IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
16 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION DC8
1415
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND
FREEDOM OF MEDIA ON THE INTERNET
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> BEN WAGNER: Hello. Can everyone hear me? Good. Thank you for coming and welcome to the Dynamic Coalition meeting on freedom of expression and freedom of the media. Because there is lots of new faces here and haven't seen everyone here before and even if I am not familiar with all the names. Perhaps we can start with a short introduction round. My name is Ben Wagner and I have been coordinating this coalition for two years now.
>> DiXIE HAWTIN: Hello, my name is Dixie Hawtin and I am a researcher focusing on freedom of expression and communications issues and I joined the coalition quite recently but I am quite excited about this.
>> ALEXANDER SCHUBERT: Hello, my name is Alexander Schubert and this is my first IGF.
>> SHAWNA: Hello, my name is Shawna from the Southeast Centre for Media and we work on the application technology to promote freedom of expression.
>> Hi. I am from the Thai Network based in Bangkok. We are working with associates in Thailand for helping them with activities.
>> LEENA ROMPPAINEN: Hello, I am Leena Romppainen from Electronic Frontier, Finland.
>> TAPANI TARVAINEN: I am Tapani Tarvainen, also from Electronic Frontier Finland. And I have been in the IGF since the beginning and in this coalition since it was formed but not very actively.
>> KARMEN TURK: Hi, my name is Karmen Turk and I am a Ph.D. student and a researcher. And also lawyer practicing lawyer in this field.
>> TATIANA MUROVANA: Hello, my name is Tatiana Murovana and I am from Mastonia and I am a lawyer.
>> BRETT SULLIVAN: Hi, my name is Brett Sullivan. I work for Access which is a new global movement for digital freedom. We work largely with human rights activists who live on the other side of the world.
>> LINDSAY: Hi, I am Lindsay from Freedom House, Internet freedom programme and we work to support freedom of expression and Internet repressive environments.
>> SUE ING: Hi I am Sue Ing from Centre of Independent Journalism.
>> JUAN CARLOS: Hi. My name is Juan Carlos. I am a lawyer from Ecuador and I work with NGOs and I focus on media.
>> KIT: Hi, Kit from the IT University of Denmark. I am also representing the youth kids online project. Many years of studying people's use of digital media.
>> I am from the Danish media council. And yes, it is part of the European network INSAFE.
>> MARY: Hi, my name is Mary and I am curious to see if the closed captioning is going to pick up my stammer. I work with DiploFoundation in Malta and I am here as an interested participant. Thank you.
>> NICOLI: Hello I am Nicoli.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: Hello my name is Marilia Maciel and I am with APC and I am working on the EROTICS project.
>> TAMARA: Hi I am Tamara. I am a researcher for one of the projects of the APC. Thanks.
>> I am with APC as well as research from South Africa.
>> Hi my name is Sodash. I am from Poland. I help software developers to move application from servers in to cloud.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Hi I am Stuart Hamilton. I am the senior policy advisor and I coordinate the work of committees that deal with human rights libraries and copyrighted libraries.
>> GODOI: Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Godoi from the UNESCO Brazil office.
>> I am Janet Mojic. We monitor freedom
>> Hello my name is Roman Waznic. I am from the German industry at the University of Cologne.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you very much. Just to give you a little idea of how this session is going to work. We have seven several people who have suggested that they want to talk about specific projects which are specifically relevant and before going in to detail on which people these will be I just wanted to ask is there anyone else who has specific issues or projects that they wanted to bring in to the meeting to have discussed there? Is there any I have spoken already to Alexander Schubert, and I believe that Karmen is going to say some words as well and Bree from the Danish council. I am not sure Brett Sullivan as well from Access. You might want to speak a little bit about some of your new projects that you were mentioning previously. And then I think that Meryem, if Meryem doesn't feel like this is the ideal Forum by all means. But again if you want to you are very welcome.
Yep. That would be ahh, and I wanted to speak a little bit about my own work on DPAC and inspection and how that relates to Internet freedom on the links between both privacy censorship and surveillance in the DPI technology. I think we should get started. Alexander, the floor is yours.
>> ALEXANDER SCHUBERT: My name is Alexander Schubert. I am German and my background is not IGF and not the freedom of expression, coalition of freedom of expression. My background is ICANN. ICANN will introduce new Top Level Doman like dotCom and dotNet and hopefully next year introduce new top level domains. In the past years I dealt a lot with this issue and I thought myself would there maybe be a community that should be represented in the Internet a Top Level Domain level but is currently not. And the project which I then started seems to help freedom of expression in the Internet. Because of this the top level domain is dotGay. So how does that work? ICANN will take applications hopefully in the next year. They are not sure about that. Then you have to make an application, something about 300 pages. You have to pay a fee, something about $200,000.
Then there might be some people who are opposed to that. I could imagine some countries in some areas of the world who don't like such a Top Level Domain and then you have to defend and then eventually there would be probably by 2012 a Top Level Domain dotGay for the gay community, the LGBT community worldwide. And how do we do that? Shall I ask for questions or is there anyone who has kind of a question?
>> Can I ask why dotGay and not dotQueer or dotLGBT? Because dotGay, the lesbian community is speaking from that space because what happens with Internet space and research space the gay community gets a lot more focus than other LBGQ areas. I am concerned about the politics and language there.
>> ALEXANDER SCHUBERT: Yes, of course. I mean my background is to create new Top Level Domains. Five years ago I already created a project that will apply for dotBerlin, the capital of Germany. They also only can apply next year because there is no process currently. So since 2005 I am thinking very much about how the string that will become a top level domain should be created and what this string kind of should be able to do. And when it came to the top level demain at dotGay, of course, I thought about many things. DotPride, or dotLGBT or dotGIBT and whatever acronym you can come with. But, of course, maybe dotLGBT would be much more politically correct, for example. Sorry what?
>> Don't forget the IQ.
>> ALEXANDER SCHUBERT: Okay. For example, but a top level domain has to do so much more than being politically correct. You have to use it actually later in the Internet and the users have to use it. And maybe they are not only from the gay community. Maybe they are also from outside and want to use it. And companies will have to use it. So you have to take a word that kind of really works with the masses.
>> Last comment because I think this is going to get we could maybe continue this elsewhere. I think from a political kind of and in terms of queer theory the best approach I would suggest would be dotQueer because that's inclusive not only of the LGBQ community but inclusive of non LGBQ community that support the community and feel they are a part of that space.
>> ALEXANDER SCHUBERT: Okay. I will take that home.
>> BEN WAGNER: Meryem had a question as well.
>> MERYEM MARZOUKI: Yeah. I am Meryem Marzouki. I was wondering if this project had a genuine proposal to start up this dotGay or dotQueer TLD or if you were planning to use it as a case study on all the issues related to freedom of expression and human rights that could be raised in the ICANN arena. Because more than 10 years ago with many other digital rights organisations we were discussing the opportunity to propose a dotUnion domain name.
>> Dot what?
>> MERYEM MARZOUKI: DotUnion and after some discussion, it was a quick discussion we ended up and saying that this will be very, very counterproductive for our objectives. And I could ensure you that in the very unlikely case that you can pass successfully all the steps you know to get a new this new TLD set up I can ensure you that you will make life very easy for all not only the Governments but also the private organisations, the civil society or corporate organisations to filter all the Web sites under this domain name. So my advice would be that you should be very careful with this proposal. Thank you.
>> ALEXANDER SCHUBERT: Just a short answer. I hear this almost every time I am talking about dotGay and we kind of take this serious. However, most countries who are already most countries who will block dotGay and there will be countries who will be blocking that's for sure, they are already blocking the same Web sites through other filters because they yeah, they simply block everything gay. It may get a little bit easier with it but in the end result in my opinion is almost the same. But I heard what you said and we take it serious, yeah.
>> BEN WAGNER: Okay. Are there any further comments, questions? Then thank you very much. And I am sorry. Please.
>> Well, it was just in the context what Alexander explained before. I think that the issue is a bit broader. I am representing the European regional large organisation at ICANN and with an introduction and the problems we face with the new gTLD at ICANN there was a discussion coming up on morality and public order. And this discussion on morality and public order to my perception went in to the direction where it is clearly violating basic principles of freedom of expression. And the point when you (Off microphone) became aware many of their members are participating in the research process. I myself was a former member of the media caucus and when I now when I am now confronted with a discussion on morality and public order at the ICANN level I can only say we must be very careful and a lot of the reservations went around potential domains like dotGay. And dotGay, for example, it is clear, it will be a problem in the whole Arabic region and many other parts of the world. And we therefore must be closely following up what is happening at the ICANN level and read from RALO and other regional large organisations. We will keep having our eye on the discussion. Thank you very much.
>> Thanks. Yes, that was a good reminder. The dotGay application is a so called community application. That means in order to achieve the status of a community application we will have to get the endorsement of a broad, kind of of the community, of the gay community. Let's place it this way. That means from the large LGBT organisations worldwide and to my understanding of my feeling is once the organizations who are representing the LGBT community feel that dotGay is a positive thing for the community and it should be done, and there is not too much opposition from anywhere, then ICANN should respect this kind of wish or this application. But like you said there is already a lot of opposition not from the LGBT community but from countries who are already opposing everything gay or LGBT. And this is probably, yeah, something for you.
>> BEN WAGNER: Okay. Thank you very much. At this point I would also like to mention that I am very grateful for Alexander coming today and joining in this meeting. Specifically because histrionically we haven't had the best knowledge and understanding of direct individual ICANN processes and decision and we have tended to focus more on the IGF. And the broadening of the issues we are dealing with moving beyond just classical freedom issues and taking a wider perception on that is extremely valuable and I am grateful for your comments and I hope to see you in the years ahead. Karmen Turk, I believe you wanted to make some comments, too.
>> KARMEN TURK: Now it is working I think. Everyone can hear me all right? So as I have introduced myself my name is Karmen Turk and I come from Estonia and this is the Dynamic Coalition of freedom of expression and media and I thought I'd briefly discuss with you what do you think the tendencies in my country are also hazardous to other countries in Europe and maybe wider. I am going to speak about supreme court judgment in Estonia and already maybe discuss briefly what are the main concerns due to this and maybe what would be I think my proposal, how could this be fixed and maybe ask you what you think about this kind of way of trying to solve this problem.
So why is this? Well, Estonia judgment concerns a media outlet, media service offer kind of a newspaper which has articles and then a comentarium where people can leave their comments concerning the article. This has around 10,000 comments a day. It is quite a lot of comments to go through. The judgment said that whenever a intermediary has any kind of direct or indirect economic interest or whenever the intermediary has any kind of control over the contents hosted by this intermediary, there is a strict liability. This is a huge problem, of course, since the economic interest can almost always be found as long as there is even a one advertisement or one any kind of indirect interest for this person to have this media service. And also the control over the content is quite easy to find found to be existing since the hoster has always the ability even to, you know, shut down the whole service. So this could be considered to be control over the content.
And so the judges, they decided that this intermediary has to precensor all the comments in realtime and so this actually, this media service hopefully intermediary has hired right now quite a few people to do that on a daily basis.
This is a great let's say hazard at least in this region because now there is a similar case already in Lithuania and they are cross referring to the Estonia case. This could be quite widespread within moments in wide Europe. And we have similar cases in other countries. By now at least the French courts have kind of started to understand what is the intermediary and what is what are the limits for them, liability and basically nonliability. Of course, now we have also the European court of justice judgment from this year's April for Google adverts service where the European court of justice stated that just because Google has economic interest or just because he gets direct profit from it or even that he has total right and ability to control it doesn't mean that Google should not be able to benefit from the immunity person directive or eCommerce. What I think why is this a major concern for everybody I think at least in this coalition? Well, of course, because of the obvious concern chilling effects, it is impossible to fulfill because the intermediary would have to know all the copyrighted works in the world and also trademarks patented different, whatever works. Also what would be defamatory and this value judgment whether it is defamatory is subjective and can't be done by an intermediary who doesn't know the limits for this concerned person when this person thinks his reputation is infringed and even more important why this major concern is that state is trying to make legal entity to carry out an obligation that the state itself is not allowed to carry out due to the different international agreements and human rights convention because the state has no right to censor. So the states are trying to make not public entities to do that for them.
And as during my research I have been trying to understand why this has happened even in this circumstance that we have eDirective, eCommerce directive from European union which should be implemented around Europe at least quite uniformly. I think the problem there was the commissions in their cites of this directive thought that all of this how the intermediary should or should not act should be left to the players in the market. However, in Estonia there was this understanding issue and agreed by the union of newspapers concerning what to do with third party contents in generalistic media outlets and the supreme court said this is not law. EDirective should be changed in a way that it should embody notice and takedown system in the level of directive and not within software guidelines or some communicative way that we will basically level. And I also think that the notice and takedown systems maybe should more right now everyone is mainly concerned that well, we have to make the notice and takedown rules so that when we get a notice we have to remove it. However, they should also follow the second step that how should we put it back up. For example, DMCA in U.S. is providing this kind of system and also French eCommerce law also provides this system. So I think this is really a way for legal for policymakers to go to make it in the form of the law so there wouldn't be any different application of this basically very important principle of nonliability in different countries. This is basically what I wanted to think and maybe this coalition also to pay attention to. So thank you very much. If you have any questions I would be glad to answer.
>> BEN WAGNER: Ronnie please.
>> RONALD KOVEN: If I understand correctly what you said, what the Court said is that somebody was responsible for the contents. In other words, somebody has to exercise he had editorial judgment. I would like to know more about what the Court actually said but there really is a distinction between editing and censoring and if what the Court is saying is that there must be somebody who is held responsible for the decision as to whether or not contact is liable or something of that sort I am not sure that that should be considered an attack on freedom of speech.
>> KARMEN TURK: Thank you again. I think you are very, very correct on the issue. It is hard to make correct whether the issue should be corrected or not. These people were actually identified through the IP address. However, the Court said that this is irrelevant. That the relevance is that this intermediary should who is over the who has the control over all the content should be liable. However, as an intermediary you should be liable if you do something. Well, this intermediary in particular is having its own articles and its own journalistic content and it is liable for as an editor for that certain content. However, concerning the comments made by third party the intermediary should not be considered as a publisher just because it makes available the means for third parties to publish their opinions and their speech. Thank you.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you. Meryem, I believe you had a comment.
>> MERYEM MARZOUKI: Yes. First of all, we don't have a systems, a put back in the French eCommerce law and we do have our share of censorship through notice and takedown and not to mention the chilling effect but besides the French situation, we had the same case with a daily merchant and I would like to be very cautious, first of all, in advocating the notice and takedown procedure as alternative or as a better alternative because this issue of Internet intermediaries notice and takedown procedures is around especially in Europe for more than 15 years. So it is not a new issue. But what is new here and it needs a bit of research and discussion. What is new is this web 2.0 services which are very active and interactive, I am sorry, and which allows for what is called user generated content but we shouldn't forget there are these economic interests. These services are free between calls because they are paid or they can survive, more than survive actually through advertisements. And it change this changes completely the situation.
Currently the Council of Europe is working on group on human rights and media where I am a participant as a representative for European Digital Rights organisation. We are discussing this issues and see how the provisions of the European eCommerce directive and the same and the like could be transposed. Because this is I mean this economic interest makes a huge difference. So how should we call it? Editorial intervention? Editorial responsibility? In any case we cannot transpose directly the case of Internet service provider, house provider, access provider to this new services because there is indeed an economic interest. In daily motion case the reason editorial action from this services to put on the front page I would say some very controversial videos, of some very videos that makes that are likely to make to promote scandals and increase the audience. So we need to take it in to account this new factor, the economic interest.
>> KARMEN TURK: I would just make a small remark that I totally agree that this economic interest is huge kind of characteristic that we have to take in to account. However, there is more to take in to account that I think the host as intermediaries they it is not prohibited for them to also have other services. However, they would practically have very certain limits on what are those services. For example, if they do publish their own material then they have to be publishers and they have to be liable as such.
However, for third party content I think there is a very good way of saying this is called I think real for blindness. That if you provoke third party content to be illegal as, for example, this daily motion case which said all the business plan, everything is about is this illegal content. They provoke uploading illegal content. However, if the host or intermediary does not provoke this and the host is not so called willingly blind concerning this illegal content I think there could be a line drawn. And I think this is also what the council is actually trying to do right now. They are trying to make a gradual liability reform that when in one part there is this pure physical access provider and in other end there is a full and clearer publisher. So there is a lot of different forms to be in between. For example, Google can be within one material, it can be considered publisher. With another it can be considered just mail conjugate and so on and so on. It has to be reviewed case by case. I do understand that and that's a very that's the only way to go, of course. However, thank you for your comment.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you both. Are there any further questions, comments? Requests? And thank you for the very interesting and again very relevant information. I think it is particularly interesting to have examples of cases which have a it is nice when as a Dynamic Coalition especially discussing concrete discussion issues we also have the ability to discuss context that are local to the local IGF. The local industry there wasn't getting to the local communities. So I am very grateful for comments which go in that direction. Thank you very much. Cade?
>> CADE: I think it is a more personal note than it is directly from the media council. A little bit about my background. I worked in this field child protection it is called, about children's use of Internet and mobile for quite some years now. But before that my starting point was actually media theory and working with human rights. So it was kind of applying youth to media theories is my background and throughout my work with child protection which is a field I have been in for the last six years and I have been a little bit puzzled about child protection and if we put it in the context of freedom of expression and participation and it is a way of containing children and limiting things and protecting them by limits. And in a way and this is, of course, a personal note, I think that one of our issues in the child protection field which I would prefer to call youth empowerment field is that my feeling has been that we have been kind of protecting some rights at the cost of our rights and usually the thing has been to take a starting point in some physical rights while disregarding some social and cultural rights such as freedom to participate, the right to privacy which is also really important and need to be included when you talk about child protection. I think that a very good example I have of this is, for example, that we have recently conducted an Internet Governance youth project where children were 4,000 youths were actually providing their input on different IGF issues and one of the rights that they put forward as the most important right, actually the highest right was privacy. And if you look at youth perception of privacy and the way they were explaining privacy it was not about data mining and commercial collection of their data. It was actually a question about them not wanting parents and educators to follow what they were doing when they were communicating.
And another example they need to be my experience is that we are having a little bit of trouble with the balance. You have to see social networking sites, logging children's communication in order to protect them from some physical threats and I think that the main solution here is what we are actually trying to work for and that's why I am trying to say that it is youth empowerment I am working with and not child protection and the children need to be raised to be digital citizens. And they have the same right to participate as adults do and we shouldn't put them in bags to contain them so they can't breathe and that was my personal load on this issue from a very different perspective than what you have been talking about so far.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you very much. If I can disagree with you on your last point, I would not say that it is in any way a disagreement from what we have done so far but fits perfectly in to a freedom of expression agenda. But I think it is very important to consider as well specifically when we have discussions with child protection and a lot of times they will be seen as conflict with attempt to protect children and attempts to guarantee freedom of expression on the Internet. It is important to consider that children themselves and young people have free expression rights and these are extremely important. Further comments, requests, questions? I know it is hard to disagree with. That doesn't seem to be the case then. Thank you very much. Brett, would you like to say a few words?
>> BRETT SULLIVAN: Yep. Okay. So as I was saying we as an organisation work with human rights organisations and democracy movements around the world, particularly those who are living in sensitive monitored environments. And one of the things that I guess we have kind of noticed with respect to freedom of expression and freedom to access information online is that many of those organisations are actually increasingly under technical attack. And I guess the issue that I wanted to raise was that you know this sort of denial of service attacks and social engineering which is often allied or attached to which brings down vulnerable sites which is an increasingly serious threat to freedom of expression. So to give you an example in the Iranian context, in the context of newspapers being shut down and all independent sources of information being closed and the Internet is the last vestige. And so the Iranian regime is very conscious of that and they use their own hackers to bring it down. Somebody has managed to convince the host that that site doesn't actually belong to the person it belongs to. When the site goes down you basically lose the community that was attached to it. Sort of if we look at kind of from a human rights perspective there is maybe 500 or 1,000, there is kind of key human rights/democracy that seem to be jewels of the movement and there is very little understanding with the risks that are associated with online expression in that respect.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you very much. Are there any points that would like to be made following that?
>> Can you tell a little bit more about the work you are doing in the area to help the human rights groups?
>> BRETT SULLIVAN: We run a digital release team which basically works with organisations such as some like some of the ones that I just mentioned. And we do a range of things, like provide front proxies and back end application servers and DNS and domain name protection backups in order to protect those sites. There is a limited amount of resources. And one of the other things that I think is important to note is that many grass roots organisations who are using the Internet as their main form of communication are using, you know, there is not a lot of resources necessarily. So all of the kind of infrastructure that they use in order to build their sites whether it be with the hosts or the DNS domain name stuff is often done with the cheapest service which has the lowest level of protection and they are the ones who need the most protection.
>> BEN WAGNER: Any further questions or comments? If not then I'd just like to add that in my own experience working on these issues as well it is not the quality of the hosting availability but the abilities of the users to understand what they are doing. And this is a big problem because a lot of human rights defenders may be fantastic at human rights but not have the technical abilities. And in my own experience of training activists it is pretty tough. It is a hard long slow job that sometimes involve simple things like explaining things don't open properly unless you click on it properly. It is important to look at technical infrastructure and equally important to focus on the users directly and to ensure at a very basic level that the integrity that any organisation needs to operate and this involves a lot of user training of, direct assistance from technical professionals and from people in the human rights community who have more experience on that. I am not sure, I believe Finland have done some work on this as well or am I mistaken?
>> Yes, basically the same issues although can't claim to be very efficient at the moment but we try.
>> BEN WAGNER: Are there further comments, questions? Then I just like to add that since there are clearly several people within the coalition who are working on these issues and the question of efficiency and ability to do so has been raised it might be worthwhile after this meeting to sit down and discuss this. These technical and both structural and this is part of the capacity building that we need to do to ensure that digital activism has the level of protection that is necessary for people who work and act in these regimes. Marianne please.
>> MARIANNE: It is to do with public library access and what is going on within universities and public libraries. I believe we have someone here. The form of blocking that occurs under the name of protection of inappropriate Web sites. Universities have all sorts of reasons for blocking all sorts of access. So I am interested to hear from experts here how public libraries, school libraries reconcile the freedom of expression. Who come to the UK and in this case or the Netherlands and find they can access information and then they start using that access to I am not sure this if you are going to cover this but how do the public libraries deal with these issues of blocking and who decides what is appropriate or not particularly in terms of protecting children from what they are allowed to see or not.
>> BEN WAGNER: Please.
>> Just a small note that we cooperated with the Finnish library association in conducting a study of different filtering programmes and the results were rather depressing. There was no consistent logic in how they were being used and in many cases the librarians didn't understand what they were doing. Rather strange results at the time and plus well publicized and I think although I haven't seen a follow up study that resulted in an little less of usage. It has not been translated in to anything in Finnish and you suggested because the study was well done. Nonetheless it suggests that filtering in libraries is not very efficient or useful and many librarians feel it should not be done at all.
>> What do they do, for instance, with trustees, schools that are run by boards of parents who have particularly clear views? I mean how do you resist that kind of temptation? It may not work but the user may not know that it doesn't work. You have to know how to circumvent which is back to the show of knowledge and education.
>> One of the main points of that study was to find a document that doesn't work and tools and come to argument for this.
>> BEN WAGNER: It is a shame that Stewart Hamilton is not in the room because I think he might have been able to answer this question as well. I think if this study were translated it might create potential opportunities for this discussion to continue at an international level so that the rest of the world can have the benefits of what Finland obviously has.
>> Can I? Just picking up on that issue of censorship and circumvention, it is not about filtering or blocking. It is actually about taking that site down so that it no longer exists, but obviously in the softer end of circumvention spectrum you have the dirty dozen countries which are the most egregious blockers. And also I think it is important to note that even, for instance, in Europe you know in the next couple of weeks is going to be hearing about a proposal for a directive on Internet blocking. In Australia there is also a mandatory filtering bill that's before the parliament. I think often we think about kind of filtering and restrictions on freedom of expression online in terms of Iran and China but in fact, it is right across the spectrum.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you. Are please.
>> I don't want to get a lot in to technical detail but I was wondering if any of the organisations here offer a hosting space for bloggers to apply to. Hosting is very cheap to do. The only tricky part is ensuring a secure process. And I think we should here we should look in to details on what tools the bloggers and activists are using and if you look at word press and all those tools being used it is relatively easy to come up with some security guidelines, like which plug ins you use to secure your workplace. I was wondering anyone offer this fee for activists to host their blogs or anyone publishing technical details.
>> We do provide that service to some partners, yeah. I will talk to you about that afterwards.
>> And Google is offering bloggers and encryption and e mail which is quite heavily used by activists. I don't think we use that for blogs yet.
>> Sorry, I am I don't want to make this long but I was wondering also if it is if you can answer like syndication, because when I publish on my blog it is easy to pull this content to a Web site. Even if my site is down the content is there.
>> Yeah, we do that. And just to add to that there are several services that provide basic toolkits. There is the NGO in a box site which provides sort of basic technical information. How to use secure e mail, how to get secure hosting and many of the hosting providers that are listed on the box.
>> Yeah, don't have anything to advertise but I would recommend that you look at the Global Voices project which is the home for many bloggers and especially bloggers from authoritarian countries where they can write and be secure.
>> It is important to know that this information is available, specifically tailored to NGOs, for people who will be in this situation who might need stronger forms of encryption to ensure they are safe. There are quite a few people providing this. But I think we can provide this after the session. Okay. I am not sure that there are any further questions on that point. I believe that Dixie wanted to mention a few words on one of her projects as well.
>> DIXIE HAWTIN: It is not really a project. Seeing as there is so many people in the room it would be a good opportunity to look at an issue that was interesting to me and I don't really know a lot about. So I was hoping that maybe some people would have some ideas to throw in to the mix and that is, there has been a lot of talk about how freedom of expression applies online and what the main issues are there. And there is still a lot of work to be done and a lot of consensus to be built. Whereas nowadays more and more people are accessing their Internet through mobile phones. It is easier to control their experience on the Web. More people accessing the Web through apps. Google and Verizon came out with a nice comment about network neutrality, perhaps not applying in the same way. And so I was wondering if anyone does know stuff that there that is something we can discuss as we are all in the room and have a bit of a brainstorm. Thank you.
>> BEN WAGNER: Questions, comments, ideas? Brainstorms incoming? Perhaps there are any experts here on specifically mobile relations of freedom of expression. It doesn't seem like. Thank you very much nevertheless. There was one further project I would like to add but I wanted to wait until the end and give everybody else a chance to speak and that's the question of the changing technological environment of the Internet. I have spent a lot of time trying to raise awareness of the fact that the way DPAC is propagating through Internet infrastructure will have profound implications on how we understand the Internet. Given the next two or three years especially for freedom of expression this will have quite significant implications. A lot of debate especially on Iran was not necessarily most factually informed. Anyone in the room who would like to get involved I would be interested to hear about it simply because people working on freedom of expression or privacy issues relating to DPI are few and far between.
>> Maybe you could explain what DPI is. I am not sure if everybody is aware.
>> BEN WAGNER: It would be my pleasure. DPAC and inspection is basically a technology which allows for filtering systems to not look at headers of the packets but look at the packets that pass through the Internet. A piece of information that is taken to be a packet comes from or let's say what specific type of information is linked to it. Geo location or other data. But the advent of new forms of technology which look within the packet payload they will look at the contents of the information that's parsing through the Internet, allows this to be reacted to and the specific difference with DPI technology it allows for live change to the network stream. So a typical DPI example would be software and hardware that is used to protect from viruses within the Internet that will look for certain virus signatures as they pass through the traffic of the Internet and this will be found and edited out and it is this live response that makes DPI both useful but also extremely dangerous.
For example, two companies which have used DPI to actually modify the packet stream and they will have both changed things and done quite problematic things which were, for example, to inject Java script in to the packet stream and to use the data they collated from the DPI that they were using for behavioral advertising. I think as technology propagates we will be increasingly talking about other human rights which is related to DPI. Any experts in the room or further people working on it I would be very grateful to your concerns. Thank you. Please.
>> Just a little observation DPI inspection, that the obvious thing to do is to push for more encryption of traffic. In particular Web sites try to use SSO as much as possible and if there are some obstacles against that we should try to work to remove. The easy way to do it costs money. Push for some freeway to get the certificates or alternatively or both for browser configurations that do not complain as loudly as they do now about encrypted but certified connections. If you look at how Firefox complains when you connect a Web site that has self made certificate, it makes it sound worse than an unencrypted connection. But it would not be vulnerable to DPI inspection. E mail communication, just push for all mail transfer agents to encrypt their communications because the standard is already there.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you very much. Please. Further comments.
>> For the DPI inspection, this only works for text, right? It doesn't work for video/audio content images? They can only inspect text? That's all.
>> They can inspect anything.
>> They can even, for example, if someone is stalking in a video they can do text to speech and filters this video based on what the speaker is saying.
>> In principle, yes. In practice, not in realtime not yet, but only a matter of time before it becomes practical.
>> I think we will have very interesting technology that helps us use this via video, but I never thought you want to use it in DPI inspection because I imagine all the traveling going on and how they can translate this video in to text and do the filtering. It is a huge.
>> BEN WAGNER: Any further questions or comments on this issue? Okay. Then thank you very much. I would like to move to the second part of the meeting to move a little bit towards this IGF specifically and to specifically discuss a few freedom expression issues that have come up in workshops during the last few days. I know that several people in the room from Freedom House have been discussing these issues and would be grateful for ideas and input that we are able to influence the process in a positive way sense of freedom. The workshops and meetings, how has these had a freedom of expression component and how can we work towards ensuring that freedom of expression is established as an important pillar of the IGF meetings as a whole.
>> Several of the issues that have come up at least in some of the sessions that I have attended are
>> BEN WAGNER: Could you use the microphone, please? Thank you.
>> Sure. Sure. So some of the issues that have come up that have been raised in some of the sessions that I have attended seem to be at times the issues surrounding globalizations of technologies and sometimes there seems to be a lack of understanding that principles that are held for freedom of expression in North America and western Europe and in other freer spaces, it seems at times that particular companies don't realise that systems that are set in place such as lack of transparent privacy policies for applications, explaining more clearly to users how information is collected and other things like that don't seem to factor in sort of the human rights angle where activists that are working online using particular technologies, how that collection and that lack of transparency can impact their work in a negative fashion because they can then face tracking from their regimes.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you. Any further comments or questions that have sort of come out of the IGF process in regard to freedom of expression? I believe there is a comment from Max.
>> MAX SENGES: I am not sure whether all the participants today are aware of the brother, sister, mother process at the coalition for Internet Rights and Principles. There is a charter that we are working on for quite awhile and it has this action and freedom of expression that I think could definitely benefit from more contributions and reviews and uses in your local or individual contexts. And by being elaborated upon with examples. I mean that is definitely one place where energy could flow.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you very much for that. From the other side of the room please.
>> YAMAN: Hi. My name is Yaman. I am the founder of cyberrights.org. After almost 16 years in UK I moved back home to Turkey last year and I started doing a lot of work to Internet censorship in Turkey. There is approximately 6,000 Web sites blocked from Turkey at the moment including popular Web sites like Youtube, Metacafe. So I already took one case to the European court of human rights in regards to the blocking of last FM Web site from Turkey. And in a couple of weeks I will be taking also the Youtube case to the Strasbourg court for alleged infringement of Article 10. What I witnessed during the last year in Turkey Turkish authorities are using western ideas, I mean not western ideas is probably not the right thing, but when I strongly oppose filtering, for example, they tell me well, Australians are doing it. The Germans are doing it. The British are doing it. Now they started saying the same thing with regards to blocking access to people's Internet access with regards to copyright infringements and there is a new bill they are discussing. So I am very much concerned about the domino effect of certain dubious legislation being involved in Europe or elsewhere and other countries are making use of it. Even worse versions of these kind of dubious laws are being introduce and they are citing Germany and England and others and they are legitimatizing basically the introduction of new repressive censorship laws. I am very much concerned about the effect of these laws being developed elsewhere.
>> BEN WAGNER: Any comments or questions?
>> Just a very quick comment on the last one. I have to tell you when I was in Cambodia a few years back, a Singaporean representative defended it by saying well, you do censorship child porn. Why shouldn't we censor what is harmful for our folks.
>> Filtering in one country and filtering in another country is no longer isolated silos. It means that each time that censorship infrastructure is set up it could be used as a precedence for other countries. It is important to ensure that the local stakeholders are aware of that this so called well meaning and friendly censorship for filtering systems are implemented I have had the same experience in Tunisia. It has become difficult to argue towards Government officials that there is some problem with censorship there because they will say look at Sweden, look at Denmark and it is not an easy argument to have when Europeans are to a certain extent rightly accused of being hypocritical. It is an extremely important point and we need to look and advocate for this both in a local context and international context if we are going to have any success as a coalition.
>> I wanted to raise a few points. First of all, to indicate the general framework that I sense evolving I sense in the last few years that among Governments but also in the Dynamic Coalition and rights and principles there is a push towards using the formulation that in particular the universal declaration of human rights and all the other documents that are related that I will not cite explicitly should be fully applicable to the Internet. This is an argument that must be made over and over again because in particular as we are in the follow up of the WSIS process all Governments and that goes for France as for other Governments, all Governments must be reminded that they have signed and endorsed unanimously a declaration that says so. If we all consider those documents are not just pieces of paper that we signed but we actually mean what is in there it is a basis. The important element is and this goes to your question, when there is the argument about what you are censoring and we aren't, it is important to remind interlockers that the universal declaration Article 9 has specific criteria when you are putting limits. It is not just out of nowhere and those limits are very precise. It has to be done by law.
Accordingly also has to be done with sufficient independent appeal and court processes because having a nice law is not valid if the court is implementing it in the wrong way. It has to be for the purpose of defending the exercise of rights of others or to protect another type of right. And it has to be proportional and this notion of proportionality is very interesting in the case of Internet because in many situations we have to react to a measure that is blocking a whole site. Like a whole Youtube or a whole Facebook because of one specific site of content. The notion of granularity regarding blocking on the Internet or interception.
It is interesting to see the debate at the moment to where the whole debate is about under which condition, should, could, should not, could not a Government block a whole TLD as opposed to the content of the subdomain. And I tend to believe that this notion of granularity could apply to this debate as well. The principles don't block a whole TLD just as don't block a whole subdomain unless there is a real reason to go to that level. The second element is there are certain a number of initiatives regarding that that are emerging around the world. Announcement by the U.S. government, Sweden is doing things. France and the Netherlands are in the course of launching something regarding freedom of expression on the Internet and there will be a meeting in October in Paris following one that took place in July and we have identified four major axes. One which is to encourage one way or the other the networking of actors who are monitoring the freedom of expression in different countries.
There is extremely good work being done by Freedom House and many other entities, reporters without border. And every day in the IGF I discover new people who do that kind of monitoring. So putting them in contact even more on the neutral framework is good to make sure that even Governments have accurate information regarding what is happening in countries and this goes also for the report of the special Rapporteur of the UN that needs good data.
The second point is the very delicate situation of handling the behavior of companies which are confronted about three types of problems very quickly. The first one is if they provide equipment or software, the request to establish not only the standard equipment but also to establish additional features to increase surveillance, monitoring and so on and how they can react to and how they make the distinction between the countries where they should do it, should not because the law enforcement is okay, in one and not in the other is a delicate subject that needs to be discussed with other actors.
The second problem the condition under which a representative Government is requesting from a company to reveal privacy and private data that will lead to the arrest of somebody or in certain cases requesting people under torture to give password access to Facebook accounts just to see friends. So this kind of problem what is the policy that companies can have to respond to those requests. And the third element is the question of censoring, what is the reaction and what can be the policy that they have put forward regarding granularity. So this is a this is a track that we are exploring at the moment and we will announce more at the end of October. But the last point I wanted to throw on the table there is a discussion about exploring analogies with the international regime of international canals, waterways and international straits in terms of rights of free harmless passage. We have a situation where a country is not supposed to have any intervention on the traffic that flows through the country and second that they can be responsible for the upstream actor towards the downstream actor regarding what flows through. We are just testing the water to see if it can lead to some kind of legal basis or legal framework for free flow of information. Thank you.
>> BEN WAGNER: Thank you very much.
>> One quick question. Who is we in this case?
>> Good point. This was very quickly this was initiated after the first meeting at the French national level, the French minister for foreign affairs on the occasion of the day of the freedom of the press. I think on the 3rd of May said I would be interested to gather certain number of people. There were reporters without borders, a few companies and other associations. And the idea emerged that it would be interesting to have something, sort of pilot group to put forward initiatives regarding freedom of expression on the Internet. So first meeting by invitation was convened, about 40 people in July in Paris with businesses and some Government and civil society actors just as an exploratory meeting and this preparing a meeting at ministerial level in October in the same format. So it is still, and I understand the criticism that will naturally come, this is still a group that is a launch pilot group for broadening the initiative afterwards, but we chose for reasons of speed to get together a relatively diverse group and the main question we will address in October what is the path for opening up the participation and I understand that I am working on a very fine line here because any time you create a small group you get the question of why are the others not invited. And it is a fair question. It is a delicate question. Thank you.
>> BEN WAGNER: I would like to thank you for that fantastic intervention and also request that as this initiative progresses keep us updated. And I realise it is very fresh and I think that Meryem had things to say.
>> MERYEM MARZOUKI: Thank you. You really generally want to bring this information. But as a very spontaneous reaction I am just wondering what's going on with such schizophrenic Government. Sorry to be blunt. How it comes. It is not only about France. How it comes. The foreign affairs ministry is taking such initiatives which are very, very good initiatives. And at the same time the ministry of justice is putting forward new legislation each year, new legislation which are adopted by the parliament and this legislation, I can cite the Adope law, the security internal security law this year and there is one or more more than one. And these laws are reaching very, very seriously freedom of expression. Freedom of access to information privacy and almost all human rights. So I just want to understand how it comes that in the same government and again it is not only France, how could this happen.
>> May I? If I may come back because I perfectly understand the context. I would have a few elements to answer. The first thing is that it is not uncommon in every country to have, for instance, the privacy commissioner be completely on opposite sides from the interior ministry and in each country there is a balance and tension between the different actors and as you said as a citizen one can believe that the law is an appropriate one or not. But it has been produced through a due process. It has been produced through a parliamentary process. And this is the fundamental dividing line. I agree that there are many people in France and in other countries who did not necessarily agree on some of the measures that are adopted. The kind of problems we are facing in a certain number of other countries are significantly higher in terms of infringement of human rights than the kind of very legitimate concerns that you can have. So it is not schizophrenic. It is that we are addressing two different problems and the effort to push the principles is an effort to say there is a first dividing line. And I hope that this is something that people can share. The first dividing line is whether any limitation is being done through a transparent legal process or not. And so the main thrive of the international effort is to establish this dividing line and whether afterwards the appropriate legal process is producing something that a portion of the population agrees with or not and it is up for criticism and there is no problem about it. It is not that it is incoherent. It is addressing different levels and these issues are very well delicate and balance and it is absolutely fair. And I am very happy on a personal basis I can almost speak in an official basis it is good in France and other countries there is debate and criticism about where the cursor is. I think this is proof that the debate is going on. There are so many countries where those measures are being taken not even by law but just because somebody from the policy office is calling somebody else. But I don't want to debate. I know it is a difficult topic. But thank you for recognizing.
>> BEN WAGNER: I would like to respond to that and respond to a few other points and then Meryem. I think that in regard to what you just said on the one hand it is entirely correct that the process is important but equally I think there is a responsibility that comes from countries that typically have their laws copied and this responsibility isn't always taken in to full account when interior ministries make decisions and then later foreign ministries are thinking about how this is done. Two weeks ago we had the French ministry and two weeks ago the Dutch released a new code of conduct of how they are going to be filtering the Internet in the future. But to return to the point that was made on companies, which I think is very important. The key question that can be made when we are talking about responsibility of European companies is to what extent we are able to find out and to understand the technologies that are used in many countries in the world by regimes that will go far further than any European forms of censorship and filtering and to what extent we except this fact. I think there is a lot of law that exists in regards to the geo process and it is important to consider with Internet technologies dual use components, established framework for this and I realise that it is not typically we are not talking about nuclear material. At the same time Internet technologies do have significant and far reaching implications and they can have these implications need to be discussing these in the appropriate legal frameworks.
In regard to the this is a key place of responsibility for European states to ensure that companies that have put pressure on them are supported at a national and local level. I think that a lot of the ongoing debate now about Google in China has ensured that much of this local debate leads to certain positions and Google is in part profiting from this debate because it allows it as a company to go with it. Also then the regulation that is required to ensure that certain types of technology may be used perhaps for filtering out viruses but not for filtering in free speech context. I believe that Marianne wanted to say something else as well.
>> MARIANNE: A process that is transparent is not necessarily good because it is transparent. There is some very bad laws and bad process that occur in a very transparent manner. I am very concerned when we talk about freedom of expression issues when it gets positioned in an us and, them mainly us. We have got great processes. It is the insidiousness of the sort of end roads that are being made are aligned to the more dramatic instance that we all hear about, Iran and Greece. My concern is as a coalition is how are we going to keep these two levels of analysis in the same frame. In order to understand that freedom of expression every day at the European level is being encroached upon and real sort of the now the public awareness of this is almost nil, beyond those of us who understand these debates fully or in part.
>> BEN WAGNER: I believe Max had a point as well.
>> MAX SENGES: Thanks for bringing that up. It gives me the opportunity to invite the other organisations, academics and other private sectors, companies to join the global network initiative. If you don't know already, the Web site is globalnetworkinitiative.net and you are welcome to ask me about it afterwards. We are definitely seeking especially European and nonwestern participants in that group.
>> Can I just say something on that because I tried to contact several times and you never respond to e mails. After the third time.
>> I am sorry about that. That's why I didn't say write us an e mail but speak to me afterwards.
>> BEN WAGNER: Petran, you want to add a few points?
>> PETRAN: One interesting element regarding dual use because there has been an approach initially that was thinking we could apply to the export of technologies the same kind of verification system and sanctions and so on. And the problem of dual use emerged very quickly and yesterday in a discussion a European Parliamentarian even made a comment it is the European standard specifications that ensure that the equipment being sold abroad can be misused because the features that are put in that allow law enforcement agencies at the European level to do the illegal surveillance had the same technical features that are just reverted on the other side.
Without quoting an explicit company I had a very interesting exchange with one provider of equipment who said and I was asking about a specific case, and he said in that specific case we accepted some time ago to provide in addition to the infrastructure an element that was not particularly doing in itself something bad but sort of a monitoring room that allowed to track a certain number of things that were in the network. And they said in retrospect one, it was a stupid thing. Second, we have discarded this unit because of this problem. And it was a typical case where the use of the equipment was actually something that could not really be controlled and so it was better not to provide. Talking about dual use, every time I hear people to legitimately support freedom of expression say they are distributing encryption equipment to human rights defenders I see two dangers. I suppose it has to be addressed. The first danger is that it gives an alibi also to the law enforcement agencies of repressive regimes to take this as an excuse to say this is spying equipment. There is a potential endangering, what are the measures to be taken to alleviate this. And the second thing is we have seen in the past unfortunately how the wonderful support that we did for some movements that were fighting against people we didn't like actually led to the equipment that was given be used later on quite in the other way. So what about preventing the reproduction of those tools to be people we would really not like to see them using.
>> BEN WAGNER: I think I can respond to several of those points directly. I think I had a discussion with a company that we shouldn't name in regards to dual use equipment. It is important to remember that the industry that is providing technologies is not as large as we commonly expected. That's to say the implications of calling certain types of software or hardware dual use and regulating them appropriately would not be massive from an equipment perspective. I think there is a reasonable case to be made here. Specifically as some of the let's say extremely large companies which could suffer greatly from being associated with such technologies would simply prefer to remove these type of business units from their general business rather than be associated with these types of technologies. The more we are able to ensure that these technologies are seen as slightly dubious and preferred to be pushed in to separate business units.
In regard to the alibi that can be made out of encryption technologies, I think it is an extremely important argument and the difficulty or the reason that you need good appropriate training that I mentioned before for activists a lot of time the encryption encryption technology first of all makes you noticed and this is a huge problem. For example, other difficulties in Tunisia encryption is illegal unless you pass on the encryptic keys to the Government first. It is also in the training of activists, it is a question of proportionality. You need to provide the right tools for the country.
In regard to the third point I think that in general it depends in how these technologies are likely to be used by people who we want to be using them on how we think the world is. Whether we expect the that will be used for free speech purposes and when I look at the world I see the overwhelming world, I see them using them for the good reasons. What is proportional to allow these people to have free speech rights. And I think this is already far too much the case in far reaching societies. Are there further questions or points on this?
>> I didn't realise I was commenting but I do have a point in general, this is a philosophical point, when we consider techniques or technologies that are to be used to catch criminals here or whatever we should consider how they can be used for evil in other places and this should always be kept in mind. And another little practical point, that it is very difficult even for Tunisia I think to forbid SSL encryption because it is essential for Internet banking. So I know a number of people actually set up a VPN to the same portis and it could be very easy to set it up so that it is impossible to distinguish it. And when you use certain other different connections, password, then it will be set up on a VPN connection. This is impossible to detect with present technology that I know of.
>> BEN WAGNER: Again thank you for very the valuable point. Just to respond what you mentioned in Tunisia there is the danger or problem that this technology doesn't need to be noticed or distinguishable through a court to still find that a certain person can be guilty. So sufficient use of the technology it is not always a technological question. It could be sometimes a social or political question and when certain suspicions which are made when a person starts to use SSL or VPN technologies and this can very quickly lead to problems. A lot of times activists are given special Internet connections. So this state has also found ways to respond to this and again this is a game of cat and mouse where we don't necessarily always have the upper hand but we can keep trying. But they certainly help on the way. Before we come to a few final organizational matters any further points? Please.
>> I have a very small point. First I want to thank you both for the very, very important feedback you have done on the company's part because it was something really bugging me all the time during IGF. What I want to do I am changing a little bit the conversation. What I noted through the whole conversation is that we gave our Governments a right to censor and we didn't question that right and we denied ourselves the freedom of judgment. So basically we told the Government we feel that we need someone to tell us what's good and what's not. For example, they say that there is some sensitive topics like religion, sexuality topics and all this stuff. What I say is that okay, I have the right to read on sexual topics and I have the right to decide for myself what's good and what is not. Even if someone is insulting my own religion. And okay, I read them and I think they are assholes and those people whose bad voices who are making no sense will eventually lose their leadership and I don't think we need to set a forum like we need to have some values and say that's wrong, that's right. We can censor this; we cannot censor this and in software we say let the market decide.
So let the people decide via leadership numbers what is good and what is not. And why do we have to make everything go through a system and deny ourselves right to judgment? Sometimes we have to go back a little bit lower and demand that our Government should give us a freedom to judge only people that are under 18, may be our kids or those should be subject to censorship because they don't have the power of judgments. Once a grown up you don't say what's your stance; I have the right to view and decide for myself. This should be brought up back to the discussion.
>> BEN WAGNER: Okay. Thank you for that point. Are there any further points in the room that would like to be made or heard?
>> I would like to use my presence here just to make a comment that comes from a workshop I moderated on governance of social media. It is the notion of private space. What I see emerging with the social media, particularly the Facebook type of things is when you think about it a chat room that is closed to people who are invited as a strong analogy with the interior of the home. We have a tendency to consider that the Internet is an open public space. The reality it is a series of spaces. Just like the constitutional court in Germany has affirmed that e mail is a private correspondence. I wonder whether we could insert in the debate, the notion when we talk about social media depending on kind of protection and the kind of efforts that we make to have the discussion in a closed space the protection should go accordingly. If I am in my own apartment with a few friends and I say very critical things about a Government, about a person, about a religion or whatever, it is not the same thing as being the owner of a newspaper and putting it on the front page of the newspaper and spreading it on the Internet. So the rules that apply to freedom of expression should be all the more strong, more the private spaces are provided, of course, there is no infringement of laws or things that are really abusive but this notion of private spaces may be it is freedom of assembly type of thing basically.
>> BEN WAGNER: Okay. Thank you very much. Before we come to wrap up the session I'd just like to mention a few organizational issues that related to the coalition. The first and foremost there are currently two coordinators. I am not sure you have met Lisa over there, Lisa Horner and myself, and we both coordinate. And at least to my knowledge it may be the case that Lisa will not be continuing this in the near future. Anybody else who feels that they would be willing or able in a process from a stakeholder group that would be very welcome. I hope that everyone here has had an opportunity to fill out the e mail list and add themselves. If not there is also an opportunity to do so afterwards.
We have a ling site address dcexpression so Dynamic Coalition expression, dcexpression.ling.com. I would like to specifically add that I think it is of greatest added value if specific stakeholders in the room come together to do specific projects, and I have seen several projects that would be valuable to work on here. In the realm of the future of the Internet and also from a policy perspective. And if we can feed in to that and in some way as a coalition ensure there is a link between their work and ours and also of other initiatives. Anybody has ideas or suggestions there is an open debate on the ling site. I am very grateful for further ideas and suggestions. Lisa, would you like to add anything to that?
>> LISA HORNER: Thanks. I just wanted to say that Ben has done a fantastic job organizing this meeting and carrying the chairpersonship forward for this coalition and I know he has some support this time around from my colleague Dixie. So thanks to both of you for doing that and apologies that I haven't been involved. And that's one of the reasons that I am afraid I won't be able to carry on co chairing this coalition with Ben but I have seen we have preserved this meeting space really in the IGF. And I am sorry I came in late but it was brilliant to see such a dynamic productive discussion. And I want to say that and thanks to Ben for doing such a good job with this. Thank you.
>> BEN WAGNER: So again if anybody feels like they would like to become within the coalition more active or to get involved I am not sure Chair is the right word. Coordinator fits better and there is many people in the room who I see would be fantastic to do it. Get involved.
The ling site, I have just logged in. You can see on the monitors anybody can sign up and there is lots of platforms and space there for further discussion and dialogue. Other than that if there are no further questions or no further comments, I will wrap up the session now. There is a received e mail over the list already which is from another coalition member who has asked that anybody who is interested could please stay for the first formative meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values and become part of that Dynamic Coalition. This will take place at 1630 in this room. Perhaps some people would like to stay sitting and take part in that coalition as well. Hopefully see you next year. Thank you for your time.