FINISHED FILE

EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM

BALI

BUILDING BRIDGES ‑ ENHANCING MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

23 OCTOBER 2013

16:30

EBU, COE, OSCE and UNESCO JOINT OPEN FORUM

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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Eigth Meeting of the IGF, in Bali, Indonesia. 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.

>> OSET MAOTOVITCH:  I am grateful for the opportunity to address you on the issue that is extremely important for all of us and also to congratulate all of the colleague from EBU and other international organizations for making these events at IGF a tradition.  We will probably need to meet more and more to discuss the issues of open journalism, importance of journalism today and the threats and challenges awaiting all of us fighting for free speech and free media around the world (Lost audio).

For me as an advocate for media freedom, internet is becoming the new front line in the fight for freedom of expression and freedom of the media.  With the internet the divide between producer and receiver journalist and reader agenda setter and agenda actor has become less obvious.

Today internet users do not only consume media content, but also have the power to shape or even alter narratives for trade in the media.  We have to be very realistic when we discuss open journalism and why it is important for international organizations and also for NGOs fighting for free speech and freedom of the media to engage in a battle for protecting free speech on line and off line.

For the first time ever, we have consumer of the news active and not passive.  Is this something that we need to stop?  Is this something we have to allow?  (Lost Audio)

>> MODERATOR:  Okay.  It seems that all technicalities are solved.  Thank you for your passion and European Broadcasting Union representing the World Broadcasting Union and there is from the Council of Europe and the other panelists that are disseminated in the room in order to show that we are among numbers that you can think and they will join us at a later stage here.  Among them is Guy Berger from UNESCO.  There is Ellery Biddle from Global Voices, Takuya Yamaguchi from Google and the World Economic Forum.  We have also in virtual presence Oset Maotovitch which will be the first speaker of the session through a presentation on You Tube and I suggest that we will start with that.

>> OSET MAOTOVITCH:  Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends, I'm very sorry for not being able to join you in beautiful Bali and I'm grateful for the opportunity to address you today on the issue that is extremely important for all of us and also to congratulate all of the colleagues from EBU and other international organizations for making this event at IGF a tradition.  We will probably need to meet more and more to discuss the issues of open journalism, importance of journalism today and the threats and challenges awaiting all of us fighting for free speech and free media around the world.

For me as an advocate for media freedom, internet is becoming is becoming the new front line in the fight for freedom of expression and freedom of the media with the internet the divide between receiver and producer, journalist and reader, agenda setter and agenda actor has become less obvious.

Today internet users do not only consume media content, but also have the power to shape or even alter narratives portrayed in the media.  We have to be very realistic when we discuss open journalism, and why it is important for international organizations and also for NGOs fighting for free speech and freedom of the media to engage in a battle for protecting free speech on line and off line.  For the first time ever, we have consumer of the news active and not passive.  Is this something that we need to stop?

Is this something we have to allow certain Governments to stop?  In explaining us the same old story, and trying to define something that is not possible to define.  We have to stop engaging in discussions on whose journalist and who is not a journalist or even try to define journalism nowadays.

It's better for all of us to engage in a battle and a struggle to protect free speech and freedom of the media in the off line and on line world.  A new type of reporting called open or citizen journalism is emerging with a growing digitalization of our societies and a greater freedom it has brought.  Small and big world news is debated and in seemingly never ending streams of posts, Tweets and comments on social networking and news websites.

Information travels fast, faster than ever.  Open journalism relies on user generated content and encourages readers to contribute and shape the news making process.  I don't see any problem with this.  Contrary to traditional journalism, open journalism is not about distributing the news story, far from it.  It captures the on going media development made possible by the internet in which editorial offices more frequently rely on users to provide them with information, give ideas and comments on stories, even before they are published, and also assist in processing various documents.

In many countries, unfortunately, also within the OSC region, there is a witch hunt going on against bloggers, social media activists and journalists engaging on line.  This is something that is in the focus of my work and the focus on the work of many courageous NGOs around the world.  We need to join forces and to do something are in order to protect free speech and freedom of the media on line.

The time is right and the time is right to do this.  The discussions are ongoing, events organized in many parts of the world by many international organizations is something that is happening almost on a daily basis, but we need to do more.  We need to do much more in order to protect people no matter if we call them journalists or not journalists in this fight for free speech on the internet.  Open journalism reflects the fact that freedom to seek, share and impart information and ideas no longer is reserved to the few, but to the increasingly many.

We need to embrace this many.  We need to work with this group of people that many call newcomers in the world of journalism.  It is a powerful tool in exercising the fundamental rights of any democracy.  Journalism in the 21st century has undergone a fundamental change from how it would be understood in the 19th or even 20th century audience.

Open journalism is a tool we need to embrace in order to safeguard and to strengthen media freedom in a digital era because open journalism is not just the 21st century of letters to the editors.  It is much more than that.  Open journalism has the potential of better meeting the needs of society and providing a plethora of pluralistic information.  It also serves as an opportunity for an open discussion of the issues important to the public.

Even though open journalism brings a wealth of new opportunities, it cannot replace traditional journalism.  It cannot be used as a way of reducing the sources of news from traditional media and journalism.  On the contrary, it must be seen as an important compliment to traditional journalism, a way of strengthening existing media outlets, and journalism as a whole.

It can never weed out media pluralism.  It must add to that and contribute to strengthening journalism altogether.  That is why once again, I think it is of great importance that international organizations have a joint voice when it comes to defense of free speech and freedom of the media in off line and on line world without any difference.  Thank you very much and I wish you wonderful and fruitful discussion hoping to be able to join you next year at IGF.

>>  MODERATOR:  This is organisation for security and cooperation in Europe.  She mentioned some words that I think are perfectly fitting with the scope of this meeting of today.  She said that the people that work on the internet creating journalism are at newcomers but have to be considered as they cannot replace traditional sources of journalism, but they have to compliment it and to give to journalists important contribution to express and to reach the voice in a different way.

I think that is this the core of the discussion of today that we try to see through different angles.  We started from something that I don't know if you have already seen, but this book that has been published by Reuters Foundation, University of Oxford, written by Richard Sambrook, Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant.  And this gave us the idea to start from this point to see if the traditional network of media in order to cover the world is still appropriate, if their reduction and shrinking is a real problem for independence and for voices.

This is all about the discussion of today that will be seen by different angles.  I will start this with a very brief presentation that you need to ‑‑ no, no, no.  We need to plug here.  Thank you.

So this is a short synthesis of 250 pages that I tried to condensate in four pages for your safety.  Okay.  I'm not a digital nut as you can see.  This is the title of the study.  The study was at first point describing the climbing importance of foreign news and the media.  The data that are used in the study are mainly coming from western countries so the first data concerns the U.S., the U.S. space dedicated in the network programme international news has shrinked between the 70s and 2000 by 15% reducing to 20%.

In the U.K., now this decline in 2009, so statistics for U.K. are more recent than U.S., declined to a record of 11% of total.  And in some television in the U.K., this dropped even more dramatically.  For instance, ITV in two years only it dropped by 73%.  Parallel to this less attention in traditional media for international news, there is also a phenomenon declining resources available for traditional media.  The U.S.E.D. study in 2010 reported that the newspapers are losing money and readers.  They say readers, but it means money, of course, in 20 countries out of the 31 that are members of the USED.

In countries are tackling these issues, such France, Sweden, Netherlands, introducing media measure to support the press.  Also TV started to have less resources as a result of 2008 in the private sector mainly but also in the public service broadcasting.  This as a consequence will as a direct consequence as a declining number of foreign Bureaus of traditional media.

In the 80s each of the major TV networks of the U.S. has at least 15 offices abroad.  Today there are less than seven and none of these offices is in Africa, India or South America.  So there are big chunks of the world that are out of the sea of the U.S. network.

The same phenomenon happened for the U.S. newspapers that have reduced their network in three years only, in seven years only they have reduced one third their coverage of the world and in Europe we have the same trend and even in some public broadcasters this trend is happening.  But the world is not only western countries, and is not only media financed by commercial revenues.

BBC, for instance, maintains still a network of 200 correspondents in the world plus freelancers mainly thanks to the world service.  Deutsch and the national public radio of the U.S. networks remain stable over the years.  Some new international challenges arrived on the scene like France went 24, that is the only one recent in the western countries, but there are many new networks expanding worldwide coming from other regions of the world that before were not actors in this scene like Al‑Jazeera in Arabic and English, Russia Today, CCTV and Shinjua from China only to mention against the trend, the CCTV in the last years opened more than 50 bureaus worldwide.  However, the bureaus are different than the bureaus of the past where you have the chief correspondence, a number of journalists and the producer and then the technicians.  The CCTV offices are made by one person that is making the journalist at the same time the producer, at the same time the technician of himself.

And they use satellite but FTP via the internet.  The main conclusion of the study that I have to short so the most significant topics are that the prices in journalism network of sources seem to be mainly a western phenomenon while in Asia there is a significant expansion.  In Africa and other parts of the developing world, journalism is developing on other basis.  Which are other basis?

Social media are increasing helping countries develop public space for debate for the exchange of information, and to tell their own stories while before there were, they have no possibility to make this.  Also on the other side, the social media are helping foreign correspondence report those countries with greater insight and accuracy.

But, of course, they are not substitute for the witness on the field.  Okay.  Basically these were the data contained in this study and these were the main conclusions.  I don't want to create, to set up conclusion from out of this, but this has to be just the starting point, so now I hand over to Yan that can give you the analysis from the Council of Europe.

>>  Thank you very much.  The analysis from the Council of Europe perspective is not easy, so I won't even try to do that.  The Council of Europe over the decades has been supporting various aspects of journalism and media.  It has been supporting very intensely pluralism of the media and in the media diversity of content.  In that context it has set standards in respect of issues such as transparency of media ownership.  It has requested our 47 Member States to promote investigative journalism which is very closely linked to what we have been discussing and hearing and, of course, the role of independent journalists, the role of independent media with their own editorial independence is essential and so on.

In that context, it has also promoted with the agreement of our 47 Member States, it is official 47 state policy.  It has been promoting and supporting public service media as an essential component of the media landscape.  If you want to be able to insure in the long run that there will be independent media and diverse media, you must have independent public service media in the media landscape.

Now, how does that sit with the changes that have been brought about by the internet?  In that respect, the committee of ministers, the Council of Europe, the 47 Member States have adopted two years ago a new notion of media, which changes the ‑‑ there hasn't really been a definition of media in the past.  We knew what media was.  It was newspapers, it was television, it was radio, it was magazines, so on.  But the committee of ministers, what the Council of Europe did was reconceptualize what media was in this new environment.  It said anything that projects content to mass communication is media.

And it provided a set of indicators so that we can see what media is and consequences indicative consequences of what should be done to that what should be the approach, but the main approach is don't tamper with it.  Don't try to regulate it.  Regulation is something that is very dangerous because it is very easy to interfere.  And there may be certain aspects of regulation that are necessary, but be careful, be very careful when you try to regulate.

Now, that is the new media environment, the social networks, the different platforms, the different content providers and so on.  How does that sit with journalism?  How do we see that?  If we see journalism along history, and I will simplify and probably get it wrong, but at the beginning probably media was journalism.  A journalist, someone who wanted to bring something to the public attention set up his own journal and published and disseminated sheets of paper with information, so on.

Later on it became a business and it developed as facilitators, the media developed as facilitators of journalism.  I think that afterward they became choreographers of journalism, of the process of developing the ideas of getting out the news from wherever they were hidden and projecting them to the public do main, to the, to society.

And in doing that, they little by little also became curators of the information, and they have tended to become gate keepers of content as well.  Now, when we transfer that into the new environment, we may have seen a process in the new media environments that starts at the end of the evolution of the relation between journalism and media.

And that, if the new players become gate keepers of content, if they become the curators of content, that would be a matter for concern because the new players are relatively big and very often they are equivalent to monopolies and if we end up with a situation where there is no pluralism, no diversity, or even no freedom of expression, then we will simply not have democracy.

So we have to think in those terms.  Now, let me come back to the question of journalism.  Can professional journalism and the journalistic activity be replaced by at least in part or largely by the so called citizen journalism?  I don't believe that.  I believe that there has to be some kind of activity that embraces the values and principles of journalism in order to deliver to society what is necessary, the debate, the scrutiny, the challenge that is necessary in a democratic society.

And I think that Duni has said it nicely that there won't be a replacement but a complimentarity between open journalism and traditional journalism.  So I think that that is part of the answer.  The question is if things are going to change in the media landscape, how do we construct the transition between the reality of today where we have seen the journalism is being supported less and less by legacy media, and the future where journalism may be developed and deployed together with open journalism in a different Forum, in a different sort of business model.

How do we transition between the two in order not to lose out, in order not to deprive society of the value of journalism in the interim?  That is a question that I hope that you will be discussing later.  I will stop here, but I will deliver a last little message, a last little thought, which links to something Jacima said, he mentioned in the BBC world service, the BBC world service has done a lot of good to the world.

It was something that the U.K., that the BBC gave the world.  And it was very useful.  It was very important in many countries in many situations.  Now, it is being scaled down.  The business model is changing and that is a pity.  If we think in terms of public service media, world service was public service media delivered by the United Kingdom by the BBC to the world.

This thought came in the context of a debate of a discussion a couple of weeks ago on media in fragile states, and the idea that came up was maybe because of the value of the world service of the BBC world service to the world, it may be necessary to find a different way of supporting the BBC world service so that it can continue to strive to operate, to deliver the value of media and journalism especially in fragile states despite the downturn in the economy and the funding in the United Kingdom, perhaps it has to be funded differently.  Perhaps it has to be the gift not of the United Kingdom, but of Europe to the world.  Maybe it can be funded differently even in addition to Europe from abroad, and so on, so forth.

So I leave with you with that thought and I hope that I at least gave some element for the discussion that will come.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you, Drew.  If it was not an analysis, it's not far from that.  I think that now we can move unless there are urgent questions you want to raise for this.  There is one very urgent question.  I see that somebody cannot resist the question.  You can use this.

>> Thank you.  My name is Haruredi, I'm a freelance journalist.  I was international journalism fellow from ICFJ.  I think it's a bit bias developed countries discussion.  For example, in Indonesia, there are 80 million internet users including with mobiles and while 170 million people has no access to internet.  What I'm doing with my fellowship in the last 2.5 years in Kalimantan in Borneo, working with RUITV, a local television station, we set up a new communication channel using cell phones.

We train already 300 indigenous he people in villages in remote area in Borneo, and using from an SMS programme, sending the news through SMS and we blast to subscribers and also appear on the news ticker of the television and sometimes voice over through the screen.  And we create some changes.  And I'm trying to get out of this journalism box and I see there is an opportunity to connect people who has no access to internet while they have access to cell phones.

300 million numbers of cell phones been bought by Indonesians and most of the area covered by this cell phone signal, and I called them not citizen journalists, although they train on basic journalism.  I call them information brokers.  The role of the information brokers is not only to share what happened in their communities, but also to find information, important information for the communities.

And it should be a media or other organizations can be NGOs or even Government to provide new communication channels that independent and can be accessed by these people who have no access before.  This is a sharing and probably you have other ideas of this is a model of communication for grass roots not for the mid um class.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you very much.  I think that is a useful contribution.  I anticipate the next part of the debate, if I can ask Yan to go to ‑‑ do you want to say something.

>> Let may say that I agree entirely, and the only way for what is to support that, and that is one of the elements in the puzzle.  It is not the whole puzzle though, but it is one very, very important element in the puzzle.

>> MODERATOR:  Perfect, so you got the first line part of answer.  I invite you to join the next speakers that are going to come one by one ‑‑ no, you can come all together.

>> ELLERY BIDDLE:  Hi, everybody, my name is Ellery Biddle and I'm an editor with Global Voices which is an international network of writers and translators.  We are almost all volunteers, and we work from 130 countries around the world, and to just introduce you to us, I wanted to just show this video.  And pull it up here so please watch and enjoy and then we will talk.

This wasn't meant to be a plea for you all to donate for Global Voices.

>> Advertising.

>> ELLERY BIDDLE:  That's what we really do.  So I am cut that.  I want to pull up the home page here for people to be able to take a look.  Global Voices, as I said, we are a volunteer network.  Nearly everybody who writes for us is not doing it because they get paid, but because they are passionate about what they are writing about.  We cover all kinds of news, but the thing that kind of distinguishes us as a media organisation, if you want to call us that, is that our sourcing, the sort of biggest bed of our sources is the internet it is of the.  We are typically reporting on events using Twitter, Facebook posts, blogs, photographs people have posted on Flickr or other platforms, videos from You Tube to tell stories.

And one of the things that is sort of unique about our writers is that they usually know kind of the different communities that are really active on line in their countries really well.  So an example, actually I wanted to pull up ‑‑ I will search.  I wanted to just show you guys a post.  I'm sorry.

All right.  I will cut back to this to keep moving.  So an example of kind of Global Voices Article that might be really valuable in a way that you wouldn't, you sort of wouldn't get this kind of unique angle from another media organisation is let's say a protest in Tahrir Square.  We have read about those in lots of different media outlets.

You will have an Egyptian author, somebody who was probably there themselves.  They will write about the situation on the ground and they will pull Tweets from different people who came to the protest, groups that might totally disagree with each other.  They will post photos that different people took at the event, maybe video, and then they will give you some context, what do all of these different voices that have come together here, kind of what do they mean?  How do they relate to each other?  How do they relate to the broader political situation of the moment.

And we think this is uniquely valuable at this moment when there is so much being produced on the internet by everybody, and so much happening all over the world, particularly when it comes to social movements.  It's very difficult to explain social movements when you don't know the context really well.  So this is a value that we feel like we have brought to a lot of actually different media spaces.

So then I was asked to talk about kind of our model, and how we, how we support ourselves, but then I think that also relates to how we see ourselves in a broader media landscape.  We are a volunteer network, we have 1300 active contributors, which is a ton.  Out of that group, we have 12 full‑time staff and about 30 part‑time paid editors.

And then we have, we also have, you will notice up at the top of the screen here that we translate our content and actually create original content in a lot of different languages, 30 actually.  I'm just going to the page that's appropriate.  And a number of our translators are paid at cost.  So they will be paid, you know, a rate that they decide often a dollar a translation.

So we have a very light budget.  We are not based anywhere.  Our staff are 12 of us live in 10 different countries, and our editors and writers are all over the world.  We are funded by a couple of foundations and we actually have some corporate support from Google and we have had support from Yahoo in the past as well as donor support, but we feel like this model is not going to be sustainable for us in the long term so we have been looking at different ways to kind of change ourselves.

And one apart from crowd funding and finding different ways to get donations, we have also started to think about, well, what's the product we are creating?  We believe that we bring a value, and we are really happy that it's free most of the time, but are there ways that we could actually start to package our content so that it's worth it to somebody to pay for it?

We also have developed a number of media partnerships with a lot of the media organizations that you mentioned in your presentation, Al Jazeera, NPR, Deutsch Oewla, New York Times, the Guardian and others.  We have actually had partnerships on different specific projects or coverage of a particular country and those are actually getting to the point where we may be able to start to make that a source of revenue for us.

I wanted to just also talk about our advocacy project, which is what I work on.  The Global Voices community, one thing that's sort of interesting about us is that we are both the kind of reporters on and often protagonists in the stories that we tell.  And about five years ago, a number of members of our community started to realize that we have got a huge set of challenges in front of us related to freedom of expression and privacy on the internet.

And this was sort of a very personal thing because a number of members of our community have been threatened, harassed, arrested, imprisoned, people have lived in hiding for long persons with disabilities of time.  And we decided to actually start a wing of the network that is devoted to these issues of Human Rights on line and so that's Global Voices advocacy, which I have got pulled up here.

And this is kind of, I guess, what brings us to IGF, is that we have realized how much these fundamental rights issues impact all of us as writers, journalists, producers, whatever you want to call us, and we believe we actually can have a powerful hopefully voice on these issues and actually sort of engage in policy debates and help shape outcomes in a way that will protect all of us as we continue to do our work.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you, Ellery.  I think that is an interesting contribution that stresses one of the points that brings us to the next speaker, because in the slides of the Sambrook book we are talking of declining business model for traditional media and we are listening that new media are looking for the business model to or something that will at least continue to do the work with the same quality and the same passion we are doing today.

So now I turn to Annie Luo that comes from the World Economic Forum you can introduce yourself.

>> ANNIE LUO:  Sure.  Hello, my name is Annie Luo, and I help run the World Economic Forum and I'm based in New York.  Before I start I wanted to say that it's really a privilege to be here both at this session and at the IGF.  And this particular topic has really significance for me both as a professional, at a professional and a personal level.

Before I joined the world economic Forum, I actually spent six years working as a financial journalist in New York and Asia.  So the future of journalism is very much a personal passion as well.  So at the World Economic Forum, we have the privilege of working with a variety of different stakeholder including the private sector, Civil Society and Government.  As we all know digital products and services have become indispensable to our lives and the way that we consume news content and other content has really shifted forever in a way in this hyperconnected world.

Since 2011 the World Economic Forum has looked at the future of content and specifically looking at several important themes.  One is evolving interplay between technological innovation and consumer behaviors.  One is the new business models that the incumbent media companies are introducing to cope with and adapt to this shift in digital landscape.

The last one is the role of public policy and how they may play a role in future business models.  Today we are really focused on news and journalism from a business model perspective what have worked and what have not.  And more importantly, what the future could look like.  So some key trends and challenges I have on this slide and I briefly speak to all of them, the first one is that there is a sentiment amongst media professionals and those who have not worked in the media sector before, that everybody is a media company today enabled by digital technologies, especially social media.

So content creation is no longer the media sector's exclusive domain.  Everybody can produce content and in fact brand produced content may eventually surpass ad supports journalism.  Forbes in the U.S. has just launched a new product called brand voices, and it's basically a product which allows brands to sponsor journalism.  It's increasingly blurring the line between PR and marketing and real journalism, but many argue that it could be the savior of quality journalism in the future is professional journalists can make money from content or sponsored journalism and then work on serious quality investigative journalism, then this may be an opportunity for the future.

Some of the other trends I think people are very familiar with.  News is becoming increasingly commoditized and that's why people don't want to pay for it and because of media professional journalists are becoming more and more replaceable.  So these are the trends at play which very much impact the entire ecosystem.  So what we have done is we looked at the cost structure of different media companies, and here is a comparison between New York Times and the Huffington Post.

What I would point out is just the profit margin here.  The Huffington Post has six times the profit margin of the New York Times, making it almost impossible for the New York Times to compete at least on the cost side.  And in return New York Times has done a lot of, made a lot of effort in both managing cost and shifting their existing business model to compete in the digital environment, but the success has been rather limited which compounds the challenges facing a lot of the legacy media companies.

I'm having a bit of trouble with the power point here.  And readers or consumers of news media are increasingly unwilling to pay for news content.  We did a survey in six different countries asking people whether they are willing to pay for news on digital platforms and an average 90% people said no, absolutely not or no, probably not.

Media companies have pursued a variety of different strategies in response to this democratization of content creation they have leveraged content so if you can not fight them you might as well borrow from them.  They have introduced branded content on top of UGC and social platforms such as Twitter, You Tube.  They have also made a bigger push to differentiate by creating the higher end exclusive content which citizen journalists or freelance journalists may not be, or may not have the necessary resources to do.

So a few case studies that we looked at and we will go through them very quickly.  We looked at CNN’s I reports initiative and which has succeeded in driving traffic to CNN.com but has not succeeded to meaningful revenue to CNN's bottom line.  We also looked at economists which in the western world has been haled as a successful case study of using blogs and social media to drive ad revenue and sell subscriptions and in general has been adapting business model to meet new digital challenges.

So the exceptions that the economist is one of the very few successful examples of traditional legacy media companies being able to turn around their fortunes using social and digital platforms.  And finally, content still matters very much or brand still matters.  So we looked at the big three newspapers, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, which have had successful efforts with using pay wars to get new subscribers to migrate from print subscription to digital subscription.

And this is the sort of 2002 comparison of the three big names and for the local newspapers it's extremely difficult to replicate this model because they do not have the brand recognition and they don't have the wide reach to be able to implement these types of pay war.  Looking at the future, a number of issues would have the potential to shape the business models.  Disruptive technologies and I think we are only scratching the surface here.  We are now looking at robotics replacing humans in reporting sports and financial news.

We are also looking at dynamic pricing.  So there is a mechanism in place now which can instantly in real time price a piece of content based on both its popularity, relevance and promptness.  And we are also looking at talent wars.  So for traditional media companies I think the war is intensifying because they are not only losing talent to digital startups and digital media companies but losing writers and editors to traditionally known media companies such as brands, consumer companies and even PR agencies.

And finally, public policy initiatives, and I think we have heard from Yan and others how in Europe there is a concern about the decline of quality news and quality news media, and because of the unique role of news media plays in the democratic societies, there will be a lot more public policy attention to how we will fund quality news media in the future, and I think the example of Yan gave about the BBC or world service is a very significant one.  If they serve, if they have a valid proposition not just for the U.K. but for the world, then whether U.K. taxpayers should shoulder the responsibility of funding this operation is a very big question.

So that last point I wanted to talk about is really looking at the future and the search for sustainable business model will continue.  And I think many in the news circles and journalism circles have shed many tears looking for that elusive business model and it was interesting when Ellery was talking about Global Voices and how you guys as a digital native supported news network is still searching for business model as well.  So it's not just a traditional media incumbent problem.

I looked at, I just went around and I looked at existing business models, existing non‑profit models.  So of course you have the public service model such as PPC, and you also have newer players such as ProPublica, which was funded by a former Wall Street Journal editor, and its primarily foundation funded, but it's a digital value proposition, so it's only existing on line.

So perhaps the argument could be that for quality journalism for investigative journalism, the non‑profit model is the way to go because we all know Serus news does not sell.  People on line want to see cats and dogs videos and they are not interested in paying for news on Egyptian revolution.  So that is the hard reality that many journalists and news media executives are facing.

The second model we looked at is a crowd funding model and it's gaining a lot of attraction recently.  I think Joe Como was with us at a meeting when we explored kick starter and crowd funding platforms and how they may play a role in funding and providing capital for quality and investigative journalism.  If you go to kick starter this is one of the world's largest crowding platform.  They published a list of the ten most funded journalism projects of 2013 and a radio station, on line radio station called 99% invisible is entirely funded by on kick starter and is now a rather sizable operation.  So this can be done.

But it's probably difficult to scale purely based on the crowd funding model.  So it probably wouldn't solve all of our problems here.  And the last one, it's a bit tongue in cheek, because as we all know Jeff Bezos from Amazon recently purchased The "Washington Post."  So the joke in Silicon Valley is technology and technology billionaires can save everything, so more people like Jeff Bezos would buy dying newspapers like The "Washington Post" and subsidize them, but is this the model we want to, if we want to uphold pluralism in journalism and there are other technologies emerging which could potentially either disrupt or save quality journalism.

One is what I talked about earlier, robotic reporting, by narrative science is a company that produces a technology which would enable automated aggregation, synthesis of news content purely from data.  So the whole concept about using data to produce news is very real and is potentially going to eliminate a lot of jobs, but create many new ones, so perhaps the role of journalists in the future is not to report on financial earnings or baseball scores, but really to curate and analyze and investigate.

And lastly, I want to talk about "Buzz" feed, which I don't know if any of you have used.  It's very popular in the U.S. and I think in Europe as well.  So "Buzz" feed started out really as a website for listicals, listicals are not necessarily Articles but 25 things you wish you did on Christmas but didn't, or the cutest cats videos on line.  So "Buzz" feed is I think five years old.  They were based on an algorithm technology developed by a graduate from M.I.T. to figure out what type of content is the most ‑‑ could most likely go viral.  And based on that, they have developed a very now profitable company.

And what's happening now is that they made their money from non‑quality journalism or arguably probably not journalism but listicals, but as they are making money through cats and dogs videos and investing in opening foreign Bureaus and they have opened 20 international Bureaus and they are now producing in my view quality news Articles and journalism on politics, on economics, on finance.

So the argument can be made that these two can exist.  Journalists can create content, sponsor brand journalism but then they may be able to subsidize investigative or serious journalist using revenue from the other side of the business.  So I mean, the conclusion is here is that nobody has found that elusive sustainable business model yet, otherwise we wouldn't be here discussing this, but there are a lot of, I would say, a lot of challenges facing this industry.

But also a lot of exciting opportunities, both enabled by technology, and by new consumer behaviors awaiting us.  So the future is not necessarily bleak.

>> MODERATOR:  My main concern is how to call my robotic neighbor in the office in the news room is a journalist or not, I don't know.  And probably will not be part of the union for sure.  Can I turn now to Google?  You have also presentation?  So Takuya Yamaguchi is responsible for policy for Google in Japan, but he accepted to participate and to give us some hints about what Google can do so probably after debate also Google could be buying some newspapers with difficulties, economic difficulties, you can announce about that.

>> TAKUYA YAMAGUCHI:  Thank you.  Thank you everybody, and distinguished panelists and audience members.  Thank you all.  My name is Takuya Yamaguchi.  I’m a public manager at Google Japan.  Freedom of expression is not ‑‑ as one of the goal related internet company supporting freedom of expression is one of the indispensable activities of Gocimoogle actives around the world.

I would like to talk a little bit about proposed topics by Jacima on how web journalist 2.0 might look like and some activities to support that.  As all of the participants here know we are living in a unique time, the age of internet.  The web is literally the most powerful communication tool in the history of the world.

Up onto the internet every form of journalism was ‑‑ few television stations owned exclusive rights to news.  The internet changed that empowering anywhere anyone to have their see.  It empowers people to lose borders.  I don't mean IGF, but to engage in debate on everything.  Blogs, social networks and on line video platforms are now widely available for everyone with access to the internet.

In 2010, blogger users published more than half a billion blog posts and wrote more than 250,000 words a minute, which is, let's say, almost 5,000 new a day.  As of May 2013 more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute.  A 37% increase over the last six months and 100% over last year.

And these circumstances, what web journalism 2.0 look like?  Here is some ideas.  One, journalism will be more open Forum.  No need to care constraint space and most likely free form.  It's almost like a snacks rather than a formal dinner on the table and can be consumed more casually.  Secondly, the journalism will be more open‑ended.  It can be published as soon as possible and can be extended or corrected on the fly.

The third journalism will be more open minded.  Again, journalism becomes more open‑ended, more variety of aspects on the news can be delivered rather easier way which supports ‑‑ and fourth, journalism will be increasingly open sourced.  Everyone can be a journalist to some extent.  I don't mean professional journalists can be altered by amateurs but you can be a journalist just with a digital camera or video and broadcast it in one click using public variable medias.

I personally agree that reliability of the news source is at risk to some extent, but I believe in providing more available source for them will lead the way.  Fifth, news will become more personalized.  People tend to search and select their interested area, politics or economics or entertainment or more specific area they want.  And lastly, news will not go without social layers.

On top of the news Article provided, people can put on additional information, exchange personal knowledge and experiences on top of the provided news.  So people tend to make sure if the source is not biased using such social networking services.  So I think these changes will make internet as a campaign tool and to empower journalists.

The large scale outreach makes it attractive media for political information, connecting with others in action.  It empowers citizens to become more knowledgeable, equips them with information and enables them to organize, form networks and gather strengths such as to secure Human Rights.  Such as the Egyptian reversion in 2011 and occupy movement in the U.S. and so on, so on.

So what Google provides, what is Google providing to support such movement to facilitate or enable web journalism 2.0?  May I present to you briefly about our activities to support web journalists.  One is Google media, we recently prepared the site where the journal is presenting available and powerful tools at Google for gathering and organizing news, engaging, visualizing and publishing it on the internet, and journalists can be supported financially using such services like as functions we provide.

And for the students, we do some kind of Google journalism fellowship and we also sponsor the ONA Google student news room which takes place at the premier Conference for digital future of the industry.  In European countries we partner with global editors network on live events, a hack‑a‑thon and the global data journalism.  We also funded Reuters institute for the study of journalism report on the impact of the internet on journalism.

In Canada, we sponsored a journalist for human rights and journalists for free expression and hosted a news room training for more than 75 journalists.  In Brazil, we sponsored Brazilian investigative journalists and for the local investigate journalism Conference to be held in Rio De Janeiro this month.  In Australia we will announce that we are the main supporters of the journalism grounds by the worldly foundation in Australia.  We provide training sessions.  We provide workshops and 101s to news rooms around the globe.

To date the media team has journalists from our world.  You might have read the latest news that we have just announced available under Google ID for supporting freedom of expression and journalism.  Some of those are not Google products yet, but we continue to cooperate or support such activities to progress journalism and to provide more transparency for the journalists.

So my last words is Google is surely committed to support freedom of expression and to maintain pluralism in journalist world and provide platforms both for the professionals and citizens so let's keep the internet free and open as much as possible.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you.  So not scoop.  You don't buy any newspaper, but you simply subsidize some activities in various parts of the world including Global Voices.  They have to increase the subsidy?

>> ELLERY BIDDLE:  It varies, we have had different grants at different times, so.

>> MODERATOR:  You want to make a request now?

>> ELLERY BIDDLE:  No, no.  That's okay.

>> MODERATOR:  Okay.  So this was the second round of panelists and now there is the last one, but if you have any urgent question, as I said before?  No?  Okay.  So can I ask you to join the audience and to the last speaker that is Guy Berger, one is already here, you want to say what you can.  Perfect for the final round of question.

So I see Annie Luo is laughing, you remember our conversation about we change the approach to journalistic, yes, this is what we are talking about.  Guy Berger he was silent because he was taking notes because he has to make the report about all of this we are saying today, but probably you have also your viewpoint on that as UNESCO.

>> GUY BERGER:  I was Tweeting, so that was a way of taking notes and sharing with people who are not seeing the session.  Shall I go ahead?  I asked to speak about journalist safety because, of course, the whole thing about journalism, independent journalism and sustainable journalism and business model and open journalism depends on journalists being safe, and, of course, not everybody wants to see journalists being safe.

>> MODERATOR:  Robots needs also protection.

>> GUY BERGER:  Robots can be victims of attacks and start generating false information, I'm sure.  Who is a journalist today?  I thought I would share this with you because this is part of the discussion so far, and interesting the UN Human Rights Committee, which is not the aim as the UN Human Rights council, but it's related to it.  They say it's important that you focus not on who is the journalist, as much as what is journalism.

So you look at the function and if you start looking at the function, of course, you start seeing who is there, and that's more or less what people would say is the most important thing from a societal point of view and from a user point of view.  At UNESCO where I work, we use journalists in quite a broad sensually it includes your typical journalists, but we also use the term to include freelance journalists as well, and also media workers, fixers, drivers, people who are assisting journalists in conflict zones, for example, and social media producers.

Not all social media producers because not everybody who goes on Facebook is doing journalism.  We are talking about those doing significant amounts of public interest journalism.  So I think this is important because, of course, freedom of expression is everybody's right, but from a societal point of view, one is particularly interested in those contributing to journalism because public news is different to personal news in terms of its overall value.

So I think it's important to say but what is safety?  Because we talk about safety and it's actually quite complicated.  It covers quite a lot of issues.  As I have said, safety should be the right of everybody.  You should feel safe to speak.  There should not be adverse repercussions, but as I will say particularly for those doing journalism, which is often, because it's a public act, it becomes far more potentially dangerous.

So safety ranges from what's in place in terms of preventing you from experiencing dangers as a journalist or contributing to journalism, what will protect you and what will preempt things?  And the combat ‑‑ one of the biggest problems with attacks on journalists is that those who commit crimes against freedom of expression are not ‑‑ a part of safety, therefore, is promote social culture at large which cherishes freedom of expression and press freedom in particular.  We like to use the term press freedom not because it's only for newspapers but we think press freedom is more fundamental than media freedom.  I can come back to that if need be.

Of course, safety then is related to laws and how they are implemented.  It's related to what institutions there are in the state that should be protecting or following up cases of killings of journalists.  It relates to the capacities of journalists themselves.  It relates to the overall culture.  And, of course, what's very relevant to this is that safety is on line and off line and very importantly interaction between these two realms.  You can't only speak about safety in one area and not in the other and I will give you one example of that shortly.

Cyber safety, I won't go into this because there is a whole discussion, a whole session that's going to happen about this tomorrow morning.  But you can see from this list here that, you know, there is a lot of particular threats to safety specific to what happens doing journalism in cyberspace.  The most interesting thing I think also because cyberspace, a lot of those threads do leave a trail.

So just as journalists may leave a trail, a digital footprint that can endanger them, people who attack journalists using electronic methods can also sometimes be traced so it's an interesting arena.  Well, to come to specifically what the UN is doing with journalist safety and now with this new era of who is a journalist and what is journalism, the group I work for UNESCO, so the constitution is to promote the free flow of ideas because this is thought to be necessary to prevent the kind of indoctrination that happened that allowed Nazi Germany to mobilize its whole population et cetera, et cetera, for the war.  So free flow of ideas is for peace.

So a lot of work has been done since 1997 in the name of the international community 195 Member States killing of journalists are condemned.  Member States are asked to report on what they are doing about these killings.  They still don't all report, but it is increasing, the number, and those who do report don't always report with great success.  So there is still work to be done there.  There are annual reports that are given to UNESCO bodies, and there is an UNESCO work plan on safety specifically endorsed by the UNESCO Member States executive board.

Now, what is interesting is UNESCO is not the only part of the UN concerned about this because the other ones, particularly UN Human Rights council which is different than the Human Rights Committees but they have started taking up this issue more and more.  I mentioned here this important Resolution last year supported by Austria.  You will hear more about that.

We also had the Security Council condemning attacks against journalists in conflict situations.  So this is trying to create a culture in which journalists shouldn't be attacked.  Special rapporteurs are clearly significant.  But you need a lot more than what is UNESCO doing, the Human Rights council and the special Rapporteur.  So the idea came about of trying to put in the entire UN, UNICEF, International Labour Organisation, UN Drugs and Crime, UN Women and say can they get involved in this cause.  So UNESCO convened this Conference in September 2011 to say to the whole UN let's put more muscle into this thing.

And fortunately the chief executives of all of the UN bodies agreed to a plan that came out of this Conference in 2011.  And I think this is important to say now the philosophy of the plan is that this shouldn't be altruism on the part of UN organizations.  They have a particular mandate, but their mandate is very much affected by the safety of journalists.  Many work directly with journalists.

They need journalists to be safe to do their work.  The World Bank trains journalists to report on corruption.  So now the UN body or the UN as a whole could single‑handedly deliver on safety for people who are doing journalism.  So the whole plan implies that there should be multiple partnerships within the UN, UN Governments, regional bodies such as Council of Europe, media actors and the Civil Society.  And I won't go into detail here, but to tell you that in this plan it targets different areas.

In the UN itself, you need more effective communication, coordination, action, sharing, responses.  Member States also need to improve their act in terms of dealing with this issue.  Partnerships is a whole other part of it, particularly partnerships with the media, Civil Society, general awareness raising and fostering safety initiatives like sharing best practices.  For example, Colombia used to be as troubled as Mexico with the number of killings of journalists.

Their experience in stabilizing that situation is something that is a sift initiative that can be shared.  To walk the talk because the nice words of the UN is going to get involved there was a step further to develop an implementation strategy with a lot of input.  This is in Vienna in Austria last year, and coming out of that quite concrete actions were proposed.

So it's not just lines of actions, now specific actions.  And part of these are now the responsibility of particular actors.  And the idea is that each actor in its particular environment can do something there.  So particularly this plan of action is looking at some of the most rebel countries, South Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nepal.  And in those countries there has been national approach to bring to for the most part in most cases Government, UN, Civil Society, journalists, freelancers, police, so, you know, it's really a multi‑stakeholder approach.

There is also now, and I will come to the most important part of the presentation, in order to see if you are making a difference with the UN plan and it's big ambitions to mobilize society, you need a baseline to say, okay, we started this now a year later, did you make a difference because it's very complex, this thing.  So there are set indicators that have been developed and besides being implemented in these first five countries, three Latin American countries we have also started doing indicators.

This is what I will tell you about indicators, because indicators are trying to say how do you assess the level of safety in a society.  So how many journalists are killed, threatened?  How many of the attackers are brought to book.  How many collaboration is there are how many joint events are there, joint statements are there, so on, for the whole society?  And then for the UN, is the UN monitoring this problem?  Is it coordinating amongst itself?  Is it training, whether training prosecutors or training journalists.  Is it promoting the normative view that it's unacceptable to attack a journalist?

State institutions, you can see it kind of indicates if you look there, that includes indicators or the political actors, political parties taking a stand on this issue.  When a journalist is killed, does the Government speak up and condemn this?  So these are the indicators we start measuring, and we hope after a year or two years we can see improvement of that.

Civil Society organizations and academia, what's the state of pay in those areas and now we come to interesting things for this session and IGF.  Media organizations, that is the companies themselves, the unions and the associations, the actual practitioners, and the coverage of safety because unfortunately the media itself is very short term oriented in terms of safety, there is poor follow‑up of safety stories.  In the indicators it says that all media actors should be promoting safety in digital communications.  So the sub indicators here are journalist as wear of digital dangers and how to protect themselves?

Are journalists effectively using the protection?  Are there opportunities and others being taken up for journalists to learn about encryption?  And are employers and others providing the kind of back up that is needed for journalists to practice digital safety.  Then we come to intermediaries like Google, not to single out Google, but the search engines, the social networks, all of these domain name registries, so on, they all have increasing potential to play a role in safety.

So part of the indicators to say do the intermediaries with respect journalism safety.  Do they have secure facilities that protect journalists' data from hackers, do they have clear and transparent and proportionate transparencies about releasing duties to enforcement authorities.  Do they report periodically on these questions?  Do they have data protection policies to entitle their clients to access what data is about them and track third party engagement of the data?

So I will wind up now, to make this thing a bit more the world frees freedom day in UNESCO, more than 100 countries are having events.  These are some of the Tweets this year.  People raise that the world press freedom, that the antipress freedom actors are becoming increasingly skilled and digitally posing as journalists to try to persuade journalists to give sources to betray their identities and so on.

This was another Tweet that came out that said anybody can be tracked.  The net is none anonymous.  Digital risks can become physical threats which indeed has happened in Mexico.  Properly responsibility, the UN special Rapporteur for freedom of expression, he said corporate responsibility should not be selling to states.

These are some Tweets that were done, some cartoons done around world press freedom day which makes the point about safety.  So one of the speakers at world press freedom day event, she said that citizen journalist bloggers are particularly vulnerable in Mexico.  Only two Mexico's after follow up killings.  Social media is becoming outlet.  Social media shows not in the best source of information, but four producers were killed, two were decapitated.  Here is one of the difficulties.  You as a journalist may not put information on Facebook but what you are doing and where you are going, but your friends and your cousins and your family might put that on line.

So it's extremely complex.  The last Tweet here is if you think you have nothing to hide on line, it doesn't mean that you and your networks are not of interest to somebody now or some day.  So for sources of journalists, this is a key thing.  So that's it.  There is more information about the UN plan of action on the UNESCO website.  You can search it or you can look at that address there.  And ultimately, the safety of journalists is a barometer of if it's safe for society to speak and for society to use social media, particularly in a public way with public interest.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you very much.  Very exhaustive representation of the, what the UN action plan means and the concrete consequence on that on the daily work of journalists.  Matthius, can I ask you to present the Austrian initiative and saying other things?  Matthias represents the Austrian Government.

>> MATTHIAS TRAIMER:  My name is Matthias Traimer.  I'm from Austria, Vienna.  I work in the federal chancellery, and I'm here also to explain to you what Europe is especially doing in this context.  I thought Jacima would say Matthias, may I ask you to be brief because time is running out.  You didn't say so because you are polite moderator but I will be brief any way.

I was thinking one would have the first part in the session today, how will I then really turn the corner from the business models to the safety of journalists and so on, but thanks to Guy it was already done.  And nonetheless, I want to speak very briefly because both our concert of Europe topics, both on the safety aspect but also on the question of the media actors, who are not these traditional journalists, very, very briefly.

As it was already mentioned not only my Government, but UNESCO, of course, and the Council of Europe has a priority topic, political priority topic the safety of journalists and other media actors.  Europe is absolutely not a field where journalists can be, can feel safe.  Also in Europe, journalists are intimidated, harassed, deprived of the liberty physical attacks and much more.

When I speak of Europe, I speak 47 Member States of the Council of Europe.  What has happened was that apart from the Austrian initiative in the UN Human Rights Council, also in the Council of Europe, we are now because the Austrian presidency will start in the Committee of Ministers on 13 November, 2013, so very soon, we will also continue to go on with this topic.  What do we see as really the big challenges?  It's the question of impunity.

So I don't know how much you are aware, but impunity means really to state, maybe it does not intervene in freedom of expression or at least he claims not to intervene.  So it says, well, do what you want, but impunity means that when there are attacks on journalists by the police but also by privates there is no reaction of the state.

So this is still an old research where it shows that one of the biggest problems worldwide that there is not enough work done by states being on the legal side, but being also on the non‑legal side, being in maybe also the education of people and the importance of the freedom of the press and so on.

So impunity, one of the central topics, and the Council of Europe is also very much, of course, based work on because it's part of the Council of Europe on the European Human Rights.  The European Human Rights especially speaks about the positive obligation the state has to protect journalists.

And we have found also in the special steering committee, I and the Council of Europe that what does this possible gages really mean, this positive obligation.  It's one of the central focuses we must also have in future, is that you can just have an idea what is meant by this positive obligation.  It's, for example, of course, the state has to create real protection for the sources of journalism.

So they do not have to disclose their information sources and so on, but there is much more in the positive obligations field because the court literally says that the states have the duty to create a favorable environment for journalists on the one hand, but also for participation in public debate for all persons.

This does not happen in many cases.  I have spoken about the intimidation and now back to those who are the persons concerned.  On the one hand, of course, the classic journalist, and the media and so on.  That's why it's so important, of course, that also EDU, for example, is having a look at this and says, well, our fellow journalists in the world are really under big, big danger.

But it's to my mind also, and, therefore, I'm very grateful also how this discussion here was prepared and is going on what UNESCO is doing about the council of ‑‑ what the Council of Europe is doing.  We must really have more intensive debate on the role of the bloggers of let's say us people who really bring contributions to public debate.

The problem is, in my mind, that politicians, that governments are very reluctant still in many parts of the world to speak about the non‑professional journalists, about those who shape public opinion.  Without those people, for example, the Arab spring wouldn't have happened in such a way for the benefit of some, not for the benefit of others.  But I think the topic really to include those who are really shaping public opinion and who are not journalists, but are media act is one of the big, big tasks of IGF sure.

Bloggers should be sure that their ideas to really participate and not to be let's say shut up in their opinion by Governments, find a place here also here in IGF, and we talk about the incidents that are happening.  Last point I will say is will be very interesting how the European code on Human Rights will continue to deal with this question of persons shaping public opinion.  As you may have heard or you may be even aware that, of course, there are very, very strict and there is very little space for states when it comes to restrictions of people who are shaping public debate, be it politicians, journalists, so on.

And I think the discussion, who is a journalist, who is a media actor, can be based on much what the court has already said because he looks very concrete in a concrete situation.  Who is the author of, is it, for example, a blogger who just blogs normally today the weather is fine, today its hot or I hate going to this or this shop, or is it a blogger who has meanwhile taken on public debate for a long time, and the people are expecting also something from him.  So it is very, it will depend very much on the offer and on the public expectation.  So I see a big task also for the future of IGF, for the future of our common work here in the multi‑stakeholder approach.  There is an in depth look of the situation of journalists on the one hand and text journalists, but also on other media actors, and Council of Europe to just underline this, will continue to be solid and reliable basis for discussions as regards the protection of journalists, but also the development of media freedom and we all invite you really to cooperate with Council of Europe, the governmental organisation for several years, meanwhile the 47 Member States have said we are ready for the multi‑stakeholder approach, and we do standard setting and so on in close connection with non‑state actors.  Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you, Matthias.  So one of the solutions could be on eBay to put sort of a reputation of the seller of the information.  That's interesting model to discuss.  And you probably could bring some ideas for the next IGF.  We are at the end of the panelists' presentation because there are people that are still with us in the room, I think that we deserve them to give the rights to have some questions.  Very short, because unfortunately we lost 20 minutes at the beginning of the session for technical reasons.  Can we have a mic over there? 

>> Thank you.  Very quickly, this is for the gentleman from the UN, you mentioned about, you know, digital footprints are perpetually on line and one of the things that we have been raising at the ITU is the right to be forgotten.  So how do we intend to address that?  Because no Government and not even many of our own companies like Google is here or Facebook, how does a company implement or can Governments make policy for the right to be forgotten, your views on that?

>> You know, I think it depends to some extent what you mean when you say right to be forgotten, I don't mean you personally, because there are different interpretations about is it a form of the right to privacy and how extensive is it and is it a time based right, and then if it's a subsection of privacy, what constitutes a violation of it?  So it's a complex issue.  I think it's still early days.  I know in Europe, the Europe commission I think was recently debating this very issue, but it's something that I think the UN system hasn't yet come to grips with as a debate.

>> As a compliment of information, the Association of the Privacy Guarantors in Europe is investigating on that and they have opened already some proceedings in various countries, so I think that there will be some developments at least in Europe.  Then the problem is, make this applicable in other parts of the world, so even in Europe.  Google have a view on that?  No.

>> Maybe we can add that within the European Union you are certainly aware of the data protection framework as such is now under complete new review, and especially also there as regards new regulation and so the right to be forgotten is one of the questions because data protection people often tell you, explain to you, you have it all already.  You have it already in the data framework, because, for example, the right to delete, but it's not that what you gentlemen, I think are talking of.  If we need more, and that is also in the Internet Governance strategy of the Council of Europe, one of the topics when we talk about users' rights, we will come back to that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, I want to talk about that when we talk about users rights an the work of the Council of Europe we will come back to that and maybe you can also join this workshop and ask again about this question.  Thank you.

>> Thank you.

>> MODERATOR:  Thank you.  Any other brave person that want to make a question?  Okay.

>> I think it gets colder and colder at least here.  So before we are froze, I think we should come to an end.

>> MODERATOR:  A way to push out of the room.  So thank you, everybody, for participating and attending this debate.  I think it was interesting and I think that we have interesting reflection to make, and Guy has all he needs for making his report tomorrow.

>> GUY BERGER:  If anybody wishes to discuss further with the panelists, please button hole us because I'm sure any of us would appreciate feedback.  So tell us.

  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR:  And if you can give the Web address of where we can see the story that you were telling before we will put in the report as an example.  Thank you very much.

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