Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 28, 2011 - 16:30 PM
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. 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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>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Hello everyone. Shall we start, as we are running a little bit late, and we don't want to confirm that this workshop is beginning a little bit late, because it's being organised by Brazilians.
So, so we are starting the -- our workshop on Internet Governance principles. It's called "Initiatives towards the improvement of a global Internet Governance."
The main goal of this session is to present initiatives that had been going around in recent years relating to Internet Governance and especially in the framing of principles, recommendations, codes of conduct, best practice, declarations pertaining to rights, principles that could be used to frame a general discussion on a number of issues that are important for our discussion related to Internet Governance. And for this sense we will have small presentations from people who have been involved in one or more than one of those documents, and see if we cannot only understand a little bit the process behind the creation of those documents, to know a little bit more of the content of those documents, and then after the presentations the idea is for us to open up for questions from the audience and among the panelists so that we can analyze, compare, and see the relations that we can create here and analyze and examine between the documents.
So the general idea of this forum is to understand or to -- not to come up of course with like final answers to some questions as to why are we seeing this great number of charters on Internet Governance in the last years.
So the idea is to put the question: Is there an urge toward a setting of principles in the Internet Governance? What are the circumstances that created this scenario? So what is the scenario behind the creation of those instruments? And most importantly, what are specific questions those charters want to address? It's important to highlight here that different charters answer different questions. So it's important here for us to understand what are the demand, what are the circumstances that led a certain group to work on principles, to work on charters on Internet Governance principles.
And then try to understand a little bit on the process, what were the best experiences on the process that created those documents and the content of the documents themselves.
So I would ask the panelists just to introduce themselves briefly. And I will ask Carlos Afonso to start introducing himself. Look at the two Carloses are sitting together to make it look more confusing on the organisation of the panel. So Carlos, go ahead.
>> CARLOS AFONSO: If you look closely, you'll notice that one is older than the other. I'm Carlos Afonso and I participated in a diverse group of people in 1994, 1995, which helped create the Brazil Internet steering committee that was in May of 1995, and which was basically in charge of governance of the IIWP name. Brazil is one of the first countries where the IP numbers are distributed. They are not distributed through the operators or providers.
So let's start.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: So this was me telling Carlos that it was supposed to be for him to introduce himself. And now it seems like mission accomplished.
So I'll ask the other panelists to introduce themselves as well.
>> DIXIE HAWTIN: I work for Global Partners and Associates in the United Kingdom and I'm also the interim Chair of the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: I'm project coordinator for a project on Internet Rights and Human Rights with the Association for Progressive Communications, and also the Chair of the Regulator of the Domain Name Limited in the dot nd space.
>> ROMULO NEVES: I'm from the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: I Chair the Cross-border Internet Group in the Council of Europe.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: I'm Carlos Affonso from Pereira de Souza in Rio de Janeiro.
The idea is that every panelist gives a short presentation on the specific document, no longer than ten minutes. So it's going to be really short and like even shorter than ten minutes. And then we open up for discussions.
So, Dixie, go ahead.
>> DIXIE HAWTIN: So I'm going to talk about the charter for human rights and principles which was created by the coalition. This is a multi-stakeholder group of organisations and individuals who are dedicated to upholding human rights in the Internet environment. We were formed in 2009, when two different coalitions merged. One of them was looking at creating a Bill of Rights for the Internet. And the other one was looking at defining policy principles for the Internet.
So, those kind of represent the two elements to our approach with the charter. We are both trying to apply existing human rights standards to the Internet environment, and we are also trying to elaborate on those policy principles which are necessary in order to uphold the Human Rights maximizing potential of the Internet.
The process was going around, being spoken about for a long time, but it really got started in 2009 with a collaborating exercise. So a wiki was set up and anyone who was interested in this initiative could go on to that wiki and put exactly what they thought was important into it.
And so what came out of that was really a broad-based involvement, really broad group of actors from many different countries and many different stakeholders fed into that. And what came out in the document was of course a really, really wide range of issues. But, as a collaborating exercise, it was not the most easy to use document.
So the next stage was to identified six human rights experts to go through that document and to channel it down and to make it usable and make sure that it was all coherent and in line with Human Rights standards. So there were six experts. And the most -- the most prolific of them was Mary Marzuko and Wolfgang Benedict from the University of Graz. That resulted in a version 1.0 of the charter, which we launched at the last IGF. And that workshop was a really, really dynamic space. The room was packed full of people from, again, across different stakeholder groups and from different countries of the world. And we got a lot of really rich, really, really useful feedback.
So after, immediately after the last IGF, we went back and went through the feedback and tried to incorporate that which was useful and relevant into making the document much stronger. And at the same time, we identified some of the more controversial issues and we had quite intensive discussions within the coalition about those issues to decide what the best way and the most human rights respecting way of dealing with that would be.
So what came out of that is our beta version. As you can tell by the word "beta," it's not viewed as a final set in stone document. This is an emerging process. And just to highlight now, I think two of the things that we really learned from that process as being very valuable ways of working is, one, to be very open and to allow people to engage. Because people will come up with thoughts and perspectives that you wouldn't come up with if you had a small group. I was just talking to someone earlier from India who said she only got involved because she thought that we weren't giving enough attention to access to information, which is clearly a vital element. And if we had had a small group, we would have missed that one and some major things.
And the second factor I think that is important to learn from this process is that human rights were the underlying factor. And they were the -- they were the seive so you could make sure that what went into this document was going to produce a people-centered Internet environment.
And just to say that two separate documents have come out of this in the last year. One was a feeling that the charter as it is is a fairly long piece of document and not that easy for newcomers to engage with. So we distilled it down to ten key rights and principles, and I've got lots of copies of those here. So if you're interested, please do grab a copy.
And we also had an international law expert look through the charter and produce a legal commentary, which was going through each of the articles in the charter and saying to what extent they are already established parts of international law, to what extent they are emerging, and to what extent they are still progressive.
So, a bit about the charter now. So the aim of the charter is to define what stakeholders need to do to produce a people-centered Information Society. We were building on and taking inspiration from the APC Internet charter, which you will hear more about in a bit, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Declaration of Principles and many other pertinent documents.
As a human rights document, it is aimed primarily at States. However, in the Declaration of Human Rights it says that every individual and organ of society has a duty to promote and respect Human Rights. And so we also envision this as being guiding for the private sector. And that is clearly an emerging area of law as we saw recently with Ruggies protect and remedy framework, that a growing understanding is that private sector as well have some responsibilities under Human Rights standards.
The charter is made up of 21 articles, covering the full range of Human Rights, not just civil and political rights. It was very important to us to also look at economic, social and cultural rights. And also to include Internet policy principles.
I'm not going to go through them all right now, because I think that would be a bit of a waste of time, but if you want to look at it on the Internet, rights and principles coalition Web site.
Instead I just chose a few articles which maybe are interesting for the discussion today. The first I wanted to talk about is access. I'd say this was one of the most controversial debates that we had within the coalition and from people outside the coalition.
On one side people said access to the Internet is not a Human right, that it will undermine the charter. That Human Rights have both positive and negative obligations on States and we should only be focusing on the negative ones, telling States to hands off, rather than to take positive action.
And then there were all the questions as well about what would that right actually mean? Who would have a responsibility? What type of access are we talking about?
On the other side, on the winning side I should say, was first the argument that without access we would be undermining the whole charter. We don't want to say that once you have access to the Internet, you have access to a whole load of rights, but until that point you have no rights. That seemed to make no sense to us. So that was one element.
The second one was the idea that access is fundamental to so many Human Rights, not just freedom of expression, but also education, assembly, association work, and many more. That in order to really fulfill any of those rights, access was necessary. So to that extent, is it de facto? Right?
And the final argument is that perhaps it is an emerging right. Last year we saw the BBC survey, I couldn't remember the exact percentage, very high percentage, high 80s, of people questioned, around 30 countries, both developed and developing, thought that access should be a right. And in these circumstances, we thought progressive and forward looking documents should definitely include it.
I also want to say at this point that Frank, who is over there, in his report didn't say that it was a right itself, but was a fundamental aspect of many other rights. And the way that we have approached access is that it both includes the negative, the hands off requirement of governments to not shut down the Internet, not produce the Internet kill switches, not take people off the Internet for violating intellectual property. But it also includes the positive element of promoting digital inclusion, particularly for marginalized groups.
And within the access section, we're also dealing a bit with quality of service, which should develop with technical possibilities, which is perhaps a bit of a cop out. But I think it's fair enough seeing that it would be hard to be more specific and probably counter productive.
And it also talks about people having the freedom of choice of system and software use, which is also viewed as an inputting aspect of access.
And it also includes network neutrality, which we think is an important aspect of access.
And I'm just going to talk about a few other points. Another one which is pertinent at the moment is around the right to culture. And we have taken the approach from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the need is really to balance the rights of the creator with the public interest. And so in that section, we include things like the need to promote cultural and linguistic diversity, the need to use and promote permissive licensing models, use of fair use limitation, and the promotion of free and open source software and open standards.
Another issue that we didn't know whether to include or not was the right to a legal remedy and fair trial. Some people thought that we shouldn't include it because it doesn't have a particular Internet dimension. But on the other hand this is a human right that seems to be forgotten a lot in our approaches to controlling the different content and activities online that we want to, which various actors want to control particularly in terms of filtering and blocking. And so in that circumstance we thought it was very important to promote the fact that this human right is still relevant today and it's still relevant in the Internet age.
And the final issue that I want to bring up is the right to an appropriate social and international order for the Internet. Under article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people are entitled to an appropriate international order in which their Human Rights can be realized. And that needs to be applied to Internet Governance as well. We need an order which will allow us to realise Human Rights. And that means both like effective participation in Internet Governance, which includes things like multilingualism, and that also means respecting principles such as openness, inclusiveness and accountability, and exercising those in a transparent and multilateral manner.
I'm going to conclude now, just to say that we are in quite a different space now than we were when we started making this charter, as evidenced by this actual panel.
And so I think within the IRP we have a bit of a decision that we need to make now. We can either focus still on talking within ourselves and trying to build our own perfect charter of what we think should be the way, or we need to start looking outward more and engaging with the processes which are going on often by actors who have much more economic and political power than us, and trying to have an impact there.
Thank you.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO:: Thank you, Dixie.
I'll ask Carlos Afonso to talk a bit about the principles of CGI.br.
>> CARLOS AFONSO: This effort by CGI.br is a product of a so-called multi-stakeholder organisation, which I would like to take about two or three minutes to explain.
The CGI.br was created in 1995, as I was beginning to say earlier. And it was constituted as a multi-stakeholder group, but the members of this group were selected by the government. In 2003, the members, the nongovernmental members, began to be selected by their own constitutions in an electoral process. And this is a significant difference between 1995 and 2003.
Next, please.
Contribution, this is the contribution of the steering committees. Eight representatives of the Federal Government. Today we have I think two -- one Minister of State -- two ministers of state as representatives. And other representatives are for their areas of Federal Government. One representative of Science and Technology, Secretariats of the States. And four representatives of nonprofit organisations, nonprofits, noncommercial organisations. Four representatives of business. Three representatives of the academic sector. And one senior expert chosen by consensus as part of this. So, 21 members.
And there is an executive Secretariat, which takes care of the operational matters pertaining to this board. So it's a Commission. It's not a formal institution, it cannot open bank accounts. It cannot manage projects, et cetera, et cetera. Okay?
Next please.
This is a formal institution which is linked to CGI.br. Several of the members are members of the CGI.br as well, but not necessarily so. There is a time lag between the periods in which you are a member of the administrative Council of NCBR, and which you are elected to the board of CGI.br. It has a number of functions, which is the registry and register of the .br ccTLD. It's in charge of coordinating the distribution of IP numbers. It operates several Internet exchange points in the main cities, which are neutral, nonprofit exchange points. It's run by a division of NIC.br called central.br. It maintains the Brazilian Cert. It's home of Cetic, which is a centre which has produced every year a statistical data on users and the penetration of the Internet in Brazil with various divisions.
It supports the Brazilian chapter of W3C. It works with the National Observatory in maintaining the National Atomic Clock and NTP service. Supports national and international projects and projects related to ICT. And provides technical assistance for managing ccTLDs in countries in Latin America and Africa. This is part of the activities of NIC.br which can open bank accounts and operate projects and so on.
So the principles, which is what we are interested in -- can you go to the next one, please? Okay.
That was in 2009. And it took more than a year to produce. Given the multi-stakeholder nature of the process, there were several interests which I can say that they were in conflict, but they were emphasizing different aspects of each of the principles which we are going to present. It started as a list of about 14 or 15 principles. It shortened to 8 or 7. And then it was enlarged again. And then ended up by coincidence as a list of ten principles, which is not to coincide with the ten commandments or anything like that.
Why we did that, we did that because we needed a set of concepts, which basically would orient our work. We have a significant presence on the Brazilian Internet in the matters that you have already seen, deriving from the projects that we operate.
And this was a guidance for us to orient new projects, orient -- or intervention or participation in several fora, et cetera.
But we wanted it also to be considered as a reference, not necessarily the reference of course, with its values and short comings, in order for a -- in a fora, national and international. So this was the main focus of the idea.
So there are ten principles and the first is basically freedom, privacy and Human Rights. And, basically, use of the Internet must be driven by the principles of freedom of expression, individual privacy and the respect for Human Rights, recognizing them as an essential to the preservation of a fair and Democratic society. Well not much to say here. I don't think anybody would disagree with that. I hope.
Second, please, Democratic and collaborative governance. Internet governance must be exercised in a transparent, multilateral and Democratic manner with the participation of the various sectors of society, therefore preserving and encouraging its character as a collective creation. This is from one of the Tunis principles, which was generated in Tunisia in the WCs process.
Third is universality principle. Internet access must be universal so it becomes a tool for human and social development, thereby contributing to the formation of an inclusive and nondiscriminatory society for the benefit of all.
And the fourth, diversity. I think this is one of the important principles, particularly given the cultural diversity in Brazil. And I understand that this can be applied everywhere. Cultural diversity must be respected and preserved and its expression must be stimulated without the imposition of belief or customs or values.
Five, innovation. Internet Governance must promote the continuous development and widespread dissemination of new technologies and models for access and use. No big deal here. It's -- I think it's pretty agreeable.
Six, I think this is important. And it took a bit of time for us. Unfortunately, Joy, I cannot give a picture of the process with which we arrived at this, like you described it in your presentation of the rights in the Dynamic Coalition. It would take a long time to do that.
So, network neutrality for us ended up as being filtering or traffic bridges must meet ethical and technical criteria only, excluding any political, commercial, religious and cultural factors in any other form of discrimination or preferential treatment. This is linked to the seventh. So we should -- which I present now.
The seventh, network unaccountability. Every action taken against illicit activity on the network must be aimed at those directly responsible for such activity, and not at the means of access and transport, always upholding the fundamental principles of freedom and respect of Human Rights.
Eight, functionality, security and stability. Network stability, security and overall functionality must be actively preserved through the adoption of technical measures that are consistent with international standards and encourage the adoption of best practices.
And nine, standardization and interoperability. This is basic. The Internet must be based on open standards that facilitate interoperability and enable all to participate in its development.
And ten, legal and regulatory environments. Legal and regulatory environments must preserve the dynamics of the Internet as a space for collaboration.
This set of principles was one of the basis used for the formulation of the so-called framework -- I don't know what the proper translation is. Civil framework?
>> Yes.
>> CARLOS AFONSO: Civil frameworks of rights which is in public consultation in Brazil, and we hope this will become a law, defining clearly what those civil rights are. And regarding these new technologies and particularly the Internet, which our junior here will be presenting later on.
Okay?
Thank you:.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you. And going from one international experience to an international experience, I would like to ask Wolfgang now to speak a bit on the Council of Europe Draft Declaration on Internet Governance Principles.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Thank you very much. The Declaration on Internet Principles of the Council of Europe goes back to a decision by the ministry conference of the Council of Europe in May 2005, when the 47 Member States of the Council of Europe just, you know, decided to look into the feasibility of a legal instrument for cross-border Internet. The question was, you know, people had the impression, the Member States had the impression that something should be done to manage this in particular with regard to the cross-border function of the Internet. And normally an intergovernmental organisation works on the basis of treaties, that means legal instruments, be hard law. But also the Council of Europe has a lot of declarations, so when the expert group was established based on the ministerial recommendation to study the feasibility of such a legal instrument, the first thing, you know, we discussed in the group was okay, what should we propose? A treaty like the Council of Europe hosts the Human Rights Convention and other treaties, or should we, you know, look into other options? And should it be just an intergovernmental instrument or should we look also into, based on the definition of Internet Governance, into -- should we include also other stakeholders in the process?
And I think when we started the debate, it was already the compassion of the expert group was multi-stakeholder. So I think it was a very wise decision that the Council of Europe said okay, you know, when we move into this still unknown territory, we cannot do it alone as government. So that means we have to open up. And the group was a small group. Only five people. But representing the various parts of the society and all the meetings where it was in an open environment, because we invited other experts, other groups, and there was a permanent consultation process backwards and forwards, you know, with the bureau and the CDMC. This is the sub minister committee which deals with it. So it means it was a process which went over two years.
But coming back to the two key questions we had in the beginning, legal instrument, yes or no. And you know intergovernmental instrument, yes or no.
With regard to the legal instrument, you know, we were a little bit inspired by the Human Rights legal framework. Because the Council of Europe is based on the Human Rights Convention. It's the only intergovernmental organisation which has really a court behind the Convention. The Human Rights court is linked to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. And if you go back to the history, then you could say okay, about Human Rights, but there was a discussion in the 19 and 20th centuries for the Kates. And only after World War II, after the shock, then governments realized something has to be done in this field.
And when Roosevelt chaired the committee, shed the same question, should we go to legally binding instruments first, or should we start with a soft law approach in the form of a declaration?
And I think that was a very wise decision. Because immediately three years after the end of World War II in 1948, the Human Rights Declaration could be adopted. And it needed another 20 years to negotiate the Conventions on social and economic rights. So if we really propose a legal instrument probably this will need 20 years until we have a result on the table.
So our approach was that it's much more better to take this approach, what was taken after World War II, and to look into general principles. And there is a great difference between principles and rights. So it means I enjoy very much your concept on Internet Rights and Principles, but you have to make a distinction between what a right and principle is.
Anyhow, we decided to move forward with a declaration of principles, let's say. A number of principles. And here it was very helpful to have both your work and the Brazilian ten principles. Because this with a, you know, the first thing really which was accessible at this time, and it was very balanced. And what Carlos just introduced, you know, was exactly what we had hoped for. It was an inspiration for other groups, and well drafted. And we took this.
And then when we discussed further we said okay, while the Council of Europe is an intergovernmental organisation, but the Internet, you know, has to be managed in a multi-stakeholder way and the question was how we approach this conflict between, let's say, multilateral treaties and multi-stakeholder environments. And our conclusion was in the very early days the work of the group was that we will continue to have a multilateral treaty system. But the multilateral treaties in the future will probably be embedded in a multi-stakeholder environment. That means the multi-stakeholder principle, you know, it's more or less the more general principle. And from this approach, then you can go to the specific rights, duties and responsibilities of governments.
Governments are an important stakeholder, though. That means they will disappear in the next 200 years and that means that the intergovernmental system will remain as an important element internationally. It has a specific role. It's not the only the band in town. There are other players, and the challenge is how to link this together.
And so far it was an interesting experiment. You know, how to move forward. And I think a very good start for this was that the Council of Europe is really the Human Rights organisation with its 47 Member States. And there was an agreement, you know, if Human Rights is the starting point for all policies and principles on the Internet, then it's much more easier to handle the other questions.
The first principle in our declaration is Human Rights, rule of law, democracy. Very similar to the Brazilian declaration.
And then in the second principle we say this can be achieved only if all stakeholders are working together. So the multi-stakeholder governance principle is our second priority.
And then we come to the role of States and all the other principles, which has been partly or the similar language in the Brazilian document, like open interInternet, end-to-end principle for the architecture, like empowerment of users, and all this.
I think the -- that's my -- you know, I went to this proposal issue, the relationships between hard and soft law. The soft law approach enables us to come quickly to a solution. And you have heard the ministerial committee adopted this declaration just a couple days before the IGF here. And more or less this was adopted in a way that you could say this has entered into something utilitory. You have a paragraph that says that the governments hope that this can be now further enhanced to other stakeholders.
And what we propose now to the Council of Europe is to see this as a Phase I, because it was adopted by the governments, and now to move to a phase two where we start a process of multi-stakeholder collaboration. And to get the commitments not only of governments to the principles, but also of other stakeholders, private sector, private sector, Civil Society, and also organisations. So it was Google, Facebook, the IGF, ICANN can also subscribe and commit themselves to these frameworks. We call this a framework of commitment. So it means the declaration of principles adopted by the government is not the end of the story.
But looking forward that means that we have to have indeed the commitment of the other stakeholders. Otherwise these principles remain empty principles.
We had a workshop on Monday, we called it a constitutional moment in the history of Internet. And indeed, you know, if you compared it with the Human Rights Declaration, this was also a constitutional moment. Because based on the Human Rights Declaration, then you can develop a body of law, a body of various other instruments. And so far to have first such a clarification about framework, I think it will be very helpful for future efforts to organise, govern, regulate or whatever, small pieces of the Internet, because there will be no general legislation for the Internet. You have to go piece by piece. But then you have always to identify whether a regulation is needed or whether just a policy is needed.
Sometimes regulation is not needed because we have enough regulation already for many things. And if you look deeper into an issue, then you say okay, what is the difference? Whether you steal money online or off line, and you have enough law which can fight against these claims.
Sorry for being too long.
>> CARLOS JR: Thank you very much. And now I'd like to go back to a national experience and ask Romulo Neves to do his presentation. I note that I'm quoted Carlos junior. Thank you for that, daddy. So go ahead.
>> ROMULO NEVES: Thank you, Junior.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: You are a member of the family as well. You know, the big Portuguese families in Brazil. Go ahead.
>> ROMULO NEVES: Well, my task here is to talk about our civil framework of the Internet. That it's not kind of principles that should be adopted internationally, but a kind of framework. We think there is caution about the very important subjects related to the Internet could be discussed in Brazil, within a legal framework, comprehensive framework.
The demand for such a framework appeared within the Civil Society. It has come from the Civil Society. And this took place in the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee and it was adopted especially by the faculty -- school of law of the foundation, Getulio Vargas Foundation, and then adopted by the Ministry of Justice. Just a bracket. There is some ways in Brazil that the people can propose directly a law in Brazil. But it's needed nowadays one million signatures to try to send some proposal to the Congress. Just to have an idea, with 3,000 votes you have a representative in the Congress. But to propose a law in Brazil directly, you need at least 1 million signatures, because it's 1 percent of the total of the electorates in Brazil. There are a number of people trying to put that number down to 400,000, but right now it's like that.
But to propose a law you need 1 million people supporting it formally. So the decision was the law or the proposal should be presented in a Web site by the Ministry of Justice. It was a very good thing in that the Minister of Justice has at that moment a very young team, and they accepted the challenge to start a huge open consultant through the Internet. The idea was since the framework is about the Internet, the consultation would also be online. So you can find the Web site. Afterward I'll give you the link. But it's in Portuguese. But, just to take a look.
And then people started to comment to give ideas to suggest it was a two phased open consultancy. The Ministry of External Administrations was demanded to search for experience like that around the world. So he made an international consultation through our embassies to have -- to gather information about such kind of proposal or initiatives around the world. This material, this information, was sent to the Minister of Justice. And then in August of 2010, the consultation was finished, and then started the work of harmonization. I don't know if that word exists in English. But in Portuguese it exists. And it's the -- it's the work to put it into a framework, into -- into law proposition. And it's very hard, because it was two phases of four months, I think.
The total period was one year. So they have a lot of material to organise and to harmonize. And in the end of 2010, we have a government change in Brazil. Politically, it was a continuation. But even in such a consideration, you have change in a lot of ministries. We have a coalition. So the ministry A went to the party B and blah, blah, blah. And we have certain delay. Because in Brazil, when the executive power has a proposal, it needs to send the Congress by the presidency.
So, we had a delay. But the proposition was sent to the Congress last August, last August, and it's already being analyzed by the representatives.
Well, there is a proposal to attach to this proposition the other laws that already are there related to issues about the Internet. Like cyber crimes, like information security, like other issues. And it explains a bit the -- how the idea was born. Which this propositions, some of them are older than the civil framework.
And we're trying to focus on very specific elements of the Internet regulation in Brazil. So, there was a threat, let's say a threat in the Brazilian legislation to adopt some laws that was very specific in some very specific points that could maybe be in contradiction with other kinds of law also related to the Internet, but dealing with another specific issue.
So the idea was to put them together and guarantee that such laws were not in contradiction one with the other.
Well, the thing that I would like to call your attention here is that it was a very creative way to put it forward, the very nature of the Internet, to regulate itself. As I have said, if it was just by the Civil Society, it would be very hard to put it forward because you need a lot of support. And even in a huge country as Brazil, to have one million people supporting such kind of law it would take too much time. It would be necessary a lot of organisation and money and it would be hard.
But then within the Ministry of Justice, governmental of course body, took the responsibility to try to organise the discussion and put it forward in an official way. It was a very good example of interchange, of collaboration, and maybe in some months -- well, Brazilian Congress is not so fast, but we hope in some months we have a Brazilian Internet framework already passed and approved by the Congress. Probably Carlos Afonso will talk more about the subject within the law. But the process is some kind like that. Thank you.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you. I will not go into a formal presentation. I would like just to go through some of the articles of the Marco Civil Review. That is a Portuguese name that can be translated into civil rights framework for the Internet in Brazil. So we have like in this part here of the screen, I'm not sure if you'll be able to read it properly. But if you go a little bit down, so just to -- it's okay. Thank you.
So just to explain a little bit. We have this test as a result of this consultation that was mentioned. We have received more than 2000 comments from people, from Civil Society, government, law firmS, enterprises and companies, academia, technical community. So it's very interesting to see the diversity in the quality of the stakeholders that were presented in this consultation that resulted in this text. It was hard to come up with a text after receiving 2000 comments. So this for us was quite new. So we are still in the process of studying and analyzing and to try to come up with best practice on the process itself.
But certainly it was hard for us to come up with wording to compile and to be something that related to the majority of the comments that we received.
One of our great challenges was how to address people who have contributed in the Marco Civil Review process for them to say my comment was well received and adopted in that specific provision, and why my comment and why my argument was not taken into account. So what was the reason behind that?
So this is the process that is still an ongoing learning process for ourselves, to learn how to better address those questions.
But certainly we have as a result of this text and in article 2 we have something that connects directly to what Carlos Afonso was mentioning about the ten principles of the Internet Governance from the CPI.BR. So a number of principles that were mentioned by Carlos Afonso were contemplated in the first articles of the Marco Civil Review.
So you have cooperation, plurality, diversity and Human Rights and the exercise of assistanceship, which is the environment as the basis for the regulation of Internet in Brazil. Of course it's a more broad article. It's more of a broad position. But it's important to have that in order to connect directly to the work that CGI.br has been doing and to create this connection to the work that has been conducted in the previous years.
Article 3 of the Marco Civil Review is also interesting, because it deals with privacy and protection of personal data. And this is a very sensitive issue. Because Brazil does not have a framework on privacy, a specific general law on privacy. So the Marco Civil Review had to be very aware of its borders, in order not to conflict with other processes. They are going on nowadays in Brazil and the creation of a law for privacy and data protection is one of those cases. So, we have privacy and personal data as principles for the regulation of Brazilian Internet.
As well as the seventh item is interesting, because it says the preservation of the participatory nature of the Internet as one of the principles of every single regulation of the Internet in Brazil.
If we go a bit down further, on article 4, could you please? Article 4 deals with the objectives of the regulation of Internet in Brazil. And this article is interesting because it talks about the promotion of innovation. And article 4, item 4 is very interesting because it promotes the compliance with the open technological standard to allow communication, accessibility, interoperability between databases. So it's a commitment to the further regulation that is applied to the Internet in Brazil is committed to open standard. So it's good to have that as one of the objectives for the new regulation of Brazilian Internet.
Going further down, let's go to article 8. Or even better, 9. Article 8 through 9 talks about the preservation of rights to privacy. And so 8 says that the preservation of the right to privacy and freedom of expressions in communications is the condition for the full exercise of the right of Internet access. And this is important because the right to access Internet is contemplated as one of the principles. And in a number of occasions in the Marco Civil Review, you have the affirmation of the right of access as a fundamental right. It can be a statement like this one, or it can be in situations in which you prohibit States and private parties to degrade or to shut down the access to the Internet through nonlegal reasons.
And it connects to the net neutrality provision on article 9 that says the party responsible for transmission switching or routing of data has the obligation of granting equal treatment to every data package, with no distinction by content, origin and destination, service, terminal or application.
Any traffic discrimination or degradation that does not arise out of the technical requirements necessary to equality provisions of service is prohibited in accordance to further regulation.
So the Marco Civil Review is intended to be the first step for the Brazilian Internet. So our idea is to set the principles. So our idea is not to go that much into detail, but to set the standards and to set the borders in which further regulation will be encompassed.
Go to article 15, please.
Article 15 was the most controversial one, and then I finish my comment on the Marco Civil Review. In the consultation, the first version of this article that now is article 15 that relates to liability of intermediaries, the first version of this article, it contemplated a position on the article that is a little bit similar to the notice and take down with some difference from the experience that the U.S. Has on the notice and take down for the removal of content online. We received huge criticism at the Marco Civil Review platform, at the Web site, from the users, from the community of the Marco Civil Review, as well as from the press, as well as from a number of players that said like this is censorship. Because content will be removed from the Internet without judicial order.
So we listened to the criticism that we received in the consultation. We changed the wording of the draft law, and now we have this article 15. That is the wording that has been sent to the Congress. That says that except otherwise established by law, the Internet application provider, this is like ISPs, can only be responsible for the damage caused by content generated by third parties if, after receiving a specific judicial order, they do not take action to, in context of the services and in the established timeframe make unavailable the infringing content. So we removed the notification parameter to a judicial order as a way to assert civil responsibility into the Internet, for torts damage.
So those are a number of topics of the Marco Civil Review. There are a bunch of other articles that created some controversy. We have unfortunately a data retention provision one year that has been the subject of a long debate in our consultation. And some good provisions on open government that had been contemplated in some way in the new legislation that has been issued last month by the President of Brazil on open government standards for the Brazilian government.
So this is just a general idea of the Marco Civil Review in addition to what the leader has said.
So switching from the Marco Civil Review to the last experience that we had to showcase and to bring to light to discuss, I would like to ask Joy to join the presentation on APC's work on Internet governance principles.
>> Can you tell me what the difference is between the ten principles that Carlos described earlier, and the 15 articles that are in the Marco Civil Review? Are they the same? Are they different? Is one legal and the other not? Can you just clarify that, please.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: And just to help the transcriptions, when you see Marcos Review, we are talking about Marco Civil Review. That is a Portuguese accent that can be hard to track. So, the difference is, aged Carlos Afonso, please correct me if I'm mistaken here, the ten principles of the CGI.br were adopted by the Brazilian Internet steering committee. So it was the result of a long discussion as principles that should guide the regulation of the Internet. But the Brazilian Internet steering committee is not a regulatory body for the Brazilian Internet. It deals with the registration of domain names through the NIC.br as Carlos Afonso mentioned. And it has consultation qualities, abilities, they are often requested, and has the government represented in its body to create some expert advice in the way that the Internet is addressed in Brazil, in technical and legal issues as well.
And the Marco Civil Review, it's a different process that is now a bill of law that is being discussed in the international Congress.
So we have first this discussion on the Brazilian Internet steering committee, and having this discussion, and having a huge debate on the cyber crime view in Brazil that generated the civil rights framework initiative. We end up having this initiative that was a partnership between the Ministry of Justice in 2009 and our law school and the Getulio Foundation online, in which people can create this view of law that was sent to the Congress last month.
>> Are these in harmony with each other or in any way in conflict with each other?
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: No, in harmony. So this was one of the aspects that were commented a lot in the Marco Civil Review platform. A number of people --
>> Can I just ask that -- just in the interest of time. If we could move to the last one and you guys --
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: I'm sorry about that. We get excited when we talk about the Marco Civil Review. Is it clear? It's okay.
Sorry, joy.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: That's all right. We have a gala dinner tonight. I'm sure you will have an interesting discussion.
I'm feeling the weight of responsibility at 5:40 on the second of the second day, in a hot room, where everybody is busy doing their e-mails, and trying to stimulate you. So I have no PowerPoint. So I would just try to make my points powerful instead.
I said previously that essentially IWP is an Internet rights charter. You all have charters and principles. At the end of the day, these are just pieces of paper. They only have the meaning and power and moral that is right that we give them by how we behave and how we act. And I have seen previously in this forum that, in my view, Human Rights are as fundamental to Internet Governance as Internet protocols are on the DNS.
And to illustrate my point, I'll talk about the Internet protocol. I'll talk about the DNS and some of the core values which underline that system, which I think are usefully brought to be in the discussion about the Internet Governance and rights.
And my first point, really, is to recall -- and I do this from my experience as a ccTLD regulator -- is to recall in the early days Internet pioneers recognized that Internet functions would themselves require trust. And that in fact the Internet was a public commons that relied on the good conduct of those who used to it maximize it to its full potential. And while the technical matters that we comment on today are different, I think it's mindful to recall how it was that the Internet itself was created. And that was through a very Democratic process. It was through a process that the technical community pioneered. And I appreciate there are pioneers and gurus in the room present today and those who have gone before.
And I recall the process of a request for comments on a version of protocols, and the one I would particularly comment on is RFC 1591.
And that is that those who operate CCDOD domains are doing so in the public good and they should be able to carry out their things in an equal, just, and as a competent job. And the manager is spoken of as a trustee to the global Internet community.
And I quote, "concern about rights and ownership of domains are not appropriate. It's appropriate to be concerned about responsibilities and service to the community." (Quoting material)
What does this have to do with Human Rights? Well, it's fundamentally a call to the moral authority of the public commons and how we behave, how we regulate, and how we engage in it.
And the other thing of course is that RFCs were adopted not by vote. They were adopted through a very Democratic process of rough consensus, where the contest was a bevel of ideas and practical things that would work.
And so if we turn to Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a binding document. It has only has a moral legal force that nations of the earth gave it when they signed on and said these are our basic Human Rights that we as governments, all governments, all governments who are members of the United Nations have ascribed to.
So I think when we are talking about this contest of ideas and this notion of rights, the question I guess is what are we building into the movement around Internet Rights and Principles and Governance?
The technical community I think has led the way. I think the Human Rights community has led the way. And I think Internet Governance provides an opportunity to bring the best of these together to create something more than a simple restatement or reapplication of existing law to this new forum. Although those things are essential and critical and indeed that is why APC developed this Internet Rights Charter, because we were struggling to frame Human Rights in the context of this new paradigm.
The other point to note in the Human Rights framework is that governments are not rights holders. We as human beings are rights holders. Governments are duty bearers. They are obliged to respect, protect, and uphold our rights. And one of the tensions we are seeing, and I think one of the reasons why, to answer the question that was posed to us, why are we reaching for rights frameworks? It's because we are increasingly seeing that what is done in the name of our rights by duty bearers is increasingly raising questions about the realization of our rights, whether it's filtering, whether it's Internet content blocking, and many, many other questions, some of which you touched on. And some would say that the question is even becoming problematic. I'm not sure I would go that far.
So my concern I suppose when it comes to this question of rights is it's wonderful to see, I suppose, what I earlier called elsewhere in this forum, the blossoming and flourishing and blooming of rights everywhere. The Brazilian initiatives, you know, the demonstration that they are giving others about how to have multi-stakeholder forums, and the IGF is a place where new and multiple forums of participation are occurring. And why are we doing this? Because in a sense rights and rights principles provide not the place for merely an assertion of our rights, but also an articulation of our duties and obligations and a negotiation through Democratic processes of where we find balance and points of sometimes very rough consensus or sometimes no consensus at all.
So I suppose my question, you know, do we need a metered principles document? Do we need a stronger articulation of rights framework on Internet Governance? To that, I'm not sure. But I would like to see a greater critique and a greater realization that actually Human Rights are infused in the fabric of the Internet Governance arrangements, particularly across and outside government arrangements, and that those are the points I think where we can dialog and say do we need another forum? Do we need to create another process?
Or shall we watch with curiosity and wonder at the principles and rights that are being articulated? And participate in those discussions and dialogs, with a view to looking at this process as an evolutionary one, rather than a final point in time, where somehow our rights are magicically crystalized forever in the final, the "Final" statement of what our rights are and also what our obligations are?
So with those few words, and a call to wake up in the last few minutes of our session, I close there and open the, on behalf of Carlos, the floor for dialog.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you, Joy. And it's totally my fault for leaving little time for discussion. But let's make the best of it. So I'll take questions from the floor. So -- and so let's go. We have like 1, 2, 3, and 4. Okay.
So, Vint, please.
>> VINT SERF: First of all, I really want to applaud the notion that we talk about the environment that we wish we could have in this network, and second we pay attention not only to the rights and privileges that we want, but the obligations that we have.
There are many parties and many actors that make this network function, and if we can characterize some of the obligations and responsibilities that we undertake in order to achieve the environment that we want, I think we will achieve a balance. And I'm not sure that we talked enough about obligations and responsibilities.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you Vint. Just go through all the four questions that we had in the first. So, Bill? Were you in the queue?
>> BILL DRAKE: Thanks. Sorry. Bill Drake. All these efforts to formulate principles, I think, are interesting. And one of the points that Carlos made at the outset, I think, really hasn't been picked up on much.
What is it about this historical moment that we seem to have all these initiatives going on? And one, you know, in part that is because the Net and the environment around the Net has matured to a certain point. Interests have configured themselves around the space and people start looking around for ways to try to provide guidance on certain things.
The problem I have sometimes with this is that the process isn't always driven by a need to resolve particular types of problems. You know, it's like the old notion of whether institutional form should follow function or not. Right? I mean, if you've got a particular functional problem that you're trying to redress, you go about trying to work through what types of principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, you know, instruments, institutional frameworks you have to devise to resolve that problem.
A lot of these have sort of been, I felt like, not addressing particular defined bounded problems, but rather people sitting down and trying to say let spread out the space and say what are the things that we think are good that should shape the space. So rather than working sort of inductively to resolve particular problems, we are doing this top down exercise of thinking about how to visualize something. And we end up with lists of principles. Governments have one, OCD has one. Everybody has one. But they are floating in the air by themselves. You know, there isn't an elaborated set of stuff below it.
(Phone ringing)
And many of them could be interpreted in zillions of ways. You could spend years, months, years to come up with a principle like everything should be good on the Internet. You look at some of the stuff that the Chinese and Russians put into their list, code of conduct, and they are kind of empty until they are really specified in relation to particular problems.
And I wish that there was a way that we could engage more at that level, rather than just to the level of creating top level global principles, because to me they often end up feeling like they are either stating the obvious or they are kind of empty or they will not be implemented or they will be implemented in a million different ways. And I don't know how useful an exercise that becomes, ultimately.
>> BILL SMITH: I wanted to echo Vint's comments. The discussions and presentations I thought were excellent. But for me, I was somewhat surprised by them. I thought we were going to talk about the principles, as principles for Internet Governance. So for me those principles would be things like transparency, openness, inclusivity.
I absolutely agree with the rights as I've seen them expressed here and elsewhere, and the principles that may be behind those, but I was expecting a different conversation. And I think only the Council of Europe actually, their ten principles, addressed any of these things with respect to what Internet Governance, the principles upon which Internet Governance itself should be based.
So... I ask if any other panelists want to respond to that.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you, Edwardo.
>> Thank you, Edwardo, from the centre for studies on freedom of expression and access to information.
It's a quick question or a quick comment on a question. I agree with the idea that normally it's much better to start with soft law and then pass to hard law. And this is what happened not only in the Human Rights environment, it is true, be I mean in the -- in the American system, for example, we passed first the declaration of the rights and duty of the man before the UN Human Rights Declaration and the Convention on the Human Rights.
The same thing happened in the anticorruption. We started with soft law declaration by the countries, resolution by the GA and now we have a Convention of anticorruption at the UN 11. Those are normal processes.
But the Internet is something different. My question: If the idea to start with soft law, having in mind to have hard law at some point, the timing is something that concerns a little bit of me. I think that we are going to have soft law, plus soft law, plus soft law, because we never will have hard law because the timing of the government to pass treaties that are binding are not, you know, in accordance with the timing of the evolution of technology, particularly the Internet technology.
So I'm not saying that we need to treaty right now, because that will not happen. But my question is: What we have in mind when Civil Societies like global partners are working with this charter, or the Council of Europe is working on a declaration, what is the final goal of all of this? Is it really -- if that is the case, I have some concerns, because of the timing.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you. We have time for like two more questions, and then we open up for the panel. Go ahead.
So we have three questions. So go. Yep, please.
>> SEBASTIAN: Thank you. Sebastian, Singapore Internet Research Centre.
I wouldn't want us to think that the Human Rights concerns that have to do with the Internet or Internet Governance is special content or is a component of Human Rights. Human Rights are Human Rights. What I think is that we can think of or work towards integrating Human Rights concerns having to do with the Internet with the rest of the international Human Rights regime, and then we look at the uniqueness of the Internet related Human Rights, see what kinds of instruments we need to put in place to bring Human Rights, Internet Human Rights related international cooperation, so that it doesn't appear as if we are inviting States, say, to constitute a new regime based on the Internet. Because States tend to be resilient against forces of Human Rights protection.
But I think the steps being made so far are important and it's important now that we collaborate through regional IGF, Human Rights organisations, start engaging regional IGF across the world, so that each of them begin to debate, to engage and to discuss Human Rights issues, so that quickly and more effectively we can bring it to the agenda of the Internet international community.
Thank you.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: By the end of the table, very quick on the comments.
>> Well, I recall how surprised and pleased I was when the Brazilian principles were introduce at the Vilnius meeting last year. And I think discussions like this have a certain helpful -- bring a certain helpful perspective to the issues of what individual countries and organisations should and will do in the future.
However, I tend to look at these discussions and ask how can they be brought down to ground? How can they be made practical? What can we get out of them that is tangible? And I think ultimately it comes down to sort of how we view the Internet itself.
To me, and I don't know that everybody would share this view, but to me the Internet is a method of interconnecting a lot of individual components and capabilities and resources, whether they be network, computers, applications. I mean, it's the protocols that really make the Internet what it is. And in some sense they are the technical governing factor. We can talk about the social institutions that help to evolve them, and that sort of spread the word, but ultimately the only thing that you can expect is that the operators and owners and proprietors of these different capabilities will adopt rules and principles subject to the laws in which they operate, and that is ultimately where the rubber hits the road.
So when we talk about rights, they may be rights that one derives in a country by virtue of what a government does. They can apply to a given operator or applications provider of some sort. But I don't think we will ever get to the point where there are specific legal constructs that apply to the Internet as a whole, protocol wise or other, because it's just too broad a concept. It's got to be applied in a local area by a local authority that has responsibility for either administering something or governing something.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you. I think we have two more. Very quickly on the back.
>> ANDREW KUSHMAN: Andrew Kushman from Microsoft. Thank you for an interesting presentation on the Brazilian Internet experience, very helpful and informative.
I was almost expecting a further discussion about the recommendations, seeing how that built with CGR.br and then to Marcos Civil I was expecting to discuss the recommendations that came from the IBSA meeting, the multi-stakeholder meeting. So I'm wondering if you have comments about that.
And then a follow on to the question earlier, are these in harmony or... aligned?
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Okay. Thank you. So that brings us to the gala dinner certainly. The last comment. Frank? Go ahead.
>> FRANK: Thank you Affonso.
First of all, I would like to congratulate the panel. I was very eager to see the different approaches. One of the issues that we have to be very clear is that one of the reasons why we're doing this, and I think everyone is doing this, is because it's going to happen anyway. I mean, this initiative of China and Russia as a court of conduct to be discussed in the General Assembly is moving and moving fast. And I think it's important that the EU has a set of principles and others, because I think it's good to balance off some of these initiatives.
Secondly, I think what we have said already, and we have mentioned it with the new charter, the idea that in terms of Human Rights, I believe that we're not dealing in establishing new Human Rights, but we are dealing in establishing principles or guidelines that would decide what will be the governability of the Internet. And I think this may be crucial and I'd love to hear the example of Brazil, where one of the articles was modified precisely because at the end it was discussed in a Human Rights framework and it would be censureship and only the take down notice would happen if it was done by a Judge. So this is a good example of applying Human Rights standards and interpretation.
So one of the probable ideas which we should jointly push if this is a consensus is that even if principles are being drafted around the world and in regions, we should draw a consensus that should be inspired from a Human Rights perspective.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you, Frank.
We are over our time so I would just pass to our panelists to make one quick final comment.
I would say that it's almost a principle not to go for a lot of details on the APS discussion in our discussion on principles here. But I'll please ask the panelists to speak briefly just for us to make a closing here. Joy, if you want to start as you were last.
>> JOY LIDDICOAT: I think that's fair. I had a very concrete suggestion, and that is that I think the governments which are proposing resolutions in relation to Internet Governance, this is my personal view, not the view of APC, I think they should bring them to the IGF. This is the place to discuss this. It's not amongst governments in a forum that is not multi-stakeholder. And I think that would be a very good concrete recommendation or suggestion or outcome from this proposal.
We would love to discuss those proposals. We would love to have multiple perspectives and have them here, where maybe we can discuss them openly.
Thank you.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Just before giving the floor for quick comments from the panelists, I just want to remind you that we have on Friday a workshop in conference room 2 on Global Internet Public Policy, A Gap, and this could be a good continuity to the discussions that we have begun here. That's almost like a movie to be continued. I'm sorry that we ran out of time here.
I would like to give the floor to the other panelists if they want to make final comments. So please... let's go backwards in the order. So that will be yours. Romulo.
>> ROMULO NEVES: That's me? Okay. Very brief. Bill, you asked me for some provocation in the beginning. I'm afraid sometimes we are a little bit realistic. Because this is going forward as frank Larue told us. This is going forward. We have to participate. We have to put our voice on it. We cannot say it's useless, first thing.
And the second thing is I totally agree with Joy that this is the constitution, the place for this debate, and it's why we bring our document to be discussed here.
And very finish, the milestone of such discussions are important. We don't know the end of the process, but the milestone that points, that where some decisions, some doubts, some problems were solved and new problems will appear. And I totally agree with Edwardo, this is a very serious problem of our issue here. But the milestone should be evaluated, I think. Then, we create new problems and then solve new problems and so on.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you.
Wolfgang.
>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: I can only agree with what Vint said, that there are no freedoms without responsibilities and no rights without duties. And so far we should have -- we have to look into both directions.
And by the way, the Council of Europe adopted another document which more specifically tries to define as a first step specific rights, duties and responsibilities for States. Because you have to be very specific if you come to the concept of rights and duties and responsibilities. You know, just to avoid -- to be in the sky and then to have something which is nice to everybody but doesn't help.
And this brings me to the second point, the binding law question. I think it was made clear. It's totally unrealistic to regulate the Internet as a whole. But you can identify some arenas, very small slices, where you probably agree, after a long discussion process, a binding law would be helpful. But then first clarify the issue, define the issue, what you want to regulate, and not just say that we need regulation. What do you want to achieve as to regulation? I think this is important.
And the final thing, I call it the principle tsunami. We have endless wakes. The parties justify their bad or good behavior by referring to a principle that was elsewhere adopted and say it was laid out there. But you have to come to I wouldn't say synchronization or harmonization, but as Joy said, that's the only way out. We have to bring this to the table the NGOs declarations and the governmental declarations and the principles.
We have four years to go with the Internet Governance Forum. This will take time but this would be a good outcome for the Internet Governance Forum if they come in 2013 or 2014 with something that goes beyond the governmental principles or the private sector principles or the Civil Society principles and would have commitments for all stakeholders, which then will help to keep the Internet open, free, and secure.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you. Carlos?
>> CARLOS AFONSO: Very briefly, I thank Joy Liddicoat for the excellent remarks. And I would just add that this civil framework is not coming out of the blue. It's also a countervailing, trying to be a countervailing response to many bills of law, which we have in Congress. We sure could make even a Bald man have their hair raised, no? And it's a really hair raising thing.
(Chuckles)
And some of these are proposed out of ignorance for Parliamentians, but others are proposed out of very deep economic political interest, and we have to have some framework in order to set the stage and the political stage and the legal stage to countervail these proposals.
So this is very important to take into account.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Dixie?
>> DIXIE HAWTIN: Thank you for letting me be on this great panel. And just to highlight again that Human Rights apply as much online as they do off line and that I welcome some of the proposals that went on about making a truly multi-stakeholder approach. And maybe the starting basis for that would be if next year the main theme for the IGF would be Human Rights.
Thank you.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO: Thank you everyone. I'm sorry that we don't have much time to go further on the discussion, but I'm sure we will take the opportunity of having everyone here join together for an event and to take this opportunity to engage in conversation after the closing of the session.
Thanks for the participants that engaged remotely and the person responsible for the technical organisation of our session. And thanks for the audience and for the panelists who took the time to spend here with us in this discussion.
Thank you very much. See you tomorrow.
(Applause)
(End of session, 18:12)