The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Good morning, everybody. Welcome to room 5. I have some details to tell you. As we go online, streaming online, I'll ask for the people in the second row that if you want to participate, please ask for the microphone, and wait until it comes to you, and please stand up. This is for quality streaming reasons, besides that, everything is fine. And we start, we will start in two minutes. So welcome.
>> Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I'm happy to speak for the German Open Forum, because my colleague Peter Stentzler organized the Forum from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But he is not able to be here. Therefore, we have a quick change, I hand over. Thank you for coming.
>> Thank you. Constanze Burger, representing the German Government, because this Open Forum is an opportunity for the German Internet community to present its multistakeholder model.
Germany was certainly not an early bird in the Internet world. In the '90s when we discussed a new economy, Germany was proud to be strong in what some people called the old new economy, broadcasting, publisher, Telecom. But in the new, new economy, search engines, social networks, Germany was not a front‑runner. It was a interesting signal when the Information Society took place in Geneva. Some countries did send Presidents and Prime Ministers. Germany was represented by Vice Minister of the Ministry of Economics.
But this has changed meanwhile. It means already a couple of years ago, the Germany established a commission where they discussed all aspects of Internet related issues. This commission produced 3,000 pages of good insight and the outcome from this was that after the last parliamentary election, there was established a special committee of the parliamentary committee for the digital agenda. We will have election next year, and we had a discussion again that the digital agenda which was finally adopted by the Government is now one of the priorities of the forthcoming elections. We will see a lot of discussion.
One thing which also is very interesting message from Germany is that we studied carefully the experience of other countries, and we realize Brazilian case with the multistakeholder IBR is a good source of inspiration. While we have a national IGF since the year 2008, we have never a real body to push for this. But in March, we created a new multi steering, multistakeholder Steering Committee, to organize in the future the national IGFs, in Germany and around the table, representatives from this Steering Committee, which will give their special stakeholder perspective.
We have also Secretariat, and I'm very glad that Lorena Jaume‑Palasi is here, the secretary of the new steering group. She will explain to you now a little bit how this Steering Committee is composed. Then we go around the table, so that you can get perspectives from the various stakeholder groups in the Steering Committee.
>> LORENA JAUME-PALASI: Thank you very much for this introduction. Yes, we decided to enlarge the organizing team that was behind the creation of the German IGF, to make it more legitimate, more accountable and to make it also more inclusive and reach out to different organizations and institution that is haven't been involved yet in Internet Governance issues but should be concerned on that, have a say on that, and needed to get into the conversation for many different reasons.
What we did is we started questioning the classical stakeholder groups that we know. Conventionally we have Civil Society, academia, technical communities, private sector and government as the initial stakeholder groups. We identified additional two other groups that are parliamentarians and youth.
With that, what we did was try to find four representatives from all those 7 stakeholder groups, and from a diverse, for instance, from the private sector, we will concentrate on bringing people, representatives from different types of private sector entities, so that we don't have only ISPs but also have media, and also have registries, etcetera.
That was on one side. This is one of the things that we did. This created a huge committee of 26 people. In order to be flexible and able to proceed faster, we decided to create a sort of chair board that would try to come in among the group on a certain position so that we can work faster, and since we have several stakeholders groups, we decided having 7 chairs would be as not as efficient as we think it would go so we decided to create four chairs, this meaning that we team up different stakeholder groups together.
We put parliamentarians and Government together as one group, in selecting one chair. Another group was the private sector and the technical community, both also selecting another chair, and Civil Society and academia selecting a third chair. The youth represents the fourth Co‑Chair. The Secretariat is a sort of ex‑officio chair, looking that the process among all the chairs is doing fine and that it's transparent and inclusive, etcetera and on equal footing of course.
With that what we have right now is Michael Rotert sitting here representing private sector and academia as Co‑Chair, Isabel Skierka representing youth as Co‑Chair, representing Civil Society and academia, for the Government representing both parliamentarians and the Government, we have representing our Co‑Chair because he was not able to come but we have a different one, it's a parliamentarian from working at the German Parliament and we are still working on a memorandum of understanding.
We have an initial draft and still working on that. And deciding not only of course that, not also aligning with basic criteria from the IGF UN Secretariat of what it means to be a national IGF initiative, but also we are introducing their structural procedures, to know how to make the Steering Committee that we have created accountable, representative with checks and balances we put in there. We are also considering to rotate so the Steering Committee is not a permanent one.
But it's still in the making, it's still under discussion. We started this year by getting new institutions that have never been involved. We have Amnesty International, never been involved in Internet Governance in Germany. They are in. We have Verdi, that is the trade union, that we are actually thinking on these issues but not really being involved. What the representative is the mother of the IGF in Germany so to say she was one of the people considering it, but she never had the capacity to act in that official position, because the trade union behind her would not still have a position on that. This year they decided to join. Of course we have many German institutions, in academia, but also with regards to the private sector, especially with regards to media, they have never been involved before and they are joining us today, this year for the first time. I think it's a good process.
>> MODERATOR: The mandate of the Steering Committee is prepare the national IGF, but if you look into the composition, then this committee probably have potential to become also a good platform to discuss issues which go beyond the preparation of the national IGF, and as you know, there is a movement in Germany that a lot of constituencies would see as a good move forward, that Germany will host one of the global IGFs. It is not yet decided. But we have a lot of good arguments on the table, and we can hope that probably in the year 2019, or 20, Germany will host an IGF. It is too early to make any ‑‑
>> Actually not.
>> MODERATOR: ‑‑ commitment. But I want to put a signal we have put a Steering Committee into a process and not just for the day‑to‑day thing to prepare the next IGF. I would propose that we have, that the various representative on the stakeholder groups will speak a little bit about their role, and their perspective. I would start with Professor Michael Rotert, the chair of Eco, which hosts the world's largest Internet exchange point, and is a well‑known veteran in all this Internet Governance discussions since 15 years and the father of the German Internet, by the way.
>> MICHAEL ROTERT: Okay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for the nice introduction. Calling me a veteran, does that mean grandfather? Okay. (chuckles).
Anyway, first let me thank the organizers for having this Open Forum at the very beginning of the IGF here in Mexico, although I have to admit it's hard to get here by switching planes and stuff like that. But anyway, as Wolfgang said, I'm representative of the business sector in the IGF in the German IGF Steering Committee, and also President of Eco. We have around 1,000 members, Wolfgang mentioned the D6 as the world largest exchange point, and we have actively supported the IGF and more or less founded it together with the other stakeholders in 2007. We are the first German IGF started in 2008.
During the years, the IGF, German IGF has become a relevant platform, open for all participants, and all those who are interested in the various topics. But rather talking about the past, it's much better to look what will be in the future. So regarding the future, of course we have, with all our experiences from the past, we have gathered a lot of knowledge and experience to work with other stakeholders, learn some lessons, for instance from the IANA transition process, which was a very big success, and which was one of the first fundamental multistakeholder events, where we could agree on a single paper within a very short time.
There is of course always as usual a room for improvement, but all in, it's a very good example from multistakeholder process what has been set up in Germany and what works currently in Germany. What our wish is, we would appreciate a much stronger participation of all stakeholder groups.
We are very happy about and welcome the enhanced political participation and the support in this process. The multistakeholder open self‑regulatory and bottom/up approach needs to be maintained and enhanced. We can see signals as private sector even, we can see signals from the political area that this is where we will acknowledge, because enhanced cooperation is taking place on nearly all levels, although it could always be better. But I certainly don't want to complain.
From my point of view, we need to look forward in things like that the Internet, as everyone says, becoming more and more ubiquitous and digitalization that we have which is in progress. Therefore the multistakeholder process we think becomes more and more relevant. I don't want to be ruled by technicians or by private sector, but I also don't want the Internet to be ruled by politicians only, because that would just fail, as from any single stakeholder model working on business issues.
We have to address new emerging issues and we are currently discussing this, which are coming up, like the hate speech debate we have in Germany. There was a meeting with other stakeholders on how to work with a complaint process in this area. We have the Cybersecurity, the cyber war and things like the fake news, which we have to address more and more.
Of course, we should discuss emerging issues on different levels. On the national level, of course, that is why there is German IGF, but also on regional, European and international level, in order to fit and to address all the needs and demands and peculiarities what we have. I would like to encourage to initiate national Internet Governance Forums, and with this plea, I would end my remarks for the time being, but maybe I have the opportunity to jump in later in the discussion. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Michael. That is a strong partner in the committee ...
(speaking off microphone).
>> Thanks, Wolfgang. Just in addition to what Michael just said, we are maybe coming from a little bit different angle, definitely later in time, Deutsche Telecom has not been part of the initial years of the Internet Governance discussions. We are trying to catch up, and definitely my perspective is that it is better to be part of the discussion than just being talked about.
So, I see my role of taking part here in making sure that topics that we care about are also addressed and that this is done in the balanced way, and I think we are off to a very good start. I'm quite happy with what we delivered with the last IGF‑D taking place in September, where we had topics that were highly relevant to industry. So I'll keep it at that.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Thomas. We have a strong technical community in Germany and DENIC is one of the world's largest ccTLD, as represented by Jorg Schweiger.
>> JORG SCHWEIGER: Thank you, Wolfgang. Hello, everyone. My name is Jorg Schweiger, CEO of DENIC, managing Country Code Top Level Domain of Germany, by the way with more than 60 million domain names registered currently, one of the top three registries worldwide.
Was DENIC involved in the IGF‑D, well, it's pretty clear that for me, Internet Governance is all about the usage of the net today, and its involvement in the future. As a technical infrastructure provider, for sure, we need to be interested in both things, usage of the network now and usage of the network in the future, that by the way on a national and international level. More precisely, what we are doing is, we contribute to the IGF‑D. We engage with different stakeholders to, well, enrich our information for our decisions. We do want to be transparent as a registry, and we strive for open, free and secure Internet.
Well, does that work? I think yes, it does. Just take as an example the already cited IANA transition. Over here, the IGF‑D drafted a statement that was actually sketched out by Civil Society involvement, by the technical community, academia, Federal Ministries and Civil Society as well.
From what I saw, this German position wasn't really very far off of what has finally been adopted on an international level. So yes, it does work. Thanks very much.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you. And in the global sphere, sometimes technical and academic community are treated as one stakeholder group. But we intentionally set up differences between the technical and the academic communities, so we have academic community as an own stakeholder group and Professor Jeanette Hofmann is one of the leaders. Jeanette was also involved in Germany, drafting Charter on digital rights which was presented yesterday in the committee of the European Parliament. And Jeanette will inform a little bit about this initiative, which is very similar to initiatives we have discussed here, from Italy, the Bill of Rights, or in the Dynamic Coalition on Internet rights and principles. Jeanette, please.
>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: Thank you, Wolfgang.
I will report about several things, that will start with what Wolfgang just mentioned, the initiative for digital Charter which aims to expand the European Charter of Human Rights, in order to take into consideration changes that we see right now, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but also with regard to digital work, for example.
So the question that we, which is 27 people from all sort of areas including the arts, but also journalists, academics, politician, Wolfgang, I'm sure, as the President of the European Parliament was among the initiators of this project. We asked ourselves, do we need to expand our European Charter of Human Rights, and if so, how. We started this discussion a year ago and drafted a text that we released a few weeks ago and got ‑‑ we were successful in the sense that we started a very fierce debate.
We were not so successful in terms of convincing people that we do the right thing. There is intense discussion in Germany about what we did, and you can imagine what people say, there are those who think that human rights as they are right now are the strongest thing we will ever get, and any attempt of changing them will mean that we lose out, because the political constellation right now is less favorable to human rights than it used to be, decades earlier.
One of the issues that is particularly contested here is the question of whether human rights should in future not only structure the relationship between individuals, citizens and the state, but whether they should also include the private sector.
I belong to those who think human rights were created to protect the individual against the consequences of the asymmetry of power between the individual and the state. But now, we have also another sort of strong power and that is in the private sector. So it makes sense to ask ourselves whether the private sector should not also be bound by human rights and not only via the state.
This discussion, I think from an academic point of view, it's good to look at the pros and cons of doing so, but each time this question is asked anywhere, creates such an emotional passionate response, that it's actually quite difficult to talk about that in a sort of sober manner, and weighing the pros and cons.
This is one thing I'm involved in.
But I would also like to report about other things. One is that the German Government has decided to fund a new research institute with public funding, that is supposed to cover the topic of Internet and society. We have already such a institute in Germany. I'm one of the four directors of that institute, and it is privately funded.
The fact that Google decided to give money for research in that area, because there was none, until 2013, created quite an emotional stir, and there was public pressure on the Government to sort of do the same but with public funding.
Now we have in Germany a competition between various regions applying for that budget, which is not little. It is 50 million Euro for ten years. So I'm coordinating one of the applicants' roles.
The third issue I would like to report about is my own research in the area of Internet Governance. A couple of years ago I started with a research group to study national Internet politics, not just one thing say net neutrality or data protection, but the question of, do we see a new policy field emerging, a policy field say compatible to environmental policy, defense policy, you know where you have a couple of actors, certain expertise, perhaps even ministries being responsible or an agency being responsible for the whole area.
So we started a couple of years ago with looking whether in Germany we can see a new policy field emerging. We looked at the various ministries, what they are doing in that area. We also look at the private sector and NGOs what they are doing.
Now we want to expand this and do an international comparison. The countries we want to look at are India, Brazil, U.S., France, Germany and UK.
We will apply for funding, because this is a big thing and we cannot do this on our own. We will need people, experts in these countries to help us doing this. We will provide the framework, but want to do real international comparison, looking at the various paths, institutional paths that we see, want to look at the agendas, what are the debates, because they differ considerably between the countries, and thereby, also creating a new research area that other people can tie in as far as they are interested.
So that is it from my side.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you, Jeanette. Germany has also strong Civil Society, by the way, the Secretariat for the Steering Committee is hosted by a Civil Society organization, Reporters Without Borders, and representative of the German Civil Society is Matthias Spielkamp, active in many circles. He himself is the chair of Civil Society organization called iRights.
>> MATTHIAS SPIELKAMP: Thank you very much, Wolfgang, for giving me the opportunity to explain a little what Civil Society is doing in Germany on Internet Governance, and of course it's too big an issue to talk about Civil Society in general. I will focus on the Civil Society organizations that are represented in the German IGF, which is iRights, the organization that I had myself, we have been reporting on Internet Governance issues on a national level, mainly copyright regulation but also data protection, freedom of information issues and communication security for twelve years now, which I think is a long time in this digital age. But we have also branched out in the last two years into international Internet Governance processes with a initiative or project that is called IGF academy. You can find information on that on IGF.academy on the Internet. That is aimed at enhancing freedom of speech by strengthening national Internet Governance structures, meaning that we support fellows from 8 different countries, four in Asia, four Africa, to create or enhance national Internet Governance structures in their respective countries. It is worthwhile to say that the German Government is funding that, the German Ministry for economic cooperation and development is funding that from a budget that is aimed at strengthening freedom of expression.
Also a member of the German IGF, Amnesty International, the German chapter, those of you who are familiar with the organization of this international organizations is that, know that they have usually an international Secretariat but they also have national chapters. Depending on the country, they are acting in, they are stronger or weaker. The German chapter of the Amnesty International is a strong chapter. They are working on Internet Governance in the sense that they are looking after human rights in Internet Governance by developing encryption, positions on encryption politics, and also other freedom of expression issues there.
We also have as a member of the German society for the United Nations which is I think a cofounder of the German IGF. They were there from the beginning. I don't know that exactly because I was not. They are member of that. They are active there, because they say that this whole IGF process is a U.N. process, that is experiencing with new models of governance of global resources which makes this very important for an organization like the German society for the United Nations. It's meant to also help bridging the digital divide and enabling inclusive education models which is something that the German chapter has always been advocating for.
Verdi, the German trade union for services was already mentioned because they are also part of the group that founded the German IGF, and they are active in topics like eGovernment, eServices, of course the future of work and how digitization is changing the nature of work, talking about platform economies or so called smart cities initiatives that are all very contested and that are all very interesting and important issues when it comes to Internet Governance.
Last but not least, it is Reporters Without Borders. Wolfgang mentioned that they have a special position in the German IGF because they are hosting the Secretariat and the process. I'm a member of the board which is a pro bono position of the German section of Reporters Without Borders. I can also tell you that as many of you know, about the organization, they are advocating for human rights and especially of course freedom of speech and freedom of expression, which is a very important Internet Governance issue so therefore, example, what we are doing is advocating for better export control mechanisms for so‑called digital weapons, meaning surveillance software designed to spy on citizens and especially of course journalists and dissidents.
Those are the institutions that are represented there. The charm of the multistakeholder model, I think, is that it's a Forum to discuss current issues and initiatives and also sometimes voice different opinions on certain topics, and I'd like to take this opportunity to also say that at least two of the organizations that are represented in that Internet, in the Steering Committee of the German Internet Governance Forum have a different take on the digital Charter that Jeanette and Wolfgang mentioned, and for example, that they refused to sign the digital Charter itself, because they are arguing that it's a misguided effort to actually deal with the challenges of the digital change that we are facing. Okay. So much for my side.
Thank you very much.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you. As you see Germany is a big country, there is a broad range of different views which is very good, because Internet Governance is an issue where you can never have just one position. No size fits all. This will be a challenge for the future. When we formed the Steering Committee, we said, okay, this cannot be only a committee for the, let's say people who represented the Internet discussion in the last ten, 15 years. We need fresh faces. I think it was a interesting decision, and I do not see it in many countries, that they have the same approach, that we said we will give young people and all stakeholder groups organize their own views, IGF. So independent from the other one, and we have two members of the Steering Committee here, and you will make the statement, Isabel Skierka is here to give additional comments if needed.
>> Thank you very much. My name is David Christoph. I'm coordinating the youth IGF. I have a focus on data. Her focus is Cybersecurity. Let me tell you more about German youth IGF. Our project was the German youth IGF has a long tradition of I think six, seven years, am I right? Five. Okay. But I joined three years ago, and what we are doing is creating a pre‑event for young people, next to the German IGF, so it is always the day before, and we organize our own program to create room for young people to prepare a bit for the national IGF, but also to have an input by creating messages for the national IGF.
This year, we had about 20 participants, and maybe important to mention is that we don't focus on youth topics because we think all topics are important for young people. And it's more that we are looking for a young perspective on topics in the field of Internet Governance.
Doing messages, bringing people, young people to the IGF, we have a direct input to the national German IGF. As coordinators, we are basically kind of doing everything. We have full responsibility, also full possibilities to get involved to make decisions starting from, looking for a venue, looking for speakers, deciding on participants, doing a program and so on. And also of course we have a budget for all these tasks. We experience so far always very good support by the other stakeholders in the German IGF.
The two of us are also in the Steering Committee of the German IGF, which means that we are in general also heavily involved into the organizing of the German IGF and this is the way we can also have always direct input to get, for example, young people on the panels, or saying, this topic from youth perspective is important, let's bring it to the agenda.
What else do I have? Yeah. Also to mention we have a European project with other youth IGF, and we have regular exchange with people, with youngsters from Turkey, Austria and the Netherlands. I think they are all here, not in the room but on the IGF. One there.
Yeah, we are doing this since one and a half year, doing trainings in between, going to IGF, at the European IGF, EuroDIG and visiting each other youth IGF to learn from each other. We produced a booklet, best practice booklet for youth IGF for Internet Governance. It will be done in March next year.
We as youth stakeholder work on focus of generational justice, on shaping the future from a youth perspective and we have a lot of freedom in the things we do. As I mentioned, we are always very happy, we got a lot of support from all those other stakeholders, and we have never problem to find a speaker or to get additional budget if needed. Okay. So far, thank you for your attention.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you, David. This was a good overview. The youth group is looking to the future, and one aspects of the future is also education.
>> Wait a minute. I need to ‑‑ I need to clarify something, that we said at the very beginning, with regards to the German IGF has no concluding position with holding a U.N. IGF or bringing the UN IGF to Germany, and 2010 would not be possible, because we are holding the European proceedings that Germany is having the proceedings within the European Union. I need to say that, because we were asked to say that.
There is no concluding position. But of course, within the multistakeholder group of people organizing the German IGF, there are many stakeholders interested in getting the UN IGF but not all of them. It's still not conclusive.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Yeah, as I said already, this is a beautiful country, with different position and interests.
(chuckles).
>> Soon disappear under the table.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Beauty of the system is that we are moving forward.
I just wanted to say that education is also a clear element, and since ten years one of the success stories of Germany is that we invented the idea of the schools of Internet Governance to summer school, and we had the 10th anniversary this year. Sandra Hoferichter, also, the Secretariat General of EuroDIG, and then I will give back to Constanze Burger because she will inform about what the German Government is doing.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you for inviting me. Is it possible to show the couple of slides showing some statistics? Or is this not ‑‑ because I ‑‑ okay. It's not many of you here in the room heard about the summer school Internet Governance. The funny thing is that many initiatives around the world emerged under the acronym SIGs schools and Internet Governance.
They are all actually going back to the original idea which was invented in Germany by Wolfgang Kleinwaechter and had its 10th anniversary this year.
We are, although the name is European summer school of Internet Governance, we are a global school. We are inviting participants from all the countries in the world. So far we had 300 participants over ten years from all regions, from all stakeholder groups. I think many in the rooms are either involved as a faculty member or as a sponsor or has been participating in that school. And I would just like to draw your attention that we are now in the stage of forming a global network of all SIGs. We probably will do it under the umbrella of the IGF Dynamic Coalition, where we sort of set some basic standards, help the original initiatives to evolve, make a network of alumnis, create a network of faculty experts, so that the schools within the different regions of the world have the opportunity to better connect with each other, identify regional experts, so that we don't only have the same people giving the same sort of presentations.
That is actually our next steps. The next school will of course take place in Meissen again, and if some of you in the room is interested to participate, then Wolfgang and myself, we would have some fliers for distribution, application period will start again in January this year, until March. The school will take place in July, 16th until 22nd of July. Those who have not ever participated in such a school are warmly welcome and invited to apply for this school. Thank you very much.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you, Sandra. Now the strong, not the final word goes to the Government, but the last word in this round is with Constanze Burger, and the new Government was formed three and a half years ago. There was a debate whether Germany needs a Ministry for the Internet. The discussion led to a solution that say we have three ministries dealing primarily with the Internet. It is Ministry of Economics, Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Infrastructure. And Constanze Burger represents the Ministry of the Interior. Ministry of Economics is also represented here, but at this moment they have a bilateral meeting. So they cannot be here. The guy from the front office is unfortunately ill, as was said in the beginning. So you can give a brief overview and we open the floor for questions.
>> CONSTANZE BURGER: Yes, thank you for the possibility to speak.
I can just say I'm really happy to be involved in that multistakeholder process, because it's necessary for our business, governments, in the Parliament, everywhere, to understand and to know what is happening in the world and what is coming up in that field. So my colleagues are going to represent some themes, for instance, the commerce, the Ministry of Commerce is representative in GAC, in the ICANN theme, also at ITU, and in the moment in the G20 themes, and they are going to care about that.
My colleagues from foreign affairs are involved in that international Cybersecurity area, and are going strong forward with my Minister and my teams together because we are going the care all the interior things.
My special part in this theme is, we are caring about the deployment of IPv6, and this issue we have really, really heavy work to do for the future. I heard this morning a very interesting session of IoT, and all the dangerous things coming up and we have to care about and to be prepared, because we have to save our people, we have to think about security, safety issues, human rights and so on.
So, we want to learn to be prepared.
I want to talk just about my favorite role, because we are, I think, a really good multistakeholder in the technical community. We learned that the Internet is an important resource also for governments and we must take care of it, improve it and develop it for further communication. But there is no specific Government framework for technical Internet development.
So we have to bring in us in the normal Internet community, and we talked in the IGF‑D about the theme, encoding values, this is really important task for us, because I am responsible for all values to come up in the Internet and the way to handle this is to take part in the multistakeholder processes.
We have an important role. We are a new and equal part of the Internet community, and we bring up a new user perspective, social values, is one of the main themes. Our constraint in the Internet development process difference from ISPs and companies, that we realized, and we started to take part in this processes. And now we are going to change, and the second policy in the ripe community, in the area, and I hope we are going to be successful.
This is a really good experience we did, that governments and part of governmental things can influence the themes and can influence the community, and can bring in their own needs and values.
This is the message I want to bring in here, and so we are on the way to develop it in the future as well. Thank you.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you very much. We have a overview about what is happening in Germany. We are looking forward to make progress in the next four, five years. We have still some time left for questions. So that means ‑‑
>> Yes, I was thinking, because we extended a invitation to Sandra, she is not part of the Steering Committee. She is German. Not necessarily something that is German because European global project, but I see there are other Germans in the room not belonging to the Steering Committee but also doing things in IG, and I want to extend this invitation to present as well. I see another German here. Are there other Germans in the room? Would you please come up, sit down and explain what you are doing, so that people can see what the Germans are organizing all around. Please, perhaps ladies first. And perhaps Paul and you, sir, I don't know your name.
>> Thank you, Lorena, for giving me the floor and explain about the work I am doing. I was wondering why the child protection people are not in the Steering Committee for the German IGF. That is what I'm representing, the German Center for Child Protection on the Internet and the Digital Opportunities Foundation. I think those roles are related to the work, not only on national level but also on the national level. The Digital Opportunities Foundation is mainly working on that big thing Connecting the Next Billion to the Internet, but not only connecting but empowering people to benefit from the connection they have to the Internet. We do that on national and on international level.
And with the aspect of the child protection things, I think it's very important to relate that also to human rights, and it's not by accident that we have not only the human rights but also the UN Convention on the rights of the child, which means children needs to be protected and taken care of their rights. So I would like to connect that also to the question of young people being online. And as we know from previous reports, one of three of Internet users is under the age of 18, and when it comes to developing countries, it's one in two of the Internet users.
So this is not a minority. It is a very important group of users. I would be ready to work with you also on these topics in the German IGF. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. Paul.
>> I'm the deputy director of Internet and jurisdiction. Internet and jurisdiction is a global multistakeholder policy network addressing tensions between crossborder nature of the Internet and the fact that jurisdictions and laws are based on the notion of territory sovereignty. The question is how can we in the future continue to have the global cross‑border Internet, harness all the social, political and economic benefits that the crossborder nature of the Internet has brought for us while at the same time finding modalities to apply the rule of law or rule of laws online. Basically what we do is we are a multistakeholder policy network that involves over 100 key entities around the world.
We bring together the different stakeholders, governments, international organizations, Internet companies, technical operators, leading universities, Civil Society, in order to enable multistakeholder cooperation, to come up with solutions that are as trans‑national as the Internet itself.
We were convening two weeks ago in Paris, the first global Internet and jurisdiction conference, which was the first time that more than 200 senior representatives from all the different stakeholder groups and from more than 40 countries from around the world came together to collectively find modalities to address those challenges.
>> Any questions?
>> Claus, I'm German and I'm the chair of N Bach which is a natural profit operation constituency in ICANN. I'm also the Executive Director of path finders, a global outreach organization and capacity and awareness building about all things Internet Governance but especially DNS. For example, we did last year's series in the U.S. in Washington, we just are going to Copenhagen and things like that.
I'm not so much involved in the German Internet scene, the simple reason I spent most of my life in Latin America and the U.S. but now I'm coming back, and if somebody wants me to get engaged or thinks I could be useful one way or another, let me know.
>> Thank you very much. We have someone else, right?
>> Hello, I'm Karen, I'm also German. But I work in the UK, Global Cybersecurity Capacity Center, University of Oxford. We do research on effective and efficient Cybersecurity capacity‑building, and developed a model to assess national Cybersecurity capacity and deployed the model around the world in 40 countries with our partners, which is World Bank, ITU and also GSE, where Germany is involved. We currently are consortium for links to Germany and for any questions, I'm here after the sessions.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Any more questions? If not, time is over. Eileen, you want to ask a question?
>> I have a question.
>> Human rights watch Germany are close, not a member of the Steering Committee but they are close in our partnership.
>> I have two quick questions to the overarching project, maybe for one of you two and then two for Jeanette. On the overarching project, other than the commitment to multistakeholder process and Internet Governance as an important topic, does the projects or did the chairs, the members have to agree on any other kinds of normative commitments or principles or protecting the open reliable Internet or anything like that? If so, was it a difficult process to articulate what those things were? That is my first question.
To Jeanette, small question is your new emerging policy field, are you calling it Internet policy? And if so, how do you choose that term as opposed to digital policy, digital governance, whatever. Then on the subject of the big question of whether the existing human rights framework is adequate, other than the two things you mentioned, some people are committed to the idea that what we have got is the best we are going to get, don't you dare move off the existing framework and others are saying it's inadequate, we need a new articulation, so I have heard that is there a middle, third way to fudge that question, which is like the concept of new wine, old wine skins or something like that. It is use the existing framework but simply say you are articulating new ways to implement, protect, promote, that there is a need for a new articulation but it's not new human rights themselves, it's new articulation of existing human rights because of the demands of the digital context. So that's all.
>> We can discuss, the first question I think it's quickly said, MOU which is still in beta code, we are still working on that. But consensus agreed MOU that we have says on the first paragraph that our purpose is to support general objectives of the global United Nations Internet Governance Forum inter alia to promote the open development multistakeholder based evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world. That is I think pretty much value behind that, way more than simply a Internet Governance multistakeholder process.
>> Jeanette.
>> JEANETTE HOFMANN: Thank you for the questions. Regarding how we choose the term, it's a translation from German into English. In Germany we used to say net politics. It turned into Internet politics. It's likely to change in future, because Internet politics obviously still refers to an infrastructure and to the idea of a space.
But with the increasing digitalization, that term might become so outdated that it will change. But right now it's not a fully fleshed policy field anyway. It is rather regarded as something where lots of ministries have one stake and are responsible for one area. It is rather a cross‑cutting area than a field with one Ministry being responsible and that is true for most countries. We are a bit in between. That makes this project quite interesting, because we are looking at the forces that pull into different directions, in the direction of fields versus cross‑cutting area.
The question about middle ground, the way I see it, many people think of human rights as something that is almost like a canonical bible, that is not supposed to change. But when you look at different countries, then you can see that rights were added over time. In Germany, we got in the 1980s this famous right to information and self determination. It is the only country that has this. It is not part of our sort of formal fundamental law. But it is considered as such.
So there is always a, let's say, sort of blurred line between what is formally coded as a fundamental right and what is by codes, governments, legal experts, considered as such. While I see the danger of looking at fundamental rights in a more flexible way because it could also mean that you lose out, I still think we cannot be so anxious by ruling out the idea that we add new rights in areas where they might be necessary. To give you more international examples, the so‑called right to be forgotten that the European code of justice came up with, many people are unhappy with the way it's formulated right now. But many people at the same time see that there is merit to think about it, reformulate it, and also reformulate the kind of actors that should be responsible for implementing it.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER: Thank you, Jeanette. This brings us to an end. By the way, what I like in the workstream 2 discussion in ICANN on human rights issue, is that they come up with a framework of interpretation. Framework of interpretation is more or less what you have proposed as a middle ground. That means we do not touch the existing rights. But we enhance our understanding, and so far FOI framework of interpretation for existing human rights could be a way forward, and we discuss this also with the new initiative in the European Parliament now, in the context. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. But probably we have a better wheel or a more, wheel which drives us faster and safer into the future.
With this, I bring this meeting to a close. Thank you for coming. I hope we will meet in Germany in the next five years for a similar IGF. Thank you very much.
(end at 11:54 a.m. CST)