Internet Governance Forum Monday 30 October 2006 Panel 1 Setting the Scene

Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the
 The Inaugural Meeting of the IGF, in Athens on 30 October. Although it is
 largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to
 inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to
 understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an
 authoritative record.

 >> CHAIRMAN VOUELOUMIS:  We had a small delay. Therefore, it is important that
 we start our procedures this afternoon. Let me first introduce myself. My name
 is Panagiotis Voueloumis, I'm head of the Greek telecommunication organization,
 which, among other things, has the privilege of broadcasting these meetings
 through our satellite, Hellas SAT. I welcome you to the first inaugural meeting
 of the Internet Governance Forum. I wish to thank the United Nations
 Secretary-General for giving Greece the opportunity to be the host and to
 extend to everybody present here appreciation to the minister of transport and
 telecommunications for organizing this event. I'm sure that this is the first
 of many such meetings giving stakeholders an opportunity and a formal venue to
 exchange views and opinions regarding the governance of Internet. We all hope
 that out of these meetings will emerge practical solutions to the many new
 issues which the spreading of Internet is raising. Internet is the case where
 the GENIE is out of the bottle. Not only it is roaming free, but it is taking
 over. Things will never be the same again cutting across borders and
 continents, it is forcing us to rethink urgently positions not only technical
 and economic, but also ethical and political. Internet can be a positive force
 in a global community, and this is the purpose of this international dialogue.
 This session will have accomplished its objective if it helps participating
 stakeholders and stakeholders in general, because not all stakeholders are here
 -- everybody is a stakeholder -- to understand each other's needs, fears,
 interests, and priorities. In an ever-changing environment, it will be
 essential for the mechanisms to emerge which will give guidance to Internet
 governance, a major challenge which I am sure that this conference will prove
 equal to. Thank you very much. And now I give the word to Mr. Cukier, who will
 moderate this conference. Thank you. [ Applause ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me add to the
 philosophical questions that we're all confronted with, not only because of
 Internet governance, but because of our venue here today in Athens. We're
 always asking these timeless questions, who are we? Where do we come from? And,
 more importantly, particularly in this forum, why are we here? It's good to
 remember that this is not the beginning of something, and it's also not the end
 of something. We're in the middle of something. On one hand, we're always in
 the middle of a transition. The Internet has been going strong now for 40 years
 or so, and it's going to go strong, we can predict, a lot longer as well. We're
 also in the middle of something in terms of how we structure the Internet, how
 we think about it from a technical point of view, but also from a policy point
 of view and regulatory view, what it means for us in society in terms of
 bettering people. Obviously, government has a role to play. Obviously, business
 has a role to play. And, obviously, the people themselves have a role to play.
 For that reason, this forum fits nicely in the framework of how
 multistakeholder institutions go forward and think about big issues that are
 more than just one stakeholder to move forward and advance. Luckily, we've got
 a terrific panel to discuss these very issues. This is the first step in for
 the Internet Governance Forum, as you're probably aware. What that means is
 much of the things that we're doing right now are untried. We have not actually
 done them before. We haven't thought about how to structure an organization in
 which we can all get together and discuss some of these issues. I mention that
 early on because I and the panelists ask your indulgences, because we haven't
 actually tried this before. And it's a little bit disorganized. But we're going
 to try to do our best. Helping us in that respect is the secretary of the
 event, Markus Kummer, who I pass to now, who will tell us about some of the
 logistics.

 >>SECRETARY KUMMER:  Yes, good afternoon. Moving now into the more --

 >> No, it's not on.

 >>SECRETARY KUMMER:  Good afternoon. We're moving now into the more
 experimental phase, after a traditional, classical opening ceremony. This is
 not a classical intergovernmental meeting where each delegation sits behind a
 table with a name plate. We are sitting in a very free theater-type setting in
 a big hall. So it will not be that easy for the moderators to recognize anybody
 who would like to take the floor and also, we have on the wall the writing,
 whatever you say will appear on the wall. So our scribes would like to know who
 it is who is asking to say something. And we try to have a slightly structured
 interchange between the panelists, and there are quite a number of them, and
 the audience, and there are many more of you in the audience. And it is obvious
 that not everybody will be able to take the floor. So bear with us if we have
 to be -- if choices have to be made. We can count on the support of some
 members of the advisory group, who will help catching the names and catching --
 trying to sort out the discussants, people who ask for the floor. There are --
 oh, they're there. You see Peter Hellmonds, vice president from Siemens;
 Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, Professor at University of Aarhus; Emily Taylor from
 Nominet, the ccTLD of the United Kingdom; and Raul Echeberria, the CEO of
 LACNIC, the regional Internet registry for the Latin American and Caribbean
 region. So they will take the names. But in order to do that, they will rely on
 volunteers. And we have some Greek volunteers who will be lined up in the four
 corridors. You see them there right at the wall, these charming three young
 ladies. They will look at you, and if you would like to say something, try and
 catch their eyes. Put up your hands. They will come to you and they will get
 your business card, preferably. This is very helpful, because it's printed, and
 then our scribes will be able to read the name. If you don't have a business
 card, please write down your name as legible as possible. And I know what I am
 talking about. My handwriting is utterly illegible. So please try your best to
 write it down in a legible way. And maybe say who you are, name, affiliation,
 also country. And, if possible, address the question or the comments you would
 like to make so that our members of the advisory group who will sort out the
 applications for the floor will more or less be able to establish a logical
 order. I think, with regard to the -- asking for the floor, if there should be
 any questions, we can try and sort it out. But this is, as we said, an
 experimental phase. After today's event, we'll go over the books, and maybe
 we'll have adjustments to make. I would also like to point out that we hope to
 have -- as you know, the whole event is webcast, so people who are not able to
 be in Athens can look at their own computer at what's happening here. And we
 hope that we will have some feedback from these people out there. They may
 approach people in the room. I don't know. Some of you may be in touch with
 friends and colleagues in remote places. Instant messaging may be a good way of
 placing questions. We will try and set up some focal points for receiving any
 questions that come from the outside. And, in addition, we have two people
 here, Ken McCarthy and Jeremy Malcolm, who will watch the blogosphere. And he
 will occasionally, then, give their impressions to what people outside this
 room will have to comment. I hope I have not created a confusion at the higher
 level. But I think we take it from here and we give it back to Ken's able
 hands.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Am I wrong? Thank you, Markus. Yeah. Clearly, the first success
 of the Internet Governance Forum can be attested to right now. The fact that
 you've turned off my mike is probably going to lead you all to do a lot better
 than you would otherwise. This is an impressive group of people before me. All
 of them are experts in their field. And I can't help but remember about a
 decade ago almost to the day being at Harvard University where they had a sort
 of similar conference on Internet governance. And there they thought of the
 questions and defined the issues. At the time, of course, there was only about
 200 people in the room. Almost all of them were American. About 60 to 70% of
 them were academics. And of course the businessmen there were thinking, this
 just does not work. Internet governance has changed considerably since that
 time. The question, maybe to start off, and I will ask all of you -- actually,
 before I ask that question, I realize, perhaps what I should do is ask you all
 simply to state your name and your affiliation so that everyone knows who you
 are and can match it with their program. So before I ask my question, please,
 please start.

 >>JUAN CARLOS SOLINES MORENO:  My name is Juan Carlos Moreno.  I am the head of
 the regulator, telecommunications regulator, in Ecuador.

 >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE:  Bertrand de la Chapelle.  I'm the French special
 envoy for the Information Society at the French Foreign Ministry.

 >>SHARIL TARMIZI:  Mohamed Tarmizi. I am a commissioner of the regulatory
 agency in Malaysia. I am also chairman of the Governmental Advisory Committee
 in ICANN, otherwise known as the GAC.

 >>JEAN-JACQUES MASSIMA LANDJI:  Jean-Jacques Massima Landji. I am a
 telecommunications counselor in Gabon, and I am now working in (inaudible).

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN.

 >> YIN CHEN:  My name is Chen Yin, Director General of the International
 Corporation of the Ministry of Information Industry from China.

 >>DAVID GROSS:  Good afternoon.  I'm David Gross.  I'm ambassador for the
 United States of America. And I am responsible for the U.S.'s international
 telecommunications policy.

 >>MANOLI STRATAKIS:  My name is Manoli Stratakis. I am a member of the
 Parliament, and I represent the president of the (inaudible).

 >>LYNN ST. AMOUR:  Lynn St. Amour, President of the Internet Society, or ISOC,
 as we're commonly called.

 >>PHIL BOND:  Philip Bond, President of the World IT Services Alliance, an
 alliance of 67 IT associations. And also president of the IT Association of
 America.

 >>DAVID SOUTER:  Hello, I'm David Souter. I'm a part-time academic, but mostly,
 I run a small group called ICT Development Associates, which works on
 information communications and development policy issues.

 >>KAREN BANKS:  Hi, everyone. My name is Karen Banks. I work with the
 Association for Progressive Communications, which is an international network
 of some 45 national organizations who work with ICTs for social justice, human
 rights, and development. I look after our members, and I'm Australian, based in
 London. Very happy to be here.

 >>PIERRE DANDJINOU:  Good afternoon. I'm Pierre Dandjinou, president of AfriNIC
 and also policy advisory on ICT for the UNDP,  which is the United Nations
 Development Program, based in Senegal.

 >>HIDEO SHIMIZU:  Shimizu, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communication,
 Japan, Vice-Minister for Policy Coordination.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Great. Thank you very much. But now you're not off the hook.
 You've only just begun. The question is, do you feel that Internet governance,
 or -- and the mechanisms by which we consider the Internet is keeping pace with
 the evolution of the technology of the Internet itself? And how do you think
 that multistakeholder approaches fit into this question, to this issue. Would
 anyone like to start? Well, I'm glad that -- oh, Phil, please.

 >>PHIL BOND:  Why not. I think it is constantly a challenge for all
 multilateral bodies to stay up with the pace of technology. That is just almost
 an article of faith, I think, for most people. And I think, therefore, the
 challenge is, and the good news is, that multistakeholders are here together.
 In my case, I'm particularly thrilled to be representing the private sector,
 because they have the reputation, of course, of being a bit quicker in their
 cycles than other agencies of government and so forth. And so we're thrilled to
 be here trying to help the corporate body, if you will, stay up with the fast
 pace of technology.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Sounds great. A consensus? Bertrand, let me put you on the spot,
 ask you, what do you think?

 >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE:  Firstly, -- well, I'll just give you the time to
 put your headphones on. The first thing is that Internet changes are not only
 of a technological nature. It depends on use as well. And we've seen a
 development with the switch from the academic environment to an academic and
 economic environment. But very few people realize nowadays that we've seen a
 second change as well. The Internet has now become a social, economic, and
 political arena. More than a billion citizens around the world exchange through
 blogs, social networks. And that's not just etrade. It goes beyond that. And so
 the result of that is that we need the three types of players now. And the main
 outcome of the summit is that we've seen a decrease in this mistrust between
 the three main categories. And it's a great pleasure to see people in the hall
 who four years ago wouldn't have sat together in the same room. So I think
 that's huge progress due to the summit. Thank you.

 >> Thank you. I think there's a fourth category as well. The young people, the
 kids --

 >>KEN CUKIER:  For the young people who are here, who are actually going to be
 making the Internet and creating it. And we're just the ones who are talking
 about it. Let me ask you, Paul Twomey, what do you think of how the Internet is
 evolving?

 >>PAUL TWOMEY:  I think in some strange senses, it has evolved critically, and
 in others it hasn't at all. In the sense that the -- that maintaining of global
 interoperability, whether the network had five nodes or 500 million nodes,
 really does require a common approach to the way in which the architectures
 worked. I think one of the great geniuses of it is that it allows the
 innovation to take place at the edge. But it's the stability, the stability of
 the various layers, of the building, if you like, which ensures that you can
 keep adding another layer on top of each building all the time. So I think
 there's -- the continued evolution of Internet governance is not really open to
 revolution, because it does require the continued building on -- your standing
 on the shoulders of the giants of the past, if you like. You do actually have
 to make certain that the way the architecture works, that you keep stability,
 while at the same time allowing for innovation. And I think that's pretty
 important, because there's been a tendency in some of the Internet governance
 debate in the past, which is now passing -- I think people are understanding
 this -- but there's been a tendency to confuse the issues that emerge out of
 the content that's carried on the Internet's routing and addressing system with
 the issues of the routing and addressing system itself. And I think sometimes
 the issues of content and new applications and new usages and the sort of
 social directions Bertrand was referring to, they may need a different
 approach.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  One of the key reasons why we're in this room today, following
 on Geneva four years ago and Tunis last year, is the question of development.
 So I'm wondering if any of the panelists can take a look at this big, broad
 question that I've put out there, you know, is the evolution of the Internet's
 policy-making and approach to how it interfaces with society keeping pace with
 the technology of the Internet, but answer that question in the framework of
 development issues. Would anyone like to take a stab at that? Please.

 >>JUAN CARLOS SOLINES MORENO:  I think that development models adapt to the
 sort of circumstances which exist in each country. And that's why there is no
 tested method. We've got countries such as France and Europe with a
 centralized, strong government which can take decisions in a lot of different
 spheres. But then on the other hand, you've got, for example, Spain, Germany,
 which are very highly decentralized. In Latin American as well, you've got
 different development models, political models, Costa Rica, for example, which
 isn't very open as such. And so there are less socioeconomic differences. But
 then on the other hand, you have countries such as Chile, which have major
 privatization processes going on. And this is -- this needs to be reflected in
 ICT policies as well. In other words, there is no clearly defined model. And
 each country has to adapt to its own circumstances, bearing in mind what its
 own agenda is, and also taking into account that technological development is
 coming about at such a rate that developing countries are finding it very
 difficult to keep up and draw up their policies at this rate, as well as
 basically the users and the private sector that want this quick development.
 Countries have to find ways to discuss this, to have an exchange of experience,
 both from a regulatory and a political point of view as well, in order to deal
 with this.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  I posed the question, from your experience, what do you think
 the best way is for developing countries to access these new technologies? Are
 there any lessons learned? Clearly, we have many decades of experience. What,
 from your point of view, works, and what doesn't?

 >>JUAN CARLOS SOLINES MORENO:  It depends on the circumstances in each country.
 In some countries, connectivity and access is very widespread. But now the
 priority is to bring in large swaths of the population to ICT. Some are more
 advanced in terms of connectivity and access. And we have to understand --
 people have understood that ICT's a type of tool for development. And, well,
 there may be different priorities in terms of local applications as well. There
 is no clear-cut recipe for developing countries to apply. Obviously, you know,
 it depends, it has to be tailor-made and will depend on the development policy
 and adapt, then, according to that.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  From AfriNIC, please, tell us, in your view, are there any
 lessons learned over the last years in terms of what works and what doesn't for
 these issues?

 >> Pierre Dandjinou:  Thank you very much. I think when we do observe the
 situation today, say, in Africa, because that is where I actually live and
 work, what policymakers are really looking forward to is the best practices in
 terms of how you should apply ICT for development. And most of the countries
 actually went through some sort of what we might call, you know, regulation of
 the sector. But still they are not yet satisfied. You still have countries
 where the question will come to you, well, you are talking about ICT where the
 issue here is water. So how do you, you know, resolve this issue? But, of
 course, I think one of the mechanisms that has worked is what we first call the
 (inaudible) access, mechanism, where we do in a few places that really yield
 very good results. And I think this is some of the mechanism that I think we
 should think about, and also the regulatory bodies in different countries. We
 feel that regulation now should become much more development-oriented. It
 should not just be about getting licenses and making profit. The question is
 going to be how we actually -- whatever money, resources we get from this
 regulation, now we are giving that money to solve the broader issues about
 development. And this is happening in a few places, actually.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  It's interesting that you say that. Thinking about in terms of
 development orientation, in the -- since we first met in Geneva, about --
 there's about 20% to 30% more people in Africa today have mobile phones than
 they did when we first met in 2004. And so I'm wondering, does the development
 of -- we're seeing the information society arrive in Africa and elsewhere in
 the world, in Asia. But it's not happening in the way that we expected it to
 happen, where there was maybe this presumption, maybe a western and a
 commercial presumption, that it would happen through the PC, one PC, one
 person, Internet access through a wire. But that's not happening at all. But I
 pose the question, why is -- what does the development of mobile
 telecommunications, mobile phones in poor countries, where, as we know, it's
 growing fivefold per year even in countries that are seeing a drop in GDP? What
 can the development of technology in terms of mobile phones tell us about how
 we think about Internet governance and go forward? Does anyone have a thought?
 Please.

 >>JEAN-JACQUES MASSIMA LANDJI:  Thank you. Maybe I can answer that part of the
 question. As you said, in certain countries, mobile telephone penetration has
 increased by ten and that's affected the classical networks as well. Because in
 a lot of countries, the telephone pool, with the land lines, was the main
 point. But as I say, over three years now, this has been a tenfold
 multiplication in the number of mobile phones. So beforehand, it was very
 expensive for operators, well, there was a monopoly there. But now there's a
 free competition on the networks And tenders launched by the governments as
 well. This has meant that we have been able to launch this sector, which has
 literally exploded. Under the connectivity approach, having as much access as
 possible to the services, obviously, people really appreciate mobile telephony.
 And it's got some huge benefits, because in certain areas, people didn't have
 access to phones at all. Mobile telephony has opened all of that up. And this
 access has allowed us to put a bit of a brake on this ignorance. People in the
 hinterland weren't aware of what was happening in the state, as such, and
 they've now become part and parcel of the overall development policy.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  David, please.

 >>DAVID SOUTER:  I'd like to come to this from a slightly different view. A lot
 of this centers around information and technology development. It's almost as
 if these things are new. And actually, information and communications have been
 going on since the dawn of humanity. People have always had information,
 exchanged information, communicated with each other. And new technologies come
 into an environment in which there are long-established patterns of behavior.
 So this isn't a kind of revolutionary new thing. And I think that's important
 to understand. In terms of the telephone and Internet, the research on
 telephone use in very low-income communities, where it is expanding extremely
 fast is showing the primary uses are for emergency protection and maintaining
 links within family and other social networks. That's a very different kind of
 purpose from what you will see when Internet is first used. So I think one
 needs to be wary of linking phone and Internet too closely in terms of how one
 thinks about this. The other point I'd actually make, it's in a sense a sort of
 warning in a sense. And I actually think there's a positive answer to this. But
 last year we had the World Summit, which emphasized the importance of ICTs in
 development. We also had the millennium review summit, which ignored the
 importance of ICTs in development. And there was a very big gap in -- a
 paradigm gap, really, between the ICT-led assumptions of WSIS and the -- and
 large parts of the development community, which needs to be addressed, I think,
 government, intergovernmental, and elsewhere.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  I see now people are chomping at the bit. Let me please ask
 Sharil to speak, and then ambassador gross.

 >>SHARIL TARMIZI:  Thank you, Ken. I just wanted to pick on that point about
 the technology issue that you raised in mobile telephony.  A friend of mine
 once said to me, you know, if you grew up with something, then it's not
 technology. And it took me some time to try and figure that out, because I was
 thinking, what do you mean?  Then I realized my three-year-old kid does not
 even think about switching the television channel using the remote control.  If
 the remote control was not there, the child does not know how to turn the
 channels. Similarly, a child in a country where you have electricity available,
 flick on the switch, you realize the light is supposed to come on.  You expect
 the light to come on. But for a child who has never been exposed to
 electricity, for example, what to make of the switch?  Then they look at it and
 they say, AH, the light bulb, that's technology! So similarly here.  Focusing
 on the technology is one thing.  Focusing on access the other. But I think what
 David was trying to talk about was focusing on what the technology can do for
 people.  I think that's the core. And that probably is maintaining links and
 social networks. You have seen the advent of my space.  You have seen the
 advent of You Tube.  Who would have thought You Tube would have grown so
 rapidly, people wanting to put their home videos and other people wanting to
 watch them.  It is working.  I don't know how it is making money, but it's
 working.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  I can't believe people are actually going to watch us live on
 the Internet right now. But let me press you a little bit on this. What does --
 Take what you have said and apply it to both, on one hand, development issues
 and on the other hand, what it means for how multistakeholder bodies like this
 one should approach the idea of Internet Governance.

 >>SHARIL TARMIZI:  Well, part of what it is is to actually learn and understand
 the perspectives from which each of us come from.  Every one of us, I used to
 use this example quite often about the story of the three blind men and the
 elephant.  Some of you may have heard me say this.  Where blind man number one
 touches the elephant from the nose and he says the elephant feels like a snake,
 a trunk, a strong one. The second blind man touches the elephant from the side
 and he says, no, no, you are wrong.  The elephant is actually like a wall. The
 third blind man touches the elephant from the tail and he says, no, no, no, you
 are both wrong because the elephant feels like a rope. Each one of these blind
 men is accurate from his own perspective.  But collectively, we all know,
 because we all know what the elephant looks like, we all know all three are
 wrong. But you put the three of them together in a multistakeholder type
 environment where you have private sector, civil society and governments
 working together, putting different perspectives on the table, agreeing to
 disagree in some cases, and looking at the different perspectives and then I
 think you will probably come up with a more whole some picture of what needs to
 be done.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  That's possible, but the other problem is they might not know
 actually what it is. Ambassador gross.

 >>DAVID GROSS:  I think the problem of what it is is a very significant one,
 and I think that's the good news.  Because what it means is that both, as what
 was discussed before, we all come with our own backgrounds and perspectives,
 depending on where we grew up, what our age is, what our experiences have been.
 But it also means that things are changing.  I think one of the things, as I
 come at this as a government official, that I worry a lot about is that it's
 very easy to talk about and defend and debate what has been the case.  It's
 much harder to understand where things are going and to try to be proactive in
 a way that helps everyone. And yet that's our job. And so when this was
 originally being discussed, having the Internet Governance Forum, I was
 certainly not only persuaded but enthusiastic about the creation of it both
 because what I heard from my friends in the developing world was that they
 needed a place to go to have this type of exchange.  That we in the developed
 world took for granted this type of exchange.  And that that was not
 universally true.  And I was persuaded that that was correct. But also, it's
 the type of exchange which, by having a dialogue can lead to greater
 understanding, not because there is a truth but because we all come at these
 things and try to create a group of truths that we can all live with, that we
 can all advance. And if the purpose of this is to better ourselves, primarily
 through bettering the developing world, that so dearly and greatly needs the
 help, it is through that sort of exchange of ideas, the best practices, many of
 which are contained in the results of the summit, which I thought was
 extraordinarily powerful, the best practices that were talked about there, and
 an enabling environment to create an environment for the creation of the
 infrastructure that we can all use, rule of law, those types of basic issues
 that we often take for granted but are really, really critical in this area, I
 think that's an extraordinarily important thing.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Thank you. Let me ask Yin Chen from China, director-general
 Chen, what do you think when you think of the idea of multistakeholders and
 Internet Governance?

 >>YIN CHEN:  In Chinese, I will give some time for the interpreters. In China,
 my government is greatly interested in this matter.  We look at it as a matter
 of strategic development for China. The development of Internet in China is
 closely connected with the how information industry development and we have
 adopted corresponding policies and measures. In China, Internet has been
 growing for just ten years. after rapid development over the past decade,
 Internet in China has more than 100 million users. As far as my country is
 concerned, Internet has penetrated to all areas of society, including political
 sphere and economic sphere. Therefore, for the country, it is quite important
 to adopt a good policy to encourage maximum competition of the market in order
 to encourage the growth of Internet.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Let me turn to Lynn St. Amour of ISOC who wanted to address
 this issue.

 >>LYNN ST. AMOUR:  I didn't want to respond directly to Dr. Chen's comments.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  That's fine.

 >>LYNN ST. AMOUR:  I think there is a danger when we speak about Internet
 Governance and tying it to forums such as this and believing that we are
 actually addressing it. I think Internet Governance takes place all over the
 world every day, many, many places.  It takes place not in recognized forums,
 not only in recognized forums like the Regional Internet Registries or IETFs. 
 It takes place in discussions between ISPs and their customers, between ccTLDs
 and their customers, between ccTLDs and each other. And the Internet was built
 on a number of premises:  Openness, transparency, and inclusiveness being two
 of the most fundamental. And I actually think when we focus on things like
 multistakeholderism as well and we talk about that as a model and believe
 that's actually something that we put a good multistakeholders' model in place
 that that will adequately address the issue of Internet Governance that that's
 doing a great disfavor to both Internet Governance, plus I think to
 multistakeholders. We can call this model multistakeholderism but I suspect you
 would find a lot of people who would say that, in fact, it's not as
 participatory as it needs to be. So I would prefer that we, instead, focus,
 rather than on models, on some of the principles.  Again, principles like
 openness or transparency or inclusiveness.  And that in all of our practices,
 whether we are a government or whether or not we are a private company or a
 private organization or a not-for-profit organization that is responsible for
 some aspect of development, that we could raise them there.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  We might find we agree on the principles but we disagree on how
 we get there. And I think one of the tensions first in Geneva and then a
 tension again in Tunis was a disagreement not on the principles.  We were all
 kind of broadly in favor of the same sort of thing but the pragmatic issue of
 what we do about these things. This forum is kind of interesting because it has
 disaggregated many of these issues and it's actually cleaved them off and is
 discussing them separately, security in one place, openness on another, access
 on a third.  And of course the very terms are slightly ambiguous, so they can
 be amorphous and add things and shed things as well, but in terms of the model
 of Internet governance and the idea of multistakeholderism, does anyone have
 anything else to add to Lynn in terms of this conflict on one hand of values
 and principles that we may agree with but the pragmatic efforts that we need to
 take to enshrine those principles going forward where we may have divergence. 
 Bertrand.

 >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE:  Thank you very much. Well, I basically would like
 to follow up this point picking up especially what was said in terms of the
 relationship between the development of governance and technology. Now, another
 point which has been touched upon is to what extent, basically, Internet itself
 can enable one to have a new form of governance. We have been talking about
 Webcasting here.  The idea of actually diffusing a blog and a whole host of
 other tools which enable one basically to see how public policy is being
 developed, decided, and often implemented without actually going into details,
 because it does depend on the individual subject.  But it is obvious today that
 a number of measures which are adopted in a country in the legal sense have an
 effect, in fact, on other aspects, and does impinge upon other actors in the
 private field. So it is an issue which would require some sort of decision by
 the courts. So technology developed whereby one elaborates the rules and how
 one is going to actually implement the rules is very important. I'd like to
 reply to what Sharil was saying, with the elephant and the blind persons issue.
 I think it's a metaphor which we need to bear in mind.  It's a tool which I
 often use to explain what is happening here within the forum, because it's
 important for each of the subjects to actually explain what the elephant is. 
 In other words, to confront the different points of views on each individual
 subject so that we can have as full, as much information as possible.  So one
 of the objectives of the forum here is to define the subjects as completely as
 possible.  And the second element is to, as was said by David, to look at the
 fundamental question:  What are we trying to construct here?  And what we're
 describing here, and what we are going to try and describe is a new mode of
 relations between different actors who have to define the subject so that they
 can work together. So this is important.  This, I think, is wherein lies our
 effort to establish a new edifice by using Internet.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  The elephant, is in America we have the idea of the gorilla,
 that 7,000 pound gorilla in the room.  And that metaphor means something else. 
 It means something that's in front of us, that's apparent that we all can see
 but we ignore because it's in our interest not to think about, not to talk
 about. The nice thing about this is it's an approach in which we are all trying
 to settle these issues and think about them.  And even as David Gross said, the
 idea of just discussing it is probably leading to a good outcome. I want to
 turn to, in Japan, Minister Shimizu to add his work, his vision.

 >> HIDEO SHIMIZU:   Concerning mobile phones in Japan, now number of
 subscribers of mobile phones is 94 million.  And also 80,000 mobile phone can
 be accessed to Internet.  So it become a very big tool.  So I think there
 should be a true -- there should be a fairly concern in governance.  But if the
 two becomes more big and big and so many person can access the Internet using
 mobile phone, there will be another 30, maybe.  Should be.  Another 30 should
 be there. So I think this time, we always ask the people, they always give us
 answer of nonregulatory site.  Always. But if the tool becomes so big it's
 always regulatory, I must think about it.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Well, you have touched -- put your finger on an important
 matter.  There is two sides to this issue.  There's probably many sides to the
 issue, but two sides I highlight is one, let's say, like you noted that if the
 Internet grows and gets bigger and becomes kind of the bedrock of so many
 interactions in our everyday life, clearly governments and the power of
 democratic institutions need to play a role.  That's what they are there for
 and we rely on them for that.  At the same time, this very platform that we are
 talking about came about precisely because it didn't have as much intervention
 from governments.  That it was kind of left to its own devices to sort of sort
 its way out.  And there is a fear amongst some people that, in fact, if we put
 too much control and government effort in guiding it, that it actually may
 create problems and undermine the very innovation that we like so much that
 gave us this platform. Ambassador gross.

 >>DAVID GROSS:  Well, I think that's a very legitimate concern.  But I think it
 misses both the history and what I think is the lessons as you pointed out
 before about the wireless industry.  That is, the lesson of course of the early
 days of the Internet, and we heard that this morning from Vint Cerf and Bob
 Kahn is governmental intervention which is governmental funding but taken
 ultimately to where it is by the blood, sweat and tears by the private sector,
 academics, others creating it.  It was not a governmental construct. Similarly,
 one of the other lessons I take away from the wireless success in places like
 Africa, Middle East, Asia that we have seen very recently is that government
 has provided the tools for the private sector to create the value.  It has
 allocated the spectrum.  It has allowed for competition. And I would suggest
 that a portion, perhaps a very good portion of the problem we are seeing in
 some of these areas with regard to Internet access is because the governments
 haven't learned the same lesson and applied it there.  That is, competition
 allowing for free flow of -- the creation of competitive infrastructure for the
 private sector and other groups, to be able to create that infrastructure for
 people to have access and the like.  It's not a complete answer but I think
 it's certainly a very significant part of it.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Thank you.  At this point what I would like to do is turn it to
 the audience, and we do have some questions for people. What I will do is I
 will call on -- call on members of the audience that have identified themselves
 as having questions, and then we will let them ask a question, have people
 respond to it and then go back and forth.  And at a certain point I am going to
 break it back, have a dialogue with the panelists again and we can talk about
 it and go to this again. The first question is from Izumi Aizu from Japan and
 his question is lessons learned from ICANN. Please, Izumi. And I should also
 note, the questioners have two responsibilities.  One is to correct my
 mispronunciation of their name.  The second thing they must do is ask their
 question in 20 seconds or less or we eject them from the room forever. [
 Laughter ]

 >> KEN CUKIER:  The chairman serve from ICANN tells us it's a lesson from
 ICANN. Please, Izumi.

 >>IZUMI AIZU:  Mike is not working. My name is Izumi Aizu.  I have been a
 member of the ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee having participated from the
 formation process of ICANN until now. The question is what's the lesson learned
 from ICANN's experience or experimentation?  And can it be applied to other
 areas than ICANN's small domain name management, in particular in relation to
 the multistakeholder approach or the participation of the civil society or the
 end users. And just two elements, which not really having been expressed in an
 express way by the panel is there is no border in TCP/IP protocol.  And the
 other element is Internet empowered the users in unprecedented ways.  So now
 the users have a lot of power and there is no border, how can we deal with
 this?  That's an underlying assumption of the civil society or user
 participation into the ICANN process.  So far it's been very difficult to
 achieve but wanted.  But I would like to hear your opinion from the panel. 
 Thank you.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Very interesting.  Who has -- Who might potentially on this
 panel have an answer about lessons learned from the ICANN experience?
 (Laughter.)

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Dr. Twomey.

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  First lesson, don't take the job of president [ Laughter ]

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  Can I answer the question Izumi is asking at a meta level. At
 one level what strikes me about the globalized economy in the 21st century is
 that we are actually facing an environment where the boundaries of the nation
 state and the power of the nation state have both blurred and diminished.  That
 not only large corporations but small corporations are truly multi-national and
 that the technologies allow individuals, both skilled individuals, I think
 that's very important, the technologists, but then also the activists and those
 concerned actually now can participate globally. And ICANN, in some respects,
 is an expression of a new form of international coordination.  It recognizes in
 its structures that governments are incredibly important.  But it also
 recognizes that the technical community who are truly global are influential,
 that the business community that help fund this are very useful, very
 important, that the citizens but most importantly the users are.  And tries,
 imperfectly and still struggling to get that right, to actually build a
 structure that reflects each of those influences in pragmatic terms that all of
 these parties pragmatically are the ones who are influencing and building the
 DNS.  And I actually think, even the inquiries that I receive from other
 players that I do actually think there are other areas of international
 coordination where this model you may well see emerge.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Paul, we met in 1997-1998 when ICANN didn't exist, when the
 U.S. government, under the Clinton administration, was thinking about what to
 do about the management of the Internet and they decided to privatize it and to
 internationalize it, but they did it in ways that other people thought might
 not be the only way to do it, and not maybe the final way to do it. You were
 part of that process, representing Australia.  You then were the chairman of
 the GAC.  The president of ICANN.  You are in an unparalleled position to
 identify maybe one or two things that you have learned eight years on that, if
 you could have done differently at the beginning, you would have. Let me put
 you on the spot and ask you to identify two things, not one but two things that
 you could have done differently.  And I force you to do that because it pushes
 you to think [ Laughter ]

 >> KEN CUKIER:  In a sense, it's not just about what's out there but also
 what's beyond what's out there.

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  Thanks, Ken, I don't do it very often [ Laughter ]

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  So I appreciate the opportunity to exercise the gray cells.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  I am mindful of this.

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  Perhaps one of the parts that, again is relevant for many
 organizations is that ICANN has built into its bylaw process a form of review
 of its organizations.  But it took us quite some time to get there.  And our
 first attempt at review was quite revolutionary. And I suppose if I learned a
 lesson out of it, it was when building new institutions, try to build an
 evolutionary way of review and reform. I think another one is an ongoing
 challenge.  And one of the ongoing challenges is if you are actually building a
 multistakeholder organization that is serving a global need, there is an
 incredible amount of work about constantly trying to recruit and engage people
 in that process. And I think that's one of our challenges.  And it's not just a
 question of effort.  It's a question of money, it's a question of time.  I
 mean, Izumi could give me 15 things we haven't done enough of. But I do think
 the up side of multistakeholder and full participation internationally is that
 you do get that sense of consensus and a bottom-up form of legitimacy.  The
 down side as an administrator is that it's a very engaging, very expensive,
 very -- you know, you have to think very carefully as to how to do that. And so
 any lessons learned, any ideas that anybody has, I will be available at the end
 of the room, and you can share them with me later.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Alfonso Avka  Let me turn to another question from the
 audience. Let me turn to another question from the audience. Indeed. The
 question comes from Vladimir Vasilyev, from the department of I.T. and
 communications in Russia. VLADIMIR.

 >>VLADIMIR VASILYEV:  Thank you very much. My question is following:  We would
 like to hear a number of different views on various questions. But in the
 forum, we basically want to examine four different subjects:  Security and
 others. Internet can be extremely useful in that respect. But, unfortunately,
 is used by terrorists and other criminals for destructive purposes. I think
 that in determining the usefulness of Internet, we ought to think about
 international security, and we ought to come up with a single answer on that. I
 think also that in terms of governance and Internet, these are important issues
 which have to be discovered. We did pick them up in Tunis. But I don't think
 that we really went into these issues in any great depth. We ought to, then,
 see how we can have Internet governance networks developed in terms of
 security. It is, of course, a very complex issue, as has already been said.
 And, of course, we're going to have to reflect very carefully upon these
 solutions that we come up with. Now, what I'd like to look at is looking to the
 future, looking to the next forum session, in Brazil, perhaps we can look into
 this specific aspects more carefully. Thank you.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  We do have a whole session that's going to be moderated by a
 terrific panel and a really wonderful moderator. The laughter is the fact that
 I am moderating that session tomorrow. However, do address this so we can drill
 down into the question of security more throughout the next three days. But do
 discuss this issue of the good and bad uses of Internet and the needs of
 security and what might be the role of a forum like this to address issues of
 security. Does it have a role? And if so, what is the boundary? What's the
 limit of that role? Does anyone have a thought? I see Professor gross and Karen
 and then Pierre. So please start.

 >>DAVID GROSS:  Sure. This is a very serious and important issue for all of us.
 We think there are certain core principles that, from our perspective, guide us
 through this difficult process. The question really does touch on the different
 natures of security. But taking the question about the terrorist aspect of it,
 for example, we think, first and foremost, that we should never lose sight of
 the importance of the Internet as a conduit for the free flow of information.
 And that no one should use these other issues as an excuse for restricting it
 in ways that are not very carefully circumscribed. So we believe that
 restrictions on the Internet content have to be done transparently, have to be
 done as a result of rule of law, which is -- has great care, including the
 enactment in the rule of law. But, yet, also take into account the fact that
 illicit uses of the Internet are inappropriate, whether it's IPR violations
 that we've all dealt with for some period of time, whether it is incitement to
 violence if the like. So it requires us to do something very important but
 often very difficult, which is to keep two conflicting ideas in our head at the
 same time. One is the importance of the free flow of information, which is
 incredibly powerful. We have seen the rise of democracies around the world that
 corresponds very closely to the rise of the Internet, from about 30 democracies
 in the world in the '70s to over 120 today. While at the same time, recognizing
 that terrorism can create problems, can kill people, through the use of the
 Internet, and must be stopped as well. But how we do that has to be very
 carefully done in ways that are carefully tailored, transparent rule of law.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Ambassador gross, it's interesting that you say that. It
 made me think, if we were to do this, there's a couple of ways to do it. The
 first way is to just say it's going to be done on -- if we agree with what you
 have said, in terms of the situation, one way to do that is to say that we need
 national laws within the different individual nation states to do this. Fine,
 it's their job. The second thing is that we need an international treaty. We
 need some sort of international norms, intergovernmental norms on how this is
 done and takes place. A third way is to say we need it to be done but we're not
 quite certain how to do this and it may be something like the Internet
 Governance Forum to do. Let me not ask you that question. Let me ask that
 question to the gentleman on your left, your right, the audience's left.
 Director general Chen. How could that -- what should we do about Internet
 content in terms of the -- the meaningful security issues that we're all posed
 with? What might be the best way to go forward?

 >>YIN CHEN:  Thank you, sir. As I mentioned earlier, China is devoted to --
 committed to a policy for developing the Internet. Our approach is to balance
 development with security. In the course of content development for Internet,
 it is necessary to respect the need for security of Internet content according
 to law. That is, we have to make sure that in terms of for laws, that there's
 freedom of communication and no threat to state security or to the healthy
 psychological mental development for juveniles should be allowed. So we are
 trying for a balance between development and security.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Let me follow up that question with a second one. Do you
 think that this forum, the Internet Governance Forum, is an appropriate place
 for these -- for a -- this sort of issue to be discussed? Or do you think a
 different forum should be the one where we try to identify what these norms are
 that we need to take into consideration?

 >>YIN CHEN:  We are meeting for the first time on the IGF. The organizers for
 the event have prepared a very good topic for discussion. The topics include
 security on the Internet. I think this will help promote the development of
 Internet. However, we have also noted that over the past years, in the process
 of evolution, there have been many discussions on Internet. We hope next year
 we will continue what we have been doing. We will try to stress our cooperation
 on innovation on the structures for our discussion, so that countries at the
 different levels of development and with different experiences will be able to
 share the philosophy experiences.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Thank you very much. Let me turn to the audience for a third
 question. This question comes from Alfonso Avka of the DiploFoundation and
 Sussex University. Afonso. Afonso of the DiploFoundation? Please.

 >>ALFONSO AVKA:  Alfonso Avka very, very quickly. Alfonso Avka, from
 DiploFoundation and University of Sussex. I just want to make a very
 straightforward question. Looking from multistakeholder view, I'm an economist.
 And I can see that it's mainstream economics approach is still permeating all
 the reviews relating to the development of the Internet with these
 multistakeholder. So I wonder if one of the people at the panel could answer
 me, why is this view permeating all -- that the market will solve -- market
 forces will sort out all these problems that different stakeholders are trying
 to sort out in order to create development for the Internet development? Thank
 you.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Okay. Looks like two representatives from the private sector
 want to tell us about why market forces work. Please, Phil.

 >>PHIL BOND:  I guess I would differ a little bit with the predicate of the
 question. Because I don't think those of us in the private sector pretend to
 provide the solution to everything or that the market solves all answers. But
 to the extent that a developing country or any country wants sustainable
 development, the market has a pretty good record of creating sustainable
 agreements that create value. So there is -- there's some real value in market
 reliance, not that it has all the answers. Indeed, that's what we hear from the
 associations, ICT associations in the developing world, that they have much to
 offer, they have track records where the market has been used successfully to
 solve some development issues. Not all, certainly not every issue.  And that's
 why we have multistakeholders here. But when it comes to development issues,
 when it comes to sustainable development, I think the private sector -- and
 when it comes to security, for that matter, I think the private security,
 technical and commercial experts are saying, "Let us be a full partner, not a
 junior partner."

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Let me pose the question to other members of the panel. Does
 anyone here share the view of the speaker that, in fact, we night want to be
 suspicious, a little bit wary of this idea that the private sector is kind of
 the best foot forward in some of these issues?

 >>KAREN BANKS:  Actually, I think that's probably one of the very important
 issues that this IGF space does provide us with. I can't think of a space --
 and maybe I can stand corrected -- where the interested and committed global
 community come together and look at how we address the question of where the
 market does fail. And we know that the market does fail. It fails in certain --
 certainly in very poor, some of the least-developed countries and very poor
 parts of some countries that aren't necessarily developing countries. And I
 think that in WSIS, we explored this to some extent. And we did begin to
 establish some interesting partnerships with people in the private sector and
 media and began exploring some of these, you may have heard of these open
 access models, for example, alternative ways of building critical
 infrastructure that had intentional public and private interventions. Now,
 that's happening in little pockets. But I would think the IGF is a marvelous
 place to raise that issue more generally and see where we can't, as an
 international community, address these basic infrastructure questions by
 looking more creatively at different business and other models.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Phil.

 >>PHIL BOND:  Real quickly, by way of follow-up, I think that would be a
 meaningful discussion. I think in many cases, you would find private sector
 folks submitting that it wasn't the market that failed in some of those cases,
 but, rather, that the environment that ambassador gross talked about was not
 appropriate. It did not allow competitive forces to come to bear and the
 investment that follows on that. In fact, there will be at 5:30 tomorrow, WITSA
 and the Global Information Infrastructure Commission will have a workshop on
 some successful developing world models like that.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Yes, please.

 >>JUAN CARLOS MORENO:  Yes, I think that what's important here is to note the
 participation of the private economy as well as civil society. The private
 sector, through innovation and development, is what is developing technology,
 and civil society is using the technology. And the idea is basically to
 understand what the two sectors actually need. Also, we have to see how each
 and every one of us has come here to offer something. So the forum is just one
 part of the equation, don't forget. The other part of the equation is how each
 country in its circumstances can, in practice, implement this whole
 multitasking effort. And I think that herein, in this room, in other words, we
 all have different experiences, different elements that we can, in fact, bring
 into this equation. And I think we need to complement this with alliances in
 the different societies, whether public or private, and to see how, when we
 talk about what is public, that we understand that we're saying the same thing,
 and to pick up the question of mobile telephony here. In my country, in
 Ecuador, we are the second country with mobile telephony penetration in Latin
 America overall. More than 80% of that mobile telephony penetration in my
 country is prepaid services. So we feel that one can actually make use of the
 advantages offered by this telephony system in countries such as Latin America,
 where mobile telephony can be used, in other words, have access to other
 services as well, broadband facilities, perhaps. But the answer here,
 basically, is that the private sector is developing a model of business which,
 in Latin America, is adjusted to low consumption of mobile telephony. And
 instead of trying to feed a more stable position in terms of what services are
 being provided, so one has to look at this aspect and see how, in fact, you can
 dovetail the two, the public and private sectors, or also the state sector, as
 such.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Thank you. Let me turn to another question from the
 audience. Abdullah Al-Darrab, of Saudi Arabia has a question on public policy.
 Please stand up and the microphone will come to you. Abdullah, right behind
 you.

 >>ABDULLAH AL-DARRAB:  Thank you very much. In fact, I do not have a question,
 but a comment. So if you allow me -- or if you prefer, I can postpone the
 comment until the end of the questions.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  I would actually, rather than postpone your -- until the
 end, with your comment, if that's all right. But thank you for -- if I
 understood you, thank you for inviting me to decide whether to allow a comment
 or a question. I'd rather stick to questions. Great. Thank you. But I -- do
 remind me at the end, and I will be sure to remember. Thank you, Abdullah. At
 this point, I need a question -- another question from the audience. Thank you.
 MIGUEL ALCAINE of the government of El Salvador has a question on Internet
 governance principles. Yes.

 >> MIGUEL ALCAINE:  Yes governments and the government representatives spend an
 awful a lot of time trying to explain what Internet governance is. You know,
 we've used all sorts of different adjectives to describe it, trying to get
 across the transparency. Now, these terms, as far as I'm concerned, imply that
 while people have to account for something, there should also be participation
 for everyone, the people on the street who also use the Internet. Well, the
 people who want to. You shouldn't force them. So my question is, what do we do
 under today's Internet governance to take on board these principles? Or how
 should they be included? As we've heard, Internet governance is a whole series
 of institutions and mechanisms. Thank you.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Yeah, I think that's an essential question. Does anybody
 have an essential answer? [ Laughter ] Pierre, why don't you take a stab.

 >>PIERRE DANDJINOU:  First and foremost, I think that we have to understand
 that -- well, we drew a distinction beforehand between the technical aspect and
 the political aspect, the policy aspect of Internet governance. So the point
 here is, what can we do to ensure that most users are on board with Internet
 governance? It's also quite clear, though, that not everyone can participate. I
 think that the real problem is, first and foremost, to provide information, but
 then what sort of information? Does everyone need to know the difference
 between protocol IV or VI before they go on the net? But -- well, ICANN
 beforehand was talking about broadband. Well, we could get the user maybe to
 express their concerns here. I think we can do this on a case-by-case basis.
 If, for example, this forum were to suggest the setting up of an organization,
 a body, which would deal, for example, with spamming, it's quite clear that
 that's not going to be everyone who's going to be involved. You have a group.
 So we've got to bear in mind the sort of information, first and foremost, that
 we're going to provide to the user. I don't think the user, as such, can
 intervene. It's not their role. Yes, I would agree.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Yes.

 >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE:  I'd like to make a comment here. In the definitions
 adopted for Internet governance in the course of the summit, I think the main
 point of headway was in the recognition of the two dimensions of Internet
 governance, the technical side, management, resources; and also governance of
 Internet use, governance of the Internet and governance on Internet. We could
 draw that distinction. Now, when we talk about public policy principles which
 apply to Internet governance, I think it would be interesting to try and draw
 that same distinction. Because you need principles which will apply to the way
 in which subjects are dealt with, the means of governance, in other words, and
 also the principles, then, which would apply to each of the subjects, the types
 of governance. In other words, a principle should applies to the way in which
 would you do this would be the multistakeholder approach. And the principles
 that we would apply in certain fields, for example, could be the private nature
 of ecommunication, it could be network neutrality, it could be other
 principles. So to draw that distinction between the two levels of principles is
 something we need to dig into a little bit deeper, I feel. The reason I've
 mentioned this is that because the main advantage, the main point of headway
 made by the forum is that, well, for the first time, we are trying to tackle
 things which deal with daily usage. In other words, we're trying to tackle
 issues which are of relevance to the user. Is my mailbox stuffed with spam? And
 how can I avoid it if it is? And can I have access to something in the country
 where I am? Can I publish what I want? What about mine intellectual property
 rights, are they being respected on the one hand? Do I have the possibility of
 exchanging and sharing? All of these come under the umbrella of governance. But
 it's linked with the daily point. Well, there are an awful a lot of bodies at
 world level which are dealing with this type of issue now. Do we need to add
 all of these issues to the IGF? And thank you for the question. It was in
 French to begin with, of course. But you promised beforehand that you'd do it
 in Chinese as well when we get a little bit further down the line. But, anyway,
 thank you for the question. What lies at the very heart of this discussion is
 the added value provided by this forum compared with other fora. In the Tunis
 document, particularly in the wonderful article 72 which defines the remit for
 the forum, there are an awful a lot of different paragraphs. I don't want to go
 into the details. But each of these paragraphs defines different types of
 functions for the forum according to the subjects involved. For example, the
 role of the forum will be different, quite obviously, if a given subject is
 already being dealt with in various different bodies, because the aim there
 will be to ensure that people get together, that they meet, that they get to
 know one another better, and that once we got to the end of the three or the
 four days of the forum, that they can then continue to interact over the
 forthcoming year and come out with a new outcome. There are other subjects,
 without spending too much time on that, where we don't fully agree as yet as to
 how we should deal with it or the forum in which it should be dealt with or
 there are maybe various different agencies or bodies dealing with it. In those
 cases, it's quite useful to decide to better formulate the issue. There's a lot
 of advocacy going on. I try and propose a solution rather than deal with the
 problem. Now, to formulate this problem in terms of common interests and issues
 is basically the aim of the forum. It's a fundamental issue. This question of
 the -- the elephants, we have to clearly define the subjects we want to tackle
 and then discuss the framework in which that can be done. So it's a question of
 guidance and our ability to deal with it.

 >>KENNETH CUKIER:  Basically, what Bertrand is saying, we're in the nursery
 school of policy issues for the Internet. We kind of bring them together, train
 them, let them grow up, let them discuss, mature slightly, have a little bit of
 exercise at recess, and then we bring them out the door somewhere else. I see
 two people I have wanted to ask, David Souter had one question, had a finger
 up. And then Sharil. Let me take that order. David.

 >>DAVID SOUTER:  Thank you.  It seems to me that if you want to look at this
 from the point of view of the citizen user, what does the citizen user actually
 require here.  And in practice, I think it's something along the lines of a
 basic understanding, which is sufficient to be able to obtain what they want. 
 And sufficient capacity to express some sort of dissatisfaction or engage in
 some kind of process if there is a problem.  And a problem arises for the
 citizen in terms of dissatisfaction or because something is not adequate or in
 terms of threat or in terms of uncertainty. Now, in reality, people will cede
 control -- will cede authority in technical areas to those whose expertise they
 trust.  So technical areas, you can't force people to be interested in
 technical issues.  The issues that interest people are different issues, and
 those are the nontechnical ones. And in particular, I think, here, and this is
 the point I really wanted to make, the issues that are of most importance are
 those where the once largely technical Internet kind of issues intersect with
 the ones that people thought they understood, which are to do with issues like
 security or policing or the relationship between the state and the citizen or
 trade and so forth. Those are the things that I think are particularly
 problematic. And at the heart of that, maybe, there's another question, which
 is that the Internet -- Internet Governance has evolved on a basis of
 innovation is desirable.  Most governance works on a basis that risk should be
 avoided. So there's a big clash of culture between those two kind of
 approaches.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Let me ask, how can one resolve or kind of reconcile this clash
 of culture in which the Internet relies on innovation which, by its nature is
 disruptive, by its nature is unpredictable, by its nature creates winners and
 losers, versus the issue, the interest of governments for stability, for
 predictability, for an evolution that is stable.  Is there a way to reconcile
 this?  Or is this the conundrum?

 >>DAVID SOUTER:  If you wanted me to comment on that, I think my real point
 there is that this is why there is a need for these two approaches to move
 together, why there needs to be discourse, dialogue between different areas of
 governance and between those who participate within them in this kind of forum.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Well, from my experience of following these issues as it
 regards to information technology, it hasn't been reconciled.  That's the
 problem. So we have the IETF and we have ICANN and we have the World Wide Web
 forum, and we have all these other institutions.  Excuse me, the World Wide Web
 Consortium and all these other institutions that are thinking about technology
 and thinking about business.  And some might criticize them for being a little
 bit too much in the pocket of incumbent industries or people might think they
 are a little bit too advanced and going beyond where the state of industry is. 
 But nevertheless, the private sector goes forward in the way that they know how
 their industry forms. On the other hand we have governments and they say hold
 on a second, and they might mean governments in the case of the Geneva summit
 of WSIS saying we need to really re-think the model that we have.  We have the
 Tunis summit in which the brakes were put on even further.  And now we are in
 this forum in which we have tried to bring together, in as neutral ground as
 possible, all of these different entities, the stakeholders from government,
 the stakeholders civil society and the stakeholders from the private industry,
 from industry and business, and try to figure out whether there is a way to
 reconcile what seems to be incompatible interests. On one hand, innovation that
 is going to create winners and losers that we are not going to be able to
 control, that we are not going to be able to predict, yet it's still going to
 happen.  And on the other hand -- And the winner and loser might be the winner
 is voice over IP and the loser is monopoly state-run telephone  operators in
 countries that haven't liberalized that see their Web use decline.  The winner
 might be My Space and News Corp for their Internet strategy and the loser might
 be BBC if they haven't actually taken the steps needed to actually capture
 these evolutions or the loser might be the New York Times company, Le Monde in
 France. Is there a way to reconcile that isn't reconcilable, two competing
 interests.  We have come together in this forum to try to figure out what to
 do, yet we're long on words and short on ideas. Dr. Twomey.

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  With due respect, I think you got the question wrong.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  It isn't the first time.

 >> PAUL TWOMEY:  What strikes me when we talk about the Internet that it's
 multiple things.  And when you ask this question about things that government
 think to control, I think if we look at the 20th century, there's two parts to
 that.  One has been traditional things of governance of society, of how people
 interact with people, and we have been doing that for 5,000 years.  But there's
 another set of things that emerge in the 20th century which had more to do with
 the capital markets than anything else.  And the building of very large
 networks.  The electricity network, the telecom network, the airline network to
 a degree, utilities.  These things required large accumulations of capital. 
 And eventually in some form or other in nearly every country there was form of
 pact formed for regulation over a monopoly and then there is process of
 liberalization.  Margaret Thatcher starts basically this liberalization process
 which then has another form of regulation which is how to stop the incumbent
 from destroying all the competitors.  The thing about the Internet, not the
 carrier part of the Internet, the physical part of the Internet but the parts
 of Internet above it is that they didn't need that much capital. And I think
 one of the reasons why the Internet blossomed in the United States was because
 the U.S. had also pursued risk capital to a further degree through venture
 capital.  So something like 5% of U.S. savings got allocated to funds managers
 who were told go out and basically take as much risk as possible.  That's what
 we are telling to you do as pension funds. And a lot of what is the Internet at
 the mathematical level above, all right, not the physical level but the
 mathematical level of the applications, et cetera, doesn't need large amounts
 of capital compared to the physical networks. And that's where I think we are
 getting a clash of ideas because in other parts of the economy where you don't
 need large amounts of capital we don't talk about this sort of topic.  If there
 was suddenly innovation in consumer products, we don't talk about clash of
 Regulation. So part of that, I think, is a clash about what's been the
 economics of the last hundred years.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Except that one country that's going through that transition
 between control and openness in terms of its (inaudible). So let me invite Yin
 Chen to comment on that tension and how one reconciles it and on the one hand
 the need for control for applying, for applying policies and norms in terms of
 benefitting the people, in terms of how to manage this case, the economy of
 telecommunications, versus what seems to be a modern imperative of letting go,
 of allowing market forces and the forces of individuals determine the outcome
 of how things evolve.

 >>YIN CHEN:  Well, in China, we have gone through several processes in the
 telecommunication development, starting from monopoly to liberalization.  And
 because of the huge potential, the market, the demand for telecommunications is
 also huge.  We have adopted a pretty liberal policy which encourages
 competition in this field.  Especially in recent years, post the fixed phones
 and mobile phones, their users are growing by the number of 100 million.  Among
 them, several millions are the new Internet users. For the part of the
 government, it has been trying to adopt policies to regulate the
 telecommunication so as to encourage the growth of economy, and this will have
 a positive impact on social and economic growth. And this is also something
 which is known to everyone who has visited to China, every time you go, you are
 going to see some new changes. This is a result of the pro-growth policy
 adopted by the government, which encourages greater investment by the
 enterprises and to satisfy the demand of the market.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Thank you, Mr. Chen. Please, Phil.

 >>PHIL BOND:  I think your question puts your finger on a difficult question
 for a lot of countries that they are still wrestling.  To Lynn's point earlier
 that much of this is still at the national level.  But I think the genius of
 this particular forum was to focus on the developing world where there the case
 for stability or status quo is not a very good case, and the case for
 innovation and how to do that and focusing discussion back around the human
 factor in the developing country could be useful.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Okay. Let me turn to the audience again for another question. 
 This question comes from Dr. Riazi, the deputy Minister of ICTs from Iran.

 >>DR. RIAZI:  Good afternoon.  Dr. Riazi from Iran. And the question of the
 Internet Governance at the top of the list, during WSIS admitted at the later
 stage by the WGIG in its list of priority issues related to IG there was and
 remains still exists the questions related to governing roots and files and
 system, DNS and IP addresses.  It is unfortunate that such priority issues, due
 to the politics of the Internet Governance did not explicitly framed the way in
 the Tunis documents.  Yet to achieve an international management of the
 Internet which should be multilateral, democratic, and transparent IGF and
 other follow-up mechanisms need to examine these core questions. Thank you.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Okay.  Thank you. Let me ask this issue of the -- the
 management of the domain name resources is a vast subject and as you know the
 Internet Governance Forum is created to talk about many, many topics, of which
 one may or may not be this one particular issue, to have anything to say on the
 topic as to Dr. Riazi's question. Well, this might be a sign, a good sign, or
 it might be a bad sign, I think it might be a good sign and why that is is
 because I'll speak personally maybe for this kind of -- the thoughts that are
 unspoken in the room and maybe on the panel that if we have learned anything
 from the last four years of these discussions, it's that the idea that Internet
 Governance is a lot broader and a lot more than just that one issue.  And that
 we have all talked about that issue and we kind of recognize it is the gorilla
 in the room that's far away.  But there's other issues that we want to talk
 about that we feel that are just as pressing, such as security, openness,
 access, and diversity.  And it might be a sign of the health of the dialogue
 that we actually remain mute on this one topic but actually have a lot to say
 on the others. So with that, allow me to then, with your consent from my fellow
 panelists, turn to another question. Okay. [ Applause ]

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Apparently we have some blog posts.  The very interesting thing
 about the Internet, of course, is not that the eyes of the world are watching
 us right now, but those eyes also have mouths and they talk back. So let's hear
 what they have to say to us. Do I read this?

 >> No, no, it's a note.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Oh, it's a note. Would you like to tell us what the blogosphere
 is saying to us right now.  Please be --

 >> Okay.  I don't have a mike.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  If you stand up, they will identify your mike.  I think it's
 on.

 >> It seems that the blogosphere is somewhat of an experiment as well and they
 seem very uncertain that they can ask a question and I will come here and give
 it to you to ask.  So at the moment they are obsessed with the opening ceremony
 and how nice it looked.  And the other bloggers are actually here in the room
 and they are complaining that they can't post any blood posts because the
 wireless access has gone down.  So this is -- [ Applause ]

 >> This is a blogosphere's moment.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  These are internal problems. [ Laughter ]

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Yet another question from the audience is from Jeremy Malcolm
 from Murdoch University in Perth, western Australia. Jeremy.

 >>JEREMY MALCOLM:  Referring to your earlier point as moderator about being
 long on words and short on ideas, I feel that there's been less -- there's been
 not much said about how the IGF itself can move beyond discussion, which is
 what we are doing at the moment and which is great.  And actually fulfill some
 of the other parts of its mandate which, as Bertrand said, is set out in the
 Tunis Agenda and which require us, among other things, to be able to make
 recommendations. How do we do that? Do we, for example, need to split off into
 smaller work groups to discuss ideas and maybe agree on texts and then bring
 those back to the IGF in a plenary session such as this to adopt those by
 consensus? I thought perhaps either Dr. Twomey or Lynn St. Amour might have
 some thoughts on those questions.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Lynn.

 >>LYNN ST. AMOUR:  I will answer the question in a moment but I wand to come
 back to a comment a moment ago building on Paul's comments. I actually thought
 he was going someplace different with his comments, and that what he was going
 to say is that the Internet is the -- probably the only communications medium
 that has come along that hasn't relied on a regulatory environment for its
 development, for its control.  And it specifically was developed in a way where
 there was no central hierarchy and central control.  It was at the edges and
 does allow innovation, allows great participation. So this may be the first
 time, going back to your clash, this may be the first time where we should
 actually be looking for new solutions for how we actually manage something that
 has such a global impact, social, political, and economic, but not look to the
 same sort of forums that we have actually used in the past. And the U.N.
 secretary-general some years ago challenged the room to be creative about
 looking for solutions along the lines as creative as the developers of the
 founders of the Internet. So I would like to come back to that because to the
 extent we talk about multistakeholder models and we talk about three-party
 participation, I think that's actually embedding today's political models and
 trying to put it on top of a development that just doesn't naturally fit. So to
 come back to the question that was just asked, I think it's actually about
 dialogue, and I don't think the Internet Governance Forum is a place for
 decisions or for recommendations.  I don't think the process is nearly
 inclusive enough.  I don't think it's got the right level of participation.  I
 don't think people can come together for four days and have a discussion and
 believe we have addressed the technological, political, social, cultural
 ramifications of something that's so vast. So I go back to I think it needs to
 go back to national level, local level, participation in the forms that are
 available to you, that are important to you as an individual.  We are not all
 interested in everything.  We are not all experts in everything.  You can't all
 be everywhere for every one of these discussions. So make it local, bring it
 back to the forums where you are interested in, where you specifically have
 something to contribute.  And again, I don't think this is a forum that should
 make recommendations.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Although it's interesting what you said.  Markus Kummer has
 often made the point that just the act of dialogue itself is a good thing
 because it allows us to exchange views and bring issues from one place to
 another by opening up to new ideas. Karen.

 >>KAREN BANKS:  Thank you.  I agree with quite a few of the things Lynn said,
 but I don't think they are mutually exclusive from some things that I think
 differently.  And although discussion is important and very valuable, I really
 do think that this forum, if it's going to make an impact in ways that we
 envisage that it might during the WSIS process, it has to be a process.  It
 does have to go local and national, but that's not going to happen without an
 awful lot of effort and work on many of our parts. My own organization very
 much believes in putting a loft effort into national work and capacity
 building, but to make the connection between the national and the global is a
 really, really tough task, and it requires a lot of work.  And I think if the
 IGF is going to add value, that this is one of the ways that it can.  I think
 there are definitely issues that need to be addressed here that aren't
 addressed in other spaces adequately, in line with the mandate. Questions about
 recommends. And if we can look at the IGF not as something where we not only
 have a good discussion, but we think about leaving here on Thursday with some
 sense of working forward around concrete activities and possibly -- and I want,
 Ken, maybe you can ask some questions about recommendations. We talked a lot
 about how the IGF can be influential. We all want the IGF to be influential.
 And there are many ways that it can do that. But how is the IGF going to
 influence other spaces that we've acknowledged intersect with our interest in
 relation to Internet governance. So, for example -- and I'll bring up the case
 of looking at, say, content regulation, cross-border content regulation. Is
 this an issue that can only be dealt with -- where can it be dealt with? Can it
 only be dealt with, say, in terms of trade rules? If not, is the IGF a good
 space to get some dialogue happening with different stakeholders in a fairly
 comfortable environment where we can deepen our understanding, and then, some
 way, move recommendations to a space that is empowered to make decisions? I
 think it would be worth thinking about how we're going to do that. Because what
 are we going to do with the outcomes of our workshops this week? Are we going
 to feed them into bilateral, multilateral, collaborative activities? That would
 be great, and we would certainly like to do that. But as a whole, as a whole
 forum, surely we are able to come up with some influential thinking and ideas
 that can help move forward these intractable issues that brought us here in the
 first place.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Karen, let me pick on you for a moment and ask -- you're very
 good at asking these questions. But now you have to answer them, too. [
 Laughter ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  As you well know, if we were having this sort of discussion for
 the telephone 100 years ago, you'd not be in the room right now. You'd be out.
 Civil society, the people, the public, forget about it. You'd have a handful of
 governments, just a few. In fact, there probably wouldn't be many people from
 developing countries here, in fact, we know from the picture that the ITU shows
 up, they celebrated their centenary in Berlin. Of course, then it was just
 white people with top hats and beards who were talking about these issues. Some
 of them still belong to the ITU. [ Laughter ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  That's unfair. I apologize. So welcome. You're on the program
 committee of an international forum in which these decisions get -- these
 issues get discussed by governments and government delegates. You're on a panel
 with government officials, senior-ranking ones from around the world. How would
 you ideally like to see the discussions that happen in the next three days be
 used after Athens?

 >>KAREN BANKS:  It's actually a much easier question than I was expecting.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  More to come.

 >>KAREN BANKS:  Well, what I -- the way that I think would be interesting for
 us to think about is that we have themes, we have themes, four themes, and we
 have two cross-cutting perspectives, development orientation and
 capacity-building. Somehow, we collectively, maybe through a division of labor,
 maybe through associating with the issues that are of most interest to us, have
 to follow a thread through the next four days. So, for example, I know there
 are five capacity-building workshops. We don't want them to happen in isolation
 from one another. And, actually, in the preparation for this forum, we've all,
 all of the organizers of those workshops, the five of them, have worked quite
 hard to communicate with one another prior to to let one another know what
 we're doing, to maybe participate on one another's workshops to try not to
 duplicate one another's efforts, and to at least open the -- open a space, keep
 something in mind that we are open to collaboration at the end of the week,
 that we may move forward and leave from here with an agreement to do some
 activities together. And I think that anyone who's here focusing around a
 particular issue probably has thought about that already, I would imagine. I
 know that there's a lot of interest, obviously, in content regulation. And
 there's a lot of talk of people leaving here, forming some kind of network,
 multistakeholder network or coalition. And in that sense, it may take off more
 in the direction of generating more discussion and awareness and visibility, et
 cetera, for the issue. I think that for me -- and I don't have an answer to
 this, because I'm not quite sure how the -- how we're going to pull it all
 together at the end. The most important thing is, we don't think that when we
 leave here, we'll leave only with a deeper understanding of the issues and have
 maybe formed some new partnerships and relationships, which would be wonderful,
 but that we see Rio as a very natural next step as the IGF moves ahead, and we
 can see how we're going to get from here to there, through collaboration of
 different stakeholders around issues that we're passionate about.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Mr. Shimizu.

 >>HIDEO SHIMIZU:  I think IGF is the best way to share research and exchanging
 relevant information and best practice. So this is maybe the most fine
 compliment. So we should make some kind of (inaudible) for many kind of e-mails
 for many persons who want to get many informations, for example, even spam or
 any other thing maybe.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Because Karen has invited me to look at this issue of how these
 recommendations get used, we have one suggestion from the minister. I would ask
 Jean-Jacques to tell us how -- what is your vision, how would you ideally like
 to see these things?

 >>JEAN-JACQUES MASSIMA LANDJI:  Thank you very much. I think that we ought to
 strike a happy medium here, and when we talk about a happy medium, we ought to
 be looking at a common understanding and then forget -- don't forget the Tunis
 engagement, commitment, which said that we had to establish something and
 thereby continue with dialogue. Obviously, most of the countries here are
 signatory states within the appropriate body to try and see how we can combat
 cybercrime. And nobody wants to have cybercrime continue. So already in terms
 of security, we have reached that level. And the use that we -- one makes of
 the Internet does provide a common ground for us to bear in mind security
 issues, and also for the technical organizations involved to establish the
 right sort of medium there, too. I think that if you, for example, look at the
 Tunis declaration and the principles enshrined therein, you'll see therein what
 we said in terms of Internet security devoted to ITU in the C5 outcome as well as various programs that have to be followed up by ITU for the infrastructure in conformity with the C2 outcome. And I do think that in terms of the content actually discussing this
 in a forum, you can't actually come to a position as to a common position. And there
 are so many factors that would hinder that, such as multilingualism. But I do
 think that UNESCO, as a specialized body, certainly can deal with this, would
 find the time to come to some sort of compromise and arrangement which would
 suit all parties. But a forum like this, which cannot take any sort of binding
 decisions, well, we can't have a recommendation here. But the various countries
 participating are linked through international agreements in ITU plenipotentiary conferences resolutions. And certainly I
 do think we need to have respect of any agreements which have been entered
 into. So let's talk about a point of departure. Let's see how we can move to
 common ground. Let's see how we can marry the most contradictory views. Of
 course there are vested interests. Of course there are those who want to open
 up. What is the middle route? It has to be a matter of consiliation. We have to
 try to bear in mind the different aspects are important to all parties in terms
 of policies around governance, et cetera, et cetera. I think that we have to
 try to find consensus and try not to endanger what we're agreeing upon here. We can't  really tip the cart over. We have also countries who are in the process of development
 who need to have access to all of these various tools, bearing in mind, of
 course, security. So I think that we all agree on this. We can start perhaps
 drawing up recommendations on the various points commonly approved.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  -- comments and the issue of decentralization much, it brings up
 the idea about the Internet itself is decentralized.  And one of the questions
 on my list comes from someone whose name is known here among us, Vint Cerf. He
 says, from ICANN, but, of course, so much more than that. And he points out in
 the small description here that he has a question about the layering of
 Internet architecture and what it might mean for Internet governance. I invite
 him to expand on that issue. If we can provide him with a microphone. We can do
 a DUET, if you like.

 >>VINT CERF:  Thank you very much. I'll --

 >> No.

 >>VINT CERF:  Achtung! Nothing happening. How many engineers -- there we are.
 That works. Okay. Thank you. I'll take two. I can talk out of both sides of my
 mouth. [ Laughter ]

 >>VINT CERF:  First of all, thank you very much for allowing me another moment
 of your time. Let me suggest to you that the Internet's implementation really
 is quite layered, and that the lowest layers are quite physical. They have to
 do with pieces of equipment, wires that move bits around or radio links or
 laser things. And there are certain parties who are responsible for operating
 at that layer. There are companies that offer services at that layer. There are
 users who get services at that layer. And when there are disputes, perhaps
 there's competition for services at that layer. I wonder if we can start
 thinking about parsing the various governance issues up, using this layering
 structure as a guide. This is by no means the solution to everything, but it
 might help organize our thinking about which parties are in dispute or which
 parties need to be governed, and what do they need to be governed about. So in
 the lowest layers, we might be concerned that there isn't enough competition at
 that physical layer. And so we might be concerned to make sure that, in the
 absence of competition, there's regulation to protect the consumers of that
 layer of service. As you work your way up in the architecture, you get
 different players. You get some players who are, in Paul Twomey's comments, are
 providing logical kinds of services. I'd like to dispute one thing that Paul
 said with regard to capital investment above the physical transport layer. The
 company I work for, Google, has had to spend a very substantial amount of money
 to build hundreds of thousands of computers around the world in order to offer
 the Google indexing service. In that case, there was a very big capital
 investment, even though the thing is operating well above the basic transport
 layer. So what I'd like to invite is some thinking about how to parse up the
 players into these different layers. Sometimes the same company could operate
 at different layers. But you might choose to have governance oversight or
 governance functions, depending on the layer rather than depending on the
 company. So I leave that just as a possible way of helping to organize our
 thinking when we ask the question, "What kind of governance should we apply?"
 And where, and to whom, and which part of the Internet.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Hold the mike. I have a question for you. Now, if I agree with
 everything that you said, I could take it one step further, and I could say,
 wouldn't it be strange if we like competition so much and diversity so much and
 experimentation so much and see the value in that and these free associations
 and interactions, that maybe we should try to think about, would it be feasible
 to have competition at the layer of ICANN? That the idea of a single root,
 although how valuable and important that it is, seems an aberration when we
 think about telecommunications in every other dimension. In mobile phones, we
 have many different standards, and they all interoperate. And in every other
 layer of the protocol stack, if you will, we see competition, and we also see
 the value of that competition. Could we imagine no, matter how strange it is
 right now, but looking maybe five, ten, 50, 100, but probably not 100, probably
 closer to five, ten, or 15 years ahead, would it be feasible to have
 competition? What might that mean? Could it be valuable? How would we do it?

 >>VINT CERF:  First observation I'd make is that the Internet was born in a
 somewhat competitive fashion. It offered a very different kind of switching
 service than the circuit switching of the telephone network. So in that sense,
 it was a competitor. But they were not offering the same thing. They were
 offering two different things. I sense what you're saying is, competitors
 offering the same service, the domain name service. One of the fundamental
 utilities of the Internet's architecture is to achieve uniqueness and no
 ambiguity as to the meaning of a domain name. What I.P. address is associated
 with this particular domain name. If you have competing domain name services
 and they are competing in the same name space, and if the consequence of that
 competition is ambiguous answers about the meaning of a particular domain name,
 then users will not get consistent results from the network. The e-mail will go
 to different places than you expect. When you go to a Web site, you may not be
 getting to the same one, depending on which of the competitors you're asking
 the question of, "Where does this domain name go?" The problem is that the
 current design of the network has domain names, for example, and Internet
 addresses that are not distinguishable as to which party is interpreting them
 for you. Www.ICANN.org doesn't -- if had you two different domain name servers
 and they were not giving the same answer, you couldn't tell which one you
 should ask the question of, because the domain names would be identical. So I
 actually don't think that competition in the way I understand you to be asking
 about it would do us much of a service. In fact, it would create ambiguity,
 which I would believe is fundamentally antithetical to the way the Internet has
 served us in the past.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Might it be a risk, then -- well, there's two answers to that.
 One is that ICANN does a lot more than just the names. And secondly, we might
 even say, let's imagine that we don't make it an issue. We say that there's
 legacy ICANN-sanctioned names that are legacy sanctioned names. They're
 enshrined in law, however we want to do it. And they'll be stable. They're kind
 of the potable water of the Internet. You know what you get when you drink it.
 What else -- where else could we maybe see how there might be a diversity of
 approaches in the functions that ICANN plays? That's the first question. The
 second one is, if we were not to allow a living, breathing, functioning, and
 evolution for ICANN, that there's a risk that ICANN becomes the very thing that
 you had to overthrow when you created the Internet, which is an ossified system
 that was very immobile and didn't change much?

 >>VINT CERF:  Before I try to respond to that last part, I'm still struggling
 with the premises of the first part. I think that if you are going to try to
 introduce some kind of competition, you had better do it in a way that does not
 create ambiguity. So let's say if we can figure out how to do that. Today, you
 go to ICANN in order to register top-level domains. And we authorize those.
 Similarly, you go to the -- the RIRs go to ICANN to get chunks of Internet
 address space. And those are then allocated to parties who need to have a
 guaranty that no one else has been given that same I.P. address. Otherwise,
 again, you get ambiguity. I suppose you could imagine having -- taking the --
 the domain name space and saying, "Well, here's a new organization, we'll call
 it FU, and this organization, FU, is going to be allowed to create some more
 top-level domains." Now, we have to make sure that FU and ICANN don't
 simultaneously create the same new top-level domains. Well, how do we do that?
 Well, I guess we better create another organization that makes sure that ICANN
 and FU don't both pick the same top-level domains. So you just recreated a
 hierarchy which has authority somewhere to make sure ambiguity is avoided and
 uniqueness is preserved. So I think that in the course of doing what you're
 suggesting, you recreate where we are today. Well, to the time warp. [ Laughter
 ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Yeah. We've been walking around in circles all the time. I
 predict that in the future, we'll continue our journey.

 >>VINT CERF:  Let me say, however, that none of this discussion rules out the
 very likely possibility that some invention will come along that is vastly
 superior to today's Internet and will ultimately overtake it. Maybe it will be
 entangled photons that can communicate faster than the speed of light. Maybe it
 will be transporter systems, beam me up, Scotty, and we won't need airlines
 anymore. There are all kinds of possibilities here. But I think that we are
 pushing the limit if we unnecessarily -- and we might disagree about this -- if
 we unnecessarily try to force competition in a place where it isn't useful. And
 in this particular case, I'm not persuaded of the utility, and I am worried
 about the risk of creating ambiguity which will destroy the utility of the net.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Thank you. Thank you, Vint. Good. Perfect. Let me call -- let me
 first ask -- actually, I can sense with my telephonic abilities that we've
 talked too much about ICANN. So let me -- let me move on. But thank you very
 much. I accuse myself of such indiscretion. I have a question from the
 audience. The person's name is Mavic Cabrera Balleza of the Philippines. I see
 him. I have a microphone.

 >>MAVIC CABRERA BALLEZA:  Thank you.  Thank you. This question is for the
 representatives of the private sector and governments.  Is there a gender
 dimension the Internet Governance?  If there is, what is it and how do you see
 it being addressed in the next three days of the forum? I'm directing the
 question to the private sector and -- private sector and intergovernmental
 representatives, because the civil society, through their representative,
 Natasha Primo, this morning has made their position clear on the issue.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Can I invite a response from the panel? I'm at a bit of a loss
 because, unfortunately, I was dealing with some logistical issues and I missed
 the question. What I would perhaps like to do -- oh, the gender dimension. Does
 anyone have a -- let me invite this.  This is what I would like to do, since we
 are running out of time and we have many questions, I feel like what I need --
 what I ought to do, with your, the panelist as well as the audience,
 permission, is to have a number of questions asked, so we have a sense of some
 of the thoughts in the room, and even we will have Abdullah ask his comment, or
 mention his comment, and then we will have some responses to this general
 feedback from the room. So we will take that as one question out there and we
 will see if that can be responded to by others as other questions come. Let me
 ask Mouhamet Diop, a former ICANN director from Senegal, to ask a question.
 Mouhamet. Indeed.

 >>MOUHAMET DIOP:  Do I need to come there?

 >> KEN CUKIER:  I think....

 >>MOUHAMET DIOP:  I don't think there has been any manipulation here of lists,
 but I want to speak to a specific point here which can be summarized as
 follows. Internet culture that we have doesn't take count of frontiers or any
 limits or the members of a specific community. Now, when we created the IGF,
 governance was the predominant factor we were thinking of, and we were thinking
 about the governmental dimension of IGF discussions and how, in fact, we could
 cross the frontiers and the limits. It's a little like when the frontiers go
 up, that economic activity may stop between countries. But we ought to look at
 this culture of nonlimitation, of freedom, of partnership, of interaction which
 does not, in fact, depend on political volition. So I want to see whether this
 is something that we might draw lessons from and actually act as a basis for
 what we're trying to achieve in the IGF.  Because we find that, often, there
 are elements which put a brake on relations between countries. So is there
 something here that can actually govern interaction? I, myself, am an engineer,
 and I can actually interact with any citizen in the world.  So the idea is to
 have a no-border, a non-border world.  Let's see how, in fact, we can,
 therefore, bring in some sort of basic value into our discussions here in IGF. 
 And I call upon the panelists for that answer.  Thank you.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  I will ask more questions from the audience before we respond.
 I have a question from Hanane Boujemi of Morocco.

 >>HANANE BOUJEMI:  I would like to ask a question which is supposed to be
 answered by the stakeholders present today with us, so I'm talking about ICT
 for development.  We are aware that different multistakeholders are meld
 together the efforts in order to set up an adequate Internet Governance system.
  From that scope, to what extent the private sector, including the giant
 telecom operators, software private corporations, are willing to support
 technically and financially the access to Internet which is a key point in the
 whole subject. And a question for policymakers and governments.  Are they
 willing to set up a flexible procedures with respect to Internet as a free
 spectrum?  Thank you. And I am representing DiploFoundation.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Another question comes from Maria Simon of Uruguay. Maria.

 >>MARIA SIMON:  I am going to speak in Spanish. Now, what I'm going to say is
 not actually new, but I do think warrants reflection. Now, I think that in the
 meetings we have said that Internet acts as a multiplication in terms of the
 stakeholders.  And I agree on that.  It has a multiplicatory effect.  And of
 course one talks about the public and private sectors here, but perhaps we
 ought to add also the civil society as well as the academic society. And we
 feel that they don't actually belong strictly to either the other two sectors. 
 And they should be added to the stakeholders, especially the academic world,
 there are people who are in education, people who do play a very important
 role, therefore. And don't forget, as we say in the world of communication, we
 have physical access to the net, which is important, to the networks as well,
 for the various applications.  But these individuals are involved in education.
 So once we have established that these are the actors we are talking about,
 elephants from different aspects on, if you like, then we have to agree as to
 the fact that these various stakeholders have the right to self-administration.
  And also to set up the various links where they can interact in shaping the
 various policies. So I'd like to hear your views on this. And also, experiences
 in shaping policies which involved many different stakeholders.  Another
 subject which I think is very important, especially for the poorer countries,
 that is the issue of what happens with the different alliances in society.  And
 also, how the various organizations function.  And how one can help the poorer
 countries so that they do receive the technologies, not as spectators but also
 as actors because at the moment they have a passive stance as perceivers and
 not engenderers of such policy. Thank you.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Let me take two more questions and one comment. The question
 comes from Teanu Tuiono of New Zealand.  Please stand up so we know exactly
 where you are.  Teanu Tuiono.  In the back.  Perfect. What I suggest is that we
 will ask....

 >>TEANU TUIONO:  Hello.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  That's great.  We can hear you.

 >>TEANU TUIONO:  Hello.  Finally. Hello, everyone.  My name is Teanu Tuiono. 
 I'm from the indigineous tribes of New Zealand, I am a Maori and I am a part of
 the indigineous caucus. Just reflecting on one of the aspirations that we had
 at WSIS, and in particular I am thinking of Article 15 which says, "In the
 evolution of Information Society, particular attention must be given to the
 special situation of indigineous peoples as well as the preservation of their
 heritage and their cultural legacy."  I am interested in listening to opinions
 from the panel on how Internet Governance can help us realize that particular
 aspiration.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Thank you.  Let me invite.  Abdullah Al-Darrab from Saudi
 Arabia.  Thank you for your patience.

 >>ABDULLAH AL-DARRAB:  Thank you, Ken.  I would like to thank the government of
 Greece for their excellent arrangements in hosting this historic event.  I
 would also like to thank the IGF advisory group, Mr. Nitin Desai and Mr. Markus
 Kummer, for their efforts in making this forum a success. On this occasion I
 would like to bring to your recollection the important issues relating to
 international Internet Governance which were given significant attention by the
 Information Society summit meetings in both phases as they have a direct impact
 on the growth, development, and reach of the Internet throughout the world, and
 the opportunities it provides for progress and development, especially for the
 least developed countries. The Tunis summit recognized that there are many
 cross-cutting international public policy issues that require attention and are
 not adequately addressed by the current mechanism. Thereby, the summit
 established a clear and effective work plan for addressing all these issues
 through two discrete processes.  Each has a particular role.  One process
 cannot be considered an alternative vehicle to reach the objectives of the
 other, and each should be handled independently to achieve its particular
 predefined goals through its consent stakeholders.  One process is the enhanced
 cooperation process whose objective is to enable governments to make the
 necessary decisions on issues related to international Internet Governance,
 public policy.  And the other is the IGF whose objective is to provide a venue
 for all stakeholders to deliberately, openly and inclusively talk on all
 matters related to the Internet while ensuring it would remain as a neutral,
 nonduplicative and nonbinding process. While we express our pleasure that the
 IGF is being held, we nonetheless remain anticipating the call by the U.N.
 secretary-general.  Therefore, we are still anticipating, as I said, the call
 by the U.N. secretary-general to start the enhanced cooperation process in a
 manner consistent with the predefined role as determined by the WSIS.  This
 will enable governments to have an equal role and responsibility for
 international Internet Governance and to develop public policy in consultation
 with all stakeholders. Thank you.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Thank you. There is -- -- let me ask one other person to make a
 question before we open it to panelists.  That's Juan Fernandez ASESOR of Cuba.
 Juan Fernandez Asesor?  Ah, thank you.

 >>JUAN FERNANDEZ ASESOR:  Thank you.  Well, bearing in mind the feedback that
 the basic subject for this forum is development, and bearing in mind what
 certain speakers recalled for us this morning, that billions of people around
 the planet don't have Internet.  And also bearing in mind the aim of this
 afternoon's session -- in other words, to prepare the scene for discussions
 over the forthcoming days -- let me ask the following question.  What message
 should we be giving to the millions of people who don't have Internet from this
 forum?  What should our message be?  Thank you.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Thank you very much. This is a wide variety of questions. 
 Luckily, we have a wide variety of panelists, and unfortunately we don't have a
 lot of time. Who would like to start, take a step forward and try to address as
 briefly as possible some of the issues that have been raised by some of the
 participants? Pierre.

 >>PIERRE DANDJINOU:  Thank you very much.  I would like to take one or two
 questions by (saying name) from Guatemala about academia and the civil society
 involvement.  And I would like to actually fully agree with her that this is,
 and for the story of the Internet, shows the role the academia played. Now, if
 you -- If I consider, and I will say maybe one of the expectations that I will
 be looking forward to on Thursday, coming from developing countries, and bear
 in mind where development, as heard, was just pointed out, development should
 be the focus of this, what I think is that we should find ways in which we
 better involve the academia, especially in developing countries. And this might
 be part of the whole capacity development issue, but I think it's important
 that we do have them. One of the reason is people are saying okay, PCs is going
 to come, it's going to be $100.  The figures are there to show that Africa is
 the place where you do have, you know, the minimum use of this.  I think it's
 something like 2.6, whatever, compared to whatever, 18 or 30%. So the question
 is why don't we make sure that these sort of low-cost computers come from
 Africa, for instance?  Where are the academia in Africa seeing some of the
 issues there, not to be solved only by development.  They live with it and they
 should be in a position to contribute fully. So I think these are the issues
 that give sort of ways in which we really involve academia.  So I think it is
 quite right that we should think on the role that academia should be playing.
 And then what message to send to billions out there that are not using the
 Internet?  Maybe they don't know that the Internet exists. But I think since
 this is about inclusion and this is one of the key words from the WSIS, have to
 be inclusive, you know, development.  I really think that it's not just the
 market that's going to solve the issue. I do agree that market will play a part
 of it, but I would like to come back to what I said, that Regulation in some of
 the places should now have some of these developmental orientation.  And that
 multistakeholder approach is important in that regard. We haven't touched upon
 the millenium development goals, which, for instance, were discussed and I
 don't know whether we really know that these goals, for instance, in most
 places in the world do not know are going to be met at all.  And if we don't
 have vigorous or -- I should say actions on them. So -- And I would like to
 return some of the word that came from this morning, sort of the speeches,
 about initiative that we are taking.  I think we need to be bold enough to say
 it's about development.  It's about offering opportunities and chances to a
 larger number of people.  And in that regard when you consider a place, and I
 would like to finish with that, a place like Africa.  The key issue is access. 
 And everybody knows today that Africans -- I mean the bandwidth, the cost they
 are paying is so high.  And especially from Africa where it is supposed to be
 the place where they don't have the means.  So something needs to be done to
 address this issue. And like how I was saying, some of the policymakers there
 are saying, well, what do we do?  We want to open the market, but at the same
 time we don't want it to be all for the market.  We want to find mechanism
 where we solve those issues and to benefit for all. So I think we need to link
 these two, the development and (saying name) from Brazil is quite right saying
 that should also be the focus.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Okay.  Thank you. Karen, did you want to add something or do
 you want to hold your fire? Okay.  Phil, please.

 >>PHIL BOND:  Just really quickly to follow-up on that, I think you will find
 the private more than willing and anxious to engage on development issues and
 regulatory issues that relate to development.  And, in fact, would encourage
 people to, if they can, attend on Wednesday.  I know Dr. Sam Paltridge is going
 to be presenting on some studies regarding access and models that seem to work
 and considerations for development.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  David.

 >>DAVID SOUTER:  I think if you're asking for a message to 5 billion people who
 don't have access to the Internet at the end of this week, it's not going to be
 we spend four days talking about ICANN and the root server system. And I think
 I will probably also say it's also not a message of the Internet will solve
 your problems. What I think it ought to be is a message that says we will seek
 to understand ways in which what we do here can play a part within addressing
 the multiple problems of disadvantage and marginalization and poverty and
 deprivation and so forth, and to place it firmly within the context that sees
 development as the priority.  So that kind of thing.  And I think that, on a
 slightly wider note, if we move away from polarized positions, whether in that
 context or another context, toward an understanding that enables us to do more
 constructive engagement, that seems to me to be a good outcome from four days.

 >> KEN CUKIER:    Juan Carlos.

 >>JUAN CARLOS SOLINES MORENO:  I would like to pick up on the questions raised
 by my colleagues from Uruguay and Cuba, talking about private partnerships and
 the message that we should give to the 5,000 million who don't have access.
 Well, yes, this is a fundamental issue.  Some of the outcome from this forum
 could be to achieve a common understanding of what a public/private partnership
 is all about. I think that a public/private partnership is everything the
 public sector, the governments can do with individual companies, the academic
 worlds, representatives from civil society. We are not limiting ourselves only
 to the private sector as such.  But it covers all sorts of partnerships which
 can be established by the public sector to achieve its ends.  It's rather
 important that the private sector and the civil society should define their
 role within these partnerships.  Partnerships are a really important element
 looking towards the future, and a stage at which governments need to re-jig the
 whole of the regulator system, to see in which areas -- connectivity, access,
 services -- where they need to intervene to have better conditions and
 competition for users to the benefit of the users as well. And there it's
 essential to have these partnerships, public, private, and with the academic
 world. Now, what message we can give to these 5,000 million inhabitants.  Well,
 the point is we are working.  We are working on it, we are looking around for
 possibilities.  At local level we are trying to understand what the -- not only
 multi-sectal but multi-regional prospects are.  Each region has its own
 priorities.  And at local level, each government, each state may adopt the best
 solutions.  In Latin America a lot of bodies are constantly working in civil
 society, the various networks that we have, and that's also going on in private
 -- the private sector as well. But we have to have a national aim for
 development, and that's what we should be striving for.

 >> KEN CUKIER:  Let me do this.  Since we only have a little bit of time left,
 summarizing as much as anyone possibly could, and one can't, what I have heard
 from the panel and what I have sensed from the questions and comments in the
 room, it strikes me that there is one sort of summing up question that I would
 like to maybe pose and then ask as many as would like, the panelists to
 respond. It strikes me that we all sort of believe in multiculturalism but in
 practice it's left a lot of difficulties in terms of how we organize it and how
 we establish this concretely in practice. This form is one example of it. 
 There's many, and it took us a long time to get here and we know it's just the
 beginning.  It's not the end. So I pose the question first to governments. 
 What do you expect from the private sector and from civil society? And for the
 people from the private sector and civil society on the panel, the same
 question in the reverse.  What do you expect from governments? Ambassador
 gross, I am going to start with you.

 >>DAVID GROSS:  Thanks. I expect a lot of everyone.  And I think, if I look
 back just over the brief history of the Internet, we have every reason to
 expect that we will exceed our expectations. You know, one of the things, like
 out at this audience here and I see many, many people who have done remarkable
 things with regard to the Internet.  We talk about the 5 billion people who
 don't have access, and that's extraordinarily important.  But that's also,
 remember, that just a few years ago no one had access to the Internet because
 there was no Internet. And actually, the adoption rate for the Internet is
 extraordinary.  In fact, unprecedented in human history. That tells us a lot
 about ourselves and about the power of the Internet and the power of content
 and communication. So while we worry about the 5 billion as we ought to, and we
 need to work on that, we should celebrate where we have been and take great
 comfort on where we are going as a result. But that doesn't mean there isn't a
 lot to be done.  I think cost, as has been discussed here, is extraordinarily
 important and I am optimistic about cost.  I am optimistic about the cost
 coming down because it has come down dramatically already and new technologies
 are bringing it down further, whether they are wire line through fiberoptics
 and the like or through wireless technologies that allow for people to solve
 that last mile route in ways that just a year or two ago, we couldn't solve.
 And therefore, have access. And as others have talked about, wireless services
 already on handsets are providing great opportunities for people to have access
 to the Internet that might not otherwise. But cost is a concern, and we think
 that competition, rule of law, and enabling environment is an extraordinarily
 important, not, perhaps, a complete answer, but an extraordinarily important
 part of the answer. We in the U.S. administration have spent, just over the
 past two or three years, over $250 million, over a quarter of a billion dollars
 in the developing world to bring access to people because we recognize that
 there needs to be help in that area, and we are seeking to provide that help.
 In addition, it seems to me that the private sector, but governments as well,
 and civil society particularly, need to create content that is both accessible
 but also of interest and value to everyone.  That means content in local
 languages, for which we have seen an explosion around the world, and we need to
 see high-value content being created.   That means development of intellectual
 property rights.  So it's not just those in the developed world who worry about
 these things, but rather new creators in the developing world should have that
 same protection.  And part of that needs to be, therefore, people finding value
 of spending their hard-earned money, no matter where they are from and how much
 or little money they have, find value in getting on the Internet, communicating
 and I think we will find that, in fact, a very high percentage of those 5
 billion people will get connected quickly because they will find that value,
 they will find that need to communicate and, in fact, those problems will be
 solved by the civil society, by the private sector, enabled by governments.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Thank you. Let me ask Sharil, from Malaysia.

 >>SHARIL TARMIZI:  Thank you, Ken. I'm just wondering whether you're asking the
 right question. And your question is what would -- what do governments expect
 of civil society, and vice versa, what does the private sector expect of
 government. One thing I can share, having been involved with the ICANN process
 for about six years, having been involved with the ICANN process for about six
 years now, and having been involved with the GAC directly for the last four
 years, the one thing I've learned a lot from the Internet techies, the
 technologists who actually build this thing, is not so much about what do you
 expect the other guy to come up with. It's more what can you bring to the table
 in terms of the discussion. And I think this is the one thing that this forum
 has an opportunity to do. Instead of saying, oh, we expect you to do this, we
 expect you to do that, what can you offer? Maybe what is required is what Vint
 had said about passing the issues, putting them into bite-sized arenas, when
 then people will come to the table and say, in more of a potluck approach,
 "This is what I can offer to resolve this problem." "This is what I can offer
 as a possible solution for your consideration," rather than expecting someone
 to come up with something.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  I take your point halfway. I agree that it's important to ask
 not what one does for someone else, but what one or --

 >>VINT CERF:  You're getting it backwards.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  John F. Kennedy said it better. Ted Sorenson said it better --

 >>VINT CERF:  I know John Kennedy. He's a friend of mine. You know --

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Thank you.

 >>VINT CERF:  You're welcome.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Bertrand, what can government possibly do and bring to Internet
 governance? And, secondly, for the first part, is there anything that
 government would like to see from the private sector and the civil society?
 Because, obviously, this needs to be a relationship, a tripartite relationship,
 that endures and is respectful. Flows both ways, three ways.

 >>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE:  Thanks for the question. Actually, I'd like to
 endorse what Sharil was saying. The big challenge that we're facing today is
 that we're now in a framework where we all are considered stakeholders. And in
 that respect, it means that there is a shared responsibility. And this shared
 responsibility, in my view, goes in three basic directions. The first one is
 not to be afraid of debate. This is what we are here for. Arguing with someone,
 not agreeing with somebody, having completely differing positions is natural.
 That means in many cases that you are just looking at the problem from a
 different viewpoint, meaning a physical position, and a physical angle. And
 only through discussion and debate can a better picture emerge. The first
 purpose of the forum is to provide better picture and more complete pictures
 for everybody. In that respect, we all have our pet subjects. And when I mean
 "we," I mean we as individuals, but also as the representatives of the
 organizations or the entities we belong to. For instance, has a certain number
 of issues that it wants to put forward. Diversity is a huge issue, and it's now
 getting intermingled with technical aspects, which is a perfect example of how
 technical elements have public-policy dimensions, and vice versa. Another issue
 that is important for us is privacy and digital identity.  And it's something
 that we'll be working at closely, and there are two workshops on that. Another
 element on the debate is that there is an 800-pound guerrilla in the room.  And
 there are issues, and we shouldn't be afraid to respect them. What are the
 respective roles and responsibilities of the differ categories of stakeholders
 and the different issues. And this is a perfectly fair question. So the first
 thing is, don't be afraid of the debate. And too quick comments afterwards.
 Network. It's our responsibility to get in touch with all the people who are
 interested in the same issues we are interested in. And if there's one thing
 that should come out of this forum at that stage -- and I endorse what Karen
 was saying earlier, is that network of people get together. And the last point
 is, let us not forget that we have agreed upon a large number of formulations
 during the WSIS process, and this is a starting point in many of the issues
 that we are discussing. Sorry for being too long.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  No. Thank you too much. Let me invite director general Chen to
 respond.

 >>YIN CHEN:  Thank you. From the discussion this morning and the discussion of
 this afternoon, we have heard the message or the hope that there will be a way
 to find a mechanism for Internet governance and to strengthen cooperation. I
 think that compared with the Internet when it was first brought before us,
 today's Internet is quite different. We should send this message to everyone
 out there, that is for the Internet, but it's still at the evolving stage. We
 should address the matter encountered also with this approach. Thank you.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Thank you. May I invite another panelist to respond to the
 question of comment expectations and a shared vision. Lynn.

 >>LYNN ST. AMOUR:  Obviously, not speaking from a government's perspective. I'd
 actually like the governments to take a real commitment to focusing on
 deployment, addressing the problems of access, addressing the problems of
 increasing and putting many more languages on the Internet, and not broaden --
 or not water down the work of the forum by focusing on too many topics. I'd
 actually suggest that the five billion people who don't have access to the
 Internet probably don't give a damn about spam and security at this point.
 That's something which will come at the secondary stage.  And they are very,
 very important issues. That's not to say they aren't. There are forums that are
 addressing many of those today. What's not being addressed on a global level
 are the issues affecting deployment and access.  And if this forum over the
 four days had focused on that uniquely, I think we'd come out of here having
 made a lot more progress with respect to bringing the Internet to the five
 billion people that don't yet have it. I also think it's very easy to
 politicize this discussion. And we can politicize it by focusing on a single
 root or the role of the U.S. government has historically played in the
 deployment, or we can continue to discuss multistakeholderism as a model.
 That's not going to bring the Internet to people who don't have it in anything
 near like the time it should and not anything like the time it could. These
 problems are not insurmountable. They're not unknown. They involve political,
 economic, social. There are many models across the world that show how it
 works. I just don't think we actually have a collective commitment from
 governments, from the United Nations, and from people in this room to do it.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Let me ask a very -- [ Applause ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Okay. Applause. [ Applause ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Just wait. Let me ask a question to the panel. Let me increase
 the squirm level in the room. To what degree does this process represent a
 mechanism by which stake- -- the stakeholders of Internet governance can
 discuss these issues rather than the people of -- the Internet users who care
 about these things, go forward, which is to say, in my poorly-worded question,
 to what degree is this debate all about us in the room as opposed to them
 outside of the room? Let me challenge you to say that the question might be
 loaded, that maybe us philosophical types like to create problems where
 problems don't need to be quite as large. To what degree is this about us
 looking for the seduction of power, this idea of governance, this idea of the
 Internet being so important, but, in fact, what we discuss here is not quite
 the priorities of the people not in this room? Would anybody like to flay in
 the wind as I pose that question? I like the idea of just having no answer.
 But, Phil, if you'd like to try, go ahead.

 >>PHIL BOND:  I think like Lynn is saying, it's too much. The focus needs to be
 more on development.  And that leads to us a whole different set of discussions
 that are more pertinent to the people who are outside of the room. And that
 that is a discussion that the private sector is anxious to have, because the
 next billion Internet users are going to come from the developing world.  And
 we want to see that happen as soon as possible. That goes to governments'
 willingness to invite the private sector in not just for their money, but to
 have policy discussions, because the private sector's more experienced in
 dealing with the rapid change of technology, and because we have a vested
 interest, too, in an environment for innovation, an environment for
 capacity-building. Those are things that are important to the private sector as
 well. So I think there's a feeling, let's get on with it on the most relevant
 discussion, which is where the next billion users are going to come from in the
 developing world.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  The thing that's most interesting to me is that this very forum
 embodies multistakeholderism. As I started my -- the session, I noted that when
 I was -- that ten years ago, we had the same discussion on Internet governance,
 there were 200 people in the room. They all spoke English. All of them were
 white. They were all -- almost all technologists or academics. And now we've
 increased the participation and the stakeholders in Internet governance. And I
 think if we recognize one thing, it's that this is a timeless process in which
 we're -- it's ever expanding and even those who aren't part of the Internet
 still need to be represented when we make these decisions. Let me turn to one
 last question from the audience, and that is from the Senator Beatrice
 Mangolfi, from Italy. Then I will brow the panelists to make some final
 summation remarks.

 >> BEATRICE MANGOLFI:  Thank you. You made us an answer. You told, what
 governments expect from IGF, I can tell what my government expects. First, to
 confirm the value of the multistakeholder method, the multistakeholder
 approach. Today, we have a confirmation about the validity of this method. I
 think it's the first time that in this context there is a really interactive
 dialogue. In Italy, we tested it. A couple of weeks ago, we had a public
 consultation, Italian government, also public consultation, and a virtual forum
 on the official Web site of government on Internet governance, opened to the
 entire nation of civil society. The success of this forum proves out the
 Italian civil society is key to participating in this discussion about issues
 of Internet governance. Second, second, about the themes of this forum, we wish
 that after the work in Geneva and in Tunis, we are ready to move forward
 towards the identification of some few agreed lines of action for the issues at
 stake. Third, in particular, Italy offers its contribution and mediation to the
 international debate for the definition of what we call a constitution for the
 Net, which is a set of fundamental rights and duties, rights and duties for the
 digital citizenship. For this reason, we have promoted one of the forum
 workshops on the theme of the Internet Bill of Rights. This workshop will be on
 Wednesday, and it will be led by Stefano (saying name). This is our work that
 begins from here, and we continue from here to Rio. Thank you very much. [
 Applause ]

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Okay. Good. Thank you. Let me now turn to the panelists. We're
 almost out of time. We have about five minutes left. Are there any final
 thoughts, any summations, any reactions to what we've heard from the senator
 that you would like to bring up that might help us set the tone for this
 unprecedented meeting in which we've come together to discuss Internet
 governance in however we're defining it, stepping forward into an experimental
 process that we don't know where it will lead? I'm not going to call -- I could
 go down the list on everyone and challenge Jean-Jacques and then Paul Twomey.
 It sounds like a very tempting thing to do. Jean-Jacques, and then Paul Twomey.
 Then we'll hear from --

 >>JEAN-JACQUES MASSIMA LANDJI:  Thank you. Well, I've got two points I would
 like to raise. Obviously, developing countries in general are trying to draw up
 policies as far as they can which will try and extend the service to as many
 people as possible. It doesn't go without saying, as Pierre was saying
 beforehand, you know, we're not going to put the cart before the horse. There
 are some very basic problems that need to be solved:  Electricity, drinking
 water. How do you want the Internet to get in where there's no electricity.
 It's a whole process. We were talking about the millennium goals beforehand.
 We're a long way from that. U.N. resolutions will provide deadlines on
 countries to achieve various concrete steps. And we're far from having achieved
 a lot of those. So, yes, we're talking about this common will to provide the
 minimum of access to all countries so that you have an elite, really that can
 benefit from the information society. But as my friend was saying, at local
 level, we want to get the regulatory provisions, the legal basis there which
 would allow us to bring in programs for the least favored sector of the
 population. Access to technologies shouldn't be essential, as such, because,
 you know, the important point is to be connected, not the level at which you
 are connected.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  (inaudible).

 >>PIERRE DANDJINOU:  Thank you very much. I would just like to -- maybe we are
 facing sort of twofold problems here, meaning how do we ensure that the
 Internet keeps on growing, meaning that we just kind of let what is working
 well -- we don't just go back to it and break it. If it's functioning, we don't
 need to go back to it. We may be able to add layers. And the problems of
 spamming, we can still work on them. But I think we need to reconcile that,
 one, the other part, which is development. And I would like to go back on that
 one. It's important that we make sure -- it's about inclusion, okay? So there
 again, we need to have the initiative that we really think appropriate to make
 sure that, you know, most people, you know, benefit from this. And I would like
 also to -- and as chair of AfriNIC, to actually say that, and the minister,
 Tarek, from Egypt said it this morning, that AfriNIC came out of kind of
 multistakeholder sort of, you know, collaboration. That's the way we did it.
 And we do have many other national institutions now that really need to be
 built on this sort of multistakeholder approach. And I would like to actually
 (inaudible) some of those positions in Africa. And definitely, I think
 positions such as ISOC, and ICANN come to mind. What they did was great,
 because some of the things were done without even government knowing about it.
 And most places, they just heard about AfriNIC. It came because of those
 volunteers that we have. So I think that we are helped because of this
 collaboration. So for me, the other message here is going to be the type of
 ground collaboration that we will be able to build, so it's not just about
 developing countries or developed countries. It's about ensuring that the
 Internet is there, grows up, and we beef it up so it can help solve problems.
 It is also about including those who cannot afford. Thank you.

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Interesting. Please, yes.

 >>CHAIRMAN VOUELOUMIS:  I think the time has come to sum up and --

 >>KEN CUKIER:  Mr. Chairman. I think are you right. Allow me to make one
 announcement before I -- we need to make two announcements before we do. The
 first one is one that I make of them, one that Markus Kummer makes, and then
 we'll allow you to close the session. But the announcement is that because so
 many people from around the world are watching us on the Internet, that there
 is -- it is not obvious where you need to send your comments to be heard so
 that you can participate in the discussions. It turns out we are setting up
 right now an e-mail address that is going to be easier to find. That e-mail
 address will be comments@IGF2006.info. With that, I want -- before I thank --
 allow you to close the session and to thank the panelists, I want to ask Markus
 Kummer to make some remarks.

 >>SECRETARY KUMMER:  The, Secretariat is also working onsetting up an e-mail
 address, in addition, in French and in Spanish.  We have members from the
 advisory group who will take in comments in French and in Spanish as well. I
 was asked to make comments by the host country that there is a reception
 tonight, as you will remember, and buses will leave at 8:00 from all the
 conference hotels. I would also like to call on the panelists of tomorrow's
 session, tomorrow morning at 9:00.  They will meet with the moderator in the
 room Aphrodite A.  Aphrodite A at 9:00 for the panelists of the open session.
 And I have been, last but not least, been asked by the delegation from Germany
 to announce that they will host a reception for government representatives also
 at the astir palace hotel and invitations can be picked up at the IGF
 information counter.  Also, bus transportation will be provided.  That's it. 
 Thank you.

 >>PANAGIOTIS VOUELOUMIS:  The gentleman on my left, Mr. Stratakis, a member of
 parliament, would like to say a few words before we sum up.  I think we should
 allow him to.

 >>MANOLIS STRATAKIS:  I didn't actually ask for the floor during the course of
 this afternoon's discussion and deliberations because by following the
 tradition of hospitality we listened to you and we listened very carefully. We
 have listened to all of the major issues which have been touched upon not only
 by the stakeholders present here but also by those who are not actually in the
 room but who have expressed themselves through us here. As a representative of
 the Hellenic parliament and representing the presence of the main opposition
 party, PASOC {sp?} who is the president of the socialist international, Mr.
 George Papendreou, I would like first of all to welcome you to Greece, the
 first Internet Governance Forum, and I would like to also wish you a pleasant
 stay. I'd like to assure you also that the president, Mr. Papendreou, did want
 to be with you here today at your invitation, but for reasons of calls of duty,
 he was not able to be with us. He is keenly interested, however, in ICT, and we
 all know his great contribution to promoting such technologies whenever he has
 the occasion to so do.  And this was especially so during the Greek presidency
 of the European union as the foreign Minister for Greece. I would also like to
 extend my warmest thanks to all of you who have made this forum a reality here
 in Athens. Athens is a city with a long history through the ages, and it
 therefore constitutes the most apt location for such deliberations on the
 Internet to be developed.  And this, of course, can set a very positive course
 for an Internet for all, which is something that we all want to be not only
 positive but also dramatic. Now the representative of the civil society here on
 the panel, I think, said that the forum has to basically come down to the
 national and local levels to see how we can respond to problems of reality in
 practice, and I think that some thoughts and reflection on this issue might
 help here. I think, to cite an example which might be followed around the
 world, where we have entered into a new epoch, a new age where it's necessary
 for new technologies warmed by the sun to actually spread its rays out to the
 whole of the planet and to every single human being on this planet.  So I am
 actually proud because as a deputy minister for communication and transport
 under the previous government I was actually the competent person for ICT.  And
 this was my basic thinking.  It was under the Greek presidency, and on other
 occasions, that we were able, in fact, to have very important and specific
 measures implemented. Perhaps I can just cite two examples by way of
 illustration on this. First of all, we were able to launch the first Greek
 satellite, and therefore become members of the satellite club, so to speak. And
 this is important because of the actual morphology of the country.  We have
 many different islands and it's important for us to have wireless
 communication, thereby. We were also able to, in successfully drawing to a
 close the Greek presidency, which I was able to participate in as a Minister
 for telecommunications, we were able there to make sure that we had security
 established as concerns the European union Internet communications with a
 specific institute located in Crete responsible for such security matters.  And
 it has been said here on several occasions during the course of the day that
 security is tantamount. I am going to conclude because we are drawing to the
 end of our day.  I fully share your view that says that knowledge is a cycle. 
 The more it expands, the more its diameter actually expands.  But this
 automatically leads us to understand that efforts should never cease.  And the
 more we expand that circle, the more we will maximize our collective knowledge
 and activities. For our part, we firmly believe that rapid Internet and
 broadband communication is something which should be considered a public good,
 a public utility thereby, so that one can build into it a vision which will
 serve the whole of society. And in the few examples I have given, I hope that I
 have been able to give it to understand that we want to contribute considerably
 to moving ahead on these issues. We do have a number of proposals which, along
 with your conclusions and views, we would like to add.  Not only in terms of
 understanding the importance of the Internet and how incredibly useful it is,
 but also to try and indicate how all citizens of this planet will be able to
 have quick and easy access to that particular tool, thereby achieving the
 objective that we all, I think, serve. May I wish you every success in the
 deliberations of your forum here. Thank you. [ Applause ]

 >>PANAGIOTIS VOUELOUMIS:  Thank you, Mr. Stratakis. I think that we have been
 here for a bit too long, and therefore, I am going to be very brief. First of
 all, I want to thank all the participants for their interventions, and also all
 the panelists for their very eloquent exposures and expositions and answers. I
 think that it was an extremely -- extremely, at least to me, informative,
 informative discussion. I would not presume to sum up because there were so
 many issues raised that I think it would be -- we'd stay here until tomorrow
 morning. I would just like to say three things which have stuck in my mind. One
 was a comment whether we should be proactive or run after the developments to
 catch up.  And then I think we are no choice.  One, we have been talking, at
 least in Greece, another thousand people have bought subscriptions for
 Internet.  And I don't know how many internationally. This thing cannot be
 stopped.  And I think that we would have to run after it.  And it will be very
 difficult to be proactive in foreseeing what's going to happen. I think we
 should be vigilant, but not try to regulate before it's necessary. And then I
 come to my second, which is my pet subject.  Don't regulate before the industry
 grows.  If you regulate before the industry grows, then you kill the industry
 or you warp it or you twist it. Therefore, better let it be with all its faults
 and then come after, when you know more about it. And the third thing which I
 would like to note, to observe, is that it's another comment made by a
 gentleman here, that Internet gives power to various groups which are not
 officially kind of blessed, not officially legitimized.  Like companies,
 technology people, and also I would say users, groups of users. And this causes
 problems for governments because governments like to control.  Governments feel
 insecure if they don't control. And sometimes governments are at a loss whether
 to be a traffic policeman or a policeman, period. And this is to me an issue
 which I'm afraid we don't have time to debate now, but it's an issue which
 should occupy the workings of this conference in the future. Thank you very
 much, and all the best. [ Applause ]