I'm back for the last panel of today. Last panel of NASIG. Happy to be here with all of you. We've talked a lot over the last two days about truth, and trust, some of the bedrocks of the values of the Internet. And our goal today has been to take all of the issues and some of the fears coming out of technological innovation, whether it be data privacy, breaches and issues, disinformation, or DNS abuse, like we talked about yesterday, and turn them into stories of hope for the future. So we're going to explore some innovative research, I'm going to turn it first over to Emily Taylor, the founder of the DNS research Federation, we learned a little bit about them yesterday, but to present some of their new and upcoming research.
Thank you very much, Kathleen. And it's a great pleasure to be back at gneissic. And also to share the panel with you, Steve and Andrew online. So my story of hope, comes from a research project, which we are just finishing up for the British government. And it's the last panel really set the scene for the context of this study. So in the run up to the whiskers plus 20 process, there is a lot of anxiety about what will happen to institutions and processes like the Internet Governance Forum, the multi stakeholder, non decision making forum that Bill and Milton and Elizabeth were talking about in the last panel. And the challenge that was set to us was, can we find evidence of the value and impact that the IGF has had, which was actually quite a daunting? research question? Because everybody knows, right, the IGF doesn't do anything, it doesn't make decisions. So where are we going to be able to find impact? So we we start, we've done this as a rapid study. In a period of four months, we interviewed 48 people, respecting gender, stakeholder and geographical balance in the selection of the interviewees. And we also did automated analysis enhanced by AI and ML, on a 1500 IGF documents, which is actually 12 million words, because those documents tend to be, you know, long transcripts of three hour sessions. So they're really dense. So I can actually share some slides, which just give a brief overview of the findings that we had. So the the short answer is yes, we we very much did find concrete evidence of impact both direct and indirect. So starting with the direct impact, where you can say, well, the IGF really played a very major role in this stuff happening. The first is Internet exchange points. So Internet Exchange Points play an incredibly important role in reducing the costs and latency of Internet connection, and really enhancing the user experience. Once you have rapid and cheap access that then that makes the access meaningful. And so what we wish to see here is that Internet exchange points, there has been a really active dialogue, both at the regional and national level, but also at the global level. So in 27, sorry, 2007 don't know how you say 27 2007. They were barely 12 functioning Internet exchange points in the entire continent of Africa. And last year, there were 53 Internet exchange points, based in 47 cities and 36 countries in Africa. And the people who built out those IXPs directly paid tribute to go into the IGF bring the Internet exchange points were important, going back to Africa and implementing them. The next really key aspect actually, before I come on to that,
the the next really key aspect also relates to improving connectivity, and that is the success of community networks. So community networks are sort of like a grassroots response to providing Internet access, where it's not really in a viable or attractive commercial setting. And what we were able to show is that in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Kenya, the IGF has played a really important role not just in establishing community The network's but in developing a framework for licensing those networks. And the so the start of them that they really gain traction was in Latin America. And then they kind of made a hop through the global process, and work and those learnings were then transferred into Kenya, where there are now 100 community networks, and also they have access to universal service funds and to develop those. So the next slide I've got to show you is the growth of the national and regional IGS. Now, you heard from Bill and Milton on the last panel, you know, who are veterans of the original whizzes process 20 years ago, as am I, that when the IGF was actually established in 2005, is mandated in the Tunis Agenda didn't didn't mention national and regional IGF they weren't really imagined at the time. And these have spontaneously grown up. And then now operating in 148 countries, the gray colored blocks on that chart on that world map show countries where there isn't a national IGF, but for many, most of those there is a regional IGF the that actually is in place. So for example, for the Arab states, there's the Arab IGF, which is an extremely active panel and process. And there is an interplay between the national and regional IGS. And also another very important direct impact of the eye of the IGF. And that is the global youth, IGF Kathleen, you and I were talking on the bus about this the other day. So lots of processes have a youth movement. And you know, you you're a fellow for the ICANN meeting here, but what I think the IGF has really nailed, is incorporating young people into the mainstream agenda. And that's partly through structure, because the multi stakeholder advisory group in the call for for proposals each year, so to say, make sure that you've got regional participation and stakeholder balance, and also a youth voice. And so the youth are really blended into the actual events, rather than sort of partitioned into a safe space where they can be useful. And actually, one of the really, for me inspirational stories that came out of this study is that these these young people who sort of whose leadership is sort of fostered through the IGF process, and go back into their countries and territories and become leaders in the national group, or, and then often go on to become leaders in Internet governance as a whole. So there's a really successful onboarding of next generation, which and other think those in the room who've been to an IETF meeting, say compared to an ICANN meeting, for me, the IGF really feels like a young meeting. And this sort of comes through in some of the indirect impacts, you know, the participation tells you a lot about whether people value the process. One of the striking things about the IGF is how many you newcomers you find each year, on average, over 60% of people who are at an IGF are new each time. And that makes it a very much more relaxed atmosphere, you can self identify as a newcomer, without any kind of sense of shame, you can blast into a room and just say stuff and no one's going to treat you like an idiot. And that's not really the case in every single other, more expert working type of environments. Also, the regional participation, it really matters where an IGF has helped. So a couple of years ago, it was in Poland, and you see a big spike in participation from Eastern Europe. The year after it was in Ethiopia, Africa is by far the the greatest participation, and then last year in Kyoto, Asia again. So the thematic dynamism of the IGF is something that we we really explored and there's a lot of detail in the report. Topics really come and go. I mean, we were talking a lot about AI in the last session, AI really spiked last year and everybody felt it. But there are also there's a, there's also quite a brutal dropping of subjects that are no longer current. So the Ayana transition was the most popular topic in 2016. The transition happened, no one talks about it now. And there are perennial topics that flow through like human rights and access and connecting the unconnected, but there's a real dynamism in the topics discussed in the IGF and that that brings me on to the last point and then I will leave it at that, which is that The IETF really, a lot of our interviewees really paid tribute to it to the idea of as a decision is shaping forum. It isn't a decision making forum. But you know, like Milton described on the last panel, how incredibly sensitive the issue of the management of the Ayana the route database was back in the day in 2006. It was so sensitive that it was not even on the first IGF agenda. And that was not by accident that was by design as Milton described. And yet a lot of the interviewees paid tribute to the IGF as a place where attitudes could soften without the threat of something bad happening. And through the process of a number of years, the different parties with their different positions on this very contentious topic sort of softened. And that kind of laid important groundwork for what became the sixth to successful transition. So I will leave it at that there's an awful lot more in the report, which I can talk about, and very happy to take questions when when they come. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Emily, I think that there's often not enough resources to voting to figure out not just the topics within the organizations that we're all a part of, but the structure in and of themselves, and how those organizations work and what we should continue to promote and what things need to be changed. So thank you so much. Now, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Steve Crocker, who needs a little introduction to this face. But he's currently the CEO and edge of edge more Research Institute, a nonprofit organization founded to develop and propagate principles of directory regulation systems, but also was very essential to the initial development of the Internet, the initial development of the request for comment, which opened up so much to the multi stakeholder model, and also served on the ICANN Board for several years. So I will allow you to take the mic and present thank you so much for being here.
This live, thank you very much. Yeah, I always always get a little embarrassment, read all that. So it's just hanging around for a long time, and having accidentally been in the right place at the right time. In the run up to this to this session, there was some discussion about the theme. And Emily, I think you said the natural thing when you get a bunch of us together to talk about doom and gloom for the future. And, and the the desire was to talk about hope, and make it very positive. So I thought back, sat back and thought about it for a minute. And some of the discussion was on particular projects that were beacons of hope in that sort of examples of positive things. But the what became clear to me after a few minutes of thought is the most hopeful thing is the Internet itself. So let's see if we can fire up the slides here. All right. So I want to talk about the Internet. And I also want to talk about a particular project that I've been heavily involved in continuing. Next slide. Yes, the next slide. There we go. So when I think about the Internet, in two ways, of course, oops. So I think about it in two ways. It's a communication mechanism. It's the sort of the revision of the worldwide telephone system that got used for data communication. And then over time, the Internet became the data communication, which is a system which is now used for voice as well. A bit a big transformation of the basic communications around the world, and a huge, very positive thing in its own right. Lots of things to say about it. The short answer is that changes in technology made it possible to put computers mediating the use of vote a very expensive long distance lines, so that because the packet switch, communications became viable, and we have the system that we have now. That's great all by itself. But there's more. And it's the more that's even more interesting, at least to me. The Internet couldn't have been built as a closed system with a very specific set of specifications that said, it's going to do this it's going to do this and that's it's kind of a product or service offering, but it was not, was built with an open architecture. So open architecture means that there are multiple quote, protocol layers. They are relatively thin and what the important part is, the openness is you can add more stuff to it. You can add things above You can add things below you go around, etc, etc. And this makes it possible to expand and change and create new applications and new services all the time. So you get a picture. This is a sort of famous hourglass picture, the IP protocol is right in the middle and above it are huge numbers of application protocols and below are an equally huge number of transport mechanisms for the different media, everything from Ethernet and long distance lines and so forth to satellite radio and fiber. And it just keeps going and going and going. And the expansion ended. The addition of things both above and below is what makes the the Internet an ever evolving and expanding set of capabilities. And that is as important or more important in some respects, than basic architecture that was developed and built some years ago. Another aspect, which is quite different from what we see is that the development of protocols and protocols are they are the essence of what makes you applications work is open and free and full, ask yourself for free if you don't have an IETF meeting. See, this is incidental compared to the enormous costs that are borne by all people who go there. Wanting to be completely accurate about this protocols are developed through the Internet Engineering Task Force. And it's built by consensus. This is qualitatively different from almost all of the other standard processes that preceded and particularly qualitatively different from the standard processes that were associated with the telephone industry as it developed. The international standards were developed through the International, the International Telecommunications, telegraph. Membership is restricted to governments, which means you have to be part of the State Department in the US or for other countries and the industry through those channels. Very, very tough. And quite stilted in terms of the nature of the DeFi. Participation. The IETF almost looks like there's no organizational, it's not true. There's a bit of organization. But as I say, it's quite different. And because it's quite a different effects are quite different. It is possible to do things relatively straightforward. And simply, although I will say over the years as the IETF has grown up, it's begun to learn the ways of bureaucracy like everybody else. But nonetheless, it's quite different. And another aspect is that the documentation is open and free. To try to get the specs out of any other standards organizations will discover that that what I've said here is as simple as it sounds, it's a very, very big deal. I have experienced that experience. I'm going to describe it as one that many others have experienced visiting in India, and I was introduced to a graduate student at the in Bangalore, and he showed me what he put together it was really an amazing assembly of different capabilities. I said well, I just looked downloaded the RFC, but that's pretty cool. And he was really speaking as he did this did require a huge amount of funding, it did require a government approval did require major industry behind him did require the team qualitatively changes the game, when you have the soil three forms openness, the openness, the architecture, the openness, the openness of the architecture, openness, of the participation and creativity, and the openness to re understanding a doctor. That is just an engine of hope, from our point of view. So lastly, this question was speech. We move quickly since that. So that that's very broad. And I want to talk about her particular project, which I've been involved in now for a while, and one of the side sort of unplanned aspects of the Internet and the domain name system is that when you register for naming, provide a certain amount of information, who you are and other contact information and so forth. And if that information turns out to be Oh interest to a large number of other people. Some of them for good purposes, some of the pronouncement purposes. If somebody wants to know, if you're running a business, who's who stands behind the debating consumer protection, and there's law enforcement and other other types of you, everyone, lot of ad people out there who want to harass. So what grew up over a long period of time without much organization planning was a post called WHOIS system. And you can just type in who is a domain name and back a lot of information. And as I say, that provided a lot of utility in positive ways, and a lot of vulnerabilities in a lot of ways. And so over quite a long time, lots of discussion about sort of this is a problem or how we change people's behavior change, some a lot of people started to hide the act, the real information and put in fake information about who they were or to use the proxy proxy service. And then there was a cataclysmic event called GDPR. General Data Protection Regulation from Europe, and it was not focused particularly on the Internet or the meaning system in particular, but it was a very, very big room that swept very widely and entangled. So the effect was that the WHOIS system almost got shut down completely with very little information became available. So that's great from a pure privacy point of view. But it's not so good from a public purpose and public interest point of view in that it was unbalanced in one direction before and it's unbalanced again. And so it's a sort of a blunt instrument. So
I've been, I was involved with ICANN heavily for 15, more than 15 years, and sat on the board for most of that time, and was chairman of the board last several of those years, and I kept watching failed attempts at trying to sort this problem out. And then I made one of those classic mistakes that the textbooks tell you not to do that when I finished my time on the board, instead of walking away cleanly and smoothly. This is sort of stuck in my craw. So I spent some time thinking hard about it gathered a set of people that I knew were equally frustrated, and deeply knowledgeable about all aspects, the technical aspects, the business aspects of policy aspects. And we began to think hard about this. And we thought hard about it without the constraints of here's the ground rules, or here's the here's the who's in charge, and so forth. We just took it as a as an independent, fresh topic. That was the good news, bad news, no funding, no portfolio, no authority. And so we just worked quietly for a while. And certain key ideas started to emerge. We reached the point a couple of years ago, where I thought the ideas were gelled enough that we should now try to socialize them. Yeah, that means I gotta get some help. That means I gotta get some money to pay them. That means I got to have an organization. So we went and did all that we've created the edge more Research Institute, got a little tiny bit of funding. And we've been gradually working our way toward trying to be helpful, or at least helpful from our point of view, and propagate, socialize the ideas that we've gotten. So those ideas, so you see on the slide that says motivation, as I say, endless stalemates and so forth. And at the bottom, we want three attributes of what we imagine the future should have, if things are working, right. It should include privacy, it should include accuracy, and it should include efficiency. And those things might seem like they are at odds with each other. Can you have all three? And the answer we think is yes, really, you can do all of that. Not easy, not trivial, but can be done. So let me tell you a little bit more. So what about GDPR? So GDPR is supposed to protect everybody with privacy, but it's, as I said, a kind of a blunt instrument. And I can't say that I'm a GDPR expert. I'm certainly not a lawyer, thank goodness. Although I have to I have to say my son is a first class attorney, and I am 100% supportive of what he does. And when I talk to him about what I'm doing, he thinks I've got no chance so we'll see how this turns out. But we think we can be we think we can provide ideas that are more detailed and and still quite workable. So took a fresh look. And these slides will be available, I don't want to spend time going through all of them. But we haven't mind that it should be possible to arrange a system which is highly automated, highly accurate with respect to the data that you get highly accurate with respect to the decisions that get made with respect to all of the equities, adherence to the privacy laws, adherence to balancing decisions, balancing tests, and so forth. Here's a picture of what the domain name registration process look like. Before. In the middle, you have a column that has the registrar on the bottom and the registry above it. And data is collected from the registrants on the lower right part and made available in the upper left to requesters who might want information. That's the pre existing picture. And there's some examples there case, just to elucidate that. And before the curtain came down to GDPR, I'm told that there were huge numbers, let's see if the numbers are up there estimated 5 billion queries per month prior to GDPR. Across, not quite, I guess it's a little under 400 million domains under under management is that is the term of art. So the part that we've been looking at is to what should the rules be with respect to collecting information, what information should be collected? How much attention should be given to making sure that it's accurate information? And here's a critical thing, is it possible to assign a sensitivity level to each of the data elements. And there's a lot of leverage in that kind of approach. So some of the data elements might be marked as no problem, these are available to anybody public, others will be marked private. And we listened to a lot of conversations. And we we discovered that private isn't fine enough distinction, because some things that are marked private, in many of the discussions, if you ask for them, you're told that the response will be quote, redacted, unquote, which indicates that the data is there, but you're not allowed to see it. But if we listen longer, we heard some discussion about, well, some of that data, even if it's there, you're not going to be told about it. So that we translate that into well, that must be more sensitive. So we have a few few levels of sensitivity. And, and then a different in various places, rules about who gets to see what levels of sensitivity under what circumstances. And then other discrimination discriminators as to which portions of the information. So you may have one portion of the data set that is in the registration, that has the same sensitivity level as another portion, but depending on who's requesting it, they may not be able to see it. And so this is this, we think, gives quite a bit of flexibility for deciding, as I say, who can see what, and also how the information should be collected and what happens at the time that it is collected. And there's a bit more that I as I said, when I give you a taste of what's going on his thoughts, they they collection side. We also noticed, not too hard to notice because they're big in the way all the time, I'm sorry, they're visible all the time, that there are various policy bodies, I can being one of the biggest, but you can view every single government as another policy body individually. And there are probably other policy bodies that also if you look from say the perspective of a registrar, which is on the front line collecting information from registrants, they have their own rules as to what data they want to collect and how they're going to treat it. But they're also subject to the rules that a registrar sorry registry would impose on them because they're in fact working for the registry in a given registration situation. And they're also beholden to whatever policy bodies are, are above them. And there may be more than one. There may be a registrar might have to adhere to, let's say, the rules of ICANN if it's dealing with contracts in the contracted party space, the gTLD and might also have to adhere to the rules of the government of the jurisdiction that it's operating on, for example. So you got to sort of complexity, and we discovered that we could represent these these different the effects. We could say this is not so hard. Every single one of these has its own policy. And these policies interact. And so a registrar then is subject to two or three or four or maybe more of these policies. And we found a way to represent the details of the policies in such a way that very quickly, instantaneously, you could take these several policies, and just line them up. And in fact, my friend Jonathan, way back there, is responsible for a particular image called the acetate model. So you think of like a plastic sheets that sort of line them up and see where the light shines through. So that was very, very helpful as a way of thinking about what those interactions are. And then on the data request side, you have, who's making the request and what the purpose is, and so forth, and then match that up against what you know about the restaurant and about the sensitivity of the data. And And here's an elegant and, and key thing about the data collection, I said you would assign a sensitivity level to each of the data elements it's collected. But you don't have to assign the same sensitivity level to the same data element for each registrant, one could imagine, for example, that if the registrant is in the term of art, a legal person, that is a business, that you would assign different sensitivity levels to the address and the street address, and so forth, than you would for a natural person, what we would call a human. But you might even have finer distinctions, for example, politicians, celebrities, NGOs, operating in contested areas, might all have a decent claim for saying, hey, look,
pretty appreciate you've got to set tables set in such a way that protect the ordinary people. But we need special protection, because we're at higher risk, no problem, you can have a separate policy that covers that subset, until at the time of registration, one could imagine that a registrant is present themselves and makes the case that they belong in this category, as opposed to a different category. So all of that mechanism fits together rather elegantly and would work. So that's the basic structure on the collection side. And then for request, one could imagine request templates in which you work out in advance that if a requester is of a certain type, and is authenticated and has credentials, and is going to use it for a particular purpose, then when they make a certain type of request, you do not have to have a human in the loop, which is going to try to replicate all of that decision making in under the pressure of how many days do they have to respond. And then several good things happen, if you put all those pieces together, you get a system that's far, far more efficient, you get a system that is far, far more effective in terms of responding to the to the needs, you get a system that is far far more consistent in the nature of the in the responses that it gives, and hence predictable by by the users. So it's a win multiple times a win win win, I don't want to sound too much like, like, a, selling a system here. I don't I don't make any claim on this. But it does generate quite a bit of excitement, that this is not just a zero sum game, this is a very positive sum operation. non trivial to put all this together, but acceptable, one can then say, well, how are you gonna get there from where we are? And the answer to that is also very interesting and has at least from my point of view, to emphasize the theme of the session of hope. You don't have to solve it all at once. You can peel off the pieces that you that you can work the problems. So if somebody says, Well, how are you going to identify people in such a way that the identities are acceptable for around the world, no matter who issues that credential, why bother? Why don't you work with parts of that problem that you can break it up so that maybe it looks like a patchwork quilt. And if that doesn't solve all your problems, you're still way way better off than where you are, where you would solve all your problems. And so you can get and you get a virtuous cycle out of that you get experience, and you get improvements, and you get mergers and cross linkages of all of this. That stuff may sound complicated, but that's just ordinary computer science. That's what we do. And we make systems like that work all the time. So this is that's the kind of stuff that we're working on. I've said some of the stuff about agreements between collector to request yours and the processing of requests. And that leads to a diagram that starts off with what I showed before and then starts getting decorated with more pieces that are there. The Green, a stars with G's in them that indicate points of governance. And so you get little points of governance across all of that, as opposed to one centralized governance system across all of that. And that's my lecture on hope today.
Thank you so much. incredibly interesting. I'm sure that there will be many questions about this after but I am going to turn it over to Andrew online to talk. He's the president and CEO of Internet Society to talk about what that group has been doing in the context of hope.
Hi, everyone, oopsie, turn that down a bit. Thanks for inviting me. And I'm sorry, I wasn't able to join you in person. But I'm very happy to be here online. Because of course, the Internet provides this, this opportunity for us all, which is one of the bits of hope that I have about this, you know, one of the things that people forget about is because we swim in the Internet now, right? We just got it all the time. But when I was growing up what we're doing right now with science fiction, and sure, it's still not like Star Trek, right, Star Trek, a completely alien spacecraft shows up, and the AV all just works, which is not the way it works in, in human life. Right? When you first show up, it doesn't always work for everybody. And somebody's got feedback as I did a moment ago. But um, but nevertheless, we're able to do this. And I think that it is something that, that we overlook a lot, because we focus as I think Emily was saying, at the top, on, on the Doom, and on the, you know, the sort of problems. And that's an that's part of the nature of transformative technologies like the Internet, the transformative technology comes along, it changes your culture in big, big and deep ways. And suddenly, you start trying to figure out, okay, well, how do I put this genie back in the bottle, and yet, you're ignoring at that point, all of the benefits that you get. So this is the very first one of them that I want to highlight what we're doing right now, this is a very hopeful thing. The Internet, in that sense, is a deeply human technology, it, it allows us to connect with one another. And it allows us to, to reach out. Another example of this actually is, is a site that is online, which is often pronounced archive.org. It's spelled AX, arxiv.org. But the X is supposed to be a Greek chi, of course, because it's nerds. And there are Greek letters involved. But this is a site that people have to put up research, Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, quantitative biology, all of these things. They're not peer reviewed research, of course, they're going to be peer reviewed research. That's what that's what this site really is. It's a place where people put up their academic work. And the reason I think this is marvelous, is something that we all went through, you know, a few years ago, the reality of the speed at which understanding of a completely novel virus emerged, the speed at which medicines were, were developed and so on, is in part because of the speed at which we're able to communicate with one another. The last time we had a global pandemic, of the sort that we just went through, you had to spread, spread your research through the mail. And when you wanted to do some, you know, when you wanted to make a big move, you couldn't, you couldn't do this kind of peer review at the scale that, that we can, what we saw during the pandemic was not just, you know, the Internet helping us, you know, keep the economy going or reach out to loved ones, and so on. What we saw were researchers being able to connect with one another, you know, vastly great physical distances, they didn't have to get together, which is a good thing, of course, because they couldn't get on airplanes. They didn't have to do that. Instead, they could collaborate over the Internet and and, you know, say, Well, I found this thing over here, somebody else found that thing over there, you put that together, and suddenly you've got a novel result. And I think that that, that fact of what the Internet does, for us is a really critical thing that we must not forget, whenever we're doing the scrolling and saying the Internet is the worst thing that anybody ever invented. An actual thing I saw posted on the Internet, by the way, somebody posted on the Internet that it was the worst thing ever invented and I thought perhaps they needed to develop a better sense of irony. The last thing that I will say is is a little one, because I am conscious that you know we will want to we want to probably open the floor for some discussion and so on. But this is a little one that is a it's a chapter of the of the Internet Society that is working on the the ISOC Serbia Belgrade chapter got a grant from the Internet Society Foundation. And they have this this little device called a Klimerko. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. Um, this is an Internet of Things device that you plug in, in your house. And what it does is it samples the air now, the Western Balkans region has the lowest air quality in Europe, and they want to do something about it. And instead of, you know, moaning about it, they got together and they thought, Oh, well, we'll just chip these little devices, and then we'll be able to tell where the problems are. And you know, that's the first step is understanding, okay, what interventions do you need to do.
And so this is the kind of thing that I think Steve was talking about, where you have this very, very flexible network, it was not designed to do air quality monitoring, that was not the I don't know whether anybody on the, in the original ARPANET project thought about air quality monitoring is one of the main things they were going to work on. But what happens is, because it's such a flexible network, somebody can have a good idea for this, they can reuse all of those protocols, they can get a little device, they put it together, and they ship it around to interested householders. And this is now being shipped in 29 cities across the Serbia, I think that this is a, you know, this is exactly the kind of thing that that illustrates for us, Hey, we use the Internet in all of these novel ways in order to make good for society. And I think that's the main thing. From my point of view, when I look at the Internet, and when I hear all of the doom that people have to say about the Internet, it's really important to remember all of these positive examples that you can come up with, it's not hard to come up with these positive examples. And when you do, you're reminded, hey, this is the kind of thing this kind of tool that we can use in order to make our societies better. So I hope that those are a few little illustrations of things that, that remind us all that the Internet really is a tool for, for good and for the good of humanity.
Yes, I'm enchanter, I think that there's a theme in all of these presentations in that playing off is something that Steve said that we can't solve all the issues on the Internet, by any means. And to find that specific issue that you're passionate about, and that you really think that you can make a difference in solving. And even if you don't completely solve the problem, it's still important to make progress, and maybe lay up the foundation for someone else to come in and help you and collaborate. And I think that's also one of the things that we don't talk about at these conferences, as much as the potential for collaboration, to come out of it, not just the substance that we're talking about. But all the people that you get to meet that you might not have met in your corner of the world at that can help you out. So I think we're just going to open the floor for questions or comments of your stories of hope as well, things that you're working on, we want to hear it all. So start in the back
My name is Sobey Abraham, and this one in terms of talking about the change driven by Internet governance. I am going to talk about the youth participation and inclusion and applause the Internet Society. Good work because I've I've known that when Internet Society youth that this program started, they were not actually do a training, YouTube and Internet governance buddy, we're not trying to fund them under bilaterally from last year, there has been a change across the border whereby some even get the funding opportunity to participate in some of the regional events are the global event. And looking at that participation, how can you improve it so that it will be more inclusive in terms of engaging more youth and net? When it comes to the government and governance aspect? Mostly in Africa, that one held in Ethiopia we had more participants in in terms of youth and other stuff, but we still need more intuition when it is cross border, sometimes to the location visa issues and other stuff. So if we are talking about inclusion, how do we also try to reach more private because the government cannot do all the funding alone and institutions to how can we also include them to advocate that they can at least fund more you to participate and be able to build that capacity that we have within the Internet governance space. Thank you.
I'll pass that over to Emily first.
Sophie. Thank you very much for your question. And it is a difficult one to solve. And, as Steve was saying, you don't have to solve every bit of it perfectly or not other. So a couple of ideas, or observations on the general problem or problems space or challenge of, of increasing the inclusiveness of youth participation, I think a lot, you know, start locally. And part of what I drew inspiration from in the Internet Governance Forum study we've just been doing is the vibrancy of the local Internet governance communities, which is, you know, if you, if you sort of stop most people in the street and want to engage them on the Internet governance, you're going to have a pretty short conversation. And to me, it was a real surprise to see how vibrant the local and national IGF are and what an important part youth is playing in those local processes. And those when they gain gain that momentum, and of course, it out of 148 National processes, not all of them are going to be a stunning success. But some of them are, really are and there were stories of, of young people kind of coming up through that system, getting their confidence locally, going up to regional and then global levels. And then, you know, if you get a speaking slot at an IGF panel, often funding then will follow for your participation. And then that that sort of confidence of interacting at the global level, then feeds back in a virtuous circle back to the local level. And there were so many stories from the youth interviewees that we spoke to, about how how incredibly dynamic these individuals have been, and how successful they've been. They have been, because, you know, they're not old enough to get all tired and cynical, like US law, they actually believe that there's still a potential to change the world through their effort. And they're doing it and it's incredibly inspirational, especially for superannuated Internet governance people like myself. So that that would just be one aspect. And, and I think in your, in your remarks, or the you mentioned that, you know, thank you to the Internet Society, I think that the way that the different multistakeholder organizations have sort of acted as force multipliers for each other, so the Internet Society helps people get to the IGF, they're not like, well, that's not invented in the Internet Society. So we don't participate. They're helping to make it a success in a very practical way. So yeah, those are just some initial thoughts on your question. Thank you for it.
Andrew, I'm not sure. Oh, Internet. Sure. If you had any more thoughts, obviously, the Internet Society functions with a lot of different local chapters. And youth programs, I wasn't sure if you wanted to speak a little bit more on that. I'm sure.
So yeah, we do have chapters in an awful lot of places. And there's also a standing group for, for the youth, within the Internet Society. So So one thing that I guess I would say, is, are going to be two things I would say is, you know, one thing you can do is join the Internet Society, it's free to join us. And you can, you can join our chapter or more than one and you can join some, some of the other activities that we have, and I encourage people to do that. A second thing that people could do, of course, is to donate to the Internet Society, I hate to have my cup up, but we are a charity. And, you know, if we have more resources, then of course, we can support more travel. So that is, you know, that is another thing that that is that is worth considering, of course, the people who need the support for the travel are not the people who are the target of this, of this solicitation, just to be clear. But the there is maybe one more thing that I would say, and that is, you know, to to sort of emphasize one of the things that Emily was talking about that, you know, one of the challenges for those of us who are in this room, who are who've been longer participants in this. In this community, one of the challenges is that it's very tempting to be invited to things and go again. And I think there's a responsibility on the part of those of us who are longer term participants to sort of, you know, ask, Well, gee, is there somebody new who could come and do this instead? Because I think that that's one of the ways that we, you know, we build a stronger and deeper community. And I think we sometimes are a little reluctant to do that. So I think I think that's something that the rest of us can think about a little bit.
Thank you so much. Thanks. Do you have another question?
I have a question. Thank you so much for all the presentations also offline and online. My name is Natalia Shiva, I am a IGF. And there I found there in the Czech Republic. And aforementioned youth standing group is currently placed around serving as a vice for facilitator. So, also thank you to Internet Society, I can just echo that they can provide great opportunities, you just have to have to try but I'm willing to. I'm hopeful that those who want to support and want to participate will always find a way to be included. My question is more about something I've mentioned on the national level, and Czech Republic related to IETF. And more generally, Internet governance discussions, that is the thing that usually you want specific representation is usually lacking. And that is being the academia, sector, and scholars. As someone who is also involved in academia, I think this is very sad to see. And I am sure this is not just the case in Czech Republic, but this can also be seen elsewhere. Usually the answer to why don't you want to be included, we would like we would love to hear your voice, it is very important. As all we know, we know that sometimes the things that are happening are not right, because we have some current research evidence that, for example, some things happening on the Internet shall not be governed the way they are governed, or maybe there shall be some differences in the regulation and so on. But they feel like no one cares about your opinion, or they don't know how to translate it. academic language, that the language that is, let's say, more approachable to these debates. So maybe I would just like to ask if you have any opinion, or maybe ideas how to include the specific study stakeholder group into the debate, because I feel like it would be very valuable.
Please, Natalie, thank you very much for your question. Yeah, I think you've really highlighted an important gap in the sort of the constellation of stakeholders that need to be involved. And actually, I'd like to pay tribute to the schools have Internet governance, like LASIK, like, like both gangs, programs, and like the the south school that are doing their bit to sort of embed Internet governance into an education system at the local and regional levels. Part of what we've been trying to do with the DNS research Federation. And actually, one of the reasons why we decided to do this is exactly that we were talking to sort of real centers of excellence in the cybers, you know, they have big research programs in advanced studies. And yet, they would be like, oh, gosh, we don't really talk about Internet governance anymore. And, and there is actually a lot of data that's available to scholars. So part of what we're trying to do is to stimulate that scholarly inquiry. And particularly from a policy type of perspective, I don't really mind what opinions people have, is just like putting scholars together with data, and giving them a bit of mentoring as well, to ensure that they understand what the data can can do for them, what might what they might, you know, how it might help them solve their research questions. And so that's a little bit of the puzzle, you know, nobody's going to be able to solve it alone. But I completely agree with you that it is a big gap in the the academic sort of world is that the study and the focus on how you govern a global communications network, which, you know, you're hearing from Stephen, from Andrew, how, how incredibly important, this is as a strategic resource for not just individuals or their society locally, but globally. You know, this is a really important area, we need our best minds on it. And we also need future policymakers to understand why the architecture is important. It will constantly evolve, as Steve was showing us. But the architecture you need to understand if you're going to be making policy that will affect it. So thank you very much.
Thank you. I don't know if see if you have any thoughts on sort of the evolution of the role of academia and whether you've seen that change both in your goals in ICANN and also externally?
I can offer a comment or two about the evolution in general. When I when I was interested in computers and they were available at universities, big companies government, not no personal Computers, nothing in your pocket and so forth, not not at high schools even. And over time, of course, huge changes in the technology, but also huge changes in the role of computing and computer science. In the university, and academia in general. There was no place in the early 60s, in most universities, almost all universities in which you could take a course, in computer science, there was no department, very few courses, if there were any. I got involved in in a club on campus. And one of the things that we did was teach programming because it was not being taught in any of the regular courses. We did a land office business, actually teaching a lot of people how to program. On the cheap, we didn't charge anything, it was really kind of amazing. And in fact, the bookstore didn't even have manuals. So we we bought them by the case from IBM, rounded the price up to the nearest 25 cents to make the change handling easier, then all of a sudden, our little club who was had a pot full of money leftover, because all real cheap. So obviously, it's a huge, huge evolution. Now, I go to visit a local university to visit the computer science department, which computer science department did you want to visit, I get to ask because there's a computer science department, that's an Information Science Department, there's a Department of Information applied to such and such in something else in something else. And when I look, when I try to look closer at the curriculum, a lot of overlap, it's just huge. Or an anecdote from a slightly earlier time. Friends at MIT who were sort of disappointed that a quarter of the MIT students were studying computer science was like sort of ticking over and become just commonplace. So huge, as I say, huge changes in academia, and corresponding changes in the professional societies. It was caught, on the one hand, in the early days between mathematics for the sort of upper end of stuff, and electrical engineering, so the evolution of circuits from analog to digital and then into more complicated things. And now and now, those departments have more trouble recruiting people and computer science departments are overflowing. And all of that is an under sort of the under body of then all the governance issues and beyond. So what are we going to do about AI? And do we have to regulate it? What are we going to do about the Internet? What are we going to do about social media? All of those are emergent things for which we can say with either pride or apology, this is what we have brought forth and made possible.
Thank you so much. I think it's so important not to forget the early role of academia and not to let the amazing research happening around the world, fall to the wayside in those more important conversations. I don't know if we have any more questions in the audience. Okay, well, I know that you will probably want to have a chance to chat with our panelists a little bit, maybe more informally. So I'm just going to wrap up a tiny bit early here. So you'll have a chance to do that. Thank you so much to all of our three panelists, Andrew online as well, for being here with us today. Really great conversation. Thanks, you all
