FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENT FOR ENHANCED
MULTISTAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
05 SEPTEMBER 2014
11:00
ROOM 10
DYNAMIC COALITION ON CORE INTERNET VALUES MEETING
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This is the the output of the realtime captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posed as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet values meeting at this IGF in Istanbul. With us we have a very, very illustrious panel that is joining us in this tiny room. But we will have a very interesting discussion, hopefully.
We will start from the left, from my left, with Adam Peake, from GLOCOM, representing the academic community.
Next to him we have David Cake, from an organisation called the Electronic Frontiers in Australia.
Next to him is Dr. Steve Crocker, the Chairman of the board of ICANN.
Then we will have Larry Strickling, who I think needs no introduction, the Assistant Secretary for Communication and Information at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Next, to my immediate left, is Vint Cerf, Dr. Vint Cerf, from Google, chief Internet evangelist.
Then to my right is Baroness Rennie Fritchie from Nomnet.
We have also Sivasubramanian M. Sivasubramanian M. is from the ISOC chapter in Chennai, India.
Desiree Miloshevic wears a large number of hats, Senior Advisor, Public Policy and International Affairs, ISOC and Afilias and a number of responsibilities.
And finally on the -- on my extreme right is Amy Stepenovich from Access Now.
So I understand that the format of the session is just going to be, since we have so many panelists, about a five-minute statement from each one of our panelists, to describe, really, what their organisations are doing to support the cause for preserving Internet values, and preserving all those core Internet values that help the Internet bring all that innovation throughout the recent years. And I think that -- and Dr. Crocker needs to leave the early. So you have the floor.
>> STEVE CROCKER: I seem to have been in error as to whether or not I had a competing obligation, sort of reminiscent of "I never make a mistake. I once thought I did, but I was wrong.” So I plan to stay unless something urgent comes up here.
On the preservation of core Internet values and what our organisation, ICANN is doing, I want to flip back to an earlier time, way before the formation of ICANN, and talk about openness in a particular way.
When Vint and I and several others began to work on the ARPANET, we -- quite naturally, not by careful thought so much, but just because it felt right, created part of an environment that got created, I should say, in which openness was very natural. And all of that led to the creation of the IEFT, the openness open architecture of the Internet. But when I look back we actually built in three layers into the process: An open architecture, which is a technical matter. And that made it possible for applications to be built by others who have not been there at the beginning, and did not need to ask permission going forward. And that has brought us many, many things, Skype and Ebay and Twitter and everything that -- good and bad, basically, that you'd want on the Net, Facebook.
But the other elements of openness were slightly more subtle. The initial setup documents that we created were distributed free of charge to everybody and it remains so continuously over the entire 45 year process. This has had a dramatic positive effect. It made it possible for individuals anywhere in the world to download the documents, read them, and come up to speed, and also to participate in the ongoing processes of creating more.
And the third kind of openness was the fact that all of the processes creating Protocols are open. The IETF has no restrictions on the membership. Anybody can join, join a mailing list, participate in a working group and so forth. Many years ago, there were statistics presented on the number of new people at each IETF meeting. And I recall the number was a stunningly high 37 percent. That's a very high ratio of new people coming to every meeting. The down side of that many new people is that there is a learning curve and a bit of an overhead to bring the people in. The upside is quite dramatic. It means that new people are entering, coming up to speed, and there is a vibrancy and process that is underway.
I use up my time with that and bring forward to the organisation that I'm now deeply enmeshed in, ICANN. And one of the questions that I think we want to look at at ICANN is to what extent are in fact new people joining the process? How open is the process not just in terms of our rules but in terms of the way it actually plays out? And I think that's one of the areas that we want to attend to, and give it some priority going forward.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Steve. We will take questions at the end. So we will bank them.
We will move to Adam Peake, with regards to the academic side of things. And you've been a member of the MAG. You've been involved in so many different pots. The IGF Secretariat. You must have a full view of the Internet ecosystem and where it's going.
>> ADAM PEAKE: I'm not sure of that. You mentioned academic. Usually I'm associated with Civil Society, but occasionally I have to teach some MBA courses. It's a small course in Japan. It's about 80 percent nonJapanese students. I begin that course by reading something I’ll read here and you'll probably recognize the original author.
He is saying -- and I'm talking to -- I will try. So, to go back, this is something that I introduced that course with, and it begins with the gentleman and it's Tim Berners-Lee. He said: 27 years ago, the inventors of the Internet designed an architecture, TCP/IP, which was very simple and general. Any computer can send a packet to any other computer. The network did not look inside the packets, which is the cleanness of that design, the strict independence of layers which allowed the Internet to grow and to be useful. He goes on to say, when 17 years ago, and now that is 25, 25 years ago, I designed the Web. I did not have to ask anyone's permission. And interestingly there, he does say I had to ask for port 80. So he had to go somewhere. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard today, to make the Web technology in turn a universal, neutral platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability or against any particular type of data.
Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me or Vint Cerf or their ISP or their cable company or their operating system provider or their Government or their hardware vendor. And these are principles that I believe in, and I think we're beginning to lose.
And when I talk to the students, that's what we build the course around. What are we losing? What do you want to retain? And it's very difficult. We have different ecosystems with applications, app services, whether it's Google Play or whether it's the Apple store and so on. And there is a whole range of issues around that.
But in that, I think Berners-Lee encapsulates what I want to obtain, the neutrality and the ability to innovate, the ability for speech. And the thing that does interest me, when he is talking about permissionless innovation here, he makes reference to that need to ask for port 80. So we have to recognize that there is critical Internet resources and that's where we come into all of those issues around ICANN. So I found that a useful statement to begin to try to get these young MBA students thinking about what the Internet was, is, and can be.
Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. Next is David Cake.
>>DAVID CAKE: Thank you. So Electronic Frontier Australia, we are one of a family of organisations not connected. There are other organisations around here. Electronic Finland, and so on. We are Civil Society organisations, and we generally describe ourselves as Internet civil rights organisations. And we spend a lot of time pushing for values like, you know, anti-censorship, privacy, other Civil rights, but we're not purely defined as a Civil rights organisation. Not only are we specific to the Internet, but -- and other sort of related communications technologies, but we specifically, in our charter, have as part of our goal to educate lawmakers about the Internet. And I think the organisations certainly at a time when various electronic frontiers were founded, 20 years ago, my organisation is 20 years old this year, the lawmakers were ignorant of that world. And many of them still are. So we see part of our role as actually to educate Government about what the core Internet values are. Now, the things that -- and why, you know, particular sorts of law or policy would be very inappropriate for the way the Internet works.
And Governments often, you know, do not understand the deep differences between, you know, a national Telco regime and the Internet, which is a very, very different model.
So sometimes those technical core Internet values, like -- that we should, for example, that we should be -- that we do the complicated stuff at the edges. And the networks would simply pass along the bits. That -- sometimes that does become very relevant to policy and that is the sort of way we can inform them. I like to hope that things like civil rights are not core Internet values but global values. But the interaction between the two can be a challenging area for many. And we do -- I think we do try hard to look at how the Internet works and the value, and the technical value, and the values of open processes that Steve talks about can best be translated into the world of policy.
That is sometimes complicated. The IETF famously has a maxim that we don't believe in kings, Presidents or voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code. When you translate that into the policy arena, we can't ignore kings and presidents, they are very much there. But we can try and bring those values of working with rough consensus and proven practical solutions that come from people who are actually working in the Internet world, and not, you know, it's simply theorizing about what it should be, into the policy process.
And of course we participate not only in our national level, but also at the -- within ICANN and other organisations, particularly Electronic Frontiers. I'm the Vice Chair of the GSO at the moment. That is part of trying to support policy processes that carry on those ideals of openness and consensus that built the Internet.
And it's a difficult -- we all -- I mean, the reason why we're all here is that translating those early values and processes into the world of global governance and policy is complicated. But of course it's part of the reason why so many of us are here is because it's very, very important to do so. And every organisation that is involved in that policy process has hope that we can keep the Internet values alive.
Thank you.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, David.
Next is going to be Larry Strickling.
>> LARRY STRICKLING: Thank you. And I just have to say at the outset, I feel totally inadequate sitting up here between two of my heroes, Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker. It's like who doesn't belong in this picture. But as the Government representative, obviously I think I want to focus my remarks on the role of Governments in this process. And this debate that we have been having from the beginning, in terms of whether Governments ought to be controlling Internet policy or whether we ought to continue as we have, putting our faith in the multistakeholder model of Internet governance, it's an important question. It's not a theoretical question, because the evidence is quite clear that the Governments that tend to support governmental control and Regulation of the Internet also tend to be the Governments that are most likely to censor content in their own countries and otherwise act in what many of us believe are repressive manners.
Freedom House has reported that I think of the countries that the WCIT in 2012 who supported more governmental Regulation, 65 percent of them regularly engage in censoring content. So it's more than just a nice theoretical debate about are Governments the right place to do this or do we want to rely on the multistakeholder process, because there are actual consequences to the answer to that question.
I think it goes without saying that the United States Government, from the start, has promoted and sought the expansion of support for the multistakeholder process. Over the last four and a half years while I've been part of the Government, we have worked hard to achieve this.
David mentioned that there is originally thought that there shouldn't be a role for kings and Presidents in this process. And in fact, if you go back and read the 1998 whitepaper from the Department of Commerce, the U.S. made that same assertion, that there was no role for Governments to participate in the management of the Domain Name System. Of course, the importance of the Internet, the growth of the Internet, has made that original premise just not a possibility any longer. But we still have the question of how to go about dealing with this conflict between Governments that want to exercise multi-lateral control over these resources versus having the entire community do it.
One of the things that we sought out early on in the United States Government, and you see this through our work on the Affirmation of Commitments and the actual work of the accountability and transparency review, teaches us that one of the issues Governments had was they felt they couldn't have their issues heard in a fair way here -- not here, but at ICANN. We're not ICANN today.
>> VINT CERF: But the same people. It feels that way.
>> LARRY STRICKLING: I know. It feels that way, so folks who followed that accountability process, they know that in 2010 a series of recommendations were made by that team to do more to formalize and tighten up the process by which Governments could give advice to the board. So on the one hand, the demand was made that if the Governments want to be heard, they have to work on a consensus basis and deliver consensus advice to the board, because up until that time advice to the board was quite diverse and more importantly, it didn't reach conclusions. Some Governments think this, and other Governments think that. And it went to the board, and what was the board supposed to do with that? So a strong recommendation to put more discipline on the GAC to work toward more consensus. But in return, when they reached consensus advice, we felt that there needed to be a more formal response from the board. It's envisioned in the bylaws. They make it clear that when there is consensus advice on a Public Policy matter from the GAC, the board has to respond. So when receiving this, the board has to have processes to deal with it. And you saw the expansion of the GTLD, a process by which the board took, what, 90 separate pieces of GAC advice and dealt with each one, item by item, in terms of agreeing to it, negotiating it, working it out. And now has put in place what I think is a pretty good process going forward, in terms of how to deal with it. So the idea that Governments could still claim that they weren't being heard at the GAC or ICANN, we felt was addressed in the first series of recommendations.
We have individual Governments who complain about outcomes at ICANN. Certainly the reaction of a handful of European States to the dot wine and dot vin situation. But the process still works in that regard. There was no ability for the GAC to reach consensus advice on the issues, because these were fundamentally complicated, controversial issues, for which there is not International unanimity of how to deal with the geographic indicators, outside the domain system much less within it. So many felt the system worked, but you still had countries complaining that they didn't feel that they got a fair shake and I think we will constantly have that.
Now I think as we move forward, our commitment to the multistakeholder process, I hope people feel, has been very concretely demonstrated by our announcement in March to transition out of our remaining role in terms of our stewardship of the IANA functions. And I do think that this is really putting our money where our mouth is, in terms of the United States support of the multistakeholder process. We're watching with great,almost amusement as the community takes this on. I think it's a real test of the community of the multistakeholder model and can they organise themselves? Can they focus on the important issues and get to consensus?
I think upon the successful completion of this, and I do expect a successful completion, this process will be much stronger for what the community is going through right now as they try to wrestle with all of the different issues that are emerging about how broad the analysis has to be and how they go about bringing together all the different interests of ICANN in one place on what is perhaps the most fundamental Question ICANN has had to face since its creation back in 1998.
We need to use the examples of success when we go to places like the International Telecommunication Union where we see these proposals from other Governments to increase multi-lateral control over the Internet. We need to continue to work country by country, and all of you as stakeholders need to work with your Governments to impress upon them the importance of supporting the multistakeholder model.
In that regard, the NETmundial conference in April we think was a tremendous step forward in terms of bringing countries from the developing world more into the ambit of the multistakeholder model, giving them a chance to observe it directly and to track their support for it. Certainly Brazil, I think, made tremendous progress in terms of hosting that and in terms of the principles that came out of that.
They know -- which they now enthusiastically support. So we need to continue to find ways to build on the NETmundial, work on the transition of the IANA functions to continue to build support and win this argument, once and for all, in terms of who should be controlling the Internet.
Thank you.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. And I recognize that Paul Wilson from AP Nick has joined us at the table. Right next to me is Vint Cerf.
>> VINT CERF: Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. We already heard a reprise of the most important properties of the network that I care greatly about. And I guess I should say that I'm trying to represent multiple parties here. I am here as the Chairman of ARIN, one of the five regional Internet registries, together we are a resource organisation, but I'm here as a Google person. That's an inescapable fact as well.
I'll try to respond to your question about what are my institutions doing to preserve the properties of the Internet that we deem to be important and single out which properties these different institutions are -- is that better?
Should I attach it to my left nostril?
So let me start out by mentioning how important low barriers to entry on to the Internet are. In the absence of low barriers, this makes it very difficult to spread broadly. And the barriers could be economic, they could be technical. They could be policy barriers, and I think all of us are interested in keeping those barriers as low as possible.
Google has been building high speed fiber networks, and we plan to do so in 34 different cities around the United States, trying to keep the costs low and the services high.
Another thing that is super important is end-to-end connectivity. When you get attached to the Internet, you should be able to reach any other termination point in the network. And one of the things that is needed for that is unique addressing. And the regional Internet registries, ERIN included, are responsible for making sure that they do -- the allocation of addresses -- that they do the allocation of addresses is unique to maintain the end-to-end connectivity.
Another property of this architecture is loose coupling. It's been articulated that it's important that the Internet Protocol layer be able to sit on top of a wide range of different technologies. And just as Tim said, the network, in particular, the Internet Protocol layer, doesn't know what the packets are carrying. In consequence, it opens up opportunities for a broad range of applications, since the network doesn't have to interpret the bits, other than to get them delivered to the appropriate place.
The NETmundial principles have been widely lauded and in some cases adopted. I'm going to abstract from them some specific freedoms, which I believe are fundamental to the utility of the network and one of them is to preserve the ability of its participants to speak, to assemble, and to have access to the information which they collectively have produced and wish to share. But privacy turns out to be a very important concept. And we're hearing a great deal about that.
But I'd like to also emphasize how important freedom from harm is in this environment. And we have to be honest that we are not free from harm in this Internet space, and we have to take steps, technical steps and political steps and other kinds of practical steps, to preserve people's safety in this environment. And that involves all the stakeholders. All of them have some shared responsibility for protecting the users of the Internet from harm.
Another thing which I think we have to take into account is that the network is what it is today because it actually has a commercial engine underneath it. In the absence of that commercial engine, you would not see anything like the wide distribution and penetration of the Internet. The tension here is how to keep that economic engine going without harming all of the properties of the Internet that we hold dear. And so this, too, is a big challenge.
So I think, Mr. Chairman, that I'll stop there and eagerly await questions and comments from the other panelists.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Vint.
>> BARONESS RENNIE FRITCHIE: I'd like to start by saying two things. First of all, if Larry feels he is between his heroes, I'm sitting at a table surrounded by enormously clever people, steeped in this sector and this industry. And that is not my background. I'm Chair of Nominet and that's why I'm here and I've been there four years. But my background is in governance. I was an ombudsman, a regulator of the Government. I chaired many boards. And so my first introduction to this world was when Tim, who everyone knows so well and I got to know when I was Chair of Southampton University, asked me to Chair the Web science research initiative, which was the predecessor to the Web Foundation and then the Web Institute. And so one of the most challenging jobs in my life has been to Chair a board with Tim Berners-Lee on it, and try to make him pay attention to governance matters. I feel I should have a medal. But I certainly learned about some of the important things. And then I came to Nominet, so it's from that background I talk to you.
The second thing I wanted to say is when you're asked to speak or contribute to an event like this, you have no sense of the room, the ambiance and all of those things, so you prepare for whatever. Since my background isn't so steeped, I haven't got headings that I can easily talk from. I've made notes so I hope you'll bear with me if I broadly stick to my notes, because then I know I'll be saying sensible things. So thank you for that.
Nominet is the operator of the dot UK domain registry and we also, having just got the gTLD, we just launched dot comerw and dot Wales focused on the UK that is sufficiently bilingual. We have been identified as an emergency back-end registry and providing support if it's needed to protect the Internet, should a user -- should a gTLD fail. So I fully subscribe to the principles that we have heard about and read about.
But I want to emphasize two other principles or values that I see as important, as enabling values to those that we have heard about. And these two are respect and responsibility.
First respect. To support our activity, Nominet worked with a clearly identified set of policies. It's important, because clear policy, if we don't have them, then it's hard to be consistent and fair to everyone. Of course to get there, we have to work closely with all stakeholders to identify the issues and how these issues will affect different people in different ways. We know we're never going to get full agreement about the way forward, unless it's the simplest of cases. But what is important is that we recognize the impact that a particular approach might have on particular stakeholders. And wherever possible, we need to look to mitigate any harm that we might cause. That is to respect the views of all stakeholders.
We can so often be limited in views of stakeholders from any organisation, putting them in a fixed box and describing them. That is those people.
I came across a quote which helps me continually refocus on keeping an open mind, and it's this, "Don't under estimate me. I know more than I say. I think more than I speak. And I notice more than you realise." I think that's a really important sentiment when we're thinking about paying attention to people we must respect.
I wasn't in Sao Paulo, but it's clear that one of the successes of NETmundial was the sense of respect between stakeholders. If we show respect to people, we then want to make an effort to understand their interests and their concerns. And we want to do it politely and thoughtfully and evidently. I mean, sometimes we'll agree to differ. But that's the heart of good policymaking. I might not agree with you, but you have the right to make your point.
Mutual respect suggests that we should all try to work together to find a way forward. Nominet has gone through a number of significant policy changes over the past few years and it has had to develop policies for the new Welsh community, the new TLD. It's not been easy to get there and some of the decisions we have had to make have been quite difficult. However, by endeavoring to enter into respectful dialog with our stakeholders, I think we found a useful framework that contributes to protecting Internet users and a good one for making predictable and understandable decisions on behalf of the industry and the domain name registrants.
We have a new agreement where we can respond to criminal behavior as an industry. The customer has a right to expect certain and clear standards of behavior. Internet users and domain name registrants and registrars and Nominet all benefit from this professional and respectful approach.
My last enabling value is responsibility. This is something that goes to the heart of Nominet's ethos. We want to make the Internet a force for good. It makes good business sense because we're promoting quality. Like or dislike the terminology, self-regulation or multistakeholder engagement, both of these terms imply that all stakeholders have to step up to the plate, that we all have to take responsibility. And that is not always easy. It means thinking outside the box.
A couple of examples in the UK. Responding to child abuse online, Nominet along with nearly all ISPs and search engines and other companies is a member of the foundation that is an industry led multistakeholder initiative aimed at acting quickly to remove illegal content or make it difficult to access. We agree to respond to requests for action from the IWF.
In addition to doing the right thing, we benefit as do all users of Nominet services from a better reputation. Our new registrar agreement allows us to take action when alerted by recognized law enforcement agencies about criminal activities. We will check each domain name before taking action.
In the case of child abuse of course we rely on the IWF, the expert agency, to make that decision.
I could go on and happily identify other policy areas where we adopted the position of good citizen as part of our recognition, but we need to behave responsibly and that we want to promote the culture of responsibility. What is clear to me, though, is that multistakeholder engagement is about partnerships. And partnership means that we must work together in the public interest, whether by providing technical services, like the emergency backend registry, or helping registries from Developing Countries make good policy decisions, or by making choices that help us protect our customers and citizens who visit dot UK websites. By respecting our partners and making sure they have every reason to respect us, we believe that we can show that the multistakeholder environment works.
Self-regulation and the multistakeholder approach are not easy options. But we can show that if we adopt them with respect and responsibility, we can achieve more than a huge amount of Regulation.
And I speak as the next regulator. I'd like to end with a poem by Natasha Yosefhas. It emphasizes our need to care and be responsible towards others. The poem is called "What am I? Somewhere between always giving to others and always keeping to myself, I stand. Somehow between only caring for others and only caring for me, I live. But when I'm only for others, I ask who will be for me? And when I'm only for me, then what am I?"
We must therefore I think be both respectful and responsible in our working together. Thank you very much.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you.
Next we have Desiree Miloshevic.
>> DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you for the invitation to be on this super star panel.
So it feels like rubbing corners of the table with the giants. I can thank you, Steve Crocker and Vint and everyone else who was involved in the development of the core Internet and technical values that is the real inspiration. But not only inspiration, it's the real goundation for the further societal development and the core values that have already been mentioned, such as permission, innovation, the open end -- the openness of the architecture, the openness of the processes. And the end-to-end principle where you can deliver packets without any discrimination, be it political or commercial, are all important core values.
But in addition to those, as well as openness and participation in the processes, something that the technical community institutions have practiced for more than a decade, I think I agree with what has been said earlier with Dave, actually, that our task today is really to maintain that openness and to see how we can translate those core values into the Public Policy making.
But I'd also like to add another core value, which I think is very easy to maybe forget, and that is trust that existed and that has been built, initially. And we can also thank, recognize persons like John Postell. So I'm not talking just about trust in the technical community and their competence to run the network, but I'm also speaking about personal and interpersonal trust that existed in the early academic community and to build and maintain the networks, and also I think the institutional trust is our next step, where we need to think how we can really best deliver that.
Because what it is about is about building lasting, a lasting cultural institutional bonds with the Internet communities around the world. And John Postell did an excellent job in doing that and I think we have a lot to learn.
So I'd say -- this is also one of the biggest developments that need to happen in the Internet. It's no longer a technology. It's really the ethics and the norms that we need to develop for the Internet. And I believe that is why we're all here.
I'll say maybe just one word wearing the ISOC hat. The Internet Society is the home of the organizational task force and we heard about the standards and the importance of allowing everyone to participate in those processes, and the inclusiveness of that openness as well, and we heard that from Steve. And I think we are trying to replicate on the level of equal footing and consulting of the interested parties when it comes to Public Policy making, and in the International fora as well. So the building of these long-lasting relationships between institutions and participants could really effectively moderate conflict and create the basis of -- for future trust.
The Internet Society could be also an example of the openness of its governance processes, because I think it's -- it should be also -- it could serve an example of how their Board of Trustees, for example, is elected. It has a huge representation of chapters around the world, more than 90 chapters in the world today can be represented on the board of the Internet Society. So there is this trusteeship theme that -- and the, you know, which stems out of the word trust. It's just a new notion that needs to be a little bit looked in and dived in -- looked in more deeply.
So I'll leave it at this point, and so we can have further discussion.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thanks very much. Next is Amy.
>> AMY STEPENOVICH: Hi. Thank you very much. And I feel a little bit -- as Deseriee said, in a room full of giants. I'm with a group called Access. It's very interesting to talk about preserving the way the Internet is today. And really built into Access' mission statement is not only to defend International human rights in a digital community, but to extend those rights. So we as an organisation, not only looking at preserving the Internet as it is today, but actually how to advance the Internet and advance core Internet values and human rights for the future. And what that looks like. So I think we have a bit of a bigger mission and maybe we're in over our heads in that.
So Access works under three main issue areas, trying to bridge the gap between advocacy, policy and technology. We have a very, very dynamic technology team that runs a 24/7 digital security help line. And that help line work feeds directly into our policy work and how we set our policy goals and what we work toward. One of those major policy projects that we have been working on for the last year, actually, almost exactly the last year, we’re about to celebrate the anniversary, is the International principles on the application of human rights to communication surveillance. That's the title. But these are what we're looking at, the human rights principles, as the core values of the Internet in our work.
We look at how you take traditional human rights considerations, and apply those to digital communities. And we came up with the 13 principles. And we work on them in very, very different means, to try to perpetuate those throughout the entire grounding of the Internet. So we believe these should be the under core, under current from governance to law enforcement, through technology, through economy online, that these should be kind of what everything is built upon.
So the funny thing is, when people start talking about how to balance social value the, like privacy, like Freedom of Expression, with the economy and with the need for surveillance, we actually think that you're not balancing them. Everything that you do should be grounded in principles of human rights, and then you build up from there, from a user perspective.
A few projects that we are working on. We launched moutlet.info. That website maps all existing agreements between countries to transfer our data back and forth between Governments and corporations. And we have a great map where you can look at all of the different agreements and see how they relate to one another and where the gaps are, which we think is very interesting, because there is an official process. And we're trying to highlight the need to reform that process by showing where it's not working. We also are working on an implementation guide for the principles. We think that talking about values and talking about human rights isn't enough. You have to look at how to apply them in very specific situations. What happens when a law enforcement officer goes to a Judge to ask for information about an individual? What should that process look like? So we are trying to take the very broad notions and drill them down into a specific set of steps.
Also, on the idea of application. We launched earlier this year a project called encrypt all the things. This is 7 steps. We thought if we put forward a baseline level of what companies should be doing to protect user information on the Internet, that we could almost peer pressure other companies into raising the bar on what they're doing to protect user data. So cybersecurity by the majority and how to protect user information online.
These are the 7 basic steps that we think need to be done. They are not exhaustive. They are not by any means putting them into place will not protect everything, but we think it's a good start so we can stop getting information from being stored in plain text, stop bad security practices from happening and more towards a more secure Internet that protects your rights through technology.
Finally, in a couple weeks, we're participating in a week of action in order to highlight the principles and highlight how Governments around the world are applying human rights and digital rights to the Internet, and how Governments and users are interacting. And so we are recognizing leaders around the world. And if anybody has an idea on this, I'm taking suggestions, who have really kind of epitomized and worked towards recognition of human rights principles on the Internet. And we're trying to give recognition not only to the people who worked positively in that direction but almost a shaming campaign against people who hurt the idea of Internet rights, the idea of digital rights and making sure that we're highlighting those people as well and saying this is not the direction we should be moving in, we need to go the other way.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you, Amy.
Next Paul Wilson. You weren't here at the beginning. The question was what your organisation and what each of our panelists organisation was doing to support the cause of preserving the Internet core values.
>> PAUL WILSON: Thanks very much. And sorry to be late. Sorry also to insert myself in the queue here, but I've been passed the baton. I'm from APNIC, which is the regional Internet address registry for the AP. So we are a member of the technical community. So-called. And I guess as I came in, I heard David Cake talking, and I tend to agree with him, not because he is an Australian. I tend to agree with fewer and fewer Australians these days, so it's nice. But the distinction between Internet principles and wider principles which aren’t -- really, I think you could argue that they are not intrinsic to the Internet itself. I don't want to draw a line on that and I don't want to extend any discussion of principles. But in terms of upholding technical principles that I'll talk about, I think we have got enough -- I've got enough work to do.
I think the technical community has enough work to do and challenging work to do. What defines the Internet, are features which are actually now so obvious and so ubiquitous that we really not only risk taking them for granted, we do take them for granted. The Internet happens to be a global point-to-point, end-to-end network, as Vint said. It's a network that is virtual. It has a loose coupling that Vint mentioned. It's a network-based on free and open standards at technical level. It's a network that, through its simplicity, provides -- has provided a very low barrier to entry. And behind each of these principles are technical features which really, you might think they come for free with the Internet, but there are all sorts of ways in which they could be eroded. And the sort of thing we need to think about is to what extent would we actually notice in ten years’ time, with the erosion of some of these principles.
The principles that we are talking about create the Internet and the Internet environment that supports permissionless evolution and innovation that supports a very low and ever lower barrier to entry and cost for users. It's a bit hard to know how, if ten years down the track we had started to lose those things, like innovation, how would we even know? And I think what we need to do to avoid that situation is really to understand what they are and why they're here and what it takes to support those principles.
Some of them actually are a little surprising. One of the features of the Internet is that at the network layer, it really is what people have often rudely referred to as a Dumb network. It does not have much happening at the network layer at all. It's lean and mean, if you'd like. But that is absolutely a feature and not a detriment. It's part of the vision that was involved with creating it.
Likewise, it is not a secure network at that level, either. And some people might say well, it should be. And I agree. Encrypt everything is a fantastic principle, but you don't want to have it happen at Internet layer. Can you imagine what might happen if we had a single monolithic encryption system underlying the Internet. What that would mean in terms of technology and policy and access and risks and authority.
It doesn't bear thinking about. So the Internet being a dumb and insecure network at the IP layer is absolutely a feature and these reflect principles that need to be appreciated and preserved.
Now, what are we doing? The IP addressing community is the -- the community of organisations that I'm a part of that provides addresses to the IP address users who are primarily network operators. And those network operators are generally commercial organisations, who are -- who are participating in an open and bottom-up manner to determine the policies in which IP addresses are being managed. I don't think you'd find that we have a set of strict principles behind the policy development process or the community processes. But I think the interesting thing is that the principles that I've mentioned are kind of observed by default. They are also supported actively in the mutual interest. The global point-to-point is something that is preserved at considerable cost as the Internet grow, and it's at cost to the ISPs who could allow fragmentation, who could have fragmentation that would create more efficient routing and switching and management for them.
But what we are actually doing is preserving the routability of the Internet as it exists, grows, and has so many more participants adding to the challenge of maintaining that.
And I think when we talk about fragmentation as we have done in this had conference, there is fragmentation at different levels. But the fragmentation at technical level and the avoidance of fragmentation through maintaining the end-to-end Internet model is one of the technical principles that I think does deserve to be recognized.
The maintenance of the -- and sustenance of the growth of the Internet or the thing that we call the Internet doesn't actually require IPv6. Because if we don't deploy IPv6, the thing we call the Internet will still be called the Internet. But it won't be the Internet that we take for granted today. It's a long way of saying that IPv6 is actually essential to maintaining what we call the Internet. You do not actually maintain the end-to-end and unfragmented model of the Internet unless every point on the Internet, every device can be addressed individually. We are at a stage where over the last ten years this is started to be lost. And that is at considerable cost of expense and management to ISPs. But the beauty of the magic of IPv6 will be, and this is something that the addressing community supports, it will be to restore the end-to-end model in a way to maintain and sustain it through a long future of Internet growth.
So these sort of technical aspects are definitely not all there is to maintaining the functional aspects of the Internet. The low barriers for entry do come from commercial concerns and policies and also, for instance, from competition policies which Governments maintain. And these -- so I'm not trying to say that technical community is sitting here alone preserving these things.
The interesting thing I think is in fact that there has been a virtuous cycle of the Internet, having enabled a lower barrier to entry that is further enabled by further deregulation. So it's having been fed from a -- I think an ethic of liberalization in many parts of the world. It has demonstrated, absolutely, the value of that and also fed through offering this highly competitive environment as fed through to support and to encourage it further.
I'll just end on one sort of clash of cultures, which I think we all see in some respects.
>> VINT CERF: (Off microphone.) >> PAUL WILSON: I think there is a clash of cultures, which I'd like to refer to here, which has to do with, you know, what are our assumptions about how the Internet should be or about the decisions that may need to be made? And it came from a question that I received from a Government bureaucrat some time ago. He said what is it about IPv6, who is in charge, when is it happening? I went through a long explanation of the distributed nature of the Internet, the fact that there is no central point of control, that there are individual requirements, which are being met by individual participants autonomously according to their own priorities, their own decision-making process. And I went through a long explanation. And he said yes, it's very important, isn't it? He said well, someone should be in charge.
(Laughter)
And I think --
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Did you volunteer?
>> PAUL WILSON: He wasn't thinking of me or any of us, actually. But I just think that there are, coming back to what David started to say this morning about kings and Presidents and voting, we really do -- we can point right back to some very early and intentional ethics that are beyond the pure technical. But they actually are absolutely cross-cutting through everything that has happened on the Internet and sustained its success today. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Paul. And so finally, we have Sivasubramanian M. who is going to -- just make it a bit short please, because we are a bit over time and I'd like to have a dialog with the room here. So Shiva.
>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN M: I'm from the Internet Society in India. And I want to agree with Amy who said that it's a room full of giants, and I want to thank the giants for honoring this coalition by setting aside their time, first of all. And I'm going to briefly talk about how we as an Internet Society chapter work for the good of the Internet in general, which would in a way indicate what all Internet Society chapters largely believe in. As a chapter, we don't collect subscriptions, are not inclined to raise funds. We have limited resources, and with that, our focus has been global rather than local. And we participated in global policy and organising workshops at IGFs, providing inputs to the IGF review process, to IANA, ICANN and ISOC, all in tune with the idea that the open architecture of the Internet must be preserved.
We always placed an unwavering emphasis on core Internet values, above local and national considerations. We stood apart from our own Civil Society colleagues, expressed views that varied from the national Government and took positions that are in tune with the Internet community. This has not been easy. This is not well understood at the national level. But I believe that a global free and open, open Internet would cause worldwide economic social development which is good for our country. So the smartest way to work for India is to work to preserve the Internet as an open, free, global ecosystem, with the environment of permissionless innovation.
So in tune with core Internet values our chapter is exploring the possibility of establishing an exchange point at Chennai to supplement the good work being done by the national Internet exchange of India. The proposal is to establish a neutral Internet exchange, which is no more than a simple switch, and not to have any equipment in the exchange that would interfere with core Internet values. I hope we will have ample support from our government of India.
We are working on a meeting to discuss a model of expanded accountability for Internet governance. This idea came from some of our members. This is the idea that Internet governance is a very broad area. The idea that came from our chapter is that Internet governance is broad. And an accountability framework would be larger and stronger than the accountability frameworks now.
I use an analogy from the business world. There are two different approaches to certifying the quality of a product or service. One is to subject the product to various things, such as a drop test or immersion test and certify the quality of the product. Another one is ISO 9000 style of certification, whereby an entire organisation is strengthened for quality processes and for a propensity to turn out quality products.
So if that kind of frame -- exercise to strengthen the framework is undertaken, then smaller questions get dropped as to a balance and regional balance and going into minute details about why a particular decision was taken and over all the trust is built. That if something comes out of ICANN or ISOC, it must be a good decision. So this is what we want to explore academically. And still -- okay. Okay.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: The transcriber is sweating in the back of the room.
>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN M: So this is just an idea that we want to work on. And I don't want to miss the opportunity to ask the largest contributors, largest contributor to Internet governance, Verisign, who is here, for some funding. As a chapter, I would request one hundered dollars, just $100, to start the funds, to start a discussion about chapter development. And I would like to invite Chuck Gomez to come and take part. So this is something that they would like to do. And so -- in general, what we have been doing as a chapter has been in tune with what the Internet community has been doing, is in tune with the Internet core values.
Thank you very much.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Shiva. And Chuck is reaching into his pocket at the moment to find another chewing gum that he might find as a starting point for the 100 dollars.
I think we will open the floor to questions. The gentleman on the right and left. Let's start with you, sir, please introduce yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Mike Godwin and I played different roles in Internet culture at different times. When I was general counsel for the Wiki Media Foundation, we had a little difficulty with the Internet Watch Foundation. And the reason we did was that we had reproduced an image of an album cover that was sold in the 1980s, that the Internet Watch Foundation determined, based on its mysterious internal deliberations, was qualified as child pornography. At that point, all wikipedia content was routed through a proxy server in the UK that made it impossible for wikipedia to enable UK citizens to edit content on Wikipedia. Because in order for us to maintain the ecosystem in wikipedia, we actually need to be able to identify users not by name, but certainly we have to identify IP addresses and we knew that because of the proxy server, that functionality had been eliminated.
Well, very quickly, Wikipedia users contacted Wiki Media Foundation and me personally, they said what's up? We can't edit anymore from England. And contacted -- we determined that the Internet Watch Foundation had routed us all through a proxy server. And contacted the Internet Watch Foundation and they said so you can appeal this decision. And I said okay. I want to appeal it. Tell me what the process is. And the next e-mail from the Internet Watch Foundation was we considered your appeal and it's denied.
So then of course I was put in -- in an always entertaining position of having to publicly shame the Internet Watch Foundation for having done this with no accountability. They engaged in censorship effectively, with no accountability, no real formal due process or appeal. And to me, it's always odd when I hear the Internet Watch Foundation advanced as a kind of paragon of shared values on the Internet, when in fact it's difficult, closed, and mysterious. And there is nothing like the due process guarantees one expects of an institution that is hosted in a Democratic Government, in a Democratic country.
So I put that out there, because I think that there is a core value of Internet governance, there is a core value of Internet functionality that has to do with openness, transparency, accountability, correctability, and I put it out there and I'm happy to have you respond to this, or anyone respond to this, that the Internet Watch Foundation does not meet those criteria.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. So we will have Rennie and Adam as well.
>> BARONESS RENNIE FRITCHIE: How long did ago did it happen?
>> AUDIENCE: The fifth of December, 2008.
>> BARONESS RENNIE FRITCHIE: So I fully understand that you had a really difficult situation. Not only did you have a really difficult situation, but getting it sorted out was also in itself difficult. But I'm not the Internet Watch Foundation. I do contribute, we do contribute funds to the Internet Ffoundation. And I do know that over time they have developed, learned from different ways of doing things. And therefore I know that the Chief Executive is here. And I had a meeting with her only yesterday. And she was talking about how they had evolved and what they had learned. So I can only hope, since I'm not responsible for them, that some the learning that came from your unfortunate experience is something that is helping make a difference. So it doesn't happen to anyone else.
Thank you.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. Adam?
>> ADAM PEAKE: I remember the case and I might have owned the album a long, long-time ago. Embarrassing, rubbish it was. But it's similar to ICANN and the issues that we look at with transparency and accountability. We are holding ICANN to strict standards and we should be looking at other organisations of power and influence on the Internet to do the same thing.
I remember some years ago, GLOCOM almost got caught in the spam black list. We had no idea. We were, we are, you know, a think tank that works on Internet, but on policy issues and that those sort of matters. And we didn't really know how we were running our network and we could have been blacklisted easily. And there are powerful organisations out there. If you are on a black list ,it's almost impossible to get off again.
Things are better now, but there are things that we can think of in terms of applying transparency and accountability rules across many of the organisations. And ICANN is doing a great job because it's showing us how to do it in many ways and we can take some of the NETmundial principles and apply them. Perhaps this coalition is being established to think of and to do. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Next is from Alejandro.
>> AUDIENCE: I have several comments here. First, on the Dynamic Coalition itself. This is a workshop of the Dynamic Coalition, but we still have to have a point of order for a meeting of the Dynamic Coalition internal procedural, et cetera. So I hope that time management allowed for that or will set aside a slot for the participants of the Dynamic Coalition itself. The focus of the Dynamic Coalition has been on what can bring down Internet principles -- or what can undo the Internet by touching the principles, even with, -- on the basis of good will. Things like Governments, or demands based on rights that are not attuned, that have not considered the openness but several other important principles -- sorry, I'll go slower. My mother was an interpreter. So I have to remember that.
These demands, for example, based on the law or on rights, may cause blocking of content in certain countries. Forbid certain conducts in specific sectors or geographies, and these things can be done in different ways. And some of those ways can actually go against the interoperability or the universal accessibility of every point on the Internet and so forth.
Going to specific comments made on the panel, Vint made one that we have been discussing separately, which is about the freedom of harm. And I think this is something that needs a serious rethink in the context of the Internet. Freedom of harm is a nice way and also to put into a list of freedoms of thinking about security, about one specific or set of definitions of security, like personal security.
And now we know that cybersecurity, let's say the -- personal security in cyberspace can translate into risks to personal security in the meet space. So we have to think, really, deeply about this.
Before the Internet, this freedom of harm was a primary function of the State. It is the State who has to use a classical definition, a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence, and that monopoly in the social contract means that the State will only apply it wisely and with the rule of law and to protect citizens from harm. This protection of harm has been a function of the State. And now we have to recast it, rethink it, so that the States can continue to function in that way, they can be heavy or lighter than that, but we need much more than that. And the -- and all stakeholders must work and contribute to this.
This leads to the question of where this happens. Where this happens in the meet space before the Internet is in the public sphere, the public space. And the public space on the Internet is privately owned. There is no piece of public space on the Internet that is really public. And even then, when it's public, it's public within one country, because it’s a website on the network that is run by the State or delegate to an institution by the State. Otherwise, wherever we meet, wherever we speak, wherever we organise, because free speech is only a precondition to change if it serves to freedom of association. This is, again, a question of core values of the Internet. If you don't have openness and if you have a company that owns the space that can decide that this picture doesn't go up or this conversation and this organisation to meet cannot happen, then you are not guaranteeing even that.
There has to be a covenant, not necessarily a Magna Carta. I think that that is maybe too much of a concept in the sense that it will create artificial stuff where we already have well-defined rights outside the Internet to preserve this public space. It's not only openness, which has been the principle subject of this conversation, but also interoperability, scalability, robustness in the sense of resilience, to changing variables, but also robustness in things like do the most with the least that you get in communications. Seamless end-to-end. These are values that are also at risk. Even if right now end-to-end is actually a simulation, we have end-to-end reachability, of full points, but it's mediated by MPLS, by DNSSEC, by networks, the complexity below is high.
And citizens are asking for a simulation of that behavior by the ISP. So these things have to be put always in the projection against the core values that we're speaking about.
This in turn -- yep, I'm in my -- almost at the end. Human corporate and Governmental conduct, things like putting children at risk, putting personal or commercial or State secrets at risk have to be addressed where the local is, which is the law and social practice. Trying to implement child protection on the Internet like has been mentioned already by Mike can actually spillover in very nasty ways on the Internet. And you are putting a lot of effort into making it difficult for child abuse images to transit the Internet. And that's okay. As long as you are also putting a huge social effort in impeding the existence of these images, and their commercial use to sell sex and child abuse commercially to humans, which happens under the noses of regular law enforcement. That is where the crime happens. Not on the Internet.
So again we have to focus on the core values that the Internet is the network and it's a transit for human corporate and governmental conduct. Most ISOC chapters focus both on local and global. And they are fed by the concerns about the core values. That would be that.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you very much. That's a huge number of additional values and certainly makes the whole topic particularly complex.
>> AUDIENCE: That's what we have been speaking in every year the sessions.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Vint wanted to react, and I'll invite all the panel members to react to the various comments.
>> AUDIENCE: Mike Godwin is here, he is the author the Godwin’s law.
>> VINT CERF: Thank you, Alejandro. I want to draw attention to the interesting problem of defining harm. It's not that I'm going to suggest that we need some dictionary definition. The problem is that harms that occur in the Internet originate in one jurisdiction and sometimes terminate in another, the victims and perpetrators are in different jurisdictions. The social contract that we make with our Governments that says I will constrain my behavior in exchange for protection from some kind of harm has to be understood in the context of who decides what is a harm and what is to be done about preventing it.
In the Internet environment, we are probably going to have to work very hard to come to consensus about what's harm and what to do about it. It will probably lead to not only multistakeholder but possibly also multi-lateral agreements about actions to be taken upon the identification of harm. So I don't want to go on and on about this. It's a complicated topic. But we have to address this.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you, Vint. Anyone else in the panel? Shiva.
>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN M: It was a question to Larry and the other panelist from --
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Sorry to interrupt you. I was going to ask you any response to Alejandro. I was going to go to the remote participants and then come back. Remote participation.
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Mr. Stephan. Thank you for the excellent map that your organisation creates. The basic principles you enumerate are useful here in Bangladesh. I wonder if the principles are not too simplistic, when we encounter something and the law enforcement want to track this online, it's difficult to explain why privacy or encryption is so important. It would be useful to provide more advice, rather than the black and white principles being proposed. The blade of grass survives the storm better than the mighty oak.
The grim reality is that the large ISPs do not announce their roots at the exchange of India. Why would a new exchange work when a Government funded organisation has failed?
Replied, Dr. Wilson's comments. We heard that there is a well-funded initiative called CRIPETIC that intends to encrypt everything. Isn't that the opposite of what you say is a bad idea?
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. Quite a few questions here. I noticed one of them mentioned privacy, tracking, law enforcement, encryption. Quite a few things that don't appear compatible with each other. Other comments?
So, let's first have the lady next to Alejandro.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. My name is Martha Giraldo. I come from Colombia and I am with Access to Information. I'm on the Civil Society part. But my background was I used to be director for the Foundation for modernizing the librariess in my country, and also I was the Director of the advanced network of the Internet, Internet in the United States. I was director of RENATA.
And my consideration, I'm on the Civil Society position right now, because there is not an institution that is taking care about access to information. All the infrastructure and what is really the proposal of the country for giving to the municipalities to the people less privileged, what is the content they are going to really help them in order for having something that really helps for that development of people.
So my Question is that, and for this in terms of the Internet values, I would really call for the representativeness. Because I really think that the Civil Society, the less privileged, are not really well represented here in terms of what they are really needing of the Internet, which I would say are really contents that would help them to address their real needs.
So access to information is my job, my mandate. I would say the thing that I'm looking for. But I really haven't found that place here to really express all this. And there is not really meetings around that. And IFLA invited me because IFLA is pushing that access to information is one of the post-2015 development goals, and we're working on that. But I really want to say that I haven't found a place to talk about.
Thank you very much.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Any comments on this in response?
>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN M: There was a question from a remote participation that went like this. Why would a new Internet exchange succeed when a Government funded exchange failed? Well, in India, the National Internet Exchange of India is a very successful Internet exchange, which is run very well by Government, and we have no second opinion on that. It's only for geographical reasons that the Chennai chapter wants to start an initiative to create an Internet exchange, which would draw lessons from the national Internet exchange of India. Take a lot of support from national Internet exchange of India, but still would remain as a neutral exchange. So that was my point and if you would allow me to ask the Question that I wanted to ask or will you give me an opportunity later?
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: No, Vint wanted to respond.
>> VINT CERF: This is just -- you have another hand up over here. Just on the Civil Society side., this has always been quite a challenge, because finding out what Civil Society is thinking is difficult when there are potential 7 billion members of that, you know, rubric. Interestingly enough, in the context of the Internet Governance Forum, the presence of national and regional Internet Governance Forum meetings may actually open up more opportunity for dialog to assemble and then push upward to the annual meeting, a better sense of what Civil Society wants, needs, and is concerned about.
So it's not a perfect solution, but we really need to find a way to open that channel.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. And David Cake.
>> DAVID CAKE: This is perhaps a response to some of the -- one of the things that Alejandro said. It very much seems that there are some civil rights and human rights with which the Internet seems to be intrinsically compatible. Organisations like mine are in favor of the Internet, because it seems like rights like Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Association, it seems easier to provide them on the Internet and not to stop them, not to say some major Governments have not tried to control Freedom of Expression on the Internet, but it requires a lot of effort where it requires none -- you know, it's the default. But it's important to say that yes, there are other rights, legal, civil, human rights, that the Internet does not -- the term is easily compatible with it.
And rather than sort of ignore them, I think we have to go back to that next level and say they are not just core Internet principles that can be translated into the sort of policy realm. But we also need to look at core Internet principles of how we develop policy. And how we develop things, we need to go back to our multistakeholder models and open discussion and all of the other -- open discussion, and what we will discover -- certainly, like compatibility of the Internet with some particular rights, I mean, the right to be forgotten is the one -- and so on, is one of the current topics, appears very difficult. I'm sure that the giants among us like Steve and Vint, veterans of decades of the IEFT say some things that appeared to be difficult way back then are routine now. There were long discussions about how to do something and it happened.
Hopefully we will be able to address some of these, if we sit down and have an open dialog, that really seriously included -- that IETF principle that this has to be practical and doable, we can find a way to make them compatible. And that's really all we can try to do.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Rennie was just going to mention something quickly in response, and then --
>> PAUL WILSON: Well, and then Shiva. We are running out of time.
>> BARONESS RENNIE FRITCHIE: I'm making the offer on behalf of Olivier Crepin-Leblond and I because we are both involved in the UK IGF. And I heard what you had to say, and I'll take back your words about Civil Society and that's a promise.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Vint?
>> VINT CERF: You can try to do it a number of different ways. It's the right to be forgotten. And you can also do it wrong, trying to use the search engines as a way to forget things is very tricky, because we have to remember everything we're supposed to forget in order to remember to remove it from the index. And it gets worse over time, because you have to keep remembering things in case they come back so you can remove them again. So that's not the right place to do it. But we're trying at Google and we're reporting the difficulties that we're encountering with that.
>> PAUL WILSON: I was asked a question and follow-up to something I said earlier about encryption of the infrastructure. And I'm aware of the encrypt everything policy, which is very useful to avoid encryption itself being an indicator of a secret correspondence. If you make a habit of encryption, then the task of working out what to decrypt, an expensive task in itself, becomes much greater. And I'm sure there are many other discussions. At the user level encrypt everything is great. But I tried to say that if anyone offers you a universally encrypted Internet infrastructure, with a monolithic built-in encryption by default, I would be rather suspicious about that. There could be standards and other discussions that I'm not up to date on. So I won't claim to be an expert there.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Thank you. And I believe we are running really over time. We started five minutes late. We will finish five minutes late. So Siva, you have the floor.
>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN M: Okay. There was a question to Larry. The American Government is known for the support that it gives to business. And, for example, in former Governments, whenever there was a high level delegation, even if it was at the level of a President's delegation to a country like Japan, trade issues were taken up by Government. And Government supports business to that extent.
When the Internet was invented, why didn't you think of a system whereby it becomes a system of patents and of privately owned rigidly controlled American enterprises. Instead, why did you open it up and why did you make it free and why did you have a policy of making the Internet free and open?
>> LARRY STRICKLING: That's a very good question. I wasn't there at the time. I've gone back and looked at documents from that period, in particular the whitepaper. And I think at the time there were a number of factors that were very important to the United States Government when it made the announcement to have the domain system be privatized. One of the key questions raised at that time was the fact that the Internet was expanding greatly, internationally. That International citizens wanted to have a say in how the Internet was going to run. And that was a value that was important to the United States Government at that time. So there are very specific references in the policy whitepaper saying that they wanted to encourage International involvement in the governance of the Domain Name System and that, indeed, part of the approach in designating ICANN to perform those functions was the notion that that organisation would seriously attract International engagement in the governance of the Domain Name System issue. So it was a core principle of the United States in 1998.
>> VINT CERF: I was there. And Bob Kahn and I actually talked about whether the design of the Internet should be in any way protected. Remember, this is 1973. We're in the middle of the Cold War. We're doing a project for the U.S. Defense Department. And we come up with a solution to a technical problem. And we realise that for that solution to be widely applicable, it's going to have to become an International standard.
So we decided that the best way to achieve that objective was to put no barriers on the adoption and use of this design. See, we published the papers without any constraint. We published the documents and Steve's RFC series describing how to build these systems. And we didn't want the commercial sector to resist the use of nonproprietary protocols using the excuse that they would have to license them and therefore were uninterested in implementing them. And to be frank, when you think about the military use of communication technology, you can never tell in the future who will be your friend and who will be your enemies. And you want to be able to communicate with your friends. So since you don't know which is which, you need to be able to communicate with everybody. That's why we didn't put any patents or copyrights on the original documentation.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN-LEBLOND: Clearly, there are more questions, I think, in the queue. And I had a question, which is the current stress there is between having an Internet that is following those core values, but that also requires other components which might clash with the core values to be sustainable, such as the economics of collecting data is one of the core principles for providing free services. Well, the contrast between privacy and transparency, and the contrast of all of these issues, I think we will probably have to touch on these the next time we meet, which hopefully will be next year.
I want to thank all of our panelists for being in this small, very hot room. Thanks very much. It's really been great to listen to you and to have your wisdom.
And I want to thank the audience and the transcriber and the technical crew. And therefore this meeting is adjourned.
(Applause)
(End of meeting, 12:37)
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This is the output of the realtime captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to the 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.
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