2pm. Side room. 31st October 2024. Co‑operation Working Group
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: We are going to start in two minutes, we see some people getting in the room, please take a seat and welcome to the co‑operation working group session here at RIPE 89 in Prague. We are here with you, myself, Achilleas and we'll take five to ten minutes in the agenda to run you through some of the administrative tasks and one of the most important ones is to congratulate Julf and Achilleas as reselection of the co‑chairs of the co‑operation working group. There were no candidates either, I must say!
Expressions of interests, so you must be happy with their work as I am as a co‑chair. So moving on, in order to speed up on our agenda today that is quite full, we will have a bit of a different agenda with a panel session addressing the World Summit on the information society and the global digital contact and look at interplay of these two different activities. But then we'll move on to the presentation style with Chris Buckridge himself who is going to be looking at multistakeholder models to govern the internet and what's missing, then we'll have a quick update on the world telecommunications standardisation assembly by Jim Reed. And finally a presentation from RIPE NCC Hisham Ibrahim on the handling requests for the information and how the RIPE NCC is and membership and community is working and engaging with governments.
So with that, I would like to ask our panelists of the first session to come up to the stage. As you do, I will actually introduce our first speaker who is remote, hello Tala. Welcome.
Tala Debs is the World Summit on information society and sustainable development goals co‑ordinator at the international telecommunication union, ITU, welcome. We are very happy to have here.
Following we have Marlene Straub from the German government and digital Ministry.
And also we have Callum Voge who is with the Internet Society. He is the director of government affairs and advocacy at the Internet Society.
And last but not least we have Nigel Hickson with the UK government, the department for science, innovation and technology.
So with that, I will try and serve as a moderator. But to give us this backdrop information of what we are going to go through, in looking at the ongoing processes in the internet governance, I would firstly ask Tala to perhaps give us some background information: When did the world of information society process start, or what's the timeline now, looking at its review 20 years after.
So with that, please welcome Talam, and we can see you and hear you and the floor is yours.
TALA DEBS: Thank you very much Desiree. Can you hear me well? OK.
Good afternoon everyone, my name is Tara Debs and ‑‑ Tala Debs and I am project co‑ordinator at the International Telecommunications Union, very pleased to be addressing the RIPE community today and shedding light on the World Summit on the Information Society with this process celebrating 20 years and achieving future milestones together.
So what is WSIS, WSIS is actually a unique two‑phase UN process that was established to address issues related to information and communication technologys in an inclusive manner by involving the government, private sector, technical community, academia and civil society and international organisations and main goal of WSIS is build people centred development oriented Information Society where everyone can access, create, utilise and share information.
So these are the key milestones of WSIS, it was actually proposed by Tunisia in 1998, followed by a UN GA resolution calling to organise a WSIS in two phases. The IT was tasked to organise these two phases. The first one was in Geneva in 2003 and the second one in 2005, the outcomes of the Geneva case were the declaration of principles an the plan of action which is the framework of the WSIS action lines an the outcome was mainly the I G F, the internet governance forum serves as multistakeholder for policy dialogue on internet governance, soon after that we had clusters of related events and since 2009, we have been holding an annual WSIS forum. And we had the first review of this UN process in 2015 with WSIS plus ten review when the process was renewed for another 20 years, next year in 2025, we will have another review coin siding with 20 years of this process and next year's WSIS has been rebranded as WSIS for high‑level meeting.
So the WSIS process is guided by the principles of the WSIS action lines. There are eleven action lines as you see on the screen. C7 is ‑‑ you see 11 actually but it's C7 eApplications that have sub teams and what's important here to say is that each of these action lines are facilitated by one or Mo agencies, for example action line C7 on eHealth is facilitated by the World Health Organisation, eAgricultural is fascinated by the FAO ‑‑ C4 capacity building, C5, cyber security, building confidence and security in the use of ICT and C6 enabling environment which is the framework for policy making.
On the left side of the screen you see the WSIS action lines an the SA Gs, in fact in 2025 the first time the WSIS was reviewed, there was a call to align the WSIS action lines with the SDGs because 2015 was the year of the SDG, there was a matrix that was built to show the linkages between these action lines and their impact on the SDGs, how is ICT infrastructure helping to end poverty, etc.
There's something also very important as part of the WSIS process which is the WSIS stocktaking, it's a repository of the digital project more than 13,000 project, showcasing the work on the ground from all stakeholders in the framework of the WSIS action lines to accelerate the SDGs.
As you see here on this slide, we have a governance process of the WSIS, so each of the UN agencies is working under its mandate to implement the WSIS outcomes. The CSTD has the followup on the WSIS outcomes. All these are institutionalised at NUNGA resolution, the WSIS is process is multistakeholder in nature involving everybody, in fact, the technical community has been very active in the WSIS process since its inception, many of the technical community organisations are actually partners, partnering annually in the WSIS forum, Internet Society, ICANN among the many others.
On this slide here you see these different elements of the WSIS forum, there are very important components, WSIS stocktaking, United Nations group on the Information Society is also an important element which is the inter agency mechanism on preliminarying the WSIS outcomes within the system, all these a cornerstone for the SDGs and they keep the WSIS relevant and robust in face of technological advancements.
So recently there was a summit of the future and a path of the future was adopted and highlighted the advances in knowledge, science and technology and how can they deliver to break through a better world. The global digital come tact was annexed to the part of the future referencing established processes such as the WSIS as foundations for multistakeholder collaboration. GDC envisions open safe, fair secure digital future for awe. We see similarities between the WSIS and GDC, the first is a unified vision for leverageing technology in fostering sustainable development. The second one is the foundation and calling the importance on collaboration among stakeholders, the third one is they shared a commitment to bridge the digital divide to promote international co‑operation and foster sustainable development with the ethical use of technology.
So by building on their shared principles, WSIS can effectively serve up as a follow‑up mechanism in the GDC ensuring the global community remains aligned in the pursuance of the transformed digital landscape. GDC matrix are currently being prepared to look at the commitments of the GDC alining us in the WSIS action lines in close assignment with the action lines facilitators.
Here on the screen we see some of the key figures on how the WSIS has delivered remarkable progress since its inception in 2003: We have 5.4 billion people connected online, 65% of women using the internet which is reducing the gender digital divide, 80% of the youth are also online today. But of course we have 2.6 billion people still off‑line and challenges remain.
So coming back to the WSIS forum, it started in 2009 as an annual event and since 15 years, it has attracted more than 120,000 participants from all stakeholders, it's organised by the ITU, UNESCO and UNDP with the involvement of more than 40 UN agencies. The forum features a variety of formats and special tracks, allowing for dynamic discussions on digital issues.
This year we celebrate multistakeholder success and co‑operation with the WSIS prizes that's become a prestige over the years. We invite you to submit for the WSIS prizes in 2025 by showing the excellence of implementation of digital project to achieve SDGs.
WSIS has always evolved through time addressing the impacts of emerging technologies, examples are with the Hackathons we organise every the WSIS forum agenda and programme is currently built through an open consultation process where all stakeholders and proposed new topics, especially related to emerging technologies.
This year's WSIS forum and the AF were currently organised together bringing the the two communities together. Exhibition space show kiss the latest technologies and we have WSIS special innovation prizes every year.
Here I want to show some of the key outcomes of this year's WSIS forum that was rebranded as a high‑level event because it also served as a platform for the WSIS review and the high‑level engagements of more than five‑hundred plus participants showed our collected effort to drive the digital agenda, I want to highlight during the forum this year and in 2023, it served as a platform for GDC consultations, we actually invited the co‑facilitators to address all stakeholders, we have sessions dedicated from the technical community to discuss the global digital cutbacks.
I leave you here with the outcomes you can check online an the WSIS forum of this year's event, the summarising main outcomes of this year's events show the WSIS outcomes continue to be a foundation for global digital policies and co‑operation. The review next year should be seen as an opportunity to keep evolving the WSIS framework and keep it relevant in global digital governance and finally leverage the WSIS and their implementation of the GDC since the WSIS action lines remain central in global digital discussion.
The WSIS forum this year was chaired by the Swiss confederation and it highlighted the importance of a WSIS plus strengthening inclusive confirmation work for the digital corporation and addressing a fast ever changing era of digital development. So going back quickly to the WSIS review, as I mentioned earlier, it will happen in December 2025 at the UNGA, we are very happy, ITU, UNESCO have jointly prepared a preparatory process to involve all stakeholders in this review so you see different milestones actually all of you can contribute, the upcoming one is in IGF in 2024 as part of the open consultation process of the WSIS, we invite you all if you are attending IGF to join us on the 18th December for the session, of course the WSIS plus high‑level event next year is an important milestone as well an the review in April.
Another call for inputs was also launched and this is specific to the ITU's work in the implementation of the WSIS 20 review including a call for all stakeholders to provide new ideas in relation to the new action lines and ensure an inclusive assessment of the WSIS process, we invite you to contribute to the call for inputs that's open until 31st of July 2025.
Save the date for next year's event, 7th to 11th July, it will also happen the same week as the AI for good global summit in Geneva in Switzerland; the objectives will be to serve as a platform for multistakeholder discussions on the progress made since 20 years and looking ahead on the challenges that remain to bridge the digital divide.
Finally please contribute to our calls for contributions, so you can come and participate in the event in 2025, but everything we do in the preparation towards this event happens through an open‑consultation process, you can send topics, sessions, organise exhibition spaces, provide speakers. So please do fill the open consultation form on our website or participate in the regular OCP meetings we are organising, the first being on the 18th November from 2 to 3pm. Registration is open on the WSIS website, participate through the WSIS prizes and submit your best digital processes for development and be recognised globally and looking also to other contests and special prizes that will be launched very soon.
Finally, we invite you to partner with the WSIS process because we are extra budgetary and every year we do raise funds to cover the operational costs related to our events through partnerships. If you have more information, look at the website or contact us.
Just to close, moving forward, please consider three things. Build up on the outcomes of the WSIS plus 20 forum high‑level event an the summit of the future, participate activity in the WSIS plus 20 review and the GDC implementation and contribute to the preparatory process for the WSIS plus 20 high‑ level event, 2025. Thank you very much.
Back to you, I hope I was not very long. Thank you very much.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you very much. It's very comprehensive with a lot of information, you have already answered some of the questions as to what's the timeline and what is the process to get involved and where can technical community make an impact, I am going to move on to our panellists. And Tala, please feel free to stay online and also make comments.
Having just seen a lot of different agencies doing a lot of co‑ordination, you mentioned the UN Commission for science and technology development that they will prepare this report, I want to ask Callum as a member of technical community what are the opportunities for the technical community to meaning flea engage in this process because there's no negotiation, I believe here.
CALLUM VOGE: Yeah, thanks for the question. So when we look at this issue, we have different ‑‑ just to reiterate this, the IGF which is for the multistakeholder policy discussions, where we collaborate, share, debate; WSIS plus 20 is for the developing high‑level action lines at intergovernance and the Commission for Science and Technology Development, their role is really to report the WSIS work throughout the UN system, to report progress made and share this information so there's kind of two ways they do this, there's the regular annual report that happens every year and what I emphasise on this, it's not a purely technical document, there's 43 countries that are members of the process and the final report does have some element for negotiation, for the technical community, how we normally engage in this annual kind of way, it's ad hoc panels and workshops, they bring in the expert technical knowledge, that he the normal way but today we are talking about every ten years there's a special report, the 2025 report is the one we are talking about specifically. And that's more of a technical report.
For the of the WSIS plus 20 review, that report is much more in‑depth, it's focused on research, typically it's contracted to independent research effort and so there's actually many more opportunities for us to get involved as compared to usually. So what this means is I can talk for example on the case of the Internet Society, we are looking at where we can highlight our experience on the WSIS action lines, things like promoting IXPs, connecting the unconnected, manners, routing security, pause for internet resiliency and things like that, targeting specifically where we believe we have added value.
I think in the technical community, we are all different sizes of organisations and some might have more direct lines and less direct lines. I would encourage everybody to cooperate with those larger organisations that might have those routes. For example, we are happy to take input from the community. And I imagine RIPE and others would be open to this kind of collaboration.
So yeah, just to to sum up, I think it's a very special opportunity, we should seize it and make sure that expert insight is getting to the right place.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Yes. Just gag back while we still have Tala here, you mentioned the process that is going to be similar to the one that we had gone through in WSIS plus ten back in 2015. Is there anything else that's different in the digital landscape apart from connecting, leaving no one behind and connecting the people that are not online to 2.6 billion, do you see anything different in process this time? First Tala and then anyone else could comment.
TALA DEBS: Yes, of course. Thank you for the question. The digital landscape in 2003 was very, very different from the one we have today. In 2003, we had one billion people connected online, barely 16% of the world's population. Now we have 5.4 billion people connected. People used their phones only to text and to do basic calls, now remarkable speed and scale of development of the digital technologies is with us today and they are present in our aspect of our daily life. So 20 years later, the digital landscape, of course, evolved but the challenges as I mentioned earlier in my presentations remain as 2.6 billion people are still off‑line.
But there are things in WSIS that are still true today when leaders came and looked at the vision of WSIS 20 years ago, they focused on the people and not on technology to ensure everybody shares the benefits of digital technologies. Second it's for making the framework collaboration inclusive by involving everyone and this digital technology and complex confirmation work of digital being and every stakeholder bringing their aspects and knowledge to this puzzle to keep everyone involved and finally building a WSIS framework that I can say is agile, adaptable to changes of processes and coordinating governance mechanisms that can be fit for future and keep pace with the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital technologys. There is a difference in the digital landscape. But I see the WSIS as being agile and evolving throughout the years to keep pace with this progress.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you. You have mentioned the UN CSTD again and they will play a very crucial part in producing this report. I would like to perhaps ask Nigel, who has been also a participant in the WSIS phase one and phase two, to really maybe make a comment how has the technical community, where can we now contribute? Is it the same as it was then back in 2015? Is there anything new now that we have the CSTD? But we also have the global digital compact, my understanding is that global digital compact is producing this implementation map wit which will be annexed to the WSIS plus 20 review report of the CSTD.
NIGEL HICKSON: Yeah, thank you very much and it's great to be here and great to to be able to talk on this panel. I work for the UK government in the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. Desiree, I mean the technical community has always had a crucial role to play. And if we go right back to the 2003 and the 2005 WSIS process, between 2003 and 2005, there was a working group on the internet governance that was set up to really sort of try and evaluate and understand what was happening back then on internet governance and the technical community played a very important role in that.
And since then, after the WSIS process concluded in 2005, the technical community has played an important role not only in the UK IGF by contributing to the discussions there, whether it be on IP addressing or on naming, whether it be on other technical issues, but they have also contributed to the UN CSTD process being observers at the Commission of Science and Technology Development when resolutions on WSIS are delivered. And in many other fora.
So I think as we move towards 2025, it is slightly over whelming. And let me just sort of, if you like, touch on this. There are so many processes going on. We have just heard from Tala about the WSIS forum in July, which is going to be obviously probably one of the last meetings before the actual UN GA discussions, there's going to be a UNESCO event as Tala has showed on her slide in February, UN CSTD is going to have a critical meeting in the spring, they will adopt a resolution which will have the report which you mentioned annexed to it.
So there's an awful lot going on but really to a large extent the critical discussions will be at the General Assembly and there we can ‑‑ we do know something, in that we know we have just been through negotiations on this UN global digital compact, now I'm into the going to ask for a show of hands in the room or I am not going to ask you to recite paragraphs of the global digital compact, you will be pleased tow that but it does touch on internet governance an the UN IGF and to a large extent it gives a good basis for the WSIS plus 20, discussions, but those discussions are going to be against a geopolitical backdrop because in all of this, as you know in life we can prepare, we can prepare, we can have technical sessions, we can have line up all our ducks and then we get to the final discussions, we find something else will take over the dynamic of those discussions.
And geopolitics is a real factor as we saw at the General Assembly, as we saw at the UN this year when discussing the global digital compact but in all of that, we have a role to play.
We as governments obviously are sitting around the negotiating table, but you as the technical community have a real input into these discussions. And the role of RIPE NCC, the role of other bodies, is being ‑‑ is obviously discussed in great detail in all of these preparation meetings.
So all I can really conclude, I think, Desiree, on this is this is important. It might all seem slightly bizarre but it is important because what comes out of the WSIS plus 20 discussions will set the agenda for years to come. The conclusions will be picked up by the ITU at the plenipotentiary in 2026, that touches on names, that touches on addresses, etc.
So whatever is concluded the technical community will be at the forefront of the discussions to follow. Thanks.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Nigel for highlighting the importance of these events and how we can get involved and contribute. It seems an awful lot of engagement that will have to do, that we'll have to do over the next eight months or maybe more, longer, until the UN General Assembly, as you have mentioned in September next year.
But having mentioned this new parallel process of global digital compact, I wonder maybe starting with Marlene, how can the technical community contribute to both, to WSIS an the GDC process in order to, from your point of view, to avoid some duplicate efforts and create synergies.
MARLENE STRAUB: Thank you for having me. My name is Marlene Straub on behalf of the German government. And there's so much that's been said already that I support and I won't repeat but I think it's really necessary to highlight how much duplication is happening and how thin everyone's resources are being spread and that's why collaboration and co‑operation is so crucial. So I don't know if this is new information for but the European Commission an the council both are planning additional council conclusions and a strategy on internet governance, so that's another two things to add on the pile of things that are going to be happening. As the German government, we'll follow these processes and the central guiding motif that we will be pursuing is multistakeholder governance has to be strengthened.
So in terms of how can you follow both of these processes and how can you collaborate, we strongly encourage you to work in alliances, because it is physically impossible to follow everything, even in the action lines that Tala just presented, every single one of those will have a consultation, it is physically impossible. So make friends, work with your co‑workers, make alliances, cooperate, this can I think the GDC processes has showed if we work together, we can get things done, think about how the technical community wasn't even mentioned in some of the earlier proposals, I think we have some very far from then and we should build on this momentum and I fully support what Nigel has been saying, just because we have negotiated the GDC, that doesn't mean it will be the basis, we shouldn't take anything for granted and it's going to be a long tedious process, so what we recommend is engaging these forums but also speak with your governments, a lot of this negotiation is going to happen on a multi lateral level, in Germany, we are launching, we have already been running stakeholders groups on the GDC, we are going to continue those and I am sure your governments will have something similar at the local level and regional level and national level, get involved in your IGFs and approach your governments, make yourself visible because really we need you to translate the technical expertise because that does not exist at the governance level and we are very grateful. Yeah.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you for that advice. So we could ‑‑ Callum, you want to say something.
CALLUM VOGE: Sure, I can jump in here, for the technical community, I think the GDC was such a difficult process because in many ways it was a black box, we didn't always know what was going on there. To be frank. It was not ‑‑ government actors were largely excluded, it was a multilateral process, we saw the first draft, the revision but later drafts we were regular lying on leaked documents to know and so I think what really concerned many people in the technical community in the early stages was certain terminology which things like enhanced co‑operation which is a term that doesn't have a clear definition but in the past has been used by governments to exclude non‑government actors from these conversations. So a lot of red flags did go off in our community I would say. But our community even with that difficulty, did take actions, I think one example would be the letter that was sent to envoice discussing the leaked draft talking about the concerns of the multilateral process and what was at stake.
I can also say for the Internet Society, we developed these matrixes, we called them zero draft matrix, we would review the text and that was supposed to hopefully guide our community to be informed and be able to monitor, it's just a huge amount of work, no single person can keep up. But also we were sending those matrixs to governments to hopefully advise them, give recommendations on how they could revise the text itself, so I would say the community was active despite the challenges maybe of that process with the GDC and now we have more decisions to make, so now although we might say that the GDC process, from our view, was flawed and that was multi lateral, we see some' shy your honourss the multistakeholder model will be respected in this process, we hope for this and then also there was a process ‑‑ the WSIS process is acknowledged, so now there an opportunity for the technical community to decide if they want to endorse the vision and the principles of this GDC, that's the first part, it's paragraphs one through six and paragraph eight which is the principles and what we have been told and understand is that endorsing these two parts does not mean you endorse all the list of objectives which are in part two. So for the Internet Society and for many technical organisations, it's the decision to make now, to weighing up the pros and cons, reasons to endorse might be that you want to be active participant, you want to be engaged and have closer collaboration. But there are voices of concern, there's still terminology in the GDC that frames things differently, it's still very government centric, there's that enhanced cooperation term in there, those could be reasons to be a bit sceptical or nervous about endorsement.
The second part of this is that, of course, as technical organisations, we can impart our individual objectives, paragraph 7 and then 10 to 63, I can say for the Internet Society, we see some objectives are very aligned with our works, we might want to commit with engaging like community networks, we have a lot of expertise, anyway, it's a hard decision to make, it's a big deTate, I think the I star organiseings are trying to align and provide guidance but again our understanding is endorsing one part doesn't mean endorsing all of it, we have had clarity from the UN on that, the Internet Society will be publishing a blog post too to help advise this process, we know there's a lot of questions. Just to say we have been engaining despite the challenges and we are trying to get charity to we can continue to be effective how we engage.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, very useful comments, I think that we can use. But because we have about five or six minutes left, maybe we can turn back on looking at some long‑term strategy for example the German government has recently published a blog post looking at a long‑term strategy for digital landscape and the IGF could be used as existing frameworks to address the GDC implementation so are there any thoughts, Marlene, that you would like to share first looking at the long‑term strategy for the review process of the IGF for example and then going forward.
MARLENE STRAUB: The IGF mandate expires next year and those countries that are still applying to host IGFs so one of the central things we are pursuing in the WSIS negotiations is going to be to not only maintain the internet governance but strengthen the mandate.
During the GDC negotiations we tried to anchor the IGF as the forum where we will discuss the review within the GDC, it was semi successful but we have a great interest in the continued existence of the IGF because it's the best multistakeholder forum we have that attracts the broadest base.
But yeah, I mean there's life after WSIS as well so the German government which published this strategy on international digital policy which we hope will guide our policy beyond WSIS and throughout and principles like human rights and free and open internet, these are key things that are anchored there.
And yeah, I think those two things we'd like to showcase so we are doing a strategic foresight series of workshops on internet governance and we are inviting all kinds of different stakeholders including some people in this room to basically try and predict the future without predicting the future, so that we are not just reacting to policy but we can try and be a bit more proactive about what might come.
And I am very happy about it, the number of young people I see in this room but we also have a generation al issue in who is taking part in these conversations. So as the German government are also sponsoring a dozen fellows who are sending to the IGF and supporting for year, yeah, so we are trying to look within and beyond the frameworks that are known to us so far.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: I will ask Nigel the same question.
NIGEL HICKSON: Yes, thank you very much. You know, absolutely I think, the WSIS process is a process and there are lots of processes going on, it's important for the reasons that people have set out, it's important in that it has to if you like uphold the mandate and extend the mandate of the internet governance forum which we think is very important. The WSIS forum should also look at development, it should look at how the action lines that were adopted in 2003 can be updated, can reflect the society we have today. And it also should say more about the role of stakeholders, because this is what has changed. What has become more and more apparent since 2003 and 2005 is the critical role that stakeholders play in this whole process, the internet would simply, the Internet Society, the way the internet is developing would not happen without the co‑operation, without the contribution of all stakeholders and that has to be recognised. We are not going back to multilateral processes, we need to evolve what we have. We need to expand what we have. We need to ensure that as we go forward that stakeholders of all types have a role in the future of the internet and that's what we must, that must be our vision as we go forward. So these are critical discussions, there will be more critical discussions to have. But the role of stakeholders is critical in that.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: We will open it up for for questions now, having seen ‑‑ so I will ask if there's any questions online or we may be able ‑‑ no questions online. If there are any questions here in the audience? Please come forward.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So we talk a lot about corporation but co‑operation on what, and to to what end goal? And another thing that I wanted to raise is we have many regulatory frameworks and legal issues that affect the open and global internet and I really applause Germany for being so vocal about open internet and wanting to respecting my rights on the internet.
The problem is that locally even in Germany, we have seen in some situations that some of the rulings by the court can affect the open global internet. So I'm just wondering how can we actually address these issues and talk to different government departments to talk to each other to, you know, to raise awareness about why certain critical properties off the internet should be accessible to everybody to keep the internet global.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you. Let's listen to two more questions and then we decide what we pick, thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Yeah, thank you very much for a good work. I am Maria and I am in charge of the Swedish national research and education network, but I was working for the Swedish government sometime ago. Good to see you, Nigel, again, keep it up.
Anyway, thank you very much for the good work and I think it's important what you are doing and it's ‑‑ the co‑operation between the technical communities and all the stakeholders is very important. And of course as you say, Marlene, we should really on the local level also try to engage with the government but my question was more like also you are between the governments because we have a good voice from the, on the local communities to our governments and it's also important that you governments Germany talk to your Swedish colleagues and to the UK colleagues and so on.
So I am happy that you two are here but there are more countries in the EU. So I just want to know whether you have a chat together. Thank you.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Hello. I have one comment and a question. And I am someone who is not so much involved with this any more, I used to be very much. And my comment is about the IGF and obviously the importance of keeping the... of the IGF. One of the things we struggled with was also getting, we would come and report back to the technical community and there were a few passionate people in the technical community who would get involved but it was always difficult to get that real engagement from like people in, from this conference for example, from these communities. And I think that needs to be, it's easy for me to say now that I'm not on the mic but I think we need to try actually to make the idea not just relevant for the policy people and for governments but actually at content in there, that makes it interesting for people in these communities to engage in that different forum where you discuss policy matters but not separated from technical issues and I think sometimes we tend to separate those two things but if we want techically knowledgeable people to engage in these processes we need to recognise these matters are interlinked. That was just a general comment. I have a very quick question to ISOC, in the past you put together these really super useful matrixes that covered all the different topics that were relevant and you provided guidance through those and I know a lot of people, me including myself, I would use them when I spoke to my governments, my regulators. Super useful, will you be doing it again. Thanks.
CALLUM VOGE: So I will take the first question, the short answer is yes shall we are doing it again, we had the recent matrix that was circulated about GDC but also for national issues or regional issues. In recent years we have developed internet impact briefs and we hear from the community that actually while those are helpful, that indepth analysis is too indepth for quick updates so we take all this feedback and it's something that we are very actively working to bring back in a big way. So yeah, thank you for the comment.
MARLENE STRAUB: Thank you for the questions. I am here until tomorrow morning, if you want to discuss in detail off the stage, yes please. I think there's some very difficult questions that I am not going to be able to answer, how do you pass on technical knowledge to judges, I know the rulings you were talking about and they are difficult. I think yeah, this is a central thing, education on technical infrastructure is really difficult and I think the people in this room play a difficult role because you are both translating towards policy awe also translating to your own people. So to the technical people probably doing the back‑end, it's not like you can give a technical briefing to every judge and every, I don't know, regional court. But yeah, this is not the first time this has been discussed but there is a need for broader information available to people and desist making positions. On the second question on how, do governments talk to each other, within the German government we have regular chats between the different ministries and that on the EU level, we come together twice a year and now that the Polish council presidency is making internet governance it's big issue, we'll be talking even more than we already do. Including with the Swedes.
NIGEL HICKSON: Yeah, if I may just two points and I will try not to be too controversial. We need to talk to friends, it's always good to talk to friends. I mean I don't have many but I just talk to anyone!
But it's also good to talk to non‑friends if you see what I mean. So the dialogue we have to have as countries has to be wide, it has to be across the board. The UK has a strategy of trying to engage whether we are engaging at G 20, at G7 or wherever, because we need to ensure that all the countries that come to the UN at least understand where we are coming from, at least try and appreciate the different viewpoints that countries have so engagement I think is absolutely critical and it's really great to hear the European Union coming forward with this strategy.
On the internet governance forum, let me just say that the annual IGF is a meeting which encompasses such a wide range of stakeholders but the UN IGF is not the only vehicle, where the technical community really has an impact and I have seen this is in the national and regional initiatives, there's only over a 150 national and regional IGFs and youth IGFs, nearly every, not every, not obviously every day of the week but every week of the year, there's a national or regional IGF going on and invariably the technical community in those countries are contributing to the knowledge base an the understanding of what they do nationally, globally and regionally and here we have to thank the Internet Society, we have to thank organisations like ICANN for contributing to these initiatives.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: And not to forget RIPE NCC.
NIGEL HICKSON: Of course RIPE as well, the RIRs have played a great role in this as well. And this is my ‑‑ I said yesterday that it's so important to engage. Why do just your own area, because this is where the internet governance ecosystem plays out.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Wonderful, with that esteemed speakers and panellists will be here with us around today if you have additional questions. Just to thank Tala, Nigel, Callum and Marlene for their excellent presentations and engagement with us, so a huge round of applause.
(APPLAUSE.)
If you didn't have enough of internet governance, well bear with us, our next speaker is a well known to us, Chris Buckridge, with Buckridge Consultants and he will be talking to us about building on this topic, how to define a governance model that works today.
CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: Thanks Desiree. Hi everybody, my name is Chris Buckridge, I am ‑‑ well, I have a few hats on these days, but mainly I am an independent consultant and analyst and I am here to talk about a project that I am currently working on and to well, basically, ask a favour on your behalf. My behalf.
About me, I know probably most of you in this room but for the ones who don't, as I mentioned, I am an independent consultant working in internet governance and digital policy, I spent the last 20 years or so working for regional internet registries. I am now on the board of ICANN and a number of other internet governance institutions, including the multistakeholder advisory group of the internet governance forum. Very interesting to hear the IGF discussed here and how that's playing out.
Some recent work I have been involved in: I was author of a paper for centre on multistakeholders governance and co‑author of a paper that was published by the DNS research federation earlier this year on the practical impact of the internet governance forum.
Now, this project that I am talking about is a study that's been commissioned by the Canadian internet registration authority, CIRA. And it's very much looking forward to the WSIS' review and these ongoing discussions about about multistakeholder internet governance and what this will look like after WSIS. I am going to diverge a little from the slides here.
When we are talking WSIS, I think a lot of the focus naturally on what have we achieved, what has been achieved by the World Summit on the Information Society.
And I think there are a lot of people in the technical, operational community who would say it hasn't really done much for me, it hasn't affected my work or what I do, and there's an element of truth to that. What I think we have achieved, which is really in some ways remarkable and improbable in 2003, 2005 is that A, we went into United Nations, into a very diplomatic government area and we had that technical operational community recognised as a distinct entity.
Now not just that, we actually had an agreement from those governments that the model that we had pioneered in the technical community, open inclusive, bottom up, would actually be the fundamental basis of internet governance going forward.
Even more improbably, that's lasted for about 20 years. That hasn't always worked out to be that ideal, but we have always had that tunis agenda, the outcome of the World Summit on the Information Society to point back to and say you agreed, multistakeholder approach is the way to do this.
Now, that's great. But I think as Tala mentioned before, if we look around right now, the landscape is very different today than it was in 2003 and 2005.
We need to make the case again and we need to make it in an evolved modulated way that multistakeholder governance is still the appropriate and best way to actually address these challenges of digital governance.
At the same time we need the internet technical community to be there and making that case, and at the same time making the case that over the last 20 years we haven't been sitting on our hands, we have actually been looking at and mitigating and addressing some of the vulnerabilities that go along with a multistakeholder model, whether that's captured by certain actors or a lack of inclusivity or a lack of diversity or even the ability of one actor to steer things off in a funny direction.
We have worked on that, we've produced some really important advances in how to address those risks, but we haven't necessarily been so active in the UN discussions as to make that case and present the work that we have done.
So, this paper with CIRA, what we want to do is reach out to the internet technical community and hear back from you on what is the multistakeholder model, what are the fundamental elements necessary to a multistakeholder model if it's going to work, what are the pain points or the risk areas or vulnerabilities you are aware of and have seen and witnessed in the last two decade and what are some of the ways we have actually addressed those, we have actually mitigated those risks.
And in doing this, in pulling all of this information together and putting it into a paper, what we want to do is try and assemble, not a comprehensive overview of the technical community's perspective, but at least some sort of coordinated perspective, some coordinated understanding of why the technical community still sees multistakeholder governance as essential in the internet space.
And that can be then pushed forward into venues like the IGF, the CSTD, the UN General Assembly discussions as we go into this year of WSIS plus 20 related discussions.
So, this is where I beg a favour. It's a short survey, it's about six questions. But it's not a yes/no tick‑a‑box kind of survey; it actually requires a little bit of thought and input. So I will deeply appreciate any responses to this survey and hope that you will find some time in very busy schedules to actually take part.
There is a QR code there. You can trust me, it takes you directly to it. If you prefer to use the URL, that's also there. And I have also posted it in the Meetecho chat, so if you want to go back and grab it from there later in the day, you are welcome to.
The deadline is 15th November, I probably shouldn't say it but there's a good chance we'll extend it out for a week or so beyond that, but that will absolutely be the hard deadline. So...
Please do answer. The sooner you answer, the sooner I can get writing and putting this altogether. So I would appreciate the answers when you have the chance.
And that's my final slide and I am going to leave this up here as long as they'll let me, but thank you very much for your attention and thank you in advance for any responses to the questionnaire.
(APPLAUSE.)
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I am happy to hear from you, thank you Chris. Just a practical thing, so I encourage everybody to answer the questionnaire and if you answer Chris' questionnaire, then you also have the ICP 2 questionnaire. And Herve Clement is chair of the ISO AC.
CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: I heartily endorse your request as well.
ACHILLEAS KEMOS: No more questions. OK. Fine.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thanks. Moving on, I hope you all fill in this questionnaire and help out Chris as fast as possible.
Our next speaker is Jim Reed and I hope that he is in the room. If not, we will try and find him. Or ask or maybe we'll just shift the order of speaking if Jim is not here yet. I believe he thought he might be the last person on the agenda.
Right. Counting once... twice... OK. We'll wait for Jim. He uploaded his slides and you can look at them online and he is also get going to be here for the rest of the RIPE 89. I would then very much like to ask Hisham to come and take the floor and talk to us about engagement with governments and then we'll follow up with the rest. The floor is yours.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: It's always good to know that you are still second choice. Right, when the first act didn't show up, yeah, yeah, come up on stage and do your talk.
Anyways, for those of you that don't know me. (APPLAUSE.) You are too kind. Thank you.
For those that don't know me, my name is Hisham Ibrahim, I work on the RIPE NCC. I am the Chief Community Officer and that has a lot of different departments under it, but the one that I am specifically talking about is the one that deals with public policy and internet governance. For those of you that were at services yesterday, you might have heard me talk a little bit about it and promise to go into more detail here which is what I plan to do. I also gave a shout out to this talk in security working group if you were there.
This is a slide that we built earlier this year ahead of our Brussels round table and it's a slide that myself and the COMS team have put in every slide deck that we have presented since. It's aimed to show who we are accountable for in front of as an RIR as RIPE NCC because we are accountable to the community as secretariat, we facilitate discussions and implement the policies set by the community here but we also are a membership‑based organisation, we are accountable to our members under Dutch law in that sense.
Being neutral towards our members and treating everybody equally.
We also are required to comply with EU and Dutch law as well. As an organisation established in the Netherlands, we need to be following those, right. And it applies to us. And we also need to understand the implications of other national ledges that apply to our members. We have membership across 70‑plus countries in our service region. And while we might not be directly affected by the ‑‑ we might not have to comply with all the legislations in all the different jurisdictions in our service region, our members have to and we need to keep that in mind.
We are also part of a global system, so we play a role as an RIR, we manage and operate Kroot and other stuff in the wider interfere governance sphere of things.
As I was saying, we have a large service region, 70 something countries that are quite diverse with different regulations and laws. And what we are seeing lately is a lot more interest, this whole session is about that, right, it's increased interest from government in understanding how the internet functions and operates for a bunch of different reasons, including the growing geopolitical tensions and advancing digital agendas, and we are just seeing this interest increasing and we don't see it going away any time soon.
So collaborating with government and this is a message that's been echoed so far, collaborating is government is really crucial for them to understand how operations of the internet work and to help them make better well informed public policy in this area, this is a message everybody in this room would agree with.
Now to mention quickly our approach to engagement ‑‑ and I am mindful of time, I will run through these quickly. You might have seen this slide, it basically starts from the bottom right of us producing insight and information based on what we can leverage and use that to to engage with the community, build better training source courses and directly engage with the government and we use all three of these as tools when we go and talk about government about what we can offer them and how we can actually cooperate. This has been a very useful strategy, we have had it for years and continue to use that and the stars indicated they are top priorities for the company, they have been priorities for the past two years an they are the priority for next year as well.
So being resilient in the face of political and legislative changes is a key thing we want to do moving forward, engaging with government is a way to do so.
Now, again I said I will mention these quickly, we produce a lot of reports in multiple languages leveraging the fact that we have data and insights into the internet operations, we use that through different mechanisms, for example we host a number of round tables throughout our service region, we actually have MOUs with a lot of different organisations across a bunch of sectors, across the entire service region from internet governance associations and groups to ministries to regulators to inter‑governmental organisations and even national crime agencies as well. And if you look at the list, which is published on the website, if you go to that URL you will find a complete list which we report transparency on.
We also contribute to a consultations, a lot of discussion about GDC here which was a big part. This is a list only of this year that the RIPE NCC has contributed towards. You can see GDC mentioned a few times here, there's also other work we contributed towards like NetNod DL, the internet that we want, even the Dutch consultation that was run on IPv6 an the goal for us here is maintaining good relationships with governments, technical bodies and standardising bodies.
I am reporting here a little bit of some of the questions that we get through these engagements, being transparent to the community, we have processes we report, all the round tables and different engagement that we do, we have reports available online but I am trying to show some of the questions we get now and some of the information we get requested for and how it's working so far an the key bit here is moving forward.
So any ways, some of the topics that come up. First is the politicisation and monetisation of internet resources, as a community we understand that the use of country codes in the database is purely administrative indicative of where you get the registration papers from what we record in the database, however it is seen by governments as national sovereign resources. Because these are my resources and today they have a monetary value or they actually indicate that you are recognising this area or not recognising that, we have seen these discussions this in community over the past years and this is an increasing tone that we are hearing more and more from governments.
We get calls on a regular basis especially towards the end of the billing cycle when we shut LIRs, governments calling us saying why did I lose 500k worth of IP addresses of my national resources, asking us to justify that which is something that we only can point at our procedures, we cannot provide more information there, but they want to get more involved and they feel this is something that they want to in fact some governments have active mechanisms of monitoring these resources and whenever a transfer happens for example, we get a call the next day.
Oh and no matter how much times we try to explain this, I have a couple of arms we have done this, it's still a topic that keeps coming up.
Sanctions, so well, actually the transfer market and the leasing market and how this is playing out in the business side of things, which we all understand here, however there's also implications on this from other parties that have watching this, especially governments, because governments have implemented certain sanctions the EU does and we fall under that, so what we have to do, RIPE NCC is required to... resources. And the reason why we fall under that is the economic gain that potentially comes from transferring resources. Right. So there's interest there for them to understand also the implication of sanctions, how that plays out, when a sanction is lifted, what does that mean, are people that are not meant to gain economically, are they gaining, when they lift the sanctions, does that, do they actually make money after that. We are getting more and more questions of this. In an attempt for them to understand how effective their measures they are taking are.
Now we report transparently now about this, we put aggregates of what's happening there, they very much welcoming the compliance and how we are reporting on this, they are actually using it as an example of great compliance. But again we keep on getting asked more and more questions.
Now under the same markets and transfer, we have seen acquiring IP addresses and we produce a report, we are seeing this from everybody, members, from non‑members, community members, ISPs, enterprise but also from governments, right, and one of the concerns that we have heard especially in the UN sphere is the fact that have the policies that were set by this community, have they actually helped or have they actually widened the digital divide, does it put more of of a burden on emerging economies to pay a lot of money to towards economys that are a lot more mature and just have benefited out of having thee resources before and we need to also have these discussions with governments.
Now there's a lot of words on this slide, I am not going to go through all of it but the point of it is as I am sure most of you here in the room know if not all of you, we maintain the RIPE registry and we keep that accurate and update to date, it contains both private and public information of the resources that we have allocated throughout our service region. Now there is a RIPE database that provides the public view of some of the registry data there, right. Now we see a lot of confusion between the two and people going, well, you don't know who your customer are or that information is not up‑to‑date. Now, if you you were in several sessions Hans Peter went to the mic and clarified that, there's really good answers, more than I have time to give on this but we are seeing this confusion between the two.
Now, one of the areas here is also LEAs, they come with this going, well, maybe you need to be able to do more in this database area. We explain to them the process, we explain that RIPE NCC does not voluntarily provide non‑public information. There's actually a RIPE document on this, it's 675, that actually explains you need to be able to obtain a Dutch court order for us to release that information and everybody else goes to the process known as MLAT to to process.
Now all of this is fine until now. Yes, we are getting a lot of questions, we are handling this with the processes that are there, looking ahead, things are beginning to change and that is what I wanted to highlight here.
So e‑Evidence is a regulation that's meant to have a framework for streamlining the cross‑border access of electronic evidence in criminal investigations. This is a good thing, it's meant to help law enforcement agencies find the perpetrators and actually solve cyber crime faster.
This will require us to review the document that I just mentioned, right, because the document clearly just now mentions getting a Dutch court whereas this opens it up to more EU countries.
And everybody else goes through an MLAT process. Now, the catch here being we do not just serve the EU countries, like I mentioned, we have 70 something countries on our service regions. This benefits twenty something of them, it leaves fifty something still having to go through other hoops.
Now how much governments of those would like that, that's something to be seen.
Data protection, so again being an organisation established in the Netherlands, we follow GDPR, you guys all know that and we adhere to that. However there are other data protection regulations that currently exist throughout our service region, while they might directly or legally, the NCC might not have to legally comply with them, we need to take into consideration our members do and us being in the supply chain of the members, we need to think of them as I mentioned and their compliance mechanisms in front of their government and what does not complying mean for them.
Another one is NIS 2, another framework designed to strengthen cyber security, expanding on the original NI S document, talks about reporting obligations on things with a broader range which are like incident reporting and other stuff that is mandated now for us to do, certain timeframes. Now analysis 2 applies directly to many of our members. The RIPE NCC is assessing the applicability of this on its operations, the RIPE NCC has got a SOC 2 type one assurance report in attempt willing to actually comply with industry norms rather than having to just demonstrate compliance through through regulation. And ideally this is something that can help us with these discussions with the governments as well.
Like I mentioned, these things might benefit a subset of our service region but not the entire service region, which will put us in difficult discussions with five something discussions across the service region if we do not as a community, and the membership, and the NCC, figure out ahead of time like we normally do how we want to deal with this in a fair way across our service region.
And like I said, while the RIPE NCC may not legally require to comply with the regulations, the members must adhere to them and we must take that into account.
A suggested way forward and I am down to my last slide, what we have been thinking of in the public policy and internet governance department is that the RIPE NCC should work together with its members to establish principles for a holistic, transparent, legally compliant information sharing framework. It basically a front door approach that we can transparently publish on our website and make it known what the process is, who will benefit and how it actually works. That approach should, this is our suggestion, this approach should incorporate transparent mechanisms of reporting this to the community if something like this were to happen. Now this also took in account the compliance requirements of RIPE members. This is a starting point I'd love to hear thoughts and ideas, this is something I know we will not be able to conclude during this short time of the working group which needs to go to the mailing list but I would love to hear more thoughts on this. Thank you very much.
(APPLAUSE.)
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: The first critical question, Jim is here, please ‑‑ you want a question also.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Sorry for stealing your spot.
JIM REID: I think this is a very good idea and there's a lot required and you have to be commended for identifying this is an area that needs attention and focus, more power to your elbow here, it's going to take a wheel to sort this all and willing to think about the potential implications of all of this stuff, as we spoke about during the week, I thought part of the solution that might need to have someone in the Dutch authorities who sort of acts as an intermediary between some of the member states we are dealing with to say, yes, this is a genuine request of a police force and then give the approval to access the data or not as the case may be but that's me thinking off the top of my head. I think we need to get a clearer understanding of what the problem space is and then understand what the potentials solutions might look like. Thanks.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Thanks for that Jim.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I am reed Jim Reed, I like to offend a lot of people.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: I didn't want to come with any proposed solutions, we need to identify the problem statement is and how we want to tackle that and then go into solutions, the idea you mention and anybody else anybody would propose or needed so that we can find our way.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I have been doing a lot of work in the past with handling abuse, the Dutch government does not like private companies to interact with for non‑Dutch law enforcement agencies, so I think it's very clear e‑evidence needs to be implemented so the 27 EU countries can use the front door and the rest have to use the M‑LAT process which is basically what Jim stated, they will see and they will look at what is a valid request and they will put it forward to you and you have to answer those questions. You could help foreign police authorities by pointing them to the IRC, which basically is the organisation within Amsterdam from the Amsterdam police, that deals with foreign requests. So you can expedite things but you cannot deliver the data.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Yes, thanks for that.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: So my question, I one of the principles that we have to consider here is to let the scope of the work and you keep saying information sharing and that in other field is very wide, we have to be careful and another thing, another comment is that if these countries feel that IP sources is their national resources, what have we been doing in WSIS, participating, do they really believe in the global internet?
HISHAM IBRAHIM: I think you made a good comment in the previous panel about different agencies talking to each other within the same governments, right, and as for the use of information, I consider data but then as a techy, it didn't feel right for me.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I have got a question on the chats from a journalist, Monica Enright: How would the RIPE NCC deal with a request from LEAs that might be in violation of European fundamental rights?
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Which is a fair and good question. I am not proposing a solution at this point in time, this is a space we need to look into and I know there's not going to be any easy answer to that, but I would rather we do this now and look at this as a community and what we feel comfortable be rather than finding well because the knee jerk reaction I would just predict like the EU regulates things, the other countries would end up going regulating in their countries as well and then either us well we don't have to follow their regulation but our members do but then where does that leave us as an organisation when it comes to engaging in these countries, can I actually send staff to those countries if we are considered by them to be breaking any laws or regulations, what does this mean to our members, can they continue to be members, at least one country in our service region that has today a law that says you cannot deal with foreign agencies today. I don't want more of those to happen without ‑‑ I consider it a big part of my role so keep this conversation together.
BRIAN NISBET: Hopefully this is a simple question with a straightforward answer, if it's OK. I just not trying to a solution today, what are your time lines, when would you like to have a solution, a plan.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: I will take this immediately after this to the mailing list and then we can figure out the way forward. This is, again, just to gauge interest here, which I see from the queue there's a lot of interest in having this discussion.
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: We have to finish up.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Is there time for one more? I have been opening tabs about the new UN Convention on cyber crime. Do you have thoughts to share? It seems apropos.
HISHAM IBRAHIM: Yes, thanks, that's also something we are looking into, I won't take more of Jim's time, thank you all very much and looking forward to talking at the mailing list.
(APPLAUSE.)
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Jim, you have already been announced, you will talk to us so, please, the floor is yours.
JIM REID: Thanks very much, my apologies for having stepped out of the room a little bit earlier this afternoon, and I am up against a deadline and coffee so I better be quick.
I want to give a quick update what happened at WTSA which is the main decision‑making body for the ITU‑T, the telecoms sector of the international telecommunications unit.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Closer to the mic please!
JIM REID: ITU‑T has a meeting every two years, they society out the remit for the study groups and leadership positions and all the rest of it for the next study period of four years to decide who is going to be the chair of the meetings, discuss changes to the resolutions which are the building blocks for ITU‑T it's important in my view that eye star is present because they need to keep an eye on what's happening there and call in friendly governments when things are happening there which are perhaps not in the best interests of the internet.
A difficulty here is that ITU a membership organisation, it's driven by member states and very difficult for outsiders to have much participation in that. Even if you participate as a sector member, you pretty much push to the back of the room and told shut up and speak when you are spoken to, leave us alone while the member states are speaking so they just finished last WTSA in Derry last week and the results were fairly good for a change. There wasn't much in the way of controversy, the biggest controversy came from our friends in Russia, so there were proposals to put forward some Russian candidates for leadership positions. Ukraine objected. Surprise surprise. 70 and 80 countries said we support Ukraine. And Russia then demanded a vote, something that's never, almost unheard of in ITU settings, with he try to do things... and again Russians lost the vote and at that point the Russian head of the delegation really went out on a limb. He called everybody who voted against them as neoNazis, that was really nasty. And in actual fact, somebody who is actually listening to the Russian audio of what was going on said the rant was even more extreme than that, the translators were actually doing a ‑‑ softened some of the language there, so we just let them them rant and said no further input on things rather than the fact that people should complain about this is not the appropriate way for collegiate behaviour in an ITU setting.
So a couple of resolutions came out, probably most satisfactory one from our point of view was resolution 64 on IP version 6 so there were major changes to that almost to the point of having radical changes with a chain saw, initial text was talking about allocation and management of IPv6 resources, that was taken out of the title of the resolution, there was discussion around things to do with security and when the internet friendly member states said well what do you mean by security in an IPv6 setting what's special about that IPv6 security standpoint, they couldn't give an explanation so the it was said if you can't understand it, take it out. Hey.
Another important thing that came out of that text was there's introduced another clause that says that the RIR are the key stakeholders in the management of IPv6 resources. Now this should mean that it would be very very difficult for ITU member states and sector members to try and do some of the stunts they were doing before about encouraging ITU‑T to be involved in the address resource. ITU‑T still got a role there in raising awareness.
One of the most vexed issues going on for a long time now is resolution 96 to do with anti‑counterfeiting measures and this is a problem because it makes references to the digital object architecture. Bob Cann's handle system. This should not appear anywhere in an ITU resolution because it's a proprietary protocol and we don't see anything reference the specific technologies in all the resolutions, two member states would not back down and that meant there was no consensus so we couldn't get that text taken out. Even when we explained to those member states you are asking to keep something which we know is broken and incorrect, please think of the damage you are doing to both to yourself and the good reputation of ITU‑T, if you think they have a good reputation. No consensus no change there.
On internationalised domain names, nothing much happened there, the text was pretty much left alone. ITU‑T have been told you have no role here, capacity building, raising awareness and engaging with other stakeholders such as ICANN, CCtld's and so on and I think that's a very good thing.
The other good news is new IP and that appears to be completely dead now, at the ITU‑T, there was no mention in the last WTSA and no mention of it again this time around. And I have since heard the proponents of new IP, that group has been miss membered and no longer existed dismembered, Richard Lee has been moved into academia now I think this is a dead duck and it's not going to get my where.
Special thanks, Joyce Chen, Einar Bohlin and Nate Davis did a great job representing the interests of the internet community and especially the RIR community and liaised with plane stakeholders from the internet friendly member states. They also got some back from from ICANN and a little which the from sigh sock, there was a lot of co‑operation from the five eyes, EU member states, there's a broad consensus trying to keep ITU‑T on a very short rope. And also special thanks to Marco who chaired some of those sessions, some of you remember when he was working for the RIPE NCC.
And with that I am done and you can run off to the coffee now.
(APPLAUSE.)
DESIREE MILOSHEVIC: Thank you. Jim is staying here with us so questions to him at the coffee break. Thank you all. The meeting is adjourned.
