13 February 2007 IFG Consultations Geneva

"Taking stock and the way forward"

Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken
during the Open Consultations of 13 february 2007.  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 DESAI:  Can I ask people to settle down.

(Gavel.)

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Good morning.

Let me begin first by explaining briefly the purpose of this meeting and
what we hope to do over this one day.

It's working.

And it sometimes helps to turn the volume up.

[ Laughter ]

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  The Advisory Group, which was charged with the
responsibility of helping to organize the Athens meeting of the Internet
Governance Forum met yesterday.

And today we are meeting in open consultation.

The purpose of both meetings, yesterday's meeting of the advisory group
and this open consultation, is to take stock of the Athens forum, to see
what are the lessons that we could learn from that forum, to make an
assessment of the extent to which it met expectations that people had so
that we can then forward this to the Secretary-General.

As you know, the Secretary-General set up this process essentially for
focusing on the Athens meeting.

And the intention was always that after the Athens meeting, we would
evaluate how this process functioned so that we could learn lessons for
the remaining meetings of the forum.

And that is the basic purpose of these two days, yesterday's meeting, as
well as today's meeting.

Our focus is on learning lessons from the past.

But, of course, in a sense, our purpose is to put these things in a form
in which it will be helpful for the organization of future meetings of
the Internet Governance Forum.

What I'm proposing as a process for today is that we can begin by Mr.
Kummer giving -- giving us an evaluation which he has prepared on the
basis of consultations to provide us with a starting point.

We will then open the floor for you to contribute to this discussion.

I understand that in the course of the morning, perhaps right at the
beginning, the -- our Greek hosts would like to give their presentation
on their evaluation of the forum.

And there are also certain others who have been involved in follow-up
activities arising from the forum who may wish to say something here.

But this is an open consultation.

There is no fixed order.

There is no fixed agenda.

But the primary purpose is to try and evaluate how well did the process
work, what -- did it meet our expectations?  What are the lessons that
we can learn that we feel are necessary to take into account in
designing future meetings of the IGF.

So with this, let me just stop and turn to Markus Kummer.

>>SECRETARY KUMMER:  Thank you, chairman.

Before I start with the paper, I would -- just to logistical,
organizational issues.

Once again, we have our faithful scribes here who write down everything
as we say it in realtime.

And this will be posted on our Web immediately after each session.

By now, I think most participants are familiar how it works.

We would like to ask you when you want to speak to give us a business
card or write down your name and affiliation on a paper so we can give
it to our scribes so it will be -- each speaker will be identified.

And, again, we have our team from Turin Polytechnic, who are doing the
webcasting, it's two new people.

The old team has moved on to other jobs, but I'm sure they're as
efficient as their predecessors.

We had posted a synthesis paper of all the contributions we have
received until Friday last week.

Copies are made available in the back of this room, and the paper, you
can see it on our Web site.

We received a total of 13 written contributions, and also ten inputs in
the online process.

Since then, we have received some more.

And I would also like to draw attention on the submission by the
economic commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, which, if it is
not posted yet, it will be posted on our Web site in the course of the
day.

That is an evaluation of the issues that are important to the country in
the region and it might be of interest to participants.

The paper, to a large extent, I hope is self-explanatory.

We have several chapters, starting with the preparatory process.

And we asked contributors what worked well and what worked less well.

Well, I'm pleased to report back that most contributors, on the whole,
found the preparatory process worked well.

They saw the role of the Advisory Group, which was appointed by the
Secretary-General, as a very useful and appropriate mechanism to assist
the Secretary-General in convening the inaugural meeting.

However, in the what worked less well part of the chapter, there was
some criticism that transparency could have been better, and we have to
take this seriously.

Transparency can always be improved.

And I am sure whatever the mechanism will be to prepare the next
meeting, that members will make even more effort to reach out to their
various constituencies and to report back from their constituencies to
tell us what the feelings are and what views are held.

Also, it was criticized that there were no reports made available of the
meetings.

I would like to point out that the work of the Advisory Group was not
just focused on -- it was an online, ongoing process.

And maybe we can improve on that by making available fortnightly
newsletters to inform a wider audience of what is being discussed.

As regards input papers, we asked specifically whether the synthesis
paper the secretariat had prepared of all the contributions that were
submitted prior to the Athens meeting had been useful or not.

The main purpose of the paper had always been to give the non-native
English speaker a flavor of the discussions in their own language.

The paper had been translated in all U.N. languages.

And I am pleased to note that various submissions said they had
appreciated that particular service.

We asked for an evaluation because it was a considerable effort to
prepare the paper, and we also had to pay for the translation.

So whether we want to do it or not, we wanted to know whether it
actually fulfilled a function.

Throughout the commentaries, however, it was clear that they felt that
the paper was not well enough integrated into the proceedings of the
Athens meeting, and one main criticism that was made was that it was
made available far too late, too short before the meeting.

There's an explanation for this.

We followed U.N. practice, that is, to make papers available in all
languages at the same time.

However, we can, I suppose, break that rule and give preference to the
English copy and make the other languages available once they have been
translated, if that corresponds to the preference of participants.

I'm sure there could be better efforts made to integrate the paper into
the proceedings so that panelists, moderators would actually use the
paper when they are at the meeting itself.

As regards other papers, I think on the whole, the process was
appreciated.

The opportunity to post papers, I think, fulfilled a function.

Several people pointed out it would have been useful had these papers
also been translated into all U.N. languages.

However, this is almost impossible.

A, it would be very expensive.

And, B, there is also a time constraint and a capacity constraint.

We cannot just have U.N. translator like that.

We can only use them if they don't have anything to do, and then, in
addition, we have to pay for them.

So I think there we have to stick to past practices and post the
contributions in the language we receive them.

As regards the meeting itself, comments on structure, format, and
content, on the whole, were very positive.

I think most respondents liked the format, the use of professional
moderators, also the concept of distributed multistakeholder workshops
was appreciated.

And the emerging concept of dynamic coalition was seen as an innovative
and significant outcome of the meetings.

There were, of course, some critical remarks as regards what worked less
well.

I think almost unanimous, the reactions were that the panels were too
large, too many participants on each panel, and that the panel sessions
were too long.

And there were other remarks as regards the overlapping of meetings,
meetings being held concurrently.

But I think this will be an ongoing discussion when we look forward to
preparing the Athens meeting.

I don't think there's much point going too much into detail as regards
the logistics.

The logistics of the meeting are very much part of the host country
agreement between the United Nations and the host country.

I think, again, most people appreciated the excellent work done by our
Greek hosts.

There were some detailed comments that were very helpful, and we can
improve on them.

One of them, for instance, was that the screens were far too small for
those sitting in the back of the room.

So we will have to learn from that and place additional screens maybe in
the middle of the room.

So this is basically a very helpful suggestion.

As regards the way forward, the synthesis paper reflects the fact,
without taking any sides, that as in the meeting we had in Athens on the
way forward, there are different views on the role and the function.

I don't think there is much point for me to go into that.

But these views, I think, basically persist.

And we have to see how we move forward.

There are those who want to -- the IGF to be more reactive and come out
with some tangible output, whereas others see the IGF as more of a
platform where people come together and then the decision-makers take
their decisions in other bodies.

As regards the preparatory process for Rio, I think most commentators
agreed that the second meeting should build on the success of Athens and
also build on the similar multistakeholder approach also in the
preparatory process.

And also, again, virtually all commentators agreed that the planning
process should begin early, as early as possible, and also that it
should facilitate active participation.

There should be enough time to submit contributions, and, again, to be
as inclusive and open as possible.

And then there were many concrete and helpful, more detailed proposes as
regards to the Rio meeting.

Again, a common thread is that the attention needs to be given to the
participation from all geographical areas, and, in particular, from
developing countries and that this should be one of our priorities, to
make sure to encourage and facilitate participation of all stakeholders
from developing countries, and we should not lose the development focus
of the IGF and the capacity-building theme as an overall theme.

Several comments were made as regards the relationship between the
dynamic coalitions and the IGF.

And I'm given to understand that several of these dynamic coalitions
would like to report on their constitutions and their progress achieved
so far at today's meeting.

And we look forward to listening to them.

There were several, as I said, several interesting proposals, like, for
instance, that all major organizations dealing with issues related to
Internet governance, such as ICANN, ITU, UNESCO, WIPO, WTO, could be
invited to hold open forums at the annual IGF meetings.

This might be something of interest to the organizations.

But it will be up to them to signal whether they like the idea.

Or another one of the very -- a very concrete suggestion -- and that was
in line with a comment made that maybe not enough attention was paid to
the sharing of best practices -- that the best practice forums could
allow governments to play a major role and present national success
stories at the Rio meeting.

With this, I hand back to you, chairman.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

That was the assessment which has been prepared by the secretariat on
the basis of the inputs that they received.

But before I open the floor, I was just going to inquire whether our
Greek host would like to speak now to give their evaluation.

Is it going to be feasible to do it now or later?

>>:Now.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Now.

Okay.

(Presentation by Greek host.)

>>PANAGIOTIS PAPASPILIOPOULOS:  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. 
Hosting the inaugural meeting of the Internet Governance Forum was a
great honor and pleasure for us, while providing us with the opportunity
to contribute to the success of such an important event.

Following our political commitment as expressed in Tunis, we were
dedicated through the procedural and organizational part to facilitate
the dialogue among the multistakeholders and enhance the potential
impact of IGF.

Indeed, attendance exceeded all expectations.  The number of
participants was almost double than the one which was originally
expected and planned for.

Actually, attendees from NGOs, private sectors, governments and
academics discussed without protocol seating, formal arrangements and
diversifications.

Also, 152 media accreditations revealed a strong media interest in the
event.

In order to encourage participation we facilitated visa issuance
procedures for many participants.

The Forum's importance for the Greek government was shown by the support
given and the high level of attendance on the Greek part.  The Forum's
meeting was open by Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis and chaired
by the Greek Minister of Transport of Communications Michalis Liapis.

A lot of people in Greece joined their efforts and worked hard for that.

The Greek government supported the Forum and the multi-task force was
formed in order to carry out the challenge.

During the Forum, more than 200 people were involved, including the
personnel of the Greek organization, the police, the medical staff, and
all the supporting personnel like technicians, drivers, and others.

The Greek government made the block working of ten hotels of one of the
most spectacular suburbs of Athens.  Ten hotels at various prices, more
than 850 rooms at government rates in the proximity of the Forum's
venue.  The Divani Apollon Palace and Spa, chosen as the Forum venue, is
a luxury five-star resort hotel situated in the exclusive area of
Vouliagmeni offering all necessary facilities and fulfilling all U.N.
conference requirements, such as security specs.

In the Forum's venue, all hotel convention centers, amenities and spaces
were reserved and fully equipped to facilitate the delegates.  The venue
complex consisted of the main conference hall, three rooms reserved for
36 workshops, the media center, the media conference room, the U.N.
offices, and accreditation area.

One of the most important issues is the accreditation, because it gives
the first impression to the participants.  The procedure was very well
organized in order to avoid queues and delays.

The participants were first driven to the accreditation desk and then
allocated to their hotels.

Nevertheless, the accreditation center was equipped with all the
necessary facilities and staff that is technicians and secretariat.

The main hall hosted more than 1,000 people and it was highly equipped
in order to meet their expectations.

Given that the interpretation is one of the key elements towards the
Forum's success, we included 23 interpreters, accredited to various
institutional bodies and their national organizations.

We gave great importance to the inbound and outbound access to the
forum.  We provided free wireless Internet access for 1500 people,
Internet corners in three different areas of the venue.  Real-time
verbatim transcriptions , Webcast of main sessions, virtual
participation via e-mail, chat rooms, text messaging and video
conferencing.  Main hall video broadcast in four languages.  Three
workshop rooms with audio broadcasting.  Universal satellite coverage by
Hellas Sat 2.  Broadcast from local TV stations.

The Greek government provided all the technical equipment needed for the
venue as well as office supplies and equipment for the United Nations
staff.

Signing was another practical issue we had to decide and be creative
about, since it was important to depicture the vision of the forum and
inspire and facilitate the attendees.

We also provided all the participants with conference material,
consisted of a shoulder bag and folder with all the necessary
information.

Participants transferring was fully arranged and free of charge.  They
were carried from the airport to the hotels and vice versa, and shuttle
buses linked all the hotels with the forum venue on a regular basis. 
For the participants facilitation and convenience, two information desk
were located at the airport and one at the venue.  A travel desk was
also provided there.

Nowadays, security is at the top of the agenda.  Close cooperation
between Greek authorities and U.N. officials provided a solid security
plan.

We covered every security aspect in the venue and all surrounding areas,
ensuring the effective function of the meeting in an atmosphere of
tranquility, free from fears of any kind.

The security plan fulfilled over and above the U.N. standards, including
access control, metal detectors, x-ray machines, and special protection
plan for the VIPs.

We provided first aid facilities within the meeting premises.  We
ensured for emergency services immediate transportation and admission to
the hospital.  Of course the food and water were subject to hygienic
control and we ensured VIPs medical profile notifications.

Regarding other services provided during the forum, we organize side
events like receptions to all participants, dinner to VIPs and a
farewell reception to all U.N. personnel.

Another important point for the forum's success was our ability to
respond promptly and effectively to last-minute schedules and arising
needs of every kind addressed by U.N.

In order to give full coverage of the forum, before its opening, during
its works and after its closure, we organized the complete plan which
included Greek Minister's Press Conference to Greek an foreign
journalists before the forum, press and television advertising, media
center and media conference room, office news agency operation in
forum's venue, Greek contact person tor coordinate and update the Greek
and foreign correspondents, press kit for journalists.

Moreover, we had national and international sponsors covering the
technical needs of the forum.

The IGF Athens 2006 site was a significant tool for this access of the
forum and the vital contact point.

The site included update on the forum preparations, important documents,
information on the registration process, list of hotels, prices, and a
map of area, hotel booking procedure, and other useful information for
participants.

Ladies and gentlemen, hosting, facilitating and participating in the
inaugural meeting of the Internet Governance Forum represents our firm
belief in the idea of an Internet free and stable for all.

We now pass the baton to Brazil and wish them every success being at
their disposal for advice and help.

Thank you very much.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much, and may I take this opportunity
for thanking the government and people of Greece for hosting us, and the
very fine facilities that they made available for this inaugural meeting
of the forum.

I really want to thank you for this.

Yes, may I --

>>:Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me take this opportunity to thank you for -- because it's your
success, this meeting.

You made a long way, you and Mr. Kummer, you came to Athens, you helped
us, and all of this group demonstrated that we managed to have a nice
meeting.

Now, together, we have to proceed all together to turn the Rio meeting
into even a better success.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

The floor is now open.

Yes, Germany.

>>GERMANY:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am speaking on behalf of the European Union.

The European Union would like to thank you for convening the present
consultations, which we welcome very much.

We appreciate very much this opportunity to exchange views on the first
Internet Governance Forum and to gather ideas for the way ahead.

We would like to warmly thank the government of Greece for having hosted
the first meeting of the Forum, which was a very successful one and
during which the various stakeholders had a fruitful debate.

We would like to recall that European Union member states participated
actively at the IGF.

We would also like to express our gratitude to you, Mr. Chairman, the
IGF Secretariat, the Advisory Group members, and not least, to all the
participants in the first IGF who contributed to making this meeting a
success.

Mr. Chairman, the first Internet Governance Forum implemented the
provisions of the Tunis Agenda in the way we all envisaged.

In particular, we welcome that the multistakeholder spirit became a
reality, and we want this important element maintained for all
forthcoming IGF meetings.

We commend all those involved in the preparations of this event for
having chosen a format which allowed for concrete discussions around
four specific themes, and at the same time, for having provided the
option to organize more specific workshops.

However, we would welcome if a limit on a workable number of subjects
could be upheld as one of the guiding principles for the next IGF
meetings.

A key principle, Mr. Chairman, as we move forward, should, of course, be
to avoid repeating the discussions we had during the Athens meeting,
but, rather, to build on this work in the four priority areas.

In the European Union, we see a value on the exchanges on the freedom of
expression and security as two major priorities for multistakeholder
dialogue.

Furthermore, we would welcome to continue deliberations on the
development context.

Mr. Chairman, we feel that Athens has provided an opportunity for a
concrete outcome, not least in the form of dynamic coalitions.

We welcome this development, and we hope to see it continued in the
meeting in Rio de Janeiro, providing the different dynamic coalitions
with an opportunity to present their work.

We thank the secretariat for having provided a balanced reflection on
the discussions had during those four days.

The IGF implemented well the provision of the Tunis Agenda, requesting
it to be constituted as a neutral, nonduplicative and nonbinding
process.

Finally, the European Union would like to reiterate its continued
support for the IGF as a forum for multistakeholder, public-policy
dialogue foreseen in the Tunis Agenda and to reiterate its commitment to
continue to cooperation with all stakeholders to ensure the continuation
of the success already achieved in Athens.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

I have ITU.

>>ITU:  Thank you, Chairman.

In response to the question posed by Mr. Kummer as to whether or not the
ITU would have some interest in presenting some material at the IGF in
Rio, subject to confirmation from the Secretary-General, with whom I
have not consulted, I think I could say that, in principle, we would.

We would take that opportunity to present the development activities in
particular would be my expectation.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I have Iran and then the United States.

And there's a gentleman there.

I didn't see your card.

>>IRAN:  Thank you very much.

Good morning to you, Mr. Chairman, and to all colleagues.

Initially, I would like to ask permission, through you, to express my
gratitude both to the government and people of Greece for the excellent
arrangements and the way they handled the job, and also to you, Mr.
Chairman, as usual, for your able chairmanship, to the secretariat, and
to the Advisory Group.

Mr. Chairman, as regards to the questions you raised initially to serve
as the framework within which we are supposed to give our inputs, I
would like to express that as far as the IGF first being held in Greece
is concerned, I could say that our assessment is that the meeting has
been a success, if we see in the context of the first meeting and how
you described it on behalf of the Secretary-General, who had said that
we are entering uncharted waters.

Of course, maybe for the meetings to come, we would like to be a little
bit more charted and more defined.

But I think everything has been excellent for the first meeting,
especially as regards the multistakeholder approach, which has been
observed in an excellent -- or at an excellent level.

And the format, too, the professionalism which has been demonstrated,
the tremendous wealth of knowledge has been there, both by panelists and
by participants, which we all appreciate.

But if we would like to just set some criteria for the meetings to come,
maybe we would like to gauge the success of the meetings to come with
the level of the mandate that we have been given and the level of the
performance and how far it has been met.

For example, going through the mandate which has been given to the IGF,
I think one of the first and most important things was discussing
public-policy issues.

Of course, we had limited ourselves to four themes, which in a way would
relate to the same thing.

But I think we rather were more technical and just describing what is
happening in the arena of communication and maybe a little less on how
we could bring some change, which was, I think, the aim of both summits.

Of course, as I said, we really appreciate the tremendous wealth of
knowledge which was there.

For us, it was both educational and promising.

But for the meetings to come, I think we have to take into consideration
the very important point which we would just summarize it into saying
efficiency versus effectiveness.

We have been very efficient as far as the format is concerned, as far as
the multistakeholder participation is concerned.

But how effectively the mandate was followed, and this is a question
which we might wish to go a little bit deep into for the meetings to
come.

The second point is, Mr. Chairman, the point which was just raised by
distinguished colleague from E.U., which I think is a very important
point.

They said that they would not -- they would not like to see the same
things being repeated for the next meetings to come, which I think is
quite a rational request or proposal.

But at the same time, having gone through the very effective and
reflective summary that the secretariat has provided us with, at the end
of each theme, when they summarized each theme, on the openness, on the
security, or access, they have come to the conclusion that they see that
IGF is a very appropriate body to follow up on these issues, and they
think that we have come to very primitive conclusions at that level we
reached in Greece, indicating that there is the need for those themes to
continue within the context of IGF.

This is not what I recommend, but this is something which one could
understand from the summaries.

In fact, what we initially proposed during the preparatory process that
you kindly chaired was to have a multiyear program of work so that we
could have a fair distribution of job, and to go through all items
foreseen in the mandate.

I will not be long.

Just I thank you and all involved in the process again.

And I finish just with one question, which I would very much appreciate
if you could just somehow address it.

And this is with regard to enhanced cooperation.

I know that we are here for stock-taking of Greece.

And maybe this is not the best place to raise it.

But since a lot of issues that colleagues will raise and I have raised
somehow relates to beyond the format that we have followed within the
IGF, how we would like to proceed, and what happened to the mandate
which was given also as regards to enhanced cooperation.

And the chairman of G77 wrote to the general secretariat asking for a
response, which I don't think he has received.

That would be very appreciated, if you kindly address that point, too.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  No.

I want to thank you for your very thoughtful and helpful comments.

Let me just quickly respond to your last query.

Though we are not discussing this here, but I think in an informal
sense, I can say that since I don't come to Geneva that often, I have
submitted a report to the Secretary-General on the basis of the various
consultations that I have had on what the range of views of people --
what the range is in terms of what is expected, in terms of a process
leading to enhanced cooperation.

And as you know, of course, there has been a certain change in New York.

So possibly because of that, there may be a slight delay in the
response.

But I have no doubt that there will be a response.

But this is basically where the matter rests at the moment.

So I await, you know, for instructions from there.

To be quite frank, I do not have a mandate right now.

I was the special advisor to the previous Secretary-General.

And I have fulfilled my duties there.

And we are just to await the arrangements that will be made in New York.

So this is where we are.

But you're correct in raising this question, because I know many others
have also -- also want to ask me the same question.

So I thought I may as well place this on the table right now so that we
can then get back to our IGF function.

I welcome your comments, particularly on the themes and the possibility
of a multiyear program of work, and I think -- I'm sure these are
matters, whatever arrangements we make for future IGFs, we will wish to
take into account.

I would also like to mention that even in the discussions in the
Advisory Group, this question did arise as to should we not be looking
at what has been done so far in relation to that paragraph in the Tunis
outcome which specifies the mandate of the IGF.

So I think these are all very valuable suggestions, and I have no doubt
that we would want to pass this on to the arrangements that will be put
in place for the future IGFs, which I hope will also be multi-year
arrangements rather than one year at a time.

I have the United States, Third World Network, Brazil, and Japan,.

The United States, please.

>>UNITED STATES:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The U.S. delegation would also like to thank you and Mr. Kummer for
holding these informal consultations today.

The United States believes that the Internet Governance Forum, held in
Athens, was a successful event that offered governments, civil society,
industry, and international organizations the opportunity to exchange
information and offer perspectives on the important issues associated
with Internet governance.

We congratulate the government of Greece and the IGF Secretariat for all
their efforts to carry out such a successful meeting.

The IGF is an example of a true multistakeholder event.

The multistakeholder character of future Internet Governance Forums must
be maintained at all levels.

The United States supports the continuation of the multistakeholder
Advisory Group in order to ensure that all stakeholders have the
opportunity to provide input to the organization of the upcoming forum.

We strongly believe that the continued engagement of business,
governments, civil society, international organizations, and the
technical community is essential for the future success of the IGF.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

We will now turn to the Riaz Tayob from the Third-World Networks.

>>RIAZ TAYOB:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Third World Network is a civil society organization with
representatives in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

It works in the public interest on issues of concern in developing
countries.

I would like to offer a reflection on the IGF in Athens and then make
some concrete proposals on the way forward.

But first I'd like to thank the Greek hosts for the courtesy and
efficiency with which particularly developing countries' delegates
received their visas.

Secondly, I'd like to thank the secretariat, and specifically Ambassador
Kummer, for his openness to civil society consultations prior to the
IGF.

The Third World Network supports the explicit inclusion of an agenda
item on governance of critical Internet resources, including root
servers, domain name servers, and Internet protocol at the next IGF.

The IGF is a nonbinding body and should thus be a safe place for robust
discussions on Internet governance.

The forum should be inclusive of a broad range of views which can
benefit from the insights and expertise of the different stakeholders,
and particularly those from developing countries.

The World Summit of the Information Society declared that the benefits
of the I.T. revolution are unevenly distributed between the developed
and developing countries and expressed its commitment to address the
digital divide.

The IGF, therefore, needs to explicitly address the concerns relevant to
developing countries and ensure that these concerns are not
marginalized.

The issue of root servers, domain name servers, and Internet protocol
are among the most important issues in Internet governance.

If they are absent from the agenda, then the core issues are absent.

The WSIS itself had discussed these issues but was unable to resolve
them.

It was largely because of the -- because these issues could not be
resolved that the IGF was established.

The WSIS then reached a consensus, but agreed to postpone these key
issues to an IGF.

It is thus imperative that the IGF discuss, rather than avoid, these
issues.

Otherwise, a large part of its reason for existence would be swept aside
or kept aside.

Unfortunately, governance of critical Internet resources was not
adequately addressed at the last IGF.

During the February 2006 PrepCom for the Athens IGF, the G77 and China
stressed the importance of paragraph 65 of the Tunis Agenda, which
emphasizes the need to maximize the participation of developing
countries in decisions regarding Internet governance, which should
reflect their interests.

During the IGF, when the issue of governance of root servers, DNS, and
I.P. addresses was raised, the moderator, the professional moderator, I
add, called it the gorilla in the room and asked delegates to remain
mute on the issue.

This reflects a lack of sensitivity to the concerns of developing
countries and unacceptable self-censorship.

To add insult to injury, the self same moderator then raised the issue
of the root server, DNS, and I.P. address issue with a panelist whose
views and support for the current governance arrangements are well
known.

There should be no space for such censorship at the IGF.

It is precisely because the IGF is a nonbinding forum that there is
scope for discussion on these issues which are within the purview of the
forum.

Specifically, paragraph 68 of the Tunis Agenda recognizes that all
governments should have an equal role and responsibility for
international Internet governance.

This is not about undermining the Internet or about creating alternate
roots, which, by the way, is technically possible.

Rather, it is about creating a space to assess the acceptability,
suitability, and appropriateness of current governance arrangements
within adequate technical parameters.

Attempts to open dialogue on root server governance are frequently met
with rationalizations seeking to preclude discussion.

Aspersions are cast alleging a lack of technical expertise or that the
robustness of the system will be compromised.

Supporters of the current governance model should not try to preclude
discussion, and the IGF should not be a party to such censorship.

There should be no impediments to nonbinding, open, and rational
dialogue on governance of critical Internet resources.

I stress, including root servers, DNS, and I.P. addresses.

We, therefore, recommend that the issue of governance of root servers,
DNS, and I.P. addresses be explicitly included in the agenda for the
next IGF, to redress the marginalization until now of these key issues
of Internet governance which are of greatest interest to civil society
in developing countries and also to several of the governments.

We suggest that for the sake of transparency and to avoid a conflict of
interest situation, that delegates or panelists who may have an interest
or position in the current governance arrangements should be asked to
disclose their relationship with current governance structures of
critical Internet resources.

Furthermore, moderators should be sensitized to the specific challenges
that developing countries face and should not seek to marginalize the
legitimate interests or concerns.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

Can I now turn to Brazil, our host for the next meeting.

>>BRAZIL:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First of all, I would like to thank you for convening this informal,
open-ended consultations and commend the work that you and Mr. Kummer
had in preparing for this meeting.

I would also like to congratulate the Greek government and people for
their hospitality and for all the work and dedication that they had in
preparing for the first IGF.

Brazil is honored to be the host of the second session of the IGF, in
Rio de Janeiro, later this year.

And we may assure you that we are ready to work with the secretariat and
with the other participants so as to make the IGF in Rio a success.

I would like to refer to, as a reference to the result of the first IGF
that we concur with the evaluation that has been presented.

It was a successful meeting, and from our point of view, we should
consider it as a starting point.

Actually, we are trying to build something that is new to the normal and
traditional procedures within the United Nations.  And in that sense,
sometimes we need to be open to new ideas and even to correct some parts
never necessary.

As a first meeting, the Athens IGF meeting succeeded in presenting a
meeting that was open, that was transparent, that was -- that had the
participation of all the stakeholders and raised many relevant issues to
the Internet governance matter.

Now, I believe that on the second meeting, we should build upon what has
been achieved, and aim at something further, which is precisely to reach
a level of legitimacy of this new forum, the IGF.

So that it will be identified by the international community as the
forum for discussion of global Internet governance issues.

And in order to achieve that legitimacy, I think we should work
basically on three main aspects:  Representation, format, and results.

As for the representation, I think there is the need for us to pay
careful attention to the participation, especially from the developing
world.  Both governments and the civil society representative of
developing countries.

This is in line with the multistakeholder approach, which for one side,
provides us with the openness that we need to enhance the participation
at this meeting.  But on the other hand, also presents some risks.  And
the risks are basically associated with a potential imbalance in
representation from the different stakeholders or from the developing
countries.

So in order that we may make the best possible use of this
multistakeholder approach, there is the need for us to consider,
seriously, a mechanism, and including financial mechanism and financial
support, to participants from developing countries and from the civil
society to attend the meetings.

On the second item that I mentioned, the format of the meeting, we need
to have a meaningful discussion in Rio.  Otherwise, we risk to enter
into a course whose result will be the lack of interest for the IGF
process.

Brazil is highly committed to the IGF, and we would like very much that
this process keeps pace with the first meeting and even goes beyond it
in terms of substantive and meaningful discussions of important matters
for the Internet governance.

As for the results, we also believe that it is important for us to
envisage some kind of written conclusions, be it a reporting,
recommendations, or concluding statement, that would be a reference of
the meeting.

In fact, the mandate that was given to the IGF on.

72, item g of the Tunis Agenda refers to the possibility of making
recommendations where appropriate.  And we should have that in mind.

We are aware that the format that has been used on the first meeting,
while it allows for the wider discussion, it may not be the best format
in order to negotiate texts.  And I don't think that we are aiming at a
binding negotiated text, but we should consider having some kind of
reporting for the fact that the IGF is not an isolated path.  It is
included within the

WSIS, all WSIS follow-up process.

And being part of WSIS, it will have to report to ECOSOC which has been
entrusted with the task of general oversight of the whole WSIS process.

And so a report will be helpful for that matter.

As I mentioned WSIS, I think it's also important for us to bear in mind
that the WSIS mandate is clear.  We are all engaged in building a
people-centered, development-oriented and inclusive Information Society.

So that is our north, and we should not lose that from our perspective,
even when we try to discuss technical matters that apparently do not
relate directly to the building of such a -- such an Information
Society.

Now, as for the items that could be discussed in the second meeting,
there are certain preferences, and of course if we ask each delegation,
everyone will have a different -- perhaps its own opinion, which will
not be completely convergent.

So I believe that the multistakeholder Advisory Group will have to
develop its work as it did previously to the first meeting, aiming at
reaching a common agenda.  That, for the second meeting, should be more
focused.

I mean, in all those broad areas that were discussed in Athens, now it
is upon us, and especially the preparation for the Rio meeting, to
choose those specific items that are most relevant to the discussions at
present.

Of course, this is not a closed agenda and we believe that there should
be no limitation on issues to be debated in Rio.

Especially because this is a new process, and there is still a long way
to go in order to have a -- a clear idea of a set of issues that are to
be discussed in the IGF.

But some items are being presented as those of most interest to the
purpose of having a people-centered, inclusive, and development-oriented
Information Society.

One of the aspects, for instance, is the question of interconnection
costs.  Because the costs as they are today, they represent barriers to
bridging the digital gap.  And so they should be seriously considered as
one of the items to be deeply discussed in Rio.

Another issue of importance is that of fundamental rights and their
relation to cyberspace and to the Internet.  And that presents us with
the opportunity to invite, also, members from the legislative branch,
from parliaments to participate, because I think they would be very much
interested in presenting their views on this issue, in particular
related with fundamental rights.

Now, what we also perceived from Athens is that in spite of the
multistakeholder character of the meeting, which should be maintained,
but that's a given.  That's not under consideration.  There was also a
lack of further government dialogue.  And we believe that it is
important, in particular if we are aiming at establishing a legal
frameworks that are compatible with the kind of Internet that we are
building.

If we do not go further in stimulating the government dialogue, we may
risk of having different legal systems and different legal approaches to
regulate this important tool for the Information Society that is global
in nature.  And it May turn things difficult.

So I think it is important for us somehow to sit down and discuss
questions associated with legal framework, at the national and at the
international level.

As for the Internet governance itself, and in particular, the logic
infrastructure of the Internet, I think it would be important to
consider inviting those organizations that have a say in this, that have
a mandate on that, to participate, to even conduct the discussions and
to bring their experiences.

As for the -- I would like to mention in particular the example of the
recent ICANN meeting held in Sao Paulo last December.  And in Sao Paulo,
there was a strong interest in having a report from the IGF.  Mr. Kummer
was there.  He presented an oral report at plenary, and there were
questions, there were comments, and it was a fruitful discussion, in
fact.

I believe that this interaction is healthy, is desirable.  And we should
also consider having the same at the IGF.  That is to say, let's have
ICANN representatives presenting their views, and with the aim, as I
said in the beginning, to having a convergence with WSIS' purpose and
with the WSIS mandate.  That in fact is the international reference for
us, and for all of us, be it governments or civil society or
international organizations, or nongovernmental organizations and so on.

Now, before I finish this initial statement, Mr. Chairman, I would like
also to take up on a matter that was raised by our Iranian colleague
which is not directly linked to the IGF but which is also part of the
Tunis Agenda, chapter related to Internet, which is enhanced
cooperation.

I would like to thank you for the information that you presented on the
point that we featured implementing that mandate.  And as you said, you
were waiting for further instructions from the secretary-general of the
United Nations.

I believe that it would be extremely useful for us if we could have an
idea, a glimpse in general terms of what were your suggestions presented
in the reports to the secretary-general that you referred to, and what
is your view that could be the next step regarding the implementation
and the delivery of this issue, which we understand is a parallel one,
but we need to tackle as well for its importance.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  On the last question that you raised, let me say I
have presented, my purpose, mandate was to canvass views, to find out
what people expected, what people's expectations were, which is what I
did by talking to many people.

And what I have conveyed is that range of views, rather than a single
proposal saying this is how it should be done.

And there is -- there are some points of commonality, but there are also
still substantial differences on next steps.

So at this stage, I cannot say that there is any particular modality
that I would be able to suggest as one which is generally acceptable to
everybody.

So may I just say that I cannot really go much beyond this.  And as I
said, strictly speaking, my mandate has ended.  It's not that I await
instructions.  In the strict sense, my mandate has ended, and I think
basically we will just have to wait because there has been a change.  In
New York, new people are coming in.

We will simply have to wait until things settle down in terms of the
organizational arrangements.

I really cannot go much beyond this at this point, because I have no
clear instructions on mandate on this as of now.

Can I now turn to Japan, then Switzerland, then I have three more.  I
have Ayesha Hassan, Vittorio Bertola, and Italy.

Can I have Japan.

>>JAPAN:  Yes.  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  Good morning to you all.  Let
me present brief comments of ours.

First of all, Japan would like to applaud the success of the IGF
inaugural meeting.  And our special thanks go to the chair, Mr. Desai,
and Mr. Kummer, and the Greek government.

We hold in high regard all the efforts in planning and operation of the
IGF that were made by the Secretariat staff and members of the Advisory
Group and the Greek government people.

And the IGF preliminary goal of creating space for dialogue among the
multistakeholders, which is envisioned in the process WSIS, has been
achieved.  And this momentum should be maintained based on the success
in Athens.

In principle, we think that the conference should be structured so as to
make sure participation among as many interested participants as
possible, and to invite as much interactive discussion as possible.

In addition, it may be useful to identify the moderator or the lead
person well in advance so that he or she can explore all the themes and
issues for discussion by contacting the participating panels before the
scheduled conference date.  Well in advance, for substantive and
fruitful discussions.

So not really for, I mean, just before five days or something.

The Athens model, overall, worked very well.  But we recommend also that
both logistical and substantive decisions by the Advisory Group, whose
excellent work is highly regarded, should be provided to the moderator
of each session or workshop well in advance again.  And the publicly
released information and materials should be posted on the net at the
earliest convenience so that the participants can be fully prepared.

Finally, we understand the IGF functions of the global space for
dialogue among the multistakeholders, and not only government but also
the active participation by the business sector and the civil society,
for identifying emerging issues and sharing best practices for the
information communication society in the hope of encouraging each
country and region to take initiative in their respective public policy
areas, in the context of the global agenda.

Japan continues to support the IGF and its related events.  Thank you,
Mr. Chair.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.  I now have Switzerland.

>>SWITZERLAND:  Thank you, Chairman.

For a change, I shall be expressing myself in French.

First of all, as far as Athens is concerned, I would say that we were
pleasantly surprised.  Otherwise stated, we found that the forum was
very positive.  Perhaps it was positive because it was possible for us
to have a very open dialogue without time pressures and negotiating
pressures.

I think that was a very good thing.

Of course, we greatly appreciated the multistakeholder aspect.  And as
you know, Switzerland was very attached to that.

I am particularly grateful for our Greek colleagues for organizing the
forum in Athens.  Without, of course, forgetting your role, sir, and
that of the Secretariat.

We also thank you for the synthesis document that was distributed to us
today, and which you drew up.

As to the work to be done for the future and for Rio, we think that we
should move forward.  Otherwise stated, as certain colleagues said
already this morning, we should continue with the discussion that began
in Athens.  Instead of taking up issues dealt with, we should try and
move ahead.

As to the dynamic coalitions exercise, we think this is very
interesting.

We are awaiting with interest the results of the dynamic coalitions.  I
think already we will have a few reports today on that subject.

We think that dynamic coalitions can make interesting proposals which
can then be discussed in Rio, and perhaps be developed in the
appropriate fora.

As to the governments, some of us this morning stressed the role played
by governments in Athens.  They took a back seat there, and perhaps in
Rio they should get a bit more involved in the discussion.

As far as the subjects are concerned, we think that Internet security
issues are an important subject, and also freedom of expression and
perhaps issues related to the media.

We think they will be important subjects for discussing in Rio.

We think that these discussions should take place also against the
background of capacity building.

We noticed in Athens and also we're noticing today that often developing
countries are not well represented, and perhaps have material
difficulties in following the discussions in the framework of the IGF.

If we respect the principles of WSIS, developing countries, both their
governments, civil society, and private sectors, as with the countries
in the north, have to be able to participate more in the IGF
discussions, because that would be in line with the conclusions reached
in the summit.

Also, we have a word to say about the enhanced cooperation.  We have
taken good note of your remarks, and also we are awaiting the follow up.
 We would be grateful, Mr. Chairman, without wishing to bother the new
secretary-general in New York, to have some follow-up in the course of
the next few months concerning the work of the enhanced cooperation.

Lastly, Mr. Chairman, allow me to call upon all of the colleagues here
present in connection with the need for support for IGF.

We saw that a certain number of countries committed themselves to having
these various fora.  Switzerland is financing some of this through the
Secretariat.

But we need everyone to help with the follow-up to the work of the IGF.

There is a need for greater support from the various stakeholders.

This is also the case in order to help the developing countries.  So we
think this problem must be settled as well.

Thank you, sir.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  On the last point that you raise, the question of
funding and organizing particularly for developing country
participation, I will say something towards the end because several
people have raised this question, and I think we -- I will make some
suggestions at the end.

May I now turn to Ayesha Hassan, a member of the Advisory Group, and
then Vittorio Bertola, who is a member of the working group.

>>AYESHA HASSAN:  Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On behalf of the international Chamber of Commerce and the members of
the business action to support the Information Society initiative, I'd
like to thank you, joining others who have thanked you, as well as Mr.
Kummer and the entire IGF Secretariat team and the Advisory Group
members for all that you have done in this past year.

We would also like to reiterate our thanks to the Greek host country and
the Greek people for the warm welcome and the exemplary example that
they set as a host country in providing all of the practical and
logistical and ceremonial setting for all of us to enjoy this inaugural
Internet Governance Forum.

As many of you know, the ICC basis group has submitted two
contributions.  They are up on the Web site of the IGF Secretariat. 
They have also been made available on the tables in the back of this
room.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to highlight some of the key
priorities that business has identified in reflecting on the Athens
event.

First of all, this was a very successful format.  Business would
reiterate what many others have said.  The multistakeholder interaction
and participation and the principle upon which the Internet Governance
Forum is based was a great success.  And Athens proved this.

We would continue to support the maintenance of this principle in all
aspects of the preparations and the IGF itself as we plan ahead for Rio.

Building on this successful format and thinking about the topics to be
addressed in Rio, one of the things that we would put forward for
consideration is that the basic topics that were addressed in Athens
were very broad, and that in order to continue the dialogue, as many
have called for, it could be useful in outlining the program for Rio to
identify creative formats to increase the interactive nature of the
discussion and to attract more stakeholders from around the world to
participate in those discussions.

Some of those format suggestions are outlined in more detail in the
contributions, but they would include what many others have said about
shortening the panel lengths and decreasing the number of panelists, et
cetera.

Some of the improvements that have been suggested by the business
community as well as others can also be addressed by planning ahead. 
And one of the key elements here would be to work together to be able to
have a program in order to invite key experts and increase participation
and diversity of participation, which will add to the richness of the
discussion and bring the benefits of this forum to more people.

We would also support the ideas of having more information posted on the
Web site and be able to integrate that information into the preparation
of the sessions, and would underscore the need for the moderators and
the panelists, as others have, to be able to prepare together.

The discussions will become more focused and will be able to take into
consideration the various viewpoints and make sure the moderators have
the information they need to guide the discussion and involve the
members of the audience in a very deep way if they have more time to
prepare which the Athens meeting had its challenges in that regard and
luckily we know that all sorts of preparations are already starting for
the event in Brazil.

Underscoring from the business perspective, we do know that getting more
of a diverse business participation will require addressing some of the
practical issues and the financing issues, and that again starting early
will solve a lot of challenges of improvements that have been put
forward.

We would also like to highlight that the summing-up sessions that the
Secretariat and the Chairman of this meeting provided were very useful,
and continuing to capture the range of viewpoints that were expressed in
sessions will be useful to do again in Rio.

In terms of the workshops, many of them were very informative and we
would request careful consideration of how the workshops are planned
going forward for Rio to create some kind of synergy between the main
meetings.  But again, giving multistakeholder groups an opportunity to
have workshops.  We would say that the number of workshops in parallel
to sessions should be part of the consideration and the careful planning
for the program in Rio, to ensure that all sessions have good attendance
and people can benefit from the information that is being made
available.

Another very important part of what happened in Athens was the informal
discussions that were facilitated by the networking opportunities, some
of them provided by the host country, others provided by other sponsors,
and the plaza concept, and creating that kind of continued informal
discussion, and opportunities for stakeholders to exchange experiences,
information, resources, practices, and get to know each other as part of
the continuing benefit of this multistakeholder forum.

With that, Chair, I would conclude, and I look forward to contributing
later in the day.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

I have Vittorio Bertola.

>>VITTORIO BERTOLA:  Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Speaking as a coordinator of the Civil Society Internet Governance
Caucus.

The Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus as the main coordination
framework for civil society participation in Internet governance
discussions at the WSIS and then at the IGF, would like to provide
feedback and opinions on the subjects of this meeting.

The first IGF meeting in Athens was, without doubt, a great success.

It was interesting and well organized, and many important matters well
discussed.

Specifically, we express our satisfaction for the widespread embracing
of the multistakeholder principle in the structuring of panels and
workshops and in the definition of themes.

We would then like to provide some practical suggestions for an even
better meeting in Rio.

We think that the plenary sessions, as designed in Athens, were
interesting, especially for the general public, but that adequate
attention should be put to all the issues pertaining to one main theme
rather than focusing on just a few.

This could be obtained by shortening the plenary sessions, which should
be kept as a special focus event on certain hot issues, designed in a
journalistic style.

At the same time, separate, more traditional plenary sessions, though
always in a fully multistakeholder style, could host the general
summarization of the discussions, including those from the workshops.

Workshops were interesting, though some effort should be made to better
integrate them with the overall themes and flow of discussions of the
IGF.

Specifically, it should be ensured that all workshops meet the
multistakeholder criteria and that at least half of their duration is
allocated to open floor discussion rather than to panel presentations to
prevent some workshops from becoming just a showcase for the organizers
or a lobbying event for a single group of stakeholders.

Clear guidelines should be given to workshop moderators to this effect.

Also, the Advisory Group, after collecting all workshop proposals,
should considering fostering the organization of workshops on issues not
addressed anywhere or requesting organizers to merge the workshops if
too similar.

Finally, workshop results should be collected and presented with more
evidence as outputs of the IGF meeting, for example, in a final acts
book.

Alternative formats for workshops should be suggested and considered by
workshop organizers.

For example, one room could be laid out in table groups to allow
workshops held there to foster intensive deliberation on the issues
under discussion rather than encouraging the passive receipt of
information.

Again, one room could be laid out with computer terminals, allowing
participants to directly engage with remote participants in the use of
collaborative development of online tools and resources.

While commending the efforts done, we see the need to further develop
effective online tools for information, participation, and discussion,
not only to facilitate the participation of those who cannot afford to
travel to IGF meetings, but also to enable those who do attend in person
to continue their work in between meetings.

From a practical standpoint, it would be important to ensure that
sufficient time is allocated for lunch break and that adequate quick
food options are offered to delegates.

Also, it should be kept in mind that many participants, especially from
developing countries and civil society, are on a tight budget.

Adequate accommodation and meal options should be provided.

Finally, we think that the IGF should put special attention in seeking
stable, greater sources of funds that could be adequate to support its
mandate.

About the Advisory Group.  While supporting the concept, we note that
its composition, including the proportionate representation of
stakeholder groups and the crosscutting technical and academic
communities, was not openly and transparently discussed prior to its
appointment.

Nor there is any clear transparency or clear norm on its terms, mandate,
and working principles.

We think that clear terms and rules should be established for the
Advisory Group between now and Rio, through an open process involving
all the participants in the IGF as a shared foundation for our common
work.

We further consider that if these rules and quarters for representation
from each stakeholder group were openly established, it would be
possible for the Secretary-General to delegate the actual process of
selection of Advisory Group members to the stakeholder groups
themselves.

Moreover, we express our dissatisfaction for the limited representation
of civil society in the first instance of the Advisory Group, which
amounted to about five members out of about 40.

We think that the significant participation of civil society and
individual users, as proved by the WGIG, is key to making Internet
governance events a success both in practical and political terms.

Thus, we would like to see such participation expanded to at least
one-fourth of the group, if not one-third, and to the same levels of the
private-sector and of the Internet technical community.

We confirm our support to the civil society members of the incumbent
group and stand ready to provide suggestions for additional members with
direct experience from diverse civil society groups.

We also reiterate the need for the IGF to be considered as a process
rather than as an event.

We support the concept of dynamic coalitions and their activities.

However, there needs to be a way to bless their work and give some
recognition, even if not binding, to their products.

A transparent, multistakeholder, and democratic process should be
commenced to develop criteria for the recognition of dynamic coalitions
by the IGF whereby the output of coalitions that satisfy those criteria
could be formally received for discussion at a plenary session of the
following IGF meeting.

The IGF was created to help solving global problems that could not be
addressed anywhere else.

Simple discussion is not enough and would betray what was agreed in
Tunis and is clearly stated in the mandate of the IGF itself.

We stand ready to provide more detailed procedural suggestions on how
this could work in progress or to participate in any multistakeholder
work in process to define it.

We think that these and future consultations before Rio should examine
in detail the various parts of the IGF mandate as defined in paragraph
72 of the Tunis Agenda, and specifically, how to deal with those that
were not addressed in Athens.

For example, Comments F and I required the IGF to discuss the good
principles of Internet governance as agreed in Tunis and how to fully
implement them inside all existing governance processes, including how
to facilitate participation by disadvantaged stakeholders such as
developing countries, civil society, and individual users.

We expect this to be an additional theme for Rio.

About the themes for Rio, we are generally satisfied with the areas of
work as defined for Athens, but note that some of them are much bigger
than others, and thus many issues falling into them fail to get adequate
attention.

We would like to propose to break the openness group of items in two,
one about human rights and freedom of expression and the other one about
intellectual property rights and access to knowledge.

We raise the attention on the importance of access not just in terms of
physical connections for developing countries, but also in terms of
accessibility of technologies to the disabled and to other disadvantaged
groups.

This could also become another group of issues, per se.

As noted above, we also feel the need for a meta governance theme.

We are aware of the complex discussion on whether the narrow Internet
governance themes, such as the oversight of the Internet addressing and
naming system, should be part of the agenda in Rio.

Inside civil society, there are different points of view about this
matter.

However, we all agree in the deep dissatisfaction for the lack of
transparency and inclusion in the so-called enhanced cooperation
process, which, as agreed in Tunis, should discuss these matters in a
multistakeholder fashion.

We ask that prompt communication is given to all stakeholders about the
status and nature of this process and that independently from the venue
chosen to host it, steps are taken to ensure the full inclusion of all
stakeholders in this process.

We would like to close our statement by thanking Mr. Desai, Mr. Kummer,
and all the members of the Advisory Group, as well as the Greek hosts,
for their hard work in favor of this process.

We fully support Mr. Desai as the chair of the IGF Advisory Group and
recognize his expertise and professionalism as a major factor in the
Advisory Group's successful completion of its tasks.

We look forward to another fruitful and successful meeting in Rio.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much, Vittorio, for your very helpful
comments and your vote of confidence.

The next is Italy.

>>ITALY:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good morning to everybody.

I am going to read an announcement.

Mr. Chairman and distinguished participants, Italy aligns itself to the
statement delivered by Germany on behalf of the European Union, and
welcomes this opportunity to contribute to the ongoing Internet
Governance Forum debate.

We would like to express our satisfaction for the excellent organization
of the meeting in Athens, and, in particular, for the full adoption of
the multistakeholder principle in the plenary sessions and workshops and
the work of the dynamic coalitions.

Italy reaffirms its commitment to work on the specific theme of the
Internet bill of rights, to expand on existing human rights
declarations, identify rights and duties of the individuals in the
online sphere, and define proper forums to state them.

We are interested and ready to further the discussions on these issues
with all interested countries and would welcome any suggestions on the
possibility to organize a specific international workshop in the
following months.

We will be pleased to host such workshop in Rome as the preparatory
moment in view of the Rio IGF meeting.

Thank you for all your attention.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

El Salvador.

>>:El Salvador:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

My delegation wishes to begin by thanking the government of Greece and
you, Mr. Chairman, as also the secretariat and the Advisory Group, for
the successful Internet Governance Forum in Athens.

Mr. Chairman, El Salvador agrees with the delegation of Brazil as to the
need to grant legitimacy for the Internet Governance Forum described in
terms of format and results.

My delegation wonders why the very good Athens report prepared by the
secretariat is entitled "informal report."

Possibly through my own ignorance, I didn't look at the Web site in the
last month, and the title has been changed.

But I was struck by the fact that the word "informal" was included in
the title of the report, and I do not think this is an appropriate way
to reflect the results.

In fact, we wish to give our support to the verbatim reports of each of
the sessions, which make it possible to give a transparent reflection of
exactly what takes place in the sessions.

Mr. Chairman, in connection with the themes that should be dealt with by
the Internet Governance Forum, El Salvador believes that we should cover
the entire mandate of the forum.

In this connection, as we said last year, we are in favor of a
pluri-annual approach, which will cover the entire mandate of the
Internet Governance Forum.

If possible, this would have as its background the four topics used for
the Athens forum.

At no time have we called into question the success achieved in that
forum.

The most outstanding successes of these have been mentioned by those
that took the floor before me, that is, the multistakeholder format and
the open dialogue that took place in Athens.

We should not forget, Mr. Chairman, the development approach and the
capacity-building approach that should prevail throughout the
discussions in the Internet Governance Forum.

These are the themes which guide other topics.

In this context, for my delegation, it is very important for account to
be taken of all the priorities of all the developing countries.

In this connection, for example, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the
economic commission for that region, through the Adelfi study, which
involved more than 600 experts from all of the interested in parties,
identified access as being a priority.

This appears as being amongst the top ten priorities in several
statements.

International interconnection costs is one of the issues in priorities,
as also clear environmental priorities.

But also, I believe we should deal with these issues in order to settle
the problem of access.

This does not mean that we are not aware of all the issues in the
Internet Governance Forum.

We were involved at the discussions when we first began to talk about
the Internet governance issues in the two phases of the forum.

For example, there were discussions on critical resources in the
Internet Governance Forum.

And this is inevitable.

At some stage, we are going to have to deal with these issues and go
into greater depth concerning them.

For this reason, we prefer to have a pluri-annual theme for the various
forum events.

We consider this as being part of a process.

In this way, we would not be leaving out any of the mandates concerned.

Critical resources are important, and in paragraph 72, also we need to
talk about improving the daily life of the everyday user.

These are themes that we cannot afford to forget.

Both of them are important, and both of them are included in the mandate
of the forum.

Mr. Chairman, we support the idea of an Advisory Group in order to
continue with the work.

To conclude, we should like to say that we would be interested in
involving other government partners, such as parliamentarians or the
judiciary.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I have Robin Gross, Russian Federation, ETNO, and
then Egypt.

>>ROBIN GROSS:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I speak on behalf of A2K at IGF, which is a multistakeholder dynamic
coalition consisting of NGOs, business, and governments working together
to promote access to knowledge and freedom of expression on the
Internet.

A2K@IGF grew out of a workshop held in Athens and has subsequently
established a work program, Web site, and mailing list to continue
discussions.

Our coalition is particularly concerned about the impact that unbalanced
intellectual property rights have on the Internet as a tool of free
expression, education, and development.

A2K@IGF will coordinator participation and awareness of access to
knowledge activities at the world intellectual property organization,
including proposals for a development agenda and an access to knowledge
treaty a WIPO.

One focus of the coalition is setting methodologies, or best practice
norms, for the implementation of laws dealing with technological
protection measures and digital rights management restrictions, which
have been shown to present serious impediments to access to knowledge
and the free flow of information.

An important goal of our coalition is to make recommendations for
implementation of the anticircumvention provisions contained in the 1996
WIPO Internet treaties and more recent bilateral trade agreements.

Therefore, key delivers will be the development of best practice norms
for DRM technologies and anticircumvention laws and report our progress
at the 2007 IGF meeting in Rio de Janeiro.

A2K@IGF recommends that IGF retain a main theme of openness as it
continues to provide a global forum for the exploration of Internet
governance issues.

It is the openness of the Internet in terms of quality and standards
that has made it an unrivaled tool for promoting access to knowledge,
free expression, development, and creativity.

Everyone with these shared goals is welcome to join this coalition to
work with us on these projects.

Please check the A2K@IGF dynamic coalition Web site at and join the
mailing list for further participation.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much, Robin.

That was the first of the dynamic coalitions.

Happy the first one was an openness one.

The Russian Federation.

>>RUSSIAN FEDERATION:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me speak Russian.

Mr. Chairman, I, too, to like to express my thanks to the government of
Greece for the very good organization of the forum held in Athens.

And now I would like to dwell on some of the key points.

One of the most important key points, the premises for successful work,
is to formulate the agenda in a proper way.

In formulating the agenda, we have to take into account the decisions of
the Tunis summit, paragraph 72A, and also the proposals made in Athens
and in the course of the advisory committee's meeting held yesterday.

Key point number two, we could have a discussion on the gradual
transition to the internationalization and management of the Internet,
that is to say, to involve a greater number of countries to participate
in this process, to start a dialogue on this issue, and to more
accurately define the problem issues, taking into account the interests
of all countries.

The forthcoming forum can make its contribution to the solution of these
issues.

Number three, another important key point is -- is hyperterrorism and
criminality.

And we have to take the proper, adequate means.

And here we need to combine all efforts of everybody, without excluding
any one country.

Then we need to discuss this trend within the framework of the
forthcoming forum.

Now a few words concerning organizational problems.

The Advisory Group has certainly played an important role.

And as regards the formation of the forthcoming body and the preparation
for the forthcoming Brazilian forum, we need to put forward a number of
proposals and considerations on this issue.

We need to have a clearcut procedure concerning the Advisory Group.

We cannot have the domination of individual parties to this forum.

We need to ensure succession in the work of this group.

And we also need to provide the possibility to involve in this group the
participation of other parties.

We also need to involve many more countries who will not be members of
the Advisory Group.

There must be a forum, a free forum, to present one's proposal, open to
everybody.

We need to enhance the role and the importance of the forthcoming forum
and its success and effectiveness.

It's a good idea to propose some -- to adopt a summary document, just as
we did in Tunis.

And there we would reflect the main salient points and measures for the
future.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

I have ETNO, Egypt, and then after that --

>>ETNO:  Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And good morning, everyone.

I speak on behalf of ETNO, which is the Association of the European
telecommunication network operators.

We're currently 41.

First of all, Mr. Chairman, we would like to thank you for your work so
far, and for convening this meeting and for inviting us to comment on
the Athens IGF, as well as suggest improvements for the Rio IGF.

ETNO believes that the Athens IGF was a success in many terms.

The first IGF promoted dialogue, which was fruitful, and it helped
improving our understanding on many complex issues without duplicating
or competing with the work of existing organizations regarding technical
management and coordination of the Internet or critical Internet
resources.

Crucial elements for this success was the multistakeholder nature of the
forum.

This was carried out in an equal footing and it must be strengthened.

Many accused or at least complained about the nondecisive, nonbinding
character of the IGF.

In our opinion, this turned an element of success, because the informal
character of the meetings allowed people to express themselves more
freely, without political tension.

Of course, there are things that need improvement.

ETNO would like to stress that participants, when arriving in Rio, or
anytime ahead, must have a clear vision and clear expectations out of
it.

It is crucial that the themes and that the framework of the discussions
are clarified well in advance.

ETNO and many others on this would like to have a rough agenda as soon
as possible, preferably by May.

There's also room for improvement in other areas, like the format of
discussion, the moderators, the panelists.

There is room for improvement in the workshops.

I do not want to go into detail for these issues, because we have
expressed them in our position paper, which is posted in the IGF site.

And I invite everybody to have a look at it.

What I -- we would like to stress is one important aspect which was left
out or not given too much attention during the Athens IGF.  And that was
the sharing of best practices.

This can truly promote the aims of the IGF, and ETNO expresses the wish
that there is more time and focus devoted to best practices.

If necessary, I will come back to more specific issues.

But for the time, I thank you, Mr. President.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

Egypt.

>>EGYPT:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  I would like to speak in Arabic, and
I'm sorry that my voice is a little bit weak because of a cold.

At the outset, Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you for the efforts
that you are undertaking and that you have undertaken since the
beginning of this forum.  And this was a reason for the success of the
first meeting that took place in Athens.  And in this context, I would
like to congratulate the government of Greece and the people of Greece
for holding the first meeting and the first forum and we are also
thanking the Secretariat, headed by Mr. Kummer, for the excellent
efforts undertaken.

Mr. Chairman, the meeting that took place in Athens is considered a
launching point, as my colleague has referred to from Brazil, or a point
of departure.  It is a point of departure, the path of which we are well
aware because it does help in preparing an agenda for the next meeting
in India and then the subsequent one in Egypt.  I think the last
meeting, the venue of which has not been identified yet.  And then
therefore, we have to look to the Athens meeting in a broader context,
that looks into -- and I'd like to emphasize this point -- that looks
into all the topics that has to do with Internet governance.

Another point, Mr. Chairman, is that the forum itself is not in a
vacuum, but is within a wider context, which is the third chapter of the
Tunis Agenda of Information Society.

And hence, this broader context is what directs the general path of the
future forum, and that the major mechanism for the follow-up, or what is
called a systemwide follow-up.

This task was given to the ECOSOC, and a meeting will take place in May
of this year, and this is the broader context for the IGF.

The third point that we would like to emphasize is that we all chose, in
a consensus, that the main slogan of the IGF is to have Internet
governance for development.  And here we have two choices, or two
alternatives.

The first is that the slogan remains a general slogan to satisfy
ourselves without translating this in the field.  And I don't think this
is the alternative that anyone would choose, since we know that every
participant participates in good faith.

The second alternative is that this slogan be translated practically in
the forums of Internet governance, and this is the intellectual
challenge that is being posed before us.

And here I would like to reemphasize what we have already said in
previous consultations a year ago, which is that we think that paragraph
65 of the Tunis Agenda is a governing principle for developmental topics
with regard to Internet governance. And paragraph 65 has two components.

The first component looks into increasing participation of developing
countries and the mechanisms of decision-making or decision taking.

So there has to be an increase in participation.  And this is a
component that we can evaluate quite easily.  And if a researcher from
this room evaluates this phenomenon, can quickly find out whether there
has been an increase in participation of developing countries in
decision-making.

This is the first point.

The second component relates to paragraph 65 again, and says that the
decisions of Internet governance, whether there is a greater
participation of developing countries or not, has to reflect in its
substance the interests of developing countries.  And I think that the
65 said that the decision should reflect their interests.

Also, there are other paragraphs, we all agreed upon as an international
community in Tunis, such as paragraph 49, that clearly speaks about the
developmental aspects of Internet governance, and refers to, for
example, the transfer of technology and the diffusion of knowledge.  And
here once again we have to evaluate Athens, New Delhi and other meetings
with regards to how much they have respected what has been agreed upon
internationally with regards to the Internet agenda.

Mr. Chairman, whatever topics we will be dealing with, we have to
remember that these have to be dealt with in the framework of
development, because even if we spoke about cyber security, we still
have to look into this from a developmental perspective.

The other point that we would like to stress is that one of the
standards of success is the comprehensiveness of participation in the
IGF.  And here we would like to emphasize once again the necessity to
enable participants from developing countries in terms of private
sector, governments or others, but we have to find a tangible, practical
mechanism that would achieve this goal which we agree upon, all of us.

However, there are other stakeholders who have a developmental pattern
or interest, and we can count on them and depend on them, such as
UNCTAD, and who has, within its tasks, and within the focal points
concerning technological matters and which provides yearly reports and
which is the technical Secretariat for the science and technology
commission which looks into the follow-up of the IGF.

I had a question, Mr. Chairman, with regards to the standards that would
be orienting the creation of the Advisory Group.  And here, once again,
we would like to say that the standard has to be the increase in
participation, and taking into account the interests of developing
countries.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I am aware that you have answered my question
previously, but I have to raise this question once again from my part,
at least.  And the question is what is the mechanism that the new
secretary-general of the U.N. would be raising with regards to enhanced
cooperation?  Especially in order to find the appropriate space, in
order to discuss matters related to general or public policies, and the
Internet that would be compatible with paragraph 69 of the Tunis Agenda.

(no translation).

>>EGYPT:  Why don't I just conclude in English by asking stakeholders to
contact us as hosts of the 2009, all stakeholders from government,
private sector and civil society, academia and the rest to contribute to
us with their ideas on what they would expect the IGF to be in 2009,
that is almost two years from now.  And we do not exclude from that any
of their wishes for physical and not electronic tourism.

Thank you, Chair.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I have Mr. Meijer of SIDN, then Mr. David Olive, and
Marilyn Cade of ITAA, ISOC, and then Argentina.

Mr. Meijer of SIDN.

>>ROELOF MEIJER:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  First of all, I would like
to subscribe to the conclusion that the Athens IGF for taking this
objective of creating an open, multistakeholder forum for discussion of
Internet governance issues on equal footing.

As the chief executive of SIDN, the registry for the .NL domain space, I
would lake to make the following recommendations for the continuation of
the IGF process.

I would suggest that the successful format of the Athens IGF with main
sessions, sessions on preselected themes and parallel workshops, with
the Chair's summing up at the end, be maintained.

I would suggest that the focus of the IGF is kept on Internet global
user issues, and the present four themes of openness, security, access,
and diversity.

I would recommend to maintain the present role, form, and composition of
the IGF Advisory Group.

I would recommend that the exchange between stakeholders of best
practices in relation to the selected IGF themes is stimulated.

I would recommend to keep aiming for discussion and subsequent actions
instead of negotiated conclusions.

I would recommend to maintain ample opportunities for informal
encounters between the representatives of the different stakeholder
groups as the diversity of these encounters and, thus, the exchanges
proved very valuable in Athens and unique to the IGF.

I would recommend to improve on the following:  Have fewer and shorter
main sessions, and avoid having parallel workshops at the same time as
main sessions.

I would recommend to improve the preparation of and by moderators and
panelists together.

I would recommend the improvement of moderation, since I think many of
you will agree with me that moderation proved crucial in the success of
the different workshops.

I would recommend to improve the preparation of workshops and the
availability of information on those workshops beforehand.

I would recommend to keep panels smaller than they were with a maximum
of about six people.

I would recommend to stimulate the discussion and exchange by asking
panelists to formulate short, pointed statements on the relevant themes.

And I would recommend that remote participation is improved and
stimulated.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much for your very concrete
suggestions.

Mr. David Olive.

>>DAVID OLIVE:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  My name is David Olive and I
represent Fujitsu.  Fujitsu participates in a number of international
business groups, and in each of these we promote awareness of and
involvement in the IGF process.

Today I have been asked to make some comments on two of those business
groups.  One, the Global Information Infrastructure Commission, GIIC, a
federation of senior executives from ICT companies around the world, and
the World Information Technology and Services Alliance, WITSA,
representing national I.T. associations.

Both the GIIC and WITSA are active members in this IGF process and of
course we work closely with our colleagues at ICC Basis and you heard
some comments from them today.

Both the GIIC and WITSA sent I.T. business executives to the IGF Athens
meeting.  They are representing I.T. associations from Uganda,
Australia, Greece, Egypt, Bangladesh, Kenya, Lebanon, Japan, and the
United States.

Together, these two groups held a workshop entitled "Enhancing
Multistakeholder Participation in ICT Policy-Making," and we thank you
for that opportunity, Mr. Chairman, and we hope to hold another workshop
in Rio if possible.

Specific comments on the IGF Athens meeting and some suggestions from
both groups have been submitted to the IGF Secretariat, and are
available for further review there and on the Web site of each of these
groups.

In general, let me say, Mr. Chairman, the dialogue, debate, questions,
comments, and interactive exchanges foster productive and valuable
discussions in Athens.  And a multistakeholder approach is greater
preferred for the entire process by our members.

The IGF should emphasize the role of the Internet in economic
development, and the importance of capacity building.

Of course, information infrastructure, access and security remain
important topics to our members.

We support an independent IGF Secretariat and praise the Secretariat's
fine efforts in conjunction with the operation of the Advisory Group and
the host government of Greece.

Going forward, we see the level of business participation in the IGF to
be critical.  Both the GIIC and WITSA will encourage its members to be
aware of and to participate in the IGF process.

We will also work with other groups for this purpose.

To that end, the GIC, in meetings to be held in London in April and in
Tokyo in May, will focus on the themes of the IGF.

WITSA will also focus attention on the IGF process at its Steering
Committee meetings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in May, and at its global
public policy meeting in Cairo, Egypt in early November.

We will continue to provide inputs and comments as we move forward in
the planning for the IGF Rio meeting in November and look to encourage
more to participate there.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

Marilyn Cade of ITAA.

>>MARILYN CADE:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, my name is Marilyn Cade.  I am
an advisor to AT&T, but today I speak as the chair of the global public
policy committee at ITAA.  ITAA is an association that represents over
330 companies from the ICT sector.  We wish to thank the Chair, the
executive secretariat, the Greek hosts and all here who helped to
cooperate to ensure the inaugural IGF was a success.  We have made a
more extensive set of comments that are available on the Web site.

It is gratifying to acknowledge the success of the inaugural IGF and the
wide support of all stakeholders.  It is our view that the concept of
multistakeholder participation on an equal footing makes the IGF unique.
 This must remain a cornerstone to the IGF as it goes forward.

The power of the IGF is its ability to attract all parties for
discussion and for sharing of experiences.  Overall, the IGF should
remain focused on education, awareness, and improving and deepening the
exchange of views rather than on negotiated conclusions.

We do not believe the IGF should seek to change or extend its mandate. 
It has a unique and key role to play.

We feel that the role of the advisory committee has been very valuable
up to now and we hope that it will continue to be available to play this
ongoing multistakeholder advisory function that it has performed up to
now.

We also believe that the membership of an advisory committee must remain
reflective of the mandate of the IGF, and that making changes today or
in the near term on the advisory committee may not be needed because of
the urgency of our continuing to advance the planning for the upcoming
IGF.

We applaud the fact that planning has started early and agree with
others who have noted that it is important to move forward with planning
so that we can have a more formalized program and help encourage broader
and deeper participation by all with focus on participation from
developing countries.

We would like to see a standardized framework for how the forum will
work moving forward so that we focus on substance and interactions
rather than a continued debate each year about the structure of the
event.

We support what others have said about some changes in the format of the
panel, such as limiting the number, but we also think the opportunity
for participation was particularly important in drawing the attendance
very broadly from around the world.

Some of the structural supports provided by the Secretariat, including
the synthesis paper and other structural supports, have helped to
support ongoing participation, awareness, and outreach.

The fact that the sessions in Athens were Webcast and audio cast and
were realtime transcribed enabled not only remote participation in real
time, but also extended the reach and the awareness of the IGF after the
fact.

We would like to see an even fuller potential of Web casting, chat
rooms, and online collaboration tools in Rio and beyond.

While we believe that the first IGF worked well with four themes and
cross-cutting theme of capacity building, it is possible we should
continue to prioritize and understand the linkage between the themes,
the workshops and the panels, and to deepen that linkage.

We think that the IGF should try to avoid a dominance of focus on the
developed world's perspective, and make a conscious effort to address
issues that are not addressed elsewhere or where the multistakeholder
dialogue can offer a particularly unique and added value.

With that in mind, we suggest that coexistence with other groups should
be a goal and that there should not be competition or co-optation of
these other groups and their functions.  Each has an important role to
play.

Care should be taken not to just duplicate the work of other groups,
although reporting on such work may be relevant.

We support the need for an independent Secretariat with appropriate
staff support that can support the IGF events and maintain the
continuity between the sessions.

We greatly appreciate the support of the Secretariat that makes it
possible to follow the work of the IGF online and welcome the public
consultations that are available.  We would like to see additional
transparency on the operations of the Advisory Group such as
publications of its minutes and deliberation.

Overall, the formation of the IGF presents an excellent opportunity for
global dialogue on critical issues.

Our organization looks forward to working with all to ensure the success
of the IGF in 2007 and beyond.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.  I have Matthew Shears from ISOC,
Argentina, and then Dr. Francis Muguet from the civil society group.

Can I have Matthew Shears.

>>MATTHEW SHEARS:  Chairman, thank you very much.  The Internet society
would also like to lend its word of thanks to the hosts of the Athens
event.  We thought it was a great success and we look forward to
building on that success as we move to Rio.

I won't reiterate the points that we have made on our submission on the
Internet Governance Forum site, and I urge you to read that paper.  But
let me touch upon a couple of other things.

I think we need to remember when we have these discussions, and when we
look forward to Rio, as to why has this worked to date?  What has been
the successful criteria.  It works because Athens was multilateral,
multistakeholder, democratic and transparent.  It was, in fact, a
meeting of equals and I think we must remember this when we go forward
in terms of how we consider whether or not the structure or the format
of Rio should change.

We should build on the success, and in doing so, we need to also
consider carefully when we look at the mandate for the IGF, we need to
bear in mind in particular paragraph 77 which others have also
mentioned.  When we consider how we can look at the mandate going
forward, it's important that we remember that there are other things
that need to be taken into account.

I won't touch upon the particular themes except to say that we also,
like others, support a further deepening of discussion in the four
themed areas.  But would not preclude looking at other areas as we feel
this is a particularly valuable exercise, and perhaps that could be
raised in the context of the emerging issues area.

I would like to urge a focus on the user when we go into Rio.  A number
of the areas of the mandate do ask for specific focus on user interests,
and that's something that we should not forget.

Also, the mention of best practices has been made.

The one thing that I believe we can derive even greater value from Rio
is if we insist and incorporate to a much greater degree the sharing of
experience and the sharing of best practices.

I would also encourage a greater interactivity, and not only remote
interactivity but interactivity within the sessions themselves.

I believe it's important that again through incorporating best practices
that we get a true give and take on the issues and a true give and take
on the various views that everyone has.

And finally, I would like to recommend that a portion of Rio be given
over to considering how we can localize this discussion, how we can take
this discussion from the international level to the national level.  How
we can encourage the discussion of Internet governance issues at a
national level is a key factor in the success of the Internet Governance
Forum going forward.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.  I have Argentina followed by Dr. Francis
Muguet.

>>ARGENTINA:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  First of all, Argentina would
like to support, to highlight its support for ideas such as access and
connectivity.

Also, in as far as the participation of the government sector in the IGF
is concerned, we feel there should be a more active role played by the
government delegates as was mentioned previously here.

Promoting comments and opinions in the debates in order to come up with
a series of useful ideas from these meetings.

Lastly, we wish to stress what was mentioned already by the delegation
of Brazil to the effect that Argentina also feels it is appropriate to
put out a report on the results achieved for the next meeting as an
outcome of the debates that take place in Rio de Janeiro.

That's all.  Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.  Dr. MUGUET.

>>FRANCIS MUGUET:  Yes.  I would like first to point out that we made
response on the discussion space of the forum, and all the three
response, not only in my response, were not taking into account on the
Web site of the Internet Governance Forum, and even less on the
synthesis paper.

I would like the people to refer to this Internet discussion space.

A few things about the Internet, the meetings in Athens.

Concerning the Web, in fact, the Web site, it was not possible to most
of the organizer to be able to include the schedule of their discussion
because of (inaudible) lasted for two days.  So I think it was a serious
shortcoming which prevented some forums to be better known to the
participant.

The other thing is, there was an invitation to all stakeholder to put
input on the Wiki -- for example, for a dynamic coalition -- and
unfortunately, this Wiki has disappeared, at least to my knowledge,
without information.  And the proposition of the dynamic coalition which
has been written into this Wiki has disappeared also.

So this is one of the few things.

Now, concerning more things of content and procedure.

We think that the IGF should closely follow the mandate as determined by
the WSIS, and in particular, there is the recommendation 2072g, the
decision concerning identify emerging issue, bring that to the attention
of the relevant body, and the general public, and, where appropriate,
make recommendation.

We believe this recommendation is very important, and this brings the
questions of how the IGF can make these recommendations, and what should
be the procedure to make recommendation.  And this brings us to
paragraph 78b where the bureau and not the Secretariat office has been
specifically provided by the text.  And we all know that a bureau has a
specific meaning in diplomatic terms, and a bureau deal with procedural
issue.

So we believe that in order that the recommendation could be made, then
a bureau should be set up in order to determine this procedure, in order
to make this recommendation.

We propose that as a first step, as a nuclei of this bureau, for
formation of this bureau, that the host country of the next IGF should
be first the official member of this bureau and should make consultation
with other members of the IGF to form this bureau in order to determine
in Rio the procedure to make this recommendation on emerging issues.

Coming back to the problem of emerging issues, we believe that it shall
be not a duplication of efforts, and this is in the text also of the
WSIS.  That's, in fact, not themes which are related to the Geneva text
-- for example, access to knowledge which is interesting by itself --
but the IGF should be concerned strictly with governance issue.

Otherwise, if the IGF is also found discussing with other issues, then
the ECOSOC and UNESCO and the other, ITU and other relevant
international organization which are involved in the action line meeting
should be involved in the organization of these workshops.

Now considering the general output of all recommendations so far in a
more informal way, it has been proposed to formalize them in terms of
the scheme of request for comments, and this has also been the
recommendation of the delegate from Indonesia, if I remember well, this
Athens.

And this, it will be a new conduct, a new conduit, I will say -- a new
way to formalize without -- without binding, in fact -- without binding
anything, without binding effect the output of the IGF.

Otherwise, the IGF shall be just very expensive chat rooms.

The IGF mandate, I believe it is not just a place of discussion, but a
place of action in order to implement the WSIS recommendation.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

Maybe we can take at least one more.

Christian Moeller of OSCE.

>>CHRISTIAN MOELLER:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would very briefly like to introduce the dynamic coalition on freedom
of expression and freedom of the media on the Internet.

Already, the 2003 Geneva Declaration reaffirms Article 19, which is the
right of freedom of expression, as an essential foundation of the
information society.

At the same time, experience shows that this freedom is endangered
worldwide.

A number of workshops in Athens addressed this topic, and as an outcome,
the Freedom of Expression Online Coalition has been set up.

This coalition will prepare background documents, discuss principles and
free expression online, and feed into the IGF process, as well as
provide input to the next IGF meeting in Rio.

At the moment, the coalition already has more than ten partners from
different sectors, including, for example, OECE, UNESCO, (saying name)
and Amnesty International.

And, of course, it's open for more supporters.

Contact details and a mailing list of the coalition can be found on the
IGF Web site.  And there is also a first preliminary coalition Web site
that can be found at foeonline.wordpress.com.

This is an open platform that can be used for contributions by all of
the coalition partners.

Concluding, let me assure that you there is also cooperation with other
coalitions, for example, with those on privacy or access on information,
to avoid duplications of activities and to be more focused and efficient
in our work.

I'm very much looking forward to continue the work within the dynamic
coalition which I think are very interesting and useful concepts for the
IGF process.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

Of formal speakers, I think we can properly cover -- try and see what we
can do -- I have four more speakers.

I have Ralf Bendrath, Colin Oliver, and Emily Taylor.

Can I have Ralf Bendrath with the University of (inaudible).

>>RALF BENDRATH:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am speaking on behalf of the dynamic coalition on privacy and I want
to give you a brief report on what we have done since Athens.

The privacy coalition was established as the outcome of two privacy
workshops in Athens at the first IGF meeting.

And in coherence with the IGF mandate, its purpose is to foster and
facilitate a public-policy debate about privacy issues in the digital
age.

We started as a uniquely diverse network of more than 30 actors from
government, civil society, business, and international organizations,
and we have generated considerable interest.  And now the coalition
gathers participants from more than 50 entities.

Participation is open to any individual interested in supporting the
purpose of the coalition.

And in order to facilitate broad participation and open discussion,
especially on emerging issues, we agreed that unless explicitly stated,
the views expressed by participants are not considered as official
statements by their respective entities.

We also have an ongoing outreach effort to attract new participants and
ensure that appropriate diversity of stakeholders and regional diversity
in order to cover the different aspects and perspectives on each issue.

For the moment, we have decided to concentrate on three major themes,
which is privacy and identity, because at the moment, the Internet is
moving from Web 1.0, which is basically linking documents, to Web 2.0,
which is basically linking persons.  And in this context, there's an
emerging layer, so to speak, Internet layer, protocol layer, of identity
management.

And we will look into the privacy aspect of this.

We will also, in conformity with the overall theme of the Internet
Governance Forum, Internet governance for development, look into the
link between privacy and development, which is pretty new and has not
really been discussed yet.

And we will also look at the links between privacy and freedom of
expression, and as Christian Moeller just said, we have close contact
with other coalitions that work on these issues.

We will develop short, synthetic issue papers in the coming weeks to
help structure the debate.

And we will hopefully prepare more debated background reports in the
perspective to Rio.

We had a first face-to-face working session this Sunday here in Geneva.

And have been collaborating online through a mailing list and a WIKI.

The WIKI, by the way, this was just raised, the WIKI is still online.

It's just not on the intergov forum.org domain anymore.

It's still there at IGF 2006.info.

And that's where you also find the link to the dynamic coalitions.

We have produced a detailed FAQ page describing our activities and
working methodologies, and this whole report including the FAQ page and
the list of current members is available in the back of the room.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Can I have Heather Shaw.

>>HEATHER SHAW:  Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I wish to make some comments today on behalf of the U.S. council for
international business, and also as a member of ICC and its basis
initiative.

While recognizing that the Secretary-General will consider the mandate
of the Advisory Group following feedback offered today, we wish to
stress the importance of timing.

Many of the recommendations made today regarding building on the
successful first meeting of the IGF can be easily resolved with
additional timing.

We are pleased that this meeting has been convened to assess the Athens
meeting and to begin to consider the details related to Rio.

In fact, ICC/Basis members will be meeting next month in Paris, and
these details will be useful in promoting business participation
throughout our global business network in Rio.

We believe the Advisory Group should continue its work.

Those members that wish not to continue in this capacity can be
replaced, while ensuring the balance amongst the stakeholder groups
within the Advisory Group.

We'd also like to suggest that it be further clarified that Advisory
Group members act in their personal capacity.

We believe this will allow for more full and active participation of all
members in the planning for the Rio meeting.

An active role of all stakeholders is key to the success of the IGF.

As all stakeholders can contribute to a greater and deeper understanding
of the issues and various perspectives.

Several delegations have emphasized the need for greater participation
of all stakeholders from developing countries, in particular, but
emphasizing more practical issues within the discussions at the IGF,
including the exchange of national experiences and practices.

All stakeholders can benefit from the exchanges that are made possible
by the IGF in convening a range of participants.

A variety of creativity formats should be utilized for the IGF sessions
to engage participants in a lively and productive discussion.

Access is one theme that, while discussed in Athens, could benefit from
additional discussion in Rio.

As we heard in Athens, access issues are fundamental to bringing the
benefits of the information society to more people around the world.

We also wish to add that summary reports are a useful and appropriate
mechanism to reflect the variety of views and the complexity of the
issues.

Summary reports, which supplement the verbatim transcriptions, fulfill
the mandate given to the IGF in the Tunis Agenda.

They both provide transparency for those that cannot attend the IGF
meetings in person, and highlight the current key issues.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

I have Colin Oliver.

>>Colin Oliver:  Thank you, Chair.

Yes, I'm Colin Oliver from Australia, one of the members of the Advisory
Group, and I would like also to agree with all of those who have spoken
of the success of Athens and the success of this venture into
multistakeholderism in this kind of forum.

There were certainly different expectations going into the meeting.  And
I think we were all learning there, and to some extent, we are still
learning.

In particular, from the government point of view, I would say it takes
time for governments to be comfortable with the new scenario.

It takes time to build a culture, and it takes time to work out the best
ways to move forward.

I'd also like to express support for the synthesis paper that has been
prepared.

I think that summarizes many of the key issues very well.

Going forward, I'd like to just deal with two things.

One is the focus on emerging issues.

This, in fact, in the Tunis Agenda is the context in which we see the --
the call for or at least the possibility of the IGF making
recommendations.

And I think we need to consider how this can be developed further.

I would suggest it could be done if we think about how proceedings are
published and the reports of workshops and dynamic coalitions are taken
forward.

That may provide a way of framing any recommendations that are brought
forward in this kind of area.

But we still need to avoid the meeting becoming a negotiation process.

That seems to me to be important as part of developing the culture.

We need to be careful not to undermine many of the positive elements
that were evident in Athens.

And, finally, I think those of us who were at Athens, would agree that
there was a very strong focus on access issues from developing
countries.

We need to recognize that.

We need to build on it, find ways to respond to this as a priority with
more extended and open discussion.

I think of the challenges and the experiences that can be brought to
bear.

Thank you, chair.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

Emily Taylor and Board governance.

>>E. TAYLOR:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to add my voice to those
who have said what a great success the Greek meeting was and to say
thank you to the Greek government for their hospitality and
organization.

One of the key principles of the success contributing to the success was
the multistakeholder aspect of the IGF, the fact that all there were
participating on an equal footing.

It was also pleasant to see people there who aren't at these meetings
usually, new faces, people who are coming into the discussions about
governance.  And this should be supported and encouraged going forward.

Two issues that I'd just like to touch upon, thinking about the next
meeting, are perhaps the importance of sharing good practice or even
best practice, and to build on processes at the national level.

I'd like to just briefly report on some of the activities that Nominet
has been undertaking in the last year or so to support the IGF and to
try and coordinate U.K. stakeholders.

We promoted awareness through a parliamentary event last year and also
held a preliminary debate which you, Mr. Chairman, were involved in in
London with multistakeholder panels, looking at two of the IGF themes.

We also webcast this event and experimented sometimes with some quite
hilarious results, with blogging and online participation.

We learned many lessons in that, which we were able to then feed into
the Athens event.

As part of this process, we created a U.K. mailing list and have used
that to do outreach on events such as this and consultations.

This year, our objective is to encourage U.K. business to come forward
with examples of good practice and what's working in themes related to
those four IGF themes of openness, diversity, and security, and --
diversity.

Sorry.

We will launch a good practice challenge for U.K. business and are
planning a series of events to support this.

Also, using our networks internationally, we are reaching out to other
country code managers.

And I'm very pleased to see the manager of the Netherlands and Canada
here today.

And we are participating in a multistakeholder group which is exploring
ways to encourage and improve online participation.

I'm not sure if we're a dynamic coalition yet, but we, of course, have
ambitions that way.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

Our last speaker for the morning, Bill Graham.

>>BILL GRAHAM:  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I'll try to be very brief, since I'm the block between this meeting and
lunch.

First off, let me very briefly join everyone in thanking the government
and the people of Greece for the excellent arrangements in Athens and
for the excellent launch to the IGF.

I wanted to say -- touch basically on four points.

The first one has been spoken to by many here.

The multistakeholder approach is absolutely vital for Canada in planning
the IGF.

And we felt that worked very well in Athens.

We really welcome the development of the dynamic coalitions, and we look
forward to other mechanisms that may arise in the form of concrete
outputs of the IGF.

Secondly, there's been some discussion this morning about what kind of
output document should come out of the IGF.

We really support El Salvador's suggestion that the verbatim records
really are the -- the written output, but we could also support the
creation of summary reports.

We don't, however, feel that we should be engaging in any kind of
traditional negotiations of an output document during the forum.

We fear that if we head in that direction, there is a strong danger that
the negotiations would overtake the discussions as the focus of the
forum.

And I don't -- I don't think we want to head down that -- that path.

Third, we really think it's essential that we develop stable
arrangements for the IGF.

To me, that includes both having an indication from the new U.N.
Secretary-General of the mechanisms for planning future IGF meetings.

It also means trying to find stable funding arrangements.

Stability for future meetings is important for the IGF, and particularly
important, I believe, if we are genuinely trying to encourage
participation by stakeholders from developing countries.

It's important for the secretariat.

It's vital for developing country members of the Advisory Group or
whatever its successor may be.  And it's also important for the forum
itself.

Finally, I would just like to support comments others have made that we
should be focusing more on the exchange of experiences and best
practices by stakeholders during the forum.

We believe that much of the implementation of Internet governance
necessarily takes place at the national level.

The IGF, therefore, should take as its focus the development of capacity
to do Internet governance at the national level.

The experience gained there will deepen and strengthen the international
discussions that take place in the IGF and in other forums where all
stakeholders normally participate.

Thank you very much.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

I have a few more -- I think we'll have to wait now, because I have more
speakers.

But in any case, I would like to say something on what people have said.

So I think we'll do it when we get back here at 3:00.

We come back here at 3:00.

So have a good lunch and see you at 3:00.

(Lunch)



AFTERNOON SESSION

(Gavel.)

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Can we just start?

I have Kieren McCarthy, Khaled Fattal from MINC, and Council of Europe.

Kieren, where are you?  There you are.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Is that on?

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Yeah, it's on.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Is that on?

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Yes.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  Mr. Chairman, it's my pleasure to announce the
creation of a new dynamic coalition this morning, or this afternoon.

The dynamic coalition for online collaboration has been set up to aid
the existing dynamic coalitions and hopes to provide these and future
groupings stemming from the IGF with online collaboration tools in order
to help them carry out their tasks in the most efficient and effective
way possible.

While the IGF process produced a remarkable degree of collaboration, one
of the biggest challenges for these self-formed groups will be in
holding consultations and discussions with one another, since their
members are both geographically and politically diverse.

The Internet's ability to enhance communication is unparalleled in
history.

This remains largely in one way --

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  (inaudible) quietly.

>>KIEREN McCARTHY:  This information remains largely one way.

It is to collaborative work where people work together to accumulate
knowledge and thrash out answers to problems that the global network
known as the Internet is turning and the dynamic collisions represent
the forefront of this movement in policy terms.

The dynamic coalition for online collaboration recognize that is a good
deal of effort and energy is likely to be expended by these groups in
the effort to find the optimal way of collaborating online and so it
intends to devise best practice guidelines alongside and in conjunction
with these groups in order to aid the process to its fullest ability.

The coalition will evaluate the available collaboration tools and
provide two-way support and advice on what technical solutions and
approaches are best suited for multistakeholder discussions.

We hope that this approach will also result in improvements in
accessibility and hence participation from developing countries.

We will be open and transparent, open to all those who wish to
contribute, and focused on providing practical solutions.

So anyone that wishes to know more or wants to get involved, please meet
at the collab- -- go to the collaboration site we set up and ran for the
Athens meeting at -- and click on dynamic coalitions.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Then I have Khaled.

>>KHALED FATTAL:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, my name is Khaled Fattal.

You may remember me and a lot of the issues that we used to challenge
the community in pushing the envelope so that we can have a multilingual
Internet.

I congratulate the IGF and you yourself, Mr. Chairman, for making this
process possible and advancing these issues.

In some of the interventions we heard this morning, we heard a lot about
a call for participation from third-world countries, especially those
whose native language is not necessarily English or European language.

In the many hats that I wear and one new one that I'm going to be
informing you of, we're more than happy to work with you to help provide
live and online translation from English to Arabic, which will help
participants who wish to participate in the IGF being able to read
content that would have been very difficult for them to read and
comprehend, or at least to participate.

So I'll leave the details of how -- if you wish to have us help you out
with this, we'll be more than happy to, and I'll leave the rest in your
hands.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

That's a very generous and kind offer, I'm sure one Markus will pursue,
he will pursue that with you.

I have the Council of Europe.

And then (inaudible).

>>CONSEL DE L'EUROPE:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

On behalf of the Council of Europe, let me first thank the Greek
authorities for organizing and making the IGF such a success and
pleasant experience.

And the IGF Secretariat for their efficient organization of both the IGF
process and the IGF event and for bringing about such open and inclusive
multistakeholder dialogue.

For the Council of Europe, both the IGF process and the event itself
have been extremely positive, because it has focused global attention on
the importance of human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of
law on the Internet, and, in particular, on the Council of Europe
Cybercrime Convention and on the Council of Europe European Convention
on Human Rights.

It has also helped promote the understanding that whenever -- whatever
the arrangements and delegations of responsibilities for Internet
governance, individual states remain ultimately responsible under
international human rights law for guaranteeing our rights and freedoms
on the Internet.

The IGF was an opportunity for the Council of Europe to explore these
and other issues with a range of other stakeholders and help to bring
about new synergies and cooperation.

In concrete terms, the Council of Europe contributed to the IGF by
making a written submission to -- on Internet governance issues and set
up a Web page on Council of Europe key and ongoing work related to the
IGF.

The Council of Europe also participated on two of the main session
panels in Athens, on openness and security.

It also organized its own workshop on human rights anonymity.  And it
also took part in seven other workshops on the panels of seven other
workshops, indeed.

Mr. Chairman, in assessing the IGF and looking to the future, I would
like to underline the importance of maintaining and building upon the
four themes of the first IGF.

I'd like to call for continued and even more focus on the ordinary
Internet user, and, in particular, on the protection and empowerment of
children on the Internet.

And to call for continued attention to relevant international
conventions, including the Cybercrime Convention, and in promoting
international cooperation and practice to this end.

Mr. Chairman, I shall like to point out that the Cybercrime Convention
is an international treaty with a global vocation, which has been
recently ratified by the United States, which has been signed but not
yet ratified by Canada, Japan, and South Africa, and has been signed and
ratified by 18 of the 46 European Council of Europe member states.

Therefore, encouraging further signatures and ratifications of this
convention and in urging international cooperation in this framework is
a way for the IGF to facilitate concrete results and in promoting the
security of the Internet.

And in this and other areas of its work, the Council of Europe remains
ready to continue offering its support and expertise to the IGF process.

Thank you very much.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you.

Then I had -- yes, sir.

Qusai AlShatti.

>>QUSAI ALSHATTI:  Thank you.

Qusai AlShatti, Deputy Chairman of Kuwait Information Technology
Society.

I would like in the beginning to express our thanks and appreciation to
the government of Greece in organizing the first IGF meeting in Athens,
which we believe that it was a successful meeting.

I would also like to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and to thank Mr. Markus
Kummer, the Advisory Group, and the IGF Secretariat, for their efforts
that were key to the success of the first IGF meeting.

Based on our participation in the first IGF meeting, and being from the
developing world, we believe that it is important to view and consider
Internet governance as a national issue as well as a global issue.

Internet governance involves many issues that need to be reshaped,
restructured, and established on a national level in order for countries
from the developing world to participate actively and contribute
positively to it.

In this regard, a national structured approach and a dynamic process is
much needed in the developing world to deal with different Internet
governance issues.

Therefore, we'd like to see the international Internet governance to be
discussed in a suitable format during the next IGF meeting in Rio.

And we support in this regard the statements that were made by different
representatives participating in today's open consultations regarding
localizing Internet governance and sharing best practices.

We would like to welcome the creation of dynamic coalitions and express
our support to their work and activities.

We believe that they accepted again the multistakeholder nature of the
IGF and their key role in it.

Dynamic coalitions will play a significant role in encouraging all
stakeholders to actively participate in the work of IGF and
constructively engage in the policy dialogue which will be more enhanced
and effective.

We further think that they can play a major role in organizing thematic
meetings related to it.

The dynamic coalition contribution to the IGF on the level of
discussion, workshops, and participation will be important to its
success, and therefore we support their continued efforts and welcome
the creation of dynamic -- of new dynamic coalitions related to various
issues on Internet governance.

We would like to emphasize on the importance of remote participation
during the IGF meetings.

The IGF meetings will be geographically distributed around the world and
not everyone will have the capacity to attend these meetings.

We need to ensure that the participation at these meetings will be open
to the biggest number of possible participants.

Remote participation will help in making the IGF meetings as itself a
continued process and will overcome the geographical barriers.

In this regard, we would like to see different formats and means of
remote participation available at the next IGF meeting.

At last, we would like to express, Mr. Chairman, our support to your
continued work on the IGF and our support of the Advisory Group on the
IGF Secretariat.

We find their work important to ensure the continued success of the IGF.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Mr. Daniel Dardailler.

>>DANIEL DARDAILLER:  Hello.

Yes, my name is Daniel Dardailler.

I work for the W3C.

And I represent here the dynamic coalition on open standards, which was
one of the coalitions created in Athens.

So this coalition, DCOS, in short, aims at better understanding the
challenges faced by all stakeholders with respect to open standard,
definition, development, implementation, and usage.

And open standardization in ICT has been done for, you know, several
years by technical consortia such as W3C or IETF or Unicode consortium.

They are not mandated by any public policy or international treaty.

But does raise regulatory and governance issues that greatly affect
policy-making, such as accessibility for people with disabilities or
internationalization, such as we heard before, or bandwidth issue with
technology.

So it's important that e-government agency, in particular, they're a key
player in that they can procure on the large scale this technology and
can push in one direction on the other, participate in such coalition.

And we think that IGF and this forum is -- may be the only one truly
international place where we can gather and get consensus on this
activity.

So we invite more participation in the forum.

We have had a meeting at the -- at the beginning of February of most of
the participants face to face in the U.S. at a symposium at Yale.

And we're planning to have another meeting in June after the WIPO
meeting to discuss, really, the agenda for Rio, what we would like to
give you as an update in Brazil.

So, in particular, it would be interesting that in Rio we have a session
not just a panel on the side to discuss open standardization issue.

You can read most of the statement of the IGF DCOS online on the IGF Web
site.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I have now a host for the second phase of the World
Summit on the Information Society, Tunisia.

It all started there.

Where's Tunisia?

>>TUNISIA:  Thank you, Mr. President.

I would like at first to thank you, to thank the secretariat and the
government of Greece for the excellent organization of the IGF.

And let me now speak in French.

I'd like to begin by expressing my support for what has already been
said here by some participants.

In particular, I note what was said by Egypt.

Reference has been made to the need to focus on the topic of development
and to deal with Internet governance as something that has development
as its ultimate objective, particularly when it comes to
capacity-building and human resource development.

We also have to see how best we can integrate various forms of
technology into education and training.

We should also look at this as a way of increasing supply and demand for
certain services and cost reduction.

But that is not all.

Alongside that, we would hope that Internet governance and the IGF in
particular could serve to promote good practices and solutions that
would be adapted for the most deprived people in the world.

We also believe that it should serve to facilitate access to information
through the use of multilingual domain names, for instance, and also
loop access.

As well as that, we would like to draw attention to the need to have a
more global and long-term vision of what we are doing.

The forum, after all, is organized over a five-year period.

And we need to look at Internet governance matters in that light in
accordance with the Tunis Agenda.

That being so, we would suggest that at the Rio meeting, we deal in
particular with new issues relating to Internet governance or to
emerging forms of Internet governance in order to prepare for future
fora, in order to lay the groundwork for those future events.

In particular, we believe that it's very important to establish a
coherent linkage between the forum itself and the follow-up mechanisms
that were established under the auspices of the Tunis Agenda.

In particular, global follow-up through ECOSOC.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Thank you very much.

I think we've had a very valuable and useful discussion.

I'm going to try and say a few things which draw on this, as well as
perhaps integrating some ideas which emerged yesterday in the
discussions in the Advisory Group.

But I would like to start at the very -- with one very important point
right at the beginning.

When we met about a year ago, it was almost exactly a year ago we met
here, when we had this consultation on how the Internet Governance Forum
should be organized, what form it should take, and all of these issues,
and that's when we came to certain conclusions -- well, more correctly,
that on the basis of the consultations, as a special advisor, I advised
the Secretary-General to set up the forum on a certain basis, which is
as an open-door forum with an Advisory Group of about 40 people
organizing it, with certain themes, et cetera, et cetera.

What I find very interesting is that, a year later, that basic structure
is something which most people -- which everybody -- in fact, I did not
hear any dissent -- is comfortable with.

I'm very impressed by the fact that every single person who has spoken
has welcomed the particular form which this multistakeholder concept has
taken, with all the stakeholders participating on a footing of equality.

I would particularly like to stress that perhaps the greatest adjustment
that had to be made here was by the government delegates who considered
this matter.

And I -- I'm truly impressed by the fact that every single government
delegate here has welcomed this particular structure and format.

And I would like this to be borne in mind, that in some ways, it is the
government delegates who have made the greatest leap in terms of
process, compared to the systems that they are used to.

And that, perhaps, is the reason why some of you felt that at the Athens
meeting they were often a little more restrained, did not -- there to
listen rather than fully participate.

I'm not sure that's entirely true.

I know that a lot of them were very active participants in the
discussions and the debates.

And certainly the government representatives were on -- on the Advisory
Group are very active participants in all of the debates and discussions
which take place there.

And I do believe it's important to place this on record, that there is,
you know, sort of universal acceptance of the concept of the IGF as a
multistakeholder forum, more or less running in the way in which it ran
in Athens, with a responsibility for organizing it resting in an
Advisory Group.

This does not mean that people accept everything that was done under
these two heads.

There are clearly many valuable suggestions which have been made as to
how this dialogue should be structured, some of them issues of
logistics, some of them issues about organization, the length of
sessions, size of panels.

And I'm sure these matters which can and should be taken into account in
designing this event in future.

But the basic concept of a moderated discussion among stakeholders
around themes seems to be something which is broadly acceptable.

Equally, on the Advisory Group, I have heard the comments which have
come about the nature of this Advisory Group, its composition, its
process, the need for transparency, for being better informed on what it
does and so on, which I'm sure we will take on board and take care of in
the -- for the work of the group.

I certainly would wish to recommend to the Secretary-General that in
future, as in the past, the Advisory Group should always work with a
process of open consultation, as we did try to do throughout the
preparations for the Athens meeting and, for that matter, earlier with
the working group also.

So it's not as if everything was right.

There are many corrections, adjustments, modifications we need to make
to this basic structure of the multistakeholder forum and the Advisory
Group, which is authorized to organize it.

And I would certainly wish to convey the many valuable suggestions which
have come in the course of these two days of discussion to the
Secretary-General on this basic format.

But I do believe this is an important advance, because when we discussed
this a year ago, we had decided to do Athens as an experiment.

And that is why the mandate was only for Athens.

And we had said that we would -- the Secretary-General had said that he
would look at the matter after Athens and then come to further
conclusions on that basis.

So in some ways, I believe that we have moved forward in terms of our
acceptance of the process.

Forgive me if I keep reverting to my marriage analogies, but as I
explained in Athens, what Athens was was a -- I come from a country
where we arrange marriages.

So Athens was the case where the bride and the groom were meeting for
the first time.

They were sort of scoping each other out.

And my understanding is that after scoping each other out, they've come
to a conclusion it's worth meeting again in the same sort of format.

So maybe the next time they will go a little further than just scoping
each other out.

Maybe they'll start holding hands actually.

But let's see.

The -- so I think, basically, in that sense, we have moved forward.

And there is a general understanding now that the next four sessions
will be organized more or less in the same structure or format.

There are many other questions about logistics and organization which
are mentioned and I'm not going to comment on, because I think all of
them are valid issues which we have to take on board, and in many ways,
Markus, in his opening remarks, had tried to cover a lot of this. 
Additional ones which had come up in the course of our discussions.  And
I think these are all valid and we should try and see how we can take
care of these.

I really wanted to focus on a few issues which will require a discussion
at a more policy -- or political level by the people who will be
responsible for organizing future fora.

Not all of them will get resolved in the context of Rio, and maybe some
of them will only get resolved over time.

But I do believe it's worth putting down on record, some of these
issues.

First, on question of participation.  I suppose the most important issue
that has been raised here is what do we do to ensure adequate and good
participation from all stakeholders in developing countries.

This is in some ways a key issue which has been raised.

I think it's partly a question -- two questions, in my view, in this.

First is the extent to which there is an appreciation of these issues at
policy-making levels in developing countries.  In how many developing
countries is there a process internally which is trying to focus on some
of these issues, discuss some of these issues.  Because it seems to me,
unless people are interested, they're not going to come.  And if they
come, they will come as strangers, as people who are there for a tour,
but not necessarily as people who can be active participants.

So one, I think we have to address this issue of how do we generate a
debate on these questions at the country level.

And the second issue is clearly that of resources.  And this is
something which I would urge that we, as a -- particularly those who
normally support these activities, the donor countries and the others,
should start looking at.

To some extent, as far as Athens was unknown.  People did not know what
it was going to be like.  And perhaps for that reason, maybe there
wasn't as much support from the donor community as we would have liked
to see.

I expect that this will change.

With the general perception that this forum is working, is valuable, has
a valuable role in the process of Internet governance, I suspect
interest will rise.

My urge here is that there be a certain coherence in this.  Because this
is a very open forum.  There is no centralization in this process.  But
at the same time, if half a dozen different initiatives get launched to
raise money for bringing people from developing countries, we might
start getting an unnecessary sort of confusion and perhaps even an
unnecessary competition.

So one of the requests I would make to all those who would wish to
involve themselves in this type of activity, and I'm sure the people who
are there at the donor end, both in governments as well as in the
Internet community and in the private sector, would welcome this type of
coherence so that you know what this is for, what that is for, what that
particular initiative is for.

And I believe that one of the issues that I would raise as a policy
question is how do we ensure a measure of coherence in these types of
efforts to increase developing country participation without creating an
unnecessary centralization.

I have no easy answer.  I'm flagging this as an issue which I hope that
the Advisory Group, which will be charged with the responsibility of
organizing future fora, will start addressing, perhaps immediately for
the New York conference itself.

The second big issue on participation which has come up very strongly
yesterday and today is that of remote participation.

If we are talking of Internet governance, if you do not use the
capacities of the Internet to allow people to connect and interact with
one another, then, in a sense, we are failing in our duty.

So many people have referred to this.  A lot of people have also said
that please keep in mind the enormous variation in the infrastructure
available for remote participation in different parts of the world.

I would add one.  Since I will be in Asia and the forum is in Brazil,
please keep time differences in mind, also, so that somebody did mention
the possibility of asynchronous participation in the process.

I think what arises from this is the need for variety.

Already, yesterday in the Advisory Group, some of the people who are
more knowledgeable on these matters have decided to come together in a
loose, informal coalition to see how this can best be worked up in time
for the Rio conference so that we do have effective ways of remote
participation.  And remote participation in many different ways.  Not
everything dependent on sort of large bandwidth video communication, but
also something which can be used in places which do not have that
capacity.

I would certainly say that this is an important area.  If we can make a
breakthrough in Rio, that would be wonderful to show that we can run a
global conference which is not limited to the thousand or 2,000 people
who can get to Rio, but is able to engage perhaps 10, 20 times, even 100
times as many people in different parts of the world.

And that, I think, would be a huge contribution.

So I would certainly say that this is probably not a policy issue.  I'm
not sure.  I don't think anybody would object to effective ways of
remote participation.  I don't think there would be any objection to
this.  It's largely a matter of getting people to work together.

There may be other issues on participation, but these two to me seem to
be the ones which have been mentioned by the largest number of people,
and they do require some action and time for the Rio conference.

There has been a certain amount of discussion on outcomes.  There was a
sense that, yes, it was fine to have Athens as a meeting which was a
familiarization meeting, where people got to know what the issues were,
where people understood where that particular question was coming from
on that particular issue.  There was, if you like, a certain amount of
education, awareness-raising that took place.  But I also appreciate the
sentiment which many people have voiced.  You can't carry on for five
years just doing education and awareness.  That something has to emerge
out of this process of dialogue.

This is not a negotiating process.  It definitely is not an executive
process.  It's not even a negotiating process.

But it must have a structure, a format and an outcome, if you like,
which is capable of influencing things which can lead to real results at
the ground level.

In a sense, we have made a beginning there, in Athens.  The dynamic
coalitions are not a negotiated outcome.  They are voluntary coalitions
that are dynamic because presumably the membership of the coalitions is
very open, can vary, maybe vary even with the issue that is being looked
at by the coalition.  And I'm told it's also dynamic to emphasize the
fact that it must move and lead to results.

And so maybe -- well, I'm sure nobody would -- the concept of calling
something a static coalition wouldn't make sense, I suppose.

Mind you, I would love to have static coalitions in my country in the
political sphere, but that's a different matter.

So this dynamic coalitions is one type of product which has come.

But there are other things which people probably look for.  And one
essential question which I hope in future we start looking at is, what
is the outcome of this meeting?

Now, one, as somebody mentioned, quite a few people have mentioned, we
of course have the verbatim record.  And hopefully, with the two are
helping us, we will always have a verbatim record of these meetings.  So
that is the record which is available to everybody.

Of course it's -- how shall I put it? -- a labor of love to go through
that record.  If somebody is enthusiastic and wants to read transcripts
of some -- how many hours?  Something in the region of 16 -- 15, 16
hours of speech making, talking and discussion, they could do so.

So we may have to do a little bit more to direct people in the right
way, because saying that there's 15 hours of transcript is, I'm not sure
enough.

Perhaps somebody can take on the responsibility of annotating the
transcripts.

Suppose you are interested in the issue of multilingualism.  Where are
the places you should look at in the transcript?  So you don't have to
go through 15 hours.

You have pointers which point in that direction.

Now, I think these are things which we would have to start looking at.

I don't think it's possible for the Secretariat to do it.  It's
overstretched.  But I'm sure, now that the transcript is publicly
available, there should be enough capacity in the academic community
which is present in this process, and the others who are present in this
process, to start doing this.

We have a Secretariat summary of this.  And of course everybody can
verify the accuracy of the summary against the transcript.

But so far, we haven't had a problem.  Markus's balanced summaries have
been generally appreciated by everybody and seen as a fair record, and
something which if you don't want to go through 15 hours, that is
available, which can be looked at.

Is it possible to go beyond this?  Please remember that the IGF is not a
membership body.  So we cannot have a formal process of approval of
anything.  Who is to approve?  The people physically present there?  But
that may vary in the course of the two, three days of the meeting.  What
of other people who are participating remotely?

So the concept of a body which approves is almost alien to the IGF.

So before we move down that track, we have to start addressing the
question as to what exactly do we mean our goals, what do we want out of
this process.

But I am raising this as a policy question because many people here are
raised this.  And I think this is something we have to address as we go
down the road.

Somebody asked why is the Secretariat's report called "informal"?  Well,
the reason it was called informal is because there was no formal process
of approval of that report.

And so I suppose instead of calling it informal report, we could have
called it Secretariat report, but it's all very appropriate terminology.
 But whatever, we can certainly revisit the titles that we give to these
things.

But the reason for calling it informal was to make it clear this is not
an approved -- record approved by anybody.

It's our take on what is available to everybody in the verbatim
transcripts.  If they think we are wrong, no problem.  There's a
verbatim transcript.  You make your own summary.  There's no difficulty
in your doing that.

The third broad set of issues that has been raised is on themes.  Where
again I believe a certain amount of political thinking, discussion will
be required in the future processes which deal with this.

One of the things which I think we can probably try and handle quickly
is the whole idea of a multi-year program of work.  So that people have
a sense that over these remaining four years of the forum, we are going
to cover all of the things that are mentioned in the paragraph 72, which
people have referred to again and again.

There is certainly something that can be done, but I would urge that if
we don't freeze the agenda too rigidly, because this is a very rapidly
evolving medium.  If we tried to set the agenda for the 2006 meeting in
2002, we probably would have gotten it wrong because the thing evolved
so much between 2002 and 2006.

So I would urge for the people who will be responsible for handling all
of these five years, over these five years, yes, by all means look
ahead.  But don't try and be over rigid because these things keep
changing and evolving.

There are more specific questions of policy, but many people have raised
these questions.  There was on whether or not the whole question of
Internet core resources is something which is -- can be discussed here.

Now, do remember, it cannot be negotiated because this is not a
negotiating forum.  But to the best of my understanding, it's not off
the table.  Anything which is to do with Internet governance is -- it's
a matter of decision.  People have to decide whether it is valuable to
talk about this.  There is nothing which is off the table.

I apologize to the gentleman who complained about being censored, but I
would certainly look at the verbatim transcript, and it was never the
intention to censor anything in this proper.  But the decision has to be
made as to how and in what form.

There are some interesting suggestions which come from Brazil on this
matter, and which perhaps could be pursued by people who are responsible
for these things in the future.

One issue which has come up consistently is people wanting to emphasize
-- well, I could -- two things together.  One is the development
approach, and the other is the focus on users.

This is something which has come up very frequently in people's remarks
and comments.

I think it's important we reflect the development approach in our
discussions on Internet governance.

But we should also be careful that we do not end up duplicating the work
on ICT for development which is being done in the WSIS follow-up.

The WSIS follow-up is a very thick process with a lot of things
happening, and I would urge that we do not sort of stray into areas like
e-education or e-health which are being dealt with very thoroughly in
the context of the WSIS follow-up, for instance.

Yet this question has been raised again and again, and there are
certainly aspects of what we are dealing with, like interconnection
costs, which has a developmental dimension which clearly belong to the
area of governance rather than elsewhere.  It is possible it may be
discussed in the ITU, but it is an issue of Internet governance.

But I would urge that we spell out a little more fully what exactly do
we mean by the development that I mentioned.

We have a beginning in the work which was done for the Working Group on
Internet Governance in the section which deals with that developmental
dimension and which did focus on governance issues rather than
everything to do with development.  And of course they also focused on
issues of capacity building and human resource development.

The focus on user interest to ensure that orientation of this forum is
such that the lay user, like me, I am a lay user of the Internet, would
feel that, yes, these people are talking about things which concern me. 
And this is not just a forum of specialists in the Internet who are
handling this.  And I think this is a useful thought.

My own sense is, to some extent, this did happen in Athens.

I was quite struck by Vint Cerf's remark that he felt that the people he
was talking to were different from the people he normally talked to when
he went to an IETF meeting or an ICANN meeting or a meeting where the
people who participated were people who were involved in the design,
development, or management of the Internet infrastructure.

That he felt that he was talking to something which was much broader,
much wider.  And I certainly got the feeling that the overall tone of
the meeting there was that it was a user-oriented meeting rather than a
specialist-oriented meeting.

But we can try and do more.

And here I want to plant a thought.

Yesterday, in the Advisory Group when we were talking about this, one
thought which came up was that in order to provide a certain, if you
like, basis for the discussions in the meeting, now that we have started
the forum, perhaps in future, every year, we should have a report on
what's happened to the Internet over the previous year.  Issues that
have cropped up apart from purely statistical issues about how it has
grown, this and that.  All of that stuff is readily available, but other
questions which have come up.

For instance, this year, I would expect the report to deal with
something like what happened when the Internet in east Asia went down
with the earthquake which took place there.  What was the response?  How
well did it work?  The reasonable cooperation, et cetera.  And issues of
that nature.  Other issues which may come up.

Now, in that context, I thought perhaps, arising from this, could we
contemplate a profile, if you like, of Internet users?  Who are they? 
What do they use this Internet for?  What do they perceive as problems?

I was very interested in something which Raul Echeberria told us about
yesterday, the survey that was done in Latin America of Internet users
which gave us a sense of what they consider important and maybe we
should do that.  Maybe we should do that on a larger scale and see what
people feel is their concern, and do it by a proper survey.

And I think this is feasible and possible.

I don't think this is going to be such a difficult or complex exercise.

But I do accept this concern, and I think this may be the value addition
that we may get from the IGF, is strong focus on the user interest.

There's also been a great deal of discussion of national-level issues,
the feeling that you really have to see whether as part of your exchange
of knowledge, exchange of experiences, capacity building, you do focus
on what is it that countries can take away from a meeting like this and
what they need to do at the national level for more effective management
of the Internet at the national level from a public policy perspective.

I think this is a valuable focus.  It may not have taken place on a
sufficient scale in Athens, and I'm sure we can do much more on this in
future forums.

This is also an area which I believe the government delegates would find
particularly interesting.

And in this context, there's a great deal of reference to the notion of
doing much more systematic work on best practices.

I may incidentally mention, I have had a long prejudice against the term
best practices.  It's highly arrogant.  I always preferred the term
"good practice," but I've given up.  I've lost.  It's called best
practice the world over, and I suppose we'll stick to that term, "best
practice."

But the only thing I would urge is, we must try and be focused.

If you simply do a generalized zed discussion on best practices, what
you will end up with is a lot of propaganda, a lot of beauty show stuff.
 People coming up saying what a wonderful job we are doing on this,
this, this.

Focus it on something.  Maybe on access as an issue.  Why is it that in
my country, India, I am paying only $10 a month for an always-on 512K
connection whereas in many other developing countries people are paying
$30.  I actually don't know the answer, but I would like to probe this,
as to how did they bring it down to this level?  What was the modality,
mechanism, et cetera?

So in that focused sense, I hope that we can have very good discussions
on best practice, and this may be one of the things which could be a
valuable take-away from this meeting.

I think there have been many other -- one important issue that has
arisen is that the IGF should not be isolated from the other things
which are happening on WSIS follow-up.  And I think we will certainly
have to address the issue of the connection between IGF and see the
other mechanisms which are in place for the follow-up of the world
summit on information.  I don't think the IGF can decide this.  This
will probably have to be decided by the apex body which is setting up
all of these things, and I suspect that this is an item which will be on
the agenda of these apex bodies when they meet this May and June.

But the extent to which the IGF -- presumably the IGF Advisory Group
really, has a view on this, it should articulate that view and
communicate it soon to the higher body.  In this particular case, it
would be the economic and social council.

I think there are many other issues that I would say have been raised. 
As I said, I'm not trying to cover everything.  I tried to mention in my
closing remarks issues which I feel are not just issues which I can
remit to the secretary-general as things which he can do under his
authority.  A lot of organizational and logistical issues are things
which can be done under his authority.  Saying yes, we will organize
this differently.

But these are issues which are more of a political or policy nature
which I think need to be discussed by the political processes which
guide the IGF.

This is my take on our discussions.  This is more or less -- this, plus
the summary which will be prepared now on the basis of this verbatim
record, will be the basis on which Mr. Kummer and I will communicate the
sense of the meetings, yesterday's and today's meetings to the
secretary-general.  And we will also communicate to the
secretary-general one message which has come from all of you, and that
is that we need to take decisions on the modalities for the organization
of the Rio meeting fast.  Because we need all the time that is available
in order to ensure that this is -- in fact, that the preparations are
effective and that we can deliver the high expectations that have now
been aroused by the generally perceived success of the Athens meeting.

This is my take on this, and I now -- unless there's anybody else, I
leave the final word to Brazil.

Brazil.

>>BRAZIL:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  I hope I will not have the final
word at this moment, as we still have some time for discussing.

But I would like to say that we feel very much encouraged and inspired
by your words in summing up our discussions.  I believe that you are
paying attention to a lot of important issues that are key to the
preparation of a meaningful and useful discussion in Rio and beyond.

And we thank you very much for that.

We are also glad to note that there is this continued interest by all
stakeholders in taking part of this process, and that is also
encouraging because it also proves that it was a good decision that we
made in accepting to host the second IGF.

We feel now that this issue is gaining momentum.  It has been very well
discussed and presented initially in Athens.  And now we are taking it
with a view to deepening the discussion and to streamlining it so as to
have a meaningful contribution to the international community as a whole
regarding all aspects related to Internet governance.

We believe that what is most important for us in the preparatory process
is the need to streamline the agenda and the format of the meeting.  And
we are very much interested in following up with you and all interested
parties on how we are going to do that.

I was also glad to hear a suggestion that came from a representative of
the civil society present here earlier today that was calling our
attention to the Tunis Agenda, paragraphs 78 -- in particular, 78b which
says about the establishment of a bureau to support the IGF ensuring
multistakeholder participation.

I wonder whether we could take the opportunity of this discussion, this
open discussion, to sense this idea.  And why am I saying that?  I
believe that the organization of work, as you said, includes a lot of
political sensitive issues.  And perhaps it would be too much
responsibility for the Secretariat alone, even for the secretary-general
of the United Nations, to take decisions of policy, of political nature,
alone.

I know that the Advisory Group has played -- has done a very good job in
preparing for the first IGF, and it should continue working as an
Advisory Group to the secretary-general.  But, in fact, the decision is
that of the secretary-general.  It's not that of the Advisory Group.

And it means that it would be perhaps -- even for the Secretariat, it
would be more convenient to have the support of a bureau that is
constituted, taking into account a balanced geographical representation
which is also called for in paragraph 78, and taking into account a
balanced multistakeholder participation as well.

As we are touching new grounds of organizing our work, we are not sure
how to organize this bureau.  But we should try.

And having the responsibility of chairing the second IGF, the Brazilian
government would be very much open to discuss that with you and all
other interested participants.

For instance, issues that could have -- could be taken up by this bureau
could be the selection of themes, the idea if we do need or we don't
need a multiyear program, what we do with dynamic coalitions and how do
we bring them up to the process, how do we select workshops that are
meaningful in terms of the general scope and the agenda of the meeting.

The question of whether the transcripts are enough or the secretariat's
summary is enough as a result or not.

How could we go beyond.

I think that it will be extremely helpful if we could have this sort of
bureau, which is a group that would be politically responsible for
helping not only the chair, but also the -- you as chairman, and the
Secretary-General as well, in presenting some political considerations
for this.

I know that a bureau does not touch on -- take political decisions on
substance, but on -- we are talking -- all these issues are related to
the organization of work.

And it's normal that at any U.N. conference there is a bureau to help
precisely on the organization of work, which includes agenda and so on.

So that's the -- there's one last comment that I would like to make
regarding your reference to the -- how to attract interest from
developing countries.

Well, this is, indeed, an important issue.

And what I think we have to bear in mind here is that the access to the
Internet is unevenly distributed around the world.

And if we take the developing world, we will see that this figure may be
roughly around 10 or perhaps less than 10% of the population with access
to the -- of course, it varies from country to country.

In the Brazilian case, it's around 15%.

But it shows that there is a huge percentage of the population in the
developing world who still do not have access to the Internet.

And that is a cause of the digital divide.

That is the most clear example of how the digital divide manifests and
how these people are deprived from -- even from citizenship and from
access to information.

And for governments, it is important that when we talk about Internet
governance, we are not focusing only on the users or only on those who
are educated to access the Internet and to use it and even to
collaborate with it.

But we should also think and perhaps primarily think on those huge mass
of people who do not yet have access, considering also that the trend is
that there is a growing trend in terms of access, and we should devise
ways and means to accelerate it and to include as much as possible as --
again, as a way of creating a people-centered, all-inclusive, and
development-oriented information society.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  If I may just clarify on the question of the
paragraph that you talked about of the bureau, this was discussed last
February.

And it was clarified by -- then by the people who were involved in the
negotiations that they had -- the bureau was basically -- what we called
Advisory Group was supposed to be the same.

The reason for this is, this is not a membership body, there's nobody
who can elect a bureau, because there's no membership.

So who's going to elect a bureau?  So I would say that that was
discussed last February.

And the -- it was clarified that what they had in mind when this
paragraph was negotiated by the people who were involved in the
negotiations was that this would be the -- the Advisory Group would be
that.

Now, what I think is important is the procedure for the constitution of
the Advisory Group.

Many questions have been raised about this, about its composition, its
membership, the nature of the process.

And those certainly are things which I will convey to the
Secretary-General.

But it was discussed a year ago.

Because, basically, the question is that this is not a membership forum.

So there is no electorate there to -- to decide that -- A, B, C.

We are used to a system in the U.N. where we have only governments.

So we can use regional groups and say, "This is the way it will be."

But when you have a multistakeholder forum with everybody on an equal
basis, the very process of constituting a bureau itself is problematic,
but even more so when there's no membership.

It's an open door.

So that was --  Then we clarified.

We asked this question to the people that sponsored.

And they said, "This is what we had in mind."

Because I said, "How do I constitute a bureau in an open forum?"

And then they explained that this is how it was supposed -- we thought.

But I just thought --

But these are surely issues which can be looked at.

And this is partly the reason why we need to also connect the forum with
the high-level processes which oversee WSIS.

But I don't think it's possible for us to resolve this issue.

But when we clarified it, this is the way we had done it.

And I will certainly convey to the Secretary-General this --
particularly on how the Advisory Group is to be constituted.

That, I think, is part of the -- because it's a multistakeholder group.

It represents countries as well as others.

And this is -- I just thought I would clarify that this was discussed.

If you look up in the transcripts of the last February meeting, you will
see extensive discussion on this, including the clarifications which
came from the people involved in the negotiating process.

But nothing is cast in stone.

Anything can be revisited, redone.

And there's no reason why we have to stick to any --  I'm just saying,
right now, we are -- my advice would be to the Secretary-General yes to
a multistakeholder forum, yes to have -- constitute an Advisory Group to
plan the -- this forum.

And that these are the questions which have been raised about the
constitution of the Advisory Group, which he may wish to take into
account.

And, of course, all of the other questions that I have talked about.

But we have a couple of --

Charles Geiger.

Yes.

>>CHARLES GEIGER:  Thank you, chairman.

In fact, I asked to get the floor perhaps at the end of your meeting.

But I just wanted to announce some meetings in May to this audience
which would interest this audience.

And we have -- we are organizing in May a cluster of WSIS-related
events, as we did in 2006.

And this would be from the 14th to the 25th of May.

There will be different Action Line facilitation meetings, starting with
Action Line C5 on security on Monday 14th and 15th May.

And very importantly, the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for
Development will be meeting from the 21st through 25th of May.

And we have planned for the 21st of May an opening ceremony and a
ministerial part.

And on the Tuesday, 22nd of May, we are planning for a joint CSTD guide
global alliance meeting, which would be probably in the form of panels.

And then from Wednesday to Friday, that's the actual planning, there are
a number of Action Line facilitation meetings taking place, about seven
or eight different Action Line facilitation meetings.

And on Friday also an Action Line facilitators' meeting, which would be
opened also to the other stakeholders.

Now, all of this is at the moment already on the WSIS Web site at the
usual place where, when you go on the WSIS Web site on the home page,
you have a section which is on implementation follow-up.

And the first link there will bring you to this cluster of events.

And we will update this from time to time.

It's already visible that we will have quite an important -- important
events during these two weeks.

Thank you, Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I used to complain sometimes that the Internet is
supposed to encourage remote communication.

But the people involved in the Internet seem to have a real passion for
flying around the world and meeting face to face.

I can see Internet governance is meeting the same way now.

Okay, we have two more people.

We have Jeremy Beale of the confederation of British industries and Ralf
Bendrath of the University of Bremen, and Brazil

Mister -- Jeremy Beale.

>>JEREMY BEALE:  Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.

I found your summing up of the discussion to date quite inspiring.

But it also prompted some thoughts on my part about the role of users.

Users have been mentioned a number of times during the meeting today,
but I think people often think of it as individual users, whereas, of
course, business users in many respects have been drivers of the
development of the Internet and involved in debates about Internet
governance as something very important to the way they can use the
Internet.

It was also mentioned that -- earlier on, the point of the Internet 2
versus Internet 1 is an increasing phenomena that's linking individuals
rather than machines.

This has had a major impact upon business users of the Internet, because
it means that their customers, rather than being in an arm's length
relationship with them, as has traditionally been the case, are much
closer to the process of product development.

And this has made a partnership between customers and businesses a much
greater phenomena than it was in the past.

It's also been the case that business users of the Internet have had to
work with governments in partnership increasingly to deal with things
such as spyware, spam, et cetera.

So I think in terms of the business community, you are starting to see
this increasing partnership on the one hand with consumers or with
individual users, but also with governments.

It occurred to me when you were giving your summing up that it could be
very important to get that community more involved in the debates than
had been the case so far.

It seems to me that if that could be the case, what you would actually
get is a much greater discussion about how investment in developing
countries could be driven by investment in Internet facilities.

And the way partnerships could be developed between governments in
developing countries and the broad business community, by which I mean
the business user community, as well as the supplier community.

And that would, in many respects, create incentives for the development
of Internet governance.

It would broaden the discussion about the kind of partnerships that can
occur between the public and private sector.

And it might also address some of the issues that you've raised about
resources and the need to increase resources.

Thank you very much.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I have Mr. Ralf Bendrath, from University of Bremen.

>>RALF BEUDRATH:  Thank you.  I would like to address two issues.

One is on which themes we should address at the next meeting.

And one is how far can the IGF go in terms of output.

On the first issue, I think just the fact that we all can discuss in a
very open and transparent and inclusive, multistakeholder setting now
does not mean we don't have different opinions anymore on many of the
issues.

And I think we shouldn't really shy away from addressing critical issues
that are really politically contested.

That is part of the job and the mandate of the IGF.

And I would like to relate to what was said earlier this morning by the
representative from the Third World Network, but also by others, that
the IGF also should address issues like critical Internet resources, as
one example.

I could also say as a privacy advocate that we should address privacy
violations, the rise of the surveillance state under the guise of the
war on terror.

That is rising on the national level, we have a fight with our own
government on this.

But a lot of these things are decided on the global or international
level.

This is something where IGF clearly has a role.

And we shouldn't shy away from discussing these.

And I think the idea that the IGF is a nonnegotiating body is a great
chance to have really open discussions about these things without
getting into the square bracket, you know, trenches.

The second point is, how far should the IGF go in terms of output.

Paragraph 72G of the Tunis Agenda clearly says, at least for emerging
issues, that the IGF can issue recommendations.

And this is definitely something we will address in the dynamic
coalition on privacy.

I am not yet sure how we will handle this -- how we will come up with
outcomes.

But I wouldn't say just because we don't have a defined membership it's
not possible to agree on anything.

If I look back on the -- to the WSIS process, where I participated in
civil society, there was no clear membership on who was a member of
civil society, who can decide and vote and whatever on our joint
documents.

But we still managed to come up with a lot of joint documents, a lot of
joint statements, and even with two large, about 20 pages each, civil
society declarations for the two summits.

That was possible.

And we just used maybe more innovative, more open, more tolerant
mechanisms instead of the diplomatic negotiation mechanism.

There are mechanisms like the IETF is using, rough consensus, things
like that.

As you said, we are entering uncharted waters here, so we have to be
creative.

But I think we should discuss and think about how to come up with
recommendations and outputs like this.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Yes.

I wish we could introduce the rough consensus method into diplomacy.

But, unfortunately, we can't.

It would be wonderful to have a procedure in diplomacy where you say,
"Everybody but other than the nut case has agreed."  But, unfortunately,
that's not possible.

Brazil, then (saying name) and then Karen.

>>BRAZIL:  Yes, Mr. Chairman.

I am a member -- Carlos Afonso is my name.

I am a member representing civil society in the Brazilian Internet
Steering Committee.  And I would like to read a statement by the dynamic
coalition on the Internet bill of rights, if I may.

I am participating in that dynamic coalition as well.

The dynamic coalition on the Internet bill of rights would like to
report to the IGF community about its activities and progress.

We have recently established a Web site at the URL
http.internet-bill-of-rights.org in a mailing list which can be accessed
and subscribed by the Web site.

We plan to use these online tools as the main venue for our work.

We encourage all stakeholders who are interested in this matter to join
the mailing list, and we plan to devote the next few months in doing
outreach and increase participation.

We are fully aware of the need to build on existing statements of human
rights and duties and to interact with other related efforts.

Our project has been started to provide a meeting point inside a
framework of a process of the United Nations, without any predefined
outcome, both in terms of form and of substance.

Collective thinking is necessary to understand, for example, the
appropriate degree of formalization and whether the objective could be
one document or a series of documents, and how to ensure that any result
is kept up to date with the speedy evolution of technologies.

We do not pretend to know everything or have ready solutions, but we
believe in the need to gather an international environment to devote the
utmost attention to this matter in advanced declaration, formalization
of consensus about it.

Consequently, we would like to devote the months leading to Rio to
finding agreed answers to the following two questions:  One, which are
the appropriate forms and instruments to implement and better define
human rights and duties in the Internet environment?

Two, what areas and types of rights and duties should be part of this
work and of its results?

We welcome the generous offer by the government of Italy to host an
international meeting on this matter and suggest that it be focused on
the two questions above.

At the same time, we stress the importance of this matter and of human
rights in general and would like that they are given better evidence and
attention in Rio than it was in Athens, where they were collated with
other important matters such as intellectual property rights and access
to knowledge.

Thus, we propose the human rights and the bill of rights become one
issue grouping itself, starting from the Rio meeting.

Moreover, we propose that the bill of rights becomes one of the main
working items of the IGF in the overall, with the objective to reach
consensus and release documents and other results pertaining to this
issue by the last IGF meeting in 2010.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Louis Pouzin, of (saying name).

>>LOUIS POUZIN:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would just like to come back a little bit on questions which have been
partially discussed, but I think not completely resolved.

I think I appreciate very much the argument you gave about -- at least
against the bureau, because we are not a membership body here in IGF.

And I think it's a very valid argument.

However, there are still functions in the IGF mandate which cannot be
fulfilled unless we have procedures in place for just to do the work.

And that's a number of functions which are labeled under the paragraph
72 in the Tunis Agenda.

So I would suggest that even if you're not talking about bureau, we
still have a group of people who would identify or try to define
procedures in Rio for helping the work of the participants, in
particular, for example, for the subject which was just mentioned by a
colleague, Bendrath, from Germany, emerging issues and how do we report
on that, how to make recommendations, if needed, hard to distribute
documents, and so on.

We have suggested RFCs, for example.

So there are a number of partially technical, partially administrative
questions which needs some kind of guidelines to be executed.

So I would suggest that since Brazil is the next in line for organizing
the next IGF meeting, that this subject be part of the program of the
Rio meeting.

In other words, setting up or proposing procedures for helping the work
of the participants.

Actually, if we need a structure for that, we might call that a dynamic
coalition.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I have Karen.

>>KAREN BANKS:  Thank you.

Karen Banks, from the Association for Progressive Communications.

I had quite a few points I wanted to raise, but I was kind of caught a
bit on the hop there.

I didn't realize that we were moving towards closure.

So I'm going to keep these comments mainly in response to your very
useful summary, and would ask whether you can advise at the end how we
can continue making contributions after the meeting.

On participation and funding, we -- APC supported quite a few people to
participate in the Athens event, albeit very small.

But our experience was that when we tried to secure funding for
participants, particularly, I think, speakers from underrepresented
communities, et cetera, it really wasn't that difficult once we sort of
put a call out and started sharing information with one another.

And although we obviously can't -- when I say "we," I mean civil society
organizations or NGOs -- although we can't possibly resource to the
extent that governments or donors can, I think that we can through
information sharing and coordinating quite early on probably try to do a
much better job of maximizing our resources to get people to the IGF.

And so I'm quite keen, I think, to put some work into that in an
informal way with any other groups who are interested.

Your comments about the importance, again, in relation to participation,
about taking the IGF really to the national and regional level is one
that resonates very strongly with us.

And I'll just take this moment to report on not what I would call a
static coalition; it's probably more one that's gearing up for some
dynamic activity.  And that is around capacity-building.

The groups who met in Athens, that's basis, ISOC, the NRO, Diplo, APC,
and two African regional organizations, CIPACO and CIPESA, have been in
touch since Athens, online, primarily.

But we will be meeting again tomorrow to talk very much about those
kinds of activities and how we can collaborate together and add value to
one another's work in various capacity-building activities between now
and Rio.

Remote participation.

I'm sure there's a lot of input around some of the -- the more high-end
applications that we can use to facilitate remote participation.

But I'd also like to remind maybe of some of the more tried and tested
and maybe old-fashioned these days methods of remote participation by
way of longer-term facilitated online discussion.

By that I mean setting aside periods of some four to six weeks where,
you know, you may have a background paper, you may have a survey.

You give people time to read, to think, to respond maybe with the
assistance of moderation on a weekly basis.

It's probably something that I'd say the dynamic coalitions, for
example, might take up in relation to their particular issues.

And I think it's one that -- I think it's one that could be worth
thinking about, particularly as we have time to prepare between now and
Rio.

And it would also be an activity that pretty much anyone with any kind
of access to the Internet could participate in.

I think that there's an awful a lot of richness probably in the verbatim
record of the Athens IGF.

And I would support your suggestion that we think about ways that we can
use those resources, for example, through working with colleagues who
are involved in research.

It could help us to identify specific elements of those issues which we
could drill down and work on in a more intense way between now and the
Rio IGF.

A note on the themes.

We would support several of the comments, and particularly, I think, the
sentiment in Ralf Bendrath's last statement about not being too wary
about addressing the issues that are difficult or too difficult.

And, obviously, though they shouldn't come to dominate the event, I
think we shouldn't shy away from them.

And in addition to looking at management of critical Internet resources,
I think we have to remember the WSIS principles also, which haven't been
addressed significantly at all to date.

Of course, we would recommend, as many others have, a significant
emphasis on access, although we find the four-theme framework broad
enough to encompass very much of what we would like to have discussed in
the IGF.

And maybe just a note on that about an event that we will start working
on in collaboration with our member in Brazil, a two-day event prior to
the IGF on access and low-cost connectivity, where we'd like to look at
everything from technology applications, processes, and public-policy
issues, and we'd like to encourage that we look at the plaza as a much
more significant space for people to interact and to share, as many have
said, best practices.

And that's it.

Thank you very much.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, then the gentleman from the
Third World Network, then John-FRANCOIS.

>>WOLFGANG KLEINWAECHTER:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, my name is Wolfgang
Kleinwaechter from the University of Aarhus, and I'm also a special
advisor member of the Advisory Group.

Again and again both yesterday and today, we have heard that people want
to have a more concrete outcome from the forum in the form of
recommendations or something else.

My conclusion from the success of the Athens meeting is, the success
became possible because there were no negotiations -- there was no
negotiation process.

This played an extremely important role to allow people to speak much
more freely in an environment where they had in the end of the day not
to vote in favor or against a certain text.

So I would really warn the group to go down this road and to say, okay,
probably in the second and third forum, you know, we start something
like a semi or quasi negotiation process to come out with some
recommendations.

It's not only the fact that by its statute, the IGF is not a negotiation
body.

Because the IGF has -- is not a decision-making body.

So it's really in the spirit of discussion, that there is no need to
have any consensus at the end of the day, even not a rough consensus.

On the other hand, it's very understandable that people, you know, want
to take something home, black and white.

And while the whole forum is an innovation and we have entered uncharted
territory, probably we can find also an innovation, you know, with
regard to the final results.

At the moment, the final result is the full text, you know, hundreds of
pages, transcripts, where you can say, okay, this is what the forum has
produced.

The other alternative would be to have a document of two or three pages.

But probably we can be innovative to have something in between.

The forum was established to send messages to the organizations involved
in the process in Athens.

So it means organizations like the ITU, like UNESCO, like ICANN, like
IETF, and others, and to say this is what we discussed, and, here, this
is an input for you.

Please take this into consideration.

And probably we can create a new, you know, form of this which we could
call message, messages from the IGF.

It is not a recommendation, it is not a resolution, it is not any
declaration or something like that.

This is just a message.

And we can also send mixed messages, so that -- say, okay, one message
is this, but we have to the same issue also another message, but it's
now up to you, to the decision-making body to consider these mixed
messages and then to start the negotiation process where you have an
appropriate organization which has a mandate to negotiate a special
issue.

So that means what I want to call you for is to be all the more
innovative with regard to results and to go beyond our established
system where we have recommendations, resolutions, declarations, and
things like that.

And having the floor, you know, let me inform you also about the efforts
which has been done in the last couple of months for the -- in the
academic community.  As you'll remember, we have launched a global
Internet governance academic network, GIGAnet, with the first symposium
in Athens, and we are planning now to have a second academic symposium
in Rio.  And there will be a call for papers published immediately after
this meeting here, and we hope that people in your environment, which
are linked to the academic community will be encouraged by you to make
contributions to the academic analysis.

And furthermore, we have also finished the preparation for the launch of
the first summer school on Internet governance.  This will take place in
July and August in Germany, and the call for applications for the summer
school has been distributed here already in this room on the table, and
there's a special Web site where you can find all the information for
the European summer school on Internet governance.

Thank you very much.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  The Third World Network.  Thank you, Mr. Chair, as
Third World Network, we welcome the Chair's comments regarding our
earlier statement, and we can supply supporting information on request.

On the composition of the Advisory Group or your recommendations
thereto, we would like to transpose our concerns regarding the
safeguarding of transparency and the avoidance of conflict of interest
in relation to the fact that delegates, panelists, and Advisory Group or
bureau members, who may have an interest or position in the current
Internet governance arrangements, be asked to disclose their
relationship with current governance structures of critical Internet
resources, whether national or international.

But as you can appreciate, there is some confusion on what exactly is
national or international.

So we would like it at both these levels.

In the hope that no one would oppose transparency or avoidance of
conflict of interest, I'm sure that we can get some sort of rough
consensus on this issue.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I don't see any problem on that.

In fact, if there's any lack of knowledge, let us know.  We'll let you
know.

There's no problem whatever in everybody knowing what individual
affiliations are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

There is absolutely nothing.

Let me tell you one thing.  My only affiliation is that I happen to
subscribe to a whole series of semi-reliable Internet services in India.
 No other role.

No board, nothing.

Jean-Francois Morfin.

>>JEAN-FRANCOIS MORFIN:  I am from INTLnet.  We are a very old
organization.  We were created in 1978.

I have two small questions.  The first one is, I understand what the
president said about the Advisory Group and the bureau.  But I am not
sure that I understood why the legitimacy of the Advisory Group
representing something which has no membership would be different from a
bureau representing something which has started having some face-to-face
relationship.  As long as I have understood the bureau, the bureau was
created -- the Advisory Group it was created in February of last year to
support the Athens meeting, and I find extremely welcome the idea of a
new kind of bureau following the Tunis recommendation, and taking
advantage from the experience of Athens which was very positive.

The second point I would like to make is that usually we have associated
the governance of the Internet to the numbering and the naming.  This is
done through the IANA.

There is two important new additions to the IANA.  The first one has
been the addition of the codes for languages, which is by far and away
the most important database of registry in the IANA, and the second
point is a question of its evolution, architectural revolution from
decentralized to either centralized or distributed.

On these four points, today the IETF is discussing decisional options
which will engage forever the new form of the Internet.  This is on
naming, addressing, all languages and wiring and who is going to
allocate the IP addresses.  Will it be a worldwide system or will that
be a ccTLD/LAC system.

We can approve this, we can disapprove this, but I think we cannot be
unconcerned by this.  And this is typically something that the IGF is
meant for.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Adam Peake.

>>ADAM PEAKE:  Thank you.  Adam Peake from an organization called GLOCOM
in Tokyo.

I wanted to thank the Greek hosts for a wonderful meeting in Athens.  It
was very successful, I think.

And when Mr. Geiger was giving the dates of the on the WSIS meeting, it
reminded me the meeting in Athens was really prepared in a little over
five and a half months and we are now about eight and a half months out
from the Rio meeting, and so I know that, Chairman, you said you were
going to emphasize that we have to get moving and moving fast.  But it
really is time now to start approaching speakers to ask them if they can
come and speak at that meeting.  We can't just ask them to leave a week
free at the end of October and early November.  We have to be asking
specific questions of them -- Can you speak on a topic on a day -- if we
want high quality speakers to be joining these panels.

And that means getting an agenda ready and drafted as soon as possible.

If we want to have workshops that are integrated into the agenda, as
many of the people have commented should happen more during the
stock-taking session, that seemed to be something that was important to
many people, that we had a more coherent mix of workshops into the
general agenda, then we have to get the requests for workshops out as
soon as possible.

So I really do hope that you can emphasize this need for urgency to the
secretary-general, because otherwise, we're going to end up in the same
situation as Athens.  And while that was a successful meeting, we have
to make Rio a better meeting.

So I wish you luck in making this request for haste.

Thank you.

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  Any further?  Good.

[ Laughter ]

>>CHAIRMAN DESAI:  It's okay.  I still have lots of commitments in India
and there's a time difference.  It's already 9:00 at night in India so I
still have to go back and work on a newspaper column.

But that's a different matter.

I would say that I think the further discussions that we have had have
been very valuable.

I think the -- Let me explain this question about bureau, et cetera,
which people keep coming up with.

It was discussed a year ago, but the term "bureau" was not used either
for Secretariat or for the Advisory Group because the word "bureau" has
a very precise meaning in the U.N. system.

And it's for that reason it was felt that we should avoid using the word
"bureau."  You can call anything a bureau if you want.

I think the important thing is transparency, and most important of all,
to preserve this openness of the decision-making processes that people
know why something is being done and what is being done so there's a
full sense of engagement.

Again, I think several people have been mentioning the idea about the
making sure about the issues.

As I said, I don't think there's anything in the mandate which precludes
any issue from being discussed in the IGF.

But I would urge one thing.  If the IGF is to discuss controversial
issues, it should discuss them within a framework of a debate of good
faith.  And the sense of a debate of good faith is you must be prepared
to be convinced by the other person.

It's not a debate of good faith if you are just going to come there and
knowing that you intend to disagree with the other person and,
therefore, are not even willing to listen to what the other person is
going to say.

The essence of a debate of good faith is the willingness to go into
debate ready to be persuaded that you are wrong.  Not going into debate
in order to persuade the other person that they are wrong.

If we can preserve this, if we can preserve this sense of a forum where
people can talk openly, freely, and in good faith in the philosophical
sense good faith, the way I was talking, then I think there's absolutely
nothing which cannot be discussed fruitfully in the IGF.

Now, if we don't have that, it still does not preclude that we discuss
controversial issues.  All that will happen is it will not be very
fruitful discussion.  If we all state known positions and walk away
feeling happy that we have stated our known positions.  And well, fine,
if that helps you, that helps, but it's very unlikely to help.

The IGF can help when there is an attempt at trying to find common
ground, an attempt at understanding which can then be taken up somewhere
else.

It's useful also in identifying issues which are not being addressed
elsewhere and which need to be picked up, and where, if you like, early
work can be done in the IGF.

There are open questions which have come up about outcomes, et cetera,
and there is language in paragraph 72 which talks of recommendations as
appropriate, and we still do not have a process for figuring out how to
get to those recommendations.  But these are things which will evolve.

A year ago when we started, everything was up in the air.  Now at least
we have gotten one point, which is this basic structure after
multistakeholder process is something that has been agreed.

We have some issues as to how we manage this multistakeholder process. 
We will learn as we go along, and perhaps it will keep evolving as we
proceed from meeting to meeting.

So I just wanted to conclude by thanking all of you.  You have been most
helpful.

I certainly have learned a lot listening to all of you in terms of what
I would wish to convey to the -- well, the only thing, final thing I
wanted to mention was I do not know what decisions will be taken by the
secretary-general on the future arrangements for the organization of
these meetings.  And it would be presumptuous of me to assume anything. 
But I will make that presumption, and on the presumption that he
continues with the present modalities, there is a thought that there
would be a meeting around the same time as the meeting mentioned by
Charles Geiger which is in May on the 23rd of May.  I just want to
mention that now in the case of those of you who have to juggle
schedules, you can start juggling your schedules now.  But as I said,
there are no presumptions here because we still have to wait and see
what are the particular decisions that will be taken by the
secretary-general to discharge the responsibilities which have been
given to him under the Tunis decisions.  And I cannot, at this point,
make any firm commitment on what those -- those positions would be.

But assuming that they are the present firm, then 23rd May is the date
that is being considered here.

So thank you very much.  You all have been very helpful and very good,
so you have one hour off from the time that we had assigned to us.

Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

(5:00 p.m.)