Transcript - Internet Governance

Sunny Chendi: We will start. Thank you again for joining the session. I will introduce the moderator for this IGF session, Mr Roham Samarajiva. He is the ... he was appointed to the Working Group of ..., appointed by the ... in 2002. With that, I will hand over to Rohan. This is a different format we are taking for this session. I hope Rohan will explain the format. Please, bear in mind that there will not be any slides on the screen here. Thank you.

Rohan Samarajiva: Good morning. Interactivity will be the key word of this session. Our topic is Internet Governance and I have been provided with a working definition that was adopted at the World Summit of Information Society in 2005, as part of the declaration of principles.

Internet Governance is the development and application by governance, the private sector and civil society in their respective roles of Chair and principles, known rules, decision-making procedures and programs that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.

I will keep that handy, as we go by, we might need to revisit the definition.

Basically, what we are trying to do is to operationalize several of the principles that we will be discussing. One is the multistakeholder nature of the governance process. We have with us a member of Parliament from Bangladesh, Mr Hasanul Haq Inu, who is the Chair of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Ministry of Communications of the Bangladesh Parliament. He is the President of the Jatiya ..., a part of the governing closing of Bangladesh, and I know from many interactions I have had with him that he is quite enthusiastic and interested in nerd governance and telecommunications issues.

We will have somebody who is from the political process.

We will also have Mr Ravi Shanker, who is currently the administrator of the universal service obligations fund and who will be heading the national opttal fibre agency of India. This will be one of the largest of the entities dealing with extending the infrastructure that makes the Internet possible. His role here primarily will be in relation to the previous position that he held as being in the Department of Information Technology in the post of Joint Secretary, and then later as ... secretary, dealing with the international Internet Governance issues, and in India on Internet matters in general, for the Government of India, and among other things, having officiated as the CEO of the National Internet Exchange of India.

Now we have somebody from the civil service, somebody from the permanent part of the Government, as we like toe say, who will also be a member of this panel discussing Internet Governance.

Then we will have Paul Wilson, who is the Director General of APNIC. Paul is the head of the regional organization that manages the numbers space, that is essential to the controlling of the Internet. Prior to that he is has been actively involved as the chief executive officer of the first privatised PE in Australia and being involved in setting up Internet service providers in the Asian region. So I guess he represents more different kind of stakeholders, in the same way that I represent a different kind of stakeholder, in the sense that we come from the nongovernmental space at this time. Though I have, of course, been in government before as the ... in Sri Lanka and one of the founding directors of the IC agency, in the same way he has been in the private sector prior to his current role.

Last but not least, Mr Raman Jit Singh Chima, senior policy analyst of Google, based in Delhi, leading the public policy and government affairs work for Google in India. He is a lawyer by training and, again, he has been trying to get this discourse, giving it some shape and form, in, among other things, having edited a recent issue of the Indian journal of law and technology that comes out of Bangalore.

We have in fact an international panel as the Internet Governance will necessarily have to involve. We have people from India, from Sri Lanka, from Bangladesh, from Australia and so on. We have people representing the multistakeholders who are involved, as is the case with the definition of Internet Governance that I mentioned to you.

We will also be trying to bring in you from the audience and those who will be participating in this discussion from afar, coming in through the Internet with the webcast and so on, because again that is also a topic that we will be discussing -- about new modalities of working for the Internet Governance, including the IGF.

The overall form will be that, starting with Mr Hasanul Haq Inu, we will have opening statements, then we will have an interactive session among the panelist, which I will try to trigger, walking around, and trying to keep that interactivity going among the panelists. Then we will bring you physically here, as well as those who are with us on the Internet and the virtual interaction into the conversation and we will conclude with closing comments from the panelists.

In terms of what I would like to say for the structure, I think the most important thing to remember -- when I was introduced, there was reference made to my role in the expert group appointed by the Secretary-General of the ITU on international telecommunication regulations, ITRs. I thought it was fascinating, because that is in fact the second attempt to create an intergovernmental organization -- the very first one was the ... postal union. Those associated with ITU, like myself, we don't talk about the IPU that much, but as a scholar, I have to be honest and say the UPU was the very first one.

Then in 1865 the governments of Europe got together to come up with rules about how the telegraph would be governed. The telegraph was active from 1848. Among the things, among the phenomena they had to deal with were things like the telegraph line coming from Germany to a place called Achen and stopping, and then the physical messages being carried across the border in France and being put into the telegraph line again on the other side of the border, because this was seen as something the governments wanted to control.

Of course, we had the phenomena of a man called Julius Reuter, whose name lives on in the company Reuters, who decided to use the pigeons to accelerate the process by which this information came from the telegraph and was walked across the border and then re-inputted into the telegraph. He carried the financial and economic information using pigeons from the German side, who were not amenable to the customs procedures and so on, and as a result the archaic procedure that was in place did not last for very long, Mr Reuter managed to leverage his activities into longstanding and powerful news organization that carries his name until today.

So you can see that from the very beginning of electronic communication, the question of governmental coordination, governmental control over content, the private sector's involvement in it in various ways, including in getting around the government controls, was a feature of the way electronic communications were governed.

I find it interesting to think that these issues that we think are being addressed for the very first time were in fact addressed -- they are not really new, they have just taken different forms.

One of the things about the ITU that was created at that point and which continues until today is the involvement of technical experts in the day-to-day activities of decision-making and coordination. For example, while the deliberation that some of us, for example, when I was working in government, I used to go to the plenipotentiary and spend five or six days, go through interminable long discussions about how to elect the next office bearers and give direction to the organization per se.

But in fact the really important work in the ITU is done in the various Working Groups. Under the ITU, particularly under the standard spot and under the radio, ITUR.

In these cases there is involvement far beyond that of ..., it is the technical people, the manufacturing companies, the operating companies, various entities that participate in the actual decision-making.

One could say that the ITU is the original multistakeholder approach. And we have to keep that in mind, because governments by themselves will have difficulty in understanding the complexities and of setting the framework for this extraordinarily dynamic sector of the economy that now we call the Internet economy.

So with that context, I think it is important for us to understand that we are at an important decision point. We have had five years of the IGF, the Internet Governance Forum, and we are now looking to see IGF2, the mandate has been renewed, but how can it be strengthened, how can it be enhanced? There are, of course, different viewpoints on this matter, about making it an outcome-oriented organization, which Mr Ravi Shanker will talk about, as against keeping the value of the organization as a platform that people can freely express their ideas. Because one of the difficulties, of course, is that the minute you go beyond governance, one vote per country kind of model, it becomes very difficult to get decision-making.

We have seen that in the ITU world, in the Internet world, we have actually brought new ways of decision-making among experts that are actually quite exemplary, even in terms of governments should be wanting to learn about what we call ... working code -- getting the job done, rather than interminably talking about things, and by the time the definition is arrived at the matter has been already resolved on the ground.

Those are the kinds of issues we will be talking about. My task here is basically to set the frame, which I will be joined in by the panelists through their opening statements, and then to raise a few questions, to see whether we can get some interactivity among this multistakeholder group and with you, and hopefully advance our understanding of the issues, the challenges that face us today.

With that, let me invite Mr Hasanul Haq Inu, member of Parliament and Chairman of the Standing Committee on Post and Telecommunications from Bangladesh.

APPLAUSE

Hasanul Haq Inu: Thank you very much, Professor. My co-panelists, good morning and good afternoon. I am from Bangladesh and I am a politician, one of the persons who is in a position -- people become scared, because when ... for this to close it. So do not get afraid, because the moderator, is in due time I will try to close my mouth and listen to you, because in politics, those politicians are successful when they are good at listening, and those who do not hear, they are bad politicians.

The world is governed by bad and good politicians. I am one of them, so I have bad things and good things also.

In December 2012 in Dubai, the ITU Conference is going to be held. At that Conference, they will discuss the governance issue of the Internet, but on the governance issues we should be very clear, the governance is ITU and the Internet Governance is very different, but the governance of the Internet is a broad based issue which needs to be addressed properly.

In that Conference, I think the government and the multistakeholders will debate on the jurisdiction of the international Internet. Many governments are also considering the continuation of the existing policy on the Internet. This could signal a shift in the regulatory paradigm on both the international and national levels. Well in 1998 the treaty was adopted by ITU which will be reviewed in that Conference, and some member states may put forward the idea of major changes with respect to the Internet.

So we are on the brink of a very interesting debate, and we need to take very important decisions, and there are many proposals floating across the world.

One proposal is to develop an oversighting body on the nongovernmental multistakeholder organizations, like ICANN, there are other proposals and to bring under ITU the core functions of many organizations and nongovernmental organizations like IEEE, ISOC, ICANN, WOCC, particularly with respect to the design of systems infrastructure, the development of protocols and the management of domain numbering associations.

Whether in that Conference or across the world, we are going to determine the appropriate role of the governments in the 21st century. These are the things, the proposals from India, and South Africa, they are floating a proposal, and Russia, Arabic and other organizations are trying to float other proposals, and the Indian, Brazil and South African proposal is to develop a committee for Internet related policies, CIRP, so these are the proposals.

But the major question is how this world body, can establish authority over the technical and personal functions of the Internet. That is the question.

As you know, access to the Internet and information is a ... of the people, unlike most communications media, Internet technology is based on global, open and non-proprietary standard and thus do challenge the existing regulatory institutions based on national boundaries.

First is a very broad term, used in many different context -- applying to activity as diverse as operation of technical standard, operation of technical infrastructure, development, evolution, its activities are not restricted to the activities of the government or a world body. Many different types of stakeholders have a role in defining and carrying out Internet Governance activities.

In public policy areas, governmental intervention has taken place in order to deal with specific issues that might hinder access or use of Internet, for example domestic restrictions are removed by the government to pave the way for the entry of IP companies, including allowing IP telephoney, developing ... to connect with satellites, setting up nationwide local call tariffs or flat fees for local Internet dial-up, providing easy market entry and interconnections of ISPs. Also access for international bandwidth. These initial steps have contributed to offering public Internet services. Moreover, experience has shown that subsidising basic intrash content and skills in terms of access and use can benefit the sectors development.

Moreover, the governments do have a strong contribution to several critical public policy ideas, limited to Internet, such as security, privacy, telecommunications policy, universal access, protection, e-commerce and other economic issues. Besides these governmental roles, the cyberspace and many international agencies and other intergovernmental organizations are playing a role in Internet Governance, for example ITU, Unesco, other party organizations, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, and Council of the Asia Pacific Forum, CAPC.

Apart from these, the governments -- the critical Internet resource, CIR, cannot function at all, is complicated. As you know, the current structure of the ICANN is ... because of this relationship with the US Government.

The Internet's technological development as well as administration grew overall with little government regulatory intervention. It developed from the bottom up, plainly by technical developers, providers and users. The model contrasts with that of telecommunication and broadcasting industries, while in many cases top-down national government regulation historically guided the structure, the design of the media. The technological development and administration of the Internet is involved in ensuring that the network is interoperable, functional, stable, secure, efficient, as well as capable in the long run.

No single person, organization, or country manages the Internet. Instead, the Internet's technological management is handled by many entities which work with a coordinated and open framework, such as IETF, IEAP, governmental consortium, consensus driven bottom-up in the field. Most of the protocols at the core of the Internet are protocols based on open standard that are efficient, trusted and open to global implementation with little or no licensing restrictions. They are available to anyone, everyone at no cost on the Internet.

So here we are now with the governmental bodies, intergovernmental organization, national institutions, so we need to develop a consensus on dos and don'ts and we need to take care of the don'ts to develop the relations, the technical protocols as well as programs. Here comes the role of the governmental body. The open nature of the Internet needs to be kept and not to be Dibbs turn. It will not be wise, from my understanding, that it will not be wise to push IETF IEGT, IEAP, WOCC or ICANN or APNIC under ITU or any other body, but intergovernmental and governmental bodies can be developed and can function in a complimentary way and can have a direct relation.

So a new multilateral treaty or agreement on certain principles can be developed to keep going the functioning of the Internet and promote solidarity and cooperation between states and underline the public value of the Internet beyond commercial interests.

IGF needs to focus on finding a new way of intergovernance, softer governance, to define the parameters for the rights of the Internet.

Having said that, I will come back after listening to you, with the national IGFs and regional IGFs need to be activated and need to be very vibrant, to keep going the Internet paradigm.

Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Rohan Samarajiva: Thank you very much, Mr Inu, for a comprehensive overview. I would like to invite Mr N Ravi Shanker to make his opening statement.

N Ravishanker: Thank you. At the outset I would like to say that the distinguished panelists have set the tone for the session. I will only add what I can call flavour from the government side, some experience of having participated in several IGFs and ICANN meetings.

When we think of Internet and governance as distinct words, we look at Internet and trade, the Internet represents free trade, free thought and free world, a ... thought process.

When you look at government as a separate word, you think it controls, and you begin to use another word called draconian, so you have draconian and somewhere you have to try to put the words for Internet Governance and try to say what does Internet Governance mean.

I think the whole concept of Internet Governance dwelt on the sole issue -- yes, there is a community, there is a community who needs a direction and in order to have a direction we need to have principles, protocols -- principles and protocols are all what governance is about. Whether we like the word governance or not, it is what is important.

Ultimately, TCP and ICP are all protocols. So when we work in the Internet sphere, we have so many technical bodies and we evolve standard and we come to a common understanding, yes, we will adhere to these standards.

As a large user community grows, and there are issues that permeate beyond technical but go into the associate logical realm, that is where governments come into play, then you begin to say, well, all aspects of the Internet are not technical but there are many aspects of the Internet which are socio-economic and associate logic, and governments begin to regulate on these things.

Often, it is the clash between two sets of ideas or ideologies, technical and governance related. If you look at the broader picture, as the Honourable Member for Parliament of Bangladesh has mentioned, we move to a situation where legislation is brought about through a process of dialogue and discussion. We into to look at Internet Governance from the larger area, that it is to foster goodwill and ensure there is a degree of coherence and consistency when we deal with these issue.

Let's look at the bodies that handle Internet Governance. We have ICANN, we have APNIC and the various ... and the IGF. ICANN typically deals with names and numbers and the numbers have been further delegated down to the RIR, of which APNIC is one such entity in Asia. Each one of the bodies, whether it is ICANN or APNIC and other RIRs, work under a set of protocols and processes to which they try to govern the names and numbers. We who have been using the CGDEs and now the ideas variations of ICT, all of those are something where we have what we can call standard protocols.

Behind the standard protocols are other bodies, union core, WTC and the like, all of which refer or relate to setting up standards through conferences and dialogue discourse.

The whole issue -- I am sure my friend from Google would like to respond when those issues come up -- when governments across the globe look in their respective spheres as to what should be regulated, and in the Indian context, our Information Technology Act, you look at features or aspects which govern society and that which govern society, you try to bring about the regulation in order to ensure that within a specific sovereign boundary, you try and delineate what should be allowed and what should not be, according to a set of social mores defined in that particular society. This is exactly what we feel the sovereign responsibility is in the whole process of legislation, and the government tries to create discourse and dialogue in order to bring about what we call legislation and a set of rules.

Whenever there is a new diversion or way in which things work, there is always a certain amount of ... but at the end of the day we have to have give and take and see each other's point of view.

I am getting to the point of the ideas per se. The idea is a body which has been created in a manner to have open forum, open dialogue with multistakeholders. Even ICANN and APNIC are also multistakeholders in that respect. However, the idea of this multistakeholders in the sense that it has industry, academic and society and the government in the process of the MAG.

I would like to dwell upon the way in which the MAG should work, because when the renewal of the ideas process has occurred, we from the Government of India articulated the viewpoint that while the idea has worked well, we feel it should move towards a new paradigm, being that it should have a development orientation and should move in the direction of an outcome orientation.

The development orientation because as one of the developing economies, we feel that the Internet and several issues relating to the governance and related aspects would be only when it has some socio-economic growth and inclusiveness into it. That is why, when we hosted the third IGF in India at Hyderabad, we called it Internet for all, and the idea of Internet for all was inclusive growth. Subsequently, the Chairman at Vilnius also adopted that, and the movement has been towards the development paradigm, rather than any other contentious issues of the Internet.

There are two tracks in the idea, one is the enhanced cooperation and another is what is called implements of idea. We have articulated views for the implement of the idea, but the enhanced cooperation, we feel certain aspects which are falling under the domain of the UNSCD should move to such a platform, so that the bodies can discuss the public policy issues.

Today there is no such entity or committee which can do that, and many of the issues which have been mentioned by the Honourable Member of Parliament from Bangladesh, we need to talk on public policy issues, for which we need an outcome orientation and this would help us look at it as a committee of nations, in order to move toward commonality of thought and purpose.

I would like to leave it at this and thank the panel for giving me the opportunity to express my viewpoint. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Rohan Samarajiva: I would like to invite Mr Paul Wilson, Director General of APNIC, to make his openings comments.

Paul Wilson: Thank you very much, Professor.

Thank you to all of you for being here, good morning to you all, good afternoon, good evening and goodnight to those who are joining by webcast.

Thanks for attending the session, in particular, because it is one that might seem a little out of place in the APRICOT and APNIC Meeting programs. Our conferences are primarily technical and I think you in the audience are also primarily technical, as I am, but Internet Governance is a nontechnical thing, essentially.

We brought them together here in this maybe slightly uncomfortable union, for quite good reasons, and for those of you who have been coming to these conferences for a while, you will know this is not the first time.

The sections between Internet Governance and the technical community are pretty important in one direction -- Internet Governance is a discipline that relies and has to rely on today's technical reality, and what better place to find it than here. We really do have a role in this community to make sure that we, as operators and developers of the Internet itself, are able to put our expertise and that information into any Internet Governance process that is going on.

Second, I think we should also understand what is happening and what is being discussed, what is being proposed in particular in the Internet Governance sphere, and that is because many of the proposals have the real potential to change the Internet or to force changes on the Internet, and we do need to understand that.

After all, we collectively have built something here, which we and our colleagues and the companies we work for have built the Internet, and it is really quite something. I would like to refer to it here as the incredible Internet. It is something that has arisen almost by magic over the last 20 years. It has actually been delivered to governments, I might say, delivered to community, delivered to governments, at no cost to governments.

That means governments are both receiving and dealing with and getting used to the Internet and what it has brought.

We all know that there is huge value and huge impact in what the Internet has brought. We cannot be surprised at governments being very interested. I think many of us are very proud that the Internet has been so outstandingly successful and it has attracted recognition and respect from all sides of society, not least governments.

We do need to understand what plans are being hatched, if you like, for the Internet, in the name of liberating or controlling or helping the Internet. That is one of the reasons why we at APNIC, at the NRO, the RIRs collectively and the rest of the technical community have been very interested in tracking the Internet Governance developments and providing interfaces between communities to ensure that we all know what we need to know about what is going on.

The NRO, the RIRs have specifically expressed support for the IGF as the Internet Governance Forum as the right place for Internet Governance to be discussed on a global level, also for regional IGFs to discuss Internet Governance issues on a local level. The thing about the IGF is it is quite specific. It is not a case of supporting just anything that calls itself the IGF. The IGF has been put together quite specifically with specific characteristics that came out of a long process, out of the UN process itself, so we do have governments to thank for the IGF. There was a long process at the World Summit on the Information Society, which was a UN Conference, but also, to its credit, quite a multistakeholder event.

Nevertheless, it was governments at the end who voted on the Tunis agenda and the Tunis agenda calls for the IGF to be established as a multistakeholder forum, also as a none decision-making forum. Those two aspects are absolutely critical to the IGF, that we would not call anything an IGF if it didn't have those characteristics.

We have contributed to the IGF, as I said earlier, the technical community has a lot to offer through the NRO and other technical community organizations, we have contributed a lot to the IGF and brought in a lot of information that is relevant in terms of the Internet and how it works. We have contributed financially, the NRO has just this year decided to double, more than double, the regular contribution we collectively make. So collectively, we are making a $75,000 contribution this year and we expect in future years to support the Secretariat operation of the IGF. That is a strong statement as well of our support for the IGF in its current form.

I would really like to recognise and support -- I was very glad to hear Mr Inu's comments earlier, which supported very much the multistakeholder model, the model that responds to the Internet as a dynamic thing that changes on a daily basis almost; that involves so many stakeholders that are so intimately a part of its creation, guidance, use and direction, that we cannot possibly have a narrower scope of some kind of decision-making control over it.

There are discussions about treaties, there are discussions about more concrete outcomes out of the IGF. But I would say again that the non-decision-making nature of the IGF is absolutely deliberate and fundamental, it came from the Tunis agenda and it is all about the fact that when you start getting into negotiations, you start getting into fixed supposedly objective outcomes from a process like this, negotiation is inevitable, and that begs the question of who exactly is negotiating on what terms and representing who. I do not think in a multistakeholder group as broad as the IGF, you will find any level of agreement about exactly who is entitled to be at the negotiating table. So it is really for a very good reason that IGF outcomes are not negotiated.

That is not to say that the IGF could not be improved in terms of how outcomes are produced and how the outcomes of one meeting feed into the next meeting and so forth.

I have been nominated and hope to serve on the multistakeholder advisory group of the IGF, from May this year, representing the Internet community. So that will be an opportunity to help to evolve the IGF and IGF outcomes are fine, providing they are not seen as negotiated far more objective decisions of some kind. We can certainly see a way that many of the IGF outcomes can be more actively produced and circulated. Many people have many versions -- if you ask someone to synthesise any IGF meeting from their particular standpoint, whether it might be technical, community, operational or even global development -- you will have a very interesting synthesis from any one or other of those standpoints.

Those syntheses are subjective views and not something that you would want to have to start negotiating.

I am hoping, as a MAG member, to contribute concretely to the way the IGF is put together. Although MAGs are in theory intented to serve in their individual capacity, I cannot avoid and cannot -- I cannot not represent the interests of this community, the Asia Pacific and the Internet technical communities in my involvement with the MAG and I would be very interested, and I would be very interested over the coming year or more to interface more with the community and to make sure, through sessions like this, we have a higher bandwidth between ourselves and the IGF, and we do our bit to make it continue to get better, to follow its essential model.

That is my comment. Thanks.

Rohan Samarajiva: Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Rohan Samarajiva: I would like the last of the panelists, Mr Raman Jit Singh Chima, to make his statement.

Raman Jit Singh Chima: Thank you, Professor. I have both the opportunity and challenge of being the last of the pannists to make comments, of a very well credentialled and extremely articulate panel, and they have put across their viewpoints, so I will try to put some points at the end of this, and give something more to talk about, about the multistakeholder process on the open Internet.

As Professor said at the beginning, talking about the definition and focusing on multistakeholders, we have also seen, as the MP from Bangladesh has pointed out, the work of the giving is focusing a lot -- not only in this panel, we have already spoken about t and I am sure many of you have questions, it is one institution among many which function on the Internet, the regional industries, the ITU, and many others play an important role in determining how it functions, how the Internet network functions, and nation states play a role and may have telecommunications policies and to make it possible, and in many cases they have worked hard to reduce the bandwidth costs and make hardware costs low to allow the Internet to function.

It is possible that the IGF was set up with the idea of the United Nations in multinational, intergovernmental and stakeholder process, to say we should consider all the issues and listen to conversations and basically be a forum for the government to format ideas and allow policy institutions and advisers to get together.

What is interesting is how the IGF process has evolved. I had the opportunity of taking part or observing the IGF several years ago in India and taking part in the Nairobi process recently. The Internet is not the idea of one particular person, but how much progress is taking place.

The progress may not be in terms of what people expected, we do not have a new treaty or complete agreements on every policy, because taking place in the conversations and the narratives that accompany the IGF, people have been working hard alongside the IGF to discuss and study matters clearly and on to come to agreements on different issues.

It is part of the dynamic closing of the IGF that functions in the workshops that take place, and many of the issues that were there a couple of years ago, have ceased to be issues, technical solutions have been found, and what were issues then are minor issues now, and major issues are providing conversation in the forum in nation states or in other bodies, and the conversations come back to the IGF in some form.

The biggest concern that most people had about the conversations were not coming back to the IGF, they were going to other bodies without people bringing them to the knowledge of the IGF. People were saying, we do not want to talk about the issue in the IGF, let's talk about it in separate groups. The concern of the bodies is that most people talked about the conversation at IGF and the discussions of the bodies in the intergovernment forum have produced better decision-making, for example in enjoying a free and open Internet and gathering information, and the conversations steered by a different world, including the Council of Europe, which is in charge of protecting human rights and liberties across the region of Europe.

In the United Nations, in the human rights council and the advisers and many other bodies, the conversations had not taken place earlier, but across the last three to four years, hard work has been done and you have global norms and standard. They are not one set, not one binding legged, but important norms that are now referred to by different government fora, whether it is national, in the private sector or in the institutions of excellence for technical collaboration, that makes things possible.

What is important is the essential question of the future of the IGF and the policy meetings. Going back to talking about outcomes, and the outcomes focus on IGF, that is important, because covering is critical but you must drive conversation to change, to ensure things stay as they are or they change.

What I put out to the audience and to my fellow panelists is what outcomes we want and how we want them. It is not just the means to make it possible, and many important conversations that take place, they are multistakeholder processes, that involve the Internet community and involve the people involved in social policy, in understanding how the Internet functions, and the people using the Internet itself, the people who use it actively, and have transformed their lives, so that you have the best possible outcomes take place.

The process is critical, and what I think we should consider is what is most interesting to see is two points: how to ensure the open Internet continues. By open Internet, I mean an open Internet in terms of how it functions, where you can instantly publish and collaborate today, without having to worry about delays or approvals or a system of publication which in a sense has been changed, or in reality changed since the early 1990s.

The open Internet is also regarding the architecture of the Internet, rather than having a select group of people affecting the Internet and how it is used.

The second thing about the Internet is how much is absorbed by intergovernment fora and conversations take place, whether they are across the world, how many nation states take the principles into account?

I would like to point out that many of the positive outcomes and ideas, how much nation states take an idea and implement it, in terms of how companies accepted products, or how companies address the people who use their services, about how they design different services, about the architecture, about how nation states create regulations, and the legislation they pass and the other activities that take place within their normal community, and about determining policy.

The idea is that you put across a certain basic value that a free and open Internet has been incredibly powerful for nation states and citizens across the world, therefore there needs to be a process which ensures citizens rights are protected and bring about careful solutions to issue, whether it is about content or privacy or safety. But if you want to advance an open Internet, that allows things to be instantly published and for people to collaborate and for the next radical set of issues to take place.

It is not just what takes place in Nairobi or the next meeting of the IGF or what takes place in meetings, but as most of them point out, how much seeps out to the people and to the important players who want the idea of change further. I suggest to many that the principles and core discussions are taking place so that ideas come out, and nation states have a critical role to play in getting more and more people online and getting people on to the Internet, for them to be able to participate in the Internet life, and take part in the conversations, and what is important, once they are on it, what do they do? Are they able to share information and access information freely and create fantastic solutions, or do the measures make a difference? These conversations have taken place.

I suggest our focus needs to take place on what takes place in 2.30, but also in terms of nation states and 2.0. With that, I would like to end.

APPLAUSE

Rohan Samarajiva: Thank you very much. We have had an engagement -- we do not have everybody agreeing with each other. To go back to the definition, we had the statement about shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making, procedures and programs, that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.

The terminology that was used by Mr Ravi Shanker was on principles and protocols. I think we are talking about the same thing.

The difference is: should there be an intergovernment role and multistakeholder body that will arrive at the shared principles, norms, procedures, decision-making procedures and programs, or is that too complicated and should we steer away from an outcomes based organization? That is perhaps the issue.

Let me put it very concretely. Let me bring it to a practical example.

Recently, I think many of you know, there was an attempt to control online privacy by the -- by certain interest groups, certain stakeholders in the United States. That was something that could have affected the very structure of the Internet, and this decision was going to be taken inside one country.

Was this happening because there was no outcome of the Internet organization? Is there a different solution? Is there a vacuum, an emptiness there, will it be filled either by nation states or other identities? Is this perhaps the argument that Mr Ravi Shanker is making for a decision-making body? If that is the case, then should we face the challenge of trying to get a multistakeholder involvement and multistakeholder design for such an organization?

That is the question. Perhaps Mr Ravi Shanker might want to respond, or Mr Paul might have some comes on that, and I invite the other members as well.

N Ravishanker: I would just like to mention that it is a sovereign right to legislate. While it is a sovereign right to legislate, and it goes about in an ecosystem.equal system/

Since we are talking about the Internet as a global phenomena, I am just trying to draw a parallel, when you are talking of trade, you are saying that you should have common principles for trade, bilateral movement. Similarly, when you are talking about the Internet, and when there are issues which are cross-border, then it augers well to have a dialogue, discourse and discussion, so that what a body like -- I am just putting it across -- a body like Google, which says, I am present on the web and I am present everywhere, and if I have to be uniformly present, then I have to interact with multiple countries.

Sovereign governments across the world would like to see that what it would like to control, it would legislate. But if we have a dialogue discourse, we can have an understanding, what is commonly prevalent everywhere. I would still think that common acceptance may be over 80 per cent and still variations made, which again is the prerogative and purview of the government and its own legislative bodies to enact the legislation.

I suppose that would bring about a type of uniformity and a flavour of diversity as well.

Rohan Samarajiva: You would see not only governments but also the stakeholders involved in the world in arriving at these protocols and procedures?

N Ravishanker: Certainly.

Paul Wilson: Thank you very much, Professor. That is a very interesting question.

I think experience shows how much work there is to be done in bringing a realtime understanding of these kinds of proposals to the community, to the Internet environment, and the information about why that should or should not be done, back into the policy makers.

Whether that is to be done by IGF or not is another question. I think the global challenge is big enough that the IGF cannot achieve everything. There was one description of the IGF that was given a number of times by Marcus Kummer, who used to work for the executive secretary, now working at the Internet Society, who described the IGF as a meeting not for decision-making but a meeting where decision makers attend. You might optimistically think if the decision makers behind SOBA had attended the IGF and it had done its purpose, you may have had an outcome that was more harmonious or more successful in the end.

Simply by the information sharing that was there. So I guess the question is, what if IGF itself had the mandate to pass a SOBA-type ruling on the Internet, or if, on the other hand, its proposal came through into the world Conference on international telecommunications,s WICT, which is coming up this year, if a SOBA proposal ended up in the treaty, in the ITRs. That is quite a question.

In governance there is a principle called subsidiarity, which is the principle that a problem should be addressed or solved closest to its occurrence. It is a principle of everyone sticking to their knitting in a geographic and sectoral kind of way, and I would have thought that to bring a proposal like SOBA through to a global binding decision-making treaty would be would be against the principles of sub-subsidiarity and would not bring up a solution that was not problematic.

Rohan Samarajiva: Who other than policy people have been coming up with new proposals? It is basically about shaping, rather than grand redesigns. Do you see part of the process and procedures that you are talking about and in relation to this question, should we be very gradualistic or is there an opportunity here for creating a new framework?

Raman Jit Singh Chima: That is an interesting question you have asked about creating a new framework. What is most important is to see the framework that already exists and how it works, because that is something that takes place in multistakeholder intergovernmental bodies all the time, for example questions on intellectual property enforcement have been barred, and they have discussed issues about new technologies and intellectual property measures.

What is difficult is when people try to create radical new measures outside, or other measures like that. But coming to your question, there is a considerable degree of space in new measures, when subtle changes are taking place, because many governments have seen they do not necessarily need to have a treaty in order to achieve social progress. Many measures are done by the sector or by society by themselves, such as trade codes of practice, and products designed by themselves, and sometimes guided by national law or often by national consensus or national social measures. That is where the mechanisms are interesting.

The governments have a radically different framework, and my idea is that lawyers only favour the committee of lawyers, because lawyers ask how it affects people's product and people will have to consult with consultants to advise them on how to produce their services.

Coming become to the point, the radical framework is not the issue, the radical issue is the nature of the Internet itself and how people are adjusting to it. I suggest that the committee that welcomes this process, it may not be the best way to do it because it may be too slow. When you have radical things taking place, by its very nature, it happens quickly and processes are slow, as people have pointed out. So having an institutionalised means focusing on creating norms may not work for the Internet.

Rohan Samarajiva: As a politician, Mr Hasanul Haq Inu, have extraordinary demands from multiple stakeholders, which is what you do every day of your life, so you know how difficult it is to get everybody to agree. But you have a process in your country which says that in the final analysis it is these particular Members of Parliament, subject to Party discipline, subject to Cabinet procedures, et cetera, who will be the final decision makers, and sometimes you will try to make a decision and there will be riots in the street.

I know your country almost as well as I know mine.

In this framework, I think your particular valuable insight is that if we are to get a multistakeholder process, which nobody seems to be opposed to, how will we -- what is the actual procedure we will have? Paul is almost saying it is too complicated, don't go there. Don't go for decisions. Because it is too complicated.

He is also saying, leave things at the levels that it is most appropriate, leave things for national decision-making as much as possible, and have only a very limited set at the international level. What are your views, sir?

Hasanul Haq Inu: Thank you very much. As you know, so long as there are national boundaries and so long as there are steps, that human beings are going to be involved in terror, and it presupposes that human beings are up to certain new things, and that is why innovation comes.

In the case of SOBA, the Online Piracy Act, shaped by the US Government, and later on taken back, because the Piracy Act, the United States Government wanted to stop the inappropriate content on the Internet. But there was a clause that they wanted to stop the whole Internet. That is why people objected.

Definitely the Internet or the ICT is getting a glasshouse in the world, and while you can see everything, but within that glasshouse we need to develop a technical mechanism and legal mechanism to protect children, women, financial institutions and government security, and so that is the challenge for the technical community, that is the challenge for the legal and legislative bodies and the governments.

What I think that -- as I said, there are two types of different positions, intergovernmental governance and multistakeholder governance. Both cases and both models, we have failed to address the issue of content, that is how to block inappropriate content, and how to protect the privacy position of an individual or an institution or an organization. These two issues need to be addressed properly by the technical community, by the governmental authorities, so here we have to address this challenge and find a solution so that we block inappropriate content and ensure the security of an individual or a state or a group or organization, at the same time we will keep the openness of the Internet.

So that is a challenge. As a law maker, I think the government of Bangladesh is trying to come up with laws regarding data security, data protection, they are reviewing cyber security and all these things, the children protect act. As you know, at the moment they are common law, but it is not enough to take care of the present developments in the Internet world.

I think that at the national level this should be taken care off, not to go to the intergovernmental level. That is my opinion.

I think if we are Democrats, if we are open, we will never come up with a law like SOBA. Thank you very much.

Rohan Samarajiva: Let me open it up to the audience, as well as those who are participating from afar. Do we have any questions that you would like to raise? Would you like to participate in the multistakeholder discussions that going on?

Kieran McArthay (dot.next): We have heard a lot about the disadvantages of creating a new body that would oversee the Internet organizations. What would be the possible advantages of going to all the trouble to create a new body and change the current system?

Rohan Samarajiva: I believe the best person to answer that would be Mr Ravi Shanker. What are the advantages of creating a new decision-making outcome oriented body?

N Ravishanker: I would like to take part of the question, because we are not talking about a body who says -- another new body. It is a re-engineered existing IGF. I say re-engineered existing IGF, from the developing economy's perspective, they are just going an attending an IGF and having what I would call a "talkshop" may not be very useful, because ultimately what is it that you come back with after attending an IGF? Is there any direction towards it? Are we having any development orientation?

I think it is very important to understand that the multistakeholderism means diverse opinions. Having participated in the five IGFs starting from Rio onwards, I have seen also that there have been changes in the themes of the IGFs. Development orientation is something that has come about, and quite a few organizations have articulated the need for it. The fact that it is non-oriented leaves us neither here nor there.

We feel there should be a window of opportunity to discuss certain broad public policy issues because the operating forums -- ICANN does not get into broad public policy issues because it has confined itself to the names and numbers, and it is doing a good job through the mechanism of the GAC. APNIC is confining itself to pure allocation of numbers and its engagement in public policy issues is also very minimal, but there are a large number of public policy issues that need to be addressed.

Ideas workshops have had a number of discussions, but the end result of it has not just been in the same in the form of a Chairman's statement, and that leaves us with a little open-endedness.

If there is a congruity, the congruity leads to more concerted action.

I here wish to re-emphasise the fact that sovereign governments' rights cannot be subjected to any international fora, because every country could define its own laws.

However, an idea providing for what I can call a public forum discussion on policy issues, and this is exactly when we say that we draw principles and protocols, we come to what are called broadly accepted general principles. I am one, with my co-panelists Paul and the Honourable MP from Bangladesh, who says everything cannot be done through international bodies. International bodies are sovereign entities and they have to have an opinion. I hope I have conveyed the sense.

Rohan Samarajiva: The sense that Paul was giving -- correct me if I'm wrong -- was the very fact that those addressing public policy issues, such as measures to prevent piracy, not only within their borders but those that could be accessed by they are citizens, would have behaved differently if he this were actually engaged in the conversations at IGF. So.

So the way I understand you is they would be informed and they would do the right decision-making at the national level. They will not inform -- they did not come to IGF, they were not part of the discussion, therefore they came up with a bad law that had to be overturned by domestic pressures. Is that kind of what you are saying?

Paul Wilson: Yes, it is. As for advantages to a treaty based organization, I could pass on the question completely, but I can talk, I think, to some perceived advantages which have to do with outcomes and outputs. If by outcomes some people mean binding decisions that will become either so authoritative that they will become either binding or so authoritative that they really have a great deal of weight -- and that is another thing altogether -- I think someone who wants that kind of outcome from IGF could have all sorts of perceptions in their mind as to what could be achieved by way of specific proposals.

Whether it was a proposal to reform ICANN, for instance, or to change the way IP addresses are managed, then it may be a perceived advantage of a reformed IGF that you could achieve those outcomes through IGF. But whether that is a bug or a feature depends on what your proposal is and what your view of that should be.

On the other hand, if it is simply a question of outputs, and that the IGF could produce more useful, more accessible or recognised outputs, then again, ideally speaking, the people who were involved with that particular initiative, the SOBA initiative, ideally if they had come to IGF they may have had more success with what they were trying to do.

Rohan Samarajiva: Do we have any other questions from the audience or shall I move on to a new line? I will do that, since I don't see much waving of hands.

The issue is, to a certain extent you are saying there are some decision makers who did not participate in the process, and we are trying to improve, enhance, the IGF process. Do we have any concrete proposals that any of the members of the panel want to talk about, about broadening the participation, that there is this privilege of those who can mobilise the resources to go to Sharm El Sheikh or Azerbaijan or wherever these things are held, and there are those who cannot, those who have limitations. We are not only talking about nongovernments, sometimes those working within government also cannot mobilise the resources.

Is there some way this organization can be broadened beyond the current level? That is one of the questions we had for discussions, about enhancing the process of conversations. Now we are moving away from the decision-making issue to broadening the conversation. Would there be any comment from any of you? Mr Chima, perhaps.

Raman Jit Singh Chima: I have noticed an increase in the last few years, but beyond that, the proposal is interesting that in groups planned by IGF beforehand, there were further suggestions and policy progressions through them, so they may not have to attend but they can send these things to them. What it requires is effective communication efforts and ability to plan beforehand, which is basically the vision and role of national IGFs is events and groups and focusing on governments. For example, Latin America has incredibly interesting and positive role with IGF process by the sorts of conversations and policy discussions they have had regionally, which are then brought to IGF from the government representatives and also from the intergovernmental and nongovernment representatives who came to take part, and represent the views at the IGF.

Beyond that, there is a lot of scope about the idea to use the IGF more effectively. More participation has increased, and the technical measures, and aside from that there is a lot of stuff in terms of organisational planning and in terms of the mobilisation of different groups, before ideas take place.

Rohan Samarajiva: What I am trying to get across is the five of us have a certain privilege standing here. We are like the people who turn up at the IGF events.

I am trying to open it up to the rest of you, but you have other priorities. I was hoping there would be people coming in on the Internet, but they have other priorities, or they feel they are marginalised from the process.

That is, in a way, an example of the challenges of doing this kind of activity. One other approach to this issue is regionalisation, decentralisation, which is another process we have had on the discussion, should we have, in addition to the global platform, regional coverings, perhaps in Asia. Everyone tells me, do something about Asia. I say, just the population of India alone is larger than the entire population of Africa.

Should we be thinking of smaller areas, south Asia, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera, and then have some articulation with the global?

Hasanul Haq Inu: As you know, there are two worlds, the developed world and the developing world -- and the countries that belong to the developing world, such as South Asia, and Asia, they are part of the developing world. So here, they need constant and that constant, the national ideas or regional ideas.

, it definitely has a very positive role to play.

For example, in the developing world, the security of the people, they are less educated, less qualified to use the Internet, so in that case, even the complement of people in a developing country is not quite as knowledgeable on the ICT or Internet and that is why if there is a national IGF of working with vibrant, active, national IGFs, that will help to interact with the government and come up with the latest own vague. The latest innovations and technologies can be given to the people, because the people do not have knowledge of the inown variations and new technology.

On the other hand, still the people do not have any idea of the Internet technology, so the possibility of cheating and all these thing, so the national IGF can come up and protect people on these issue.

How to ensure the freedom of the people, because the government of the day in the developing world has a tendency to encroach on the freedom of the people. So here, the national IGFs can come and if it is very vocal, and vibrant, coming up with letters and permission to ensure the freedom of the people.

Then the national IGF can help the government ... because at the national level we need to frame such laws, we frame laws for the use of the Internet, to facilitate the application of ICTs and at the governmental and nongovernmental level, so law framing is an important area, where the national IGF can come up with ideas and can be an observing partner with the government.

Then the national IGF or regional IGF can go for a self-regulation, and then the government and public partnership. If there is no national IGF or regional IGF, so government and public partnership, this concept is not workable. So if you want to go for this concept, private and public partnerships, then if there is a body that is beyond government, for national IGFs or regional IGFs, then this partnership can develop.

Beside all these things, the regional IGFs are necessary because there are cross-border issues. We have common cultural similarity and diversities also. To add to the cross-border issues, in the India region, the regional IGFs if necessary.

My proposal is that there be a central unIGF for discussion, but the national and regional IGFs need to be active and vibrant and needs to be very dynamic. That will help to ensure Internet for all, it will help protect the end users, and that will help to disseminate the knowledge of new innovations and new technology. Thank you very much.

Rohan Samarajiva: I heard something very interesting in this last commentary. In the same way that Bangladesh has led the world in terms of microfinance, ... treatment and so on, I also heard Mr Inu say there will be an attempt to have a national level multistakeholder conversation on Internet Governance within Bangladesh. Was I wrong in understanding that?

Hasanul Haq Inu: Already Bangladesh has a national IGF and I am chief adviser to that body and this national IGF has constant dialogue with the regulatory body of our country and the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications and Ministry of ICT. So the national IGF works in cab ration, and we are working together to develop the laws of cyber security.

Rohan Samarajiva: If more countries will implement the multistakeholder principle at the national level, that would be a contribution that we can make to the international debate.

Hasanul Haq Inu: In the developing countries, because the government of the day in all developing countries, because alternative technology, many government officials do not know the application of IP, so it is the multistakeholder community, in Bangladesh, for example the sooner you include the government organizations the better the government is understanding the ICT and the Internet. So my proposal is if you want to have more participation with the government at the IGF level, at the central level, we need to include the government organizations, and for that ... since they have created the ideal body, why not send nationals to the respective governments, so they should have participation in the IGF process.

For example, from Bangladesh, in the last five IGFs, no government representative has been sent, it is me participating in IGFs and taking back my ideas and passing it to to the government and the government was kind enough to take those ideas and act on those ideas. Thank you very much.

Rohan Samarajiva: OK. That is a very positive note. We are almost at the end of our time. If there is one last question, I will take that. But instead of having a separate answer to your question, I will ask the panel to fold it into their closing comments.

Kieran McArthay (dot.next): I have a question which is -- before you were saying you would like to see the IGF end results put out there more clearly, and Mr Shanker, you were talking about the advantage of being able to make decisions if you have a more formal body.

Why is it that the IGF has never really produced useful clear text. It is very much, as you said, they thought it was a good idea or a bad idea. The advantages to a treaty organize, even though negotiations are often very tedious, is that you end up with some solid text and people are forced to discuss in some precise detail what it is that they think is the right way forward.

Why hasn't the give managed to produce text that everyone can agree on, is a less or more interesting approach. And is it feasible, is there a way in which the IGF can change so it starts producing, not legally binding text, but something solid that people can take back and say, this is what we learned from the IGF?

Rohan Samarajiva: We are now between people and their lunch, so I invite the panel to make brief closing comments.

Raman Jit Singh Chima: Last thoughts are, and it is important to mention that there are many different voices coming from the IGF and I contest the point that not all of it results in outcomes. Still, a lot of stuff that takes place has gone into national legislation, or has impacted on protocols and standards. I would say there needs to be a different focus on how you structure the discussions with IGF. For example, every regulator, all the regulators there were present and work together and if you have discussions on a treaty, it might be useful.

The IGF is completely unstructured in that nature. Of course, the response is that governments are the creators and the people who want to do it, but there can be a great amount of conversation we have with all of us, saying that these things must take place at an IGF. The government -- the focus the people mentioned is how much you want to change, as our moderator mentioned, it is participation rather than the actual change, and if you do not do this, what will take place is that you have the national course of legislation, where national governments must take place.

If you want to inform the discussions, the space, the discussions must take place at IGF and other forums, but what we must focus on in groups connected to the IGF, we must focus more on what people take from that. That is why I think the discussion at IGFs -- the best ones do not take place in the Chair or in the main workshops, the best outcomes take place alongside. But when we look at how to be more focused and useful, and other bodies, whether it is the United Nations or different agencies, the inter governmental bodies or groups of nation states, it is important that what comes out from their side, it is made available.

For example, now, when I go away, I do not think you can collate all the material that took place. That is a simple thing that need to go to the IGF Secretariat and we need to focus administerly. It is simple hard work and a lot of voluntary efforts.

Rohan Samarajiva: Please keep your closing statements brief, or skip them altogether. Because you are keeping people away from lunch. Paul?

Paul Wilson: I will try to be quick. I have a couple of things to say. We have been talking about the IGF in the abstract here, and those who have not attended might not quite understand the scale of the IGF and really the success of the IGF.

The Nairobi meeting, the first or second rounds of the IGF, with doubt hanging over its support, it was the biggest IGF, with 2,000 participates, it had remote hubs for remote participation in 50 or 60 locations and some thousands participating remotely. That, combined with the fact there have been national IGFs, such as in Bangladesh and many countries and many regional IGFs -- let's not forget, this thing is real, it is outstandingly successful, it has legs, as something that can go on and can go on in the same form it is in.

I think, in some sense, the call for fundamental reform of the IGF is, to put it kindly, ill-timed in terms of the success the IGF is demonstrating, purely through the level of support it is getting.

As I have mentioned already, I take Kieran's point about the outputs of the IGF and as a MAG member I will be very interested in that. There is a vision of a pluralistic multistakeholder approach to the outputs of the IGF, an accessible store of those outputs that can be put into the public domain and mined and researched and results can come out of that for those who want to do that.

The idea of multiple syntheses, almost competing syntheses at the event and post the event, to give people's own authoritative and supported, but their own individual community views of what the IGF has been.

There are many improvements to the IGF in its current model which can be taken, but I think, again, multistakeholder is the key, and we have heard the word used quite a bit, I used the word in conversations outside the forums and often people have never heard the word "multistakeholder". They think it is someone at a barbeque.

It is a real and meaningful term which means everyone is participating at the same level. It does not mean just running a webcast or having two categories of membership, it means everyone is on the same playing field.

I was interested, and I have to point out that the reference to the ITU as a multistakeholder organization is interesting. The ITU has a sector membership, so companies can pay money and join the ITU but it needs to be understood when the WCIT is convened in Dubai at the end of the year, it will be renegotiating the ITRs with proposals that impactful on the process itself and that will be between government delegations and that is the opposite of the multistakeholder approach, no matter what the outcomes or outputs of a multistakeholder approach, whether it is decisions or documents or a mine of miscellaneous information, that is a multistakeholder approach which is really quite different.

As to participation in this meeting, the participation we see here in the course of the technical meeting is probably -- it could be improved and I would like to see it improved in future. I hope the session has given some impetus and encouragement to people who are here to stay involved and get involved and understand why we are here and why we are doing this and to be participants as well through, as I said, many different ways that can be done.

Rohan Samarajiva: Mr Ravi Shanker. He passes. Mr Inu, any last words?

Hasanul Haq Inu: As usual, we cannot come to a total decision, because I think there are ideas, we are ... and ... why everything is not happening. In this change from old to new, the major political question is who will guard the guardians? That question is still unanswered. We are trying to find an answer.

How to take away the power and how to isolate those who ..., so these are the things we are trying to do across the world at the political level and the social level.

I add, how to keep the Internet open and also how to protect children, women, financial institutions, government organizations, et cetera, et cetera.

So there are developments but we need to answer because we want on to keep going. For the next meeting, the Internet to next million, and the next million, and the last billion, that will be different from the first billion, because the issues will not be primarily technical but will be social and political issues. The last billion, the next billion users, will barely use mobile, not computers.

Technology is not an issue, it will not be a big issue in the developments. Cost is not an issue, the issue will be the way we use this new technology. Thank you very much.

Rohan Samarajiva: Thank you. I think that is a good closing statement. Please join me in thanking the panel, the multistakeholder panel that we have assembled.

Then I will hand over to the organizers. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Sunny Chendi: Thank you, Rohan, for accepting to moderate the session and putting together a good session of Internet Governance. Thank you, speakers. We will take a lunch break. I apologise for running the sessions late. We will try to make it up after the lunch break. If you could take your lunch break and come back at 2 o'clock, we would much appreciate for that. Thank you very much.