IGF 2017 - Day 0 - Salle 15 - The 12th Annual Symposium of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)

>> ORGANIZER: That was just to say hello and welcome.

We have now begun formally.  Thank you so much, Milton.  Have a great day, everybody.

>> MILTON MUELLER: Thank you.  Marianne Franklin is the Chair of the GigaNet Steering Committee.  I'm the program Committee Chair.

The program theme this year was Internet Governance in a time of Global Reordering.  We're relating to the turmoil in the world caused by the resurgence of nationalism and sovereignty and some of the strange politics going on, trying to relate the Internet Governance theme to that, we'll look at topics of the role of the private sector, the ICANN regime and other national regimes.  We apologize for the delay.  We think maybe this was just a way to get you to anticipate and want to be here even more like a good restaurant that you have to stand in line to get into, we are ‑‑ we're making you wait for this excellent program.

Let me give you a bit of background.  We tried to get as many good papers in as possible so we crowded the Agenda a bit.  Now that we have been thrown off, we're going to have to struggle a bit.  The schedule is tight.  Every session will have a timekeeper that will impose very strict time limits on the presentations.  It will be about 15 minutes.  We want to leave time for question and answer sessions. 

GigaNet this year had 40 submissions, and there are 15 accepted papers and 5 poster sessions. 

I want to call your attention to the poster sessions.  The poster sessions are a lot of fun, very interesting way to interact actually more with the author of a research paper than a normal presentation in many cases.  Just before the lunch break, we encourage you to wander around amongst the poster sessions.  You see the bulletin boards out there, and we think that most of you are going to be interested in the posters as well as the papers.

As for lunch arrangements, we ‑‑ you want to make the announcement about lunch?

>> We'll have lunch outside.  You have a book of tickets and a list.  (Speaker off microphone).

>> MILTON MUELLER: Right.  Good.

As you may have noticed, we have captioning available.  If any of you are having trouble with either language or hearing, this should make it more accessible for you.  That also means that they'll be wanting us to speak into the microphones every time we speak.  It will be a little more formal than maybe usual.

Why don't we get started with the program now?  Our first speaker is going to talk about language diversity and internationalized domain names.

>> UNDRA BASSANJAV: Thank you, good morning.  I hope the transcription works with my accent.  I'll talk about the language and the International Domain Names.  Here is my contact information.

What I looked into was language and how the different kind of language scripts are included in the architecture of the Internet, the domain name systems ‑‑ I'll try not to make it too technical and the domain names are pretty ‑‑ international domain names are pretty much domain names, textual names written outside of the alphabet so pretty much nowadays multilingualism on the Internet is pretty much universal.  1.4 billion people pretty much on the Internet speak different languages rather than English.  Also Google translate and other kinds of the social media websites even allow you to do minority languages here.  Despite all of this kind of development, Internet, it pretty much remains close to the minor languages and, scripts, multilingualism.

Thanks to the UNESCO effort, there are many languages available on the Internet, including ancient Mongolia script which I originally came from ‑‑ it is 800 years old ‑‑ and it is preservation and revitalization of the languages through the UNESCO efforts.  It is pretty good.

In 2009 ICANN, the governing body of the Internet thought of the International Domain Names and country codes.  Here is some examples I pretty much provide here, Arabic, Chinese, all of the different kinds of scripts.  International Domain Names are domain names written in characters outside of the Roman alphabet.  One, of course, the question rises as if the International Domain Names leads to the linguistic diverse content on the Internet.  UNESCO pretty much says yes, even though ‑‑ here is ‑‑ I have a diagram here that this first represents the languages spoken, that represents the spoken languages in the population of the world and second one pretty much represents web content in to the different languages.  You can see English is dominating there.  The next bar pretty much represents the diverse languages in the International Domain Names.  UNESCO pretty much says multilingualism is represented in International Domain Names, yet due to the historically symbolic power on the Internet, the domain names are overwhelmingly in Roman alphabet, 2 to 5% these days according to UNESCO.

Here is a lot of the technical things.  I won't get into the detail of the standards.  International Domain Names brought several unprecedented challenges to the Internet community when introducing different character sets into the Internet architecture also it creating legal and institutional arrangements for managing them in cyberspace.  Internet, there are a couple ‑‑ I'm sorry, it is jumping around ‑‑ there are a couple of standards, including Unicode and variance and those are pretty much standards associated with the language diversity.  There seems to be some kind of a tension between the language uniformity of the Internet and then multi‑lingual representation of the Internet users.  It seems to be pretty natural in that sense.  We talked ‑‑ Dr. Muller have written about the control of the U.S. by the U.S. government and how that is overwhelmingly managed by U.S. corporations until the transition of the ICANN in 2016.  Nowadays, because of ‑‑ thanks to the Unicode and Punycode, the language representations, they're pretty much available in the domain names.  You can see Unicode, for instance, Algeria is represented like that, but because it is not recognized different languages, they have to translate it into the Punycode, the xm suffix and not only that, there are some variance and then alternative labels for the different kinds of the scripts because regional differences in languages and scripts seems to be translated into the core architecture and has to be managed at the register's level in the different kinds of issues.  As you may have seen in other documents, so interoperability of the Internet is a very important thing and one of the big issues came up with the introduction of the International Domain Names was the mixing of the different characters, for instance there is a mix of the Latin C and others and then it may be used by others to spoof the traffic, et cetera.  Now there are variance of label generation rules that tend to allow or not allow certain kinds of the using of the codes in different scripts.  This is usually very open and a public process, but still pretty much in a variant standard rather than policy issues within the ICANN's practices.

We talk about IDNs and codes and label generation rules so many language scripts, including Chinese and Arabic have regional differences in writing styles that are causes of the interoperability issues, certain code points have to be really checked by the DNS spot to see if that can be allowed for domain names.

From the user's perspective in non-English speaking countries, the domain names in different languages are not the most important issue because most Internet users rely on certain engines to find a website.  Yet, like governments, like China and Russia, they politicalize the U.S. controlled form and the pressure of the ICANN and U.S. to create a process for delegating top‑level country code domain names so this way country code top‑level domain names, international domain names have become synonymous with the diversity in cyberspace.

Let me see ‑‑ then you may ask why this kind of international domain names, country code top‑level domain names is a big issue.  I have pretty much applied the policymaker ‑‑ the garbage can model.  According to this model, pretty much the solutions to certain kinds of issues doesn't really develop ‑‑ pretty much the solutions to existing certain kinds of issues may already exist and be put on the table when it is kind of ‑‑ countries like China, Russia, they were already for the International Domain Names in their own script and they pretty much use this World Summit on Information Society kind of Ad Hoc process to take the control over the International Domain Names.  That's kind of one of the arguments.  Then, of course, the multilingualism on the Internet is illusive, and then linguistic Rights is a relatively new consensus within international law.  So universal declaration of the Human Rights recognizes the Rights to Freedom of Expression and to fair trials and the Right not to be subjected arbitrary to interference of privacy, family, correspondence, et cetera.  Existing international standards are mostly limited to tolerance‑oriented Rights, that's right of the linguistic minorities to publish their own magazine, their private schools, only private schools and pretty much in the private sphere, but on the other hand, promotionally oriented language Rights, that's the Right of the public funding of the minority language schools, minority language TV, et cetera, are far less clear in international law.

Since the promotional of the Internet language Rights further the use of minority languages in the public realm, they had been city center of most language conflicts around the world.

Recently ‑‑ furthermore, many of the international laws are mostly limited to the UNESCO soft laws which doesn't have the enforcement mechanism and mostly kind of ‑‑ software that doesn't have the enforcement mechanisms and recently UNESCO in ICANN's conference pretty much accepted the Rome Principle, the Internet has to operate right‑based, Human Rights‑based and open and accessible to all, and also has to be with the multistakeholder participation.  Another push for a multilingualism in cyberspace comes from the European Parliament which has 24 operational languages before Brexit and all of this that's going on last year.  That's kind of the European development here.

When it comes to international domain names, the domain name, it is playing an important precedent in the International Domain Names.  So the community has approved the linguistic type of domain names partially due to the former Chairman of the ICANN who was leading, who came from that background and he pretty much campaigned for that domain name and paid expensive, political hurdle over the decade of the hurdle cataloging the community pretty much accepting ‑‑ got approved that catalog on domain names.  This situation, however, that was in Europe, but if you look in the other kind of areas in the world, linguistic minority, doesn't really get their own kind of domain names.  This is a situation where the States control, the country code domain names contradicts the precedence of the ICANN promoting multilinguistic names.  The names pretty much set the precedence for this international domain names but it is kind of difficult to follow on that one.

Pretty much ‑‑ I would like to kind of emphasize that ICANN, it goes through the lengthy and open process, involving more government authorities, regulators, private companies, especially from Developing Countries.  Based on that kind of thing, the ICANN policy pretty much primarily benefited the State and left unaddressed the cultural needs of the different linguistic groups within the States and Developing Countries. A criteria for the post transition INA is ‑‑ was to ensure that a government or a group of the governments cannot capture or exercise undue influence over the domain name systems.  So limiting our site, any government, in different technical, cultural groups in promoting Rights in cyberspace, it is a new test for the post‑transition ICANN.  Multi‑lingual practice on the Internet is management driven and corporate managed.

That process of the point of the new International Domain Names is increasingly being in what's called the line of the State and corporate interest because online life is increasingly intertwined with the cultural and individuals fundamental Rights such as privacy and free expression and the Human Rights are being left in the hands of the private companies is definitely a concern.

>> MILTON MUELLER: Thank you.

We will defer questions to both speakers at the end of both presentations.

I'll turn it over to Aaron.

>> AARON van KLYTON: Hopefully I didn't put too much important information on the top line.  Okay.

I'm Aaron van Klyton and I'm here obviously to share recent research that we have been developing at the University of Greenwich in London with regard to Internet Governance and we look at a set of business stakeholders westbound the framework to look at the language they used to understand the degree that hegemony is occurring or the incidences of hegemony are occurring.

The groups we're concerned with are shaded ‑‑ I'm not exactly sure what color that is ‑‑ anyway, the shaded boxes, it is the GNSO, the Generic Name Supporting Organization, and this was founded in 1999, a year after the privatization of ICANN.  The group remained in structure until 2010, and at that same time there was an implementation of the Commercial Stakeholders Group, which was the middle box and then it had three subsets beneath them.  We're focusing on the business constituency group and the commercial stakeholders in the GNSO.

The GNSO, they're responsible for maintaining the top‑level domain name.  They want to ensure the functionality of this domain name and that it is kept fair and open across the Internet.  The Commercial Stakeholder Group, their function is a Parent Group of the constituencies and they're concerned with the views ‑‑ so they represent the views of the commercial Internet users within the relevant I T Sectors. 

The last group is the Business Constituency Group, and they are responsible for small, medium ‑‑ small or medium, large enterprises and multinational enterprises.  They have 60 members and they represent clusters containing 50,000 companies from around the world, and 88% of them are small and medium enterprises.  It is not just the usual players, the Verizons.  They're, in theory, representing smaller groups. 

Participation then is the discourse that's been elaborated on by Milton and others.  This is one of the front pages of the ICANN website.  You see I highlighted in red the discourse of participation and open collaboration.  The multistakeholder model relies on this discourse and the policy forums are open to all regardless of what your relationship to the Internet might be.  However, the extent to which participants are ‑‑ let's say ‑‑ influencing the processes and the outcomes of the policy meetings is probably not what they would have hoped for.  In fact, it was said in 2011 participation as a construct in multistakeholderism merely serves criticism to the institutional actors.  We're set up automatically to look at what power plays are at work here.

So the theoretical framework we were exploring emanates from the work of Muller on participatory evangelism, and to that extent ‑‑ sorry, I think the page numbers have gone from the slide ‑‑ they're at the bottom.  So the hegemonic power asks you to prescribe to what was an exploitive system, not so much to ICANN but multistakeholderism overall.  Again, it was discussed the persuasive power of hegemony and the focus was on language and power as he was trained as a linguist.  He argued that the power is from a social order inherited and then the outcome is a moral and political passivity that occurs allowing the Dominic Historic Block to anchor and expand their prescribed social order.  This is a very interesting view of power structures written about in the 1920s, et cetera.

There are many things we talk about in the paper, but obviously for the sake of time, I'll focus on the highlights and get on with the methodology.

We have the two research questions then:  One is the role of the relationship between hegemony and participatory evangelism in Internet Governance, and there are three groups we focused on.  We wanted to see if there was a difference of the tone and rhetoric of the groups in statistical terms.  The data that we're using, just so you know, they're the archived transcribed meetings of the three groups.  As you know, ICANN meets three times a year. 

You also referred to one of the meetings in the last year in different locations around the world, and during that week of activity there are several different sorts of meetings going on.  The archives of the transcripts of these meetings is what was analyzed from the year 2002 to 2016.

It is a two‑stage analysis:  The first stage is a textual linguistic analysis.  We used a software called Diction 7.0, and this is done with the leadership efforts, that sort of material and it measures the tone and political rhetoric of speech.  After cleaning the data, we then ran it through Diction 7.0.  The software evaluates with three dictionaries that have been rooted in linguistic academic structural analysis, and they have developed three dictionaries that are used to analyze the overall tone and even the more nuanced tone of talk.  We have five master variables there.  We have 31 sub variables and 5 ‑‑ also the four calculated variables.  On the handout you received on page 2 ‑‑ sorry, on page 1 ‑‑ it has the list of the 31 sub variables, and the next group are the 5 master variables and the last ‑‑ the next group are the calculated variables, that's four, and then five of the master variables.  This is also the sort of output that the software produces. 

Basically there is a Z score that's averaged across each of these variables according to the data, the empirically tested data over a period of time, and any data from your text that's either above or below the norm in terms of standard deviations receives an asterisk on the side in the last column that shows that it is statistically significant according to that rubric.  They do that for the 31 variables, the calculated variables and the master variables.  The ones with the asterisk are the ones that go into building the second model.

I wanted to post some discourses we're talking about.  This is raw data. 

We see there is a lot of passion in some of the words, the tone is quite sharp.  The idea is that the three groups are very open at these meetings, they don't hold back.  They take the voting process seriously.  As you can see in comments 5 and 6, they have rationales for why they're voting in particular ways on policy guidelines, et cetera.  There was a lot of that.  That's why we use the software to make that process more manageable.

The output ‑‑ right ‑‑ these are the master variables.  As you see, the time period goes from 2012 to 2016.  The dominant one, there is certainty.  The powder blue color, the definition of certainty is prescribed by the software.  It is there.  We're talking about resolute language, inflexibility completeness and a tendency to speak with full authority of the office.  Each of the five master variables are composed by some of the 31 sub variables.  It takes the positive contributions to certainties so that there are four of them, tenacity level, terms and subtracts from that in this case four sub variables that are negatively associated with certainty.  On this page we have the calculated variables so there were four of them.  The one that's predominant here is insistence and as you can see in this graph and the graph before it, it is pretty consistent all the way through, 2002 to 2016, there's not been a lot of movement around the themes.  That means that there is some consistency in the way that these business stakeholder groups approach the policy elements in their discussions.

Systems is described there.  We can imagine what the word means, what the definition is there.  You can also notice that it is one of the terms affiliated with certainty.  Those two things kind of act in tandem.  At the end of the ‑‑ remaining?  Wow.

At the end of the qualitative approach then, we come up with this sort of result.  We then use the significant variables from the three groups to develop a quantitative model.  I'll just ‑‑ we use exploring the different constructs and the associations and how they relate statistically of the three groups.

I'll skip ahead to the outcomes and what it means for us.

On page 2 of your situation you have four models, we ran a total of 15 and these are the four models that were perceived as best fit.  We did Anova, analysis of variance, statistical testing and then we ran it through an Anova ‑‑ an OLS regression model.  In the 7 ‑‑ the 7, 9, 14 and 15, the big story here, it is that the variables that were perceived to be consistently ‑‑ nearly consistently relevant for describing the discourse of these actors are the three at the top.  Cognition, complexity, and if you notice that complexity, it is a huge value, ‑11.01 and so that means the more complex the discourses of these participants are, then the less likely hegemony is contributed to.  It is the discourses that facilitate the hegemony from a theoretical or statistical perspective over the masses so to speak.  Complexity is negatively correlated with the production of the response variable that we constructed with the data that came before this point.

The other big finish here, it is that the CSG, the Commercial Stakeholder Group, they're perceived as having the most significant impact on the production of hegemony.

In this case we have the ambivalence, account complexity, the rows 4 through 6, if you will, that measures the Commercial Stakeholder Group.  One was the business constituency and three was the GNSL. 

We can see that in this group for whatever reason, I mean, that would be the next stage of analysis to figure out what dynamics exist within this group that gives them the most voice.  Why do they respond to things in the way that they do, and they have a strong kick against the dominant statistical structure and we want to see to what extent that is true?

This is a wrap up:  Ambivalence, cognition, they were significant, but the real player here, it is complexity.  The more simple the discourses are of these people, the easier it is for them to be controlled basically.  That's the breakdown.

Again, complexity obviously was the main driver for this particular group, the CSG.  That's kind of a repetition.

There are differences between the four models but models 7, 14 and 15, they're related in that they're polled LOS.  They took all the groups through them together and ran three different tests.  The difference of 14 is that we added the master variables, the five master variables in the running of the model, and then in the last one, 15, we included the stakeholder group distinction just to know who is doing what.

Contributions to theory, well, first of all, Diction, the findings were robust enough to support the idea of participatory evangelism as being alive and well in the Internet discourse, Internet Governance, certainty from a theoretical perspective, this notion of certainty came out the winner.  In the final result, it was really complexity of the discourses of the talk that really is a determinant statistically.

In the end though, we see if they contribute and participate in this process, then they are contributing to hegemony, supported theoretically in 1999 that argued that participation is consent which is different than how Gramsy depicted it, overt approval.  Approval is not to say sufficient enough for consent, but now it is just participation.

This is a recap. 

We did a lot of analytical work, textual work on Gramsy and others, et cetera.  Just with the limitation, we would like to see more longer datasets so that we can do sort of panel data analysis to see the trend over time.

Thank you.

>> MILTON MUELLER: We have time ‑‑ we have had a presentation about two very different dimensions of the ICANN regime, one about the multi‑lingual domain name process and the other about the discourse, I would say, within the GNSO and particularly the Commercial Stakeholder Group.  Do you have any questions or any discussions of the methodology?

>> AUDIENCE: (Off microphone).

I was wondering why did you choose to solely look at transcripts and ‑‑ did you look at different approaches to measure the differences?

>> AARON van KLYTON: The mailing list, it is an interesting approach.  I hadn't thought of that.

Initially, my University ‑‑ led by me ‑‑ I took a team of 4 students, Master students, to present at ICANN 50 in London.  It was the first time that they had involved University people, stakeholders.  I listened to some of the other meetings because they were all live‑streamed, and I was struck by how abrasive they were at times during their conversation through the groups.  I thought, wow, there's got to be something in that.  We talk about power all the time.

An author Epstein, Dmitry Epstein, in his work talks about a lack of variability in terms of how we measure stuff in Internet Governance because no one had looked at the transcripts I thought it was a very good opportunity, and then borrowing from linguistic studies ‑‑ sorry ‑‑ leadership studies, they do this thing all the time to compose variables that are not so directly measured like charisma in leaders.  I thought it would be good to see if it worked out.  As a next stage, there is another paper with network analysis by Cheno who is now at a university, and it may be interesting to look at that and other dynamics that go on within that group.

Thank you.

>> MILTON MUELLER: Yes.

(Off microphone).

>> AARON van KLYTON: I agree with you.

You should have heard me in 2014 in the Istanbul GigaNet where I talked about Internet Governance among African countries, and part of the problem is linked to what you said.  It is about capacity, and having capacity in the case of the African countries it was the capacity to get to the meetings and have the expertise to contribute meaningful at the meetings.  This is also a problem.  It is also a problem through representation and power.  Yeah.  I don't address that in this specific case.  I wanted to look at ‑‑ because I'm also from an international business department, and there is very little I think business people involved in this sort of discussion.  I wanted to contribute something.  That is a good point, the voiceless.  Yes.

>> MILTON MUELLER: Next question.

(Off microphone).

>> UNDRA BASSANJAV: Thank you for the question.  That's a really good question.

I think most of the language issues on the Internet are pretty much solved but the core architectural kind of domain name systems and here I appreciate this power perspective on that in that ‑‑ because most of the language groups coming from the ‑‑ mostly from the very different languages, they tend not to participate because of the capacities, they don't have microphones and speaking cultures and maybe language abilities or the technological knowledge of the domain name system administration.  Those people haven't spoken.  Here I'm kind of trying to argue for the Civil Society and language groups that don't really get their presentation in the ICANN conferences and it seems to be my main argument here is the power, again, the State and corporate organizations are pretty much kind of coupling together to eliminate the Civil Society in language groups and the presentation, it is really, really lacking.  If you look at the precedence of the community which started, and then you can pretty much see how the cultural representations are very, very important in the perspective here.  We're not getting ‑‑ those groups, they're not represented and their languages are not really there.  Of course, the domain name systems, it is pretty much open to the major languages in the States, in the Chinese, the Mandarin but others, in Turkish, those in China, any other kind of the language groups, they don't have the representation and the domain name systems and because it is mostly State‑based if you look at the domain name system in ICANN's documents.  40 countries completed a string of the system, and then only two countries with the multiple languages, Singapore and then India represented two languages, but all States are pretty much majority languages.  When the States are given this kind of the power, they tend to enforce the majority languages, not the minority languages which is the power of the minority ‑‑ they stigmatized kind of the minority languages, and then States take advantage of the power system given to them and then disadvantage the minority speakers and minority groups.

This is kind of the design of the ICANN, to give the domain name systems to the States, first of all; and then second of all, if there is nothing done about this by Civil Society in the language groups, those groups are pretty much natives, either not by knowing the processes or not having the mic and then also when I talked to Dr. Mueller and he pretty much said that the countries which are very linguistically different, they don't have the capacity to participate in all of this ICANN Forums and discussions and probably are left out.  I see your questions.  I see your points.  Most of the time, Google translate, other kinds, Wikipedia, social media, they're handling, but for the users it is not really a big issue, they're pretty much relying on the search engines, not many people, the minority languages, they don't address ‑‑ that's really not that common.  On the other hand, still, the Civil Society, the concern here I'm raising is that there is a coupling of the corporate structure with the States and then State powers in the ICANN processes seems to be rising and it is not Civil Society.

I hope that addresses the question.

>> MILTON MUELLER: One more question?  Yes?  Then we'll have to cut this off.  There's a bunch of questions here.

All right.

I'll be lax and accept the two the questions.  You go first.

>> AUDIENCE: A question for Aaron, I don't want to mischaracterize it, is it a tool that the business constituency uses in the discussions or just trying to get to ‑‑ it is a complex set of issues that people are talking about.  How do you put that in context about the discussions and the topics that are actually being talked about?

>> AARON van KLYTON: Thank you for that.

Complexity is not a tool.  It is an outcome.  So the software itself, it has as rubric gauging complexity along with the other variables.  So that was the one that was dominant.  I don't think that you can deliberately use complexity with such a large organization.  It is not ‑‑ even though complexity maintained itself throughout the whole period, there is still a contribution to hegemony.  They have the resolute language and the decision making themselves, it is still contributing to hegemonic practices.  It is not that complexity is a description in the sense that, you know, the room is brown.  It is a measure of the language through the software.  Yeah.  It isn't to belittle the issues.  The issues are very complex.  The way that they can approach it.  Also ambivalence was there, which means, you know, either yes or no, and this was statistically significant, but not to the same degree of complexity.

Thank you for that.

(Off microphone).

>> UNDRA BASSANJAV: If I understand right, you're saying that the Russians have been successful in the domain names and the Chinese have less of the international domain names?

>> (Off microphone).

>> UNDRA BASSANJAV: Second‑level domain names.  Yes.

>> (Off microphone).

>> UNDRA BASSANJAV: Right.  Right.

>> (Off microphone).

>> UNDRA BASSANJAV: That's an interesting question.  I don't have the answer.  I think both countries, both comments are pretty much pushing.  I think the Russian government has been really pushing really hard and then they had pretty much put the emphasis on ‑‑ I think the Russian domain names are pretty much leading.  I think Taiwan, they're doing a bit and there is a lot of promotion slides from the businesses coming and, of course, that's also true, the local ‑‑ there is certain things that cannot be done at the international level but at the local level I acknowledge that one, mostly this one is a linguistic group and they probably have to get together and then bring up the campaign, like the communities had said, but when it comes to the resources, those people tend no not have either technical or the financial resources to go with that and then I think Chinese government has been also pushing pretty ‑‑ pretty much for the lack of domain names and the businesses, but I agree that it wasn't really a big issue until ‑‑ the Chinese names were already there by 2000, the second level domain names and then they tried to capture the Chinese domain names in the first domains.  I think that the Chinese governments has been persisting for a very long time.  Also they had showed the world that it has to be interoperable and then after that I think in my opinion I think the users as I said, the users, they're pretty much ‑‑ they don't really use the domain names, it has to be is somewhat powerful, the groups that has resources has to push for that kind of the campaign levels.  Maybe you are right, I think that the local communities in China is not really coming together, especially if you're looking to the minority groups, the Mongolians in China, they don't have the resources or technical capacity to understand what the minority languages can be or can have domain names.  Maybe that's why it is maybe also kind of the State is stigmatizing the minority languages and they won't give ‑‑ they don't even know how to kind of claim those language Rights on the Internet.

>> MILTON MUELLER: On that note, I think we need to move on here.

Thank you very much for your presentations.  We'll go on to the next panel and Jeremy, we'll fit you in here.  Come on up.

>> MILTON MUELLER: Jeremy's paper is about a device in Civil Society about our approach to trade policy issues.

>> JEREMY MALCOM: Thank you very much.  I'm trying to get my slides to appear in the appropriate way.

>> MILTON MUELLER: This is a PDF?

>> JEREMY MALCOM: Yes.

>> MILTON MUELLER: Try pushing here and pushing the slides up.

>> JEREMY MALCOM: No.

>> MILTON MUELLER: This arrow here.

>> JEREMY MALCOM: The arrow.  Okay.  That might work.  As long as we have a way to move to the next page.  This is going to be annoying.

If I have to work without the slides, I can work without the slides.  Oh, that's better.  Okay.  This is ‑‑ this is not ideal.  I think it will do.

So I wrote this paper for a group of trade experts at a meeting in Paris earlier this year.  Some of this is on a fairly basic level for this audience.  I think there is still useful information there and an updated, improved version of this paper is about to be published in Internet Policy Review.  If you do check out Internet Policy Review from time to time, you will see very soon an updated version of this paper which is the basis for what I'm presenting from this morning.

The reason I wrote this, I had observed that one of the projects I have as a Civil Society activist, it is to promote the inclusiveness ‑‑ improvements in the inclusiveness, accountability and transparency of trade policymaking processes and a problem that I found is that not everyone agrees on what inclusiveness, accountability and transparency should even mean in the context either of improving trade policymaking processes or in the internal operations of Civil Society groups. 

The Internet Society groups that come from the internet community, they have a different idea of the transparency internally.  For example, as to what the Trade and Development overseers do, I thought it was interesting and wanted to explore that.  I found that to some extent the different meanings that they attach to the criteria stems from differences in the institutional development of the Internet Governance regime versus the trade policymaking regime and the institutional difference have in turned influenced expectations on what, for example, accountability and transparency could mean.  Also I found that there was a deeper explanation for their differences on these criteria.  I think the mainstream CSOs ‑‑ Civil Society organizations, the focus on Internet activism, they favor governance mechanisms based on markets, technology and decentralled action rather than government, even when government interaction is there, they limit that to upholding individual Rights rather than the provision of broad or intrusive social proms that would affect the operation of the network or administration.  This' assembles politically to the Right with Internet Governance policy issues.  When you compare the Trade and Development CSOs, which are much more likely to exhibit a skew to the left and the government addresses issues on the intersection of policy and trade even when it redistributes or places new restrictions on the free flow of data across the Internet which is similar to the Internet‑focused CSOs.  And examples of this include the unwillingness of the Trade and Development seers as ‑‑ data flows is an example. 

The World Trade Organization meeting just wound up last week in Argentina.  This was one of the main areas of difference between what I'm calling the Internet CSOs and the Trade and Development CSOs on whether it is a good idea to use trade agreements to promote the free flow of data across the are Internet which is a value I think that the Internet CSOs hold to a had greater extent than the Trade and Development CSOs.

This paper explores that, I'm not going to ‑‑ I'm not going to be able to go through all of it in the time that we have available.  I'll skip threw these slides and hopefully cut to the most interesting parts.

That little introduction was kind of a summary of the whole thing.  I'm going back to the beginning to talk about some of the differences between firstly the trade and the is Internet regimes.  This is really annoying.  I wonder if I can actually do this in a different view.  No.  I'm not used to this version of Adobe.  Never mind.  I'll carry on.

A reason for my getting involved in trade is because it is ‑‑ because of the adoption of new Internet issues in trade negotiations, issues like spam, cryptography and domain name policy have made their way in trade agreements.  In that ‑‑ they're competing, of course, with the more open stakeholder bodies that we're more familiar with, ICANN is one of them in which actually some of these trade negotiations are trying to compete on policy issues and IGF, others, there are definitely some challenges from the trade regime coming there.  The group that I brought together in 2016, which I'll talk about more later, has taken a position that modern trade negotiations are biased in favor of legacy industry stakeholders and don't reflect the needs of broader effected communities in the way that the Internet Governance community tries to bring in a broader community of stakeholder groups.  Historically trade wasn't dominated by government in the way that it is today.  I mean, when we look back, of course, there was a non‑State based transnational legal system that operated in parallel to national legal systems.  It is only when bilateral strayed   agreements started to be made, such as in the 1860, the treaty between the U.K. and France that states really started to take control of international trade law and then, of course, it was formalized through the WTO, the WTO though as I have mentioned just held its last ministerial conference in Argentina, and Civil Society groups were ejected from ‑‑ even those that were accredited, the Argentina government canceled their accreditation and turned them away at the door.  Clearly the WTO is still more closed than we would like it to be in terms of Civil Society participation and even when you compare it to other international institutions like WIPO where you can sit in as an observer and even contribute during the time that's made available for Civil Society to speak.  The WTO doesn't live up to that standard, and certainly makes a contrast with the Internet Governance institutions we're familiar with.

I'll slip through some of these slides.  This was new information to a lot of the trade people I was talking to, less new information to everyone here.  One of the main points I made to them, was that historically there is more of an aversion to government reliance on government for governance of the Internet, and I used the example of the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspaces, an early cyberlibertarian rallying cry against government‑control of the Internet.

Then I also informed them of the multistakeholder statement that recognized that there were different roles of the stakeholder groups in Internet Governance, including certain sewed and that the roles and responsibilities would vary from one issue area to another.  Certainly trade is one of those issue areas where governments do have for historical and other reasons more of a leading role in Civil Society, whereas in other areas of governance, such as the technical, such as at ICANN, there is more of a balanced role between the stakeholders and in some areas there may be a leading role for Civil Society or the Technical Community and lesser role for governments.  That's recognized I think in the Internet Governance community and less so in the trade community where it is taken for granted that governments should lead.

We have an obvious difference in the meaning of, for example, inclusiveness, between trade policymakers and Civil Society as a whole.  I'm going to talk on that very briefly.  I'll talk about even within Civil Society there are differences.  The differences between the trade officials in Civil Society, we tried to call those out in this Brussels declaration on trade in the Internet which was released at the end of the 2016 meeting that I organized that I alluded to earlier when I talked about in more depth in the paper.  We explained the difference between the way that policy is made in Internet Governance and trade and suggested some quays to bring those closer together.  I won't read that out buddy hands we had were releasing draft texts, having opportunities for meaningful involvement and Consultation with Civil Society and so on.  When you look and compare them to the way that trade actually operates, I give an example of the U.S. trade representative and in that case, inclusiveness they believe to be satisfied by having trade advisory Committees that are mainly composed of corporate representatives who receive information on a non‑disclosure agreement.  Accountability is lacking in the U.S. Trade Advisory process, for example, the U.S. transparency office, it is its own general counsel.  There is no independent accountability mechanism there. 

Likewise, on transparency, we don't receive any of the text proposals or the consolidated drafts, yet the U.S. trade representative has considered this status quo as being the most transparent it has ever been.  There is a real disconnect there between Civil Society's view of inclusiveness and accountability and transparency, what it should be and the trade ministry's definitions of the terms, not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well.  I look at the differences in Civil Society and I alluded to this in my introduction.  There are two factions of Civil Society, the Internet Governance groups which have technologists as core members, which tend to focus on Civil and Political Rights rather than social and economic Rights and may except corporate and or government money with less issue than the Trade and Development focus CSOs, which tend to in to the trade unions, the space, the core unions of the groups, they focus on economic, social rights rather than on individual rights and they tend to reject corporate or government sponsorship as being inherently corrupting and not compatible with their ideals of accountability.

How do we reconcile the differences?  How do the differences impact the attitudes of inclusiveness, accountability and transparency?  So key differences include whether multistakeholder governance is an appropriate model for trade at all.  A big problem that the Trade and Development groups have, of course, it is that it tends to elevate the industry stakeholder group to the same level of governments.  That's in some ways an over simplification, we don't say that the NETmundial Declaration recognizes they're not on the same level, but we talk about them participating on equal footing.  This is really hard to get the groups that come from a trade perspective to accept.  Likewise, the idea that CSOs could accept corporate money or government money is difficult for some groups to accept, and transparency also differs between the groups.  The Internet groups have open mailing lists, meetings recorded and transcribed and the trade CSOs, that's strange to them, they have closed mailing lists, circles within circles and an inner circle with access to core information and an outer circle and they find it strange to be as transparent as Internet CSOs are.  I won't have a lot of time to talk about the approaches that EFF has used to try to reconcile these.  Very briefly, just in a minute or so, the meeting we held in 2016, we tried to have both factions of Civil Society there and to try and structure the meeting in a way where they would not push outside of the comfort zones.  For example, rather than having an open and webcast, we had it under the Chatham House Rules.

And let me just skip forward.  I know I'm running out of time.

We used deliberative democratic models for the meeting trying to get people from different backgrounds and beliefs to be able to communicate on the core issues we agreed on about improve trade negotiations and excluded some of those issues that we knew would be controversial.  For example, the substantive issues like data flows, we knew they would be controversial and we focused that coalition just on areas where we think we could find compromise, for example, in improving transparency and accountability and trade negotiations.

There are some other ‑‑ other projects that I'm not going to have time to talk about but they're in the paper.  I would encourage you to look at that.  The idea of Dynamic Coalition on the Internet which has a first meeting this year at the IGF and you're welcome to come to that on Tuesday.  Then a broader approach, shadow regulation, it is about trying to socialize the concepts of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability to a broader community, including not just the trade community but even beyond that as well.

I rushed through this.  The slides were in a strange fashion presented due to technology here.  I apologize for that.  Yes.  Happy to answer any questions if we have time for that.  Otherwise you can engage with me during the break.

>> MILTON MUELLER: I think we probably want to try to get a couple of questions in.  I see one over here.  We'll have our coffee break then.

>> (Off microphone).

>> AUDIENCE: I wondered if the division between Internet Civil Society and Trade Civil Society, how much is cultural?  Certainly I think a big Internet Civil Society group, I do think of the United States as leading the way on that.  How much is cultural norms underpinning that? 

And the second one, in terms of Internet Civil Society  groups maybe bringing some new perspectives into Trade Civil Society groups, where do you think it could be the reverse?  Do you think some Trade Civil Society could be used to shape Internet conversations?

>> JEREMY MALCOM: I don't think it is as simple as talking about culture in terms of national or ethnic cultures.  Even if you look at the Internet Civil Society within, say, the United States and the trade groups, we still fined many of the same divisions.  I work with groups like public citizen, which is U.S.‑based, and there are others where I can say, look, we're observing pretty much the same cultural differences in a broader sense, I think it is Internet culture versus the trade union culture more so than American culture versus other global cultures.

Do I think that the trade groups have things to offer for the Internet groups?  Definitely that's the case and that's one of the reasons that I have tried to make sure that the coalitions I have brought together, which are the Open Digital Trade Network and the IGF Dynamic Coalition.  I strived to make sure we had representation from both groups there and some of the things that we can learn are maybe our transparency.  It is like our kind of radical transparency we practice, maybe it isn't appropriate when dealing with trade negotiators because the trade negotiators are put off by that.  Maybe we should actually change some practices to learn from their much longer experience for example at the WTO.  There is a clash of the new blood coming in to talk about digital issues at the WTO and putting noses out of joint that's been there for 30 years.  So definitely I think we can learn from them.

>> AUDIENCE: When you said the community is stronger on procedural Rights, but the other community is stronger in pushing for substantive Rights, you consider development Rights to be ‑‑

>> JEREMY MALCOM: I don't know if I would say that.  I think Civil and Political Rights are not a weaker form of Rights than social and economic Rights.  I wouldn't say that personally.  In terms of our fixation with process, yes, I think to a larger extent we're concerned more with improving the openness and transparency in my case of trade negotiations, whereas their more concerned about the outcomes.  That's probably more true.  They're more likely to cut corners that we would be uncomfortable with when it comes to transparency at the WTO.  I think ‑‑ and in other trade negotiations.  They will deal behind closed doors with negotiators and have closed‑door meetings and we would rather not.  An example of that would be the Trade Advisory Committees that my organization just refuses to even be a part of that because of a condition of being a part of that is to accept non‑disclosure agreements we're not willing to undertake and some of the other groups ‑‑ not ‑‑ so ‑‑ I mentioned ‑‑ I don't want to pin this on them, but other groups do deal behind closed doors in the process in a way making EFF uncomfortable.

>> MILTON MUELLER: We have a question back there, and then one here.

I'm sorry, we have a question back there and one up here and that will be it.

>> (Off microphone).

>> JEREMY MALCOM: Sure.  Well, I would point you to the paper where I go into that.  Mainly it is anectodical, I gave examples of a case where Civil Society groups behave in a certain way, an example I give, it is a split that occurred between ‑‑ within the Internet Governance caucus, an Internet focus group and it has Trade and Development elements in there.  There was a split that led to firstly the formation of the best bits network that I had a hand in forming and even the best bit network split again into the JustNet Coalition and the conditions of just bits and some of the reason for the split was disagreements and misunderstandings over some of the things like accountability and transparency, and I'm pretty frank about how that happened and why in the papers.  I would direct you to that.

>> (Off microphone).

>> AUDIENCE: Within the trading negotiation space or within the governance space?

>> JEREMY MALCOM: Both.  They're merging.  That's really the point. 

I do also give examples of groups that I think are crossing over either from trade into Internet or from Internet into trade and there are networks like the ones I mentioned here, the open digital trade network where there was a combination of both of these Civil Society factions.  I think it is inevitable as trade and Internet complexity together, we need to work together more as a unified Civil Society in different spaces, whether they be traditionally IT spaces or trade spaces, and that's the reason I wrote the paper.  I think it is important that we have to understand each other and reconcile our different ‑‑ the different meanings we ascribe to criteria, inclusiveness, accountability and transparency.

>> MILTON MUELLER: I'll intervene and ask a question, we had a meeting yesterday and had discussion of the difference.  What did you ‑‑ what was the take away from the meeting where you had a direct clash between the Trade and Development perspective and the Internet Governance perspective?

>> JEREMY MALCOM: Well, I think it is positive that we have a meeting like what happened yesterday when we were in the same room together and we can confront the facts, yes, we have disagreements.  A lot of the time the disagreements are papered over or denied or just not even ‑‑ people don't appreciate them.  I think the first step is to acknowledge them and to have a robust discussion internally and that's one of the things we tried to do yesterday.

>> MILTON MUELLER: All right.

So we're going to have our coffee break now.  We're way behind schedule because of the delays in getting through the gatekeepers. 

Carolina, are you here?

>> (Off microphone).

>> MILTON MUELLER: Do we have coffee out here in our own little segment or do they have to ‑‑

>> (Off microphone).

>> MILTON MUELLER: Try to be back in 10 minutes if you can. 

(Break). 

>> MILTON MUELLER: We will get started again.  Come on, sit down, we'll get started.  All right.  Please join us.

Our first presentation is Jan Aarte Scholte who will be talking about the ICANN's IANA transition.  What was that role, you were an appointed expert by ‑‑

>> JAN AARTE SCHOLTE: God knows.  My collaborators in crime are smiling.  I was an accountability an adviser.  Whatever that means.

>> MILTON MUELLER: 15 minutes.

>> JAN AARTE SCHOLTE: I put the code down at the bottom because you'll see the titles on the slide.  Is anyone having difficult with hard of hearing or my English?  Otherwise we can put it back up top.  Yeah.

Indeed, thank you, Milton.

I want to say in a moment, many of you that know me as being an adviser where I was playing my policy hat, at the same time I'm an academic.  Today you will see my secret character, my other identity that you didn't know about.  If it seems like another person talking, it is the same person but it is my two different roles and I'm happy to slip back in the policymaking one later on.  I'm a global governance scholar and was not part of the Internet space at all until I was asked to be an adviser in 2014.  I'm a global governance scholar and I'm interested in how it is that in global spaces we get regulatory and predictable change and order, we don't have a world state or a world people, but we have these major global flow, Internet, financial markets, environmental problems, so on.  We have to get some governance for that without having the stake‑like operators that we have for national politics.  How do we get that, working governance for global spaces.  I have this idea that it actually comes through hegemony and I'm using it in a different way than Aaron, I'm using this in a way of saying legitimated rule by dominant power, sources of superiority, they settle rules, but they do in a way that has the confidence and the trust of the people that follow the rules.  There is a positive endorsement of the rules.    It is interesting.  How do you get dominant forces to actually get the whole to go along with the rules that are being set?  How does this operate in contemporary global governance, that's the overall question?  And specifically what's the IANA suggesting. 

So I'm approaching this transition not in terms of what does it tell us about the workings or not of the multistakeholder regime, but what does it say about global governance more broadly how it may operate.  I don't have to go through this.  Everyone has been through this far more than they want to.  We'll go on.

This is the transfer of legal over site of the names, numbers, protocols, infrastructure regime from the United States government to a multistakeholder apparatus.  If you're interested in where I come from, theoretically you could say I'm a global political sociology, interested in social structure and social change within global changes and what that says about power and legitimacy.

The method for all of this, documentary testified, I was an action researcher, an adviser and researcher in the IANA process, I attended 23 meetings, 8 relevant governance bodies and followed the IANA tribe I like, I figured it was a global anthropology I suppose.  I did too many interviews.  The dominance power, it is my way of understanding this.  And the hegemony means world ordering through the trans world regulation, notice for a second here, this is legitimacy in an association logical sense, not in a normative sense, I'm not making normative judgments on whether the regime is good or not in my academic view but asking how is it that the people involved perceive and believe that the regime is worthy of their positive endorsement and they see it is being legitimate in their eyes.  I come to on the conclusion that the hegemony which operates and allows a global Internet Governance to operate is complex, it has different forces, multiple forces rather than a single site.  On one hand it comes from State and particularly a dominant state of the United States government and we don't see a transfer to any other particular State like China through the IANA transition.  At the same time I say it is not rested in the State, but also rested in the network and by MSE ‑‑ I mean, the multistakeholder community.

There is a dominant legitimate governance through the multistakeholder community as well.  Those two actors, the multistakeholder community and the U.S. government together in a mutually enforcing way created a lot of conditions for a successful transition but at the same time that transition had to conform to a material structure, a deeper structure of information and communication capital and as well as conform to a number of different multiple discourses which goes a bit in some of the directions that Aaron talked about before.  I'm saying it is those four things coming together that created that hegemony rather than saying it is the hegemony of the U.S. State or capitalism or something, that's too simple in my view.

None of those four forces was sufficient by itself to yield legitimated dominance, together they're a powerful hegemony formation, if you look at each one through the interviews, observations, each, the State domination of the U.S. government, the network domination of the multistakeholder community, the dominance of capital and the dominance of discourse, each of those were subjected to critiques.  It is not completely secure.

The legitimacy and the efforts of legitimacy of the regime have on the whole remunerated in narrow circles and not out to a wider public.  To that extent I will say a bit later, you know, you could have this complex hegemony more fragile with the way that trade and finance have kept theirs narrow in a while and came out in public debates and found themselves to be under a lot of critique that they didn't expect, one could imagine a similar scenario with historical circumstances around Internet Governance too.  That's me trying to predict which is impossible.

On the U.S. side, yeah, the hegemonic force of the U.S. government, inasmuch as the U.S. controlled the loss of control, it largely set the terms and the timing and the conditions of the IANA hand‑over, tightly monitored and periodically intervened in the multistakeholder deliberations and undertook the final review and approval of the transition that others did not have.  In the post‑transition position, there still is ‑‑ there is a reduction of the U.S. power for sure, but there are still certain significant U.S. dominant areas. 

In the transition, most resistance was from the Brazil, Russia, India.  The headquarters in L.A., State of California law, staff is American, board is predominantly Euromerican, the maintenance agreement, 10 of the 13 root servers are in the U.S., so there is a lot of ‑‑ yeah.  I'm conscience, we have 15 minutes.  I'm halfway, you see, already!  Okay! 

What I want to say, the strong U.S. government role, it was also hegemonic in the sense of it being endorsed, positively endorsed, welcomed, underwritten, positively taken.  It wasn't seen as dictatorship or something of that kind.  In that sense it has that legitimate quality that is found in hegemony.  At the same time, hegemony was fragile in that if you scratch the surface the U.S. government was pushed to do the IANA if not announcing it when it did, they would be in trouble in the months and years to come.  It is also a ‑‑ a lot of people went along with the U.S. government leadership because they had feelings about they had to be careful about the U.S. domestic regime and domestic situation so it wasn't a positive endorsement.  Hegemony means positive legitimacy and in this case it was pragmatic, we have to deal with the situation that is this and it wasn't quite so strong.

Basically no.

The network of the multistakeholder community, they're an elite network with academic, business, technical sectors from across the globe, they came together and actually largely constructed the post transition IANA regime.  I would say that the IANA transition has been very important for the consolidation of that global elite network.  Some of its provisions, significantly departed from the U.S. government expectations and preferences, for example, around accountability.  Those who may say that the multistakeholder community somehow is subordinate to or an actor for the U.S. government continuing dominance, I don't think that washes empirically.

Again, that involvement of the multistakeholder community, hegemonic, widely embraced by the elites themselves as a global authority in global Internet Governance, fragile though because ‑‑ one heard this throughout to the IANA transition, major questions asked about the accessibility, diversity, accountability of that multistakeholder community.  They have answered the issues on accessibility, diversity, accountability for their own ‑‑ to its own requirements quite well, whether it again is able to sustain those arguments about the accessibility, diversity, accountability in the wider public is not clear and untested.

I'm just going to skip over that and say that ‑‑ yeah.  I think if you look at the two forces, the U.S. government on one side, the multistakeholder community on the other side, together a lot of mutually reinforcing possibilities to set rules and to set rules in ways that the global public if one can speak of such things would accept.  At the same time, I think there had to be an alignment of certain deeper structural forces and one is the predominance of information and communication capital meaning that the regime should serve an accumulation, a surplus communication regime around the Internet, the early Internet names, numbers, protocols, they were not subjects of corporate leadership, they became so over the 1990s and into the 2000s largely through the ICANN regime and the IANA transition was not a transition away from that modification of the Internet infrastructures, virtual infrastructure.  So those rules that came out of the IANA transition which would reproduce and continue that dominance of a capitalist frame were immediately accepted and anything spoken, deviating from that would be ruled as being out of order.  I think again we see that in the IANA transition, corporate sponsorship of the main organizations, ICANN's accumulation paid for the transaction process, all of the money, into the meetings, it was out of the ICANN profits, you cannot be surprised that something that's being funded by accumulation actually then conforms to accumulation as well.

I have no run ‑‑ running out of time.  I'll go and say ‑‑ well, what's interesting, you don't see in the text of any of the documents that come out of the IANA transition, you don't see the words capitalism, others, but they're the unspoken sub text.  Again, hegemonic, this is not something that people are complaining about, they're not against it.  They are positively thinking that this is the Right ‑‑ a good way to run the global Internet infrastructure.  It is hegemonic, it is legitimate, not opposed.  It is taken as the way that things are best done.  It is done partly because there are also discourses which have underpinned all of this.  It is interesting to see how certain phrases and certain words and certain language has given a legitimate veneer to the transitions as well, security, stability, resilience, maybe it is ‑‑ I'm not ‑‑ I'm not sure ‑‑ in any case, this phrase appears 72 times in the final document for the transition.  No one ever defines what it means.  But it is clearly a comfortable phrase that people feel like, okay, the regime is giving us stability, security, resilience, it must be a good thing.  It is interesting to see that everyone just keeps repeating that phrase and is happy about it.  I remember one security specialist at one point in a meeting said we don't actually know what this means.  It was kind of interesting.

I mean, discourse of market efficiency as well, again, built in to even the bylaws of the new regime, interesting, multistakeholderism itself is legitimating, it sounds cozy, democratic, everybody is there, everyone has a voice, of course we can have critical examinations about who actually gets voice and so on, for the purposes of the legitimate sizing exercise, the multistakeholder discourse is well.  Accountability, it is displacing the discourse of democracy, everyone talks about accountability, no one talks about democracy anymore.  Accountability serves a diplomacy‑like function it would seem so that helps people along.  Public interests makes people very cozy ‑‑ again, not something that everyone is struggling to define what public interest actually means, let alone global public interest.  That discourse, it is all over the place and makes everyone feel like they're on the right track.

Human Rights, interesting.  You know, discourse has no place in the global Internet Governance.  Five years ago as is the Constitution of the private governance in the post IANA transition and there is a need for Human Rights suddenly.  That's interesting.  There was structures together with the material structures together with the U.S. government sponsorship and the multistakeholder arrangements, you put the four together and you have complex hegemony.  Again, it is hegemony in which none of the elements singularly is sufficient but together they have a strong combination.  Each of those four elements has critiques coming at it.  Each of them are on the narrow elite base. 

To that extent, I think that the IANA transition is probably not the last transition in global Internet Governance, and we have no idea which way it will go which is what complexity is about.  I don't think history will standstill now that we have reached 2016. 

Thank you. 

>> MILTON MUELLER: I'm sure there will be a lot of questions about this paper.  I'm going to ask one of them.  I think we'll get both presentations out of the way, and then we'll have maybe a broader discussion of the ICANN regime that can cross both papers.

Now I present to you Mark Datysgeld from Brazil.  He's a younger scholar, and he is talking about ICANN and the role of governance in ICANN.

>> MARK DATYSGELD: Good morning, all.

Thank you, Professor, for the introduction.  It is a great pleasure to follow‑up on this presentation as I think we'll be able to establish some dialogue.

What I'm talking about is the structures of power in Internet Governance, how it was formed.  In that sense I look particularly at the State actor. 

My background is international relations.  What I went out of my way to explore is the power contained in the Internet Governance label that I felt we needed to unpack a little.  What qualifies leading stakeholders as legitimate?  This is a keyword for me, legitimacy.  And how does digital space, how it was seized by the actors as in how did they occupy the space that doesn't exist in a practical sense, and in the same way that you occupy a plot of land, it is a conceptual space.

I went back to the origins.  And when you look at it, the consideration between North America and Western Europe reflects very much what we saw in the telegraphic era, the same structure and the same kind of leadership that's informed that system and gave those actors the advantages over others.  And this is the same case with the cycle that's developed in France.  In that sense, the early norms that were established in the system were by academics from the global north with technical expertise and who were more or less acting under equal footing because they were pretty much researchers.  We do have a standout, which is John Pestle, operator of the first DNS roots, editor of the RFC, he emerges as a figure, very important, but what I would like to give some emphasis is that this is not multistakeholder in my view.  In one way or another everyone was affiliated with government agencies.  Even though it was mostly academic, basically academically, they all were connected to a government which I think doesn't yet characterize what we could call multistakeholder.  What was behind those people, so the RFC ethos was built on top, according to Markoff of the culture movement idea.  It is collaborative, becoming universal, for those not in contact with RFCs, they are how Internet rules to say or structures are established but they are requests for comments so you don't just sit on an idea, you put it up for comments and I found it interesting that this actor would make this connection.

In a sense, we can see this progressing into something very real as what was developed under the community under all of the premises won over the ITU and the ISO's motto of OSI and IBMs and Digitos which are not much talked about but they were with this.

In this sense, the community was striving, the logic, the strategy, it was working because it is not exactly every day that you see a community model trumping an ITU or an ISO model.  It was something that was generating the kind of results they were expecting.

Eventually, when things became more commercial in the Internet, ISOC made a push, an attempt to take over the root of the Internet, and this is reflecting global governance.  It has a '90s feel to me.  Our global neighborhood, those ideas of unity, feeling very much like that.  They built stakeholders around them from the United Nations, different companies, not the U.S. governments, it only had one representative, but they had built a force and attempted to take over.  The thing is, this is where State power is shown, the U.S. didn't give it to ISOC and that was the end of it.  When we think of legitimacy and power, we have to keep in mind no matter how ‑‑ it is still a State, it will act as a State.  This is something that was shown to me clearly here.  

In 1998, ICANN was granted stewardship over other functions that are more or less controlled DNS or functions, and here you can see that governments aligned with industry jumped the community.  And to me, I went deep into seeing what it was that ICANN had different as a result of that.  What was it that ICANN brought to the table?  And the two authors, they had a definition that never left my mind all through my Master's that ICANN had a capacity of International Policy and implementation through gatekeeping, and I really like this term, gatekeeping.  It is what ICANN does.

To translate this, I termed the ‑‑ it was a way for me to come back to this idea so kind of compiling that, what I mean is that norms established within the ICANN community has a direct effect on the Internet as a whole by means of the DNS.  Even if the actor does not want to take part in the regime, it has to.  That's very different from how the U.N. works and any other kind of global agreement that we understand, because fundamentally it doesn't matter how much the U.N. tries to enforce something, if the country doesn't want to, it just doesn't want to.  However, if you're dealing with ICANN that runs the root server that has authority, that is recognized as pretty much the only legitimate one, there are alternative DNS roots, of course, but they don't see much use, if the actor wants to be a part of the network, it has to at least accept the norm.  It doesn't have to take it in.  It needs to block it on a national level.  This is interesting, by the fourth, the norm, it takes fact.  You have to avoid it in the sovereignty.  If you don't want that rule, you have to block it.  That's a form of engaging with the norm no matter what you have to acknowledge that.  This, to me, is comparable to what governments or institutions do, or only that ICANN is not government sponsored fundamentally.  It still has governments, but it is largely industry led and it is in this. 

How does it do that?  Professor Miller would say it is by ruling the root.  I agree.  I think behind the root, they have this Cascade of contracts that's kind of never ending.  There is a steered system from register to registries to ‑‑ and passing by resellers and resellers of the resellers and it all ties back into the U.S. and into California law and everybody is kind of tied p it is hard to sneak away from that.  You can but you won't be in the web.  You can do it ‑‑ you can do a lot of places.

What I can manage to do in my personal opinion, it is to mediate the disputes over the domain names, I think it does that with certain efficiency and it brings relevant actors from all actors to participate in the process and more importantly, steer the focus of the industry and that's something people don't discuss a lot, but an item we only talk about domain names then we do because of ICANN, they're informing the types of discussions we're having on domain names and that's very interesting.  There is a classic example, most of you would know about it, but when they allowed .xxx for pornographic or adult content, they are acknowledging that kind of material should be on the Internet, it has a place.  If your government is against that, it has you block it on a national level.  On a global level, it is allowed.  That's ‑‑ even though it says it doesn't deal with content, that's a very clear way of dealing with content.

I have done a lot of field research, tried to engage with other stakeholders, multistakeholders, and these are only my top examples but I tried to engage with a lot of them.  Indulge me.  On the ISO, they said my University needed to be government sponsored for me to be able to watch any meeting.  I was denied.

The FIFA, you know, football for those of you that like it had, you need to be indicated by a government to be there, so denied.

This is considered along with ICANN some of the best models of multistakeholder governance, you can participate as an individual.  You have to be an NGO of some sort of trade association, denied again.

I went to another six, seven that I didn't have space to put here, all denied.

ICANN, ITF, IGF, you can just get in and join the discussion.  That's what I think is different.  That's something that kind of deals a little bit of stability a bit in a good way.  It takes some of the constants from the process, an actor can just walk in.  From a perspective of how governments are used to dialing with situations, they usually go to an international forum and they can reach an agreement.  If the executive powers agree to something that's all good because it doesn't matter that they agreed.  At the end of the day, it is the country that will turn that into a law, the legislation.  What is done outside of the country internationally, it doesn't have real impact.

When you do that, in Internet Governance, a conclusion is reached, suddenly that conclusion ‑‑ that norm becomes real like I was saying.  That was very different for ‑‑ when you think about States.

Here is where this begins with the WSIS, a lot of what I read, it was that the sentiment that the United States and ICANN controlled all of IG, and the way you think about it, it is a bit different from other researchers that I think governments rush to seize content before anybody else, particularly ICANN, and then do a very State‑like thing, making the IGF not have a tangible goal, not having deliverables, not having a set of anything that can really be ‑‑ they can be measured against.  Which is the whole point of the struggle for power which I listed here. 

Very briefly, that John Pestle was considered a very strong community leader ‑‑ and if you're on ISOC's website, there is a page telling all about the list of condolences given at the time of his death there were over 300 entries from people from the Internet sector.  He was a very strong force and cannot be ignored only because he's a single actor.  Even when it was moved to the private sector, they kept him as policy head and ISOC formed around him and then ICANN, he was to be the first president before his untimely death.  You know, at the same time, the U.S. government never saw him, he was a figure, very active, but the U.S. government, they always held the control.

What I bring you to, there were three types of legitimate rule, traditional authority, charismatic authority.  And in summary what I mean to say about this is that while ISOC, why it made a push for Internet Governance to control the roots, it was relying on traditional authority, that the engineers, they were the builders, but they didn't have the legal authority to back that which is my point about the U.S. owning it.  At the same time, when ICANN was built, you first rely on Pestle to giving the legitimacy, when he dies suddenly you start needing the charismatic authority which is when significance like Vint Cerf started to surf more other than reading about it during the time, the number of interviews, engaging with the media went up substantially and then ICANN was born.  The governments start off very small at ICANN, very few governments and even talking to the Chairs, the former Chair, the current Chair of the GAC, they did not understand the process they had a small closed off meeting that didn't engage with the community and only in 2016 did they have the first completely open meeting.  That is very far away from, you know, where they are ‑‑ where the constituencies were.  Yes.  Then they started having the small problems, the domain names which you have heard about them.

Just to finish, engaging with some of the other talks that we had, ICANN attempted to appease Russia and China.  But just as this past week, Russia announced a rooted server ‑‑ in case you're not in tune with that news, watch out for that.  China, we know about in process of slowly moving away from the roots and what I have been hearing about is about a DNS blockchain, does that threaten ICANN?  Possibly.  The blockchain is meant to keep stuff.

>> MILTON MUELLER: We have to stop.

>> MARK DATYSGELD: Thank you very much.

>> MILTON MUELLER: I have a quick question for you.

In the abstract proposal, you said you were going to study two major developments, you were going to do the role of the GAC and the IANA transition and the role of the GAC in the it Geo names controversy.  I wonder what happened to those themes?  They would have fit in very well with the other paper and that was sort of what your paper was supposed to be about.  Can you tell me what happened to them?

>> MARK DATYSGELD: I did quantitative analysis of the GAC meetings and came to the ‑‑ I tried to ‑‑ tried to establish what actors were active and what actors were leading the setting of the thematics and the conclusion I came to was that very few States actually intervened in the process.  It is under 15 States that actually do the talking out of over 100 something actors.

To that end, I thought there was a need to maybe broaden my assumption about how the GAC acts and rather look at how they're being ‑‑ how they're inserted within the context because there has to be a reason for so few actors to actually speak out and particularly in the IANA transition, it focused around 8, 9 States ‑‑

>> MILTON MUELLER: It would be nice to see that data.  Nobody has actually documented that as far as I know.

>> MARK DATYSGELD: I will include it on the final paper.  I just thought it was information for the presentation.  On the paper I can.

>> MILTON MUELLER: We better move on now.

We have these two papers.  I will open it up to questions now before we move on to the next panel.

>> JONATHAN ZOOK:  My question is for Jan. 

I did see at the outset that you were an academic that covers a lot of sins ‑‑

>> MILTON MUELLER: Concede.

>> JONATHAN ZOOK:  Exactly.  That's the question.

There was a lot of summary about how it represents the governance, the Internet Governance represented hegemony but I guess what I feel was missing was why we should care about that?  Why does that matter?

>> MILTON MUELLER: A good question.

>> JAN AARTE SCHOLTE: When I was talking about the beginning, I said there was different rationalities.  There is the rationality of me as part of the policy process and then it is about problem solving and figuring out exactly how do we get from A to B and sort out this conflict, that conflict and the academic rationality, it is a different one.  It is a different question in this case.  It says, okay, it is also a relevant question but in a deeper, wider sense.  How do we get global governance?  Yeah.  When you're on the day to day working with these things, it is kind of where you take that for granted.  It is the academic's job in a way to sort of step back, look at the wider historical processes and say how is it that we are where we are?  How can this be? 

Think of it 50 years ago if you said a private multistakeholder arrangement will set the rules for the basic global Internet infrastructure, people would have said you're crazy, how can that be?  Yet, within a few decades we're in a position where that's become how global governance works in some areas.  The academic is asking how did that happen?  How is that possible?  Again, for you, trying to get from one Intellectual Property issue to the next, it is not the issue of the day.  For an academic and citizens in all of us I suppose, there is a question of how does this happen and for me that's why it is interesting in that regard.  It is not the sort of thing I would say in the CCWG, but it is what I would say ‑‑

>> MILTON MUELLER: The question is what do we know more of that you attached the label hegemony to this process?  What's that tell us, how does that guide our actions and understanding and does it?  It is also talking about capital ‑‑

>> JAN AARTE SCHOLTE: No.  No.  No.  Absolutely not.

>> AUDIENCE: How is it possible not to apply to that to a global Internet of structure, to say something is complex, you leave room for any group of actors to get together to be powerful enough for a global regime of some sort.  It is not, again ‑‑ it is ‑‑ I don't know what the ‑‑

>> MILTON MUELLER: Let's let him answer.

>> JAN AARTE SCHOLTE: The implication is, if you look at the theory, again, this is not so interesting necessarily for you.  In the academic theory ‑‑ as I say, I'm fulfilling my academic role here.  My academic role is to say look, the models actually goes to Milton's point exactly, notions of hegemonic is used in academic, they're usually simple.  They either say hegemony is a dominant State, it is the British State, American State, the question is China, what State in the future.  That's one way of thinking about hegemony.  Another Marxist way is to say it is about legitimatizing the rule.  Then there are other draconian arguments talking about the governmentality of different languages and discourses and there are liberal theories that that you can about the elite networks and what I have done contrary, yes, those of you that have a bone to pick with one of the other of the theories say that I'm representing that theory, the point of complexity in this case, no, it is not.  The point is, rather than saying that we have to pick between one theory or another, actually you can pick out something that actually resonates from the different ones and bring ‑‑ mold them together and you have a picture of what's actually more sustainably going on.

>> MILTON MUELLER: That's a good answer.

I have to push on here.  There was a question back there.  Yes.

>> AUDIENCE: (Off microphone).

>> MARK DATYSGELD: Yes.  This is not ‑‑ it is a 62‑page paper on the moment and it is on its way to a book, apologies when it is all crushed.  I'm happy and would be very happy if anyone has the craziness to actually read the whole thing to give me feedback, I would be so much happy!  There is a lot of detail on the sort of questions you're asking in the paper.

In brief, I would ‑‑ yes.  There are key hierarchies but I would say rather than, again, the hierarchies for me, they're complex, it is easy to say it is U.S.‑dominated.  That's far too simplistic, there are Geo political, social hierarchies, cultural hierarchies, style of talk, language, so on, all are coming together in complex combinations.  Some people want, again ‑‑ people want easy answers, simple construction so they say U.S. dominance making it easier.  I don't think it works that way.

I think there's really ‑‑ if you look at the Chairs for example of the various transition Committees, there is only one, two Americans, the rest are from elsewhere.  That it is U.S.‑led, U.S.‑State sponsored from the beginning, yes.  That's got buy‑in across, that's the hegemonic part of it.  People are willing, happily going along with it.  I'm not making a moral judgment on it whether it is good or not, I'm recording that this is how the power and legitimacy is working.  

>> MILTON MUELLER: The Chair of the Steering Committee of GigaNet signaled me.  I better cut this off or something bad will happen.

>> (Off microphone).

>> MILTON MUELLER: That means we'll have time for the next panel.

I don't think anybody would be crazy to actually read Jan's paper.  You should read the whole paper.  You should read all the papers that are actually submitted.

With that, I thank the speakers.  We'll move on.

Rene and Amanda, are you here? 

 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay, thank you, everyone.  We are going to resume our next panel, which is entitled ‑‑ just give people a moment to settle back down.  Just to reintroduce myself, I'm Marianne Franklin, and I'm the chair of the GigaNet Steering Committee.  We have two panelists.  Personal data is the title of the panel.  They have agreed very kindly to keep their presentation to 12 minutes so that there's time more time for question and answers.  We have a very lively audience.  So they will be able to bring up details from their paper that they've had to maybe miss out on question and answer.  We do need to break punctually for lunch.  If you did not register in time, I'm afraid you'll have to find other arrangements.  There are also posters outside because we have a number of papers that have agreed to give their papers as opposed to session.  So thank you very much for joining them.  And I've just lost the information on the screen.  So has someone got the program for me?  Okay.  No, you're first up. 

>> The titles of mine are under the blue ‑‑

   >> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay. 

   >> You can drag it down. 

   >> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: All right.  It's all right.  Okay.  I've found it.  All right.  So first of all, we have Rene Mahieu, and his paper is "creating an evidence base for assessing the effectiveness of the right of access for transparency and user control."   I'll give you the floor and I'll signal when he is halfway and after that I'll try and not be too rude.  Thank you so much, Rene. 

   >> RENE MAHIEU: Thank you so much for the introduction.  As you can see on the first slide, the title of the paper changed while writing it which happens sometimes.  It's now called collectively accessing the right of access, individual effort and societal effect.  And actually, in some sense that's also the conclusion of our paper. 

Our paper is about the right of access, which is subject rights in relation to, like, data governance, specifically important in the European context where the general data protection regulation is going to be introduced or is going to come into force next year.  And one of the central rights for citizens in that law is the access right, which gives citizens and consumers the right to ask any organization what kind of data or what ‑‑ not only what kind of data but what data is being collected on them, how it is collected, so where from, why it is collected, and with whom it's shared.  And the logic of that is that it should lead to transparency and accountability and that individuals will be empowered by that and that in the end, that will lead to trust in the system and therefore people will keep using the system often Internet‑based systems in which a lot of personal data is being used. 

And we wanted to ask, like, does this idea, this right of access, which on paper is pretty simple and pretty clear, does it actually work in practice?  So in order to address that question, we started, like, some kind of what you would call, as was said before, like an action research.  We started by getting participants, like citizens, people, asked them to attend these access requests and then to share what the responses are with us, with a team of researchers.  So in such a way not to just see, like, how does this function in the law or on paper, but how does it, like, function in you actually use it? 

So for this pilot study that we did we had seven participants, and we sent over hundreds of access requests.  And then we collected the answers inasfar as there were answered and went according to the law, and we made a, like, subjective classification because as this rule or this law is meant to empower citizens, we thought that one of the ways that you can look at it, you have to actually interact with these citizens and ask, like, okay, what effect does this have on you with this reply, do you actually feel empowered?  Does this lead to transparency? 

So I'm going to go over a few, like, very high‑level, like, things that represent, like, the whole ‑‑ like the whole 100‑plus that we sent, and I'm going to give some examples to give you an idea of some of the kind of problems that you run into. 

So here in the first graph, how long did it take to respond?  So we sent an access request, and how long does it take to get an answer back?  And it's interesting, like, this first research they did analysis and in the Dutch law, it says that within 30 days, organizations have to give, like, a final response.  And you see that, like, on average, actually, the average response time was indeed 30 days.  But in many cases, it was much longer.  And often we had to send multiple, like, reminders, like, hey, we sent this access request.  Like can you please respond to it?  And in many cases, like, we had a system where in the first reminder, we just said, hey, this is the right.  According to this right, you have to answer in 30 days, so could you please still answer?  And if in two weeks later no answer was given, we would say, hey, this is a legal right.  And if you don't answer, we could go to court with this.  So can you please answer and often answers would come in then. 

So we looked also at, like, who is answering these access requests.  Because in many of the organizations, it's often unclear, like, who is responsible, like, how is data governance functioning found within the organization to actually use data?  And there is a huge diversity.  Like you get answers that are sent by legal departments which often have very often, on average, very legalistic terms and very little data.  So they say a lot in legal terms about how they use data, but the actual data that is being used is not shown.  Sometimes it's sent by technical departments.  Very often just like customer service.  So there's a huge diversity in that. 

As an example of what you can see when sending such a request, this is a huge table that we actually received from one of the participants who is also a researcher who sends an access request through the data held.  What is being received here is a full list ‑‑ well, we don't know if it's full, but it's claimed to be a full list of all the different data systems that the university has that contains some kind of personal data.  So it doesn't actually give the data, but at least it gives, like, a full overview of the systems that use data, the types of data that's in those systems and the legal basis on which the data is being collected. 

And in the interview that we held with this participant, it was seen as a very positive experience.  Why?  Because on top of getting this rather extensive answer, they contacted the person individually, asked saying, we spent quite some time in making this answer, but if you have any more questions, you can contact us and we are willing to give you more detail.  So that was really like an open ‑‑ some kind of way answering that felt transparent. 

This is another example.  This is a letter sent by Amsterdam Airport upon an access request.  And basically what it's saying is well, we looked in our systems.  We don't have any data on this participant.  And then it says well, on the airport, there are actually different functions like there is the police also.  So maybe a police would maybe have some data on you, or the baggage handlers which is a separate company, so they might have some data on you, but we don't have any. 

The way it's written, it seems, like, very plausible or at least well written and serious answer.  But then what we figured out by sending five different requests by five different people and also with different content in the letter, so in general, we just send out a letter saying this is ‑‑ please give us all the data that you have, but in some cases, there was a question asked, like I took this particular flight.  Do you have any information related to that particular flight?  Or if Wi‑Fi scanning in the airports, Wi‑Fi tracking, so one person said I was in the airport on that day.  And this is my phone.  Do you have data related to that?  And interesting thing that we found out is that the exact same letter, without making any reference to the particular question asked by the individual participants was being sent. 

So then by comparing these letters, if you only have one of these letters, it seemed like very good and transparent answers, when you start to compare that, it starts to show they're different.  Then in the telecommunications sector, on average, it was really dismal.  Many telcos just didn't answer at all.  Some replied with an answer like, please look at our privacy policy.  While in the privacy policy, it's explained that you have the rights to demand access. 

Sometimes people from customer service called and said, yeah, if we start with doing this, where does it end, you know?  While it's a legal right.  So very big difference there.  How much time?  Two minutes.  Okay, one less example. 

Then we are going to ‑‑ like the way that participants reflected upon this when asked.  Like many things like, okay, these organizations let you walk in circles, you'd never get anywhere.  Or it feels like you are in some kind of a black box.  And then especially the last is actually interesting.  Sorry.  That while, on average, there was quite some negativity of, like, how does it function to get transparency, people did feel some type of empowerment, and that was particularly like in combination with being part of, like, a group that is sending these requests and in relation that if you do that normally as an individual and you would kind of get a closed door, you might not know what to do and just move on with whatever you were doing.  But when it's kind of made into a societal or a group endeavor, then people feel much more emboldened to actually say no, no, no, this is my right.  Or I have a colleague who knows something about this.  I know what I can demand, so people start to actually also demand more. 

So, yeah.  To, I think, conclude, there is this problem with the transparency or with the idea that if you just give people right of access, then they can get transparency about their data.  But through our research, we also found that there's, like, a way forward.  And a comparison to the Freedom of Information Act rights really came up.  Like a Freedom of Information right in principle, every individual could use.  You can ask of your government, like, what kind of ‑‑ what is going on there, make what's happening transparent, and there is already a lot of research in that showing that actually getting openness from government is often very hard.  But you have a whole ecology of transparency.  You have simple society organizations.  You have people from the media.  You have people who are kind of become specialized in using those rights.  And then around that, you get, like, public strength.  You get a kind of rebalancing of powers.  So although it seems that if you look at the letter of the law, this kind of collective use of the right of access was not maybe expressly intent.  It is a possibility of the law, and you also see that it's being used that way a lot.  So there are some digital rights organizations, for example, across Europe who have already done, like, collective actions and also have attained some results.  Results meaning that, like, slowly some organizations or companies who started with being very close about their data practices under the pressure of being, like, publicly questioned about that started to open up. 

Can I have one minute still?  Okay.  Because this is kind of a pilot study, we did now all kinds of requests by hand.  But we are building a digital platform, and it's called datarights.me where basically citizens can, in order to send access requests and there are requests also to send ‑‑ or to share the responses they get and their interpretations of that with researchers so that we can get a much broader base for seeing if these rights can be, like, kind of emboldened and also to see if by making that more public also might have an effect on organizations because if they know that they are also being watched, that might have an effect on their behavior. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks very much.  Thank you.  Thank you, Rene, for keeping the time.  I'd like to give the floor to Amanda Espineira on "sovereignty over personal data in Brazil."   Just note here, sovereignty ‑‑

[ No audio ]

>> Yes.  One big change is that in the DDPR, because as an important background information, like this right of access already exists in the current, obviously because we couldn't have done this research, already exists in the current legal framework.  Next year the DDPR is going into effect.  And there, for example, the data protection authorities have a much broader right to impose penalties on noncompliant organizations.  So we will have to see in practice if that actually will lead to many more fines or regulatory actions.  But what you're seeing now, at least, is that a lot of organizations are now very active in improving their own, like, data practices.  And there was actually one of the very positive parts also of this research.  We also had quite many participants who were actually contacted by the organizations who themselves said, like, okay ‑‑ well, they, of course, didn't really use this word, but they kind of said, okay, our data governance inside is a mess.  But because of the DDPR coming, we're now, like ‑‑ we're now trying to get it up to standards.  And actually, your access request is kind of helpful measure to see if we can actually now answer in a good way.  So, yeah, there is that effect. 

And also, I think what you see is a lot of civil society organizations are, again, putting much more effort, like, focus on it which, again, there is lots more attention in the media and that, again, also has an effect on actual practices. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you.  One more question.  Yes. 

>> It's more of a comment than question.  Are you thinking about comparing the different national frameworks?  That's my first question.  Sometimes you access some information and it could be good to look at the reason why they refused.  I know in Canada, compromised competitive advantage of a company (?). 

>> RENE MAHIEU: Yeah, two great questions.  First are we going to compare different frameworks?  Well, for sure the idea is to make this into a research with at least, like, somewhere between 100 and 500 participants.  And have them across Europe.  Of course, across Europe, the legal framework is fundamentally from next year the same.  But still, for example, vigilance, how strong rules are actually enforced can differ among countries and might already be historical cultural difference among countries.  So we are going to do those comparisons.  Also in the current research, we compared different sectors like, for example, utilities or telcos.  But I didn't focus too much on that because the amount of access requests at this moment is so small with 100 that you cannot really make any statistically significant claims about that, but we definitely want to do that. 

And your second question, sorry, on the ‑‑

>> Rationale. 

>> RENE MAHIEU: Yeah.  The interesting thing is no organization, zero organizations, refused.  Like they just didn't.  If they didn't, they just didn't.  They just blank‑out ignored.  No one ‑‑ we didn't get any letters saying, like, hey, you asked for this, but you cannot get that.  You can only get this, or there is this regulation stopping us from giving you.  There were many cases in which it was ‑‑ and that's one of the fundamental problems kind of if you are not getting anything, or if you're only getting a part but you believe that there is more or you have ‑‑ you basically need to have the answer of this, or you're using this law to get access to what you already have to know to know if you get a full reply.  It's really kind of circular.  And that is actually something that I believe can be broken or at least partially broken, this cycle, by getting people together to basically increase the knowledge base on which you do those requests. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks so much.  We will hopefully have some time ‑‑

[ No audio ]

>> AMANDA NUNES LOPES ESPINEIRA LEMOS: Okay.  Thanks very much.  Sorry for this technical problem.  Morning.  I'm Amanda.  I'm from Brazil.  And also my colleague that will write with me has a Ph.D.  starting research about our academic, and we are going to talk about sovereign in personal data.  So like a study case, what's happening in Brazil for that.  So that doesn't work.  Our research ‑‑ yeah.  Okay.  Our research questions that started our investigation was what's ‑‑ yeah, thank you ‑‑ what sovereign and also this is applied to personal data protection, how the Internet affects that.  Does the privacy platform the sovereignty our rights involving personal data, and how does Brazil regulate that protection?  We know we have a lot of Brazilians that do not have a framework, a model, of that yet. 

We talk about views and a context from law and federal statutes also.  An exception, for example, for communication, and also how do the procedures of communication connected in courts.  So the judiciary analysis from this case.  Well, the objective is to discuss what sovereignty over our personal data.  The terms of use and the privacy policy from the corporation and what's applicable is higher or not than Brazilians sovereign.  So that's the question for our paper. 

So we made a case study and also a bibliography.  In the end in the first section, we share our paper in four parts.  We have a short comparative analysis from the regulatory data protection models in other countries.  And showing what Brazil can do for that.  The first one, we have ‑‑ we start from this premise that the definition from privacy diversify according to the context that it inserts.  So in this section, we discuss about regulations, about legislative proposed bills and of data protection and also exceptions from Brazilian jurisdiction. 

So we have the Internet framework and also another institute that talks about access to information.  We have degrees from this regulation, but we don't have yet ‑‑ well, not a bill and not a model defined from data protection.  We have discussions since 2009, a lot of time, and we didn't have something concrete, some results yet.  This is the discussion from the National Congress.  Here (?) For a lot of civil society organizations like our data.  So Freedom Protection and also regulation.  So the other, talking about initiative from civil society, we have also Internet representance here and also we have, like, a library or online time line talking about the blocking case from Brazil that's also another initiative that we use data from this paper. 

In the second one, we have procedures, and we get in the blocking case.  And we talk also from the constitution actions.  We have four cases result and the constitutional action, questions from the international framework device that talk about privacy and also blocks.  So our conclusion is this part (?) Well, how protected is attribute from government or not?  That's our ‑‑ well, not conclusive, but we think that sometimes the third part that they don't ‑‑ the judiciary don't know how to entertain that.  We have technical limits.  So according to the governance design, thinks about the Internet.  The technicals and the infrastructure analysis and view.  We have a lot of, like, cryptography and encryptation and a lot of issues that need to be considered for the decision from the judge's decision. 

So here in Brazil ‑‑ there in Brazil, we had the public speech in the constitutional actions that I told.  And they talked about those questions that need to be understood.  While we don't have a conclusion from this judgment from this constitutional action, we need to talk about that in the academy and other spaces and also here in IGF. 

We talked about another relevant case.  But Brazilian case also in perspective.  To understand more, models of privacy, especially European and also United States, understand how sovereign conflict between government and privacy corporations can be solved.  And also the importance of data protection could be in this context ‑‑ well, could be talked about that.  And we have a lot of global examples how to establish, for example, data control cryptography could be understand.  We don't have a perfect conclusion, but we find that building hypothesis for our work (?) Master and ‑‑ well, before.  And also, we have that sovereign may acknowledge the Brazilian case when it comes to issue involving online data collection mainly due to the ways that is the issue.  And the courts (?) Always involving criminal investigations.  But they don't have legal statutes.  They don't make interpretation, for example.  And it's not possible to (?) And also the responsibility for an application keep that separate could be talked and it's limited because we don't have a privacy protection issue concluded. 

So this case shows the online data access rule of law.  And (?) Tradeoff.  We couldn't make this case the discussion about privacy regulation.  So the challenge for this one, prevent conflict situations.  We had building something with principles and parts of that one, principles important but it depends on the case, I think so.  So that's all.  Thank you very much for the opportunity and the attention. 

[ Applause ]

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks, everyone.  We have a few minutes for questions.  I just want to remind us all that we all work in universities.  And those of us working in the current union which still includes the UK will be subject to the GDPR.  So just think about all that information that flies across your e‑mails, students, mitigating circumstances, marks, those messages you write to your colleagues.  And I think we are an academic network, and I'd be very interested to hear any questions from the floor to our presenters about the implications of their work.  In Latin America which has a lot of world‑renowned universities about how data protection strikes me as the fox looking after the chicken coop, but that's just my view. 

So from the floor, we have one.  Any more?  Okay.  Please.  Could you state your name and affiliation just for the record.  Thank you. 

>> (?) Presentation and I think an area I'd certainly like to learn more about in terms of Brazil.  And my question is I guess the interaction between local Brazilian telecommunication companies and the globally operating ones.  And if you could talk, is there a commonality from your viewpoint?  Are we seeing distinctly different viewpoints in terms of privacy from Brazilian companies versus globally, especially U.S. operating companies? 

>> AMANDA NUNES LOPES ESPINEIRA LEMOS: Well, yeah.  This dialogue sometimes doesn't work.  We have some initiatives, for example, the ITU that talked about governance.  So this is the attention, I think, between the infrastructure and the telecommunications and talking about data.  So this public hearing speech I think is the objective for that one to hear a lot of stakeholders and try to build something in this case.  I don't know if I answered your question.  I think it's more ‑‑ well, what do you want to know more? 

>> I guess the bigger question is, with U.S. companies having so much influence on some of these laws, standards, policies, smaller countries, and I'm including Canada and Brazil, to what extent can we forge our own policies?  Or do we ‑‑ are we always kind of confronting the U.S.? 

>> AMANDA NUNES LOPES ESPINEIRA LEMOS: Yeah.  I think it's pretty difficult.  I think sometimes in Brazilian implementation for Facebook is one of the commercial things.  Concentrating on USA, I think that's the speech that works in this situation.  But I think it's important to build some importance for the users, terms of use and privacy policy in this case.  I think so. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thank you.  Any other questions?  Sovereignty.  Data?  Who's protecting what from whom?  Who has access to what by which means?  Should we care? 

>> So the data access rights, so they traded data access rights, and you're discovering that the law in some ways isn't being fully implemented.  Can you discuss ‑‑ it sounds like in order to implement or enforce the law, there has to be some surveillance or data gathering into whether the behavior of the people who are subject to the law, are they obeying the law or not?  And you're sort of just finding that their compliance with the law is questionable.  Is your research the possibility of feeding back to the legal process and therefore eliciting some law enforcement? 

>> AMANDA NUNES LOPES ESPINEIRA LEMOS: It's for him? 

>> It was for him, but it's open ‑‑ 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Both of you are free to answer.  

>> RENE MAHIEU: Yes, it definitely is.  And in multiple ways.  First of all, the access rights has two ways to kind of enforce or demand enforcement by the citizen.  One is a request can be made to the data protection authority to step in.  And although the data protection authority cannot do much more than kind of intervene which means that the data protection authority then will send a letter to that same organization saying hey, you really need to answer to this.  And secondly, a citizen can go to court through means that are relatively easy.  That's the lowest level of court.  You don't have to pay any fees.  You don't have to have a lawyer.  The boundary's made as low as possible. 

We did find that at least in this group of participants who are above average in, like, social class and education, the boundaries still even for them and even within this group to actually go and do that is really high.  So enforcement is not used.  That's one thing. 

And then on the other side, I think that there is really this ‑‑ the more information that is public and that you can refer to, the easier it becomes to actually litigate.  So, for example, there has been people from the Dutch base of freedom which is basically ‑‑ well, I think (?) They have done some access requests also and actually one of their members has actively gone to court for that.  For example, to one of the telcos to say we know from technical specifications that it's impossible that you do ‑‑ that you provide mobile telecommunication without actually tracking my location.  So I just demand insight in my location data.  The telcos said that they wouldn't.  They said they couldn't.  All kind of arguments for not giving that.  They went ‑‑ they went to court and kind of simply won because, I mean, there is really no ‑‑ yeah.  The law is simple.  So the data is there.  So it needs to be kind of given.  And what you see now is that for a second person then to request that kind of data, of course, because it's much easier to just refer to that case and say this has already been tried and won.  Our data, our research can also contribute to that especially when it's going to be extended. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Thanks.  Amanda, you wanted to comment? 

>> AMANDA NUNES LOPES ESPINEIRA LEMOS: No, that's okay. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: You sure? 

>> AMANDA NUNES LOPES ESPINEIRA LEMOS: Mm‑hmm. 

>> Yeah.  Sometimes the privacy rights advocates sort of operate in kind of an economic theory vacuum.  So they say this is a legal right.  It's very important.  We all agree with them.  But it's like the actual implementation of these rights has massive economic consequences.  So have you thought at all about, you know, suppose this right is fully recognized, fully exercised at scale.  What are the incentives of the people who hold not just the kind of data you're talking about like the mobile telecom operators, but everybody everywhere, schools, churches, every organization?  What are their economic incentives going to be in terms of how they store and handle data? 

>> RENE MAHIEU: That in and of itself I think is the topic of multiple thesis, but okay.  I can give it a shot. 

>> In your interactions. 

>> RENE MAHIEU: Based on my interactions and also based on a lot of talks.  I think one of the things is that we see a huge ‑‑ although we have agile turn and much faster and kind of more unit‑based software design, you use concentration and a huge kind of monopoly or oligopolies, and I think it's going to be the question of how these are going to react.  If standard components of software are going to be designed in such a way that it just includes a lot ‑‑ or designed with the logic in mind that this has to be possible, then that might have a lot of effect. 

But indeed the costs of that for any individual software project are extremely high and therefore this might potentially help or lead to more centralization in that sense.  And another thing that you also saw is that if you don't have the data, you don't have to give it.  Or at least the organizations seem to think in a certain way that if you just make all kinds of different units and you kind of legally separate them from each other, for example, the city government wants to be sharing data with the tax authority or the other way around.  And that can be done in two ways.  It can be done like the city government actually gives the data to the tax authority.  Or the city government just opens up a portal by which the tax authority can actually peek into that data but doesn't ever really transfer the data.  And that's still a bit of an open question.  You see now that organizations try to build systems in that way, that they actually never have data, but they look into external databases and use that as an argument to say, okay, we don't control the data.  And therefore we also have to provide access.  And I see ‑‑ I think that's really one way that it's being designed at this moment.  But it's legally very questionable if that actually will hold in court. 

I think that if you actually would make the argument, well, you're still in control of the data in the sense that your organization has the means of deciding under which terms and in what way you can access that data, you still control it, although it might not be on your server.  So I'm not sure if that will help.  And I understand this is very partial answer. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay, thanks very much.  Thank you.  I'd like to thank our two panelists one more time. 

[ Applause ]

We'll now turn to the important question of who is on the list.  Carolina, we need to get people's money on the list.  She has a little list.  Could you explain how you want to do this? 

>> If you're registered, you have paid and I'll give you a ticket.  If you haven't registered, it has your name there (?) But we don't have more than 30. 

>> MARIANNE FRANKLIN: Okay.  15.  So thanks, everyone.  We'll reconvene at 2:00 P.M.  And the poster sessions are just outside.  So please go and have a look.  Thank you. 

>> So just so you all know, the poster session is going on.  We welcome you to see it.  One of the posters will be in here.  It will be on a PowerPoint slide.  So you can come in here and see one of the posters.  Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, there will be a poster presentation here in this room.  You're all kindly invited to stay. 

(The session concluded at 12:30.)

 

>> Iran and cause their equipment to blow up.  So as users, so I say there's two broad categories of users.  There's persons, corporations, persons, and then there's states in international relations.  So just as there's two fundamental branches of politics, international and domestic politics.  There's these two classes of users.  And they'll both find themselves now in a state of nature.  Because they can do things to each other that they couldn't do before.  And they're wondering maybe we should have some rules.  Or is there anything wrong with me penetrating into Iran and messing up and now Iran is going to penetrate into Saudi Arabia which they did in Aramco.  I don't know if you know that story.  It's kind of a revenge.  They've toasted ‑‑ they wiped out ‑‑ they wiped clean every hard drive in all of Saudi Aramco, an entire mega corporation.  And it was seen as a bit of a pushback. 

     >> Okay.  I only knew about stocks. 

     >> Yeah, I actually went to Aramco and they talked about it.  I was, like, what are you talking about?  There's even a third way that actors are brought into new social relationships, and that is the community of service providers.  You know, the companies that make the Internet run are now all joined in a system. 

>> Yeah. 

>> So you have Internet exchange points, one ISP, another ISP.  But the technology demands that they figure out relationships.  We need some rules here.  We need the rules.  There ought to be a rule about how we exchange data.  Or we all share the space.  Well, who gets the addresses?  Who gets the domain names?  We need rules about this kind of stuff?  So everywhere you look, the technology has created ‑‑ people are running around saying we need some rules. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And you can identify three classes of ‑‑ it's person to person, we need rules, state to state, we need rules, and system operator to system operator, we need rules.  So you actually don't have one state of nature.  I would say three basic states of nature.  And you see that in the Internet.  It's playing out that there's I can, which is all about the systems operators.  There's international cybersecurity, which happens a little bit at the U.N. and, you know, I don't know if you know about the Talene manual and NATO's work. 

>> Yeah, it's more state to state. 

>> That's state to state.  And then there's the question of privacy. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And the answer is, that's a person‑to‑person issue, including corporations.  And it tends to be handled ‑‑ the question is, you know, who's going to make some of these laws.  But in any case, so you end up with multiple states of nature, different classes of actors being brought into context.  And I have three.  The systems operator, then users as persons and users as states. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And of these three types of classes of actors, there's two kinds of governance.  Governance of the ‑‑ have you ever heard people talk about governance of the Internet as opposed to Internet governance?  You have to have been in the field for a while to have heard this. 

>> Yeah.  But then ‑‑ I always get kind of confused. 

>> Because a lot of it will be confused.  The distinction is governance ‑‑ the governance of the Internet is you've got these companies making ‑‑ who run the Internet, and they need to be governed.  So those are your system operators, right?  So ‑‑ and then there's a different kind of governance which is people using the Internet need to be governed.  So one is you're governing the operations of the Internet.  And the other is you're governing how people use the Internet. 

>> Use the Internet, yeah. 

>> And that distinction ‑‑ so these are users. 

>> Yeah. 

>> So this is sort of Internet governance.  But these aren't users.  These are operators.  That's governance of the Internet. 

>> Oh. 

>> So even in everyday parlance, this distinction is kind of recognized.

     >> Yes, yeah. 

>> Well, damn, now I'm even being transcribed.  This is getting better and better.  In any case, you have this state of nature, there's not one, but there's three states of nature.  Three fundamental classes of people brought into conduct by the technology now having disputes.  And the state of nature predicts, proclaims that the state of nature, the way you solve the problem of the state of nature is through norms and institutions.  They call it a social contract. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Institutions.  Norms allow for dispute resolution, right?  So instead of you and me fighting over whether I can capture your data, a rule is declared, I can only do it with your consent or I can't do it at all, or I can do whatever I please.  But once there's a rule, our dispute is over. 

>> Yeah. 

>> I mean, maybe one person wins, one person loses.  But the dispute is ended because we now have a rule for these situations.  And the general word for rules is norms, right?  So norms settle all those disputes in the state of nature. 

>> Yeah. 

>> But norms don't appear out of thin air.  To generate norms, you need institutions.  Institutions are these rules of procedures that are ‑‑ that create the norms that can then be enforced in society.  So the state of nature is resolved by institutions.  Problem of the state of nature is resolved by institutions.  Where do they come from?  Sometimes they are already there.  There's a field called institutional choice.  You and I have a dispute, maybe we need a law.  Where do we go to the law?  Should the city of Geneva make the law?  Should the Canton make the law?  Switzerland legislation make the law?  Should the European union make the law?  But there's a choice of institutions out there.  We can try to get a norm made.  And sometimes we say no existing institution is adequate.  So we are going to create one from fresh.  ICANN was created ‑‑

>> Yeah. 

>> Or new.  But whereas other things, you know, the EU preexistent makes a lot of rules in the United States.  Federal Communications Commission.  But either way, you identify the institution. 

>> Yeah. 

>> You know ‑‑ either make or buy.  It's either there or not there.  You have to make it or just use it.  And it generates the norms that settle the disputes in the state of nature.  Kind of thing.  So as I said, there's, you know, I said there's three basic states of nature.  The operators ‑‑

>> Operator, user and state. 

>> So you get different governance institutions for those three different things.  You've seen that on the Internet.  So you have the society of systems.  Here we have the state of nature, society of systems operators.  And the reason they have to have their own institution for governance is what they are trying to do, the vision of the good, right?  System operators, they have a vision of the good.  Persons, the vision of the good, the states, the vision of the good.  System operators, system stability and efficiency.  They have to make that work.  Persons, it's the public interest.  That has to be upheld public values.  And states, the good of sovereignty.  Autonomy, mutual respect of the states.  So you have different institutions that are sort of optimizing, if you will, different high‑level values. 

>> Yeah. 

>> This is sort of a techno keep things stable kind of regulation.  And so the rules produced for this community will be rules to ensure stability. 

>> Yeah. 

>> The rules produced for the society as a whole, it's a legislature upholds the public interest.  It will often be just a form whereby international agreements made in international form.  So of all the things going on on the Internet, one of the first things you can do, hmm, even the speakers today, you could categorize them.  Is this person talking about essentially regulation? 

>> Yeah. 

>> Coordination and regulation?  National legislation?  Or treaties?  You know, I've tried to do that.  So one woman gave a talk on internationalized domain names, right?  So huh, okay, we have domain names.  That's part of the technology of the Internet. 

>> Yeah. 

>> But they're communicative.  It turns out that people rely on those.  So originally domain names would only allow English speakers and their character sense to communicate.  So suddenly if you're from China, it's, like, wow, others can communicate with each other.  I'm denied communication through domain names. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And that's just not right.  There ought to be a law, right?  Ding, ding, ding, ding, there ought to be a law.  It's not right.  So it's, like, well, you clearly need an institution, don't you? 

>> Yes. 

(Laughter)

>> The question is where do you go for an institution like that?  It might be at the global level because it's China vis‑a‑vis the Angelo, English‑speaking world, et cetera.  So it already helps making sense ‑‑

>> Yeah.  It gives you kind of a road map.  It makes more sense. 

>> Yeah.  Even, too, I mean, so this is kind of what you do in academia.  You come up with categorizations, typologies, and you put different events and observations in different boxes.  And maybe that's all you do.  It's a lot of progress to be able to box it like that, right? 

>> Yeah, yeah. 

>> I bet this is going to be handled ‑‑ this should be handled at the U.N.?  Should it be handle the at some international business?  But it's going to be at the global level because it deals with these different internationalized domain names. 

>> It's like a guide to dispute resolution. 

>> Yeah.  And the other guy, he talked about the Dutch airport wasn't releasing the data.  So it's, like, okay, the Internet allows us to collect a lot more data.  In fact, it's not really an Internet issue.  It's more of a data issue.  It's just data in general.  But there's ‑‑ somewhere there's a norm.  So the norm already existed in his case.  He said the norm was that people have a right to access their own data to find out about it.  So you say, huh.  This sounds like a sort of public value.  People have a right to find out about their own stuff.  And it sounds like it's happening.  You know, what was the institution?  So it sounds like the society of persons, public interest.  And a lot of the institutions here are national institutions, right?  So he told us a story about public interest. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Society of persons. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And norms probably being made by national legislature.  So we can put them in this box right here. 

>> Is there a possibility where we see overlapping of actors?  Like cases where actors overlap? 

>> Right.  So these cross‑categorical ones, definitely.  So there's definitely stuff like that.  And there's a lot of them, actually.  So one of them is how about privacy in domain names. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Domain names are kind of ‑‑ I mean, the fundamental problem with the Internet in some ways is what country do you live in originally? 

>> Berlin. 

>> Okay.  So you're in Berlin.  I'm in Atlanta, USA.  You and I never have practically have any contact.  You know, I could call you up on the phone, maybe.  I could send you a letter.  But suddenly on the Internet, I can do a lot of things.  I can record your voice again.  I can do a lot of stuff.  So you and I are much ‑‑ our social relations are much more connected than we were before.  Because the new technology created new social relations. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And now here I am recording all your stuff.  And you say, that's just not right.  There ought to be a law.  And I say, yeah, well, maybe there ought to be a law, but I'm in the United States.  You're in Germany.  We can each ‑‑ we're in different lawmaking domains, and there's no common lawmaking domain, right?  So interestingly, you and I have entered into a state of nature.  We have essentially a dispute.  We need a norm.  But there's no institution that's around to make that norm.  So what are we going to do now, right? 

>> Yeah. 

>> Here's one answer.  Cut the relationship between you and me.  If we ‑‑ either ‑‑ maybe we need a global ‑‑

>> Yeah. 

>> ‑‑ institution to make global rules. 

>> Yeah. 

>> But that's awfully hard to do.  So instead why don't we terminate the state of nature?  Because the whole problem is that you and I can talk to each other.  So why don't we fragment the Internet.  Put national boundaries on the Internet.  We'll go to zero.  We'll be back to making phone calls and mailing a letter, but it will be a lot more constrained.  And that solves a problem, too.  There's two ways to solve the problem.  Either the problem arises with a new technology, so if you terminate the technology, that solves a problem. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Or if you allow the technology to go, now you need norms and institutions that cover us both. 

>> But there's the kind of situation that we see with Internet in developing countries like India and other countries where they don't know where to address the issue of fake news and rumors printing and creating chaos in the community.  They just shut down the Internet because then there is no communication happening. 

>> Yeah. 

>> So ‑‑ but that's the understanding of the government because they think if there's no communication, then there's no conflict. 

>> Right.  Well, what ‑‑

>> Because they don't have ‑‑

>> They don't have the institution.  So you have a choice.  You either need institutions and norms, or you get rid of the technology that's caused the problem, that's unleashed the problem. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Or if you do nothing, you have a festering problem. 

>> Yeah, exactly. 

>> Which is often what ends up as well. 

>> Maybe I should write an article about Internet trends and institutions and about how not having an institution in India is actually causing problems and economic damage. 

>> Mm‑hmm.  Yeah.  Okay, good.  So this is productive ‑‑ you know, you start to ‑‑ the relationship and the technology ‑‑

>> Exactly. 

>> ‑‑ technologies create social relations but social relations need institutions.  If you haven't got an institution, then the crude is you avoid the social relations by clamping down on the technology.  It's a stupid solution. 

>> Now it's more like a flow chart.  Like one action follows another.  Yes or no, do you have an institution?  No. 

>> Huh‑uh. 

>> And then you continue on, making it more efficient. 

>> Uh‑huh. 

>> Now it's more simplified and flows perfectly. 

>> Mm‑hmm.  Mm‑hmm.  Okay.  So let's say ‑‑ so this brings us to part 2.  What are institutions?  How do you design institutions and so on?  For each state of nature, because as I said, there's three different states of nature, the novel technology created novel social relations, the novel social relations created novel disputes.  So we need novel norms and novel institution norms to resolve this dispute.  So this is a challenge. 

So each ‑‑ each one needs a governance institution.  So what's a governance institution?  And there's a lot of ‑‑ again, what exactly is an institution?  It's a horrible word.  Everybody uses it and nobody really can define it. 

>> Ideas. 

>> Well, I define ‑‑ so I said institution ‑‑ they create norms, right? 

>> Yes. 

>> So "A," they provide norms.  They make them. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And "B," they enforce them.  So first they come up with thou shalt do this and thou shalt not do that.  That's already a big step forward.  But then it has to be backed up.  It has to be enforced, right? 

>> Oh. 

>> Are you the next speaker for the next panel? 

>> No, I'm a poster that couldn't find a printer.  I refuse to use paper, damn it.  What are we, in the 20th Century?  No.  I wasn't everything I've ever created in life to be erased with one keystroke. 

>> The next is sovereignty in cyberspace? 

>> I'm glad you're here and I'll just quit talking and listen to the poster presentation.  That's the important thing.  So norm provision. 

>> Okay.  Okay, good. 

>> What do institutions do?  They promulgate, if you will.  They provide norms.  Also they enforce them or there's other sets of institutions that enforce them.  So even the norm provision, this often gets mixed up.  Is you have to distinguish between norm design and norm authorization.  A lot of confusion.  All the time people fail to distinguish between these two.  Design is very participative.  Lots of experts, you know, subject matter expert, people with interests, people with power who get to play, people without power may be excluded, that's fine, but they design a norm.  This happens in ICANN all the time.  It's wonderfully participative.  You spend a thousand hours.  And what do you do?  Is it now the law of the land?  No.  It's a design.  It has to go past the authorization process, which is separate from design.  In ICANN, authorization means the board of directors, which is very price.  18 people or 19 or whatever it is.  It takes a majority vote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  And what happens a lot ‑‑ I know Melton Mueller wrote a paper on this.  It goes for authorization and they throw it away and just pass whatever they wanted to pass in the first place.  And it's, like, because I say to Melton and others, you have to be focused here on authorization.  And who participates here, it could be representation.  But this is a big ‑‑ I think this is a big issue in ICANN is that they're constantly trumpeting how everybody gets to participate in design. 

>> Yeah. 

>> But it's not clear that design actually is connected ‑‑

>> Translates to authorization. 

>> ‑‑ and to the implementation of it, right? 

>> Yeah. 

>> Because this happens a lot.  It's, like, oh, hey, you troublemakers.  You're complaining.  I'll send you out to spend 1,000 hours fantasizing about how you'd like the world to be.  I'm going to ignore whatever it is you produce, but you're going to be out of my hair for the next six months, says right?  Some people would say that happens a lot in ICANN. 

(Laughter)

So this is one part of institutions is designing the norms and then authorizing them.  And then once you have a norm, you have to enforce it, right?  So the norm enforcement ‑‑ this gets us into law enforcement.  And there's three parts.  And this is ‑‑ there's a whole ‑‑ there's a sociology on ‑‑ it's actually the study of criminology.  But it's also in engineering this comes up, too.  I want ‑‑ thou shalt not steal.  Okay, we now have ‑‑ I'll cut off your hand if you steal.  Okay, those are beautiful words.  So I'm going to go on and steal or not steal.  Well, if you really want the norm to be enforced, you have to have the surveillance to see what people are doing.  You have to catch someone if he or she is stealing.  Or maybe somebody else, the victim, self‑reports and says I've just been ripped off.  Someone stole from me.  Or there's the third‑party surveillance.  You know, maybe the video camera at the store.  But there has to be some surveillance if you're going to have law enforcement to observe actual behavior.  And then you catch somebody.  We saw you ‑‑ we think we saw you violating the norm.  I.e., we saw you slip a candy bar in your pocket.  We're not sure, because the final judgment is made by someone who specialized in making these kinds of judgments.  And collecting the observations with surveillance, taking the norm, holding one against the other, and judging whether the norm was violated.  That's called a judge.  Not surprisingly, judges judge.  And they compare the behavior observed here with the norms passed by the institution. 

And they're vested with authority.  And then the last thing is if it's judged that you've violated the norm, there's intervention which might be a punishment, or it might be incentives for future behaviors so that you don't steal.  There's a whole way that governance institution intervene in society.  Change the tax code.  You punish.  You educate everybody, et cetera, et cetera.  But wherever you have institutions, you'll see the surveillance judgment intervention.  This, again, gets us into law, law enforcement, criminology, et cetera, et cetera. 

So, again, this is when you're confronting the problem of the state of nature, new technologies create new conflicts.  There's a demand for norms.  So you start creating institutions that, as I said earlier, first of all, they provide norms.  Once they're provided, there's mechanisms to enforce the norms through surveillance, judgment and intervention.  Okay. 

So the last thing in this ‑‑ in all this, technology is kind of the driver.  I said, you know, we enter into a state of nature because new technologies bring us into novel relationships, right?  So it defines the social relationships.  But that assumes a technology sort of happens out there, right?  It ain't quite that way.  If you look at the history of the Internet, in the early years of technology, you have the IAB ‑‑ oops ‑‑ IATF, to a certain extent, they were kind of making the technology, and they were oblivious to the full impacts of it.  Who knew it would be this big of a deal.  They didn't really plan the social relation.  It's fair to sort of say the Internet kind of just happened and then came on to change the world.  But now that everybody's saying whoa, the Internet's really changed, the social relationships driven by technology are really important.  So now it's feeding back to the design of the technology, right?  We're not just governing the impacts of the technology.  We're governing the technology itself, increasingly.  So, for instance, proposals to put boundaries on the Internet.  Let's modify the technology. 

So the Chinese state says, for example, hey, boy our Chinese citizens are talking a lot with dissidents outside of China.  And we think it's bad for society.  We have a rule, don't do it.  People are still doing it.  So instead of making rules, let's redesign the underlying technology and break the connection so they'll stop talking to each other.  So the governance feeds back not only norms, but it feeds back to technology design which is a form of norm.  So proposals to put boundaries on the Internet.  There's a big dispute about IPV6 addressing that it would deny people anonymity, so they shifted the technology designs because anonymity is sort of a form of social relationship.  You know who I am.  Or you don't know who I am. 

Then the last one was internationalized domain names, which we heard today.  Again, they changed this technical standards for domain names.  So that in order to respect countries' culture and so on.  So we end up embedding norms into technology.  This is kind of the idea of code.  So we know that technology allows us to affect one another.  So instead of merely managing those effects, you can design the technology to have certain social relationships.  That's one rule of technology.  But there's another one, too.  Because the enforcement's really important.  The Internet was designed as a communication.  So different parties can talk to each other.  But it turns out there's certain functions that we want from the system that many of us want, others of us here, we want these sort of orthogonal functions.  It should allow us to be surveilled so that laws can be enforced on the system.  And it should allow law enforcement to intervene when you're using the system.  So these are systems initially aren't really designed to allow for surveillance and intervention.  But when the system becomes important, pretty soon the law community starts pushing hard for it, you know, we want to add some additional functionality to your system.  Surveillance so we can observe bad guys and catch them and intervention so we can stop them from doing what we're doing. 

So you end up with design for surveillance ‑‑ and should be design for intervention added to the system.  And we're watching this happen on the Internet.  The technology's being shaped to better identify users, to better observe transactions.  You know, like data retention laws.  I guess that's more of an operational.  Who allows for surveillance and who's doing what.  And then how do you enforce rules on the Internet using the technology.  You throw, three strikes and you're out, you cancel someone's account.  If you don't like what they're doing in the domain name system, you take away their domain name.  If you don't like Bitcoin, you block it, et cetera.  So these are sort of the orthogonal ways that technology is used to enforce the norms underneath it. 

Okay.  So this is my last slide.  My last poster.  It's kind of a summary here.  This is what I was talking about, this holistic model.  We see over and over the Internet creates states of nature.  I.E., novel social relationships, brings people in contact in ways they haven't been in contact before.  It creates disputes because not all of these relationships are happy.  They can involve taking another person's stuff.  So there's disputes and those disputes lead to a call for norms.  It's not right that you can copy my files.  There ought to be a law against you recording my telephone conversations.  So when you start ‑‑ this is the problem of the state of nature is that people want norms.  There ought to be a law.  So they turn to the design or provision of institutions that supplies the laws and impose order on society. 

What institutions do, two things.  Norm provision.  They design and authorize them.  And norm enforcement.  They conduct surveillance, judgment, intervention.  And then technology plays a role.  It can be redesigned to affect the original social relationships and redesigned to allow for enforcement.  And I would say that most of the literature I read, because millions and millions and millions of case studies and interesting cases, everybody is analyzing bits and pieces, and most of them will fall somewhere in this framework.  So hence the claim that it's a holistic model. 

>> Great.  I really like this paper. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Thank you for coming. 

(Laughter)

     >> Do you have a paper? 

>> No, I don't have a paper yet.  You can take my class, which is my main vehicle for working this stuff out, which I'm teaching in an infinite loop until ‑‑ and it's not going to be a paper, it's going to be a book.  Because this is so huge. 

>> Yes. 

>> I also recommend, I think like the research can always put it somewhere in this framework. 

>> Yeah. 

>> Yeah, it's great. 

>> Yeah, so that's what I was trying to do even as people were giving talks this morning, trying to say where do I look with that paper. 

>> Translate the norms to legal enforcement measures by legislation. 

>> Say that again? 

>> How can we translate those norms to legalized transactions? 

>> Well, okay.  So norms ‑‑ you know, laws are one subset of norms. 

>> Yeah. 

>> And ‑‑

>> But norm doesn't necessarily mean law, is that right? 

>> It does not, correct.  So I'm using norm to mean everything.  And one category of norm is a law.  And there's others.  There's regulations.  International treaties.  Technical standards and so on.  But laws ‑‑ laws are an appropriate type of norm for certain kinds of social interactions you want to relate.  So in person‑to‑person, two persons, human beings or corporations, whatever.  Perhaps regulating things like theft, privacy, fundamental social societal values.  There you might say this is an appropriate place for a law.  The norm that would regulate this interaction would be appropriately a law.  And therefore will appeal to a lawmaking institution to provide that norm. 

>> The last speaker also mentioned about legalization, lack of legal authorities, (?) So I'm thinking in terms of Internet governance and where the legal‑making power lies, because it has no international law.  Human rights law. 

>> So one of the slides I said there's different ‑‑ there's actually multiple governances, right?  So there's governances of international stuff.  There's governances of person‑to‑person interactions.  I said there's also governance of ‑‑ this various ‑‑ within the operation of the Internet as a system, there's all these autonomous players linked together through the relationships and the system.  Two ISPs have to exchange data.  The system architecture, the way the Internet works, brings them into contact.  And now they need some norms.  How are they going to exchange the data?  They might have a private contract.  But in any case, they're going to make a collective agreement, collective norm about how to handle their new relationship. 

So depending on the kinds of norms you need, you go to different institutions to provide those norms. 

>> Yeah, but in terms of (?) Is easy to be sourced.  But in terms of (?) What kind of things ‑‑ what is public interest?  How can we make which kind of consensus about what kind of norms?  That's appropriate, I think. 

>> Well, let's say if I'm in the United States and I have a dispute with somebody else in the United States, then the good news is we're in the traditions and the values of American culture. 

>> But between two countries. 

>> But if I sell you my e‑book and you give me $10 and I send you actually only pages 1 through 100 of my 200‑page book and I say if you want the rest of the book, I want some more money.  And if you say you have ripped me off, there ought to be a law against this.  But you're in China.  I'm in the United States.  It's hard to get that norm. 

>> Yes. 

>> And it's hard to get any kind of enforcement between the two of us, right? 

>> Yeah. 

>> So the solution that applies domestically doesn't necessarily apply internationally because of limitations of institutions, right?  So you might say, hmm, either existing institutions don't work very well.  We could try to design a new institution.  That's one strategy.  Another strategy would be we could try to design better technology so that the capacity for me to rip you off is less.  What's that?  Block chain.  You know, these e‑book readers where they exercise a lot of controls.  Or we could say we don't have a solution, and the problem festers.  Because a lot of these problems, they fester.  The answer to a lot of disputes at the global level is actually, we can't really solve them.  Here's a possible technical solution.  Here's a possible institutional solution.  But in the meanwhile, we're not ‑‑ "A," we could find a solution that's not legitimate.  Like you could send your buddy over here to hold a gun to my head.  Okay, take the money back.  But that's not a legitimate ‑‑ you know, that's illegitimate.  Or you could just go away. 

>> Argue that we could use the international law, for example, international human rights law.  There's two conventions as a legal basis, as a normal base to govern, whether you are Chinese or American (Inaudible).

>> So try to harmonize our respective domestic laws.  Or there could be the world summit on the information society which stopped short of law.  But it tried to enunciate high‑level norms so that every country could adopt those norms individually in some sovereign‑based enforcement.

>> I think we should distinguish between norms and laws.  It was more about you do something that may not be the norm in country.  Like when you sell somebody a book, the norm (?) And then the question is more about rules, I guess. 

>> Mm‑hmm.  Okay.  So I'm using norms as sort of a sociological ‑‑ you mean by norm a sort of informal social understanding?  I think people are getting ‑‑ are itching for the next thing. 

>> What is the definition, collectively shared standards of appropriate (?)? 

>> Yeah. 

>> Right? 

>> Yeah.  Although that's, like, you know, you shouldn't burp loudly at this meeting.  That kind of a norm, right?  I mean, anybody would be embarrassed, right?  Whereas if I would steal your money, we're dealing with laws, not norms.  We have to get started now. 

>> I've just got to get my memory stick. 

>> Oh, you want to get it out.  Okay.  Hold on.  I've got to move our ‑‑ so you're already set up. 

>> Yes. 

(The session concluded at 2:00.)

 

>>> Welcome back to the afternoon session.  In this section, we have two presenters.  So this session is about sovereignty in cyberspace.  So we have two presenters.  The first one is Stephane.  And Sophie ‑‑ is that ‑‑ okay.  And the topic is what does the concept of sovereignty mean in digital, network and technological sovereignty?  We have a second speaker, Sara.  And her presentation is about fulfilling freedom of expression online: The problem of access‑based jurisdictional approach in Internet‑related cases.  So each speaker has 15 minutes.  And then after the two presentations, we'll have a question time. 

Can we pass time to Stephane first.  Thank you. 

   >> You tell me when it's time. 

>> Yeah. 

>> STEPHANE COUTURE: Okay.  My name is Stephane Couture.  I'm professor of communications at New York University.  My colleague is not here today.  So actually, we decided to do this research because we were interested by the concept of sovereignty when talking about the digital. 

So the first reason, we found that the concept of sovereignty was rooted in political thinking.  So it's a good way to think politically about the Internet.  The second thing and more important thing is that we found out there are very diverging ways to conceptualize sovereignty when applied to the digital.  So we decided to do a small literature ‑‑ not a small, but a literature survey about the question. 

So the plan of my presentation is like this.  I started by the introduction.  Some historical definition and then I present the body of the analysis which is five or six, changing from day to day, conceptualizations of technological sovereignty, and I finish with a conclusion. 

So just to tell you the picture here is Jacques who discovered Canada and asserted the sovereignty of France over Canada.  So it gives you an idea of a critical eye we could put on the idea of sovereignty. 

So what we did is basically a literature review with insight from this course analysis about technological sovereignty and related terms.  So we use articles that we survey article that used technological sovereignty and related terms like digital sovereignty, network sovereignty, I think you understand.  So we focused on substantial text, meaning texts that are longer than just one blog or ‑‑ sometimes activists and policy oriented also. 

What we didn't do, actually, we didn't look at political discourse or politician decision, for instance.  It's really about thinking about the sovereignty that we were looking at.  What we didn't do is interpret something as being sovereignty.  So we were really interested about how people use the term sovereignty. 

As I said, we took at some point some liberty in finding more or less activists.  And sometimes technological was not exactly with sovereignty but a bit aside, but always sovereignty was present.  What we are interested, this is not super precise in the analysis, but we are interested that sovereignty as a metaphor and a perception of Internet governance.  While it's still a work in progress, if you have a suggestion of other articles to include in the analysis, that would be nice. 

So before going into our own categorization of sovereignty, I would like to come back on the historical notion of sovereignty.  So in modern classical thinking, the notion of sovereignty has been used in order to conceptualize the supreme authority over our political entity.  Mostly it was, like, the supreme authority over a country.  It was mostly related to territory including like the air over the territory, the human infrastructures and the soil under the territory.  So this is what we call in international relation like state sovereignty or (?).  But sovereignty has also been articulated let's say with family ties and networks.  We can imagine, for instance, indigenous tribes, their concept of sovereignty is more tied with family ties than with the territory, the people living in the territory. 

So there's other notions that are informing the current conceptualization of technological sovereignty.  One of them is food sovereignty.  Food sovereignty is very different.  Basically, it refers to the right to define and the right of people to define their own food and agricultural systems.  So you see in the picture this.  It's food sovereignty, food for people, not for corporate profits.  So this metaphor is really used to combat, like, big corporate national food industry.  The category of (?) Sovereignty is also used in feminist thinking to insist on reproductive rights and authority over one's own body. 

And finally, there's a publication we just discovered in cultural interpretation.  They analyze the current sovereignty in social science.  So we are not the only one interested in this.  And the notion to deconstruct the notion and see how it is rooted in colonial history.  So it is something I will try to do in this analysis. 

So based on our literature review, we identified about 50 texts, 50 articles.  So it's not exhaustive.  It's not exhaustive, but it's a nice sampling.  So five or six conceptualization of technological sovereignty, actually in my paper, I have five.  But yesterday I decided to add another one.  So it shows that I'm still not sure how to categorize this.  So there's the state sovereignty.  Indigenous technological sovereignty.  Social movement sovereignty.  Personal sovereignty.  And there are some questions about the impact of technology on classical sovereignty and the sovereignty of cyberspace.  Yeah. 

So some of them, especially state sovereignty and social movement sovereignty are very distinct.  What is important here is to know this distinction, at least to understand sometimes we don't talk exactly about the same thing. 

So in the conceptualization of state and national technological sovereignty, we found out both normative and analytical papers.  So analytical papers are papers that look at, like, the relationship between the state and technology.  But normative paper, they tried to say, for instance, that the state should enforce technological sovereignty.  So there's a prescriptive stance in this.  The oldest one we found was in 1983.  It was calling ‑‑ sorry ‑‑ it was calling to Australia to build their industrial and technological sovereignty.  And it was referring here to the industry's capability in terms of skills and the freedom in legislative terms to select to generate or apply or explore technology needed for Australian innovation. 

So it's a bit different subject today on technological sovereignty, which is more about the flow of data and the privacy.  So contemporary issues about technological sovereignty are digital sovereignty.  So in France, there was an article about the president in which he called for France to develop technological sovereignty.  And he called also for systems saying that all machines of the state should use an operating system that is kind of native and different from Microsoft and stuff like this. 

In my own work, as other people said, sometimes I'm pure analyst.  And other times I'm policy oriented.  So I advocated also for my own government for software to remove the dependence to Microsoft and to United States‑built technologies.  There's the concept of network sovereignty, referring to the necessity to reduce rooting of data outside a country.  And also, the idea of data sovereignty that I think it's much more contemporary is like subjecting the flow of sensitive data to national borders and jurisdictions.  So I feel when we talk about sovereignty and Internet governance, we are really in current issues. 

They distinguish between weak sovereignty.  Weak sovereignty is the state to force companies to enforce encryption or enforce privacies and stuff like this.  And strong sovereignty, which is the state control network and censorship.  So the idea of having its own infrastructure.  So state and national technological sovereignty determines the way in which we characterize sovereignty. 

The second way we found, they are not exactly in the same analytical level, but we decided to keep it like this.  It's a bit like the state sovereignty, but it's for, like, for people who want to have a state or who have claim for self‑determination.  Mainly indigenous people in Canada, in Australia, in Americas and in Australia.  There's a student at New York University that indigenous people should be considered under user spectrum passing over their territories.  So let's say Wi‑Fi and 4G, if it's going to the territories, they should be considered.  And indigenous sovereignty, rights regarding collection, ownership and application of data.  And also in 2017, sovereignty is about collection but also the way we interpret that data.  And at what sovereignty (?) Actually, it's more the technology or the network Internet as a means to reclaim indigenous technology sovereignty. 

The time is passing.  So the third way is social movement technological sovereignty.  So this is one ‑‑ some colleagues we know wrote some papers about this.  And there's a (?) About the way it was conceived in state technological sovereignty and social movements here.  So basically, the idea here is having sovereign technology are technologies developed from and for civil society.  And technology that are not controlled by the state nor capital.  Okay?  So basically, it's technology that breaks dependence over state‑controlled data and surveillance.  And also from capital corporations.  So we are talking sovereign technology, our free and open source software communication networks, community networks, encryption, activist collective, et cetera.  So there's a necessity to change practice to avoid commercial and state surveillance or control.  Here it means avoiding dependence. 

So social movement, we call it social movement.  It addresses collective organization.  But there's also a part of this which is also related at the personal and user technology sovereignty.  So in our book, Ashley, she says in order to keep your personal ‑‑ your personal technological sovereignty, you have to use encryption ‑‑ two minutes  ‑‑

>> Yeah.  ‑‑

>> Encryptions.  You have to use free software, et cetera.  So privacy (?).  We found another article about texting as a technological sovereignty.  I didn't quite understand, but I just named it here.  So you see the diversity. 

Fifth, technology of an impact on sovereignty, there are some books that are trying to see our software and technology will reinforce or reconfigure actual state sovereignty.  So for example, the social impact of border changes in Google maps to show how technology can have an impact on state sovereignty. 

And the last one I will name ‑‑ actually, before I wanted to put it just in the conclusion, but I'll put it ‑‑

>> Last minute. 

>> Last minute?  So sovereignty of cyberspace that we could mention.  We could refer to the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.  That cyberspace should be governed on its own terms.  And there is a book by Mueller talking about multistakeholder governance as a popular form of sovereignty in cyberspace.  So cyberspace diversity in its own terms.  So I think that will be my conclusion.  Sovereignty refers to the capacity to innovate but also the control of data flow.  To control the data flow.  This last part is gaining significance after Snowden revelation.  And we also find out sovereignty is mostly determined in this course.  It's mostly against USA (?) So we didn't find, for instance, an article claiming, reclaiming USA sovereignty.  There are articles claiming France sovereignty over the network or social server movement sovereignty, but not USA. 

So I'll just finish, I think the very idea of the notion should be questioned as it is rooted.  I didn't have the time to ‑‑ it is a project of the west also.  And it should be rooted also in the colonial context.  So thank you very much. 

>> Thank you.  Thank you.  Okay.  So should we pass the time to the second speaker, Sara.  You have 15 minutes. 

>> SARA SOLMONE: Yes, thank you.  Thank you very much.  Do you know how to enlarge this by any chance?  Thank you. 

Good afternoon.  My name is Sara Solmone.  And I'm based at the University of East London.  In my paper, I look at the way that states exercise jurisdiction online.  And when referring to jurisdiction, I refer specifically to prescriptive jurisdiction.  So the way that states apply their own laws to regulate content that has been published online. 

Because of the Internet apparently borderless nature, there is uncertainty as to what state jurisdiction really means online.  And this is because traditionally state jurisdiction has been established by relying primarily on territorial criteria, whereas in an apparently borderless environment such as the Internet, it's not always possible, of course, to clearly identify when an act is committed online, where, in fact, it happened. 

Now, because of this uncertainty or in this context of uncertainty, what's currently happening is that some states are applying extra territorially to regulate content that has been published online.  And one example of this extra territorial exercise of state jurisdiction is the access‑based jurisdictional approach, which can be defined and we will see some examples in a moment, but can be defined as the exercise of state jurisdiction over content that has been published online but that was uploaded and hosted in foreign countries. 

Now, the argument that I tried to make in the paper is that establishing jurisdiction‑based access can have negative implications on the fulfillment of human rights online with special reference to freedom of expression.  So my three research questions are what are the main characteristics of the access‑based jurisdictional approach?  What are the complications that each approach has on the fulfillment of human rights online?  And finally, how can the existence of a clear enclosed nexus between content that is published online and the state exercises jurisdiction can be established in an apparently borderless environment? 

So the access‑based jurisdictional approach has two distinctive characteristics.  As I mentioned before, the approach is used by national courts to establish jurisdiction over content published online but that is uploaded and is hosted in foreign countries.  And the second point is that the places upon which jurisdiction is exercised is that content published online can be accessed from within the territory of the country exercising jurisdiction.  Now, the authors investigating this phenomenon have observed that this approach seems to be transversal to different areas of law from copyright to defamation, for example, whereas some authors believe that this approach is more recurrent in a specific area of law which is defamation. 

Also, the authors investigating this phenomenon have mainly deferred to laws and case law from North America, Australia and Europe.  It appears safe to say, therefore, that this approach has been used in this geographic region but obviously it does not mean that this approach has not been used in other geographic areas.  It's just that data about that are missing. 

The cases that I have examined in the paper are listed here.  And the case selection was conducted by relying on theoretical informed research‑driven approach.  I have selected cases from mainly two areas of law which are defamation and publication of content with regard to criminal law.  And I have selected these areas of law because they allow to clarify all the difficulties that arise when national codes are faced with a specific question.  When content published online can be said to have been published from within the territory of the court, of the country exercising jurisdiction.  And interestingly, the courts in all these cases have given the exact same answer.  Jurisdiction can be exercised in the state where the content published online can be accessed regardless of where the content was uploaded from, of the country where the content was uploaded from. 

Now, a classical example of the access‑based jurisdictional approach is the (?) Case.  Now, what's happened in that case, Mr. Peron is a UK resident.  And he owned a website.  The website was managed by a company located in the United States.  And it was also hosted on servers located in the United States.  Now, some pictures of a sexual nature were published on Mr. Peron's website.  Those pictures were perfectly legal in the United States.  In the United Kingdom, however, a policeman, during the course of a criminal investigation, accessed those pictures.  And because they were found to be in violation of the obscene publications act of 1959, Mr. Peron, who was living in the UK, was first sentenced and then arrest ‑‑ sorry, was first arrested and then sentenced to 30 months imprisonment.  So he actually went to jail. 

The UK courts exercised jurisdiction of those pictures because those pictures were accessible within the UK regardless of the fact that they had been published by a U.S. company hosted on U.S. servers and were perfectly legal in the U.S. 

Now, looking at the EU approach, there is a specific approach that he uses to establish jurisdiction ‑‑ that is enforced in the EU to establish jurisdiction in online defamation cases.  And this approach has been defined as the mosaic approach.  There are jurisdictions on ‑‑ well, the regulations on Internet jurisdictions within the EU establish that the states that can exercise jurisdiction is the state where the harmful event occurs or might occur.  For this reason it's important to establish how it is expression, the place where the harmful event occurs online can be interpreted when the content is published online.  Now, the ECJ clarified that jurisdiction on the online content in the defamation cases can be exercised on three specific jurisdictional basis. 

So if the defendant is ‑‑ so if states can exercise jurisdiction if the defendant is established in that state, if the victim have their center of interest in that state, or ‑‑ and this is the access‑based approach ‑‑ if online content is accessible from that state, of course we are talking about online defamation cases.  So the requirement stands that the victim must have a reputation in states that exercises jurisdiction based on access.  So this is important to bear in mind.  Now, these three basis for exercises jurisdiction, however, justify a different extent of states' jurisdiction.  Indeed, interestingly, the court stated that only the states where the defendant is established or the victims have their center of interest can ‑‑ are competent to adjudicate on the totality of damages posed by the publication of online content.  Whereas the state that exercised jurisdiction because content is accessible from that state and the victim has a reputation there can only adjudicate on local damages produced by that defamatory material. 

However, this approach was further in a way complicated for some clarified by the ECJ in a quite controversial case which is the BOU case which was decided by the ECJ on the 27th of October of this year.  So in that case, BOU is an Estonian company.  And together with one of its employees, they brought legal proceedings against a Swedish‑based defendant.  The Swedish‑based defendant is a trade association, and they manage a website.  And on this website, some comments, defamatory comments, were published about BOU and one of its employees. 

Now, the claimants asked Estonian court ‑‑ thank you.  The claimants asked Estonian courts compensation for the damages, of course, that were caused by the online publication as well as the ratification and removal of the incorrect information.  Now, interestingly, the Estonian courts ‑‑ and this is a different with the Peron case found that although that content was accessible within the Estonian territory, the damage to reputation had not, in fact, happened in Estonia.  It had happened in Sweden.  And the court relied on two specific factors to determining that, which are the fact that the comments were published in Swedish and were not comprehensible in Estonia and the fact that BOU, the company, conducted the majority of its business activities in Sweden because the turnover, the majority of the turnover of the company was in Sweden. 

Now, what's important for the access‑based jurisdictional approach is a question that the Estonian supreme court referred to the European court of justice, which is the following.  Can a victim of online defamation bring a request for removal and ratification of incorrect information before the courts involve the member states where content published online is accessible?  And the ECJ answered in the negative.  So the ECJ stated ‑‑ and this is a further specification of the access‑based approach ‑‑ the court that exercises jurisdiction because the content is accessible there can do it but cannot certainly exercise jurisdiction over request for removal or ratification of incorrect information because that measure by itself is indivisible.  It's not a request for damages who are locally quantifiable. 

Now, what is ‑‑ what are the critiques and the problem that the access‑based jurisdictional approach poses to the fulfilling of freedom of expression online?  Well, establishing jurisdiction‑based access has the effect of imposing freedom of expression of Internet users while located in foreign countries and rejected in foreign jurisdiction, and they should comply with the jurisdiction of the states that they are in.  And perhaps the Peron case illustrates this point better.  Indeed, the conviction of Mr. Peron ultimately meant that publishing those pictures online equates to having committed a crime within the UK.  Therefore if the person managing the website similar to that of Mr. Peron, if they were to enter the territory of the UK, they could certainly be arrested.  And the same goes for Internet service providers.  If in the UK if they knew that they were facilitating access to illegal, obscene material, they could be held liable before UK courts. 

This approach has also been criticized by the advocate general in the BOU's opinion because it's contradictive that is contained in the regulation on jurisdiction.  And this is because how is compassable with predictable jurisdictional rules having included 28 member states that are competent to adjudicate over content published online because it has been accessed there. 

Finally, this approach is certainly not reconcilable with the nature of some remedies such as an injunction or ratification of online content.  Besides, no formal analysis of the link between the perpetrator of the unlawful act, the legal content published online, and the state that exercises jurisdiction has been conducted.  Had such an analysis been conducted, it could have helped national courts to limit the exercise of states' jurisdiction only to those cases that shows a clear and close nexus with courts exercises jurisdiction.  And indeed, this is the opinion of ‑‑

>> Excuse me. 

>> ‑‑ last minute.  So the importance of a clear and enclosed nexus is indeed underlined by some international authorities in the field of freedom of expression which you will see listed here, which have issued some documents and declaration stating that in order for freedom of expression to be fulfilled online, jurisdiction should only be limited to those cases that have a real and substantial connection or are more closely associated with the courts exercise jurisdiction. 

So just to conclude the points that we have seen in the presentation today, due to the uncertainty as to the meaning of states' jurisdiction online, some national courts are doing the access‑based jurisdictional principle to establish jurisdiction over content published online that has been uploaded and can have negative implications on the fulfillment of human rights online.  And there is some consensus at the international level obviously on limiting the exercise of states' jurisdiction only to those cases that show a clear and close nexus with the courts exercising jurisdiction. 

Some criteria have been mentioned by the international authorities in the field of freedom of expression as to how to exercise states' jurisdictional line in a way that is compatible with freedom of expression.  And among this criteria, there is only one which is the targeting test, which seems to be better suited than territorial criteria to establish jurisdictional content published online.  And I will leave that here. 

>> Okay.  Thank you.  Thanks for the two presenters.  So now we have a few minutes left so we can ask about two or three questions. 

>> From Georgia Tech.  Question about sovereignty.  Some of the definitions seemed to not have agency.  And sovereignty ‑‑ sovereignty implies there is a sovereign ‑‑ you know, you said an authority over quality.  Authority is a decision‑making capacity.  So food sovereignty seemed a little ambiguous.  Sovereignty over one's body makes sense.  There's an agency over your body.  National sovereignty.  But food sovereignty maybe another one that didn't seem to have an agent there.  I just wonder ‑‑ even cyberspace sovereignty.  There cyberspace isn't the agent.  Food isn't an agent.  Do you think those definitions are consistent with the others?  Do you think there's good definitions that would hold up? 

>> STEPHANE COUTURE: Do you want to take any questions? 

>> Yeah, you can take the first one. 

>> STEPHANE COUTURE: Well, first, food sovereignty is not my term.  And cyberspace sovereignty, I'm not sure if it's my term or I forged it.  So there's an analytical difference.  I would say both of them, maybe it's the sovereignty of the people.  In the case of food sovereignty, it's probably the sovereignty of the people eating the food and not building the food, but nurturing the food.  I think the agency is people in both cases.  It could be a people sovereignty, yeah.  But the food ‑‑ my point, food sovereignty is not me who's creating this. It's part of ‑‑ it's part of this course.  Cyberspace sovereignty, I think it's more relying on the ‑‑ actually, I use the book of Milton Mueller.  And basically, it's part of the multistakeholders' arrangements that take part in the governance, so the agency would be up there, yeah. 

>> Okay. 

>> Yeah, these are both really good papers, but we're kind of short on time.  I also want to ask about sovereignty.  You're right, when I talk about sovereignty, the citizens or residents or participants in cyberspace.  I want to ask you about the issue of the different definitions of sovereignty. 

It seems like some of them are talking about collective entities, and some of them are ‑‑ and most of them are referring to traditional states.  And some of them are talking about individual and personal sovereignty.  And those definitions are pretty clear.  I think one thing I would ask you whether you could work into your analysis is a more historical approach.  That is, the consent that sovereignty as it's established in law and as it is actually implemented changes throughout history.  So in terms of current Westphalian sovereignty has an historical origin in Odan.  And then in the '90s you get redefinitions of sovereignty because of globalization.  And I think if these concepts of sovereignty are detached from political and social history, they kind of lose a lot of their interest.  I wondered if you'd agree with that. 

>> STEPHANE COUTURE: Well, the comment about historical sovereignty, I agree with this.  It's an improvement I can make.  As a sociologist, I tend to take seriously, like, the categories of actors put themselves.  It's not me, actually.  We were surprised by this conceptualization and sovereignty, and that's a response to this that we wrote our paper saying it's a bit weird.  But still, many people, it's not just one person, it's some, like, there are many people using this.  So as a sociologist, I would take this seriously and try to see how it is framed.  That would be my answer to this. 

>> Okay.  Please. 

>> Thank you very much for your presentations.  I'd just like to mention, doing comparative research or doing research around these jurisdictional questions and in relation to really the kind of lack of normative or legal framework we have available at a global level, in relation to African jurisdictions and, you know, when you don't even have the rule of law, never mind the digital rights, freedom of expression, et cetera, and how one could even begin to use these framework to limit states' interventions and shutdowns (?).  I was just wondering, you know, is this really only possible within the kind of northern ‑‑ you know, global north context and Australia that you seem to (?)? 

>> I'm really not sure, of course, about that.  Again, I would love to see data.  So judicial decisions and whether and how the courts were faced with the same kind of questions and problems that in the other geographical regions that I've looked into have been faced with.  But I would certainly, certainly be curious about seeing data about that.  I'm afraid that's the only thing that I can ‑‑ that I can say.  That would be super interesting, definitely. 

>> Okay.  We'll just take the one from that lady. 

>> Hi.  Emily from the University of Calgary.  Thank you both for your presentations.  Mine is also one about jurisdiction.  I just want to give you a chance to give an answer to your final comment.  Because you said that you saw that the targeting approach was the most suitable one.  And I'm kind of interested in why you think that's the case?  And I was also wondering, related to that, whether you've looked a bit closer at the new defamation act in the UK.  That might be a useful comparison.  You know, we're trying to solve some of the jurisdictional issues in the area of defamation.  I know that was one of your test cases here.  I don't remember what they ‑‑ I think they were looking at what is clearly the most appropriate (?)? 

>> And it's kind of different than what you're talking about here.  You're still dealing with assets saying, well, as long as you access it, but they're trying to narrow it in a different way. 

>> SARA SOLMONE: Yes. 

>> Consider that and you're saying no, that isn't the right approach.  Can actually give you some material to ‑‑

>> SARA SOLMONE: No, absolutely, thanks.  Thanks for the question.  So as far as the targeting test is concerned, what the targeting test consists of, what the (?) Have explained and what some sorts actually are using is that jurisdiction is exercised on all the content published online from foreign countries because that content is targeting an audience that is located in the state that is exercises jurisdiction.

The way this approach is more suitable to establish jurisdiction on the Internet or seems so is that it allows to bypass all the difficulties that are associated with territorial criteria.  Because if we rely on territorial criteria to establish jurisdiction on the Internet and we rely on the state where a perpetrator is located or the state in which content is uploaded, these two criteria are not necessarily useful in all those cases where on the Internet it cannot really be established where the content was uploaded from or even who uploaded it.  So relying on a targeting test allows to still rely in my opinion on a sufficient connecting factor that would justify the exercise of jurisdiction of a state other than state where content is uploaded from. 

And there are courts that are relying on the targeting test more and more as part of the connecting criteria that they use to establish when an out‑of‑state defendant, a defendant located in a foreign state, can be found within their jurisdiction.  And among the criteria that they use, there is, for example, the language that they would use just as the Estonian court did or whether the traffic, for example, on that website as well sometimes ‑‑ or this has been suggested to rely on the traffic to see where the website is most accessed from, although that is as well controversial.  But I certainly believe that relying on some criteria that are other than purely accessibility of online content is the way to go. 

>> Okay, okay.  Thank you very much.  Thank you for participating.  This panel is finished.  If you have a question, can we discuss it privately because we have to hand it to the next panel.  Thank you very much.  Thank you. 

(Applause)

(The session concluded at 2:50.)

 

>> Okay.  Okay.  Thank you all.  It's good to still have a full room on a Sunday afternoon.  So we're going now to our second panel session of the afternoon, Governance by private actors.  We will start with Louise Marie Hurel and Luisa Lobato's paper followed by Natasha Tusikov.  And if Kseniia and Francesca manage to get in, we'll have them join the panel at the end.  Thank you very much. 

>> LUISA LOBATO: So hi, good afternoon.  It's a pleasure to be here.  I'm Luisa Lobato together with Louise Marie Hurel, we are going to present a paper.  We had originally a ‑‑ we had thought on bringing you a PowerPoint, but we wanted to make it sound more like a conversation.  So we will drop the PowerPoint.  Our work is on unpacking cybernorms: Private companies as norms entrepreneurs.  I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Rio de Janeiro.  And Luisa is enrolled at LSC.  Starting with a presentation, I will do a brief conceptualization and then Luisa will make the case and we'll analyze our case of understanding private companies in our case study on Microsoft as a norm entrepreneur. 

So ‑‑ the current international agenda for cybersecurity has been shaped by responses to pressing concerns over practices in cyberspace such as security, data collection, state‑sponsored cyber attacks and so on.  And these processes vary in size and shape, and they are proposed by different actors.  And they involve these propositions by these different actors of public and private nature. 

And there are other cybersecurity issue has allowed the proliferation of governance mechanisms at responding to these problems. 

For example, we have, like, NATO and the OSCE guidelines for state behavior in cyberspace as good examples.  And cybersecurity governance also comprises more than just the state.  As we show, in fact, it has been shown in the literature.  The industry has allowed the court the development of Internet infrastructure software, hardware and cybersecurity solutions and services.  And governments have looked at industry to protect response and recover from cyber attacks. 

And in the commercial mass market ICT and the underlying infrastructure used to develop and operate these processes have also served as targets of cyber conflict, state sponsored or not, and which may result in significant risks to users and as well as the fact, the reengineering costs across industry sectors.  So in our work, we look at Microsoft's case to understand how the ICT industry has been engaging on cybersecurity governance.  And more specifically, actually, with an attempt to see the role played by these actors and private corporations and cybersecurity (?) Norms for behavior in cyberspace. 

It will be a topic in this forum and different workshops and panels in this forum.  Microsoft has advocated for a Geneva judicial convention as a way to guarantee greater predictability over states' actions in cyberspace as well as the protection from potential consequences of state actors. 

As a strategy, the company also publishes a series of documents, white papers, reports, blog entries.  It sets the stage for industry participation and policy discussion.  As we note in our work, at the same time, they call the attention to the role of ICT industry as first responders in cybersecurity, nonetheless, the needs for developing norms that reinforce a shared responsibility in addressing cybersecurity. 

And we turn to, as a theoretical ground, we turn to norm theorizing in international relations literature first to point to the growing ‑‑ how the growing interest in private actors has been designed ‑‑ has been discussed in the discipline but also to look at how belief and ideas have been conceptualized in it. 

So as I said, the interests of private actors has been ‑‑ is not something new.  It has been highlighted before (?) And other actors studying the impacts on companies in the economy as well as security studies by authors that look to the actions of private military companies in the context of war and more recently also in the context of security approaches.  So they have been subject of interest in the discipline for quite a while. 

And literature has also looked at these factors.  And ‑‑ okay ‑‑ five minutes? 

>> Yes. 

>> LUISA LOBATO: They have been engaged in the advocacy and promotion of norms internationally.  So we think that this literature, we have argued that it is very helpful in understanding the rule of Microsoft as an actor that promotes advocates for international norms in cyberspace. 

We note that the development of state actors in conflicts and cyber conflicts has been a source to Microsoft and to other private actors and also this has been ‑‑ has motivated these actors to come up with this kind of solution.  And I will now pass the word to Louise so she can delve deeper in the case of Microsoft as norm entrepreneur.  Thank you. 

>> LOUISE MARIE HUREL: Thank you.  It's a pleasure to be here.  I'll kind of stick to Microsoft.  I think first of all, we come from a process of widening and deepening the understanding of security within our literature.  And we seek to understand the role of private actors as an locus for legitimacy and relevant stakeholder in global governance. 

At the same time, a growing number of actors, actors other than the states, appear to have taken authoritative roles and functions in international system.  They claim to be performed as and are recognized by as legitimate as the public.  They establish boundaries or limit for action.  They certify the guaranteed contracts.  They provide border and security.  In short, they do many of the things traditionally and exclusively associated with the state.  They act simultaneously both in the domestic and the international arenas.  What is most significant, however, is that they appear to have been accorded a form of legitimate (?). 

Thomas wrote that in the context of trying to illustrate how private companies and private actors kind of emerge as important stakeholders in the context of rising globalization.  But over here our efforts take a similar path.  This paper seeks to understand both governance and norms and entrepreneurship beyond the states and to also understand the place of private actors and more specifically Microsoft in this case either in support of private companies that either support Internet infrastructure or provide certain kinds of services.  As Luisa already said, they have sought to portray the constellation of these actors and the complex nature of cyberspace, for example.  Attempts to try to expand this horizon, trying to conceptualize security governance as something that also relates to all of these different functions when we talk about cybersecurity and cybersecurity as something that is not necessarily tied to the states but something that depends on these corporations and networks of actors. 

So going now to the second part, this horizontal ‑‑ the state group, state ‑‑ the stakeholder groups involved in the vertical, the hierarchy shifts entanglement regulatory that can highly be seen as a cohesive playing field or reduced between tacit agreements. 

In the context of international cyber norms, the failure of the last UNGG can be seen as a reinterpretation of what Radu said, which is the redefinition of the roles played by existing actors.  And perhaps even a redefinition of locus and form and how cyber norms debate should progress. 

In his recent paper, Alex Grigsby very boldly even argued that we might be headed towards the end of the world of cyber norms.  But ‑‑ and states are not the only ones getting into the norm‑setting game.  Microsoft has leased its own set of cyber norms.  But then we turn to Microsoft.  As a case that might allow us to understand the role of private actors as norms entrepreneurs.  And although this research started as an initial investigation of what this digital Geneva Convention should be and what does it mean, it gradually shifted to how the company engaged and built its own internal structures.  So we argued that this case calls for both a shift in form of international cyber norms and shift and role of the private sector and shaping them.  So the shifting role refers to a multilayered approach that encompasses the development of diplomatic strategies within Microsoft's own internal structure and that includes three different dimensions.  We went through policy papers, white papers, blog posts as we already said.  And at least three different facets. 

First is on the diplomatic side.  They structure their own global security strategy and diplomacy team.  They have been involved in different international strategies and processes for cyber norms such as the global commission on the stability of cyberspace, negotiations with the U.N., and the other layer is the technical side.  Obviously we cannot talk about Microsoft without taking into consideration of that which would be mostly providing policies and developing policies for cloud services and working on takedowns. 

And the third layer would be the national and regional engagement through their government security program.  And most recently through their transparency centers.  So the shift in form comes in analyzing the processes behind this context where the digital Geneva Convention emerges.  And however, through the drafting of the Geneva Conventions, they have been attempting to trigger a norms cascader which means mostly to try to convince the critical mass of raising this tech accord as they said in the context of growing skepticism with regards to the possibility of developments in the international scenario about cyber norms.  Over state‑led offensive operations. 

So this shift in form refers to the need for international cooperation and norms making processes that go beyond state‑centric approaches to cyber norms, which ‑‑ and even the literature in cyber norms, we go through that, is very much focused on the state and the role of the state and being the main actor on that.  So a key conclusion so that we wrap up because I believe we're already over the time, but in this paper, we start to explore Microsoft ‑‑ how Microsoft has been engaging in cyber norms.  And as we already said in our literature review, we looked a lot at how private actors have normally been considered as central to cybersecurity.  Nonetheless, the recognition also comes at the high cost of contention of vis‑a‑vis the perceived notion of security as national security. 

We, first of all, sought to repurpose the debate on cybersecurity.  Thus conceptually understanding and looking at cybersecurity but looking at it as a governance issue.  And that is very important to understanding the processes that we are going through.  So among the work's finding, we note that Microsoft engages nationally, globally, regionally in different layers of cybersecurity.  And as this paper suggests, the transparency centers, the diplomacy team, they have established in the past years, their technical support services integrate the company's socio, technical and multifaceted approach to regulating cybersecurity. 

However, when we look at the digital Geneva Convention, we have to be a bit careful.  As part of a wider international cyber norms context and as part of the efforts from the company in building their own internal structures and publishing white papers and policy recommendations.  The cascading effect, we have not seen that happening yet, even though the entrepreneurship and they are saying that they want to, like, broadcast this new type of ‑‑ not new type ‑‑ but drafting on the Geneva Conventions.  We are not seeing that yet.  For example, the NATO cybers event center, two researchers from there have argued that calling for a digital Geneva Convention is both legally confusing and politically unrealistic.  But on a closing note and perhaps a bit pessimistic note, the lack of

(Captioner Change)

 

...processes is this particularly illustrative present challenges for international framework for norms on cyber security.  Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]

>>Thank you.

>> Our third panelist has arrived so I invite you to use the table as well.  Natasha called.  She will start with her presentation.

>>Do you want me to go first?

>>Yeah, I just got rid of her.  So we will leave the questions for each of the presentations at the end.  And as you realized, I'm leaving ‑‑ I'm trying to leave something around 15 to 20‑minute for discussion from the floor for the panelists for the presenters.

>>If you could just start with the slide show.  So yes.  Thanks.  Just as we're opening this, I'm an assistant professor at York university, and my research really looks at the enter play between regulation, crime and technology.  I'm particularly interested in large mostly U.S. based internet firms and now they act as what I call the new global regulators, both formally through formal legal orders and informally through what I call hand shake agreements. 

This presentation builds on a chapter in my recently released book.  My publisher will be happy I'm promoting the book available.  And in this book, I really provide the first scholarly account of these big U.S.- based internet firms and how they act as global regulators on behalf of rights holders of intellectual property trying to crack down on the online sale of counterfeit goods.  And this paper draws upon 20 interviews with policy makers, internet companies themselves, rights holders and civil society organizations in Canada and the United States.  And it looks at this type of normal regulation which got a lot of public exposure with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and this problem of fake news.  Suddenly, governments around the world are calling on internet firms to do something voluntarily about fake news.  And this isn't the first time that these internet firms have been tasked to do something voluntarily about third party consent on their system. 

And voluntarily here doesn't mean entirely voluntarily.  It means in the absence of legislation, in the absence of formal court orders.  And so the goal is to push these companies with direct governmental pressure.  The goal is to push these companies to exceed voluntarily their legal responsibility, to force them to go beyond their legal responsibilities, and advocate of this approach, including the European commission, term this beyond compliance regulation.  So this pushing these companies to go beyond their legal responsibilities. 

As the case study for this paper, it looks at the creation of a particular network, a particular program, that is really a hybrid regulatory program, the center for safe internet pharmacies in the United States.  So the center for safe internet pharmacies, is a industry run nonprofit association, and it brings together state and industry actors with these intermediaries to dismantled online pharmacies that violent U.S. federal and state law. 

And to begin with, I just want to explore a little what I mean by beyond compliance regulation.  So I argue that this type of regulation should be understood as state enforced hybrid regulation.  So I draw from the big body of regulatory theory, from the work of others, and this is a regulatory program of regulatory hybridity because there's hybridity in both the actors, it's a combination of state and industry actors and hybrid in terms of its regulatory instruments as well.  We have hard law, formal law, and we have soft law. 

And in terms of the hard law, we have the internet firm's contractual terms of service agreements, we're all very familiar with what these agreements allow these companies to do, withdraw their services, remove contracts, and in terms of the soft law, this is industry derived best practices, guidelines, codes of conduct.  So they're nonlegal, but they attempt to guide these intermediaries enforcement practices in regards to third party content on their system. 

And so it's really bringing together this hard law and soft law, these industry actors and state actors that forms this hybrid program, the center for safety internet pharmacies.  And really what's interesting and what's unique about this ‑‑ this program is that it provides what the director for the safe internet pharmacies call the firm private sector response to illegal online pharmacies.  Excuse me.  And what is key to this, I argue, is state conversion.  So we're seeing direct state pressure, direct state conversion, on these internet intermediaries to push them to go beyond their regulatory responsibilities.  So state conversion is a key actor.  And in this hierarchy that intermediaries is growing regulatory responsibilities is that we really can't consider them relation intermediaries, that provide specific commercial and technical (?) Imposing either directly or indirectly on these companies. 

Sorry, I'm getting tweets about the conference as we're doing this. 

So what types of intermediaries are a part of this, and I turn these mega intermediaries because of course not all intermediaries are being targeted by the U.S. Government.  In these are big U.S. based companies that tend to dominate their sectors.  So Visa, PayPal, Mastercard, Google and Facebook, which are the largest Google advertising activities.  GoDaddy who owns the large swath of the domain industry.  And the fact that these companies are headquartered in the U.S. gives an indication of the commercial dominance of these companies. 

We're all familiar with their terms of service.  This is their legal authority by which they can withdraw services, remove consent.  These terms of service agreements incorporate national laws and also incorporate industry or firm specific rules.  If a company has a specific rule about nudity or graphic content or specific rule about use advertising, this is where we will see them located.  What this means, and I stress this especially for audiences unlike this who aren't familiar with these companies, they don't require formal legal orders.  That tends to startle a lot of people outside of the internet community who aren't familiar with these companies. 

What these companies also have is tremendous latitude to amend agreements, update them as they wish, and the agreements typically include a clause that the companies can withdraw their services from you for any reason, even if your behavior content is legal.  So that means if the companies have some kind of disagreement with whatever you're doing, they can withdraw their agreements from you.  For states, this means that the companies are highly flexible actors.  They operate globally, and they're ideal regulators to work with, given their operational scope and facility, which means that in some cases for some issues, we go see them as having a greater regulatory capacity than the state. 

This is really why countries and governments like the United States government turn to these internet intermediaries.  And certainly, online pharmacies, the online distribution of medication has been a regulatory issue of importance to the United States for some years, utmost at the urging of its large pharmaceutical firms.  In 2012, after several years of pressure from the U.S. Government, Google and GoDaddy formally launched the center for safety internet pharmacies. 

The signatories shown here are those big, very prominent U.S. companies in the domain, advertising payment sectors.  The center also has two important ex officio members with close touch to the pharmaceutical industry.  One is the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies and the other is Legit Script, which most of you are not likely familiar with.  It's a company that certifies and investigates online pharmacies and sells its monitoring and investigative services to the pharmaceutical industry. 

What it will do for example is produce threat (?) About the threat that these illegal online pharmacies they post to the businesses of these companies.  So despite its identity ‑‑ cease its identity as industry run, it's a nonprofit association.  It really was created by direct pressure from the U.S. Government.  And state pressure was really fundamental to this idea of beyond compliance enforcement.  So negotiations over the creation of this program took place under the shadow of legislation.  You may recall when the United States was negotiating this stop online piracy act in 2011 and 2012 and the background of negotiations like that, these discussions were going on. 

Those bills failed because of a massive online protest, a revolt against those bills.  But at that, few would have accurately predicted that they would fail so these companies can be understood as negotiating in the shadow of forthcoming legislation.  And they also faced a direct legal pressure from states, Google especially, faced the pressure of criminal charges in relation to the ads it hosted for online pharmacy.  The intermediaries themselves acknowledged they faced direct pressure.  A lawyer said the direct of future legal proceedings is the pressure that gets everyone to the table.  And as the quote shows from Mastercard, Mastercard is admitting that thanks to pressure from the U.S. Government, Visa was a key factor in pushing negotiations forward, that without this pressure, the entire online payment industry wouldn't have the set of best practices that they do.  The industry itself also acknowledges that direct governmental pressure was key. 

So how does it operate?  Basically, Legit Script identifies pharmacies that it contends are operating in violation of U.S. federal or state law, then forwards the pharmacies on to the entity it belongs to and those companies withdraw services. Of these payment services are the most key because websites, if they are raising money through donations or funding through the sale of goods and services, If they lose their payment services, it means they're commercially nonviable. 

So certainly, when we talk about a big part of the paper, I try and talk about how beyond compliance regulation offers certain benefits for states.  This is because these regulators have ‑‑ they don't require formal legal orders, they don't require any interaction with wrong doing.  Importantly, they don't have to prove wrong doing.  So they don't need to respond to an allegation of wrong doing in order to withdraw services.  And states too are very cognizant of the fact that these companies can operate globally.  Victoria who is the architect argued that working with intermediaries on the (?) Allows governments to have an impact on websites that are beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement agencies.  The U.S. Government is clearly admitting that jurisdictional problems, intermediaries can help them overcome those jurisdictional problems.  As well as states can give themselves cover by transferring all the probability by saying this is a voluntary industry run association.  If you have issues, take that up with the private actors. 

Certainly, we may want to protect a very important issue but we have to be critical about the regulatory program set up here and essentially there's a lot of accountability problems with this.  Naught least of which is a potential conflict of interest or an actual conflict of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.  But I wanted to raise one particular challenge, and this is the challenge of the very nature of internet intermediaries. 

So currently we're seeing globally a number of questions about what is the regulatory responsibility of intermediaries?  What regulatory responsibility do they have for the third-party consent on their platforms and what are those intermediaries required to do reactively and encouraged to do proactively?  And what we're really seeing is the entire notion of intermediary influx.  And intermediaries are overreacting to their uncertain regulatory environment by taking on additional regulatory responsibilities voluntarily. 

And finally, I just wanted to draw a few points in relation to the significance of this.  So seeing U.S.- based intermediaries emerge as new global regulators, I think raises a number of really interesting and concerning questions.  And the fact of really underscores this interdependent relationship between the U.S. Government and very key U.S. commercial actors which some powers are calling an information industry complex and this complex is characterized by mutual interests, economic political security interests in promoting certain policies, standards, internationally.  And one of these standards is intellectual property.  The U.S. Government is the strongest proponent globally and we see that through the program. 

And by working with intermediaries, we're also seeing too is a way for governments especially in the global north to embed their preferred standards, their preferred policies in internet company's regulatory efforts and export those globally.  So we're seeing very U.S. centric standards and policies set within PayPal, within Microsoft, and Google and then exported globally and most of us in other countries have no idea that this is even really happening. 

One of those standards is as other presentations have talked about, a very highly commodified sense of information.  So a process that minimizes our privacy rights in other areas and commodifies information. 

And I think patterns when we talk about these patterns of global rule, diffusion global forth versus the rest of the world, we have to talk about who is able to set and enforce these rules, whose interests are served, and how this really affects global flows of information.  And related to this, and this is something that the paper tries to wrestle with as well, are questions of jurisdiction.  Whose rules apply and where, and who gets to decide that.  That's it.

>>Thank you.  As I mentioned before, we'll have time for questions at the end.  And now it's Francesca.

>>Thank you so much.  Sorry for the belated arrival.  I've had more amusing beginnings of afternoon.  So thank you very much for allowing me to present a paper today.  So I'm Francesca.  My research with the fresh council for scientific research.  I'm based in Paris.  And this is joint work with post dock on the next project which I'll be telling more about. 

Perhaps if I just move a bit closer.  Okay.  Should be much better.  Thank you. 

So what I will be presenting today, as I was mentioning, a piece of the research that I am currently conducting in the next lead project.  It's a European project and a 2020 project, part of the collective awareness platforms program.  As such, there is a little bit of sociology, philosophy, and a number of technical partners trying to build a usable piece of protocol to do an encrypted secured messaging in somewhat of a decentralized fashion. 

So what we were interested in in this particular paper was the fact that so after Snowden, there is this increasing tendency to consider that large scale and usable encryption of digital communications is a matter of public concern and constructive of the public's fear. 

So there has been a number of events, not only for Snowden but this has been further spurred by the Snowden regulations to create next-generation protocols and there seems to be a tendency to consider the signal protocol that is derived from something called ax laudo.  As the quasi‑standard protocol in the field widely recognized as being valued and usable, yet it remains officially unstandardized.  So we try to see a little bit what were the reasons behind this absence of official organization and why actually there is a de facto organization process happening in the field of encrypting messaging that actually happens around the signal protocol.  So it's not very practical that it's ‑‑ okay.  Should be okay anyways. 

Our restoration in terms of literature and what we want to contribute to with this research is like two aspects that are currently examined by scholars of same technology started.  So one has a very long‑standing tradition that has to do with how categories, standards get made, how they get embedded in society and how they become what they are.  So we refer to as such as Laura bush who talked about the internet connection between standards and power.  (?) On the role of standards and making up of particular social order.  Again, Laura Bush with a look on to further explore the different degrees of internationality of making standards and cite a very internet governance reference and how successful standard becomes irreplaceable when its success happens in practice. 

So the second strand of literature will be to contribute and withdraw from is the literature to the trust to explore the mundane practices of internet governance.  So the recognition that government happens in a lot of organizations and actors beyond institutions.  So this is, of course, a paneling which a lot has been said already about it.  And we more specifically concentrate on ‑‑ well this environment in which standardization happens so de facto informally as a side effect of something that is not necessarily explicitly an action of governance of these kinds of things.  And it is a part of a reflection and doing internet governance in which we have recently gotten an issue with Kristen on McKenies have distribute or semiformal governance.  So to get a little bit of context of the practical fielding with we will be talking about.  So max encryptions, this intends to bring encryption to a large public.  As I was mentioning, pre‑existing regulations has been spurred by that.  It's a field in the making.  It's a constantly involving system of several projects to give you an idea with saying we have a ‑‑ taken as a first step in the next review project a review of 30 projects and to an encryption to secure messaging projects and it was not an exhaustive survey. 

So there's a lot of that.  And according to a systemization of knowledge paper in 2015, this field so-characterized by the light of a clear winner in recent for deployment.  And the persisting of a lot of research ‑‑ difficult research problems that are lingering as unsolved.  And also there is quite a bit of discrepancy between some grandiose claims with the security that tools will provide versus the actual provided security.  And finally, there is, as developers consider as a main issue as a large tale of encrypted tools, the user friendly and usability.  So this is a step that is quite popular among developers and has been increased by some scholars as a force of musicians and users and likelihood of failing to take into account a more organic approach to security.  And also it should be mentioned that there is a powerful double narrative that I compound as encryption, not unlike looking for peer to peer technologies at the dawn of the century.  So that, on one hand, there is a narrative of empowerment and civil liberties and privacy and on the other hand, these tools are often in the media because of our alleged links to the bio terrorists.  And so developers move in this place so take into account both aspects.  

A quick word about methods.  So I already spoke about the survey.  So the step after the survey was that we selected a few applications that could be studied in more detail with Edna and quantitative methods.  And we (?) Signal as one of these cases for a number of reasons.  Its substantial role in the encrypted messaging ecosystem because it has comparatively lots of users, it enjoys media attention, and there is quite a lot of available documentation on how the protocol was developed in addition to what we could know from developers directly.  And also we'll via the technical team, we had a relative accessibility of the field work. 

So what we have been trying to do a sense making of signalism as an emerging system and as a community of practice. 

Let's talk about history of this application.  There is a signal property and an application called signal.  So the product itself is perhaps the most popular among the next generation messaging secured protocols and it is so for a number of reasons because it does not fit an excessively complex key manager on users, has a number of properties such as reputation for secrecy and also has added future secrecy.  So messages can get it raised automatically after times they have been exchanged.  And it should also be noted that signal is centralized as a single server.  It mediates the setup of the protocol in that most ‑‑ in the most popular widespread development of the protocol.  So Web stat, Facebook Messenger, Wire, and Google Alert, to name a few.  And there is also a number of open source.  So those are ‑‑ those are sources that are claimed to know the civil protocols are one of its works.  So it is widely adopted.  It is considered that improvement over the previous generations in protocols.  That remains officially unstandardized.  There is some sort of an informal draft that has been produced by the protocol creators after a considerable community pressure by fellow developers. 

So what is this deposition process about?  Developers of secure messaging apps seem to care deeply about the standards as something that is for the most part, they perceive that it's too early to be working seriously on most organization process, but it is something that is ‑‑ it is soon will be necessary for increasing the dialogue between applications and reduce the effects that is a quite prominent right now.  And this decolorization is underused as a reference, and that's as an important communication or obligation instrument that helps the member of the community to understand each other and build a common knowledge grand out.  And also it guaranteed that new applications can see the light in a smoother fashion on top of the protocols that will be more standardized. 

And also should be noted that there is a widespread discontent with the existing standards bodies.  If you talk to developers and that for several reasons.  So first of all, they ‑‑ the developers, underline recent transformations of these organizations and they refer to some golden age of a previous golden age of standardizing bodies and when they boat of existence was actually more similar to that of an open source communities, and second reason, it is that there is now ‑‑ there seems to be, at least in the developers perception, a growing importance of private actors and stakeholders in the standardized bodies.  And this would lead to a more adversarial environment, so less suitable for projects that would just see the light or that need a lot of discussion to figure out if they're the ration and so on. 

So most developers actually share the philosophy that they would build the application first and then focus on standardization, then more development is needed on the code.  However, there is actually a new way of constant organization that is being practiced around the signal protocol and it is actually by rounding the code, by producing a number of variation of the code in different applications, be theyope en source or appropriately.  So a quasi‑standard becomes very simply something that works that we cannot see, something that works, something that would be recognized by users as something that is both technically sound for their needs and easy to use from a standpoint of the interfaces of the applications. 

For about this, this is the second part that is perhaps less interesting.  There is one thing I would like to mention though that ‑‑ so we have retraced a number of applications for which it has been difficult to implement the signal protocol according to their own needs and most of these have been connected with the lack of specifications from the signal team.  And so it would be a consequence of the licensing policy of signal.  And if you talk to signal developers, this has actually to do with a concern they have over the technical competence of a third-party developers.  So if we keep it entirely open the specifications of the signal protocol, they say we may not be able to provide them a bug assistance or not be able to actually consider what is going on in these different applications stale signal protocol.  So actually, it's interesting that signal may be using an organization as a business model for them because the missing part of expertise and specifications that are necessary proper development of the protocol can actually be offered to the different ‑‑ the developers of the different implementations by the signal team as a service.  So this could be a part of their business strategy. 

So to conclude, as encryption becomes much more of a public concern, than it was a few years ago, there are several encrypted messaging developers that are growing schedule, dialogue on standards and indeed the capacity of a tool to be ‑‑ to appeal to would be realized by a large pool of users as something that works appears to be an indicator of succession and adoption as a de facto standard, each if there is no formal document that describes it as such. 

However, it should be noted.  So what's in it for the institution in all this?  So they engineered ‑‑ this course has recently acknowledged a term in encryption.  So among other things, the central role of the user in the large scale adoption of a tool versus another and so the importance of considering the different models of users and everything.  So more traditional arenas and standardizing processes may be moving alongside the rising nuance in different fashions that remain to be seen. 

And to broaden up in my last slide the scenario a little bit.  So beyond the aspects of iterability and the standardization, the motivation for adoption of a privacy enhancing tools are also dependent on things such as the reputation of their creators and the more traditional governance such as shifting political appliances that may have affected the reach of government agencies in one country with respect to the other or these particular audiences.  And de facto standardization processes are one of the several dynamics that speak to internet governance.  And yes that's as I described previously, so as mundane and informal activities.  And others are the form of decentralization or the technical architecture and the community of the different tools.  The concentration of leadership and in controversy among some developers if there is a core team.  Signal is actually a good example to observe this and to the degree of the code. 

So long‑term changes and infrastructure via standardization, whether it happens in a very informal way or more traditional avenues such as the ATF requires a number of things that include developing and inspecting the attitude of developers towards adoption.  The relationship they have to institutions and their business models or lack thereof.  So in the pod plans you cannot see, we are looking at in particular the degree of centralization and the centralization of a number of these tools and trying to make sense of this aspect in a governance way.  Thank you: I'm looking forward to comments. 

[APPLAUSE]

>>Thank you very much to our all-female panel session, yes I'm very gender aware these days.  Okay, comments from the floor, please.  There's hands the.  Yes.

>>So I'm kind of hearing two narratives in the relationships between the state and business.  And on the one hand, Natasha, yours had a pretty scary story where the state is exercising powers that it couldn't access on its own but by having the intermediaries, they're actually able to act as regulators even as strains imposed by the liberal constitutional and state.  So that's a pretty scary story.  On the other hand, the other two panelists who have standards development I assume within the state (?) In response to Snowden with the encryption stuff, because the state surveillance is very important for state security, law enforcement, et cetera so if your private sector seems to be helping security capacities that would frustrate the abilities to stay longer thereby exercising control.  And the most interesting is the Microsoft initiative.  I ask people at Microsoft the bugs and they well no.  The state department's quite unhappy with the Microsoft initiative on the digital.  So the it seems in some ways Microsoft is pushing a bit like an intergovernmental agreement which the U.S. brought to light on other states.  And possibly undermines the U.S. initiatives and to you cyber work there, possibly assertively interest in international compliance.  So let me ask you. 

Do you think there's a risk that the U.S. is empowering the private sector to act like governors, is it playing with fire and the private sector might all go Microsoft, and they can say, sure, we'll govern and they'll start behaving like Microsoft, initiating intergovernmental agreement without the private sector, making a lot a lot of money in government and in ways our government, the American government, doesn't like.  So there's a possibility that the private sector strategy could actually blow up in their face.

>>Absolutely, I think that's a risk.  That's a risk for several reasons.  First of all, intermediaries have had regulatory responsibilities for a long time.  But what we're seeing now is a broadening and expanding of those responsibilities including for companies to proactively identify consent that is inappropriate for various reasons, like extremist content, child pornography, their regulatory responsibilities are broadening.  Secondly, the companies have always had latitude to remove content they don't like.  What we're seeing is a greater political and public awareness of the roles these companies play in facilitating essential services.  So we saw this in the United States with the Charlottesville rally of the neo-Nazis and suddenly a kind of greater public awareness that neo-Nazis use the internet too.  And so this idea that companies should do something about this, but the counterbalance to that was, well, should we have private companies deciding who is able to use their services?  Should we have private companies as arbiters of what we consider hate crime or inappropriate speech?  So I think this type of regulation raises those questions that have existed for a long time to newer audiences, especially to politicians who have seen internet regulation as kind of a technical or highly specialized area, and now they're suddenly paying attention to it.

>>(?) The U.S. Government has an investment in (?) U.S. Government in some ways uses sworn policies and conversion as a tool in Iraq, Syria, Libya, blah blah blah, whereas Microsoft ‑‑ at Microsoft sometimes there's a loser because of ‑‑ the word goes to world, someone at Microsoft, Microsoft is an American (?) U.S. Government.  Microsoft is pushing to distinguish it from the U.S. Government, and might be more a probe piece or probe global actor.  And in that respect, you can compete with the U.S.  so it might be Microsoft playing a positive role toward U.S.  so ‑‑ Microsoft to talk about that.  I mean, this is really Microsoft's going head to head with the U.S. Government in ways that I find ‑‑ produce international detriments to the international (?).

>>I haven't thought that through, but I think you raise where does this line between Microsoft and the U.S. Government blurs when you talk about, are there other international players, companies, interpret this rise of Microsoft trying to play a diplomatic role in advocating for international cyber norms and I think this ‑‑ I haven't seen this blurry line and like this interpretation of Microsoft being an extension of like U.S. interests.  Now after the digital Geneva convention, I see a polarizing in the U.S. as you said kind of criticizing this initiative.  But on the other hand, what I find interesting in this case is that (?) Have been there since the beginning of the internet, you know, and they have been crucial throughout the whole development, be it in the infrastructure side, be it on developing software and security systems, and not you see this different kind of positioning where Microsoft takes a stand in trying to play the political international diplomatic card.  And that was pretty interesting.  They build up on the legitimacy that they are private actors and essential for the functioning of security and cyber security.  But on the other hand, playing the political card, I think it's the other turn to it, which I find is particularly intriguing in this case.  Do you want to add something to that?

>>Thanks for the question.  I think this is very interesting to note that ‑‑ actually (?) But the facts that we often see ‑‑ a conflict in how people scores policy makers perceive the role of private actors and prodder political issues.  It's more like companies and states are like in this like liberal view are always opposed.  (?) Always in conferences, private presents some kind of state interest in some sort of way.  These actors, they have preferences of their own and they sometimes overlap, the interest, the overlap or they enter in contradiction of each other.  So it's a much more in my view, complex dynamic.  So I think that these two views are states and private actors.  They pretty much illustrate how it is ‑‑ how difficult it is to understand these dynamics, these interceptions between those actors.  And for example ‑‑ and this is purely speculation.  But you can see for example in this conflict between Microsoft and the U.S. Government about Geneva digital convention, Microsoft is trying to protect its own visual interests.  Windows is used worldwide.  So we're not seeing this also as an attempt to protect the integrity of its own systems in face of increasing conflicts.  And so this is one possibility.  So I mean this is not only suffered from internet governance but the station between public and private is very nondiscussions.  So I think that's your bifurcation is great and this is it makes it clear Denham Springs distinctions, no?

>>(?) (Audio fading in and out.) Do you have an understanding, is there something particular had about this organization that makes it suitable going into this kind of line of reporting?

>>That is a great question.  I think that's the question that we kind of bumped into while we were trying to make sense of why Microsoft is advocating for a digital Geneva convention and that is why we try to look at the internal structure of Microsoft.  And I think what is interesting to see that this is not new.  If you look at the whole history of how Microsoft has been interacting and building up policy strategies inside of it and for a couple of years now, also in terms of like cyber norms, you see it is not unpredictable that they would come up with a certain positioning as they are having now.  However, that's why I think it's interesting is noting that this is not new.  They have been doing this to protect their own interest.  I think that is a fundamental point to the debate because if you go through Brad Smith's discourse over at the RSA conference, you note that he's saying,well, we shouldn't talk about only state actors as the one.  They are the ones that are kind of like breaking down the system and posing a real threat to the stability and security of cyber space and we need to have some kind of moment of agreement or international norm that can protect private actors and citizens.  But if you continue to look at the whole discourse that comes after that, you'll see that the greater emphasis is on securing the role of private actors and a little bit less on the side of highway protecting, we can guarantee that individuals and end users are actually being protected in this context.  So I think ‑‑ I don't know if I respond directly to your question, but I think it's interesting to like when we were question yourselves, where does this come from?  We went all the way back to understanding how it consolidated it itself and it's not unpredictable.  And that's the key point we tried to understand how Microsoft has gotten into the specific moment where they kind of graft of the Geneva conventions.

>>I believe we have another question here.

>>(Audio fading in and out.) Stating policy and creating commercial policy as national policy.  On the other hand, there's also being a support for very conserve or very reactionary or impressive governments to supply cyber security and its very surveillance systems et cetera that the participation of private companies and policy making might be able to counter by bringing together different credit assumptions to that process.  So I'm just ‑‑ you know, he's trying to just discuss and ‑‑ contents.  Where on the one hand you may actually wish to use a private company in order to state ‑‑ testing to the physics of basic cyber security that you require in order for the function of they might also be complimentary (?) So it's kind of before the ‑‑ I think there's (?) And maybe it's their national companies or international companies that have a private process (?) This kind of discussion normally comply of values that you're not getting in this, you're getting to meet your description of these companies and they're all operating in our countries, too, but maybe performing a different role at that point?

>>Absolutely.  And I think my point to a case study where we see very problematic outcomes in terms of accountability, transparency, (?) Certainly one of the problems is these agreements are conducted in secret

>>You have big intermediaries and government partners.  It's not in a very small area of the U.S. Government. There could be other situations where you have civil society industry government all at the table, discussing this in some kind of progressive transparent way to achieve some kind of public interest goals.  And this was a pretty narrow discussion among pretty powerful actors that was closed to the public and the operation of the center for safe internet pharmacies is very, very murky.  So it's a bad case for that.

>>(?) (Audio fading in and out.) The government excerpting control of the company.  By why would you would you think that is otherwise happening?  The state is using the companies.  Why is that kind of percent (?).

>>No, it's a good question because this is a very complex case.  First of all, it's the case of intellectual property.  This is an issue that's very important to the U.S. Government.  It's very important as a political and economic issue to the U.S. Government and it's very important to key U.S. industry players.  So the pharmaceutical industry, apparel and accessories.  So this is an area that the U.S. Government is very heavily lobbied on.  Trade interests largely composed the U.S. Government's policy in intellectual property.  So this is a specific case.  It's a case where powerful industry interests have a very receptive ear for the U.S. Government.  Secondly, we're also seeing that these companies can perform a lot of regulatory duties.  They can remove content, withdraw services, so they're very valuable regulators for the U.S. Government.  So before we saw them interested in tobacco, child pornography, all types of intellectual property, fake news, online extremism.  Because governments are recognizing that these companies can do something, especially in a global way in that U.S. Government simply can't because of jurisdictional problems.

>>(?).

>>I guess it depends how you look at it.  The U.S. Government would see it as others adopt rules, the U.S. Government wins as well because it's a priority.  So pharmaceutical companies win, but it's a bipartisan issue for the United States.  It's a key political priority for the U.S. Government and has been for decades.

>>And I have one last question for Francesca.  Her approach in this panel, there's no way they are envisioning encryption is from kind of a different private sector actor.  So how would you frame kind of these differences in this role of the community around encryption because it's definitely not a ‑‑ Microsoft is definitely not a powerful global U.S. company.

>>I think that they have tried to become ‑‑ they have tried definitely to become like a point of reference in this space.  And so that there is a present we couldn't see this kind of attention between the distance seems kind of a broader level objective and the small ‑‑ the everyday tiny controversies like, for example, wire that subbed to implement their protocol but was, well, was met with some ‑‑ well, it was not very complicated to say the least.  So I guess on one hand there is this strong will by the correlated developer of signal to be a central player and on the other hand he also has a very strong personality and has a very specific idea of how he should go about it, how it could be.  So perhaps the next step in there becoming even more like the reference player in the field will be this (?) Is sold because there is a lot of controversy every time that an implementation of the signal protocol goes on the market.

>>And the information that they were not particularly (?) Is a standard, actually what they're looking for is (?).

>>Yeah, yeah, what they are looking.  Yeah.

>>Okay.  No more questions.  We are going to have a short recess of ten minutes, and we are convening back in this same room at a quarter after four.  So we have ten minutes. 

[APPLAUSE]

>> All right, let's get started again.  Can you all come in and sit down?

>>I guess so, yeah.  Do you want to?  All right, all right. 

So everybody, can we have your attention please?  Hello?  Hello?  We're going to start again.  We want to start ‑‑ we have a really interesting set of papers.  These are about national governance machines.  Before we do that though, I wanted to clarify something.  Where did it go?  The ‑‑ this thing is such a pain in the butt.  Whatever I say is getting written, right?  Yes. 

So on the program, it says there's a reception at 6:00 or at the end of the business meeting, and there's actually not.  So I wanted to tell you that so you wouldn't be wandering around wondering where this reception is.  However, some of us have picked out a really cool place in Geneva that we are going to congregate.  It has a big bar, and it's called the Brasry desHollis Delegal.  So it's right there on the river in this old factory building called the LUZING.  And it's not that close to here.  You would probably have to go to Carnvon and then walk 10 or 15 minutes to this place.  I think we can show you the address here if you want to write it down. 

Here it is here, it's one ‑‑ one place DELEEL 1204 (?) Maybe I can go to maps dot ‑‑ you know, these keyboards are different.  This is very ‑‑ okay. 

Do you see where it is now?  We're going to do directions from our current location.  Hopefully this is turned on.

>>So the easiest way to get there from here is to take tram 15 all the way to the bus stop ‑‑ tram stop named (?) And you get off there, you will see it on the left‑hand side.  You need to cross the street and you are there.  It is in the middle of this island on the connection between the lake and the river.  So it's quite easy to get there?

>>Number 15.

>>15, yes.  It leaves from right here.  And you need to take it from stand.

>>Stand up as in stand up for your rights.  As in stand by your man.

>>What time are we going?

>>Probably at seven.

>>Seven.  Okay.  Seven.

>>Yeah, you guys would have plenty of time to go to your hotel, drop off your stuff, and go there, you know, arrive between 7, 7:30, I think that would be fine.

>>Did you say after seven?  We have an hour still here, right?  Okay, seven onward.  And if you get there early, have a drink.

>>Okay.  Now, sorry for the interruption.  Which one is you?  No, this one.  It's ‑‑.

>>Okay.  So that's good.  We have that.  Do you want the banner at the top or the bottom?

>>Bottom?  Yes, bottom. .

>>I think I will sit over there and be your timekeeper.

>>Good afternoon.  I am Fabricio and I am PhD (?) In southern Brazil.  Together with Diego Coonbahoe, political side condition from the same institution from Brazil as well.  We have looked into the participation of known stakeholders in internet governance in Brazil by (?) Of the Brazil (?) Coordinated in 1995 to the related internet activities in the department.  And we're up to 2003, the ministry of science and technology and ministry of communication appointed all nine members of this community.  After 2003, the community was over house said and the change expanded the responsibilities of the community (?) Which was given to our seats and it's by the electoral process of the (?) Of the government representatives.  (?) Funded by the president and work information center which allocates (?) And IP addresses and runs (?) In the country.  Today as you can see in this slide, maybe the next one, the community is composed of 21 members distributed in four groups, four from the business sector and the first 1, 4 from the (?) Organization, three from community and nine appointed by the government and one at large expert.  (?) Groups to appoint (?) To the board of for 3‑year terms.  Specifically, we focused on 2003 and 2016 elections.  The term four.  (?) Global internet governance.  (?) In Brazil.  We applied quantitative and quantitative approach to study the composition of electroscholars that (?) As a result of each election.  We relied on the available on the CI website for the consumption of the (?) Charts, graphs and maps to reveal the general characteristic of the power (?) And their representation each case.  We cut out same structure interfused with select stakeholders (?) And the representation side (?) Are affected for better and see how (?) Stakeholders works in Brazil.  Let me first explain how these electoral process works.  (?) The submission and validation various documents appeared for challenge those (?) The elimination of CDC and filing the pole itself.  (?) For example the common is formed solely by business sensation unions, et cetera knowing companies are allowed to vote (?) Only research institution professional associations that employees are allowed to join the college. 

This means there's no expectations for individual universities, professors or (?) Organization only (?) Other sort of sectors (?) Individuals can't participate except in the intermediation of those entities.  The votings or rules of the technical communities and civil organization changed between the two elections of 2013.  Each institute voted for four candidates (?) However, in 2016, they could vote for only one.  Why the sector uses a segregated voting system for some groups for available seats independently.  The same system was applied in both elections.  And the next slide.  Our investigation, we can see ‑‑ no, I think this is what ‑‑ thank you.  Sorry.  Our investigation covered three main aspects as you can see in the slide.  The immobilization and the strategy employed by candidates and the electoral college and turnover rates and distribution.  Now let's talk about mobilization in each stakeholder group.  As you can see the slides, (?) It has a low level of participation.  In general, the winners get elected with only a few votes.  Despite the small size, it's (?) Into political (?) Policy discussions.  The rules are resulting (?) Are not the most common form of research organization Brazil.  The business sector, as I said before, is segmented into the four groups, corporate users that will provide bes and content providers and finally industry.  The last three represent less than 20 percent of votes from the sector.  And each rules elect with only a few votes.  (?) Considered in economically concentrated segment with a new nationwide representative ‑‑ representative organizations. 

Brazil has around 7,000 ISPs spread around the country.  They are a regional force which are organized into relatively fewer relative organizations which results a nice.  The corporate users segment however is now (?).  In 2016, it's (?) In the electoral college than any other stakeholder roof.  It depends much more on the action of its (?) Coherence.  In general, the rules of the game favored who exercising flames over state level and local chapters affiliates and partners.  The candidates need to activate their personal and professional net worth to support themselves.  For example, Doctor from the 2016 elections shows that in (?) Represent ten percent of our entities described from the entire process.  Most of them cast their votes for their specific candidates.  We call these mobilization as behavior this idle.  Like a process.  Lastly, the civil society organization segment is a big and verse college for years.  Some of its entities have been deeply engageant in the internet governance discussion in Brazil.  The public debate is on the creation in addition of internet rights besides the feud more than ever.  In the last election, political convergence originates a formal coalition, rights of more than third organizations.  (?) They are bringing controversial topics to the discussion (?) And in social networks.  They are the entities enrolled to participate around 2000 to (?) Diverse from the local representation counter side.  In some cases, we note that the top behavior was implied by some (?). 

The second aspect of the study was the turnover rate of the board members which was low in 2013, amount with the 11 electoral representatives, seven got re‑elected while four were new.  However, two of them had previously served as deputies.  In 2016, the rate was even lower.  Only three of the 11 members were not incumbents.  And again, two have been members in previous terms.  This indicates that the rules guiding the elections may be in favor of (?) Incumbents who can run for election as many times as they wish.  The low turnover rate can also be explained by the fact that becoming a member requires significant resources and it can be time consuming to attend the meetings and other events.  This represents an entry for new players.  In terms of regional, the electoral college are concentrating in southwest region where Rio and Sao Paulo are located (?) The highest number of votes.  In fact, a comparison between two elections reveals slightly difference in terms of concentration which varied by about five percent but was less regionally concentrate on their last election.  There are some ‑‑ I am (?).  There are some differences in the way different stakeholder groups mobilize their votes.  These differences in coming apart from uniform rules being applied for different groups and the different internal voting procedures used pie each group.  But beyond the institutional aspects that stricture the election, these differences are related to different strategies to the ‑‑ that the stakeholders apply to (?) Other institutions by previous scholarship (?) The immersions in proponance of power leads that contributes to a turnover rate and our revolving dynamic in the composition in the board of the comment.  The most important servant is in the investigation (?) Which involves getting the support of entities connected to (?) Affiliates for specific candidates.  Rules that guide the elections break in favor of our incumbents who are in the privileged position in terms of the (?) Research

Additionally, this change (?) 2016 do not seem to have brought the promise reduction in powerful concentration.  New relation to the behavior and strategy of candidates in the relation to the behavior and the strategy of the dates, the 2016 rules kept rewarding the network power of a research kind of days.  We all subserve that some unctuous quick parkway through the long electoral process.  The requirement presents a large number of governance and then pass through the numerous things can be quite a burden, especially for new commerce.  To ensure that bounds and representations CGI shoot unless the issue of the constituent's motivations as well as the gaming of the rules by incumbents as observing the elections and the other (?).  This is just an overview of our paper.  I invite you all to read the ads in our research.  And of course, I'm sorry but (?) Is here just to answer some question that you have in this paper.  I'm sorry to (?) Write a lot of data and the (?) But I may be good to be a comparison with another case for example.  Thank you.

>>The availability of English speakers is limited so I'm just going to (?).

>>Okay.  Our presentation is about the case of Chinese case.  Actually, our study actually has many topics that we discuss in the morning.  First of all, I'd like to introduce Michael from School of Journalism and Communication in Beijing.  So there's also the dean of the school.  So we want to discuss two core issue of the internet governance.  The first is a power distribution among the actions.  The second discussion actually is about a nonprofit organization, it's a private sector, as I said civil society organization.  So we're going to explore these two questions in our case study.  We use Beijing internet association as a case study. 

If we look at the (?) Internet governance, at the moment, the core, you know, mortal is a (?) And is actually we emphasize is that functionalist is kind of (?) Argument.  Many people also criticize it.  Actually, this modest day (?) So therefore we try to use the other model which is proposed by professor moolah and it's called level governance so instead of the modest day (?) More functionalist approach.  (?) Governance actually included two parts.  The first part is a treat as a governance which means that analyses.  And second approach actually is called (?) Which is menu focus on the (?) Such as (?) The position and relationship to links between the actors. 

So in our research, actually we attach both.  So we treat a governance as both governance and as (?) Unit as well.  So while we adapt the (?) In Chinese case because there's a potential for it.  Two potential.  The first one is that in the Chinese case we sought, we observe it as less (?) Of civil society and the interest groups.  And also the government controlled model and (?) Government public management and level the governance.  And secondly, we observed as a future of the government delegation of some governance functions to not state or civil society organization.  So that's why we figure it.  And that is circumstance.  That's why we try to apply these governance ‑‑ level governance model in Chinese case, to test the effectiveness of these in splendor situation.  So the second issue we're going to explore is the nonprofit organization in China.  If we look at the concept which is derived from the alliance west society, actually there's a (?) Nonprofit organization in China.  And if it is (?) The reason we just lease out ‑‑ so for the developing country, they have this (?) And for the developing world, they have a different social society situation.  But at the same time, we observe even the garments in developing country are join force of nonprofit organization to help divide process because they sought the importance of the social nonprofit organization in development. 

So when we try to analyze the role of the nonprofit organization, we apply quite a few set up by the (?) So this is a role of the nonprofit organizations, which is a defined by the U.S. document.  Okay.  So in our alert research way applied (?) We look at actors.  So what ‑‑ who are the actors morphing this government?  Secondly, we look at the relationships between the actors.  For example, the types of links.  What kind of links they have and the strength of the links as well.  For example, I think the (?) And the prominence.  In terms of the analyzing the power actually where you quote this concept of the bulkage.  So we use the concept to analyze the whole (?) In this whole network.  So there's a different type of (?).  And in our case, we find that the big keepers the, the type is most suitable in our case. 

Now let's turn to the pay study.  Which is the first ‑‑ sorry.  Internet association is the first nonprofit internet association which collecting the internet company with the government parliament.  We choose this because member in China's major social media companies and they also have the link between the garment and the social media industries.  And also they have a different (?) Set up.  And including worry famous, the attitude and website is called the (?) It's kind of drawing (?) So therefore it is provided as some (?) Sample to study the mechanism of internet governance and the collaboration process.  So that's why we choose these.  At the same time, we want to explore the power relationship within this network.  If rumor had our structure an husband, first of all, we have a social organization which is a internet association and we try to look at different actors for example hike a media company institution academics and government agents.  So now we use this as three to analyze the power relation.  First of all, we look at actors.  Secondly, we look at relationship and the power distributions. 

So our findings first of all we look at (?) Actors.  This is how do we define actors.  And in the case of BIA, the night worker consists of different organizational actors.  So here they are.  This is ten different actors, okay.  And so they including that (?) And different companies ISPs and social, online news websites, all these.  So they are allowed to this network space. 

So if we look at how this be as a network of governance, we look at a concrete example is the Beijing entity (?) Actually, if we look at the website, I have these columns.  Each column displays different rumors and they supply different actor in this network, for some they have already a rumor the callers.  They have a distinguished truth from the force of columns.  So each column is a supply of different actors in that network.  Is that what they ‑‑ it can be supported by Beijing television, Beijing deign or even legal in news.  So this is how this network works in concrete terms.  So there's four ways to detect a rumor as for example you can use the menus, menu discovery better or staff formed a channel. 

So they have a user reporting mechanism or can use the technology to detect the rumors.  Or they even follow the instruction from the garments to remove the rumors they define what takes a rumor governance.  So this is one way we'll detect rumors.  Then if we're looking at types of links.  So actually the type of links between the factories and the government agent which is the Beijing information of this. 

So we can see the statutory actually is a gatekeeper.  So this year, the government message and agenda with the members to actually in the networks are also they represent the members to communicate with the garment.  So that's why the is the gatekeeper.  They have a special capacity of information control and that they also have the findings accessible to different keepers in both the (?). 

So but given that, but the relationship between the BIA and the government actually is foremost of collaborative forms is not a formal one.  And so if we look at the relationship between internet company and the factory and the other internet companies, actually, we found that there's a relationship called the exchange of intangible resource between different actors.  So this kind of intangible resource could be information, knowledge, or personal connection.  So the key actors, if we're ever 160 members of that network and 16 ‑‑ okay, 60 of them are core members.  Those core members, most of them are commercial websites.  So including social media companies on a news website or web fortes.  So most of the activities in that network actually is organized around those companies.  The other members such as research institutions, technology companies or traditional media.  So they only participate the kind of marginal actors instead of the key actors.  So we're found in our research that four cage type of relationship and the capacity a powerful expanding measurements in this BIA cases.  And the BIA also the sectary act as a (?) And the commercial companies analyze the more powerful organizations and the type of actor social resolution technology company and transition media given all part of this network.  Okay.  If we're look at the ‑‑ the information changing, you know.  So here we have the (?) We have the BIA social networks.  There's secretaries and other actors.  And (?) Information office.  So basically the BIA factories act as a (?) Demands issuemize information skills to the IAO.  On the other hand, the they also (?) And the collections resources from the BIAO to that BIA social network.  So that's why they have the section functioning as a gatekeeper. 

So this bring us to the other question about rule of the civil society organization ipChina.  As we know, there's no pure or independent ‑‑ fully independent civil organization in China.  And all this civil organization is kind of semi dependence.  It is quite an intermediate civil society organization.  But the question is does it mix anything you know to our research of the internet (?).  Actually it, does have some meanings.  The change from the internet regulation which is entirely managed by the government to the development of a social governance, which is a multiple actor can be used for the dis(?) Already a progress because the state at least this kind of social organization to communicate with the internet industry actors and also, they can realize the diversity and the effectiveness of internet governance informs. 

So that's the why we want to refract and up hold of doing internet governance research.  (?) Power distribution among the actors where modest day (?) Is kind of the normality of this course.  It's kind of functionally arguments.  (?) Two different approach in our internet research, particularly for the internet policy makers, social media competence, civil society and researchers in the field.  It's kind of challenge questions.  So we need to have an ethical approach.  But at the same time, it has to be compliment with (?)

So this is a ‑‑ I think this is a what we want to explore in our official research as well.  Thank you very much.  Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]

>>Okay.  The timekeeper is saying the battery is going to die so we'll leave it up here.

>>Good afternoon.  Thanks for being here.  I'm (?)

What I'm trying to explain, to show in my paper is basically an historical overview of the global structure of Chinese internet why.  Because during the last years we've been assisting to some important events in terms of internet governance that put China in a (?) Opposition both international and domestic one.  Some of you are probably already familiar with the famous letter was the open letter that was delivered at Washington post by former secretary of China administrative office in which the politician describes which is the most (?) This is the multilateral one, which is considered (?) To the multistake holder one.  The Chinese position is getting more and more importance trying to be blurred also to the (?). 

This was probably not the distance that during the ‑‑ just a couple days before, the first official visit of president CP to the U.S. organized together with some Chinese (?) Joint event with most of the most important U.S. companies.  But the idea of these new model as is roots in the past of course.  Probably the most important event to place in 2010 when Google decided to redirect servers to Hong Kong, leaving the factor of the Chinese department.  The state decide which is the most prominent institution ‑‑ political institution in China published a famous white favor in which years stated that internet governance should be support ‑‑ should be followed in more lateral model.  And more importantly internet for (?) Should be respected. 

In order to promote this idea, especially at internal level, a couple of years later, presidential opinion last administration office lead by (?) And of course this provided very important proof in terms of (?) Of the internet.  And probably the last event in this new platform which is the word internet corperance in which China tried to play a (?) In order to promote ‑‑ better promote the idea of this multilateral model.  Of course I have no time and I'm sure that you're ready for media where the main difference is between the two models.  For this reason, I will go further with my presentation. 

What is interesting to see is the attention addressed today is the specific research field which is internet governance analyzed through a Chinese perspective is getting more and more important.  For my analysis, I referred mainly to two papers (?) And most of the data are retrieved by the PhD certification discussed pie collaboratively (?) In which attract all the participation of a Chinese delegation in the most important international organization.  Relating to internet governance.  (?) Of course the organization are (?) Are

For this paper, I decided to focus the collection of my data to internet governance forum.  (?) Because both of them are considered to be closer to the Chinese (?) For the status of reasons.  For instance (?) Has been growing during the last year in terms of research group and in the interest of the most important and the key positions. 

The main research question I'm going to try to answer to this paper is the first one.  So to what extent the Chinese ‑‑ the Chinese presidency (?) In order to answer to this first question, I adopted an archival approach.  And text book analysis.  I expand a couple of weeks through Itune archives in order to find some materials that try to map the Chinese vision, the Chinese relationship between IT and China.  The most important governmental (?) Which took place in in the fall of 1994.  It's very important because it's considered the first official event in China.  And I found something that is going to think and (?) With idea of Chinese government to development its multilateral approach.  And eventually I collected those most important statements by Chinese delegation during the worse information society and internet governance.  (?) Of course I selected the way I selected the most important events with a particular reference to internet governance forum was because of the presence.  As you can note, this is a research (?) That 2007, 2009, 2010, recorded the highest presence of the Chinese delegation and this event.  And it's possible to argue that the presence of the government in civil society is the most representative wide. 

Why 1994 is a crucial year for China for several reasons just to mention some is the first web server was launched and then their official domain and .CN was connected to national server using ‑‑ IP protocol.  And then there was also the creation of a (?) The most important (?)

There are also (?) Facility of China project launched the first 64 key international delegated (?) Important also among the Chinese scallers and politician and it was considered one of the most important technology behavant of the year.  Coming to research, I will not rid for you but just I would like that some of the key (?) Key ministers of the time possible communication already nodded a very strong imbalance in terms of the work (?) And the gap between the most (?) So basically what (?) Find a way to get (?)

And there was also this kind of concern about the role of (?) And the large amount of the (?) And then also there was another interesting point (?) China provides a service a kind of (?) Breached and in order to support other developing country with left behind in terms of internet (?) Development. 

Yes, there are also ‑‑ the Russian minister of the Chinese government but also other members of Chinese government highlighted that this is perception of (?) Which is China was ‑‑ was already noted by other foreign industries.  So the generality of the proposal that was addressed to ITU was to report (?) Back to the main goal of the Chinese government to us to development and economic international and domestic economic of the internet. 

And this is just what I noted in this report.  Come into the 2003 deposition became a little bit more clear and was not the case that the head of the Chinese delegation at the time mentioned to come (?) According to each sovereign states, the government should play any role in the decision‑making process.  It was a way to promote the multilateral governance mechanism and the level of internet governance. 

And again also the ministry or information industry proposed for more participation (?) By intergovernmental organization.  It is possible to argue at this first meeting, 2003 China wanted to use this platform to promote these idea of multilateral ‑‑ multilateral mechanism.  This is quite interesting because (?) Multi‑stakeholder approach.  In 2005, the (?) In particular was even more difficult and complicated because not only the generality of multilateral model was confirmed once again but also because they asked for (?) Which was the creation of United Nations framework and also admitted again the sense of government which was considered (?) Acceptable. 

In other words, the Chinese delegation remained the defect that the platform was an information society was an event which was not able to represent the majority of developing countries.  So also for this reason was asked to allocate ‑‑ was asked to the United States ‑‑ United Nations to allocate the specific budget to support this countries.  In 2007, China tried to become smarter in order to show how the multilateral model could work to say ‑‑ to show some specific problems.  So this idea to share with the doing their first internet governance policy event which was an analyzed research that the problem with Spam could be solved also using the Chinese model. 

In the second event I took and an husbanded in the internet governance forum is again ‑‑ show again a kind of difficulty relationship in between China internet governance forum, basically China is (?) Dissatisfaction for the whole system and arrived also to doctor by the renewal of the extension over AGF.  Nevertheless, they ‑‑ in the end, they confirmed their support.  The main suggestion was addressed during these events was to support the agenda.  There were questions what are also noted, there was a lack of reverence in the other ‑‑ in other key important governance event, 2010, 2013, 2014, there was no mention about the case and in 2014 no mention about leaks and no mention to the internet government conference that year took the first edition of this conference here.  And no mention to the cyber administration of China.  Considering limitation of time, I'm going to skip to the conclusion, saying China the goal is to preserve (?) Needs to be (?) Choices.  In other words, it's possible to argue the Chinese approach to support the multilateral model is not changing so much during the time as confirmed by the government published in 1994.  The second finding of this research shows that Chinese government highly support (?) And actually because of its very ‑‑ because their relationship started already specifically in the ready to internet start already in 1994.  So there is a a lot of relation of trust.  Chinese government appears to be more focused to promote general idea of internet governance instead of to analyze specific and domestic issues and although this is the finding (?) And more recently internet governance forum to reconfigure the internet resource and management, however, the Chinese governance is to support IGF. 

And the last point is again, this idea of China government to represent a kind of (?) On the developing country.  (?) Already in 1994 but still happened during the ‑‑ because of this new platform, which is the wording for internet conference which arrived to its 4th edition.  These are my conclusion.  Thank you for your time. 

[APPLAUSE]

>>Well I think we have some really interesting papers here and I'd like to draw some contrast between them.  Just point out first that whereas when emphasized the network governance elements of the Beijing internet organization and didn't talk about the state, Luka talked almost entirely about the state and sovereigns so it might be interesting to have those two contrast with each other.  And then the Brazilian case, it's very interesting data about the similar ‑‑ I would compare it to quick's paper because it's PT internal national governance of the CGI.  So we have a lot of really interesting material here.  Anybody have any particular questions? Natasha?

>>My question is for a really interesting paper and I was thinking quite a lot about the (?) And wondered if you could talk about the ways in which the business actors main influence government policy in terms of technical standards and other things relating to internet governance.  And secondly, you talked about the control of online rumors.  What other areas are these business actors internet companies being asked to regulate?

>>Yes, thanks for the questions.  Actually, this is the complicated questions.  How we call the PAT (?) Actually they have been play quite a fragile role in terms.  As you know, the Chinese government strategy is big different from the other middle-sized country.  They want to have their (?) Not a domestic or confined as to the company expansion.  Therefore, they actively support those kind of big company.  Therefore many (?) Every five years, they have this kind of policy development, national policy on science and technology.  For particular reason n two years, if there's many bigger plans like AI, artificial intelligence, big data.  There's close collaboration between companies, commercial companies, and national garment strategies.  So we can say to some extents, they're very close related to each other and sometimes you look at a statement but made by the CO of.  And also the governance policy, one of my students as you did a comparison between them, they found that we're crossing between these two documents.  I'm just saying, tholes those were a close link with each other those are one of the routine (?) By these two company.  The topics, the (?). 

The second question sorry is about ‑‑.

>>The second question is about where else are these companies asked to regulate.

>>Maybe Professor Cheng can talk about that.  In many areas because we have (?) They manage (?) Company.  Many sensitive posts would be delete in warm political issues, mental issues, and OSC like what do you say to them (?) They can remove what they disliked.  Of course what was the reason that they give the mechanism, why they remove this post is because of instruction from the governments that they were not of course again for those orders.  They were combined.

>>(?) This kind of relationship within the government and private sector.  One interesting point is that the government actually party member in the board of the companies and arrive to them between the 1 and 2 percent of the budget.  Also, it is not a director in part on the decision but it still played important role.  On the vice versa in the row of the private sectors, he's developing many in very consistent way.  If you think about this, you already heard about the internet plus which was lodged in 2013 and was actually an idea we came by ‑‑ came from the sea of consent and eventually turned to be a policy ‑‑ a larger policy project that's getting a lot of vestment and also a lot of promotion for the government.  So you can see a very direct connection in this sense.

>>Okay.  Any other questions?  Yes.

>>(?) (Audio fading in and out.) My sense was that either there are multiple Chinas (?) But also I got the feeling there was (?) It said multi‑stakeholder and (?) But the (?) The Chinese government has taken a vice chair.  There are Chinese representatives showing up in the (?) (Audio fading in and out.) Multi‑stakeholder basis having a Chinese brash having its first meeting this year.  I get the sense China's changing.

>>Absolutely, yes.  (?) Anywhere in the paper.  I noted there are some contrasts from especially from the private sector in representing the Chinese view.  It's not the case if you ever look to the presence of ITU, the Chinese presence ITU is meaningless in terms of private sector.  But if you go to the (?) You see a lot of Chinese companies that will to the want to invest more.  These are some technical cases in which there are actually some Chinese companies such as (?) Revolted against the government position.  So for sure the situation is much much more fragmented as explained probably in this presentation.  My point that the they are a multilateral model with roots in the past.  (?) But we're sure it's very, very blurred.  And the official discourse, especially domestic level, seems to promote more convincing way that multilateral model.  So the historical approach goes from this line.  It's not very clear to see which is the most supported line, but if you ever look at a story outside from the multilateral one, it's still an important one.  It's true that the internet ‑‑ the word internet competence is based on the multi‑stakeholder one.  At the end of the day, they're promoting the multilateral one.  At the end of the day, they're trying to let the participate to sign a kind of memorandum understanding in order to support what multilateral approach.  It's very difficult to understand.  It's very strategic from Chinese side to similarity like before.  (?) There are much, much more months which can.

>>(Audio fading in and out.).

>>Thanks for the question.  I think it was a very good question.  Basically I think a requirement for the independent to civil society which means that it's independent to financial and also independent not from the human resources you know point of view.  The governance is not a controlling the personnel and also the civil society is not you know dependence on the government for financially.  So I think that's a basic line for definition of civil society, you know.  And so I think we say there's no inference of society.  In China, there's a (?) Really officially controlled by the Beijing information office.  But still the head of the (?) Of the government is agent so that they share the same head.  But of course, the operation is not controlled by the head pause he's just there as a head.  But the operation is controlled by the factories.  But the head has to be government officials.  This is the case where very difficult.  And the second is financial the kind of partial dependence on the governance because you note that the PIA actually, they have to rely on the outsources of the governments.  The government outsources some projects to this organization so they can have the financial incomes.  So that's a true life of the defense.  But in the future where we think increasing independent, I think so.  I think increasing becoming less and less dependent.  So I think it's really to think the link and highly link between the government and civil society in China.

>>Do you think that a problem is surmountable in the long‑term that there would be an independent civil society emerging in China?

>>Entirely independent, no.  It's difficult.

>>(?) I tried to retrieve the role of the civil society.  It's kind of a connection there.  It's difficult to say ‑‑ very difficult to predict whether we will reach civil society in a western.  But for sure if again if we ever look for a historical profession, there's much more open diversity in the past suggested paper is of course I don't want to be deterministic in this lecture, but for sure, it's not because of the internet allotment but internet play quite an important role.  We know that there are formal protests, formal organizations, form of tentative desperate in through the internet.  What is interesting, I told you the domestic level but the international one.  So I'm ‑‑ this is no joke that the very present situation is often framed as the return of new mound I don't think is definitely the case.  I think it might be misleading.  For sure, the censorship and terrible sufficient which is not very good for civil society in western terms.  But if we ever look on the longer perspective, I think there are more chance to be a little more optimistic about that.

>>That's why at least out to the role of the civil society we're defined by documents.  I think it's not ‑‑ we're trying to avoid the two coins to say this is a civil society saying dependent on my independence.  But we're having to look at separate functions.  That's different functions, the civil society organization defined by the UN.  In some way, we look at the function, the Chinese civil society has taken of up functions which is a definition as civil society.  In terms of the structure, as I said, unless the governments structure change, there's a political reform, I do not see the possibility for independence.

>>Last point, if I may, I think it's crucial that when we frame Chinese civil society, it's a cultural problem because of the language because it's not related to the Chinese (?) And the very most recent Chinese politics but even during the (?) There were at least 3 or 4 ways that civil society in Spain and China.  (?) And many others.  It's a cultural product.

>>Okay.  Just to bring it back to Brazil for a second before we stop.  So Brazil, I was also surprised to learn that the CGI is perceived pie many people in the internet governance fear is this model of multistakeholders but in many ways it's tied to the state that might surprise Americans for example.  Lots of CCLTs are independent of the state, and some are owned by the state.  But in Brazil, CGI is fundamentally in this very close relationship to the state and it seems to want to be autonomous and multi‑stakeholder but it's got this string that can be pulled.  Is that a correct characterization or is it an exaggerated ‑‑.

>>Well, thanks for the question.  It's very difficult, especially if you are wearing my shoes now, just a disclaimer, I work as an expert (?) But here I am speaking on my personal capacity.  I think that to respond your question, answer your question, one has to look to the history of CGBI in terms of the constant effort of creating a more and more independent steering committee.  So in 1995 when we would create it, the student committee was completely dependent upon government oughtimations.  In 2003, the committee was reformed.  In order to allow half and half participation let's say like that.  In order to enable the election of not government stakeholders to the board of CGI.BR.  And at this point we are sort of discussing internally which would be the following ‑‑ the following steps for that and.  One government stakeholders, they all coalesce around the notion of equal footing participation and complete independence from a big committee from the government while the government stakeholder group, they actually do not agree with the notion of equal footing and they are working with the umbrella of the WSIS agenda which says just like common but differentiated roles and responsibilities.  The other is environmental.  So that's the whole thing.  It's just like an evolutionary process, yes, and I would say that the whole issue is that we still do not have equal footing stakeholder participation as generally it is formally presented in an international level.

>>I'm afraid we'll have to stop here.  Thanks to the panelists.  It was really interesting papers. 

[APPLAUSE]

>>And now I'm going to call our August chair to the podium and do you want to preside over the business meeting.  In five minutes, we're going to impeach Maryan and then be done with it, right?  You did cooperate with the Russians.

>>Coralina and Isadora, where are you?  Come on up.  Please don't go.  We love you so.  I just want to thank everyone for a very intense and rich day for being here, for having a pretty full room for most of the day.  Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]

>>There was a lot of competition with some amazing other meetings.  But this is four out of the 8, 50 percent of the current steering committee.  So this is a chance for you to meet the people who have been doing the work behind the scenes to create and hope an increasingly welcome and inclusive space for engaged scholarship and thinking about what internet governance means in all its multi‑stakeholder, multidimensional ways.  Because we are hosted by the UN, it's very important that we are here engaging with other researchers who are working in activist or policy making communities.  So many of us are running around in many places, as you are.  So thanks for sticking with us today.  In five minutes, we just want to update you on all our advances in the past year.  I'd like to thank our program chair, Miller.  And he has finished his first and second year is next year.  Whenever the IGF is next, we'll have fun doing that.  I have just briefly to tell you how much money we have or do not have, and a little bit of the participation review and then I will just get Carolina who is our outreach chair officer and coordinator who works very closely together with I is, adore who is our new incoming or soon to be we hope continuing membership ‑‑ communications chair.  So the thing about the steering committee is that we have a government structure and that allows‑us volunteering our time and energy to have specific roles that we can develop individually and together.  And this is a real pleasure to chair as I'm the current chair.  It's been an absolute pleasure to work with everyone, including those who are not here, Dimitri Epstein, who is the vice chair and has done a lot of work.  And I've just turned off everything.  That's great.  Has done a lot of work to keep building the organization.  Madeleine car is our outgoing treasurer who has been here today.  And Joanna Clesha who is our membership chair.  Now, some of you may be observers.  Some of you may want to be members.  In which case just contact Joanne and she will tell you what you need to do, which isn't too terrible.  And, yeah.  But participation, and Daniel, excuse me, our former chair who's still in Brazil and cannot make it given the timing and the venue, like many people.  But he's done an enormous amount of work as well. 

We've got 338 members and observers who are now part of gig net, 338, of which 50 arrived in the last year.  So that's down to the outreach of my fellow steering committee people.  If you are still an observer, which means you're app observer not a member and you feel you've reached the honorary stages of member, do get in touch with Joanna and tell her why.  We have done a breakdown.  Our membership is predominantly in the U.S., that are, and in Europe.  But we have a sizable number in Africa, the Asia pacific, and the Latin America and Caribbean regions.  So we are actually starting to become more diverse geographically and we're working on it.  And of course, a number of scholars are based in the states but of course come from different parts of the world, the same as in Europe.  Where we are by affiliation does not necessarily define who we are by a preference.  So that's just one way to breakdown our geography.  We also have money in the bank.  We have about 4,300 euro.  We've calculated in euro at the moment.  We're looking to coordinate ourselves on the account.  We'll update you on that with the generous support of ICANN and ISOCK over the last couple of years.  We've been able to establish a floating fund which can buy for us in the next 2 or 3 or even five years, will support our web promotion, our South Carolina SR subscription which is very expensive, thanks to our research funds, we've been able to do it thus far but we can self-finance and our domain name.  We've also been able to buy the services of a web designer.  Would someone like to type up the website, just to show.  So we spent the last year getting a new website together which isn't as straight forward as some of you may think.  It's more than setting up a domain name and going for it.  So we've taken a long time and developed a website that can be sustainable and transferred to other people.  We're very proud it.  It was based on our logo that was designed last year, and these are people who may not be members but have contributed to the work.  And this is our straight forward website.  So help us populate it.  The membership will be coming on here, a searchable database and we've established ourselves in the 21st century which is delightful. 

So we have money in the bank.  We have ongoing coordination, cooperation, and collaborations, any number of academic institutions, and perhaps Carolina, you'd like to speak a bit more to that about the various participations we've done.  We're cosponsoring events.  We can't pay for them, help you fund them, but we can help you do things.  But Carolina you can talk briefly about that.

>>Yes, we have received at the last year's many request for endorsing an event related with a gig net or internet governance/internet policy approach and so we have ‑‑ because we received so many requests and we did have sort of clear guidelines as to what was expected of us and we don't have funding for those kinds of endorsements, but we can provide a symbolic and international flavor to an event that you might want to host in your research center, university, et cetera so we have nose guidelines and they are available and we have been providing this endorsement to several events in the last years.  And we're looking forward to consolidating but because this annual symposium is our flagship event, maybe I'm thinking of participating in other gig net organized gig net activities which have been in the past years present in international conferences such as the ICA or AOAR.  But we are very much open to ideas from the membership and work from the membership as well in terms of ‑‑ because it's a heavy load in terms of this work we do here.  So heavy load of work in order to submit calls for special panel sessions so round tables that are part of the agenda of this research community for other events, for example, we are talking with madeleine during the lunch recess about submitting something for the ISA in the future.  So this kind of collaborations is the kind of like really open ‑‑ the open agenda that we have and that we look forward consolidating with a membership and not just as sort of pushing the card but also receiving feedback from you, and also being able with the use of the logo and what it implies for the overall membership to ask for our endorsement and then you will receive the guidelines and all the possibilities.

>>We are compiling a list of all the organizations right from day one that we've actually worked with or come through or been supported by in turn have supported which is quite courtesy actually after 11, 12 years.  We also have a Twitter handle @ Giganetter and thank you everyone for contributing.  And thanks to our wonderful new communications coordinator Isadora that we're actually a bit more out there.  I can see already from the tweets today that people are starting to notice.  There are things going on here that are actually worth listening to.  Any particular point as to how you see things?

>>Maybe just kooreiterate on the collaboration from a communications perspective.  Presence and access are to very very important things for any organization, especially an organization like this one.  Vag functional website now that you can easily access things, that we're still working on of course but each in the future, increase our ability to communicate among us as members to exchange articles, events happening, and even thou our platforms eventually as well and that comes down to using the logo as well, the recognition and what Giganet is and that will be future work from a communications perspective in Giganets.

>>Thank you.  We are actually ‑‑ we do cross the two hemispheres, even though the U.S., the UK and Canada are the highest numbers of our members, we have a sizable portion in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.  So we truly are intercontinental.  So you know from little beginnings, great networks grow.  So at this point I'd just like to thank once again our committee for getting us this far and for the ongoing work in making my job as chair a very easy one, a very smooth one, for a commitment that comes in free time and increasingly overflowing in boxes and band width.  At this point, the floor is yours.  Is there anything you'd like to comment?  Someone can take notes if they've got something handy.  Apart from the fact that our elections are currently running, they close on Friday.  I know they're not contested as such a number of steering committee members are standing again, namely Carolina and D, mi it, ri is standing again and Isadora's standing again and we have a treasurer nominee as well and we really would encourage you just to take part.  It really is only two minutes.  Because that helps us see that you actually think what we're doing is worth bothering with.

>>Can I just ask how any of you are not Giganet members?  Anybody who is not a member, please raise your hand.  You see that.  Now you know where to go.  You just go to that membership link and become a member.  It doesn't cost you anything except some space in your mailbox which is not a high trafficked list.

>>So, yeah.  Thank you for that question Milton.  That's a large number of you, we'd like to encourage you to be members.  If you're not able to be a member, to become an observer.  Are there any comments at this point before we break up for the day? 

You don't have to be a member to comment.  Seeing as half the room isn't a member.  But anyway.

>>So just a question.  (?).

>>That's a good question.  I think I should kind of apologize.  I think we should have our act together a little better so we have the papers for this conference available on the SSRN during the conference so you can all sort of see what you're going to be presented and many of the papers really need that supplementation.  But I think Dimitri knows.  I don't really know how to do that yet.  He's been in charge of the account.

>>We'll get all the papers up.  We'll discuss that and answer your question, but all the papers are up to be up on the account.

>>But since they're not, you can continue to update them through easy chair.  The license will expire in the middle of January so I would encourage you to do it before them.  We can renew the license if it's necessary, but really let's just get it over with and get those papers finished and get it out on SSRN.

>>We have the hold from last ten years on SSRN and that was one of our major projects last year, to get all the papers up and load them.  Once again, we haven extraordinary file of archives for software tools, searching and data mining and inferences to be drawn in itself part of the record for the internet governance foreign meetings.  So thank you very much for being here.  Hopefully see you at the pub later or during the next few days.  And thanks once again to everyone for your work with the papers you've provided and the intellectual labor and findings and insights you've provided for us today.  Thank you very much. 

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