FINISHED COPY
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR ENHANCED
MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
02 SEPTEMBER 2014
11:00
WS 196
IGF & ENHANCED COOPERATION, PARALLEL TRACKS OR CONNECTED
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The following is the UNEDITED output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. The following is UNEDITED.
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>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Okay. We are just waiting for five minutes before starting the workshop. So just five minutes to go.
We will start in a minute. Well, good morning, everyone. And thank you for being with us and joining us today in workshop 196. IGF and Enhanced Cooperation, Parallel Tracks or Connected. I would like to welcome our distinguished panelists and thank them for being panelists for the workshop. I am Qusai AlShatti and let me introduce to you our distinguished panelists. First Desiree Miloshevic from ISOC UK and Carlos Afonso from the director of Institute of NUPEF, Brazil, right? And Mr. Marilyn Cade from Cade, Inc., the United States. Mr. Peter Major, the representative of the Republic of Poland in Geneva. And Mr. Faycal Bayouli ‑‑ Hungary. Sorry. Mr. Faycal Bayouli, from the Ministry of Research Information, Technological Information, Tunisia and Mr. Ayman El‑Sherbiny, from UN ESCWA Lebanon.
The workshop is around three major questions and in the brochure it is there. The first question is can we view the IGF and Enhanced Cooperation as two linked processes since they both address IG public policies or they should remain as two independent facts.
The second question if the IGF is nonbinding can Enhanced Cooperation serve as an outcome for its policy dialogue that can reflect multilateral, multi‑stakeholder and democratic and transparent process. In light of the two previous questions what should be a workable framework for Enhanced Cooperation to enable Governments to carry its role related to IP public policy. I will pass the floor first to Ms. Desiree Miloshevic so she can take the floor.
>> DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Good morning, everyone and thank you for inviting me today. I think in order to answer these questions it would be good to remind ourselves where is Enhanced Cooperation today and what does the phrase mean, and also to remind everyone about the sector activities that all stakeholders participated in since 2005 when the Enhanced Cooperation term came in to the Tunis Agenda. We know that Enhanced Cooperation today has not been resolved in a definite way. And we have to go back to 2005 in WSIS when the term Enhanced Cooperation was set in the paragraph 71. So the ‑‑ there's obviously a different understanding of that term by different stakeholders today. And then and it is a code word as well for many of them. And the ambiguity of that code word is something that's also appreciated by many stakeholders because it leaves room for the evolution and for further defining of what enhanced processes could mean.
So as it has been said the Enhanced Cooperation has been envisaged as a separate track to the Internet Governance Forum and at a time some governments saw the Enhanced Cooperation process as an animal with a tooth should there be a need for it. And the differences in understanding range from wide spectrum from those stakeholders who would expect that Enhanced Cooperation could mean setting up a new body to those who understand that Enhanced Cooperation is a process that is taking place between and within the existing Internet institutions and organisations. And that we have many examples that I could mention as well starting from new processes within ICANN, informational commitments and say the idea and track where we see Governments working together with other policymakers to come up to the international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet.
So I hope while we recognize that it was a separate track, these different meanings and readings in to what it is were not very helpful and not very resolved. You can imagine that today's situation is very much different. And that many stakeholders have been involved. The Civil Society, the Internet technical community, private sector and Member States have all been involved in this different set of activities from 2005. And just to give you a broad brush background what some of these activities involved, for example, since the Tunis Agenda document we had a report in 2006 by Anita Desi who was the Chair of the first IGF MAG and also the undersecretary of the ISOC. He prepared a first report on Enhanced Cooperation in 2006. Following that we had in 2008 a selected list of organisations that reported on Enhanced Cooperation to UNDESA. And that was after the 63rd UN General Assembly.
Then further on in 2009 we have seen that UN Secretary‑General writes a report on the progress of Enhanced Cooperation and in December 2010 we had convened open consultations in New York.
I think moving on, if we want to go down this chronological list of events and activities, in 2012 in December I believe it was a key issue when the decision by the UN GA asked the Commission for Science & Technology for Development to convene a Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. And in 2013 in January the formation of this group was discussed and a full multi‑stakeholder group has been formed with participants from Governments, private sectors, Civil Society, academia, Internet technical community. It was an open call and an open process for these representatives to be included in the work in the CSTD, the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. So far three meetings have been held in May 2013 and then in November of 2013 and lastly in February 2014. And this report has also been discussed in June 2014 at a meeting for the Commission for Science & Technology for Development. I do believe that it is ‑‑ it is obvious for many stakeholders that international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet cannot be solely left to the government. And it should include other stakeholders. All these set of activities has included other stakeholders, but we have not come up to this defining the way and the definitive meaning of such a term and maybe it is too early as well.
We were going to ‑‑ maybe it would be just beneficial to remind everyone in that little booklet what paragraph 71 actually says. But it said that Enhanced Cooperation would actually ask Governments on equal footing to ‑‑ with their roles and responsibilities to work on international public policy making issues pertaining to the Internet but not in day‑to‑day technical and operational matters that impact international public policy making. So that distinction was there from Day One I think very clear. But in terms of what still remains to be discussed and input to be made and all our community to come together and make further input is to define this process a little bit better.
I think I'll stop here having described this set of activities without answering your question, whether it should be a separate track but I think we'll come to that.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Okay. Thank you. And I will pass the floor to Carlos Afonso from Brazil.
>> CARLOS AFONSO: Well, thank you. This introduction was fundamental. She covered the history of dealing with the theme. And this is very good. I would start by saying that the Internet is an international phenomenon which is quite interesting in several aspects. One of them is that remember in the '90s, until the '90s one of the major discussions on Intergovernmental fora UN or nonUN was the issue of transborder flows. That after the Internet which is no longer an issue which was treated as it was before and, of course, it still remains a challenge on many aspects of the question. But the fact is that this is the extent to which the Internet has influenced the communication of societies. And, of course, all sectors need to be aware of that and participate in this process, in the development of this new thing called the Internet.
I ‑‑ for the first question I think that the IGF has Enhanced Cooperation in practice which enhanced cooperation. In the debates in the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation we had strong views of smaller groups of Governments which said that Enhanced Cooperation is a nonissue because the Tunis Agenda covered everything and should basically be regarded as a sort of bible or Koran of Information Society, and all that was needed was there. And, of course, this is not the point because of the view most organisations of Civil Society, even the private sector and the majority of Governments have this data. Enhanced to involve all sectors of society. That's why I say the IGF is Enhanced Cooperation in practice.
The second point is this, IGF yes, is nonbinding and probably will continue to be nonbinding, like the NETmundial declaration was nonbinding but unlike the NETmundial IGF is so far an outcome, which is not really true. Because we have the workshops, the Dynamic Coalitions and there are several initiatives that come from that. It is very important initiatives in some cases. But anyway IGF as a whole is not allowed so far to make recommendations. Probably this will change because every, you know, advisory group and even the CSTD, et cetera, are recommending that the IGF starts to recommend something. And this may change in the near future. We assume that the IGF will continue.
So I think that the IGF is this space, Enhanced Cooperation is practiced here and we have to learn from it. And we have to convince the Intergovernmental fora that this is a practice of Enhanced Cooperation that we want. It is as simple as that. No? Thank you.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you our Dear Colleague Carlos for this wonderful intervention. I will pass the floor to our Dear Colleague Peter. Please.
>> PETER MAJOR: Thank you. Well, I want to make it clear that I'm from Hungary, not from Poland. And I sit here in the capacity of being the Vice‑Chair of the CSTD which is the Commission for Science & Technological Development. And in particular I was chairing the Working Group and I am still chairing the group. We had a nice introduction from Desiree and nice comments from Carlos. We had four meetings for the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. And that was an antecedent to the Working Group. And that is a work group to improvements to the IGF. And basically I believe that for the first Working Group in the UN system which was multi‑stakeholder. And Marilyn can confirm that we had a big fight to let our stakeholders in to the UN system to be part of a Working Group. And after this big fight the second Working Group was formed quite naturally as being a multi‑stakeholder Working Group.
Before answering the questions which were asked probably have to put the events in perspective. It is my assessment that in the Internet Governance ecosystem we have ups and downs. Just to refer to the WCIT we had in Dubai my assessment it was a kind of example where we couldn't get to some common agreement as opposed to the WTPF which is the World Telecommunication Policy Forum had just after WCIT a couple of months, after that which we went smoothly in a multi‑stakeholder environment. And subsequently we formed this Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation which was always in the air that something should be done about it.
Well, after the four meetings which in my appreciation was a very short time, we had about one year to come out with some result. The positive part of it was that we had the UN General Assembly resolution to continue the ‑‑ one of the most important part of our work that is the mapping exercise. For those of you who don't know what it is, during our Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation we created the correspondence group to identify the existing mechanisms and to identify the gaps to facilitate Enhanced Cooperation. The work has been initiated. There was a lot of work being done, but the analysis part couldn't have been made during the short time we had.
Say it was the Secretariat of the CSTD which according to the UN General Assembly Resolution should take the initiative of continuing this work of the mapping exercise with the analysis and have some results for the Intersessional meeting of the Commission of Science & Technology for Development in Geneva and present the results of this mapping exercise.
It is my best hope that this result will be taken up by the regular session of the CSTD. And it will be as usual forwarded to the General Assembly through the EcoServe that is the Economic and Social Council of the UN. Now as for the Enhanced Cooperation and the Internet Governance Forum are the parallel processes or they are converging, the question is yes and no.
Well, it very much depends who you ask. And naturally there are some parties who would think that Enhanced Cooperation is not happening. And there are a lot of other stakeholders who think that it is happening. Probably we shall have a definitive or a more accurate answer to this question before the mapping exercise has been completed. It is my assessment that IGF is a good example of this Enhanced Cooperation but probably it is not the ultimate goal. So probably there is some convergence I can see. But we have to keep in mind that we are treating a very sensitive view. It is a point of view of legal systems, point of view of different civilizations. So the heart of the matter is not the Internet but rather the underlying systems we have. And it needs a lot of time to come to some kind of understanding. We have to talk to each other and we have to understand each other. So as I always say during my meetings I'm always optimistic and I think the time will come that we are going to understand each other and we are going to have the Enhanced Cooperation as will be satisfying for all. Thank you.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you, sir, and apologies again for the unintended mistake. I pass the floor to Mr. Faycal Bayouli. Please take the floor.
>> FAYCAL BAYOULI: I am Faycal Bayouli from the Ministry in charge of the ICT. I will talk about the experience of IGF and Enhanced Cooperation in Tunisia as an example of what we can do in this field. So in Tunisia and especially after what we call the Arab Spring that we change in the political system in Tunisia, we launched the official Tunisian IGF in September 2012. And then we have the first elective assembly of Mult‑stakeholders Advisory Group, MAG in March 2013. And this assembly was composed by 13 members, three from the Government, three from Civil Society, three from academia and three from private sector, plus Secretariat.
So this experience of multi‑stakeholder assembly and experience was very interesting for the IGF in Tunisia because it is for ‑‑ I can say the first time that the governments stay with Civil Society in the private sector and the academia to discuss and to have an area where they can discuss and make decision about the Internet.
I can say also in the ‑‑ this is for the national level. For the regional and international level in Tunisia we participate in many ‑‑ in many Forums and Working Groups about the Enhanced Cooperation and especially the follow‑up of WSIS outcomes, implementation in ITU, in CSTD, and we don't have ‑‑ learn about the discussion in these Working Groups and in these Forums to have, I don't know, to have not a decision but to be in the move of this discussion. And also in Tunisia we organise many Forums and conferences. Like in 2013 we organised the freedom online, but it was ‑‑ we can't imagine it few years ago when we met in Tunisia. We participate, for example, in the IGF in Baku at ministry level. So it is a ‑‑ the Government is and ‑‑ every multi‑stakeholders played the role in this kind of discussion. Thank you.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you. I will pass the floor to my dear colleague from the UN, Ayman El‑Sherbiny.
>> AYMAN EL‑SHERBINY: Thank you. Thank you Dear Distinguished Colleague, panelists who spoke before me. This is a very interesting topic and I remember the day when Qusai called me at 5 to 12 to think about this workshop. You remember before the closing date and we said yes, we have to do something like that. It is the topic of the year. And I thank him for doing this excellent work promoting the idea of this workshop and getting these distinguished panelists as well as doing the backward planning or the preparations for the topics. In fact, the question is not yes or no or black or white or 0, 1, it is certainly recognize the need for Enhanced Cooperation in the future to enable Governments on equal footing.
When we think about Enhanced Cooperation the core concern, the dilemma was Enhanced Cooperation by Governments. We can think of Enhanced Cooperation for multi‑stakeholders. We are doing Enhanced Cooperation in the IGF for sure, yes. The very problematic dilemma was this by Governments. This is '69 in the WCAG. There is a problem for important subgroup which is Governments that actually we all as active ‑‑ the last idea I just want to bring to the table is that ESCWA is very much interested in the IGF as it stands and Enhanced Cooperation quest, whatever it lends itself to and that's why we are participating heavily in the IGF from Day Zero. And we have mimicked the same process of the global IGF in the Arab IGF with a multi‑stakeholder thing. Dialogue in itself is precious, but when it lends itself to action it becomes much more precious.
And was ‑‑ I mean this takes place today or tomorrow. This requires dialogue itself. So international organizations like ESCWA and the others plays just a role of Convenor, facilitator as Peter has mentioned to keep the dialogue and to keep ourselves talking to each other, all the subgroups to find common areas of common interest to the best of the whole Information Society and the citizens at large. Thank you.
(Internet outage)
>> MARILYN CADE: And to see if ‑‑ and to see in the room others who have participated alongside the work that we have tried to do in the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. I am going to mention a couple of analogies. I am from business as many of you know because you have seen me in many other settings. I have been very actively involved in ICANN since before ICANN existed. I was very fortunate to be a part of the business community that participated during the two phases of the World Summit on Information Society and I want to really impress for all of us that as I look at this I see tremendous progress in how we actually are working to address the tough questions of Internet Governance. Who should govern the Internet and who should be involved and when should they be involved, when should decisions be taken by a different group of stakeholders and for business and Civil Society and something that is sometimes overlooked that actually when the WSIS began and I think many times it is easy to forget the original purpose. And we owe a great appreciation to Tunisia to call on the world to take that examination.
We should not forget the purpose of the World Summit and this is to bring ICTs, the Internet, the online world much more directly in to serving the needs of citizens, businesses, NGOs and Governments as users of the Developing Country in particular ‑‑ countries in particular. It is easy to forget that when all we do is argue about who is in charge. So one thing that really struck me a couple of facts. I am from business and facts are our friend. When we founded ICANN there were less than 40 ccTLDs who attended the first few ICANN meetings. Today the vast majority of the country code managers not only attend ICANN and belong to not all but most belong to the country ‑‑ the country code supporting organisation and it isn't just the manager who comes. It is large numbers of the staff who come and participate.
When we founded ICANN we had about 25 Governments who agreed to work together in the initial Government Advisory Committee. I think we aspire ‑‑ today there are over 140 countries and 65 to 70 actively participants attend. And it isn't just a single Government representative who comes, the GAC representative but it is now additionally other participants from the Government agencies and ministries who come and participate. So, you know, I think we need to really very much think about we are in an evolutionary process. I like to think that maybe our terminology needs to evolve and instead of just thinking about Internet Governance and Enhanced Cooperation we need to also be thinking about enhanced collaboration. And I think we can point to examples of where that collaboration is beginning and where we can continue to augment. The world isn't perfect and we have not solved all of the problems. And we haven't given every stakeholder everything that they need in order to be effective in making these decisions.
When we went through the World Summit there was one term for all non‑Governmental stakeholders. It was called the private sector. All of the World Summit we now have distinct stakeholder groups and private sector translates in to business for most people. So private sector now means business. We have Civil Society and we have academia and we have the technical community. We have really begun to evolve in to thinking about the participants in making the decisions very differently. And I think the process we are trying to go through now in the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation was to begin thinking not just about the different stakeholders but where and when do different stakeholders need to be involved in studying an issue, identifying an issue, developing solutions. So I might share with you two analogies. One, I like the parable of the nine blind men and the elephant to describe the effort to find a definition for Enhanced Cooperation.
It depends on what part of the elephant you are touching. But the second analogy I might give you is the following, my father was a carpenter in rural Missouri. He passed at 92 but he loved working with wood. And here is an analogy that he shared with me; you want to climb to that top of that roof and all you have is two long pieces of wood. You are not going to get there. So what you do is take the two pieces of wood and you drill holes in it. And you put in rungs and you make it a ladder. You take it apart it is two parallel pieces of wood.
Tie it together with interactions and with exchanges and with information and shared decisions and you can build the ladder that allows you to reach the top of the building you want to climb to. I think we need to be thinking about Enhanced Cooperation in this way.
We are not going to get there with two parallel pieces of wood.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Marilyn is the last speaker on our panelists. I will pass the floor to the participants for the interactive discussions, comments and questions. So the floor is for the attendees. Please introduce yourself before the question, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Okay. My name is Hider Frayheart from United Nations ESCWA in Beirut. Regarding this ladder, I think it is speaking of our word analog. I think it is the trees in the forest rather than the forest itself. When we go in to the details then we can see there that ‑‑ the building blocks of whether it is Enhanced Cooperation or multi‑stakeholder. For example, let's speak about Governments. We say Governments but, in fact, we have two types of Governments. We have democratic, elected participatory and we have nondemocratic dictatorial authoritarian and so on. When it comes to Government's involvement in Internet decision making I think we need to distinguish between these two types of Governments.
The other thing about the size of Governments in the economy, in the society, we have some countries where Government represents 2 to 3% of the economy or society. We have other Governments where they represent 50 to 60% of the community. And therefore in the decision making and in the policy making. We have some countries where civil servants represent more than 70% of their employed labour in that country. So again when we see the word Government we should really think about their size.
The third thing is whether we like it or not Governments are already making policies and making decisions with regards to the Internet. It is a fact of life. Sometimes the decisions are made in the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Homeland Security in the U.S. and the security apparatus, the Minister of Interior or Homeland Security or whatever, he is not highly willing or enthusiastic to come here and speak to people around. In fact, within the same Government the security apparatus people they are reluctant to speak with the other stakeholders within the same country. So again this thing needs to be unbundled before we talk about the ladder and so on.
Let me bring in an example from the Arab Spring. We have seen in many of the Arab Spring countries, we have seen Ministers making decisions to ban, block, to open, to unopen certain Internet services. Sometimes we have two outgoing and decisive Governments and they blocked services, certain services. Sometimes we have, for example, Syria which everyone is still bashing. Still the Skype services, many of the Internet basic services are available to the two sides of the problem.
Okay. So the last point I want to say that Governments, if they are continuing to be ignored as unified decision community or policy community vis‑a‑vi the Internet, then they will continue to make decisions without us noticing that. So we don't ‑‑ do we have the luxury? I want to ask this question. Do we have the luxury of continuing to involving them only on equal footage with every other stakeholder or we need to give them a special podium, a special auspices, a special room, Roundtable, whatever it is to sit in and discuss their very many Governmental issues rather than universal Governmental issues? Thank you.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: I will pass the floor to Marilyn. Peter, please.
>> MARILYN CADE: I certainly would support the idea that we do need to unbundle the issue and think about who needs to be involved when in a particular decision. But as business we do not believe that it is possible to have a centralized approach in this area. In fact, I would say that the ‑‑ of course, Governments are involved today already both at a local level, at a national level, at a regional level, at a global level in making decisions that affect the Internet. But that to business does not translate in to the idea that you need to have a Ubra governor of the Internet because the Internet is not actually a single thing. And when we say Internet, we actually mean the World Wide Web. We mean the social networking applications that you referenced. We mean the underlying infrastructure. And we mean the content and the uses sometimes that people put the information to which may be good uses and also can be bad uses. But I think the idea that there needs to be a unified single place that Governments would go to, to consider decision making about the Internet isn't actually ignoring the complexity and the importance of the issue. Instead I think we need to make sure that Governments are participating actively throughout the various activities where decisions are being made about the Internet. And I'm going to give an example of where that's already happening.
At one point very few Government participants came to the IETF. And very few Governments had a lot of engineers working for them or what we in business typically call the sys admin people that have relied on Governments as a user as well as private businesses and citizens. Today you find that Government employees from a number of Governments actively engaging at the IETF, the standards body for the Internet. We also, of course, know that Governments are actively participating in other fora where decisions about privacy are being discussed and it is not just the representative of the Telecom Regulatory Authority. It is also coming from other ministries, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education. So I think what I would say is a single centralized point just like on the Internet would be a point of failure. Instead we need to accelerate the inclusion and the incorporation of the Government employees including the Ministers at appropriate levels in to where decisions are being talked about and where they are being made.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you Marilyn. Peter.
>> PETER MAJOR: I just want to react on the (Off microphone). I will try again. Try to react to the special role of Governments. I think in the Tunis Agenda we do have provisions for that, for all stakeholders, their roles and responsibilities. So there is a clear definition for that. Now as far for the content, what it means it is really up to us and as I said before it is a long, long process. And I have been honoured to be given a new task; that is, I can construct a letter according to Marilyn's example and I am ready to take up the challenge.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you, Peter. Desiree?
>> DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: To the questions you supposed, I think what you have been talking about is a place for Governments to come together and also exchange what they have been going through, which is on a national level, rather necessarily discussing the subject that pertain to public policy issues which has already been discussed by stakeholders. So I am just noticing that you might have expressed this need for Governments to come together on equal footing, for example, at the IGF a day ahead and do what other stakeholders do, usually when they meet, Internet technical communities, Civil Society we come together and private sector and exchange information only. But when it comes to the decision making processes or our then deciding on the international public policy issues I think it has been clear that even in the paragraph, you know, 71, I think the process of Enhanced Cooperation has been explained. It is stated as a process towards Enhanced Cooperation to be started by the UN Secretary‑General involving all relevant organisations by the end of the first quarter 2006 will involve all stakeholders in their respective roles. And unbundling these respective roles whether they are a facilitator, Convenor the problem is that the Governments usually need an invitation. So probably that's one of the reasons why you haven't yet organised yourself as a ‑‑ but that's also not true. I think I witnessed many activities of parliamentarians in Brazil at IGF to do information exchange and we have high level meetings from Nigeria. Sorry. That was the first one in Kenya, the IGF. So now this is the third one. I think I have seen progress, but it feels like you are asking for something more. And I could just refer back to the question how do you see that process being organised.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Carlos. Do you have a comment or not? Please. Carlos, please.
>> CARLOS AFONSO: Okay. I would like to make a historical summary which I think is ‑‑ may be interesting to our dialogue. Shortly after the Cold War, the end of the Cold War 1992 we had the first meeting of the UN which ‑‑ with strong multi‑sectoral participation which was the United Nations environment and development meeting in Rio in 1992. Consequently it was the first meeting to use and bring the Internet to remote participants to the Forum. The April 1992 meeting opened a new process within UN Forums which was the bringing of other sectors to the Intergovernmental arena. One of the most relevant meetings shortly after the April 1992 was the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna which had the same theme of Civil Society people operating the Internet for that meeting.
And the Vienna Declaration which by the way was written, the final draft was written by a Brazilian Ambassador and you know that I am a Brazilian. So I had to mention it. It was adopted by Consensus by 171 countries and was the basis for the General Assembly of the UN to endorse that declaration, and it was the seed from which the High Commissioner on Human Rights in the UN originated. And that was with multi‑sectoral participation. I don't mean that all decisions in the conference were made with multi‑sectoral participation because multi‑stakeholders is a perfect process. But then other conferences followed the international conference on population in Egypt in which again the same Civil Society team that was in April 1992 helped to incorporate the Internet, that setting and the World Summit for social development in Copenhagen in March '95, and the fourth conference on women in China in '95 as well which all of them had learned from April 1992, I mean the UN and therefore multi‑stakeholder participation in those conferences was taken for granted, was a nonissue any more.
The issue was how this multi‑stakeholder participation was realized, was carried out but not that it was or it was not a multi‑stakeholder participation in UN fora anymore. Eight years later we have another process was the WSIS which in 2003 again with very strong multi‑stakeholder participation and then the Internet was, of course, taken for granted in the conference. We have the Internet.
From which came the WCAG, the Working Group on Information Society which was a multi‑stakeholder group which ‑‑ sorry, Working Group on Internet Governance which was a multi‑stakeholder group practicing defined the concept of Internet Governance. Many organisations and many of the Governments were doing Internet Governance in the past but didn't have the name. Didn't have the concept. This was finally drafted and proposed by this Working Group on Internet Governance. And from that WSIS process came what we are doing here at the IGF which is a multi‑stakeholder process. So this is a short story I want to tell you to show that the efforts, more clearly participation within the UN fora and even in other Intergovernmental organisations fora is counting on this kind of participation at different levels with imperfections. Sometimes you are from a point on only were kept outside of the room where the Delegates get together and finally decide things but you are somehow influencing them.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: If we can just wrap up.
>> CARLOS AFONSO: So that's what I wanted to summarize. Thank you.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you, Carlos. Mr. Faycal Bayouli, please.
>> FAYCAL BAYOULI: So the remark that he had about the distinguished democratic regime and autocratic regime it is very important I think and this process of Internet Governance is very linked to the governance in other fields. So it is very important to link the Internet Governance to the other kind of governance. And the case of Tunisia and the ‑‑ for the Arab countries I think it is a ‑‑ we must go step by step because it is very difficult to change dramatically from one side to the other side and with the own geopolitical environment. So the issue of democracy is very important in the IGF process. Thank you.
>> Intervention or find remarks ‑‑
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: No, reply to the comment.
>> AYMAN EL‑SHERBINY: I think he touched on very important detail which is that the quest for this subgroup to have a venue or platform is not really like casted in stone but there are some more questions within it. So this is I think the whole idea that even the participation of Governments, even if it is ad hoc, like in a pre‑event or more crystallized like the constituents in ICANN or whatever was in the nation itself, it is another story. But what the very idea of that is that we have to recognize that there are such kind of aspirations and we have to put it in the right perspective and in the right size and magnitude so as not to harm or hamper any of the developments of the Internet and its uses. This is a worry that needs to be tackled and even proposals given to them that helps them shape their roadmap, what they do. Network, group, constituency, whatever but there is some kind of fundamental hindering measure in the way IGF is designed that every workshop and panel I think it has to be multi‑stakeholder. At the same time we think that some subgroups need to meet on their own. So this needs to be also part of the improvements in the IGF in the future. How can we balance these two conflicting roles? Roles say that all the activities within the IGF annual meeting has to have multi‑stakeholder balance.
At the same time we encourage the subgroups to meet and discuss their own common interests, Civil Society, caucuses and businesses and International Chamber of Commerce. We need to give them more category of submeeting group and there is such kind of track within the next IGF. It is a subgroup meeting and it is open and should be public also and other stakeholders can listen and observe. So maybe this can be the take‑home idea to move our discussions here to the other Working Groups on the enhancement of the Internet Governance ecosystem which is one of the main Plenaries, how to enhance these kinds of things.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Oksana from the Ukraine. I would like to point out the importance of international organisations in all this process. For example, in Ukraine we will have our fifth Ukrainian IGF but the main majority of participants in this event did not participate in global IGF or in regional IGF and only this year thanks to the Council of Europe we have a large Ukrainian Delegation based on multi‑stakeholder approach. It is representatives of Ukrainian Government, not business but Civil Society, and it is a great impact for our next IGF in October. We would like to see a lot of foreign guests. And we would like to receive the same attention from the United Nations organisations, maybe ICANN, ISOC and so on.
>> AUDIENCE: I am Parminder from an NGO, IT for Change in India. Interesting discussion and I have a lot of comments but I will try to keep it brief.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: It is working but not loud.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes. Thank you. I think ‑‑ I mean following on from what Carlos said ‑‑ I think so. It is working now. I am Parminder from NGO, IT for Change in India. Carlos, I agree that since 1992 end of Cold War, geopolitics changed and increasing move towards participatory democracy in a global system which has been going well until I think the balance of power got shifted and that's what we are talking about. Where the center got so displayed in my view that instead of making policies we have reached a position of policy transparencies and the thing has become so diffused and spread out and we are not able to do any policy making, and therefore nothing is good in itself. Everything is good in certain proportion. And my intention is in an Internet Governance space we have become too loose and we have reached a point of policy paralysis. Whether Government should do it or somebody else should do it to what should be done and what kind of situation we are in. If you go and talk to somebody on the street, the thinking people at least, and ask them whether something is right now problematic about the Internet, is there a lot of things not in your control and 90% of people say yeah, there is a huge number of things which read daily newspapers asking do you think that anybody is doing anything about it and almost all of them would say no. They don't think so. I can give any number of examples. You pick up a newspaper and there are so many frightening things are happening and they are out of control and people are getting used to the new norm and ask them if anything has been done and you say no, I don't think anything has done been.
The privacy question, the new normal that I don't think that any kind of privacy tools apply. If real privacy, even basic privacy regimes apply, Google, Facebook can't run their business. It is going up which shows their business entirely depends on using your personal data against your wishes. That's very basic, simple principle on which these components work. Stock keeps going up because there is no privacy regulation and there is no privacy regulation because they are global and you don't have a global system. So the point we need to discuss is there a norm for Internet policy.
Second point that need in many ways global before we come to the point who should do it. Privacy, how the Internet is eating up media and how it is meeting up newspapers. I am not taking sides, but the fact that tectonic shifts are taking place and they should be under some control. They are not. How private censorship takes place, Google removes one million links on IP violations, what it thinks is IP violations and deciding what is IP violations huge list. Dot health has been given to a body and if somebody asked me in India whether they should sell generic drugs, I would say don't do it because the U.S. law would apply and you get kind of your ‑‑ dot book kind of cyber piece issues, any number of them and nobody is doing anything about it.
The issue is do you think guys think that anything needs to be done. I hear a lot of stuff that we are progressing slowly. We are in very fast changing times and whomever things we are doing well could be on the right side of the gains which are coming in the new Internet Society and a huge number of people are on the wrong side of the distributional wealth, social power and political power and our kind of redistributions which the Internet affects and they don't think we are doing well enough. And one needs to figure out what kind of policies are needed and I would quickly in a minute come to a question who should make this global policy. I am for changing the system. If you want a global parliament, go ahead and do that. But whatever system you are placing in place of the Democratic system which we have which is multilateral you need to justify it on how does it represent people's interest. Business was never considered a category which represented people's will.
Technical groups are expertise based groups. They do not represent votes and these questions have to be put out. Or should we keep on going the path which Carlos is talking about when the UN global system was being democratized increasingly until we reach this point where multi‑stakeholderism has categorized in my view. Sorry for taking so long.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: I will leave each panelist to reply to the two questions and make his final comment. I will start with Desiree.
>> DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: A quick reply. He raised an important issue to matters that need a lot of urgency and attention from our global community, but as we know most of the decisions about the Internet and policies are made are within the national laws. So what could be the instrument and what could be the benefit of the let's say an IGF Forum where we discussed these policies. We need to show some leadership and guidance of how these policies should be developed. And I think the biggest development that is going to take place or is needed really badly for the Internet is the applied ethics and, you know, this is something that we are grappling with the norms, the international public policies pertaining to the Internet. And the process is very slow and the technology will be there and there are technological solutions to some of the privacy problems, but I think what's missing is the ethic and the norms that would be accepted on the international level.
I do not think we need a central place or the body to oversee any of these processes. I think what we need is a cooperation between the existing organisation, more exchange of information but also creating some additional spaces where these issues could be discussed in a matter and fed in a more, if you like, urgent way than they are today.
And so I'll just stop here. And making policies in a vacuum, as you know there is a high rate of failure if a Government implements a policy and it has not been run or has included other stakeholders or has received any feedback. I think that's a fact. So in order for all these norms and policies that we are going to come up with we are really ‑‑ we really ought to engage not just a global community in Civil Society and the technical community in private sector but, of course, Governments have a role to play as well and they can choose whether a Convenor, a facilitator or the implementer.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Carlos? Marilyn.
>> MARILYN CADE: So I would never pass a real engineering test but I will take the liberty of describing myself as being at least a little bit technical. And one of the things that I would just like to point out is that when we were trying to define rules and behaviors for 40 million users on the Internet that was one thing. But now we are at 2.7 billion. We also have this terminology in the technical community where we ‑‑ that we call the ISO stack. You don't need to learn about it, but it is seven layers and it starts at the infrastructure layer and the top layer deals with users. But the top three layers there is the applications and the content and I use that to move to introduce the name of the UN organisation that is important to all of us to consider some of the issues that you'd mentioned, Parminder, and that's UNESCO. UNESCO is doing a study which will be released next February in Paris, and it is studying four areas, including I'm going to really get this wrong, but let me try, including the importance of universal access to information. So not so much the infrastructure which we work on elsewhere. But one of the four areas is the ethical area. So it seems to me that Parminder has raised some very important and relevant questions from a business perspective. I would go back to the point that we need facts. We need information.
The good news is that UNESCO is doing this study and I'm really looking forward to the meeting in February and looking forward to the idea that when we come in to the IGF in Brazil that we'll be hearing a lot more about so what are the expectations about the norms and experiences. There are a number of sessions UNESCO is putting on here that are addressing this. And I just thought it would be interesting to point out that that's a space that some interesting and helpful research I think is being done, and at an UN agency that can then be rolled back in to the regional and national levels. And I think needs to be listened to by business. This ethical dimension issue is something that given the number of users and the next few billion we want it is something we have to talk a lot more about.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Kind of talking about setting for these four issues but there was a kind of different views about instrument setting but there is too advanced to talk about. So it was called on the General Assembly of the UNESCO to do that study. Peter, please.
>> PETER MAJOR: I just really wanted to react to what Parminder said and I know that perception is an extremely important thing, but I would qualify your remarks as perceptions. I wouldn't jump to conclusions before the mapping exercise is over. For those of you who don't know me, the mapping exercise came out from the questioner of the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. It identified 24 areas of concerns in problematic areas and tried to link these areas with existing mechanisms to tackle these areas and tried to identify gaps. So once the analysis is all up, probably we have a little bit more than perceptions. We have a kind of information, quantitative information and qualitative information about these issues. So I want to really stress that probably we shouldn't jump ahead. And once we manage to identify all the mechanisms and identify the gaps probably that would be the next step and the way ahead to come up with recommendations where to go from here.
Thank you.
>> FAYCAL BAYOULI: I just want to highlight the importance of the national IGF because it would be the area where the multi‑stakeholders can learn with this new mechanism especially for Developing Countries. So I think it is very important to have a national IGF for ‑‑ to improve the global IGF. Thank you.
>> AYMAN EL‑SHERBINY: I just wanted to reiterate the importance of recognizing the reality of co‑existence of notions, co‑existence of platforms and this is the aim of our lives. We will continue dialogue about possibilities and these connections, the ladder and building the bridges between the processes to the best interest of the humanity and the Information Society. And the last word I would like to thank you for your efforts.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you. Well, there is remote ‑‑ okay. Okay.
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Yes, with regards to remote participation we had three remote participants connected all the time to the conference. All the way from Australia to the United States. I just wanted to mention that.
>> QUSAI ALSHATTI: Thank you. Well, I would like to thank you all for joining us and I want to thank our distinguished panelists for being with us and giving them their time to join us in this workshop. Let's give them a good round of applause.
(Applause.)
(Session concluded at 12:29)
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This is being provided in rough‑draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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