FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES – ENHANCING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 24, 2013
4:30 P.M.
WORKSHIP 324
ENHANCED COOOPERATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
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>> MODERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, welcome to the workshop on Enhanced Cooperation For Sustainable Development. The Workshop Number 324 is organized by China Internet Network Information Center or CNNIC. CNNIC is the operator of the national domain of China. It also takes the responsibility of internet technology, policy and development research. Here is some workshop information and technical information which you may need. Our moderator today is Dr. Xiaodong Lee, the CTO of CNNIC. We also have remote participation which can be found in the IGF website. Our remote moderator today is Dr. Xiantang Sun and my name is Ling Chou, I'm the commentator of the workshop. Today is our great honor to have five panelist to join us. Miss Y.J. Park from SUNY Korea, Mr. Nigel Hickson VP of ICANN in Europe Region, Mr. William Drake from Zurich University, Mr. Norbert Bollow from Bollow Software and Dr. Xiaodong Lee from CNNIC.
Due to schedule clash, Mr. Nigel Hickson and Mr. Nobert Bollow are currently are having another workshop but they will join us later at 5:00 in this session. We are also glad to see that we have representative from Chinese Internet Society and Chinese Government are also taking participation in this workshop. We thank you for your support. Now I would like to present your Dr. Lee, CTO of CNNIC. Dr. Lee?
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you, Miss Ling. It's very nice today to have a long table so if you like, you can to sit by the table so we can have a group discussion around the one table. So, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This really means a lot to have you all here with us in this Number 324 workshop. I want to express my sincere gratitude for your participation and support. Today the panel is here, now I would like to share with you some ideas on topic of Enhanced Cooperation for Sustainable Development.
Now let's start with the background of this workshop. Of course, Dr. Drake and Miss Park are very familiar on this issue. In 2005 the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society came out from a meeting. It came to the Global Communication Society with three major achievements. First the definition for the Interest Governance. The model stakeholder model as well as enhanced comprehension. Respectively these three achievements come in in different ways. First the working definition is the development and application of government and private sector in the society, in their respective laws of shared principle, the same procedures and programs that shaped the evolution and the use of the internet. This definition has identified a number of public policy issues that are relevant to internet governance which enhanced our understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of government, intergovernment and international organizations and other firms as well as the private sectors and Civil Society from developing and developed countries.
And the second achievement is the model which is a hot topic on these meetings, they will be mentioned a lot in this meeting for the modern stakeholder. This model encourages development of open processing at the national, regional and international levels to discuss and collaborate on the expansion of the internet as a means to support develop efforts and to achieve internationally agreed developed goods and objectives. Briefly speaking, it provides all stakeholders with a chance to participate in the governance which encourages openness. It involves enhanced cooperation which is in general principle about equal footing and the cooperation practice. This region of enhanced cooperation provides a potential strategic region for stakeholders' interest and maintaining the coverage and guaranteed equal footing of each stakeholder in the internet governance. Comparing with the motto this is focused on harmony among different stakeholders.
Now, I think most of us are excited of the motto for the advantage of openness but to further drive the positive outcome of modern stakeholder and growth of internet some improvements and supplement work needs to be done. Especially with regards to providing harmony and equality in the modern stakeholder environment. It cannot solve conflict automatically. We need to come in and sit down do work together. In other words, we need more active and constructive cooperation and cognition.
In the long term if we are facing the challenge of how to sustain the continuous growth of internet, if you only have people gathering together and do not promote mutual understanding, it will make no constructive contribution to the sustainable growth at all. The conflicts and distrust among different stakeholders can be disruptive, inefficient or even cause disasters. For sustainable development we need to have a strategy to guide us for future cooperation. Therefore, the major points I want to address here, that the modern stakeholder cooperation should be viewed on the basis of harmonious cooperation. We need a modern stakeholder plus enhanced cooperation to drive the sustainable growth of the internet. There are many great people with long vision who are actually making great effort in this regard. This should be a good opportunity to learn from each other, this is why we are gathered here to share our experience about enhanced cooperation. And the implication to sustainable internet development. So today we have five panelists, two who will come here later. First I want to give the floor to Professor Park who joins us. She is part of the inner society and professor in Korea. She previously served multilingual internet, very active member. Her background from Civil Society she has dedicated herself into cooperation for modern stakeholders. She delivered a paper at the regional IGF in September. So now she will give us a lot of introduction about her work. Thank you.
>> Y.J. PARK: Thank you. Thank you, everyone, I think we don't really have that many participants here so maybe we can have more dynamic dialogue and, so, I have been introduced to you, I have been involved in Civil Society but also I was working in Singapore for the i‑DNS, so I was provided with the private system. Once in a while I work with government for the many different issues about the internet policies, so, I in that sense have a lot of the understanding about different sectors, but we know that this subject matter of the cooperation is very important. We form the working group on DNS cooperation. There is still a long way to go to achieve the consensus about different understanding about the DNS cooperation. If I remind you of the definition of corporation which is still in dispute, back in 2005 there was like the DNS corporation phrase in the Tunis paragraph, I think, 69 and some people interpreted part of paragraph 69 as a way for government to be more engaged with this internet policy making process and on the other hand the second group sort of is not only government but all stakeholders, getting more involved with this multi‑stakeholder process.
So there are like two ways of understanding and under this situation I wanted to be a little bit more provocative with some people here because maybe ‑‑ usually multi‑stakeholder ideas and DNS cooperations have been presented from more like Western culture or Anglo‑Saxon kind of public policy environment which is quite different from Asia Pacific ‑‑ actually Asian public policy making environment where the government has been driving all the public policy process. It been very difficult for governments to respond to the new framework, so, for example, like back in Korea, in terms of this DNS cooperation which I take the second definition approach which means like all stakeholders work together to respond to the different kind of standardization process, for example, ITU which also requires lots of different sectors, the corporation.
So, in case of this ITU's proprietary process back in Korea, the Korea government identifies some specific institution that is going to coordinate a lot of this work among those identified experts from the academia, and from the industry and, so, they are getting all together for preparing for this ITU meeting, so in some sense even before the multi‑stakeholder region and internet policy making process, the concept of multi stakeholder region has been there but the whole thing is under the coordination of the government. And probably the main difference between the I.T. version and ICANN version is sort of the final decision making process. Basically final decision making process is done by government, not by the other sectors, even the other sectors are required to keep their kinds positions and their kinds of knowledge and expertise, but at the end it is sort of the government who make all those decisions, and that hasn't been a very fixed process, which it has been operated.
And now we have ICANN and standard organizations like IETF and, so, whenever we deal with this like a new form of decision making processes like ICANN and IETF on the international level like Korea, many people feel very sort of, you know, lost, and they don't really know whether they can use the traditional coordination they used to have like sort of under the umbrella of government like sort of they identify the different institutions and therefore they call those like different experts from the academia and industry, so that is like the traditional coordination model which they feel very difficult to exercise in the case of IETF and ICANN because they feel this has nothing to do with government.
Because they also heard a lot of times government has no role in ICANN. The role for ICANN is advisory, that means they don't really have any decision making process, so therefore government does not really do anything and that's the problem for many times in Korea, at least in Korea, so what happens is whenever we try to go to government for asking for this kind of coordination, because at this level it is very attractive terminology, but in reality without any funding, without any resources you cannot really effectively respond to this process.
So, therefore, at the end we have to go to government and asking for their help like sort of mobilizing some kind of funding and from their end what they are saying is we don't really see our role here, we don't have any role in IETF, no role with ICANN, therefore we cannot do anything with this so you have to deal with this on your own.
And, so, that is sort of the ‑‑ in some sense a vicious cycle. Today, for example, Korea in terms of the number of new detail, the application was only five, so many people like in ICANN community kept asking me, and some say ‑‑ many people say Korea is one of the most advanced I.T. countries, what happened with this ICANN community? And the insight I can give to them is because, you know, of this kind of sort of very different mechanism of coordination, it has been very difficult for the government to coordinate this kind of ‑‑ the private sector oriented process.
And, so, in some sense when we talk about this UNESCO corporation, and multi stakeholder principle, I think the concept is very, you know, very productive one, however, the implementation stage or implementation process should be reconsidered and should be kind of readjusted to the different culture of the public policy making embodiment. Without concerning those different public policy making embodiment which has been existing like for more than a thousand years in our sort of country and in this region and it is going to be very difficult to like, you know, respecting the same principle the way it has been nurtured in the Anglo‑Saxon or more like Western countries public making process. This is one of the provocative topics of discussion and I know the approach of the UNESCO corporation and multi‑stakeholder can be very provocative but I think it's very necessary dialogue if we really want to achieve some kind of consensus among those stakeholders who are in the same space because of this whole gap we are creating like new platforms all the time.
I mean, we created already like WSIS and without having this consensus we created Internet Governance Forum, IGF, and still we cannot really discuss this in a substantial manner, so people kept creating the different kind of platform of the meetings, like sort of how to improve the IGF working group and now based on that we finally created, like, the UNESCO corporation working group and now we are going to have a very exciting meeting in Brazil next year and, so, we keep creating like a lot of the different platforms to talk about this without any conclusion, so, hopefully even though this is a little bit painful kind of discussion for some of you, you have a little different understanding or standing but, still, it is going to be very meaningful discussion for us to, you know, develop more substantial dialogue. Thank you.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you, Professor Park. Before I go to next, I prefer to ask the floor if you have some questions for Professor Park. Okay, yeah, so I will leave some minutes for question and answers and then I think it next is my turn to give some presentation about our understanding. Not now on behalf of moderator, on behalf of CNNIC. I agree with Professor Park, you know, there is some kind of balance issues between the developed and developing world. In a sense from my understanding now for the countries, the issues, they are strong stakeholders, if we discuss modest stakeholders, and some countries are weak stakeholders even for the policy or even for some financial issues and also their knowledge about ITU and the discussed powers and especially now it's a hot topic, even for the critically resource location, the developing countries, it's also lack of knowledge and lack of power for that.
So we have a lot of balance issues, so maybe it will cause some issues maybe not only issues but conflict. Also, there is some kind of knowledge issues to make some distrust. I think we want to feel the trust but there is some distrust issues here. And there is a lot of similar aspects. I think now days it's a reality. Even for this type of meeting, you will see a lot of attendees from American, Europe, but lack of attendees from so many countries having a lack of money, their lack of knowledge and even their language not very good, I mean, for English.
From inside we try to research on these issues and find how to solve it. We want to build good conditions. It is mentioned a lot, but how to leverage the modest stakeholders relationship to be better. In China we say a wonderful word is "harmony," it's a popular word in China. In the Chinese tradition of philosophy we prefer to make harmony to achieve the living condition. So how to make enhanced cooperation strategy, to make sure it can have living condition. You know we need to coordinate with international on issues for ITU, UNESCO, for a lot of governance relevant organizations including for the internet industries. We also need to coordinate with government. Of course, as mentioned by Miss Park, in the very beginning they cannot get a spot from the government, including China, but now recently I think there are a lot of changes but in the very beginning it is a reality. You also need to coordinate with the academic organization including the university, institute and NGO'S, you need to coordinate with industry in society and NGO and, of course, business, there are a lot of big internet companies, how to make sure they can work together to be able to run a system and also, of course, any others. There are a lot of users in the work. Also in industry. To make sure all of the stakeholders can work together to get their benefit from the governance system is very important.
How to do that. I think in the past 16 years since CNNIC was established in 1997 we tried to build a platform and to initiate some kind of project and get output on best practice. So, you know, in some sense you need some kind of platform to make sure you can engage different kind of stakeholders to attract them to join.
How to do that? You can sit here. I think if you only have the platform, but you have nothing to do and then we have nothing to upload, it a problem. So in the next slide I think I try to give you some examples of experience to show how to build the platform, how to make the product driven environment and how to output best practice.
I think for CNNIC is a good example for the modest stakeholder model because we have a board of trustees. It includes the government officials and the carriers and the individual expert and they supervise the work of CNNIC and also we are the security of policy and resource committee of Internet Society of China. For the DNS has issues, we are the sector of ‑‑ then we also are the funder of the Asia Pacific alliance, we provided the security for this. Recently, this year, CNNIC hosted the ICANN Center in Beijing to try to engage the stakeholders in China. And this year we also host the Asia Pacific Society for the security of the organization. In China, the Chinese, it is popular now, but in the past 30 years there is an organization called Chinese, it's funded by CNNIC, and I asked John to push the Chinese to admit it. Also we paired with the national security center to support DNS, by coordinating to solve security issues.
I think there are a lot of platform to folks different topics. I think that is the first step, you need to build the platform to attract different stakeholders to join your activities. And then how to build the capacity, to overcome the divide. I will give you an example. Last year and this year we had capacity meeting for the Southeast Asia countries. CNNIC did a training program. This training program aims at providing a comprehensive cost of technology in the regions, management experience to the internet leaders in the Asia Pacific region. In this year I think over 10 countries John is training. There are also some from here.
Of course, we try to have others groups, for instance in China, to improve their security for their domain name resolution service. I think you will see this picture, last year we provided additional training for the Ministry for Communication and Mongolia joined. This year it is cheaper than last year, a lot of people came to the capacity, it was less than three weeks training.
Another example is about the international e‑mail. Now we have Chinese dominium, we have international dominium. Now there are international dominium added into the servers. The most important thing for the international dominium, e‑mail is popular, very important compared to the websites. In the very beginning as setting a goal, CNNIC worked with other Chinese community members to push IGF to be a working group to fix the international e‑mail standard issues. Last year all of it was published by IETF but the software even for Outlook, a lot of e‑mail ads doesn't support this service, so we try to also build a platform and fund a platform.
For example APAC, they just finished the APAC meeting in Bali, to promote the international e‑mail societies, now it was accepted by APAC and approved. There are so many countries in this project, they tried to promote the international e‑mails in their country. Also it's important for them to accept international dominium, because no email ‑‑ in some sense there is no e‑mail.
I will give you some examples, there are a lot examples, but for the time I can't give you more. Our target is to research the problem and coordinate different stakeholders and work together to have the best practice. I think it's very important, how to achieve our collaboration.
So, in this year I think the governance issue is very important and also there is a misunderstanding about the governance issue in China and even in your own country. So CNNIC tried to initially institute internet governance research. So, I think so many people here get the book about our research institute. For the governance issue in China, in some sense, to speak frankly but it's very important issues for us. We also want to find a very good solution for us, but there is no perfect solution.
We try to find a solution based on our country's environment. So every country has different kind of background, culture, economy and technology, so there are different governance models in different countries but how to bring the best practice from the world to China and also how to bring the best practice from China to the world is a very important issue. And also we focus on some governance models for developing countries. I think it is a little different from other models in developed countries.
So, we also try to initiate some products just like the best practice compared to other issues, so I think in the future we also want to have some kind of output on best practice. I think we would contribute the research outcome to the work to improve the mutual understanding between the different kind of work and different kind of countries, I think, it is my presentation.
So, I think all of the panelists are here, so to save time I want to just approach the question and answer in the last 20 minutes, so I forward the floor to Norbert.
>> NORBERT BOLLOW: Thank you. I first need to apologize for being late, the problem was that I have to be on two panels in the same workshop slot which is still a bit of a problem to split yourself into two identity copies. Talking about enhanced cooperation for sustainability development, I want to share my perspective on how to make it practical. Next slide, please. So, the first question is who cooperates from the perspective of how I read the Tunis Agenda, I suggest that this term "enhanced cooperation" is about cooperation between governments with the purpose of these governments being enabled to actually fulfill their responsibilities. There was a time when it was possible for governments to do that job properly without worrying about the internet, that is no longer the case.
When we talk about enhanced cooperation, the question is also what is the goal of this cooperation. Even in private life or as a Civil Society person, there are many situations where you are in a dilemma to either cooperate or not cooperate. If you don't cooperate, you are alone, you've lost already. If you cooperate you participate in the cooperation but the goal might not be so perfectly aligned with your interest. You might also lose by cooperating. So enhanced cooperation, first of all, needs to solve this dilemma, that's the first thing that I would say needs to be enhanced.
Also, this cooperation process, even if I agree with some people to cooperate and the goal is good, I must be somehow assured I must be able to trust that this cooperation process will not over time deteriorate, be subverted and become something that in practical reality serves a different interest that I might not actually have wanted.
Next slide, please. Now, we are talking here about this specific goal of making development sustainable. I want to very quickly share a few thoughts about that. First of all, I would say to make developments sustainable we need to work toward social justice. If we don't have social justice we may have development in the material realm but sooner or later society itself will rebel against that kind of situation. It's not sustainable.
We must end those ICT violations of human rights like privacy which are, as we are very much aware currently are very intensely violated by states, by corporations, by foreign intelligence services. One necessary condition to achieve it is you can trust the software you are using. From my perspective you can't do that by relying on foreign proprietary software where the contents are unverifiable, you don't know what is in there, you can't trust it. That stuff also happens to be expensive which is also not good for sustainable development, if too much of the resources, the money of your country goes just to some foreign place.
So, what is the solution? We can use free and open software and that actually is a great example of a cooperation process. When you use this software and you may need some changes, some improvements for your purposes for your needs, you can hire a local company to improve these things and if they do it professionally they will also ‑‑ I mean if they do it the right way they will not only give you the improved version but also put it back into the development project so that this is in your own interest because in that way the next version with other improvements, it will also contain your improvement so that it still meets your needs, but these improvements in that way become also available to others and when several countries and governments participate in this free software process simply by using it and buying from local companies whatever changes, enhancements they want, cooperation happens.
The enhancements, they get pooled simply by the free software economic process, so that is a wonderful way to cooperate that doesn't actually need to be enhanced. That works already.
The question is how do we get this kind of good cooperation in regard to other global social problems. Climate protection or internet governance, those are the areas where cooperation really needs to be enhanced. Next slide, please.
Here is a picture giving what, in the opinion of the author of the slide, a very positive vision of cloud computing. I got that from the presentation of the chair of the committee dealing with, among other things, cloud computing. The date is November 2013. I have not used a time machine. Actually this presentation has been circulated in advance to the member of that committee. But I think if you just look at that picture for a moment and let it communicate to us, we see there is some immense global social problem going on there. There is some power going on there. There is a huge risk for those countries that might not be connected to that cloud. On the other hand, connecting the cloud exposes you to huge risk also, you come under the power of that big international cloud. Next picture, please.
So, I have a proposal for addressing this that is an internet draft, I have submitted it as an input document to the CST working group on enhanced cooperation, and the purpose of this thing is called enhanced cooperation task force is to coordinate ‑‑ create some coordination of public policy on global issues, it's modeled on one hand on the practices of the free and open software communities, also modeled on the IETF. The idea is to create documents outlining possible policy choices, advantages, disadvantages and then to feed those informational documents for decision making into the national parliaments.
The stakeholder consensus staff that does not allow you to choose between different choices for which there are conflicting interests, at some point you have to really make the hard choices and I propose a mechanism which exists in practically all countries, in some countries it may need to be enhanced but at least it exists. I propose to use the national parliaments in this enhanced cooperation task force, I propose to use some thinking tools of something called the theory of constraint. Ask me afterward if you want to know more about it. So I propose this to this U.N. working group and, frankly, my trust in the U.N. system is not that great that I expect something to happen immediately.
So, let's go to the next slide, please. I have an alternative just in case it might happen that the U.N. does not immediately serve the enhanced cooperation problem because I think the internet way of doing things, if something needs to be done, don't wait for the U.N. If the U.N. solves the problem, fine, but if it doesn't maybe we can do it independent of the U.N. and this variant does not rely on governments being interested but it is more directed to building at the same time a social movement to bring this inside that gets developed directly to the attention of members of parliament.
In theory it could co‑exist ‑‑ there's a typo there. It could co‑exist with enhanced cooperation task. In that case the enhanced cooperation task force would be for cooperation, coordination to address needs identified by governments where this thing would be more for the bottom‑up staff that the governments are not yet interested in that needs to be brought directly into the parliaments. But, of course, why not if after some time when it works the U.N. says why don't you bring it under the umbrella of the U.N., why not? Thank you.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you, Norbert. Not to wait to do it the right way. I think it's a very wonderful proposal on the enhanced cooperation task force. Also from an IETF guy I love the word "task force."
Now, we have those who participate in the open software program, international standard and also the debate, it is motivated by a strong desire for the protection of person, data and communication privacy, I think it's very professional person. Thank you, Norbert. I will forward the floor to my left side, Nigel Hickson, Vice President of ICANN for European. You want to make some remarks.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: Thank you very much, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for inviting me. I'm a bit of an impostor, I'm afraid, Xiaodong who is a good friend of mine, we worked together with vice president for ICANN, he had the unfortunate job of being vice president of Asia, I had to be the vice president for Europe because I only spoke one language and that was called European, actually it is called English. So really you should have the new vice president for Asia but unfortunately he's got some other conflicts at the moment who is a very talented person and will be looking after Asia for ICANN.
So, I'm going to be quite brief. Enhanced cooperation. So, I think ‑‑ I hadn't really concentrated on what enhanced cooperation meant. I mean, some experts like Bill have sort of dined out on enhanced cooperation since WSIS, but I must admit it didn't really interest me enormously until I joined ICANN and saw the importance of it. And I suppose the interesting thing about the words "enhanced cooperation" is there must be a sort of common sense approach to enhanced cooperation. I mean, we ‑‑ we are fairly sort of as English, we are fairly basic, we are not very sophisticated in some ways, we just look at words. So "Cooperation," we cooperate. Some people cooperate better than others. Some governments cooperate with each other. Some stakeholders cooperate with each other. I used to be in government a lot, I cooperated reasonably well with people, as long as they bought me coffee I could cooperate or beer, I was reasonably good at cooperating with people. "Enhanced" means you cooperate better which I think is always a good thing. In this area of this dialogue on the internet it seems to me a common sense way of looking at enhanced cooperation is that if we are going to realize the true benefits of the internet as has been happening and Xiaodong has outlined for us, the benefits for society, individuals, businesses then we have to cooperate together because all of us have different ideas, different wisdoms, background, perceptions.
So, that's the common sense view. But I know enhanced cooperation means more than that, it derives from the Tunis Agenda, the Tunis Agenda has some fairly specific language. So all I was really going to talk about is how we deliver, if you like, this enhanced cooperation as part of the Tunis Agenda in ICANN. Some of you have been involved in ICANN, some of you have been to ICANN meetings and ICANN meetings are quite interesting, aren't they? Well, they are interesting to some people.
The first ICANN meeting that anyone ever goes to and I'm sure Bill here has been to more than most people ‑‑ you've been to quite a few, I suspect, Bill ‑‑ but the first ICANN meeting you go to I would have thought for anyone unless they are very clever is rather confusing because you go from room to room. It's a bit like the IGF here, that's quite confusing but the confusion here has more to do with the rooms have got two numbers on each so you have to work it out.
But in the ICANN concept the confusion is to a certain extent you go from room to room and there are different groups of people with acronyms like ccNSO and cc ‑‑cc ‑‑ sorry, GNSO, I'll get it right in a minute, and ALAC and you think who are these people and GAC. And the GAC is okay because these are the governments, and they will sit around a big table, they call themselves governments and look very serious. You can tell they are governments. But when you go to other rooms some are wearing shorts, they aren't governments. Some are wearing T‑shirts and some are wearing suits. And there's lots of different bits of the ICANN community, there's lots of different constituencies in the ICANN community and they all work together whether they are registrars, whether they are registries, whether they are businesses, whether they are civil society representatives, whether they are intellectual property lawyers, fortunately we don't have too many of those ‑‑ no, I shouldn't say that, Tom.
And all these people have to work together. There's an ICANN model and I won't explain the ICANN model, we don't have time and I'm not very good at it, everyone has to work together, but the importance for this topic is the way the governments work in ICANN because that's what enhanced cooperation has a sense of the way that governments can fulfill their public policy responsibilities for this part of the internet governance agenda. And in ICANN there are 129 countries that participate in the GAC, China is a very important player in that, we don't get 129 countries at each meeting, which is lucky because we don't have enough chairs, but all the countries that do turn up sit around the table like this and have an input into the process.
They discuss policy issues, they discuss issues concerning generic top level domains, concerning country code top level domains, they discuss a range of issues and particular in the new gTLD program ‑‑ by the way I should have started my address by congratulating China for having one of the new international domain names, it's gone into the root of the internet this morning. That's marvelous, after all this time we have a generic top level domain and it's of Chinese script rather than Latin scripts. That's fantastic news.
But that preparation for those new top level domains, the governments had advice to give to the ICANN board, we want generic top level domains to be shaped like this, we want this, we want that and the ICANN board had to listen to what the government says and there's a process under which the ICANN board cooperates with the governments, cooperate with the GAC and that's called a process where the GAC gives advice through to the board, through a communication, document, they give advice to the board, they say to the board in outlining the process we think you should do this or do that.
Now the board has to listen to the governments, it doesn't mean to say that in every single case it's going to completely agree with what the governments say, but it has to listen to the governments and it has to come back to the GAC if it doesn't agree and explain why it doesn't agree and it might come back to the GAC and say, we're sorry, governments, but you got it slightly wrong, you missed a point, or perhaps this wasn't clear. We all don't get things right all the time, but the process has to be that the board has to listen to the governments and if they don't agree with the governments they have to come back and have a physical meeting with the government, if the government wishes and if the GAC wishes to resolve the issues.
And I think that is what enhanced cooperation is all about is getting together, it's not and it can't be an absolute veto, you can't have governments in a multi‑stakeholder processing having the ultimate veto. There has to be a decision‑making process but the governments must have a very significant voice in the process.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you. He has been working with government for several years. He worked for the government for seven years.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: Yes. Now I'm on the other side.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you. Next speaker is Dr. William Drake. You know, in the very beginning, Dr. Drake, I cannot describe how many jobs William Drake has done. There's a lot of work, also for the IGF from the very beginning, there was a lot of confusion on this. Dr. Drake is an international fellow and lecturing in the media, mass communication of the University of Zurich. He was part of the United Nation governance forum. We're especially interested to hear why the man has sustainable agreement as the key issue for this. What was the major concerns and major stability issues. And it has altered.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you very much, very pleased to be here, always happy to meet with Chinese colleagues and talk about these issues. I have to say just two quick corrections, Nigel said I have dined out on the concept of enhanced cooperation. Just so you know it has not been a very tasty meal, in fact, it's been a problematic one. The notion of enhanced cooperation on the agenda here, it's hard to say really that it is central because the way they designed the agenda, there is no real central focal point in some respect, but it is a theme that came up quite a bit and because we have the CSTD process going on and so on, so there are sessions that deal with it. But there are other sessions as well.
Of course, events have overtaken it in ways, right? We have all been using the euphuism of recent events, recent events make things of a complex environment and now we have the whole initiative with the Brazilians to have a meeting in April, so that has been absorbing a lot of time and energy but there still is interest, of course, in the enhanced cooperation topic that has been around for quite some time.
The term "enhanced cooperation" was one of those wonderful European commission sort of inventions. We were in Tunis at the Tunis Summit in 2005 struggling to come up with some language that would allow everyone to declare victory and go home from Tunis with the summit not having collapsed. One component of the deal to do that was to establish the IGF. When Civil Society first proposed the notion of an IGF the year prior, we received pretty negative responses from pretty much everyone. Internet Society, the international chamber of commerce, the U.S. government, European commission, everybody told us we were crazy.
But has it happened, as things began to evolve we went through the whole difficult negotiation phase of WSIS Prep Com 1, Prep Com 2, Prep Com 3, the preparatory meetings leading up to the summit in Tunis and it became clear there were strong deadlocks between a lot of players particularly on the question of oversight of the critical internet resource functions and particular the kind of functions performed by the United States with respect to the root zone file, the IN function and contract with ICANN.
And it was in that context then that people thought more broadly ways we could continue the summit and have dialogue. One is the IGF will talk to each other, we will have a nice meeting and the other was enhanced cooperation which is a term Europeans used for an entirely different process but got imported into the discussion.
And the framing was as people were involved back then I like to point out very artful diplomatic ambiguity. Some people would call these weasel words but I will say diplomatic ambiguity sounds nicer, it was a phraseology that was basically meant to allow everybody to read into it what they wanted to read into it and say they got what they wanted. And, so, we had language, as you all recall, that said governments all operate on an equal footing and have equal responsibility for internet governance, that there would be work on globally applicable public policy principles and that there would be a process started by the Secretary General involving all relevant organizations. We couldn't ‑‑ the governments bring themselves to say "ICANN" at the time so we had to say "relevant organizations."
And everybody said, okay, great, we have an agreement. And then everybody walked out of the room and said completely different things about what had been agreed. So we spent then the next years debating this. It went on for quite some time. I was a classic example of a dialogue of the deaf. You had people from the internet technical community, business and the industrialized countries and a good chunk of Civil Society who were saying well, enhanced cooperation is a multi stakeholder process meant to enable governments to more effectively fulfill their public policy roles by improving the quality of dialogue taking place within and among governments and other agencies ‑‑ institutions across the board.
So, we had this process where the Secretary General would asked for inputs from all the different players about what they were doing for enhanced cooperation and we'd get annual reports from ISOC and other organizations, NRO, Number Resource Organization and others documenting, okay, in the past year we have taken the following steps in order to make it easier for governments to perform their policy functions and to enhance and increase the level of dialogue and cooperation. And, indeed, there was substantial degree of opportunity to talk about. And everybody would point in particular to the growing role of the government advisory committee within ICANN.
I'm always perplexed when I come to IGF meetings and I'm told by some government representatives that governments don't have much voice in ICANN, we are really marginalized at ICANN. Because those of us that work at ICANN think, my god, the government advisory committee is taking over. Everything we do, I ran a panel this morning on closed generic top level domains, the government advisory committee raised concerns about closed generic top level domains, now of the 168 applications for closed generic top level domains, only 10 remain closed. So all of the companies that have proposed business models that would be closed where you would have essentially the registry would be the only one that had access to the second level name, they have all thrown those aside and said just let us sign the contract, let us go into business and we won't even follow the business model we had proposed and that's because of the GAC intervention so to say GAC has no voice, governments are oppressed, so marginalized, this is remarkable to those of us in ICANN.
People would point out there's all this work that has been done to increase the level of public sector participation in the process, increase the level of cooperation, enhance cooperation is going well. And then we would have a coalition of governments, particularly the G‑77 who would come back and say no, enhanced cooperation is not happening, nothing has been done. We heard this over and over: Nothing has been done. The reason they said nothing has been done is because their particular interpretation of the words in the Tunis Agenda meant that somehow there was going to be a new intergovernmental oversight body quickly created that would tell ICANN and other "I" organizations what to do and have this kind of comprehensive one‑stop shop, intergovernmental authority over internet governance.
And I'm unable, no matter how many times I read the wording of the enhanced cooperation paragraphs, to see that in there. But because that's what many governments advocated during the WSIS process that's what is in their mind, it's parts of the legislative history and interpretation they put onto this text. Since that hasn't been created they say enhanced cooperation hasn't happened.
And so we go around and around for years on this discussion, it's happening, no it's not happening, it hasn't been a terribly productive discussion. You may know a year ago or back in 2011 somebody finally decided to make a concrete proposal and, so, we had from the Indian government a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly for a U.N. Committee for Internet Policies CIP. CIP would be comprised of 50 states chosen for geographic diversity who would meet for two weeks a year in Geneva and during those two weeks they would make all the decisions on internet governance that had to be taken. They would be a treaty making body, dispute resolution body, they would coordinate and oversee the bodies responsible for technical operational functioning of the internet including global standard setting.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: They would be busy.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: It would be a very busy two weeks. That proposal didn't go forward. So now we have the analysis of this process going on under the United Nations Commission on Science Technology and Development, there's a task force that has been created that has mentioned, they have conducted a survey asking people what do they think their priorities should be for enhanced cooperation, they are digesting those survey responses now, there will be a meeting in November, there will be an attempt to write a report for next year, they will undoubtedly ask for the mandate of the group to be extended because it's an U.N. process and it can't possibly finish on time and, so, they will issue an interim report that will go to the United Nations ECOSOC and in the meantime all this other stuff is going on in the world. By the time they finish this process I think we will all have been exhausted by the concept of enhanced cooperation and whether we will be any wiser for it, I'm not sure.
Which leaves on the table then the legitimate question how could you enhance the ability of governments to take public policy decisions on the range of global internet issues where they might want to? And we still don't have a good conclusion to this and this is part of what they have talked to the Brazilians and hold a meeting and we are going to try to take a global look and not just the question how do we underlie the names and numbers and critical internet resources but whether or not we need to have new mechanisms to be able to tackle some of the other problems that really don't have an institutional home like privacy, consumer protection.
So there is a lot left to be done, a lot of dialogue to go, I'm not sure the enhanced cooperation term or the debate that has been structured in the U.N. around that is going to help us that much in it but hopefully it will at least stimulate discussion that will ultimately lead to some convergence among all the different players as to how we might move together with each other. Thank you.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you, Bill. That is a very insightful address. Before I give the floor to the audience to raise questions, I want to ask the panelists if you have more comment on our discussion.
>> Y.J. PARK: Well, thank you, Bill and Nigel about sort of the explanation about government advisory committees function. Obviously there are different perceptions about the GAC and I think that is sort of the challenge we have on this table and, because, a lot of the, you know, the perception from Asian governments, for example, what the GAC is, they don't have any seat for government, so if you probably like observed like the participation from Asian governments in GAC and since we have Micah as the representative in the GAC, probably many times you noticed Asian governments are not serious about sending their government delegation, even though they send, like they either send a very junior staff or they don't send anybody and they just ask some institution to cover what is happening there.
That means they don't really take GAC seriously. That's the main difference we have and I think that as sort of the most important challenge we have. So one of the things the UNESCO corporation has discussed is the equal footing. So what is the equal footing here? It's like voting right. So as long as we can give governments voting right like in the ICANN process, I think that can make everybody really happy and we can still like sort of like give the voting right to Civil Society and registry, registrar but why not only government? That is the difficulty of the governments in many parts of the, you know, world, have about this ICANN. And going back to like Nigel's comment about this ICANN, I think my first ICANN meeting was back in 1999, the second ICANN meeting domain which I was very excited about the whole formation of ICANN. Because we didn't have the career structure of ICANN, we didn't have DNS structure, the concept was there, we were about like to formulate all the constituencies like we were creating all those memberships and after all those efforts, a lot of the Asian participants including myself, we felt very left out from those whole kind of the formation process.
We were there from the beginning and we really tried to make it, you know, up and running, but most times like ICANN has been very dominated by U.S. and Europe. Initially U.S. I remember the meeting that a lot of the European participants in that meeting like at the microphone, almost like more than 40 people, one by one, just "we want globalization, and we want globalization."
That was the impression of the meeting with ICANN. Yes, after that we had globalization, it was Europeanization which makes sort other parts of the world feel left out and that is one of the reasons we want to have more diversity and one of the things we are using is the UNESCO corporation.
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: I don't want to give you the opportunities.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: No, no, I know we haven't got much time and other people will want to speak, but I mean I take the point entirely others have more expertise than I do, but it's a problem that ICANN has recognized how a GAC operates and if you like the equality within the GAC. Now this isn't rocket science in any group of governments there will always be a dominant, a government that feels more at home on topics, more at home on language that is used as the main language tends to be English, so there is an issue here, but we can do things to improve it, and, indeed, it has been recognized and one of the strategy panels ICANN has set up in the last few weeks will be looking at various, the way the stakeholder process works within ICANN and that is how effective the GAC can be open to other voices. This is some of us a lot of us recognize. It will be nice to hear different voices, but, yeah.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you, Nigel. Sure, we have lack of time. So, because we also have the remote participants, so I want to, because the time is very limited so I want to give two questions for the room and one question for the remote participants. Is that okay? So, yeah, you first. And then you.
>> MARK CAVELL: Thanks very much, Mark Cavell, UK government and indeed the UK representative on the GAC. There are issues about the level of participation among the GAC membership, but I'm not so ‑‑ I don't think the picture is quite as bleak as you describe. We've always had very consistent representation from Asian countries, Japan, China, Taiwan, Singapore. Singapore actually held the vice chairmanship of the GAC, one of the three vice chairmanships of the GAC and there has been very active contributions from Asian members and the work load of the GAC particularly at the time of formulating inputs into the drafting of the applicant guide book on GTOs was spread across quite a wide range of membership. It is a matter of resourcing, a lot of administrations find it difficult to resource consistently high level of participation and activity my their representatives on the GAC, so that is a problem. We have highlighted it in our inputs into the current accountability and transparency review, how we can within the GAC ensure that more members fulfill their mandate, if you like, in representing public interests, concerns in ICANN policy development, so there is work to be done but I think the progress to date has been good and we are at a total membership of 129.
And, as I say, certainly most of the leading economies in Asia, a lot of the African states are now members and in Latin America too. So the geographical diversity picture is much better but work to be done, I do agree with that. Thank you.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Thank you for your comment.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I work for China Academy Society, I am also a GAC member. When I was selected as one of the members last year, I was surprised why ‑‑ China is Number 1 internet country in the world, but only used to be only one GAC member. I was the second one. I told him, he said anyway you have two, what about Japan and Korea.
No, not only other stakeholder, Japan government and Korea government are not in system so I agree, when I heard not a stakeholder concept I think I was really amazed. When I learned more about that, I really agree, that is very, very Western. We talk about actually sharing, and not a stakeholder is very closed. It's human rights. That's where the comment comes from, so I fully agree with that. But if you look in the model of modern stakeholder, will you show your slide, with modern, if you look into the stakeholder model, both the ICANN, we found the largest stakeholder is missing. Which is internet user, right? The individual. If you talk about traditional modern stakeholder theory, one is government and the other is media, both models, maybe this one ‑‑ yes, yes, this one. So, I very appreciate your model, your end user. I think that is very important, so what about bloggers? What about game players?
We don't hear any of their voice at IGF or ICANN. Their voice is very difficult to be heard. We can even hear government voice or Civil Society voice. But I have a question to your model that you have business but you also have internet ‑‑ this is a conflict or not? And I ask someone, because I'm a newcomer in this group, so I asked someone where is the individual in this IGF model as a stakeholder. I was told that's Civil Society. No, Civil Society is not individual, right? They have interest. The individuals, we are just end user. What about them, right? So, that is one thing. Another thing is it's good we are given voice of other modern stakeholder models, but because it's the model, it's very hard to make decisions.
So I agree with the first speaker, we need government involved to make decision but I have a question, if like in China the government made decision we had to do something in China. Japan government may make something they can make decision in Japan, that is part of it. But according to them, ICANN model government voice is heard but I would ask which government? You know, each government doesn't have the same voice. So you can hardly say you can hear the government voice but different government has different voice.
How much government voice can be in the decision making process? With so many governments' voices it's even more difficult to make decision, right? So, government is one thing. So I would like to have your advice and comment. Thank you.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: Do you want to do something?
>> WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you. I almost don't know where to begin with so many interesting ideas on the table, I'll make a few quick observations. This is a very interesting slide, will you make these available? I'd love to be able to have those. I'm very interested in continuing dialogue with folks from China about the question of enhanced cooperation. This is really important stuff. On the points that Y.J. made I admit to being a bit puzzled, I don't understand why the GAC voting would be better than the GAC working by consensus nor do I understand how if Asian governments send lower level people, one can then complain that the Asian governments are not well‑represented and the discussion is being dominated by other governments that send higher level people. The way to equivalate the discussion to me is to take the GAC seriously, send senior people prepared for the meetings and engage.
As far as the points that you were just making, I was puzzled when you said that users are not represented in ICANN. I'm the chairman of the constituency, we have 300 members, 85 organizations and 225 individuals, they are Civil Society users of the internet, there's also the not‑for‑profit operation constituency which represents another 40 nongovernmental Civil Society, users of the internet. There are the ‑‑ there's the enlarged community which represents users both commercial and noncommercial across the board, not just in the Genesis work. There's the commercial stakeholder group that represents business users, which include the Civil society. I think users are in effect represented by ICANN pretty well as is Civil Society, so I don't really understand. But we can talk about that off line because we are out of time. So you can explain to me what you had in mind
>> XIAODONG LEE: Okay, I think I want to leave the last question for the remote.
>> XIANTANG SUN: Panelists, actually we have seven questions but there is only one available in this occasion, so that is why I choose the more challenging one to the panel, so are you ready? So the top level domains is exciting but it means competition, tough competition, so how could you enhance the cooperation be achieved in this very competitive environment. Thank you. It's a general question.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: Michael, it's an interesting question, I'm not sure of the linkage, it's interesting, it's not just in China, I'm sure it will be greater consumer choice, better business choice, what domain name they use for their businesses or Civil Societies or whatever. What individual users and, of course, it's the same everywhere, the new domains will give greater choice, it will give greater flexibility in their use. But I don't think they basically reflect the model of ICANN and the role of governments within ICANN. The role of governments in ICANN which Bill outlined, which has been applied for is significant in the outline as well as the growth of generic names. I'm sure that the government advice will continue and indeed just as a final thought, from the questioner, I mean, at some stage the ICANN board and the ICANN community will make a decision on when there might be another round of generic top level domains and when that happens no doubt there will be a lot of discussion, the governments will give advice to ICANN on how this round ought to be carried out on pricing and other aspects what has been learned from the first round. Again that will be a significant role for the government to play.
>> XIAODONG LEE: Okay. I think we can have an online and open discussion. It's a very good start. I believe all panelists think we need some form of enhanced cooperation. We can network now. No country can go solo. Any country cannot work without the internet, how to make our cooperation is more effective, how to make sure our resource sharing, how to bring our society much more orders, it is the responsibility to take on and not to wait, not to wait right? So, to make sure our work is better and better. I think thank you for your listening and attending the session. Thank you.
[Applause]
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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