My name is Naela Sarras, I am the Vice President of stakeholder engagement for the North America region at ICANN. And so we are one of the many organizations that are brought up here a lot as a one of the players in this ecosystem. And I'm very, very glad to be here with you today, it's my second or third time participating in Nasik. It's always a very excellent learning experience. Always new ideas and, and just very thought provoking. So I'm really happy to be here. And we that my team, we also sit on the planning team occasionally with the Nasik. And so we get to see this come together every year. And it's really very inspiring to see this come together. All right, so we are coming here together today to talk about multi stakeholder model. I am gonna keep a minister very cognizant of the that because you said it's not done multi stakeholder model, Milton. So we're here talking about multi stakeholder model? Well, I have a few questions prepared for the moderators that I will pose to them. And I will see how far we go with the questions and then we'll open it up to the audience because I can see this is a very engaging group and they have a lot of questions. With me today for moderators, I have two distinguished colleagues that I've known for a long time. We have online I hope we are able to see at some point Andrew Sullivan. And Javier Rua, hey, Yvette, I'll do a quick intro the introduction of the panelists very quickly here. And we were meant to have Marita more also as one of our panelists, but for personal reasons. She couldn't join us today in on the panel, but I believe she is tuning in here. So thank you, Maria, for listening to the session. And please chime in when we get to the q&a, because I know you have wonderful insights to give on this topic. All right. So on to my panelists. I have Andrew Sullivan. As I said today, a little bit of an intro and Andrew Sullivan is the Internet Society president and chief executive officer. He has focused focused on Internet infrastructure and standards since 2001. and has served in multiple roles in technology organizations from launching top level domains, to working on internationalized domain names and internationalization of the domain name system in general. And then managing DNS development and infrastructure work. Hendra Andrew has a long bio that's included on the NASA website and I encourage you to review it there. Lots of credentials that are attached with Andrew have here Ruach Evette is our second panelist here he is an attorney and former Puerto Rican government official and is currently president and CEO of JRj consultants and legal advisors LLC specializing in renewables and Information and Communication Technology Policy. Javier has also served top positions in Puerto Rico in top positions in Puerto Rico's government as well as currently holding several distinguished international posts. He has also served as a counselor at both the at large Advisory Committee and more recently, the country code name supporting organization of the CCNSO of the Internet Assigned Numbers, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I can, again fooled by your for heavier is also available on the nice Nasik website for the 2024 edition. All right, so we're talking about multi stakeholder model in this governance, multi stakeholder model model of governance here. Quickly I'm going to say this is in when we talk about the governance model, we're referring to a model whereby different groups and individuals come together from different backgrounds, participating equally in discussions and collectively making policy decisions. So it's sort of a setup of our coming at this, this topic. Our keynote this morning laid out an excellent foundation for why this topic matters, and why Internet in arguably has been one of the most significant innovations in our human history. This flow of information that's happening on the Internet, enabled profound effects on the world and has become a foundational infrastructure relied upon by billions. This chronic critical infrastructure was brought into sharp focus recently, with several things that are happening on the global level. The global pandemic was one of them. And A more recent example is the current conflicts around the world and and the impact that it has brought to our world of being able to stream live news and live in have images of what's happening and how those affects us in our day to day life. So with that talk with that backdrop, we will talk today on the Internet and a global communication infrastructure that's available to everyone and yet not really owned by anyone. Milton this morning talked about why couldn't we have? And is it an Internet czar or administer of truth, I can't remember what you called it and goodly convinced us why that's not a good idea. But really, truly, we are looking at a system that's not owned by everyone, anyone really, but it is something that impacts us all. So let's talk a little bit about how that the governance of that system is handled currently. And that's why we're talking about the multi stakeholder model today. So I will start with my questions. And to set this up a little bit, I want to ask each of the panelists to give us a little bit of introduction to multistakeholder model from their point of view. And, really, I'm going to add a little bit to to this. This morning, a number of our panelists talked about different organizations in this ecosystem that makes multi stakeholder model. And so as you do your introductions about what the multi stakeholder model is, from your point of view, I want to ask both of you to go We've talked a lot about ICANN today, and I think there was a lot going on here in this last panel, but I can but go please, please a little bit beyond that. And talk about the different players in this ecosystem that make up this ecosystem. Because that's really important as we walk into this multi stakeholder model who these different stakeholders are coming together. I know Bill Drake refer to it as the ice star, for example, was one of the examples he he mentioned. So as you give your introductions, please have here and Andrew, I want you to talk a little bit more on that ecosystem as a whole. So without further ado, I will go to have your first Can we go to you and then we'll come to you, Andrew. Thank you.
Talk in there your morning, afternoon. Good night to all online and here present. I'm heavier again. And great to see you. So the question is broad, and I'm no expert on I-star organizations. And they were mentioned in the in the prior panel. We have Internet Society, we have IETF. We have other organizations that are that are in this broader digital governance ecosystem. Maybe some others. But the way I like to answer this type of question, and some of this was was touched upon in the prior panel, and I really can't do it better than the last panelists. The way I framed this whole discussion is precisely this central question. Governmental, or non governmental. It's almost like you know, To be or not to be governmental or non governmental. And I, as a former government official, came to know about this phenomenon called ICANN. from government, I ended up being an observer in one of the ICANN ICANN sub organizations, the Governmental Advisory Committee, I was chair of an entity called regula Pil, which is a regular TELESAT association of telecom regulators. When I it was the Argentina, Argentina, ICANN, when Osiris and when I got there, I saw this brave new world, that's not maybe a bad term, because it's a new world of where governments were less important actors than individuals. And that really, really, less important in the policymaking conversation, let's say, and that really struck a note a personal note in my psyche, because I'm Puerto Rican, I am from a non sovereign jurisdiction or territory of the United States, that that there's usually a lot of barriers to entry in international transnational conversations to people like me, and and jurisdictions like Puerto Rico and let alone citizens from jurisdictions like Puerto Rico and all of a sudden you have this wide open world of participatory opportunities. So, what I like to stress about this in the governmental or non governmental question multi stakeholder versus multilateral is that multilateral multi stakeholder ism is in a way, piercing or stressor on the normal paradigm of international governance, which is usually a conversation of states talking to each other independent states talking to nation states to talking to each other. But all of a sudden, we have a world here where students, individuals, corporations, private actors, sit on a table with an equal footing and sometimes stronger footing than states. A, you look at ICANN as an organization, you have the different communities and there you have, you know, the country codes CCNSO, you have the governments, the GAC, you have the top level domains, the generic the GNSO, well, in a way that GNSO and CCNSO, as as you know, are entities that have more, more policymaking power to really say that way than GAC, which is just advisory, just like give some advice versus, you know, these DNSSEC CDNs are actually right in the conversation, and they're so so I'll leave it there, I think ICANN is always a good example. But in my view, better than ISOC and IETF, and other ISOC organizations, because in a way I can is truly making transnational policy via private contracts over the world. And the actors that are having this multi stakeholder conversation, that is a bottom up conversation that ends up being kind of like policies that are adopted everywhere, on a very limited space of goal, just the DNS and numbering policy world. It's really creating binding norms that are transnational. And the actors are, are anyone that wants to participate. And I think that's a step, you know, step that's stronger, I think, than other ISOC organizations that are consensus based, and they agree on standards. And these standards trickle down in ways that become binding in a way. But I can have a whole contractual way to make things truly legally binding all over the place. So it's, it's a really a real stressor on the usual international policymaking paradigm of states talking to each other and making treaties. So I'll leave it there for a second.
Okay, it's better? I don't see Andrew, is Andrew still with us? All right, over to you, Andrew.
Thanks, thanks very much. And sorry, I couldn't be in Puerto Rico in person. But, you know, through the magic of the Internet, I get to be there anyway. So thank you for inviting me. And thank you to the organizers for inviting me. But one of the things that I think is always very interesting about these discussions about multi stakeholder models, is that people often talk about it as though it's a sort of alternative political settlement as opposed to, you know, multilateral approaches, or, you know, voting or whatever else you might like. And one of the things that's weird about about this model, is that it sort of emerged on the Internet. And that's partly because of what the Internet is. So, so it's not the case that we ended up with a multi stakeholder model of governance for the Internet, because a bunch of nerds got together and decided, Oh, this is the way we want the world to run. Instead, what it is, is that the Internet fundamentally, is made up by cooperation. You have your network, you run it according to your needs, I have my network, I run it according to my needs. And they connect together. And that's what makes it an Internet. That's it's right there in the Word. And the way that the Internet happens is that you have these standards, these protocols, they're called that all of the networks implement in ways that interoperate with one another. And that way, you got no boss in the middle. And now you can just build this world wide network, out of independent networks that are just working together without a contract being in the middle. So whereas I think it's probably true, that ICANN is bringing contractually binding things to, to the players in this industry, if you had to scale the Internet that way, it would never work. In fact, we did that before we had a network that worked that way. And it was the telephone network. The telephone network worked by transitive contracts all the way up. And the final contracts were of course treaties that created the ITU or created before that other other other name things that are sort of the same thing. So the Internet worked because it was this because it was this network of networks, and everybody's just doing their own thing, and you got to get everybody to agree. And if you've got to get everybody to agree, in order to make the whole thing work, then you have to do it in a multistakeholder way. What I like to say is that on the Internet, you know, the story of the donkey with the carrot and stick, right, you want the, you want the donkey to move around. So you put a carrot in front of the donkey, and you beat it on the bum. And and then the donkey moves ahead. On the Internet, there's no stick, you've just got carrots, you've got incentives for other people to do the right thing, you have no power to make them communicate with you, you can't, because it's their network. And if they don't want to talk to you, they just won't, that's just how it works. So what you have to do in order to build the intranet is to have this multi stakeholder model where everybody's opinion is considered, because if you don't consider everybody's opinion, maybe some of them won't participate, and then you will have the Internet anymore. So that's fundamentally why we've got this model as a deep part of the of Internet governance, this wasn't a sort of easy political settlement that nerds came up with, because they wanted to do something weird, they came up with it, because it was the only way they knew how to get other people to cooperate with them. And if you've ever been in a nerd conversation, you know, with a bunch of engineering people or something like that, their idea of getting along is perhaps not a conventional one, right? Like this is a very tussle Lee kind of environment. But the reason it's that way, and the reason it's messy, and the reason that often doesn't make, you know, a lot of people comfortable, especially people who are much more used to more diplomatic sorts of environments and so on, is because some of the people that you have to get along with in this environment are irascible people. They're not, they're not that friendly. They're they've got very strong opinions about how things ought to work. And they're going to tell you, and they're going to tell you in detail in details that you didn't want to know. And that's just part of how this system works. It has the advantage however, that out of it, we get the Internet. And the Internet is this like nearly magical collection of these networks, right? The fact that the Internet works without a central coordinating authority is mind boggling if you think about that as an engineering fact. But it's because of the particular way that we arrange things. And so that to me, is really a piece of this multi stakeholder discussion that I wanted to bring to the surface so that we had the opportunity to see that as well.
And thank you, Andrew. Thank you. Yeah. All right. So then on this theme, Andrew, and you bring this up on the theme of people get together. And out of willingness, you use the analogy of a donkey and a carrot and there is no, in this case, there's no stick in a donkey, there's only the carrot. The Internet works because we all agreed to use the same shared standards. And we get together and we use the same standards. And it works. And like you said it magically works. Could I please redirect this question to you, Andrew, can you talk a little bit to us? And I know I'm asking you this? Because I know you have a lot of history in the IAB and the IETF? How do these different actors come together to create these standards that we then all eventually agree to use? And then how do we? How do we avoid if it's voluntary, and people come together on a voluntary basis? How do we avoid being captured by a certain interest in how these standards get developed? If you could tell us a little bit more about that? And Joe, please? Sure.
Um, so the standards and other and other activities like for instance, the regional Internet registries that that handout, IP addresses, you know, they're typically not developing standards, but they've got a process for, you know, who gets what addresses under which, what circumstances, which, you know, matters less now that ipv6 is rolling, because there's so much ipv6 space but mattered a whole lot when we were doing ipv4 Because it was a scarce resource. So there's a lot of different ways that these things get expressed. You know, the standards development works, basically, through through rough consensus and running code. I mean, it's not, it's not an especially, it isn't really a, a democratic way of doing things for a Democrat. The, the way the IETF works is quite unsatisfied, because it's not a representative arrangement. You don't have a constituency, you show up, you do reviews of the documents, you join this club that has all kinds of arcane rules that are very hard to understand. And, and then when you show up there, you know, by participating and by all you know, offering useful critiques that make the stand the protocol work better, you sort of gained some you know, you sort of gain reputation points. I guess, but, but more importantly, you know, you come to be regarded as somebody who's useful because they've got useful observations about how other things have worked. So probably, there'll be useful in this case as well. And this has, has some upsides, like, for instance, you often get pretty good protocols out of that. It has some real serious downsides. Like, for instance, the, the culture of the IETF resembles the culture of the Internet, in only the dumbest way like it, like the sort of demographics of the people who build the standards on the on the Internet, or not, especially like the demographics of the people who use the Internet. And, you know, that can mean that the standards are built with various blind spots. So we actually have the problem, where, you know, things are captured in that sense, but we are blind to it, because of course, you know, it's just the sort of culture that people that people are living within, you can have the situation where somebody attempts to take over one of these things, I mean, one of these, one of these bodies, either directly, you know, through lawsuits or so on, or else by sort of, you know, overwhelming the the population through just like over participation by one demographic. And that can be a problem. Arguably, that's, in fact, a problem at the idea of now, you know, white guys like me, are over represented in the in the IETF. Today. The last thing that I would say, though, is is a piece of what is a slightly different thing? I thought it was where you were going with a question, so I'm going to answer it anyway. But there is this other thing about the Internet that it is technically quite resilient, we managed to build a reliable system out of unreliable parts. This is a genius piece of engineering, because we just did it with a lot of redundancy. You know, the old phone system, everything was a five nines, reliable piece of equipment. Internet doesn't work that way, we just ship 10 of them and figure that one is going to work and it'll be fine. And that's kind of the way that the intranet happens to work. And it turns out that it does. But it's it is politically actually quite fragile. Because it depends on this idea. The reason that the multistakeholder model is so important is because it depends on everybody embracing it, and being in line with it, and thinking that more connectivity is good. And we're no longer in the world where everybody believes that more connectivity is good. There's lots of people now who think that breaking connectivity is a good idea. Lots of countries are doing Internet shutdowns and so on. And that means that we're not really, we don't have a political settlement that covers this technology in that way, if people don't embrace this multi stakeholder model, because of all the things that I said at the beginning.
Indeed, Thank you, Andrew. You're right. That's not where I was going. But I'm really, I'm really glad you went there. Because I think you've set it up very nicely for our next perhaps for our next point or next question. And you touched on it a little bit heavier. We often talk about multi stakeholder model. And we contrast that with the multilateral stakeholder with the multilateral model. So perhaps I can ask you maybe to for our audience, for our new scholars here in this in this room, perhaps to differentiate a little bit between the multistakeholder and the multilateral approaches to governance. And then, you you talked with in your intro about the GAC the role of the Governmental Advisory Committee and and perhaps give them maybe they even have a lesser role in the ICANN multi stakeholder model. So perhaps touch on that as well. Thank you.
Sure. So, some of you might know already, but and it was mentioned the prior panel multi-lateralism really refers to let done intergovernmental model which is a normal normal or way or historical way where international rulemaking has happened. So, what that means is that in different contexts, it can be the UN or it can be other context where their clubs of nation states, independent nations that have standing in the international sphere, talk to each other and they make they make treaties, which are kind of like agreements with by with themselves, it can be bilateral or multilateral, by to multi, many to make these norms and they become legal norms, because because states want them to be so that's called opinio, juris and international law. But multilateralism as opposed to that is, is really, so if multilateralism is just a nation of a club of nation states multistakeholder ism is really a way of governance which has very low barriers to entry. States are part of it, but not the protagonists, they are important, but you can have, you know, individuals, you can have corporations, you can have other groups of other interest groups. So in a way you can one can think about this As if the paradigm or the traditional paradigm of international governance has been purely public, public, meaning governmental, what multi multi stakeholder ism is part of can be seen as part of a stress or to that model, where the boundaries between the private and the public are less less than that substantially, and and ICANN and other ISOC organizations, but I can I see ICANN as evidence of a movement in this direction, which has been slow kind of Eero eroding this multi stakeholder model. And it's not ICANN is unique, but you can also think about other entities that are weird like I can, I can, it's unique, but think about, for example, the International Red Cross, the International Red Cross, is legally a Swiss Corporation, with subsidiaries all over the place, but it has mandates by international treaties to implement the law of humanitarian international law, but it's a private corporation, a suit super interesting, it doesn't seem to fit clearly into the multi lateral model, the state centered model, even if states allow it, allow it to be so and they gave this entity public mandates but it's a private entity, the Red Cross, think about the International Olympic Committee, also a Swiss corporation with with subsidiaries all over the place, sometimes more governmental than than then then then others in depending on the local situation politically, sometimes Olympic Committees locally are purely governmental, and sometimes they will purely private, but the International Olympic Committee as a private entity, but with a kind of public mandate, you know, international Olympism competition and also all the regulatory aspects that have to do with with, you know, like, for example, doping and, and its relationship with the anti doping appellate mechanisms in the world so, so I can, all of a sudden, you have this entity and Professor Muller mentioned it, I can, it's kind of like another step in that direction. He didn't frame it this way that I'm framing it, but this is where I see it, I can a further move in this direction, because now I can, even though I can still legally a California Corporation, a non California nonprofit. Thus, the legal, the legal umbilical cord was severed with the NTIA, the federal agency, kind of like had the legal mandate over this, the umbilical cord was cut in the Ayana transition, the ICANN modern modernization transition, but then some sort of constitutional event happened whereby the governance the sovereignty over this organization is placed upon this notion of the, you know, the people of the Internet, the multi stakeholder community, and this is new, this is new, not that non state actors and Internet, international governance are new, you have, as I mentioned, you know, Red Cross and International Olympic Committee or other non state actors like the, you know, environmentalist, the Rainbow Warrior, and it happens, but I can seem like a new constitutional cause a new a new kind of like entity in transnational law, at this as an attorney, I can't escape framing it that way. And but yeah, it's it's a stressor, in my view, on the normal way of doing top down international rules. And this is a bottom up international policymaking process where everyone can be part of
indeed, thank you. And I really, really appreciate the examples you gave with the International Red Cross and the Olympic Committee. I think we we don't spend enough time talking about other examples of the application of this model or how it's applied to other organizations. Andrew, I want to go to the next question. But did you want to add anything about multistakeholder? Multilateral?
Oh, no, we should, we should. I mean, just in the interest of time, we want to make sure that people have time to, you know, throw questions at us, too.
Okay. Excellent. Thank you. So then I want to talk a little bit want to move kind of a little bit about the positive aspects of this model as we observe them and then areas of improvement, like with all models, their strengths and, and areas of improvement. We heard in the previous panel a little bit about for example, multistakeholder model is great when everybody's represented, everybody's has a voice. But do we have everyone at the table that needs to be represented and have a voice? The ICANN of 1520 years Go is not the ICANN that we see today when we walk into an ICANN meeting, in terms of the people that we see in the room. So simple representation just by what how much the room looks differently. So maybe perhaps I'll I'll start with you, Andrew, a little bit on their strengths and weaknesses of this opportunity. And where do you see of this model? And then what do you see opportunities for growth?
Oh, well, I mean, you know, an obvious strength is that is, especially in respect of the Internet, is that it's aligned with the way the Internet actually works. So, you know, on the one hand, sometimes people say, Well, what about the people who aren't here? You know, who haven't joined the Internet yet? And what about their interests? And, you know, I understand that, on the other hand, you know, if they're not connected to the Internet, maybe they don't have an opinion about it yet. And, and, you know, you maybe want to, you know, like, it's sort of got this lightweight feature of being the model of people who are interested in the topic, because they got a stake in it. Hence, the stakeholders, right? They're not stakeholders, like they're going to put it through your heart, they have a stake in sometimes I think they're gonna put it through my heart, but the, the, their stakeholders, because they got a stake in the outcome. And that's part of the reason that we, you know, we want them to participate. And of course, the multi stakeholder model allows that because like, if you suddenly discover you have a stake in one of these outcomes, you can just show up, and there's no, you know, you don't have to get credit accreditation from a UN body or anything like that. You just show up, you go to a mailing list or whatever. And now you're now you're a participant, go to town. The disadvantage, of course, is that it it does have this problem that it doesn't match are other kinds of are other kinds of political settlements, right. I mean, I can does, just to pick on ICANN, but like this is true of the IETF. This is true of the of the Internet Society, which isn't exactly one of these kinds of things, it's true of all of the regional Internet registries. If you don't already know what you're looking for on these websites, you are very hard pressed to find it. And the reason you are hard pressed to find it is because you gotta be deeply familiar with like, what problem it is you're trying to solve before you can even start looking. And that's that's a consistent problem. In all of these processes, they're very difficult communities to join. You know, probably many of the participants in the school will have noticed that on the ICANN site, like there's this, you know, there's, there's all these little pegs that tell you Oh, here's another acronym that you don't know. And like, it's this acronym soup that you got to learn, just to get started. Also true in in Internet standards also true in the, in the in the numbers, discussions, it's true just generally, because these are, you know, they're specialists kind of disciplines. And it's a hard, it's a hard community to join. So that's an obvious like, sort of downside. And then there is this additional thing that I think is a current problem, although it isn't, it hasn't always been a problem. You know, we started talking about multistakeholder ism, and how important it is, and so on. And we we kind of put in an amber, like, there's this tendency to treat it as though it's a single thing, and that we know what it is. And like, we know how the constituencies in ICANN work and all the rest of it. But of course, those are just fit for purpose today, if something changes dramatically on another occasion, we've built all kinds of structures around our current understanding. And, and sometimes you can see the trickiness of this when the community is changing and getting ahead of the structures that we've built, and that's one of the difficulties because we don't have, you know, in a multistakeholder system, you don't really have a constitution that you can say, Oh, we're just gonna, we're, you know, we're going to pass an amendment through our legitimate people who's legitimate under those circumstances. That's precisely what the tussle is about. So that's where that's where there is a structural problem.
To that, sure. I mean, I can disagree, I think a disadvantage and maybe a weakness of the multi stakeholder model are not of the model itself or just of its fact is just that it's diminutive, diminutive, it's small. It's a way of doing things, but it applies to a very limited set of things in the universe. And because it was the this governance model was kind of born and raised and developed for the Internet. So it works for this. But would it work for governance of nuclear weapons? I don't know it. So there's always this is diminutive because it applies to a set of talks topics that seem natural for this model. But but it is there's an even there, there's pressure from governments to kill it, even in that very diminutive world, imagine growing it into other topics, I would love for it to grow into other topics. Because multicell mostly state governor holder governance believes in the best kind of like angels of human nature, you know, good faith collaboration. So, but But human beings are not 100% good faith and collaborative. And then you have and then you have different types of governments, you have different types of interests are so big, it's small, and it's hard to grow into other topics. But that doesn't mean that that similar things don't creep in into other policymaking a, kind of like spheres. But it's hard to describe them as true multi stakeholders. Um, you can, you can say, you can see, for example, private opinions and private actors being incorporated into international negotiations, to have more legitimately more deeper views, more complex views on topics or more interest being being being considered. But I don't know if that's true multistakeholder ism, but it's definitely not the standard nation states, just talking to nation states. But it's that it's just it's small, and it's hard to grow because it really grew for our for this, and we have to figure out what what other areas you can naturally evolve into in international and French lateral policymaking?
That's really, that's really interesting. Yeah. Okay, but you bring up, you know, you said, you brought up governments again, and I wanted to go into my next topic here that I wanted to make sure we get to, before we're gonna run out of time, which is the term digital sovereignty. It's something that we are increasingly hearing more about, especially as you know, when things become a little bit unclear, protectionism tends to want to go up. So, Andrew, I know this is something something that the Internet Society has done work on. So perhaps, if you could please talk to us about a little bit about digital sovereignty? Does this pose a challenge for the multi stakeholder model? And if so, how? And in the interest of time, while you have the mic, I want you to also take us into how that is connected, or could lead to Internet fragmentation or the splinternet. If you could take that topic together, please. That would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah,
sure. I mean, you're right to link them because, in fact, they're really the same thing. That sort of digital sovereignty when people talk about that. I mean, sometimes they just mean something. Like, it's a $5 word for something, you know, fairly, fairly ordinary, like, you know, oh, well, like our laws apply here. Yeah, sure. They do. You know, corporations that are active in your, in your jurisdiction are subject to your jurisdiction, that's kind of what jurisdiction means. But when we, you know, take that further, and sort of said, well, we want the intranet to work in this different way. And we don't care what the, what the consensus is about how it actually operates, or in some cases, like, we don't want it to work, right? Today, we want to turn it off for the next four hours, in order to turn it back on later, we want everything to come back the way it was. That's, that's really breaking the Internet. It's, it's not just, it's not just like a little thing. You know, a few years ago, there was this, this article passed around that, you know, there's gonna be three internet's there's going to be the Chinese Internet, there's going to be the European Internet and the American Internet, and like, they're going to evolve in these different ways. And what the people who worked on that seemed not to have fully appreciated or anyway, I mean, maybe they appreciate it. But I don't think a lot of readers of that article understood it is that you don't have the Internet at all, if you got three of them that can't talk to each other. Like that's not the Internet, that's three different networks. And they're separate from one another. And we had things like that in the past, in the pre Internet days, you had like America Online, and you had CompuServe. And if you were on CompuServe, you could talk to other CompuServe users, but you couldn't talk to anybody on America Online. And, and you had to have accounts on both things in order to talk to them. If of course you say, Oh, well, we'll have these three things, but we'll link them together. What you've added is like an extra layer of Internet for no obvious purpose whatsoever. So there's only two possibilities here, right? Either these things can talk to one another, or they can't. But I think that many of the people who are enthusiasts for these sorts of so called Digital sovereignty approaches fail to understand that what they're really talking about is not being able to talk to other people because the Internet was designed for precisely not around country barriers. And so if you start to say, well, we want the country barriers back, what you're saying is, we're going to break the way the Internet design works in favor of what was what you can think of as, as an early idea about what became the Internet, which was called a cat in that you take one network, and you stick it on the end of another one, and you stick it on the end of another one. And you traverse all of these networks all the way along the path. And each one of them speaks a slightly different protocol, and they have converters at the edges. And of course, the problem with this was very quickly you like this was unmanageable. And so we ended up with the intranet where we ended up with just one common protocol underneath them all. If you're gonna break that now, because that's how the routing system works. That's how the TCP IP works and everything like that, we're not going to have the Internet, we're just going to have these isolated networks. And that is really what the splinternet is. And by the way, just to be an alarmist, I like I'm sorry to say this, but like, here, I am the president of the Internet Society. And I'm here to tell you, I think we are terribly close to losing the Internet for good, like forever, because of that kind of drift. And it's not just governments who are doing it, there are also private interests, they're very, very large, some of the best capitalist corporations in the history of capital, they want to own you, they want you to stay inside their walled garden. That is the tension that we're facing. If people don't believe in interconnection and in in, you know, allowing the free flow of packets, we just lose the Internet, we don't have it anymore. And that would be a terrible thing for us to uninvent for ourselves.
Indeed, and scary. But I'm gonna bring us back to hope, Andrew, because hope is one of the three pillars of this school. And I do want to have some words of wisdom from both of our panels today for the for the audience and the newcomers. Today, before we end up, so I'm going to open up the question right now, some questions, see, what are what questions our audience has. And then before we run out of time, I will take some time to ask our panelists what their advice is for newcomers how they can come into this space, and how can they participate? So what questions do we have online? Or in the room? Alfredo?
Yes, we have an online question from Siva, he is asking specifically to Andrew, and I think you sort of gave us the answer. How is the multi stakeholder model evolving? Or what needs to happen so that it can evolve and avoid the fragmentation of the Internet?
Well, I do think that there are, there are a couple of things. One thing is that there are a lot of people who just want things to go back the way it was. So there are you know, there are commercial interests, for instance, in the world who just don't want the Internet anymore, because it ruins their business, and they would like it to go away. And I think we have to accept that, you know, as John Culkin, like to say, you know, we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us, the Internet is a new fact, in the world, just as surely as the automobile was a new fact, in the world, in the early 20th century, we have remade the world, because we've introduced this, this vast new thing. And so one thing we've got to do, like, just as constituents of our respective governments, is to remind them that sometimes the world has changed, and you've got to cope with it. So I think that's one piece of it. A second piece is we have a bunch of interests. You know, and some of those are our governments, and they're, they got tired of waiting for, for answers from, especially the things that like work over the Internet much more than the Internet itself. And so what they saw was, oh, okay, well, I can just regulate this Internet thing, and that'll cause that'll cause the right thing to happen with, with the thing running over the top. And so we have to get a hold of them and stop them from imposing the rules, you know, from from trying to regulate, pick your favorite, you know, tech giant meadow, or Google or Apple whoever. We got to stop them from trying to regulate that by changing the way the infrastructure works. And, and that's something that the Internet Society is very engaged in. So I encourage you to, you know, to join us in that in that work, we have a bunch of, you know, advice for, for policymakers, and so forth along those lines. But the final thing, of course, is is a little bit related to what I was saying earlier, that you know, we have to accept as participants in these in these various bodies. The bodies themselves are shaped according to the ways the participants that participated all the way along did, you know made things and like it's not good enough. For, you know, guys who look like me and the IETF, to say, No, we always did it that way, that's not an argument. And we're going to have to adjust ourselves and accommodate more voices and more people because they're interested in what we're doing. I think that's true. And I can I think that's true in all of the regional Internet registries. I think it's true in all the standards development organizations, and the Internet, Society itself needs to needs to evolve that way too, although we don't have that role. So I think that that's another important fact.
Thank you, Andrew. Okay. Let's see if we have any other questions in the room? Yes, we do. Could you please state your name?
Yeah. For the record, part of ice of Brazil. And I would like to make a question, especially to Andrew. And I don't know if the same article that we are talking about, but the one I read recently was also talking about the Indian view on the Internet. And which is not a separate model, but mostly based on the GCL ID and the services that were there, within a regulatory government framework. And one important part of, of it that was not exactly in the article is that was based on mostly on open source models. And a lot of people are talking about open source as a way of getting out of the fragmentation problem, this digital sovereignty problem. And I wished I wanted to know, if you think it is really a solution, if it's capable of resolving most of the problem, or if it's just something that is unnecessary, or a barrier, it's not that important of the solution to the problem.
Oh, thank you for that. So, you know, if you make a, if you make a technology illegal, the license under which it is released, doesn't matter. And there are plenty of things that the government of India has made illegal on the Internet, that are, you know, parts of the function, particularly in certain regions of India. And, and I think that, you know, that model is one in which there is a center of control in the networks, when you start building networks around the center of control, you'll make them much more fragile. It's been awful watching Russia over the past many years, unpick the resilience that it used to have and its networks in order that the Kremlin can turn the Internet off in Russia, that's a terrible thing to do, we have this nice, reliable infrastructure, and you've broken it on purpose, just so you could turn it off. And so I think that this is, you know, this is a piece of, of the message of hope that we have today, we need to take that forward and remind, you know, policymakers and governments where we live, hey, the resilience comes out of this redundancy, the redundancy is a valuable thing, especially in a world where the climate is changing, and, and so it's 11 degrees here in Toronto in February today. And so like, you know, you gotta be alert to this, and okay, the world is going to change, I need more redundancy, because my infrastructure is going to be more fragile, we need to have all of that redundancy. So let's build it. And let's, you know, let's make sure that we do it. So open source, I think is a is a part of this, just because it allows for a lot of auditing and so on, people can understand what the code does, and that that prevents the fear that of some, you know, foreign piece of code, but it doesn't automatically guarantee that you're gonna get into an operation.
Great, thank you. Have Yeah, before, I don't know if there's more questions in the room, but we'll have before we run out of time, I want to start with you, for incoming people, fellows, newcomers. How can a new person coming into this space, have meaningful participation in the multi stakeholder model of Internet governance? How can how can people like our colleague over there this morning was saying, you know, how do I feel like I belong, I have a place in this space and I can contribute.
Go on line. I mean, if you take ICANN within ICANN, you have the large community, the large organization where like and at large has very low or no barriers to entry. So within that large you have region a lot larger organizations that you know, your country might have some and then and look into those and send an email, try to Europe, Puerto Rico, you might be able to go to the ICANN meeting, try to seek out people that that are that will help you understand more, but just go online and read up. There's multiple ways to join this world, this movement, and it's pretty open and the information is out there. And it's not hard. It's not hard to do. It's there's also funds what you there's ways to apply for funds for the different like travel that has to happen or logic that has to happen, but a lot of the activity is really remote via the Internet and There might be some challenges there on connectivity and and, you know, paying for Internet. But there's also, I believe there still are some some ICANN funds for connectivity. So there's ways to help out, you know, reduce even more the these low barriers to entry, but the opportunities are there, I think at large at ICANN, it's a great way to start. Dr. Struck here, Dr. Jonathan, in that's that's, that's the community I first started at large. In the case of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico is part of the North American, regional, large organization. But in my case, I came in as an individual and individual member even so. So you don't even have to be a part of like even lower entities, like you're within morale, you can even be individual in some cases in this world. So look up, read up, and the opportunities are there.
Thank you. And definitely talk to colleagues. Exactly what have you said, just stop people make them talk to you, because they will, because they need you? Andrew, I believe the same opportunities are also available through the Internet Society, I don't know if you wanted to speak to that at all.
Oh, well, of course, this very meeting is hosted by the Internet Society of Puerto Rico, which is a chapter of the Internet Society. We are organized around a central charity, and then chapters, which form part of our part of our wide community, and that's part of our governance and so on, I won't bore everybody with all the details of how the Internet Society is, is organized. But what I will say is that the Internet Society also runs a lot of training. And those, you know, those things are opportunities that are available, some of them are in person, some of them are a lot of them are online, and you know, they can be self guided, or they can be instructor guided. So we have a lot of opportunities there to you know, understand the fundamentals of how the Internet works. And you know, how governance fits into that and so on, which is one of the things that you know, is part of our part of our charitable mission. The other thing that I will say is members, individual membership in the Internet, Society is free. So, you know, feel free to join us. We're always happy to have more members, but we are a charity, and we take money from you, if you want to give it to us.
Thank you for that. I know we have one more minute. Are there any other last questions? And I know that we're standing between you and lunch, but we will take one perhaps last question. Yes. And please state your name.
My name is Volker or the record I am the data November. So I have a question to heavier from your perspective as a member of CCNSO How has the multi stakeholder model influenced global and regional approaches to Internet governance and if there are any areas or model any format is required? From your point of view? Can you please address?
Well, so if let me so for the benefit of all the CCNSO is a country codes named support organization is the entity itself actually predates ICANN, but it's now within the ICANN family within ICANN. It's the entity that that is the home to the country and territory codes in the case of Puerto rico.pr also have sponsor here. So in my case, my accession to CCNSO was via via the NAM comm which is not really via the local country code is really a lateral entry to that entry, via this mechanism that I can have to recruit stakeholders in a way. So but in terms of the CC NSOs, and the CCS role in Internet governance, I think it's huge. Why I think country code managers, which are the entities that house the, the National domain names or the country codes and territory traitor codes, have, you know, they're a huge spectrum, the total spectrum of governance models. So you have very governmental CCE managers, let's say I would guess the Russian one might be very governmental, I don't know, for a fact. But let's say governments that are very top down very governmental to be have managers that are very close to their government. But then you have you have other models that are purely private and for profit. So that is also parodic merit Benedict Matic in itself of what multistakeholder ism is the variety of governance models, and of ways to approach multi stakeholders from where they're from a purely private, for profit kind of model, or private nonprofit also, to mixed mixed models to purely governmental. So So So CCNSO is very representative of this. A, and gives, in a way a lot of legitimacy to ICANN itself, kind of like the international legitimacy and legitimacy to the multi stakeholder model itself. Because it because it shows that this club that CCNSO is where the CCM managers of all flavors and types, talk to each other and collaborate and propose normal norms for themselves that then become policies via the ICANN policy process. I think it's, it's a real really good example of of what we're talking about it and even within CCNSO, that you also have an individual with because I wasn't really tied to the country, but we're really good friends and I love that PR, but I came in as an individual and to CCNSO a, in this recruitment process called NomCom. So so I don't know if that answers your question, but, but that's kind of the way I talk about CCNSO within the multistakeholder conversation.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to go ahead and close the panel for now. We are at time. Thank you so much, Javier. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today's panel.
