wanting to be on there and said localizing human rights discussions are important and also to create a document to policymakers that are making legislation with the rights in the 2013, to guide them and take an African view.

The process came up with a document published in 2014 at IGF with 13 principles, preamble, a focus on affordability, access and cultural and linguistic rights.  And it also has a strong call on various stakeholders what to actually do in order to implement the rights.

What were the impacts in the advocacy of the related document?  The Coalition that forms when the document is drafted was created with a Secretariat.  And the coalition started using ‑‑ doing advocacy on local other national, transnational African level.  Significant impacts were a great influence on the 2019 revision of the Declaration of principles on freedom of expression and access of information Africa by the African Commission on human rights and people's rights, which is an important human rights instrument in the African Union.

Citation also of the document by U.N. Special Rapporteur.  These are successes and influence on policy and on nation state level.  That is the last two slides for Adio again. 

>> Adio: So this particular proverb on the screen is one of my favorite African proverb from Nigeria.  Until the lion tells his side of the store the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.  When we talk about Internet freedom or Internet routes, Nkrumah wrote about how we need to shake off the shackles of the colonialism.  So AFDEC was Africa writing its own story.  So when we talk about Pan-Africanism, we're looking at a document that is written as Dennis explained, focusing on guiding principles for Africa, by Africans.  As we noted many times.  Many African States led behind when it comes to understanding the rights online are also rights offline.  The cultural and linguistic diversity makes this document particularly pan‑African given how Africa is in the country and how Africa is a diverse place full of different languages and different cultural issues.  So however the issue here, which Nkrumah would raise an eyebrow about, but maybe not, that there have been the involvement of foreign entities from our earlier ‑‑ earlier slides, we mention how Nkrumah identified the age of hegemony.  It is clear that we should not risk throwing away the baby and the bath water.  So what did he mean?  He meant that aid from foreign places could be accepted as long as this particular aid came in the conditions or terms and conditions which were favored for Africa.  So in this case, assistance from the foreign entities can be viewed as assistance to further the goals of Africans, by Africans, for Africans. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much Adio and Dennis.  And to keep on time and to share ‑‑ you had more?  Sorry? 

>> Dennis: 10 seconds.  Limitations of future research.  We acknowledge that Nkrumah has other legacy, particularly authoritarian rule.  It is an important limitation.  We focus on the Pan-Africanism of Nkrumah here.  We have other things to look into.  Still doing interviews.  This is a little bit of the work and progress.

>> MODERATOR: And I get from the last line, if you have more interviews, suggestions, he's open to receive them.  It is good to showcase here.  Thank you again Adio and Dennis for your rich presentation and to share your early findings and the working in progress that you are developing.

About the flow of the session.  We have three Articles, three Peoples ‑‑ papers that we will present.  I will give 10 minutes each.  Just had one.  Just a few teaser provocative questions I will throw to the presenters.  Then I would like to take from the floor and from presenters themselves because I think the paper will speak to each other.

The second one I will call to present is Professor Ian Schultz.  The paper the co‑authors have presented is governing the Internet through self‑paced regional regimes, at APNIC, LACNIC.  Professor if you want to take the floor? 

>> Okay.  I need to screen share.  You know how to do it?  Here we go. 

Okay.  Good afternoon, thanks to Jamal and the rest of the Committee for putting this together.  This paper is written by five of us, a team spread across the Regions.  Debra Christine in Indonesia.  Horrence in Netherlands.  And Naeema, Brazil, Gloria at University of Maryland and funding from Sweden research Council.  And we're doing something similar in terms of regional South based autonomy direction in the Global Internet Governance.  In this case looking at three regional Internet registries based in the Global South.  We will say something about what the regional Internet registries are.  Have you heard of those in this audience?  Some yes, some no?  Say a few things about them.  Say what the study is about, why we look at the question of legitimacy and about the data collection. 

 These are the five regional Internet registries.  Based in North America, ARIN, ripe NCC, LACNIC, AFRINIC and APNIC in the Asia‑Pacific region.  You notice three of the bodies are in the Global South.  It is a regional approach to Global Internet Governance.  And it is non‑Governmental and multistakeholder.

That is a unique combination in Internet Governance, if you think.  And the RIRs make rules that matter.  That is the other thing to say.  Various other Region constructions of exchange point associations and CCTLD associations.  In terms of significance for the rules they're more trade associations.  These people make a number of rules.  Originally, the RIRs were two or three.  You see that in Africa and Latin America they came up somewhat later.  Indeed on the argument of largely regional self‑direction and self‑determination.  The 3 RIR is 7800 members spread across 56 territories.  Latin American Caribbean note LACNIC was launched in 2002 and has more than 12,000 network operators spread across 33 countries.  Big.  AFRINIC was launched in 2005, currently has 2240 members.

And again, there is a question that comes out of all of this.  Here is South‑based, does that mean more autonomy and Internet Governance outside of NERC and North America and do we have more force for encountering Digital Divide? 

If you are not familiar with the RIR what do they do?  They collect the IP addresses and system numbers so we have unique numerical identifiers for all the devices on the Internet.  On one system, without the one system of coordinated numbers we wouldn't be talking on the Internet.  Wouldn't happen.  There is an important transition.  It started with Internet protocol version 4.  IPV4.  This was the number version used initially.  But only 4.3 billion of these.  There are 5.4 billion regular users of the Internet now.  You can do the math and see we have a problem.  IPV4 addresses are insufficient.  New version, IPV  6 with larger capacity.  340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses, we is have enough.  The fact that it has come down, there is a scarcity issue and a secondary commercial market that has arisen there.  That leads to interesting scenarios that for example, China‑based company has set up Seychelles shell company in the Seychelles and selling them in other areas that leads to digital colonialism and the like.  It is not just a political economy behind all of this, which is quite intriguing.

You say it is only the numbers and registering the numbers?  No, the RIRs do more.  They have trained tens of thousands of Internet engineers over the years.  Given grounds for innovations, for start‑ups and spread of the Internet in less served areas.  Measure Internet use and performance.  Done things on cybersecurity.  30 years of meeting are instrumental in building up the Internet community of regulators and managers.  They're stakeholders in building the Internet.  You wonder why don't we have more research on the RIR.  Milton in the back wrote short pieces 10 or 15 years ago.  Two Ph.D. theses.  And a couple of short histories here or there.  Actually we don't have an academic inquiry on the regional Internet registry.  Certainly not complementary to the other bodies.  There is a gap.

These bodies take a regional approach, a multistakeholder and South based in three of the cases.  And they're important.  We're trying in the study to look at what basis and the three South based Internet registers are attracting legitimacy.  How far are they having approval, confidence faith in the alternative ways of organizing Internet Governance?  The larger body of Governance coming up, that feeds into the literature. 

But also this underlying them, theme, if we can show the legitimacy is attracted or not.  On this basis can a multistakeholder South based approach to key global resources be transferred to other areas and be part of a more general South‑based initiative on dealing with critical mobile resources? 

To that extent, one hopes larger stakes are involved.  Quickly here to look at the rise of multistakeholder Global Governance.  Sometimes I don't think people necessarily get the specifics of this rise as clearly as they might.  The dark line here in the middle, are the numbers of Intergovernmental, traditional Intergovernmental Treaty based organizations.

You see that basically they've plateaued since 1990.  There isn't an increase in numbers.  Also if you look at resource, material resources and you look at institutional capacities to take decisions those have remained stable if not declined in the last decades.  In contrast, the multistakeholder arrangements have grown and more than twice as numerous as the Intergovernmental organizations.  And indeed often have increasing resources and capacities at the time that multilateral has stalled.  It is worth looking at this area of Global Governance.  Looking at legitimacy of the South based RIR.  That is how far people believe they have a right to govern and exercise it properly.  If the organizations have the underlying approval, it gives more strength and stability and security.  If they lack it, things are probably more fragile. 

Legitimacy, again, we look at it because it is not the only thing that makes governing tick, if you have legitimacy you can expect more mandate and resources and expect more participation and be expect to be able to take decisions better and expect more compliance.  Thereby reach the goals you have and probably advanced problem solving and hold yourself against competing institutions. 

In a way at the moment, we see the African Network Information Center is having considerable legitimacy challenges.  If you look through the list, you can see they're struggling with the mandate, to get resources and getting people to participate, they're under an official receiver at the moment and can't convene a meeting.  They're unable to take decisions because they don't have a Board.  Compliance is hard.  Other people are starting to say we want to set up another organization.  You can see without the legitimacy an institution gets to be in trouble.

We have interviews in people asking them if they think legitimacy is important.  It is reassuring to research to find that 84% of people say extremely important.  It says 86 years, dropped to 84 with the latest couple of people had downs.  ‑‑ doubts.  Everyone is saying it is extremely or very important.  The research we're doing extensive interviews with people asking them about level of confidence in the RIRs and a number of ways in which they ‑‑ number of sources that might be driving their legitimacy beliefs.  Asking how much confidence in the organizations and how much they care about the organizations and how much they feel affected by the organizations.  This is perhaps getting into intricacies of legitimacy research.  A lot of legitimacy research on the regional and Global Governance has only asked people how much confidence they have in the organizations.  It hasn't asked how intensely they feel about the organizations.  You end up with the results that say oh, people's average legitimacy beliefs for I don't know the United Nations is the same as their average legitimacy for the Government.  The hunch is people feel more affected by the national Government than the United Nations.  So you need to ask the additional questions.  We're doing that in this research.  And seeing what will come out of that. 

These are the interviews we have done so far.  321.  We were meaning to come here with more concrete results.  But it is really hard to do this research.  I mean, to get people to sit down with you for 30, 40 minutes and do an extensive interview about all of the different aspects and so on.  In addition the conditions at AFRINIC in the moment because of the fragility of the organization people are understandably shy to come to ‑‑ we do anonymous and confidential interviews.  Nevertheless people are exposed.  You have to be careful in terms of research.  I can't cannot say these are the results.  I can say we find variation in the levels of confidence between these three RIRs.  You can guess how that might be going.  We find variation between stakeholder groups.  So if depending on whether you come from a Government or Civil Society group or business group or academic group you find technical engineer, the differences amongst the groups in terms of how much legitimacy.  And social categories, differences by age, gender, language, so on. 

So we expect again can't go all the way here to say what the drivers are.  But on the basis of other research and initial findings we think we're going to find that institutional drivers, people's perceptions of the purpose, procedure performance of institutions those are the main things that drive the competence and legitimacy beliefs.  Though psychological and prevailing societal norm drivers probably figure as well. 

Ask us again in a year.  Thanks. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you Professor.  You advanced one of my questions regarding the driver.  I will skip that off.  Thank you for your presentation.  We'll have more time for questions in a moment.  I would like to call the last paper with Stephanie Arnold.  She's going to be online. 

>> Stephanie: Can you see the screen? 

>> MODERATOR: She will talk about making policy global, shaping policymaking locally in the EU twofold effect on the digital landscape in the Global South.

>> Stephanie: Good morning from Brussels, and good afternoon to those in Kyoto.  I'm a Ph.D. fellow at university CRIS in Belgium.  I want to talk about the EU's effect on digital policymaking Globally especially in Africa.  I tried to do so through the lens of digital sovereignty and digital colonialism.  I want to thank my co‑panelists to giving a brilliant introduction to the concepts.  I hope mine will complement what they already said.  I will see if I can move the slides.  Yes.

We know that there is no very clear concept about digital sovereignty.  But the understanding of what digital sovereignty means, there across Regions.  I will focus on the European Union.  And I would argue that in the European Union, the European Union is such but also Member States argue for more state sovereignty over the digital space.  This is especially to counterbalance the increasing power of big technology companies, especially from China and United States.  To this end, over the past two years, the European Union has adopted a series of digital policies, most famously probably the general data protection regulation.  The GDPR, more recently than the Digital Markets Act, the digital services and the AI Act, so on. 

The objective was to protect individual rights in the digital space.  And yes, to protect ‑‑ extend the two digital sphere.  So we also heard about The Brussels Effect.  And basically through that Brussels effect the policies have reached a Global influence in a way.  And it is not through Brussels Effect that EU Global policies have a reach.  But the EU has devised tools that facilitate the spread of the least call European Governance model.  To other Regions and we look at the digital policy and development hub set up in the gateway.  If we look at this, take the digital development policy, that is already little bit older, dates back to 2016.

We notice that the digital development policy aims to promote access to digital infrastructure, literacy, skills, digital entrepreneurship, digital technologies for Sustainable Development and so on.  At the time, this changed with the Global gateway, at the time there was no dedicated funding.  The idea was to mainstream digital technologies in development policy more in general.  I think we have heard in our first contribution that the European funding to Civil Society organizations to promote yes, the digital human rights.  So this could have been one of the ways, how it worked.  So through the support of other, yes, organizations.  Now, we notice when looking at the digital for development policy, there is a strong focus on Africa.  This slide shows the D4D mention, how often a geographic Region is mentioned.  You can see Africa the Orange bar, Africa outnumbers all other Regions.  And Latin America is mentioned four or five times, compared to Africa being mentioned over 70% of the times.  This does not match the development of fund flows.  As we see here the EU development fund flows go to Asia and neighboring policy countries, which is the bar on the very right.  Then we still have the official development aid by Member States, the purple bars.  And those go ‑‑ yes, mainly to Africa, but still, yes, it is not necessarily the majority of funds that have gone to Africa in this sense. 

Well, if we take the stance from Africa, we need to bear in mind, most African countries depend on foreign technology and foreign finance for digital development.  At the same time, we have a fragmented cyber Governance.  There have been various initiatives, especially also on the pan‑African levels.  Through the African Union, there is the implementation of international Governments has ‑‑ at the national level has been rather, yes, hesitant.  For instance, if we take the Convention on cybersecurity and protection, there is one country, Rwanda that ratified it so far.  The factors make African States vulnerable to digital colonialism by big technology companies, to extract data.  I would argue one of the main ways to avert this are digital policies at the national level.  That is why I looked at what effects digital policy adoption had at the national level.  The research questions in this regard were the focus of the policy to affect the ICT policy in African countries and make them more resilient against digital colonialism.  To what extent does Chinese enhance the effects on the ICT policy adoption? 

What I did is a multivariate repression analysis.  The outcome variable was taking the ICT regulatory tracker scores.  That is an index, compiled every year by the ITU which looks at different variables.  The change of the score 2013 to 2018 to see if there are improvements in the ICT policies or actually been declines?  So the expanded variables to see whether there is a different effect on Africa compared to other Regions on the one hand macro‑Regions.  To double‑check and to make a robustness test I use the U.N. scheme.  And checked if difference between BRI membership and had control variables of economic relevance.  Just briefly, this is what I found. 

If we take Africa as a benchmark up there.  With the zero.  Compared to Africa, so yeah, being located in the Arab States, one of the Arab States, would yield a much lower percentage of ICT policy adoption compared to Africa.  Each is the same for Asia‑Pacific and former Soviet space.  Arguably, this could be ‑‑ here I'm still conducting analysis.  This could be exactly because Africa has this additional influence.  Additional attention for instance, by the European Union for digital development policy that encourages digital policymaking.  Let's see what happens if we scrutinize for membership in the initiative.  If we look only at B R I members, Regions outside of Africa, the east Asia‑Pacific, Central Asia, essentially.  They perform much better than African countries.  If we look at nonmembership, there is the opposite trend.  I'm looking into this, why.  An early explanation could be that areas that receive less attention from the EU, they rely very much on initiatives such as the Belgium initiative to promote it at home and with more digitalization is the need for more regulation.  Africa might be more immune to this influence because they have various alternatives.  Multiple influences from abroad. 

The main takeaway is the geographic focus of the policy does make a positive difference in Africa.  They boost the option and interest is low.  That is from my side.  Thank you for your attention, I look forward to your questions and suggestions. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you Stephanie for joining us.  There is applaud from the room.  For the three of you and thank you very much again.

I'm glad I alert you that I was sleep deprived.  In the beginning I forgot to introduce myself.  I'm Roxana Radu and I join GigaNet many years ago in 2007.  I was presented my paper at the time.  My master and PHD is about Internet Governance and the serenity principle.  We were a few of the researchers and sources I could grasp at the time.
I'm glad it has expanded and we have more people to dialogue with about it.  I will start teaser questions and I will invite the audience to come to the microphone and make their questions.  Just a few reactions first on Dennis and Adio, I think he's still with us.  Sorry Adio I can't see you. 

But to mention, first, you have also used the Brazilian view of rights as an experience.  I can speak closer from my experience.  And in fact Marcus feeds in the legislation into the digital colonialism idea.  It was not only about shaping a good policy, let's put that way.  But also about how it is implemented and then follow‑up, right?  I think in your paper in the presentation, it is pretty clear also this dimension through shaping the policy and implementation and follow‑up and impact, whatever you can measure of the impact that is really important. 

What strikes me as curiosity, if you are going to expand or have, you know, a little bit more on this two dimensions.  And what can be more intention based and more replicable in other countries and Regions to draw from?  What I mean by that is usually for example, even the African Declaration, it is kind of triggered by a necessity and not necessarily an intention that a process that you start and build.  And a continuous process.  And also takeaways to replicate that in other places.  Is that clear? 

Okay.  For Professor Ian.  I am trying to take two, but I can't say with the coffee I don't get more.  I want to react in regard to the IPV4 and 6 policies, not to get through the nitty‑gritty of the African situation, also if you were considering comparison with the north based RIR and the ripe, because I can see some of the differences for example, from AFRINIC and our end, how they're taking different policies with regards to the IPv6 leftover market.  This is very interesting also to compare how those regional policies are really happening and what is the impact. 

And the approach is different from the South.  My second question, I'm probably going to put together two of them.  And try to explain why. 

What I find interesting in terms of the background in this paper is that it puts the RIRs beyond their tech mandate.  The technology mandate.  One thing on the technical community, it is pretty straightforward.  The Internet needs to work and we need technical policies for it.  Then the discussion about the role of the technical community also in the gray area of policies and political policies.  Right?  I'm trying to be redundant here.

And then I think it is where you were going I want to check if that is you know, the consideration in the overall research that you were taking. 

But also in terms of the context you were mentioning, and how the technical based organizations are understood in the broader community.  The perception that they are only technical communities or if they are, you know, beyond this mandate.  And I'm saying that because I see also from experience that there is this kind of bundle tech lash, the RIR, CCTLD and technical organizations are considered part of the digital platforms.  And they're considered part of ‑‑ you know, a mushy place.  Anyway, that is kind of my very broad curiosity in your paper. 

Stephanie, sorry, I don't ‑‑ now I see you.  You can address to you in the prompter here.  So some of the questions I had in regards to your presentation and your paper, it is a very limited one, but let me explain why.  What is considered digital policy?  I was also curious on one basic difference, in particular when thinking about the different law regimes, if talking about common law and civil law and not necessarily everything is mapped as a digital policies in a narrow way, in the narrow concept.  I'm not sure if you are considering some sort of classification on this front.  But if you are, I would love to hear.  And then my second question is regards the difference between quantity and quality. 

One of the extremes, that is very interesting that you are trying to bring the numbers, right?  Evidence‑based research and those are very interesting findings that you brought.  But then I kept the questions.  If you are also considering an evolution of the research to also consider the quality.  You were mentioning the positive effects I think by the end of the policies to be geo based.  If they are in terms of the content itself, if there is going to be any evaluation.  I think these are the teaser questions.  I don't know if you want to start in the reverse order?  Just to hear and then invite the public. 

Stephanie, can I start with you?  Okay. 

>> Stephanie: Thank you so much.  Very interesting questions I have not very much reflected upon yet.  But I will try to see.  With regard to digital policies and ICT policy, in fact, I believe there is a discrepancy.  And especially based on what we just heard, I think we need to distinguish between for instance, the ICT regulatory track or score takes into account the competition environment in the online space.  I think that is very much different from, for example, the freedom of expression.  So I do think in going forward I will need to introduce a classification or specification of what exactly I mean.  And I think that it is closely related also to what you said, that while not all laws that touch the digital space are explicitly digital policies.  So I think that that goes hand in hand.  And then this would mean to actually look at the content or the quality of the policies, not only the quantity, that is a very valuable comment.  One that I will need to address going forward.  So far, the limitation that I had, this is still a project let's say the earlier stage of research.  The limitation I had is I can't really consider all the digital policies of all the developing countries.  In the Global South.  That was one of the main reasons why I limited the analysis to the quantitative and just relied on the tracker score.  Now that I know for instance, African country tends to perform better with policy adoption taking into account level, I can limit myself to that Region and then look at the content.  So, thank you very much. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Stephanie.  Professor. 

>> Ian: I had a 50% chance.  Thank you Raquel.  We have chosen a method of deep qualitative mixed methods research in the meetings.  That is very high.  Large numbers of interviews.  The research budget to do the work we're doing is already high.  We chose to prioritize the South based.  That was of course certain limitations.  IPv6 I was trying to chase up the data here.  I believe it is right that in fact LACNIC leads the way on IPv6 as a proportion.  I don't think they're working with IPV4 new allocations.  That gives a great advantage to some extent.  If AFRINIC had done the same and thrown itself deep into the IPv6, a lot of the problems would recede if not disappear.

LACNIC are going to IPv6.  The RIRs are described as technical mandate.  You will realize nothing is purely technical.  It is economically and all of the other things, and one sees that in the organizations.  What kind of knowledge they're producing, for whom?  Deep cultural political questions, deep economic issues, IPv6 is core to the development of thing, Smart Cities, smart homes, industry 4.0.  The huge economic interest involved in this.  And questions of power of who is making the decisions for whom?  Who gets the voice and who doesn't?  There are deep political questions.  That makes it much more interesting.  The technical circles say we're only technical, leave us alone.  They're much more than technical, so we don't leave them alone. 

>> Dennis: I'm trying to answer the two questions.  The national document in the larger database on digital bills of rights.  It is in that sense part of the conversation, in the sense of looking from there analysis we do, it is an African document.  It is very different.  Looking at African documents, we have the Nigerian rights and freedom bill, never actually signed by the President.  That would have been rather an example that would be comparative to see how do you amend legislation and implement legislation.  This is an advocacy document with very different role to play in that sense, it brings up the question that Stephanie also said, national legislation in Africa is the solution.  Look at where is it actually happening?  From that kind of promoting African Union or Pan-Africanism, maybe not.  Maybe you should solve the problems across the continent in a way those that wrote the African Declaration had in mind.  The second part, how intentional is it when one of you start drafting a document, do you know this is where it is going?  Two things that happen at the same time.  Many of the documents, not just this case people have a clear idea of what they will do. Achieve how and why.  Things change and they have to change their plans.  Same time, colleges do many things at the same time.  You have the effect of throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks.  You target many levels.  Yeah, people still have an idea and hopeful how things will be adopted.  It would be agree if this would be law or a Treaty.  That is awesome the main focus of the documents. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much for the further consideration and clarification.  Now we're going to have people in the queue.  Milton, you want to take the floor?  Anyone else from the audience wants to make questions, there are microphones in both aisles.

>> ATTENDEE: I have a comment on one paper and big question about another one.  Is that okay?  We have time for it? 

>> MODERATOR: All right. 

>> ATTENDEE: Do we have time for it? 

>> MODERATOR: We do. 

>> ATTENDEE: Okay.  The comment is about the IP address registers.  I think Ian, you understated the amount of literature that exists on this.  There is a lot of literature about IP address scarcity and markets.  We published two papers about that and there is a detailed paper, not a short paper as you said, about the implementation of Akram’s theories of self‑governance to the IP address space looking at it as a common pool resource.  Another thing is you indicated that if Africa had gone into IPv6 it wouldn't have had these problems.  I think that you are completely wrong.  IPv6 is not adopted because it is not compatible.  To upgrade you have to spend a lot of money.  Africa is lagging behind because it doesn't have the financial resources to convert all the networks into an incompatible protocol and keep running the running one at the same time.

We can talk about that more Ian.  I want to talk about digital colonialism.  This thing is thrown around.  People say I'm progressive, they're against digital colonialism.  I don't know what it is.  In one hand, people implying if people in Africa use Google, they're being colonized.  And I think this is a weird notion.  When I think of colonialism and I think of troops marching, in occupying territories, killing people and establishing Governmental structures.  Not about market transactions between end users and a foreign company. 

Can we get a better notion of what exactly we're talking about with digital colonialism?  What kind of a power relationship are we talking about?  How do you distinguish between market relations and political relations?  I realize they're related.  I'm a political economist, but can we have a sharper distinction when people are engaged in market transactions by foreigns or when they are oppressed and dominated by foreigners? 

One other element, the paper about Europe implied if Europe runs these Programmes that is protecting them against colonialism.  If shine provides that kind of development aid it is colonialism.  So what is the difference? 

>> MODERATOR: There is a question, very short one.  Then I go ... yeah. 

Introduce yourself.

>> ATTENDEE: I was a discussant that came in late.  I feel the pressure that I have to say something.  I'm from card universe and the European action institute.  Digital colonialism is when someone set the standards and no capacity for the rest of the world to negotiate the standards somehow.  This is my own interpretation about digital colonialism.  That is linked into the conversation we're having here today.  And it is maybe a question to Dennis.  How do you see it happening at the registry level coordinated or complementary to other conversations, forms of international cooperation that are happening in other Fora, negotiating a totally different stuff, say talking about cybersecurity, the discussion about cyber diplomacy and lots of inequalities there also from the Global South and in this other processes. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much Andrea.  I was almost myself answering with Milton.  We can do that over coffee.  I will take Professor irk an and then Dennis and Stephanie.  I will ask for short reactions, two, three minutes then continue offline.

>> Ian: I want to recognize my colleagues that are online.  If they want to jump in on any of this they should.  Milton on the literature thank you.  I'm wondering whether this literature is on Governance.  How much is on Governance?  As opposed to more technical aspects, economics so on let's see my comment is related to Governance.  I'm sure that is limited.  The IPv6 and technical competitions of adopting it is true.  I was saying a what if kind of comment instead of meaning it can be done quickly.

The question on digital colonialism, there is a lot to be said about all of this.  But just give two examples.  May be that illustrates a little bit.  When I can set up the sale of TTLD and say you have to pay $25,000.  185,000 U.S. dollars only to apply.  And it takes over a million U.S. dollars to get to the end of the process.  And you set up insurance policies that are not available easily outside of Europe and North America.  Surprise, surprise you get less than 10GTLDs in Africa.  That is more than market forces, that is power relationships as well.  I attended the APNIC meeting recently.  One of the people from a cable laying company got up and gave an account of how by laying the cables they were opening up Africa as Stanley and Livingston had done before.  Feeling no dis comfort in that return.  I give anecdotes when someone thinks something is not quite right going on here. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.  I am sorry I didn't acknowledge Debra, Hortence and others that are online.  If you want to take the floor, please open the mic and say it.  I'm not looking Zoom, but I'm following with Dennis and we can which back if anyone wants to take the floor who is online.  Okay. 

Adio, you will take the question? 

>> Adio: Thank you if the colleague.  I didn't get his name.  Stephanie and Ian you have sort of answered this question on digital colonialism.  I would like to fundamentally differ from the colleague in the audience, particularly when he mentions that this issue of digital colonialism, that is just market forces.  I feel like that is an oversimplification of a complex issue.  You talk about digital colonialism, we're talking about issues of power.

Juxtapose this with troops Marching in, changing everything.  At the base of that, that is power.  We're talking about digital colonialism, we're talking about the power of foreign owned platforms in determining policies and the rules of the game in Africa.  For example, Facebook or TikTok.  To put this in context we have seen how all of the major platforms have gotten in trouble with the GDPR or with the U.S. being summoned to Congress.  Why is it happening?  Because these are issues of power.  What happens with the platforms when they come to Africa and convert Africa as a site of data extraction.  With the African data harvested and saved and utilized outside of the continent without prior
Regards to the needs and determination of the Africans.  So also in my definition of digital sovereignty and we tie it into colonialism.  I spoke about the issue of tech sovereignty and who is developing these and who are they servicing?  Can I get tools to allow me to communication in the African language?  No.  But however, at the end of the day the Africans are forced to utilize these tools in the particular language and cultural and economic context.  That is what we need when it is the digital colonialism. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. 

>> Adio: It is okay.  Sorry.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Adio.  And it was Milton Miller that made the question.  Very known scholar and one of the founders of GigaNet.  Very known to touch open wounds, which is good.  We need to discuss this openly. 

Last is Stephanie.  Do you want to take the floor?  I'm sorry to push you for two minutes.  We need to close and go for the next panel.  Thank you. 

>> Stephanie: Maybe I will limit myself to address the comment on my contribution.  I did not mean to say that the EU is some good Samaritan that comes in and saves Africa from digital colonialism.  Neither did I say China is the evil players that comes in and colonizes Africa.  Not at all.  What I meant to say are digital policies are one of the ways that can help avert digital colonialism. 

What I found in my analysis is that the EU through for instance, the initial development policy encourages digital policy adoption.  As I also specified in the previous comment, we would now need to look at the specifics of the digital policies.  But just to add to this.  The European Union does not pursue this way because yes, they are again the good Samaritan.  I think it is rather because they don't have such a powerful position in terms of the big technology companies.  Those are mainly located in the U.S., China and with their own digital policies they try to curtail the power of those companies. 

And by contrast, China for instance, they have less of a focus on regulation and policies.  Doesn't mean they automatically colonize others.  Not at all.  The findings I found is looking at membership, in the initiative membership, we actually have more policy adoption compared to non‑BRI members.  Except that in my ‑‑ yeah, in my opinion ‑‑ this is because the digitalization that requires near regulation and the BRI membership are enable more digitalization.  I hope this was somewhat clear. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you Stephanie and everyone who join us in the panel.  And the audience.  Now let's go for the next panel with our colleague Luis, thank you very much. 

>> MODERATOR: I presume you are looking forward to a break.  But the panel I think would be worthwhile to persist.  I am Luis Barbosa from United Nations universal in digital Governance in Portugal.  It is my pleasure to introduce the papers on somehow related or unrelated topics, we'll discuss digital sovereignty, ways of pressing Governments and youth participation.  The three different topics will make sense together I think.  We will start immediately with the first speaker, which is Nicola from Dublin.  Nicola you are online? 

>> Nicola: Yes, can you hear me?  I'm sad to not be there with you, but I hope we can have any way a fruitful discussion on the topic.  Without wasting time I will share my presentation with you. 

In the digital world it is a concept of sovereignty but in the taxation of the cyberspace and extra territorial power.  And how it will create a digital constitution and authoritarianism.  And the sovereign practices, (?) in the cooperation of the Global effort to guarantee fundamental rights in the digital environment.  I want to apologize in advance to stay in the limits of the presentation. I can only provide spotlight for each point.  If there is a topic you would like to deepen I would be happy to discuss them during the question time.  State saying digital sovereignty is a concept in the relation and beyond.  Jump in the process of the society and become more and more aware of the challenges it poses and increasing number of subject with the control on data and digital technologies.  It will combine conceptual sovereignty.  We have a conception bases on sovereignty as super and political authority, that focuses on the capability by States to control data flow, digital infrastructure, and operators within the boundaries but on the other end we have a natural conception that shifts focus to concepts such as autonomy, self‑determination, resilience, (?)

There is confusion well illustrated by the concept of digital autonomy.  That can be considered as the operationalization of States digital sovereignty and consist of the ability to decide and act autonomously on the aspect of a current country long‑term security and institution.  (?) given that the digital world is composes of the vast majority of transborder processes and flows underlying assumption is to exercise digital sovereignty States must not only control the activities on the territory, but also try to influence subjects that are beyond its borders, so digital sovereignty is operationalized to complementary processes.  On the one hand the territorialization of cyberspace and the projection of power on the digital world.

The territorialization of cyberspace consists of the process of bringing back the aspect of the digital world into configuration of authority and power linked to territorial space.  On a more practical level, among other things may consist of the control of Internet traffic.  Meaning States may impose Internet Service Provider s to block the access to the denaturalization of Internet operator by requiring legal representative on the territory, with the champions, to forage companies, that localization practice, to store and possess data in the borders of the country that the data is collected. 

By implementing also mandate risk and assessment to ensure it is the security standard in line with the national interest of the country.  While on the other side the extension of digital sovereignty may occur in a different way.  The first one is to recognize principles such as active nationality principles, and passive nationality principles, the effect of doctrine or protective principle.  The main point is don't reinvent the wheel.  The States have legal basis of the claims and sovereignty.  But the potential conflict that may be arise may be in the framework of international law.  The extension of sovereignty may be through the technology and in this case if (?) that which technology is developed, deployed or used beyond the border, it could embed the principle within the architecture of such technology and also define the related possibility and constraint.  While a third way is by using national tech company as a proxy of power.  In so doing States can extend digital sovereignty using the transnational technological infrastructure of tech company to perceive the goals.

We observe that it refers to the territorialization of cyberspace and to the sovereignty.  I want to point out digital sovereignty can be considered as double‑edged sword that it must enable people, protection and control.  The control of digital infrastructure that the control is crucial to safeguard the rule of law.  The same at the same time can lead to massive censorship policies and used to perform on the state to conduct cyber warfare operation and in short it can be considered as unnecessary and not sufficient condition to realize this sovereignty and reverse the practices.

In the last part of my presentation I would like to show state resource for the digital sovereignty conception practice and propose a topic on the data sovereignty related policies of China, U.S. and European Union. 

While we can see that in all the cases, States put in place the cyberspace practices in particular all of them are some form of data localization, even through different means.  Chinese have legal obligation in the case of European Union, this is a second more secondary effect of privacy requirement for data transfer, to make it more convenient to store EU data locally.  In the U.S., that is not requiring any particular legislative intervention, but it is due to the fact that of course the largest Internet companies are based in the United States.  While also the technology and security assessment of software are common practice in all three cases considered.  Moving on the extraterritorial expansion, you can note the United States, European Union and China will have digital sovereignty in their own territories but advance extraterritorial claims in the principle we mentioned before.  For example, the Article 3 of the GDPR on the Article 10 of the national intelligence law.  The differences between the cases is U.S. and China leverage on the digital champions as a proxy to domestic and extraterritorial enforcement.  And European Union in the overall power.  The EU is closer to the digital constitution model in which the digital sovereignty practices are used to safeguard the safety and privacy of citizens.  While U.S. and China and different wages of power to conduct surveillance intelligence operation.

So in the current landscape we are digital sovereignty claims that feed geopolitical conflict and tension.  Some of that are combating claims on tech companies to store abroad data.  On the Chinese national intelligence act.  It could be the ban war between U.S. and China.  And furthermore the ambiguous strategic use of digital sovereignty of States by jeopardized fundamental rights, potential in the pausing at the least humane risk.  First risk is privatization.  This is possible in the Chinese personal information protection law.  These are very advanced privacy and data protection principle similar to GDPR but mostly trained for the domestic and tech companies to protect data transmission abroad rather than to safeguard Chinese people right.  And the next is safeguard on the fundamental right of power resources.  European Union is supposed to accept a territorial power to the supposed Brussel Effect to give the capability of factors (?) and to force French country to adopt the standard.  This is a risk at the international level to replace international law with power.  And power sources to ground human rights protection.  That is in the next the Brussels can be replaced by (?) and company forced to adopt the Chinese rules and standards. 

The best way to solve this without this is to use sovereignty to engage in the international cooperation and reach agreement and regulate the technology.  It sounds (?) but some samples of the discussions we have under the Global Digital Compact or about the Council of Europe could be good example of for this way to move forward.  Thank you very much for your attention.  And if there are some aspect of your questions, I would be happy to answer during question time.  Thank you so much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you we will take questions in the end.  Let's thank the speaker first. 

Now, the stage goes to Romero. 

>> Romero: I will discuss regulatory threats.  This tries to conceptualize this, looking forward to empirical and comparative research project.  Threats are normal.  This is a mechanism of Governance.  All sorts of fields.  That have been mainly studied since the 1970s by economists working on regulated industries in other areas.  I have found evidence of the use of the concept all over the place. 

This is the definition of what we propose of what constitutes a threat.  An utterance or action of public officials that hold regulatory power over others that they suggest or imply the desire to see a subject's conduct move in a particular direction. 

This is a compass that we have created to try to understand what kind of public officials conduct fall under this definition.  It is organized around formal and informal process and private and public actions.  

We believe that in our definition, everything falls here.  And we have built our definition broadly, basically against three authors, against Tim he Wu.  I should say this is called jawboning, because of the jawbone we have here that we use when we talk.  We think a broader concept is necessary.  Against Wu we don't exclude opinions or reports.  In the paper the issues of defense of the mechanism of jawboning, he considers only formal kinds of actions.  And he excludes opinions or reports.  We don't talk about legislative threats but regulatory threats to include all sorts of public officials.  Against Bambauer we reject the loaded taxonomy.  There is thought that jawboning is bad when it is politically charged and ask for something they can't get in theory.  There is a neutral conceptualization.  From our point of view, pressure of the regulatory threat is the life of constitutional democracy.

The issue is more or less undertheorized, mainly studied in the U.S. by legal scholars.  There is a lack of empirical studies but a bunch of U.S. cases, judicial cases in which this issue has been extensively discussed.  The right to case of 1976 is an interesting case on the FCC and how the FCC was pressuring television and broadcaster owners into adopting a voluntary policy of the family.  And the Biden saga, the positions that happened over the last few weeks.

This practice of jawboning or threat of regulation challenges basic concepts of the rule of law.  We believe they involve a paradox.  We want our public officials to be effective.  We want them to talk to those who are regulated by them.  At the same time we don't want them to use this mechanism as the only way of achieving public policy goals.  That is why we have formal processes that are created to be sure transparency, accountability, participation, stakeholder engagement and so on.  When only this mechanisms are used and when these mechanisms are very successful, all of these values are sort of sacrificed. 

Of course, the reason why jawboning is issue is because of the potential abuse.  The problem that concerns the scholars occurs when public officials asks from individuals or corporations things they couldn't ask or get through the formal processes of policymaking.  Because what they ask is illegal or would be unconstitutional or because what they ask would allow players to block the initiative.  When they succeed through the informal process, all of the opportunities of objection basically get lost.  This seems to be obviously a thing.  In the last few weeks, a case by federal judge that ordered more than 40 public officials in the federal Government to stop talking to corporations.  Decision was redistricted by the Court of appeals.  This case law we don't go into it itself it is based on drawing the line between what is Government speech and this form of threat.  This suggest the case line drawing is possible and doesn't lead to manageable standard and certainly not clear‑cut rules to be administered by those who are subject to it.  But would take this literature and our conceptual paper to do comparative research about it.  We believe that this is a regulatory mechanism that every country uses and every company threatens companies with actions and they're generally receptive of the threats.  They want the channels open.  And the premise is companies dislike regulation.

We want empirical research is to document instances of regulatory threats and document company actions that are responding to the threats.  In order to detect correlations and links between them.  This will allow us to better understand how the mechanism works outside ever the United States.  This has a lot of challenges.

First is how do we build that database?  We already have a database on terms of services.  And policies like corporations.  This is the database that has been capturing for a few years now.  We have the database of Latin America builds on all sorts of Internet regulation proposals.  We are building a database of policy announcements and taking stock of the big tech companies.

This poses in methodological challenges.  How do we load data points?  Should we limit constraint?  Or constrain ourselves by theme.  One of the very important findings we have produced so far is that this issue really comes out through judicial discovery.  This is very limiting from the point of view of researchers.  In this graph, which basically is red toward the upper right portion of the graph, whiter toward the lower portion of the graph.  Basically what is more red is what we can see and observe.  What is whiter is much more difficult.  These are informal meetings, informal emails only come out in judicial discovery, in the cases I already mentioned.  We have a challenge in how to document the data that is needed to assess how the practice works.  What we have so far is basically this is bills that have been announced but not from Brazil, that is leaving inquiry linked to a specific legislation or not.  Official administrative action that is the most important part of how threats happen.  And later public speeches.  This is observable.  We can look at it.  We can do a research about it.  Internal emails and communications won't come out by looking at publicly available information and issuing freedom of information requests is impossible for the scope we're proposing.

The actions for the platforms are much more documented.  It is an easier way.  That's it.  I look forward if you have comments or suggestions, especially in terms of the methodological challenges that we had.  We'll be highly appreciated. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you Romero.  The last speaker is Nadia.  I believe she will talk about youth participation in the IGF ecosystem. 

>> Nadia: This Article comes at the end of my Ph.D.  This is my last Article, I'm excited to share it with you.  Part of a series.  Last year we had meta participation and looked at how stakeholders can participate with youth and started to create their own spaces when they felt the status quo wouldn't be changed in the processes that already exist.  They create their own.

I would like to look at YOUthDIG participation on regional and global level.  First the participation of how they create new spaces.  I was looking this time at the flow of participants enter the spaces and how do we continue their participation starting from your environment at an entrance level.  In this case, YOUthDIG, EuroDIG, the European dialogue on Internet Governance pre‑event.

The reason I wanted to study this is because the United Nations Secretary‑General is asking in our common Agenda to look at mechanisms for youth participation engagement. 

So this participation study started in 2022 which was the EU ‑‑ the EU year of the youth and Asia year of the youth into 2023 which is the commonwealth year of the youth.  There is conversation on how the participation of youth can change the spaces we're seeing.  Different regional areas, focusing on.

Starting with YOUthDIG, I wanted to look at a group which I can navigate through.  Starting with YOUthDIG institutionalized in 2017 until now, there have been 150 YOUthDIG participants.  I thought I would send them all an email because the same mailing list.  I thought it was easy.  It is not.  I learned from this mailing list that youth over time change.  Youth is very varied and starting some people submitted University email, some submitted student Union arc fill ‑‑ affiliation or company they set up or youth affiliation, over time, YOUthDIG is in June.  September is the new academic year or start new job, just graduated.  Youth change.

The survey was not an option to try to identify them.  And trying to find 150 people by email is not a possibility either.

In the database I collected the names that I have from YOUthDIG, EuroDIG and IGF.  I mapped which participants, how many times did they go to EuroDIG or to IGF.  I was able to identify 40 people that meet the criteria I set.  Which they must attend EuroDIG three times or more so they have a feeling of how it flows.  Or attend EuroDIG IGF or didn't come.  Or never attended an IGF.  Based on the criteria, 40 met the criteria.  Of and 20 accepted.  The 20 that doesn't accept, ranged in reasoning.  Some said they were not allowed to participate in the study because of the job they have or particular affiliation that required them to be independent.  Some people weren't replying, I'm not sure if I had the right email or addressing the right person.  Names are familiar and you think you know someone and trying to reach out to them.  That is also a problem.  For those questioning why there are 21 people in the citation.  There are people who are anonymous in there who wanted to make public statements but also private statements.

Based on this, I used the data to map.  I'm not talking about all youth and not representing everybody that is part of what we see as the youth stakeholder group.  Because for youth it is personal.  The model is a western framework and has ideas such as individualism.  This may not represent the accurate manner of participation of youth in other settings.  This was noticeable in one of the examples, one particular event and two people responded to it in the same year, same time and they both responded differently to it based on their cultural acknowledgment of that particular opportunity.  And I went in that case, with how they felt about the opportunity rather than acknowledging that those are two cultural components.  I focused on the feeling of how they felt their purpose was in the participation.

I want to note that the data includes COVID‑19 times.  Means there were two virtual YOUthDIGs.  That meant that there is an overlap, separation, difference between those who were able to attend on‑site, which is far more cultural and far more community building and that type of engagement.  And those who have to do it online and be far more individual.  I mentioned before, this is public participation data.  But that comes also with limitations as a registration Forum.  You can choose whether you are not publicly listed or not.  That is a limitation of whether or not we can actually find participants according to the database. 

I want to introduce the pyramid of participation.  Arnstein's ladder, is in the working on community work.  Very many other places.

The reason why I chose to do a version of Arnstein's ladder, it is because there is a lot of notion there is a ladder, so you build yourself up.  The examples used to map around the ladder is always per step of the ladder.  If you take a step, it is another point.  I see it as an ecosystem and moments in time and even at the same time that people navigate themselves through the system.  You look at the pyramid you see as a newcomer, you are integrated into the system.  You are informing so you are sitting here today, right now.  You are listening to me talk about something I find interesting and I want to share with you.  During this, you are being informed about the different content points and about the process of seeing how things work.  At the same time you may decide at some point you want to do an intervention and then you contribute something to the session.  So then you are forming part of the integrating you are consulting the result of the group.

But if you decide to participate in the IGF and organize a session, you go in roles of leadership and perhaps partnership where you work together with other places or delegate a power that you are given a role by the IGF to take on specific topics such as the people who are forming part of the Dynamic Coalitions or individual experts who then participate.  So you see that throughout the time you are both ‑‑ you have the opportunity to be part of the ecosystem that is continuously evolving and rotating.  Even though perhaps at some point you are in a position of leadership in another point at IGF you are just starting to integrate.  You come here in the IGF but maybe you will go back to regional organization or national IGF to kind of contribute there.  Outside of the scope of the paper is the top of the pyramid, meta participation.  That is what I wrote and presented at GigaNet last year.  If you want ton how it was created at IGF by youth.  Look at the presentation on the GigaNet website. 

What is outside of the scope of the paper is I look at meaningful participation.  So not looking at tokenized purposes.  So when meaningful participation failed in the process, I am analyzing that through the lens of how they're not able to participate rather than going into the particular processes.

Using the framework I created tables in which I outlined you see tiny example, I'm sorry I couldn't make it bigger.  It is a far bigger table but it basically analyzed and looked at different purposes.  I looked at specific topics.  Participants performing and consulting at EuroDIG, with the participants they express when they are participating they're learning content and processes.  They talk about the structure accessibility and community building that leads to particular responsibilities.  But when we're looking at what makes them fall out of this ecosystem is when personal reasons come up, for example, if you started at a family and can't leave them.  Or structural reasons there are documents you can't manage, look at someone submitting an issue.  It is not easy to take up the positions.  When the teams are involved they have delegated power.  The YOUthDIG organize the YOUthDIG.  It is created by people in the process themselves in the last iteration.  And used that information how would they have organized the event?  If they had ‑‑ if they had the chance to do it.  This is them doing it. 

I looked at IGF as well.  For this I have a separate table navigating what is the purpose in how youth thought about participation.  Among the examples are participant that come from a regional event often attend the IGF because they have particular connections or mentors that encouraged them to participate especially by inviting to volunteer or speak.  And sometimes the struggle they face is lack of meaningful interaction or encouraged to be token actor.
I'm LGBTQ and woman.  That discouraged because they're being put in a particular space.

The last remark.  This was the final Article of my research on youth participation.  Tomorrow I will launch my final public awareness publication.  A EuroDIG publication that looks at the philosophy of youth participation at YOUthDIG.  And if you have any questions, feel free to let me know.  I'm excited to continue this discussion over the next few days.  And the youth at last will present about youth participation at the IGF further.  Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: We have three papers, well written, pleasure to read.  I will try to emphasize ideas and raise points the panel might like or not to address if a later stage.  Starting with Nicola's paper.  The starting point is clear conceptualization from different perspectives.  The classical one emphasizing the right of state to control data infrastructure and flow, claiming the need to protect critical infrastructure in a more ambiguous way to protect their way of living.  The second one, broader, if I can say so a more rights based one.  Associated with the capability of the citizens, communities, Civil Society dynamics to control and decide about the digital processes in which they are involved.

The paper identifies a number of ambiguities and interpretation of the two perspectives that places this debate in a sort of field.  This is interesting contribution of the paper.  For example, the classical conceptualization is a big step forward to what Nicola called the extraterritorial projection of power, which has points in the Romero paper as well.  And the right to conceptualization is differently received depending on which part of the globe we are.  One may feel sure with the privacy protection.  For example, with the European GDRP or New Zealand protection of Indigenous communities, which is something you may like to sit in the paper.

But on the other hand, comfortable with the state control by digital means.  On the other hand, and from a different point of view, the not so uncommon appropriation of the rights based approach.  The companies presenting themselves as bunch of (?) there is literature about this misunderstanding that can be interesting to look at. 

So raising issues, if the review of the self‑governing Internet is true nor operational as Nicholas claimed the current state of affairs is a current source of conflict.  And we are left with a lot of questions.  To begin with, role of States is unavoidable in this.  But quoting from the definition from the standpoint (?) that is in the paper, the authorities obtaining and I quote from a mutually recognized source of legitimacy.  This is the crucial point here.  Yes? 

To what extent States can be trusted we may ask.  Do they actually present the Global public interest in cyberspace?  If not, who do?  And this is a concern. 

Second issue may be related with the fact that this debate is clearly to international institutions and dialogue.  Namely (?) the United Nations context.  You already mentioned digital Compact in the presentation.  Is that a possible Roadmap?  In it there will be a place for Nations without States, for refugees, displaced people, Indigenous communities, the New Zealand law I mentioned.  So on. 

Okay.  One of the means that States use to shape Global digital landscape is regulation and standardization.  And Romero's paper focused on the processes to constrain the ecosystem, discussing regulatory threats of different flavors.

I think you did a great job of characterizing them in a precise way.  As a specific but largely diverse mechanism of power.  I will underline the largely diverse mechanism of power.  That is in its of Internet Governance.  So relative in this Forum.  Particularly around the enforcing voluntary schemes of compliance with public positions and goals.  Might be interesting to expand research through systematic discourse analysis as one perceives from your examples, language is always performative.  We know this from the '70s.  In concrete case studies.  I liked your detailed illustrations.  Probably we need to go a step further in research, to identify concrete correlations, if there are, effectively.  Methodologically this is the most thing for the studies, even if they can't carry on.

(?) along the two axes you have shown public private, formal, informal.  Providing operational tool to guide understanding and acting in this domain.  (?) producing results weaker and more informed than other means.  And on the other hand as we know, the transparency, accountability and so on, so forth.  My point is in senses they are also unavoidable.  When they call for the reinnovation underlying the process.  (?)

How to raise awareness of Civil Society around this?  Extremely important from my perspective if you agree, is how to increase digital literacy informed empowered citizens and dynamics to protect the democracies, in your case, and if you come back to Nicola's people, we doubt the rights based perspective in the self‑determination and rooted power won't flourish anyway.  Again, we can ask is there a rule in this area in particular for the win, as a Director of good practices and instance of debate.  Side note to the way you put the references along your footnote I found it a bit strange for my taste but very effective in providing interesting reading.  The last paper at first sight it is on (?) side.  You discuss concrete and plain participatory framework.  That you mentioned.  What is the IGF events for youth?  That is concrete focus.  IGF with the format at the levels provides a most interesting background to discuss all of the issues.

If extrapolation is possible, and suddenly this is a qualitative research.  So we always need to be careful about that.  This has the clear merit to provide an expected insight and increase questions and help to make operational.  The statement of our common Agenda to announce youth engagement and take future generations into account for participation. 

Again, you can look at this paper, also quite well structured.  Within the clear borders much the IGF ecosystem.  What in my opinion makes it relevant for the debate this afternoon is the identification of mechanisms and what do you call meaningful participation.  That is your topic as well.  But you can put this same question for the participation of old people or pensionists or source of minority groups or disabled people or refugees, whatever.  This is in a challenge for Nadia even if bringing the sort of voices within IGF+ could be interesting to consider in the future.  But in any case, designing and implementing more effective and meaningful voicing mechanisms for people in the communities, providing them with time and voice is a manager issue for the Internet Governance.  Your work is well‑connected within this session.

I see three well written papers as I mentioned.  Thank you for them.  We may also open the floor to the audience for any questions and then we'll go for second round between the panelists.  Yes, please. 

>> MODERATOR: Can you identify yourself? 

>> ATTENDEE: I'm from Queen Mary University in London.  I enjoyed Nicola's paper because I'm also looking forward to reading the full paper.  I try to analyze the same concepts and materialize through case studies.  It was an interesting paper for me. 

The one question I have for him is that in what capacity does he think that misinformation platforms can contribute to solidifying the digital policy concept without escalating geopolitical tensions? 

>> MODERATOR: Any other questions from the audience?  Okay.  We can go ‑‑ I was going to propose in reverse order as this connect was directed to Nicola, maybe we can take the same order this time.  Nicolas, please. 

>> Nicola: Thank you Luis for your very enlightening comments.  In particular I see yes, one point you write, catch a very important issue and dynamics and debate and the role of the States as really unavoidable, but also really tricky.  I think there's the dynamic that needs to be understood together which is underlined with the weakness and ineffectiveness of international institution that in the last decade as being for several reasons enabled to create a common framework for the Internet and digital world.  This created the room for the rise of the digital sovereignty claims that as I tried show in my paper they create tension and geopolitical context that are harder to reach and very needed in the moment.  It is not easy to identify a way in which to move forward.  Because the tension seem to be increased also in the following years. 

But I don't see any other path than constitutionalize also the international law order.  And then to write some kind of agreement in which States exert digital sovereignty because it is necessary to guarantee the right of the children or guarantee the fundamental right in the digital world.  They need also to be constrained by a superior law and rules.  That impede the digital mean and use it to relate to human rights and also to conduct undue differences in the right of other countries.  I say, yes, there are some discussion as we underline in the Global Digital Compact.  We know it can be too much ambitious to be unreleased in things we cannot really reach an agreement that is able to achieve this goals. 

And another solution that is what I suggested we did with the Convention is to create some more limited regional agreement but between like‑minded States and nation to have at least, you know, something that is fragmented but can be also (?) a critical mass to be a threat for the other country proposing a model based on the digital constitution principles.  While coming to the other question about the capable, the call to raise the process, I think that what we are saying is do it also in part of the failure of the model multistakeholder is also because yes, to be clear, we need the participation of wide range of different actors a good model can be the framework Convention and the United States is already (?) in the environment international policymaking.  And this process, there is also room for the participation of Civil Society, Private Sector, technical community and the possibility for them to give the contribution in something that ‑‑ some aspect that is bending. 

When we come to Internet and digital round, the multistakeholderism is very often being used just to ... create initiatives that have binding outcome.  Or other issues where they're more related to the concrete management, operation of the Internet they also have ‑‑ they reproduce some power inequalities between the different members participating to the initiatives that India lasting power in the ‑‑ and of a few actors very often, we know big tech companies and also the U.S. Government and this is another factor to contribute to create a mistrust at the international level and impair the reach of international agreement.  So I think we have to move forward.  I think we have to try to recover the role of international institution.  And ground any step on international law.  Thank you. 

>> Romero: Very briefly, I'm glad you noticed the footnotes.  The footnotes are to blame on my U.S. legal education.  That is how U.S. lawyers write for some reason.  I have captured that habit.  On the question of how to shed light on this I have to say I have almost not seen the issue discussed outside of the United States.  I have found literature that has discussed in other contexts, but on Internet Governance the only one with Region is Michael, he has written about the jawboning in India and Canada.  That is as far as it goes so far.  Now, in terms of how to shed light on this.  In the U.S., this is a legal problem.  Because it is a legal problem, it leads to litigation.  It leads to litigation because people feel that they are in a way harmed by the informal process of rule‑making.  It is a bunch of people that are claiming they were censored by companies and the invisible hand of the federal Government was behind that censoring.  That is an interesting case.  I haven't seen it elsewhere. 

What I have seen is threats being made as a mechanism of Governance outside of the United States of course.  This is used everywhere.  In Latin America I have seen bills presented as a way to force tables at a certain table.  I don't know what they get out of it.  I have seen bills introduced to force companies to sit at certain places.

The judicial litigation in Latin America about (?) for instance, is a novice source of potential regulatory threat in a different form of the form of a judicial decision that sets specific standard.  I know officials in companies do perceive this as regulatory threats and pass that information up the ladder. 

And then perhaps in the most interesting case I have seen is the way authorities in Latin America have successfully managed to persuade Internet companies to sit at certain informal mechanisms of coordination around this information.  Like this has emerged as the so‑called Mexico model.  But it has been done by Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina at least.  And this works, this creates channels of communication in which the potential of pressure is obviously there.

What we have seen in terms of possible avenues for further research is that processes and interactions between States and companies are increasingly being formalized.  This is a very good example.  (?) establishes a bunch of claims and prerogatives, obligations, corporations and create a formal process to have this happen.  There is an opportunity to think about forcing the processes to be documented.  To see if the processes are transparent and so on.  That is the research we want to do.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.  Nadia, please.

>> Nadia: Thank you for the kind comments.  I'm pleased that my research is now done.  But also I'm excited at the challenges ahead for United Nations.  But also regional organizations worldwide looking to foster youth participation in the policymaking.  Notably, one of the things I hope to achieve during this IGF is revisiting the definition of meaningful participation and specifically I was looking at the definition of Malcolm which aims to capture to the extent that the processes in question are effectively designed to incorporate the youth precipitation into development policies in a planned way.  This being the centered feature of the multistakeholder processes can claim democratic legitimacy. 

I think that starting with this point of meaningful participation and adopting that as a definition, you then use the framework to kind of further reflect on the manner in which we're allowing participation within the Internet Governance ecosystem.  And I quite concur, there is opportunities for this type of growth into the elderly or minorities.  And that would be very welcome to me.  If there is someone who would like to find me to do that research.  I'm perfectly happy to do so.  What I did want to emphasize with the methodology is I use the European framework and different cultures are different in that regard and especially minorities and how they interpret the manner that we engage with each other and perceive participation and the meaning it has to them. 

The purpose a looked at was something I was familiar with by living in that space.  If a research is looking at another region I and they be supported by someone from the Region to understand we know the nuances from body language when we talk about our understanding of our purposes within Internet Governance and participating there.  Thank you for the communities.  I think that we're just at the very start of how to contribute further.  I'm very excited to see it happen. 

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much.  I don't know if there is any other question from the audience?  I guess that's some people in the room, maybe people as old as myself recall a movie in the '80s.  Woody Allen movie in which at some point he says oh, the answer is yes.  But would you mind to repeat the question?  I think we leave this feeling in cyberspace Governance.  Thank you Nicola, Romero and Nadia for your participation and all the audience.  I think we can close now.  Thank you. 

>> JAMAL SHAHIN: (Muted)

I'm not saying all of that again but thanks to everybody.  We are now going to meeting room 4 to hold the GigaNet business meeting, if you are a member of GigaNet you will have seen the link which I can't read out because I can't remember it all.  It is a Zoom link we'll set up in the meeting room to start at 5:30 thank you to all of the discussants and participants.  We look forward to taking this further. 

One thing I look forward to saying.  We look forward to taking this further, there is probably a special issue of a journal.  So we'll invite you to think about whether or not you want to continue with your papers in our special issue and we will set up an editorial team and get back to you about that.  Okay.  Thanks a lot. 

(Applause)

Enjoy the rest of the IGF.