FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES-ENHANCING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION
FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 24, 2013
8:30 A.M.
SESSION NUMBER WS 344
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FOR THE NEXT BILLION USERS
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This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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(Please stand by.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Hello, everybody. We'll start in maybe three to five minutes. We are just setting up a video that we want to show. There's a technical issue here. Check your e-mail and stuff.
(Standing by.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Thank you all for coming this morning to our panel on the next billion digital natives. I'm Ron Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Before we begin I would like to pass the mic along the panel to have each panelist introduce themselves. I'll say some remarks. We'll show a short video and I'll explain about the video. We will have a dialogue. There are no set presentations. It's a question and answer dialogue involving not only the panelists but we hope as many of you as possible.
And then we will show a video at the very end as well which I'll also explain about at the time.
If you pass this down to Phet?
>> PHET SAYO: Good morning, everybody. My name is Phet Sayo. I'm senior program officer with Canada's International Development Research Center. It's a crown corporation of Canada based out of New Delhi.
>> JAC SM KEE: Hi, my name is Jac. I'm with the Association for Progressive Communications. I work on the women's rights program and I'm from Malaysia.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Good morning. My name is Hanane Boujemi. I am the project manager for the Internet Governance MENA program with Hivos and I'm based in the Hague.
>> WALID AL-SAQAF: I am a Walid Al-Saqaf, director of master journalism at Arab University, researching new media and censorship online. And I'm from Yemen.
>> RON DEIBERT: Thank you all. And helping us is Jenny from our group, and Robert will be carrying a mic around acting as Facilitator of the conversation as we get started.
As I said the first thing we will do is show a short video trailer. This video is a, we did this as a kind of overview of an event that we have held for the last three years at the University of Toronto called Cyber Dialogue. I want to tell you a bit about how that process started. So for those of you who don't know, Citizen Lab is a research institute at the University of Toronto. We are independent of government and corporations. We do research on Internet censorship, surveillance, information controls broadly from a human rights perspective using a mixed methods approach.
In 2009 we had a report come out that kind of put us in the middle of a minor global media storm at the time. A report called "Tracking Ghostnet" about cyber espionage. That report started with research that we were doing in Dharamsala, India, with Tibetan groups who suspected their computers were being monitored. We have a capable forensics team that went there and gathered evidence that we analyzed in the lab and we found out because of mistakes made on the part of the attackers trying to infiltrate the Tibetan computers, not only had they infiltrated the Dalai Lama's office but also hundreds of governments, ministries, foreign affairs, the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., so on.
We wrote up this report, the Ghostnet report. It was covered widely in the media at the time. And it brought us into contact with a community that we certainly, speaking for myself, I knew a lot about as a scholar of international relations and international security, but we hadn't had much contact with directly as a research group. That's the intelligence defense community, especially in the United States.
They saw the Ghostnet report as something very important. And so we were invited down to Washington, D.C. to pentagon events and so on. To audiences that normally people from a human rights background don't have much conversation with.
At that time it dawned on me that there was a problem emerging at a global level. Very quickly this domain that we all use for communications, for, as our public sphere, sometimes for our most intimate conversations on a daily basis, was quickly becoming ground zero for the armed forces of the world and intelligence agencies. I could foresee as it is becoming securitized there are going to be problems for some of the things we take for granted or assume are characteristics of the Internet and cyber space.
Meanwhile I began to understand from the perspective of those communities that they had real issues to deal with. There are, first of all there's a vast underworld of cyber crime that in fact was the basis upon which the Chinese-based attackers were using techniques from that to infiltrate the Tibetans. This is a big problem that law enforcement has to deal with. And of course, there are many national security issues. I realized that civil society sometimes has a reflexive tendency to dismiss or not want to be a part of those conversations. Those are the conversations that take place among the men and women in uniform. I thought this is a problem. We need to at least have a forum where we bring together these different stakeholders.
So we started that forum at the University of Toronto called Cyber Dialogue. We have had three now. It is by invitation only. Capped at 100. It is the one event I think in this space that brings together equal representation of civil society, private sector, and government, including defense, law enforcement and intelligence.
The format is very much like what we are intending to do here today. At the Cyber Dialogue there are no set presentations. Instead, there are conversations. And just an ongoing dialogue among people who maybe don't necessarily see things from the same starting point.
We have had several themes. The last year was about the question of whether you can have governance without government in cyber space. And we have a trailer from last year that attempts to summarize the conversations that went on there, but also point towards what we want to do next year at the cyber dialogue, which will take place March 30 and 31st, 2014.
So without further ado I'll show the trailer and then come back and explain a bit about the theme for today's conversation. So thank you.
(Video played, then stopped.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Uh-oh!
While they are working on it ... it never fails. So the topic for next year's cyber dialogue after the last event we decided that it needed to be about a different kind of conversation that needed to happen between stakeholders, and I'm not quite sure the language to use here myself, between let's say north and south. I have again through experienced I've personally had but also of my colleagues it is clear that the vast majority of the users of what we call cyber space are coming from countries of the Global South. Yet a lot of the policy discussion takes place in places like Silicon Valley, in Washington, D.C., and again I foresee a problem happening here that those, where the technology was invented and a constituencies and the stakeholders that make up and who invented the Internet are not really understanding that the users today and into the future are coming from countries that in many cases have a much different context; have different policy, economic, security challenges.
I think it's interesting that these huge rates of growth in the Global South are occurring at a time when cybersecurity is at the top of the agenda, especially now in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
My own concerns I have had about those revelations, putting aside their content, certainly putting aside Edward Snowden's motivations himself, I have big concerns that the short-term implications of these revelations are going to be mostly negative. That as we have begun to see, countries will seek to insulate themselves, especially from the United States and U.S.-owned networks and companies, but in doing so might set up systems of nationalized controls.
Also I fear greatly that many of those countries will want to essentially imitate the NSA or create localized versions of the NSA. Meanwhile there's a huge defense industrial complex waiting in the wings to service that desire that will also fuel it.
So together I think we are at a precipice, in my opinion, a very dangerous time coming that we need to address for all of those reasons.
The video I have been told is ready. So why don't we show that video and when we get back, since I already described the content of next year's cyber dialogue, we can get right into the conversation. So let's try it again.
Is it possible to turn the lights down without unplugging something?
(Music playing.)
(Video played, then stopped.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Okay, yeah. That actually has to -- the first thing I'm going to do is turn it over to Phet whose entire career was focused on research and located in the Global South.
>> PHET SAYO: I'm going to switch gears a bit and talk about the population you're talking about, Ron. I don't really quite like this term but we use it anyway, the bottom of the pyramid users, the next wave of users in the future. And particularly mobile phone.
IDRC has been reporting research in supporting users of the poorest of the poor, people living on incomes less than two dollars a day. This is a decade long research, looking at mobile access. As you know, a lot of big numbers thrown around, particularly IT of 6 billion mobile users. Our own research tends to have that number a bit lower. We estimate around four to 5 billion instead. The methodology we adopted in looking at mobile use looked at public access, shared access, double sims. These things that are not accounted for. I think the numbers thrown around globally are looking at the supply side, asking Telecoms how many active sims are out there and that is not accurate. That's a point about methodology.
It is interesting when you are interviewing and surveying users in Africa, Latin America and Asia, this is over a span of a decade, credit goes to DRSI -- sorry for all the acronyms. There is a monograph we are going to produce about all this we can share with you later about all the findings, but network users in these countries access the net through their mobile phones.
When asked if they know what the Internet is, the answer is almost always no, but people are accesses Facebook through their mobile phones. It is an interesting finding about perception.
Another significant finding globally is that the poorest of the poor are spending five to 20 percent of their income on Telecom. That is huge. Consider how much of your income you are willing to give to Telecom. And you know, one can make an argument that that, that there is perhaps perceived benefits, on that expenditure or make an argument that it a form of taxation, a burden. It is the way the modern world is and it is a necessity.
The other major finding, of course perhaps obvious but I think needed anyway, the access was predominantly mobile access, predominantly for security and social activity, things we take for granted. But expenditures of five to 20 percent is significant.
The last point is that there is at the global aggregate level findings that suggest that mobile access, Internet access contributes directly to GDP. But there is a question of causality, right? Whether or not rich people have access or because they have access, therefore they are rich. So we are interested in looking methodologies that would link access with livelihood. That is from a development point of view that is a significant task for the development community to work out before we sort of make the conclusion that mobile access, Internet access is super beneficial to the poor.
I just wanted to lay out that context of users.
>> RON DEIBERT: What impact do you see specifically about the Snowden revelations? On the groups that you work with? What is your assessment?
>> PHET SAYO: I think there is going to be -- I agree with you that there is going to be a counter narrative of particularly surveillance over mobile in the name of security. I think there's going to be backlash in that sense. I'm based in Delhi. Delhi and in India, they are hydrology out the biggest identification system, universal identification system. I am not sure if you know about this. I mean, on the one hand the argument is that it is about national security. Terrorism, on the other hand it is about social welfare and distributing benefits.
I don't think it is that black and white sort of issues, but I think the discourse around security and terrorism will, the an tee will be up because of the Snowden revelations.
>> Do you have more time to ... (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> RON DEIBERT: You know, you're in India which is a critical country for this conversation, right? It is the place where, I don't know if it is now, but probably soon will be the most Internet users in the world probably. And it also is typical in some ways in that it has huge governance challenges, but also as our friends Sunil points out often, major security issues on a constant basis in local areas throughout the country as a whole that have to be dealt with somehow.
So I have noticed, and many people are noticing that India is starting to develop a cybersecurity strategy.
So how do you think that will look like? What do you think will be the content of India's cybersecurity strategy?
>> PHET SAYO: I think Laurent can answer a good portion of this answer. I think at the moment under the ICT act there is some abuses from the state right now in using that act in the name of security, but really it is about political defamation. Ambiguity is about defamation and security within the act sort of has to be amended.
I don't see a process that is happening that -- I don't see a process that is happening that is multi-stakeholder in its process and that will derive at some sort of cybersecurity law or regulation at the moment. And in terms of Internet penetration, we have to remember it is about 12 percent of the population has Internet. Most of that is mobile phone. And this is the elite of the elite within India. While the number seems huge, I think it's a bit exaggerated in terms of access. Increasingly it will be about mobile phone. I don't think the distinction between mobile access and Internet access, we should do away with that distinction. Everything is over IP at the moment. It's the offline/online distinction also is blurred at the moment.
>> RON DEIBERT: Are there any specific comments that people want to make in reaction to or questions to Phet, I forgot to mention that Phet has to leave to catch a plane. All toe we had an inside joke that he was going to storm off and be ... so. No, no, I'm not going to try to show that video again for awhile. Robert, can you take the mic around to people? There are some questions.
Thank you. Over here?
Linnet? Maybe you can quickly introduce yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Linnet Taylor from Oxford University. And I am studying big data in developing countries at the moment. However, formerly I studied the mismatch between ICT statistics and reality particularly in Africa, but I imagine the same thing is going on now in Asia.
Can you talk whether there is misdirection going on right now in terms of policy and in terms of the right discussion because of the belief that far more people are online than actually are; or are online in more ways than they actually are. I think you have very good insight on that.
>> PHET SAYO: Let me see if I understand the question. Delivered distortion?
>> AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> PHET SAYO: I don't think there's a major conspiracy. I think it's a matter of gathering data and that's the easiest method to look at the supply side and active sims. We through grants with the University of Washington looked at public access. So in the early days it was looking at tele-centers and looking at access through that forum.
And now as we evolve to mobile phones we are looking at the shared access, some people say mobile phone is sort of the killer app to tele-centers. I think that's a yes and no situation, depending on which country you are at. If you ask the Philippines, that's not the case. India was rolling out 100 tele-centers at one point. The research community can do better at consolidating methodologies and understanding the numbers.
But clearly we can make the conclusion that mobile access is Internet access for the bottom of the pyramid. Again, so that is the concern.
>> AUDIENCE: Good morning. I'm from Irmgarda Kasinskaite from UNESCO. Thank you for an interesting presentation. I have a question and something to clarify with you. You said when you ask mobile phone users what the Internet is, most of them didn't know. Did you carry out any kind of assessment, competence assessment of those users? How did you come to this conclusion? That is quite interesting for us. We would like to carry out similar things. We are just coming with assessment framework in few weeks time and those kinds of questions will be asked.
>> PHET SAYO: And this is mainly, the figures come from Africa. And it is through an organisation Research ICT Africa, RIA, global Network; LER in Asia, DRSI in Latin America look at this. It was a seven-year study. So looked at a sample. And I apologize, I'm actually representing a colleague who was responsible for the research. The sample was initially investigated and asked about perceptions about what they were using and whether or not they understood what the Internet was, what they used it for, et cetera. And then the same group of people were revisited just recently, a year ago, to be surveyed on that and the perception still was we don't use Internet. What really is that? When asked what do you do on your mobile phone? Well, we Facebook.
Often, you see Facebook and social networking in at least the Developing Countries, package is part of the phone and sort of the plans, et cetera.
I don't know if you can make an argument it is just a question of definitions and what is significant about that. We felt that it was significant ton understand who thought they were connected and not. And what they were using it for. That was actually an unintended finding. We really wanted to know what they were using it for and social networking was the primary use. And it turned out that they perceived that they weren't on the net. Again, I think in a few years time this distinction also won't be as significant as we think it is now. That's just my opinion.
>> RON DEIBERT: Okay, another for Phet. We are focusing on him until he has to leave.
>> PHET SAYO: Five minutes ago.
>> RON DEIBERT: He had to leave five minutes ago.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank You. I'm -- from Indonesia Internet Society or we call it Masterly in Indonesia. You said in India they are rolling out almost 100 telecenters throughout the nation. We do also have the same program like that in Indonesia. What I would like to ask you, how do they managing the daily activities of the telecenters? How do they funding it? And do they also providing the special content for the telecenters, for instance, for the educational, tutorial? Thank you.
>> PHET SAYO: The one village, one ... in any case, in India the decision of the government to roll out what they call community information centers was an indirect consequence to our sport to the swam my foundation and their aligning with tell centers which has become a global movement and we've supported that over a decade. And work especially in Indonesia as well and the Philippines. In terms of operations, and sustaining that, it has been a major challenge. I think it is going to remain a challenge. It is heavily subsidized and without international funding and government support it is difficult to find models that work. Not to say they don't. I think you see initiatives in Africa that move towards more of the mobile access and services, add-on services. I think the sustainability is sort of around the add-on services.
But the telecenters that exist now, there are for example the IGNU open university certificate for telecenter operators. This comes again from our funding.
I really don't have a simple answer or a clear answer for you. I think the telecenter movement, I just met with them in the Philippines just a few months ago. They are struggling and thinking about how to sustain that.
There are nodes within that movement. Europe is doing well in that. In my own country in Canada, the movement in the Maritimes and the Territories, that was successful.
They are again confronting the idea of everyone is going mobile access. What is the function of an all purpose telecenter hub in rural communities? The language before was around providing employment, information services around -- personally, I think it should be linked to agricultural extensions. Of course, in India that is quite significant.
No simple answer for you. It is at the moment heavily subsidized.
>> RON DEIBERT: Phet really has to go now. I appreciate you taking the time to come. Thank you for sharing your insights with us in this area. Good to see you again. See you later.
He is going to do it. Thank you, Phet.
(Applause.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Where I wanted to go after the video was to ask the panelists to go through the panel one time and answer the question when we any about this topic, you know, the fact that the vast majority of users are coming from the Global South, from your perspective and from the perspective of the communities of which you are a part, what do you think are the most important questions we should be asking?
So I want to start with you, Jac.
>> JAC SM KEE: Well, start with Hanane.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: We are all here familiar with all of the challenges that people from the Arab Region are facing at the moment. I come from Morocco. The region is still in kind of turmoil situation and people, the elite somehow embrace Internet connection because they manage to find a way to can he their regimes locally using the Internet but it doesn't stop there. I think there are a lot of challenges that generally people are facing in the Arab Region at the moment. I think one of the most important topics that we are working on in the program we are running in Hivos is to try to engage civic actors more in the policy making process. And it proved to be very, very difficult to engage with governments on the Arab Region to speak about the issues at stake and most of them are related to freedoms and the legislation in place that usually hinders civil rights.
So I think the use of the Internet in the Arab Region at the moment as it stands, because I think somehow we are talking about access to the Internet, I think according to the recent statistics we have seen, it is kind of an emerging market in terms of access but when we want to decode how this Internet is being used we have a big question mark to answer because most youth, generations are using the Internet at the moment just to access Facebook or to tweet and even the content is not valuable. It is mainly used for joking and so on. There is a small community of bloggers who are trying to reflect on local issues.
So content and even in Arabic is a critical issue at the moment in the region and we are trying to see how this Internet can be used for sustainable development because that is what people relate more to. So people would like to use the Internet to basically improve their standard of living, for education, to be able to air their opinions about the current issues in the environment where they can exchange information and be more on top of how they can air their concerns at the global level and at the local level as well.
So it is quite a complicated situation because there is no kind of strategy from the Arab Region on how to use the Internet effectively. That is a problem in itself.
So the government is probably working on deploying the necessary infrastructure for more access, but there isn't a clear plan on how the Internet can be used efficiently. And at the moment there is a whole hype of how to, people enjoying actually using the Internet so much but just for fun not for lucrative purposes.
>> RON DEIBERT: I want to come back to you on that, but I want to quickly turn to Walid if you don't mind because, keep it in the Region, so to speak. Walid, you're from Yemen. You spent a lot of time speaking about this region. Picking up on what Hanane is saying, do you feel there is a disjuncture between the vast majority of Internet users and the political leadership in the region? How is that manifested? How do you see that playing itself out?
>> WALID AL-SAQAF: I mean, I will just give you an anecdote. Hanane and I are actually colleagues and working together on the Arab IGF and on one panel I moderated, it was on openness and content. And that panel, it was quite clear there is a huge divide between the young generation and the older generation. You could tell very clearly that the young generation is eager to create change. There was a colleague, activist from Jordan who had voiced his concern about the blocking of websites. And blocking of websites is quite a popular phenomenon in the Arab Region. It happens in almost every Arab country. He was quite furious about what happened in Jordan recently with the blocking of so many hundreds of websites and news websites and so forth. As moderator of the panel I let him speak openly and he was harsh. He used the words: "The government may be confused."
Imagine that there was actually a representative from that country and he got agitated because it is said he is confused. You see how early we are in the democratic process? This was supposed to be a forum where people can share ideas and they debate.
So at that moment I got a request to shut this person down. Imagine being in that position.
So you can tell, obviously I did not. I allowed him to continue to the end and gave the floor the opportunity to respond to his comments.
But you can see, this was a clear demonstration that the country is changing. The countries are changing. People are beginning to see a glimmer of hope in having new generation connected to the Internet, trying to voice their views, openly critiquing and venting, such as the Arab IGF could serve as a manifestation of this gap.
However, it is much deeper than simply a moderated session. It falls within the lines of government. If you look back at the history of the region, you see that oppression has been a trait of these countries. So it takes much longer than simply one revolution to change all that overnight. It would require incremental change, social behavior should begin to also change, not only on the political level if I may say but also on the cultural level an basic community level.
People are not used to convey opinions openly. That is why I agree with Hanane that people are beginning to use the Internet for less, more mundane tasks and entertainment issues because they have not matured enough to immediately begin to go all the way for politics in terms of -- I mean, there are some good examples, but I'm talking about the mainstream. So it would be very rare to find someone openly going forthwith a critical Article against the particular minister, so on and so forth.
It takes a bit of awareness. It takes education. That's why I always say to my students, whom I teach at the Arab University, the Internet is a reflection of, it is a mirror of what is going on. People are beginning to understand that it is not some unique ideal outside world. It is a reflection of reality, but it is also a catalyst for change. So it accelerates change.
The thing is that in the Arab world we need to have both approaches offline and online. You cannot simply go online expecting things to change. You have to have a educational track, a capacity building track to the ground.
I commend ideas such as Hivos' ideas of training people what it is and why it is important for change. That takes long and takes perseverance and patience.
>> RON DEIBERT: I want to ask one more question to you and Hanane before going to Jac. Apologies, Jac, for keeping you waiting.
You describe the divide between the young users, the leadership as a complex relationship.
Another complex relationship that we experienced at the University of Toronto was between research and advocacy groups in that region and us coming in when we were setting up the cyber stewards network. We got slapped down, I would say, in the lists. I wonder if you could describe a bit about the impressions that happen at the time, where they came from. Maybe a bit about your recommendations.
Hanane, similarly, your perspectives because you work with a lot of research groups and advocacy groups in the region, how they feel about the communities in the region, whether they are activist or research communities in the so called the north.
>> WALID AL-SAQAF: You really hit a very sensitive topic. In fact, a lot of advocates and activists in the region are wary of quote-unquote western Agenda. I don't know if you heard that, but it is popular in the Arab world. The conspiracy theories have been dominating for a long time.
The thing is that they are an accumulation of issues, scandals, stories, the latest, the most recent is the NSA revelations and these indirectly harm people with good intentions such as this, Harvard University's Brickman centers and others who are willing to engage in the community. Because of their fate of being geographically located in a country known to do evil stuff, it has become consequential, negatively consequential on their actions.
The thing is, I come from Yemen and I understand the context and the frustration of both sides. I mean, there are people in the Arab world who are willing to engage. I am one of them.
But there are also people who are reluctant, not only because they may already believe in this conspiracy theory, but because the surrounding environment is not empowering them. It is not helping them build the bridge. It may even lead to reputational issues within their environment. It could cause them harm directly. So one very important step to take is to begin exploring means and methods of building bridges and trying to break, say end the stereotype that if you were based in a society or country that may have certain political approaches that you don't like, it does not reflect on every sing em member of society. That requires extending a hand and coming to the region and opening up. Staying where you are may not help. It will never lead to a solution. Being inactive will not help.
There is an approach of mutual understanding in terms of seeing what could work and what could not; getting an approach of not dictating what researchers should think or should do, but coming to them and engaging them directly and saying okay, we are here at your guests. We have to learn what you want, what do you need. What can we do together in terms of cooperating. It begins with an open agenda, not something that has been scripted for.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: I would like to feed into what Walid just said. From my experience, the Arab Region can be specific on how to engage with people on the local level. Obviously, people are more kind of prone to engage with organisations who are willing to work on the ground. That's what we try to do. At Hivos we organize ground training, like on site trainings in different Arab Region countries.
At the same time we are trying to, not to set an agenda, you know, for these countries. We would like civic actors to define the issues at stake and address them from their own perspective. All we provide is a framework and kind of a platform for these people to come together.
Obviously, we are trying to strengthen the knowledge as far as Internet governance is concerned, but we would like to focus on the issues at stake in the Arab Region.
There is a lot of work to be done to build capacity in terms of the principles. You know, the stakeholders, the issues, what is going on at the global level, so they can get used to the conversation.
But I happen to discover this year that Internet Governance is the least of priorities for specific actors. To be engaged in the dialogue proved to be very, very difficult because they don't relate to it because they were excluded from the very beginning. What we want now is to expand not only at the level of stakeholders, like have civil society but literally expand the number of representations from different regions because of the agenda at the moment is mainly dominated by either American organisations analyzing what is going on in the region. People don't want that anymore. They would like to analyze their own issues related to surveillance, to censorship, to all these kind of, the red buttons.
So we are trying to press them. But at the same time we need to try to build capacity on how to strategically engage with governments because as Walid said, working in the Arab Region is just so difficult. And the experience in Algeria, for example, it was very striking. It set us back many, many, many years because we just couldn't engage with the government. And there was a huge misunderstanding about even the concepts in our governance in the Arab Region means government for some people. Policy does not even exist. Policy is politics.
So there is an issue with terminology and when we want to engage new people and obviously we need to have the actors in place. We can't have governments only taking over the show. We need to build a civic society take is able to discuss these issues at the government level. Usually all the actors we work with have kind of revolutionary ideas and are very forward. And that doesn't work. It simply doesn't work. Why? Because it is in the culture. It is, as Walid said, we are not used to having conversations with each other. The concept of civil society does not even exist as a concept. The governments are not used to consult with people.
So it is really a hard process, but we already started working on this. It is just going to take a very, very long time to convince different parties that we need to have a multi-stakeholder dialogue. That is what we are at at the moment. Then we come to speak about the issues at stake. Freedom of expression, current legislation, how it contradicts with civil liberties. Arab governments usually find the easy way out, applying offline legislation online and things like that.
They are not compatible. You know, this obviously hinders a lot of other opportunities. Businesses and big companies would like to invest in the region but there isn't the necessary platform for that. Not only access, but if the Internet is not open enough, it will hinder other opportunities.
Now we are at how to establish the link between the economic benefit of the Internet and freedom. We really need to find that kind of balance. That is what we need. In the north we speak about how to find the balance between security and freedoms. But in the Arab Region, I think it is economy. To speak to governments, you have to talk business. And to speak about rights as well. You really need to connect on how an open Internet will contribute in economic development.
So the homework for next year, while we are doing this project, is to establish that link by doing research, by trying to highlight that clearly and have policy recommendations on that basis.
>> RON DEIBERT: Interesting insights. Jac, I want to come over to you now. You have had probably more experience than many people in this room on the issues that we are talking about. I just want to ask you what your reactions are to these conversations, first.
>> JAC SM KEE: The reason I sort of passed the mic around because I wasn't sure if we were talking about Internet governance issues or access or whether we were talking about both. I think we are talking about both.
Maybe I will start talking about issues around access. So I work a lot with women's rights organisations as well as with sexual rights organisations. And when we talk about Internet access for women and looking at it from a gender lens, then we really need to ask several key questions. One is around control over resources. Who has control over resources? What are the existing disparities within that?
Next is around control over mobility. Simple things like where you can go and can't go. And control of the narrative perspectives and realities. I'll go through them each in turn. The one that has the motion attention when it comes to policy debates around increasing access. And access is a big issue these days, is control over resources. So we are talking about infrastructure. We are talking about cost. We are talking about what is the best platform and so on and so forth and I was at two meetings this year where this was kind of like the primary issue as well.
UNESCO started a Working Group database and there is a Database Working Group commission and there is this alliance that was formed last year looking at mobile phones and access for women and all of this has to do with the Millennium development goals expiring and the 2015 Development Agenda. It is very much focused on this. That is important. When you look at cost, you need to look at -- there is definitely a gender disparity in terms of income, in terms of being able to have gainful employment and even when you have gainful employment there is a disparity in that. That is the premise to start looking at things and that matters in terms of at the end of the day who can afford even a mobile phone. Who can afford a tablet. Who can afford one hour in a cyber cafe. That's an important question to ask.
Then before you even go there, there is the issue of literacy. Even literacy there is a gender gap. You know, there is a disparity between education. So you even actually have to start from that level, whether you can read or not. What is the emphasis on education for your sons and your daughters. And we know that there is a difference in terms of our experience.
And then from there you move on forward in terms of production of content and so on.
But I think one thing I would like to caution against in terms of access in relation to infrastructure is this whole kind of drive towards mobile phone as the silver bullet to answer all access issues, especially for women. This is, you know, we can be -- we can run the risk of actually falling into some kind of marketing discourse as well. I think there is a recognition that women is the next big market. Most women are still not connected yet. There is a gender digital gap. Probably the next billion, most of them are women. We need to give them mobile phones because the mobile phones are cheapest and best. But it also spoils the fastest. It has the danger of security and issue, the types of content you have is different. All of these questions don't get discussed. We need to be quite careful around this rhetoric. There is a private sector and government relationship as well in relation to this. I think civil society needs to be a bit more critical. Or other actors, not just civil society. Ask a little bit more. Actually what kind of content will we get and what is the impact in terms of trying to access the benefits of toll.
Going over to control over mobility, we talked about, I think on day zero we talked about this campaign in Saudi Arabia with the #Women2Drive. This basically was #Women2Drive and this happened in, I think it was probably last year where, you know, in many -- in Saudi Arabia it is illegal for women to drive. You are not allowed to go in a car and drive on your own. In many countries it's difficult for you to drive on your own. They started this campaign and hashtag it. Start talked about it on Twitter and hashtag and they decided to translate this into action. One day in June let's all go out and drive.
And then one of the people who were part of this campaign, somebody videoed her driving and going out on the street and I think she was put in jail. That response came out, too.
But you see how this actually highlights, you know, the connection between mobility empowerment, control over the spaces that you occupy in order to be able to define it. I think this is very important question to think about when we talk about issues like telecenters. When we talk about issues like public Internet access points as solutions to trying to get access to the advantage. A lot of women don't have time, especially the women you want to target. The women who already have access and control over economic resources probably have their own infrastructure. So we also need to think about these issues when it comes to stuff like that. So the layer of cultural and norms and social different social expectations, this is the layer that policy don't want to get into because it will expose a lot of discriminatory approaches that they have in policy. That is exactly the thing that we need to target and be more nuanced in understanding to make things matter. I guess to have an impact, have an impact that is beyond rhetoric.
Finally control over content and narratives and perspectives. First you are able to get access. Then you are able to use the access to do stuff. Then you have you have what you see. Once you write your stories and do stuff, at the get controlled and blocked and gotten rid of.
So in Indonesia itself we did research last year. So we are doing this global monitoring survey every year and stalking to sexual rights activists. What do you use the Internet for an what are your challenges? The survey said yes, the Internet is critical to our work an we need it to advance our work. 58 percent said that they actually face some kind of issue in terms of where there is blocking, threats, intimidation, et cetera.
And I think 15, up to 15 percent said as a response to this, we walk away. We stop doing what we are doing. That is quite something quite sobering. In Indonesia itself we have some colleagues who work here who said websites on sexual rights, information about sexual rights and education got blocked under the pornography act.
That is challenging. With this, it really brings to mind that we need to have a very strong, clear and committed human rights framework in thinking about all of these issues in terms how of how we want to approach this as different stakeholders and what this means to us. As a government, you know what committing to the human rights framework means to you and as a civil society and technical community and I will stop here, I think.
>> RON DEIBERT: Your last point about blocking the civil rights sites in Indonesia, we are doing a study of Indonesia an controls what we are here. And we found what you said, in terms of filtering here on the ISPs in Indonesia, sites that are not pornographic that fall into this category are being blocked.
The other thing it reminds me of, a mutual colleague, Helmi Noman has long said it would be interesting to do a study that systematically looked at what happens to the organisations whose websites get filtered? Like once they are blocked somewhere, his perception echoing what you are saying is that they can, there's a risk that they say forget about it, let's do something else. Let's go offline.
That's something that needs to be tracked and researched around.
I would like to open it up to people in the audience. Especially, we had other people on the panel that couldn't make it today. It would be nice to hear if it's possible from people in sub-Sahara ran Africa and Latin America as well.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you for the panelists and for the organizer for such an exciting panel. And I have heard quite a few exciting points that I would like to pick on, but I'll choose three points. Two of them regarding Hanane and Walid and what they have said about Arab public, their level of engagement, the level of participation online as such.
And I would like first to introduce myself. My name is Abeer Al Najjar, a university professor at American University of Jordan. I come from Jordan and with Freedom House and I work the Jordan chapter of About Freedom.
I wasn't quite, although I understand and respect the opinions that were expressed by the panelists, but I was not very comfortable with the criticism of the lack of public participation from the Arab point of view. There is so much political satire. At the end of the day if you follow many of the young people, adults, journalists and politicians on Twitter and Facebook, you find so many of all the issues are being dealt with and being discussed. Many of the political opinions are being clearly expressed, communicated. And distributed around many circles. So that is point number one.
Point number two, in terms of agenda of whatever conversation we are having, whether in terms of governance or in terms of access which I just listened to a great approach to as how to deal with access. It is very important to go to many civil society organisations in the Arab country with, as Walid suggested earlier, with an open minded sort of approach in the sense of, you know what is going on. Let's try to work something out. And I think from that very particular perspective I can propose two important things that could be tagged on. One is issue of transparency. There is so much vagueness when it comes to the different laws under which freedom rights activists, advocates, et cetera, are being brought into, in some countries the courts. It is very, very important need for clarity from the side of the government and from the side of the judiciary in terms of how do we, how do we bring these people and what makes them liable in the Penal Code and what makes them able to be persecuted under the laws, whether it's copyright or Penal Code or any other law.
Another point I wanted to pick on in terms of government. Civil society organisations are not reluctant. Somehow they are not capable, I'm just trying to refute the fact that they are not capable of working with the government. They are begging the governments in so many countries for an access to talk to them, but the governments for some reason after the Arab spring, they are just not willing to listen. And that is not confrontational, but that is truth.
In many country, I know for example in Jordan, Egypt and many other countries, if you are not pleasing the government they will not listen to you.
I think there has to be some work of diploma's to talk to the government to bring them down to the table of negotiation. There is no trust, but it can be built. This is part of negotiation. That is part of what this forum is trying to do, to establish links and bridges. That is the title of the session.
I'm sorry I talk so long. I just needed to say whatever I say. Thank you so much for your patience.
>> RON DEIBERT: Rather than go back, maybe I'll have somebody go to you next. Before you comment, video people, Jenny, if you can let me know when there's enough time at the end to show it so we don't run out of time to show both videos. Signal me when it's time. Sorry.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes. Y.J. Park from Korea. Thank you for this great session. As Jac said a lot of the panelists address the success issues, so I wanted to address more like Internet governance perspective, especially like trust dimension. I think the synonym of the trust is sort of like security. And there are a lot of different dimensions of security. And Ron mentioned the Snowden incident, but I wanted to address the security of the country like domains which has been addressed in several platforms. So if I reflect, my first experience with this cybersecurity approach to country code domain names was like ten years ago back in 2003 when there was like WSIS pre-regional consultation meeting organized by ESCWA back in Beirut. There were ministers from that region started to talk about the security issues of the CCTLDs. Ten years now, I think probably a lot of the regions feel more secure with their country code top level domain names in some sense, but we still have the unsolved issues of the CCTLD issues, especially with this islands. A lot of the islands from Caribbean region and also the Pacific region, they have been still struggling to take back their authority to operate their own CCTLD registries. As of today, a lot of those are small islands, the CCTLDs of operated outside of their countries in the islands, which they don't really have any specific platform. They have to address with. And if they go to ICANN, ICANN doesn't have such kind of political authority to solve that re-Delegation issue. They cannot go to ITU because ITU doesn't have any authority to deal with any CCTLD issues.
I think this is a very substantial issues to solve before we have this billion users on the Internet. Otherwise, if we can not build this trust in this network, it is going to be very difficult to achieve this billion users in the same network.
So I think sort of addressing this CCTLD securities in this process also can be very critical.
>> RON DEIBERT: Thank you for that. Are there other comments, interventions people want to make at this point?
You bring up -- oh, there's one over there, Robert.
No, that's fine. Let's get some input from the audience.
>> AUDIENCE: My. My name is Dave Moskovitz from Internet Governance New Zealand.
The point I want to raise, the last couple billion of Internet users have come from countries where there is a healthy tension between government, between civil society and between the private sector. That healthy tension has helped enable each one of those stakeholders to have a significant say in how things are run.
My concern is that the next billion users are coming from countries that are mainly captured by government where governments have a disproportionate power compared to the other potential stakeholders. What can we do as existing several billion Internet users who are already there and already having this conversation? What can we do to ensure that the voice of the people in the countries that these next billion users are coming from are not completely captured by the governments? How can we make sure that they have a seat at the table that we are at right now in formulating the discussion and making decisions.
>> RON DEIBERT: That's a really great question. I would actually like to put that to the entire audience here. I would like to hear people's opinion. What do we do about this? Does anybody want to jump on that? Up here? Okay.
>> JAC SM KEE: What do we do? First of all, I think it's hard to make such a broad sweeping staple as well. There are some countries which are disconnected currently. Still have a large proportion of people not connected on the Internet, who is mostly captured by the government.
I think that is kind of a little bit -- I am not sure how helpful that is actually to try to unpack the particularities of, I guess participatory decision making in terms of Internet Governance. I also think we need to expand this concept. I think yesterday I heard this concept by Jeanette Hofmann. Unblack boxes the multi-stakeholder and what do we mean? Each of us have a different conception of what the magic wand is. We bring this old tripod of private sector, civil society and state into this issue of Internet Governance, but there may be other people who are involved, for example technical community which is kind of a little bit there and there and everywhere.
And then to kind of like think through within these different stakeholders as well. What are the different kind of viewpoints and concerns that are being brought forward by different people with different expertise. It is not necessarily homogenous in that sense.
In many countries where there are transition area democracies, it is huge to think what is participatory democracy now? We know that the old ways of working isn't working now. We don't want such huge monetary influence in the way that things are being run. That cannot be the safeguard against another kind of, another kind of power. So how then do we try to reconstruct this?
I think in transitioning democracies, especially there is an acute awareness of the Internet as being a public sphere. With that, that actually creates an enormous opportunity to rethink how do we want to govern this public sphere, not from entertainment or use or just a cogeneration point of view but a sphere that is critical in terms of defining citizenship and how do we all participate in this citizenship? It is being done but the challenge is how to translate this into a logic and understanding of what multi-stakeholder is. It is actually this kind of existing logic and imagination that needs to shift to be able to allow for new kind of thinking and models to come in.
>> AUDIENCE: How?
>> JAC SM KEE: How? Maybe we need to shift the people who are speaking? Maybe we need to -- I think actually, this is another thing that I heard recently, which I really like. The fact that IGF is such a great space because I know it gets critiqued that it is not a decision making space, but it is the space in which debates that have to take place before decisions take place can happen. This kind of space is really critical. We need to have rooms that are not like this, but rooms that are much more -- let's talk about how do we make this happen? How do we think about -- really coming up with structures, ways, that unbox this idea of multi-stakeholderism, maybe.
>> RON DEIBERT: Listening to that and thinking about it, when you enter into a forum like IGF that is multi-stakeholder and has this idea of dialogue, there is so much accouterment of the U.N. system and formalities and the way speeches are laid out. It's still structured in the way that is the old style system that acts as a constraint on participation from a lot of people from the get-go, right?
Did either of you want to remark on those comments? On the how?
The how is really good.
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Yes, the how is actually what we are trying to define now. I can speak only of the Arab Region. I said earlier we need to be very tactical in engaging with governments. Without them you can't go anywhere. You just said that. We are not trying to paint a black picture of how the online environment is being shaped at the moment in the Arab Region when it comes to the use.
I know that there is kind of many, many emerging blogger communities that is hand-on when it comes to reporting about issues that are directly related to the socioeconomic problems in the Arab Region and so on. That's a minority. We are trying to target the crossroads. That is happening at a much more larger scale.
Now, how to engage with governments probably to feed into the question of the gentleman is literally you will have to be in a position to sit down with them on the same table to try to convince them that this is important. But from my interaction with government officials from the Arab Region, there is a kind of complete closure when it comes to open up to any kind of normative idea that will foster a change in the mentality, in the mind set.
It is an issue with the mentality. Sometimes the conversation can lead to a counter kind of solution or counter -- it backfires. It happened in Jordan. In Jordan when civil society tried to speak with the government about banning online websites, and the result was shutting down other knowledge websites like Heber, and that is the result of a conversation with the government official. So engaging with governments does not always result in positive results in the Arab Region.
So look past to maybe --
>> RON DEIBERT: Let's go to Walid, too. We are going to try to go one more time with the video.
>> WALID AL-SAFAQ: One by one, public participation on the online world in the Arab world is not as bleak. The thing is we always have to raise the bar. So we constantly need to the point out that we need to do more. The open approach of western-based or north-based organisation feeds to be transparent and open and that is a message to those organisations. So I think you conveyed a very strong message. I agree, these islands need to be addressed. This is the forum for it, IGF. These issues can be addressed here. This is important that it be kept in the script so people can know.
Finally the next billion and concerning the authoritarian regimes where they come from, basically the Internet is the catalyst for change. So bring it over there. And then begin to see change happening in those countries as well. It will accelerate.
So that is what I would like to happen.
>> RON DEIBERT: Okay. We are going to go to the video again. I want you to all do what I did. I made a paper airplane. If this doesn't work, we are all going to throw paper airplanes at you, okay? One last chance.
>> Two things, this is the video we are going to show --
>> RON DEIBERT: I'm arming it, Robert.
>> Wait, you have to --
>> RON DEIBERT: Go, go, go.
>> All right.
(Music playing.)
(Video playing.)
>> I think we are in a watershed moment for cyber space. If you fast forward 50 years down the road, historians will look back and say there was a time in the 2000s and 1990s when the people of the earth built this open distributed network and everyone could communicate with everyone freely, and it all shut down through censorship, surveillance and militarization.
>> We live in a surveillance state, increasingly consumers are using services provided to them for free. That business model has had aside effect of facilitating easy, cheap, wholesale surveillance.
>> The law enforcement folks as well as military folks say you might be part of a terror network. Therefore, everything has to be monitored.
>> I see a real danger of the State casting itself in the protector and being seen as the enemy of the people.
>> It looks like we have two sides. There's a side of governments that support openness and the other side is governments where they have black boxes.
>> The approach to digital security has to be comprehensive. And we have to empower citizens as opposed to what some of these authoritarian regimes are doing which is disempower people and not allow them to have the control over their own lives.
>> We have to defend freedom of expression. It goes hand-in-hand with privacy. I believe that freedom of the Internet is the biggest contribution peace in the world.
>> I work with a group of people in Morocco who were targeted by a software called DaVinci.
>> The number of ...
(Lost audio.)
>> The digital arms trade is big business. And that means it won't stop.
>> What used to be our global commons of information has become ground zero for intelligence agencies and military organisations around the world.
>> If one side says I'm building a national Internet from which I can attack people, the rest of the world doesn't have a choice. We are going to have to fight this out on a national basis.
>> National security is important. But it is problematic when governments reengineer the results that the whole world uses for communication and for organisation.
>> I think you are all running out of time because the next really unpleasant event will cause people like me to pay a great deal more attention to the issue of cyber controls, and no one will like the results.
>> I think the future of cyber space is not going to be determined by those of us living in Toronto or New York or even Silicon Valley, but by the next billion digital natives coming online from the Global South. If we care about keeping cyber space open and secure we have to engage in a global dialogue.
(Music playing.)
(End of video.)
>> RON DEIBERT: That is one video. We have a second video.
(Applause.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Its the work of engaging and talking to users in India that a colleague there has produced.
So we will show it right away so we can get a little bit of comments afterwards and reaction.
(Video played.)
(Sound of traffic.)
>> NARRATOR: -- opened up the initiative with the idea of anonymity, with the idea you could be anyone. The famous line is everybody can be a dog on the Internet or someone is a dog on the Internet.
But basically -- (dog barking.)
>> Actually, to be very honest, Indians are quite clueless about how much personal data is being collected and in how many forms. Many of these forms are now being done in a manner which seems very innocuous. But all the data in the end is ending up with one single repository, which is the government. So therefore, there are huge issues here which people are mostly unaware of.
>> I'm struck that if you are tapping all our phones, how do you not have the information you need to address issues like taxes, to address issues of corruption and dishonesty, decision making that is extremely flawed by persons, by elites in positions of power.
>> It is very important for users to learn how to protect themselves online. It is the same as if you go out into the world, you also need to know if you are going to cross the road, you need to know that you better look left an right before you do that to see if cars are coming.
It's the same way on the Internet.
>> When you are community indicating online, users need to find out how to make themselves more secure. Once the user education is well, it will take care of a lot of other issues. If the user education is not there, that basically means you have given away all your rights on communication to somebody you trust. Would you like to trust other site or software, it's up to you. If you don't have an understanding of what is required there is no way to actually learn about it.
>> The cyber war is a new phenomenon. It is more, needs more discussion among all interest groups to formulate a mechanism that is very important so that one interest group does not dominate even the law or the impact of it.
>> If you look at the Web of laws that exist that can be used in a way to kind of curb access to freedom online, you are really talking about a really intricate network. The visible ways of things like Information Technology Act, et cetera. You have a wide range of laws whose application cannot even be anticipated. So I think in that way, yes, it is impossible to talk about cybersecurity without simultaneously discussing it as a leading issue.
(Video concluded.)
>> RON DEIBERT: That's it.
(Applause.)
>> (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> RON DEIBERT: Any comments or questions?
>> Maybe quickly to give a quick overview of what you have just seen, it is a sort trailer of a feature length documentary on cybersecurity in India. But we are approaching it from the civil society perspective. I mean, government and enterprise have their own PR teams and we have very few. So we are hoping to tell a somewhat unique story, a story that needs to be told more, I think.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. My name is which is Bouzaine Zaid from Morocco, and I teach at the university there. In response to the gentleman here about his question an also from what we saw in the two documentaries. Now, we need a model of what this Internet is. Now, I mean, the first few billions who are using it, I don't think they figured it out yet. I can make an argument about prince media and broadcasting. There are existing models out there that say for instance, the First Amendment, should not be regularized. Broadcasting, we have public service as a model. There are principles, it's there.
Now with the Internet we don't know. I mean, the western countries have not yet developed and idea of what this is, how it can be regulated. Is it regulated like print? Like broadcasting or something else?
Now, I mean, things get complicated with Snowden, of course, revelations and everything, but these issues here of national security, child pornography, privacy issues, copyrights, Intellectual Property, all of these. I mean, I think we need to figure that out at some moment and just decide on how do we want to deal with this beast. How are we going to deal with the Internet? Without this normative model it is very hard for us in the south to really make any progress because we need some normative standards out there that say this is what the Internet ought to be. Some articulation of that. It is something that is, I have been here walking around in this forum. I haven't seen that yet. So thank you.
>> RON DEIBERT: Thank you very much for that. So am I right that we are, we've reached the end. I want to first of all thank all of you for coming out and participating here in this dialogue and secondly, I want you to join me in thanking the panelists here who gave some really insightful commentary on the topics that we came here to discuss. Thank you very much, all of you.
(Applause.)
>> HANANE BOUJEMI: Actually, there are normative standards that have been developed and are being developed. There is the Internet, the APC charter that has been around since early 2000 and there is the necessary and proportionate principles around surveillance and privacy. That is important to check out. It is not that we are in want of stuff to really guide our practice and our behavior. It is really about political will, really. This kind of like this sense of it's okay, surveillance is like pervasive okayness. It's not okay and we need to challenge.
>> RON DEIBERT: Thank you very much. And thanks to the technical people there. It is always challenging. We appreciate you coming through in the end. Thank you.
(The session concluded at 10:30 a.m.)
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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