PARTICIPANTS IN UNITED NATIONS FORUM ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE ADDRESS

KEY THEMES OF NET OPENNESS, SECURITY AT RIO DE JANEIRO EVENT

 

RIO DE JANEIRO, 14 November -- Openness and security of the web were the main themes at today's session of the Internet Governance Forum, which is gathering in Rio de Janeiro more than 1,700 participants from Government, civil society, the private sector and the Internet community.

Ronaldo Lemos, Law Professor at Rio de Janeiro's Centre of Technology and Society, opened the morning session.  Openness, he said, had legal, political and economic dimensions.  One legal issue that had to be regulated locally was the liability of online service providers, but most countries had yet to address it. On the economic front, openness was related to the lack of interoperability of Internet systems, which generated costs that developing countries could not afford.  But openness also lowered the barriers for new entrants in economic markets, thus fostering innovation.

David Gross, Coordinator for International Communications Policy at the United States State Department, said the Tunis Commitment adopted at the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) recognized the importance of encouraging the free flow of information, ideas and knowledge, which were essential for the information society and beneficial to development.  Each country should determine how to implement that recognition, in a democratic fashion and reflecting the country's culture and norms, but with an eye towards that principle.

Masanobu Katoh, Corporate Vice-President at Fujitsu Ltd., said neither freedom of information nor regulations should prevail over each other.  For many, “IP” did not mean “Internet Protocol” but “Intellectual Property”.  Internet experts felt freedom of expression was paramount, and intellectual property experts felt the same about intellectual property rights.  The two could coexist, as shown by legislation and guidelines adopted by the United States Congress, the European Parliament and Japan.

Self-regulation by the private sector should supplement Government action, he said.  It could be more efficient and avoid some of the risks of the “surveillance society”.  The dichotomy between Internet freedom and Internet regulation could be resolved by striking a balance among competing interests and by combining laws with guidelines established by the private sector.

Mark Kelly, an international human rights lawyer, stressed the public service value of the Internet.  The web had become an integral part of people's lives, and people relied on it with the expectation that it would be affordable, secure, reliable and enduring.

But the public service value of the web was not being respected by all groups, he said.  States had become accustomed to being held accountable for respecting Internet freedom as recognized in the WSIS outcome documents.  But two years after WSIS not all parties were playing their part, especially the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and private companies, not all of which had incorporated a real human rights approach in their decision-making.

Alexandre Jobim, Chairman of the Legal Committee of the International Association of Broadcasters, said broadcasters were held strictly accountable, for instance through laws prohibiting child pornography and incitation to violence.  But those same restrictions did not apply to the Internet, leading to an unfair imbalance between strong regulations for print and broadcast media and much looser regulations for Web-based media.  Broadcasters fully supported Internet freedom, but saw the need to limit online criminal activities.

Nick Dearden, Campaign Manager for Amnesty International, said Internet filtering was spreading rapidly, activists were imprisoned for legitimate online activities and companies cooperated with Governments in censorship.  “As Internet access continues to grow, this repression seems certain to increase as well.”  That could threaten ultimately the nature of the Internet itself, turning it into “a tool of repression and limitation rather than liberation and openness”.

“For many Governments across the world, human rights are actually slipping down the agenda,” he said.  Governments were concerned about credit card frauds, child pornography and cyberterrorism but seldom mentioned freedom of expression.  Current Internet problems should be addressed, but always taking freedom of expression into account.

ICANN Chairman Peter Dengate, also an intellectual property lawyer, said freedom of expression was sacrosanct, but there was also the “freedom to enjoy the fruits of your labour and the freedom to enjoy the undisturbed use of your property”.  The Internet made the copying of people's property “extraordinarily easy”.  Images, music and texts could be taken and used instantly, without having the authority, leading to a potential conflict between the two freedoms.

Copyright law had developed on the notion of a fair use of other people's property, and had tried to balance the owner's exclusive right of use with the right by others to use, he said.  Copyright did not protect ideas but the expression of the ideas, and there was no conflict between copyright and freedom of information.  Once the issues were separated, there was no contradiction between protecting the idea and protecting the effort that someone had made in turning an idea into a useful product.  In drawing the boundaries of intellectual property law, one should recognize that those boundaries shifted as the community shifted, and with the Internet came innovative solutions to the problems it posed.

Carlos Gregorio, an expert on privacy rights, said openness was the balance amongst the right to access, the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy.  Everybody wanted to keep the greatest openness possible, but openness could also make people vulnerable, and the main creator of such vulnerability was the State.  In Latin America the State exposed people unnecessarily.  Many of the websites of the judiciary had been made public in the name of transparency, but people with HIV/AIDS had suffered because of that openness.  One Latin American country had almost all people living with HIV/AIDS online, with names and social security numbers, and most of them were children.

He said workers who had sued their former employer were made vulnerable because the verdict was available on-line, ensuring that they would never by hired again.  A Mexican company checked every day the websites of the judiciary, and then sold the results to the personnel office of companies.

Teenagers took normal pictures, changed them into pornographic photos and posted them on the web for sexual harassment, he said.  “The Internet is open, but it is not a space for irresponsibility.  There should be rules, rules where you can have criminal and civil punishment.”

Freedom of expression was made vulnerable when the priorities of access to information were established by Google, Alta Vista, and other companies, he said.  “Privacy, regrettably, is being lost.  And it will be very difficult to keep it up.”

The afternoon session on Internet security was opened by Antonio Tavares, Representative of the Private Sector at Brazil's Internet Steering Committee, who said that 95 per cent of crimes committed on the Internet were already covered by existing legislation.

Ralf Bendrath, Research Fellow at Bremen University in Germany said security could be approached as security of computers at the end point of the net, security of companies, protection against fraud and cybercrime, but also as better security for the user, to which greater attention should be paid.  Total security was impossible, yet politicians tended to ask for more and more security, and there was a need to decide where to draw the line and acknowledge that a satisfactory level of security had been reached.  Rather than talking about network security, it was better to talk about network reliability, which was achieved with the web delivering daily huge information packages all over the world.

Huang Chengqing, Secretary-General of China's Internet Society, said one dimension of Internet security involved law enforcement and countering crime.  All over the world, cyberattacks and Internet frauds had increased much faster than the Internet growth rate, and cooperation between business and civil society was essential.  In the first quarter of 2006, 21 per cent of the world's spam had come from China, which had since adopted anti-spam legislation and administrative measures.  Spam had gone down to 4.9 per cent.

Lamia Chaffai, Director of the Tunisian Internet Agency, and Christine Hoeler's of Brazil's Computer Emergency Response Team also called for cooperation among business, civil society and regulators in order to adopt policies, legislation and technical solutions and to standardize rules.

Marco Gercke, Professor of Criminal Law at Cologne University in Germany said law-enforcement agencies needed to cooperate across borders, which was not happening enough.  There was only one international treaty against cybercrime, the Council of Europe's Cybercrime Convention, which was open to all countries and had been signed by 43.  Most of the signatories were technically advanced countries, and the Convention had not involved developing countries enough.  Yet in 2005 the number of Internet users in developing countries had surpassed that of users in developed countries.  There was a need to standardize norms, involving especially developing countries.  The Convention had created a committee for legal standardization among signatory countries.

Zahid Jamil, a lawyer from Pakistan, said his country had adopted cybersecurity laws following the killing of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl.  However, the laws had proved too draconian, and Pakistan had worked with the Council of Europe to adapt the Cybercrime Convention to its specific needs.

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