The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> If you are part of the panel, please join us at the table.
Okay. I think we're ready to start. So good afternoon, everyone. This is the ‑‑ I have to speak really close to the mic, oh dear.
Sorry, a few technical problems here. Can you hear properly now? Yes? Excellent.
Well, good afternoon, everyone. This is the meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values at the IGF in João Pessoa. We are meeting at every IGF meeting and have done so for quite a few years now discussing the set of values that are primarily technical in scope but also that do extend to the more societal elements of the Internet values but not extending as far as freedom of speech or Human Rights. So it's a rather more scoped‑out and restricted mandate. This workshop is going to be discussing the thought that the organizations responsible for components of Internet governance including large internet organizations, governments, and civil society organizations could formulate or contribute to formulate Internet policy in a manner that the Internet does not slip away from core internet values.
With me, Olivia Crepin‑Leblond will be the moderator today. The workshop was put together by the organization and moderated by Sivasubramanian Muthasamy, who unfortunately was not able to join us today.
Starting from my left, we have Kathy Brown, CEO of the Internet Society. Next to me on my left is Carlton Samuels, University of the West Indes. On my right, Mark Carvell from the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sports. And Paul Wilson is a little bit on the side due to the length of the power lead to recharge the batteries after a short, very short lunch. And Paul Wilson is CEO of APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Center that is the reginal internet registry for that part of the world. Hopefully joining us later will be Erica Mann. I have seen her being busy a little bit earlier today.
So the Coalition itself has submitted a document to the IGF, a one-pager about the Dynamic Coalition. I'm now going to ask that it be put on the screen, please. Rafael, the document, please? And we're not going to read that whole one-pager. I think it is linked or should be linked from the agenda. We'll see the link on the top of the screen. It's a little bit difficult to read there. It is part of the overall, very large document that is constituted by the reports from all of the Dynamic Coalitions but also the best practice forums which have been put together in the past year and have done an incredible amount of work.
So that one-pager provides you with a brief background of when the Coalition was started. Primarily in 2009 with the then-Internet Society President, your predecessor, Kathy, being the Chair of the workshop, and the workshop was on the fundamentals, core Internet values. And it examined the questions: What is the Internet? What makes it what it is? What are its architectural principles? What are its core values? And we're pretty much driving along in the same direction from workshop to workshop. But filling the gaps of the fact that the Internet does continue to move forward and new challenges are now coming ahead of us, we'll be speaking about those in a minute, and that the work of the Core Internet values Coalition has to, of course, reach at some point some point of -- I wouldn't say a deliverable but certainly a goal as to what we are really looking for here. Are we looking for a document that could be signed by stakeholders? Are we looking at going further than that and perhaps getting organizations to bring these core values as part of their operational values? Very open questions on this.
The Coalition, after the IGF in Egypt, was formed with meetings held since 2010 at every global IGF, and each time having a different Chair for the meeting. It's quite a loose coalition. It has a mailing list, and the Chair changes from year‑to‑year -- the Chair of the meeting changes from year‑to‑year. I did Chair the meeting with an illustrious panel and there is a video that is available out there. This year is equally as illustrious as we have the movers and shakers of the Internet. I think Paul, you were in last year's panel, as well, on this. It was quite a small room and extremely hot. Today it's a noisy room, very large and quite cold.
Anyway, moving further down on that document, there are two points of views, really, the one of course is the set of values that the Internet ought to not slip away from. In the that way one says it, the architectural values, the Interne is a dumb entity, the opening of the Internet, the interoperability and openness of the Internet that has made the Internet what it is today and that has contributed to the vector of growth that the Internet has become.
On the other hand, there are other views that it is inevitable that some of these values, maybe not all of them but certainly some, might be outed because of the Internet's evolution. For example, the Internet's architecture remains an overall guiding principle, but the community sometimes recognizes that in some cases of abusive content, spam, malicious traffic, et cetera, there might be some need for filtering of some devices that will step in between the end‑to‑end, and therefore not keeping the power of what to send and what to receive in the end user's, the end point of connection. So end‑to‑end architecture remains a core value but not adhered to blindly. We all know that there are many gray levels to which this can be pursued.
Further down in the document -- I'm just trying to summarize it quickly for those people that have not managed to read it. The technical values could result in a larger sociological benefits. Looking at the global network of networks, the architectural values of openness and interoperability make the Internet a network of networks that require literal or no architectural changes as such. We are seeing that some architectural changes that had been made such as the network address translation are gradually, perhaps, going to move away with the introduction of the new IPv6 protocols. And therefore what seemed to be a change on the initial core values is now backtracking somewhat perhaps not because of political push in any sense, but certainly because of the evolving technology that allows for this to happen.
Nevertheless, the threats of fragmentation are still very much present. Some call it Balkanisation. I'm not quite sure it's a nice way of saying it, Balkanization. I know historically everyone knows what that means, but fragmentation is a big problem. The whole thing of having different Internet islands that are separated with bridges and moats, I think it was called, the Internet Society did have some presentation about this. Moats and bridges I think it was called. And that's still something that's very much present.
Further down the page, there are a set of values that are provided there. And if we can perhaps scroll up on the projector -- I'm not quite sure you can even read this on the projector. Rafael? We have a visual communication taking place here. Further down that page -- and that should be available from the IGF website. It took me about a half hour to find it, but it is on there. Further down, I think it's Paragraph No. 11, there we go, set of values, global, open, free, user‑centric, end‑to‑end, interoperable, robust and reliable.
There are ‑‑ right now there is a comment period that is open and that is currently collecting comments on the right‑hand side of the page. You can see there are quite a few comments received already. You can see these one‑word bullet points are left to interpretation, I guess, for some. For example, free. Well we all know the Internet itself is not free. We all have to pay for our Internet access because it costs something. So free is one thing. But then you could interpret it, of course, in the way of freedom of information and free of filtering, et cetera.
And then, finally, I think that we have looked at that. There is one paragraph that I have missed with regards to fragmentation that also looks at the artificial borders raised by walled gardens and the zero‑rating services. A little bit controversial here. It is in the document. We have received some feedback in the comments that asked for some different language, and I invite you all to have a look at that, as well. Finally the end point while it could be deemed as a standard for global internet policy, the organizations responsible for components of Internet Governance, large organizations, governments, civil society to all formulate Internet policy in a manner that the Internet does not slip away from those core Internet values.
So, from your perspective, and I think I should probably start with Kathy, since I know that the Internet Society has drafted a very extensive document and set of documents and has been pursuing core Internet values -- from what was it? 1994 since the very inception of the Internet Society. From your perspective, how would these principles be received by your stakeholder group?
>> KATHRYN BROWN: Well, our stake holder group are the people who adhere to these and actually are passionately advocating these values, living these values in the Internet space. This is what they believe, how we believe that Internet -- that the value that we bring and that we build into the Internet.
I must say that we should, I believe, think about the word "values" as the word "attributes." And then the words that go toward how you live out your values, how you then live your values are different in some respects from the architecture of the Internet. In other words, this way you approach something as opposed to some of the things, some of these comments you make, make me a little nervous because it doesn't go to the thing itself. It goes to the value you bring to the thing.
And so I would point people to a paper that's recently been updated on what Leslie Daigle, who was our Chief Technology Officer for any number of years at the Internet Society, calls the Internet irvariance. In other words, what makes the Internet the Internet? These are the values we bring to this undertaking, but there are attributes of the Internet that are, as she says, what makes the Internet the Internet. If you don't understand that, if there's something different happening than these pieces of the way she describes attributes, then it's not the Internet. And I think that's a useful paper to put next to this one.
You will find that paper at cigionline.org. And it's paper number 7. I took it down already. And this paper was done for what is sort of colloquially called the built commission that came on about two years ago after the stone revelations. And there was an inquiry as to how do we think about preserving the Internet as the Internet? And the commission asked Leslie to update her piece, which has long been on the Internet Society's web site, to talk a little bit more deeply about this idea of what makes the Internet the Internet, and what are the threats to that? And this paper is extremely good on this issue.
So just as an opening, I sort of want to bring this up‑to‑date that the work, the very good work that Lynn did very early on and really worked through policymakers and stakeholders so that there was a wide acceptance of these values has been added to by an understanding of what makes the Internet the Internet also done by the Internet Society.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Kathy, for this. Let's go to the other end. Let’s start with Paul Wilson. Paul, from your perspective and from the perspective of your stakeholders, how would these values be addressed?
>> PAUL WILSON: I think firstly I'll say this is not something that's been discussed in this Forum at all and I don't have the ability to represent any position or what would be likely to be the position of our very diverse membership.
What I'd say, though, and this relates, I guess, back to previous contributions and also, in fact, to what Kathy has just spoken about, is that I think from a technical community point of view, people would want to be much more specific and much more technical, if you like, about exactly what we're talking about here.
So in my past contributions here, I have spoken about the aspects of the Internet, the technical features of the Internet that make it the Internet, the things that we actually take for granted but which didn't occur by luck or good fortune. They were part of the original design principles at a technical level. They are things that, in some cases at least, need to be act fully maintained. They are also in other cases that actually do get compromised and they get compromised very deliberately in some cases. And you mentioned network address translation, for instance, or various types of network filtering, which do naturally overwrite sort of an end‑to‑end principle. These are technical features and in general they can be well‑defined, very well‑defined. Defined to the extent of no disagreement at all of an objective agreement by all who are involved.
So I think what I'd like to see here is the actual definition of what we're getting at in terms of the features of the Internet in an objective manner that can be defined as unique. And I think what Kathy spoke about is the fact that ISOC has already done this and is way ahead of where I am, for instance, in actually articulating this stuff. And so I'd also recommend Leslie's paper there as something that is really deep dive into these issues in a way that there really can be a real clarity amongst all concerned about what we're talking about in terms of technical features.
Now what I'd then like to see is I'd like to see these values, which are different from technical features, I'd like to see them linked with the dependencies defined so that we actually can see that the global nature of the Internet is something that we can aspire to but which is dependent upon and linked to certain kind of certain management features or maybe policy features. I know not all of this is into the technical characteristics of the Internet so there may not be a direct link between the value and the feature in every case.
So I think anyone from my community would want to see that. They would be wanting to say what do you mean by global Internet specifically in terms of our language? What do you mean by that?
And then you might have a discussion about to what extent that can be achieved or should be achieved or can be agreed. I don't think we're talking about enforcement here. But we might be talking about agreement on an aspirational goal, which we really can say we want to maximize this. But then we do need to know exactly what we're talking about.
I'd actually suggest that the values themselves, as opposed again to technical features, these values really deserve to be explained and articulated in much more detail than the single words here. So I'd like to know really what we mean by saying a value of the Internet is that it's global. Maybe it somehow goes without saying or we think it does, but I don't think so. I think if these things are core values or key values, then they deserve to be spelled out quite a bit more, defined, explained, so that we actually do know what each other is talking about. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN LEBLOND: Thank you, Paul. Have regional internet registries already worked on this type of topic?
>> PAUL WILSON: I would say that there are features, technical features of the Internet, that it is a key responsibility of the RIRs, for instance, to work on. The policies have always had an absolute concern with the routability of addresses that are allocated. It would be possible to manage or mismanage addresses to the extent that a small number or a large number became unroutable in parts of the Internet or globally. And so the global nature of the Internet, the routability of the Internet, the fact that you can go from one address, you can reach any address from your own address, that's a technical feature. And it's something that is also objectively understood and something whichever one in our community would absolutely agree on. We are here to maximize or to ensure the routability of address space that's there. Routability doesn't mean that it's necessarily routed. It may be filtered. There may be other things going on. The fact is you don't want addresses to be unroutable or the Internet to break down in terms of its global integrity.
And routability actually goes to the end‑to‑end principle, so it's the global end‑to‑end, point‑to‑point nature of the Internet. IPv6 is something that is absolutely bringing that back because as you said, network address translation is something that's used quite deliberately and quite consciously, and yet it breaks certain of these principles; and the idea of IPv6 is exactly to get rid of all that and to allow every point on the Internet to be reachable, if not actually reached, even if there are decisions that then actually modify that, moderate it. But the idea of reachability is that you can, if you wish, reach any point from any other point. And that's IPv6.
Again, when you put these things, when you look at the features behind your values and you put them in clearer technical terms, you'll have a lot of points of agreement or at least points of very clear discussion within, hidden behind all of this. And I'd like to see it go in that direction. I think it would be very interesting. I think members of our community would be very interested in having a discussion as to how their work on technical infrastructure actually maps to values that other people see and aspire to or attribute to the Internet as core values. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Paul. Carlton Samuels, you have been very active in the Caribbean and beyond of the academic community in the Caribbean and beyond. In your community, has there been much discussion about these values, and how would these core values or points as they're given here, whatever they're called, how would these be received by your community?
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Thank you, Olivier. A couple things. In the Caribbean, the Internet is core and central to the development agenda. So it's economic and social development. And pursuing those goals as aspirations, definitely the issue of a global Internet is very important to us. We try to double down on connectivity and accessibility. So we are very, very much concerned about lowering the barriers to people accessing the Internet. And in order to do that, connect each of us to all of us. And so the global and end‑to‑end principles are important to us. If you think about economic exploitation or economic use of the Internet, it all is very important in small island developing states where we have small populations to be able to reach everybody we can reach in order to make some economic gain from it. The issue of the Internet as interoperable is very important to us because one of the things that we are absolutely sure is a requirement for development and social and economic development is that we should be able to use all applications, all services are available across the Internet and there is no discrimination against applications and services. Those are principles that are embedded and a very much important part of it.
How we action that is between policies that we encourage our policymakers to engage in. So, for example, we support spectrum policies that allows for access to the spectrum on an equitable basis, access to spectrum by our suppliers, the availability of community networks to participate. We do not believe in blocking of applications, blocking of services. We are definitely for a situation where it's reusable. So reusability is important so there are no sacred cows. They're going to be opportunities for renewal and innovation and so on.
And the expectation is that you will always have opportunities for renewal and change and ensuring that all participants are treated fairly and with equity.
So if you look at all the principles combined, every single one of them in your tool or aspirational objectives, which is development, social and economic development.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks very much, Carlton. Governments, I guess, are particularly important stakeholder in that they have a sovereignty aspect of doing what they need to do for their citizens and their country. Some governments have been known to perhaps not be particularly conducive to defend those core principles. And then yet others have been very vocal about this. So I do know that there's been some discussion on the U.S. stakeholder group on this, but from your perspective, how have these principles been received by your stakeholder group?
>> MARK CARVELL: Thank you, Olivier.
First of all, I want to say this is a very valuable initiative by the Dynamic Coalition to define and articulate core values which should inform government policymaking. You could argue that some of these ‑‑ this is not an exhaustive list. There are some characteristics of the Internet and how it's governed that could be added to this list. But it's a very important list. And those elements that are defined here are recognized by most governments as essential determinants for maximizing the social and economic benefits of Internet technologies and applications, using a wholly neutral Internet infrastructure.
The question becomes more difficult when the governance models that we are developing. And this is one characteristic that we would want to emphasize in this kind of debate, that governance should be multistakeholder, the problem is that for some governments, this is ‑‑ this means adapting to a whole new approach to policy development. I can come on to this perhaps later in terms of how our governments have had to re‑assess how they approach the Internet and the problems relating to the Internet and how to develop responses to it given that the Internet is essentially borderless and the classic government approach to define within its community laws and rules that would apply, that approach will simply not work.
So that's where the problems arise and that's where some governments find adjusting to this New World of a single globally interoperable communication medium so difficult and where the kind of risks that you're highlighting in this paper of Balkanisation or governments wanting to exert some sort of sovereign control over Internet activity and the ability of their citizens to access the Internet and to realise all the consumer benefits and rights of expressing themselves. Some of those governments are not able to adjust to this new borderless medium.
So I would certainly commend this approach of the Dynamic Coalition to all the fora where governments are actually engaged have and those fora should be multistakeholder. They should enable governments to develop their policy in an informed way which takes account of the technical evolution of the Internet, the dynamics of it, without ‑‑ and so obviating the risk of governments weighing in with a top‑down approach that simply does not recognize the dynamics of the Internet.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: I thank you, Mark. Just as a followup. You mentioned multistakeholder on many occasions. I gather that the UK does support the multistakeholder Internet. We've heard a number of governments supporting both multistakeholder and multilateral decisions and saying that some decisions need to be taken entirely just by governments.
What's the view ‑‑ because that obviously would go against the principles as they are listed here.
>> MARK CARVELL: Well, the UK, like many governments, would consider a wholly governmental approach to certain issues still to be inappropriate. We're seeing this argument playing out in the current 10‑year review of the implementations of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, the WSIS + 10 review, which is now underway in New York at the UN General Assembly. We're seeing there some governments saying, “Cybersecurity, this is too important. Only governments should take the lead on that. And we should be forming some kind of treaty‑based approach to this.”
We would argue, and many other governments would argue, well we can't do that. We will probably make fundamental mistakes. It would be a slow process that does not take into account the evolution of the Internet and does not take account of the need to engage with the technical community, with other constituencies in the Internet ecosystem because they would have a say. They would have expertise. They will have a role to play in any rollout of a response to security threats. That's the kind of argument we would ‑‑ we are articulating in New York against that more traditional, top‑down multilateral approach that we argue would not work and would probably lead to all kinds of problems as a result. Thank you.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Mark.
Kathy, would the treaty-based approach work for you?
>> KATHRYN BROWN: So I'm going to suggest that's the wrong question. I think that the right questions to ask are the very ones that you've just laid on the table.
So to the extent that there needs to be agreement around some way forward with respect to some aspect of security, and there are many, the issue becomes how do you do the policy development?
And then to the extent there is an enforcement issue because the, if you will, the whole of the body who did the policy thinks that it's best to enforce, then there is some mechanism to do that. So I'll give an example.
So the issue -- and I just think this whole area of security and trust is hugely important. And I would strongly agree with the notion that anything on the Internet can be done top‑down with no input, no part of the rest of the community, is a misunderstanding of the network of networks and how it works. So I go back to the fact that this is a different kind of phenomenon, if you will. It is a network of networks that is many, many networks that come together, that are interoperable and that there are agreements between these networks for the transit, if you will, of bits that are distributed across the network and identified by unique identifiers in very, very different ways than traditional telecommunications networks that many, I'm afraid, of our regulators grew up with. So it's very different architecture which requires a different kind of understanding of how one builds on it, makes it better, makes changes, does security. And there's no ‑‑ so let's assume that there was a treaty. What would the treaty be about? It would be about saying we should keep it secure. Now after that, what? Now what? Okay. Who's going to keep it secure? What does this ecosystem look like? What part of the ecosystem is affected by the security issue that you've raised? Is it the device? Is it the transit that comes across the large continent? Is it my WiFi right now that's happening here? Where is the problem that we want to fix? How in Heaven's name are we going to have a treaty that decides that question?
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Is it the work of governments to keep it secure?
>> KATHRYN BROWN: And how would the governments do that? They will say to all of the people who run all of the pieces of this "keep this secure."
Okay. And now we're back to where we were. We call this collaborative security, by the way, at the Internet Society. And we put out a paper on this very issue that says there's no silver bullet here. There is a collaborative process that needs to happen to figure out first what the problem is ‑‑ what any particular problem is that we need to solve. And then to bring the legitimate stakeholders and experts to the table to solve it. That does not mean that this is outside the realm of government. Government may have very important and legitimate interest in getting the problem solved, but it cannot solve it by itself. And I think that is the nature of the thing itself that says it can't happen that way. This is why I say it's the wrong question because so what? Yeah, sure, go. Yeah, what would you do? And then what, is always my response. See, we start at a different place.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Paul Wilson?
>> PAUL WILSON: Something that Kathy was saying there reminded me of a conversation I had quite a few years ago with a regulator in a particular country in my region who asked me when the switch to IPv6 was going to happen, on what date. And I went into quite an explanation about the nature of the problem and the number of stakeholders involved, the distributed nature of the networks and the authority over them, the vendors, the software people, the users, the fact that there could not be a single date.
And so his next question was, well, who's in charge? And so I rewound again and sort of stressed that as I explained the diversity of this system and the fundamental nature of it, there was actually no one who could be in charge. And that's again why there's not a particular date.
And he nodded and said "Yes, I can see it's very important." And I thought, okay, yes, it is. And he said, "So someone should be in charge."
And what's occurred to me there is that there's not so much a technical feature, but there's a feature in the reality of the Internet and the way it exists that actually is a set of features that are simply that's the way the Internet is, it's actually behind the Internet's success. But it actually leads almost directly to another core value, which is multistakeholder management. Because there is no alternative. Because there is no one in charge, there can be no one in charge. The best thing you can do is to put the decisionmaking and relate the decision making directly to all of the different parties that actually fulfill all of those different roles. So it just occurred to me again that there's a linkage between the aspirational key feature of the Internet that we want to support, which is the multistakeholder process, and the fact that it is actually directly linked to that set of features that make up the reality of the net. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Mark Carvell?
>> MARK CARVELL: Yes. I just wanted to add that many governments are recognizing this, and they are instituting changes to the way in which they do develop their policy responses to threats. It involves a lot of coordination now across administrations that never used to happen. You have different parts of a government steaming ahead and introducing a regulation in response to a particular issue, I don't know. It could be something to do with identity security, home office in the UK, without any consultation across other parts of government which are also developing Internet‑related policies. So we in the UK, we recognize that was an early risk and we'd institute the practice of wide, cross‑government consultation.
And then, secondly, coming back to the point about the borderless nature of the Internet, you have to talk to other governments, too. So you do that instinctively within your region. The UK, there's the European Union. There's that sort of platform of consultation.
And, again, you'd have to sort of build that out to involve other stakeholders, too. And I think that has been happening. And it's been very important that it has happened.
And then globally. So here we are at the IGF, there are many government representatives here, and engaging in sessions on many of these challenging issues. We're here. We're listening to the community, to civil society, to the private sector, to the technical community. And we are, then, becoming better informed. We understand. And we can explain the rationale for why governments, Ministers, want to react in a particular way; but we can then, as officials and experts, advise that this is what you can do and what you can't do and what needs to be considered with regard to the technical dynamics of the Internet and so on.
So the whole sort of approach to governance here has changed a lot. And many governments are instituting changes to ensure that they respond responsibly and coherently, internationally.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: And just as a followup, Mark, what are the risks of not actually having those changes, changes in the ways that governments get engaged?
You've described the multistakeholder input that the British government receives. What are the dangers of not receiving that, but government‑led set of decisions?
>> MARK CARVELL: Well as I was suggesting, the risk is a wholly contradictory approach to the Internet, one that impairs the development of it in a truly innovative, user‑centric way that reflects what citizens want from it and also what governments can actually get out of the Internet themselves, you know. So there are a lot of risks for governments moving forward with a particular response to a policy issue without consulting stakeholders. They can make many mistakes, and quite often they are very difficult to unravel once those mistakes have been realized.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks for this, Mark. Just on a housekeeping note, I have a timer telling me four minutes. I believe this session is a 90‑minute session, so not a 60‑minute session, so let them know that we don't just have four minutes left at the moment.
We have spoken a number of times here about the borderless nature of the Internet. And something which has been quite difficult for some countries to grasp or, in fact, indeed some stakeholders to grasp. I can think also of the content providers that are struggling with the notion of this borderlessness, if that can be said, with regards to their content. Films, music, et cetera, going across borders when they were used to a market when they were very much in control. Are we looking at a radical change of the overall nature of business and nature of the way one has to look at the Internet issues and intellectual property in the way that countries regulate services and so on? Are we looking at this as being something that one cannot shy from? And here I leave this open to who wants to go first of the Kathy.
>> KATHRYN BROWN: I will do the simple answer and then go to you. If you want to do business on the Internet, of course it is a very different way of doing business. You don't have to do your business on the Internet. If you choose not to, you can use other modalities. But if you choose to do your business on the Internet, it has a different consequence because of the nature of the global reach and distributed nature of the Internet itself which means that's the point, that from here, I can get anywhere, and from anywhere, I can get to many. That is the nature of a net. Many businesses find it actually an exciting new way to think about business, and some have been very threatened by it. Others have adapted their own products, their own offerings in very different ways. By the way, the business still happens inside of a border. It's not that. And we mustn't ‑‑ let's not get ‑‑ it still happens locally. It's just that it can also happen globally. And that means your business model has to assume both, or not. So, yes, it's different.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Kathy. Carlton Samuels?
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Can I give you one example. When you go digital, it changes the game. I mean, radically changed. Let me give you one example.
Perhaps the biggest threat to the old style telecoms conglomerates is the Internet and voice over IP. And we see that in the Caribbean, for example, where we are coming out of a space that was historically a monopolist situation to more liberalised.
And the Telcos are seeing revenues decline because of the newer technologies like Skype and Viber and WhatsApp and so on. And that is eating into revenues. And their response has been to block them.
It is the same telecom company that sells you an Internet pipe to get on so you have access. And they are now trying to make a distinction between well, is it voice or is it data? And if it's not ‑‑ if it's just voice, then it's actually what they call a run‑around their services. It's something that they should market.
So the other thing that is happening is that the models for making money have changed, and they have not adopted to it.
You may have heard that one of our providers in our space has now determined that it should block ads on the Internet. It should block ads. So it is reported that it blocked 134 million ads for the Jamaican market in one month.
Now, the numbers are mind boggling because if you think about it, there's only 2 million, 2‑1/2 million people in that space. And their claim is that there's 134 million ads that were directed at 2 million consumers in that time.
What have they done? They've decided that we're losing revenue because the content providers are not putting any money into the infrastructure. And so we are going to block them.
Here's what happens, though. In blocking them, it also put at risk some of the innovation in having a mobile application development that we've been trying to fork in the region, because the business model that is used for mobile apps is tendency to have apps for the service. So you have apps for the service. And by trying to block them, they are actually putting a chilling effect on innovation and development.
Here's another example of how the technology has changed the approach to business and has changed the models and the old-style providers are just not keeping up. So this is the threat. On one hand we look to the Internet and we see opportunities for innovation and we see opportunities for expansion of economic and social activity. And on the other hand, they see it as a threat to their livelihood and so they think they should intervene. Increasingly they are trying to get governments to use their role as policy maker. And those of us in the fight are pushing back and saying well, governments can't make that decision by themselves alone. The governance issue is totally different. This is just one example.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks, Carlton. You mentioned the blocking of ads. I guess ads are content. And blocking of content is seen as breaking those core Internet values.
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Absolutely.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Is the blocking of ad breaking -- ?
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Yes. And all of you here, yes. I called the national ICT advisory council in Jamaica and we're an adviser to the Minister responsible for telecommunications. We advised the Minister that this is definitely a violation of the values that, the net neutrality values; it's a violation of my freedom of association, for example. You can't decide which ad I see. We have our Electronic Transactions Act that says that the provider may not interfere with any transmission without lawful authority. And the lawful authority is that they have to get a court order to do that.
And our position is that in blocking content, they are actually inspecting content. And it is a violation of law. So this just comes with challenges. The bad thing is that the law as it stands now, there's no specific legal recourse because the laws and the regulations are still a little bit inadequate to meet these kinds of needs.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Is the blocking of spam breaking those attributes?
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Well one man's spam is another man's good content. And again it is about what it is. And in our view, we do not contest that there are content unregulated or content that people did not request, unrequested that is bad and it's clogging the Internet. But we are very mindful that content regulation in and of itself is a very slippery slope. And it requires a lot more introspection and a lot more collaboration about the various parties to decide what we do with it.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Carlton. Mark Carvell?
>> MARK CARVELL: Yes, I just wanted to chip in on spam. And how to deal with this. Some people love spam. They read every email and perhaps there is some sort of benefit they might derive from that. And the businesses that are sending stuff out, maybe there is a return on that.
But of course there are other issues involved. The volume of spam can impair network resilience and network efficiencies and so on. And there -- in that case, there is valid argument for stepping in and dealing with this as a problem that's affecting everybody's interest.
Just the other point coming back on to the issue about business opportunities and content and so on, of course e‑commerce is a vital aspect of life now. People are shopping increasingly online. Businesses will secure far greater opportunities in a larger number of markets by promoting their products online. And there are technologies that are changing the way services can be delivered. There’s Uber, which is revolutionising how people will get around the city, that will put governments in a difficult position because you have the traditional industry pushing back, resisting that, the taxi lobby. So governments have a role, I think, to play in trying to determine the best way forward that ensures fair competition in the delivery of services online that, promotes opportunity, innovation, new kind of services and goods that the Internet will enable consumers to enjoy, while also protecting some, perhaps some or softening the blows, if you like, to established industries that are going to be threatened by these unstoppable changes. Governments really think -- need to keep in step with change and handle this in a sensible way.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Mark. Paul Wilson, you've submitted some comments on the document that is published. I wonder whether you could share some of those comments with us. Going back in there, is there anything that raised your eyebrow or got you to think "I need to respond?"
>> PAUL WILSON: Yes. Some of the comments I made I've repeated here which I think is that it would be useful to distinguish between the technical features which are part of the Internet and which we can agree are essential to distinguish those from the core values as they're being described.
Another one, though, is also the implications behind an absolutist definitive sort of approach to some of these values because as you mentioned before, it can be a slippery slope to try and apply the end‑to‑end model for instance to every situation whereas you said -- as we said there are perfectly good reasons why individuals or companies might want to ‑‑ service providers might want to ‑‑ might want not for that not to be a pure and absolutist position. And there are engineering techniques applied throughout the internet that do break a pure net neutrality model and a pure end‑to‑end model, and they do it for user benefit, for efficiency, for cost effectiveness. Even the idea of a robust and reliable Internet, if you take that to its maximum, then you actually have a MilSpec Internet, if you like. You have something that becomes extremely expensive that you absolutely, you take it to its extent, you've got something that's 100 percent available and robust. Whereas you know if you're an engineer, you roll that back to what’s called five 9’s or four 9’s or three 9’s in terms of the percentage of uptime that you have. So again it's the slippery slope thing that I think probably applies to almost all of these. And I think it's where the idea of something that we would sign up to really has to be aspirational and it has to recognize the conflict between many of the things that we want to achieve.
Something occurred to me earlier, as well. It actually came out of a discussion earlier in the week about zero‑rating and the idea, a question came up as to whether a zero‑rating, whether zero‑rated services were more or less like a one‑way publication and really that was the distinction between zero rated service and the other one. And of course the defender of zero‑rated services was saying no, of course not, it's not a one‑way service. It's something that you can publish just as easily as receive information. So it's not like a newspaper publication. It's a genuine Internet service.
But what struck me, what occurred to me then was that the sort of publication that you're actually after, that I think needs to be looked at and actually was definitely sacrificed in this discussion about a particular zero‑rated service model is the creative aspect. And that's the innovative aspect. And that means that what you're putting on the Internet isn't a status update on Facebook. What you're putting on the Internet is something that's genuinely your invention, your creation, and that is not permitted when you have an Internet that's restricted to a specific set of services. Because what you need is you need a freely open and accessible Internet model.
So the question for you or for this group is where is the permissionless innovation aspect in these core values? And I think it probably is in there. But again maybe we'd see it if we actually spelled them out more. Maybe it's in the open value. But a lot of people might miss that, that the open value here actually includes the ability to innovate, the ability to use an open network to put your tone creations ‑‑ your own creations out.
So, yeah, I'd be interested to know, Olivier, whether you actually have considered the permissionless evaluation value as part of this, thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Yeah, thank you very much, Paul. I'm not the drafter of the document. I do believe that the Coalition is actually fully supporting the permissionless innovation, which is, I think, perhaps the first core value of the Internet, the fact that you don't actually need to ask anyone for a license before you get connected or propose your content.
But you've touched on these zero‑rating services, and I wonder whether, Kathy, the Internet Society has looked at the topic of zero-rating services and what the overall thought was on this? It seems to be a highly touchy issue at the moment. Something that this year has come up.
So has there been any discussion?
>> KATHRYN BROWN: I think Paul just talked about what the discussion is about. This is an application of the Internet. It's clearly an Internet service. It's being offered as a service. But it is an application, not the whole of the Internet ‑‑ and the issue – now, is there value to users of certain users to this? I suspect there is. We know of people who say this is wonderful for them. It's a different place where they can communicate with people who they otherwise couldn't do. Is it the Internet? No. Should we be clear as to what it is? Yes. And I think the concern that any one of us would have that wants to ensure that the whole of the Internet is open to everyone is whether there is some way that this person doesn't have the ability to go elsewhere, that they're locked in, that something in the arrangement locks them into not going further. And that, to me, is the area worth conversation and one that is enormously important, I would think, as we talk about development.
And so it's in that respect that we've had the conversation, not in some notion of nefarious kinds of behavior kind of thing.
And I think that that's a fair conversation to have and one we need to do.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Carlton Samuels?
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Listen, to get to the innovation part, you first have to have access, and you first have to have connectivity. And that costs money.
In any scheme, there are various zero‑rating models. But with respect to connectivity, in the connectivity agenda and accessibility agenda, any scheme that affords a user to access the Internet, you need to look at seriously. And you can't just throw it away. Let me tell you why.
I agree it is a service. And I believe that where we come from, any service that enables a user to get online then reduces the cost to get online is useful. We are adamantly clear that you should not advertise it as "the Internet." And you should not lock in a user so the user cannot go anywhere. In other words, there must be a path to graduation from it.
We feel that those things, as long as those principles are there, too, then we see zero‑rating as actually one method to get people get online. And that is something that we want to encourage. We don't look at it as a nefarious plot to people at all. We see it as a step that enables access and enables connectivity.
>> KATHRYN BROWN: I'm going to have to apologize. I'm going to have to leave the conversation. But I have another appointment I have to go do. So thank you very much for including me.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: I was going to ask you one last question which was received from a remote participant. And that was the question on actually what to do next? And the question here was would the Internet Society consider inspiring its organisation members to articulate and commit to core Internet values and inspire them to consider formulating their business policy in a manner that the core Internet values are respected?
>> KATHRYN BROWN: I think we do that. That's what we're all about.
But ‑‑ I'm going to say my “but” is what Paul has suggested, and that is that we need to understand what it is we're talking about. And in most cases, I believe that's what our conversation is about with our members and our chapters and our organizational members. And it's in the implementations of all of the various things that happen on the Internet that these values are reflected or not reflected. And I think a conversation about when they're not reflected is as important as when they are reflected. And I think that's exactly where we are in the development of the Internet. And I think that's what we ought to keep doing. With that, I do apologize and I'm going to run off.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Kathy. That was the correct answer and you're now released. Thank you.
[Laughter]
Okay. The floor is open, by the way, to anyone who wishes to comment here. You're very welcome to take part in the discussion. I don't think it's ‑‑ we have such a crowd that we'll have a queue at the microphones, but if you do wish to comment, please put your hands up and use the mics or use the mics around the table.
We're looking at the next steps, and one of the questions which was actually asked on the document itself is should there be some enforcement of these values?
Indeed, if they were to be enforced, are these values actually enforceable? Any thoughts on this? Paul Wilson or Mark? Paul. Let's have Paul Wilson.
>> PAUL WILSON: I think I've said it. I think the values as they stand here are not enforceable at all. There is not I think it's simply ‑‑ there is too much wiggle room. There is definitely too much abstraction in all of this to say that you could enforce on anyone. I don't think you necessarily want to enforce either, as we've said the absolutist definitive sort of approach is one that's a slippery slope towards prohibiting or sanctioning all sorts of things which are actually good and have all sorts of benefits. I would say that, as Kathy did, as an organisation, we could stand for a set of values in principle that is meaningful and real and APNIC's statement is about ‑‑ our vision is of a global, open, stable and secure Internet that serves the entire Asia Pacific community.
We've sort of said it, that that's what we're after and that's somehow something that drives us.
ISOC will say it similarly but differently. And I think those of our members who are particularly interested and those of our community who are particularly interested in these things may be subscribers as to both organizations. But that, I think, is the permissionless, liberal and permissive approach that we want to take rather than one of requiring compliance and sanctions unless we're very, very, very careful in doing that.
So again I would only step anywhere towards kind of trying to sign up formally if we had a lot more specifics about what is actually being asked for here. And I'm not sure what they would be to the extent that they could be sort of agreeable.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks. Mark Carvell?
>> MARK CARVELL: Yes, thanks, Olivier. Interesting question. In purely practical terms, I don't see how you could actually enforce core values of this nature in a global manner. It doesn't seem possible. Immediately you ask, well, who is going do the enforcing? And Paul was hinting, also what kind of sanctions regime are you going to have to construct for not adhering to these core values? I think that's the wrong approach to take.
You are seeing these values and others related to them articulated as principles in many of the outcomes of key discussions, including those involving governments. I mean, these principles are pretty much if not fully but in principles related in a very similar way and going back to the Tunis Agenda of 2005, we're seeing many of these elements also appearing in the current negotiation text in New York. In Council of Europe documents related to Internet Governance and rights, you're seeing reassertions of the importance of an open and free Internet which is accessible by all and so on.
And so I think it's important to ensure that these values and others that we haven't considered, it's not an exhaustive list, embedded in the outcomes of discussions and events like the IGF and so on and outcome documents. I think it's always important to reassert these core values in that way.
And then from a government perspective, you then proceed to make recommendations that are consistent with those core values. That's the approach to take, I think.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Mark, as a followup, would governments be ‑‑ as a followup, would governments be interested or be even likely to say yes to something like a document with signatories adhering to core values?
>> MARK CARVELL: I think that kind of process would be very difficult to manage. It would be a negotiation process. It would take forever. And you'd have horrendous arguments as to defining what is global, even.
So it certainly wouldn't be the kind of thing you'd have states signing up to in a sort of traditional, multilateral, convention‑based way.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: I hear from my left side from Carlton that we think that's probably right.
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: I agree with Mark. Just going through the definitions alone would take about three years. So I don't think it's something government ‑‑ but certainly going back to what APNIC said, you could see them as aspirational values. And you could always put them. Just like you say, if you look at your values that you put in or how you see yourself in relation to your customers and so on, most of these are captured in that, in your vision statement, your mission statement. Most of these are captured. So they're aspirational. And I think it's the best you can expect right now given the mix of stakeholders that you'd have to go through.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: I think that Kathy earlier referred to them as aspirational attributes. Paul?
>> PAUL WILSON: I never attended this session with the idea that the intention was to finally get to something enforceable. And so, I mean, the best we can do is not that because it would be for good reason because it would not be better at all, in my view, to sort of be advancing towards something, something enforceable. And I also don't want aspirational to be seen as a second best either. I think there's more to it than that, in that, I think, by being, as I suggested, more specific about what technical features we're looking at here and how they link quite specifically to the different values that we can say that we are interested to maximize these things. To maximize the value that's there. Which is not by enforcing absolutely the thing that makes the value possible. But it's about interpreting and stating that value as something that actually can be maximized. And then agreeing that that's what we want to do. You can't exactly commit yourself absolutely and in an enforceable way to maximizing anything. That's where it becomes, if not ‑‑ perhaps aspirational but also something that's not able to be defined and enforced in that way. And we don't want to do that. That's a feature, not a bug or a failure.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: One more question that came in remotely, and that was as follows and it's towards you, Mark.
As governments who value ‑‑ let me retrack again.
As earlier users of the Internet and first participants of the Internet revolution, Europe and USA have a deeper understanding of the core Internet values and about the multistakeholder process. As governments who value this better, what work is being done by the UK and European governments and the United States multilaterally to disseminate the merits of the multistakeholder process of internet governance and core Internet values, ministerial or even at higher levels than ministerial values?
>> MARK CARVELL: Thanks. A lot is happening, actually. The UK government is very active in all international fora where Internet Governance and the sustainability of the multistakeholder model is under discussion. For example, in ICANN, we engage with the community alongside many other governments. The Government Advisory Committee has now a membership of 155 governments. And we are all advocating how the multistakeholder model, as demonstrated by ICANN, can evolve and improve and build on success. We do this multilaterally with other governments at ministerial level and at official leve. to discuss how we can advance the multistakeholder model, ensure that governments have the capacity to engage effectively. Many governments have not got that facility which we in Europe take for grandted, the ability to draw on the polity expertise that will help discussions at the multilateral level and also in multistakeholder fora.
And in the UN now, we are engaging with many governments on how to advance the Information Society and the contribution that the Internet makes to the Information Society beyond 2015, how to build on the achievements of the last year under the WSIS, the World Summit on Information Society, outcomes over the last 10 years and the implementations of those and sustain supportable developments. The intersect with the Sustainable Development Goals which have just been agreed is very important. We've talked to the governments about how we can best realise the contribution that the Internet and the Information Society in general can make to sustainable development.
So there's a lot of dialogue going on, at official level, at international level. We have a European group on Internet Governance where the officials meet from all the Member States of the EU. That is a very regular occurrence. So a lot going on.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks, Mark. And as we reach the final two minutes or last minute of this meeting, 30 seconds on your ‑‑ oh, Ayesha Hassan?
>> AYESHA HASSAN: Ayesha Hassan from the Internet Society. Very briefly. I just wanted to say this was a very useful conversation. And I wish that there had been more people to benefit from it. But that is the way it goes at the IGF. Sometimes the most dynamic conversations don't get the most of an audience. But I do hope that you'll capture some of the very important viewpoints that were expressed so that others can benefit from it afterwards.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you very much, Ayesha. And let's turn to Carlton Samuels. 30 seconds.
>> CARLTON ANTHONY SAMUELS: Thank you, Olivier. Well, as I tell you in the Caribbean space, the Internet is central to economic and social development. At the core of it, the most important high priority is access and connectivity.
In terms of access and connectivity, the values of the Internet, some of these core values are relevant and aspirational. Our intention is to have each of us connected to all of us. And to do that, we need a global Internet that is open and everybody can access everybody else. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks, Carlton. Paul Wilson?
>> PAUL WILSON: I think this has been very interesting and I very much appreciate Aisha's comments. I think the value is in the process and not the product. And I think part of the process is to be able to articulate more and more clearly and to share more and more widely an understanding of the things that we take for granted or are at risk of taking for granted, the things that make the Internet the Internet and what are the potential risks to those things? What are the tradeoffs? What are the factors that can maximize those aspects of the Internet that we take for granted and make sure that we actually don't sacrifice more than we intend to by doing any particular action or activity on the net. Thanks.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Paul. Mark?
>> MARK CARVELL: My final comment I think is that it's incumbent on all stakeholders to work together in a truly cooperative and global way. And this is why the IGF is such a valuable forum for facilitating that. Because what the Internet potentially has and is delivering in many parts of the world, sadly not all parts of the world, is enhanced quality of life for citizens. That means the ability to improve their economic and social well‑being, enhancing their ability to express themselves, to impart information, and to receive information. That's our common goal here. These values are important in ensuring that we have the right approach to the governance of the Internet to realise that key objective whichever government should have as a key priority.
>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thanks very much for these wise words. And just building up on what Aisha has said. This is being recorded. This is also being streamed and I'd like to thank Julie McFee for performing some of the wonderful work he does in streaming this out to the wider world, as well. So thank you to all our panelists here. Like a quick round of applause.
[Applause.]
Certainly we will be building on this. And I think we should continue the discussions on the mailing lists and continue building on these core values.
With this, this session is adjourned. Thank you. Goodbye.
[End of session.]