The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin, Germany, from 25 to 29 November 2019. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone. We will start in one minute. Please have a seat. Okay. Good morning, everyone. We welcome you to attend this forum. The forum is hosted by China Ministries of Cyberspace. Key policy questions and expectations will be discussed around what are the problems and the challenges of online protection of underage users and sharing the experiences and practices of online protection of underage users and how to use the laws and policies to strengthen the online protection of underage users. I'm from the China Cyber Law Society and also from the Institute of Law, China Academy of Social Sciences. I'm very glad to be here.
I want to introduce the five speakers, and first is Jasmina Byrne, the chief of policy, Office of Global insight and policy, United Nations Children's Fund, welcome you. Her speech is around online and offline protection.
The second speaker today is Professor Zhang Jiyu. She's the Executive Dean of Future Rule of Law Institute, Renmin University based in Beijing, China. Her topic is underage user protection and positive guidance.
The third speaker is the Professor Bernd Holznagel. He's a professor of University of Munster. He will talk about the protection of minors in media law.
The fourth speaker is Dr. Wang Lei, the secretary‑general of Sina Internet Law Institute. He will talk about the challenge of children's information protection from the perspective of comparative law.
The last speaker is Dr. He Bo. He's the researcher of China Academy of Communication and Technology. He'll talk about how to strengthen the protection of underage users in cyberspace.
I think each speaker can speak about ten minutes. We have time limits to leave some time to discuss, ten minutes.
Okay. Now we welcome Miss Jasmina.
>> JASMINA BYRNE: Thank you so much. Thank you to the Cyberspace Administration of China for inviting me to speak this morning. I may be actually shorter than ten minutes, which may leave us some time for discussion as well.
I just want to say a few words about the online and offline nexus and protection of children. We know ‑‑ we all know that with increased access to the Internet, social media platforms, online games children are encountering new forms of risk from violence and abuse that did not exist before the Internet. However, these risks are not brought about only by the Internet nor they exist independently of online risks and offline abuse. When children are harmed ‑‑ children can be harmed by those that they do not know and who they meet for the first time online, evidence shows that most online violence is actually perpetrated by those who are known to the child. Friends and peers, relatives and careers. I'll give you a few examples.
The worst forms of child abuse online, such as child sexual abuse images, involves both those who use, share and store such images and those who commit offenses against children in real life. Child abuse images that are circulated through online media often depict very young children who do not even have access to the Internet and whose careers commit abuse in real life.
Recent "New York Times" articles shocked us all by showing how many of such images are still being circulated on the net. Often very young children and babies are being abused in most horrific ways. Statistics from the center of missing and exploited children show that some 25 million child abuse images are reviewed annually, and the overwhelming number of these images, about 75% of them, are of children below the age of 12.
Furthermore, the behavior analysis unit of the FBI found that about 38% of cases involved dual or multiple forms of abuse of children by perpetrators who possess those images that were undertaken offline and online as well.
When we talk about the older children, adolescent children, for example, who fall victim to grooming, to predators online and people that they encounter online, we also need to think about what makes these children particularly vulnerable to fall victim to those predators, and why some children fall victim and some do not. Are some children particularly vulnerable because of their online behavior? Does online behavior have something to do with the offline world? For example, isolation, lack of support and family networks, mental health issues, loneliness.
Researchers argue that some children are more at risk than others. For example, those who have been abused previously, children from LBGTQ communities, children who frequent chat rooms or engage in more risky online and real world behaviors. When it comes to peer‑to‑peer violence or violence of children against children, when we asked children, they often complain about hate speech, bullying and harassment.
I'm not going to give you any statistics right now because tomorrow my colleagues from UNICEF and the school of economics launch the global kids online study that will share more data and insight about what kind of harm children experience online when they use the Internet. What do we know about the reasons behind such behavior? Does it happen because children use Internet ‑‑ because of their use of Internet, or is this behavior grounded in lack of tolerance, empathy and civility that exists offline but mirrored in the online environment?
In each of these cases, we need to ask ourselves, are we as adults doing enough to make sure that children's environment offline and online is safe, and what role do we have to play to model appropriate behavior? That means that we need to have adequate child protection laws that are enforced, existence of prevention and support services to prevent violence before it happens, and offer rehabilitation services for victims when it happens, and that all actors in society, government and the business sector alike, are doing their best to make children's environments safe.
There's a lot of emphasis and talk about the role of parents in supporting their children's reasonable and safe use of Internet. Parenting mediation practices are most effective when grounded in values and principles of positive parenting in general that foster open communication and trust. One of my favorite studies is a study from 2007 from WHO that examines parental roles and responsibilities of adolescent children.
This study emphasizes five critical roles. Love and connection, protection and provision, modeling of appropriate behavior, monitoring and supervision and respect for individuality. These values can be easily translated into the online world as well.
In practice, what it means is that parents need to be good role models in their own use of digital platforms. They need to establish connection and trust so problems children encounter online are discussed openly.
They need to enable ‑‑ undertake enabling a nonrestrictive monitoring of Internet use. Provide children with adequate resources to use the Internet safely and responsibly, and above all, to respect child individuality to allow them to develop a healthy sense of self apart from his or her parents.
So in conclusion, only purely online solutions to online violence won't be effective if we don't address offline causes of violence and develop measures that address children's lives, circumstances, contexts, availability of support networks and broader family and child support services. In UNICEF we see these as interconnected, and our work on protecting children online is part of our broader work on violence prevention, but also on work with the government and the tech industry to uphold standards and values and the U.N. convention on rights of the child.
Coincidentally this year and month we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the convention on the rights of the child. So several of my colleagues can give more examples about how we work with parents, educators, businesses, governments and children including my colleague from UNICEF China.
Finally, I'd like to say that we need greater evidence and understanding of this interplay between offline and online violence and the causes to that we can offer better and contextualized responses and understand how each of the actors I mentioned earlier can contribute to child safety online. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I totally agree with you that when we want to fix out the problems in Internet, we should find out the root cause, whether it's online or offline. If it's online, we need to find it out. Online means we should work on offline measures.
Okay. So next will be professor Zhang Jiyu.
>> ZHANG JIYU: Thank you very much. I'm from the Law School of Renmin University in China and also from law and technology. It's my first time to attend the IGF, and I'm really excited to have a chance to share with you some of my ideas of online protection of underage users. I can see this is material I gathered here from the forum.
We can see there are children standing in the forest, and they're wearing virtual reality glasses to observe the nature, observe the world and get information from cyberspace in addition to the information of the real space. So our children are really growing up in a digitalized world.
They're active users of Internet and digital technologies. The thinking, interacting and learning and socializing in cyberspace so that we should really pay attention to the impact.
According to the China statistical report on Internet development released by the China Internet Network Information Center in 2019, there are almost ‑‑ I think the number of Chinese under the age of 19, and the total number is about 178 million. So that's a huge number.
We can really pay attention to the impact on children skills and development from the cyberspace. We see that children of this generation are more independent from parents and teachers, and they're relying more on the Internet and peers to get support than the earlier generations. For example, my generation.
We can see the Internet and the cyberspace is really amazing. It may have negative impacts on children. We see many examples of teenagers heavily addicted to online games and even dropped out of school.
We also see examples of teenagers committing serious crimes under the influence of online violence and gambling and drugs. We also see many examples of teenagers committing suicide and lost their young lives due to people taking their personal information.
So we see with this problems, of course, it's unwise to completely block children from the Internet, because their future is just to live in a digitalized world, and they should be familiar with the cyberspace and they should know how to take advantage, how to better use the cyberspace. So it is the responsibility of the society to create healthy and beneficial cyberspace to our children. It's, of course, a difficult task.
I see there is a basic framework to be discussed now which will provide some kind of merit to identify the children on the Internet, and then for the children we should control the negative impact and also promote the positive guidance. The verification is there now, but the network platforms are taking them.
They try to identify children, but ID numbers can be easily faked. Then the platforms, some big platforms have exercised the public security authority database to verify the ID numbers. The children can easily borrow ID cards and numbers from their parents and other adults. So it doesn't work well, too.
So some platforms are thinking about performing, for example, face recognition testing on adults' accounts, which is suspected to be of minors. This, of course, may be more effective but also brings some issues to be discussed and started. For example, the issues of the potential conflicts with personal information protection.
I think many people think there are trustworthy restrictions on the storage and uses of the related data, it might be a way to identify children online. Of course, it's not enough, and so we should also strengthen the regulation of the physical places and the equipment.
First off, in kindergarten and primary schools and middle schools they should set up filtering and monitoring software for minors on the network devices and to better protect them. For public places such as Internet cafes, we think it might be necessary to strengthen the supervision for the minors there.
There are some criminal cases involving minors and the Internet in China, which was in 2017, more than 60% of the cases are in Internet cafes and more than 20% of the cases the juvenile defendants are acquainted with their accomplices or the victims in the Internet cafes. So we think it may be a good reason to strengthen the supervisions there.
Of course, we should provide more terminals for minors to simply get online, so we should promote more public network terminals for minors for the children in a more secure and controllable places such as public libraries to facilitate the access of minors to use the network information for them to be familiar with the cyberspace.
So after the identifications, we show the negative impact and not talk time about it.
Just some examples. For example, the management of online games stipulates that online game business units should adapt technical measures to prohibit minors from exercises inappropriate games against each other and limit the gaming time of minors, prevent minors from being addicted to the Internet. Also the regulations on network protection of children's personal information, which took it this year. Also, we found some regulations, and I see another speaker will talk more about it.
I want to stress here that the negative impacts, we should also do a lot of research on how to promote the positive guidance. After all, cyberspace is a place that children are very interested into, and they can get many impacts from there. The China children protection law they want research and development of Internet context which is conducive to the healthy growth of minors.
On this topic there is still a lot to do and their still considerable different opinions regarding the potential effect of technology, especially IT technology on child development. We see the cyberspace is really attracting, but it may not be on the education of children.
There's an interesting book called (?) written by a famous writer Maximus. He found many research labs of the industry where they pay more attention on how to make the food more attractive to people rather than how to make the food more healthy to ‑‑ to make people more healthy. So it implies that sometimes the goal of the business is not aligned to the public interest, public value. So it is the government and also the academic responsibility to figure out what we want children to have with the cyberspace and the IT technologies.
So I think there are already many conflicts about the added technology and the tradition culture. For example, in traditional Chinese culture we believe many activities for children should contain some good qualities and abilities that the society cherished. For example, many parents in China and I think in some other countries, too, will let their children practice calligraphy.
It's not just about to let them have beautiful handwritings. It's more about to let them cultivate some good abilities and good personal characters.
For example, we believe they can be more respectful and they can practice learning how to calm down, how to concentrate and how to know better of the philosophical concepts of some traditional Chinese culture. So we see that these kind of practices and these kind of activities believes it will be beneficial to children's personal character cultivation and the development.
So I think it is time that we should really ask, what can kind of abilities and personal character we want our children to cultivate from using products and the cyberspace. Then when we figure it out, we should ask how to better achieve that. So my speech, and thank you very much for listening. Thanks.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you, Professor Jiyu. That's very useful for restricting the online user protection especially in China. Also, the balanced solution on the ground of China's philosophical views. Thank you.
Next is professional Bernd.
>> BERND HOLZNAGEL: Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm professor of law in Germany and doing research on constitutional law and information law, Internet law, media law and so on. So I try to discussion more the legal issues or the governmental issues, the government issues because Germany has an interesting approach of governance of the Internet in this field, in youth protection. There are the European law, so the EU member states are forced to set up a legal scheme to protect minors, and each state has discretion how to do it.
The provisions of the law are not very strict in this sense, and what Germany did and this is now in place for more than ten years is to develop a legal scheme that covers broadcasting, so TV and radio as well as Internet. That is, by the way, the only field where this is taking place, because usually if you look at advertisement rules, the TV and radio has much higher standards than in the Internet. If it comes to youth protection, the standards are similar.
And how do we do it? There is three‑level protection scheme that is in general also used in other European countries like Great Britain and so on. And these three levels are ‑‑ there is a category of content that is specifically dangerous, and that is completely prohibited.
Then there are ‑‑ there is seriously harmful content that is mostly illegal. I come to this in more detail soon. There is fairly harmful content. That is what you just mentioned. Content that especially or women groups in Bavaria think the use should be protected from. This is the category which is mostly disputed, I think, in Bavaria the rules are more strict than in Berlin if it comes to show nude pictures or whatever.
So this category is always very much culturally driven. Where there is clear consensus is basically about the content that is strictly illegal. That is first and foremost child pornography. In Germany we are also very strict if it comes to Nazi content. This is basically denial of the Holocaust and these things is just a no go. If you see this in the Internet ‑‑ okay. I've never seen it in TV or radio, it will be immediately ‑‑ you will immediately have the police coming to your home, and you are about to go to jail. That's just something you don't do. I think this is the area it's not worth to discuss it, because the consensus is extremely broad in Germany. You can dispute this denial of the Holocaust. It varies to tradition.
Second category is where you have seriously harmful content that, for example, pornography and acts of violence. In this category you have the problem that you have to balance the youth protection interest with the interest of the adults to have a freedom of information. That is a constitutional issue, and in Germany at least you cannot say that adults have no access to normal pornography. But you cannot send or transmit pornography, let's say, on the airwaves in the TV, and in theory you're not allowed to transmit pornography via the web.
In theory, the idea is that adults should have access to pornography, but only in close user shops after examination of the age and the specific authentication process. In TV it's done, as you know, by a very complex PIN code system, and I don't talk about the Internet because there is like a huge implementation gap of all of this. This is probably one of the dark sides of the web.
The third level is this content that is fairly harmful but nobody really knows what this is.
That varies in Germany from province to province, and if you go to the north of Europe, it's much more ‑‑ they are much more tolerant than in Italy or in Spain. So the general idea is that there are age ratings, and that you just give access in a different way. People who are 18 can see more than people that are 16 and who are 12.
You know the system, I think, almost everywhere because this rating system is also used by cinema and movies by the film industry. It is, again, very difficult how to judge this constitutionally. One could argue that this clause itself is unconstitutional because there is broad language used, and here you have the problem of how to balance freedom of speech with youth protections.
That is very hard to answer on a general level. Basically it has to be done on a case‑by‑case level, and then you have to balance both rights, the rights of the children and freedom of speech.
In Germany the final decision will be made by the courts and controlled by the constitutional court so that freedom of speech will be valued importantly. That is the third level.
This is, by the way, not very much disputed. I looked up the cases that came up to the administration or to the courts. The system works. There is not so much resistance against these constitutional issues. They're important, but they are in practice not a hot potato.
Now, I just have two more things to say. Now we have a new EU directive, which is now making the video‑sharing platform providers liable. So as you know, Internet companies like YouTube or Facebook are in general just liable after in Europe and notice and have a takedown procedure. You tell Facebook here is illegal content, pornography. If they know it, they have to prove, and they will send the managers to jail in very hard cases, yeah.
The idea is then you go to the company, Facebook is just one example, it could be a German one, too, and saying this is now illegal, and if you don't take it out, you're liable. In the first step these companies are very, very much protected because they're not liable for content of third parties, and they don't have to look for that bad and illegal content. That is changing.
In this area of youth protection, they have now taken appropriate measures to protect the youth, the platform providers, and that's a new paradigm in youth protection law. I'm very curious of the German legislators, how they will implement this. It's open. I don't know. I don't even know the builds.
Last point, because government is now so discussed in the Internet field, Germany actually took a very, very interesting approach traditionally actually. We used it in broadcasting. All this content control in the youth protection area is traditionally done by self‑regulatory bodies, basically the industry. That is the same in Britain, for example, because they do also the age rating for movies in the cinema, for films in the cinema. So they have a lot of experience, so the government system works as follows.
Industry forms self‑regulatory bodies for the Internet as well, and if there are problems this self‑regulatory body has to make the first decision and only if you have very severe cases, extreme cases, let's say 1 out of 100, the formal state agency that is responsible for youth protection will step in.
So in practice, basically the majority of cases is done by these self‑regulatory cases, and they are somehow supervised by basically it's our broadcasting authorities even in the Internet field, so there's independent regularities like the American FCC. If they find that they are not doing a good job, then they step in, or if somebody sues and forcing the agency to look at these cases more closely.
So in general I looked up the cases that are dealt with our independent regulators. I think they are just 300 cases per year, so it's not so much. Germany has 80 million people.
This area is heavily disputed, and it's not so much than I expected, yeah, because I didn't look up the statistics for a while, and then I thought, wow. But in general if you look up the literature or look in the news, this whole system works now for ten years, and I haven't heard any fundamental criticism on this. Thank you very much.
( Applause )
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Professor Bernd. You gave us a very specific introduction of the three‑level protection of underage in Germany.
I think it's very useful. Let's go to the next speaker, Dr. Wang, please take the floor.
>> WANG LEI: Thank you. I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to participate in this forum and talk about the protection on the Internet and personal information especially the children's personal information.
My presentation is about the challenge and the measure of children's personal information, protection from the perspective of comparative law. This is the introduction. Before the development of the Internet, children living in the environment was mainly concentrated in family and schools, but with the popularity of network technology and the mobile smart devices, more and more children are beginning to use the Internet.
According to a report on children from the United Nations, in 2017 one‑third of the world's Internet users are children. More than 175,000 children worldwide access the Internet for the first time ever. That's an average of one child per second.
The order of the networking environment is based on the responsibilities and the general situation that now includes a space with differentiation treatment mechanisms, so it's posed a great risk to protection of children's personal information. And my presentation is divided in four parts.
The first one is about the necessity of the protection of children's personal online information, and the second one is a compilation of children's information in the system among the United States, China and the European Union and the common problems this children's information protection system in different countries. The last one is about the legislation in China, children's personal information network protections and regulations.
Here is the children's personal regulation in China. Like the mobile account like Facebook, we have some information like the preference, social network and the background on some others and by registering an application of the account. About the protection of the children's in the system, we have the United States. The example in the United States is the (?) and the scope of application of websites or online service operators for children.
Children refer to minors and their age of 13, and the two categories are (?) Here is some specific regulations as follows. It's also required when the website or online service is not intended for children but actually knows that personal information is being collected or maintained from children. This one is about the similar legislation in China.
On May 31st, children's personal information network regulation draft for comment is published and, on August 22nd children's personal information network protection regulation is published. The regulations apply to activities such as collecting, starring, using or transferring and disclosing personal information of children through the Internet of the people's republic of China and the children refer to minors under the age of 14.
About the compliance of requirements for the network like this, they need to look at the rules and parents rise to review and reject some others. That's here. And in China we also have some of the requirements for network operators like the regulation in China adhered to the principle of the network safety of personal information protection requirements. That's a voluntary standard and the personal information standard of the information on security for technology in the children's personal information that belongs to the sensitive personal information.
Here are some ways to obtain parental content in the United States and in China. In China the regulation in China adhere to the principle of the network safety personal information protection requirements.
In addition, the provisions also further on the basis of security technology and personal information standard mainly including network operators are required to set up special protection rules. The person in charge specifies the scope of the matter to be informed to the guardian, and often the expressed consent of the guardian and the refusal option.
Here is the GDPR in EU also gives that gives a special provision on children's information protection. It has the digital age and refers to the (?) of a child to give consent and authorize others to possess personal data and search that. GDPR has information protection that's about to rise to be forgotten, and about the automatic possession of children's data is prohibited.
About comparing the legislative about the United States, Europe and China. They also have some common problems about the children's information protection system. The first one is reducing the experience of children's online service and the continuing discrimination against the children users.
Like the new rules and the comments about Google under this, they decided they define personal information about children too broadly will limit the ability of operators to maintain and develop children's projects. Then the second environment is the common problems that are the high social cost of identifying children's age and opting guidance and consent because it's very difficult to the practice and the driving network of readers who deny services to children allow them to lie about their age like some children use their Internet to lie about their age.
The problem leads to extensive data collection and significantly increasing reasonable social cost. The third one is about the platform's responsibility and guiding the responsibility, because the guiding consensus is not (?) like the safe harbor and the security privacy authorization system of the United States and the authorization about the sharing of the platform responsibility.
Here is the ‑‑ some suggestions and some introduction about children's personal online information, how to protect in China.
Like us where I just said, the children's personal information network protects the regulations of China is the first domestic legislation for the protection of children's personal information, and in line with international standards, it (?) for children's personal information network protection.
It contains the (?) to protect children's information and give the Internet company six compliance requirements for how to deal with the children's information. Here is the six compliance requirements for the company. The first one is the children's information protection commissioner should be set in the Internet process, and they need to specialize the privacy protocol for the child and give the Internet access.
That's the assessment of the children's data. Some special provisions like the children's personal information shall not be disclosed except under (?) and the guiding of the child shall have the rights. In my opinion under the train of globalization of the economy, the Internet company like the (?) we should reexamine business practices and the Internet personal information security and build a best practice about the security and protection system. This is my presentation. Thank you for listening.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you for the comparative analysis with America, EU and China and also give us the common problems and suggestions. We'll go to our last speaker. Dr. He Bo.
>> HE BO: Thank you. Distinguished guests and ladies and gentlemen, very good morning. I'll be very brief. First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to appreciate our session organizer, cyberspace administration of China. I feel privileged to be invited to this forum to address you on this topic of working together to protect underage, underground users in cyberspace. This is a new experience, but I do believe that the topic we're discussing in this conference is very important.
The year 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the formation of the people's republic of China and it's the anniversary of the birth the Internet and the anniversary of China's connection to the world Internet. The Internet is changing the protection and life of human beings and driving social and economic development in the Internet so we can have less conflicts here.
Over the 25 years of rapid development, China has quickly become an Internet giant. Here I would elect to share some information about China's Internet achievement for the past 25 years.
Firstly, the network infrastructure is continuously upgraded. As you see from the report, that by June 2019, there are 396 million people receiving home service and accounting for 91 (?) users. At the same time China has more than 50,000 blocks of sixth and ranks first in the world.
Secondly, the number of users continues to increase. This year in China it reached 854 million, an increase of (?) from 2008. Also certainly we can see that digital economy in China is developing very rapidly, and China has promoted the application of the Internet in the facility especially for eCommerce and Internet service. It reached 31 trillion (?)accounting for 35% of the GDP. It's a new engine of economic growth.
In recent years with the rapid development of the Internet, the number of Chinese underage users is astounding, and the cyberspace is a new space for the protection of manners. According to a report from SINIC the number of underage users in China was 169 million and the Internet has rose to 93.7 persons, which is significantly higher than the Internet reach of the population during the same period.
At the same time, Chinese have more choices for Internet devices than over all the Internet users.
According to a new survey there are more than 92% using mobile phones and 48% use desktop computers and a number of people using TV and tablet to access Internet are higher than the Internet users. The development of the Internet provides infinite responsibilities for manners, but the protection of manners in cyberspace is not enough. We found that more than half of underage users were exposed to illegal information such as gambling, drugs as well when they went on the Internet. In addition there are also inappropriate environment of fighting and robbery.
So the list of illegal information on cyberspace needs attention. In the past few years, the Chinese government had attached a great importance on online protection of manners. According to the cybersecurity law adopted in 2016, the state supports the research and development of online products and services beneficial to mental health and punish the usage of network to engage in activities harming the physical or mental health of manners, which are providing a safe and healthy online environment for underage users.
This is the mission that on August 22nd of this year the CDC released the regulation on the protection of children's personal information online, and it went into effect on October 1st. This is the first legislation in China in the children's online protection, and it's very strict requirements for network operators if they connect, storage, use or transfer or disclose the personal information of manners and is 14 years out.
Meanwhile, China is highly concerned about the international cooperation. In 2017 under the guidance of the FCC China used the federation, UNICEF and ICT hold a special forum looking at the future of online protection of underage users. There are more than 100 government officers and scholars representative from organizations and Internet companies from all over the world to share the experience of online protection of underage users.
In closing, I believe that we have much of things to do for this important issue. The Internet has no boundaries. Online protection of underage users is a common thing around the world. It is a joint effort from all the stakeholders, here the government, enterprises, schools and families should take all important responsibility only with the cooperation of all parts to protect the minors as well. Thank you for your cooperation, and have a nice day.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you Dr. He Bo. We still have four and a half minutes. Any comments or any questions for our speakers? If you have any questions, please stand up and give a very short comment or question. Thank you. Okay, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Can I go ahead? Thank you. I have a question for the last presentation. By the way, I'm (?) from UNICEF. You presented the type of content that is deemed illegal and violence was one of them. I just wanted to, you know, have a little bit more detail on what type of violence that entails. Does it also include issues around child sexual abuse material and related content?
>> HE BO: Thank you for your question. I just found this data from a report online. If you want details later I can find out more details and will share with you. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Next.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from Aston University in Birmingham, UK. My question is for Professor Bernd Holznagel. You talked about what Germany does to protect children from exposure to pornography.
I wondered, it extending to websites that originate in Germany with the domain name. What can that do for sites that originate elsewhere in the U.S., for example, which is where most of the content actually comes from?
>> BERND HOLZNAGEL: I think this is more a question of implementation of the law. Maybe one is not strict enough to go against this. I'm ‑‑ maybe somebody has to sue against these sites and then just to prove what will happen. We always have the problem if you put content to sites and service outside of Europe because, as you know, the legal system is quite different. First of all, you have areas in the world where there is nothing more than the state or there is no power that controls these things.
Maybe they have other things to do because it's civil war and whatever, and then you have countries with a completely different legal system. There Europe can do something, too. I think that's how things work.
So I have not a real answer. If you really would like to go against this content, you have to use filters, but this is extremely problematic, too. I don't know. Are you aware of this debate we just have on using filters in the copyright world? You have seen how many problems and conflicts this caused, but if you ask me Frankly what I'm thinking, it's that probably this model protecting copyright law will be in the long run copied for, let's say, youth protection or protecting honesty, and that would mean that you use these devices in a controlled way and maybe that you also give law firms the possibility to go against this type of content and make out the business model.
This was, indeed, very efficient in Germany because when all these law firms started to go against infringement of copyright law, there was a tremendous reduction of this. Maybe it's not always the state or a Civil Society who can resolve problems and one has to think more innovative. This is from the constitutional point of view it's a very, very difficult situation. You always have to balance it and you have to make really clear what is your focus that you want to protect.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Our time is up. Thank you very much for attending. We have to come to the end of our discussion here, but if you have any further comments or questions, you can directly talk to the professor or other speakers. Thank you very much.
( Applause )