UNITED NATIONS INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM FOCUSES ON KEY THEMES –- RESOURCES,

ACCESS, PRIVACY, AMONG THEM, AS FOUR-DAY EVENT CONCLUDES IN RIO DE JANEIRO

RIO DE JANEIRO, 15 November -- The second meeting of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum focused on future Forum tasks and emerging Internet issues, before the four-day event concluded today.

At the segment on “taking stock and the way forward”, the Special Envoy for the Information Society at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bertrand de la Chapelle, called the Forum “an innovative and forthright experiment”.  It had been “incredibly dense and fruitful”; a new thematic thread had been started -- critical Internet resources –- and interaction on that theme had evolved.

He added, “The amount of laughter at that session was unanticipated.”  People had stepped back from fighting on a contentious issue and realized that it was “a common problem that we all have to address”.

The second emergent thread had concerned human rights, with many debates on freedom of expression, privacy and an “Internet Bill of Rights”, he noted.  Participants had assessed the implementation of existing rights, as well as the formalization of new kinds of rights related to the Internet’s structure.

Fatimata Seye Sylla of Bokk Jang, a Senegal-based African non-governmental organization on Internet governance, said that, for Africa, access was paramount, but added, “You cannot govern something that almost does not exist.”  Africa was at the bottom of the list in terms of infrastructure, capacity and content.  It was time for implementation, for a more active African involvement, because “only Africans can defend Africa’s rights”.

Work was ongoing in the continent to build capacity and create local content, she said.  There was a need to develop public-private partnerships and a regional regulatory and policy framework conducive to investment in information technology.  “But until projects are fully implemented by Africans, there will be no sense of ownership,” she said, calling for more involvement by African civil society and for stronger political commitment by African leaders.

Representing the private sector, Juan Carlos Solines of Ecuador, said that task in the next few months was to understand what people needed from the Forum in terms of technology and knowledge.  “We should reflect the concerns of the communities we serve,” he said, and eliminate barriers to participation.  Strong topics that had emerged at the Forum were public policies, inter-global exchanges, open access, data protection and the importance of accessibility.

Another private-sector representative, Arthur Reilly, said that the Forum was one of the few places where representatives from all Internet constituencies worked together on an equal footing, with very candid discussions on an expanding array of topics.  Keeping the Forum open, transparent, participative and democratic, therefore, was imperative.

Concerns among the public in Australia, asserted Colin Oliver, General Manager at Australia’s Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, included access in rural areas, child safety, security and privacy, and the Forum had addressed such concerns.  Future Forum meetings should see more participation from the private sector, and not only from developed countries.  The Forum should avoid negotiation, but should move beyond simple information-sharing, inviting contributions of more structured information.

At the session on emerging issues, moderated by BBC anchor Nik Gowin, Robert Pepper, Senior Director for Government Affairs at Cisco, said most of the Forum had focused on the supply side, specifically, how to extend information technology to all.  Spectrum for broadband and wireless broadband was an important emerging issue.  Another was the continuing trend to lower cost, for instance, through local and regional Internet exchange points, which allowed traffic to be routed within a region, thereby reducing global Internet costs.

There was also a need to focus on the demand side, first of all, through capacity-building, he continued.  That meant, not just technology training, but also educating users, parents, teachers, small and medium enterprises on how to use the technology and be comfortable with it.  Building trust on the Web, creating content in local languages, would also help to build demand.

On the demand creation side, an increasingly important issue was to use information technologies to address issues of energy and the environment, he said.  Those technologies could not only improve the supply of energy where it was not easily available, but at the same time, help to address climate change, and the Forum should begin to deal with that topic.

Mr. de la Chapelle remarked that the “incredible growth” of social networking sites was causing a new problem, namely, the management, not of privacy, but of intimacy -- of a zone that was not completely public, but addressed to friends.  Since those sites had populations of millions of actors, the internal governance of those social networking sites should perhaps be addressed.

British writer Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, said that user-generated sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube were the future of the media –- a development that raised political, economic and social questions.

“The future is not good,” Mr. Keen said.  People commonly thought that the Internet was bringing more democracy, and there was much talk in Silicon Valley about the profound democratic transformations wrought by the Web.  But there were “unintended consequences”, and the technologies of “Web 2.0” -- the second generation of web-based communities and hosted services -– would bring less, and not more, democracy, he worried.

“The future of the Internet is one of less democracy, less economic, political, geographic equality,” he said.  The explosion of user-generated content was not benefiting the talented and was not creating a web cultural elite.  Profit would not benefit the creators of content, but a tiny corporate minority.  There was an “annoying emergence of an anonymous oligarchy of activists”; they were running the content of sites like Wikipedia.

He said that the Net was trivializing politics and was showing voters the “inanity of politics” and the political process.  It had brought “less globalization and more localization”, and was largely controlled by a small elite.  It had created a “cacophony of opinions, where one cannot sort out the truth”.  There was a profound difference between Wikipedia and professionally-run outlets, such has the BBC.  The remedy was teaching young people, not about technology, but media literacy and a healthy scepticism.

The anonymity of Web 2.0 was eroding conversation and undermining community, he said.  “We cannot allow Internet users to hide behind anonymity instead of being contributing members of the community.”

Fred Baker of the Internet Society replied that, in many countries, giving out one’s identity was dangerous:  “anonymity sometimes means protection”.

One audience member from the Republic of Korea said his Government had mandated that all “netizens” participating in online activities should register their name and social security number.  “This looks scary,” he said, but that had brought structure to Web participation.  His country had elected “the first Internet President”, with the online discourse having a major impact on the election.

A Pakistani member of the audience said that the Internet had allowed citizens to influence a draft “cybercrime” law, with the public having “a seat at the table”, together with lawmakers and the private sector.

Vinton Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, said there was increasing understanding of the need for Internet responsibility.  “Global Internet law” should be developed at some point, along with global agreements about what people “can and cannot do”, as well as ways to enforce laws globally when people did infringe the law.  “This will be very complicated, something like the Law of the Sea, but perhaps we will need such a matrix to sort things out,” he said.

Robert Kahn, another “father of the Internet”, stressed the need to embrace and maintain the current open architecture of the Web, accommodating linguistic and cultural diversity and creating new functionalities.  The Internet had been created by “bootstrapping” on existing infrastructures, and the same model, with all the difficulties involved, could be used for future developments.

Mr. Cerf agreed, adding that the Internet should be used as a scaffolding to build the next communication infrastructure, “trying things out to see if they work”.

Markus Kummer, Executive Coordinator of the Forum Secretariat, said another issue had been the linkage with sustainable development and the importance of tackling the environmental impact of information technology.  The Internet could actually help to reduce emissions, and that capacity should be further developed.

A total of 1,376 people from 109 countries had attended the four-day Forum.  The largest participation had been from civil society (380), followed by government (302), the private sector (168), the media (104), and intergovernmental organizations (67).

Eighty-four events had taken place in parallel with the main sessions –- 36 workshops, 23 best-practices forums, 11 dynamic coalitions meetings, eight open forums and six other events.  Of those, 19 had been devoted to the issue of security, 11 to the issue of openness and freedom of expression, 12 on development and capacity-building, 10 on critical Internet resources, 9 on access and 6 on diversity.  Of the security sessions, nine had spotlighted child protection and Internet child pornography.

The third meeting of the Forum will take place in New Delhi from 8 to 11 December 2008.

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For information media • not an official record