EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES-ENHANCING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION
FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 24, 2013
2:30 P.M.
WS 329
MULTISTAKERHOLDERISM AND THE DYNAMIC INTERNET
The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Eigth Meeting of the IGF, in Bali, Indonesia. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. We are going to discuss something very, very topic all, multistakeholderism and the Dynamic Internet. And to do that we have very distinguish the panel. First of all before we get started I would like to introduce briefly the speakers and also to tell you that we have in advance given them a number of questions. And I will read them out to you so that you know what they are responding to. Otherwise it might be a bit tricky. So to my right-hand side I have professor Christopher Yoo. He is the John H Chestnut professor of law of computers and information science and founding director of the center for technology innovation competition at the University of Pennsylvania.
And he has emerged as a leading authority on law and technology. His research focuses on principles of networking engineering, imperfect fect competition that can provide new insights into the regulation of the Internet
But if you would like to say something more about yourself, you are of course welcome.
To my near right is Bill Woodcock. He entered the field of Internet routing in 1999 in that field. He looks young. That's longer time ago than I would have expected
He has also designed an operating and international multiprotocol service provision backbone. He is now currently a trustee of ARIN and, a research director for PCH.
On my left-hand side is the initiator of this workshop, Lorenzo Pupillo is executive director in the public and regulatory affairs unit in the Telecom Italia. He is also affiliated at Columbia University and next is Olga Cavalli. She is an ICT and Internet specialist and she has large experience in project management, market research, competitive analysis, public policy and regulations. She is since 2007 a member of the U.N. he can Secretary General advisory group for Internet forum as well as Argentina's representative in the GAC of ICANN. She is associated professor at the university at Buenos Aires and career training in the ministry of foreign affairs of her country. She holds a Ph.D. among other degrees. From the university where she was born
Last but not least, Sam Paltridge. He is a Ph.D. and he is working in the OECD where he currently heads up the Telecoms unit in the division on information consumer and communications policy.
He is actually one of the founding members of GAC. It is an honor to have a founding member in the panel. Thank you very much all of you to participate in this.
So let's move on to the substance. Christopher Yoo, we put a number of questions to you together with Lorenzo. It would be the dynamic Internet and how it affects the Internet Governance processes. How has the Internet changed and why do you talk about the dynamic Internet? How is that affecting the Internet Governance process? Do you see the in multistakeholderism and this is the key question, I gather an is the multistakeholderism model in danger? So the floor is yours.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you to Lorenzo for organizing this.
So I would like to start with two quotations that I think frame the way the existing Internet community has viewed multi-stakeholder governance and the role of different actors. David Clark said we reject kings, presidents and voting, really demanding a consensus based idea in which there is no real deference to governmental authority and even more polemically John Barlow said governments of the world I come from cyber space. On behalf of the future, I ask you to leave us alone. You have to sovereignty where we gather.
It's an informal and anti-governmental vision about how the Internet will goorch itself. In the beginning that actually worked out well. The Internet really enjoyed a period of benign neglect where John postal and a number of people who were graduate students were in charge of a lot of the with work in the ar pa net and he hands out domain names on a hand shake an resolved disputes and a very narrow range of users connected by a narrow range of business relationships. All those statements are now false. In fact, the number of users is not just academics and hi defense subcontractors in that community. It's much larger and more gee graphicically diverse and much more diverse in their interests. There's a lack of shared values, a lack of a common alignment in their perspective. The applications are no longer Web and e-mail. We now have a variety of applications, people often talk about video because of the bands width demands. Prerecorded video is not problematic. One example I like to give, financial services require actually a different profile. What they want are microsecond latencies, perfect records and expost audit ability. Bandwidth they don't need but they need other services that the best efforts of the Internet has not been designed to produce. And technologies we have now worked from a PC connected to a phone line to a whole variety of end user devices, whether smart phones or feature phones or tablets. Now the majority of messages are sent from a mobile device. And beyond a fixed line telephone network we now have a wide variety of networking technologies. And the topology, the old simple world of tier one, two, three through pricing mechanisms, pricing is heterogenous. Data centers, CDNs, different approaches in terms of how they are going. I'm terrible about this because I'm a bad academic. This is all drawn on the book that was published last year which is the cover on the screen.
What does this mean for Internet Governance? One of the reasons that you can draw out of the literature primarily associated with Eleanor os trum for which she won the Nobel prize last year, for informal governance to work you need a number of prerequisites to hold. It can be encapsulated with the idea of close knit community. Those can often govern themselves without law. Why? They are relatively small in size. If the behavior you are seeking to regulate is highly visible in the community, president community is homogeneous in terms interest and backgrounds and they frequently interact in a wide variety of contexts, so when something goes wrong you don't have to go to legal sanctions, you can go to a wide variety of social sanctions. This worked well in the early days of the Internet. As quaint as it seems the original means for deterring spam was shaming. Back in the use net days, there was actually an effective means by which that was possible. In fact we had very informal relationships with DNS and the like. We are finding these things breaking down. Shaming is no longer curing spam problem. We see dpiewts where we have to establish UDRP an other means for resolving the disputes. Congestion management you are starting to see different actors start multiple TCP sessions. There's an arms race going on between the browsers. We have known since the 80s you can get more bandwidth by starting multiple TCP sessions. The original RFC said you can start two, one in each direction. The browsers went to six and then 12 and then they went to, I think it's 18. And it can be done in an arbitrary way because of the centralized nature of this, the ability to get everyone well behaved is gone, extremely limited.
There are different endpoints which don't actually follow the strict speaking of the protocols of how they are expected to behave and the different actors are pushing very much against the limits. What does this mean for governance? The first, the basic literature would suggest that as the community becomes larger and more heterogenous, we are probably going to have to start relying on more formal mechanisms.
And the one that is generally put forward is mms, but the funny ii-- mms, but the content is left vague. It is going to derive from the Internet principles of decentralized optimization where each endpoint makes its decisions and the reason the Internet scales, it can optimize for its own interests without taking into account all the other things around.
At the same time that makes it very, very difficult to manage. For example if you can't what you want from the network what we are seeing, for example, is instead of Internet telephony we are seeing VOIP. Basically it is happening through specialized services or private networks using IP based dumtions but something that will assure them the quality of service they need which is the dominant way to do it. Even in the wireless world of LTE, voice over LTE hasn't come about. That's something that Verizon is deploying next month. We have a world where you can't get all those interest together. Things work by consent internationally, but these processes to be successful have to take into account all the different points of view but have to be meaningful. It is supposed to be a process by which the different groups understand the concerns and accommodate the concerns of other parties. In an earlier session somebody talked about a multi-stakeholder process because the government simply withdrew. The government was no longer interested. Hostility towards government is reflected in John Perry Barlow's statement. People who work in real multi-stakeholder processes need to come to grips with the fact that the government is an important actor with access to certain venues of information and influence and in fact they have a legitimizing effect and to the extent to which it's international you're depending on multilateral solution to create some part of the system. Each stakeholder system has to take others into account, but the decision making structure of any multi-stakeholder group is critical. We have seen this in EU reform, they went from one country one very vote to reflecting different interests. You can choose one of a number of organisations. The voting rules matter. In fact they influence the outcomes and flop the willingness of different parties to participate. In fact, we have to think carefully before we say mms to understand in this world where government owe beaming down. How do we structure these processes in ways that it's in the interest of various parties on balance to be part of it. As Bill and I were talking, you don't have to get every person on board. You can get a tipping point consensus which will bring other people along without actual consent. You can have a more flexible process, but it is one that has to take everyone's interests into account and finding a decision making structure that will make that real.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you very much, IBM. So the questions for you would be are these developments increasing the range of benefits or concerns associated with the Internet? Do you share the view that the Internet will become more dynamic and more homogeneous? Are these increasing the range of benefits and concerns associated with the Internet? How does the technical community see itself in the complex government environment?
>> BILL WOODCOCK: Thank you. So I don't have any slides prepared and I'm going to speak extemporaneously. I think the technical community has had sort of self, a set of self governance mechanisms for much longer than we had this notion of multistakeholderism and so because the technical communities governing mechanisms sprang up in advance of the multistakeholderism notion, they are not in exactly strict alignment, right? So we can sort of retrofit an explanation for how it is in fact multistakeholderism, but the fit is not 100 percent perfect. So I would like to sort of draw upon three different examples. One is the way Internet exchange points are formed. That's something that I have a lot of experience with. One is how the IETF creates technical standards. Again, something I've done a lot of myself. And the third is how Internet service providers agreed to interconnect with each other. These are all three very technical governance problems that get solved in ways that predate the notion of multistakeholderism, but are sort of exemplars of multistakeholderism if you sort of wrap your head around it right. So to start with, in the IETF there is a very strong preference for those who show up, right? So yes, it's multistakeholderism, but you are a stakeholder if you show up and do the work. So the vote is strongest for those who participate most. There are a lot of processes that are like that. There are a lot of processes where only the people who show up get a say. The flip side of this, however, is you have to decide whether someone who didn't show up can have a veto after the fact, right? So if you have a process like this where people get together in the room and they do the work and decide what is going to happen and they charge forward and then somebody else shows up later and says no, I should have been included in this decision. I disagree. It shouldn't be that way. Should that be able to stall the process? Obviously there are good and bad sides to that. On one hand if you say no, if weren't there what you say doesn't matter. Right? We are going to go ahead anyway.
You can have some very bad decisions. You can get a small number of people moving in a closed room, in secret doing something bad for society and there's no check and balance on it. On the other hand it's hard to get anything done if everybody who comes out of the woodwork later can throw everything back on to the drawing board.
So the IETF has managed to resolve that. Not perfectly, but you do kind of have to be there. You have plenty of opportunities. Nothing happens in secret. It's all out in the open. The cost of participation is very low. If you don't participate, you don't really have an excuse by which to say I was excluded from the process and now I'm contributing.
The lesson I think that can be learned from the way exchange points get formed is that you don't want to stall your process waiting for 100 percent unanimity or 100 perspiration or really full consensus. There will always be people for whom the status quo is preferable or not making some change or development is advantageous. And they will always find ways to sort of filibuster a project or fall out the decision making process or whatever. And so very often what you need is to not hang your hat on the big guys agreeing with you. Right? With exchange points what we see is often a situation where there is a range of sizes of participants. A bunch of medium sized guys, a whole lot of tiny guys and a couple real huge incumbent phone companies. For the big incumbent phone companies the creation of the exchange point is almost always a step backward from their near monopoly. So they would prefer the conversation not happen. If it has to happen, they would prefer that it have no outcome. If it has an outcome, they prefer that the outcome be that nothing be done, right?
So they have a series of fall-back positions. And at some point you just have to cut and run and say: You know, that's nice. We get that you don't really want to do anything, but this is going to happen.
To give an example of that, the exchange point in Malaysia got done on the first try. The first two tries got completely starred out by Telecom Malaysia participating in the process and making sure that it didn't go anywhere. The third time finally everybody else said no, this time we are going to run the process to conclusion regardless of what you say. So you better either come along or get out of the way.
And the third example is work I did in preparation for a paper I wrote for Sam. We surveyed interconnection agreements between Internet service providers, between networks. We looked at I think 140-something thousand agreements. So it was fairly comprehensive survey an it didn't really turn up any complete surprises, but a lot of things were more true than people thought they were, right? So people thought something was true 70 percent of the time and it was actually true 99 percent of the time. That kind of thing.
The big finding, though, from that, that 99 and a half percent of the time carriers understand, the two networks that are interconnecting understand the terms of the interconnection so well that they don't need to write them down. Ninety-nine and a half percent of the time everybody is so clear on what the global norms are that nobody even bothers to write it down. Right? There's no other kind of contract in the world that you can think of that has that degree of common understanding or shared agreement. So we can have remarkably effective Internet industry self governance. We can have remarkably effective degree of consensus. It evolves. If you look 20 years ago there was a huge amount of contention on the interconnection between networks. Everybody had to write everything down or they would winning it and find out after the fact that they had business disagreements about what it was they thought they were doing. So this sort of thing, you can evolve towards consensus. You can evolve toward shared understanding of what is right and reasonable, but I think you've got to not wait for everybody to get on board because there will always be people who disagree and you have to decide what you are going to do about people who weren't in the room at the time an making sure that everybody knows about it and you operate completely transparent and in the open, is probably the best answer to take one.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you very much, Bill. So continuing with Olga, your questions are: How these trends, how are they affecting Internet Governance programs and practices. Is there more room for government's role? In particular should governments be held more accountable for the protection of less technologically sophisticated end users or is user's vulnerability just a myth? That's an interesting question, I think. Where is the lat heading on these issues.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Linda. Thanks, Lorenzo for the kind invitation and thank you to the panelists. It's an honor to be with you today. When I was thinking about how to answer this question, I thought that sometimes we tried to identify the multistakeholderism as itself, as a concept. And we really sometimes lose perspective of all the examples that we have around that are really multi-stakeholder efforts and are related with the Internet governance at a local original level and I brought to you some examples that are, to be interesting to focus, especially in the region where I come from. I live in Argentina and I come from Latin America. And Bill just mentioned about the IXPs. I think IXPs are an excellent example of multi-stakeholder effort. All the Internet exchange points in my country were built mainly by private companies, by Internet service providers that wanted to improve their networks and enhance the traffic exchange. But at the same time always the government was aware of that and supportive of that initiative. Never against and never putting any barrier to those companies in gathering together.
Now the situation has evolved a little bit more. In my country there are like ten Internet exchange points and many more in Brazil. There are new ones in other countries. Still there are some countries in the region that don't have Internet exchange points. So that's a space for multi-stakeholder cooperation with our neighboring countries in our region that we can think about. Also in the last time there is a regional Internet exchange point for the whole region. So fiber optics. Latin America is a very large and diverse region. We have very small country, island countries, mountains, big countries like Brazil and big countries not so large as Brazil but big enough like Argentina and others and geography that is really diverse. What happens with our traffic? It is mainly driven through the United States because it is cheaper. And so focusing on regional connectivity, it is an important issue for our region. And in a meeting of the governments of the South America region in UNASUR last March all the ministers of foreign affairs agreed on trying to build a ring of fiber optics in our country. What is happening is a lot of fiber is being laid today. In Argentina the government is laying very big fiber optic network that intends to arrive at all the small cities.
The interesting thing about this project, it does not compete with the small ISPs that are today providing Internet service to rural areas. On the contrary, what the project wants is to bring high bandwidth to small places in rural areas and enhance the service that these small ISPs can give to their users. That is another multi-stakeholder of the dynamic Internet to share with you and also I would like to share with you another interesting project I was involved in. There is a prorches in my company called La Pam pa in the area of Patagonia. It has few water. So the province decided to bring in an aqua duct bringing water from the north and bringing water to all the small towns.
Someone in charge of the project thought like five, six years ago it could be interesting to lie fiber along the aqueduct. The interesting thing is that there was a high resistance at the beginning for him to do that from other people in the project. Finally he got the approval and the project only increased 3 percent of the total cost, including fiber optic with the aqua duct. Now all the small towns have water and all of the small towns have high bandwidth connectivity. They are offering this public Private companies to all the small ISPs and small companies all over the province and becoming one of the fully connected provinces of my country and it is not one of the wealthiest provinces. That is a nice example.
About the users, you have -- I thought a lot about this question. I think in Latin America you have two types of users. The ones very included that are fully connected and have access to all the information and platforms that they can use. Those are perhaps not so much aware of privacy concerns and security concerns. And then you have those which are not so much included. And in that point I would like to stress also all the projects that are happening in all the countries of Latin America, the largest in the world is happening in Argentina. It is called connectari Vualdad. The gft is giving new computers to all the students. It is an experiment for the schools, the teachers, the parents, the students. It is changing the way the families are using the computers because the students take the computers to school. Now the government is facing this security challenges and they are working on building capacity and awareness in the society about how to be careful about the usage of cloud computing, security and privacy. And that's something that is happening now. I will stop here. Maybe we can add something later. Thank you very much.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: That's great. Thank you, Olga. The next is Sam Paltridge. The question to you would be should governments play a different role in Internet Governance. What is their responsibility as legislators? Now that key question comes, as more policymakers become active in Internet Governance how can the multi-stakeholder model evolve to best meet their needs and do we need more operational definitions of what constitutes good multi-stakeholder approach to Internet Governance?
>> SAM PALTRIDGE: Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you for minding the questions. Usually I try to avoid me but you have gotten me back. Let me see what I can do in ten minutes.
Let me take you back about 15 years. At that stage basically what we were trying to do is take governments out of communications. Most gfts around the world ran their monopoly Telecom network not very well, penetration was pretty poor. Investment generally got diverted into other good causes to health, education and Telecoms was generally used as a tool often to raise taxation, proxy for taxation.
So we were at the stage where we were trying to get governments to step back. Not only from operating networks but in a sense also governing them. We were trying to create independent regulators to oversee the Telecoms market.
And along came this thing called the Internet which kind of slipped through the cracks. A bit of a U.S. accident in a way. And we looked at the Internet and saw that it was an Internet, a network of networks, but also a network of private networks, which I think is an important distinction because when we did look at this, we saw that these networks were essentially self governing. Of course they were self governing in frameworks that were created by the policies, the practices that operated in that country, rule of law and all the other things that go along with that.
So we asked ourselves a different question. We asked ourselves what is the role of governments? And I'll perhaps say something about that before I say should there be a different role? And essentially we decided that this should be effectively a private sector driven approach because we saw that they were essentially running the networks. And then we learned about these other institutions that Bill was talking about that had emerged. The IETF and all the other institutions that you well know. We saw there was also an Internet technical community and we saw that this was becoming more and more important to the economy and that there was all these other stakeholders that also wanted a say.
So we did some of the work that led up to the U.S. green paper an white paper that led to the creation of ICANN where at least at that stage because the Internet was mostly in OECD countries. And ICANN was created and everyone was scratching their heads: What is the role of governments? And so the GAC was created. To give governments a voice, a way to input policy into this basically private process. The GACs changed a lot over the years and at the first GAC meeting there was about 15 people there, 15 governments. I guess two or 3IGOs. Essentially, I can remember the first issue that they were most concerned with for the governments was about their CCTLDs, how they should be governed. Effectively some of them had territories overseas where there was, the French had the Tom Toms and so forth. They sat around the table trying to figure out who runs these? Are they legitimate? At that stage some of them were in jail. Some of them were in countries where for various reasons that government couldn't interact with that person in that country. There was all these -- it was a very complex and confusing situation.
So that was one of the first issues that the GAC tried to deal with. At the time the GAC has evolved it's now more than over 100 members of the GAC. Not everyone can always attend but it kind of mirrored the expansion of stakeholders in the process in the same way that later the IGF was created, I think to fill a gap that existed for everyone to get together right across the spectrum of all groups that consider Internet policies and practices.
Now, if I come to the final question on my list about how the definition of the multi-stakeholder process is evolving and where it should go, I think there's been a lot of tests along the way, but I really think we are at a critical juncture for a lot of the institutions and that is how they manage public versus private interests. You know, governments have tried really to step back from the process and it is up to these institutions to see how they can in a bottom-up process arrive at a conclusion that really lends confidence to governments that the process is working. And if they can do that, then I'm quite optimistic about the future. But there are real challenges. The GAC is dealing with complex and difficult issues and in some ways it wasn't designed or resourced to deal with some of those issues. Some of them come from other, directly from the mandate of other international organisations. You know, the GAC is look GAC is looking at trade issues which is really the WTI, but they are trade issues that involve domain names. They are being dealt with at the GAC. It's extremely difficult to deal with these issues in the GAC because, one, you've got GAC members there that are incredibly taxed at the moment. The new detail process is putting extraordinary pressure on them because they are getting hit on all sides by the different stakeholder groups and interest in their economies reflects the Internet itself expanding into those areas.
I come back to the issue of public interest. Can the Internet institutions which are primarily dealing with private networks and private interests arrive at conclusions that deal with public interests and some very difficult processes. Thank you.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you so much. Now the last speaker is Lorenzo and your questions are the following: Is the more active role of the governments here to stay? Are the principles of the multi-stakeholder approach still valid in this context? Which approach can best respond to the need to match governance issues with the right governance institutions? How are the more traditional telecommunications companies dealing with the new challenges in sneered? Internet and how do they handle the more complex business relationships mentioned in the workshop.
>> LORENZO PUPILLO: Let me thank first the panelists and lid today to accept the invitation to participate in this workshop.
So far if we impair, the words, the frequency of the words we have heard the most in this almost three days of the conference I think there are two words: From one side, Brazil. Brazil can be seen as a proxy of more active role from the government. And from the other side everybody, of course, is talking about multistakeholderism in a different way I want to link to what was said, we are at a very critical junction for this institution because I strongly believe that Internet to some extent also might be the multi-stakeholder approach. It is to some extent a victim of its own success. In other words it has been so successful at a given contest, now because this contest is changing, it is changing because of what Christopher was mentioned, the dynamic Internet. But because some of the players want to play a new role. We should try to address this issue to find the more sustainable role for all these different players, in this institution.
The role of government I am convinced that this is part of the puzzle, the piece of the puzzle that is changing the most. This is not something that will go away very soon. In other words, it is a more active role of the government. It is here to stay for at least for four reasons. First one, the government understood the increasing important role of the Internet in every day life. Although there are no, you know, technical people call the kill switch for the Internet. There is nobody can break completely the Internet, at least in the more Developing Countries. We definitely real least that in some instances, for instance in Egypt, you know, the shutting down of the communication had a big impact on the production, the development of GDP. They estimated an impact on three to 4 percent of GDP in Egypt during the Arab spring.
This was, we have to say that the government is arriving at this importance because before they were not very active in this arena.
The second issue as Christopher was mentioning, the fact that the Internet is becoming more heterogeneous, dynamic. It will have an impact on the -- there will be a trend towards a more formal governance. This will cause, by definition almost, a more active role of the government. Think about the issue of security, for instance, okay?
The third element is more geo political. Up to a few years ago there was this book written by Friedman. The world is flat. We thought that the globalization on a different level, culturally, level of technology, the trades level was going to win, you know. Now we realize the proxy for that is this book by cap land, geography is having its own revenge because we have seen that instead local component play an important role for that. We saw that during the Arab spring, for instancement we thought the ICT were going to spread freedom to all over Africa, but besides the first moment this did not happen because later on the lack of institutional framework and so on created a major problem. It gave more role to the local government, even in fragmented reality of this type of countries. But definitely it is giving more role to the government to step in.
The fourth element is this idea that I strongly believe that if you read the book of Ed Schmidt and Cohen, the new digital age, they claim we are already living in a late stage cyber war, even though we are not aware of that. That means that all the States are preparing for this war, probably is going to have a different effect. The government will play a different role. But definitely we will have an increasing role. So we use also ICT for that.
Having said that, this basically means that as the Internet is becoming an essential part of business society, the -- the government will become -- interests to the government will become too big to stay out. The interests around the word diverge widely. That means that we are in the process of aiding versus some type of national Internet. To some extent there are some people who say that so far we have been lucky because we have a great uniform system, a great unanimity because probably the government were not so involved in this process. But because the world is more plas I had place, the Internet is part of the world, this divergence is probably going to grow. I was coming here, for instance, I I had to stop in Singapore. I was surprised when from the captain speaking saying: Well, we are giving you the immigration paper and we remind you smuggling drugs in Singapore is punished by capital death. For Europeans, we are talking about soft drugs -- no, it's a completely different paradigm. There are people who say if you come to the Internet world, you can can address issues through filtering and so on. But everything, there is an issue that there are different ideas on how to handle these matters and because the Internet will also be the vehicle ton introduce video through the cloud TV. The conception of TV over the U.S., Iran will definitely be a strong tradition. We have to expect some type of divergence on that.
Okay. Having said that, what are the implications then for the multi-stakeholder approach? I think that we should -- the problem is, I also today not to mention this in other workshop, there is this idea of we should distinguish between the idea of equal footing. In other words, if we compare different players, probably we should make clear that there is a difference between the shared responsibility and requiring equal responsibility. In other words, probably the way to go is to allow for this diversity to be perceived incorporating this process because I think quite often we talk about the system as, the code system is characterized by predators, death and birth to some extent. To have a more resilient ecosystem we should allow for this diversity. I think we should allow for the different players of the stakeholder model. To play a different role, different role according maybe to the different governance issues that need to be addressed. For instance, if we talk about standards probably the private sector should have the lead. If we talk about Internet issue related to a particular community like the accessibility, the Civil Society should have the lead. For instance, if we talk about cybersecurity, before prism I was inclined to say that probably the government should have a major role. After that I see a big role that can be played by an alliance between the Civil Society and the private sector to approach in the governance process.
You know, the idea, I will call this process like variable geometry governance. They try to understand this new role that some players want to play. Should they be incorporating this process?
Some people mention that this can be done going back to the WSIS declaration. But in practice, what does that mean, the different players should play according to are their role. I think we need more work to be done in this area to clarify and allow for this type of dynamic.
The last things to go to the question of our companies, private company, how they respond to this heterogeneous Internet. More dynamic, I think the idea is to work much more towards offering -- services. And these sorts or something related to what Bill said before. I think that is also the paper that he mentioned was basically related to the offering of basically tech connection, best effort. I think they should probably promote, you know, agreement among the operators to be able to offer while they keep the possibility of offering best effort. But first to offer point of services.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you very much, Lorenzo. So we have come a long way from government stay away. That's clear from the panel, but not totally clear where we are now. I mean, there is the Tunis declaration that Lorenzo already mentioned where governments roles are sort of referred to, but that is actually all we have.
I see from the remote moderator that there are no questions. So I will get up and go around the room and take your questions.
Who will go first? Come on, don't be shy.
>> You will have to just pick someone.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: That's too authoritarian. That doesn't belong in this context, right?
Good.
Thank you. I'm most grateful.
>> AUDIENCE: Robert pepper, San Francisco.
A couple thoughts. One, Sam, you mentioned that almost by Secretariat the Internet wasn't regulated in the U.S. Actually, I want to just correct that. Right? The fact that it was not regulated as a Telecom or regulated at all at the beginning was a very conscious decision by government to not regulate.
It may have not been completely visible outside of the U.S. that that was the decision, but I can tell you about meetings where it was discussed and there were decisions made to not regulate and in fact, to the contrary, to reject calls by the traditional telephone operators to regulate the Internet.
So it was actually, there were requests to regulate it and we actually figured out ways to not regulate it, and we rejected those calls to regulate.
Now, having said that, you are right. There was what whole set of voluntary groups that were dealing with issues that were not necessarily advice toibl the people outside of that community, right? The IETF probably being the most important one at that time in terms of working on the standards questions.
So you know, the issues that Lorenzo, you raised that, your four points I think I would agree with. But I guess the question is when we think about the appropriate roles of governance today, where are the appropriate places to have those decisions made? And the fact is that there are, because the Internet fundamentally is very empowering, there are some governments that support the Internet in empowerment of citizens, but there are other governments that are very, very afraid of that. So there are some governments that are engaged in conversations very well intentioned about how do we collectively solve problems, but they understand that government by itself is maybe not the best place to do that or the best way to do that. There are other governments that may not be as well intentioned because in fact they are afraid of the Internet because it is so empowering of citizens. How do you distinguish between those two groups of governments and intentions when we are talking about a process that started out with little g governance that had nothing to do with governments? As we evolve this and increase the role of government.
By the way, the GAC is a great example of an appropriate role. It is a very important roam. And it's a growing role, but as part of an overall process. It is not a substitute. One or the other.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you very much. Who wants to go first? I see there is a mic. I can come back to you.
>> I actually agree with you. So, Bob? I agree with you. I agree with you. The U.S. did take a conscious decision not to regulate. If it came across that I was saying that, that's not what I meant. And the classic example here is VOIP. About 1996 we had a petition from, I think -- I can't remember which group in the U.S. it was.
(Sam.) who basically petition the the FCC to do something about VOIP. We had the first VOIP services starting to be launched.
We had a workshop around that stage and we had various players. We had the U.S. entities whose name I forget. They were small, Internet industry group. I can't remember the name.
>> ACTA was (Speaker away from microphone.) regulate Voiceover IP and --
>> SAM PALTRIDGE: We had them and the Israeli company that invented or put the first public service on the Internet. And we had a guy called Jeff Pulver and Jeff, Jeff thought hey, this thing is a pretty good idea, the idea of getting people together to talk about this stuff and went off and made millions with a conference series in the U.S.
But getting to the point, I actually agree with you it was a conscious decision by the U.S. government not to regulate it. To see how it evolved, yeah.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: And what about the question regarding the two different profiles of governments? I.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Can I compensate? I think it's a very interesting differentiation, thinking that way. I would refer to the decision about Brazil and ICANN doing this summit. It's an interesting reaction. An open meeting to discuss things instead of taking other more restrictive measurements.
So I would say that in general Latin America is, I think it is an area of the world that is pro Internet and empowering people through the Internet.
And I would like to take some comments that something about the GAC. I think the GAC is really stressed with a high level of things to review and to -- I myself being a GAC member have to now review information about different uses of this TLDs, maybe from names related with regions or gee graphic denominations and how does this relate with trademarks and (non-English phrase), the thing we have with one and -- there is a name in English that doesn't come to mind at this moment.
This is complex for all the people who goes to the GAC and has to deal and understand many things that usually they don't deal with, but at the same time we are doing real important effort in trying to support all the multi-stakeholder process in ICANN. That's my comment for the moment.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: I think one of the thing that I'm extremely uncomfortable in this conversation, we talk about the government as if it is going to have a uniform presence across all these issues when in fact the issues are very, very different. I'll make a funny statement as an American. In one sense for this forum prism was a good thing. It was all about ICANN and GAC. Talking about domain names as the world. That has a certain multi-stakeholder set of interests that makes sense. Security should be very different. Privacy should be different. The Aetna proarnlt, WICT on interconnection could be very different. We have to bear in mind the real flexibility of these solutions, we shouldn't think of a single venue or presume that the same venue will resolve all the different issues. The Val ins are different we should probably design individual processes for each.
Bear in mind what Bill said. Sometimes this is done by bilateral negotiations and individual institutions have choices, whether to choose to do a multilateral solution or private multi-stakeholder solution or biall rightly. That choice is endogenous based on what the actors think is in their self-interest at any one time. That will not lead to results that people like but that is the nature of Internet Governance where basically if you cannot participate in the system the way you like, you can private network, you can do all these competent objections that remain there or ask for specialized services that will provide you with the quality of services you need. Keep in mind whatever the solutions are going to be it has to work for all the interested parties and has to be taken into account.
>> BILL WOODCOCK: Just something that I thought bears reiterating here for those who haven't thought about it, which is that the Internet is growing exponentially. It has been doubling in size every ten and a half months for 30 years. Governance of any sort is a utility. And the utility governs -- sorry, the utility constrains the rate of growth of the thing governed, right? If you are looking at a city, a city can't succeed 30 grow if it its governance structures don't grow along with it. If you don't have additional schools, if you don't have additional trash collection, additional firefighters, all these services of government, but primarily what governance is is the resolution of problems that are unexpected or the creation of new policies to fit new situations, the resolution of problems between people who wouldn't otherwise be able to agree.
Anyway, all of these things scale along with the size of the thing being governed.
So the amount of governance available is a constraining factor on the growth of the thing being governed. If we wanted to have a sort of boring linear growth relatively small network like the 20th century voice telephone network, we could have a single monolithic governance organisation and it would grow as fast as any one organisation can grow. And it would hire new people an train tem and we would have linear growth. But that is not what we have. We have an Internet which grows exponentially which means we need exponential growth in governance. We have that. The way we have it, we have individual governance organisations which each grow. And we have growth in the number of Internet governance organisations. Right? You multiply those two linear growth factors together and you get exponential growth.
If we didn't have that, we wouldn't have exponential growth. We can not retreat from that to something that centralizes governance or concentrates governance or even retains the status quo and still continue to have the level of growth in the Internet that everyone in the last 30 years has become accustomed to.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you very much. Now we have a question. Could I get the mic, please? It is there. Please go ahead.
>> Peter ding at thrush. I want to give you historical reference to the John Perry Barlow. John Bailey withdrew from that him seem. He said you get older and you get wiser, he's on record. There's a good rebuttal on that in the last few months. I wanted to share with you. Somebody said we like to be governed. We the Internet community. They turn around and say you might like to find that, if you can.
I also wanted to pick at the point about the multifaceted nature of governments. You have to bear that in mind when you are talking about the government or even the GAC. We had an example in New Zealand recently where we had the Education Department came down heavily changing the rules on registration and what they would fund by way of registration for students at the Polly tech nicks. What it amounted to, the Polytechnics were restricted to students in their geographic region. But the IT dement had pushed wanted people to register online from all over the country. Two different points.
The government into monolithic. The issue where that comes up in the GAC, to take the, we were having a sovereignty and jurisdictional, TLDs and all that. It's very difficult. But the major point I want to make is about why we have it. It is the power to arrest and imprison. Why contract work in the civilized world. If you do away with contracts, the person who has a contract broken, we say we have a civil law, but you can go to the court and the court will order one of the parties to perform or take a pen amendment. If they continue to not follow the court's orders they get arrested not for breaking the court order, you get arrested in and in some countries you can be executed. The difficulty we have in creating Internet Governance systems, what is the underlying power to compel. The problem is that it tends to be turning people off. Taking away their domain names. Taking away their access. And so what we've done is we've put that power to compel into a number of different hands. I think that's a useful area for further study. Who actually has that power of denying access basically or limiting or closing or impinging access? How well are they controlled? What rules are they using to exercise them?
>> BILL WOODCOCK: I would like to respond to that really quickly. One of the interesting things about the Internet, it is a network of networks. It is specifically the network of other Internet protocol speaking networks. We are a very lose ago gom racial of people who agree to abide by rules. Anybody who doesn't abide by the rules is by definition not part of the Internet. We have these walled garden mobile carrier private networks out there that are just barely connected to the Internet. They are just barely following the same set of rules. They have a gateway between them and the rest of the Internet. The rules on the other side of their gateway are different, but they manage to translate them at the edge to make themselves palatable and make themselves part of the consensus that we operate under. That kind of goes two ways. On the one hand, yes, you can say the power of government is the power to execute or exclude or whatever. But at the same time it is the decision of each participant to participate, to follow the same set of rules and when they choose not to, if you choose not to follow the IETF protocols you will not be interoperable and physical connectivity is completely besides the point. If you choose not to follow the IEEE, you won't have ethernet working. Each set of rules that you choose not to follow, each set of -- each portion of the consensus that you disagree with takes you one step further away from being part of the same network.
So this has two sides. I see it as being a much more humane system than the physical world one in which governments do have to execute people sometimes, some of them. And where people do not have much choice about what set of rules or the degree to which they want to follow those rules, right? I mean, if you don't like the rules in Singapore you can walk across the cause way to Malaysia and have a ID set of rules, but there are only a limited number of sets of rules that you can choose to abide by. Whereas on the Internet, if you don't like it, find a bunch of other people to agree with you and go off and do your own thing.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you. Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Annal most I'm a researcherment I belong to the Spanish IGF. I had experience trying to build multi-stakeholder groups and discussions. I wanted to say I really liked how Christopher, you spelled out the characteristics of the informal governance. It got me thinking. You said things like small size, people who see each other frequently, that there's homogeneity to it.
Translated into my own experience at the IGF which I have been going to for years now, as open an inclusive as they want it to be with the multi-stakeholder an thousands of workshops, even with that there's a lot of informal governance going on at the same time. This year particularly, 20th Twitter has been saying things like there are close the meetings that I cannot have access to. People are saying that the important things are happening in the hallways. Who is participating in those things is people who feel like they are a close knit community. People who see each other frequently not only at the IGF but many of the meetings that these stakeholders also are involved in throughout the year. So I just wanted to add that this was a helpful perspective in understanding things that are going on right now, even though we try to grow to make it bigger. At the same time we are still enhancing just that close knit community feeling.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: If you take that another step and hook at international law they think about things not in terms of multilateralism and bilateralism but regionalism. In trying to find grand shiewtions to some of these things, they don't necessarily have to be that way. That is quite striking to me. Even though the gentleman left, the other comment I wanted to make is about the power of the State. Yes, the power of the State is always there and it is strong. There's a James Austin long school of thought that believes that's what matters. The other saving grace fad to what Bill said, if the State has to exercise that power, it's general hi lost. It can't execute everybody. It is like I'm a parent. There is punishments that if you impose them, you know you lost. If you have to foreclose on someone's house to get your money back, that is not a win.
>> That is the OSI -- (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: And they failed. We have to understand governments, they are not just a coercive force and if they have to resort to that that is a failure to them. They have to be more constructive. They would love it if private entities could solve these problems and just make them go away. I think that the government actually isn't the -- there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful about the role of government, in addition.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you very much. More questions, please?
Welln that case. I don't know if the panelists want to say a few famous last words before we wrap up? Yeah?
>> LORENZO PUPILLO: I want to respond a bit to the question of Bob pepper. I understand that there is this differences in tone among the governments, but first of all what I try to do is because of that, because there are, exactly because there is this difference among governments, it is important to talk about that and make this differences. Otherwise we are all saying oh, all the governments are the same and we don't understand what is happening now. Even the -- for instance, personally I'm confident, I know that if at the WTPF probably we would discuss the motion from Brazil, probably we didn't have now this meeting in May as has been planned because probably there was a room for display, to play, to have a different role. What I'm saying is that in terms of multi-stakeholder we should think about allowing again a more dynamic among the players and try to match, to match the different players with each governance issue.
The problem with the locals, where is the place we should discuss? Today someone was saying probably we will need, I don't know, informal Council of multi-stakeholder. We will suggest not impose, suggest a place where we discuss some issues, even to some extent who should take the lead on some specific issues, for instance.
>> I would agree. I think one of the problems that we've seen and why we have some reactions by some governments that are very well intentioned is that there are people who talk about multi-stakeholder approach but they don't include governments as a legitimate participant in a multi-stakeholder approach. You know, multi-stakeholder approach is a multi-stakeholder approach. Everybody needs to be able to have a seat at the table including governments because of the appropriate roles for governments, right?
(Robert pepper.) in the early days of the IGF, in fact you can go to some of the regional IGF meetings and there's virtually no government participation. Right, which I don't know whether that is because they don't care in those regions or because at the feel that they are not welcome.
If you take a look at the participation even this week here, an it's a lot better than in the past, there is really not a broad-based participation by governments globally. As participants, right, in a multi-stakeholder environment and process. I think that the short answer is yes, I agree with you. We need to think about from the conversations here, where does it go? Who is the most appropriate actors and places, but one of the things that the Internet has enabled is broader participation at virtually, in virtually every venue, right, whether it's a traditional government venue or even in business as we know. So I think that what we need to be doing is thinking in a very forward way about using the model of the Internet, which is decentralization. The advantages of what we've seen in Internet Governance which is the over used phrase of permissionless innovation which actually worked. And yet figure out where indeed we need a role for government, and there is one. In fact, you re-mined me. What I was looking at, the Presidential directive in 1997 from President Clinton, right, which sort of laid all this out. It's on the Web. And it specifies things for the U.S. government, the Department of Commerce to do, to facilitate the Internet and things that he had directed the government to do to protect. So in terms of, for example, standard setting. You know, he says I direct the secretary of commerce to support private sector D of technical standards for the Internet and the U.S. trade representative to oppose efforts by foreign gfts to impose standards or to use standards for electronic commerce as nontariff trade barriers.
I think we all accept that now. Not everybody, but I think everybody on the panel would accept that and most of the people in this room. So it was very clear also that there were things that needed to be done by government. For instance he directed the secretary of commerce that would facilitate the growth of the Internet. He wasn't regulating it. He was enabling it. The government has a lot of different roles in commerce, in the Internet, in everything. That doesn't mean regulation. A role for government doesn't always equal regulation. Sometimes we lose sight of that in the conversations.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: So, a few short compensates because we ran out of time.
>> BILL WOODCOCK: Regarding multistakeholder processes, you and I both dealt with a lot of governments. More times than not government is the one who shows up after the fact and wants a veto, right? Sometimes they are participatory. Sometimes they lead by example. Sometimes they are very forward thinking but more often than not it is quite the opposite, right? So saying what can the multi-stakeholder governance process do to ensure governmental participation is, it seems to me, putting the responsibility in the wrong place.
>> Robert pepper: That's fair.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Really quickly, the one thought I keep having in response to Anna's comment, sometimes that he is small conversations are not a bad thing because in a way IGF I think is growing up in the sense that we sometimes can make small solutions. I'm also reminded of a big movement in the U.S. which is occupy Wall Street. When they generated political pressure they tried to find leader to say what do you want? Because the organisation was committed to this very open structure, there was no one to answer that question. All the possible force they had didn't work. In a way, there has to be some internal structure. If IGF which is gone for eight years is going to start making the next step from formulating options and debating to having a serious discussion of debating policy alternatives.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: Thank you. Did you want to come back, Bob?
>> AUDIENCE: Just to support Bill's point and actually go a little bit beyond that which is the following. I remember there was an IGF in Nairobi where there were complaints by government saying there are other governments that are not here. And we asked, probed why. It turned out those other governments were not comfortable coming to a meeting where they were not given prerch rengs treatment over the other players in a multi-stakeholder environment, everybody is equal. These were governments, nondemocratic governments in this case that did not want to come where they would have to have conversations with people who were not in other governments. They just didn't understand that. And they didn't understand when some governments came to a meeting, why the tables were not set up with the name plates by, in French, by governments and that's how people sat and when they wanted to speak, you raised your card. They thought it was a U.N. meeting, right? And there is -- it is a different culture. And so I would agree that with Bill it's not always the fault -- in some cases, I think some some places we have not done enough to make the friendly -- the governments that are sympathetic feel comfortable enough in an environment to which they are not yet used to.
>> LINDA CORUGEDO: So thank you very, very much to the distinguished panel for your participation. It has been very, very interesting. I'm just sorry we had no remote questions but that is often the case. So hopefully in the future people will feel more empowered to come in from outside.
Especially because that's when it gets truly multi-stakeholder. So thank you very, very much. Have a good continued stay.
(Applause.)
(The session concluded at 4:00 p.m.)