INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM OPENS IN ATHENS

 

(Received from a UN Information Officer.)

ATHENS, 30 October -- “Internet governance includes more than Internet naming and addressing,” Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis said this morning at the opening of the first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Athens.  “It includes significant public policy issues, the management of critical Internet resources, security, safety, as well as other social and economic issues.”

The Internet Governance Forum is a result of the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society ( Tunis, 16-18 November 2005).  At the Summit, Member States asked Secretary-General Kofi Annan to set up such a body to discuss public policy issues relating to the Internet’s functioning.  More than 1,200 participants are attending the first meeting, including some 10 Ministers, some 90 Government delegations and a number of key private sector and civil society representatives.

Mr. Karamanlis told participants that the Forum had united, under the same goal and vision, Governments, intergovernmental organizations, the private sector and civil society.  “Taking into consideration our shared interest in the ongoing robustness and dynamism of the Internet, this Forum should be considered as an opportunity for a broad policy dialogue,” he said.  Close cooperation among all interested parties should lead to the development of globally applicable principles dealing with the coordination and management of critical Internet resources.

The meeting, he said, should focus on issues such as affordability and availability of the Internet; interconnection costs and security; management of critical resources and technology transfer; multilingualism and local development of software; capacity-building and participation of developing countries.  The Forum, structuring the issues around the democratizing effect of the Internet, should introduce a dialogue on how to promote the worldwide free flow of information.  Before moving to Internet democracy, it was reasonable to first enhance democracy in the Internet itself.

The Chairman of the Forum, Greek Minister of Transport and Communications Michalis Liapis, said the Forum should shape a common global vision for the development and growth of the Internet.  It should also shape principles, rules and democratic processes, which would provide an orderly form to its outcome.  The aim was to bring about ongoing economic development and social progress for all people.  That could be achieved by establishing a correct legal, political and regulatory framework, which would guarantee the respect of the Internet's founding principles.

Nitin Desai, the Secretary-General Special Advisor for Internet Governance and Chair of the Forum’s Advisory Committee, said it was appropriate that the meeting took place in a city associated with the very idea of open democracy, which was hosting of the first open house for the citizens of the global Internet.  The meeting had brought together interested parties who often met separately, but seldom together.  The Forum should be a harbinger of a new type of multilateralism bringing together multiple stakeholders around a purpose.

Yoshio Utsumi,Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union, said that, in the spirit of Socrates, he would challenge commonly held beliefs.  The Forum had been created because there remained a continued lack of consensus on Internet governance.  One camp claimed that, for certain issues, there was no further need for discussion, because things were working quite well and there was no need to change.  But, another camp saw that as just an attempt to avoid debate by claiming there were no problems.

The focus of the meeting was on development, but Internet governance was not just a developing-country problem, he said.  The basis of that perspective was that with more capacity- building, developing countries would come around to an enlightened point of view.  However, many of the critics of the current system of Internet governance were not from developing countries, while interested parties in developing countries were tired of hearing “you just don't understand”.  Many did fully understand that no matter what technical experts argued was the best system, the current way of doing things was not the only one possible, and there were no such systems or technology that could eternally claim they were best.

No matter what was discussed or decided at the Forum, in the end, the global marketplace would define the outcome, assessing whether the Internet matched what users wanted, had an adequate price, availability, and convenience, met local priorities and needs, and had the ability to rapidly innovate at the edge of the network.  And, it was there, most of all, that the current centralized system was weak.  What was needed was more diversity and recognition of the principle of users’ true needs.  To respond to such needs, matters should be handled at a level that was closer to the user, and any central role should have only a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which could not be handled more effectively at a more immediate or local level.

Whenever there were discussions of governance, there would be discussions on the role of Governments, Mr. Utsumi said.  Replicating a debate that had taken place with radio in the 1920s, there had been much discussion on the role of Government in the Internet.  The question asked in the 1990s, “Should the Internet be regulated?”, now seemed naive, in view of the extent of Internet-related legislation enacted daily around the world.  The Internet had become a central part of everyday life and could not be treated differently from the rest of society and the economy.  That meant, for better or for worse, that the Internet would, in due course, be governed or regulated in a way that was not fundamentally different from the way other things were governed.  And, that was why the future of Internet governance would inevitably be local rather than global -- because the best approach was different for each society and economy.

Egypt’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Tarek Kamel, said the Forum responded to the need for a stronger international dialogue, participation and cooperation on Internet governance to ensure the Internet’s stability, sustainability and security.  Internet governance was an ever broadening subject where it was hard to draw the line between the intertwined technical and policy dimensions.  It implied broader and diverse issues such as spam, Internet exchange point, international interconnection costs and multilingualism, as well as security frauds, data protection, consumer protection and privacy.

The Forum should allow the Internet, as promoted by industry, to continue its growth.  The unique character and irreplaceable structure of the Internet should be preserved, maintained and built upon.  The Internet’s security and stability should not be affected at any level, and the integrity of “one Internet for all” should be the guiding principle.

Developing countries faced barriers such as high costs of bandwidth, scarcity of local content and availability of suitable infrastructure.  Other barriers to Internet penetration, not confined to developing societies, included the absence of a truly diverse, multilingual Internet, capable of addressing all user needs irrespective of their language and culture.  The international community should realize that unless such problems were solved through cooperation among all actors, the Internet would not be able to flourish and expand.  Internet communities of the developing world, more than others, needed to multiply their efforts and participate in Internet governance to increase their stake and overcome the existing divide.

Viviane Reding, European Union Commissioner for Information Society and the Media, said the key element was to keep the Internet as open and as censorship-free as possible, where all the world's citizens could communicate freely in line with internationally recognized fundamental rights.  The flow of information facilitated by the Internet strengthened democratic processes, stimulated economic growth and allowed for cross-fertilizing exchanges of knowledge.  But, this very freedom was under attack from those that did not value freedom of expression or disregarded the economic and social benefits of allowing a free flow of information.

Internationalized Domain Names were not just a technical issue, she said.  Notwithstanding the need to address the Internet’s stability there was, above all, a legitimate political imperative for the Internet to offer different language scripts.  Users wanted to be able to use, for instance, China's ideograms or Arabic scripts.  There was a real danger that prolonged delay in the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names could lead to a fragmentation of the Internet's name space.

International Chamber of Commerce Secretary-General Guy Serban said that business would continue to contribute to the Internet’s development through the productive resources provided by companies around the world, and through working with all partners.  The meeting should address the question of how to increase the flow of information and the access to knowledge in a cost-effective manner and in a secure environment, and how to bring more people with different cultures and language skills to take advantage of it.

Natasha Primo, Executive Director of the South Africa-based Women’s Net, called on the Forum to “respond valiantly” to the concerns of civil society, particularly how to advance the human rights and development agenda and how to narrow the digital divide for women, for the differently abled, for developing countries and for the poor.  She set five challenges for the Forum to address:  extending the human rights culture within the information society, making Internet access universal and affordable, building capacity for developing country participation, building an inclusive process that capitalized on the knowledge and participation of women, and ensuring that the Forum process shore up all different actors.

Vint Cerf, saluted as one of the “fathers of the Internet”, said that many of the Internet’s “problem behaviours” -- such as fraud, harassment, illegal copying, material unsuited to children -- were international in scope.  “These concerns will need to be addressed at local, national and international levels and will call for cooperative technical, political and legal efforts for their solution,” he said.  The Internet Governance Forum was the latest in the potential forums in which such issues could be addressed and directional concepts shared.

Putting into place legal and technical frameworks that enhanced the global effectiveness of the Internet’s capabilities would further increase the value of the investments made in the Internet, he said.  A variety of organizations was already carrying out standardization or coordination work at the technical level.  The Forum could be a platform for identifying important Internet-related issues and the organizations equipped to deal with them.

It was essential to preserve the global interoperability of the Internet, he said, while striving to make it more inclusive of all the world's languages.  The Internet community had a strong interest in having the ability to register domains written in the characters used in their preferred languages, but, therein lay a huge technical challenge, which would require extraordinary expertise.  Organizations such as Unicode and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers were addressing that challenge.

Robert Kahn, the other “father of the Internet”, warned against complications arising from diverse and perhaps contradictory policies developed independently around the world.  Increasingly, Governments and private sector organizations might be called upon to coordinate such policy choices, perhaps on a bilateral basis to begin with, to avoid unplanned and unwanted outcomes.  The Forum could play an important contribution by identifying emerging issues.

In the afternoon, the Forum held a policy dialogue on “Setting the Scene”, chaired by the head of the Greek Telecommunication Organization, Panagliotis Vourloumis, and moderated by Ken Cukier of The Economist, which led to an exchange of views between a panel of experts comprised of Government representatives, private sector Chief Executive Officers and academics with members of the audience.

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