Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values Workshop at IGF 2012

Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values Workshop at the Internet Governance Forum, Baku, Azerbaijan on November 8 2012.

The third meeting of this Dynamic Coalition examined the challenges to the Open and Global Internet, define present issues and arrived at recommendations for fair policies for the further evolution of the Internet as a free and open eco-system

Chair:Lynn St Amour, President of the Internet Society,

Participants include:
* Nick Ashton-Hart - Geneva Representative, Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA)
* Sebastien Bachollet, ICANN Board
* Fatima Cambronero - President, AGEIA DENSI (Argentina)
* Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
* Sivasubramanian Muthusamy, President, Internet Society India Chennai
* Alejandro Pisanty, Chair, Internet Society Mexico,
* Paul Wilson (Director General, APNIC)

http://wsms1.intgovforum.org/2012/Meetings/dynamic-coalition-core-internet-values

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I would like to welcome everybody to the Dynamic

Coalition on Internet values. We do have one or two panelists that

will actually join us a little bit late. Dr. Cerf should be here in

about 30 minutes or so. And I know we have remote participants as

well. So just two or three minutes on this particular Dynamic

Coalition and its history, and then we will ask the panelists to

introduce themselves and respond to a question which I will actually

pose in a moment .

But this particular Dynamic Coalition came out of a workshop on the

fundamentals, particularly around the Core Internet Values, which was

held back in 2009 in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. And then following

that workshop a Dynamic Coalition was established and there have been

two other presentations since that time, one at the IGF in Vilnius and

another at the IGF in Nairobi.

This is the third meeting of the Dynamic Coalition, and one of the

things we want to come out of this meeting with is really trying to be

quite concrete about some next steps and some work. The purposes of

the Dynamic Coalition are to actually do work between meetings.

Largely remotely. There's an awful lot of work being done on Core

Internet Values in various parts of Internet ecosystem. But I think

we'd like to try to define whether or not there's something specific

we want to do here, particularly in the multistakeholder format.

So the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values was actually

organized to debate questions such as what makes the Internet what it is?

What are its architectural principles? What are some of its core

principles and values and what's happening to them in the process of

Internet's evolution?

So specifically, when we talk about core values and principles, the

things we often quote are openness, transparency, collaborative

processes, bottom up, local processes such as that embodied in the RIR

process and, of course, the distributed nature which is central to how

a lot of the work actually gets done across the Internet ecosystem.

So over time, some of those principles and values have been

threatened, I guess, sometimes, you know, perhaps less intentionally

in terms of trying to address or solve some problem without clear

understanding of the impact it actually has on the Internet, other

times we could probably ascribe more intent to some of those actions.

Before I do that I want to ask each one of the panelists to take a

moment to introduce themselves. In particular, I would like a quick

reflection on whether or not they think the Internet principles are

alive and well. Are they thriving or are they under some level of

threat for lack of a better word? So I will turn to my right and I'd

actually like to thank Siva as well. Because Siva was actually the

driver and the instigator behind the very first workshop, and has been

central to the other two and was very central and the driving force

behind this particular workshop. So it's really to Siva that we

actually owe all of us being here today.

One final comment, while I am with the Internet Society and a number

of the people on this panel here are Internet Society members, this is

not an Internet Society workshop, panel, or Dynamic Coalition. The

Dynamic Coalitions are definded by having members from a minimum of

three different multistakeholder communities. So if I say 'we', I am

doing my best to say that 'we' in the context of what we are here as a

Dynamic Coalition, not specific to an ISOC set of activities or an

ISOC kind of ownership, if you will for this paticular idea. We all

own the Core Internet Values. So Siva?

>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: Thank you, Lynn. I'm Sivasubramanian, I

serve as the president of Internet Society India Chennai, which is

also an ICANN At-Large Structure. I'm from India and that's in brief

about me and responding to the question by Lynn, I think Internet core

values are under a serious threat and a lot of things that are

happening all around us, a lot of changes, a lot of regulations that

are proposed, a lot of legislations underway - they seek to threaten,

to alter the core values considerably.

And in my opinion, a lot of these changes are happening quite

unintentionally. It's not that governments want to alter core values

intentionally, it is just that Internet is new to us and Internet is

new to governments and there are several departments handling

Internet. For example, in Germany, at least six different ministries

deal with different policy functions related to Internet, and then

France, there are roughly three ministries that handle different

policy aspects of Internet and there are often not sufficient

coordination between these ministries and it so happens that sometimes

somebody in some department who does not quite sufficiently understand

how Internet works tends to make some policy changes, some policy

proposals, that end up being very, very harmful to the Internet and

its core values.

For example, we know that the government of India has been very, very

positive, and the minister from India was here at this IGF - Minister

Kapil Sibal - and he has understood Internet and he's understood how

Internet Governance works and he has been very positive and was even

saying that the term Internet Governance itself is an oxymoron and he

was talking about Internet accountability and to that extent he was

positive. He was reaching out.

At the same time, somewhere else -- from somewhere else in India, a

proposal was filed at the ITU that was very bad. I don't want to use

a different language. I would simply say that the proposal was very,

very bad. This is one example of how the lack of coordination between

government departments give rise to some proposals that invariably

end up threaten the Core Internet Values. So what the core values

coalition and what the Internet institutions could do is to make sure

that every corner of the policy making sphere understands how the

Internet works. Once there's sufficient understanding of how the

Internet works and how it has to evolve, I think most of the policies

will be in the proper direction. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you Siva, that was very very clear. I'm just

going to go direct through the panelists, because I really do want an

exchange amongst the panelists and to invite the remote participation,

and obviously the individuals here in the room as well. So the

purpose of this runthrough was just to get a broad perspective of

views. Sébastien Bachollet?

>> SÉBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Thank you, Lynn, and thank you, Siva for

organizing and supporting this Dynamic Coalition since its inception.

I'm a member of ISOC and I am board member of ICANN. But I am not

talking on behalf of any of those organizations.

I want to follow what Siva just explained and push just a little bit

further. It seems that in a lot of countries, whatever the type of

political organization, democratic or not totally democratic, or not

democratic at all, we end up with the same type of decision to make a

law each time we have trouble with something that happened once on

Internet. And we end up to add law to law to law, and, in fact, the

situation will be better handled by the private sector, the civil

society and in discussion, in finding some consensus discussion, and

the fact that it's very often ending in the parliament where people

are really not aware of what is happening. They take bad decision and

then it's one element to threaten more the Internet as we knew it and

as we would like to have it in the future. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Sébastien. Paul Wilson?

>> PAUL WILSON: Hi. I'm from the organization APNIC, the Regional

Internet Address Registry for the Asia-Pacific. So we're a member of the

technical community, and have been for coming up to 20 years. We

operate as a nonprofit, mutual community organization that has got

this particular technical responsibility of managing IP addresses. And

I guess because we are a predominantly technical organization, we have

taken a fairly pragmatic and practical view of what we do. We know

well what we have to do and we know technically how to do it and

probably haven't spoken so much about the values, the vision of the

values behind what we do.

But I think, as years have gone by and particularly as we get into

this much more complex world, that I think the IGF exemplifies, it's

become more and more important to talk about our values, to have

people understand what we as an organization are and I think it's --

it can be said fairly reliably -- that movements and organizations

that actually have values and vision to express are generally more

successful than those that go from day to day on a -- just knowing

simply what they do and how they do it.

So we have been spending a bit of time on this, and I think the same

thing I described actually goes to the Internet itself, that the idea

of having identified, some identified vision and a set of values for

the Internet gives us a very good, a very good idea, if down the track

the Internet were to change, I mean, and that's what we are talking

about here. We are talking about the way the Internet might evolve in

future. I think of whatever network we are using in the future, it's

going to be an IP-based network and we will call it the Internet but

how would we know if the Internet 10 or 15 years down the track has

become a different Internet from the one we enjoy today. It may not

be so easy to tell, but it certainly helps if we have an idea of the

values that are being supported and a vision of the Internet and how

it is really intended by a consensus of us to operate.

I think to -- the question that Lynn asked is whether the principles

of the Internet, which I think we do need to enumerate, whether those

principles are here with us today, and I actually think they are. I

think the only reason why the Internet has been -- absolutely the only

reason why the Internet has been so successful is because of values

that are either implicit or explicit in the way it's been envisaged

and the way it's run, and the Internet today is still thriving. The

Internet growth is phenomenal. The growth of applications, of content,

of usage and of the user base of the Internet is phenomenal. So

today, today we are doing well. The question is whether tomorrow the

Internet or as I said 10 or 15 years down the track the Internet might

be on a path towards change that does damage those values and the

success.

So the values are things like the Internet as a single global

accessible network that links every point of the Internet to every

other point. The fact that it's a neutral network, where the actual

infrastructure of the Internet, the Internet itself is separate from

and can be separated from the applications and the content that run

across it, whether the Internet continues to be open and accessible.

These actually are -- these are values that I think we all actually

understand these days and they are -- they are critical values. They

are values which have been actually delivered to us and they have been

enabled by the -- both the original design of the Internet and the way

that it has been maintained.

I mean, we tend to take these things for granted. As I said, the

Internet is the Internet, and we just sort of think we know what it

is. But in fact those things have not been delivered automatically or

sort of magically by the Internet, they have been designed and they've been maintained. So there

are numerous ways in which those values may or may not be served by

developments.

Over time, we might see a sort of fragmentation of the Internet down

the track, and an increase in the complexity of the Internet down the

track, where you have fragments of the Internet which have more

complex interconnections between them than exist today. That could

happen. That could be a result, for instance, of a failure over the

next 10 years of IPv6 to be deployed, so at a technical level you get

a fragmentation and a breakdown of the global nature of the Internet.

It could also happen by political policies -- by policies, regulations being

adopted that actually start to break the Internet up.

The neutrality of the Internet, likewise, is something that could be

threatened by various different factors, whether it's commercial

decision making that becomes predominant and unregulated, whether it's

other governmental or regulatory actions. I mean, the interesting

thing about network neutrality is that the term didn't exist before

the Internet at all. The term -- prior to the Internet, there was no

such thing as a neutral network, because a network was provided by a

telecoms carrier that bundled the transportation and the applications

and everything you did into a stack of services and it was never

neutral. It couldn't be neutral. So network neutrality, the ability

to have a debate about network neutrality, no matter what your

position on it is -- the privilege we have of having a debate about it is

something that the Internet has delivered to us. And, once again,

that is something that could be eroded and disappear so that we find

ourselves technically unable, or for other reasons unable, to deliver

a network that's neutral in the same way that the Internet is today,

and that debate then becomes a thing of the past.

So there's many aspects of this and I won't go on hogging the

microphone, but I think the -- the Internet is thriving. The values

are still with us. I think there are -- there are all sorts of

circumstances, call them threats or inadvertent circumstances that

might change or threaten the values that we have and I think it's

really useful in this forum to be able to actually talk about them,

identify them and help to understand how we would recognize if they

disappeared or how we might help to avoid that from happening.

Thanks.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Paul, and that was actually a nice level

and a nice thorough, sort of exposé of some of the Internet values. I

actually can't see what the name tag says right to your immediate left

and if it says -- okay, Désirée. Désirée was actually a tentative,

and apologies on some of the flux on the panel here. There are a

number of other workshops that are schedules in parallel and people

are fighting over resources. Correct Olivier? So let's move to

Alejandro.

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Thank you Lynn. My name is Alejandro Pisanty, I

am the chair of ISOC Mexico and a professor at the National University

of Mexico. I'm not speaking on behalf of the University, and I'm very

tentatively speaking on behalf of the chapter because this is work

that will go back there.

First, I want to join Lynn in embracing, enormously, the efforts of

Sivasubramanian Muthusamy. He has kept the continuity of the effort in

times that were of duress for many others of us and I'm enormously

thankful and in recognition of what you have enabled us to achieve and

achieved yourself. We really have a great debt of gratitude to you.

It's hard to improve on what Paul Wilson has already said. I think

that there's something to add, which is that these threats -- the

threats that I see are very concrete. They are pervasive, they are of

a permanent nature, and they are of a recurring nature. It's not only

that some actors or some involuntary circumstances will continue to

present, it's also that new actors and circumstances will continue to

present. We can only not foresee when and how strongly a company will

do something, including lobbying a government for legislation that

actually interferes with network neutrality. That's one of the most

visible threats right now. That will interfere with the end-to-end

principle, or other of the technical principles. We don't know whether an

apps developer will come up with something that becomes very popular

and will actually breaking the openness and interoperability to which we

have become used to. I think we have also become used to see the

threats coming and we should be warned about them. That's my

assessment about this general -- let's say, at the more technical

level of the core principles and certainly the principles of

collaboration, decentralization, the whole multistakeholder setup are

also continuously both being built up and being threatened. When I

see this kind of circumstance, my reflex now is to think of performing

a risk assessment, which has to be very objective. It includes

strengths and weaknesses. It includes threats that are very

improbable, very unlikely but would be of very high impact, and

includes classifying the threats by their impact and probability

therefore, and to try to make a rational, assessment. I think there is

an important space to do this in the format of a Dynamic Coalition, or

a similar one, in the sense that many organizations that come together

in different fora are able to perform some parts of this and we are

able to crowdsource and bring in a more popular and open participation

to these by individuals, small companies, small consultancies,

government units, the whole multistakeholder gamut and that would be

one possible task to perform that would grow on the competencies and

strengths of the existing organizations and would add a lot more to

the mix.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Alejandro, excellent as ever and

thankyou for repeating the thanks to Siva as well. Nick, I want to

make sure that you really feel like you are a part of the panel and

not sort of falling off the table there. So, if we need to move down a

little bit, we'll scoot down. But please introduce

yourself and give us your thoughts on the Internet values.

>> NICK ASHTON-HART: Sure. Thank you very much Lynn and my thanks

also to Siva for keeping the flame alight when there weren't many

others to carry it and I'm glad to be here today. I'm Nick Ashton-

Hart, I'm the Geneva Representative of the Computer & Communications

Industry Association -- which has the privilege and the burden of

being the only technology industry association that has a permanent

presence in Geneva. So I get to watch the sometimes painful way in

which struggles over the identity of the Internet play out in

different aspects of international policy, be they at the ITU, or in

the World Trade Organization, where there are negotiations on

liberalizing services and in recognition that the openness of the

Internet is of key economic importance to the future, interestingly

enough.

And there is -- I think there are values to the Internet, there's no

question. The application of those values, I think is the difficult

part. If you think of the Internet as a general purpose technology

that affects everything, not just some things, the last, I think --

probably the best example was the development of the steam engine in

the 1800s. And if you think about that, before the steam engine came

about, time was not synchronized. Every village in England had

different time. The reason they had to create a common time was

because of railway schedules. Railways which were made possible by

the steam engine.

People literally traveled by horses, and it took so long to travel

between points you didn't need to have common time. And so you think

of the total transformation in life of just changing from having

village time to national time. And I think this is what the Internet

is doing to the modern world. It's completely transforming everything

about it, and not everyone wants to be transformed. Not everyone

wants to see the same videos. Not everyone wants their nationals to

see the same information.

Human rights are recognized in pretty much every country but we would

not recognize the application of those rights in many countries as being congruent with our

concept of what those rights mean.

And so I think the challenge is going to be to recognize that we need

to have common understandings of the architecture of the Internet, and

of its core characteristics which must be respected in order for it to

be used for any purpose. While living with the fact that at times the

application of norms, social norms to what people use the Internet for

will vary widely, and there are societies which are not willing to

accept a globalized concept of the individual at the same pace as

others. Whether we like that or not, I think we are going to have to

-- to recognize that people, different cultures, have a right to

define their norms slightly differently even if we disagree with them.

Because otherwise we will see the internet becoming balkanized, we will

see private country networks like we are seeing in Iran and the like.

And then we are all lessened by the result. I suspect that's a

controversial conception. But I see -- at the moment, I see the way in

which content is perceived and the way in which the network is being

perceived as being conflated together. And the result is, it's easier

for countries to say let's just turn off the connection, let's just create

a firewall and attempt to remove what we don't like. It's not very

successful doing that, as we've seen, because people in China find a

way around that, freedom finds a way, and speech finds a way. But I

think this is going to be a key challenge is -- is those countries

which socially even have a consensus that say this is not something we

are willing socially to see, or read, or hear. How are they to be able

to feel comfortable with the globalized parts of the Internet that do

work for them and for everyone else?

This is going I think to be a key policy challenge, and an

uncomfortable one for all of us who would like to see the

democratizing, and levelling, characteristics of the Internet carried

to every corner. It may take a little longer for that vision to

become -- to become reality than we would like.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Nick. I want to kind of moderate this

in quite a light way. So I am going to first ask the panelists if

anybody wants to react to Nick's comments. I think he was trying to

elicit a response or a reaction there. Second, to ask if there's any

other discussion the panelists would like amongst themselves, and I'm

looking to see if this any a remote participation or questions from

the audience. And I do see there's one back there. While we actually

get a mic, could I see if there's anybody who wants to take up Nick's

challenge on what he thought was a somewhat controversial statement?

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: I'd rather see the audience.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Sébastien actually wants.

>> SÉBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Thank you. Yeah, to what Nick just expressed,

I fully agree with him, but I am not sure if it's just the case of the

democratic or not democratic country, it's also happening in the

democratic country where there are -- decisions that are part of

publications can't be on the internet, and that the open Internet,

it's not anymore open, and when you have difficulty to -- to access to

different publication, it's the start of censorship.

Of course, we feel that it's more important when it's happening in

some non-democratic regime but I would like to say it's more broader

than just those country. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you. So there was a question from the

audience, which we will go to and that will give me a moment to get

Vint settled.

>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Thank you. Can you hear me?

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Yes and could you introduce yourself as well?

>> COURTNEY RADSCH: My name is Courtney Radsch, I am with Freedom

House and also an academic writing my dissertation about cyber

activism. And so I'm very interested by the last person's comments,

I'm sorry I didn't catch your name -- Nick. You mentioned at the end

about the efforts by Iran to create their own national Internet. We

see this very much across the world as regimes are learning from each

other, et cetera, but I was fascinated by your example of time and how

that developed out of the steam network. And time does not belong to

any countries, right? The countries not sovereignty over time. So why

do we not conceive of the Internet as something, why are we -- let me

rephrase that -- why are we conceiving of the Internet based on

sovereign nation state boundaries? Doesn't the Internet hold the

potential along with other trends such as the power of multinational

corporations and the power of individuals to connect across borders,

hold the potential for conceiving of a different set of organizing

principles outside of nation state sovereignty? And I think that it

would be interesting to hear at this forum if we can get beyond this

idea of the nation state. It concerns me both from a human rights

perspective, but also as an individual who has grown up with the

Internet, that we are still conceiving of the Internet and its rules

as being governed by states and that they should still get to govern -- they govern

their citizens so we don't care what they do inside of their borders,

but online, we have the potential to have something different. I

would love for us to think about, how do we make that possible?

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So thank you. That's also a very -- I'm lacking a

word this late in the day -- question. But let me first go to Nick

because the question was specifically directed to him, and then we'll

ask Vint to come in and add any comments he'd like to to the last

comment. We actually started this discussion with some discussion on

the Core Internet Values and the question - are they alive and well, are they under

threat?

>> NICK ASHTON-HART Well, I would say, you know, can we move to a

conception that is not based on the old, centuries old, concept of

sovereignty. I certainly hope that's true. I certainly hope that's

true. In fact, I think it's inevitable that we will do. I think you

already see social constructions which on the Internet, which are not

boundary related. They are bounded by what people identifying with

other people that are perceived to be like them, which is a more human

construct than a physical border. But just like it wasn't overnight

that people said well, I'm going to give up my concept of time in my

village, and agree on a national or international concept of time. It

actually took a little while.

There's some interesting books on it. It was quite controversial and

people felt very strongly about this. They felt if they gave up the

ability to determine what time it was, they were giving up their

concept of the world in a real visceral way. This is why you still

have daylight savings time and this kind of stuff. We've -- in two

and a half centuries, we haven't totally disposed of this. We are still

changing the time in the summer because of the perception of people

who wake up early in agrarian environments.

So, I hope, and I believe, that that vision -- we will get to that vision.

All I'm saying is I think we may have to be patient. It may take some

time for social constructions to catch up with a boundaryless world.

That's all.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So Vint, if you could also just say a word or two to

introduce yourself. I am sure you are known to everybody here, but

when people look back at these archives in 10, 20, 30 years,,

>> VINT CERF: They will wonder who was that bearded, ancient person.

Hello, I'm the talking dinosaur on the panel. My name is Vint Cerf,

I'm Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. The

question that you've raised is one which I have recently become

intensely interested in, thanks to two things that have happened in

literally the last few days, partly a consequence of this Internet

Governance Forum. Bertrand de La Chapelle, who is probably known to

you, is the 21st century reincarnation of an 18th century French

philosopher. And he gives us much to think. He says that the notion

of sovereignty in a highly connected environment may have to change

because actions taken on the sovereign grounds may have impact on

others outside of the territory of that sovereign domain. He gives an

analogy where river is flowing through country A and country A chooses

to pollute the river just as it leaves the borders of country A and

flows into country B visiting all kind of serious and deleterious

results on country B.

The gentleman Minister from India, Mr. Sibal, made a rather bold

statement that sovereignty was dead and that the concept of

sovereignty was no longer appropriate in the Internet environment.

I'm not quite prepared to give up all notions of sovereignty but I

will tell you, and remind you, that John Perry Barlow wrote an

interesting manifesto about the online environment of cyberspace. I

can't reproduce it literally, but it basically said the cyberspace is

a different universe and you governments can butt out. I don't think

we can quite get away with this yet, and here's why. If we want to

adopt a non-national kind of environment in the Internet, we have to

emulate at least some of the protections that are given to us under

the notion of sovereign social contract. We expect the governments to

protect the citizenry. We actually give up some of our freedoms in

exchange for safer environment. When we are harmed we expect that the

state will have set up processes so that we can recover from that harm.

That the victim has recourse against the party perpetrating the harm.

There are a variety of other social order elements that show up in

this social contract. If we are going to move away from the

mechanisms that sovereignty gave us, we will have to find a way to

reincarnate something like that in the cyberspace environment, because

if we don't then we will have no recourse against harms occurring to

us in that space. So, this isn't to argue that sovereignty needs to

be retained necessarily but it's an argument that something has to be

introduced into the cyberspace environment that provides protections

and assurances of safety for people who are using that space. And

that may take some effort.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Yes. And just while the mic is going to the young

woman there? Are there any questions from the remote participants in

queue? Not yet.

>> COURTNEY RADSCH: So, I think that might be the case if we are

talking about democracies, but I think if you look at North Korea, if

you look at Burma before the transition, if you look at many

authoritarian governments, there is no social contract, right? So we

are talking about sovereignty, I think in the United States is very

different, but the problem with this idea of national sovereignty is

that means they get to control whatever they want to do over that

population of the citizenry. And so, you know, when we are talking

about the Internet, I think that looking at the nation state as being

sovereign over these parts, I mean this is what's happening in Iran.

That's why they can create their own Internet, same with Saudi Arabia

being able to create only one Internet access point and control all

Internet flows. And I disagree that we're definitely on the track towards

getting above and beyond that notion, I think there's a very strong

push back against that. And that there are many states, and democracies

included, who are very much trying to maintain the traditional

concepts of sovereignty. So I would just push back a little bit on that.

>> VINT CERF: Let's keep pushing. I still want to debate with you.

First of all, you seem to have avoided the point that I was trying

to emphasize, which is that if we are going -- if it were, in fact,

possible to create a uniform Internet, which we do not have for

exactly the reasons you just outlined, but supposing we had one, we

are still going to expect a kind of social contract in that environment. May

I ask if you reject that? You want to be unsafe in the Internet? Is

that what you are looking for?

>> COURTNEY RADSCH: I think we would need multiple social contracts.

I don't think there's going to be a single social contract.

>> VINT CERF: Then you are going to have a really tough time

figuring out how to deal with jurisdiction. You have a big problem. You

are going to have to come back to the table with a design that does

what you want it to do because right now I don't see it.

I'm not disagreeing with the vision that you have necessarily, but I

would posit that we are certainly going to need some kind of

protections, you are saying maybe more than one. I don't understand

how the jurisdictional questions get solved, but let's set that aside

for a moment. The other side of the coin is reality, and that is that

the Internet is constructed out of real things. It may be an ethereal

space of concepts and abstractions, but it arises out of a real,

physical system and the real physical system does lie inside of nation

state boundaries, and unless we were going to do away from nation states which

I don't think is likely to happen in the near term, they will have the

ability to do a certain amount of control.

So the attractive vision that you dangle in front of us is not

necessarily reachable if there are -- if nation states as they exist

today have the ability to control that virtual environment that --

that you seek to instantiate. I don't know how to undo that either,

no matter how hard we may work at special pieces of software to tunnel our

way out of the traps that we might exist in. That is still an

artifact and anything we can do, technically other people can

interfere with. So I think we are a ways away from being able to

realize that vision. But it's very important to recognize that, if we

were to realize the vision, we'd still have to figure out how to

make it the place that we want to live in.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Vint and now Alejandro has asked to get

into the queue.

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Thank you, Lynn. Again, I'm a little bit

uncomfortable with the radio format here.

(Laughter).

So this is Alejandro Pisanty speaking. I think this exchange points

us in -- towards some of the things -- ways to do things, and things

to attend to, that will be very productive for a group of interested

people of all stakeholder groups. So I will go back first. This post-

Westphalian regime which would look beyond -- let's say to have a lot

more power and a lot more of life defined by life on the 'Net, instead

of life determined by nation states has been pointed out long ago

among others by Wolfgang Kleinwachter in the Internet Governance

sphere, and long before that with utopian cyberspace visions of John Perry

Barlow and many others. It has also been described by Manuel Castells

as the Space of flows and it's something that we actually do know a

lot about. And, of course, we know a lot about that and we know a lot about

the limits that we find, the boundaries that we meet, and the walls

against we bump, when we get to the nation states. And we know that

some of the walls between nation states are a lot harder, and less

porous, like some of the ones you mentioned. In a UN context like the Internet Governance

Forum, we refrain from pointing out specific countries but

innuendo and other rhetoric tricks allow you to know exactly who you

are speaking about, even more.

So, the way I see that this very valuable exchange feeds into the work

of the Dynamic Coalition is very concrete. It's a very direct

funneling. What we want to see happening over the next years is that

the way the Internet continues to be built and expanded -- and it's

not the way the Internet grows and expands, because that doesn't

happen spontaneously -- it's people, companies, governments, technical

organizations doing it. So, the way the Internet continues to be built

and expanded has to be in such a way that it allows by design, or

incentivates and invites by design to live more in the Space of flows,

to live more to make more easy to have the -- those transnational

flows that are easy to do, that are the low hanging fruit like the

transfer of information, for example, communication, right to free

speech, right to free association. These are easily available,

compared to things like taxation or, as Vint mentioned, the ultimate

social function of the monopoly -- the legitimate monopoly of force,

that corresponds to protecting the citizens militarily or let's say,

at a level of physical security. That's a harder wall to climb but we

do want, is to make sure that the design with neutrality, with

openness, with interoperability, with multistakeholder decentralized

decision making, goes in the way of enabling these transnational

global way of working against a trend which would enable more easily

the national boundaries to prevail more strongly against even those

things that you have already achieved to do in the Space of flows.

That will tell us a lot of what we will have to be watchful for. If we

see, as you mentioned national Internets, if we see layers of national

Internets-like proposals to administrate the IPv6 addressing with

national administration, if we see coercion or legal mandates to link

IDNs to nationalized ccTLD management instead of the enlightened

global ccTLD management we have, and that to do things like taxation,

civil life expression, individuals registration, before speaking,

anything that builds that platform, that would -- would have to cause

an alarm to be sounded and action to be taken by those who can

actually take action. I think that feeds very directly into the need

for this Dynamic Coalition to exist and operate.

>> VINT CERF: This is -- I'm sorry I don't mean to prolong this

unnecessarily, but it occurs to me that if you look at this sort of

utopian view of Internet, one thing you need to keep in mind is you

are not your avatar. You are you. Your avatar is only a

representation of you. The map is not the territory. And it's

inescapable that the Internet is rooted in a physical world. So if we

are going to move away from purely national boundaries for legal

jurisdictions and the like, there will have to be at least some amount of

multilateral or global agreement about social norms and at least legal

norms that will allow abuses to be dealt with in this cyber

environment.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Well, I have to thank you for the question. It's

obviously given rise to a lot of very interesting debate and I also

appreciate Alejandro I think starting to move the discussion forward

with what might this Dynamic Coalition do going forward? Before we

pick that up, there was actually a question or a comment from a remote

participant.

(No audio).

>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Thank you very much. As a follow-up to previous

questions, we got several questions from our remote participants.

First, a question was from Joly MacFie. As entertainment is

increasingly delivered via content distribution networks, how does

this affect peering arrangements and the end-to-end principle, as

users access content rather than hosts?

The next question was from the United States, from Marcus Ledbetter.

Do we all agree that this is just one Internet?

And the last one, was to Mr. Vint Cerf, balancing sovereignty,

openeness, regulation, and national laws, seems to me a very tricky

job to do. So my question to Vint Cerf, which body do you think would

have the task to manage this complex task?

>> VINT CERF: OK. Shall I try to answer the last one? Maybe this

Dynamic Coalition is where that solution starts. Maybe this is a

group that can begin examining what's possible and what isn't. It's

pretty clear, though, if you are going to have international

agreements that create a kind of homologized legal framework, that

ultimately you will have to go to bodies like the World Trade

Organization, or the Worls Intellectual Property Organization, or

other parts of the UN -- or you are going to have to go to a

collection of multilateral treaties in order to establish agreement.

I think we will probably end up starting with the lowest common

denominator, simple things. For example, what does a notarization

mean, and what's a digital signature mean, and does it have common

weight in all countries? We're going to have to build this up a

little bit at a time. I don't think there's one body that solves all

the problems.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: There were two other questions that were posed.

One was do we all agree there is one Internet and the other has to do

with content and peer to peer and whether the impact on the end-to-

end.

So I'm sure Vint's ready to jump in and respond to that. But is there

anyone else who wants to -- Nick, and then Paul.

>> NICK ASHTON-HART This is Nick Ashton-Hart. So on the content

question, I'll take that one. I will be cursed for the rest of my life

in dealing with -- with copyrighted material and what happens to it,

given that I was a music manager for over 20 years, off and on. This

is the great -- this is a perfect example of the clash between

sovereignty law and the real world of the Internet and how it's really

used. The copyright system is a national system and it's implemented

different in different countries and yet cloud computing by its nature

means that you access the same resource, two different times in the

same day and you are accessing multiple different servers in multiple

different countries on each of those occasions.

And the application -- how to deal with the legal issues there. There

has been a treaty negotiation going on in Europe for 50 years to try

to determine how international law and private law, the law of

individual countries, works together? And they have been unable to

agree this. This is an enormously thorny question. I think it's

certainly true that the desire for enforcement has an impact on what

people can access. We can see that the iTunes store has different

material at different times. And I do think we're going to have to

come up with some way to internationalize the way in which rights --

national rights work in an international environment. There's going to

have to be some way around that. It's not just for entertainment

contentment but simply for the efficient functioning for services upon

which increasingly large amounts of the economy rely. Pfizer, one of

the world's largest drug companies, recently transferred its entire

supply chain and directed all of the vendors to a cloud-based system

so that they can see in realtime absolutely everything about their

product. Where they are being made, where they are being shipped,

where they are running out of them? This is going to become

increasingly the case, and the more of the world that is integrated in

that way, the more of which the conflicts of laws become very

difficult. There is going to have to be some conception of how laws

work on the Internet. And I think the 50-year conversation will end

much sooner -- it won't take another 50 years because the commercial

realities of dealing with this will require a pragmatic result that

wasn't required by the situation over the last 50 years. It was an

academic discussion for 50 years because it could be. Now it's not

academic anymore.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Nick. Paul?

>> PAUL WILSON: I wanted to answer the question about one Internet in

a slightly different way, and that's -- but it's a way that depends on

how you define the Internet in asking the question. Because I used the

term loosely before in terms of how, what would the Internet be like

in ten years down the track, and would it become a different Internet.

In that case, the Internet's kind of everything, it's the universe

that we are talking about. There's only just one of those. But if you

start to drill down through that either through the level of users, or

content, or applications, then it's really -- the Internet is in the

eye of the beholder, and I think it's in all of those layers that we

start to get confused in Internet Governance. What are we really

talking about? There's the broad definition, there's the narrow

definition. But actually speaking technically the Internet is the

transport layer of the network that we are talking about. It's the

thing that I was referring to before that is the single global neutral

network that allows any point to connect to any other point, and

actually that thing is in its ideal form that we are all working to

preserve. It is one network. And that is the beauty of it. So let's

not sort of mix up ourselves too much about saying which Internet we

are talking about, and yes there are many, or yes there are none,

because if you want to be quite specific about the Internet layer of

the network that we all enjoy, the Internet layer is the transport

layer. There has to be just one of those and it's really not a matter

of perspective, it really is -- is simply the technical infrastructure

and that is something that, as within this discussion about values, we

should really identify, as I say, which Internet we are talking about

and be quite precise about that. Thanks.

>> VINT CERF: So it's Vint again. I would like to make a small nuance

here. We all understand that the Internet protocols don't necessarily

have to be used in the global interconnected sytem. People have used

these same prorocols to build private networks. But I don't consider

those to be capital-I Internet, those are lowercase-I, clones that

don't have the same scope and probably have different intent. I

wanted to come back to this question of rights management and dealing

with intellectual property in adigital environment. It occurs to me

that, if we treat content as digital objects for just a moment, not

differentiating what they are, whether they are books, novels or some

game or some other thing, piece of software, just imagine them as bags

full of bits.

And if we thought that it was possible to build mechanisms for access

control to those bags of bits so there was some form of enforcement

for access and use, if we thought it was possible to achieve that,

then we might actually come to a general purpose solution to the

problem of --that you were talking about, Nick.

And so, I think there may be technical mechanisms that might be

implemented to make access to digital content, and digital objects of

all kinds, manageable. And here, if we were able to demonstrate that

you could establish whatever terms and conditions you wished and these

are for access and use, and if those terms and conditions could really

be enforced, technically enforced, then many of the problems that have

arisen in the national context of copyright, for instance, would

evaporate, and be assimilated into this more general system.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So I want to see if there are any remote

participants or anybody here in the audience who would like to either

follow up or engage on any of the discussions to date or a new topic.

We need a mic up here in the front row.

(Silence)

>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: Hi. My name is Subi Chaturvedi and I teach

journalism and communication at Dehli University, and I run a

foundation called Media for Change. We just put together one of the

first IGFs in India. I think it's been a fantastic experience just for

for me to have been here and experienced this. But when we are

looking at the core values of the Internet and there have been several

threats that I've observed just now and the fact that we are having a

discussion. I'm coming from a country which is India, and when we

talk about access, diversity precedes access, and I do not think that

the question of Internet as a physical layer that transports data.

Because the Internet in India, per se has been an enabler, it's been a

facilitator.it's meant different things to different people. And as,

probably Susan would read things, it is not one thing but many, and

then we are looking at core values.

I wanted Vint in particular to address this because I would slightly

disagree. The discussion on the Internet and the future of the

Internet has almost not been academic enough. On the contrary, it's

been in almost every space possible. I would on the other hand

suggest that we need to institutionalize learnings both from the IGF.

It's been a fantastic bottoms up approach. So there are two questions

there because there's clearly -- and I'm putting this across in the

context of the ITU and the ITRs, we are looking at a situation where

we could be writing binding, mandatory treaties. So what happens to

core values such as permissionless innovation, openness, the idea of

putting together structures, the modularity of Internet. Because

clearly some of the issues that the -- the new ITRs are trying to

address are local, they're domestic. And then we are trying to bring

in questions like IP to IP interconnectivity to spaces such as those.

So, my concerns are many and there are several threads and strains of

questions. I don't even know if I have been able to articulate the

right thing but if some of the panelists could comment or take those

issues up, I'd be most grateful. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I'm sure Vint"s in the queue,

>> VINT CERF: Yeah, anybody else?

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Alejandro and Nick.

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Thank you. And I will ask you for your name

later for the record I am keeping. And I think that I am very glad to

hear that the discussion is not academic enough. At the same time that

I hear -- especially at the same time that I hear the discussion is

too academic. I think we are lacking. We are continuously lacking

discussions in both senses. I think there's a dearth of academic --

solid academic research and reflection, that has to expand the body

that's already growing from many other angles, and on the other hand,

we have to be able to take the knowledge, the informed opinion, that

we are obtaining in the I -- from academic discussions down to -- to

the questions as you have mentioned, how to institutionalize the

knowledge coming from the IGF without institutionalizing the IGF too

much, because that's one thing that we continuously want to -- I won't

say to avoid, but to manage properly.

And, again, you mentioned what happens to the core values, things like

the ITRs have the potential to crystallize or to -- yeah, or else I

will keep it to that, to crystallize things that should continue to be

flexible, and that's the kind of permanent watch that probably a well

functioning Dynamic Coalition on Internet Core Values should be able

to at least report on and maybe deliver the appropriate calls for

action.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So I'll go to Nick and Vint and in the last 15

minutes, that was an excellent series of questions, in the next 15

minutes I would like to go to what might this Dynamic Coalition

address going forward. The reason we keep coming back with these

workshops is because we have interesting discussions like this and we

find enough of interest to get us hooked. We get just now to take the

next step and be a little more concrete so we can actually keep it

live between forums. So Nick?

>> NICK ASHTON-HART: I will try and start on that with this. Your

questions are excellent ones and it made me think that perhaps one of

the answers is WCIT itself because, as Alejandro and others have

described, WCIT is designed to regulate the relationships that can

impact the permissionless nature of interconnectiion, as you put it,

the fundamental foundation of the Internet. That is why, I think,

they have attracted such a visceral and strong response. And so it

occurs to me that perhaps one of the things this coalition could do is

to try and articulate a vision for the fundamentals of the Internet,

and then recognize that people may take a different view about how

societies, not necessarily nation states, but how societies approach

information that is sent, differently than they approach the

importance of preserving the free flow of data inherently, and the

inherent architecture of the Internet, so that it can work. I hope

that's not true. I hope that people understand that you can't have

one without the other, but maybe we can start -- we can get a broader

consensus if we start, saying how do we ensure the widest possible

access to the Internet, with the highest performance, at the lowest

cost, for the maximum number of people, on a permissionless basis,

such as we have enjoyed so far. So that we get as much the world

online at the lowest cost possible, as a starting place, which is

obviously clearly happening as Internet access growth is exploding in

the areas where it is least dense. Maybe that's not the right

solution and you can all tell me I'm wrong but --

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Vint?

>> VINT CERF: I don't think you're wrong, Nick. It's Vint. Let me

start by asking you to think a little bit about how the Internet is

actually constructed. It is a layered architecture. I don't want to

make that overly rigid or prescriptive, but it's helpful to think of

it as a layered architecture, and what happens is that, as you work

your way up in the layers, you abstract from the behavior of the lower

layers, you actually hide some of the details. And as a consequence of

this abstraction going upwards, there are emerging properties that

come out of those abstractions. And what is interesting about the

emergent properties is that as you get up to the point where you are

in the application space, you are in a universe that is very nearly

unbounded because it is an artifact of software. It is literally an

artifact of what the software -- how the software interprets the bits

that it's moving around. The consequence of this notion of emergent

property is that the jurisdictional aspects of who is responsible for

what, how do you go about enforcing some particular practice might

vary from one layer to another, which is why, for example, we might

tolerate an ITR environment that's focused on the layers of physical

interconnection, but we might not tolerate an ITR environment that

looks up into the application space and says something about content

and what we can or can't say, or do.

So I think we are going to have to keep in mind that order arising out

of this abstraction and emergent properties is going to vary from one

layer to another.

Second point, I think, is that the Internet has evolved successfully

over the last 30 years of its operation primarily because it's been a

regulation-free environment. Most of the decisions that get made are

freely made among parties. The protocols that are invented and

adopted are a consequence of consensus in the IETF. The decision to

interconnect or not, or even to build a piece of Internet, or to

choose a particular piece of equipment, or a particular version of

software is entirely open. And each individual operator chooses, even

you do when you buy a router to put at home and build a Wi-Fi station,

you make a choice. Nobody dictates to you anything except you should

buy one that does the following things, because if you don't it won't

work. It should do IPv6 now because you need IPv6, things like that.

So I think that the one core principle that we don't want to lose, is

that the relatively deregulated environment has allowed a lot of other

forces and incentives to choose a way forward for Internet to evolve.

Prescribing its evolution with a set of constraining treaty-like

agreements does not sound like, in the next 20 years, we would

reproduce what we have enjoyed in the last 20.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So I'm going to ask Siva to say some comments and

at the same time see if we can get a mic up here at the front. Because

Fatima wants to come in after. And while we do that I will say that

the small committee who was pulling the panel together obviously

failed horribly in terms of gender balance. I'm extremely happy

though that that the three questions we have had from the floor have

come from the women in the audience. Thank you.

But if you could get a mic over here for Fatima, while we go to Siva.

we'll be able to move forward a little more quickly.

>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: Actually there was supposed to be

greater gender balance, Désirée was supposed to be here and I made

some miscommunication error in communication and so she is not here.

I want to reflect on the suggestion by Nick Ashton-Hart. He was

talking about the Coalition articulating a vision for the future of

the Internet. And what we could do is bring together some of the most

brilliant minds. Vint was talking about Beretrand, the 18th century

philosopher being reincarnated in the 20th century. And I can think of

people withe diverse opinions, people like John Perry Barlow, Vint,

and some of the early founders of Internet, not only to think of

Internet as the layer, as it means to technical people, but to think

of Internet as what it means to the common man. It is -- it is much

broader than the layer. It is much bigger than the layer, because

everything for the common man.

And we want to articulate a vision for that Internet, put together

some of the brilliant minds and come up with a vision and communicate

that vision to governments, to other stakeholders so we start working

on it in the long term, and that is one of what I think we could do,

and it's open for corrections.

And the other thing we could to is have even between IGFs and not --

I'm not talking about only about events, some activity between IGFs.

It could be an event. It could be -- it could be anything. It could

be anything happening in different parts of world, one in New York,

one probably in Mexico, India, Pakistan, everywhere and so that way we

can continue our activities and we could also expand participation in

our mailing list. These are some of my ideas and suggestions. And

it's for Lynn to think over and do it for the next one or two years or

more.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: As somebody on my staff says, I think that was a

lateral pass to what he believes is a more nimble player! (Laughter).

I'm not sure the pass won't go back.

>> VINT CERF: That's called delegating upwards.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I'm only doing what Siva tells me to do. Did you

have any other comments, Vint, before we go to Fatima?

>> FATIMA CAMBRONERO: Now? Ok, thank you. I'm Fatima Cambronero. I am

ISOC ambassador, but I speak in my personal capacity. We are speaking

about the bottom up processes and regarding to the future of the

Dynamic Coalition, it's a suggestion, I think it would be a good idea

to do the outreach in the national and regional IGF, to get the input

of the community, the local and regional community, to grow well a

Dynamic Coalition. Thank you.

>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: I will just make a twitter comment. I couldn't

agree more with Siva when he mentions the fact that there should be

more IGFs. You could call a rose by any name but you would want a

thousand flowers to bloom. One of the things that really concerns us

is that when you are looking at any -- because Internet has largely

become for us in this part of the world, public good. When you are

looking at any policy that affects that, it has to be taken into

consensus by multistakeholders and it has to, has to look at opinions

because it's going to affect our future. So that was one submission.

And the second was, we've had the Occupy Wall Street, we've had the

Arab Spring. If you could look at this as an Internet Governance

movement and not merely a forum and keep us all connected, because

there are vulnerable communities, and I speak from the margins, and

mostly women and children are used as a peg by a lot of governments,

in a lot of spaces, for backhand regulation. So that must not happen.

And if we could somehow facilitate this process of engagement, and

disseminate the learnings, that becomes crucial because we celebrate

this movement. We celebrate this opportunity but I do believe we owe

it to the universe, at the risk of sounding dramatic, to make sure we

preserve what we have, which is ours. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I'd sign up to follow you into that vision. In a

second. And we should certainly pull you into the steering committee,

if we can identify one as such.

>> VINT CERF: Did you just delegate in the other direction there?

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Just pulling in multiple voices. This is a Dynamic

Coalition which is composed of multiple voices, multiple stakeholders,

drawn from different communities.

Let me see, is there anyone who wants to come in or that or any other

suggestions? I know, we certainly have taken a number of

possibilities away in terms of things we might go do more concretely,

and we will get you the mic back. And we'll take that away. There is a

mailing list open, so please join the mailing list, and let's see if

we can identify some concrete activities. Yes, I know. Yes. We will go

to you and then we will go to Vint.

>> COURTNEY RADSCH: Hello, so on concrete recommendations and

following up on the comments, we were actually on a panel yesterday

about national and regional IGFs. And I think for those of us who are

attending the international IGF for the first time, but who have also

attended the national ones, it is very unclear how are these related

and how do these feed into each other?

And I want to go -- you -- yes, so Subi, you have a very long name,

the gentleman from India, mentioned what can we do inbetween. I mean,

one of these things could at least be to create a wiki or something

online where some of the outcome documents, can be put online, and

maybe have a discussion online. I think that having physical events

obviously produces barriers to participation, even though we do have

remote participation and that sort of thing. So I think there are

multiple ways of doing that, and you know, the core values of the

internet, ultimately, I think is one of the most important debates

that's at hand. So this is a great opportunity.

And one thing I would like to get from you guys before this ends is

how to continue this discussion inbetween IGFs.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I really appreciate your comments and we will go to

Vint and I'm also really heartened to hear the support for the Core

Internet Values because within ISOC, we spent so much time talking

about it, you could start to feel it is overdone, if you will, even

when you see evidence that it's still needed, and more is needed.

Vint?

>> VINT CERF: So I have two suggestions, maybe three. In the Internet

Engineering Task Force, where working groups develop standards, one of

the tactics that is used to solve particular problems is to send a

design team out, maybe three or four people, not many more than that,

to work through the problem and make concrete propositions. We might

pick particular problems and have a design team approach to proposals

to solve them, or at least, proposals to approach them. Example,

Internet -- I'm sorry, intellectual property management, of course, is

a huge area, but the design team that tackles a conceptual framework

for dealing with that, in an online environment, might be a concrete

thing that could be done. I'm not saying that's the only thing. I'm

picking that as an example. The other thing which I find extremely

appealing is this notion of Internet Governance movement. Sometimes

the words capture exactly what you want and this is not a point

solution thing. It's a continuous process.

And in the case of core values, this Internet Governance movement, I

would interpret to mean the preservation, a movement to preserve the

values that have made the Internet what it has been, and what it

should be in the future. So I like the term very much and I appreciate

you introducing that meme into our intellectual universe. There was

one other very practical thing to suggest. Google+ has a service

called hangouts, and if you have adequate access to Internet

bandwidth, hangouts turn out to be a pretty convenient way to have a

design team discussion even if you are not in the same place.

>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: That is a limitation of ten users, and

so..

>> VINT CERF: But that's why I said design team, which typically has

three to four.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I think he was trying to give you a product

message. (laughter)

Before we -- I want to go around once more, giving preference to those

who have'nt spoken so much, so Sébastien has asked for some comments,

and then Paul, Alejandro, Nick, closing comments?

>> SÉBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Yes, it's a comment on the comments you made

about the Internet Forum, and the fact that you start to be involved

at the national level and the regional level before to come to the

international one. It's interesting because the IGF was created the

other way round. It was created not bottom up, but top down, and --

and even at the beginning, it was very difficult to make understood

that we need regional and national IGF, and it's still not understood

everywhere. In France, there's no IGF at all. And I don't see when

it will be. Then it's interesting the way it was done and the way you

leave with. But I would like to take as a very good suggestion that,

how we can, under this subject, in each and every IGF, and not just

traveling because it's quite complicated, but people who could be

involved like you in your country or in your region, and with the

tools we can have to be in agreement and participation on that

subject. I think if we can globalize this local intervention, it will

be a good way to go. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Sébastien. Anyone else?

>> PAUL WILSON: Final remarks. Well, I think the suggestion with

reference to the national and regional IGFs is really well put. And I

think this kind of -- ongoing process that's employed by Dynamic

Coalition is a really good one for linkage at the regional and

national levels. And, come to talk of that, there was recently an

Australian IGF, which had a really nice session - a little too

ambitious as it happened for the time available, but it was a really

nice approach to Internet values, which started with a brainstorming

on what are the aspects of the Internet that we believe are

fundamental, and which we either take for granted, as I mentioned

before, or which we would regret if we lost.

And I think that's a really interesting approach, but one of the --

one of the sort of problems I guess I had with the process was that it

was a little bit over expansive for me. So it tended to capture

everything that we wanted out of the Internet, whether freedom of

speech was on the list, I'm not sure, but it was sort of -- it could

have been, the way, with that brainstorming approach. And I think the

powerful term there is a word I learned to spell during WSIS which is

subsidiarity, and it's this idea, that the solution to any given

problem is best located closest to that problem. It doesn't mean

geographical actually. I'm just recalling that Roham Samarajiva made

this staement that international treaties should be limited to what

they, and they alone, need to do. Which is also a statement of

subsidiarity. SO if we are talking about Internet principles I would

like to suggest to bear that in mind and be really looking at what

fundamental to the Internet, not to do with our expectations and our

higher aspirations, out of the Internet. Because we kind of know

that's unlimited, really, but to look at it from that point of view,

and maybe that's something that an exercise, in the meantime, or

through linkage to regional, national, IGFs we could look at. Thanks.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Some very interesting comments, as well Alejandro,

or Nick, any closing comments before people need to run?

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Very briefly, I think the point of subsidiarity

is very well put by Paul. We must make form follow function. In many

countries raising a national IGF brings a number of metaphors. It's

like kicking a sleeping dog while you are raising a high antenna under

a thunderstorm and painting yourself a target, and a few more of

those, but it's really not necessarily a desirable thing. You have to

find the tactic that's locally appropriate.

I do take very seriously, the excitement and the enthusiasm, the wiki

actually already exists. We have to -- I take responsibility, I

guess, together with Siva, to activate it and make it known, and make

it available for you to contribute, and we have a mailing list that we

will include you in and make more active. All the things exist and I'm

committing to you to put a lot of the effort into making it continue,

and be of service, and be actually fed by everybody.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Nick? And just one quick comment, you can actually

get to the Dynamic Coalition from the IGF home page on the left-hand,

and we will make sure that you can get easy access to the list and

that sort of information from there as well.

>> NICK ASHTON-HART That was going to be my question is do we want

it, like, people to give an address or something, who want to get on

the mailing list, or is it easier to just go to the IGF website or

something?

>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: What you could do is you can all give me

your cards and straightaway, by today evening, I will send you a mail

giving you a link tothe mailing address, or sending you an invitation

to the mailing list straight away.

>> VINT CERF: I'm having a small cognitive dissonance right now. And

the reasaon is that, we were talking about trying to move away from

nation state, sovereignty and everything else. So why do we think

that we have to have national and regional IGFs? Why aren't we

talking about people who are -- have common interests, no matter where

they happen to be and the organizing principle is not where you are,

but what you think and what you are interested in.

>> PAUL WILSON: It has to do with travel costs. (Laughter)

>> VINT CERF: No, that's why we use the Internet to do this in the

first place.

>> PAUL WILSON: But Google hangout only allows ten people at once.

>> VINT CERF: Well, so, that's what a design team's all about.

There's also On-The-Air version which allows a bazillion people to

listen in while the other ten are talking to each other.

>> PAUL WILSON: I knew you'd have an answer.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So I actually think we need both obviously. There

are some discussions that are really well advanced local level, local

language, really particular, and you can take it to the concrete, and

then you can actually use that to move forward and drive action. And

yet there's an awful lot of learning that happens in broader forums

and exchange of best practices and thoughts and your ideas are

enriched. I think there's a lot of value in both of them. And I

think that's actually one of the good things about the global IGF, if

that's what we are calling it and a whole host of different types of

forum, whether it's a national IGF or it's some workshop, you know,

it's about discussion, communication and exchange of ideas. We are a

little over time. I would like to thank the remote participants for

hanging in there. I'm sure this isn't nearly as robust or enriching

an activity as when you are in the room. And I see one comment back

here from --

>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Just one comment to the recent comment of Mr.

Cerf, from a remote participant. Seth Johnson says, the general

purpose nature of copyright comes from the inherent flexibility of

information, once it's published. This is reflected in the fact or

idea versus expression dichotomy. You don't really deal with the

nature of copyright online, if you just talk about work as bags of

bits. So I think this is a question. Why is sovereignty strictly

limited to rights? People assert their rights via local

sovereignties. It's a matter of recognizing that the people must rely

on that for rights, versus the broader oversight the nation states

attempt. So it was a comment, general.

>> VINT CERF: If you want me to respond, one thing I need to respond,

the bag of bits is not static, necessarily. Because if it's a piece

of software, or if the bits need to be interpreted by a piece of

software, it's a very dynamic thing. So if the criticism is that the

bag of bits is similar to a book or other static object, I don't think

they have to be. They cab extremely dynamic kinds of elements.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I wasn't forcing to you respond but I always like

your responses. So I'd also like to thank everyone here in the room,

particularly for being so engaged and I think some excellent questions

and suggestions. Obviously thank you to the panelists, and a very big

thank you to Siva as well. As I said, he really has been, as

Alejandro has said, the person who has kept actually kind of this

alive from forum to forum. So I would like to give everybody a round

of applause and thank you very much. (Applause)