The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Berlin, Germany, from 25 to 29 November 2019. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good morning, everybody, it's half past 9:00 and I'm happy to welcome you to the dynamic coalition of child online safety. I'm pleased to see so many familiar faces but also new faces interested in the topic of our session today. For a start I would like to quickly introduce you to the dynamic coalition of child online safety. That is somehow a short trip to the past.
It was in the year 2007, the second IGF in Rio De Janeiro that child welfare activists decided to join forces in order to keep children safe online. That marked the birth of the dynamic coalition of child online safety. The Coalition has grown over the year for stakeholders from child welfare be it from Government at organisations, civil society, or private industry. And we are working throughout the year to assess current technological developments, new devices, services and applications in regard of the impact on children's lives, and also to ensure that measures are taken to keep children safe online.
Dynamic coalitions are a certain type of format in the IGF ecosystem. They are open to any individual as well as to any organisation and I would like to take the opportunity to join the dynamic coalition, just come to us, send an email and feel free to work with the dynamic coalition. The dynamic coalition is led by ECPAT and my colleague Marie‑laure Lemineur, and contact her whenever you like when you are interested to becoming a member of the dynamic coalition. Those working with and for children may know that it was only last week that we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UNCRC. That is the most ratified human rights treaty in the world with 190 and six states having themself committed to respect, protect and fulfill the Rights of the Child. And with ratification of the UN Convention, they are legally bound to do so.
In 1989 neither those who have originally phrased the UN Convention nor those who have ratified it could have imagined to what extent children would inhabit the digital world 30 years later. Nonetheless, that is what we are talking about today in the next 90 minutes. The UN Convention provides for children's rights in all areas of life. Many of the rights dedicated to children need to be looked at from a new angle with regard to the digital environment.
These are the rights to access to information or freedom of expression where it's obvious that it's related to using digital media, but it's also a right that is laid down in Article 31 which is our focus today. This is the right to leisure, play and culture. And I would like to quote that Article. It reads as follows. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage and play in recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child, and to participate freely in cultural life and beyond.
The online environment is now a key arena in which that right is exercised and our distinguished panelists will shed light on this arena today. I would like to introduce them to you now and I will start with Shaun Pendergast who is a young Internet user playing games and he will tell us about his experiences. We have Daniel Kardefelt‑Winther from UNICEF who have prepared a report on children's rights and online gaming and he will present some of the findings from the report.
On the very left from my side we have John Carr, today speaking for ECPAT international. He has many hats on his head and can tell us several stories. Then to my right I have Emily Cashman Kirstein. Coming from a child protection organisation called Thorn. You will introduce us to that. Then we have Clement Leong, also known as stinky, and he is an E‑sports moderator organising tournaments on E‑sports, welcome on our panel.
We have on the very right Lies van Roessel who is a researcher at the Martin Luther University in Halle researching free‑to‑play games and last but not least we have Vicky Shotbolt representing the voice of the parents.
I'm Jutta Croll from the digital foundation leading a program on children's rights in the digital environment. One of the founding members of the coalition which I'm glad of to do so. And now we will start the panel and you have the floor, Daniel.
>> DANIEL KARDEFELT-WINTHER: Thank you very much, Jutta, both for the introduction and for inviting me to speak. I'm excited to be here to talk to you about online gaming. It's a fascinating space. The gaming industry is growing not only in terms of profit or the number of players that engages, but also in terms of geographical reach, technological capacity, and this means that as an industry, they need to start assuming greater responsibility for the environments that they are developing.
For this reason, UNICEF developed a paper on online gaming and child rights to explore online gaming environment and children's rights. UNICEF's approach child's rights is fundamentally holistic. We try to take into account all rights of children in our work, because rights are interdependent. They can't be separated, nor can we choose to account for some rights and ignore others.
If we are talking about age verification or blocking or filtering of content as a way to uphold children's rights of protection from harm in the gaming environment then those measures need to be balanced with right to participation, leisure, play, et cetera. So this paper we have developed, it's meant as a conversation starter, both for us internally to inform our own engagement with the industry, but also externally for other people who are now starting to think about the implications of the sector for children's rights.
We are interested in working with industry so they can become more child risk compliant in their work. The paper points to a number of areas where we think the industry has either opportunities to support the realization of children's rights or areas where more work really needs to be done to ensure that some of the other rights are protected. And so far I mean the paper was released about a month ago, and it's been fairly well received. We presented it to Fair Play Alliance in London, and they felt we had done justice to many of the topics we bring up.
And I'm not going to go into too much detail of the paper because I don't have time to do that, but to briefly say that some of the issues we consider are things like how the gaming industry need to deal with toxic environment, racism, sexism in games, for example, or gender stereo typing. We look at monetization practices especially around free‑to‑play games. We might hear more about that from the speaker on my right.
And we look briefly also at issues around violence and video games which is a contentious topic, and just try to put a number of questions on the table. We don't try to offer direct solutions. Now, what I wanted to do is to draw your attention to three points that come out of working with this paper that I think we need to address in order to engage constructively with the industry. The first one is that the evidence base, so the research around children on online gaming is quite weak with a few notable exceptions in the past year. We have small scale research often using somewhat dubious measurements and drawing conclusions or making extrapolations that data doesn't support.
And most research on gaming has been adult driven reflecting more our perceptions of gaming rather than children's realities. This I think is a problem and I think that personally this has made it more difficult to draw sound conclusions about the overall benefits and harm of gaming for children and that needs to be improved going forward because I don't think we have asked the right questions so far, which leads me to the second point, which is that there are many unanswered questions with respect to industry operations that we need to deal with. Compared to social media companies, we know less about how much data is being collected from children and games and how it's used.
We heard about children algorithms, but are these things true, and if so, how common are they? My guess would be that some companies would use frustration mechanics to drive sale, but most companies do not, but we need to know more and we need to stop lumping gaming companies under a common label such as the gaming industry. Companies are very different in how they operate. The monetization scale is different, the gaming environments are different. We need to keep that in mind for recommendations to be realistic and for companies to be able to engage.
My third and final point and this is something that frustrates me. We have an environment here where children willingly spend a lot of time happily doing fairly mundane and repetitive tasks sometimes and they find it really enjoyable. And it's an environment that we have the opportunity to shape yet we keep focusing on the negatives, protecting children from harm rather than figuring out how to harness the positives and safety is paramount, but really a child rights perspective demands more than that.
So just think about it, what kind of informal learning opportunities do we see coming out from gaming. There are a few people that have done research but a lot more could be done and I think the opportunities are considerable. How can we use children's fascination with the gaming environment to model positive behavior, and who could do that? E‑sports stars, streamers, other players?
And can we use the gaming environment to share messages about healthy eating, is physical exercise or mental health support. A lot of games are trying to depict mental health. These are things we need to understand better to make the gaming environment work for children in their best interests. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Daniel, for this sort of review. I do think it touched upon several issues that will be addressed by the panels during the discussion. Now, I may turn to John, and would you like to tell us when you did start gaming and what fascinated you at the beginning when you started gaming?
>> JOHN CARR: I started gaming, I think, around 2010. I started playing Minecraft first. That was my first big actual game that I played, and I started off by myself with my sister, and that's how I just played. And it was a big moment for me, because like allowing me to do what I wanted in a game where I could just have any freedom was something that I he really enjoyed, and I eventually got into multiplayer and that's where things started to take off, and eventually started downloading other games.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I know your sister is also in the room, so you did not play only on your own, you did play together? Can you explain that a bit, what you did with Minecraft?
>> JOHN CARR: I think since me and my sister both liked Minecraft, we only had one computer, so we would often switch computers and play Minecraft and build structures and just come up with ideas and build them, and that's what early gaming was like back in 2011 and 2010 for someone who was seven and eight years old.
>> MODERATOR: At that point of time, did you feel in any kind at risk of being harmed when playing that game?
>> JOHN CARR: Not in single player when I was playing with my sister, but as I moved to multiplayer playing with other online players that could communicate with me, I did feel that my actions could have big consequences, and it could lead to things that can get out of hand.
>> MODERATOR: So the feeling of there might be a risk of being harmed was more related to the communication you had during that game, the contact you had to other gamers?
>> JOHN CARR: Yes, I do feel that talking with other players is a big role in why gaming is big today, and back then it wasn't looked on that much, but that was something that I didn't really understand back when I was seven.
>> MODERATOR: I do think we will come back to that point later on in the discussion. I was asking about the risks because the two speakers we have now on the panel are also working with, trying to avoid risks for children, improving safety, and I first give the floor to John Carr speaking for ECPAT International.
>> JOHN CARR: So John Carr, representing ‑‑ I live in London, U.K., but I'm representing ECPAT International, which is a global NGO based in Bangkok. I first got interested in this issue when my own children started using games but my interest was piqued from the child protection point of view. By the report in the United Kingdom, a terrible case where take young boy had gone into a gaming environment which, like many of the online gaming environments which exist now, had a chat function, a chat facility, an interactive component to it, got talking to this person, be friended them and then followed the fairly typical pathway for these types of things, which turned out to be what we call grooming.
Anyway, long story short, this young man after playing many, many different games online with this person agreed to go to his house, and he did, and he was raped and murdered by the man who he had befriended initially through this gaming environment. Another instance that caught my eye and, again, as I said, piqued my interest, was of a report from, I think it was South Korea or China, I can't ‑‑ it might have been both. Anyway, the point there was some young people were becoming so hooked and so apparently addicted to online gaming, there was this one particular case that sticks in my mind where the young, and this particular young man had rigged his games console in the toilet so he could sit on the toilet while playing his games without having to break off to attend even to the call of nature.
Now, that did suggest, again, that there was something in particular about these sorts of environments that was new. And in fact, the reason this was discovered was the young man died. He never ‑‑ he had some kind of heart attack or seizure in the middle of the game and he was found dead with his console by his side in the toilet. So these were two very unusual and striking things and in no sense are they typical, obviously, but they do point to risks that haven't existed previously and are very severe and dramatic and which we all ought to know about, both as parents, as child care professionals, but above all, perhaps, as we want the gaming industry to be aware of them and take what steps they can to minimize the risk of repetition.
By the way, I Googled this just now to confirm that my memory was correct, the average age of a gamer is 35. It's not a child. But the way in which games are aggressively marketed to young people inevitably has drawn substantial numbers of young people into the gaming. And they are a very, very contemporary and modern form of play. If you are in a school playground or if you are at school, if you are not into the latest games, you are going to be the nerdy kid who didn't really fit in with the social set.
So it's a fact. It is a fact of model children's lives, and it's one of the reasons why we as child care professionals, parents, in my case grandparents, need to take a much greater interest in it. And one of the features of the gaming industry which I'm afraid is exceptionally common is the norm in fact of the high tech industries as a whole is a complete lack of transparency about what it is they are actually doing to safeguard children both in relation to potential for addiction, both in relation to grooming behavior, the kind that I mentioned at the beginning, and also thirdly in respect of the commercial compensations.
These are very big and extremely propertiable businesses. And I'm not going to ‑‑ profitable businesses and I'm not going to steel Vicky's thunder here because I'm scared of her, by the way, but she will speak in particular about the ways in which families are being as it were dragged into debt or spending far more money than they thought they were going to be doing precisely because their children have been drawn into a gaming environment.
Another quick dimension is to refer to here is the privacy aspect of it. This goes back to the point about transparency. In the U.K., again, we have developed or we are developing a privacy code which specifically addresses toys and games and makes it clear to the manufacturers or providers of both that they must make explicit the kind of data they are collecting in the gaming environment that they are drawing children into, how they process that data, where the data ends up, so on.
One of the reasons this has become prominent, and it's not because of something that happened in Britain, I think it was in America and Germany, I think, was that a lot of the data that children were creating or in the case of toys generating through speaking to the device was being recorded on servers in distant lands and these servers were being hacked because the security of the servers was not up to standard.
We don't know of any cases that have led to any child being directly harmed as a result of that data being hacked, but the fact that it was happening came as a complete shock, a complete surprise to parents that had no idea that when they were buying these games or toys for children that that was one of the things that could happen as a result. There are lots of things. Obviously nobody wants to stop children playing. There are lots of very positive aspects of the gaming environment, problem solving, learning to work with teams and all of those kinds of things, that are very much beneficial for children in the 21st century.
That's not our gripe. Our gripe or my gripe is lack of attention that is being paid from these new and immersive environments from the point of view of children's health or welfare. So it's not one or the other. We need a little bit of both.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, John. That was a very good description of the landscape that is more or less also shows us where the risks melee. So may I turn to you, Emily, and I would like to invite you to explain a little bit what Thorn is doing in the United States and then turn to the games issue.
>> EMILY CASHMAN KIRSTEIN: Great. Thank you so much.
So just to giver as you mentioned, background on Thorn. We are a non‑profit in the United States, and we function very much like a tech startup. Our mission is to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse and exploitation and so we are kind of bushing the boundaries of what it means to be a non‑profit in that we actually build software both for law enforcement to help identifies victims of child exploitation faster and for industry to help remove child sexual abuse. CSAM or what may be legally defined as child pornography from platforms.
>> So today in terms of gaming the nexus between our work and gaming comes from the software side of the house and from our research and prevention side. So starting on the research and prevention side, at Thorn we believe that kids need to be supported so they can successfully navigate this balance between exploration and safety which I think we are going to be focusing a lot on today, and like some of the folks in our panel, we found that there wasn't a lot of recent data about this issue, and so we took it upon ourselves to do some research ourselves.
One of the pieces that we researched that is relevant to today's conversation related to sextortion, the threat to reveal intimate images to coerce action. Between 2015 and 2017 we surveyed about 3500 young people in the United States, and just some key pieces I wanted to flag today. At the beginning of online friendships, it was reported to us that a lot of participants share the handles on multiple different accounts, not just the accounts to they meet on, and then sextortion scenarios get to a point and it makes it or easier for an offender to target a young important on multiple platforms, not just the one they met on.
45 participants in our survey reported being contacted by the off fender across multiple platforms. In 2015 specific to gaming 4% of those who had experienced sex Tortion reported the gaming platform. By 2017 that doubled to 8% and that is something that we are going to continue tracking into our research in 2020. And just to give some sense of age here, we heard that one in four victims were under 12 when they were first threatened.
And 47% who met their abuser online versus knowing them in real life received threats daily in these scenarios. So this kind of leads into some of the qualitative research we did more recently this year in 2019 that said, you know, apart from any abuse scenarios just talking about which platforms were most popular with younger kids, and we found that the gaming platforms were generally more popular among 9‑year‑olds to 12‑year‑olds and that was true with a number of platforms.
We also found that in terms of how they were dealing with unwanted conversations and that sort of thing, we found that children were putting their own safe guards in place to talk about, you know, to stop these incidents from happening that took the form of blocking is something that was widely used, simply ignoring threats, and there was also in anecdotal feedback that if you reported a user that didn't necessarily mean that that user would stop talking to you or something like that.
So we are going to continue that research going into 2020 looking at prevention and education and awareness tools based on some of the research we are doing and if I could just speak briefly about what we are doing on platforms when I talked about the software side of what we do, we also have a tool that we had just launched within the past year called safer, and what this this does is autilizes hashing technology to identify known bad content, CSAM, child sexual abuse material on platforms and to be able to have the platforms identify, remove and report the content.
In terms of gaming this could come into play for a gaming platform that may have kind of direct messages or group chats that enables file sharing. If any of these files that are known to be illegal content and child sex use abuse material that they would be immediately flagged for the platform, removed and reported to authorities.
That's kind of a wrapup of what we do at which thorn.
>> MODERATOR: Would you say when you talk about working with the platforms and what they could use or utilize to keep children safer, would you call that safety by design?
>> EMILY CASHMAN KIRSTEIN: I think that's part of it. I think going more into the conversation we will have today, when we are talking about new platforms that may not be thinking about how their platform could be misused in minority cases, I think that's a big piece is getting, I think it was the Australian E‑commissioner putting that forward and building in these safe guards and understanding how the platforms may be misused from the beginning to build in safety measures at the onset.
>> MODERATOR: To balance the panel a bit I would like to talk about the units although Daniel has mentioned that the report was focused very much on the opportunities. So let me turn to Clement, and would you like to explain a little bit more what you are doing when you organize tournaments, who are the gamers who take part in the tournaments and how do you moderate E‑sports?
>> CLEMENT LEONG: So I'm Clement Leong. I normally go by stinky. I'm related with the DotAsia organisation. I'm an E‑sportscaster and I organize tournaments and do back end administration stuff. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm an expert on gaming particularly, but perhaps I can offer a bit of a different perspective. So first of all, there is a bit of a distinction between games and E‑sports and I would like to talk about both separately. I don't think the definition is something that's particularly relevant.
Let me begin by saying that I think games and play is very important, you know, in the wild for animals it's an important part of how they learn. We know in early child development, the social learning is important and I think games are a good medium for that and that is not just limited to video games. I think that applies to board games, sort of physical tactile games as well. I think that's very important.
And there is a lot of potential for games, you know, when you are talking about the story telling potential that some of the games have when you are talking about the properly logic that sort of puzzles the strategies that you can apply. And this is more specific to the E‑sports site, but once you start introducing competition, when you start introducing structure there is a lot more potential there as well. But obviously we are here to talk about sort of the threats that video games can bring in addition to some of the opportunities.
Again, I'm not an expert in this field, but I guess I would like to highlight some trends that we have sort of seen over the years, over the decades that have happened. So first of all, the hardware that these games operate on once they first were, I guess, designed when you are talking about games like Pong, they were often on dedicated machines that only ran that one game, and we saw something similar, you know, when you get to these arcade games, I guess when they kind of exploded in the 90s or the 80s where you get these large machines come with the controls, come with the screen, come with the game and focused in places that would do other games such as maybe pinball.
You get to the evolution where you have multiple games that run on a single console platform. The ps4, the Xbox is, and you have a significant portion which are, I guess, a pretty big market now which is maybe started in the 90s, which is PC gaming. And there has been a huge shift from that in the past decade or so where you get to smaller screens, when you get to mobile games and that's sort of the latest evolution of the hardware that you see.
And sort of going with this, you see a change in the participation model. So when you are, you know, playing at an arcade, it's a very social environment. There are other kids watching you. They are waiting for your turn. They are waiting for you to die or fail so they can have their go on the machine. With consoles starting in the maybe 2000s, you saw a lot of social gaming where you go to someone's house, their console is plugged into the TV and you maybe share a screen together, but, again, moving onto the evolution, when you are playing PC games, it tends to be alone. And similar with mobile games, it's very hard to share a mobile screen, so the participation model has short of shrunk and it's become less social and more individual, harder to share.
And obviously that applies to fellow gamers, but I think that also has pretty big implications for the parents where as before you were very directly involved in what your children were playing, now it's harder when they are looking at their mobile screens. Another trend which I think there are better qualified people to talk about is the business model that has sort of evolved. It used to be very tied to the hardware. When you buy a machine, that comes with the games, but the PC, for example, you tend to have a general purpose PC and that can run games. You buy the games from the title, and now I guess a fairly recent trend relatively speaking is when you get these micro transactions, and I think that's going to be talked about a lot more later, and link to these micro transactions is these boxes are potential gambling mechanics as some people would have it.
I know there is a lot of criticism about the potential harm that games can bring, so I guess in a way to sort of play the devil's advocate but as an avid gamer in support of games, I feel like there is a lot of potential for games, but there is a lot of potential for misuse or abuse of games. But at the same time, I feel like there are sort of symptoms or symptom relief even of bigger problems.
So not necessarily a problem in itself, so, you know, you see people turn to games in a negative sense for a lot of issues that are possibly outside. So escapism from real life issues, you go into your fantasy world to avoid real life issues. Perhaps you are lonely. Perhaps you want to find other people to play with, you want to have some sort of collaborative experience, and I know there is a lot of talk about addiction, and that's a very valid issue, especially whether you are talking about the modern design of games.
A lot of them are sort of built with a sort of skinner box, onerrant conditioning addiction. You get that quick Dopamine hit when something pops up on the screen, and often that's linked to the micro transactions as well. But personally I feel a lot of the solution actually comes in greater participation in games when parents actually start being a lot more involved in the games that their children play. It's not here is a phone, go play on your phone. I feel like it should be more of a shared experience, which you will often see what we will say physical games, board games, I mean, scrabble, monopoly, I'm sure there are better examples out there, but it can be a fun experience for a whole family.
We generally see the opposite instead where as time goes on it becomes more focused, more individual, and with that I think it brings a lot of potential threats as well.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks a lot. I think you have mentioned some issues that had not been mentioned before, and I do think you described very well this evolution of the gaming from the big machines to now having the small screen, and that would also mean for children especially to being in the different situation when playing games. I would have a quick question to to you.Ment we have heard about the opportunities to learn in gaming. Can you say what is the most important thing you learned when you were gaming.
>> SHAUN PENDERGAST: The most important thing in gaming is to control what I'm going to say and my actions. It's hard to say what you want to say because there can be people watching what you want to say, and they are going to be looking for you, and they are going to be looking at your age and what you want to do. So I think controlling what you want to say is a big part in gaming.
>> MODERATOR: So you have more developed your social competence and social skills when gaming, not only focused on the, like, the using skills and technical experience.
>> SHAUN: Yes.
>> MODERATOR: I turn to Lies van Roessel which will present the academia perspective on games, development and the business models behind that.
>> LIES VAN ROESSEL: Yes. Thanks a lot, Jutta for inviting me and letting me join on this panel. I'm pleased to be here, my first IGF. So I'm a games researcher, and I do, currently I'm based at the University of Halle and my Ph.D. is about the games industry, how the free‑to‑play model intertwines with development practices. I'm glad that Daniel and also John drew attention to the fact that there is generally a lack of research into this industry.
It has often been said that it's a black box and very secretitive. People working there tend to keep what they do to themselves and with my research maybe I can contribute to opening the black box and looking at what is happening in the industry. So I conducted interviews with German game developers asking them about the monetization model and how they kind of build it into the game design and how it has to be kind of thought into the loop from the very beginning. And also ask them, for instance, how do you handle this tension when it's like controversial or what is to you still like ethically okay in terms of monetization, because this can be pretty aggressive.
I also agree very much with Daniel that we shouldn't lump the whole games industry together. There are studios that make like very, that make premium games, for instance, that offer good experience and there are others that might try to exploit their players or really go for a quick profit at the cost of maybe people getting addicted. So there were two things I would like to address in my input. Maybe we could pick up on them in the discussion. Some things have been touched upon already as well.
The first point actually has been said a few times but coming from a games research background, I think it's generally good to always keep an eye on both sides, like not only at the threats, although, of course, the work that people are doing here is very important and relevant if there is really kids being abused or exploited, of course, those topics should be worked on. But I think, yes, at the same time, we still should also look at the opportunities that games offer.
Of course, there is this whole field of serious games which are games that try to teach something or train or to have people exercise while playing, but also next to the serious games there are a lot of games that were made for like mere entertainment purposes that still offer very valuable experiences. And, of course, I'm very glad that Shaun also mentioned Minecraft which is often also given as a positive example of a game that can foster creativity, it can also enhance social skills.
So there are a lot of opportunities there, and I think we should not lose signature of that side as well, eastbound though there might be harmful practices as well. This was basically the first point I wanted to bring in.
The second is a little more specific and focuses more on the research I work on myself, so if we look at these rating systems, of course, they are available everywhere. You can see from what age a game or an app is actually suitable. For instance, in Germany, there is the German game association game that manages this self‑regulation program in which they give games age rating based on content. My point is that the age rating is very often based on the mere content of the gamer, like the graphical theme. So is there violence going on there or explicit sexual content?
And, yes, in my opinion, we should really try there also to keep in mind the business model behind the game. So a game might have a very innocent theme like and very simple rules like matching candy or collecting cute animals or whatever where you might say this is suitable for all ages but then there is also behind the surface these monetization strategies going on, which I think are more of a thread than actual maybe things that look maybe a little bit more gross or whatever.
Yes, so in these rating systems, I would plead that the people rating those games would take a more holistic approach and also look at the way the game is montized and whether there is advertisement prescribe, and I think there is also a part for the parents to play to maybe not tend to the free games because the free games need to make money in some way, so maybe it is also worth spending 3 or 4 Euros or dollars to a game that was made in such a way that there doesn't need to be made a profit after downloading the game.
We shouldn't lump it all together. There are a lot of free‑to‑play games that have more moderate monetization strategies as well, and there are a lot of ways a free‑to‑play game can be monetized in the end. It can be additional content or additional moves or even only like appearance, so maybe clothing for your avatar. So we should distinguish between monetization strategies and consider that in rating games for children as well.
I think in general what could help parents is like platforms or collections where games are rated, so both in terms of their content and in terms of their financial models or business models. For instance, the German youth institute has a database where apps for kids are reviewed and with regard to actually all of these parameters, the game offers pedagogical content but also business models, and I think those places can offer a good start for parents and kids because, of course, everyone knows there are millions of apps in the app stores and it's hard to find the good ones and the ones that offer actual added value instead of trying to exploit.
So, yes, that was my two cents, and I'm looking forward to an interesting discussion.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, I'm pretty sure we will have afterward questions also in this regard. You quoted that the youth institute is the database where apps for children are rated in advance of producing the database, they also did research how parents do their decision when deciding which app would be appropriate for their children, and even for younger children, most parents who are not well experienced would say, okay, if I can get something for free, and another game that is in the app store, it looks very similar, but I have to pay for it, why should I do so?
So parents tend to choose also the free‑to‑play games without knowing the monetization model that is behind that. And I'm now turning to Vicky because I know you are working with Parentzone, you have experience with parents and what is what you found out how parents do decide on their children gaming?
>> VICKY SHOTBOLT: Thank you for inviting me to be here. It's nice for parents to be included in these conversations.
I think what's fascinating about the gaming discussion that happens in families is that there is a very big gap between the experience that young people are having and the worries and concerns that parents are expressing. So when we talk to parents they will talk about the time the child is spending on time. It's what is it that a child can be doing for so many hours and it's the addiction debate that is front of mind.
They will be concerned about bad language in games and maybe some of them have heard some of the extreme cases that John talked about. When we talk to young people, they have a very different set of concerns, and the concerns that young people talk about is the way the gaming space is changing and those monetization techniques are really evolving to the point where in the research we did recently, half of the young people we talked to that they only thought gaming was fun when they were spending money in the game.
That evolution of the gaming world has happened because games have, they are no longer can buy a stream and those monetization techniques can continue all of the time that you are in the gaming environment. I think the enormous Gulf between parent and adults and standing at the gaming world and the reality of the gaming world is so vast that we have a very, very big job to do.
Our research has all been led by young gamers because we found that the gaming environment was so complex that unless you had a very experienced gamer guiding you through it, it was really kind of impossible to understand what was going on. I just finish with one example of how we, of the work that we did in the U.K. which was around gambling and gaming, and that connection between loot boxes and gambling and skin gambling that lives on parasite websites that live alongside platforms that allow you to exchange skins you by in a game.
We approached schools in the U.K. and said we would really like to talk to young people in your school about whether they know anything about skin gambling and the opportunities to gamble in gaming and every single school said the same thing, every single school said you are very, very welcome to talk to our pupils, but none of our pupils gamble. And when we went to the schools and talked to the young people, not only did these all know about skin gambling, at least half of the pupils that we were talking to were skin gambling.
And that's just one example of this huge gap between adults understanding and gamers' understanding of what they are doing. So to answer your question how do parents make decisions, not terribly well, and not in a very informed way.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Vicky. Shaun, I know that your parents are in the room so I will try to phrase the question very fair. Do you think your teachers do understand about the students gaming and not talking about gambling, but gaming?
>> SHAUN: I feel like my teachers don't understand much about gaming how they take it so when people are gaming in school, they often get in trouble and if someone is gaming too hard and their grades start to drop and teachers don't understand that, that's something that's really big, and I feel like my teachers in general when someone is playing games in my class, they don't understand why, and they want them to focus on school mainly, but that's just something that they don't understand. It's more of our generation that understands games better than teachers.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. So there is potential in games for education, but it's not yet harnessed for educational purposes. Thank you. So now we have left 40 minutes and we would like to open up the floor. I hope you have brought your questions with you. You see a lot of experience here on the panelists and, please, we have microphones. You can stand up and just give us your questions, please yes, please, just take the microphone.
>> AUDIENCE: I have a quick question about More than.
>> MODERATOR: Could you introduce yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm local La I work for assembly 4. I question have a question about thorn, I admire what you are doing and your intentions but I have a question about one of the programmes, to my understanding spotlet is a tool which is used to fight sex trafficking online by non‑consensually scraping data directlies and handing information over to Amazon, Facebook and more. As a consensual sex worker myself who has been affected by women, queer and marginalized communities on line. I would like to understand how Spotlight is handling my data and how I can find information about it as well as what this data has been handed over to authorities such as ICE and border control. I understand that this is a hard problem to solve as we all need a place online, but considering there are over more than 40 million consensual sex traffickers right now how are you ensuring the data isn't being misused.
>> EMILY CASHMAN KIRSTEIN: Thanks for your question. So to be clear, we are a mission‑based non‑profit, and we are building technology to defend children from sexual abuse and exploitation. When it comes to spotlight, we are on like you said publicly available sites, and they are sites that are confirmed to have child victims on them.
I think what we are doing is ensuring that we are 100% deploying the most cutting edge technology to be put to bear for children who are in these scenarios, and I think when it comes to gaming, to bring it back to what we are talking about today, I think what, you know, just to give a sense of what this looks like.
So we are talking about children who, I will go back to a case that was in New York, where a child was other than a gaming platform, they are just talking with the chat functions and a 9‑year‑old boy was approached by a 16‑year‑old boy on this gaming platform. He said, you know, I am, I see that you are struggling a little bit, I would like to help you. How can we work together? Can I give you tips? And they started chatting on these platforms?
And a couple of weeks later what happened was the child, the 16‑year‑old said, listen I'm in a lot of trouble. Can I, you know, someone is going to kill me, and the 9‑year‑old said what are you talking about, that's awful, how can I help? And he said you know what would be really helpful is if you could send me a photo of yourself with your shirt off, that would help me. So the boy did it, the 9‑year‑old.
The 16‑year‑old stopped talking to him. He went off line, came back on a couple of weeks later and the 9‑year‑old said where have you been, are you okay? What's happening? He was like that was so helpful, thank you so much. Continued, that was part of the grooming process. A couple of weeks later the boy said, you know, again, I'm in trouble, can you help me, and the 16‑year‑old and the 9‑year‑old said, of course, and the 16‑year‑old said this time I need a nude photo of you.
And so the boy took it with his iPad, the 9‑year‑old. And luckily what happened was the father of the 9‑year‑old had seen these photos. He had an Apple TV. He was able to see whether he had logged on the most recent photos taken with his iPad. And he was able to then go to the authorities, report this, and find out that this 16‑year‑old was actually a 30‑year‑old man in another state.
So the importance of building in protections for children on these platforms is immense, and that's what our mission is as an organisation is to be building in the protection so that those, you know, minority cases are able to be addressed.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you for this example although from a child's rights perspective I would say luckily the 9‑year‑old was safe, but it was also an infringement of his privacy if his parents could monitor everything he was doing. So how do we balance that approach between the children's rights perspective and, of course, their right to be protected? I think it's very difficult. We do have more questions from the floor. Can I go again? I don't want you two only to have a dialogue but if you want to respond to what Emily said, you are welcome.
>> AUDIENCE: I guess you didn't really answer the question in how my data is being used and where it's going and how I can access that, because we don't have control over that, and it seems a little bit like mass surveillance?
>> EMILY CASHMAN KIRSTEIN: Appreciate the question. I think since we are talking about gaming today, maybe we could have an offline conversation.
>> AUDIENCE: Sure.
>> MODERATOR: Next question.
>> AUDIENCE: Edmund Chung from DotAsia, but asking the question as a father of a 7‑year‑old and 5‑year‑old, the last year or so I have been kind of obviously testing when they can have their own device or when they can have, you know, their own time with their own device, and often use the addiction kind of rule, if I can't get it back from them within a authority period of time, then they don't get their own time. The older one now has her own device, and one of the things that is very interesting to me that was touched on, but I wonder if there are further research, and if not, I think we need that kind of research, I think Stinky and Daniel mentioned it, there are games that or there are situations where it's beneficial or it actually helps kids grow up through games, through E‑sports and through the environment, but then there are also situations where it switches over to become addiction, to become problematic.
Where is that line? How do we detect that line especially for parents, I guess, without invading into their privacy, how do we get a sense of when that switch might be happening, and how do we encourage the more positive direction? Are there research on that? Can you point me to that? If not, I guess we need more of finding that line and also, you know, publicizing how that line could be found.
I'm sure it's a fuzzy line. It's definitely not a very clear cut, this is a yellow line and you can't cross it, but, you know, I guess that's the main question.
>> MODERATOR: Of course, since all children are individual, you could not answer that with a strict line, but Daniel has volunteered to give you an answer.
>> DANIEL KARDEFELT-WINTHER: You laugh, but so I think there are a couple of things to say. First, I do think the use of the term addiction is unfortunate. I think overuse is probably more accurate, because addiction draws so many parallels to substance use behaviors that really aren't supported. Going into the research on overuse or excessive use of technology which is something I have engaged in in the past ten years or so, we are in a bit of a tricky situation because most of that research is really not well done at all.
In fact, I would say when you look at research on children's use of digital technology broadly, the field that they call addiction research is probably the worst in terms of methodological quality. You asked an important question which when can parents know when something is turning from harmful use. The best way to do it is to observe your child and look at behaviors not only necessarily in the gaming platform but outside of it.
Do they stop going to school? Do they stop seeing their friends? Do they become more and more isolated? Do they seem depressed? And I think Stinky put it well, overuse of technology in general, if you look at, although it's poor, if you look at the body of research we have, it suggests it's a coping mechanism to deal with general life problems. And so if you see your child just becoming less social, more inwards, signs that something isn't really right, that's what you should pay attention to, and I'm not saying that this is only reason why children play a lot of games.
Most children play a lot of games. They don't have these problems which I think is important to keep in mind, but I would really suggest that you focus less on the connection with the device or the overuse of the device than to how your child is behaving and feeling in your life in general.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Daniel, anyone else from the panel that would like to respond to the question. Vicky or John?
>> JOHN CARR: There was a study done a long time ago, like more than 10 years ago, which is like three generations in the Internet space. And these are about some guys who have been caught and convicted of collecting child sex abuse material, and for some of them, there is absolutely no question that part of the attraction was not the content of the images, but the mere fact of collecting them, and ordering them and getting complete series of them, and things of that kind.
So, in other words, obviously there must have been an underlying sexual interest in children, but it was quite clear from the psychological profiles and the analysis that was done of some of these guys that it wasn't so much the ‑‑ it was the notion of having a complete set and a complete collection on all of these things that is part of the attraction. That goes to Stinky's point in a way, that sometimes if you do find people who are excessively engaged in something, it's, there is something else going on. It's not the device. It's not the game. It's something about that person that means it's a kind of displacement activity or a focus of an underlying psychological state.
An unhappiness. If your girlfriend has just kicked or you or whatever, you go and find something else to do to take the pain away.
>> AUDIENCE: Anjan Boes from UNICEF, thanks to the panelists for stimulating conversation. The it point I would like to raise is following Jutta's comment on product development by design. This is an area where the industry particularly, I know it's a competing space, as a really new generation model they have, but what is the current thinking in terms of sharing good practices between cross sector and enhancing maybe the reporting mechanism when, how well established is it right now in terms of the gaming industry because, you know, from Child Online Protection point of vie, my colleague, Daniel, had alluded to the balance approach we have in terms of ensuring all kinds of rights that children are entitled to or upheld, but particularly from a protection point of view, I would say that this is something that we need to urge the industry to take forward. And following on John's point, he mentioned some grave cases related to the online board. And as Stinky mentioned, there has been an evolution of the technologies and soon we will be going into our virtual reality space.
It's not too far in the future. And what that means for offenders who have vested interest in children and how do they see this platform. So that research and product development design, you know, is very critical, and we need to think crucially. And finally, I just wanted to say that, you know, in children collector sets in the gaming platform, it's very close to them, and when they lose those assets can be quite detrimental, and that can lead to very dire consequences for them.
How do we build as we go online, how do we create a culture of trust so that, and education so that children understands that online world obviously has its own realm, but in terms of the offline world, how do we build those ethos into the online world. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, John Jajan for the question. Before we go to online education, I would like to ask Lies because I know you have experience with the gaming industry. Have you found out anything about how ready they are to cooperate, to exchange experiences, the gaming industry, the developers and the companies?
>> LIES VAN ROESSEL: I think it was really different, yes, there were various approaches, you mean cooperation between the gaming industry and like child rights activists or representatives? Well, I remember in one interview where I asked about how this particular developer felt about maybe building in monetization strategies that were a bit too exploitive and he would say, yes, but we have this new regulation where you cannot call the app free anymore, and you could just say it has in app purchases and it seemed he was pushing away the responsibility.
Others were more like reflective about it, like, yes, I know it's a gray area and we try not ‑‑ of course a lot of them said our games do not, are not made for kids in the first place, but you can argue the graphical style does appeal to children very much, so it's maybe too easy to say that, but generally I think awareness can be raised there about the implications. So they were not, I think maybe there are also finding that's report, but I think it should grow amongst game developers to make sure they have this awareness. Of course, also with the sheer numbers of players they have, it grows.
>> I want to echo this experience. When we spoke to companies before, during and after developing this report, our sense was that there is general awareness that they need to do something. Many don't know what to do, and they are very open to suggestions. But then, of course, it's a question of whether the suggestions get implemented when the whole profit argument comes in.
I think one of the conclusions is that this is still a fairly new industry, and I think they have quite a bit of work left to do in the protection space, but I don't sense unwillingness, but I think they need to be pushed a little bit to realize if they don't do this, if they don't take it upon themselves to do this, regulation is going to follow, and I think that's going to be worse for profits overall. So that's an argument we have been trying to advance.
>> MODERATOR: So I take that for something we can take out of the room as a task for the dynamic coalition of child online safety, we have already members that come from industry, but I don't think it's the gaming industry yet, so, and we will take that forward and try what we can do from that.
I see two hands in the back of the room, please. Just go to the microphone and brick in your question.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Sonia Livingstone, global kids on line and London School of Economics. I'm listening to the discussion about gaming but I'm thinking about the parallels with social media. In this room also, in this same dynamic coalition over the last few years we have been discussing social media, and there, I think, the consensus is that we have as a child rights community spent really a lot of effort and time identifying that industry, working on collaborative approaches to self‑regulation, hoping that self‑regulation would work and finding it has failed and I would think people would say it has failed in relation to social media.
I'm kind of distressed that the gaming discussion which is maturing but seems a bit behind is now saying if I can pick up on what you said, Daniel, that we are now getting to the point where we know how to ask for self‑regulation, and can we not just cut past the whole of that and say we already know that won't work. We have tried it. It's failed. Can we now say what regulation is needed. And who is to regulate?
>> DANIEL KARDEFELT-WINTHER: I couldn't agree more. I mean, I have absolutely zero faith in self‑regulation in any area in online space because it has been repeatedly been shown to fail. I was at an event in New York last week and met a couple of guys, journalists, who have been working in this area. Things we had all believed to be true turned out not to be true, and they were able to document it.
Why were they able to document it? Because they had a very, very generous employer, The New York Times newspaper, who allowed these guys six months and provided them with a substantial budget to fly around the world and with legal advice every step of the way to document and research how the promises that have been made and the statements that are being made in public in the same of self‑regulation were not actually working at all. And I don't believe that the games industry will be any different. So I'm afraid my confidence and faith in self‑regulation is zero.
So I agree very much with the implication of what we said, Sonia, we might as well get right to it and start saying it needs to be regulated and I think privacy regulators or something like that, privacy Commissioners would be a good way in and I think the approach of the five rights foundation and that kind of thing, that's a potential avenue. I will just mention one thing or emphasize one other thing.
In the U.K. and most countries it is illegal for children under the age of 18 to gamble, and certainly in the U.K. and many other countries if you want to go to a traditional gambling website, you have to go through an age verification process before you can place a bet. Lute boxes are going to be regulated in the United Kingdom we have a regulator in the gambling space, but it should be made clear to games companies that if you socialize gambling, if your games, if the games that you produce look very much like gambling and encourage gambling type behavior, even if there is no micro transaction involved, in other words, even if there is no money changing hands, it should still not be allowed in the game unless you have taken steps to ensure that the people playing the game are over 18.
There was a game called Texas hold them up poker. I don't know if you remember that. It was a free gamed, so called free game that was available, it was available on Facebook, it was available on mobile phone applications. I lodged a complaint, and believe it or not, I'm not normally the kind of person who complains at least not through official channels but I did on this occasion. I made a complaint about that game, and my complaint was upheld. It was a free game, any child could access it, and it was essentially a card game.
So this was a way of socializing children into the idea of playing cards to win things. It shouldn't be happening. So that's another dimension to that. I know Vicky mentioned that and Stinky mentioned lute boxes they are not the only example but that has to be part of the picture too.
>> MODERATOR: Daniel?
>> DANIEL KARDEFELT-WINTHER: So many things I want to say know, my understanding is that the gambling regulator said not all lute boxes qualify as gambling, and that's where the discussion was. Perhaps I'm wrong on that. We can talk about that. Sonia, very interesting question. I think I half agree and half disagree. My worry is that we don't really know what aspects of it to regulate.
When we did this report, we also noted that actually most of the risks and opportunities for the gaming sector are shared with social media companies. But my concern is that we don't really know what aspects of the gaming environment to regulate and given all of the, I would say bordering on moral discourses that go around I would be concerned with overregulation. Already we heard about some of the challenges that you can see when you start looking at, I mean, it was a question about spotlight, and then non‑consensual scraping of data already there we are into a complicated discussion.
If we want to move towards regulation what we need to distinguish somehow how much of a risk of harm to the child is due to the gaming environment itself versus a company versus actually what I would call the individual or personal choice. I mean, John, you made examples of about sexual abuse and how games facilitate that. This crime has existed long before games came around but the gaming environment is now a facilitator so we need to consider the implications on that.
If we talk about overuse or overspending I would say that that perhaps falls more on the individual and that there are unethical practices that might push young people into spending which perhaps we should look at. But I do think we need to consider a bit more carefully what kind of risks that are actually due to the gaming environment or the company. And, you know, even free‑to‑play business model, I don't think they are necessarily problematic.
You might say free‑to‑play games promote inclusivity. But the micro transaction element can be designed into a game in a way that is either positive or negative. I wouldn't say we are quite there yet, but perhaps a bit more work to be done figuring out which risks to address.
>> MODERATOR: I'm very grateful, Daniel, for bringing us back to what we started with, that is the children's right to learn you're, play and culture, and, of course, games are no part of a digital culture of children growing up today. I know that John wants to chime in and I see another hand in the back. So please stand, up go to the microphone while John is shortly answering that question.
>> JOHN CARR: Just my heart bleeds, I mean, really I'm very anxious about the prospects of overregulating the industry, not. If they want to avoid being overregulated, it's very simple, open the books, let's see what is happening. Give the data to the academics, give the data to patients, be open it about it. And if they won't do it, bend by the way, I don't think they will, then, of course, politicians will step in. That's what politicians are there for in democracies to respond to anxieties that expressed.
And if they want to avoid overregulation, open the books.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm grateful that that's where we are at, I'm Podner for IT for R for change. This is a balanced great conversation about the promises and the perils of the gaming industry. I'm going to follow up from the last couple of threads in this conversation today about regulation, and the importance of trying to bring in regulation within these spaces, and if you are interested in having, being a part of another conversation on this, we will be doing a panel on the 29th on Internet detox which will focus on governance frameworks for online frameworks regulation generally. I wanted to highlight that there is undoubtedly an under addressed and distressing problem of harassment and abuse within the game world.
And it's acknowledged to be somewhat misogynistic and abusive space and as Shaun mentioned, it creates high burdens on children to be careful about what they say and how they present themselves online. This is the space where children are essentially learning to socialize. These are the spaces where I think we definitely need some important interventions and regulations to be framed with grave seriousness and let's say with a lot of fire behind our heels, because we are waiting on an entire generation to grow up in social media interfaces gaming spaces which are going to have a massive effect on the culture of the next generation.
So I invite your comments on this. On that note, incidentally, I think there are some applications of AI that are being looked into. I think Microsoft is looking into getting, using AI to filter conversations within XBox games, and create some sort ever sliding scale to make different levels of visibility of vulgar or whatever, you know, content that shouldn't be visible to children by default, and perhaps there are mechanisms we can explore along the lines of safety by design, not just privacy by design.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I do think this was not a question to the panelists. It was more like a statement. Thank you for that. I would like to come to closing the session, but first I would go back to that question that was mentioned at some point, so what can we achieve with education of children? We have heard a lot now that we would need regulation. We also maybe we don't trust in self‑regulation, but still, I would not abandon the concept completely finding out what self‑regulation we could do, but, of course, we have been talking about children communicating with their parents, with their peers about what they are doing there but still, Shaun and I had a talk yesterday, you come to some point where you just are so emotionally attracted to the game that you might just forget what you have learned about how to behave.
I do think children, most children have learned now the lesson not to give away their real name, not to give away their address or the school they attend, but still when playing games, you are emotionally involved in the game, and could you say where you can draw the line or have you experienced situations where you would say, okay, it's just I'm into the game and I want to be protected, but it's not only my own responsibility?
>> SHAUN: I think there definitely should be a line. Having me being 14, I don't know where to draw the line, so I can't really give a thoughtful answer on that. I have no clue. But I feel like you should not give away what you do for a living or what your age is, as you said, but I do have friends that unfortunately do do that. And I feel like to them it's a second world, video gaming is a second world and they do believe that they should give personal information because it's what they love to do and unfortunately that's where it's at right now.
>> Just to chip in as sort of what the next steps could look like. I think it's important to recognize that there is a whole host of issues within gaming. It's not a single threat. As you are talking earlier, there are issues with the monetization, there are issues with the graphic, you know, violence or whatever. I think for graphical stuff we actually have a pretty good system that borrows from the feature film ratings, but it's important to recognize that there are a lot of aspects of gaming that need to be sorted out in a framework. And I think a large part would be research to focus on one aspect, being monetization, addiction, and I believe there is potential for qualitative research rather than quantitative do build best practices guidelines that we have for a lot of other things. I think that doesn't exist for gaming at the moment.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much. Since I don't see any other raised hands, I would like to have a quick last round of the panelists. I would like to ask you what is your take away from this session in regard of children having the right to leisure, play and culture, but at the same time having the right to be protected in the digital world.
We start with John because I know you are quick in thinking and you have your answer already.
>> JOHN CARR: No question children should be able to benefit from the great stuff games can do, no issue there at all, but we do need the games industry to step up and appreciate that they need to do a lot more to keep it safe and healthy.
>> I guess my one biggest take away is we are kind of behind as far as a lot of aspects go as opposed to the adoption of games that have exploded in recent years so there is a lot of work that needs to be done and ideally fast.
>> The first is we can't leave it to parents and the second is we need to be careful. It's not like one industry and it's not like the social media industry. There is a difference between publishers and developers and we need to be much more sophisticated if we are going to think about legislation that we understand what we are legislating about.
>> SHAUN: I feel like all of us should probably talk more with people my age because it's easier to talk with people that have been spending time playing the games and get a better understanding for people that actually have played games.
>> EMILY CASHMAN KIRSTEIN: I agree that there has to be this balance between making sure that children have the safeguards necessary to be able to play in these spaces and understand that kids are developing these. What more can we give them, what kind of tools can we give them to be able to play in the space safely, and then on the other side not putting the burden only on the children but what can the platforms be doing to better safeguard kids in a safety by design fashion.
>> I'll build on that a little bit and say I'm pleased that there is a good mix of the representation, people in the room, people on the panel, people have different views and I think that's promising because it will help us achieve balance in whatever solutions we arrive it. I want to second what Shaun said we need to involve people who play games in these discussions.
>> I would like to pick up on what John said earlier. The games industry needs to open up and provide access to academia, to regulators that we know what is going on and only then can we begin to regulate. I agree that games industries in many ways is also behind in terms of diversity and there is a quite a long way to go there, I think.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much to all of you in the room for attending this session. I hope you have your own takeaways. I would like to repeat the invitation to join the Dynamic Coalition on Childs Online Safety. We will be here in the room you can approach us and those who are already members of the Dynamic Coalition please stay a few more minutes in the room so we can see who would be interested to join us and agree on a meeting time and date during these days to come.
As the last comment I would like to mention that all Dynamic Coalitions which are 17 now in the IGF ecosystem will have their common main session on Thursday afternoon 4:30 in the Convention main hall number 2, and there we will relate the work of the Dynamic Coalitions to Sustainable Development Goals. Of course, we have some takeaways from the session that will also go into that main session, so you are warmly welcome to come to that main session on Thursday afternoon as well.
Thanks to all of my really, really brilliant panelists. I'm glad you have been here and I do think we had a good debate and special thanks to Shaun. Thank you.
(Applause).
(Concluded at 1100).