Report from Regional roundtable & IGF issues specific for Asia Pacific
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REAL TIME TRANSCRIPT: Report from Regional roundtable & IGF issues specific for Asia Pacific
Hong Kong IGF
17:00-17:30, Thursday 17 June 2010
Hong Kong
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speaker’s words, it is possible this realtime transcript may
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be posted later. LLOYD MICHAUX and APrIGF accept no
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contents of this transcript.
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>> Edmon Chung: Good afternoon, everyone.
We don’t really have a scheduled break, but it seems
like most people are out for a biobreak.
But let’s get started.
This session is really just a quick report from last
two days of meetings.
I think Stephen and many others mentioned that on
Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, we had an Asian
Pacific regional IGF round table.
This panel will report some of the discussions that
were held during those two days.
Really, grateful to have Sam Dickinson to help us
start off with a comprehensive summary from the last two
days.
I’m also happy to have many distinguished panellists
with me to just say a few words about the first Asian
Pacific regional IGF and how it went.
Just realised that all of them are chairs of some
sort, chair of the ICANN nominating committee, Wolfgang,
chair of the APTLD, Keith; chair of Internet Society
Hong Kong, Charles; and our chair for the local
organising committee, Stephen Lau.
First, I think we’ll have Sam help us just recap on
what happened at the round table.
>> Sam Dickinson: This is a very high level summary. There
were a lot of case studies discussed during the last two
day, but I haven’t gone into those. It’s just the
high-level themes.
The first session looked at security and was quite
interesting, because there were a number of perspectives
shown this that session. We looked at how internet
users view security, how businesses view security, how
governments view security.
There was also an interesting emergence of the
convergence between on-line and real world worlds, so
there is a convergence between devices these days which
now have a lot of internet connectivity, through
wireless networks quite frequently, and so threats that
previously were separate physical threats, so if you
wanted to enter a building illegally, you would have to
go there and break down the door. Now the door may be
controlled by a networked device and you can hack that
and just digitally unlock the door.
There was also discussion about how previously there
were internal threats, so you would — a type of
internal digital threat is stealing intellectual
property, whereas you would have an external threat such
as we all know, phishing, where you’ll get an email that
says please go and check your bank account and they will
steal your your details whereas nowadays there a is
convergence where there will be malware that will be
used in conjunction with insider knowledge to have
a more targeted security threat. So an example you
probably all heard about was the Google example in
China.
There is also a big discussion about the importance
of balancing security against the need to protect the
open internet structure and the privacy of users.
The internet will not continue to grow if you don’t
have security measures, but equally, it will not
continue to grow unless you have users assured that
their privacy will be protected.
As time has gone on, the threat has moved on from
things like viruses to now large botnets.
There was an interesting discussion, because some of
the governments speakers were talking about cyber threat
as a national security issue, so threats to critical
infrastructure like electricity systems, whereas for
civil society offer, if you are in a country where
perhaps the government is a bit more authoritatively,
there is a threat that the government can actually take
the users. Depending on which side you’re on, cyber
threat definition can change.
One of the things that as more and more people enter
the internet, it’s affecting the security issues.
So you get more new users who don’t understand
security issues, you get new internet operators who
don’t necessarily understand security issues.
So there is a need to educate both the users, so in
terms of things like children, you teach your children
at a young age not to run into the middle of the road,
you need to do the same thing with the internet.
Equally, you need to teach the internet operators
who know how to operate a network, but you may not have
a security understanding, you need to teach them how to
manage security threats.
An interesting thing that came up towards the end
was the notion that a lot of attacks appear, not
necessarily are, but at least appear to be originating
within the Asian Pacific.
Which mean that is if you’re a network operator, you
may be called on in future to respond to this. It also
has an effect on government policy and speaking as
someone from APNIC, I know that a lot of peak blog any
address from the Asia Pacific region.
The following session looked at openness. There was
discussion about needing openness at all layers of the
internet, so whether you’re a user of the internet, so
that you have the ability to speak freely, if you’re an
intermediary, so you’re someone that hosts a web size or
hosts a group discussion board, or openness at the
actual technical specification levels.
The internet, it was discussion about the internet
as a tool for societal change. So if you have an open
internet culture, you can use that to make changes to
the political environment in your country, make that
more open, or the societal culture of your country.
There was also discussion about how it can be used
as an alternative voice to mainstream media or
mainstream government views.
There was also an interesting link back to the
security section which was held before it, that if you
have an open internet, where there is freedom of speech,
how do you protect children from that free content?
There was discussion about a report that the Hong Kong
Government has done looking at how parents control their
children’s activity on the internet and protect them.
On the flip side, if there is a lack of openness,
what can happen is that people are so scared of being
punished, criminally, that they several sensor and quite
often, if you are afraid of some sort of defamation
case, you will censor yourself more than you actually
need to.
But there were discussions about how you can
creatively work around this. There was discussion about
Thai blog. What they do is they change the domain name,
the IP address, to try and get around these issues.
Digital divide. One thing that came out that was
very interesting about that, there’s two aspects. One
that is traditionally discussed at IGF, which is looking
at providing the physical access, so actually providing
internet connectivity, but that is just one step. The
second step is making people feel that there is
something on the internet worth looking at, so providing
interesting content or applications or different
languages on the internet that it’s like you can take
a horse to water, be I you can’t make it drink.
Provide something interesting.
Digital divide is there for a number of reasons.
There can be economic reasons, old people who may not be
technologically savvy, people with disabilities, or
because of cultural or linguistic differences.
The other interesting aspect that came out was that
if you are not someone who has access to the internet or
can’t use a computer, it mag fews a real world divides
there may be, so if you can’t use a computer, that means
you can’t do an awful lot of jobs.
That may then increase your financial divide.
The problem, though, is that when trying to address
this, for governments for civil societies, there are
lots of other wordy issues in the world, so how do you
encourage this issue to be a priority?
Some of the strategies that were show cased were
looking at government policy, although one of the
warning bells that can happen is that if you regulate
the internet too much, it can actually stifle people
access in the internet, so in a country, a developing
country that’s trying to encourage people to connect to
the internet, there is a balance between providing
enough regulation and over-regulating.
There was discussion about how governments are
working with the private sector to try and develop
projects to cross the digital divide and there is also
a lot of community projects to bridge that divide.
One of the interesting points that someone brought
up was that I’m not sure if it was in the Philippines,
there was a high percentage of people who could access
the internet, but a much lower of people that were using
the internet at home.
It was pointed out that because the internet was
available freely in many locations, why do you need to
pay for it at home?
When you’re looking to come up with — it was
Malaysia. Thank you.
When you are looking to come up with policies to
encourage people to connect to the internet, you have to
understand what the real problem is, because there the
problem is not that people don’t want to use the
internet, it’s because it’s free elsewhere.
The developing world is the majority of the world.
They’re not yet on the internet, but when they are, that
will significantly affect how the internet works.
So there is a great need to do capacity building for
both the user, to know how to understand the internet,
and user and not be liable to botnets, et cetera, and
for operators in these countries to understand how to
manage their networks effectively.
There is also a very large diversity in our region
in particular, which then reflects a large diversity of
needs.
One of the solutions is to have multilingual content
and use IDNs, but while regional venues like this or the
IGF are great, there is also a need to find local
solutions.
Another point was someone brought up was that with
bridging the digital divide, often the people to benefit
are the companies that provide access and provide
websites and sell domain names, whereas what you really
need to do is empower the users.
That session most of the people on the panel were
from developed countries. So for them, the digital
divide was about bringing people up from say an
80 per cent penetration rate to 100 per cent. But for
developing countries, it’s often bringing them up from
30 per cent to 50 per cent.
There are digital divides, but there are different
needs in different countries.
Markus at the end of the session explained that the
mandate of the IGF is not to provide incentives or the
content and use of the internet, it’s about the
technical providing access. But that if that is an
issue in our region and it seemed to be given the topics
that people discussed, it is certainly something that
can continue to be discussed in the APRIGF and in
national IGFs.
The first session on Thursday was looking at
critical internet resources and one of the main issues
was looking at IP addresses and the need to move to
IPV6, given that IPV46 is about to become exhausted.
There are two main issues. The IP address
availability and that is the main problem is getting
widespread deployment of IPV6. So a number of the ccTLD
operators discussed who they were deploying it. But the
problems are that there are locust mer demand and there
is no financial gain if you have IPV6. It’s just we are
running out of V4, so you have to move to V6.
But one of the interesting things was as soon as
Youtube enabled V6 on their website, the IPV6 traffic on
the internet shot up.
It will be interesting to see when Facebook enables
V6.
Once again, in the V6 deployment, you need both
government and the community to work together.
Also in that session, there was discussion about the
open transparent bottom up processes that organisations
like the regional internet registries and ICANN that
coordinates domain name IP addresses, et cetera, use and
how this has been reflected in more recent creation of
the IGF.
Finally, I don’t have a link to it, but one of the
panellists Lined to a survey he had done a number of
years ago that looked at what people actually think are
critical internet resources, because in the IGF context,
it’s things like IP addresses, domain names, grid
service and that’s an interesting survey, because it
looks at for a lot of developing country, it’s things as
simple as electricity or roads, so that you can get to
places.
IDNs.
There was discussion about how it helps the rest of
the world that doesn’t speak English use the internet
more effectively.
But there are a number of issues still being ironed
out in IDNs. Characters and different scripts can look
the same. In Chinese, there are characters that are
also usused Japanese, but that are different character
sets completely, but they look the same to the user.
Sometimes in the case of some of the endian
languages, different languages can use the same
character set. There is also the support that you need
in software. For people to be able to use these
websites to create this sort of technology.
Some someter sets are used by more than one economy.
So in the case of India, Hindi is used both in India,
but it’s also used if if Ijy, ur du is used in India and
Pakistan, so who has a right to those character sets as
a top level domain name.
There is also the intellectual property
considerations for businesses. If you own certain
copyright term like Pepsi Cola, once you get all these
international domain names, do you own each of those
this can other people have them in if you have a certain
domain name in the ASCII form of a country code TLD, do
you also therefore automatically have the right to the
IDN version.
Yesterday afternoon, we were looking at the role of
civil society in internet governance. It was quite
interesting. Wolfgang in particular was looking at the
role of civil society, how originally in the early world
summit on the international society, civil society had
been pretty much kept out of the room or right at the
back as you heard this morning.
Now they are firmly in the room, in the IGF.
But it’s not just about making people participate,
it’s making here that the view that is they express are
also considered equally to any views expressed by
government.
Another interesting point that came up with that
often there is a divide between people who are
participants and those who complain. Basically, if you
want to have your say, you need to be in the room.
It’s not enough just to complain later, because you
couldn’t turn up to the room. The point is to make sure
that people’s views can be heard and there are enabling
tools that allow voices to be heard, so that they don’t
feel that they can’t participate.
Like the issue of the divide, internet gov is one of
issues that entered the civil society sphere. If they
have competing priorities, how do you get that threw to
them and for people that are new it to it, it’s very
hard to understand the processes, so there’s a need to
have simplified processes so that new civil society
organisations and participants can can even the
discussion.
There was also a look at what civil society can do
within the Internet Governance Forum.
One of the things it can do is that for many
governments of a more authoritarian nature, they may see
internet governance as a form of control. What several
society can do is challenge that view.
What they are also doing is raising the issue of
human rights and ICT for development and that is
beginning to come into the IGF.
Another view was that this dichotomy of civil
society versus government is an age old story and this
is just the late I chapter. But what’s interesting is
that this negotiation between the different stakeholders
could form a new multi-stakeholder government model that
is used elsewhere.
In the final session, there was discussion about the
continuation of the IGF. Its mandate is up this year.
Last year, when there was a consultation, the community
overwhelmingly supported the continuation of the IGF.
The next stage is for the governments of the United
Nations to decide whether the IGF should continue for
the recommended five years one of the panellists brought
up an interesting point of view. The United Nations
secretary general have written a report of
recommendations to go to the governments of the UN about
the continuation of the IGF.
The panellists pointed out, Chris Disspain, I think,
that many of the recommendations seem to be at odds with
what the community had actually suggested.
He’s publishing that within the next week or so, so
that would be a very interesting document to read.
Who came out of that session was that regional IGFs
and national IGFs like the ones that are being held this
week are very important conduits for information from
IGF back to the community and from the community through
to the global IGF.
Ended with a bidding war for the next regional IGF
and lots of people expressing an interest in national
IGFs.
I think that’s that says that people were very
enthusiastic and enjoyed the meeting.
>> Edmon Chung: I was hoping to start this conversation with
some status I cans from the last two days. I finally
got them.
We talked about multi-stakeholder. In the last
couple of days, in the APRIGF round table, we had about
150 participants come in from over 20 countries, just 21
economies, including Hong Kong.
We had 13 from government officials. We had about
40 coming from civil society.
We had about 10 from international organisations.
We had about 10 from media that have been
participating.
The rest were private sector.
It’s sort of like about 10 per cent for government,
10 per cent for international organisations, about
10 per cent for media, about 25 per cent coming from
civil society and the remaining about 50 per cent from
private sector.
I think we didn’t do too bad. We had a pretty good
participation there.
If we include today and the youth IGF camp, there
are about a total of 300 participants over the week long
event.
That’s a very summary of the statistics so far.
With that, I’ll go across the table, Wolfgang, Keith
and then Charles and then I’ll go to the floor for any
questions and then end with Stephen with a wrap up for
the session and for the day.
>> Wolfgang Kleinwachter: I got two minutes to wrap up.
Chair of the Internet Governance Forum who served as
the special internet adviser to Kofi Annan and Ban
Ki-Moon, always says a United Nations conference is
either a success or is an outstanding success.
My summary from this meeting the last two or three
days is this was an outstanding success.
This was really a very impressive meeting and as
a first meeting, I think it did a great kick-start and
when the IGF started in the year 2006, nobody could
expect it that within a couple of year, this becomes
a process which involves more and more various
communities and regions and constituencies in so many
countries in the world.
I think my experience from all these meetings is the
first and most complicated thing is to get the process
kick started.
Because if you have to first version, then you know
how it looks like and then you can improve it.
What I was impressed here from this very first
meeting is that you, it was organised as a bottom up
process and bottom up process has the power to pull
people into the process.
You have now a version here on the table with
practical experience, so you can immediately use the
outstanding success of this meeting to think about the
next version in the year 2011.
Because I think this is important, that the IGF is
not a single effect. When we discussed the sign of the
a IGF in the working group of internet governance, we
had to positions. One people said OK, that’s an annual
conference and in particular, people from the civil
society argued, no, this is a process with an annual
highlight in between.
So it means very important is what happened between
the different conferences, so my encouragement to you is
create mailing lists, create on line working groups,
where you continue the debate of the issues you have
raisraised and try to pull more people to the process.
The other important and impressive observation from
my side is really the multi-stakeholder nature. The
statistics just given us by Edmon prove that all
stakeholders has been involved, still in probably not
really balanced way, but you can do it better. My
experience from the German IGF, in the beginning the
government was sceptical and said, the internet crowd
makes another noise and that will do it. But with the
from the Federal Parliament, we had one vice minister
from the federal government and three ministers from the
regional governments, because now policymakers have
realised after the third one, something is going on,
these are important issues, we will lose the connection
to the community in so I think these are very brief sum
of my observations and probably representations for the
future and I’m looking forward to see second IGF for the
Asia Pacific region and also national IGFs for this many
huge region with so many countries.
Thank you.
>> Keith Davidson: It’s always intrigues me the way the
internet has grown. It started off as a playground for
the technical community and all the answers to all the
problems on the network were technical answers.
They were only technical problems and technical
answers.
As the interfelt has grown through the 1970s, it
came to a point where it was inevitable that other
aspects of life would enter this internet. It was no
longer the preserve of the technical community.
Today, we see the collision of the many varied
interested in the internet. There are the technical
community who continue to develop the standards and
protocols and the uses for this network.
We have government, both at the highest political
level at the law making level and at the law ebb form
level, even in that or that having problems in the
balance of privacy versus the rights of freedoms and so
on.
We have the educational and the advanced educational
and research communities using this thet work to do some
truly extraordinary things.
We have business seeking to make money or make
a name or deploy new technology. We have civil society
that has concerns about safety and protection and
freedom.
All of these people have brought together through
the concept of an IGF into quite a unique situation,
where rather than being talked at, we are being talked
to constantly.
Because it’s not a decision-making forum, because of
its nature, if you want to advance your thinking, you
need to stand and talk to people and from that, I think
we actually start to think and we start to think and
rationalise about the things that are important in our
communities and for us and reflect on other people’s
experiences and knowledge.
We actually start to get somewhere.
I think the most valuable example of that came as
a reminder to us during the AP IGF, where Prof Tan, the
associate director for the extra of internet research,
reminded us about the work he was doing some 15 years
ago on the internationalisation of domain names and here
we stand, these weeks and days with actual deployment
within the country codes of internationalised domain
names.
He talked of, he and two other people developing the
technical solutions to make it work, but this issue has
been through the whole gamut of all the legislative
educational research and technical communities
exhaustively over the last 15 years, to finally now be
deployed so we can deliver an internet in your own
language, in your own script and I think that’s
a fantastic effort.
It is through the moves like these
multi-stakeholders community that is that we will see
the next levels of advancement of the network.
My congratulations to the organise I came here with
reasonably high expectations and my expectations have
been exceeded if all regards. I think as a first
endeavour, it’s familiarised your local community with
a lot of the issues that have been discussed in the
global IGF or that and I think you need to take this
forward and to future years and develop and actual put
some con seven traited earth into some themes that are
of more important in your regeneral. My con
congratulations to you. My organisation that
I represent here today, the APTLD is a sponsor and I’m
sure we would be happy to sponsor again in the future.
Thank you.
>> Charles Mok: Let me try to speak in Chinese again,
because after all, it’s local, but I’ll try to do it
a little bit slower N.
As you can see, what my requirement to show some
slides or pictures, because today we have been talking
about IGF, but besides this mornmorning, Markus Kummer
has explained to us, baseically what is IGF. But once
in a while, when we look at the pictures, we just see
what is the situation in the location, that’s what we
have been doing.
The last year in Egypt we have a forum, we have an
IGF meeting. There’s a lot of pictures, I would like to
show you yesterday, I hosted partially of the human
community. Is one of the very important emerging
issues, is a very new issue.
Yesterday, a lo of speakers have spoke to us about
a lot of inspiration to me. I would like to conclude
this wrap up is what is the creation is very important
to our community. This is one of the speakers from
Malaysia. That’s what he told me. Yesterday, there is
one local, she has talked to us that in the internet
community, not only focused from the technical, but also
is policy making people, but I know all of you that is
not very traditional technical sectors, but as Ms. Lock
said, when we are talking about governing of the
internet, we have to look at the level of how we are
going to interface, what is going to share the power.
As I’m going to promote tomorrow, do I have to speak
slower in tomorrow morning’s session, with I talk about
is the emerging issues, these are new issues.
We are going to discuss the new media. We have
China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, speakers going to share what
is their experience and what is the outlook for the
future, what can affect the governing of internet by our
past experiences.
I think everybody has enjoyed the pictures,
nevertheless, didn’t listen to what I have been
speaking.
Some of the serious issues besides that is very
enjoyable event.
A lot of workshop, we learn a lot and you can see
a lot of examples, a lot of youngsters from Hong Kong.
They come through by DotAsia, our global internet
association, a lot of youngsters to join. I hope in
your community, in your association, that you can come
and youngsters can join, to participate, because it’s
a change of knowledge and experience and sharing. It’s
very important. Because participating is quite
difficult in certain regards, because it is costly and
it is time consuming, because usually they host these
kind of forum in a very far away places, they won’t host
it in Macau or nearby, so to us, for the financial is
kind of pressure for not too many people can
participate, but I still encourage this September, when
the next IGF host, what we can have a remote
participation.
A way of remote participation to help more local
participant can come and be part of it.
Because they might be interested in some of the
sections, I think to us, is in Hong Kong, we always say
we are international city, a metropolitan city, because
when I was there, I saw a lot of participants from
Taiwan or China, not too many from Hong Kong. This is
something we have to focus. Doesn’t mean they have
a sign of Hong Kong then we are international city. It
is not the case, because we need people to participate.
That is my words.
>> Edmon Chung: Anyone who participated before and want to
add to what has been said or wanted to ask a question
about what happened?
>> : Ram buely
First of all, I want to congratulate the organisers
for really being very courageous to pick this theme.
Openness, security and privacy.
Rather than one can of worms, I think it’s three
cans of worm, because each one of them are really
touchy. Earlier on, Charles make the point, saying that
privacy and security are in Cantonese, like
troublemakers. But, in fact, I think depends on whom
you are talking to. I think they are interesting
topics, questions.
Because if there is no problem relating to security,
people like Anthony Fung and the like, would not have
that much business.
If there’s nothing about privacy, copyright,
intellectual property, Michael Jackson would not be
talking about us today, we don’t need a law professor to
tell us.
Anyway, I think that there are three points are
important.
But I feel that there is a pooling effect between
privacy and openness.
Openness we know about it. But privacy, copyright
and so on, they have closeness. They seem to go two
different directions.
Now the point is, how do we draw a balance?
Also, the topic mentioned time and again in the last
session, education.
I think they are all necessarycloseness and Mr O
openness. Ideally, 50:50.
But how do you tell P and C to settle for 50:50?
What about Mr P? I want 51. Can but go 49? What
can we settle? What can we teach people in such a way
that we agree?
I feel that there is something missing here.
We got law professors here talking to us about
intellectual property, privacy, we got former law
enforcement experts to talk about security.
We got all these technical experts here, talking
about the nitty-gritty of the technology and so on.
But I feel that in terms of education, what do we
teach people? I feel that we should talk about ethics,
computer ethics. That’s a subject I have been teaching
for the past 10 years.
I feel that probably we may add this aspect when we
talk about balancing, because some of the things we want
to settle is why do I do this? There must be a purpose.
There must be consequence. There must be results.
That’s why I do it.
Or at the same time, what happens in what are the
consequence if I don’t do it?
It’s easy for us to say, but where do we draw
theories? Where do we draw concepts which may be
accepted by a lot of people already, to back up our
argument. So we call to some theory in ethics to talk
about the consequences of your action.
>> Stephen Lau: I think we should, at this point about
ethics, in firms of our future sort of forums and where
the relevant sessions are, this ethics issue of I think
should be included in all the relevant discussions.
>> : I make the point. Thank you very much.
>> Edmon Chung: I’ll will have Stephen for a wrap up of this
session and for the day.
>> Stephen Lau: First of all, just wrap up this particular
session. I just want to add that this, as was
mentioned, this is our first attempt, it was a catalyst
and in fact the catalytic effect was felt in the last
session yesterday, in the round table, was that already
we understand that there are a number of countries and
economies like, for example, Indonesia is going to run
a national IGF next year, followed by regional forum,
the year after, Bangladesh wants to run a regional one,
Malaysia wants to run a national one next year. So we
do see hopefully as I say the spark has ignited people’s
wish and desire to maintain this momentum in Asia and
Asian Pacific. So that’s a really good thing and we
will be working with these economies or countries in
terms of providing food for thought to ensure that we
will have meaningful and successful IGF events in the
future.
That’s my wrapping up comment.
As far as today is concerned, I want to continue
what Charles was saying about tomorrow morning.
We have a very interesting session on on merging
issues and the late morning we have a reporting back by
the students themselves on the youth camp. They spent
two nights and three days discussing, role playing
internet issues in the Sai Kung facilities and they were
reporting back on what their perceptions and what their
conclusion or at least their discussions have been,
I think that will be really good.
Officially, in the afternoon, we have managing
critical internet resources.
Every time I hit about this one, it’s always very
technical. But the way we are going to position it is
that it is going to be educational, it is going to be
awareness. It is in a sense that we will talk about
what are top level domain names, what are international
domain name, what the IVP4 and 6 and their sort of role
in the entire infrastructure of internet.
Therefore, it will be educational, rather than we
will be talking about bits.
The morning session, the youth camp reporting back,
the critical resources, I know most of you are coming
back, but for those who are thinking tomorrow is Friday,
consider the richness of tomorrow’s programme and we
look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
With that, have a good evening and thank you.
I’m sure for those with tickets, there is a dinner
tonight here.
>> : If people who wish to go to the gala dinner, please go
outside and to the open space in front of the
registration counter and our volunteer will lead you to
the restaurant.
For those who wish to go back to your hotel room
before the dinner, you can do and our volunteer will
wait for you at the lobby of the hotel at 6.15. Then we
will lead you to the restaurant.
Thank you and see you tomorrow.