IGF 2022 Day 0 Event #3 Global Internet Governance Academic Network Annual Symposium

>> DMITRY EPSTEIN: Hello, everyone.  We will start in a few minutes.

>> ROXANA RADU: Good morning, everyone.  I think we will start in the next minute or so.  I see more people are logging in.  So we will give people another 30 seconds and then Dmitry will take the floor.  Can you confirm that you can hear us in the room.

>> Yes, we can hear.

>> ROXANA RADU: Wonderful.  Thank you very much.

>> DMITRY EPSTEIN: Well, hello, everyone.  Welcome to the GigaNet annual symposium.  A little bit speaking remotely, I'm a little bit jealous of people in the room.  I'm Dmitry Epstein, the current chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network and I'm really excited to welcome you all to this event.  I don't want to take too much time.  I just want to thank Roxana and the entire program committee for putting together this really stimulating program and really looking for this day.  I will let Roxana introduce the event.

>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you very much.  A quick hello and thank you from my side.  I will take the next two or three minutes to make sure we credit all the persons who have contributed to this event.  First of all, thank you all for making it to this room because I know there were quite a few issues.  I was still troubleshooting until last minute.  In terms of links and receiving the access to the platform, I know this has been quite difficult, but I'm very grateful that you all made it here and you are also supporting others to get to the room.

We have a rather small team in place.  Therefore, I would like to thank the steering committee, and the program committee for all the work on preparing this program, since March this year.

There have been many months of intense support going through the whole process of selecting the abstracts all the way to finalizing the program.  It is the very first time we organizing a hybrid event at the IGF, and despite all the lessons we learned during the pandemic, I can tell you it was quite a challenge what we are doing for today is truly hybrid.  We are not running sessions online, but we are also having a presence in C2 and all of our chairs and discussants are connecting from this.  Therefore, special thanks to our colleagues present on site.  Yik Chan Chin to ensure everything is running smoothly and she's the contact person on the ground.

If you know people who might want to attend throughout the day, and are attending the IGF, please have them get in touch with her so they can get all the information over there.

Last but not least, our authors contributions are much awaited and we're very thankful for that.  They are coming from different continents, five in total and they have been very kind to work with us on the time zone differences, and to make this happen.  I know some of them are connecting in the middle of the night, others really early in the morning.  We're very, very grateful for their time and participation.  The research is normative and provoking and policy relevant.  As you will see, all the papers discussed deal with current issues and we are hoping this will fit into other conversations at the IGF.

We're planning to continue our collaboration with telecommunications policy journal, and we're hoping we can have another special issue out after this event.  At the end of the day, we will be starting the thinking process around what might fit together thematically for our next special issue.

We will have completed already two special issues by the time this event is over.  We had one in 2020, and another one from contributions from last year is due to come out early next year.  So we're hoping this third year of collaboration with DPE will be even smoother than in the past.

What we are enabling with this is access to this research for a much wider audience.  We know there is a community around the IGF and around GigaNet, in particular, but we want to make this cutting-edge research available to many more people and we are also trying to make that open access whenever possible.

Our authors, chairs and discussants come from very different continents, and we are very, very excited to see this event coming together.  Without further ado, I would like to hand over to Yik Chan on site, to the first panel discussion.  It's really great to see it happening.

Thank you.

(No audio).

>> ROXANA RADU: We don't seem to have sound from the room.

(No audio).

(Distorted audio).

>> And to have an audience in front of us of mainly Africans is just really a wonderful experience for me.  I'm a former deputy chair of the GigaNet and we really tried very hard and not always successfully to extend our membership to the Global South.  So wonderful that you are here and let's begin the first session.  A data policy framework for Africa and there was a considerable debate in the discussion, in the paper, around the preparation of the paper around what constitutes digital and what constitutes data infrastructure because in the literature, I think they are quite important distinctions made.  This is an opportunity to take our policy research and to policy practice, and bring these ‑‑ the information from these really wonderful papers and the analysis from these very wonderful papers to particular context that this is developing in.

I think another thing that's quite distinctive about the data policy framework is that it's unlike many of the other data policy frameworks emerging and have emerged in Europe and the north is that there's enormous emphasis on the need for this foundational infrastructure.  And I think we have had discussions in GigaNet about where Internet governance stops and starts and there's different degrees to which we are looking at the foundational infrastructure.

I think this is a really important session, particularly in the context of Africa, but more generally, because countries across the world now are facing similar data infrastructure problems.  I think one of the main distinctions that we see in the paper that digital infrastructure, that some of the first two papers deal with are talking about satellites and hard infrastructure, or digital infrastructure, not new digital infrastructure, whereas some of the other papers are more using a data infrastructure analysis, which includes physical infrastructure, but also speaks about the necessary institutional enabling environments, the institutional infrastructure that you need in a data environment.  So you will see the papers go far more broadly than just digital infrastructure, if that's people's understanding of it.

First is Stephanie Arnold of University of Bologna, and she looks at China and the World Bank and the ICT sector in Africa and compares the development investments and the outcomes and the politics, really, the geopolitics of these investments.

The second paper we look at is what we owe each other which is critical access for affordable and reliable LEO broadband satellite services and this is by Berna Akcali Gur from Queen Mary University of London and Joanna Kulesza from the University of Lodz.

The next one, I don't think we had an online paper, but it's on power plays, industrial strategy and the appropriation of open software in the making of Open RAN.  The case of Japanese industry in 5G standardization, Riccardo Nanni.

I think this paper is pertinent in terms of the geopolitical issues happening around this but unfortunately, we don't have a copy of that online.  This comes from data infrastructure where it's looking at encoding privacy, and it looks specifically at tech workers as co‑regulators and data protection regulation.  It's looking particularly at shifting some of the ‑‑ from the analysis of this more social context of compliance to a context of more transparent, achievability regime so that you look at regulation and enforcement in that environment, rather than in a compliance environment that can often not be made.  So very interesting paper there.

And then the final paper on AI politics and sanctions, comparing cases of Russia and Iran, and we have Radomir Bolgov and Olga Filatova Saint Petersburg University.  We have started a bit late and taken up some time.

We have with us Wolfgang from the university Amherst.  So we will have a short discussion and period after the discussants and we'll take the discussants responses and then we'll take a question‑and‑answer session and you can all participate in the question‑and‑answer session, including Wolfgang.

The presenters have eight minutes each to present.  If you could try to keep to that time, please.  The discussant will have ten minutes to discuss all the paper.  It will be a bit of a challenge and then we'll give a short opportunity, a two- or three-minute response to the discussants ‑‑ to the paper presenters to the discussant and then we'll hopefully have lots of questions from the floor, and a lot of engagement from the floor.  It's wonderful to see you all behind the pillar but you might like to come around this way so that you can join in the conversation, and you don't have to look around the pillar.

So with that, we'll start with the first presenters ‑‑ with the first paper, which is online.  Stephanie, if you would please present.

>> STEPHANIE ARNOLD: Can you all hear me?

>> MODERATOR: Very loudly.

>> STEPHANIE ARNOLD: Can you please allow screen sharing so I can share my slides.  I prepared some slides.

>> ROXANA RADU: Stephanie, I'm not sure we are going to get that.  May I ask you to just go ahead and we'll try to follow and if they ‑‑ meanwhile, I will let you know.

>> STEPHANIE ARNOLD: Yes.  Yes.  Well, in that case, I would just suggest those who can to access my paper.  I will talk about some geospatial maps and it's difficult to seeing them.  My name is Stephanie Arnold.  It's first time at GigaNet and the IGF.  So it's really good to be here.

I will talk about fiber optic network providers and development aid, and how China and World Bank and the ICT sector in Africa are somehow connected.

So you might wonder what do fiber optic network providers have to do with development aid?  And I'm arguing they have to do quite a lot together because in developing countries, especially in Sub‑Saharan Africa, they rely on foreign administrations to get the backbone infrastructure, but then they also have to somehow look for finance abroad, because usually they don't have the internal resources to pay for this expensive kit.  And that's where the development aid inflows come in.

And once we talk about development aid inflows we must, of course, look at donor policies.  Donor policies in terms of digital development, for example, and there we have different approaches.  So when we think about digital developments from a western perspective, I think all of us know about the ICT for deep paradigm, the ICT for development paradigm that has been around since the mid1990s that has been incorporated in Millennium Development Goals, later in the Sustainable Development Goals and the whole idea is constructed around the human‑centered approach that aims at achieving universal Internet access.

And these are supposed to set out, for example, how to achieve more digital literacy, and how to construct the backbone infrastructure, and how to do the regulatory framework and so on.  By contrast, if we look at the Chinese approach, for example, so China, we know is a much more recent player in the development landscape, and actually a developing country itself.  And China often puts its national interest and strategic priorities first.

When it comes to ICT infrastructure and new technologies in general, we know that China actually has big over capacity, domestic overcapacity in these infrastructures, and one way to cope with this is to go global, actually.  So Beijing encourages its companies to make investments abroad.  It has devised the Digital Silk Road, for example, which compliments the bell kin initiative.  It's at expanding the Chinese built infrastructure around world, where China stays at the center in a way.

And the way they do this is through a quite specific scheme that so‑called ECP plus F scene.  ECP plus F stands for engineering, procurement construction, and plus finance.  This plus finance is key, it sets the Chinese strategy apart from many others because if we imagine Ericsson coming into an African country and wanting to build the fiber optic network, the client government usually has to find the financing.  So they have to come up with the money to pay for it.

But if we talk about ECP, they can provide state‑backed money through the policy banks or other channels and they can advance the payment in terms of a loan or maybe an aid‑like payment.  But upon the condition that the infrastructure provider will be Chinese.

But that's what creates a very strong bond.  This is how they do digital development but only through their own companies as opposed to the West which has arguably a more open strategy.

Now the research question emerges from this landscape is whether these different approaches to digital development affect the ICT infrastructure provider landscape in Sub‑Saharan Africa.  So what are the consequences of these two different approaches and what I did is I collected open access data, that was made available by after fiber and A Data and they complement it with news articles to ‑‑ yeah, just add the information that I could not find in the databases themselves and then I plotted geospatial maps, as I mentioned earlier.

So I hope all of you are able to see the maps from the paper at least, along the western coast of central and southern Africa, most of the fiber optic cables are read and read in this case for Huawei and then in South Africa and in Zambia, as well as Ethiopia.  You can see that many of the ‑‑ of ‑‑ most cables were built by ZTE.  We have 70% of the cables in Africa that were built by China or in like a Chinese provider.

If we look at the lenders in Africa, we see most of the development aid from the World Bank has gone to western Africa and Eastern Africa, but not so much of the western calls of central and southern Africa, also because it's more sparsely populated.  By contrast, Chinese aid inflows have not gone much to western Africa.

What we can get from these maps is that first of all, it looks like consistent Chinese aid inflows, nearly always entail a Chinese‑based provider.  This we see in the case of ZTE, and Huawei, because in all parts where these countries ‑‑ where these providers constructed the network, we also see consistent Chinese aid inflows.

Then secondly, we see that ‑‑ like, above average World Bank inflows alone, do not seem to be correlated with provider choice.  For example, in western Africa, we have high inflows but the provider choice is usually Huawei.  In Eastern Africa, where we also have high World Bank inflows, the provider of choice varies a lot.  It goes from Viatel in and ZTE in Ethiopia and so on.

Finally, it looks like low World Bank inflows, I refer mostly to the western coast of central and southern Africa, ranging from, say, Cameroon all the way to Namibia, Chinese development assistance is almost always consistent.  So it's been above average.

And the provider of choice is usually Huawei, not ZTE.  ZTE is where both World Bank and Chinese aid inflows have been high.  So for example, in Ethiopia, Zambia and South Africa, mainly.

So what can we conclude from this?  Well, if we remember the initial research question, the exploratory research, at this point suggests, yes, in the case of Chinese national interest in ‑‑ in the case of Chinese National InterCenter approach, it does look like the digital development strategy does affect the IST provider landscape in Sub‑Saharan Africa.  This is at the exploratory stage and we can look at what the African agency is like when it comes to provider choice.  We could broaden the scope and include other financial tools, including like sovereign loans and foreign investments, et cetera.  And we could compliment this exploratory study with more empirical analysis.

So I hope my presentation was clear, despite the maps.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Stephanie.

>> STEPHANIE ARNOLD: I look forward to your comments and questions.

>> MODERATOR: Stephanie, unfortunately, we didn't get to see your wonderful maps.  Perhaps you can share your screen now.  Perhaps you can be ready to put up your maps again because I think they are very helpful with your analysis.

And then as the next speaker speaks now, they'll start sharing their screen.  So don't do it right now.  Do it when we come back to the discussion but thank you for a very, very interesting input.

>> STEPHANIE ARNOLD: Yes, thank you so much.

>> MODERATOR: And just to confirm, all the lead speakers and lead authors have been made cohost.

Okay.  So Berna Akcali Gur, are you ready to present?  Are you going to share your screen or just talk?

>> JOANNA KULESZA: I'm going to try to jump in here, this is Joanna.

>> MODERATOR: We can see you but can't hear you.

>> JOANNA KULESZA: Great.  Brilliant, I'm not Berna.  I'm Joanna, I'm the second coauthor.  We agreed with Berna for me to present today.  I hope that's okay.

>> MODERATOR: Absolutely.

>> JOANNA KULESZA: I'm still not able to share my screen, if I could be given admin rights.  I do have a few slides.  It's a challenging broad topic.  So the slides might be useful, but the paper is uploaded for reference.  So whenever the hosts are ‑‑

>> MODERATOR: Joanne, just so that you can do your presentation and just so we can move on so we don't lose time, I'm going to move on to ‑‑ because the first author ‑‑ okay.  You can share.  Please go ahead.

>> JOANNA KULESZA: Brilliant.  Thank you very much.  I'm going to try to do that.

Please kindly confirm you can see the slides and that they are advancing.  I'm just going to try to do that.  Have the slides advanced?  Please kindly confirm.

>> MODERATOR: Yes, it looks like they have.

>> JOANNA KULESZA: Brilliant.  Thank you.  What I would like to discuss is a paper that is a joint effort between Berna and myself.  We have agreed for me to present since the topic is complex and we only have 7 minutes.  I'm going to try and focus on the research questions and kindly ask for feedback, but we are also very much looking forward to the discussion.

The paper compliments the intervention very interesting intervention from Stephanie in the previous session, since we are, again, looking at infrastructure, but we are looking at satellite infrastructures.  Since as you have kindly noted, the IGF is taking place in Africa, there is an interest in ensuring that Internet access is equitable.

So Berna and myself have looked at the principle of equitable access and tried to understand what it means for that access to be equitable, meaning that it is secure, affordable and reliable.  When we do engage with remote areas that now struggle to obtain Internet connectivity.

The first question we might wish to pose is whether there are any restrictions or limitations with regards to obtaining sustainable access.  That's the title of the paper.  It might, indeed, sound familiar "What We Owe Each Other" is a book on moral and ethical philosophy by TM Scanlon.  We acted under the assumption that we actually do owe each other something and we focused in the paper on understanding of what that might be.

So should there be comments to negate that statement and say, well, we don't really owe each other anything, if you can do it, then please just go ahead.  Our answer to that question is a bit different.  So we're not here to discuss the negative answer to the question, what we owe each other, that's a philosophical debate, reflected in that lovely NetFlix series that I put up on the screen.

Our answer is a positive one.  We agree there are certain commitments when it comes, in particular, to Internet connectivity.  We looked at that answer through the prism of the Tunis Agenda.  The Tunis Agenda very clearly indicated that there are certain conditions for Internet connectivity to be made.  Now, since we are speaking to a well‑informed audience, I will not reiterate these promises, but this is the backdrop against which we have tried to analyze the most recent developments with regards to online connectivity.

What do I mean by these most recent developments?

I'm just going to use a few headlines here.  I do not wish to turn this debate political, and I will refrain from discussing the gentleman behind these headlines for a good reason, but I would like to use his enterprise, StarLink.  So Elon Musk has been offering satellite connectivity.  In February we praised him for offering Internet connectivity in the regions of Ukraine that were under an armed attack.  And now we seem ‑‑ we see for that business model that he engaged in, to struggle, there are certain issues with funding and the question is whether this is a private enterprise that Mr. Musk can manage as he pleases, or whether there are any political or maybe legal constraints to consider when Internet access is being offered through low earth orbit satellites.

I will cover the technicalities of that model on the following slides.

We argue, Berna and myself, that this is a very current issue that needs to be looked into.  I'm using the SpaceX example because it will likely come to mind when we talk about satellite and Internet connectivity.  This is not the only option.

Also very recently, Europe has announced a large research and infrastructure funding program that will hopefully build for Europe its own satellite Internet access infrastructure.  Now what is the legal or the ethical paradigm of that network to be developed is one of the questions Berna and myself are trying to answer as Europe embarks on that, there are others.  One Web is probably the enterprise that we here in Europe think about, but China is definitely one of the leaders in that race.  So Berna and myself are trying to understand if there is a common paradigm, normative or ethical to making sure that whoever receives their internet connectivity through a satellite will receive equitable access.

I will refrain from discussing the technical details.  I do not feel that this is the appropriate place to do so.  They are discussed thoroughly in the paper, and there will be other sessions during the IGF where this will be discussed.

What I do want to highlight, however, is that we are talking about the LEO low earth orbit satellites that you can see here in the picture and there are different business models.

Now, Mr. Musk is quite popular, because he is offering his service to the individual end users, and questions of affordability, for example, come to the foreground.  But One Web has a very different business model and they do offer their LEO satellite‑based asset to national service providers.  That kind of service would be seamless to the individual end users.  We would probably not even know that it's actually satellites providing the connectivity.  So these business models need to be taken into consideration, maybe one of these are better than others.  Now, the questions we have focused on in our paper are limited.

We have looked at equitable access and multi‑stakeholder governance but for me to get off the table other relevant issues that are not discussed in the paper, I'm going to note we did also research.  We are researching questions of security, cybersecurity, supply chain security, access to data including personal data.

(No audio).

>> MODERATOR: Joanna?  Sorry, you just broke up.  If you could just go back to your point on privacy and data protection, that's where we lost you.

>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you very much.  I will repeat.  We focused in the paper on trying to answer the question of what equitable access and meaningful connectivity means.  We have looked at where Internet Governance and the multi‑stakeholder model has brought us.

Now, during the IGF itself, but in other conversations as well, we have heard that the multi‑stakeholder model needs to be advanced.  It needs to do better or it risks losing credibility or losing the weight that it has gained throughout the years.  The LEO satellites debate might be our chance to improve that model.  We might wish to take the lessons we have learned since the promise of the WSIS agenda and feed them into whatever LEO policy we shall develop.

What are these lessons?  Well, Berna and myself have questioned individual end users through a survey.  We have sent out a survey to ISOC, Internet Society chapters and questioned them about access to LEO based infrastructure.  Surprisingly the confidence in the multi‑stakeholder model is still strong, despite the deficiencies, the ISOC has been identifying, the end user wishes for ICANN and the IGF, to discuss what meaningful connectivity with the use of LEO satellites might mean.

If that is the case, it means that we should consider the specific diversity of business models and this unique way to connect to the Internet in all the policy and policy‑related conversations during the IGF as well.

It means raising the awareness of how this model works.  It also means identifying a potential liability model for any damages or space debris that are becoming an increasing issue.  This is our moment to stop and decide which way we ‑‑ this new way of providing connectivity to unroll.  Should we let the leading companies that have the forefront of this discovery in their hands right now do as they please or should there be certain regulatory constraints to reflect what it is that we do owe each other?

In the paper, you will find specific recommendations arguing for the latter.  So these constraints that are the result of lessons from the second order multi stakeholder model should be implemented in both national laws, regional policies, as working here in Europe, we will be looking into how that European funding for LEO‑based Internet connectivity will be spent and we will try to address the decision makers to make sure that this process is equitable.

It also means bodies such as IGF raise awareness about that business model behind the infrastructure, that national governments make an informed decision when they do facilitate Internet connectivity in remote areas.  Who gets to provide that service and the prices and what the cost of such service might be needs to be analyzed now rather than when those are fully operational.

>> MODERATOR: I'm afraid you have run over, Joanna.  Thank you for such an interesting paper.  Hopefully we will come back to this paper.  In the discussion.  We will.

If we could move on to the next paper, please.  Do we have Riccardo Nanni of Fondazione Bruno Kessler.

>> RICCARDO NANNI: Good afternoon, and good evening, depending on where you are.  Can you confirm that you hear me?

>> MODERATOR: Yes.  You are a little soft.  We will try to get your volume up.

>> RICCARDO NANNI: I will try my best.

>> MODERATOR: No, you are fine.  We will do it this side.  We can hear you now.  Please go ahead.

>> RICCARDO NANNI: As anticipated, I will present on power plays, industrial strategy and the appropriation of open software in the making of open radio access network.

As anticipated, my paper is not online and that's because I'm at the much primitive stage in my research and literature and it's a side project also for me.  So I requested the organizers, that I would be allowed not to share the paper at this stage, because as you see, it looks like a research note about what to do about this topic, rather than a fully-fledged complete research.

Now, I'm trying to advance the slides.  There you go.  What I'm trying to look at is how the Japanese government and industry interact in the making of the open radio access network.  And I maintained ‑‑ the way the open industry is an appropriation of open software and Japanese industry's participation in O‑RAN, is compared to the rest of the world.

Just for some background for those who may not be too familiar with the telecommunication environment, I will mention in 3GPP which is the main venue for standardization of mobile connectivity from 3G to 5G.  And the 3GPP work feeds into the broader work of standardization and telecommunications made by the International Telecommunication Union, the ITU, which is a UN agency.

In turn, radio access network is one of the telecom infrastructure, and in turn the most profitable, because it affects the way devices have to be produced and that's why there is a strong industrial interest in this particular aspect of nowadays 5G standardization but tomorrow it will be 6G and forthcoming generations.

And in this sense, the O‑RAN Alliance which is the main body that standardizing an Open RAN which is the addition of the work of 3GPP on radio access network.

So to conduct this study, I tried to formalize my theory and approaches.  I used a theory lens of techno nationalism, state empowerment, growth orientation and global connection.  So we shouldn't in this case consider nationalism as a ‑‑ it's a state support to the industry, to become global and interact at the global level with industrial partners and competitors from abroad.

And I adopted process tracing as a method to observe how the Japanese industry in partnership with the state have interacted with Open RAN but before getting into Open RAN, one needs to understand how the Japanese industry has got this and therefore, I identified three different historical moments, roughly corresponding to the standardization periods of the previous generation of mobile connectivity networks.

So 3G, 4G and nowadays 5G and my working hypothesis is that the Japanese industries engage with O‑RAN is the result of a coordinated state company strategy to counter Japan's loss of ground in telecommunications standardization vis‑a‑vis global competitors.

Now, as a background, I started from this landmark publication by Thomas Johnson from the '80s which shows how the ‑‑

>> MODERATOR: Ricardo, could you just hold for a moment because you have broken up.

>> RICCARDO NANNI: Okay.

>> MODERATOR: All right.  You seem to be back.  Just if you could start with this slide.  We heard you up until now.

>> RICCARDO NANNI: Okay.  So was my hypothesis clear.

>> MODERATOR: Yes.  We just lost you on the next slide.

>> RICCARDO NANNI: So I started with the historical background from this landmark publication which shows how the Japanese industry has interacted actively with the ‑‑ with the Japanese state in order to foster a very impressive growth in the second half of the 20^th century.  And the way in which Japan is ‑‑ has fostered industrial growth is in many ways similar to the strategy adopted by developmental state across East Asia and I'm leaving that for the moment for the sake of time.

Moving instead to my very early findings that would need to be corroborated through the recent steps what I found is that when 3G was first launched, the standardization was first started, Japanese industry was much more prominent than nowadays.  In particular, when 3GPP was founded by the European industry, the Japanese industries has become its first partner.  And it's also become quite active not only in standardizing the 3G standard that became prominent in Europe and then America and many parts of East Asia.

And then throughout 4G and 5G standardization, we saw a convergence of standards.  We no longer have a sort of ‑‑ we no longer have a standard that's prominent in Europe and one is prominent in another country, but we tended to have more and more an international standard or at least international interoperable standards deployed all over the globe and at that point, that also meant a rebalancing of power among the industrial players.  With we see nowadays Japanese like in the past, Chinese companies like Huawei have become very powerful and stand up to their Ericsson from Europe and others.

The operators from other parts the world have launched the Open RAN alliance.  So a body and initiative to standardize an open software based radio access network?  Why that?  Because much of the telecommunication standards converging and we see a global standard of 5G emerge, and et cetera, et cetera.  We know that the telecommunication infrastructure is strongly subjected to vendor locking.  Therefore, if they rely on one provider for the telecommunication infrastructure, it's going to be economically bound to WIFi on the same providers next time, unless they want to incur an extra cost.  So different RAN components can be purchased from different providers, and this breaks the vendor lock‑in and therefore, it can arguably break the advantage that certain operators and certain providers of network infrastructure have built throughout the previous years.  And therefore, this might be construed as a strategy by actors that lag behind in the standardization and in the ‑‑ in the network and the manufacturing market from standardization to rollout.

Given that the Japanese industry and the Japanese operators in particular, have been among the promoters of the Open RAN alliance, it can be argued that they are pursuing this ‑‑ this strategy.  Now, heading to conclusion.  This is at a very preliminary stage and it's contributing with insights on literature on software and it's very preliminary and hypothetical and so I will be analyzing for the document, and formalizing vertical comparisons throughout time in order to strengthen my analysis, and also based on strong historical background on Japan's industrial development and I will be very happy to listen to your questions and comments after this round of presentations also to, of course, improve my purchase and this data.

Thank you all very much for being here and for your attention.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Ricardo.  We look forward to that paper.  Very nice historical account of the development of the standardization of 3 to 5G.

We now go on straight to the paper by Rohan Grover on encoding privacy, tech workers as co‑regulators in data protection regulations.  Rohan, please take over.

>> ROHAN GROVER: Sure.  I don't think I can share my screen, though, unfortunately.

>> MODERATOR: You should be able to now.  I think Ricardo is still sharing his screen.

>> ROHAN GROVER: It says host disabled screen sharing.

>> MODERATOR: We are just checking that.

>> ROHAN GROVER: Sure.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Could you check it again.

>> ROHAN GROVER: It still says the same thing.

>> MODERATOR: Rohan, do you care if we go to mad miles an hour and Olga.

>> ROHAN GROVER: I can share now, actually.

>> MODERATOR: There we go.

>> ROHAN GROVER: Just in time!

Okay.

Okay.  I think you can see my screen.  So I will begin.  Thanks to GigaNet and the program committee for selecting my paper for this year's symposium.  I'm very happy to be here.  So I want to begin with an anecdote to illustrate what this studdie is about.  So in 2019, I was a product manager in a technology news company and we were charged for the consumer privacy act.  They were reluctant in part because that would make them liable for our outcomes when we asked our attorneys to help us interpret this.

It was just enough to avoid scrutiny and financial penalty.  This left us uniquely empowered as a tech team to shape what CCPA would actually mean in practice for our users, but without any real training or preparation to do so.

In the end, then, we lacked confidence that what we actually shipped our final product, was compliant.  But we still had to release our work to meet our deadline and return to revenue generating features so this experience was an entry point to studying, across space and across actors specifically this study focuses on how to understand what happens when data protection laws in the EU or CCPA in the US move from policymakers to software developers and other technicians who shape not only those laws, but also the very concept of privacy itself.

So this builds on a body, a large body of work, especially from human computer interaction and computer science, this research has collectively demonstrated that there is a gap between the expectations of privacy laws and privacy features and practice, and that the way these features are designed can affect users privacy decisions.

So one general conclusion I want to highlight from this work is that developers attitudes and behaviors towards the concept of privacy have real implications for what users experience and expect.

So in this study, I'm building on the prior work by approaching compliance work as a process of translation, from policy to practice.

So very briefly, I draw from STS and a little bit of organizational sociology from my theoretical model such as situated practices and mediation among social groups and boundary work, and I have conducted interviews with software developers, other technical workers across a variety of organizational backgrounds and identities who have experienced working on GDPR and CCPA and there's a lot more results in the paper.

So I will discuss the findings.  Here are four main themes from my interviews.  I will go through these very quickly and get to the discussion.  But first theme was about how compliance work according to these participants is situated organizationally and so how the work is delegated specifically to developers over other actors without much accountability and with generally weak relationships with lawyers, the second theme was that participants generally expressed a low level of confidence about being able to achieve compliance for an entire tech stack with the resources they had.  The third theme was that participants were quite skeptical about whether these regulations actually produced any kind of network positive material effects for users privacy, and the fourth and final theme was that many participants approached compliance work in a rushed and self‑described hackie manner, as opposed a comprehensive view of data protection.

Some of these themes are captured by this quote from one participant who said, I do not actually know, and I don't think anybody does, that our service stops collecting data when the user flips the switch.  I'm the person building it and I have no idea what happens.  I'm entrusting that what is supposed to happen does.  Hopefully the person in the place where that record exists, which is, in fact, many places and many people, are treating it with due respect.  We're sending them something and getting a response.  That's the extent of our interaction.  What happens on their systems is completely opaque to us.

This quote illustrates that even when developers understood what was required of them, the extent to which the user date, what as affected by their actions in part because they access to knowledge about a small component within a larger system.  So that quote really highlighted my key overall finding is that the data privacy systems are fundamentally and necessarily marked by indeterminacy:  At the same time, though, those developers are structurally not able to ascertain a comprehensive view of how it moves across an entire data system and they lack confidence in claiming that a system is in compliance overall.  And by system, I mean not just in the in‑house tools but the third party integrations and things like that, that are components of a platform.  And legal scholars have called this legal endogeneity, and so talking about compliance amounts to compliance without any concrete enforcement.

How do we know the true influence of data like the GDPR and the CCPA, is the theater of compliance.

What is missing is the privacy knowledge.  It's a localized experiential understanding of a specific mechanism, that contributes to a technical system.  Whether an integrated third party service whether that third party service collects information is not in documentation or a project.  Board but a technician's firsthand experience of whether or not that instrument has been instrumented.

Now, what does it mean for understanding how data protection regulations are translated from policy to practice.  Well, first implication is that it calls for attention to articulation work.  And how is it anticipated and planned.  This approach prioritizing the often emotional labor of quite literally translating ambiguity into discreet steps for them to follow.

Most prior research, divorce social identity from their attitudes and behaviors and it calls for greater scrutiny.  And this attends to the economic and the consequences and where it happens.  It mobilizes a global labor force for GDPR and CCPA, what are the implications for similar protection in Global South.

Particularly in India where there is an urgent debate about data protection unfolding today.  It began as an empirical that these teams make, and it's let how the indeterminacy translated from policy to practice.

And I think it analyzes the privacy analysis itself which inevitably raises more questions than answers about who is responsible for compliance work and about the political and the economic consequences of that labor.

Thank you, and I'm looking forward to the discussion.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Rohan, and for being on time.

>> Finally, we got to here in the room.

Why don't you come up to the podium.

Radomir and Olga.  Your paper on AI politics and sanctions, comparison the cases of Russia and Iran.

>> RADOMIR BOLGOV: Dear colleagues, thank you very much for the opportunity to present this paper.  Our paper is about artificial intelligence policies and strategies by countries, conducted by countries which are under sanctions.  Now Russia and Iran.

So we know that at the moment, leading our ‑‑ many countries are moving forwards modernization through new technologies including artificial intelligence, and it's strategically necessary for the development of countries and the purpose is to identify similarities and differences and in the AI policies and the states which claim for the influence in the Russia case and regional in the Iranian case.

And for the scope of our studies, analysis of legislation and strategic documents, policy papers, as well as institutions and practices.

So we compare these policies according to the ‑‑ such parameters as development goals in the field of artificial intelligence authorities responsible for these projects implementation priorities and positioning the global rankings such as government of AI readiness, Nature Index, Artificial Intelligence, and Global AI Index, and Tortoise Media.

Next slide, please.

So we collected these cases ‑‑ two countries which occupy restrictions imposed against the countries we must mention that we should not draw parallels.  And at the same time, there are some similar features of these cases.  For example, the countries try to claim for influence, they challenge so‑called western world order.  In both countries, the assets of central banks are blocked.  Almost all western brands in are left.  And SWIFT doesn't work and the oil is under embargo and sanctions as well.  So it makes not possible to so get foreign technologies for the development of artificial intelligence and because there now exchange possibilities.  The Internet is filtered, et cetera, et cetera.

At the same time the situation is not fully similar, because Iran is autocratic state which is led by Ayatollah, unlike in Russian, the introduction of sanctions in Russia was shocking.  It was made at the same time a lot of sanctions but the sanctions against Iran has been introducing during 40‑year slog.  So next slide, please.  As for strategies.

In Russian case, we managed find 11 artificial intelligence policy.  The institutions are policed as well and I will not take much time for this.  You can see this in my presentation and in my paper.  So next slide.

And the sanctions forced the government to search for technological sovereignty and the principles declared by the government of this technological sovereignty are listed here.  And so this means that the government, the country must have its own basis platforms which are provides with their own software, hardware and technologies that are not completely dependent on the country.  And the legislation is flexible and nuanced regulates online and no one should be able to censor someone else's space based on their own vision as declared.

Next slide.  So at the same time, there are the problems because persons of researchers and developers is, for example, in China, which takes positions, it's a little more than 1% of GDP.  Any IT products are based Asian countries and based on the technologies of foreign companies which can limit exports and impose anti‑Russian secondary sanctions.

Next slide.  As for the Iranian strategy, so 12 years ago, Ayatollah Khamenei has instituted the resistance economy.

And now they have China's technologies.  Iran supplies energy resources and consults energy resources and computers and chips from China.  And Iran utilized the crypto currency as a way to avoid sanctions in the field of money exchange and blocking West estimates and Iranian currency systems, et cetera.

Iran developed many international applications for geospatial ‑‑ it looks like Uber, et cetera.  It's fifth largest producer of STEM graduates.  There are many researchers who study artificial intelligence in Iran and talk about military artificial intelligence.  Iran is a big producer of drones and other automatic machine guns.

Next slide.

Here we tried to compare the positions in the rankings and you can see that China and the United States have much higher positions than Iran and Russia.

So next slide.

Yes, I will conclude right now.  And the last slide, please.  

So we conclude that at the moment, Russia and Iran are not leaders in this field.  There are some basic attempts to develop artificial intelligence policies and institutions, but at the moment, there is no clear vision in these countries how to develop in the light of sanctions.

Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much.  That's such a rich paper.  I urge you to read it.  It's absolutely fascinating assessment of Russian and Iranian kind of geopolitics of it.  Wolfgang, can I ask you to please ‑‑

>> WOLFGANG:  Thank you.  Thank you very much and I'm really impressed by all the five papers and as the person who organized the kick start meeting for GigaNet in July 2006, the small village of Germany with the help of UNESCO, the international association of media and communication research and the international communication association, ICAA, it's really incredible to see how this crazy idea from 2006 to establish an academic network to deal with Internet Governance has gone over the years and I can only congratulate those new leaders who have developed this idea and that we have now a global academic network which produces excellent papers which hopefully will have its effect and influence decision makers.  When I compare the situation, which was described in the papers we had nearly 20 years ago, I see a really interesting shift.  And while the five papers were different, but from one perspective, they were similar and they demonstrate in the last 20 years the world has changes.  It was mainly a battle about the Domain Name System, the IP addresses and the control of the root server and bridging the digital divide.

Today we have seen the battlefield has changed.  It has become more pulled into bigger geostrategic battles between the US and China and other regional and global powerhouses.  And it has moved to other issues like satellite and AI and standardization.  So this doesn't mean that the domain system, root servers, IP addresses are unimportant.  They are still the basis for all the developments we have on the application layer.  What I have seen in the last years fortunately, the battle between ICANN and ITU about who controls the DNS and the root servers.  I have learned also this from the recent plenipotentiary conference of the ITU in Bucharest where I was a member of the German delegation.  So this is over.

But that doesn't mean that the battle is over.  The battle has moved to other spaces.  And so I'm really impressed about the details and the facts and the data which was presented by the five papers we had here.

So Stephanie's paper, you could say the G7 with the bill back better initiative via the Digital Silk Road initiative of China.  And I think it's important that we can learn also from the session that it's a challenge to make up the call for Africa.  Addis has developed a strategy, digital Africa for digital transformation and I think it should be used by African researchers to make clear that Africa that we should become the subject of this development and they should develop cooperation both with China and the G7.

But the own interest of Africa should have priority.  I think Joanna's paper has also put the focus on some issues here.  Now, 20 years ago, we celebrated the multi‑stakeholder vision as a big achievement.  So ‑‑ and we said, okay, the Internet is too complex, that it can be managed by one stakeholder group alone, though if we leave it in the hands of governments, this will be one sided.  If we leave it in the hands of the private sector, this will be one sided.  So all stakeholders have to have a say in management of the Internet governance.  But with, let's say, new technologies, new infrastructure.  So it gets even more complex as Joanna's paper has said, with the LEO satellites and the other types of broadband satellite and we have new risks now.  On the one hand, the complexity of the multi‑stakeholder model, you show, has also its weaknesses and it's time consuming.  If all stakeholders bring their perspectives but to have sustainable results, you need them.  Otherwise, these policies can be captured.

And when Joanna said there is a risk that Elon Musk will capture policy making in LEO satellites and we have to come back to the original justification for the multi‑stakeholder model, but that means the stakeholders have to do their homework.  We have to improve the multi‑stakeholders and we have to look at the Tunis agenda and the principles from the declaration from 2014.  So time is right now to develop more procedures and the model will work and probably the discussion on the Global Digital Compact, which will be also take place here in the Addis Ababa.  And it's here in Ethiopia and responsible for the Global Digital Compact which will be hopefully adopted in as part of the UN summit in 2014.

It's time to enhance the multi‑stakeholder model and I think Joanna was very clear that we have to raise awareness that the weaknesses of the multi‑stakeholder model does not mean that the multi‑stakeholder is bad or captured by governments or the private sector but we have to be proactive and academics have to play an important role in elaborating this.  Ricardo's Pape has also impressed me because he put the additional on a new area of conflict.  And this is standardization.  I think the terminology standardization war is very familiar for people active in this field, but we have moved now, you know, to a new level of standards.

It's not only the standards traditionally Internet standards ton by the ITF, and if it comes to all this new 5G standards and WSIS, we see this really is about markets and policies, and behind the policies.  It was interesting to see that last year when the United Kingdom had, that the G7 ministries started a protect and said we need to look into the implications of standardization.  Is standard station done in intergovernmental environment, like the ITU, ITU‑T, is it done by let's say more private standardization bodies in so these are important issues and raised an interesting issue with regard to Japan of techno nationalism.  Because some countries are looking behind or trying to broaden their influence while pushing for certain standards and this is very risk.  Because if we go into a direction that every country says my country first, so it started with Mr. Trump, six years ago.  America first.  But if I travel around now, I see it's China first it's Russian first and India first and Brazil first and so this can contribute and so this will be history.  I think it's important and this will be decided via standards if we have a fragmentation in the standards, this is ‑‑ this will fir back to everybody.  And everybody has to pay a price for fragmented standards.  We need global standards to enable communication.

And it was also interesting when Rohan raised a question and compared the GDPR with the CCPA in California and asked the question:  What are the consequences for the rest of the world?

India he did not mention China or the idea that was discussed in the United Nations, do we need a global instrument for privacy protection, data protection?  So it's discussed in the ‑‑ so we have a Special Rapporteur on privacy in the digital age.  But this is really a big challenge.  He raised an indirect point, the cooperation between code makers and lawmakers.  He lamented that the regulation is very vague in many things and developers have no clue, you know what to do with the regulation.  And then say, and let's find a way and we are moving forward.  So the way forward is really to bring the collaboration between code makers and lawmakers to a new level.  So that they work hand in hand in developing the products and working together with the manufacturers and working together with policymakers.

And the final paper from Radomir and Olga.  The AI is the battlefield of the future.  Everybody knows this and different countries are now working on different kinds of regulations or framing and so we have the UNESCO recommendation on the ethics of AI, the European Commission has started to regulate AI with an AI package.  The Council of Europe is work on AI convention and so the US has just recently adopted a bill of AI rights which is the policy framework.  And so it's difficult to find it and it was very interesting to see what Russia and Iran is doing and this is the next battle field and Vladimir mentioned there were military implications when he mentioned the drones.

So we have lesser autonomous weapons systems which are negotiating calls on the conventional weapons to try to regulate autonomous weapon systems, killer robots ‑‑ how not to delegate the issue of life and death to automatic weapon system and this is a crucial question and here we need more awareness and more engagement of academics so that they help to so that people understand that it's a very risky future.

And we cannot avoid ‑‑ and the AI is not only a future battlefield.

It has a lot of benefits, but it has a lot of risks and I think the responsibility of academics and in particular, also of GigaNet is to ‑‑ to help the broader public to understand the issue, to maximize the benefits and to minimize the risks.

Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Wolfgang and thank you so much for contextualizing these excellent papers, not only in the context of GigaNet and the growth of GigaNet over these years, over the last two decades but particularly in the international context as well and the various developments in these various areas that you are so familiar with.  Let's go immediately because we are running a little bit late to questions and answers from the floor and then we'll also give you a chance to respond to those and to respond to Wolfgang's input or discussion for your different papers.

So those of you presenters, are we'll go straight to questions and answers online and in the room.

And we'll just start with questions in the room.

If you could take your name and organization.  Is.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, I'm Walabila, and I'm here in my personal capacity.  My question is around one paper from someone who spoke about the air surveillance.  I think from yourself, sir.

I think it's time for us to start demystifying the global power players within the stakeholder discourse.  I heard people say that China is the player of digital infrastructure global development and linking to some of the Chinese companies, particularly Huawei.  But I think what we need to recognize is the fact that China is not the only company supplying advanced technologies globally.  Even western domiciled companies are providing this in Africa.

I was looking to a balanced analysis from the participants who ‑‑ particularly to show what other countries are doing in plying these technologies.  Thanks.

>> Thank you very much and I'm sure that Stephanie wants to answer that question because her analysis was very meticulous in the connection between investment and state‑owned contracts in those ‑‑ in China.  And different case of western investments in Africa.  Perhaps Stephanie can answer that question as we think about more questions.  Could you come forward so that you can take the mic?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay.  Thank you very much.  Emmanuel is my name from African Union.

We talked about policies and governance.  Most of our organizations are catching up with these policies like which measures, for example, how secure is our data in their environment mainly?  Can the speaker give us some light on how secure our data can be?  In the digital space.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much for that and I think I will and over to Roxana for some online questions.

>> ROXANA RADU: I'm not seeing anything over here for the time being but I know we are almost running out of time.  So I think we might have to close the panel very soon.

>> MODERATOR: All right.  Let me quickly give a chance to the panelists to respond.  There was a question, I think directly related to Stephanie's paper.  Perhaps he is would like to share the screen, and if any of the other discussants or paper authors would like to respond to the discussant.  Please raise your hand or I will take questions from the people in the room, the presenters.

>> STEPHANIE ARNOLD: Yes, so thank you so much for this question.  I'm really clad you bring it up.  In fact, it gives me an opportunity to show one of the maps that I tried to describe earlier.  And what it shows is the different ICT providers that build the fiber optic network.  This is a niche part of all the new technologies that we now find but it is a matter of fact that 70% of all the cables were laid by Chinese companies, mostly Huawei and ZTE.  And so the red ones are Huawei and the green ones are ZTE but we have western providers such as Ericsson and we have Nokia and then the yellow ones are in my opinion quite interesting because in Tanzania, we have Viatel from Vietnam and then in Democratic Republic of Congo, we have Liquid telecoms which is based in South Africa, for example.

It's definitely an important question that you brought up and it's important to acknowledge that there are many stakeholders in this environment.  I hope I kept it brief enough so I don't run over time.

>> MODERATOR: I think your maps are zoomed.  Because we couldn't see them on this side.  Very interesting detailed maps.

I'm now going to ask Radomir and Olga to respond to any of the comments very quickly before we go to the other online presenters.

>> RADOMIR BOLGOV: What I need to do?

>> MODERATOR: Would you like to respond to the questions?

>> RADOMIR BOLGOV: Thank you for your thoughtful suggestions and we will compare these cases with other countries and I think the European practice and the practice of other international organizations will be useful and at the same time, the topic you have touched about the ethics of AI, it's very perspective topic for the discussion in future and we will focus on this.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much.  Joanna, would you like to respond?

>> JOANNA KULESZA: Thank you, I'm always happy to respond, also to specific questions but my general feedback is just sincerest thank to Professor Kleiner to reflect our paper so diligently.  That's exactly the message Berna and myself have focused on in the paper and I was trying to convey here briefly in seven minutes.  So just thanks and appreciations for the summary.

Indeed more focus to the processes also when it comes to what happens to your data once it has been carried by an enterprise.  It's something we focused on in the paper and has been reflected in the comments.  So that's the immediate response, but I'm happy to answer questions.  Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much.  We might not get to further questions.  Rohan, perhaps you would like to take the question, particularly on data protection although it did not refer directly to your paper, maybe just a general comment you would like to make in response to the discussant to Wolfgang and if you would like to respond to that question about data protection.

>> ROHAN GROVER: Sure, thank you.

Yes, I echo my thanks to Wolfgang for the engagement with all of our papers and contextualizing my paper within the broader topic of just policy more broadly.  I was focused on the translation process between policy and practice.  But it's important to keep that context in mind about all the various contexts you have for the potential data protection framework and establishing a baseline sense of human rights bested protections for data and privacy, conceptually in the privacy space.  And in terms of security, how secure can our data be?  There's a relationship as a way to strengthen security of data in data systems.

I would say that the kind of direct relationship from my paper to that question is my key finding is that we're really deeply unable to answer that question with confidence.  If you ask a particular company or data system, they will pound to policies and to documentation and to check list, whether or not there's due diligence and whether anybody has a clear and specific sense of confidence, it's something that really needs a lot more attention beyond just kind of looking at the policy at face value.

So I think it's an open question, but policy is definitely the first step.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Rohan.

Ricardo, would you like to just respond?

>> RICCARDO NANNI: Hi yes.  I would like to add from my end, I just want to echo the thanks for the professor's comments and to GigaNet for having me and selecting my paper.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Riccardo.  Any further questions either from the room or online?  Roxana?

>> ROXANA RADU: Nothing else from our side.

Thank you.  No other comments from the online room.

(No audio).

>> DMITRY EPSTEIN: We lost the sound in the room.  Sorry to interrupt.

>> We're not interrupting.

(Laughter)

Can they hear us?

Do you think?

>> ROXANA RADU: There's a break in the room.  Everybody online can also refill a cup of coffee or take a little break.  We'll be back in five minutes.

Hopefully the microphones will be fixed by then.  We will check with the technical help on site.  Apologies for all the technological glitches this morning.

(Break).

>> Okay.  So we will start our second panel.  So the second panel I'm the chair of the second panel.  So second panel is title on the diplomacy and the participation in the new era of Internet governance.  So we have five papers.  The first one is from Nadia and Diana from United Nations University.  Their paper is on the agent of change, Youth Meta participation at the Internet Governance Forum.

The second paper is from four authors from Ferdinanda, Kimberly and Maria and it's politics of the citations:  A gender analysis of the conference proceedings the REDE in Brazil.  And the third paper is from Stefania, responsible behavior in cyberspace:  Engaging the private sector from tech diplomacy.  And fourth paper is from Sophie, roles in the digital space:  Symbolic Interactionist Role Theory and norms of sovereignty.

The last paper is from the Knesia and Francesca and their paper is on safe space by design?  Federated architectures as alternative sociotechnical models for content moderation governance.

We will have the discussant is Asian and he's from the Humanity In actions.  So each speaker has eight minutes and then we will have feedback from discussions and then we will open the floor.  So should we pass the time to the first speaker Nadia and Diana?

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you, my name is Nadia Tjahja, and I'm here with Diana Potjomkina.  This year is the year of the youth and this is extremely important, especially very important with the UN Secretary General in his report on our common approach, he was looking at youth participation and therefore, we wanted to look at youth meta participation at the Internet Governance Forum.  And for this reason, we looked at three research questions.

Overall, how do youth want to participate their participation at the IGF, specifically what activities and mechanisms are being created to change their agency or influence participation?

So we looked at three ways.  What is even considered youth and how is the identity evolving?  And how are youth changing the processes of their participation to the IGF?

So to understand what we actually mean with this meta participation.  I would like to give the floor to Diana to elaborate further on this.

>> DIANA POTJOMKINA: Yes, hello, are Diana Potjomkina, coauthor.  My part in this paper was the theoretical part.  The chances are high that you have not heard about meta participation before because this concept actually hails from literature on youth participation on the local level.  So why did we decide to apply it to political science in this question?  Because we believe that the literature on what we call ordinary participation if you welcome on the figure of the right does not really cover all the expressions of youth activity or in general civil society activity and in IGF in the framework of IGF.

So if you look at the literate on participation in general it talks about participation as being framed by the existing possibilities framed by the existing roles, be that participation in maybe elections or maybe it is also less standard participation but not aimed at overhauling the system of governance but it is also the second point.  It is aimed at changing specific decisions.

Or maybe electing the new people who sit lower, but in their specific positions.  So again, the another of author participation, is to change specific things on specific topics and method participation, which you see on the figure on the right, and is in the definition on your left, it is a way of participation which is aimed at changing the process of decision making itself or if you are organizing the participation of stakeholders, which means as we see on the left.  And so this is a question on the Spanish language article which is the original article that used this concept to the best of my knowledge.

Meta participation happens when the participants consider that participation is not enough or not effective enough.  And it means the participants demand or generate new participation spaces and mechanisms.  And so in this case, Nadia and then we'll continue telling you the story about how youth within the IGF have been trying to influence specific issues but organize the decision‑making process more generally.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: To be able to understand how youth at the IGF were creating their own spaces or generating spaces or trying to find ways to adjust the processes and the protocols that were there, we chose to do a mixed approach.  We did desk analysis, and interviews with youth activists at the IGF, youth participants but also youth facilitators who have often been unacknowledged that they are also creating spaces for youth at the IGF.

So then we started to look at the first question, who is considered youth at the IGF and how is their identity evolving.

When we look at the stakeholders, we are familiar with the Tunis Agenda paragraph, 35 and 36, which outlines what stakeholders are involved, but in those, there's no mention of the youth.  Youth is dispersed among these categories.  The official definitions are mostly age focused but the important thing to remember is that this deaf significance spans an age range from 9 to 11 years.  And so from the European it's from 15 to 24, but if you take the youth coalition on internet governance, which is what the IGF uses that spans a really large range of what is considered youth at the IGF and it doesn't include or acknowledge the different life changes and transitions that there are and youth has generally been associated that there are newcomers and generally that they are not bound by a job description of a stakeholder.

So there have been many discussions about whether or not this should be a separate stakeholder or group or this they should be integrated as a group.

So I have given a little bit more in‑depth and I try to address the following questions by taking simpler results.  If you want to go into more depth, please feel free to read our paper as we go into more depth about the definition but also from the upcoming examples.

It's a convene in which it's ab annual event in which they are created or engaged with.  So as an example, you can see with the NRIs that there are youth initiatives created.  You can go through an application procedure to create this space in which youth exist within a national or regional space.  There's thematical inter‑sectoral work.

Specifically they aim to create spaces or to create an understanding of how they want to shape Internet Governance.  But also recently in the expert group meeting there was an acknowledge element where there was a process to appoint a youth representative and this was a very complex protocol.  But aimed to create this influence.  And then the IGF is an annual event.  Here we defined in a IGF Secretariat, which is top down, and it's made for by and for youth and creating sessions about their participation, so, for example, there was a Working Group on youth participation Internet Governance where youth would reach out to stakeholders to ask them to add a youth perspective or to add a youth stakeholder to their panels but also the IGF youth track was designed to bring a lot of people together from different cultures and backgrounds from different ages to then decide a track for youth by youth.

When we go to the stakeholder led section, you see there are youth and academic programs that have been created independent from the IGF to learn more about Internet Governance and create this space for youth to interact with each other and empower them to participate in these decision‑making spaces.

So in our last question, how are youth participating in these processes, we saw that in these last two sections that youth have multiple entry points three create spaces for themselves and other youth to participate and we see that there are two separate tracks developing, the younger youth who create a separate space for discussions on youth issues and creating a safe space where they have support and participation.  And we have an older youth who are creating space for youth and looking to create a space in which all stakeholders are participating.

The structure has provided opportunities for youth but also the perception of youth because of the large age ranging and sometimes youth doesn't necessarily mean newcomers.  There's a specific idea about what youth is and how to be involved, but that has deterred them to provide peer‑to‑peer support.  Young people have used the IGF to create existing opportunities and what our paper does is to shed light on the cope of what youth is and that they are aware of the limitations of the processes but they are driven to create spaces for themselves.  If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask us about our papers and we can talk about different participation at the IGF.

Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Nadia and Diana.  So we will have a Q&A session at the end of the presentation.  So you can keep your question and ask had later.  So now we ‑‑ we give the time to our second speaker, and their paper is about politics citations, a gender analysis of the conference proceedings.  And this is from Fernanda, Kimberly and Maria.

>> KIMBERLY ANASTACIO: Can you hear me?

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Thank you very much.

>> KIMBERLY ANASTACIO: Thank you very much, my name is Kimberly Anastacio.  I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the American University.  I wrote this paper with Fernanda Rosa and Hemanuel Veras, and Maria de Jesus.

We are focusing on gender issues.  In our study, we present the bibliographic index, that we scammed to what extend female and male names have been excited in the proceedings of the Internet Governance research network, REDE in Brazil.  What is REDE, it's an academic, that started promoting during the Brazilian IGF.  Kind of what you do here with GigaNet in the global IGF.  This November, we just had our fifth meeting, and we are considering between 2017 and 2020, excluding the year 2021 ‑‑ excluding 2020, when we didn't hold one due to the COVID‑19.  As REDE members, we recognize that this is not just the basis of knowledge production, but also technologies and as a technology, we have the knowledge production and it's based on this idea that since our first meeting in 2017, REDE has been collecting data for our bibliographic index, the BRI.  This is a form that authors fill after they submit their final paper to the hedging citation.  And so the form is filled by the authors themselves and the idea is this is a pedagogical context.  And it's participatory, and authors that are participating in REDE are expected to broaden their perception about their own theoretical production.  This means in our paper, it's left to the author's own perception about what is a female and a male name.

This points out one main limitation of the study.  We are not here talking about absolute terms on the data that represents people that identify women as men, so we don't capture the complex, the nuance, the gender identities in our field.  For instance, because of this narrow binary gaze, we don't deal with the issue of trans women and men, and the nonbinary people in the citations.  We talk about names the perceived male and female names.

In REDE, 16 were written by female names and 15 by male names and four papers were co-authorship independently of the order in which the names appears and this means that our conference over the years had parity.  There is a preponderance of citations to male names across the years in the argue, you can see the citations to law and we can see there is a slight increase in female names but still the disparity is there.

We also examine whether there are differences in the female male distribution based on the name of itself.  And regardless of whether the authors have female or male names, we could maybe assume that female name authorship would generate more citations for female names but they cited fewer female names.  And this difference does not seem to be because male authors in the data sets build larger bibliographic references.  So to rate this among other issues we believe that some reasons may be the lack of knowledge of female bibliographic resources between the people who are authoring, and maybe absence of certain areas of female names and maybe because we are following algorithms that site the most highest referenced.

But what we found is that this is part of a long-standing tendency that has been observed for a long time in many different fields from anthropology to communication and a lot of references can be seen in our paper.  And we know that one initial challenge is that we cannot point out how many more female names could be excited in order to achieve balance because we don't the universe of names available because Internet Governance researchers are spread over several departments and we don't have statistics to allow us to measure the number of graduates.  They don't even identify themselves as Internet Governance researchers and so to how to situate the BRI, we turned to formational spaces.  So there is a recent document that compiled some syllabi, and it's quote/unquote a sample to give you the idea of the expertise and the topics taught in academia and at schools.

And so we quantify the female and male names in the least sources presented by the IGF, just as the authors of the REDE proceedings did and we found among the citations there's a predominance of male names and this is more visible, when you look of this.  We configured this on the thematic modules of syllabi.  And there's a fewer number of female names and Internet access and human rights which includes teaching modules is the one with more parity, but just slightly.

The idea is to contribute to the expansion of gender diversity in our field and we received some comments from the authors who feel the BRI after presenting at REDE proceedings and most of them iterate what can be seen in this excerpt here.  After filling it out, my first reaction was one of astonishment, considering the difference between the number of male and female authors in the article.  Despite being aware of this gender issue in science, seeing this issue in the form of quantifiable data shocked me.  At the same time, as soon as I saw this data, I was thinking about the problem and how it would be possible to remedy, but I came across an issue that precedes the difference in the number of citations in the article.  I don't know enough female authors so that in the future there is a balance in the number of citations.

So based on our paper, we are now developing shaping this action research process that I mentioned.  So we are making available the translation of the BRI forum with the paper and we have a diversity statement that they will include in their papers for our proceedings and it says ‑‑ and it goes like this.  And these are the numbers that we are presenting here through the declaration, we join a collective effort to undo the structural epistemological erasure in academia against women, nonbinary people, black people, people from Global South, and other social groups, whose voices are less heard due to the bias in citations.

So Internet Governance schools and Internet Governance conferences we believe they are fundamental spaces to the current gender gap and we hope this will grab to changes in that direction and we thank you very much for this opportunity and for any comments and suggestions that you might have.  So thank you.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Thank you for the wonderful presentation.  We can see the power, the power between the female and the male in your research.  Yes, we already have some questions for the authors, but as I said, we will take your questions all together in the end of the final presentation.  So you can either type your question online, in the chat box or just save it to the end of the sections.  So now we pass the time to our third speaker Stefania from the University of Geneva.  So engaging in the private sector through tech diplomacy.

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: I would like to share my presentation, but I'm not enabled to with Zoom.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: You are not able to share it?  Can you share screen?

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: No.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Just a moment.

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: Maybe I can send ‑‑

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Just a moment and we will fix it.

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: Perfect.  Thank you.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Can you try it now?

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: Yes thank you.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: The time is yours.

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: Good morning and good afternoon, good evening, everyone, thank you for meeting here today.  I'm Stefania.  I look at how we rely on policy grounds and more specifically how this is established through political discourse in providing security in cyberspace.  To give you a quick overview of this presentation.  I will go into the research review, and looking at the hypothesis and then I will analyze the preliminary outcomes and findings before moving into the conclusions.  As you know, the Internet is the backbone of our society and the social, political rely on the Internet, the more security studies look at its vulnerabilities.

The second aspect to consider is what I call the cybersecurity challenge, which has posed important challenges to the traditional conceptualization of security through the identification of its reference, and while cybersecurity is an international and national priority for governments they can hardly address the issue by themselves and so a variety is considered for their expertise and finally another issue to consider is the lack of agreed definitions and so different understandings of sign cybersecurity so the finding, defining cybersecurity creates rules and responsibilities.  In this paper, we argued that this relies on political quantitative documents which explain why the question of responsibility in cybersecurity is lacking in the global governance.  So we ‑‑ what extent is the role of the private sector implemented in the request for cyberspace.

So to address this research question, we rely on two main theoretical frameworks the securitization theory and the orchestration intermediary theory.

It conceptualizes security as a way of establishing relations and relationships.  And this first theory helps us in understanding how cybersecurity narratives are advances and we know cuss on different we think that it moves by state, and leads to a higher relevance as we so see.  The second theoretical is the orchestration to intermediary theory.  An actor ‑‑ it addresses the target in the pursuit of governance goals.

In other words, the orchestrator brings into the governance arrangements intermediaries instead of a target.  We rely, in our case the private sector to govern a target that is a cybersecurity target.  So to recap, we look at the definition of cybersecurity by three state actors and we focus on Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.

Then we look at how they portray cybersecurity discussions towards the establishment of policies and then we look at how true politicalization is securitized and then the emerging role.  So on the basis of the research question as I mentioned before, we expect to see that the extent to which states engage with the private sector is a foreign policy priority.

Once again in this paper, we looked at Switzerland, Canada and the Netherlands, we collected data in terms of methodology and we collected data from national cybersecurity, and recommendation papers and official press releases and complimented it with the semistructured interviews.  We then put this document through text analysis to identify the priority and finally we look at the roles and responsibilities in the provision of security by focusing on once again the existential threats proposed by the states identified.

I don't know if you can see it with the video as well, but there's no consistency in the identification of the existential threats and each state identifies different elements showing how the securitization is based on a politically commentated ground and then if we look at the question of cybersecurity which builds on the security studies leading question we can see that states send to look at the role of the private sector and achieve cybersecurity foreign related priorities.

And so to sum it up, we have the emergence of non‑state actors and the need for participation.

So regarding the debate over cybersecurity, we see that the emergence of non‑state and nonmilitary actors in a position to securitize a problem and influence whether or not an audience accepts the associated measure and this links to the need for orchestration.  And we see that states need they need the ‑‑ of course, further analysis is needed here on the role of method actors and the legitimacy of their role in ensuring cybersecurity and I think here we can see that there is a lot of students to study the emerging role on cyber and tech diplomacy and what it means in achieving cybersecurity.

So that's it from my side.  I hope everything was clear and I look forward to your questions.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Thank you, Stefania.  The model of the Internet governance and the increasing importance of the non‑stakeholder involves in the Internet Governance and as so many of you are taking pictures for the slides.  I want to mention that all the papers of the presentation are actually available on the GigaNet website.

If you go to the GigaNet website, you will see the symposium, and also all the papers you can download from there.  Of okay?  If you have any questions about how to access the website, you can come to me at the break we thank you for the wonderful paper and so we hand the type to our fourth speaker from Sophie.  She's from United Nations University, and her presentation is on roles in the digital space:  Symbolic interaction role theory and the norms of sovereignty.

Okay.  Sophie, we hand the time to you.

>> SOPHIE HOOGENBOOM: All right.

Yes.  Hello, everyone.  Thank you for having me.  My name Sophie Hoogenboom, I will talk about my paper, roles in the digital space.  I have to give a slight warning from the start, my paper is slightly different than the ones we have seen so far today, given the fact that it's very theoretical and conceptual paper.  And it's quite difficult to properly explain and ‑‑ to explain the argumentation in seven minutes.

The research puzzle that inspired me to write this paper.  We can see a lot of state and non‑state actors trying to find a role, a suitable role for themselves and so too that we can see a variety of users using digital sovereignty.

It was these two trends are already mentioned by a lot of other academic articles however, I feel not many tend to think of it in a theoretical or conceptual way.  It was therefore that Id to find a theoretical approach to these two phenomenon and I looked into this.

Before you can use the theory in a digital realm, it's important to share with you a few of the basic central concepts of the theory.  The theory originates from the work of George Herbert Mead, he was a psychologist and he worked ‑‑ he focused on the level of the individual and he stated that every individual has a sense of self and that this is the project of social interaction.  The sense of self also has an idea of role conceptions, suitable role concepts for itself.  It consists of me, the ability for us to look at ourself as an object and I which refers to the ability of the individual to creatively respond to differences and differences in self.  According to Mead, we don't recognize this, until we are faced with a problematic situation, until we look at self or reality.

And it is because of this problematic situation that the self will go into a reflective mode in which it will come to terms with the new reality and things and new world receptions ‑‑ after the individual has done that, it will engage in role making processes exercises in order to make the role and this is done by changes in behavior and also a crucial aspect of this is ‑‑ it refers to the fact that I need to cast the others into roles that are supportive of my desired role.  Following the 1970s, three center concepts and ideas were followed into the studies of international relations and it's in my paper that I transfer and applied them to the digital.

So in the paper, it's a theoretical of the ways in which the theory can help us understand and I'm also following that I argue for using this theory to conduct empirical research.

So I will briefly go into the theoretical exploration, because there's of aspects that I cover in my paper.  If we focus on sovereignty, sovereignty is understood as a collective meaning which is the result of interaction, it's not a static concept, it's only there because people continue to give a shared meaning to it.  It's therefore, important to talk about the norms of sovereignty.  Or concern characteristics change over time.  We would say the norms of sovereignty are based on the understandings, but this is not fixed and this can change.  Not only is it important on the world stage, but it's stated in the quote by Beasley who says it's not only that they establish and set parameters for the nature of agency and scope of acceptable behaviors for the sovereign role, meaning that on the world stage, no the only sovereignty is an important concept for roles but it's something that we can go to the sovereign role.

On the basis of theory, I argue that we can understand to not only ‑‑ as a problematic situation ‑‑ this is not only because it's a new field in which but the characteristics challenges the roles and norms of sovereignty and such as the reality and absolute authority.  This I consider a problematic situation because it impacts the idea and we follow the theoretical framework, we take part the role taking process and they will try to make this role by behavior changes.  This is when we refer to the level of states or international organizations and it comes in the form of policy and strategic documents and the changes in languages.

And this brings me back to the ‑‑ to the two aspects that inspired my paper.  Which is the concept of digital sovereignty, and on the basis of the theory, I argue that we should and can approach digital sovereignty as an important role making practice, given the fact that the current ruling norms of sovereignty, let's say the norms of sovereignty in the analog square do not fully ‑‑ or are difficult fully applied to the digital and it's therefore, very, very important for actors both states and non‑state actors to either come up with new norms of sovereignty in the digital or to adapt norms of sovereignty to the digital.

So it's therefore that I think that this conceptual scheme on the basis of these central concepts, I'm talking about role taking, role making, can be very useful ‑‑ and be a useful framework to conduct empirical research and I would say that we could use this to look into individual actors by first identifying a specific problematic situation for them, and then see how they engage in role taking and how they engage in role making and specifically how they engage with the concept of sovereignty, whether they avoid it, whether they explicitly mention it, whether they use a new discourse of digital sovereignty and then alter casting processes which is tied to the role making exercise because if I placed digital sovereignty at, let's say a regional level, explicitly and implicitly, I am costing other actor as a nation state, in a lesser role and a role that supports the desired role conception of the region.

So to conclude on the basis of my paper ‑‑ in my paper, I argue that symbolic interaction is very useful in the further understanding of roles in the digital space and how sovereignty relates to all of this.  This, given the fact that it can be used to conduct empirical research of a specific actor and how they position themselves and also shed light on what I think is a social process that we are now witnessing in which current ruling norms of sovereignty are adopted or even completely reconstructed to deal with it, the digital realm.  And I thank you all for listening and I'm looking forward to your comments.  Thank you.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Sophie, we are looking forward to reading your paper, because it has only eight minutes forever each presentation, we didn't see a lot of the empirical analysis because of the time restrictions but we will certainly, you know, read your paper to see how this ‑‑ how do you apply it in your data analysis okay.  That's a very interesting data approach as well.  So thank you, Sophie again.

And then we go to the last speaker, Knesia and Francesca.  And it's on the safe space, to architecture ass as alternative sociotechnical models nor content moderation governance.  Who will speak?

>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Yes, Yik Chan.  I will be the one presenting, this is Francesca.  Knesia is here but on a train.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Great.  So the time is yours.

>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Thank you so much.  Glad to be here.  I'm having technical glitches but I'm glad we are all here with our interesting papers.  It's great to see you guys.

So I will say a few words about this paper, given that Knesia is keeping on doing interviews for it on this ‑‑ at this very moment.  And also because it's a work in progress, also because given to ‑‑ given what Elon Musk has been doing with Twitter in the past couple of weeks in particular, this research about alternatives to federated alternatives to microblogging and the secure messaging platforms is actually of ‑‑ very much an actuality right now.

So right now, I will present what we wrote in the work in progress paper that is available on the GigaNet website, but, yeah, this is very much going on and going and we hope to have updates soon.

So as I was mentioning, this idea of using federated infrastructures ‑‑ federated architectures as the basis of a number of communication platforms nowadays of the secure microblogging, it's a search for alternatives that are ongoing.  Why are they presented as alternatives.  They are alternative on one hand to centralized applications that introduce a single point of failure in the network and lack of interoperability and on the other hand, they are alternatives to purely decentralized peer‑to‑peer, apps that necessity higher levels of engagement, expertise from the users and from their devices.

So this centralization ‑‑ sorry federation opens up the core set of protocol designers and involves a new kind of actor which is the system administrator, responsible for maintaining the cluster of servers that are necessary for federated networks.

So there has been this idea of migrating from centralized platforms and the rise of this federated that is based on ‑‑ federated architecture, we have Mastodon, Pleroma and Peertube which are aimed at different use but share this idea of federated architecture.

And in the field of secure messaging, more precisely that is at the core of our research, we study for a few years especially in the frame of our project which is called NEXTLEAP, which is over by now, but we keep on pursuing this line of research.  There is a will to go against messaging silos.  So ‑‑ such as Matrix or Delta Chat have goals of interoperability, security and privacy.  We tried to do something with this paper that we touched upon in our book about secure messaging that was released in April of this year.  We tried to look a little bit more closely at what federated architectures do for content moderation and vice versa and we saw that ‑‑ well, this type of architecture is introduced a number of challenges for content moderation practices.

And as mentioned this is a work in progress.

So what is federated moderation about?  Federated social networks introduce novel forms of content moderation, reputation, infrastructure maintenance and community involvement.  They do so by ‑‑ (Garbled audio) a number of ways, bots and relative reputation systems and identity verification in decentralized manner and machine learning type solutions.  We delve more into these alternatives in paper.

And, of course, the novel forms of content moderation also introduce new controversies in particular, who holds the responsibility for the control ‑‑ for the content in the centralized network and the control of this content.  One example of this controversy was the ban of the matrix secure messaging tool from Google Play last year, or the ‑‑ the use of the Mastodon code by the platform Gab and so on.

And other controversies are about identity verification and related issues.

So in this ‑‑ in this paper, we are ‑‑ we have organized it around the central part around two case studies.  One Mastodon and it has been hailed in very, very recent days as a possible alternative to Twitter.

So there are a number of things that we highlight in the paper about Mastodon.  One is that the user ratio with respect to moderators is very different in such a platform.  Facebook has 7,000 per 100 moderators for 2 billion users and Mastodon it could be 1 to 500 to 1 to 5,000.  So we can see the difference.

There is a kind of social centralization.  And so administrators and moderators are vulnerable and they are often very known by the community.  So ‑‑ which is quite unlike with respect to Twitter or Facebook.  There is ‑‑ the moderator has a number of responsibilities that are not only more visible but are also more ‑‑ that can be different with respect to centralized platforms.  So there is a ‑‑ there has been an application programming interface that has been built in 2019, to allow third‑party tools to help build solutions for servers, administrators that are dealing with Spam, and with harassment.  And so in the case of matrix, it is ‑‑ it is another secure messaging federated tool, while Mastodon is more microblogging platform.  They have been dealing for a long time with the reputation and abuse handling problem and there's been previous controversies about it.

They have been trying to implement a number of solutions that include a support bot for bans, redactions, anti‑Spam, room shutdown and so on.  They have implemented a relative reputation system.  And the users can combine the feeds in any way to produce their own reputation scoring system.  And matrix has been looking to implement a principle of protocol neutrality since its early days.  So there is no moderation done on the protocol level but instead there's moderation policy lists or ban lists, which is stored as room states and this is an example.

And they can be shared across different rooms and servers on the platform.

There have been discussion in both ‑‑ for both of these tools about machine learning solutions and so I'm going to go very, very fast on this because it's still very much the subject of discussion and sometimes we can see how despite all of these discussion, there is ‑‑ there is still a return to good old forms such as why do you want to join?  This will help us review your application.

So to conclude, because eight minutes are really short, indeed.  In the conclusions we have rearranged and updated what we had called the four Cs of federation in the chapter dedicated to federation of our book published this year.  So we identified in that ‑‑ in the conclusions to those chapters ‑‑ to that chapter, four keywords that happen to all start with C in English.  And so we called it the four Cs of federation, that are very important to start figuring out federated architectures affect platforms and can be affected in return.  So the first one is customization.  Moderation solutions are left on the implementation level and this is protocol neutrality.  And the second is compatibility.  However, those solutions can be shared across instances and this is the strength of ‑‑ of federation.

There is a community dynamic, the reputation of servers and the rooms is really collectively built, quite as much as a living thing and codes of conduct are continuously debated and in that sense, the responsiveness of the administrators of the different instances that composed the federation is vital.  There is an aspect of care and maintenance.  So moderation solutions are implemented without harming the infrastructure and the users, and the user, there's no backdoors.  And so there is a fifth honorary C that we added, this time because indeed we observed that there is an inherent risk for recentralization coming along with those solutions.  This is also an old problem of partially or totally decentralized, that recentralization is always there and subject to coming back into the picture and we have to see the extent to which it is possible and it is actually happening, the dynamics of recentralization.

And so this is it, and maybe there will be some questions looking forward to it.  And possibly Knesia will chime in as well.

Thank you so much.

>> YIK CHAN CHIN: Thank you.  Thank you, Francesca and Knesia.

So now we have five presentations finished.  So now we are giving our time to our discussions, and he is from Humanity in Action.  So please come here.  Please come forward to our stage.  And so, yeah.  Can you share your thoughts and give some comments to our speakers.

>> Absolutely.  Thank you so much.  My name is Aden Totaline, I'm with Humanity in action and, firstly, thank you so much for all of your presentations today.  These have been really interesting.  I was brought in as a discussant at the last minute.  So I haven't had the chance to dive into your papers to the extent that I wish I could, but I certainly did read all of them.  And I learned a lot from all of you.  And regardless, I hope that my comments can still be helpful and what I certainly hope is not the case is that I become one of those discussants that you recognize that doesn't know what you are talking about and haven't read them.  Hopefully I'm able to offer some comments that will be very helpful.  Firstly, I appreciate that all the papers came together to discuss the composition of who is engaging in the agenda setting and the decision-making processes pertaining to core Internet infrastructure.  Some measures are more theoretical and more orients to practitioners, however, this is an important field of study.  I will provide a few individual comments.  First on each paper and I will present these in the order of the presentations that we just heard today.

So to the first presentation by Nadia and Diana, Nadia, hi.  Firstly.  Great to see you again and this is very near and fear to me.  I followed the earlier research and pleased for you to look at Youth Meta participation.  This is a term I did not hear before.  A difficult subject.  Youth is such a broad watt gory and it's in general really difficult to do this topic justice.  I understand why you gave voice to youth.  It makes a lot of sense, but what are the perceptions that non‑youth stakeholders have of youth stakeholders.?  That could be an interesting angle to go down in the future.  And I thought the IGF is one of the less interesting explorations.  The IGF, it's one little space, but it's a bit of a talking shop.  Decision making processes don't necessarily, build out of what happens at the IGF.  And I appreciate what I'm about to say as an anecdote, but some people don't participate in the space because there are other fora where they feel like they can have more of an impact and be more ‑‑ can move above their weight and under different spaces where youth are making space for themselves, where they are potentially having different levels of impact and why is that the case?  Again, great work and pay makes these great.

>> The next paper with Kimberly, Maria and Fernanda.  Great work, and great topic.  Thank you for your research here.  I wasn't sure to what extent you had explored it, when ‑‑ so we're talking here about citations and gender gap.  So what extent do men self‑cite themselves in their own papers and to what extent does this potentially perpetuate some of the citation gaps that you are seeing.

I realize this is an anecdote but I have read the work of a lot of the scholars that you cited in one the footnotes and people do sometimes site themselves and there are legitimate reasons for doing that, you don't want to be accused of self‑plagiarism.  Is self‑citation also a factor here that we need to think about now turning back to the substance of your paper.  I like you explored the syllabus about how local communities can teach how Critical Internet Resources are managed.  There is definitely a gender gap or a citation gender gap that you highlight in your work and, of course, unacceptable.

I guess a piece of puzzle that I thought was missing was remedies.  How do we fix this gap without putting the burden on traditionally excluded communities to do more labor and resolve this tension.  The next paper, Stefania, you introduced the concept of orchestration as a model of indirect governance that supplements delegation models ‑‑ which are premised on this.  The theory that you relied on before, I haven't seen it referenced before in the literature, but I think it makes sense.  And in that sense, it is of course, a new contribution to the field, and I think that the theory does accurately describe the nonhierarchical relationship between the core he is grater, and the intermediary and the agent.  I find the idea interesting.  I couldn't figure out why I chose Canada, Switzerland and Netherlands.  I'm not sure if it was a personal connection or the ease to access leads for interviews whether it was because of documents being available or maybe there's another rationale all together.  That was something that was missing from the paper, of the justification for why the three countries were chosen.  I thought the sample size was on the smaller side.  And interviewing more people, particularly from the private sector would have been interesting given that the paper was really as the title of the paper would suggest, has a bit of a focus on the private sector so two interviews seemed to me not quite enough and while I understand the justification to offering anonymity to the people who are interviewed, it made it difficult for me to assess their credibility for the comments that they offered.

What is the size of the tech company?  Ball and what are their responses?  Are they on a public policy team?  I thought this needed to be more of a justification as to how the interview subjects were chosen.

And I hate to end on a negative note, so please take these comments in good faith and great work.

Sophie, so you presented a theoretical explanation of the way in which roles in the digital space and the position of the notion of sovereignty can be understood.  I thought this was a really strong and convincing paper.  Of course, it was accepted to this conference.  So it would be strong and convincing like all of our papers here today.  So I guess my only comment is to link it back to where there were additional references or scholars who should be cited, just a cursory look at the names that were cited.  I don't know.  Maybe there's some missing voices.  I will leave it to you to look into that and see whether there might be different perspectives that could be brought into your excellent work.  And then finally, Francesca and Knesia.

You are aware of this because you mentioned it.  It is a piece of work that is evolving because Mastodon has been growing in relevance over the past few weeks, sort of the aftermath of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.

No doubt that is changing some of the conclusions that you were drawing upon in your work.  So it could be interesting to explore that Mastodon has gone a little more strain stream, the some of the other protocols and the blue sky initiative and the authenticated transfer protocol and trying to bring about interoperability.  You highlighted the challenges that these face, but then the conclusion I found a little unconvincing.

Are they promising alternatives when they have so many flaws that you identified in your paper?  I would like to see a bit more as to why these are so promising.  I would like to stop here and give the floor to our moderator but thank you again for your work.  Thank you so much for your opinions.

Apologies for stepping in my name is Allison Guild.  Yik Chan has had to step out.  So Roxana, I wanted to check if there are any online questions.  Are there any from the floor?  Are there any question that we can take?  We are getting 15 minutes over time.

>> ROXANA RADU: Absolutely.  We have two questions that came in, both are from Kimberly.  What reliance, are they only to the head of publications or all the literature cited?  There was an additional comment from of Berna about the assignment of gender to names which would be difficult in Turkish as well.

So this is all from the online room.  And if there are any questions on the Florida over there, maybe we can take all of them together and ant back to our speakers:

>> MODERATOR: So no questions from the room.  If we can go immediately back to the online questions and the online answers.

>> ROXANA RADU: I suggest we start with Kimberly and then give everyone a chance to respond to Aden's comments.

>> KIMBERLY ANASTACIO: I will try to answer the question on Zoom.  First, about the reliability of the measures taken for the assignment of gender to the names.  We definitely believe this is a tricky issue for the part where we talk about the BRI results, the author of the papers presented at the REDE proceedings themselves were responsible for quantifying the female and male names.  We have no control over their research process.  As part of the participatory action methodology that we used.  So the authors themselves do the quantification to reflect on what they wrote.

One of the equivalents of the citation standard used mainly in the US but sometime in Europe as well, in Brazil puts most of the references with the first and last name, and I believe that REDE authors use that for female and male names.  And for the part where we talk about the document, we quantify the citations ourselves and we use our understanding of what was a female and people name and we turn to searches when we identify female and male.  We discuss the limitations in our paper, which due to the difficulty to analyze this type of data has been a method that has been used in other papers as well that is cross gender in other fields too.

As for the second question if the citations for only two REDE publications, the citations that we used in this data set are all the reference lists in the papers that were presented in REDE conferences.  So if you think about GigaNet, it's like if we had analyzed all the papers presented and published in GigaNet's proceedings used in the reference papers.  As for the comments, I thank you very much.  Especially the question about the remedy.  We as the authors of this paper are members of the organizing committee for REDE, the GigaNet equivalent, let's just say in Brazil, we are using the BRI as one intervention and one remedy, because we believe that by making our authored consider their own citations maybe we can foster change and bring more balance over the years.  Now we will analyze ‑‑ now that we will include the statement that ‑‑ the diversity statement, maybe we will see across the years some changes.  And as for the self‑citation things, we definitely believe that this is something that is important.  It's a bit out of scope for this paper now but maybe for future studies, it's something that we should definitely consider.  Thank you very much.

>> ROXANA RADU: Wonderful.  Thank you very much.

I'm wondering if someone would like to add a response to Aden very quickly.  We are 15 minutes over time.  So we can try to squeeze everything in the next two minutes.  If inn in has a burning question or answer back to Aden, please feel free to step in.

>> STEFANIA GROTTOLA: Maybe I would start.  Just a quick response to your question in my case, the selection of the three countries was done on a proposed sample basis.  Yes, for ease of data collection, also because no previous studies were available before and so I had quite flexibility in the decision ‑‑ in the trust with the countries and regarding the interviews, I fully take your point.  Just one quick response, the interview were complimentary to the data collection.  It was mainly done on the interviews but they complimented a little bit, a picture that cannot be grasped from the documents but definitely if this is a starting point then for next ‑‑ for further, you know, papers for sure, I will go more ‑‑ I will build more interviews and more data on that.  So thank you very much for that.  And yeah, thank you for this incredible discussion.  Thanks.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Hi, Aden.  I appreciate your comments and I appreciate that you looked at everything and shared your thought.  I know the IGF is an exciting opportunity in my opinion.  A lot of things are changing and with WSIS 20 coming up, it would be interesting to see how youth are in these spaces and with the Secretary General wanting emphasis youth participation in bringing that together and having something to work from and moving towards, I love your idea about then moving that forward and looking at how that working and the intersections then can further develop will be absolutely something that I would love to do for a post‑Doc, something to consider and I appreciate the time have you taken for this.  Have a great time in Ethiopia.

>> ROXANA RADU: I wonder if Francesca.

>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Yes, I resupplied to Fernanda in the chat to her specific question.  So I will just say in the promising alternatives.  I think is one thing that is particularly useful to explore in this type of arrangements and we can see it very much with the musk controversy right now.

Instances in federated architectures allow users to have different degrees of autonomy and technological expertise and ‑‑ and at the same time, are able to choose an instance that has values and terms of to use privacy protection and some that are closest as possible to their own values.  And so I think this is the you have advantage of federated architectures centralized and purely decentralized ones that they offer different levels of possible expertise and adherence to special values that users can explore.  Yeah.  This is also why somebody was saying in Switerland right now, discussing this was going ‑‑ what's going on in this panel right now, that choosing the server is important when joining Mastodon.  And it's choosing the right instance for you.

>> ROXANA RADU: Thank you all very much.  I realize we have run over time massively.  I would like to thank once more to all of our presenters and participants.  It has been a fascinating discussion and I hope wick continue this conversation over lunch break if you are physically present or some of it online here into our next panel.  Thank you once more.  Apologies for running late and enjoy your lunch break.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much.  I'm sorry we didn't get chance for more of a discussion.  Thank you so much to all of you who stayed with us running over, and those of you joining us, be back at 2:00 so we can try to keep these sessions on time for the people online.  Thank you so much for your participation.