Internet Governance Forum Tuesday, 31 October 2006 "Openness"

Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the
 The Inaugural Meeting of the IGF, in Athens. Although it is
 largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to
 inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to
 understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an
 authoritative record.



 >>CHAIRMAN ROUSSOPOULOS:  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to,
 on behalf of the chairman this morning just to welcome to you the second day of
 our deliberations, second day of the Internet Governance Forum. So permit me at
 this stage to express my warmest thanks to the Secretary-General of the United
 Nations, who, according to the Tunis agenda in terms of the information
 society, has convoked on this first meeting of the IGF. Now, for Greece this is
 a special honor to host this meeting, where, for the first time, an opportunity
 is being given to all the stakeholders to express their views concerning the
 governance issues of the Internet. The participation and the lively interests
 of those here demonstrates that this is going to be a very fruitful and
 constructive dialogue on these issues. Now, during the course of our meeting
 today, we will be examining the issue of an open network, freedom of
 expression, the free flow of information, ideas, and knowledge. This issue
 concerns not only one of the main characteristics of the Internet, but more so
 the actual principles upon which it is based. Communication through the
 Internet means that every day, millions of people exchange information, and
 thus become members of the information society, thus enriching by their
 participation the very contents of the Internet. Now, through the history of
 mankind, this, in fact, is the first time that so many people have had the
 opportunity of having such direct communication and expression so quickly and
 at so low a cost as Internet users have today. The network, therefore, the
 whole Internet network, is conducive to communication and information relay.
 It's a common platform for rapid communication through written text, and also
 through images, and through the audio facility as well that one can have such
 communication MODI. This means that the Internet has a very decisive role in
 constructing an information society, which turns towards its citizens, and
 thereby does away with social exclusion and helps social development. So we are
 now going to examine these various issues. And during the course of our
 dialogue, I think this will come to the fore, that what is important is that we
 should be thinking very carefully and reflecting upon the further development
 of the Internet. And this, of course, is linked directly to the issue of
 security, because it does also link up to what sort of security provisions we
 have for the Internet as well as provisions for special needs of users, trying
 also to look at issues of diversity, variety, and directing itself to the free
 market of ideas being exchanged. I do believe that the conclusions of this
 forum will be especially useful for any future meetings on this issue. I hand
 over to Nik Gowing, who is our coordinator this morning. And he will take over
 from me. Thank you very much. Mr. Nik Gowing, you have the floor.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Minister, thank you very much, indeed, and thank you all for
 getting in here through security and the storm out there and however you've
 managed to get here this morning. Can I encourage those of you sitting at the
 back to come forward. Because if you want to speak, the microphones will not
 get to the back. I'll make sure of that. I'd like you to come forward, please,
 if you could, even if you're plugged into a power cable over there, merely
 because I want to make this some kind of brainstorming, giant brainstorming,
 rather than -- let me underline these principles of freedom of expression, let
 me give you some kind of landscape and anchor by which to judge what we want to
 do over the next two and three-quarter hours on the issue of openness, the
 principles captured in the Geneva declaration, also in the Tunis commitment as
 well. But let me remind you all, you don't need reminding, but many of these
 principles remain under challenge. They remain under threat. There are those
 determined to diminish the fundamental attraction still of the Internet. And I
 know from many discussions before we've all assembled here, the great variety
 of views there are among all of you and many who are simply not here but
 watching on the Web site, I should underline, there are different views about
 what the issue of openness is. And I'll come to how I want to make that as open
 and inclusive as possible this morning in a moment. Some of these issues are
 very obvious, political conceptual. Some very technical. Let me go through a
 shopping list of what I think we should be trying to put on the agenda in the
 next two and three-quarter hours. The institutional fears of the new
 empowerment, because of the new fragility which is out there for governments
 and cooperation in power at the moment. The instinct of many still to control
 and intervene. Online censorship, the pressure now on bloggers. There's a
 particular case here in Greece at the moment. Should the major corporations use
 their massive bargaining power to change the terms that host governments give
 them to operate in some countries? Blocking by governments. Questions, should
 Internet service providers maximize freedom of expression in countries with
 restrictive laws on information and communication? The aspiration of knowledge
 for all. Those tensions that are built into the system. The tensions between
 defining copyright and intellectual property rights issues, how to balance the
 rights of the consumer and the content producer, and the threat to upholding
 human rights. Questions like, shouldn't companies resist compliance with local
 laws that are inconsistent with human rights principles? How to square that
 circle defined yesterday here at this time by the prime minister, Mr.
 Karamanlis, to enhance democracy, to have social cohesion and respect the rule
 of law. Recall Commissioner Reding's remarks yesterday. We must respect
 fundamental human rights and protect freedom of expression. That's the core of
 openness. So what are the best practices to strengthen freedom of expression
 through openness? What are the limits acceptable to preserve openness? Legal,
 policy, regulatory frameworks? I'm just trying to sketch that landscape for you
 as we focus our thinking over the next three hours. Let me repeat what Nitin
 said yesterday and what was clear from Kofi Annan's remarks yesterday. This is
 a unique multistakeholder policy dialogue, and unique means it's a different
 kind of discussion. And that means also that it's not that formal. Nitin
 reminded us, stakeholders like you often meet separately, but never together
 like this. So as Ken Cukier reminded us here, standing, doing what I'm doing
 yesterday, this is all a giant untested experiment in dialogue. And this is,
 really, the next stage this morning. And as Kofi Annan's message underlined, it
 is all uncharted waters. These waters are a debate in which governments and
 corporate interests cannot assume any right to command the high ground. So
 everyone has a voice. We met after yesterday and discussed how best to move
 forward the spirit of yesterday to make it more inclusive. I have to say, that
 means there could be a few storms and uncharted reefs in these uncharted
 waters. Notwithstanding the storms out there in the Aegean this morning. And my
 aspiration is really to help sail in these open waters and not to flounder on
 any of these issues. The challenge for me and for all of us is to focus and to
 fashion, to focus and hone all these understandings of the openness issue into
 manageable areas we can debate. So I want to make this inclusive. I want to
 make it a giant brainstorming, if possible, in an enormous room like this. It's
 not an ideal inclusive format, but let's at least have a go. There are no
 speeches from up here, you'll be glad to know. The role of these here on the
 platform is to help catalyze, to share their expertise, and to clarify the
 arguments. In a moment, I will ask the panelists to introduce themselves. But
 rather than those up here just stealing that high ground from the start, in the
 spirit of that multistakeholder dialogue, I also want to spend a few minutes
 soliciting from some of you at this stage what is on your minds about openness.
 This will help us and let me help define the agendas and the areas. I'm not
 asking for speeches, just 20 seconds, 30 seconds, as Ken said yesterday. But
 try and help us put various issues on that agenda. So at this moment, attract
 one of the microphones, if you'd like to make an opening suggestion of areas we
 should be covering. We've been given three hours. I'm going to give you
 something practical now. Some complained yesterday, it's a long session, making
 super-human demands on time, energy, and concentration. But let's all be
 practical about this. Because if we have a coffee break, you'll all disappear
 for half an hour and half of you won't come back. So we're not going to do
 that. If you want to go out and have a break, that's for to you decide. And
 I've invited those on the platform as well, if they want to disappear and have
 a coffee break, they're not walking out on the session, they, too, are just
 enjoying a few moments of getting away and relief from the session. But it is a
 big ask, for three hours. But I encourage you to do that if you want to. But
 there will be no coffee break between now and 1:00. And then it will be lunch.
 Yesterday, the Wi-Fi in here was overloaded, as many of you all know. We've
 been trying to blog. We are still trying to blog. We still have bandwidth and
 other challenges. We're going to try to make that work for those of you who are
 out there on the Internet watching the webcast of this. During the session,
 what I'd like you to do is fill in a card as well, of the kind of issue you
 want raised. And when you do that, could you put your name, your affiliation,
 your country, and what's on your badge here, the issue number. Right. Let me
 ask those up here, thanks for being patient, to introduce yourselves. Let's do
 it from the end, from Carlos. Introduce yourselves, why you're here, and then
 we'll move forward. Again, reminder, if you would like to at least give an idea
 of what we should be talking about on openness, please make sure a microphone
 comes to you while we're getting the introductions. Carlos.

 >>CARLOS AFONSO:  Okay. My Names Council is Carlos Afonso. Wow, that's a good
 sound! I am a director of the Brazilian organization called information network
 for the third sector. Which is affiliated with the center for progressive
 communication. I have the honor to be beside the chairperson of the
 association. And I work also with the Internet steering committee of Brazil as
 a representative of civil society organizations.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Anriette Esterhuysen, executive director of APC
 association for progressive communication, an international network of
 organizations that see the Internet and other communication technologies as a
 very powerful force not just for development, but for social justice.

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  I'm Hanne Sophie Greve. I'm a former judge at the
 European court of human rights. Now I'm here for the council of Europe. I've
 had a challenge for six years to look at freedom of information, freedom of
 expression, and the balances and the difficulties of this in Europe.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  Joi Ito, I'm on the board of creative commons and the chairman
 of icomments. Also on the board of ICANN, the Mozilla foundation, the open
 source initiative. And I'm also on the board of witness, which is a human
 rights association. But mostly involved in openness at political content
 software and social levels.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  My name is Jamie Love. I work in Washington, D.C., for an NGO,
 consumer project and technology, that works on issues about access to
 knowledge, access to medical technologies, and access to knowledge defined more
 broadly.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Paschal Mooney, I'm from Ireland, a member of the Irish
 senator, but also of the council of Europe parliamentary assembly, and human
 rights activist. I've also prepared a number of reports on the media and public
 service broadcasting over the last number of years.

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  My name is Andrew Puddephatt. I'm a member of OBE. I'm
 here currently because I'm currently working for the Ford Foundation look at
 the impacts of network communications on democracy, human rights, civil
 society, arts, and cultural. I also consult for UNESCO and UNDP on media and
 transparency issues. .

 >>ART REILLY:  Good morning. My name is Art Reilly. I'm a senior director of
 strategic technology policy at Cisco Systems. I have also had the pleasure of
 being a member of the business community in the WSIS preparation leading up to
 both the WSIS 2003 in Geneva, as well as the Tunis World Summit on the
 Information Society, and I'm currently also a member of the Strategy Council of
 the U.N.'s Global Alliance for ICT Development.

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Good morning, I'm Richard Sambrook, director of news for
 the BBC and also a vice president of the European broadcasting union. I'm here
 because as a public-service broadcaster, obviously, the Internet is an
 extremely important means of distribution for our content, but also because I
 think the principles underlying public service broadcasting, universality of
 access, of investment in high-quality content and of a focus on public interest
 are of particular relevance to this morning's discussion.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  Good morning, I'm Fred Tipson and I work for Microsoft in
 Washington, D.C., on international issues and principally ICT for development
 issues, and issues surrounding Internet governance.

 >>CATHERINE TRAUTMANN:  Good morning. I am a member of the European parliament
 and former minister of communication and culture for France. And if we have a
 parliamentary delegation from the European parliament, there is a reason for
 it, because we believe that, in fact, we are the legislators, and we have to
 make sure, in fact, that we do bring together citizens, enterprises, and
 communication. And communication triangle there, for between citizens,
 parliament, and the European parliament. And, of course, I'm here because I
 want to leave Athens with information on participatory society to see how we
 can, in fact, within our European legislation, make sure that we have the
 objective of development included. Thank you.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Yes, Richard is my boss on the platform. Right. Now, let's move
 on with anyone who's got anything that you want to add to the agenda. Have you
 got a microphone? Can you get the microphone to you now, please, rather than
 waiting. Please, can we switch the microphones on each time.

 >> (saying name) former ambassador, now a consultant. I'm actually going to put
 my question in a different language, another international language. I -- just
 by way of reflection, I would like to say the following. What I think is at
 stake today is not simply Internet, because what we're actually doing under the
 aegis of the United Nations and the IGF is to make one of our first attempts of
 governance at the universal level. So what, basically, this conference, I
 think, is going to release in terms of ideas is going to spill over into other
 sectors, which perhaps don't link into Internet as such. For example, the
 energy sector or public health.

 >>NIK GOWING:  About openness, in particular, that's what we're gathered here
 for in the second of four days. Anyone else want a microphone quickly at this
 stage. Get -- because then we can keep up the pace.

 >> Hello, Steve Ballinger from amnesty international. We're here because not
 only do we see the Internet as a potentially powerful force for human rights,
 but also one way or another, freedoms are under threat, not just from
 governments that are shutting down Web sites, blocking, filtering, locking
 people up for what they're saying online, but also from I.T. companies that
 have colluded with repressive countries, particularly in China, in some cases
 providing information to governments that have led to people's prosecutions. So
 I guess our question is how do we ensure that human rights are protected and
 they remain right at the very top of the agenda here at the IGF.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you think you're making any progress at all on your concerns?

 >> Well certainly we've attracted an enormous amount of support. Our
 irrepressible.info campaign has attracted 50,000 supporters, and we'll be
 presenting a petition here of that at the IGF. A lot of people -- there's a lot
 of support there, and a lot of people are taking action on cases.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Anyone else putting up their hand? And I can't see them with the
 lights.

 >> Asni Vlavianos-Arvanitis, biopolitics international organization. I'm mainly
 here because I'm concerned about the fact that we are moving too slowly while
 we have the potential to move a lot faster. And humanity is still divided into
 very small little spots with a small universe. And we have never (inaudible)
 altogether. And we have proposed for years a global referendum to save the
 environment and to accelerate the pace of participation of every individual on
 our planet.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Why do you think it is moving too slowly?

 >> I think that this should have been done years ago, since Internet technology
 has been available, and we still are separated into small nations, and we don't
 see our common concerns. The environment is deteriorating and there's global
 warming, there's loss of biodiversity. These are issues where we can all join
 forces. Every individual needs to participate.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Move faster, freedom of expression under threat. Who else out
 there? This is your moment if you want to put it on the agenda or help us put
 it on the agenda. Any other hand up, please? Could you attract the microphone
 to you.

 >> Hello. I am from the foundation for a free information infrastructure. And
 our problem is keeping the infrastructure free. Because if the information and
 the knowledge is going to be free, then the infrastructure is -- must be free.
 So the problem is software patents, essentially. I think we are going to talk
 much about this. I was -- I wanted to stress that we are talking much about
 freedom of expression, but in the practice, there are movements around Europe
 to legalize the ownership of knowledge.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Has anyone got a mike there?

 >> Thanks.  Amadeu Abril a Abril. So far I have survived WSIS, ICANN formation
 process, and many things before. I have a suggestion for the moderator, is
 going the reverse way we are going in this conference. Instead of enlarging the
 agenda, I think it would be useful, given the new tools we have and the new
 environment we have for discussion, to focus on some ideas deeper on these
 small points and trying to reach some more -- more discourse on that, instead
 of spending once again a full round of meetings around the world in setting the
 issues that worry us. It's only, you know, three hours. So better to focus on
 three or two, four points, instead of trying to discuss ten, 20 seconds, 200
 points.

 >>NIK GOWING:  I'm not going to try to do that and it's impossible. But your
 point is taken. It's the moderator's dread that there's far too much to discuss
 in three hours. Please.

 >> Good morning. I'm (saying name). I represent civil society. And for open
 access, what I would like to know is, how can we give access to the greatest
 number of Internet users so we need interoperability, low access costs, and
 giving everyone the tools which will allow them to exchange content in the
 future. Which means free use software and the ability to distribute content
 freely. What about software patents? And what about current trends, which is to
 patent basic concepts?

 >> I have DIVINA, represent the researcher and patent-holders' coalition, and
 also researchers for info com. I would also like to agree with the previous
 speaker, representing civil society, and I would like to insist on the
 importance we should give on free content exchange, especially for university
 students and university researchers. We need free access. This is the most
 important point I would like to raise. And I think we should link it to
 openness, which is this morning's theme.

 >> JOHN HADOULIS:  Good morning. I am from Agence France press. And I'm very
 interested in the Cisco participation in this panel, because would like to ask
 them what happened with the software material they have sold to the Chinese
 police. I would like them to give us an explanation of exactly what their
 policy in China will be.

 >> My name is (saying name) and I'm from the Danish human rights institute. I
 would like to pose the question as to how we deal with the fact that in an
 Internet context, different countries have different standards on what is
 illegal content, such as the problem we saw with the (saying name) case.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Someone over there has the microphone? No? Okay. Who's got the
 -- please, can you get the microphone to somebody quickly.

 >> I'm (saying name) from Bangladesh. Openness underlines transparency, are we
 addressing that, too?

 >>NIK GOWING:  Okay. One over there, please.

 >> My name is (saying name) from Nigeria, from Nigeria Internet group. We
 cannot be talking of openness without looking at the issue of access. Access,
 inclusiveness, and openness are tied together. In a country where very few
 people have access to the Internet, openness becomes a secondary issue. I think
 we have to look at a way of providing low-cost equipment to access the
 Internet.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Over there, please.

 >> (No audio.)

 >> NIK GOWING:  Wait a minute.  The microphone is not on.  Can someone switch
 the microphone on, please.

 >> Mr. Chair, in my mind, it would be very interesting to discuss also a little
 bit about freedom of express and freedom of religion.  Thank you.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Okay.  Thanks. One over there.  Has someone got it over there,
 please.

 >> Good morning.  I am from Peru, and I belong to a nongovernmental
 organization.  I have a question on freedom of expression, and I would like to
 address myself to members of parliament or government. I would like to see how
 access to information makes the state more transparent.  It allows citizens to
 exercise their right and follow exactly what state policies are. The problem
 for the state with openness and transparency is that governments generally
 don't like offering this transparency to their citizens. And I think that we
 should emphasize this need for governmental control. So let's draw a line and
 say on the one hand, we have free access and on the other hand we have the
 necessity of governments to control and limit so I would like to make a point
 of raising that issue.

 >> NIK GOWING:  A moment of the kind of issues that are on your mind.  But
 please don't see this as me shutting down that part of the brainstorming.  Get
 your details on a card and let's funnel those forward, please. Let me pick up
 particularly on that point from amnesty international and picked up over there
 about China. Andrew Puddephatt, what's your reflection of where this debate has
 got to when it comes to human rights organizations, the issue of freedom of
 expression and what amnesty are raising about online freedoms under threat.

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  First of all, I think amnesty are quite correct to raise
 it, and one thing that's noticeable about many communications discussions is
 rights don't form a central part of the way we discuss communications and think
 about communications.  It tends to be something that's put to one side or
 brought up by a minority group. One of the interesting things to me about the
 Internet is it is, notwithstanding the problems you have in China and one or
 two other countries, much less regulated than the traditional media, broadcast,
 print and so on. Many countries don't seem to regard Internet services and
 Internet providers as requiring the same kind of control and regulation. 
 That's why the Internet is such an exciting area for campaigners who believe in
 democracy, openness and human rights.  And why we are very nervous about
 attempts to restrict the ability of the Internet to provide the free flow of
 information.  Because the fundamental human rights, international declaration
 of human rights, is the right to receive and impart information regardless of
 frontiers.  And if anything can achieve that, it is the Internet, which is why
 it is such a precious resource --

 >> NIK GOWING:  Do you see progress or not at the moment?

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  I definitely see progress in a sense.  Obviously, there
 are points about access.  I mean, less than 4% of Africans are online compared
 to North Americans.  But putting the access point to one side, where access
 exists you can definitely get information and ideas on the Internet that you
 cannot get on the conventional media.  That is progress.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Let's talking about online freedoms that has been raised by at
 least three out there.  What is your view on whether there is an entrenchment
 on positions?

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Nik, I am going to step back a bit and respond to
 Andrew and then try to answer your question.  I think the answer to amnesty's
 challenge is to not put access to one side.  I think we need to look at rights
 and openness in terms of human rights and social and economic rights.  And they
 are very integrated. And you have to the access to communicate and to speak,
 whether it's to speak about your rights being violated or not having access to
 clean water, is very fundamental.  And I think that Internet needs to be
 protected.  We need to, as Andrew said, there is freedom there.  There are
 spaces, and they are not always safe. But I think the real power of the
 Internet to create a world where there is more awareness and more realization
 of rights cannot be dealing from access. I also think that in terms of
 challenging governments that are not putting human rights centrally on their
 agenda, it's much more effective to engage them at a social and economic
 development level as well as a human rights level.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Do you see progress at the moment or not?

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I do see progress.  And I think that the thing about
 progress and why the Internet is so interesting is that progress is, to some
 extent, top-down.  There is also huge encroachment but there is also awareness
 of the power of the Internet to promote transparency and more people are using
 it.  But there is also protest and I think that is the power of the Internet,
 that even if there is limited progress at the level of government policy and
 some real violations happening, there is a movement of awareness, and there is
 a bottom-up force that is demanding rights.  And I think an event like this
 illustrates that. I think what we need to be careful about with events like
 this is not to always assume we all agree.

 >> NIK GOWING:  I don't think we assume that all the.  What I am trying to do
 is get the maximum level of variety of opinions. Carlos, can you contribute on
 this point at all about particularly picking up what amnesty have said here and
 their making a big point about it on this issue of online freedoms under
 threat?

 >>CARLOS AFONSO:  Okay.  I have a difficulty in dealing with these issues about
 Internet without considering the situation of regulation, legislation and
 control of the network itself. It said here, it was said in the first session
 we had, the opening rituals, that the technical question is not as relevant as
 the other issues.  And I think it underlies a lot of the -- what we need to
 know in order to make some decisions. I will just say at this point, I would
 just propose a question running a bit over the moderator.  I would like to ask
 you would you pay for more bandwidth?  And probably most of you would say yes,
 I would pay for more bandwidth if I need it. But we need to -- in my view, we
 need to answer this question like this.  Yes, we would pay for more bandwidth
 if we have the right to participate in decision-making regarding price
 formation of this bandwidth, regarding pricing of this bandwidth. So we ask
 about freedom of access, but we are not discussing this. How these decisions
 come to be?  How come that, say, a country in Africa has to pay much more for
 bandwidth than any other country?

 >> NIK GOWING:  On this one issue, online freedoms under threat, and I am
 quoting from one of the points there, let me ask all of you, who wants to take
 a view on that?  Please.

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  Thank you.  Just to amnesty, I appreciate that there is,
 indeed, a tract on the net to the freedom of expression, but I think it's
 erroneous to think that human rights moves one direction all the time.  It's
 ups and downs in every field of human rights.  And I also think we should not
 speak of human rights as being isolated to civil rights.  Social and economic
 rights are, indeed, human rights as well. And the human rights challenge is
 really to balance all these different rights at the same time. And I think
 what's needed at this moment is really to focus on what are the specific
 challenges to the freedom of expression on the net, as amnesty said them, for
 instance.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Fred from Microsoft, you want to come in.  The words used there
 was that I.T. companies are colluding in some of these freedoms being removed
 on the Internet in some parts of the world.  Do you accept that accusation?

 >>FRED TIPSON:  No, I don't, but I think it's a longer discussion than we
 probably will do here, and I just might note that I am in three other workshops
 at this session dealing with these issues.  So if people don't have their
 chances with me at this discussion, they will have several others.

 >> NIK GOWING:  But you can give me an abbreviated answer to the question.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  No, I don't think I would accept the accusation that we are
 colluding but I think it's a longer response.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Why do you say that?

 >>FRED TIPSON:  Because I think we are optimizing the access to information for
 users and governments that amnesty is targeting for its criticism.  And it's
 those users that we need to keep our focus on.  And there is an issue of roles
 here as to where criticism needs to be directed, not that we shouldn't receive
 some of it, but I think there are different roles that need to be discussed in
 terms of how we do protect freedom of access for users in societies where there
 are severe restrictions on information.

 >> NIK GOWING:  But define where your line is, corporately, on this issue.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  I don't think it's a simple response.  I think that's part of
 why I want the chance to really engage on these issues. We are -- the condition
 of doing business in a country is to abide by the law in the country, and we
 are, frankly, have been engaged in the last year on figuring out how best with
 industry other partners and with organizations like amnesty that care about
 these issues how we can do a -- have a better discussion with governments to
 improve freedom of access and expression.

 >> NIK GOWING:  But can you share with us, where is the room for maneuver at
 the moment?

 >>FRED TIPSON:  I think the strongest arguments in most countries is the
 economic value of the Internet in driving growth and development and education
 opportunities.  And the freedom of expression issue is often too segmented
 into, as one of the previous speakers said, segmented too narrowly into a
 discussion around free speech, not that those aren't -- that's not a primary
 value.  But the more telling argument with governments is how they are
 depressing their own economic opportunities by constraining and smothering the
 Internet.

 >> NIK GOWING:  How constrained do you feel by this debate?

 >>FRED TIPSON:  I came here to be in this debate and that's why I say I am in
 three other workshops to talk about these issues.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Thank you.  Let me move on with Cisco because, Art, you have
 heard one particular question there which I have to put to you as it was raised
 from the floor about what you take on your routers and your systems in a place
 like China.  What happens to the data that you hold back and what happens to it
 if it's handed on to the police?

 >> That's not my question.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Wasn't it?  Well, in that case would you like to put it again? 
 Would you like to put it again, then?

 >> We know, of course, that Cisco sold routers to China, and I am not
 discussing that.  But we also know that Cisco sold equipment specifically to
 the Chinese police, telecommunication equipment to the Chinese police.  And
 that's on this issue that I would like an answer from Cisco.  Not on general
 comment about how to do business in China and --

 >> NIK GOWING:  I didn't say that, but it's about what you said what happened
 to the data, I think.

 >> No.  I can show you if you want, I have leaflets distributed by Cisco in
 China to the Chinese police.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Ask your question to Cisco, then, please.

 >>ART REILLY:  Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate the fact that there's
 been such strong support for the free flow of information.  And the suggestion
 by a number that that free flow of information is under threat, because I think
 when we're talking about that here, we're talking about it, and many people
 have mentioned it in the context of people being able to communicate and the
 fact that they may be filtered. I think one of the other aspects of this and I
 think the thing that derives this particular question really relates to the
 fact that the Internet has become so important, so critical to countries and to
 international communications and commerce that it's become a target.  And as a
 consequence of that, there are threats out there that exist from individuals or
 organizations that would like to, in fact, minimize or reduce the capability of
 the Internet to, in fact, perhaps even eliminate its potential to provide that
 free flow of information. And so as a consequence of that, it's essential that
 there be security and network management capabilities that allow operators and
 owners of the equipment to, in fact, manage their network and provide the
 security that enable the free flow of information. So that that technology that
 does that is the same technology that's utilized by parents and by libraries to
 ensure that they have the ability to control and filter what their children can
 see, to avoid the potential for pornography, et cetera. That technology is
 technology that is utilized by operators to manage their networks and to enable
 free flow of information. The capabilities that Cisco provides in its equipment
 are sold to owners and to operators of networks, and, in fact, provided.  And
 it's the same equipment that we sell in every country around the world in which
 we sell equipment. There is no differentiation.  We do not sell a different
 product in one country over what we sell in other countries. But it is provided
 with the capability, as I said, to allow the network operator to, in fact,
 manage the network, control the flow of information, to ensure that that free
 flow of information allows capabilities to be brought to the millions of people
 who look to get the benefits of the information that the Internet provides.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Do you think your systems narrow and restrict the level of
 openness within the Internet, and you are comfortable with that?

 >>ART REILLY:  I think quite to the contrary.  I think the growth of the
 Internet is evident, and the capabilities I talked about in terms of the
 software that performs those functions is the same software or the same type of
 software that's provided by the other equipment suppliers. And so the Internet
 has grown as a result of the fact that it is out there and it has provided the
 capability to allow users around the world to get access to information, to
 communicate, to in fact exchange ideas, to be innovative, to create.  The
 beauty of the Internet is the fact that it is open, it is inclusive, and it has
 the possibility for innovation at the edges, which means that users at the end
 of the network can create capabilities, they can create applications, they can
 utilize that to their benefit. One example, and I think one of the subthemes or
 the cross-cutting themes here is capacity building and also the issue of
 development. An example, we are partnering with the Navajo nation, an
 indigenous peoples within the southwest U.S.  They were interested in being
 able to utilize IP technology to connect the villages over a very disparate
 real estate using IP technology for education purposes, for eGovernment
 purposes, but also to allow them to open up the market they have for
 capabilities, their handicraft, their crafts. That capability currently under
 the existing conditions, they get 15 cents on the dollar.  The ability to
 access and provide their information directly to the world allows them to make
 85 cents on the dollar.  So it's a great enabler.

 >> (inaudible).

 >> NIK GOWING:  One moment.  Can you just get the microphone?  We can't hear
 you.  We can't hear you.  Could you get the microphone, and then I'll come back
 to you. But again, because it's on a lot of people's minds, and in discussions
 about this session, we knew this kind of thing would come up, do you feel, and
 that word was used over there, that you as I.T. companies are colluding in
 restricting freedom and openness on the Internet?

 >>ART REILLY:  No, I don't.  As I indicated, we are selling the same product in
 every country around the world.  So we are not colluding with any government to
 do anything customized to meet any special need with regard to filtering. The
 product is provided to allow security and network management to promote the
 free flow of information.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Now, there is one more question there.  Can you get the
 microphone, please.  You have the microphone?  Please.

 >> Clarify that.  I have a brochure here given by Cisco in 2003 in Shanghai,
 and it's a brochure which shows that you sell equipment to the Chinese police. 
 So when you say you sell this kind of equipment to all the countries, it might
 be true, but you sell that sell that to other police forces.  And isn't it a
 problem to sell equipment to the Chinese police?  Because you must know what
 the Chinese regime is and you must know how they are going to use your
 software. So please answer first, did you sell the software to Chinese police? 
 And if you did, isn't it an ethical problem for you?

 >> NIK GOWING:  Could you just clarify the answer?  Then we can move on.  Did
 you?

 >>ART REILLY:  I'm not familiar with the sale of any product to a specific
 entity within China. I think we sell Cisco equipment to enterprises around the
 world, including governmental entities, that utilize it to provide their
 communications to meet their needs internally. We also, obviously, provide it
 to --

 >> NIK GOWING:  Do you ever say no?  Do you ever take a view, "We must not
 sell"?

 >>ART REILLY:  Obviously there are business conditions that exist with regard
 to the sale, establishing price and our ability to actually deliver.

 >> NIK GOWING:  All right.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Nik, can I quickly respond to that?

 >> NIK GOWING:  We are getting the point so can I get the debate, please.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  There are repressive governments and there will be for
 a long time to come, and they will demand tools and software and technologies
 to aid in their repression, and there will be companies that respond to them. 
 I think the real question is how does a forum like this, a group of technical
 people, policymakers, entrepreneurs, civil society activists, how do we begin
 to create an international policy and principal framework that stops that from
 happening.

 >> NIK GOWING:  I have got the --

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Controls it.

 >> NIK GOWING:  -- the question.  Stop writing down an agenda of the answers to
 your own question, how, and let's bear that in mind. Catherine Trautmann.

 >>CATHERINE TRAUTMANN:  I think the answer we were just given really clarifies
 that it's market laws that are considered of more importance than freedom of
 expression. And at the European Parliament we agreed practically unanimously
 last July a resolution which tries to give a response to this issue, because
 there are sometimes technological means that are not repressive, per se, but
 can be used to a repressive end by various governments.  So we have asked the
 manufacturers of this software and equipment to, of course, do business with
 all governments, but also keep in mind that users of the Internet should also
 be protected. So these interests should be balanced, and I think it should be a
 50/50 kind of balance. Because we can work in a market, and also keep in mind
 that the users may have different needs. And we have asked the member states to
 adopt a declaration which will promote freedom of expression on the Internet in
 the whole world. And we should condemn all attempts to restrict free expression
 on the Internet and also take up contacts with businesses in order to guarantee
 this, and only cooperate with governments that respect access to information
 and freedom of expression.  And we should also negotiate our cooperation
 conditions, taking into account the behavior of these governments. Of course I
 understand that civic rights and human rights are not an abstract declaration. 
 They should be given a more concrete context.  And we should give citizens a
 right to have access to information, because that will allow for a more
 balanced kind of development.  Freedom of expression is fundamental.  And if we
 want countries to develop in an egalitarian way, they should express freedom of
 expression.  And I think that should be the for most condition for governance.
 [ Applause ]

 >> NIK GOWING:  Based on your work in the European Parliament, are you saying
 that you are moving quite rapidly toward some kind of calibration of an index
 of repression, however you want to do it, for issues like I.T? and the
 Internet?

 >>CATHERINE TRAUTMANN:  Yes, in degrees, of course. But what we should keep in
 mind is that there is national sovereignty.  We are not going to ban them, but
 we could ask questions. We could not cooperate in certain areas, or we could
 apply pressure, for example, in some ways. We are 25.  We will soon be 27
 member states.  And I think that's quite a big number of countries.  And some
 of them did live for a while under a totalitarian regime.  And we saw events
 and we saw the turn of events in Tunis. We discussed various issues while human
 rights activists were being abused. I think that I felt ill at ease while this
 was happening, and I think it's very important to see under which conditions
 freedom of expression is discussed. Because freedom of expression should be
 discussed in a context which is free, and which applies these recommendations
 we have been issuing. I am a member of parliament and I think it is part of our
 mandate to look into these issues. Although I do understand that there are
 security issues for various regimes.  But I know that my colleagues from the
 former Soviet bloc really have some very bad experience from this.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Jamie.  I don't mind.  Jamie?  Go ahead, Jamie, first of all.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  Quickly, I wanted to say I realize it's very easy to want to
 paint countries and big companies with a broad brush and sort of paint them bad
 or good.  And I never thought I would be sitting here defending Microsoft, but
 it's very important to understand, because I am a businessman at heart, that
 sharing and openness also makes practical business sense and also very often in
 the best interest of many countries.  And that companies and countries are a
 myriad of different people with different interests. So, for instance,
 Microsoft has an open source license.  They just made a plug-in for Creative
 Commons for us.  We have been doing open democracy stuff in local governments
 in China.  And I think what's very important is to not destroy the dialogue you
 are creating with these people by not becoming antagonistic generally or
 broadly with them. Because it is important to amplify the good things that are
 going on as well as to highlight the bad things.  I am sounding overly
 diplomatic, and I am not, by the way, but I think it's important to understand
 Microsoft is not one entity, it's a very complicated place, and you have to
 find the right people and don't attribute to malice that which can be
 attributed to inertia or ignorance.

 >> NIK GOWING:  The point out there is to collusion.  I.T. companies colluding.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  And I think everything, being on the ICANN board I know this,
 everything from the ICANN board looks like collusion.  Yet when you go into an
 Cisco or Microsoft there might be some private organization there would be a
 lot more agreement than you would expect.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Let me go to Fred then Richard Sambrook.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  I will buy Jamie a drink later.

 >> NIK GOWING:  This is Joichi.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  That wasn't me.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  Then I will buy you both a drink.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Why don't you shut the microphone for a moment because we can
 hear your conversation over there.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  To distinguish between different kinds of human rights concerns
 that people have, let's just simplify by saying access to information, which is
 typically in most of these context relate to go search and the censorship of
 search is very different from freedom of expression which is classically about
 blogging and being able to express your opinions on blogs which is quite
 different from the monitoring of e-mail traffic and the demands for personal
 identifying information which, you know, is a third area which is very
 different from sales of technology that may have uniquely repressive potential
 that's unavailable to governments otherwise. And I think we need to discuss
 each one of those things in a different context.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Richard Sambrook, then Jamie. And I think we need to discuss
 each one of those things in a different context.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Richard Sambrook, then Joichi.

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  I think Joi put his finger on the core dynamics here,
 which is a collision of business interests with principle. The BBC's Web sites
 in China and Iran and a number of other countries are blocked because we refuse
 to compromises on our reporting. If we re- -- if we agreed not to report issues
 around the Falun Gong and Tibet and so on, we can probably get our Web site in
 China unblocked. But I think the principle of freedom of expression would be
 too severely compromised. And the question is whether a compromised service, be
 it in terms of technology or information, allows to you build a relationship
 that produces a longer-term gain or whether, by making the compromise, you
 actually undermine any possibility of that longer-term gain. We certainly take
 the view that -- open reporting of all subjects is too important for us to
 compromise on. Clearly some I.T. companies take the view that a little progress
 is better than no progress. But that's a business decision rather than a
 decision of principle. And I think what we're seeing is the collision of those
 two.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you think the BBC has made any commercial or brand sacrifice
 when it's made those kind of decisions?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  We have certainly made sacrifices. It's a hugely important
 audience and public in China which is not getting access to our services and
 information that we would like them to have access to. But we think the
 principle is too important.

 >>NIK GOWING:  And on issues, we're talking about openness here, Richard. But
 not just in China, but elsewhere around the world. Do we -- does the BBC
 experience anything similar in terms of blocking and filtering and restricting
 of its signals, television or all our 13 platforms?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Yes. I mean, the Internet is the latest manifestation of
 it. And China and Iran are the most obvious examples in terms of our Internet
 services, not the only ones. But back in the Cold War, our short-wave radio
 signals were jammed by Russia and eastern Europe.

 >>NIK GOWING:  But now.

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  But at the moment, China and Iran are the two obvious
 examples.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Right. Jamie.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Okay. Thank you. I -- as many people in the audience have
 described, I mean, there's a lot of threats to freedom. There's a lot of
 opposition to freedom. There's constant attacks on freedom. I think it's
 important that people are open about that, they talk about it, and they push
 back in all these areas. There's also, I think, -- there's a lot of attacks on
 what I would call the opposite of freedom. I mean, if you think of what freedom
 is, the Internet is kind of a big kind of attack on authority, it's a big
 attack on control, it's a big attack on all those things. And it's, I think,
 interesting for us to talk about why it is that the Internet is such a -- such
 a disturbing thing for authority. Why is the -- why is the Internet actually
 changing things in a positive way? And I think part of it is the fact that
 there's this is sort of routing around function that takes place in the
 Internet, where there's certain sort of bad government or bad corporate
 behavior or bad this or bad that, or bad university, or -- and people kind of
 use the Internet in a way to organize themselves, propose alternatives, find
 kind of fixes and workarounds in these areas.  And there's also this sort of
 different model of where voices come from. I mean, we're sort of used to be,
 with television, sitting at home and turning on the television and figuring out
 broadcasters or somebody wants to show us. On the Internet, it's different.
 Everybody themselves is sort of the voice. It's this sort of routing around.
 It's sort of these instruments. I think that to the extent that the IGF can
 defend or promote the types of things that are positive about routing around
 authority and challenging bad governance in different ways or, you know,
 excessive control, you know, it would be very positive. I've heard discussions
 about open standards once by Yoki Bentler (phonetic) where he said one of the
 big things in open standards was that people had the freedom in a true open
 standard to implement in ways that were not controlled by, anticipated by, or
 even contrary to the interests of the people that developed the standard. It's
 sort of the idea that the lack of control led to, and the freedom that was
 associated with that, led to not only all kinds of innovation, but it sort of
 changes the order of things. But I also think in the businesses, it's in the
 interest of business in the long run to have this less control system. Because
 the sort of monopolistic sort of instincts and control this and control that,
 that led to big market shares of a small pie. And when you have more freedom
 and you have more, you know, sort of opportunities to sort of let people do
 things that they have the talent and the capacity to do, and the intelligence
 to do, you end up with, like, more wealth, more dynamic society, more things
 going on. So I think that some businesses, like IBM has shifted more from
 trying to control very sort of top-down controlling the interfaces more, the
 sort of approach to I.P. has sort of changed, because they thought to the
 extent that knowledge is shared, it's perceived to be more valuable than if
 that's controlled in some way. So I think there's -- you know, we should try
 and figure out why it is that the Internet is a threat and what are the things
 that the IGF can do to move things in the right direction.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Let me just underline how I'm trying to manage this. And I know
 a lot of you have come in and filled seats further back. I want to stay on this
 issue of corporate responsibility, then move on to issues like copyright and
 IPR and some of the other issues raised. I want to exhaust this as far as
 possible and then block it off and move on. But there is that critical question
 I raised for all of you at the end about can or should major corporations use
 their massive bargaining power to change the terms that host governments give
 them to operate in some countries? Is that doable? If so, how? Minister, do you
 want to intervene? Do you want to intervene on this question or something else?

 >>CHAIRMAN ROUSSOPOULOS:  Thank you, Mr. Gowing. Without taking up too much
 time from other speakers, I'd like just to move to an issue which is important.
 I mean, we're talking about access to the Internet, which is important,
 information flow, which is very important, and each of us being able to
 actually go onto the Internet to find information. However, there's another
 route, if you like. Each and every one of us can become a source of
 information, we can create information. And the question here, since we're
 talking about free access and free expression, where does freedom stop and
 where does one's complete, unbridled flow of information start? I mean, I can
 actually talk on television or talk to the newspapers, but I'm governed by a
 certain code of ethics therein. On the Internet, however, if I become a source
 of information and write anything I want against any body I want, it's an
 attack. It is not criticism in the good sense. It is, in fact, libel.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Could I just (inaudible) that issue, because I want to just
 focus specifically on that issue about major corporations, bargaining power
 that they have. Who wants to talk about that, particularly Paschal.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Could I make a brief intervention. We're talking about
 operating systems. One of the major corporates, Google, have questions to
 answer about the manner in which their corporate policies have (inaudible)
 specifically in China. And it was mentioned earlier by one of the speakers that
 a journalist was arrested, convicted, and jailed on (inaudible) information
 provided by a major server. Now, the question must be asked, where was the
 corporate ethics involved there? It seemed to me as an outsider that it was all
 about making money in China. So that's essentially the questions that need to
 be asked to the corporate sector. I'm not so sure whether the attack should be
 essentially on the operating systems operators who are selling their products
 everywhere. And if they are adopted, and I'm not in any way trying to defend
 the question that was asked earlier about China and about the Chinese police
 getting the Microsoft system. I mean, if Microsoft sells their systems abroad,
 it can be interpreted in any way. And, in fact, the reality, as you probably
 know, in China is because of the severe intellectual property problems in that
 country, that they could have copied the system anyway. So all I'm saying, --
 and probably did. All I'm saying is the question should also be addressed at
 those who are providing the vehicle for all the rest of us in order to access
 information. Do they have questions to answer about their ethical problems? And
 my only final brief intervention is to mirror much of what has been said by my
 colleagues from the European parliament. 46 member states, many of whom are not
 in the European Union, many of whom are still struggling as fledgling
 democracies to come to terms with many of the rights that all of us in western
 Europe, in particular, have enjoyed and have taken as a given. And where we see
 our role is in assisting those countries where there are difficulties
 surrounding access, freedom of information. And they still are there, countries
 and governments still want to control the flow of information. We want to be in
 a position to assist them, because, basically, it is an essential tool of any
 democracy that you have free flow of information, and there is already
 happening, particularly in western Europe and my own country, the practice of
 edemocracy, where the government are now putting proposed bills before the
 people on the Internet and asking them to submit their ideas in order to frame
 policy. And this is not happening in a lot of other countries, but it is a
 model, I would hope, for the future.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Is there anyone here from Yahoo! or Google who would like to
 speak? I'll come to you in a moment. But I want to give right of response to
 that. Can we keep focused on that and can I also recognize Zahid Jamil from
 Pakistan. I will come to you in a moment, if I want to check where you are so I
 get a microphone, please. Can I focus specifically again on this point. Can you
 restrain yourself if you want to talk about something else. Should major
 corporations be using their massive bargaining power to change, please?

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  I think traditionally, we have had two different
 approaches when it comes to human rights. It is the approach of confrontation
 versus engagement. And I think it would be very interesting here, with
 Microsoft, with BBC, with Google, to know how did they succeed in improving the
 conditions and lives of people by choosing opposite approaches.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Okay. Corporate power. Andrew Puddephatt, do you want a word on
 this?

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  I think -- sorry. I think the key thing is, does it work?
 I mean, I don't object to companies taking the view that if we sell our
 software, our equipment, are we creating new openings. The question is, are
 they actually creating new openings or are they simply reinforcing the control
 of the regime that it's already exercising in other spheres. We all make our
 judgments about that. And I think with the Chinese government, you know, many
 people would feel they use the software and the technical equipment they buy to
 reinforce their control, and it doesn't actually contribute to an opening up of
 a political or Democratic space in that country. And it's not clear whether the
 economic development in China will produce greater transparency in other
 fields. There's been the lesson in my field, looking at journalism in China,
 there was certainly an opening in the way that economic journalism, sports
 journalism, and others were allowed to operate, as opposed to political
 journalism, but that's been shut down and very notable Chinese journalists have
 been put in prison or become quiet because they fear the regime has actually
 reacted to the exercise of their freedom. So I don't think anyone is objecting
 to a strategy that works. And if it's effective and works, that's fine. The
 question is, does the kind of deals that China's done with the Googles, with
 the Ciscos, and some, is it opening that country or is it contributing to its
 further closing down?

 >>NIK GOWING:  Anyone who can contribute to an audit here of that would be very
 helpful. Mr. Jamil.

 >> ZAHID JAMIL:  I'm a human rights lawyer from Pakistan, and I'd like to take
 on the point about -- let me start with saying, I come from an area, region in
 the world where human rights is a challenge, not just for the lawyers, but the
 people and journalists and others. In that context, I don't see a problem
 selling Cisco, Microsoft, or any other products to countries like China,
 Pakistan, or others. Think about it:  If you're in China, the Olympics, do you
 want a Cisco system with the security services or not? I think it's a better
 thing N Pakistan, where we deal with terrorism, we are pushing that our
 security service, our police, our anticorruption agencies and
 terrorism-fighting agencies should have electronic systems and coming from
 abroad, because it ensure audit, it ensures the security and is transparent.
 Let me tell what you the other sides of the situation is, sir, I know you
 (inaudible) this good gentleman. But let me just say, thank God for Cisco.
 Otherwise, the guy gets picked up, is put into prison in our kind of countries,
 and you never see him again. And the court system says habeas corpus, bring the
 guy. And the answer to that is, we don't know where he is. So thank God for
 Cisco. Thank you. And my question is, why aren't we (inaudible) those kind of
 things. I think it's a good thing that the Chinese government is going for
 these systems, because it shows that it's trying to bring in transparency. So
 the question to the panel would be, do you propagate this or not? Thank you.

 >> JAMIE LOVE:  Nik, can I just say one quick defense, but -- not defense, but
 just some positive thing about China, because I feel this is kind of a
 China-bashing session.

 >>NIK GOWING:  No, no, it's not a -- hang on. It's not a China-bashing session.
 Jamie, it's not a China-bashing session. We're trying to audit the state of
 openness.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Right. And if I can respond. I think it's good that people focus
 on the deplorable state of censorship and repression that exists in China. I
 think that's a very constructive thing. I'd like to say that there are some
 other things that China do and that I think also are very positive, like, for
 example, in the World Trade Organization, the WTO, they've submitted a proposal
 in their Technical Barriers to Trade committee, to address the issue of the
 relationship between standards in trade and its relationship to intellectual
 property. And they've raised the issue that in the WTO that countries are using
 intellectual property rights as barriers to trade in ways that are quite
 important. And the China initiative has been widely applauded by people that
 are seeking more openness in certain areas, particularly in the area of I.T.
 standards and things like that. And also, I think if -- I'd like to join in
 some of the Cisco bashing for a second and to suggest that I think one of the
 other areas where Cisco could be asked to talk about has to do with the
 technologies developing around this net neutrality issue, where there's just
 been a huge amount of effort in marketing technologies so that monopolistic
 bandwidth providers that control the last mile of bandwidth can undermine this
 sort of end-to-end principles of the Internet by providing discriminatory
 access to some providers to allow the person who controls the monopoly in the
 last mile to begin to exercise monopoly on the content itself. I think that's
 dangerous and pushes the Internet in a way that's really quite -- that's quite
 bad. And I think that people should look all around the world at areas where
 there's these attacks on openness and where the role of corporations is
 important.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Could I just -- the point about -- it was not China bashing.
 It was trying to address what you were saying. Google compromised their
 corporate policy in China, which resulted directly in them providing
 information to which a journalist who was using the Internet was subsequently
 arrested. And at the same time -- I'm quite happy for people to contradict
 that.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Everyone's saying it's Yahoo!

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Forgive me. I wanted to say that the same company in America
 was challenging the American government for the complete opposite, because they
 were restricting freedom of information in America. So all I'm saying is that
 to address your issue, it happens to have happened in China. What is the
 question relating to a company like that who compromises its ethical principles
 in that country? And that's a human rights issue.

 >>NIK GOWING:  I'm going to come to you shortly. Can you stack up your answers
 to various things you hear. Vint Cerf, you have a microphone, I hope.

 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. First of all, let me refute
 the assertions that you've made in two respects. First of all, it was Yahoo!,
 and not Google, that supplied that information. Thank you for not confusing the
 two companies.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Thank you. And I withdraw that.

 >>VINT CERF:  Second, Google struggled for over a year before we concluded that
 we would offer services in China for precisely the reasons that we were worried
 about the obvious, not just potential, but the clear interest in censorship. In
 the end, we concluded that we would prefer to provide as much information to
 the Chinese people as we could through the Google search engines, in spite of
 the fact that we also are self-censoring material which the China government
 tells us we are not to exhibit. We had an agreement with them and took
 seriously that when material is discovered which we are not supposed to
 present, we show that there is suppression is taking place. You can see from
 the response coming back from Google.CN when there is an item not coming back,
 we say we are suppressing this at the request of the Chinese government. You
 made another comparison which I think is not accurate. It is correct -- Let me
 also say that we also chose not to offer certain services in China. We didn't
 offer Gmail. We didn't offer blogging. The reason we did not do that is that we
 did not want to have materials on our servers that the Chinese government could
 ask us or insist that we reveal in order to identify individual parties. So we
 chose deliberately not to offer certain services in order to protect the
 interests of the Chinese people. With regard to the court case in which we were
 demanded -- it was demanded of us to produce a large quantity of material from
 the search engine at Google. We resisted this. We resisted this because we were
 trying to protect the interests of Americans who were using Google. And so I
 think our actions are actually consistent, not inconsistent, in the sense of
 protection. In the case of the subpoena that came to Google, we fought that for
 several months until we got to the point where we were able to provide
 information that was not in any way compromising. It was a substantially
 smaller amount of information than was originally demanded. So I hope -- thank
 you for letting me set the record straight, Mr. Chairman.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Can I ask you one question about the massive bargaining power
 that a company like Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and others have to change the
 terms that host governments offer, in other words, to change the mindset, we're
 here talking about openness, thinking of ways forward, picking up the shopping
 list we've already been encouraged to think of. Do you believe you have
 bargaining power?

 >>VINT CERF:  I think that it is probably not consistent with our view that we
 would use or even feel that we have marketing power to force change. I rather
 like the comment of engagement. I like the idea that you bring information to
 people, you bring opportunities to produce revenues that wouldn't be available.
 In the case of Google, we've split revenues from advertising with parties that
 have information on Web pages that draw people to it. So I would rather think
 that the company can bring persuasion in the form of economic development
 rather than trying to use some form of market power in order to negotiate.

 >>NIK GOWING:  That's not quite my question. The fact that you are significant
 players, does that give you more leverage in persuasion?

 >>VINT CERF:  I honestly do not think so. And the reason I don't think so is
 that in the particular space that we operate, it's a highly competitive space.
 And if we don't deliver, for example, what people are looking for, people will
 go elsewhere. So I don't see this as having the same form of leverage as the
 concern that was expressed about access at the local loop, for instance, where
 you were talking about the ability to absolutely control. So, no, I don't see
 the same kind of leverage.

 >>NIK GOWING:  All right. What I'm proposing to do is talk around this for
 another 15, 20 minutes, and then move on, maybe even shorter, to copyright and
 intellectual property rights and other issues like that. We've made significant
 progress, I think. Who is out there who wants to speak as well. Is there other
 issues related to this, but I want to get to the point where we can understand
 at least the corporate positions on this issue of openness in countries where
 there isn't total openness. Please.

 >> Thank you very much. I am (saying name), Iranian representative of
 government. I should say that we have a shared value with other governments.
 And I would like to mention that regarding to the concept of openness, it is
 firmly integrated with the concept of other values, like security and ethical
 dimension of information society. Regarding that, there are two points. One,
 each of these is a kind of value in the discussion of Internet governance. In
 some cases, of conflict between these values, we should not sacrifice one value
 for the sake of the others. And by our understanding of how it conflicts.
 Second, the problem is raised when the desire to find some kind of
 consciousness around (inaudible) and law-based applications of these values,
 how should we solve the problem of conflicting meanings and application while
 each country and government has its own understanding of these two values? As a
 suggestion, according to my point of view, it's the last sentence, in a
 fruitful dialogue which we could not be decisive on each stage of representing
 of concept illuminating and law-based application of different values and
 different laws. So, according to what one of my colleagues said in this
 session, I should like to mention that if we want to solve the problem, you
 should pay attention more to the different points of view and solve the problem
 of different understanding of meaning and different application of that meaning
 according to the different law of different countries.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Thank you. Niels Elgaard, are you there? If you are, come to the
 microphone. I'll come now a moment. That particular point about making a
 judgment which is too based on northern cultures rather than accepting the
 cultural differences in other parts of the world, who would like to address
 that? Joichi, do you want to? All right. Who would like to, please.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, there is a tendency to look at
 censorship abroad as really egregious and then people kind of accept a certain
 level of control or suppression of information or take-downs or things like
 that in your home areas. It's sort of obvious. It doesn't mean in my mind that
 people can't make value judgments about things outside of their home. I think
 that's part of being part of the -- I think that's something that we're all
 going to -- people do. And I think that's fine. But I think that if the focus
 is too much on, you know, just one part of the world or one particular culture
 and not -- and, you know, you don't sort of, I think, explore some of the other
 aspects of the issue, then it sort of gives the impression that it's a little
 one-sided in terms of where things are coming from. I think that what role the
 IGF would play in elevating openness across the board is something it would be
 interesting to talk about, what strategies the IGF could do that could actually
 improve things.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Let's put that on the agenda, raise that as well. Did you want
 to intervene at the moment?

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I think just to support what Jamie is saying. I think
 that, yes, you need a holistic approach to openness, or otherwise you do
 provoke a defensiveness. I think also when it comes to the limitations of
 freedom of information on the Internet, that happens not just in developing
 countries; it happens in rich countries. And there are other forms of social
 exclusion and silencing of critical voices than through censorship. And about,
 you know -- addressing your question about which large corporations use their
 bargaining power, ideally, I think yes. But I don't think that we should make
 corporations responsible for securing our freedoms. I think there need to be
 laws, rules that ensure disclosure when they sell certain equipment or provide
 software. Governments should be -- either voluntarily should disclose if they
 limit freedom of information, or activists should make sure that that
 information's in the public domain. But, ultimately, we need to take, with
 lawmakers, and with citizens, responsibility for ensuring that those freedoms
 exist.

 >>NIELS ELGAARD LARSEN:  This is Niels.  Things like that happen in other
 countries, too, and it is just as bad.  And that is my question.  It seems like
 we Europeans are taking the high ground when in fact freedom of expression is
 under a lot of attack just in the European Union, and specifically Denmark and
 Sweden and so on.  I am thinking about the filtering the fight against me
 allowing to talk and now the Danish police is going to monitor for IP phone
 conversations and so on. So what does that leave Cisco?  Are they supposed to
 be allowed to sell systems that can assist the Danish police in blocking my
 phone call to my wife that is in Canada right now? I don't want this to be an
 excuse for China and so on to do repression.  It's bad where it happens.

 >> NIK GOWING:  You are talking about double standards.  Please, there is an
 intervention here.  Can you introduce yourself, please. We can hear you, yes.

 >>YANG XIAOKUN:  Good.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Are we getting translation?  No.  Could you just wait one
 moment.  Is there a Chinese translator in there?  Is anyone hearing the Chinese
 or English translation?  No.  We are not hearing you. They can hear you now,
 yes.

 >>YANG XIAOKUN:  First of all, I have to say that today we have talked a lot
 about China, and think that's rather strange because if we participate in
 forums like this, I think that we should spend more time reflecting on the
 issues that have been raised.  And -- Perhaps we have talked a lot about China.
  There are lots of millions of Chinese that have no access to the Internet and
 our deepest hope is that everyone will have access in the future, so that they
 will be able to communicate and take part in these exchanges. We are here
 because we would like to promote openness.  But we have not really raised the
 issue of how we could participate more fully and how we could have better
 access to the Internet. My second point is that I heard what various people
 here said, and collusion and collaboration and cooperation with China. The
 Cisco example was given.  Everyone knows that there is a lot of tourism in
 China, and towards China.  I hope that everyone will be visiting us soon.  But
 I think that we need to also protect tourists in our country.  And I have to
 say that I am a Chinese citizen and I feel that I need to be protected.  For
 example, we are threatened by terrorism. We do need protection. So we should
 make sure that everybody can come to China, enjoy our beautiful country.  And I
 heard with great interest what our Pakistani colleague said. Now, on the
 equipment use and the software in China, I don't think that we should be using
 different standards to judge China. In China, we don't have software blocking
 Internet sites.  Sometimes we have trouble accessing them.  But that's a
 different problem. And I know that some colleagues listen to the BBC in their
 offices from the Webcast.  And I've heard people say that the BBC is not
 available in China or that it's blocked.  I'm sure I don't know why people say
 this kind of thing. I work in Geneva.  I am part of the Chinese mission to the
 U.N.  And I listen to the BBC in my office.

 >> NIK GOWING:  (inaudible).

 >>YANG XIAOKUN:  I still have several points to make.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Could I -- may I ask you a question?  How would you define, for
 those who are not familiar with your government's policy and the detail of it,
 what is the principle on restrictions of openness in China?

 >>YANG XIAOKUN:  We do not have restriction at all.

 >> Come on! (Shouting out from audience).

 >> NIK GOWING:  All right.  Do you want to answer -- would you like to
 elaborate on that?  None at all?

 >>YANG XIAOKUN:  How can I elaborate on it if we don't have any restriction?

 >> NIK GOWING:  Okay.  What are the other points you wanted to make, quickly?

 >>YANG XIAOKUN:  Yes.  Somebody talked about the -- okay.  Well, some people
 say that there are journalists in China that have been arrested.  We have
 hundreds of journalists in China, very few have been arrested.  But there are
 criminals in all societies and we have to arrest them.  But these are legal
 problems.  It has nothing to do with freedom of expression.

 >> NIK GOWING:  What was said from the Chinese representative that the BBC is
 not blocked, can you clarify the BBC's position on that?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  I'm glad he listens and reads us in Geneva, but he if he
 was in China he would not be able to listen to our Mandarin service on short
 wave radio and not be able to read our Mandarin news site on the website.  And
 this is now very well established and it is very effectively blocked on both
 the Internet and shortwave radio and has been for many years.

 >>NIK GOWING:  I said I would come back to both Microsoft and Cisco and I have
 to keep moving forward.  There are a number of questions.  I am not requesting
 to ask you to stand up, because they are quite similar about corporate
 responsibility in promoting free speech, and we heard that suggestion.  Are
 corporations meant to be involved in securing openness and freedom to speak. 
 Could we round off this section with your view and some of your responses to
 some of the things you have heard, but about particularly, not least what we
 heard from Vint about the limits to corporate responsibility in this particular
 area. Art.

 >>ART REILLY:  Going back to the point at which I entered the queue, the
 question was what do we have the ability to audit progress within China or the
 situation within China, and I wanted to mention one metric.  Cisco entered the
 market in China in 1994 and in 1995 there were about 80,000 users on the
 Internet in China.  In 2005, so ten years later, they had gone from 80,000 to
 130 million. So substantial increase in the use and the ability for the
 information to flow within China as well as to across borders into other
 locations and to get access to information in other locations. And as you can
 imagine, with issues such as worms and denial of service attacks, these are not
 unique to one part of the world and so the issues I raised before relative to
 the need for capabilities to protect against the threats from viruses and worms
 and denial of service attacks exist and so the equipment that's provided in
 China is the same as elsewhere. I very much agree with Vint on the issue of the
 power of a company like Cisco or perhaps others to, in fact, exert influence. 
 The market in which Cisco is involved is a very competitive market.  In fact,
 it is a competitive global market and as many of you may know there are, in
 fact, significant manufacturers of equipment that, as I mentioned before,
 provide similar capabilities for the same purposes I mentioned, security and
 network management to in fact ensure and promote the free flow of information.
 So the actions that we are taking with regard to this technology is to allow
 that free flow, not to impede it. Thank you.

 >> NIK GOWING:  But the word he used was persuasion being probably best you
 could hope for.  Do you agree?

 >>ART REILLY:  Yes.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Fred.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  Yes, and I do also, Nik.  I think massive bargaining power is
 an exaggeration, although we are actively exploring within the industry how we
 can better exercise our joint persuasive abilities in these areas. But I think
 it's critical for the forum and in the entirety that we not portray the
 Internet as a threat to governments.  That that not be the theme that comes out
 of this discussion, because the reality, take a country like China, the
 Internet is transforming the political culture of China.  There is no question
 about it. And for someone who has worked in and around China for 20 years, it's
 incredible to me how much is available when you search for it, how widely
 people are expressing their political views, often at great personal risk, on
 blogs in China and chat rooms and all sorts of other places. There are
 courageous people who are pushing the envelope of politics, but there are also
 courageous people in the Chinese government who believe in the importance of
 the importance of the Internet as a modernizing, educating force.  There is not
 a monolithic determination to suppress the Internet in a country like China. 
 But that's obviously a much longer discussion. The point I really want to make
 is if we are serious about human rights, if we really want to advance the cause
 of human rights for users in China we must be specific about what it is we are
 concerned with. The Yahoo! case is a classic example.  First of all we need to
 get the company right, but secondly, the Yahoo! case involved a situation where
 the police came to Yahoo! and said, "We believe that there's a criminal sending
 e-mails across your service.  We want to know who he is." Yahoo! servers were
 located in China.  If they had turned them down, all the people would have been
 arrested, they probably would have been thrown out of China. Now, it could be
 the position of human rights organizations legitimately to say that should be
 the result for Yahoo!.  They should not be doing business in China if it means
 they put users at risk. The fact of the matter is Yahoo! didn't know this was a
 journalist.  Yahoo! didn't even know he had gone to prison.  I didn't know what
 Yahoo! didn't know.  Let's talk about hypotheticals but the clear situation is
 you don't know when the police come in the door whether they are after a
 journalist, a pedophile, an IP polluter.  And no country in the world gives you
 that information. In fact, you are required in the United States and I believe
 in the UK not to inform the person the police are looking for when they come in
 seeking information about that person. Now, we, and Microsoft, our services are
 basically -- our servers and the information relating to customers has been in
 the United States and, therefore, is not as easily accessible by police
 authorities outside the United States. But China and virtually every country in
 the world is headed toward the situation where they are going to require that
 personally identifying information is available to the police authorities in
 that society as a condition of doing business with their citizens. So that is
 the trend of the situation we're watching.  Not only that, the trend is for
 governments to say you must retain this data in available form for at least two
 years in the case of some of the discussions that are going on in the United
 States, to make it even easier for the government under legitimate
 circumstances and due process and so forth to get access to this information.
 Now, that's the reality of the kinds of human rights challenge that companies
 have in trying to do business not only in restrictive societies.  Arguably, in
 virtually every country in the world, including my own.  There are balances
 being struck and challenges that we need to address.  Obviously there are in
 certain countries the effort that's going towards restrictiveness is much
 greater than in others.  But that's a conversation we need to have, because you
 would be surprised when you look country by country at what's restricted how
 many subjects and how many countries have restrictive regulations. So I do -- I
 don't want to monopolize this conversation at all but I think if we really are
 serious about talking about human rights we need to talk about the rights that
 we want to protect and how best to protect them and not broad brush condemn
 nations of this government or that government without reference to the facts.

 >> NIK GOWING:  But Milton Mueller of Syracuse University points out the
 effectiveness of corporate codes of conduct in influencing state behavior,
 using examples like South Africa and the fight against Apartheid in the '80s. 
 Is that something you can use as leverage?

 >>MILTON MUELLER:Could I ask a question about that?

 >> NIK GOWING:  Could I ask Fred and Art, please.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  I think the Apartheid case is one of the most important
 examples.  But again, we have to talk more -- In the case of Apartheid, the
 companies that were defying the Apartheid system were really able to do so
 basically within the sphere of their own operation, to treat their own 
 employees inconsistently with the requirements of Apartheid.  The Sullivan
 principles were a set of principles by which companies agreed to do that. 
 That's a very different situation, or the sweat shop situation or the oil
 companies and the voluntary principles, from the situation where the government
 has specifically decreed the way in which companies should operate in a given
 country and to act inconsistently with that is to invite being de-licensed and
 therefore unable to provide service.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Carlos, you wanted a word.

 >>CARLOS AFONSO:  Thank you.  I feel that we are not dealing with very
 important aspects of this issue.  And there are arms dealer, hardware dealers,
 drug dealers and so on and they all confront the same dilemmas. I remember a
 hardware maker in California who used to say, look, my packet sniffer is the
 best on the market, but the way it -- I sell to anyone.  The way they are used
 is not my concern. And this is the packet sniffer AT&T uses to sniff and copy
 data on gigabits per second speed in the United States.  And a phone company in
 Brazil does the same to sniff and peek into packets of heavy traffic in
 Brazillian Internet exchange points and so on. The point is what is the
 responsibility of network operators, which we are not talking about?  Network
 operators are feeling the gap in terms of regulation regarding what can and
 cannot be done because they have gone up one or two layers.  They are now into
 transport, they are now into content. And there is no regulation, because the
 only thing we have regulated internationally with an international framework
 and so on is at the level of telecommunications, is the ITU.  Nothing else. And
 what happens, these guys start to regulate themselves and start to block any
 kind of streaming traffic they decide should be blocked. And what is this
 responsibility of these network operators?  What is the regulation we should
 establish?  What kind of regulation we can establish that does not interfere or
 goes against certain cultural values and the basic differences that are -- that
 exist from one society to another? We cannot just establish -- We know that
 child pornography is a consensus, but what are other aspects of freedom of
 information, of the flow of information that should be considered, you know,
 which can be accepted universally?  What is the responsibility of the network
 operators, not only Cisco.  Cisco is just a hardware maker and seller.  But
 these guys buy these equipment and do what they please with the network. And
 all the more so.  Now we are losing more and more of the interactivity on the
 Internet because interactivity is being done in their own terms, not our terms
 as users. They decide if voice over IP traffic can pass through an exchange
 point or not.  And it passes with what speed, what quality of service?  We are
 not allowed to talk to them about what policy they are using and what
 regulations should be established to guarantee that the flow of information
 which passes through these networks is really warranted, is the responsibility
 only of the users who generated this content and not a network operator. These
 points we are not talking about here, and I am worried.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Jamie, quickly, because I want to move on to IP and copyright.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  I think there is sort of a deep hypocrisy of surprise when these
 instruments of surveillance are used as government surveillance or even
 corporate surveillance.  There is this massive development technology that's
 designed to track information, put fingerprints in information, know who does
 what, on a scale that we have never had in the history of mankind. And so then
 people are kind of shocked when people sell those things as products and people
 actually use them in ways that are just completely predictable. I have been in
 discussions with the State Department about digital rights management systems
 where we said don't you think this is going to be used in a certain way?  And
 we have mentioned China, but other countries as well. And how can you, like,
 sort of not -- how can you sort of not sort of think through the consequences
 of developing these kind of monitoring technologies outside your border? And
 the same thing is in the efforts to try to restrict access to encrypted,
 secured communications.  There is sort of an opposite thing to protect
 technologies that actually promote privacy and anonymity and stuff.  A lot of
 it is related to intellectual property rights.  In order to protect
 intellectual property rights we are creating a world that creates opportunity
 for political (inaudible) because it's hard to disconnect the two technologies
 in a way.  And I think that's part of the direction that we are heading.  But
 it's not really -- it's not as if countries in Europe and the United States
 don't have a hell of a lot to do with the way things are going because they
 push things in a certain direction.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Right.  I am going to pause this discussion of at this point,
 otherwise we are not going to cover any of the other issues.  I think what we
 have done is we have mapped out the differences.  Hopefully we have exposed
 some new lines, and we're building on that shopping list from Anriette about
 how we move forward.  Our job here is to at least show the way things are
 moving and help define on openness.  We're not going to agree here.  That --
 that can't be achieved in this. I want to move on to copyright, intellectual
 copyrights. Particularly copyright in IPR. Who would like to intervene on this
 one?  Joichi, how about you, on the challenges of IPR, intellectual property
 rights.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  I think Jamie started out and I tend to agree with most of what
 he said but I think it's very important to understand the repercussions that
 laws and technologies that we are creating to protect assets have on other
 countries. And so I'm not going to go into a long discussion here but in the
 United States, we have -- the United States has a strong lobby both in
 software, for software patents, and also Hollywood in terms of content and
 there are many, many laws and technologies being put in place that will inhibit
 the ability for people to freely share content. And it starts leaning into a
 kind of world where, for instance, if -- for instance, right now, because of
 the U.S. law, if one person -- if two copyrights -- if a copyright holder says
 to another person I would be happy for you to take this DVD and turn it into a
 classroom project, it's illegal to take that information off of a DVD because
 you are circumventing copyright technology.  And that's one of the basic things
 inside of the DMCA for instance.  So it's very important that, back to Jamie's
 point, a lot of the laws that we think of as rational because of the context of
 the United States have severe repercussions when they are implemented in other
 places. And also the identification relates to the copyright as well.  It's
 very difficult in some of these developing countries and emerging democracies
 to have free speech without some level of anonymity and it is very difficult to
 implement digital rights management and copyright without anonymity. This is a
 difficult discussion but I think the key point is to think about the rest of
 the world when thinking about copyright.  And that it encompasses everything. 
 It's open source software, it's scientific journals and their availability in
 other developing nations, because journals currently control the copyrights and
 it's very expensive and that hinders science.  Just about every aspect of free
 flow of information is now encumbered by laws, patents, and technology.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Can you see laws catching up with the speed at which things are
 changing?

 >>JOICHI ITO:  The biggest problem I would like to point out is originally
 copyright law primarily was concerned with the business of publishing.  And it
 was about copying.  So whether you read a book, how -- if you slept on a book,
 if you gave a book to somebody else, this was not under copyright. The problem
 that we have with the Internet is that every time you view something, you are
 copying it.  And so when Google scans a book in order to make an index, that's
 a copyright violation.  When you download something to view in your browser,
 that's a copyright violation. Suddenly, the sphere of influence of copyright is
 everywhere.  And so now, for instance, I am not saying this is good or bad but
 Amazon is thinking about selling books by the page.  And eBooks are saying
 books per view.  And publishers in the United States are now saying secondhand
 bookstores don't pay us royalties and we have more control now on the Internet
 over content.  Maybe we should try to get the physical world to act like the
 Internet.  And we see this coming around to more and more control. In many
 businesses, unless somebody puts it in check, it will go to excess, and I think
 we are seeing that. And so the answer is the laws right now, I don't see it in
 any way helping, and in fact, getting worse and worse.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Do you see openness being constrained by the threat of action
 at some point?

 >>JOICHI ITO:  It's already severely constrained, and it's just getting worse. 
 The solutions we have, I think there are two fundamental solution directions. 
 One is to re-look at copyright law in the context of multimedia and then
 creative commons, which is my non-profit, we are trying to work within the
 constraints of copyright law to at least allow artists to give choice.  And we
 are engaging with people like rights collection agencies.  But it's still very
 difficult because the economic interests of the past push against the economic
 interests of sharing.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Anriette.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I would add a third one to that, and that is to
 requesting or challenging the public sector to rethink what is the commons,
 what is the public domain in the world of the Internet.  Most responsible
 governments used to have public libraries where citizens could read the
 newspaper, access box and journals.  And these are absent in many developing
 countries.  But the Internet presents an opportunity where, for example, all
 scientific research that's publicly funded can be made freely available. So I
 think it's about what you said, about rethinking copyright, looking for
 alternatives like creative commons, which gives the owners of content an
 opportunity to decide how they share it. But I think it's more than that.  I
 think we need to make very sure that in terms of access to knowledge and access
 to information, the Internet is conceived of and regulated as a space that can
 provide access to a public -- to a commons.  Information commons.

 >> NIK GOWING:  I've got two interventions here from Francois Pelligrini. 
 Could you take the microphone.  And also Divina Frau-Meigs.  Can I go to
 Richard Sambrook of the BBC on the issue of who is pinching our content or who
 is trying to pinch our content given the enormous capacity we have now to
 project globally.  How much is an enormous organization like the BBC concerned
 about this and how can we at least make sure that the copyright of everything
 that is paid for and produced on the net then at least has a value which is
 respected right around the world?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Well, two things, I think.  First the public service
 broadcaster probably has a slightly different take on this to a commercial
 organization because public service broadcasters are primarily interested in
 reach rather than generating revenue necessarily. Therefore, if people take use
 of our content, as long as we get some credit for it in some way, I think
 that's fine.  And increasingly with -- YouTube is a classic example, but in
 many other ways, in terms of building participation around content, we are
 actually seeking to  encourage people to take our content and use it and do
 things with it.  And we have a creative archive where people can take our video
 and repurpose it as they wish.  Because again as a public service broadcaster,
 the public have already paid for that content and invested in it so I think our
 position is slightly different from the commercial interests of some other
 organizations.

 >> NIK GOWING:  Yet the BBC has to protect its editorial integrity and you
 don't want people fiddling around with the stuff.  How can you protect it?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  There are limits to it, clearly. But I think as long as
 there is a link back to the original content on our site, or there is --
 obviously, we would try to take action against anybody who we think was using
 it improperly or inappropriately, if they were using it in an obscene way or in
 some way that was seeking to be harmful or damaging to other groups and so on,
 then we might want to take action against it. But as a broad principle, people
 should have some access to our content and be able to repurpose it. I think
 there's a lot positive about that.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you think the BBC has achieved maximum openness for its
 content yet?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  No. Nothing like it. Francois.

 >> FRANCOIS PELLEGRINI:  Thank you. I'd like to go back to a subject which I
 presented earlier. The way we use our common products in order to allow
 everyone on the Internet to create content themselves. Because there are
 copyright problems. We also have the digital content act which is in use. And I
 would also like to see what the behavior of the various patterns of this in the
 world is. There's a European pattern, Germany's, the American. Access to the
 information is becoming more expensive, and the equipment to avoid pinching
 content is also every day more available. So access to information, to raw
 information, is becoming more difficult. Is it necessary in that case for
 governments to act to make access easier? How can we allow our citizens and the
 citizens of poor countries to have access to information?  'Cause, otherwise,
 we will live in an information -- in a feudalistic information society, where
 only the very rich will have access.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Over there, please, yes.

 >> I'd like to also just endorse what's been said by the previous speaker. And
 certainly we have to think of what's happening in terms of online production on
 the Internet, but also what happened with the actual ownership aspect in terms
 of intellectual property. I think that what we see at the moment is that you
 have a complete closing in vis-a-vis usage, especially for those in education.
 And we don't even have a fair use equivalent here in Europe. And people are
 criminalized in the class, parents in the house, and the children as well. And
 most of the users of Internet and those who actually need to broaden their
 knowledge therefor find themselves where they are running a risk by accessing
 Internet. So let's look at free access and contents and how we can use
 everything that is available and which Internet actually makes available to the
 users. At the university level, we'd like to also look into the resources for
 free access at all universities for noncommercial purposes thereby and to be
 able to have access to the general public in the public domain. There is an
 interoperability problem there. We have to try and identify what the sources
 are. But we have to also make these visible and usable. I think this is
 important for the reader, important for dissemination of information in a
 shared society.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Thank you. The former French minister of culture and now in the
 European parliament. How can you see this contradiction being resolved in the
 immediate future?

 >> CATHERINE TRAUTMANN:  I think that this contradiction is quite difficult to
 resolve, because we do find ourselves in a situation of flux in terms of law.
 We have, of course, the production of intellectual artistic goods which are on
 the Internet. So we have to, I think, actually change our very concept of what
 our rights are. I think that it's important to bear in mind what the public
 domain is on the Internet and you find that user's rights have changed. Often,
 we mix and match and don't actually distinguish what's happening here.
 Obviously, we can have a public domain recognized as such. But we may have,
 perhaps, a paying service. When we talk about a free service, gratis, it may
 not be a matter of the actual source; it may be a matter of the service that is
 provided that is actually furnishing that. So we have to see whether access to
 the service might be financed by publicity. It may be free overall, or you may
 have a sort of pay-as-you-go principle. This might work for certain -- access
 to certain types of information where you would actually pay for the service.
 What about the author? Does the author renounce his rights? Is it a recognized
 freedom here? But the other question is basically to know whether what we are
 doing in terms of pure protection and what we are doing in terms of
 remuneration of the authors. And the authors' rights would seem to be a binding
 obligation, incumbent on us. Are we going to stem any creative or artistic
 production here. That's the first point. The second point is that we must not
 actually keep back or hold back information and access to it. So there are two
 main questions being posed there. I think the European regulation on this is
 only going halfway in terms of resolving this problem. What about the
 patentability of software? That's important. We're talking about total openness
 there. But I don't think we're going to achieve that. We are looking for a
 route which will enable us to recognize in specific cases the possibility of
 protecting patents or protecting the intellectual property, but also developing
 at the same time open sources, open routes, financed by public resources with
 public funds. And this would mean sharing knowledge. And as has been said here
 already, where universities and other educational establishments would have
 access, I think that we ought to perhaps change the law. Protections should
 change here. We ought to agree as to what we mean when we say "pirating."
 Pirating, in a sense, does make us face the issue of intellectual property
 rights. I think that we need to look at the directive that was adopted and is
 in the state of play today. But people aren't fully satisfied with this. And we
 thought that perhaps we just should stop and think about this and see how
 Internet is developed and how the various services on the Internet will develop
 and see how consumers and users are actually serviced.

 >>NIK GOWING:  We're trying to get a balance between openness and rights now
 and moving forward. But protecting that openness. I remind any of you who have
 come in late that you can join this conversation hopefully by sending me a
 piece of paper so at least I can scale stuff around and order it around to make
 sure we're still focusing on this issue. Andrew, you wanted a word.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  I also have been indicating.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Yes, I know, I know. Andrew.

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  One of the things that always interests me is that
 copyright's a relatively new invention in human history. I mean, Shakespeare
 never had the copyright over his plays. The copyright belongs to the
 publishers. And no one ever believes that Shakespear's creativity was impaired
 by the lack of owning copyright to his own product. But leaving that aside, we
 are now moving into a different era where, say, in the past, restricted
 information could be much more open and available to people. There have always
 been copyright libraries in the United Kingdom F you're a student at Oxford or
 Cambridge, you have certain privileges at the British library, you can go in
 and read any book published within the United Kingdom. There's no reason why
 countries couldn't take responsibilities for that so their population could use
 it. You have access to the information and sources that have always been
 available to a certain number of scholars and a certain privileged group. We
 need to look at the positive benefits of a the new technology. The danger is we
 will see the growth of the Internet as an excuse to privatize even more
 information. I know professors at the London School of Economics, where I'm
 based, who no longer give out their reading lists to courses to general
 enquirers, because they take the view that if a student pays to come on their 
 course, the student should have sole access to the reading list, let alone
 their lectures and the content. And that seems to me to be a terrible
 derogation of responsibility of a university to promote awareness and promote
 knowledge and promote the resources that ought to belong to the commons. Simon
 Qobo, are you out there, still? I'll come to you in a moment on this issue.
 Paschal, you wanted a word.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  Only brief, because the point was made earlier by the two
 speakers and also one of the panelists.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you need to repeat it?

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  No. But I think there is definitely a need for a wider
 debate on making more available on the Internet, free, free of any copyright
 restrictions, information and material which is already in the public domain.
 And I would have liked Richard to have perhaps expanded a bit more on what I
 understand the BBC has been leading on this in the public service area, which
 is about making available freely archive material on the Internet, because it
 is already in the public domain.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Well, we can get an answer now.

 >>PASCHAL MOONEY:  I'm saying that this is a peculiarly European concept of
 public service broadcasting. There is a vast amount of material that is already
 within the archives of very many broadcasting organizations. And I'm curious to
 know whether, in fact, if there is a wider debate on this issue, because
 certainly I know the BBC has started it. It was only to make the point in
 general that there is a lot of material in the public domain that governments,
 I believe, have a responsibility to ensure is put out into the Internet free of
 any copyright restrictions. Because, primarily, the concept of public service
 libraries, which, again, is unique to Britain and Ireland, that has been there,
 as you know, Nik, since about the 1950s, was essentially to disseminate
 information to those who were not in a position to access it because they
 didn't have the money or resources. And there is nothing changed today.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Can you clarify? The issue -- is it capacity for the BBC or is
 it the rights issue?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Well, there are clearly some quite complicated rights
 issues around it. We make available the material to which the BBC owns all of
 the rights. Clearly, a lot of our programming and content has other material
 embedded in it to which we don't have the rights. So we need to sort that out.
 But the principle is that because we are publicly funded, the public is
 effectively already invested in that material, and that the Internet allows us
 to make it more widely available, and, indeed, allows us, under certain terms,
 like in the Creative Commons license, not repurposed for commercial gain and so
 on, for people to reuse that material if they choose to do so. And the
 justification for that, really, is partly the education, if you like, we think
 there's an educational benefit to it. We think there's a creativity and
 innovative benefit to it, that it helps to spark innovation. And, as I said,
 the principle is that we should make this material, which has already been paid
 for by the public, more widely available. But there are rights issues around
 it.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Simon from South Africa.

 >> SIMON QOBO:  Thank you very much, Mr. moderator. In fact, since (inaudible)
 Internet governance for development, I would like to know how we find a right
 balance between intellectual property rights in terms of copyrights, and -- and
 technological advancements subsequent to development. We are in an environment
 where we're not getting a (inaudible) of copyright infringement. It's just more
 than a mouse, so just click and you can get everything. But the how do we find
 the balance. Most of the information is in the form of digital rights
 management systems. And then we have witnessed that all the, if not most of the
 exceptions and limitations (inaudible) reporting, teaching, scholarship,
 research, which are (inaudible) innovation, have been, if not completely
 (inaudible). So I hope we find the right balance. It's a concern for us in the
 developing world. Because information, knowledge, is (inaudible) to our
 development. Or maybe you can look at operating (inaudible) access to knowledge
 (inaudible) something like that. But we need to do something about it. Thank
 you very much.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Thank you. (saying name) are you out there? Still? I can see a
 hand out there. Jamie Love.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Maybe one practical thing that can come out of this is every one
 of the panel members could express their commitment to the proposal that Simon
 just mentioned about elaboration of a treaty on access to knowledge, to lay
 down a kind of a baseline. This is something that south Africa and more than a
 dozen other countries have put down in the, and it's received a lot of support.
 But there's a lot of influential people on this panel. And perhaps some of the
 other people can express their support for elaboration of a treaty for access
 to knowledge on WIPO.

 >>NIK GOWING:  You have just been nodding your head.

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  I would definitely want to endorse it immediately.

 >>NIK GOWING:  How achievable is it?

 >>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE:  I think it is very achievable. But also, I want to raise
 a slightly different issue, but on the same. I think you were asking earlier on
 the bargaining power of corporate entities. I think also when it comes to
 copyright, and, in particular, when it comes to research, there is some
 bargaining power that we might want to look at. I'm thinking of the fact that
 when you use public funding for research, I think it should be an issue that
 this should be made available to everyone and there should be some commitment
 to have this on the Internet and distributed widely. And, second, I think that
 in many -- particularly in many developing countries, people are asked to
 contribute, giving informed consent, say, to medical research. And when the
 study has been carried out, they may not have access to that particular
 research. I think giving informed consent, for instance, to medical research or
 other elements of research should also mean that you would have an impact on
 the copyright that should be made available to those who participate. I think
 we should look at what is the entire content of what's being sort of published
 and presented. Of course, there are rights for the authors. There are
 copyrights, et cetera. But there are rights for many others. And I would very
 much welcome a situation in which it was made accessible on a very, very broad
 basis. I think that is really the way forward for better governance, for
 bettering the situation of people in the world. Thank you.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Arturo (saying name).

 >> Hello. So I would like to ask to Joichi Ito and the European representative,
 how big is the treaty posted to the free flow of information by technologists
 like digital rights management and (inaudible) computing. Of course, we know
 everybody that less privacy doesn't mean more security. Thank you. Bye.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Joichi.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  I'd like to make one small point that relates to this, which is
 --

 >>NIK GOWING:  Pick up on that.

 >>JOICHI ITO:  But I want to make sure that we understand that when you write a
 book or an article and somebody quotes you in length and criticizes you and
 uses it in some way that you don't like, you do not have the right to tell that
 person they can't do that. In our current social discourse, it is allowed for
 somebody to quote you and tear you apart. But in things like music and artistic
 works, we have a lot of more rights that say, well, I don't like -- I wouldn't
 want that person to use it in that way. So many documentary producers are being
 prohibited, for instance, from using videos of the President of the United
 States for copyright reasons because of the intellectual property. And this is
 -- and I would throw some of this -- would like your reaction from the BBC on
 some of this. But now that we can use little personal computers to edit video
 and edit sound, the editing and modifying of multimedia is just as much a part
 of the public discourse as text was. And so I think we have to really
 understand that sometimes we give up rights. We give up the right to be able to
 protect our written work from being used against us, and we need to think about
 what are we doing in terms of the video and so on. And so to get to the point
 of this answer, digital rights management, we really need to understand that
 sometimes you have to give up rights in order to better society. And one really
 key thing that we -- I'd like to tie into the earlier part of this panel is
 that the free speech element of being allowed to share in remix video and audio
 content is really, really important and is separate from just education.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Do you have a strong view yourself?

 >>JOICHI ITO:  I have a strong view that right now, we are -- the youth, the
 young generation, are using music and video in very, very creative ways and
 remixing this in a new culture. And if you look on the Internet, there are many
 interesting political documentaries being done by amateurs which are not legal
 because of the copyright restrictions. And I think we're inhibiting a
 completely new type of free speech that would emerge right now like crazy on
 the Internet if we didn't have digital rights management and we didn't have
 lawyers going around shutting down sites of people who are making these amateur
 videos.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  If I could just add to that. WIPO right now has a proposal
 before it that's been pushed by the European public broadcasters for the WIPO
 broadcasting treaty, which they also want to extend to the cable organization.
 And it has the practical effect of -- in some of the proposal, certainly the
 proposal that Chairman Euklides, that I think is here in this meeting, has
 proposed, to create an intellectual property right over 50 years for
 transmitting information, and to associate technical protection members,
 digital rights, and it's coming right at the time where, just as Joi mentioned,
 there's this explosion of creativity about how people use video for commentary,
 for political reasons, to create new social works. You see this take-down of
 the YouTube site from Comedy Central, where a lot of the downloads are
 political downloads about the Kobe Report, or -- YouTube right now has become a
 huge source of political criticism. And, in fact, it's changing the way media
 works, because media right now, they'll say something on television, then
 they're ridiculed in blogs and people have taken little bits of what they say
 on television and they annotate them and juxtapose them. And it's actually
 improved in some ways the way people report on things. Because there's this
 sort of instant feedback taking place off the Internet. The problem is the
 intellectual property laws, the lawyers are way ahead of in one world, and then
 people are in a different world. And they're like not very close together. WIPO
 has to sort of get the message that, you know, the people are right and the
 lawyers are wrong on some of this stuff and kind of move things back in the
 other direction.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Anriette, you're nodding. [ Applause ]

 >>NIK GOWING:  Vigorously.

 >>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I agree vigorously. I think that, yes, I think there's
 definitely a new concept, a new right. And I think the right to share, in fact
 ABC has just put in our Internet rights charter the right to share. And I think
 we need to look at how people can do that creatively on the Internet, and not
 just from the point of view of freedom of information, but also new business
 models, new ways of innovating. Piracy creates jobs, but open source and open
 standards create opportunity, create entrepreneurs.  And I think that's the
 challenge for the IGF as well, how to look at it is a public interest forum,
 the Internet is a public space, and how can we facilitate maximum sharing,
 maximum creativity, peer production, new models, innovation. And I have a lot
 of respect for Microsoft's efforts to provide educational content in developing
 countries. But as long as they copyright and limit the right of teachers and
 learners in those countries to reuse and change and share that information,
 then there's very limited value to that. So I think, yes, sharing and openness
 is absolutely essential if we're going to use the Internet for development.

 >>NIK GOWING:  But what about the constraints? Because one of the questions, I
 can't remember quite who it was from, which I noted down at the beginning, is
 about free content and free access. There are several questions about free
 access. That session is tomorrow afternoon, so I won't go down that road this
 morning. But this expectation of free content and free access, those days are
 now numbered?

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  I don't think so. I think the ability of --   Look at what's
 happened with Wikipedia. I mean, okay, you can't get access to -- you used to
 have to worry about could you get a commercial encyclopedia. People just create
 their own encyclopedia.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Yes, but some of us have an experience where what is written in
 Wikipedia --

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Is often --

 >>NIK GOWING:  Is often wrong, it's inaccurate, and you want to correct it very
 quickly.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  And it's more often to be more contemporary and more
 illuminating than what you get in a published book. I think the quality is
 quite good, myself. But I think the sort of role of people in creating content
 is quite important. That's what the free software movement's about. People are
 concerned about monopolistic problems, lack of transparency in the code, all
 kinds of confusion about the software, the security of software. And what do
 they do? They basically have taken over a very strong position in the mid-tier
 server market by creating their own industrial-strength server. The Internet
 was based on people creating their own applications that they couldn't even get
 from commercial companies in a lot of cases. And it's worked well with
 commercial software. So I think that there will be free content. I wouldn't
 sort of suggest that the public's going to be ruled by -- entirely. But DRM and
 things like that, software patents, they represent threats, threats to this new
 surge of movement of openness and people doing -- creating their own products.
 It tries to kind of legislate out what people are doing. We have a listserve
 that is illegal under the copyright law because we routinely publish
 information. That has meant that developing country negotiators and NGOs and
 citizen groups and people all over the world organized on access to medicine
 issues. It's been a great movement. The glue that holds it together is the
 sharing of information. A lot of it's copyrighted information. If we were to,
 like, abide by the actual law or if companies could put DRMs to prevent us from
 doing it or things like that, then you have to subscribe to these really
 expensive services. You wouldn't be able to keep up with what's going on.
 People would not be as well informed. And a lot of big decisions go wrong when
 people don't have information. It's just -- there's a cost that society plays
 when people do stupid things and do things because they don't have information.
 So I think that there's a lot riding on keeping people informed and promoting
 these norms of access to knowledge.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Just so you know where we're going in the next 40 minutes, we're
 doing pretty well on the shopping list. There's the issue of free speech and
 defamation which the minister asked if we could go to. Probably we'll come to
 that in about ten minutes. If you have anything else burning which you want to
 put on the agenda, can you make sure that I know about it in the next few
 minutes, please. Just before I go to Andrew Puddephatt, can I go to Microsoft
 as well on this issue of lobbying power. Richard, again, making that
 declaration of interest, I work for you, I work for the BBC. But this
 complexity now of user-generated content and its nature, its integrity, how
 much it has to be mediated, how much it can be trusted, because in the end,
 that's the latest manifestation of openness, particularly in times of crisis
 and tension, where people like me as a presenter for BBC world, we often find
 that the user content is more accurate sometimes than governments and others.

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  I think there's two issues. I'll come to the user thing in
 a moment. I want to first respond to the point about the ability to take other
 people's content and repurpose it and so on. As I've already said, I think for
 a public broadcaster, the issues are slightly different. And I do think it's
 shifting. We've made certain moves within the BBC to try to open up as much as
 our material as possible. But I think if I were to try to speak on behalf of
 some of my commercial colleagues, if I were to represent Reuters or The
 Associated Press here, I would say that, clearly, that does undermine their
 business. You know, they make their business by selling that information. And
 if you undermine the business, actually, you undermine the availability and the
 amount of information that's available. If Reuters can't afford to sustain
 their hundred-plus bureau and their however many reporters and camera crews,
 the world will have less access and less information. There are genuine rights
 issues here. And I'm very sympathetic to the notion that says there's this
 fantastic burst of creativity and information and people need to be free to
 repurpose it and so on. But there are genuine issues underlying that about what
 supports the production of that material and the ability to support and develop
 that material. So that's the first thing. The second point is the integrity of
 the way that it's repurposed. And, of course, that will depend, you know,
 entirely on what the material is and on how it's used and so on. But to use
 Joi's analogy, if you take a quote and then attack the writer because you have
 a different point of view, that's one thing, as long as you keep the integrity
 of the quote. But if you set out trying to suggest that the quote is saying
 something different from what it says in its original context, then you'll be
 in trouble. So the way it's repurposed is very pertinent to it. It's not as
 straightforward an analogy as it may appear. On the wider point, the user
 content now is a fantastic resource. So --

 >>NIK GOWING:  Would you like to explain the impact it's had on an enormous
 organization like the BBC?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  I think in some ways, we overcomplicate T very briefly, I
 think there are sort of four sorts of user content. We've seen, for example,
 with the London bomb attacks and other occasions where people now send in their
 video and their stills, and there are hundreds of thousands. That's an
 explosion of material available to us. In some ways, we've always used material
 from the public, and as a news organization, and, indeed, that's now extending
 out beyond the news into other kinds of genres as well. So that's the
 technology has enabled an explosion of quantity, which, of course, is a
 fantastic resource. Secondly, there's the question of how you integrate opinion
 into, you know, mainstream media content and so on. We've always done that,
 traditionally with telephone phone-in programs, for example.  But now how you
 integrate blog opinion into mainstream news and you're seeing sites like news
 vine and other, dig, and so on doing that. But also the "Washington Post" and
 the "New York Times" seen trying to do it from the other direction, as it were.
 So that integration of user opinion with mainstream content is going on.
 Thirdly, some people simply make content, which becomes broadcastable or
 reportable or useable.  And I suppose YouTube is one example of that. But there
 are many examples of where there's just great content being produced and
 available. And then, fourthly, there's network journalism, how you use the
 expertise, the collective expertise of the public to better inform your
 programming and your journalism and your content. And that's in some ways the
 most difficult part of it, but also potentially, I think, in many ways the most
 exciting. There's a whole range of user content there. And the technology in
 the Internet is, you know, driving all of that forward. And I think there are
 some editorial issues and legal issues and rights issues. But I think broadly,
 it is -- it is forcing organizations like the BBC and other major media
 organizations to open themselves up to the public and to this burst of
 creativity and innovation.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Could you say there's a cost or even a -- when it comes to those
 out there who think they can get to manipulation or deception when it comes to
 multiple e-mail addresses. In other words, the amount of time or energy that
 has to be used by a large organization by the BBC just to mediate and check
 whether what we are being sent in this open environment is actually what it
 claims to be?

 >>RICHARD SAMBROOK:  Yes. I mean, from my position, news organizations have
 always been open to being hoaxed just as the amount of material that can be
 sent in is exponentially higher, the risk of hoaxing is exponentially higher,
 it costs resources on our part to make sure that doesn't get through. And just
 as there's a huge resource in handling the photographs and the e-mails and the,
 you know, blog material as well. So there's a big resource virtually by the
 impact of this technology and what it's able to produce.

 >>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT:  It's been covered, actually, Nik.

 >>NIK GOWING:  Fred.  Particularly on this issue of whether a large corporation
 should be used to lobby on these issues of rights, given your roll-in software
 production.

 >>FRED TIPSON:  Well, the answer is, yes, we should be lobbying governments to
 promote the interests of our users in freedom of expression and access to
 information and so forth. And we're trying to sort out the most effective ways
 to do that. I assume the question probabl