rough transcript of the igf dynamic coalition on core internet values, nov 8, 2012, igf baku,...

7/30/2019 Rough Transcript of the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values, Nov 8, 2012, IGF Baku, Azerbaijan

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SEVENTH ANNUAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM

BAKU, AZERBAIJAN

SUSTAINABLE HUMAN, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

8 NOVEMBER 2012

DYNAMIC COALITION ON CORE INTERNET VALUES SESSION16:30 LOCAL TIME

* * *

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.

* * *

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Everything is still coming together here

in the room, and, in fact, there are still people coming in

slowly. So I will just give it another minute or two before we

start.

I would like to welcome everybody to the Dynamic Coalition on

Internet values. We have one or two panelists that will join us

a little bit late. Dr. Cerf should be here in 30 minutes or so.

I know we have remote participants as well. Two or three minutes

on this Dynamic Coalition and then we will ask the panelists to

introduce themselves and respond to a question.

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 elSheikh in Egypt. And then

following that 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 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 beingdone on core Internet values and various parts of Internet

ecosystem. I would 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 organised

to debate issues such as what makes the Internet what it is?

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


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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 that is

embodied in the IRI process and the distributed nature which iscentral 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 Internetprinciples 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 actually like to thank Siva. It 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 owe all of us being here today.

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

number of the members up here are Internet Society. This is not

an Internet Society, but a Dynamic Coalition. They have a

minimum of three multistakeholder commissions. If I say we, I'm

doing my best to say we as a Dynamic Coalition, not specifically

to an ISOC set of activities or ISOC kind of ownership, if you

will for this. We all own the core Internet values. So Siva?

>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: Thank you, Lynn. I serve as the

president of Internet Society in India, 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 legislation is

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


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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 tens 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 government of India has been very,

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

and he has understood Internet and he's understood how Internet

Governance works and he was 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

it was very, very bad. This is how lack of coordination betweengovernment departments gives rise to some proposal that

inevitably 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: I'm going to go direct through the

panelists. I would like the remote participation. So we want to

get a broad spectrum of views. Sebastian.

>> Thank you, Lynn, and thank you, Siva for organizing and

supporting this Dynamic Coalition. I'm a member of ISOC and I am

board member of ICANN. But I am not talking on behalf of any of

those organisations.

I want to push a little bit farther what Siva said, whatever

country, democratic or not democratic, 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 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, infinding 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 Internet as we knew it and as we would

like to have it in the future. Thank you.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, Sebastian. Paul Wilson.

>> PAUL WILSON: Hi. I'm from the organisation APNIC so we're


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a member of the technical community, and have been for coming up

to 20 years. We operate as a nonprofit, mutual organisation that

has this technical responsibility of managing IP addresses. And

I guess because we are a predominantly technical organisation, we

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

We know what we have to do and we know technically how to do itand 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 bet

into this much more complex world that I think the IGF

exemplifies, it becomes more and more important to talk about our

values, to have people understand what we as an organisation are

and I think it's it can be said fairly reliably that movements

and organisations 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. I think thesame 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 what network

we are using in future, it's going to be an IPbased network and

we will call it the Internet but how would we know if the

Internet 10 or 15 years town the track became a different

Internet than 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 supported and the 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. I

think they are. I think the only reason why the Internet has

been absolutely the only reason that the Internet has been so

successful is because of the values that are either implicit or

explicit in the way it's been envisioned and the way it's run,

and the Internet is thriving. The growth of applications, ofcontent, of usage and the user base of the internet is

phenomenal. So today we are doing well. The question is whether

tomorrow the Internet or as a said 10 or 15 years down the track

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


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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 theyare 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. The

Internet is the Internet, but they have not been delivered

magically they have been designed and 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 theInternet down the track, where you have fragments of the Internet

which have more complex interconnections between them than exist

today. That could happen. That would be as a result of the

failure of the IPv6 in the next decade and it could be due to

policy regulations that start to break the Internet up.

The neutrality of the Internet, likewise, is something that

could be broken up, whether it's predominant or unregulated,

whether it's other governmental or regulatory actions. I mean,

the interesting thing about network neutrality, 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 telecom's 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. That could be eroded and

disappear so that we find ourselves technically up able to

deliver a network that's neutral in the same way that the

Internet is today, and that debate then becomes a thing of thepast.

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 actually be able to talk


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about them, identify them and help to understand how we would

recognize if they dis appeared or how we might help avoid that

from happening. Thanks.

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

nice level and a nice thorough, sort of expose 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, Desiree. Desiree was a

tentative and apologies on some of the flux. There are a number

of other seminars and people are fighting over resources. So

let's move to Alejandro.

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Thank you lip. My name is Alejandro

Pisanty, I'm the chair of ISOC Mexico and the 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, enormous, the effortsof Sivasubramanian Muthusamy, he has kept the continuity of the

efforts, and I'm enormous 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 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, but 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 endtoend principle.

I think we should see the threats coming and be warned about

them. That's my assessment about this general let's say, at the

more technical levels of the core principles and certainly the

precipitations of collaboration, decentralization, the whole

multistakeholder setup are continuously both being built up and

being threatened. When I see this type of circumstance, myreflex 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 a very high impact and those classifying the threats by

their impact and probability 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


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many organisations that come together in different fora are able

to perform some parts of this and we are able to outsource and

bring in a more popular and open participation to these by

individuals, small companies, small consultancies, the whole

multistakeholder gamut and that's one possible task to perform

that would grow on the competency and the strength of theexisting organisations and do that a lot more to the mix.

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

thanks for repeating the thanks to Siva as well.

Nick, I want to make sure that you are not falling off the

table there and you are really part of the panel. If we need to

scoot down, please do so. Give us your thoughts on the Internet

values.

>> Sure. Thank you very much 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 Ashtonhart, I'm the

Geneva representative, we have the privilege and the burden ofbeing the only technology industry association that has a

permanent presence in Geneva. So I get to watch the sometimes

painful way in which the 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, time was not synchronized. The reason

they had to create a common time was because of railway

schedules. Railways that were made possible by the steam engine.

People literally traveled by horses that it took so long to

travel between points you didn't need to have common time. You

think of just changing from having village time to national time.

And I think this is what the Internet is doing to the modernworld. 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 to see their national see the

same information.

Human rights are recognized in pretty much every country but

we would not recognize those rights being congruent with what

those rights mean.


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I think the challenge is to recognize that we need to have

common understandings of the architecture of the Internet and the

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 for what people use

the Internet for will vary widely and there are societies whichare 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 recognize that different culture is going

to have the right to define their norms slightly different even

if we don't agree with them, otherwise we will see internet

vulcanized, and see private Internets like Iran and the like.

Then we are all lessened I about the result. I suspect that's a

controversial conception.

At the moment, I see the way in which conflict is perceived

and it's conflated together. It's easier for organisations to

say let's turn off the connection and set up a fire wall andremove what we don't like that. It's not very successful.

Freedom finds a way and speech finds a way. I think the key

challenge, those countries in which socially even had a

consensus. This is something that we are not willing to see or

read or hear, how are they able 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 to be a key policy challenge, and an

uncomfortable one for those who would like to see the

democratizing of the Internet carried every corner. It may take

a little longer for that vision to become reality than we would

like.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, nick. I want to moderate this

in quite a light way. I will 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

think discussion among the panelists and I'm looking to see if

this any a remote participation or participation from the

audience.

I see there's one back there. While we get a mic, can I see

if there's anyone that would like to take up Nick's challenge onwhat he thought was a somewhat controversial statement?

Sebastian.

>> SEBASTIAN: Yeah, to what Nick just expressed, I fully

agree with him, but I'm 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 the citizens are part where

the publication can be on the internet and that the open


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

to access two different publication, it's the start of

censorship.

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

happening in some nondemocratic 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.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. Can you hear me?

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

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Courtney Radge, I'm with

Freedom House and I'm academic and writing my dissertation by

cyber activism. I'm sorry by the last person's comments, 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 the regimes are learning from each other, et cetera, butI was fascinated by your example of time and how that developed

out of the steam network. Steam doesn't belong to any countries.

The sovereignty is not over time.

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 cross borders, hold the potential for a different set of

organizing principles out of nation state sovereignty. I wonder

if we can get beyond the idea of the nation state, it concerns me

from the human rights perspective and also an individual who drew

up with the Internet that we are still conceiving of the Internet

and its rules as being governed by states and that they govern

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

borders.

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 the day. I will go to Nick and ask Vint

if he has any input.

>> NICK: I would say can we move to a conception that it'snot open the old century's old concept of sovereignty. I

certainly hope that's true. In fact, I think it's inevitable

that we will do. I think you already see social constructions 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 say I will


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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 tell what time it was, theywere 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. In two and a half centuries, we still haven't disposed of

this. We are changing the time in the summer because of people

who wake up in agrarian environments.

I hope we will get to that vision. All I'm saying is I think

we may have to be patient. It may be time for the social

construction to catch up with the bounderless world.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Vint, could you introduce yourself.

>> VINT CERF: They will wonder who was the bearded, ancient

person. Hello, I'm the talking dinosaur. My name is Vint Cerf,I'm the chief Internet evangelist at Google.

The question you raised, I have become interested in that,

partly the consequence of this Internet governance forum.

Bertrand de La Chapelle. 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 pollutes the water, just before it goes into

country B and has serious and deleterious results on country B.

The extra minister from India, Mr. Sepaul made a statement

that sovereignty was dead and 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 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 but

out. I don't think we can get away with this yet. If we want to

adopt a nonnational kind of environment in the Internet, we haveto emulate at least some of the protections that are given to us

under the notion of sovereign social contract. We expect the

government to protect the citizenry, we gave up some of our

benefits for the protection of the forestry. That the victim has

resource against the party perpetrating the harm the.

There are a variety of other social order elements that show

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


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

way to reincarnate something like that in the signer space

environment, if we don't we have no resource against harms

occurring against us in that space. This is not to argue that

sovereignty needs to be retained but it's an argument that

something has to be introduced into the cyberspace environmentthat provides protections and assurances of safety for people who

are using that space. That may take some effort.

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

young woman there? Is there any participation from the remote

participants in queue.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that might be the case if we are

talking about democracy. If you look at North Korea and Burma

before the transition. If you look at many authoritarian

governments, there's no social contract, right? So we are

talking about sovereignty, I think in the United States and the

United States, it's very different but the problem with this ideaof national sovereignty is that 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 as looking at the state over that's what's happening in

Iran. That's why they can create their own Internet and Saudi

Arabia being able to create one Internet access point. I think

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

push back. There are many states, democracies included who are

very much trying to maintain the traditional concept of

sovereignty. So I would push back 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 emphasize, which is that if we are going if we are, in

fact, possible to create a uniform Internet, which we don't have

for exactly the reasons you outlined, but suppose we had one, we

will expect a social contract in that environment. May I ask if

you reject that?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Sure.

>> VINT CERF: You want to be unsafe?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think we have to figure out a

multistakeholder.>> VINT CERF: You have to come back to the table with a design

of what you want to do because right now I'm hot seeing it.

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

but I would posit that he will have to have some type of

protection, you are saying more than one. I don't understand how

the jurisdictional question gets solved. Let's set that aside

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


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Internet is created out of real things. It's made out of

abstractions but it arises from a real, physical system and the

real physical system does lie inside of nation state boundaries,

unless we would do away from nation states which I don't think is

likely to do in the near term, they 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 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 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, another person can interfere

with. I think we are a long way aways from recognizing vision.

We still have to figure out how to make it the place that we want

to live in.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: And thank you, Vint and Alejandro has askedto get into the queue.

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

bit uncomfortable with the radio format here.

(Laughter).

So this Alejandro Pisanty is speaking. There are things to

attend to and it will be very productive for a group of

interested people to all stakeholder groups. I will go back

first. This regime that will look behind let's say a lot more

power and a lot more of life defined by life on the Internet,

instead of determined by station states has been pointed out long

ago by Walter Clinebecker, and others utopian space with John

Barlow and Manuel Castellis and it's something that we know a lot

about. He would know a lot about that and we know a lot about

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

bump. We know that some are a lot harder and some of the less

porous. We refrain from pointing out specific countries but

innuendo and other rhetorics allow you to know exactly who you

are speaking about, even more.

The way I see this feeds into the Dynamic Coalition is very

concrete. It's a very direct funneling. What we want to see

happening over the next years is the way the Internet continuesto be built and expanded and it's not the way the Internet's

growth and expense, it's people, companies, governments,

technical organisations doing it. The way the Internet continues

to be built and expanded has to be in such a way that it allows

by design or incentivites or invites by design to live more in

the space of flows, to live more to make more easy to have the

those transnational knows that are easy to do, that are the low


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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 social function and the legitimate force,

to protect people at military or physical security. That's a

harder wall to climb but we do want to make sure that the designwith neutrality, with openness, with interoperability and with

multistakeholder decentralized decision making goes in the way of

enabling these transnational global way of working against a

trend that 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 knows. That will tell us

a lot of what we will have to be watchful for.

If we see, as you mentioned national Internet, or if we see

layers of national Internets like proposals to administer the

IPv6 addressing with national administration, if we see coercion

or legal mandates to link IDNs to ccTLD, and some of theenlightened ccTLD and 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 directly into this

Dynamic Coalition to elaborate.

>> VINT CERF: 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 23409 the territory. And it's

inescapable that the Internet is routed in a physical world. So

if we are going to move away through purely natural boundaries to

legal jurisdictions and the like, there will have to be 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 starting to move with what will we do

going forward?

Before we pick that up, this was a question from a remoteparticipant.

(No audio).

>> Thank you very much. As a followup to previous questions,

we got several questions from remote participants. First, a

question from Joly MacFie. As the Internet content distribution

networks, how many of these affect arrangements and the endtoend

principle, as the user content goes forward.


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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, this seems to be a

very tricky and hard nobody to do. My question to Vint Cerf,

which body do you think would have the task to manage this

complex task.>> VINT CERF: 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 is not.

It's pretty clear, though, if you are going to have international

agreements that create a kind of homologized legal framework, you

will have to go to parts of the UN or a collection of

multilateral treaties in order to establish agreement. I think

we will start with the lowest common denominator, simple things.

What does a notarization mean and what does a digital signature

mean and does it have common weight in all countries? We will

have to build it up a little bit all the time. I don't thinkthere's one body that solves all the problem.

>> 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 endtoend.

I'm sure Vint is ready to jump in and respond. Does nip want

to

>> Nick. Nick. Go.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Nick.

>> NICK: I will be cursed for the rest of my life in dealing

with copyright material, given that way a musician for 20 years

off and on. 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 50years to try to determine how international law and private law

works together? They haven't been able to agree to this. It is

an enormously thorny issue. It's certainly true that the desire

for impact. We can see that the eye tune store has different

material at different times. I think we will have to rationalize

the way in which rights the national rights work in an

international environment. It's not just for gent contentment


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but simply for the efficient function services upon which

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

world's largest drug companies recently transformed the entire

ply chain and directed all of the vendors to a cloudbased sim so

they can see in realtime absolutely everything about their

product. Whether they are being shipped, where when are theysaddled? This will become increasingly the case and the more the

world is integrated in that way, the more of which the context

are of law will be totally different. This has to be some change

in how laws work on the Internet. I think the 50year

conversation will end it won't take another 50 years because the

special realities of dealing with this will require a pragmatic

result that was not required by the situation over the last 50

years. It was an academic situation but now it's not academic

anymore.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Paul?

>> PAUL MAASSEN: I wanted to answer a question about oneInternet in a slightly different way. It depends on how you

define the Internet in asking the question. You used the term,

what would the Internet be like in ten years down the road. It's

the university that we are talking about. If you drill down

through that through the level of users or applications, then

it's really the Internet is in the eye of the beholder, that's

where we get confused. Technically the Internet is the transport

layer of the Internet that we are talking about. It was the

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

mutual network that allows any point to connect to any other

point and actually that thing is in its ideal form that we are

working to preserve. It's one network. That's the beauty.

Let's not confuse yourself about the Internet. If you want to be

specific about the Internet layer 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's the technical

infrastructure and that's something that as within this

discussion about values, we should really identify, as I say,

which Internet we are talking about and be precise about that.

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

small nuance here. The Internet protocols top have to be used inthe global internet. But they are lowercase I, that don't have

the same scope and probably have different intent. I wanted to

come back to rights management in the digital environment. It

occurs to me that if we treat content as digital objects for just

a moment, whether they are books, novels or some game or some

other thing, piece of software, just imagine them as bags full of

bits.


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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 come to a general purpose solution to

the problem that you were talking about, Nick.

I think this may be technical mechanisms that make access todigital content manageable. Here if we were able to demonstrate

that you can establish whatever terms and conditions you wished

and these are 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 copyright, and be

assimilated into this more general system.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: 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.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. I I wanted to say I'm a teacher.It's been a fantastic experience for me to be here and experience

this. There are several threats that I 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 perses

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 and

it's meant different things to different people. And probably as

Susan would read things, its not one thing but many, but we are

looking at core values. I.

I wanted to particularly address this because I would slightly

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

Internet has almost been not academic enough. It's in almost

every space possible. I would suggest that we need to

institutionalize learnings both from the IGF. It's been a

fantastic bottoms up approach. 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. What

happens to core values such as permissionless, innovation,

openness and putting together the structures in modularity. Someof the issues that the ITRs are addressing are local and

domestic. We are try to bring in IP to IP interconnectivity to

spaces such as those. My concerns are many and there are strains

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

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

those issues up.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I'm sure Vint is in the queue, Alejandro


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and others.

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

later for record keeping. Especially at the same time that I

hear that the discussion is too academic. I think we are

lacking. We are continuously lacking in both instances. I think

there's Dearth of solid academic research that has to expand thebody that's already growing and on the other hand, we have to be

able to take the knowledge, the informed opinion from academic

discussions down 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.

An, 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 permanentwatch that a world functional Dynamic Coalition on Internet core

values should be able to report open and maybe deliver the

appropriate calls for action.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Then to Nick and Vint and in the next 15

minutes, I would like to go what should this Dynamic Coalition

address going forward. We have interesting discussions like this

and we find enough of interest to get us hooked. We have to take

the next step and be a little more concrete to keep it live

between forums. So Nick?

>> NICK: I will try to 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 Alejandro and others,

WCIT is designed to impact the permissionless interconnectivity

the way you put it, the fundamental foundation of the Internet.

That's why they have attracted such a visceral and a 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 society's approach information that is sentdifferently than they approach the importance of preserving the

free flow of data inherently and the inherent architecture of the

Internet so 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 start, how do we ensure

the widest possible access to the Internet, on a permissionless

basis, such as we have enjoyed so far, so that we get as much the


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world online at the lowest cost possible, as a starting place,

which is obviously clearly happening as Internet access growth is

exploding in areas where it's the 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 are 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 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. When you

get up to the point where you are in the application space, you

are in a universe that's nearly unbounded because it's anartifact of software. It's literally an artifact of software and

how it interprets bits that it's moving around. The consequence

of this notion of emergent property is that the jurisdictional

aspects, how do you go about enforcing some mar practice may vary

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

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

interconnectedness, and then we might not tolerate something that

says something about what we can or can not do or say.

I think we have to keep in mind that order arising out of this

abstraction and emergent properties will vary from one layer to

another.

Second point is the Internet has evolved successfully over the

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

regulationfree environment. Most of the decisions that it made

are freely made among parties. The protocols invented and

adopted are a consequence of consensus in the IETO and 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 WiFi choice. Nobody dictates to youanything 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 one core principle that we want to use, the

relatively deregulated environment has allowed other forces and

incentives to choose a way forward for Internet to incentives to

find a way forward for Internet.


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>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: So I will ask Siva to say some comments and

see if we can get a mic up here at the front. The small

committee who was pulling the panel together failed horribly in

the gender balance. I'm proud to say that the questions have

come from women in the audience.

If we can get a mic here.>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: It was supposed to be here, and

I made some miscommunication error and so she's not here. I want

to reflect on the suggestion by Nick Ashtonhart. He talked about

the coalition for the future of the Internet. We can bring

together some of the most brilliant minds. Vint was talking

about 18th century philosophy being reincarnated. I can think of

people like John Perry barlow and Vint and not only think about

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 and other stakeholders

so we start working on it in the long term and that's 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, but 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

can expand the 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!

(Inaudible).

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

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

have any comments before we go to Fitima.>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm ISOC ambassador, I'm Fatima, but I

speak in my personal capacity. We are speaking about 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 information

from the community and build a Dynamic Coalition. Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I will just make a quick comment. I


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couldn't agree more with Siva when he mentions this should be

more IGFs. One would want a thousand flowers to bloom. Internet

largely has 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 multistakeholder and it has to look at

opinions because it will affect our future. So that was onesubmission.

And the second was we had the occupy wall street, we 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 by a peg by a lot of

governments in a lot of spaces for backland 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 move. We celebrate this

opportunity but I do believe we owe it to the universe to protectwhat we have.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I would follow you into that vision.

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

this?

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Just pulling in other people.

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

any other suggestions? I mean, we certainly have taken a number

of possibles away in terms of things we might go do more

concretely, and we will get you the mic back. There's a mailing

list open. Let's see if we can identify some concrete

activities.

We will go to you and then to Vint.

>> Hello, so on concrete recommendations we were on a panel

yesterday about national and regional IGFs. And I think for

those of us who are attending the international IGF for first

time, but who 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 Siva, you have a very long

name, the gentleman from India, what can we do from in between.

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

something online where some of the outcome documents, request beput online, I think having physical meetings, can create

barriers. I think there are multiple ways of doing that, and the

core values of internet, ultimately, I think is one of the most

important debates that's at hand. So this is a great

opportunity.

One thing I would like to get from you guys before this ends

is how to continue this discussion between IGFs.


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

will go to Vint and I'm really heartened to hear the support for

the core Internet values because within ISOC, we spent so much

time talking about it, you could feel it is overdone, and though

more is feed. Vint?

>> VINT CERF: So I have two suggestions, maybe three.In the Internet engineering task force where working groups

develop standards one of the things 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 design team that tackles a

conceptual framework for dealing with that in an online

environment may be a concrete thing. I'm not saying that's the

own thing. I'm picking that as an example. The other thing Ifind extremely appealing is this notion of Internet Governance.

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

thank you for introducing that into our universe.

Google plus has a service called hangouts and if you have

adequate access to Internet bandwidths, hangouts turn out to be a

good way to have discussions if you are not in the single place.

>> SIVASUBRAMANIAN MUTHUSAMY: That's limited to ten users.

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

usually three to four.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I think it was a product message.

I want to go around once more, giving preference to those who

have not spoken much, Paul, Alejandro, Nick, closing comments?

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Yes, it's a comment on the comments you

have 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 interestingbecause IGF was created the other way around. 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.

It's interesting the way it was done and the way you leave. I

would like to take as a very good suggestion, how we can, under


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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, Sebastian. Anyone else?

>> Final remarks. Well, I think the suggestion with respect

to the national and regional IGFs is very well put. The ongoing

process that's employed by Dynamic Coalition is a really good one

for linkage at the regional and national levels. This was

recently an Australian IGF, it was a really nice approach to

Internet values which started with a brainstorming are what are

the aspects of the Internet that we believe are fundamental and

which we take for granted, as I mentioned before or that we would

regret if we lost.

And I think that's a really interesting approach, but one ofthe sort of problems I had with the process it was a little bit

over expansive to me.

It sended to capture everything we wanted from the Internet,

whether freedom of speech was on the list, I'm not sure, but it

could have been. I think the powerful term is a word I learned

to spell during WSIS which is subsidiarity, it's located closest

to that problem. It doesn't mean geographically. It should be

limited to what they and they alone need to do, in treaties. I

would like to suggest to bear that in mind and hook at what is

fundamental to the Internet, not to do with our higher

aspirations. We 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 or sort of linkage to

regional, national, IGFs we could look at. Thanks.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Some very interesting comments. Alejandro,

or nick, any closing comments before people need to run?

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Very briefly, I think the issue of

subsidiarity, we must make form follow function. The national

IGF is like kicking a sleeping dog while you are rising under a

thunderstorm and painting yourself a target, and a few more of

those, but it's really not necessarily a desirable thing you.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 who made 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


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really deal with the nature of corporate line, if you talk about

work as bags of bits. So I think this is a question. Why is it

strictly limited to rights? People are sure their rights via

local sovereignties. The people must rely on that for rights,

versus the broader oversights the nation states attempt. So it

was a comment, general.>> VINT CERF: If you want me to respond, one of the things 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.

>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I wasn't forcing to you respond but I

always like your responses. I thank everyone for engaging and

obviously some good suggestions. Thank you not panelists and a

very big thank you to Siva as well. He's really been, as

Alejandro has said, the person who has kept this alive from forumto forum. I would like to give everybody a round of applause and

thank you very much.

(Applause)

(End of session)

* * * * *

This is being provided in a roughdraft 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.

* * * * *

rough transcript of the igf dynamic coalition on core internet values, nov 8, 2012, igf baku,...

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