Buenos Dias, Bienvenidos San Juan, Isla de Puerto Rico. I'm excited to be here. Our President this morning said that we should be confidently bilingual. So I'm happy to say a little few words in in Spanish. I also would like to to add my welcome to San Juan and to Puerto Rico and to NASIG 2024. I also wanted to say in part of being English and Spanish bilingual, I also try to encourage our programmers to be bilingual as well. I program in the R language and have for many, many years. But, I also have recently been encouraging our programmers to program in Python as well. And not to have this debate between R and Python. So being a bilingual programmer is also important.
So, this panel is entitled Understanding Internet Governance, and our charge is to review the basic concepts of Internet governance, its stakeholders and fundamental principles that help to guide its development. So, we know Internet governance is driven by this multistakeholder Internet governance model, and that this NASIG is focused on truth, trust and hope. Last year at American University, we were pleased to host NASIG 2023 in June, and we focused on accessibility and inclusion for Internet governance. And when we hosted NASIG last year, we had collaboration across campus. We had our Internet Governance Lab, we had our Institute on Disability and Public Policy. From the Law School, we had the Technology Law and Society Program, our Cybersecurity Governance Center, and all coordinated across campus with our Inclusive Technology Policy Initiative, and that hosting and cross campus collaboration really helps to illustrate how multifaceted Internet governance is, and all the pieces that come together with Internet governance.
So, with this panel, we're going to have an opportunity to learn some of the background from some of the early Internet governance pioneers. Many of us have been involved in these areas from the very early days from the beginning, including working in the GigaNet, the Global Internet Governance Academic Network, and it's just couldn't be a better start to NASIG 2024 than to have this panel on Internet governance, and to have it led by Milton Mueller and Bill Drake. So, we're gonna start with an opening from Bill to talk about broad Internet governance issues, and Milton will follow up with more detailed discussion. So, Bill?
Thanks, Derrick, and good morning, everybody. So, this is a interesting thing for me, because I've been participating in these schools of Internet governance now for what, since 2007, around the world, I've done a bunch of times in Europe, Asia, Latin America, South America, first time in the North American school. So I'm, I'm pleased to have that opportunity.
I should say something about that, maybe. You are part of a sort of global movement by being here. There was a time when this didn't exist. In 2004, some of us were appointed to a working group on Internet governance by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, which had the task of defining Internet governance, and putting forward a framework for understanding it so that we could deal with it in an international negotiation, the UN's World Summit on Information Society, which went on for three years -- it was a very elaborate process, about which more later -- and in that working group, I and a couple other colleagues started saying, Well, where do people actually get capacity building and training and learning around Internet governance? Back then, it was a whole new thing. There wasn't a field of Internet governance as it scholarly activity, and so on. And we ended up birthing a couple of things out of this process on an informal basis.
One was, Derrick made a mention of the global Internet Governance Academic Network. The idea was, we need to have some place for scholars around the world to come together and focus on Internet governance, and to support them, lift them up within the institutional matrices of universities where Internet governance was not a recognized field, and that has grown to be an important thing, because particularly for many scholars from developing countries to be able to come to a international meeting, the GigaNet meetings always held during the UN Internet Governance Forum, which rotates around the world, to be able to come to a UN meeting and present a paper and so on, often lifts up people within their respective countries, communities and so on, in ways that are important.
The other part of that was to say, well, in terms of capacity building, training, there's nothing out there, there is no institutionalized set of programs. And so, in 2007, we launched the European Summer School of Internet Governance, from which then the South American School grew. And then, these proliferated all around the world, so there's many regional and national schools of Internet governance now being held, and these are important parts of a capacity building thing that has brought people to the table, and given them the ability to engage with the institutions and the processes in ways that didn't happen before. So, it's an important thing, and you are part of that. So, I'm very happy to be doing this with you.
Let's start from the top, Internet governance. You're all signed up for a couple of days talking about Internet governance. So, let me ask: What is Internet governance? What does Internet governance mean to any of you? Somebody give me a just a quick answer, you know, off the top of your head, what is the term basically, connote to you?
Yes. Anybody? Is there a mic somewhere?
We need for people to be able to speak, sorry, I didn't mean to throw you for a loop.
All right, so thank you. My name is Abraham Salvia, again, for the records, and Internet governance, what comes in mind is that the Internet and governance, so making policies that governs the Internet, so this is my understanding.
Policies. Anybody else have a similar thought. or a related thought?
Very simple, a regulatory framework.
Okay. So, in both of those definitions, we're talking about policy. Historically, people have thought of policy as something that is produced by governments, and one of the things I want to problematize for you is that construct, because, in fact, that was a fundamental problem that we confronted with Internet governance globally, and became the source of a great deal of contention.
So, if you go back to the 1980s, you saw the emergence of a technical community of people that were coming together to do technical standardization, and write the codes, and engineering the systems, that would make the Internet operate, and they developed a sort of culture within their institutions, including especially the Internet Engineering Task Force, of a very kind of inclusive, anybody can participate, kind of engagement. This late later morphed into what became known as multistakeholder cooperation, and it set out an initial sort of set of assumptions about how Internet management should work, which is that it was an open, transparent, inclusive, so-called bottom up sort of process.
But, in that context, a lot of the people, particularly coming from the engineering kind of environments, did not think of what they did as governance. In fact, many of them resisted that idea. We would hear all the time from people: Oh, there's no such thing as Internet governance. Governance doesn't exist, because the Internet is this kind of self aggregating cosmic thing, untethered from physical reality, which is not run by governments. And so, Internet governance is just sort of an amorphous, meaningless term, that kind of way of thinking about that was prevalent for a long time, and pretty strictly supported in the United States by a sort of libertarian cyber culture that developed in the 1990s.
But then we had a push to establish frameworks to actually create institutional structures to manage the zone file, the IANA functions, the Domain Name System, things like that, which led ultimately, through a long and contorted process, which I think Milton will say something more about, to the creation of ICANN, and once ICANN was launched, the decision take in 1998, there is a second sort of strain of thought that came, which is, well, Internet governance is whatever ICANN does. And so, a lot of people sort of careened between those two kinds of approaches. It's either kind of like an abstract term that meant nothing, or it's something that ICANN does.
When we got into the early 2000s, and governments around the world began to recognize that this Internet thing was taking off, and had political and social and economic consequences, they wanted to have a role in it and get engaged. And so, as the United Nations process ramped up for this World Summit, which as I say, was a three year process of multiple long, two week meetings with 1000s of documents, and, you know, 10s of 1000s of people participated ultimately, what we saw was a lot of people who came to the table from governments were saying: No, we don't like this, who are these people?
I remember sitting at one meeting in the UN, in 2003, and I was hanging out with a lot of the governments that were perhaps not sort of on the same political page as me, so I was hanging around with the Iranians and the Cubans and the Saudis, and some of these others, and I remember somebody from the Internet Society, well the CEO of the Internet Society got up and started talking about 'How we do Internet governance'. And, I remember, the ambassador turned to me and said who is this person? Who appointed her? Why am I listening to her? And I said: Well, she's the head of the organization. And he says: Well, what's the organization? I said: Well, it's all these people from around the world who come together. Well, who appointed them? I said: Well, they just chose to be a part of the process. And he was like: This makes no sense to me. Because, ultimately, authority comes from governments, these people are not appointed by governments, why are they running anything?
So, a lot of governments around the world began to sort of raise concerns and say: Wait a minute, this whole thing is run by these, like, people, non-commercial actors, you know, academics, and people from research institutions, and, you know, some private sector players and things like that, and these are not our people, we didn't have any role in putting them in place. So, they started to put forward a new kind of concept of Internet governance, which is that Internet governance should be intergovernmental control, that governance was inherently something that governments do, and so you had to have an intergovernmental mechanism. So, we had to have an international institution, run by governments, in charge of the Internet.
They pushed for the idea that the International Telecommunication Union, the 150-year-old organization from, well, 1865, based in Geneva, which is historically the place where ministries of communication and major national telecommunications carriers, came together to do technical standards and operating arrangements, and so on, that they should be in charge. And the ITU, for those of you who know anything about it, has a history of being sort of the clubhouse of the national telecommunications administrations, who were monopolies, and who ran things in a kind of very government heavy, centralized, bureaucratic way, including through a whole system of treaties and regulations, which were antithetical to what was going on in, say, ICANN.
And so, it began to become this big power play where you had government saying that the intergovernmental mechanisms had to take over Internet governance, and you had people coming from the multistakeholder kind of world, the technical community, and so on, saying: No, no, no, no, we got this. We're running the names and numbers, the interconnection of different autonomous systems to constitute the Internet. And so, it became a whole debate in 2003 / 2004. What is Internet governance? It became a highly politicized discussion. And so, there was a need to try to come up with some sort of a neutral, generalizable definition of what is Internet governance, that all parties could come together around. And, because the first phase of the World Summit deadlocked over that question, the Secretary General appointed this working group to try to figure these things out, which I was involved with.
And, we pushed for the concept that the notion of Internet governance had to be a process-oriented one, that governance is about steering, it's about social shaping and steering of some domain of activity. It's not necessarily an authority relationship. It's not about some single set of actors make decisions that everybody else has to comply with them. Governance, we tried to emphasize, and this is me and several other academics and civil society people who were on this group, governance was, in fact, a process that takes place at multiple levels of society, and involves multiple different actors. It can involve civil society, technical community, business, governments, and so on. And, all these players had a role in in different ways.
Getting an understanding that that was the case, and that it didn't that Internet governance did not mean simply that governments would come together through the UN, and create a mechanism to control everything, was a big, big battle. We spent so much time fighting over this issue, is incredible.
So, that was one major sort of bone of contention was the, who is in charge? The second was, what is covered by the concept of Internet governance? And again, as I said, for a while it was the notion that its names and numbers, it's ICANN stuff. But, many of us in the context of the World Summit process, and some of us earlier, had advocated that we need to take a broader view of Internet governance, because there are different types of frameworks being established for a wide variety of uses of the Internet, not just how the underlying infrastructure works, but how digital trade takes place, or e-commerce takes place, how privacy protection is done, how intellectual property protection is done, how security issues are managed, that there's a whole constellation of issues where different actors would come together, that also were properly understood as Internet governance.
So, this was the notion that we needed to have a broad definition of Internet governance. So, these two dimensions of who and what, that involve multiple actors, in different types of relationships, and involve multiple issues, in different types of institutional spaces, became integral to the idea. And, we ended up adopting a definition which I played a kind of role in shaping, which was drawn from political science studies of international relations, which argued, which said that Internet governance was, and I'll read it to you, it's boring, but the words actually mean things: the development and application by governments, the private sector, and civil society, in their respective roles -- and I'll come back to that, because it's a problematic formulation -- of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programs, that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.
It's a lot of words, but two important things to say there. One, the development of application by governments, the private sector and civil society, that meant it's not just government, it's everybody participating on potentially an equal footing. And, it pertained to the evolution and use of the Internet, not just the underlying infrastructure, but the use of the Internet for communication, information, and commerce.
So, that definition, that we wrote in this little working group in a chateau in Switzerland, ended up being adopted at the international level by other governments, 140 governments, or whatever it was, who participated in this process, and remains the official UN definition to today.
Now, I just wanted to emphasize one point that I said was problematic in it. When we said, 'it's the development and application by governments, the private sector, and civil society', there were governments in the group who insisted: Well, wait a minute, governments are still the only ones that are responsible for policy, we're still the only ones with authority over public policy, and we have a different role from everybody else, and that has to be acknowledged. So, they wouldn't let us adopt this definition unless we put in the phrase, 'in their respective roles', which meant to them that, okay, it's fine, technical community people, civil society, business, sure, they can participate in things, they can be part of a discussion, but when it comes to making real decisions, important decisions, we're the governments, and we have a special role.
So, this notion, then, of Internet governance, has been institutionalized at the international level, and has been repeated endlessly in multiple international discussions ever since. The particular elements of it, I could talk about more, but I don't want to go too long. We have another speaker. We can talk about that when we come back, I just want to emphasize, by way of closing, then, when we talk about, I said something about the who -- different players involved in different roles, and it's not just intergovernmental -- indeed, intergovernmental organizations, so far, do not play such a central operational role in the Internet, but they aspire to. So, I talked about the who, talked about the what, it covers a broad range of things, and I just wanted to, like, flag then, so, in terms of topography of what we're talking about, a simple way of talking about these things, it's actually problematic once you drill down into it, but we used to say 20 years ago: 'There's a difference between governance of the Internet, and governance on the Internet'.
And I think that's okay to say that as a starting point here, it's kind of a device. Governance of the Internet, meaning the physical underlying infrastructure, the systems, the telecom networks, bespoke networks, and so on, that are used to actually transmit bits, and the logical infrastructure, the code, the domain name, system, IP addresses, technical standards, and so on, that make it all work. So, that's governance 'of' the Internet. But governance 'on' the Internet, is all the ways in which the Internet is being used, and the different types of rules systems that are applied to that, some of which, going back to what you guys said at the beginning, originate in governmental authority, but many of which do not. Many of which arise from the work of people in the private sector, technical community, and so on, trying to set up rules and processes pertaining to the whole range of issues, privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, freedom of speech, human rights, digital trade, all those kinds of issues, what goes over the net.
So, to conclude, when we talk about Internet governance, at the international level, what has been agreed to then is a broad inclusive understanding of the concept, in which there are spaces where things are done in the multistakeholder sort of setting, involving multiple different players working in an equal footing kind of basis, including, most importantly, ICANN, but there are also a variety of intergovernmental kinds of processes underway. You may know that there's negotiations in the UN now over a cybercrime treaty, there's negotiations over cybersecurity, there's negotiations over digital trade, negotiations over a whole variety of issues, where governments are trying to use governmental mechanisms to assert greater authority, in particular over the use of the Internet.
So, those are the two sides we want to think about as we go forward talking about Internet governance here. Now, my colleague Milton will talk in particular about the first part the governance of stuff in the context of ICANN.
ThanredoModek you.
How long is this supposed to take?
15 to 20?
Okay,
We have til 11:30
Oh, all right. Okay, good.
So, hi, I'm Milton Mueller. I'm a professor at Georgia Tech, and I'm in the School of Public Policy. So, I do public policy, which is what governments claim to be the exclusive preserve of governments when it came to Internet governance.
I'm going to try to give you a much more precise definition of what ICANN does in terms of Internet governance, because I think that that is frequently not clear. And, for reasons -- the historical reasons that Bill described, that ICANN became the center of controversy, in a global basis, over Internet governance, in the early 2000s, ICANN has kind of assumed this mantle of being the institution for broad Internet governance. But, if you look at what ICANN actually governs., and when we talk about governance, it's important to know what the heck you're actually governing, right? And, what leverage, or what mechanisms, you have to engage in that governance.
So, what is it that you think ICANN actually governs? Just anybody, throw out an answer to that question. Yes, sir. Just shout it out. We'll hear you.
So I, in my view, I think ICANN governs the domain names, where the domain names -- those people who, like, in terms of the governance aspect, in countries...
Alright! Domain names,
Yeah.
In two words, you could say that ICANN governs domain names. So, that's, that's ome third correct, in the sense that there are two other things that you could say that it governs more or less indirectly. But, let me just put a more precise definition to what that means. So, when we talk about governance that ICANN does, it is of registries. okay?
Registries. Think about that. What is a registry? It is a record of some kind of unique identifier, right? And, we have to keep track of what goes into those registries, so that we don't end up giving people the same domain name, or the same IP address, or the different protocol parameters, right? So, these are literally registries. Now, what are some other registries in society? Well, if you own a home, you probably have some kind of local government property registry that says, here's the boundaries of your property and, and here's a name and a number, a unique identifier, for that property lot, and then they will know that you are the owner, right? Your identity is associated with that property, right?
And so, that's what ICANN does with the top level domain name registry. They say, there's a root zone, which has entries in it, and if the dot com top level domain is associated with an IP address and a set of servers that you own, then you are the owner of dot com, and you can have a certain level of control. And, ICANN also says, before we delegate to you the authority to run dot com, we're writing a contract with you. We're actually saying, here's a set of constraints about what you must do. And, for example, it could include certain forms of economic regulation, it might say, you cannot charge more than than this. Sometimes it says that, sometimes it doesn't. But, point is, that is your leverage for government, is this grant of a property title, if you will, to a top level domain system.
Now, what about the other identifiers? ICANN also, in a very loose sense, is sort of the apex of the address registry, in the sense that the IANA, which is a subsidiary of ICANN, is responsible for moving large blocks of numbers from the IETF into regional address registries, and the regional address registries, that would beARIN for North America, that would be RIPE for Europe, LACNIC for Latin America, AFRINIC for Africa, and APNIC for Asia, all of these registries maintained lists, records in effect, of who owns what IP addresses, and, again, they have to deal with certain kinds of governance, if you will.
So, when you have a registry, what kinds of policies do you have to make? Right? So the big policy issue, the reason why ICANN is so centered on and associated with domain names, is that, in 1995, the US National Science Foundation said: Hey, you can start selling domain names. Before that, it was just a voluntary technical infrastructure, run by a bunch of computer scientists doing an experiment in data communications, and then they said, suddenly, you know, this is exploding into a public infrastructure, and everybody wants a domain name, snd so there's too many people demanding them, and the people running that Domain Name System registry, can't handle it, so they need to be charging you instead of just giving them away for free.
And so, ICANN became the site for deciding how many new top level domains would there be, and that was very controversial at the time, so, many people were just willing to fight and die for the opportunity to get a new top level domain, because they thought there would be lots of money in that.
In fact, there's an interesting story about Puerto Rico, and its top level domain. So, in the early days of the Internet, Jon Postel, this sort of computer scientist who helped develop the Internet, he was just giving out top level domains to computer scientists he knew, and in different countries, there was no formal process. And, he gave the top level domain dot pr to a guy he knew... What was the name of, um...?
Oscar. Oscar Moreno. So, a mathematician, a very colorful personality, I really liked this guy, I met him before he died. And so, in 1988 or 89, Oscar Moreno gets to run the top level domain. Now, it didn't matter, in the sense that this -- again, this is an experimental infrastructure. But then, again, the Internet starts to become public, and so Oscar does what everybody else is doing. He says: Well, let's start selling top level domains to anybody who wants one -- which, in my opinion, was a good thing. And so, suddenly, the University of Puerto Rico says: Hey, you're making money on this. We want to take control. And then, we we have a lawsuit, and, basically, we have a long debate about, who owns this top level domain? Because there's no contract, right? All we have is a delegation made by Jon Postel to some guy in Puerto Rico, in 1988 or 89, and there's no conditions, and no contracts or anything. Was it going to Oscar, or was it going to the University of Puerto Rico? We didn't know. And so, that's an example of why we needed to formalize things, because suddenly there's a bunch of economic stakes, literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars could be made if you had a top level domain.
And so, the initial policy problem, that ICANN was formed to solve, was about domain name registry policy, like, how many new top level domains should there be? Who decides there was nobody to decide? Who has a stake? There was nobody that was represented formally in the process, it was just a bunch of IETF guys sitting around saying, maybe we should have more top level domains. What do we do about trademark domain name conflicts? There was no policy, which is, like, there's going to be domain name trademark conflicts, we have lawsuits, but lawsuits are going on all over the world. If you have registered a domain in South Korea, and the trademark owner is in the United States, do we have to do international litigation about tens of thousands of domain names?
So, these were policy issues, and they had to be solved. And, here's what I think we need to emphasize, although Bill did a good job of providing the general context, was that we decided, in creating ICANN, based on the Clinton administration policy called the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce, that this would all be decided through self-governance by the Internet community, that this would not be turned over to national governments and their laws. There were several reasons to do that. One, we wanted a global system, we wanted a globally compatible system. And, the governments of the world are divided into different territories, and there's 200 of them. So, we didn't want 200 different governance regimes for the domain name system, we wanted a single global one.
Now, the other reason was that we thought that more people should be able to participate and provide input into the policymaking process, that it shouldn't just be your national government deciding this. And, we also knew at the time that many national governments were authoritarian, that they didn't want a free and open Internet. And, most of the people using the Internet did want the Internet to be more free and more open. So, when we created ICANN, we were saying, this is not going to be a state actor.
So, I notice that whenever people talk about the multistakeholder model, first of all, there shouldn't be a 'the' there, there is no such thing as the multistakeholder model. If you're talking about ICANN, and you're talking about the address registries, and if you're talking about many other things that happen on the Internet, you have maybe a more open and multistakeholder system, but the key characteristic here is not the multiple stakeholders, because you can have multiple stakeholders participating in a governmental process. the key characteristic is that this is governance by non-state actors. This is a new institution, a form of global self governance by the Internet community. And, that's the important thing to understand about what makes ICANN and certain forms of Internet governance unique, and it's very important to defend that.
As Bill described, this was extremely controversial when it was first started. The reason the government's were coming after ICANN, was because they wanted the power, and they viewed it, correctly, as a delegation or a loss of power, and a empowerment of a global Internet community that they didn't control. So, we have this ongoing struggle between governance by governments, and governance by non-state actors, which is enacted every day in the ICANN environment.
Now, let me conclude by saying a few words about the nature of the broader forms of Internet governance, that Bill was talking about, that is all of the things that happened, and Tripti's talk also did a good job of differentiating between, you know, the governance of the integrity of data that ICANN does, and the issue of truth when in speech, and what anybody can do on the World Wide Web or other forms of communication. First of all, we do not want -- at least as a liberal, I would say -- we do not want a centralized governance authority over content. I mean, why do we not want that? Why can't we have like a Minister of Truth For The World, who decides what's true and what's not?
Well, just to pose that question, is telling you that that would be a horrifically politicized and potentially arbitrary and incredibly sweeping form of power. We do not want our speech, our communications, to be referenced by a central authority that decides what we can say and what we can't say. We have to work out truth through debate, and through interactions, and through community discussions. We can certainly have certain forms of suppressing bad forms of speech. That is to say, if you're running a newspaper or a website, as we do at the Internet Governance Project, we can decide something's false, and we can not publish it, or we can criticize it, or attack it, even, but we can't make that decision for everybody in the world, right? And, again, I don't think any of you would believe that there's some authority, some godlike authority that could make those decisions for everybody in the world.
So, the point I'm getting at here is that the one of the reasons it's so great to have an institution of self-governance, like ICANN, is also that it is narrowly limited in its mission, right? It serves a coordinated function, an enabling function. It allows us to be able to do what we want to do, because it gives unique identifiers, and make sure that that data is correct, and that allows us to coordinate our activities in ways that allow that enable us to communicate that enable networks to work, and that enable us to find the truth in whatever way we want. We do not want, again, a central authority that makes those decisions.
So, the important thing about having a global governance agency, is also to have constitutional restrictions on its powers, such that people are free, and the institution serves to protect and enable communication rather than to control communication.
Now, let me again, put ICANN into this broader context by noting that there are all kinds of governance relevant to the Internet that happen outside of ICANN. And so, I would encourage you, again -- to do a little self promotion -- to look at the website of the Internet Governance Project. We should be easy to find because our domain name is InternetGovernance.org. So, we try to maintain a running commentary about Internet governance in the broader sense, and, in fact, what we've discovered is, even though we consider ICANN and Internet identifiers to be an important form of governance that we continue to cover, we want to now look at the Internet as part of what we call a digital ecosystem, and that involves... Think of semiconductors, how important those are -- the production and distribution of semiconductors -- to the whole digital ecosystem, right? You don't have that computer on your desktop, you don't have AI applications, you don't have any applications, unless you have powerful semiconductors.
And, as you probably noticed, the production and distribution of semiconductors has become a big issue now, with the US imposing export controls on China, and other kinds of attempts to basically control the production of semiconductors. In fact, there's a paper that came out recently, which I found horrifying, but many people like, that said: Well, if we want to control AI, if we want to govern AI, we have to govern compute, so let's impose controls and restrictions on how people can do computing, so that we can control AI applications, right?
So, that's one part of the digital ecosystem. Another part is data. So, data governance is a critical part of how the whole ecosystem works. And, that deals with privacy. It deals with security and integrity of data. It deals with ownership of data, which could mean both copyrights or other forms of ownership, and, how much can you buy and sell data, and that's, again, a critical part of overall Internet governance, because it is a critical segment of the Internet ecosystem. So, if you want to understand the role of the Internet, in this broader governance of the digital ecosystem, what you need to understand is that, by creating a globally compatible form of networking, that it brought the whole legal ecosystem together into a single ecosystem and interactive ecosystem, which is still very decentralized in its management, but it's also interoperable and interconnected on a global basis, and it's now connecting, you know, 6, 7 billion people. So, the Internet, the compatibility of the Internet, which ICANN plays a big role in by maintaining the compatibility of these identifiers, it really is a critical part of the Internet ecosystem. But, again, that compatibility is an enabling function more than a controlling function, and we want ICANN to be enabling rather than controlling.
I think I'll stop there, and we'll go on.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Milton and Bill.
So, I've got three questions for our panel, and then we'll open it up to the audience. I think this is a really exciting discussion and really laid the groundwork for this panel. So, one of our charges this morning was to talk about the stakeholders involved in Internet governance, and Milton just, you know, read my mind in terms of my first question, which is around the Internet governance ecosystem. So, I'd like both of them to say a little bit about, what do you see the contours of the Internet governance ecosystem? So, where do all of the ICANN, IGF, IETF, RIRs, all of these Internet governance ecosystem? Where do you see the contours of that?
What do you mean by contours?
Who are they? What are they? Who are the stakeholders? What's the ecosystem? Can you describe it in in more detail?
We had three of these then.
It's, it's enormous. I mean, it is it is literally enormous. And it's also extending into the cyber physical. So the, you know, we certainly would agree that this is an Internet enabled digital device, but your car is now going to be an Internet enabled device. And I was told by my taxi driver that everybody in Puerto Rico has a car. And that's why their streets are so crowded. And think of that, as a digital device. Think of that as something controlled and managed by networks. So that entire industry is now becoming digitized in effect. So the boundaries, the contours of this ecosystem would be very hard to define. And the stakeholders would be almost everybody. I think a point I need to make in relation to that in terms of governance, we cannot forget that. Markets are a form of governance, that when people buy and sell things in the price system, regulates supply and demand. That's an important form of governance is not just, you know, authorities telling people what to do, or passing policies, it's also market forces are playing an important role. And as this ecosystem becomes bigger and bigger, I think market forces will have to play a larger role in many of these things. But of course, we do need to set policies to guide market forces in certain ways.
So it's an interesting question. The notion of Internet ecosystem and institutional ecosystem has also been one of those highly conflictual issues. Many people who work in this sort of Internet technical bodies that so called the I* type organizations, the regional Internet registries, Internet Engineering Task Force, ICANN, so on, they, when they are asked about the ecosystem will characterize it as the agglomeration of those groups. Right. But again, I spent the 20 something years living in Switzerland around in hanging around the United Nations, governments around the world say, Well, wait a minute, again, same point I made before, who are all these people who pointed them? And why Why isn't there an ecosystem that engages us and so many governments have tried for a very long time to sort of marginalize, as Milton noted of the role or even take over the role of some of these entities and bring it into the international institutional framework of the United Nations, and so on. And this was a source of huge conflict for many years. First, in the western context, we had the debates about whether or not the ITU should take over from ICANN. And, and the assertion was that this would create a more accountable intergovernmental based system, and you'd have an ecosystem built around that. Then when we adopted this definition of Internet governance that sort of said, governments are not in charge it the whole question of moving tonight to us sort of slipped off the agenda. But then developing country governments and authoritarian governments insisted on having a process called enhanced cooperation, where we spent five years in intensive meetings because they were trying to create a new centralized international organization within the United Nations, that would have oversight over everything, including over ICANN. And then, of course, didn't get support from all actors, either. We ended up with a situation where many governments are very annoyed by the continuing existence of this ecosystem of non governmental, non state decision making, and constantly asserting that there should be a greater role for governments. And so they would say, if you ask them about the ecosystem, they think, okay, there's those bodies. But there's also the United Nations General Assembly, there's also the ITU, there's also UNESCO, there's also and they would list the whole alphabet soup of intergovernmental organizations that in some way, shape or form, tried to assert a role as a policy lead in some dimension of Internet governance, and say, they're a part of the ecosystem too. So the very boundaries of the ecosystem are, again, a continuing source of conflict. And there's been some tamping down over the years of the whole debate that we had about multi stakeholder versus multilateral or inter government mental kinds of models. Now, I think we've moved towards the sort of a little bit more steady state blending of the two. But still, the question remains in the minds of many what the balance of authority should be. And many governments don't accept the status of what we have now as being stable and desirable.
Just an additional word about that. So the Ayana transition, or the ICANN transition and reforms, was an important part of sort of tamping down those questions because you had this weird situation in which we're saying we don't want governments involved. But oh, by the way, the US government is in control of ICANN. Right. So when we solve that problem, I think it did help.
So to follow on,
and we should say something about the transition in this context. Yeah.
So So to follow on. You know, there have been some discussions about the name of this space, Internet governance, is that the right name for this space? Milton just talked about digital digital ecosystem? What do you think about those arguments about this? Internet governance is not the right name for the space? And if so, what would the name be? And what might be the implications of changing to some new name?
Yeah, I do think Internet governance is not the wrong name, but it's a limited name. So it really is governance of the digital ecosystem. Internet is a critical part of that you can't deny that. So there's all kinds of important ways in which the digital ecosystem relies upon governance of various aspects of the Internet, but you cannot look at it as solely as Internet governance anymore, you've really got to talk about data governance, software governance, and again, the device governance, the semiconductors and so on.
Are there implications Milton of of moving away from the term Internet governance, do you think that helps us in some way? Or harms us in other ways?
Yeah, that's a good question. Because when we first started doing this, started proposing this, then many people in the Internet governance community were concerned and afraid, basically, that if we change the name, then we are undermining the strength of the Internet community that has formed around this concept of Internet governance. And I don't think that's true. I think if the Internet governance community organized around ICANN and the other Internet registries understands where they fit into the digital ecosystem better, then they will be actually stronger and more able to defend that position and exercise their position properly. But when you're dealing with, you know, just look at the way I hate to keep harping on this, but it's so fundamental, if you look at the political activity, a governance activity around semiconductors now, it's hard to call that Internet governance, but it's so critical to what's going on on the Internet, and our attempts to control what's happening on the Internet. So I think you really have to broaden your perspective. And people who are part of this multi stakeholder community can then say, well, look, if you're trying to control what happens on the Internet by controlling trade in semiconductors, then maybe we need some more multi stakeholder participation in these trade negotiations and these national security can claims that are going on About semiconductors. Bill, what do you think? Well, so
often this issue gets drawn into contemporary turf struggles again. So as Milton suggested when some people said, well, maybe Internet governance doesn't capture it, we should have a broader digital governance formulation, then people came became concerned because the United Nations, as we'll be talking about on Friday, through the global digital compact process that's been initiated by the Secretary General, there has been an effort there to talk about digital governance as this broader thing that I the Internet governance institutions are not adequate for. And so again, we should create some new mechanism, that's digital governance and move Internet governance, thinking into that and responsibilities into that. So again, it's the same old kind of turf issues. But I would have opened up the issue a little bit more in a way. We agree, Internet governance is a sub subset of a broader thing called Digital governance. I would go further though, because I think about things historically. Internet governance, to me is a subset of something that you could also call ICT governance. I mean, I always call it ICT governance, because information communication, technology governance goes back to the 1800s, long before the Internet existed, you had international institutions, procedures and programs that grew the global network of telecommunications networks upon which the Internet was then layered. And so you have mechanisms for standardization, interconnection, of national networks, radio frequency, spectrum, satellites, all this kind of stuff, which antedated, Internet governance, as well as the new technology, issues of AI and autonomous cars, whatever, which people would also call digital governance. So when I say digital governance, I think we should think of it in a broader, more holistic way. And so yes, Internet governance is still important. And it's worth defending institutions that are focused on Internet governance, we just recognize that that's a part of a larger tapestry.
I have so many questions. And so I want to open it up to the audience. But I have one more question that like to sort of support the students and emerging scholars and activists who are out here, what do you think they should be studying and focusing on now to prepare themselves for this future that you're describing?
Oh, you know, IGP, is hosted in an academic institution. And I have students who are answering these questions that I'm encouraging to go in different directions. So I'll just describe that. So we are looking at the relationship between national security and trade and information technologies, the US is in a very sort of reactionary period now where we're saying any information service that comes from a foreign adversary nation is dangerous. And so we're literally ripping telephone switches out of rural areas, because Huawei made them and spending billions of dollars replacing them. How much does sort of trade and interchanges of information services, like tick tock, really threaten national security, that's something that we really need to know more about in an objective way, and not just a politically exploited way. Another critical issue is digitization of money, that we're I'm encouraging PhD students to look into the digitization of money and what effect that will have so many of the kind of registry level governance issues that I can deals with will be reprieve reproduced in certain ways with certain forms of digital assets. And they will, they will be dependent on digital identifiers and on accurate identification of ownership of resources in a digital environment. So if you look at things like that, that's another interesting area. And another area that we're doing and I want to shout out to the Internet Society Foundation for helping us we are researching the production of trust in digital certificates on the Internet, which again, is taking place through a private sector led a self governance agency of the browsers and again, we have a conflict with geopolitical authorities, with the European Union trying to assert control over this private sector led self governing process of the public key infrastructure of the digital certificates. So that's another interesting area.
Excellent. Thanks, Bill, your thoughts on what they should be studying and focusing on now to prepare for this future? All
of us here on this stage, teach Internet governance. All of us for decades have had students come to us and say, Where should I Go with what should I study? And the question the answer is always well depends on what you want to do, and where, where you're coming from, right? So I'm teaching in business school, and I teach digital economy at Columbia Business School students that are coming into my class there, a lot of them, they're interested in the financial aspects, they want to get into digital currencies, digital money, crypto, that kind of stuff. But a lot of them are also interested in the sort of more intellectual property aspects and things like that. So those are different. And where you would study those topics depends. There's different schools that have different kinds of strengths in the different areas. I also teach a course on Internet governance for developing country, government officials, mid level officials that I do online. And they come at it from a governmental perspective. And they're saying, well, from a public policy perspective, what do I need to know, to be able to represent my government in international negotiations? And what do we need to do to formulate national policies? And for them, the priorities are different from what the business school students priorities are, right? So again, it just so there's no simple answer, it really depends on where you're trying to come from. But I have often found us running for you're working with a cybersecurity group. There's certainly if you're looking for career opportunities, you can't go wrong, if you know something about the security aspects of the digital environment, that's for sure. A lot of people allow the energy has flooded into that this whole programs created all over the place, including Georgia Tech on that. And it's a many faceted, kind of set of problems. But I would encourage people to think also beyond the obvious, right? Because there are a lot of new and emerging issue sets that don't fit within those, you know, people default to the easy things that that are known. Every everybody is you know, like now, everybody comes to me and says, Okay, what about AI? Where do I go to study? Ai governance AI policy? Right, exactly. So you know, and all kinds of institutions are out there planting their flag saying, Hey, we're the place to do this. So again, it's all a question of what your career objective, and intellectual orientation is under
present. So what are your questions out in the audience? And online? We have one back in the back. Thank
you. My name is Benjamin Achalasia, Williams and Milton. So here's my question concerning Internet governance, we know that the majority of people to get on the Internet are still more than the ones. I mean, there, there are newer populations to get online. Now, the narrative that has shaped Internet governance for so far, has been the global north agenda, most cases. So do you think the current approach to Internet governance is truly global, or just tilted towards the powers that are currently still trying to hold on to where where the influencers concern as against the majority of the people that will be on the Internet?
Shall we reverse order this time? Alright, so the global south role in Internet governance is pardoned and growing. And I think that it's easy to fall into sort of simple binary kind of discussions and say, well, one group is has these roles, and one group has these roles, when in fact, things are more diffuse. And sometimes there's not a clear understanding of that. One of the arguments that made developing country governments put forward in pushing for more inter governmental control over the past decades, through groups like the group of 77, which is really not 77 countries, is the g 77. And China's like 130 countries with the United Nations. But what they would push for in trying to say that it should be the ITU or some new organization that should have all this authority, and be given this with our was that for them, it's easier for them to participate in those bodies, because they have standing representation in them already. And so and governments were the lead in those places, and they would say, people would say to me all the time, Look, you guys have this multi stakeholder stuff. But in my country, we don't have a broad, diverse technical community and private sector and civil society that's going to engage in this. It's the government that is capacitated and ready to engage. So therefore, for us, an intergovernmental mechanism is a more democratic sort of thing. But the problem is that that rationale tends to miss the fact that the multi stakeholder side is in fact very open to a greater engagement from the Global South. He has been working very hard to try to promote that. I remember when I was involved in in ICANN, GNSO over a decade ago, you We had meetings with the board. At the time, some of the people on the board were sort of they didn't get this issue that some of us from civil society, were jumping up and down said, you have to do more outreach, you have to make the stuff more transparent, and so on. But a lot of effort went into subsequently doing that. And so you go to ICANN meetings now and you see lots of people from around the world. And same is true in other bodies. I will say one last thing that I'll stop. I remember in the content, I talked a lot about these conflicts between the over intergovernmental versus multi stakeholder, but it's quite important. In 2000 level, we were at an Internet Governance Forum UN meeting in Nairobi. And at that point, one government India was proposing a new centralized intergovernmental body that would take over responsibilities from ICANN. And in trying to explain why this is needed, the representative from the Indian government was on stage. And she was saying, well, developing countries, people are not represented in these bodies, like the IETF. And then Bucha, hands went up, I was moderating the session. And three Indian guys from the audience said, I'm in the IETF. And the government people didn't know that they they didn't, because they don't know who their stakeholders are. They're engaged in these processes. So if you listen to the official story, from certain governments, civil society, technical business is not there for the global south. But we know that, in fact, that's not true anymore.
That the key issue for the Global South, if there is such a thing is, is economic, in my opinion. In other words, the reason the domain name industry is is very much dominated by North American businesses, there's no question about it. But part of the reason for that is that so many governments in the global south are restrictive in their policies, and do not allow people to enter the market and and get involved. And, in fact, the domination of the sphere by governments that Bill described can become a self fulfilling cycle in which they don't develop a private sector, they don't develop a vigorous civil society precisely because the government is playing a leading role in everything. Now you see, countries like India, in fact, really beginning to play a bigger role in the digital sphere. And China has already gotten to the point where it has massive, you know, social media platforms of its own. I think personally, the government plays too big a role in regulating them in a national level. But the point is, if you have economic development of these industries, then you will play a bigger role in the overall governance of the in these regimes because you need that kind of economic sustenance and sustainability to be to be able to play a role and stop being just a passive receiver of standards and ideas and start being a generator. So I would say it really depends on on market development in in the Global South, and the government's need to find policies that encourage that rather than restricted.
And I would just add, I'm trying very hard to be a moderator and not a panelist, I think I'm doing a good job. But I do want to just add to that what both Milton and Bill said, you know, Milton used the phrase earlier about self governance, this multi stakeholder model is about self governance. And so over the years, we've we've been included additional mechanisms to be able to participate remotely, where you don't have the financial responsibilities and burden of traveling to all the meetings, you can participate actively, remotely and so many of these discussions, and so there's a responsibility to engage and to develop yourself to be able to participate as much as possible. It looks like we have a question online, and maybe one or two more so online. Yes,
this is a question from Novick kovanda. He is asking, since Milton mentioned that he has the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech. Some of them are asking what are the opportunities for people from outside of the institution to collaborate as researchers to these initiatives?
Yes, we do. We have run schools of Internet governance in Middle East and adjoining countries and we also we get grants sometimes to do research we can which can support people in other regions. And the other opportunity is actually to become a student. So we have this An online master's program in cybersecurity, which is very economical in the sense that, you know, you don't have to quit work and come to Atlanta and study. But you can take this course well, totally online and get a master's degree and interact with us. And, and occasionally we have people approach us, they want to do blogs for the IGP site. And I encourage you if you have ideas, and if you're making points that we really think need to be made, we can publish those, those blog posts. And we always welcome people who are bringing us perspectives from ones that are very different from ours, for example, we had a Turkish Visiting Scholar. She's supported by her government, but she has come to Atlanta for a year to work on her dissertation. And she's, of course, doing a comparative analysis of cybersecurity in Turkey, Russia, the US and China. We have another visiting scholar from China. We have never, we have never had an applicant for a visiting scholar from Africa, but we would be receptive to one again, we don't always have the money. But if they're getting support from their government, or from their university to study overseas, then we have established ways of of bringing them into the IGP. community and working on issues with us.
One other one other short question. Oh, sure.
Why don't we try and get a couple of questions, and we'll just give very short answers. I think people haven't had enough chance to
talk. Yep, I see one here. That's the only hand I've been seeing. Okay. Oh, now. Good. All right. Yes, Jonathan?
Yeah. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Jonathan Zook. Thank you. It's interesting, because this discussion Bill talked about this sort of debate about governments versus self governance and everything like that, it, it feels like the lines get very blurred, though, in many respects, in particular, because of this issue of trust, the government's see that feel themselves as sort of stewards of their citizens. And that's often a different set of objectives than a purely technical or academic community. So one example of this was the feeling on the part of European government that they needed to implement privacy legislation that many would think, had an effect that I can and was something they didn't get around to doing. And so there's this issue of if, if the self governance doesn't seem to be working or working fast enough, and governments try to find a way to come in, and then suddenly the acts that they take become confusing and difficult to apply, and back and forth. But I mean, it's a, it feels like it's a very fluid thing in that respect, that there might be roles for governments that we need to recognize, but find some way to make them fit back into this interoperable world that we're trying to build ourselves and a lot at the center, that seems to be this trust issue.
So before we answer, I sell three other questions. Right in the back there, and then. So the gentleman with the anchors on his shirt? Very much. Do you want us to do the question before they answer the questions we're going to take? Take all the questions. Okay.
All right, Mike. Thank you. Again, my name is sabe. Again, Internet governance. My take on it is the multilingualism. Looking at the Internet governance that we have, we have, how can we make multilingualism very inclusive in terms of Internet governance, because what do we see that talking about Internet governance every day, some people are underrepresented because of some barriers of language, content, Policy Governance, how do we try to make an inclusion let me take an example like in Africa, some people in the eastern part would say some languages like Swahili, some are in languages like French, some are speaking Portuguese, English and other stuff. So in terms of promoting the inclusiveness, that diversity, for people to be able to understand even government organization, most of them don't get a concept of Internet governance because it doesn't break down to the local level languages. So how can we try to improve that from the perspective of the high level? Thank you.
We've got two more questions I saw right here. If you could just as short as short as you can with the question, so that we can get the answers the lady over here on the left on my left, and then in the back there. Just those two.
Okay. Hi, everyone, my name is Jonathan McPherson. I am a student studying networking and cybersecurity from Jamaica. And he said short on spicies, I'm just gonna give it. So my question is What role should civil society play in shaping Internet governance policies and advocating for digital rights and freedom? So that's one of my biggest case and our challenge in Jamaica, we want to know, where do we get started? And how can we have a voice in Internet governance?
Thank you, Kathleen. I think the last one was right. Right behind there, I believe.
Thank you, Professor. I guess I can go quickly, the last time we were had the privilege to be here in Puerto Rico. GDPR was imminent, as we were in ICANN calendar, and it proved to be radically inelegant with respect to our industry and what we do. What are some things that we can do to help when governments do put forth such things that it's more elegant or at least can consider the industries that are affected? Thank you.
I hate to have people online, not getting recognized.
We've been answering, why don't we just go ahead and and finish up these questions. We're over time. Yeah, we've been answering them.
Well, this, I mean, the GDPR questions I could talk for an hour about, but I will not. I just I think it's easiest to answer Jonathan's question about, you know, the elegance, alleged and elegance. So I think what was inelegant about GDPR was the the who is and I cans refusal over a period of 20 years to recognize a privacy interest and the specific stakeholder groups who named mainly Intellectual Property Groups who refused to recognize the privacy interest and succeeded in blocking consensus for 20 years, even though we all knew that this was a violation of privacy. And yes, the European Union had to intervene and kind of kick some sense into ICANN and get the process more aligned with privacy rights. But the the non commercial users are raising this issue within ICANN since 2001. And were consistently ignored or literally suppressed in their attempts to get policy to recognize the privacy problem of publishing domain name contact information to the world. So I think we have nobody to blame but ourselves for the elegance of the EU intervention. Let me make another quick comment about the multilingual problem. I think multilingualism is a issue that is best handled at the content layer and not at the infrastructure layer. In other words, if you look at the ability of people to translate websites, into different languages around the world, there are resource constraints on that, of course, but it can happen very rapidly, if you want. Look at how long it took and how clunky it is to put different content, the different scripts into the domain name system itself. And then nobody uses them to be to be blunt, nope. You know, there is no single popular non ASCII domain name. And even in China, where they have a completely different script. Everybody is using ASCII for the domain names because they want Global Access. Right. So I think the content issues have to be handled at the content layer rather than at the the ICANN layer. quick word about the the question about Jamaica? So yeah, you do need to advocate for for rights, individual rights in the digital sphere, you need to be careful about what's the best place to do that. Right. So a lot of the ICANN issues, no longer really deal with that we were dealing with freedom of expression issues in terms of the trademark domain name relationship, but that's a very narrow area of expression. It may be that your own government's national policies towards censorship are much more important place to focus your efforts. And in terms of privacy, the same thing, it's like I can, I can nexus with some of these individual rights issues is very small right now. And there may be more important places to put your put your energies in terms of digital rights.
Just as a follow up at that point. Both of us have been shared for many years of the non commercial users constituency with an ICANN which was a sort of the focal point for work around GNSO domain name type policy issues, and certainly you know you're here for night Can meeting. That's one place. There's also the large community. There's other bodies within ICANN, where user type groups can go. And even if you aren't as deeply engaged in domain name issues, and as Milton says, very often the most pressing issues at the national level are different, connecting to people internationally, reinforces and strengthens organizational development of civil society groups within developing countries and capacity, its individual participants, by learning and connecting, and networking. So I would certainly say, you know, yes, work hard at the national level, but engage at the international level too, because it really reinforces and there's a lot opportunities, both in ICANN and other bodies around the Internet governance ecosystem.
And I would just add to that, as we close, also think about connecting with other transnational advocates, transnational actors are working in networks around civil society involvement. We're only four minutes over. And I just want to thank all of our panelists for such a great job. And I also want to just say that I have I brought one of one copy of three of my books and I'm going to give them away one a day. So the first one I'm going to give away is for the first person who comes and tells me where with this was held, and it's a trick question. So the first person who can tell me where this this was held gets, gets the book
