The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> DAVID: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this Town Hall Number 74, IGF 2023.
The topic of this meeting is Internet fragmentation and the technical community and in the context of the GDC. We have four speakers today. So my name is David I will be moderating this session. I work with a company called Analysis mason and we do quite a bit of work in this space.
To my left, the vice chair of the ICANN board, and to my right Annelise Williams from dot EU and Martin Santos and online we have Michael Kende, who also works independently on a lot of these topics.
The idea in this meeting, I know there's quite a bit of scheduling conflicts. Hopefully we can make it interactive. Please don't hesitate to sit around the table if you would like to speak during the session. What we will do is have each one of the speakers spend about four or five minutes setting the scenes in their own areas and then we will open the floor to questions and discussions and hopefully it can be interactive. And we can agree or disagree in a constructive manner.
Just to set the scene very briefly. We have been talking about fragmentation over the last couple of days. There were a number of meetings and town halls and workshops, and one of them was the types of fragmentation. We can't obstruct this from the various types of fragmentation we were talking about. The Internet was built effectively from the start as a way to ensure that separate and fragmented networks could work together, could communicate. And the main objective in the origins of Internet was resilience. And scalability and versatility, ended up as side effects of that resilience. But that's what makes the value of the Internet today. So the fragmentation of networks was an issue from the start and it was was necessary to define unified protocols shared technical resource management and shared governance to ensure that the Internet works.
There have been examples where there has been attempts to unify networks ‑‑ network protocols further and therefore, for example, the 2030 initiative, there were some discussion of new IP that would fundamentally change the way the network protocols work, and that did not work, I think it's fair to say and we can explore why it's of interest to people in this panel.
So it's important not to talk about fragmentation in the abstract but in the context of specific aspects of Internet, including this middle layer of technical resources and technical standards and. The link with the Global Digital Compact is really there in terms of the link with the policy objectives that we want to pursue. And the questions that we want to ‑‑ that I want to ask today are what ‑‑ what is the role of the technical community, as unified in some ways in pursuing the roles and in responding to the policy objectives set out in the GDC and policymakers and governments and how governments and the technical community can talk together in more effective ways is also a thing that we want to address.
So I will stop there and I will hand over to Michael Kende, for a retrospective of how we got here.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: Great. Well, good morning from Geneva. I'm glad to be here at least virtually. Can you hear me?
>> DAVID: Yes, we can.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: As David said, the purpose of this town hall is to identify how the technical community can best represent itself within the UN Global Digital Compact process on the topic of avoiding technical fragmentation and that's broadened out a bit as I will explain in a minute to more broadly the role of the technical community within the Internet Governance in general.
So I will give a brief background on the GDC, the Global Digital Compact process and the role of the technical community. After a few years of discussions and reports on digital cooperation, the idea for the compact was proposed by the UN Secretary‑General in 2021 in a report called "Our Common Agenda" as a way to outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all.
And according to the report, the compact could cover a number of topics, including connecting the unconnected, data governance, human rights online, artificial intelligence and specifically avoiding fragmentation. Internet. Sometimes it's kind of hard to get a handle on what is actually meant by what is the Global Digital Compact going to be and I think that's still to be resolved, but a good quote that I found kind of explaining it comes from the Geneva Internet Platform, the GDC is the latest step in a lengthy policy journey to have at the very least a shared understanding of key digital principles globally, and at most common rules that will guide the development of our digital future along the lines of the topics that I just mentioned.
And the goal is to have this GCD in September of 2024 in New York at the General Assembly meetings. There were a number of consultations. Many people submitted to ‑‑ their views on the various topics into the consultation. And then the two countries that are co‑facilitating the development of comtact are Sweden and Rwanda and they organized a number of thematic deep dives earlier this year in the spring on eight of the topics, and slightly shifted from fragmentation of the Internet and Internet governance.
Among the questions was related to fragmentation, the questions to be raised during the deem dive included how to ensure an unfragmented Internet, how to make sure it's interoperable, and specifically, the role of ICANN and ITF. And if it's not explicit any more, the role of the technical community still needs to be addressed and should ab dressed. And the definition of multistakeholder governance was developed and adopted, actually starting here in Geneva in 2003 and then in the Tunis agenda of 2005 at the World Summit On the Information Society which itself was an intergovernmental meeting that allowed input from stakeholders, including the academic community, technical community, civil society and the private sector.
And the technical community was specifically highlighted as a stakeholder haven'ting to the work of government, private sector, and civil society. But recently, a blog came out by the heads of ICANN, APNIC and ARON that kind of started to say that maybe there's a new tripartite view of digital cooperation where the three players are the private sector, government, and civil society and that the technical community is subsumed within civil society which was not the case before and arguably is not relevant or should not be the case now.
I will drop the link to that into the chat for those would have access to it.
But the question that I think we wanted to raise in this ‑‑ in this session was do governments really understand the role of the technical community? How can one best get it across? How should the technical community ensure that there's a role in the negotiations that are coming up later this year and in the spring? How to ensure a role in the summit of the future and a role in the Global Digital Compact itself.
I will leave it there and I look forward to the discussion that will follow. Thank you.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Michael. I will pass it on to Danko on both the role of ICANN in that space and Michael raised the question of whether the technical community should be should be a more unified stakeholder in the multistakeholder model, so if you have any thoughts on that.
>>> Danko: Thank you. Okay. We can hear that. A lot has been said in your introductions and I agree with that. Let's take one step back when we discuss about the role of the technical community and sitting here at Internet Governance Forum, maybe we should sometimes ask ourself, what is the Internet? And from the technical point of view, Internet is network of networks, obviously, but something that it defined by the ITF developed protocols. So we have IPv4 and IPv6 overlaid over each other and the Internet is defined by the IP addresses that are assigned by the regional Internet register, and by the BGP routing that is connecting those IP addresses.
But also for the end users' point of view, Internet is defined by the DNS system. It's defined by the route zone that is managed by ARIANA and the key to that, all that depends opt trust of end users into the route server system in those 11 IP addresses that define the location of the route servers. So.
So when we look at the fragmentation, I they will we should ask ourselves what are we discussing ‑‑ I think we should ask ourselves what are we discussing about? We are actually discussing this system of trust that is rooted in the route server system and that is all that defined. So it is important if you want to avoid the fragmentation to continue to have the trust in that system, and that system is the midlayer that is overlaid on the telecommunication networks and below the applications and the user of ‑‑ the content of users, but this midlayer is critical for the Internet. I think I would agree that in fragmentation, we always had a different user experience in different countries.
And for example, in order to get to the content of Facebook, you have to log on. If you want to go to the website of a car manufacturer, usually you go to something dot‑com and that takes you to your ‑‑ it moves to your local country code, where you see content in your own language. You have different experiences in your countries. The mid technical layer is still there, and it still functions.
I would say that the Internet is not fragmented in that sense and I would say that we are fine, but going into discussions about Global Digital Compact, we have to think how we will protect this middle layer and in interoperability that is built on that trust in the call system and the root server. And this brings us back to what is the role of the technical community and how, especially in the UN environment it is basically a multilateral and Global Digital Compact that will be contract of countries, how to best to have the role of the technical community, and I think it is very important that it is well‑defined and that it is a keeper of the future freedom of this open protocols and interoperability and ‑‑ and how to say it, basis for the trust in the system.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Danko. You made an important point here around the fact that fragmentation and diversity don't need to be in a position to one another and can actually compliment each other. So if we avoid fragmentation at the right level, we will keep diversity where it matters.
Perhaps Brunet, if I could ask you to talk about the Internet fragmentation and also the perspective of the civil society, perhaps you can take your view on whether or not the technical community should be part of civil society or not.
>> Brunet: It's a deep and hard question, right? But starting with the PNIF,ible net fragmentation is one of the intersessional work for the IGF currently, right? We are just in our second year. And we started with this perspective that it some of the discussions about Internet fragmentation went to a technical or excluding at times because it would be debated surrounding basically the technical layers and the technical aspects and then a lot of people's questions and perceptions about what happened to the user experience were left in the middle of the way.
So if you spoke with the folks at ICANN, ICANN community, they would maybe mention and bring some of the things that Danko just brought up like DNS or whether, like managing IP numbers, that would be related no this if they failed, it would be related to fragmentation,.
But when you speak to civil society or even activists, some people very often bring up cases like Internet shutdowns as examples. So what we did in the PNIF, we divided this into two baskets. The first one being the fragmentation of the technical layer. So classical discussions on this space. Second one would be the fragmentation of the user experience. So the interventions that might occur to the net or to the user experience in the general way, and that would affect their own perception or their own experience, like, shutdowns or even, like, court orders, asking for content should be geo blocked or even blocking of applications on the Internet. And the last one is the GDC, that is the fragmentation of Internet Governance and coordination. And it goes ‑‑ it starts with an analysis that a lot of these foras that we have been engaging, they stop to communicate with each other, and the GDC was the most concerning one because it is placed from a Member States perspective, but but it felt like something that would go along the lines of the IGF, because at the very beginning of the process, it did discuss the IGF plus and how we would improve this space, right? But some point, these discussions were dropped from it.
And then recently, we had the suggestion of the digital cooperation forum. So what the PNIF does within this discussion is just say, we should avoid duplication, we should make sure people have the time in the space and the knowledge to engage, in the spaces and last but not least, all of the digital cooperation discussions and governance, they should be leveraging from the IGF's collective intelligence. That's a little bit of some of the things we have been discussing, and on the discussion paper, the PNIF does discuss the digital cooperation for Anthenaeum was suggested within one of the policy briefs, mostly because it will be another expensive and excluding process. It's not everybody that gets no go to New York. It's not everybody that knows how to navigate UNGA or something like that and to know that just now the second voice mentioned that civil society or any other stakeholder should engage with Member States, should be part of the delegations is something that hints, right, that multistakeholderism might not be a tool in that way. And it's ‑‑ like, it's concerning if the GDC continued to touch upon a lot of topics and discussions we have here.
I think let's just say that. And about the ‑‑ like, technical community, civil society, I do think it's a misunderstanding to be honest, like ‑‑ or it might just be from a very kind of policymaker perspective that doesn't really dive into the multistakeholder debate and divisions that we did in the WSIS and the Tunis process. They will might look at all of us as civil society and the broader way but they ‑‑ but when we put everybody in the same box, we miss a lot of the relevant discussions, right, like a lot of the activism that each of our spaces can.
I think it might be bundling everybody up.
>> DAVID: Thank you. There's a couple of things that resonate hopefully Annelise can comment on as well. I think one is the fact that some of the discussions can be overly technical and excluding. So obviously your point, your perspective perspective is civil society. But can be excluding for government stakeholders that might not have the expertise and that resonates around the misunderstanding that you highlight.
One thing that we can discuss around this table is the extent to which the technical community can make its open fate from that perspective, by maybe putting together a more unified or more coordinated front to be more visible to policymakers.
And do you want to stay a few words as a member of the technical community but also as a former government official?
>> ANNELISE: My name is Annelise Williams, I'm with the.AU domain, Australia's ccTLD. I'm relatively new to the technical community. I have been with.AU domain. And I was with the Australian government, including as ICANN's ‑‑ Australia's representative in ICANN's governmental advisory committee and Australia's representative to the ITU.
So I have been involved in these discussions for quite sometime, on a ‑‑ from a government perspective. And it is wonderful to be here today to be at the Internet Governance Forum. I did want to just really make the point as wonderful as it is to come to these multistakeholder meetings, they are very interesting, the point of the multistakeholder governance system itself is because preserving the open, free, secure and globally interoperable Internet is best done when we have all of the relevant stakeholders as participating and a part of the decision‑making processes.
The Global Digital Compact is an intergovernmental process.
It doesn't necessarily have a seat at the table for the technical stakeholders. So I would ‑‑ you know, my ‑‑ my, you know, challenge, I guess to the technical community is to involve yourselves in these conversations. There is a tendency, I have observed over the years among many stakeholders ‑‑ technical stakeholders well, consider the technical and the policy issues to be separate, but they are not separate. They are very closely linked and there does need to be more engagement between the policy stakeholders and the technical stakeholders as David has just said, engaging with governments and helping them to understand the technical aspects of policy issues or that ‑‑ the technical implications of potential policy issues, is a really important role that the technical community can play.
I think it's important that we engage is a technical community. We need to lean in to the conversation, engage with governments, listen to their concerns, and instead of just saying that's not my problem, you know, it is our problem. It is everybody's problem to get together and have these conversation collectively.
You know, it's everybody's business to get engaged.
The technical community is uniquely placed to be involved in these conversations. We ‑‑ you know, there is significant expertise in the technical community and my view is that the technical community needs to step up and lean into these conversations or there is a risk that as a distinct stakeholder group, that voice will be lost, and I think, you know, Brunet alluded to it before. The Secretary‑General yesterday referred to the business community, the civil society, and governments in relation to the Global Digital Compact but there was no mention of the technical community. I think it is important to get engaged and it's not enough to just sort of sit on the sidelines and let everybody else do the discussions.
Yes, my request and my invitation to the technical stakeholders is to lean in and engage with governments in these discussions.
Thanks, David.
>> DAVID: Thank you Annelise. So we are at the halfway mark. What I would do is we suggest it to questions, discussion and recommendations and I would ask all of you to not hesitate to put forward strong views.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I have a few questions, I don't know if we can answer this. Why is the change to the technical community? An how they did he do this technical change? Which other companies have been merged? Has any other community been requested to be merged with civil society or with any other thing? Who has been consulted for this position and what is the technical community going to do to prevent from being removed from the equation?
>> David: Who wants to take this?
>> It comes from the perspective, if the GDC is to be moving forward as a solely intergovernmental process and then everything that's not government is going to be bundled up, right? And that's why the tech envoy says we should be asking for inclusion within delegations. They are mostly looking at everybody in the same way. I ‑‑ I don't understand whether ‑‑ I know that there was one statement from him that was rather critical on the engagement of technical community and that's also why on the civil society gathering, we had there week, we more or less a general consensus in the room that none of this conversation should be moving forward without the technical community as well, because otherwise, we would lose some of the aspects. But I just wanted to maybe weigh in on that. I think this is mostly from the perspective of the intergovernmental and anything that's not there should be ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Correct me if I'm wrong, from my memory, the statement was mentioned about new tripart site model, and so all of a stud, corporations are not government. It's not only governmental.
But the only ones that seem to be merged somewhere is the technical community. So I'm very cursous about why that particular move and under which circumstances and who has been consulted prior to that, if anyone.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: I can answer a built of that. David?
>> DAVID: Yes, go ahead, Michael.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: I think some of it may be historic. Hi, Konstantinov. Some of it may be historical that the original definition of multistakeholder governance, the one that's always quoted talks about the development and the application by governments, the private sector and civil sole site and their respective roles of shared principles, et cetera. So the technical community was never mentioned specifically there. It's the same three that are being talked about now.
But then if you dig into the Tunis agenda and everything, the technical community is discussed specifically. The other one I think that's not mentioned now is the academic community, which I don't think was mentioned at all. So some of it may be historical, just taking the same three but I think that just highlights all the more the need for the technical community, for everyone to be specific and ensure a specific role so that it just doesn't get subsumed out of kind of historical, I don't want to say laziness but just looking back at the overview definition and not what went behind it.
And I think that was ‑‑ I put that blog in the ‑‑ in the chat, if you have access to, it but I think that's really important that people delve into the history a little bit and make sure that everyone knows that the technical community was represented from the beginning.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Michael. Annelise, did you want to add something to this? No? Same point. Thank you very much.
Does somebody else want to weigh in and ask a question?
Don't be shy.
Go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Better? Yes.
Good morning. My name is Peter Cook. I work for Germany, uncountedly a technical community. And I would respectfully suggest that we are allowing to have ‑‑ to be forced into a wrong discussion here. I did hear the sec‑gen mention the technical community specifically, obviously in response to some concerns that were raced, and, again, in response to a statement made by the ambassador at the EuroDIG meeting, already later corrected or amended at his appearance at the Caribbean IGF if I recall correctly.
So I would not say that this is not important or not necessary, but I would say instead of investing into the forensic of these events, we might do ourselves and everybody else, because we are important, we might do ourselves a favor and to ‑‑ looking into better explaining what the importance and the contribution of the technical community is.
Which also might include the question who is the technical community actually, given that the Internet Governance is evolving into digitals that might include others and, of course, all the quote/quote boundaries between these different stakeholder groups, none of these are very sharp or very thin, right? It's always floating.
So instead having the forensics going on, what is the contribution? And I do think that the contribution today is probably more important than 20 years ago when it was all about names and numbers and so on and so forth which still it important, but we see more and more regulation coming up, and more and more demands for regulation that completely lose out of sight these unintended side effects that the technical community is probably well prepared to identify and explain. The farther away we go from that technical layer, the more tempting the regulation appears to be these days but the more unintended the side effects might be. And that's something that I suggest we focus on.
Thank you.
>> DAVID: Does maybe want to weigh in on these two questions who is the technical community? And how should engage? Those are the points that Peter raised.
>> DANKO: I have a bit of comment on that. So, first on the forensic, the UN Secretary‑General, he mentioned the technical community but part of the IGF and the WSIS process. And later on when he talk about Global Digital Compact, it was a different stakeholder group. So in a way for me, that was a kind of message and I think this is important why we want to emphasize the importance of the technical community.
Obviously, to ‑‑ because we should not talk about the model, we should talk about the success of Internet that was brought by this open standard and everything. But I think the key, as you said, are the consequences. So we in the technical community often, we are not familiar with legislation. We have observe the regulations of the country but we are there to discuss with the countries and to help them understand the consequences of a possible policy discussions.
So, for example, in the ICANN, there is obviously Government Advisory Committee, and also we have a global stakeholder engagement and government engagement in trying to ‑‑ to do all of those things. But looking back on those discussions and how the things will turn out, I think it's not ‑‑ it's not very logical that ‑‑ so there is risk that things might turn out in a way that some of the concerns of the technical community in the future will not be fully taken into account. And on your question of where it is coming from, I don't think it's kind of a decision that was made by someone. I think it's a trend that is also resulting of the ‑‑ of this ‑‑ what is happening now. So I was sitting as a MAG member for years, a couple of years ago and most of the discussions are not anymore about names and numbers that seems to be kind of solved layer, but most of the discussions are about content, the abuses on the Internet, the negative consequences, crime, hate speech and all that.
And importance of the ‑‑ of the technical community names and numbers going back is that that mid‑layer is very convenient for some of the possible regulation to find a magical key that will solve the content problem. And we understand that that magical key actually doesn't work and can create all sorts of different problems. So I think this is the reason why we are trying to use this as IGF to bring back this discussion about possible fragmentation, and the roles that must be there to avoid, I think, trying to quote, Vint to avoid that the Internet ends up where we deserve it to be.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Danko. Anything? Did you want to comment on this? No.
>> ANNELISE: Just to echo, I don't think it was a deliberate decision, and, you know, I think Peter is absolutely right, we need to be having some conversations about what it is that the technical community can contribute to these conversations, and also, you know, who is the technical community these days? I think the Internet and the use of the Internet and our reliance on the Internet has changed significantly since the Tunis agenda was written and the roles and definitions of stakeholders was, you know, enshrined in those early documents.
>> DAVID: Thank you, it seems that up west outcomes of that to square what the two of you said and what Danko just said is that the technical side is consumed by the corporate, because the corporate entities are the most easily regulated. And so is that something that's desirable or not? I don't know. Perhaps that's a question. You are shaking your head.
Does anybody else want to ‑‑ Brunet?
>> BRUNET: It's okay. Just about the inclusion of corporations in the whole thing. There's one part that will come at some point, that is Member States, the UN needing to ensure the buy‑in from companies. Summit of the future ‑‑ the summit of the future will include code of conduct and integrity and it touches on a lot of these corporations. So that will talk about social media companies, we'll talk about some other content related corporations as well. So I think that by addressing them, from the very beginning, might be an initial attempt to get some level of a buy‑in from these stakeholders in general, but at the same time, I as civil society, like we have been very critical of the whole process in general. And I think a lot of this conversation, both the technical community and civil society one is kind of this shared consensus about some level of frustration for abandoning the multistakeholder model, along the way in the process that started with this promise of improving the IGF or discussing the spaces and discussing the participation. So just to add to the conversation as well.
>> DAVID: Thank you.
Perhaps just behind you. Yep. There was a question there.
If you can say who you are.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning. We are still morning. David if a irrelevant child from the Canadian mission in Geneva. I jumped in a bit late but there's something that we wanted to convoy, we the foreign ministries which is the demographics of who is doing the negotiating has changed in 2005. The people you want to interact with are not the same people anymore. It's a challenge that is accelerating, but who in the technical community has met with their foreign ministry counter parts to meet and educate, we are running out of time. The GDC negotiations will begin probably begin shortly in the new year and we have two and a half months, there's no zero draft to work from as far as we understand.
So it's an empty canvas and I think the challenge is different Member States are at different levels of cooperation and collaboration internally, but I think for many of the technical community, it's a new demographic that they are not used to talking to.
And so I put that out as a challenge on both sides of the floor. It's a language that we don't speak. So there's a lost in translation aspect to this, but it behooves us as policymakers to seek out the technical community but it also works the other way. I think that's just an important point I think I wanted to flag.
>> DAVID: Thank you. I think that's similar to what Annelise said, talking the same language, and engaging productivey there. I guess one of the questions that we're grappling with is who is doing that engaging and how are they speaking? Are they speaking from one voice and how does that come across on the other side to the counterparts that you are describing.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to make a reflection. I would like a bit of an opinion about this, cognitive dissidence that I serve to observe. That technology is something nebulous. Imagine that we are having this conversation in terms of healthcare and we will have policies about how to manage healthcare but we don't recognize that doctors are the ones who are going to be applying all of that. You have the same conversations about quotes for buildings skyscrapers and you don't talk with the architects. Oh, civil society will talk with them and we will bundle them with corporates because they are the ones building the buildings.
We are in this room because someone came up with the idea of building the Internet and that was a technologist. And no matter the resolutions that we have in these rooms in the end when it comes to technical application and technical implementations, it's going to come from a technologist as well. So if we keep talking to them in language that they they don't understand and we don't talk to them in a language that that they didn't implement, I don't see how we can remove them from the equation without considering having them in the room as an actual participant. It just ‑‑ it doesn't compute to me. Maybe I'm missing something, if anyone can give me an argument about that.
>> AN ELISE: I don't think anybody here is suggesting that these conversations should be happening without the technical community. This is kind of the purpose of this session, is how can we engage in these processes? What have we got to say? What do we have to contribute? Yeah, I don't think anybody here would argue that the technical community ‑‑ the technical stakeholders shun be part of conversation, but the fact is that these are intergovernmental processes and the best way of engaging is to engage with ‑‑ with governments and, you know, foster relationships and dialogues and, you know, help them to understand and for the technical community to ‑‑ to try and understand where they are coming from and what problems the governments are trying to solve.
I'm seeing Konstantinov wants to spell.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Very quickly on this. You said exactly what I was about to say, the technical community, I think the difference is how the technical community involves and what sort of message it conveys and I think this is what has ‑‑ is different, in many okays. You know, 20 and 30 years ago, governments were not really invested or knew a lot of things about the Internet. We were all celebrating the interest net because we didn't ‑‑ it hadn't been used yet as a weapon of any sort, whether it was misinformation or for cyber attacks or cyber ‑‑ whatever it was. So everyone was really behind it. It there was little governmental interest but right now, we are at a place where governments, for better or worse, they are interested. And they are stakeholders that. As the whole part of the multistakeholder model, right is not ‑‑ you know, no one leads necessarily in the multistakeholder model in the sense that what I am saying needs to go because I happen to know better. That's not the way it works.
So the technical community needs to be involved, but also the technical community and I sort of leave aside what I mean by the technical community, and understand that things have changed and also it is important to provide a narrative that equips governments to, you know, to defend the Internet rather than give them very abstract notions of openness and global reach and interoperability. No, you need to tell governments how they can achieve this.
He have the infrastructure that supports these things.
That infrastructure will always, always exist. The question is: How can we make ‑‑ how can we use this infrastructure to its fullest potential?
>> DAVID: Thank you.
>> ANNELISE: Sorry, just to come back and I'm not sure of this gentleman's name but I did want to flag that AUTA has published an Internet Governance roadmap, and we are calling for greater collaboration among the technical stakeholders in order to ensure better core nation amongst the existing Internet institutions, and, you know, strengthen collaboration between the policy and the technical stakeholders. So I just wanted to draw your attention to this.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Annelise. Danko, you wanted to add something. Maybe Danko first and then Michael can go ahead.
>> DANKO: I just wanted to thank both of you on these comments. I think it is very true, and speaking of ICANN, I think we got the message. So first of all, traditionally, ICANN has the Government Advisory Committee and we are working with country representatives, they advise ICANN board and the public policies but we also have a lot of rotation there. So it's ‑‑ it's continuous work. And we have government engagement team that is also very much present here.
So one the engagements we are doing here. But also, as we very a free large ICANN meetings throughout the world, in June next year, we will have a big meeting in Africa in Rwanda, that is not only for African region but it's global. And in connection to, that we will have a high‑level ministerial meeting and one of the things that ICANN is doing is trying to engage the governments to send high‑level representatives to that meeting.
So I think we get the message and we are doing that, but also, very importantly, I think it's not only about ICANN. ICANN is ‑‑ has the resources to do those things so that's why we are doing it, but it's also all the technical community coming together not only for the ICANN, but through the different things and, of course, with ISOC, with country code registries, with the regional IP registries and we have to prepare ourselves for the WSIS plus 20 review that will probably move the things to be more sync with importance of the current world and as I said, the government's see the importance of Internet now. They see also negative consequences. They are very important with them. We have for example, bilateral with the UK minister who said the most important increase in crime is online. So for the UK government, it's important topic.
And, of course, ICANN is doing something. We are very active in the abuse. We are communicate with the governments very strongly and I think this is something that shows the results.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Danko. Michael, did you want to come?
>> MICHAEL KENDE: You mentioned the new IP proposal in your introduction and there there was kind of a clear and present danger that was presented and along with a number of other people, the technical community responded and I think it was a paper from Olof at ISOC and there was one from ICANN and I'm sure ITF was pushing back because it was tangible and clearly a technical issue where the technical community could respond and discuss how this would impact the Internet and fragment it in some ways, completely.
But as David Fairchild mentioned there may not be a zero draft that could be responded to and we end up as Peter said talking about forensics Wark was said by the tech envoy, how it was it said, where did the technical community came up ‑‑ come up.
And then the risk is that we end up kind of reacting too late, when there's finally something on paper, and there's a risk to be discussed. So I think one thing that would be interesting is, how do we come up with examples or, you know, Peter mentioned some ‑‑ you know, there's demands for regulation, where the technical community clearly can discuss the side effects. So one way, I think to do it is to kind of look forward and talk about, you know, the kinds of risks that could come up and how the technical community can address them and they were already addressed at ITF and elsewhere.
I think that's something we should think about so we don't end up in February, March, April, seeing the first draft and in some ways it may be too late to react when we can finally see some tangible threats.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Michael. We can take one last question. Yeah. Go ahead.
And then we'll spend maybe just five minutes going through concluding remarks from anyone who wants.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, first of all, really great to have this session at the IGF and really appreciate you putting this to go. It's asometime that not more people are there. I see it's being recorded and hopefully more people can benefit from it. I work in the UK government, ministry of science and tech. And I'm sort of disappointed that we're making such a contrast between the technical community and the government. I'm a firm believerrer on working on technical standards and I have a team of technical experts that is very much a part of the technical community and engaging in ICANN and the IGF and other technical bodies.
And for me the really big question and I wonder if they can address this in the closing statements is Arendt right mechanisms. Definitely, I got David's point on how many of you on the technical community are engaging with foreign ministries. And UK foreign office is trying to get a lot more technical expertise into their missions and they are bringing experts in and I think this is a really great move. So for us, we are trying to think about how we have sustainable flow of talented government that will never pay as well as the corporations do.
But when I looked at the GDC consultation and it was an open process. I agree with the concerns. We are very concerned about multistakeholder participation from here, but there was a chance to feed in, and the participation and the contributions from private sector and from the technical community were very limited. We were very disappointed to see that because there was a chance to feed in, and I'm wondering whether that's because it was so high travel it was hard to see the technical problems that might come further down the line.
But there needs to be a mechanism to allow for that engagement and I do think that there is a large practice in the UK, how that's working and how do we do that on a global level before sort fora like this. We work the ITF to build their trust that governments, are a stakeholder and not see ourselves as enemies but actually trying to achieve the same objectives and how can we understand the means and where we might go wrong. Thank you.
>> DAVID: Thank you. I think we can close here. Just perhaps to on my side, just to rebound on what you have just said. And perhaps a point to John, I think in your remarks it sounded to me as if you were saying that government needs to come to you, and that I fear that this is not a ‑‑ this is not a ‑‑ that wasn't your point. You can tell me afterwards.
All right. Do you want to say a few words to conclude, maybe Danko first?
>> DANKO.: Thank you for these comments. I think true governments have technical experts and, of course, we have to work together and I think this is very good message.
But for conclusion, thinking back about the fragmentation, I wanted to also ‑‑ I'm coming from Serbia. It's a small developing country in Europe, not part of European Union and in such a developing countries, the Internet is the key to be part of the global world. And I think the risks of the fragmentation of Internet are ‑‑ are real. But the possible consequences of those risks are especially significant for developing countries because this is the ‑‑ having one Internet for the one world is the way for a country to be part of that world, for people to export their services, to be part of the global workforce, to learn, to work, and, you know, share culture.
So I think this ‑‑ this Internet thing is actually kind of a world peace project and we often discuss now possible negative consequences but we have to celebrate the successes of Internet, and we have to protect it for the citizens of the world, but also very much also for the developing of the world.
>> DAVID: Thank you, Danko. Anna lease?
>> AN ELISE: I would like to thank you for your opposition. We shouldn't see governments as the opposition or the enemy. Governments aren't just trying to stop everybody having a good time. They are trying to protect their citizens and that is ‑‑ that's the job of the government.
So, you know, I would like to just, you know, encourage the technical stakeholders in the room to, you know ‑‑ I think we need to have a coordinated response into some of these public policy processes that are happening and these conversations will be happening whether we engage with them or not. So I would like the technical stakeholders to sort of, you know, give some real consideration to what it is that we can contribute and to some coordination ‑‑ coordination amongst ourselves to provide that input to these processes.
Thanks, David.
>> DAVID: Thank you Annelise. Brunet.
>> BREW NATE: Just about the comments on the process of the GDC, I thought it was rather open and it was welcome to have consultations and so on, but there were some problems along the way. And speaking as part of, like, a group of CSOs that engaged on it, from the very beginning, the first question we asked was, where will be the modalities? This is still an unanswered question, like two years after. Yeah. And the whole, like, debate about the deep dives as well, right? Like, when the deep dive ‑‑ the deep dives were cut in half, right at the end of the it. Not allowing any other stakeholder to speak for more than three minutes or only allowing the ones in New York to speak on the consultations, it kind of highlights that it's not a governmental problem, but it highlights the excluding side of the conversation, right?
So that's when we criticize all of those spaces and so on. And maybe my last remark about that is that we need to do more things together, right, like? So maybe it's now the moment nor the technical community to advocate for more participation together with civil society and other stakeholders on this process that still lacks transparency, that still lacks defining a little better its scope and what will be the next steps. So maybe it's did definitely time for collective action on that. So thanks a lot.
>> DAVID: Michael.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: I want to second the idea of the two‑way engagement that's been mentioned a few times and maybe point out that there's a long list of issues not just avoiding fragmentation of the Internet, but there's other legitimate concerns of the government and one the incentives or one of the reasons that there's discussions of fragment and the kind that Brunet is talking about is because of concerns about protecting citizens, you know, the human rights issues and others. So maybe the way to engage is to engage on the other topics as well, and show that the technical community is not just protecting its own role, which is, of course, important, and needs to be understood for developing an interoperable Internet but for helping address some of the other issues on the list and have a proactive approach rather than a more defensive one. Thank you.
>> DAVID: Thank you. And thank you very much for getting up at 2:00 in the morning to be with us. Thank you. A suggest we close it here all so much for contributing and for the discussion. And please stay to interconnect after this session. Thank you.
(Applause)
(End of session).