FINISHED COPY
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR ENHANCED
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
04 SEPTEMBER 2014
11:00
WS 157
CROWDSOURCING A CONSTITUTION FOR THE INTERNET
CROWDSOUCING A MAGNA CARTA FOR “THE WEB WE WANT”
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This is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> D. MILOSHEVIC: So we'll start in a couple of minutes. Just giving a few people a couple of more minutes to take their seats and come in.
So good morning, everyone, and welcome to everyone to our workshop today and the title of our workshop is: Crowdsourcing a Magna Carta for the Web we want, and for the Internet we want. My name is Desiree Miloshevic. I'm going to be a Moderator, and we have a set of esteemed panelists who are very experienced in our topic, the people who walk the talk. And in our 90‑minute session, we'll probably try to have some logistic separation where initially in the first round of questions, we would be looking at some social implications, and also some technical challenges of how to go about mobilizing Internet users to create Magna Carta for the Internet. And then we will also hear in the second part of our session, we will hear from the people who are involved in some of the most recent building of the Human Rights instrument. Like the Philippines will have firsthand experience from people who were involved in the Marco Civil and you'll have ample opportunity to ask them questions and challenges and lessons learned from these initiatives, set of initiatives.
So I think the questions we have today before each of the panelists start introducing themselves in front of us is really how we can move forward, how we can mobilize Internet users to create this soft law for the Web we want, for the Internet we want, and can we design a platform that enables us to crowdsource from across a global vision for the Internet we want?
We will also see how we can overcome some of the barriers be it linguistic, social, or of a technical nature. We will see how we can design both these platforms in a way that overcomes rather than increases barriers. So I think you'll have a lot of questions for all of our panelists and in this session I think we will probably come up with some best practices, which is the aim of the workshop that will contribute to the overall tangible outcomes that we're trying to build at this IGF, 9th IGF in Istanbul.
So I'll just start with moving forward, with asking our panelists starting with Vagner Diniz from W3C Brazil. Mike Godwin from Internews. Nnenna and Carlos, Cristiana Gonzalez. We have Wafa Ben Hassine. Ahmet Sabanci, and I think there's probably 10% of panelists are from the developed countries and 90% are panelists from the developing countries and I think you'll appreciate the experience.
Stopping here, I'd like to ask Mike Godwin to perhaps start with his view of how we can move forward with building Magna Carta.
>> M. GODWIN: Thank you, Desiree. Let me talk about working with Internews the global Internet project for more than a year and a half and how it has informed my thinking about this issue. And Internews when we set out our Internet policy advocacy project we set out to help developing and transitional nations promote democratically oriented Internet policy, ICT Policy typically along the lines our partner organisations in those countries wanted to pursue and the question that I felt compelled to address immediately whether there were common elements in the different problems that different countries were facing. One of the things that I had a friend tell me at the outset was that no two countries are alike. Every country is different so when you try to generalize solutions from one country to another that never works, and because I am a contrary person I immediately set out to find out whether there were generalizable solutions that might work and one of the things that I noticed very early on was that there are some nations that can't really engage in the normal ‑‑ that don't really have a very healthy policy advocacy process. So that if you are a Civil Society organisation or maybe a multistakeholder Coalition and you're trying to improve Internet policy in your country in a more Democratic way, maybe the country's political environment is such that you have no traction. You have no way to get started. You have few ways to make progress. And as I studied the problem a little longer what I realized was that the nations that had difficulty having a good positive policy process by which I mean a healthy dialogue between stakeholders including Civil Society and Government policymakers the nations that were having problems fell into two categories.
One were nations that typically because of a recent political crisis effectively had a paralyzed process. It was so ‑‑ a country like India for example, where the IT Act was amended in the 2008 into a very expansive overbroad Cybercrime oriented Act, that was passed almost without debate in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack, created a problem for Civil Society in India which was that you ‑‑ one was in a position of having to ask members of Parliament to roll back something they had all voted for. There was very little change in Parliament over the course of years and even now with the change in Government, there's still a lot of inertia behind the original passage of the 2008 version of India's IT Act.
And other nations also have difficulty getting traction. Obviously Thailand now more than ever Civil Society organisations have difficulty advancing a Democratic Internet so nations that are either ‑‑ that have a paralyzed policy process have a set of problems and nations that are essentially brand new to the policy process, where there's no tradition of Civil Society asking for or seeking input into ICT Policy also have a problem, because without a tradition of Civil Society organisations and other stakeholders talking to Government, nobody really knows how to do it. It's very hard ‑‑ and the Governments themselves may not know so if you look at nations like South Sudan, the newest nation in the world. Or if you look at developments in Myanmar as the Union Government progresses towards democracy but without a strong tradition of Civil Society engagement, the challenge is to start the dialogue, to start the process. In other countries with longer policy advocacy traditions, this is not a problem. Everybody has ongoing relationships. The Government officials know who the stakeholders are and vice versa and there's ongoing dialogue.
So I had to figure out: How would you start the process in both countries that seem to be paralyzed and countries that seem to have a blank slate, that don't have a tradition? And in both cases it seemed to me that progress would be made best by having a country‑level Human Rights instrument initiative, and here the inspiration comes primarily from Brazil. This ‑‑ my work on this issue started before President Dilma Rousseff helpfully promoted Marco Civil at NETmundial, and also the Philippines was an inspiration because we had actually since only 2012, we had an example of a crowdsourced Magna Carta for Philippines Internet freedom and it was expansive. I think I read it's like 100 sections the draft I read. There's a lot to it. It covered everything and it was written to counter the Philippines Government's reflexive passage of a Cybercrime Act in 2012.
And I realized that here were two nations in different parts of the world that Civil Society was fighting the impulse to try to do Human Rights instruments. And that was quite interesting to me so I began working with our partners to talk about whether in their home countries they had the potential to pursue Human Rights instruments. Now, regular attendees of the Internet Governance Forum know there are already plenty initiatives to create soft law versions of Human Rights instruments whether it's necessary in proportionate principles or whether it's any of the other projects that we've seen here where people are promoting rights frameworks, but one of the things we know is that if you try to approach setting standards ‑‑ if you try to approach Internet rights as Human Rights at the international level you may be disappointed because there's not a universal consensus among member nations in the international Forums to advance Human Rights on the Internet or if they officially espouse Human Rights on the Internet they always want to qualify them, typically in terms of protecting stability or children or something that leads to a watering‑down or limitations on Human Rights guarantees.
But if you're working at the country level, you actually have an opportunity to directly engage with legislators and policymakers that you actually know, that are actually ‑‑ that you actually have a lot of common elements with and that you can actually build long‑term relationships with. And when ‑‑ even though the Marco Civil was a long time in passage from its inception as an idea in 2007, once Brazil's Government got behind the idea of passing a Human Rights instrument at the country level in Brazil, progress occurred very rapidly.
In the aftermath of NETmundial the question for Civil Society actors was: What do we do now? What do we do next? And my view is generally, and I'll talk more about this, but I'm trying to sort of set everybody else up here as an introduction ‑‑ my view is that the very next thing we should be doing is helping other nations, Civil Society organisations and multistakeholder groups and other nations, at the nation level, advance their own Human Rights frameworks, because we don't want Brazil to be a one‑off. We don't want it to be an anomaly, a novelty. We want it to be a trend. We want it to be the wave of the future.
We want people to feel empowered to not merely to wait around for international Forums to advance Internet Human Rights, but to advance them in their own country and then by ‑‑ after the first two or three or six nations pass their Human Rights instruments, focus on the Internet, and there are some potential low‑hanging fruit here. In the near term, these could include nations like Philippines or Iceland or Estonia or Finland.
But we know that once we have a few nations, we don't have to wait for the developed nations to take the lead. Why should we?
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Mike ‑‑
>> M. GODWIN: I'm at the end of this. I think we have a very exciting historical moment, and that's I hope I've teed up everybody else's discussion. I was really at my last sentence so there we go.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Fantastic, thank you for that outlay of, you touched upon a lot of things and I think just opening up the question of National versus global, it was an interesting view, where I believe you think many nations should take a directive similarly to Philippines.
Since we have one panelist who could not make it to our panel, talking about technical platform, I'll just mention that our hashtag for this workshop is interwebrights as you can find things on the interweb. So I'd like therefore to ask Vagner Diniz with W3C to give us technical perspective of what he's working on and in terms of why do these grassroots movements make sense for a global Bill of Rights.
>> V. DINIZ: Thanks, Madam Moderator. Good morning for everyone. My name is Vagner Diniz. I'm the head of W3C Brazil office and also I want to underline that Brazil is hosted by the Internet Steering Committee, the CGI.br which as you may know is the organisation responsible or in charge of the Internet Governance in Brazil.
My brief comments are related to the principles for what we call here the Magna Carta, or the crowdsourced for Magna Carta, and I will start with a few questions for the room.
The first question I have is: Is this crowdsourcing process the same as multistakeholder process? And if it is the same thing or if it is not, the second question, my second is: How to assure a broad and multistakeholder participation in the crowdsourcing process for Magna Carta.
And the third question I have is: What about the 2/3 of the world not connected to the Internet? Should they be heard in the process of Magna Carta for the Web? And if "yes," how they can participate of the Magna Carta for the Web.
And I started with this question because I think that to go ahead for the Magna Carta, we should have some basic principles. We call it the Web Decalogue, or the 10 principles for the Web. I want to underline some of those principles that are the same of the Human Rights Declaration, I think there is some non‑negotiable principles, like the rights of housing, the rights of education and the rights of or freedom of speech. This is some basic principles not negotiable in the Human Rights Declaration.
So I think that we should think on some non‑negotiable some negotiable principles for the Web. The first principle is the Web for All. That means that the Web should be available for everyone, not just for a group of people or a group of organisations, but the Web should be available for everyone in the world.
The second is the Web in Everything. This is not the environment suited to desktop computer anymore. Now the Web is in everything, so we are talking about the Web should be also present in devices and many other things.
The third principle is the Web organised by standards. That means that standardization means creating a universal environment. That means creating an environment for innovation.
The fourth is accessible Web. We're not talking about only people with some special needs or people with disabilities, but also we are talking about a prerequisite for the Web to evolve into a universal and inclusive design.
The fifth is a reliable Web. To continue in this process of using Web as a universal tool, the Web should be confidence, and the confidence is directly related to the full rights on the Web.
Another principle is the Web with multiple authors and readers. We are talking about the Web's diversity in a collaborative way.
And another principle is the Web to serve democracy. We need to ensure the free development of applications on the Web, especially based on open data, so open data is nowadays a pillar for Democratic society.
And another principle is the Web for socioeconomic development. We should agree that the use of the Web in e‑Commerce and also in e‑Government fosters the local economic development especially in remote places.
Another principle is the Web that preserves the memory. Resources should be dedicated to preserve the Web's memory in all aspects of its culture.
And finally, may suggestion is the Web of All. That means I'm talking about Web governance. And Web governance should be guided by the principles of collaboration, collective creation, ethics and Human Rights. So this is in summary the 10 principles that I suggest should be the basis for this movement of a crowdsource for Magna Carta. Thank you very much.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you very much, Vagner. I think moving on I think we will go to our next panelist, and it's Nnenna Nwakanma, also from Web Foundation, too. Nnenna please if you can share with us your views on how does it differ from previous efforts?
>> N. NWAKANMA: Yeah. Good afternoon or morning. It's still morning in Africa. I would like to share one point each, and be very short about what I see as the strength, the weakness, the opportunity, and the threat.
On the strength, for me coming from Africa, one strength I see is that this is something that has been done at least somewhere, so when I start speaking to people or Governments or Civil Society, stakeholders in Africa, I have a place to point to. I have a document. I have that photo of President Dilma signing Marco Civil. That is something. I have it in a photo and a video, so that for me is a strength. However, there is a weakness which he has raised. We are talking about digital rights in a planet where 60% are not yet there.
So are we not making the gap larger? Will these be rights that will apply to the 40% that are online? What happens to the 60% that are offline? So affordability and access is a weakness in a Magna Carta drive.
What's the opportunity? Some three years ago, I published a paper on the importance of social networks in public engagement, Public Policy engagement for West Africa, and my research, which crossed four African countries, showed that there isn't any major Public Policy issue that will happen without Web engagement. And so the Internet in itself is the greatest opportunity for the Magna Carta itself, because it's not going to be my Internet. It's not going to be Mike Godwin's Internet. It's going to be our Internet.
So for the first time, we are going to have citizens of a country called "the Web," and we are not one million. We are not one billion. We are billions. That I think is the greatest opportunity we can have in crowdsourcing for the Magna Carta.
What is the threat? The threats actually are many, but I think I will take two out of it. I'm originally Nigerian, and Nigeria is a country where a bunch of Civil Society organisations have started for the past few months thinking about a Nigerian Internet Bill of Rights actually. And the first thing we started doing last week when I was there is: Is there a President in this country? And the answer is yes. Civil Society started FoI, the Freedom of Information Act, and it took 11 years to finish from beginning to end.
So if we are beginning this in Nigeria, are we willing to put in 5‑plus years? In Nigeria, there's going to be elections. That means that the whole of the Assembly, National Assembly, will be off and back again so for the next one year, nothing substantive will be happening in the Nigerian National Assembly and in many other African countries, the year before the election, the year of the election, and the year after the election, nothing legally can be done. So that's a threat in many places if you're pushing this at country level.
The other threat is us, as Civil Society. How long are we going to be there? It's very easy to have a nice room, have a bunch of people. But when you go home, what can you do? It's easy ‑‑ you get married, you move places, you have your children, you move jobs, and then you get burnt out. What happens to this?
Are we ensuring that there is a next generation that will follow when I'm no longer here? As long as it takes to have the Magna Carta accepted all over the world, how much energy are we as Civil Society, willing to put in it?
I have hope because I give birth to children every day. I have hope that the blog posts I have will remain. I have hope that my Twitter account will not be deleted. I have a backup anyhow. I have hope that we have transcripts of meetings like this, so that even when we step aside, the Internet has a memory. Thank you.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Nnenna, for your views. I think moving on since everyone has mentioned NETmundial and there's been a lot of criticism where the soft principles just remain a talk, and how do they get operationalized? I think it would be great if perhaps Cristiana Gonzalez who worked and Carlos Alfonso, as well, could ‑‑ first starting perhaps with Carlos and then Cristiana, since they've been involved with the process for many years ‑‑ give their insight into the process.
>> C. ALFONSO: So this is Carlos Alfonso from INTS, in Rio. So I'll be very brief but my contribution in this debate is to try to analyze how the Marco Civil, how the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights fits into this discussion as we're having now about the Magna Carta. So the concern here will be I hope this is not disturbing you.
But I think the discussion here will be what are the advantages and disadvantages to go on with a hard law perspective as the Marco Civil in Brazil was? Because when we discuss a Magna Carta for the Internet ‑‑ I'm sorry ‑‑ we come up with a concern about how can we bring to this Magna Carta the same level of enforceability and degree of agreement as we have with a hard law perspective?
So our concern with a Magna Carta approach that would be regarded as a soft law approach is to first of all differentiate it to ‑‑ Magna Carta for the Web won't be a Treaty. It will be something people would agree on and then work on a National level as the Marco Civil is a good experience, as we have previously heard here, in which you know the representatives and Senators and it seems to be easy to get a domestic experience approved as the Marco Civil was rather than to get broad agreement at a National level.
But having said that I think it's important to understand the difficulties of both experiences, and when it comes to the Marco Civil, when it comes to have a hard law in the National level option, you first of all need to understand some challenges such as a misconception about having a law regulating the Internet, because we're pretty much used to go to a number of international Forums in which we talk about Internet freedom and I think it's important to understand here that for a great amount of people, the single fact that you are having a law to regulate issues that concerns the Internet is on itself a form of censorship, or a form to take away liberties, to take away freedom. So there would be in this understanding an opposition between to be free and to have a law to regulate something, especially when we're talking about the Internet, which has empowered so many liberties as the architecture of the Internet and enabling it so it's important to understand how Internet freedom means that you're not free because you have no law. Internet freedom means and the Marco Civil was a perspective in this regard that you're free because you have a law, a law that's Human Rights oriented that tries to understand the values and the nature of the Internet and tries to preserve those values and is at the same time but I know that may sound tricky but the Marco Civil tries to be I'll say conservative in one side and evolutionary in the other. It is conservative in one side because it needs to conserve to preserve what the Internet has brought to us and the liberties Internet has empowered but in the same time it needs to be revolutionary because it needs to look towards the future and enable the next steps for the Internet and why not the Web itself? So this is just to say that we have challenges both in the hard law and in the soft law perspective and when it comes to the Marco Civil itself I would like to mention and Cristiana will go over it in this discussion but it has a number of roots, a number of inspirations. One inspiration comes from international level and we had opportunity to discuss that here in the IGF and it's important for us to come back to the IGF to talk about that because one of the inspirations of Marco Civil is in the IGF which is the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition that has produced this Charter on Internet rights. I'm not sure if you guys know that. We have this Charter on Human Rights and principles for the Internet in English, Arabic, in Turkish if you want to improve your Turkish, maybe it would be a good idea in which you can improve your Turkish and get literacy in fundamental rights on the Internet so maybe that could be a good suggestion so we have this international inspiration for the Marco Civil and in the domestic level we have the work the CGI.br has done for a while now in having 10 principles for the governance and use of the Internet, but I will leave that to my other Brazilian colleagues and that will be my first contribution. Thanks for the invitation.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Carlos, and Cristiana, would you like to make now additional comments? Or later on when we go into the discussion? Fine. I think staying on the same topic on the difference between National and international grassroots set of activities, perhaps Wafa you would like to make a comment and have your view, as well. So please go ahead.
>> W. BEN HASSINE: Hello everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Wafa Ben Hassine. I am a rights advocate from Tunisia, and I also was a legislative aide in the Tunisian constituent Assembly where I was on the first Commission drafting the Preamble, excuse me, and one of the projects that we actually engaged in was an open governance and open data project.
So I heard so many different ideas being talked about. It's such a very, very broad topic but I briefly wanted to touch upon the dynamic between having a Nationalized process by a Government that is undertaking a crowdsourcing mechanism as opposed to Civil Society engaging crowdsourcing and trying to somehow report back to the Government or regulatory authorities and what have you. And I'll give two examples to show the difference.
So in Tunisia back when the uprisings have just settled in, there was a much more, a greater involvement from rights activists in the Government, and one of the initiatives that was started by a blogger who became a Minister at the time in 2011 was starting a pirate pad to get citizens to help draft the Constitution. Now, this was three years ago. This pirate pad was started in March 2011, and the last comment on the pirate pad was about I think in September 2011. It was a very good tape of initiative, but it didn't hold for long, especially after we've held elections and then the constituent Assembly gathered to write the Constitution, but frankly close off the drafting of the Constitution a little bit more. And I'll talk about that a little bit more later.
Another example now, now even though that type of crowdsourcing for principles that time has ended in a way, there are other types of initiatives by Civil Society, and one of these initiatives is something called "Ilkamsha," which means being caught redhanded and this is a project started by an NGO in Tunisia that has ‑‑ it provides a digital platform for ordinary citizens to report cases of corruption such as bribery, all sorts of things in hospitals and schools, and it maps it on a map of the country.
And so you can log in, download the application, report it really quickly and then just keep it there for reference, and expose cases of corruption. So that's something that Civil Society is doing, and these types of initiatives can be used by Governments to fight corruption, to make ‑‑ to have better governance.
But unfortunately now the Government doesn't necessarily use open source crowdsourcing platforms as much as it did for a very brief moment in 2011, and I guess I wanted to point out that so as you can see from these two examples and maybe it's not very obvious from the get‑go, but nationalized processes for crowdsourcing require a whole host of different resources, a whole host of different strategies, different ways of thinking about, what are the goals of doing this? How are we going to do it? What is the mechanism we're going to use, as opposed to Civil Society doing it? And there are weaknesses and strengths to each one. I don't have any answers, but I'm simply trying to point out that these are not the same. These are not the same at all. There's a difference between institutionalizing open source crowdsourcing types of processes as opposed to civil types of activities.
So I'm going to wrap up for now. But I think there's a much bigger conversation to be had as opposed to global versus National, and Nationalized versus grassroots. There are many, many angles to crowdsourcing, and I wish to hear from the rest of you about that, as well. Thank you.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Wafa, for your views. I think since Mike has mentioned also that usually some of these initiatives have been set off by the adoption of a Cybercrime Treaty so there's a wakeup call so there's something that maybe follows up and something that is inspires.
Here today we also have with us a woman who's been working on the grassroots crowdsourcing of digital rights in Philippines. Nica, introduce yourself and tell us where you are and when do you think your Magna Carta would be adopted, and would that set an example for the rest of Asia? Could you become the leader in Asia?
>> N. DUMLAO: Hi. Hi again. My name is Nica from the Philippines. I work with the Foundation for Media Alternatives in the Philippines. We have a 27‑year‑old non‑Government nonprofit organisation working on democratizing resources for citizens and communities. We've been working with a lot of local and global initiatives. We're a convenor of the Philippine Internet freedom alliance, the Coalition, a nationwide Coalition in the Philippines who has been in the forefront in defending Internet freedom in the country.
Also we're a proud member of APC, the Association for Progressive Communications.
I think what I can share is that a history of what we did already in the Philippines and what triggered it. In September 2012, about two years ago, actually it was in September '12, the Philippine President signed a repressive Cybercrime prevention law in the Philippines that restricts freedoms and tramples on rights. This event paved the way to a very active Internet freedom movement in the Philippines, so I don't know if it's ‑‑ well, it brought good news and bad news in the Philippines.
It also brought to life the Magna Carta for Philippine Internet freedom, a crowdsourced comprehensive Internet freedom legislation that doesn't just tackle rights, but it also tackles ICD infrastructure development governance and cybersecurity. So this crowdsourcing initiative was built, and on Internet freedom and Internet rights principles, and it was ‑‑ the crowdsourcing initiative was built on Google docs, so where everyone interested can comment on the draft made by citizen initiators.
Right now the Magna Carta is moving a bit slow in Congress, but I think it's moving faster than we expected in the Civil Society, and inclusivity in the discussion on strategy on how it will get passed is somehow a challenge for Internet freedom advocates. But what we see in this progress is that Philippine netizens demand for protection of rights is now gaining ground in the Legislature and that is good. And I think we now have Internet freedom Champions in Congress that can initiate a conversation that is rights based on Internet policy legislation. So since our workshop is entitled, crowdsourcing a Magna Carta for the Web we want, let me just ‑‑ well, it's crucial to ask: Who is "we" in the Web we want? And I think for us, we don't just see the "we" as the connected. It should also include the disconnected, especially the marginalized, the oppressed, in developing countries.
It should not just include those who can afford to be connected to the Internet. In the Philippines we have 33.6 million Internet users out of 100 million population, and I think the Magna Carta is ‑‑ can be a powerful tool if ‑‑ but if we think that we will just focus on online crowdsourcing I don't think it should just be online crowdsourcing. We have to put more focus and energy on offline outreach.
Well, good news is after learning about this crowdsourcing initiative on Internet freedom, our legislator in the Philippines also proposed a crowdsourcing Bill to encourage citizen participation in policymaking process and I think that's again good. These things happen after the repressive Cybercrime law, so there were many good news after that law.
He encourage citizen participation in policy making process not just online but also offline, so how this will be concretely put into practice hasn't been finalized yet, and we don't know yet how that will happen, but I think that is where the global movement of multistakeholder Internet Governance should come in, or can come in. We can try to talk about platforms on how we can effectively do this crowdsourcing to be able to reach out to those who doesn't have the means but are connected, and also have the means to be connected.
So I don't know. So our work in Internet rights advocacy is not just about supporting an Internet freedom legislation in the Congress. Our work is to spread the message and consistently push for inclusive multistakeholder process in any policy making process in the country, in the region and in global spaces. So the crowdsourcing process involved ‑‑ this crowdsourcing process with the Magna Carta, actually only involves a few netizens and that should also be addressed I think.
But we have to build more constituency and, well, I think ‑‑ as a matter of fact, even traditional Human Rights organisations, some of them were not able to really participate in the crowdsourcing initiative. I think because they're not really that used to participating in crowdsourcing effort in ‑‑ alone or drafting a legislation, yeah.
So there will be a National election in 2016, so that will be how many years from now? Two years from now. We're about to end 2014. We only have a year. But if this won't get passed, I think we'll need to strategize how we can succeed in the advent of a new administration and we're going to have to conduct for awareness and consultation and maybe do another round of crowdsourcing and get people to be ‑‑ to participate more in the process.
And reach out to those who are not yet well versed and articulate in Internet Governance issues. To conclude let me reiterate in our experience in legislation, laws can only do as much, but if you want to a law to be effective it should be responsive to the interests of the people. The Human Rights based approach mandates that legislation involve broad‑based real and full participation especially those who are in the margins of society, women, youth, in light of possible differentiated impacts to them. So crowdsourcing is not ‑‑ is an innovative participatory mechanism, but it is not yet comprehensive we think in the Philippines and not yet fully Democratic.
So what we want is it might be best to combine it with other participatory mechanisms to just reach out to the offline and to those who are not connected. Thank you.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Nica. I think there's a lot of best practices and insights and questions probably to follow up. We also have here with us Ahmet Sabanci from Turkey, who is helping to organize the Internet Governance Forum. Maybe we can hear firsthand from you what is going on with the Human Rights instruments in Turkey.
>> A. SABANCI: Thanks. I am Ahmet Sabanci from Turkey's Alternative Informatics Association. We're focused on Internet rights, freedom of speech and Human Rights issues based on technology and Internet. So that actually we really didn't have so much crowdsourcing or other kind of experience about legislations and bills because as probably most of you heard the Turkish Governments all around history doesn't really like to get recommendations and ideas from the crowd, from the public, and that was one of the main reasons why the protests happened. But after the protests started to cool down, there was some interesting outcome. There's a thing born called Crowd Neighborhood Forums which is people who lives in the same neighborhood started to gather their parks or the street at nights and started to talk about their problems, what's their main problems right now and how they can solve this, what they can do right now.
And they started to gather around and kind of crowdsource their own problems and start to spread their ideas on the Internet. Maybe they were just using Facebook and Twitter, but they started to connect other Neighborhood Forums, and they would gather in Neighborhood Forums and kind of gather in bigger events, and they're still continuing. And I guess maybe for a crowdsourcing a Magna Carta for the Web and for the whole Internet, maybe we can get some ideas from that, because we know that Internet is a global place, and we are all netizens or people who uses the Internet also have to connect the people who didn't, and we get the ideas and what their problems are. We have to learn them, their problems, and we have to connect them how to solve them.
And maybe creating some kind of a expanded neighborhood forums for all around the world around to countries and cities for reaching out to people who cannot connect, and also reaching out to people who already connected to Internet but couldn't reach out each other and talk with each other about the problems they have, and ideas how to solve about it.
But also I guess we need some better tools to give the comfort that people get at what I call the Neighborhood Forums, all around Turkey, because I saw that most of the people didn't really feel comfortable to using ‑‑ to reach each other online, but they were really feeling free and comfortable at the same sitting in a park and talking at night. And maybe as developers and other people who most uses and improves these online tools started to think about how to make people more comfortable especially for the first‑time users and others who are first time connected to Internet.
Actually right now, that's all I can say. I hope that ‑‑ I am sure that there will be more discussion.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Yes. Thank you, Ahmet. I think what's coming throughout some of these remarks you made is really reaching out to the people who are not connected and you see that as a Human Rights instrument and part of the challenge that we're facing I'd like to open up now the floor for the questions I think to have ‑‑ we have about 40 minutes left for discussion and I'm certain there are many questions.
Cristiana is also on a panel and she's been involved deeply with the Marco Civil initiative, so I think probably just before asking the first questions if we can hear something from you, as well.
>> C. GONZALEZ: Because people see Marco Civil as a trend, I think that's a realization that's become a trend. I think that it's more like an experience that must be shared with other countries and then adapted to each context and to each country's reality because it was not easy at all, it was not perfect. It was not perfect at all but is it possible achievement in a democratic environment. So I bring here to adopt the context and the issues that triggered the Marco Civil and they are very similar to the Philippines.
The Marco Civil so it's the law, and but ‑‑ which is of course different from the Declaration principles. But it was inspired by the CGI.br, 10 principles for Internet Governance and news and the context of this is in part related to the growing number of cases and intermediaries to remove the content of the Internet.
So they realized that it was necessary to start some sort of discussion about having things to guide the news, the establishment of laws to inform Public Policy and Civil Society and also some decisions of the CGI. And so it also must be noticed that these principles, so they were born in the organisation that is multistakeholder already, and had a mission to establish strategic directives related to development in use of Internet.
So what that means is that principles are always related to practice, so we need to take that into account when thinking about Magna Carta and principles.
And another lesson that we can have from this principles process is that we need to keep it simple, keep it sharp and be precise. And be patient, two years at least for principles.
And at the same time that the CGI had approved its principles, we had the specific context that some ‑‑ around the Internet regulation being forced in 2008 in Brazil when a Congressman proposed new text Bill on Cybercrime. So this Cybercrime in 2008 was inspired another law that was in the legislative pipe line since 1999. This Bill went to establish new criminal offense and the debate surrounding this Bill reflected a common Internet regulation and control of Internet that the Cybercrime Bill could serve as a purpose for that. And supporters of the Cybercrime Bill argued that it would be compliant with the Budapest Convention and there was sort of agreement that so to establish international norms on Cybercrime so there is the international context influencing a lot of Brazil in that time.
And although there is some doubt as the Cybercrime law are not actually met the standards of the Convention, the signing compliant with this international Convention was seen as an important step to Brazil to assert its leadership in Latin America so it was like the dark side of the place of trying to make Brazil be an example of Cybercrime enforcement so that was the 99 draft and the 2008 bills of Cybercrime are the examples of the absence of precise knowledge with Internet Governance without protection and privacy and also the Internet operation logic so that raised a lot of concerns from activists and academics and political parties.
And so just ‑‑ so in this context there was a petition, so talk about crowdsourcing, there is a petition in Brazil that had 106 signatures and last year it was part of this process with the movement. And this petition recognized the benefits of an open Internet and development in Brazil so that also inspired the born of this of the Marco Civil. It was a long process, the process was based on centralized notation as we know already. Followed by debate of the regulatory framework and the year that was ‑‑ it was on the Web ‑‑ .
[ Technical difficulty with audio ]
Including comments and a difference in website. 2010 a two stage process of public consultations. And that we're online and offline also.
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So the process ‑‑ after more than a year paralyzes it's not easy. The President finally send the directive to the ‑‑ .
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And establish a special commentary and the project was scheduled to be ‑‑ several times and after a series of amendments, the Brazilian ‑‑
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Now we experience the final stage was every week we knew it was about to go to ‑‑ to try to convene issues ‑‑ a strong private Sector lobby and so what are I want to say here is that it's not all about having principles, having Magna Carta, having National law like that. It's not all about the consensus but how to do it with this end and finally how much resources you have and we are willing to put on it. So there's a lot of capacity building, getting opinions, so it's a really, really hard process.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you for that comprehensive overview. As you say, resources, I wonder how many laws were involved in these efforts. If there are any quick comments from the other panelists. Wafa, you had a brief comment and then questions, please. I think we have one question at the end.
>> W. BEN HASSINE: My colleague that was working on the campaign I mentioned that collects cases and maps them he just contacted me and told me that their platform was hacked very recently, and that they have suspended the operations of the platform for at least another month. They will be launching it again a month before the elections to use the platform for reporting on electoral fraud and campaigning and religious sites and what not. It just emphasizes and highlights we need to actually remember even though we would like to start doing these crowdsourcing types of initiatives we actually have to remember that digital security here is not exactly the forte of Civil Society members that want to engage in this. There's a lot of work and trainings to be done to ensure that whatever processes we have and initiatives we have to start a Civil Society are actually safe and secure.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Mr.‑‑ or please introduce yourself.
>> J. KLEIJSSEN: Thank you very much. My name is Jan Kleijssen, Director of Information Society at the Council of Europe, and I have a question or rather a suggestion to make as regards what Magna Carta we're speaking about or you would like to speak about. The Council of Europe perhaps is known to some of you as the home of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is also the home of the global Cybercrime Convention. The Cybercrime Convention that unlike some of the Cybercrime laws that are mentioned here I should stress has a very strong Human Rights component. Now Sir Tim Berners‑Lee at the beginning of this year called for a global Magna Carta on the Internet, and I think he meant hard law rather than soft law.
We've had and NETmundial has shown this again now a whole series of commitments of the international community and I think it is time as Sir Tim Berners‑Lee has said that these are codified. These could be codified in an international framework agreement and that would build a collective set of standards. Not to regulate the Internet because I know activists are always very worried when it comes to treaties on the Internet.
Such a Magna Carta, such a Framework Convention would not be to regulate the Internet. It would be rather to regulate state behavior. It would be to establish a set of standards based on existing best practice, and agreed through multistakeholder dialogue. And as in any other part of Human Rights law it would provide collective system of guarantees and states would accept to be held to account.
I think that is the sort of Magna Carta that really would bring added value over the current commitments but often I'm afraid only lip service to standards that we have.
Crowdsourcing is I think an extremely helpful way to contribute to getting this. A very concrete example of crowdsourcing I would like to offer you a platform is the world Forum of democracy which takes place every end of the year in Strasbourg. It's organised by the Council of Europe, but it brings together nations from all over the world. It's a global, truly global, Forum. It usually opens by Nobel Peace Prize winners to give you an idea, and youth delegations make up a large part of this so I think such a Magna Carta supported by a global Forum is something that as Sir Tim Berners‑Lee said, it is not naive to think about it, but it's naive to think you could just sit back and think it comes automatically. Thank you.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: For your contribution, obvious support I think. So we had ‑‑ a quick response over here? And then Stephanie and gentleman over there and we'll go around the table.
>> N. DUMLAO: Thank you for your suggestion, Sir. I would just like to point out that the Council of Europe has been funding having this initiative in Cybercrime laws in Southeast Asia and has been a very big problem in Southeast Asia because we have been ‑‑ our states are trying to pass Cybercrime prevention laws who are not upholding the rights of the citizens. It has been very problematic. It is being used by the Government to prosecute Human Rights defenders so I think it is good to learn that there's this initiative right now guideline of Human Rights for Internet users that is being initiated by the Council of Europe and I think you can replicate that as well in the ASEAN and not just cybercrime law.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Stefania, please introduce yourself.
>> S. MILAN: I'm Stefania Milan. I want to share with you an experience we had in Italy in 2012 when there was a small window of opportunity with the technocratic Government and I was part of that and we tried to combine the hard law approach with the crowdsourcing initiative. That isn't why you might not have heard of these initiatives. The Government collapsed and we never brought anything home. This is very typical in my country but I have some ‑‑ this is why I want to share these experiences to compliment some of the stories we've heard here, so just to problematize it a little further.
So the issue of software, there was supposed to be someone here speaking to that issue. We're very short of time. We lacked just a couple of months which was a big mistake, having heard about what people shared here so we went to a commercial platform called idea scale which had two advantages, one to promote interaction not only with the text but also between users, and the other was transparency so everyone could see and interact with other people's contribution but unfortunately it was not fully accessible to people with disabilities. And this is an issue that has to be taken into account very seriously.
There's something that I actually forgot to tell you, the way we went was to prepare a draft of this Magna Carta, call it the Charter of principles for the Internet, sort of interim Bill of Rights and we open it up so citizens everyone ‑‑ that was basically a draft people could interact with and in order to ameliorate, whatever so it was very much freedom. What have we learned?
Yes, you need time, but you also need many resources to dedicate. In terms of moderation we didn't have it at first. We introduced later on, because there were a lot of trolls including from private sector and telecoms who were trying to have different things from what we wanted included. Also, building a critical mass is very difficult. We only managed to involve a few citizens through the hard core dedicated activists who participated a lot, but certainly wasn't the Charter of the people.
And this is a very small country. We're talking about 60 million people. And then the last point I would like to share with you is do not assume people will participate have the same progressive values you have or expect them to have. I think this is very important because yes we want to be inclusive but we also have a very clear mind of what we want in the Internet Bill of Rights. How do we balance that? How do we get progressive views and we're still inclusive? Does it work in moderation so this is what I wanted to share and I'm happy to tell you more.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: I think the gentleman over there. In the beige shirt.
>> R. POPPI: Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Ricardo Poppi. I coordinate social participation approach on Brazilian Government. I want to make a short remark about the process. I think that when you think about the crowdsourcing process, it's good. It's good to think about the word. So you have the crowd part of the word and the source. And the crowd part I think the speech of Nnenna was very inspiring about we are billions. So that should be our goal. We know it's impossible to involve billions but that should be our goal.
And the other part of the word, the "source," I think it's about the source code methodology of the source code of the process you're going to use because there is lots of ways of doing a crowdsourcing process, and I think that there is a way we should think a way to foster to hinder the collective intelligence in the process. That should be our goal.
And I bring an experience we recently had with people involved in creating the Arena NETmundial in Brazil. We made a public consultation with more than 200,000 participants asking a question about what Internet do you want? And then we had lots of good surprises about regular citizens that use Internet telling us things about quality of access, net neutrality, liberty of expression, and so on.
So I think it was not a perfect process with very things to learn and to make a balance but I think it's something to inspire us in thinking this process, going beyond the technical enabled community or the activists as our colleague brought the experience.
We can go beyond and crowdsource is maybe the key for that but we need to think about the process, and focusing on collective intelligence. I think that's the message.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you. Do you have issues like the colleagues in or the netizens in Italy, with trolls and a moderation of inputs of 200,000 people commenting on issues such as net neutrality? Or was it more a homogenous support? Can you make any comments?
>> R. POPPI: Yeah, we use the peer wise methodology so people were enabled to bring proposals and the proposals were a collectivity moderated so the group proposals got high and the troll ‑‑ that comes from troll get down.
We have this document with all the explanation of methodology. I'll make it available to the panelists. And it can be accessed on the Internet. It is published.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: We will be building the best practices documentation I think. There was a gentleman on the right hand side at the very end and then back to you.
>> W. AL‑SAQAF: I'm Walid Al‑Saqaf in Sweden, but come from Yemen. I can relate about what Ahmet said about the situation of Human Rights on the Internet. The irony is I started my whole career here in Turkey, and it looks like countries that have gone through transitions like Turkey have gone through ups and downs in their various historical context but what is interesting is that perhaps the bottom‑up approach that Civil Society could use is in networking among us ourselves in the region.
So starting from a bottom‑up approach I would suggest that we build up the momentum that's taking place in the region including Egypt, Tunisia, and I happen to have been a friend of the Minister who helped us pirate mentality, but then the momentum fell and things went back to normal. What we need to build is a grassroots approach to it.
So I suggest that the obviously the governance initiative I applaud very much is that we should come up with some strategy to link with other countries in the region. Only then will we be able to have more of a Regional source of power, and furthermore, there is a need to connect to the progressive minds within the Governments.
I can tell you that not everyone is evil in the Turkish Government. Not everyone in the Yemeni Government or whatever, but there needs to be more of a multistakeholder approach even within the context. We've fought in the past as an activist myself I've fought against Governments and found it's counterproductive to put them constantly under the zone of the culprit. There needs to be some sort of exchanging views with them. And that's what the IGF is about.
So I truly wanted to just express this view.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Walid. For the inclusiveness comments. Mike, you had a brief comment?
>> M. GODWIN: Very briefly, I've actually been working, just to follow up on your comment about what's happening in Yemen, I think that the interesting thing about the relationship between Civil Society Internet rights activists and Government is that when you are approaching them and saying, roll something back, or undo what you did, or you did this terrible thing, now you need to fix it, that is not always the best way to start a conversation, because not everybody takes that as a happy note.
But if you talk to policymakers and say: You have an opportunity here to be associated with a very positive guarantee of rights for all citizens, and have your name and political reputation associated with something affirmative that protects citizens, that is a huge political opportunity, and I think one of the things that we will see increasingly is that at the country level especially is that politicians and policymakers will want to be associated with rights instruments.
Who wouldn't be? I mean, it's just inherently you'd like to have a Bill of Rights associated with your name. Who wouldn't? The thing about coming back just very briefly to the Cybercrime Treaty now called the Budapest Convention, I've been writing about that for I guess 15 years since it was in the early draft forms. And the interesting thing that led to the ‑‑ and it relates to the genesis of the Marco Civil.
The notion that the Council of Europe's first impulse when it came to creating a model for approaching cyberspace was to define "crimes." That was quite troubling, because, in fact, for most people, the Internet is a channel of liberation and connection, and growth, both political engagement and other kinds of engagement with the rest of the world.
And in Brazil in particular, it was academic commentary on the initiative to pass Cybercrime law in Brazil following the Budapest Convention that led, in fact, to the discussions that inspired the development of the original draft versions of the Marco Civil. And it's also interesting that in Philippines where once again you had the initiative to pass a Cybercrime Bill, the reaction was to come back and create a rights instrument with a Magna Carta for Philippines Internet freedom.
So I think that the impulse ‑‑ the Council of Europe has plenty to be proud of, but in particular, the fact that the Council of Europe's approach right out of the starting gate in terms of Internet model law was to talk about crime on the Internet, reflects a kind of moral panic about the Internet and its disruptive potential.
But in fact, the Democratic potential of the Internet is what should always be our primary focus.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you. Nnenna and then the gentleman over there.
>> N. NWAKANMA: Thank you. I just want to come back to one of my Tweets, and I said: Magna Carta is an English word. It's an old English word. It's 800 years old this year. And I think we would need to learn the lessons of the Magna Carta itself. Why? Who?
Then, who had power? And why did people want those liberties proclaimed? And here we are in a digital environment, in this new evolving reality called the Internet. Who runs the Internet? Who rules over the Internet? Who wields power? And I think that in those days, the feudal barons had issues with the King, but today the question will be: Who is the King?
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you for that. Please go ahead with a question.
>> Thank you. I come from a part of Turkey. I would like to have a few remarks about occupy movement and the Civil Society also in terms of digital rights. So after Occupy Giza in the past year, we have had thousands of NGOs being formed up and Civil Society forming up new organisations or collectives, and seeing the Government responses to this kind of uprisings calls for more liberties and rights, seeing the Government responses in Turkey, Tunisia, Italy or many other countries I can say we're on the right path.
Among the funds and energy being directed into being pulled into censorship and surveillance technologies and precautions shows me that we are on the right path achieving something great. But of course it will take time. However, I believe that this has to be done at a global level and National ‑‑ international programme for more liberties on the interpret would of course be great but not be enough.
And I can say ‑‑ sorry. I think I will have to cut it there.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: You can also feel free to answer the question or anyone that Nnenna just raised: Who's the King? She doesn't know, so I think it's a longer question. Thank you for sharing that information. So do we have any remote questions? Renata, please go ahead.
>> She's based APC Policy Director, and she asks: What families think that are the basic conditions and premises to start a Magna Carta crowdsourcing process at the National level?
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: And perhaps we can use that question to maybe make some final comments and statements, if each of you will try to maybe starting with may going this way. And then Harry as well.
>> M. GODWIN: Could you read back the question? I want to make sure I address it.
[ Off microphone ]
Okay, I'm going to try to address that question.
I think that just to come back to first principles, I think that we now exist ‑‑ in the international environment, we know we have tried to build international frameworks that enable nations to come together. We have certainly had some success at creating Human Rights instruments internationally that at least in theory and form what the member nations of the United Nations and what the member nations of various Treaty organisations do, and so there's ‑‑ I understand the impulse to approach Internet rights internationally, but because not all of the nation states that are participating in the international forums really truly embrace Democratic values, I think it's really important for us to look to the nations, both the developed nations and the developing and transitional nations, that are already committed to democracy to inspire and inform through their efforts at the country level what happens internationally.
I think that's actually going to lead to a better outcome overall internationally than to try to do a top‑down approach, or focus on a top‑down approach so that's sort of my general response.
>> N. NWAKANMA: What would we need at local level? My answer is a straight one: The capacity and the means to self‑mobilize by those who need the freedom. I'm from Nigeria, and originally Nigerians were not manifesting on the streets. But recently, guys actually buy their own plane tickets to Abuja. They spent $400 to go and hold up placards in front of the National Assembly.
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Like Mandela said: Freedom is not free. It doesn't come on a platter. Someone has to go and grab it so when we are ready to ask for our own freedom, when we have the means to pay for it, when we are willing to stand for hours, when we are willing to go down, we need to listen to, then we are ready to go.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you, Nnenna. Wafa, do you have any final comments to make?
>> W. BEN HASSINE: I agree completely with Nnenna but I think one of the primary, the base necessities of running any type of successful crowdsource campaign regardless of the topic is connectivity, is connectivity. We have to remember that 2/3 of the entire world are not connected. So crowdsourcing is not limited to politicians, not limited to NGOs, not limited to academics. It needs to be every single person who has an interest in making their world a better place in securing the Internet, making it a better environment for everybody involved so connectivity is the simple, simple answer. Thank you all for coming.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Thank you. I'm just going to go around the table and see if Carlos or Ben or Cristiana or Ahmet, bearing in mind we have two minutes before the end of the workshop. Go ahead. Pass the mic off, please. Final comments.
>> C. ALFONSO: We had a question from IRC which the question is: Except, where do we take it from here? How can we actually get things done? And I think we have this very large problem at the Internet Governance Forum in general, we talk about the Human Rights, and in general these reforms tend to become what we call sometimes hot air machines. So there's discussion, online statements and then you go outside and your Internet still sits there and things haven't changed and you're still being ignored by your Government and Silicon Valley. There's also been a lot of controversy over the NETmundial's world Forum so this is sort of maybe the IGF is where we just talk, but actually things really get done because a few people hang out.
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It's interesting insofar as I think what Nnenna and other people have said is that ultimately what really causes change historically is not a small group of rich people. And it's not usually actually a Declaration of nice words but what changes things does tend to be bottom‑up grassroots social movements and if the Magna Carta can provide a common vision for a large heterogeneous Internet‑driven movement, I think we have the chance to really do something historical. I just want to point people, Renata over there from the Web Foundation is organising the Web we want festival which is I believe September?
[ Off microphone ]
Yes.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Online?
>> C. ALFONSO: The Web We Want festival is also organised physically in London. Tim will be there and other people discussing the Magna Carta. There will be a it's not public yet, it's not released but Web Foundation is still working on it but there will be a crowdsourcing platform of some sort for a few core principles that people can discuss on the Internet Magna Carta. The goal is to engage millions of people with this and those principles can range around net neutrality, freedom of expression, open standards and decentralization, protection of personal data, and also at least for me importantly, privacy of communication and for those people who say you can't actually change things, you can't actually for example as an American I'm very sensitive to mass surveillance. The American Government is doing a in my opinion was in effect mass surveillance. You say how can we stop that? We're just people. Historically large social movements and eventually infiltrating governments and pushing things have prevented technical work which is dangerous for humanity from going forward so you can look at nuclear weapons. Tim Berners‑Lee said mass collection of personal surveillance is equivalent in danger to humanity as nuclear weapons. You say let's look at that proposition.
How many people agree? Maybe we have a large grassroots movement against mass surveillance, so I think there's a lot that can be done. I would follow The Web We Want Twitter account which is Web we want. If you're interested in technical work, particularly around photography, W3C always needs technical help and standards review. We do crowdsource the open standards that run the Web and we always want more input.
And I think that essentially the next steps will be released over the next Internet and you hopefully will be participating.
>> D. MILOSHEVIC: Closing with that I'd like to thank our discussants and panelists with a round of applause.
[ Applause ]
[End of session ]
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This is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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