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Internet Governance Forum 9 December 2016 0900 OF12:  Commonwealth
Telecommunications Organization (CTO)

(For remote captioning accuracy, clearly state your name before speaking)

>> MODERATOR: Welcome to this important meeting of the commonwealth Group,
and this is has become a tradition at all ICANN and IGF meetings.  We have
an agenda, which I will project on the screen.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Yes.  For those just coming in, I was expressing my
welcome message to everyone, and I'm happy to see a cross-representation
here from Africa, from the Pacific and from Sri Lanka and so on, and also
our friends from the Caribbean and Europe and the U.S. as well. This
meeting is one of our regular meetings which we normally have with the
ICANN and IGFs, but before I proceed, let me extend my official
congratulations to Mark sitting on my left, who we effectively promoted as
the vice chair of the GAC.  It's a new culture -- (Applause) -- it's a new
culture which we have established within the CTO to promote everything
Commonwealth, include Comment candidates, and we've achieved this in a
number of areas.  At the ITU, we had a number of elections to ITU study
groups, and one of the most contested was Study Group 2 chairperson, and we
eeffectively supported the gentleman who won the election, who is from the
UK and also -- that was a very hotly contested election, and we did
everything spo support the candidates, and the EG elect, so if you're
thinking for contesting for an election, once you're a Commonwealth member,
please let us know.  We put the oil in the campaign for you. Let me also
thank my young sister here.  Bernice was agreed to do notes for this
meeting, even though I know it's the fish record, but she has kindly agreed
to write the notes.  She's a student in one of the universities in Kenya,
right, and she takes this as part of her internship. Yes.  We have an
agenda, which is projected on the screen.  Okay.  The scaend is very
simple.  We've -- agenda is very simple.  We've done the first one.  We go
to the second.  There are just a few points.  One is to hear from Mark, who
is going to be telling bus the Commonwealth principles on Internet
Governance, and I will provide you with an update at what we're doing at
CTO headquarters.  Mark will come back to talk about the output documents
and the outputs, and then our friend Tracy from Trinidad & Tobago, who will
give us an update on the Commonwealth cyber crime initiative, and then
we'll have closing remarks.  We wanted this to be effective and efficient,
and by TEP ten we should be out of this place, so at this point, let me
pass the mic to Mark, who's going to look at the second issue.

>> MARK CARVELL: Yes.  Thank you.  Thank you, Shola.  So this agenda item
is about the application of the Commonwealth principles to Internet
governance, and the principles we're talking about here are those that were
agreed for the Commonwealth cybergovernance model at the -- they were
agreed at the Commonwealth ICT minister's forum, as a guide for members to
plan and implement actions in policy development, recreation, and
legislation, cross-border collaboration, and capacity building, so that's
the purpose of the -- of those principles, and they're derived from the
Commonwealth values set out in the charter that was agreed back in March
2013, as I recall. Of course, the charter emphasized the importance of
democracy, development, human rights, and the rule of law, international
peace and security, and economic development, free flow of information, and
so on, so Kee values that -- key values that relate directly to Internet
governance policy, so I will just run through the four main principles with
a cross-reference to where I see Commonwealth action is taking place to
implement each of the four. The first one, we contribute to a safe and
effective global cyberspace, and here I picked out some of the Kee elements
under this principle most relevant to what we've been discussing throughout
this Internet Governance Forum here in Guadalajara, so the elements I see
under this principle, which we should bear in mind are multistakeholder,
transparency and collaborative governance, net neutrality, interon built,
safety, and affordable access. So how is this principle being applied?
Well, we have participation very actively here in the global Internet
Governance Forum, and this is a Commonwealth subset of that, if you like,
as the Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum, so we are actively
supporting multistakeholder dialogue in these key international events,
and, of course, there are many regional initiatives and national
initiatives throughout the Commonwealth membership implementing this
principle. Second principle, actions to support broader economic and social
development.  Here the key elements I identified under this principle are
enabling innovation, cultural and linguistic diversity, digital literacy,
and international cooperation, and, again, of course, we are engaged as
Commonwealth members in many of the international discussions here at the
IGF and at the national and regional level. Third principle, tackling
cybercrime, and key aspects of this principle we should bear in mind are
collaboration and doing this in a very multistakeholder process, involving
working alongside the private sector, technical community, and others, law
enforcement agencies and others with an interest in tackling this very
important aspect of the fact of life today that cybercrime is a big
challenge for all stakeholders. And, of course, our main way of
implementing that is through the Commonwealth Cybercrime Initiative, and
Tracy HackShaw to my left is going to give us an update shortly in our
agenda on that. Fourth principle, rights and responsibilities.  Here the
Kee aspects are defending human rights, freedom of expression, and access
to knowledge leading to empowerment, and protecting vulnerable members of
the community. So, again, I think the record is very clear about the
Commonwealth membership committed to implementing this principle through
all national and regional initiatives and discussing them within the -- in
the international fora. So those are the principles.  I open the floor,
really, to comments on how we can do more to apply them and what is going
on, perhaps, in your particular areas of activity.  Shola, thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much, Mark.  That was a very brief overview
of what the Commonwealth is doing in the area of Internet Governance. What
I would like to do is to ask give your comments, ask questions, or maybe
share some of of your activities in your region with us.  If you don't want
to speak, I will force you to speak. Well, let me go to the nearest country
here, the Cooks Island.  What are you doingThere?  What are you doing
there?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, this is my first (Off microphone) one of the
things -- sorry.  One of the things about this particular aspect in
relation to the Commonwealth -- the Cook Islands, in fact is -- I don't
think we're actually a member -- we participate in the Commonwealth games
and all the other Commonwealth activities, but we are actually connected
through New Zealand, which we are a predict rat of, and there have been a
lot of situations, for example -- this is outside of this particular
situation, but there have been lots of situations where we haven't been
able to participate because we aren't members.  But at the same time, we
still consider ourselves members of the Commonwealth, and in relation to
this -- I'm not quite sure whether our prime minister actually attends
Commonwealth minister's meetings, does he?  Shoal shoal no.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, so one of the things I know is a real issue within
the Pacific is that the -- there is a government -- government will to
actually participate more actively in development of Internet governance.
In fact, at the moment, there's a preoccupation with connectivity and
affordability and all those sorts of issues, so when it comes to sort of
like the next level of sort of governance -- eGovernance areas, it's only
people perhaps like myself who is very concerned about the select
development happens before we're actually ready to put it into place, and
that would be sort of like a pretty general -- you know, it's, I think, a
problem across the region.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Okay.  Thank you very much.  Also I must say we did have
-- I think the regulatory agency that has been at one of our meetings in
the past, so we look forward to good interaction.  Any other contribution?
BARRY.

>>: Thank you for the principles and the IGF principles.  One of the things
I want to say is that I don't know how many of us are from the
stakeholders, not only government because CTO, they relate at -- regulate
at government level and telecom regulators now through ICT, but the civil
society, the business stakeholders, the academia, the technical, you can
stand for technical as well as government, so I don't know how we are
reaching out to them to know that they are part of this process or this
group so that each -- each of the stakeholders will be able to know there
are rules and participate in making sure that we apply these principles.
That's one. The other one is that at the time we had what we called
Commonwealth IGF.  I don't know what has happened to it.  Maybe we want to
look at it, is there anything we are doing wrong that the Commonwealth IGF
is no more -- is like gone, and if we want to revive it or we just wanted
to fizzle out, then there are -- there are also countries in the
Commonwealth that are not yet -- who are in the international IGF.  Do we
know them?  Are we encouraging those countries to at least have their own
initiative and have their own process, national IGF or participate in their
regional IGF?  So those are the three or four things I needed to raise
here, and then we could discuss it further.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Great.  Let me get some comment first, and then I'll ask
Mark to respond.  Frank from Uganda.  Please introduce yourself.

>> TONY: Thank you.  My name is Tony Ukuna, I work for a CTO organization
based in northern part of Uganda.  Looking back at the principles that were
mentioned, they reflected on two key issues.  One reflected on the
affordability and then reflected on the access.  When I looked at that
growing experience of what we are doing down on the ground with the
communities who are rural-based and also some of the institutions who are
based in the community, I looked at challenges of accessibility and
affordability, based on their strength, on resources, and also based on how
they can be able to be reached out and also to be helped, to get to know
some of this. If they get to know some of this, my concern is the
sustainability.  Are they going to be able to sustain this kind of
initiative at the grass-root level?  That's actually what we are looking
at.  As my experience and with my NGO, we have done our best to not only do
our activities in the urban centers but we are based in the rural
communities, trying to reach out to the rural poor, provide the services to
the community, and then the schools that are in the community.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much.  Any other comments? Okay.  I'll give
the floor to Mark, but before I do that, let me correct an impression.  CTO
is not just government.  We have members who are governments and
ministries, regulators.  We also have private-sector members.  Facebook is
one, there is another -- GSM is a member of the CTO, so we have membership
from different stakeholders, and that is the kind of framework that enables
us to reach out to our membership and provide value for what we're doing.
Let me turn to Mark to respond about the issues which have been raised.

>> MARK CARVELL: Yes.  Thank you, Shola, and thank you for all the
comments.  I think they hit on some key issues and challenges which this
global IGF is addressing and also, I mean, affordability and access and how
to sustain the situation when addressing those problems, I think, is where
we value the Commonwealth community, sharing best practice and knowledge
and disseminating information about partners and what has worked and not
worked so well in the past, so I think that's a very important point to
register from this discussion.  And it sort of links, really, into Mary's
point about the future of a Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum entity,
and we will touch on this a bit later and perhaps in more detail, but we
have the legacy from the earlier initiative for the Commonwealth Internet
Governance Forum, and if we look back on the history of that, it achieved
quite a lot.  We developed a child protection toolkit, and it was the base
for launching the Commonwealth cybercrime Ditch, So The Common Internet
Governance Forum, I Think, As A Forum Within the global IGF, did a lot of
important work, and we -- we're in the lead really in terms of developing
tangible outcomes from multistakeholder dialogue within the UN Internet
Governance Forum.  (Initiatives) the responsibility has returned to the
CTO, and there is a Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum page on the CTO
website where we've captured the earlier work done with regard to the child
protection toolkit and the links across to the Commonwealth Cybercrime
Initiative and so on, and it's the base there, I think, for doing further
work and developing the concept of a Commonwealth Internet Governance
Forum, so it's not fizzling out.  We're at a crucial stage, really, of
revisiting it as a concept and perhaps even creating the opportunity for
stand-alone Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum event in the future, but
that's something for us all to discuss.  So that's what I say on that. With
regard to national and regional initiatives, the NRI's initiative, we've
got this new acronym, NRI now, through the work done from the MAG, the
Multistakeholder Advisory Group, to create a place at the center of the IGF
for the national and regional IGFs to present on what they're doing and
also to engage across the network that's now pretty firmly established for
all the NRIs, so that is the medium, I think, for advocacy of national and
regional and participation, which is another point, Mary, you val ubly
raised, about -- valuebly raised about the regional internent fora. So we
have a job to do to promote further adoption of national multistakeholder
fora throughout the Commonwealth membership, and I think the Commonwealth
Forum here is a good place to start that advocacy.  I don't know if --
Shola, if you want to add to that:

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Okay.  Thank you.  Oh, yes, please.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone)

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm going to make a very quick intervention for anyone
who doesn't know me, it's my fault.  My name is Marilyn cade, and I want to
make a direct intervention in support of a comment that Mark made and in
special recognition of those of you in this room here who are already
launching and coordinating national IGFs. The Commonwealth IGF, in and of
itself, is really a fabulous initiative, but I urge you to also consider
the new network that has been stood up at the Secretariat where I ask as
the coordinator to support.  We made a pledge last year at the substantive
session of the NRIs to double the number of national IGFs in the next two
years, and we also called for the creation of a focal point at the IGF
Secretariat because up until that time, the NRIs and the regionals all
emailed their questions into Secretariat@UNOG.ch.  Since last year, Anya,
and I have helped to launch new information, and at this meeting we have
identified six more.  They're all from your interested parties.  I think
the NRIs that -- the comment that Mark made that I would just like to build
on is -- and Shola has heard me say this before -- we can debate public
policy at a global level; we can debate it at a regional level, and we can
only implement it at a national level, and I think the NRIs have a huge,
huge opportunity ahead of them. Let me just say I am thrilled and terrified
that at the NRI session today I have the top official from the UN coming
for 15 minutes where he will hear just a brief introduction from the NRIs,
and so I hope we'll have, Shola, you there or perhaps Mark -- Mark, I know
is going to be there.  It's not a direct call to action, but there are
significant resources available right now that can help net countries to
zbet started and work further with you -- and can get started and work
further with you, and with that, I'm leaving.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone)

>> MARILYN CADE: This meeting is at 11:30.  Right now it's in Room 9.  I'm
trying to get a larger room.  The only speakers will be an NRI coordinators
or someone who has in formation because of the limited number -- we have a
tough agenda, but it's not that it's not an open meeting but it's a working
session.  Thank you for the time.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much.  We always appreciate your
contributions.  Any other comments before we move to the next agenda? Okay.
I see none, so what I'm going to do is to move quickly to updates on what
we're doing at the CTO. Okay.  Well, some of you at the recent resource we
had last year, two years before, we informed you of the six goals that
we're trying to pursue in the next three or four years.  Just briefly,
we're enhancing the value of CTO membership, and because of the framework
we have, we have, you know, organizations like Facebook joining us, which
has added value, are to we also are promoting a regulatory environment
through events on spectrum, quality of service, and I mentioned something
about OTTs literal.  We're also looking at improving investments, enhancing
investments.  I'll mention something about that later.  snp we are doing a
lot of work on broadband.  I've highlighted two areas.  We're doing a lot
of work on promoting culture of cybersecurity and effective
cybergovernance.  Mark has just highlighted the principles, and we are
appropriating these at a national level.  I think Mary mentioned one
important thing, that we can all do these at the Commonwealth, or ITU or
ICANN.  At the end of the day, the implementation is on a ground level, and
that's what we're actually focusing on ourselves.  We're promoting the
development of use of ICT applications, encouraging you to design
applications which can be used locally.  And we also ensure effective
coordination.  This is the kind of thing we do here. In terms of the
achievements, which we have been able to reach, Mark mentioned about the
past work which was done, and all of that has now been transferred to the
CTO website.  By the way, this will be there for every one of you, the
PowerPoint, so you can also get the information, and I will ask you before
you leave, submit your contact points, your business card to -- can you
raise your hand, please.  So Bernice will take your contact and she will
ensure you have all this information sent to you. We also have the online
child protection toolkit, which was compiled by Jan Kerr in collaboration
with international center for missing and exploited children and other
partners, and this has been updated.  We hope to have a new investigation
by early 2017.  (This is being updated) We continue to organize meetings in
the margins of ICANN.  We had in Marrakech, we had in Helsinki, Hyderabad
was there, and in Mexico, we're also here to update on what we're doing.
Basically some of the achievements we have been able to -- which at these
meetings, one, we've updated our members on the annual stewardship
transition.  We've discussed how to improve and engage Commonwealth
countries at the GAC level.  We're encouraging more countries to join.
This week I was engaging with the bank la desh minister, who really wants
to get engaged (John Carr) and we have now establish add framework where
Bangladesh will be in future GACs properly, and I'm very pleased about
that.  We've disclosed the implication of the new gTLDs, and one thing that
is unfortunate, particularly in Africa ya, they have -- not a lot of
activities have happened there, so we want to encourage our member
countries to go active in that process. Like I said, we do encourage our
member countries three times a year, we bring very senior colleagues within
the regulatorys to the UK and they spend a week.  We have a variety of
resource people, who we expose them of the issues around the industry, and
they always have the benefit of visiting UFCOM, which is the regulator,
Facebook, for example, and there are others who have taken an interest in
what we're doing, and the next batch coming in April will be visiting the
new center in the UK Again, we have -- in the area of cybersecurity, at the
national level, which is quite important for us, we've been able be to
develop strategies for Malawi, mow sedan beak, and tans near.  I have
colleagues that are there helping to wrap up these activities.  snp we've
also assisted -- for those who are helping with strategies, we're helping
them implement, Botswana, Cameroon, Uganda.  There is cybercrime, and what
we've been able do is have the security agencies and other stakeholders,
and particularly, the effort has been focused on Bangladesh, Pakistan, and
Nigeria to tackle cybercrime.  In fijie we've helped them develop their
cyber security strategy through agreements, and one other thing which we're
doing is develop and promote standards. Just two weeks ago I was in
kingston, Jamaica, where there was a lot of interest in actually promoting
standards for all the businesses that are there, SMEs who want to make sure
that every single company in that country is compliant and can also be
ready for potential cybercrimes. One initiative which we taught to
encourage the youth is to start the Commonwealth youth ICT application
awards aerngsz we had two winners from Uganda and Cameroon.  Very
interesting applications which can you check on our website, and one of the
applicants from Uganda, one of the winners, as soon as we announced his
name, his president invited him to his office, and that was quite, you
know, very great for us.  There's a lot of things happening within that
space. We -- in terms of other programs, next here we have annual
cybersecurity forum, and the next one will be at the BT Center.  BT is very
interested in this and they're supporting us quite a bit. Some of the
topics which we'll be discussing, including telegovernance, approaching
cybersecurity, privacy, and data protection, protecting critical
information infrastructure, cyber standards, cyber space and extremism,
government's role in developing cybersecurity, protecting the vulnerable,
and building control of cybersecurity.  The ITU director of standards has
accepted a petition to be a keynote speaker. We are very worried about
standards in terms of -- we've invited him and he's acknowledged he'll be
there to talk more about how countries can benefit more. In Europe, it's
easier for countries to come together and deal with the standards that they
have, but when we're in the Caribbean, in Africa, they wonder what kind of
standards they should be adopting, so what we're doing in Commonwealth is
to use what is working, in the UK there is a group called ISME that the UK
government has actually authorized to be the reference point for standards
verification, so we're doing that across the Commonwealth for countries who
are interested so that they can be certificateeighted. -- ateed.  So that's
how they can go and from the infrastructure for cybersecurity plans.  for
us that is the key. We -- many of the initiatives which I have taken
particularly is reaching beyond the Commonwealth, and we on Monday I did
address the high-level meeting and there were two issues which I talked
about.  One is about Internet governance and what we have been doing. The
second thing is the investments.  Many of our countries still require a lot
of investment, even in the response of medium-scale businesses, so what we
have done is engaged the government of UAE, and they've agreed not to only
support but to host a first Commonwealth investment for ICT for emerging
markets.  You're all invited.  It's from the 10th-12th of April.  It's
going to be an exciting event.  There are organizations that are already
interested.  I have wonderful friends here from the U.S. who is -- has
capacity to help countries to write projects such that they are -- there
are a lot of projects across Commonwealth that cannot get financing because
the proponents of this project don't have that capacity to prepare projects
from conception to implementation, so we're going to bring in ministers,
countries, every member of the Commonwealth will have some time slots to
present their projects, and there will be financial institutions, there
will be bilateral meetings.  ICANN is already informed.  There are a lot of
opportunities for young people, and they are taking advantage of them.  We
really want to bring them onboard and find those who can help them to start
their small businesses.  It's very important for us. Finally, we have
embarked on a major study, OTTs.  Now, all of us are beneficiaries of OTTs.
We all use WhatsApp, we all use fiber, but we've gotten a lot of questions
from our members.  In South Africa, the parliament has raised issues on
tax, on levies, are they paying taxes, are they contributing to the access
fund?  We also are conscious of the fact that these services are extremely
useful, not only for the social environment but also for business, so what
we're trying to do is to look at all the issues involved and then come out
with a better understanding, which I think is one missing, understanding of
the dynamics of what it is, how did it work, what are the benefits, how can
countries be involved, did they have to have policies to encourage, do we
need to regulate, do we need to step back?  These are the issues we're
looking at.  We've already sent out questionnaires to various stakeholders.
There are questionnaires for policymakers, there are those for the
regulators, those for users, also those for ISPs.  Check our website.
Please, let's have your input. We intend to publish a major report next
year, and it will be given out free so that countries can then decide what
kind of framework they really want to adopt. There is a journal called
eCommonwealth.  If you want to -- tell us your stories and we'll publish
them.  If you don't tell your stories, we'll publish them.  As long as
you're a member of the Commonwealth, we will plush that, and that will be
shared, and that -- public publish that. Whether you're from Sri Lanka,
wherever, please tell us your story. If you have issues or questions.  We
can discuss them.  Yes.

>> SUZI HARGRAVES: My name is Suzi har graves.  We work around the world.
We have 16 reporting portals across the world, and we're very delighted to
be working with CTO and also working with many countries in support of
helping you develop reporting mechanisms for reporting and removing child
sexual abuse content, so if there's anything we can do to help, please have
a word with me, but I have a question, okay, so that was my pitch. My
question was in terms of the Dubai event, are there specific countries
you're targeting in relation to emerging markets?  Which ones in particular
are you focusing on or is it just a very general thing?  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Okay.  Any other questions?  I'll take a few and then
respond.  Yes, please. Member I'll have you sit next to me.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: And also because we are countrymen.  Thank you very
much, Secretary General.  The presentation was very illuminating, and
thanks, Mark, too for your consistent engagement. A quick question.  Are we
looking at emerging issues like DOA, because we in business, there have
been a lot of questions asked.  We're looking at sort of fragmentation
level, so I think it would be good for CTO to take some of these issues
frontally.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you.  Any other questions or comments?

>> We have one in the back here.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Yes, please.  Let's see your face.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, thank you.  I'm from Nigeria.  I wanted to
comment on the CTO Internet Governance Forum.  When I heard about it, that
CTO is actually planning or they have the Internet Governance role,
something came to my mind, and I had a question that came to my mind, and
the question is is it where the CTO is trying to create another, you know,
engagement so that all the countries and all the CTOs will be engaging in
discussion on Internet Governance?  But I would like to suggest that the
CTOs should rather help to strengthen the existing regional and national
IGO so they can help build the capacities of the country involved rather
than to create another pilot Internet Governance Forum, so I just want to
bring that to the meeting today.  Thank you.  (IGF)

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you.  Any other comments?  Yes, you have a question?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: A comment.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Okay.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you so much.  When you look at the CTO website,
you find that the issues surrounding youth is one of the major agendas
relating to the CTO, and there's so many opportunities for the young people
and the youth in the Commonwealth countries, and I think we need to come up
with initiatives which can really help in terms of creating awareness among
the young people about the various opportunities that they can leverage
when it comes to the Commonwealth aspect of it, and also to build solutions
which are able to solve problems relating to the Commonwealth countries.
Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much.  So let me respond quickly to the
questions. First, there was an issue about Dubai.  We don't have any
particular countries we're targeting except emerging markets.  We're -- not
only Commonwealth, countries beyond the Commonwealth, and it was
intentional to choose Dubai.  We spoke to them and said what we're trying
to do, and they said wow, this is great.  We have a lot of financial
institutions within Dubai, let's have a way to build it up together.  This
idea came partly because of my participation in ICANN meetings, and I see a
lot of opportunities.  One, for example, called for invitations to gTDL and
others.  These are opportunities we can benefit from.  Why is it not
happening?  Is it because they don't have investors who can partner with
them? So we thought this forum could be a forum where we could help
everyone, not only youths, even governments.  There were things about dream
projects and I remember the one to chiro.  And it doesn't happen?  Why?  Is
it because it wasn't a viable project?  We're trying to bring all these
together, investors, let them talk, and it's going to be continuous
efforts. The issues about emerging issues, this is why we have this
gathering.  It's your contributions that will define what you do (Chiro) so
I think we will definitely look at all these issues in different
engagements.  Are we trying to create a different platform?  No, what we're
trying to do is facilitate.  We're not saying anything different than what
is being said at the IGF globally.  We're also trying to say at our level,
because you have an institution, because you have resources, let us help
countries to achieve what globally IGF is trying to achieve, so it's more
or less like adding value, reminding them of what they need to do.  (Cairo)
In terms of the opportunities, yes, again, like I said, this is the forum
where your views will be taken into account.  If you think there are things
we could do for the youth, please let us know.  We will be able to assist.
Any other comments?  Yes, please.  Please introduce yourself.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, everyone.  Good morning.  My name is ivy Wata
from Ghana.  I work with the telecom regulator, but I am here as an
Ambassador.  My -- okay.  I know CTO has been there for some time, and with
top officials from Ghana who have help with these things at the CTO.  Since
the CTO's goal is to help in development of Internet and ICTs in the --
among its Member States, I would suggest that you reach out to the national
government that they will be involved more into some of these activities.
I'm here on the ticket of ISOC.  There are other colleagues from Ghana who
are also on the ticket of other organizations, ICANN and all that.  The
telecom regulator doesn't have a rep here.  The Ghana minister of
communications doesn't have a rep here, and I believe it's the same for the
other regions or countries who are part or members of the CTO, so I would
suggest that we reach out to these governments so that they will be
involved more into some of these things. The Ghana regulator is doing well
in terms of ITU study groups, but aside from ITU, I have not seen any other
organizational activities that the Ghana or the telecom regulator and other
ICT agencies in Ghana are actively involved in.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much.  Now, you've raised a very important
issue we could discuss for one hour, but it's at the center of the IGF.
Now, in many countries there are issues as to who's responsible for issues
of Internet.  In your country, in my country, many countries there's this
competition to the extent that sometimes your regulator steps back because
there's another agency that takes importance.  Nigeria is at a regulatory
level.  There's an official here, a director, so there are some regulators
here and they are very heavily involved.  There's a cross-section of
countries.  Mark represents a government.  Mary used to be a regulator, now
she's in the private sector, and since you're an Ambassador, take that
message back to your regulator, and I hope next time we have more people
from the regulatory agency, and I hope the way we write our reports, it's
not really for ISOC, it's also for your regulator because they pay you and
they've accepted you should come here on their behalf.  Mary.

>> MARY: I want to make a comment.  I think she challenged CTO that at your
different fora, IGF issues should be brought up as part of your program, so
whatever -- whether you're -- whether it's at the ministerial level or it's
at the regulators' level or at the real Commonwealth, so we shouldn't -- we
shouldn't step back from, you know, giving this conversation -- giving this
information -- south Africa just is working up, and they are now strong in
the IGF issues. The minister came, minister of communication, and high
level of issues are here, so she's asking you to -- to extend this
conversation and information and sensitization among the nations.  Thank
you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much for saying it better than the way I
said it.  We took your views on both. Any other questions?  Yes, please.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.  Thank you.  My name is Tony again.  My concern
is on the proposal issues.  You talk about proposal support person who will
help people who wants to develop proposals.  At what level is that proposal
development, at country level or at any other level that needs to be done?

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Very simple.  One, we are inviting everyone, governments
can come to the platform and present projects; individuals can come present
their projects.  It's a mix.  There will be a deadline which is the end of
February to submit your proposals, and if you check our website, you'll see
all the principles there. When you get there, you'll find others who you
can discuss with.  We can start discussing -- we can't start discussing all
those things here, but as I said, there is a platform for everyone, small
business, youth, government, private sector, more importantly to encourage
governments' private-sector partnership.  Many governments believe the ICT
sector is a cash cow, so they step back and don't put funds, and we are
trying to say no, no, no, we need government investments, we need
infrastructure, and Monday when I spoke at high-level meeting, I mentioned
the case of the UK government that puts in billions of pounds to help
access -- access gaps.  It might surprise you even in the UK there are
areas that do not have access to high-quality Internet.  Now, if the UK is
doing that, the other countries that are less privileged are not doing
that, then there's something big we're missing, so on that point, I would
like to close the bit on this particular issue, but my friend Nigel from
ICANN -- I can't refuse him.  He's got a lovely voice.

>> NIGEL HICKSON: THANK YOU VERY MUCH.  NIGEL HICKSON FROM ICANN.  I don't
think that says I can speak at all.  The point is from an ICANN
perspective, we really value the -- value the work of the -- of the CTO
being involved in the various discussions, and clearly, any -- any
participants in the CTO arena, if you have any time, any concerns, any
queries on the work of ICANN, obviously you can bring them to us at ICANN,
but also, we talk regularly to the CTOs, so please use them as a conduit as
well. I mean, on the question again, the work that you've done in
preparation for ITU meetings in the past has been tremendous.  I think the
Commonwealth has this sort of unique perspective because it covers, you
know, different regions, and so it makes the voice so relevant in the ITU
context, and I just wondered whether you're going to do some sort of
coordination ahead of the WTDC?  I know it's not until next year.  We
haven't got this year over yet with -- over yet.  My English is not very
good.  I apologize, but, yeah, the WTDC next year is quite an important
event.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Yes.  Thank you.  I assure you for every international
forum we do preparatory work.  We do for the WTDC, for the spectrum, which
was extremely successful.  It determined the outcome of the conference
because we had a meeting in London with various groups.  We've done it for
WTSA.  We encourage countries to propagate the right principles.  We are
going to be doing it for the WTDC in Argentina next year.  We've
established it.  The ministers have given us our mandates, and that's what
we're basically doing. Now, let me move on to Mark, who's going to give us
a brief about the -- we only have ten minutes, and about two, three minutes
for you.  Yeah.

>> MARK CARVELL: Okay.  Yeah.  I'll be as brief as I can.  Policy options
for connecting the next billion.  This is one of the leading tangible
outcomes from the IGF, and it's now well into its second phase, so I think
I'll just kick off with a question.  Who in this room has contributed
either to Phase I of this initiative of the IGF, which is intercessional,
it's not just rooted in this annual event, or in Phase II?  Who in this
room has contributed to it?  one, two, three, four, five.  Good.  I'm glad
there are contributions because I think it's imperative on the Commonwealth
membership to contribute to this seminal work of the IGF.  It connects with
the sustainable development goals, in particular paragraph 9c, which is
significantly increase access to information and communications technology
and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in
least developed countries by 2020.  That's a very challenging deadline.
There's been discussions here at the IGF about that, but it's an
aspirational deadline, and I think the Commonwealth community has a great
opportunity to contribute to this work and helping to deliver on that
particular SDG, and, of course, it -- it impacts all the SDGs as we've
heard in some of the discussions here at the IGF. So I think I will just
leave it at that, really, as this meeting underlining the importance of
contributing to that, either individually or through national and regional
IGFs.  Get in touch.  Showcase what's going on, identify the barriers, the
problems, the needs for assistance and guidance in enhancing the
opportunity to connect more and more people to the Internet. I think I'll
leave it at that, Shola, with the clear message out to all of you.  Thank
you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Thank you very much.  I was going to take it as a mandate
from you that we will do something in the headquarters, maybe a working
group, that will also assist countries to have a framework that they can
adopt at their level and also promote the international community.  Our job
is to facilitate good decisions, so if we're in agreement, we'll take that
as one of the outputs of this meeting. Finally, we have a gentleman here,
Tracy Hackshaw, who has been active in the development of the Commonwealth
Cybercrime Initiative, so in two or three minutes, he will tell us how far
he's come.

>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Thank you, Shola.  So just it's very brief.  The CCI,
which is the Commonwealth Cybercrime Initiative, was established or
formally endorsed in 2011 at a government meeting, and it's really a
program of the Secretariat, the Commonwealth Secretariat, to assist member
countries through multistakeholder partnerships, create a comprehensive
program to reduce cybercrime. Now, one of the key thrusts of the CCI is to
reduce the amount of duplicity and replication of initiatives in
Commonwealth countries that are happening between all the agencies that are
involved in this area, so as an example of who's involved in the consortium
that the CCI has called together, we have the AWG, the ACU, that's African
Union commission, the Caribbean telecommunications union, the CTO,
obviously, Commnet, Council of Europe, Diplo foundation, Interpol, ITU, you
name it, and there are, I think, over 30 of those organizations, and given
our time is limited, I'll go straight to a quick update as to what the CCI
has been doing in 2016. In the Carribean they have continued doing
cybercrime needs assessments.  We started in Dominica.  It's expanded to an
diga and Barbuda, Barbados and Granada.  Key trends that were in the
Carribean, key assessments are compassity building, requirement for
additional support for child honor and protection, and more public
awareness.  There were several neeingts were held supported by the CCI --
meetings that were held supported by the CCI in March 2016 and there were
other meetings being held throughout the Commonwealth in that area. In the
Pacific region, Pacific region cybercrime, criminal justice training
workshop was held in Tonga in February 2016, and at that workshop a
platform was established to share knowledge and best practice in cybercrime
and to encourage cooperation between jurisdictions. In the Africa region,
several activities happened, including where we met in March of 2016 they
drafted a security bill and drafted a national cybersecurity policy and
response to safe government. The Commonwealth also was successful in
obtaining a grant from the SCU to do a program called capacity building for
awareness raising with the law enforcement public sector and Commonwealth
association.  This is the African, Asia-Pacific, and Carribean country
regions and some more information can be held available on the CCI website
and social media. Interesting updates as well on the virtual currencies
working group.  The report was published in February 2016 about the impact
of the Bitcoin and block chain technology movement, and the working group
plans to continue its work in 2017 for technical guidance, such as central
banks in working for this guidance. And lastly, a review of the
Commonwealth model on computer and the computer related crime has been
engaged.  A proposed working group has been established.  Revisions have
been drafted, and they have met once so far to consider international
cooperation measures and provisions leading to electronic evidence among
other SUs, so the next meeting will be held in 2017, and we're looking
forward to your participation in that, and that's my rapid update.  Thank
you, Shola.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Great.  That's a very efficient summary.  Any questions
for Tracy?  Yes, Mark.

>> MARK CARVELL: Yes, thank you, Shola.  Just to add with regard to the
Commonwealth participately association, the UK government is very pleased
to support the CPA initiative on cybersecurity and best practice and so on.
There have been two meetings, I think, one in Australia and one in Wind
Hook, and there's another one coming up, so that's very important part of
the Commonwealth mix, if you'd like, on cybersecurity.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Good.  So now we come to any other business.  I see none,
so I really want to thank you.  Let me just highlight some of the points
which I had clearly from you.  One, I saw a need for us to step up our
efforts, the governments.  The lady from Ghana did mention that. There's a
need to take a lead in contributing to emerging issues, businessman, am I
right, said it very clearly. We need to have, like, a working group on the
policy options to respond to the next billion. There was a realization that
the platform which we created in Dubai, it's a golden opportunity and will
encourage attorney participate, governments, private sector, SMEs, youth,
and I think you all encouraged us to do our best in that regard. We also
had that we should do more in terms of our coordination efforts.  WTDC next
year in Argentina we should prepare for it appropriately, and also the --
what we're doing on OTTs.  We did ask that you give us input.  Check our
website.  Every group is included, so let us have as many input as you
like. And Mark did mention about the CPA, the government of the UK's
providing support of parliamentarian.  It's important to get the
parliamentarian's support, because at the end of the day they make the
notes.  I have committed to work with them so we can help this initiative.
Is there anything I've missed?  Yes, please.

>> MARK CARVELL: Yes.  So just one piece of information, this kind of
calendar thing following on from our discussion about the national and
regional IGFs.  Marilyn reminded me earlier that at the next ICANN meeting
in Copenhagen in March, there will be a session, a kind of lunchtime
session, I think, that's squeezed in on the national and regional IGFs
initiatives, and that's an opportunity for us.  Those of us who are going
to be in Copenhagen, there's an opportunity to engage at a meeting to
discuss the progress for the NRI's network and so on.  Thank you.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: Okay.  Finally -- yes, please.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.  It's Ben Wallace from Microsoft, and it was
great to hear about the OTT study and great that you're looking for
interest -- responses from all different sectors, and I found it on your
website.  I just wanted to clarify when the deadline -- when is the survey
closing?  I couldn't see a deadline there.

>> SHOLA TAYLOR: The deadline has closed but we've opened it because of
Microsoft. (Laughter) Actually, deadline was middle of November, but we've
extended it because our members wanted to take more time to respond, so
you're welcome. Now, one -- sorry.  Yeah, okay.  Just before that, just one
-- I understand that the next IGF might be in Geneva.  If that's the case,
please apply for Visas early enough.  Don't complain that you can't get a
visa.  Apply six weeks before.  It's an appeal, please.  Especially from
those from Africa.  Yes.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I also want to use this opportunity to really thank
Shola Taylor as the Secretariat of the Commonwealth.  We will see more
activities at least in our region, so thank you for our constructive -- can
we all appreciate Shola? (Applause)

(Session concluded at 1002)

Internet Governance Forum 9 December 2016 1045 OF30:  UN Women

(For remote captioning accuracy, clearly state your name before speaking)

>> MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this ITU UN Women Open
Forum.  We're thrilled to have so many of you with us here on the last day
of the IGF.  It's been an interesting week.  It's my first IGF, and it's
been great to see how so many of the sessions have talked about digital
inclusion in general, but also very specifically about the digital gender
gap and how we really need to step up our efforts in a collaborative way to
really bridge that digital gender gap.  We had a session that was called
"the Innet Of Women.  oyrm oyrm We'll Have -- We Had A Best Practice Forum,
and we'll hear from Jac about what happened at that Internet forum.  We're
excited to tell you about the initiative that the ITU and UN Women have
embarked upon.  We announced it in September on the eve of the general
assembly, and the initiative is called EQUALS, and it's a global
partnership about bridging the digital gender gap. Of course, the
initiative keeps in mind the 2017 agenda and all of the SDG, and we're
really zooming in on SDG 5 and how we can use technology to really empower
women and girls all over the world. The track in EQUALS is structured in
three different tracks.  We've taken the digital gender gap and broken it
down into access skills and leadership, so in a few moments, we're going to
hear from our great group of panelists about how we are collaborating in
the different issues that they bring to this new partnership, so I'm going
to pause for a moment and turn over to Lara, who joins us this morning from
UN Women.  Lara covers the Carribean and all of Latin America, and we're
really thrilled to have lara with us.  Lar lar thank you very much, Doreen,
and good morning to everyone in the room. I'm representing the UN Women, as
door even said.  I actually look after the regional program of UN Women for
Latin America and the Caribbean, and we are based in Panama. I'm sorry, I
only arrived today, so now I'm realizing everything that I have missed
throughout the week.  I'll make sure myself that in the next -- next year I
actually join all the discussions because I've been hearing that it has
been very interesting, and it clearly looks like a very important place to
be. So it is my great honor to be here representing UN Women and together
with other partners to discuss how to better collaborate on closing the
digital gender divide. As the lead UN organization on achieving gender
equality, UN Women actually works with a variety of partners to promote
women empowerment in ICTs. An area that, as door even was saying, is
tremendously powerful in transforming women's lives and achieving gender
equality in support of the 2030 agenda.  I think everybody knows here that
the issue of ICTs has been included as one of the means of implementation.
It is actually one of the vehicles that we would use to be able to achieve
gender equality. We have -- in the past, we have accumulated experiences
from project implementation that can be further scaled and scaled up, and
now as one of the founding partners of EQUALS with ITU, we are proud to
build this global inclusive platform for all of our partners to come
together and act together. Reducing the digital divide and empowering women
and girls in science and technology is of key importance to UN Women, not
only because women are underrepresented here and actually -- I'm sure that
you all know the numbers, but for someone who is not from this field,
looking at the numbers is actually quite shocking, and, you know, I'm going
to take the risk of repeating some of them because we are always -- we are
always saying women are -- I'm going to use examples from the region,
actually.  We are 54% of the labor force in Latin America and the
Caribbean.  We have a gender gap of 19%, but when you actually go into the
ICT sector, the numbers are so much lower.  You're talking about, you know,
9% of women that have developed apps in the case of Europe.  You talk about
things like 7% of funding goes to businesses where women are the owners.
You talk about, you know, that 10% of electronic products are being
produced by women, 90% by men, so, you know, we are used to, you know,
small figures, but these are actually shocking, and I think that that is
exactly the reason why we are here. And having those numbers in mind is
quite important because it tells us about the magnitude of the -- of the
kind of work that we also need to do. So reducing digital divide and
empowering women and girls in science and technology, I was saying, is of
key importance to UN Women, not only because women are underrepresented,
but also because this is a fast-growing industry where there are enormous
opportunities for women to thrive. ICT is a cross-cutting thing in all UN
Women's strategic work, including empowerment, the elimination of gender
violence, as well as peace, planning, and budgeting.  For most of our
global flagship programs, we have also embedded ICT through promoting
innovation. Since UN Women's establishment, we are the newest agency within
the UN system, but since the beginning, we have connected with a large
network of partners from both public and private sectors, working in the
areas of closing the gender digital divide. We have also accumulated a
wealth of experience on the issues and barriers that women face in this
space, and just to share some issues that we can use in the discussion that
we are going to have here, I would want to mention first that there is also
a disconnect between the technology and the gender equality communities.
Gender perspectives are also not mainstreamed or fully reflected in in the
technology development spectrum.  And this results in a limited
understanding of both communities on where and how to bridge that digital
gap. For example, we know that IT innovation and investment are among the
hottest topics in both developed and developing countries, but even in
developed countries, women groups are far underrepresented in both tech and
venture capital streams.  The EQUALS Coalition might be in a good position
to take the lead, to rethink the situation and redefine the partnership
channels and formats to address this. Secondly, the underinvestment in
closing the gender digital divide is a barrier for implementing big
collaboration projects.  Breakthroughs for digital gender equality requires
grant funding for early stage and social and commercial viable investment
for later stage projects; however, such resources are also very limited,
and this financing gap requires innovative solutions. It would be also
extremely valuable to hear the advice from our panel members in this regard
on how the EQUALS can promote gender financing towards addressing the
gender digital divide. Thirdly, interp mediating trust --
intermediateateing trust among partners is important.  A significant amount
of collaboration in EQUALS will be promoting public and private
partnerships.  This is also central for UN women to work with the private
sector in order to accelerate the traditional development work.  A common
language between different partners will also help to promote such
partnerships. And fourth, although we're building a global platform for
collaboration, the action and impact must be achieved at local levels.  UN
Women has recently launched some ICT initiatives for women's economic
environment.  One is school targeting second chance education for
marginalized adolescent girls as well as providing 21st century skills for
women and girls to be able to take advantage of the technology revolution.
Although this is a global initiative, our potential local partners are the
key to the project's success, as the accessibility is one of the biggest
challenges for the school.  We are looking also forward to working with our
EQUALS' partners in this area of work. As I said I work with the Latin
America and care Ben regional office.  There are great initiatives in that
topic, but I have to say they are limited and fragmented, and we did have a
need to expand and upscale such efforts so they can lead to the kind of
transformations that we want to ensure.  (Caribbean) And just before coming
here, I was actually -- one of the things that we have been discussing, and
I'm going to kind of turn around the topic, but one of the things that we
have been discussing is how to protect human right defenders and forced
migrants in the northern triangle, which probably you know that is one of
the regions where women face -- where we have rates -- the highest rates of
femicides of women.  We're talking about rates that only for women are 13%
or 14%, so one of the things that we have been discussing with our partners
is how we can use technology that we have been producing to actually make
these women safe and even be able to communicate in the migration path and
the human right defenders also to do their work in safer circumstances. And
technologies is important.  I mean, it's access.  It's also a number of
platforms that we have been producing, so we have been talking about how to
develop a technology, a technological package to put in place and to
benefit all of these women. So far we have already started doing that, but
as I said, the initiatives are very fragmented and small, so hopefully
also, with these kind of partnerships, we can work in that direction.  We
do have talented colleagues working in the regional and country offices
talking to big IT companies and remote female communities day-to-day, and
for these women to connect to better tech world is strongly sensed by us.
First we send our heartfelt invitation to everyone here for constructive
discussions. And last but not least, I want to say that we're in the
process of developing buy from women, a platform for women entrepreneurs
and small-scale farmers in one of our flagship ICT innovation projects.  It
is currently being piloted in Rwanda and will soon reach to other countries
for varying sectors. And here, again, we look forward to collaboration.  I
would like to thank our colleagues in ITU who organized this workshop and
further bolden efforts to promote EQUALS for women and girls in need.  I
would also like to thank all the panel members and guests who all support
this endeavor with consistence, wisdom, and resources. As one of the
founding partners, UN Women is committed to working together and be counted
for in any facilitation that we could provide for the closing of the
digital gender equality.  Thank you very much.  Thank you, Doreen.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Thank you very much, lara.  I'm going to pick up
on your point about fragmented and small because, actually, that was sort
of the motivation for moving forward with EQUALS.  In our view, there was a
lot happening on the different areas from access to skills to leadership,
but our feeling was it wasn't scaling, and if we were really going to be
able to make a difference in bridging the digital gender gap, we needed to
bring parties together and try to figure out in the spirit of collaboration
what could we do collectively as a partnership to really move the needle,
so EQUALS is really all about creating an unstoppable movement where women
and girls are equal participants in the digital technology revolution, and
as I said before, we have -- we have decided to take the work and divide it
in three main areas, and we'll hear from the panelists what they're doing,
so we're looking at access as the first -- we call them coalitions.  It's
led by GSMA, and in that area, we're focusing on getting more women online,
getting more women with mobile phones, and on the skills side, we're really
looking at trying to encourage more girls to take an interest in computer
science, getting more girls interested in STEM in general.  We're looked at
coding camps and coding opportunities to bring more women and girls into
the technology field. Under the leadership track, we're looking at a number
of things from women as creators, women as heads of SMEs, women in the
corporate world on the tech side, and women in the public policy space in
the ICT field, and so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Claire.
Claire many of you may know, so Claire heads up the Connected Women's
Program at GSMA.  She has been working with the ICT for many years, and she
also is spearheading our Broadband Commission working group on gender, so
Claire, if I can pass the floor to you, and if you want to maybe highlight
some of the challenges and opportunities that you see regarding women and
the access issue.  Claire.

>> CLAIRE SIBTHORPE: Thank you so much.  Yes.  We're planning through the
access group a discussion having to build on a lot of the work that's
already been done, so the UN ITU -- UN Women and ITU issued an action plan
last year, and the Broadband Commission gender working group has been
looking forward to taking that forward in more detailed ways, and this
access commission will look at the next step on that phase, and I think the
action plan on the work of the Broadband Commission has identified what are
sort of the key issues that we need to focus on in access so while
recognizing that this gender gap is driven by the structural inequalities
around men and women around income and education and social norms that
there's also some very specific barriers and issues we can look at in the
IT space, and those have been articulated as, first, there's a need for
better data and evidence base to inform policies, product, and services, so
we have a lack in tatea, and we need -- and we need that data if we're
going to drive forward this issue.  There he a -- there's a need to have
strategies policies and plans and have specific targets and measurements
and measure ourselves against the delivery of thechlt There's a need to
address all the different barriers which -- around accessibility to the
Internet, affordability, safety, the digital skills, and ensuring there's
relevant content application that's relevant for women, and everybody needs
to work together and share good practice and lessons learned, so that's
sort of -- that's the sort of framework that's been articulated as the need
to focus. And in terms of the actual coalition, I think what it's -- the
discussions to date have been around making sure that it's very action-
oriented, that we're -- that it's not just going beyond talking and
documents but looking at how collectively we can work and set targets and
have clear things that we're measuring ourselves against, how it goes
beyond, as you said, the small-scale pilots, how we can make a big
difference, and how we can work together because TSA complex issue, and
there's no -- it's a complex issue, and there's no civil bullet.  We need
to work together and address all of them holistically, so I think the
challenge of this group will be, you know, how do we do that together,
address the sort of range of challenges that need to be addressed and
really take action and take action that's not just about sort of more
small-scale pilots but really move the needle.  I think it's a big
challenge ahead of us, but hopefully with this group and with EQUALS and
the convening by the UN Women and UT on this issue, it will help to move
the needle.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Thank you very much, Claire.  Also linked to the
access issue, I'm going to turn it over to Najira, and you were the winners
of our 2016 gem tech awards.

>> NANJIRA SAMBULI: Yay.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: So we're happy to have you with us.  If you would
like to tell us about your work and how you're specifically addressing the
access divide.

>> NANJIRA SAMBULI: Sure.  Thank you for having me here.  So at the web
foundation, we've been trying to -- not just trying to figure out, we're
working at global and local levels to merge these two worlds because
oftentimes things that happen on one side don't transfer to the other, and
so I'll best share by example.  With two programs, we have the -- it's a
coalition model that brings in government, civil society, private sector
both at a global level but at a country partnerships level where together
they work to figure out what are the barriers to affordable access and how
to tackle them, what are the priorities in each country.  They identified a
multistakeholder way, if you will, and worked together towards that,
towards policy form especially.  With our women rights online program,
which is the one I lead, we've taken research.  We've had the digital
gender divide, put a number to it, put some context to it, put some real
human stories to it in if the work we've done, and not -- in the work we've
done, but not just research, many of the partners in this room today, UN
Women and CEDR put it together and said let's put a score card to it, this
is how governments are faring, and let's -- the most important stakeholder
being the women we're talking about, working with her to amplify her voice,
make sure it's heard, what her dreams and aspirations are to use the web,
and transfer that to when we talk about policy, which can sometimes be a
very unhuman space when we talk about numbers and, you know,
multistakeholderism and all these words, and so trying to find a way for
all of that to work together. So we're starting to see success, and we're
very excited working with GSM, working with so many actors within this room
around the idea of access.  We're working not just to tell governments they
need to collect better data but trying to figure out how they can do that.
For those writing the ICT policies, it's trying to figure out how do you
make sure the policy from the get go is baked in if because it's telling us
having ICT policy is not enough. We're excited about bringing that
practical aspect to the partnership, and I'm very excited about when we
come back next year to give even more stories, and again, I think it's
testament that the work we're to go is counting for something and we're
very happy to win the award on behalf of the women we work with.  So I'm
happy to talk about it a lot more and I look forward to keeping it as real
as possible as we go ahead.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: That's great.  Thank you.  Thanks so much.  So now
we're going to shift a little bit to the issue of skills, and then we'll
move on to leadership and then we'll open up to some questions.  Paul, if I
may, I'm going to start with you.  Paul Mitchell is the corporate vice
president and general manager of regulatory policy and standards at
Microsoft.  He's also a member of the Broadband Commission.  Paul, we know
that women were sort of there at the beginning of, you know, programming
from Grace Hoper and others, but yet we see that girls are less interested
in taking up studies in STEM.  Microsoft, I know, cares about this issue a
lot.  Can you tell us what you're doing to try to change perceptions and
make a difference?

>> PAUL MITCHELL: (Off microphone) there we go.  Now, it is.  Okay.  So
yes, in fact, the world's first actual computer programmers were women,
minging target citing in the second world war, which people don't remember,
and then for whatever reason, you know, women got pushed behind, and for
Microsoft, we really have an imperative in a couple of ways.  One is
changing our own operations, so how do we actually reflect this idea in our
mission that, you know, to enable every person and organization on the
planet to achieve more, that includes the half of the planet that is women,
so operationally, what do we do, how do we -- we create -- how do we create
jobs, how do we actually find the women to fill those jobs, and how do we
make sure that we -- within the employment space actually cater to the
unique needs that women have as distinct from the ones that men have.  So
that's on the one hand. And we have a variety of programs aimed at trying
to reinforce the value of women and their unique insights, including women
at Microsoft, which is an internal network around the world.  In fact, over
55,000 women.  Which also is used to provide -- to do outreach into the
community in their various countries. We then leverage that type of
activity with partnerships with governments, for example, here in Mexico,
Codogoecis, which is a multistakeholder partner which is trying to get
women and girls literal with programming skills.  We (Literate) we have a
loot of these under the banner of youth spark, which includes digitie
girls, which puts together coding camps and training camps around the
world, both online and offline, and then in person opportunities.  We've --
in Italy, we ran a program called Pink Cloud, which was a focus, again, of
girls learning programming skills. The challenge we face really is that to
start with, we need people with baseline in math skills, and I think, you
know, Doreen mentioned this sort of focus on STEM, and STEM in schools,
STEM education in schools is falling behind. Just in the United States -- I
mentioned this in a different session, we have 37,000 high schools, we only
have some that offer an advanced placement course in computer programming,
and we have something like 600,000 open computer jobs in the United States,
and we graduated collectively something like 40,000 computer science
graduates of all genders, right?  So there's a huge inequity and a big gap,
so we have, you know, employment opportunities, and we're somehow not
reaching them. So these programs, which were really designed to try to
reach girls as young as we possibly can, need to start in the elementary
schools.  They need to be sort of, you know, colocated with the rest of the
educational curriculum, and that means we have to have a focus on teachers,
so around the world we also have a sort of teacher training program, which
is on basic computer literacy, and we, you know, try to get it more
advanced.  Specifically in the United States we then have a program called
TEALS, which it stands for Technology, Education, And Literacy In Schools,
and this was a program that was started in if 2009 by a single Microsoft
employee who recognized that his kids' school didn't have a computer
science -- they had no literacy in computing, and so he basically
volunteered to go teach the computer class.  That's how this works.  So
TEALS takes volunteer computer literate people and pairs them with schools.
Now it's a big program across the United States, and it's something that
can -- the concept can easily scale to other parts of the world, but it's
basically taking people who know and pairing them with where there's a need
and then trying to get people excited. One of the things that we did
specifically as an educational focus, and I don't think people recognize
it, we bought Mindcraft, which is a fun game, but it's really a programming
tool, so it's really about teaching people logic skills and how to
accomplish something and sort of spark the interest and imagination that
they can do something too. And then we do our best to try to highlight
successful, skilled women in the tech community, so, you know, one of our
tech leaders is Chris Devor, who's doing nano computing, which is on the
farthest end of the super cool spectrum, and, you know, she is an example
of what someone can be, so we're trying to do all of these things.  The
things that we can't do, I mean, Claire mentioned and Doreen, there's all
the statistics about, you know, gaps, and then there's the social-culture
issues that get in the way.  We can't fix those.  But the one thing we can
do is create curriculum, we can deliver the message about the need for
education to -- and we advocate loudly at -- you know, with governments
that this is a really important critical thing for the success of the
economy of any given country to be able to actually realize the benefits of
this second half of the population of the planet in getting those sort of
diverse perspectives in place. If you're interested, all the information of
all these programs is available online under Microsoft.com, Youth p spark,
or you type Microsoft and Women in any search engine, you will get a long
list of things that we do, and many of them are things that are intended to
involve others in the community, so there's -- you know, the die is to be
generative and expand -- idea is to be generative and expand the outreach.
So far the programs are working successfully.  They could always do better,
and we would welcome suggestions and partnerships to reach even more.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Thank you very much, Paul, and indeed, Microsoft
is doing some great work in this space, and we have mapped on our digital
gender gap map some of those initiatives. I had the pleasure of
participating in if your Ping Cloud event in Italy, which was fabulous.
It's very much linked to something that the ITU has been running since
2010, which is Girls in ICT Day, and it's the fourth Thursday of the fourth
month every year where we invite governments, private sector, Civil Society
to bring girls into the workplace, link to technology, and really present
to them the opportunities that studies and career -- careers in the tech
sector can provide, and to date, we've had some 160 countries celebrate and
over 250,000 girls participate in those events, and we've been working very
closely with Microsoft and many others on those celebrations. So now I'm
going to turn to the -- to the leadership gap, and I'm going to turn over
to Yolanda, who's going to give us a little bit of the Mexican experience.
On the leadership side, we heard from lara kind of the -- in terms of app
developers, Europe 9%, I think, globally it's 6%.  When we look -- can we
go back to that slide for one second? If we look at -- no, the other one.
Sorry.  The one on no leadership.

>> (Off microphone)

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: There you go.  Yep.  In terms of women in the
technology workforce globally, again, this is less than 20%.  It's good
that a lot of the Silicon Valley companies have actually started to report.
Previous speakers have mentioned the importance of data, and that's very
much what we're looking at, that we need to have the baseline data so then
we can begin to measure, and we look at the ICT ministries and we see that
the numbers are particularly low, only 12% of ministers are women, and when
we look at the regulatory agencies, that number is actually lower, at 7%.
So that sort of leadership on the public-sector side.  So this data is
really important because it does help us get a baseline.  I know Mexico is
very committed to bringing more women into the technology sector, both on
the private and the public side.  We heard the other day from Al hand ra
about this great initiative, so if you could tell us briefly some of the
things you're doing in Mexico to get more women and girls involved in the
technology sector.

>> YOLAND MARTINEZ MANCILLA: Thank you.  Good morning, all.  My name is
Yolanda Martinez.  I'm the head of digital government under the Ministry of
public administration.  I am part of the team at the national digital
strategy coordination office, which is led by a women, Mrs. Al hand ra
Cunez.  There is another women who leads the Institution responsibleable
for -- responsible for ICT policy under the Ministry of public education,
and another colleague, our chief data officer, is responsible for prosper
digital, so as you can see, the national digital strategy executive team is
mainly women. So we lead by example, and we're truly committed to that. I
would like to share with you the story of Marcella.  (Speaking non-English
language) Thank you.  Marcella's a student from Guadalajara, which is here,
my hometown as well.  It was applied to one of the most recognized higher
education institutions in Mexico online in a very easy and transparent way.
In service seems very easy and probably is available in most developed
countries many, many years ago, but in developing countries and less
developed countries, this is still not possible, and it's a barrier for
access of higher education.  Speak speak Lupita, which is a single mother,
she was able to apply to a life insurance program, which is sponsored by
the Ministry of Social Services, 100% online.  I give you to -- and if we
go to the (Speaking non-English language) Okay.  If we go to the -- I have
a few examples that I wanted to (Speaking non-English language) because
that's one initiative that is -- that we're doing as -- with the
multistakeholder community, and it's basically a mentorship program for
girls to teach them leadership skills but also how cool it is to be in the
IT world and to lead the efforts, for example, my case, digital policy. So
just to set up the scene and give you some numbers, which I agree data is
important to make us -- to make us feel where we are, 2/3 of the poorest
population in the world are women.  2/3 of illiterate people around the
world are women.  Less than 4% of managers from the 500 most important
enterprises in the world are females.  And all over the world, women earn
less than men.  An average, according to World Bank is between 60% to 75%.
Against this background, technology and Internet are key enableers to
improve our women, and ICT creates opportunities to create solution,
increase their income, access to knowledge, and mechanisms to accomplish
public and private rights.  As member of the Internet multistakeholder
group, it's our duty to have public policy which allows to close the
divides. The Mexican government launched the national digital strategy,
which is a plan of action the government is implementing to encourage the
adoption and development of ICTs and Internet in Mexico. In order to enter
the no one is left behind, the inclusion skills is one of the five key
enablers proposed in our policy.  These enabler promotes the creation of
gender equity in all policies in the development of digital skills. One of
the main key actions is our national one-stop shop.  They have access to
government information and public services and provides a platform for
participation.  Government provides access to more than 4,000 services
online.  They're to accomplish the sustainable development goals are free
and can be done 100% online, and that's very important, because we're
looking to have access to all services related to SDGs and especially to
that targeting to empowering women and girls to be able for them to access
social services, health care services, education services, and leadership
initiatives, like coding OX to make sure they have enough skills to lead
their own development. Currently women can access to more than 21 public
services regarding social programs, and today, I think men and women do not
only have the opportunity, but I think we are co-responsibility to lay the
foundations of a more respectful participatory and inclusive society.  I
would like to congratulate EQUALS initiative and I actually would like to
join since I have the privilege to lead the network for EU government under
Latin American and the Carribean region, and I think it's a great
opportunity if we create more partnerships with the government officials in
the Latin American and Caribbean region to create partnerships and support
EQUALS' initiatives for the greater good of women.  Thank you.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: So we welcome you, please. (Laughter) That's
great.  It's fascinating to see how you're using digital government,
eGovernment, as a way to empower women and girls, so thank you for sharing
that with us. Now I'm going to turn over to Cecile.  She's the eCommerce
and law reform manager at UNCTAD, and the Secretary General was with us a
few weeks ago in Bangkok where he announced he was joining EQUALS, and
we're happy to have you onboard.  If you want to tell us some of the things
you're doing from the UNCTAD initiative.  I know you work with women and
SMEest, and if you could tell us what you're doing on the eTrade side.
Thank you.

>> CECILE BARAYRE: Thank you, Doreen, and good morning to all.  We have
heard a lot of challenges this morning, but we also have to recognize also
in progress to ICTs as well, they allow women to be better integrated to
reach out to new clients in the world, so instead of talking about the
challenges, I think we have already mentioned a few of them, I would fon
the opportunities.  We know that improved connectivity of Internet and
access to global online platform and payment method, together with the
connected delivery services and also the development of policy and legal
frameworks that support SME and reach out to consumers have improved
situations.  I am not implying we have solved all the issues, of course,
but at least we have made a move, and UNCTADD, as door even mentioned, we
have carried out a survey, offered 212 women and entrepreneurs in Tanzania
as part of a guide that we developed, which is called Empowering Women
Entrepreneur through ICT.  Initially 97 of those women used mobile phones,
were asked only one out of ten use websites for business and 16 only sold
products online, so we can see there's still a challenge here, but what is
the most important is that women see eCommerce as an opportunity and can,
you know, say it's a power of eCommercial so I would like to give you two
examples myself because I always think examples of what we see on the
ground is much better than big figures as well, so I met once with Dena.
Dena is a Tanzanian entrepreneur.  She's selling flowers, and on one hand
she's holding a phone while she's doing her cooking in the kitchen.  She
can receive orders and send, you know, orders as well, and she's a first to
see that ICT and women entrepreneurship go together, and it makes life
easier, she can save money, she can deal with her family and save costs as
well. Last July I was in Narabie for our conference where we launched this
initiative I'm going to talk about, and there again, I went to a company
called Kezarie.  Maybe some are familiar.  It means small and beautiful.
And it's an enterprise led which produce handmade jewelry, and it's funder,
Mrs. Susan Woods, started with two Kenyan women, and soon she discovered
that a lot of women in the surrounding were unemployed and needed to, you
know -- but they were a single mother and they needed to get a job, so now
the company is about 400 women, and they're exporting through Internet to
over 30 countries, so that's another example of how technology can allow
women to get on and reach out to clients and create business and avoid
certain barriers. So what I mean here is that serving global markets or
local markets is no longer -- for women, and that is very important.  There
are, of course, various -- access we mentioned, policies to push for women
entrepreneurial partnership, and we need to raise the skills of women as
well, but it's also, you know, the need to collaborate, so we are already
collaborating in in certain number of initiatives.  As Doreen mentioned,
we're part of equal rr and UNCTAD has joined (Inaudible) basically there's
a platform to create the eTrade and commerce in developing countries.  It
is multistakeholder initiatives.  There's about 18 partners already.  I
have a brochure if you want to see who they are.  It's mostly an
international organization, government.  We have actually another pillar
which is equally important when you do this kind of initiative.  You have
to involve the private sector, otherwise there's no eCommerce there, so we
have about 22 companies ranging from big companies, like Google, eBay,
Paypal, FedEx, and there are smaller markets in developing countries.  The
idea is to build a platform where government and enterprises will see what
is available in terms of assistance, in terms of building capacity
assistance among the partners, and we will also dedicate a segment for
women, so you'll be able to see what programs have eCommerce and have less
qulons learned, and we know that women and men engage in different ways in
e, We were saying that -- eCommerce, and were saying that earlier.  They
face barriers as well. We are thinking in the future to open up a network
of women entrepreneurs, we can speak to each other, share their concerns,
share opportunities and with that, you know, hoping that they can create
certain leadership in eCommerce.  So with that, I thank you.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Yeah, thank you very much, Cecile.  Indeed, ITU is
very happy to be part of the eTrade For All, and thank you for sharing
those stories.  It makes you sort of visualize and feel and get excite ed
about the importance -- excited about the importance of being able to
empower women through technology, so thank you for that. Now I'm going to
turn it over to Jac, and we'd like to hear from all of you.  Jac, if you
can -- Jac was one of our first gem tech winners.  She was with us in 2014
at the plan potentiary conference where APC won for their take back tech
initiative, so we're really happy to have you with us, Jac, and if you want
to tell us what you've seen this week in terms of the digital gender divide
and the number of sessions that you've been following on this issue.

>> JAC sm KEE: Thanks.  So, hello.  My name is Jac.  I'm with the
association for progressive communications.  I lead the women's rights
program.  APC does a lot of organization, we do a range of work in one --
and one of the biggest areas is looking at access.  I'm also part of the
MAC, so I co-convened the best practice forum on gender access this year,
which basically was a year-long process, and it's basically a year-long
process that tries to get together different stakeholder groups and learn
the best -- yeah -- oh, there's no way to say this.  Learn best practices.
Yes.  Okay.  So to try and like glean best practices from existing areas of
work in a way that IGF as a process and as a forum is able to do, so they
try to bring together stakeholder groups that's already doing work around
this and to see what existing work has been done and what we can take out
of this. And it's really great to see gender access as a big topic, and
this year's IGF it's been getting a lot of focus. I've been attending a lot
of the access sessions for the past three days.  I think I have access
coming out of my ears, but I think it's really great and it's great that
every session has been very, very full.  So when we shared the best
practice forum's findings, I think two days back now, we had, like, Doreen
and Claire at the session to share some of the work, and it was full, full,
like standing room people, like people were sitting on the floor and such,
and in a way it demonstrates there is interest and there is commitment, and
I think those are all very, very good signs, and I think SDGs provide a
really good opportunity to also really consolidate commitment taking this
work forward. So in the best -- I'll just share with you a little bit about
the best practice forum's work and some of the key things that I've seen
popping up in this conversation. So in the BPF's work, what we tried to do
is we didn't want to basically reinvent the wheel and do things people were
already doing, and we acknowledged -- the first thing we did was really to
map some of the great work that has been done in this area, especially
around research, and there has been a lot of really incredible research,
especially around affordability and availability, such as the other
research as well, so we looked at all of this and from there tried to pull
out, okay, let's focus what are we looking at, and we thought it was
probably most useful to look at two things.  One is what are the barriers
for women's access.  That still presents as women's access to technology,
and secondly, what are exist being initiatives that are already in
existence to meet some of these barriers?  And in the barriers we sort of
stood them up and looked at different sections, including skills, decision-
making, availability, affordability, and so on, and the two things that
popped up for us quite early on in terms of real -- both as a very, very
important issue that needs to be addressed as well as a kind of gab gap in
existing research is the important role of cultural norms and barriers, and
this is an area that is also incredibly difficult to research because it is
so context actually specific, but if we're looking at the realities of
women and girls, this is something that we actually absolutely must take
on, so while there are statistics arounds existing gaps, these statistics
also sit within existing disparities and context, culture, and norms act as
significant factors that interplay with them, so how do you think about
this, how do we do really sound and useful research around this in a way
that is also -- that is both context actually specific as well as things
that you can take out and see if we can do some comparisons and learn best
lessons from those. And this reminds me of a session I went to on the DC on
community access where there is an initiative that's -- no, sorry, not
community access, connecting the unconnected and part of their work is
really to try and get as many case studies as possible and to learn through
case studies, and maybe that's a methodology that can be useful because
then, you know, you're able to get the context but then also try and see
what are some common factors from there. And we mapped about 60
initiatives.  What we found was there were a lot of initiatives that looked
at skills and capacity building and that was really great, but less so
around sort of other different areas that we were looking at. And the other
thing that -- the second thing that popped up in terms of the finding that
we didn't expect and we didn't put in as one of the categories of barriers
was the role of online gender-based violence and abuse as a barrier to
women's access, so both in terms of getting to the point of access, if
these are public access points, what are the safety risks that need to be
taken into account, as well as what happens after you get access, and this
contributes to kind of a sense of confidence, a sense of ownership, a sense
of feeling that you can really also develop and build your own capacity and
experiment when you're on this space, so this is again another significant
thing that maybe we need to pay attention to and think about a lot more.
And in the IGF itself, there's been a lot of conversations around access,
lots of different inputs that have been given around a variety of
diversity, actually, of approaches and thinking through how do we address
this access gap, whether this in terms of mobiles, whether this is in terms
of thinking about access as a public good, thinking about broadband access,
thinking about spectrum allocation, as well as my own personal pet
interest, which is last-mile access, so how do we think about bringing
access to people actually where they are, especially in underserved groups
and underserved spaces, how do we think about this?  And this year has been
really a fantastic year in terms of bringing together a lot of initiatives
and a lot of different groups who are doing work around this area, who's
thinking also through community access networks from a variety of different
kinds of technology platforms, so from wireless to radio and so on, but I
think the challenge there is how do we bring in -- there's two challenges.
One is how do we bring in a gender lens to this conversation around
community access networks.  I think that's very much missing and I think
that's a very beneficial and useful work to think about because community
access is also about -- it's also about thinking -- it's also about
community ownership over access infrastructure, it's also about community
ownership and investment and sustainability of maintaining those things,
and also about development of relevant content, and I think content is
another big issue. So I think that's kind of a worthy question to think
through, how do we bring in a gender analysis into this piece of the
conversation as it is gaining importance in this field. And the second
thing that -- what did I say was it?  The first thing?  The second thing.
Okay.  So the second thing that's worth thinking about also is what you
were raising about scalability, so how do you scale up something that is
very, very specific, context actually specific and responsive, and at the
same time, you can learn lessons from there and scale it up so it becomes
more beneficial to different people.  These are kind of two pieces of
challenges that I think would be really great if we can -- you know, as a
group that is really interested in this issue sort of pay a little bit of
attention to.  (Context actually) And yes.  So in the mapping of
initiatives, we mapped about 60.  We started speaking with EQUALS to see
how we can share some of this mapping initiative.  I think it's great that
we're looking at collaboration.  I'm very excited about this, and I'm
excited to see what we can do together more.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Excellent.  Thank you so much for sharing that,
and also for bringing up the role of culture and sort of societal norms,
which is something that I've heard in several sessions this week and also
for your -- for your two challenges, and I think that's where we can all
work together.  I mean, I've learned so much this week, and there are so
many things happening, and I think what has been most rewarding for me is
to further connect the dots.  The 20 cases that -- what's it called? -- one
-- the U Penn initiative, One World Connected, right, and you're 60 and we
have Map 240, and by just bringing our work all together, I think our
impact can be huge, so I'm really optimistic.  Thank you for sharing that.
I think we have time for maybe a couple of quick comments or questions.
Oops.  That's good. (Laughter) Please go ahead.  Why don't you say your
name.

>> EVELYN. MY NAME IS EVELYN FROM UGANDA, and I had two comments, one was
on the skills.  You spoke about the need to start enhancing skills at a
very early level.  One of the big challenges is that some of the
governments, especially in underdeveloped countries, it's very hard to
change curriculums, it's very hard to change, you know, the way of
teaching, and so you have this sort of education level where children come
out and they're not -- they don't have the relative skills to make them
competent, so how do we change that? And you find that the only people who
are doing initiatives that are actually enhancing the different ways of
learning don't have funding to actually, you know, come in and, you know,
have these alternative ways of learning. And then another comment is for
you, sorry, I forgot your name.  You spoke about the women entrepreneurs
and the innovation fund that your apiloting in if Rwanda.  I'm an
entrepreneur, and we use ICT skills to help small farmers in Uganda, so I'd
like to know about that, and if there's information online, could you
please point me to it?  Thank you.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: I'm going to take two more questions and then
we'll come back.  Over here, please go ahead.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Sharda.  I am a researcher.  I work on the
project one world connected.  I wanted to make an observation and also ask
a question.  The observation that I wanted to make from some of the
research that I have been doing in compiling case studies, which I'm hoping
to collaborate more with EQUALS as well as the BPF on is just that, like,
we -- I'm finding out more and more that there are women involved in these
initiatives but also that these women don't have the ability to network
among others, especially in the field of access, to be able to connect with
other people.  One of the examples is a woman that I'm speaking to is
currently a peace Corps worker who has been doing great work in building a
Community Network there but hasn't had an opportunity to connect with the
broader networking community, which I feel is -- which I feel should give
us pause because I feel like it's not just the ability to build capacity
individually but the ability to build a peer network for women in
particular who are working on issues of access, especially access to the
Internet, because I feel like that community at this point -- and I might
be very naive, but at this point seems to be a male-dominated community
where making inroads for women is often difficult or they don't know the
right contact points.  Mentorship programs might be a great idea.  I wanted
to ask if either EQUALS or the BPF or any of the partners in the room might
be willing to consider instituting a mentor program for individuals that
are working within their communities to be able to build that access and be
able to collaborate with them to be able to give them support.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Okay.  Thank you for that.  I'm being told we're
going to have to shut down in a minute, unfortunately, because there's so
much to say, we could go on. So I would suggest that other comments and
questions, maybe we can take them outside the room.  I don't know if, Paul,
you wanted to say a quick word about the issue that was raised in the case
of Uganda about curricula or about the entrepreneurship, Cecile Oreo landa,
but very briefly, please -- Yolanda, but very briefly, please.

>> PAUL MITCHELL: I think you're absolutely right.  This is the approach
that we took in our project in Kenya where we actually worked with the
schools and with the teachers to actually revise the curriculum as part of
the entire project, so that -- because we recognized you have to get the
teachers at the beginning with the skills to be able to carry it through,
so ICTs is not a special subject, ICTs are used in teaching, and that --
and there's a fundamental difference of approach, and it's worked very well
in that situation where three years on, there's a couple grade point
average improvement in the national exams.

>> Very quickly, since you're from Uganda, Rwanda is a good example where
we have to move things.  The president has put ICT -- so there's a strong
leadership on that, and he has, indeed, changed a lot of things in the
country, including access with solar panel energy and schools as well
curricula, and I wanted to say UNCTAD is going to look at the strategy on
eCommerce that Rwanda has been having so far and providing recommendations,
so definitely this aspect of education will be there in IT skills.  Now,
network, just quickly, as I said, this is very important for us, as well.
I may not have made the point strongly enough, about you that's what we
want to create, not only in terms of access and infrastructure but in best
prak es in reaching out to -- practices in reaching out to global markets,
global platform.  That's, indeed, very important.  Thank you very much for
that.

>> I can put you in contact, because there has to be a constitutional
reform, but one that is very simply implemented, so I think it will be a
great access for to you learn at the chair.

>> Well, I'm sorry we didn't have more time actually too, because I have so
many things that I would want to say, as I've been hearing all of you
present, but I will just close by saying that we are committed to
partnering with everybody to do as much as we can, and I think we -- we owe
it as well to women.  I'm very -- I think I'm very concerned about the
data.  If you look at the SDG 5, actually, the indicator that we're
supposed to use is access to mobile phones, actually.  It's having --
having mobile phones, and we need to go far beyond that and understand and
learn more about what we have in our hands to be able to work, so the topic
of big data, for example, which we can use also to understand this topic
but many others as well.  Hopefully this partnership will help us run with
all these topics, and of course, since we are in the region, both of us, I
think we can start working right away, so thank you very much to everybody.
Jac, it was wonderful to hear you, and all of you.  Thank you.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: Thank you, lara.  So in the spirit of gender
equality, I'm going to invite either Peter Major, who's the chair of the
CSTD, to say a brief word. (Laughter)

>> Thank you.  I really feel at home.  I have two daughters and one wife,
so -- thank you for the session.  It was very enlightening, and I will
propose to the commission to have as one of the priority themes SDG 5 in
the upcoming session, well, in 2018.  I think it's extremely important.  We
usually treat these issues -- some education is very important, and
especially we are treating it, but to have a holistic view, I will propose
as a priority.  Thank you.

>> DOREEN BOGDAN-MARTIN: That's a perfect way to conclude.  Thank you very
much.  That's very concrete, and we welcome that -- that proposal.  So I
would invite all of you, check out our website, equals.org.  Follow us on
Twitter, which is@equals.  Use the #beequals, as you see on the screen, and
we look forward to collaborating with all of you.  EQUALS is a open
multistakeholder partnership, so we invite you to join us in bridging the
digital gender gap. Before we leave, I'd like to invite you all to stand up
and we're going to make the EQUALS' sign. (Laughter) So thank you very
much, and please stand up.  Thank you.  And slad mere is helping photograph
-- Vladimir is helping to photograph, and we have the cameraman still here,
so -- so you can do this anywhere you go.  Get your kids, your friends, get
people involved, make the sign and use the hashtag, and we will retweet
you. Be EQUALS.  Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Session concluded at 1119)

>> MODERATOR: Excuse me, everybody.  Ladies and gentlemen, we need you to
please leave this room because we're going to make some arrangements for
the next session, so we will be very thankful for your cooperation and
understanding.

Internet Governance Forum 9 December 2016 1130 DC on Platform
Responsibility

>> LUCA BELLI: Good morning, to everyone.  Welcome to this third meeting of
the Dynamic Coalition on Platform Responsibility.  We are here today to
discuss some quite relevant issues and particularly how a platform can
behave, and also other intermediaries but particularly platform can behave
in a responsible manner, and based on the principles in which states have a
duty to respect human rights, platform -- sorry, not platform, business
entities, amongst which platforms have a responsibility to respect human
rights and they jointly have a duty to provide effective remedies in case
of human rights violations. We have a very intense panel today.  We will
have -- we will start with Toby Mandell, who is the director of the center
for democracy who will present their data.  Then we will have Megan
Richards.  We will have a research director at the Humboldt institute, and
also from Trinity, and then wlee have Barbara Bucovsca, who is director for
article 19, and last but not least, we will have also Iliana Omar from
ranking digital rights. To kickstart the meeting, I would like to ask Toby
to start providing us some insight on their excellent work on their
recommendation of responsible text, so Toby, go ahead.

>> TOBY: Thank you.  It's a great pleasure to be here.  This is the main
product, and here are the recommendations of it.  I have two copies of
each.  I don't want to take them back to Canada with me, so after come take
them.  It's available online at www.responsible-tech.org:  And the focus is
on the human rights responsibilities of private-sector online ent immediate
airies, so we define that broadly, you know, access providers, platforms
content with content spaces, whatever, really.  We meticulously avoid
getting into the issue of state obligations in this piece of work.  We do
have another product, a piece of research on that.  It's from 2012, so it's
a little dated, so I think the main things remain correct and relevant.  I
have one of those, and I don't want to take that back to Canada also, so
please take that.  Okay.  Somebody's got it already. We're aware,
obviously, of the very close relationship between private-sector
responsibilities and state obligations and state performance, but we tried
to avoid that as much as possible because it's an endless rabbit hole,
bakes limit The work is a result of our one and a half year process of
study.  We have partners the center for Internet and society in India, Arab
network for human rights information in Egypt, the -- I'm not going to try
to say that in Spanish, but it's a center for studies on freedom of
expression and access to information in Argentina, open net Korea, and the
public policy and interest klib clinic, so sort of partners -- clinic, so
partners around the world.  We had an advisory panel with a lot of leading
lights, from the multistakeholder, both from the tech side and from
academics and not governments, actually, but -- and civil society, UN
special rapporteur on freedom of expression, and the result was an analysis
ranging over quite a few issues and looking at -- and with recommendations
as wel. I'll just comment very briefly on what Luca has already laid out,
whereas states have obligations, the language that's emerging for companies
as responsibilities, and I notice that in the DC PR recommendations, you
distinguished between shalls, which companies must do, and shoulds which
companies should do, and I would just like to say that this is really an
emerging area.  It's been emerging for a while.  We know what obligations
means for states.  They're in many cases legally obliged to respond to
those obligations, and not to do so is a breach of their legal obligations
under international law.  I think that it's much less clear for states, and
of course, states, you know, there's a horizon application of rights, so --
horizontal application of rights, so states have obligations to place
onlinegations on companies, and companies will have a legal framework, but
still a very, very importa -- posh area.  So my main focus will be on
recommendations, and I'll highlight some of the differences between our
recommendations and DC PR's recommendations, and I'd start by noting one of
the big challenges we faced with this is trying to make recommendations
which are globally applicable and applicable across the full set of
private-sector intermediaries, and I noticed that in your recommendations
you kind of distinguish between -- in some places between the big players,
you don't quite define it like that, and there are -- perhaps there's only
one really dominant player.  That's my view. But anyway, there's's not more
than four or five of them, and they do control public spaces, public
communications, things.  We didn't do that because we wanted to be
universally applicable, so we didn't have that kind of distinction. Also
your work focuses on Terms of Service, ours looked at all of the activities
of online intermediaries. Just a couple of comments on your principles,
which I -- you know, there's a huge amount of overlap and concord Nance
between -- concordance between what we say and what you say.  One thing I
notice is you define a legitimate law as a law which meets international
standards on freedom of expression. Now, I think that Canada's a pretty
good country and have a pretty good record on human rights, but we have
held being in breach of human rights standards on numerous occasions, often
involving our laws, so many Canadian laws do not correspond to that
standard, and the result of your use of the term "legitimate law" means
that you're actually saying that companies are not supposed to obey
illegitimate laws, and that means that tech companies, even in a place like
can darks let alone the vast majority of the world, would have to refuse to
obey the law, and I don't think that's a reasonable ask to make of them, so
I think that's kind of a structural issue, with your recommendations. A lot
of commonalities and some differences, which I will point out as we go
along.  Our recommendations cover six different areas, expanding access,
net neutrality, content moderation, privacy, transparency and informed
consent, we grouped them, and responding to state attacks on freedom of
expression.  We're not going to address the first two because we're looking
at platforms and those are not so relevant for them, as you asked. Okay.
Let me start first with the transparency because it's really a cross-
cutting themes.  In terms of Terms of Service, many of the same things that
you said.  We -- sort of going beyond some of the things you said, we said
that -- I mean, Terms of Service are the basis of the legal relationship
between platforms and their users, so, I mean, as a lawyer, I understand
that sometimes those things need to be rather complicated because they need
to be legally sustainable or defensible or sound, so we called for
companies to produce summaries or guides that would not be legally binding
but that would, for a layperson, render those Terms of Service, which are
legal documents comprehensible.  We called for them to be a made available
in all of the languages which companies provide services.  We had quite a
long discussion about exactly what languages.  If you're providing services
in a language or doing something in that language, you should also have
your Terms of Service in that language. We called for companies to help
users understand the Terms of Service, sort of providing a health -- a help
desk, for example.  To consult prior to making major amendments to those
Terms of Service, and like you, not to opt in to new services without
consent. In terms of reporting, still under the transparency hat, we talked
about three types of transparency reporting, which could be in one report
or in three different reports, about take-down requests, about information
about user requests, and also about sua moto action or self-action, so
where the platform acts itself to take action, that also should be
reported. We called for strict transparency on procedures for responding to
government requests.  We also called for companies, you know, within
reason, to legally challenge transparency restrictions, you know, where
they were not in line with the local legal framework, including the
constitutional framework, and to explore alternatives to reporting where
reporting was legally restricted, for example, in the form of warrant
pinaries, so we had no user requests today, we had none today -- we don't
see anything today, so that means we did have one today sort of thing.
Okay.  Going back to the content side of things, very topical as always,
some recent sflements that area that -- recent developments in that area
that captures some attention here. We basically accepted that it's up to
companies as private-sector actors to set the content standards.  You know,
obviously they're required to obey the law, by and large, but if they want
to set content standards over and above the law, that's fine.  I was
chatting with Patrick.  You know, if you want to have a -- a platform that
discusses horses, you know, you can say only stuff about horses is
available on this platform, and if you talk about cows, we're going to
remove it or whatever. We said, however, that those standards needed to be
based on objective standards -- sorry, those rules needed to be based on
objective standards and that they should not be idea logically or --
ideologically or politically based and you should consult with your users
about that. We understood at the time that was not a fully developed
standard and a lot more needs to be done to understand what that means, and
for example, we have today this announcement about the terrorism
initiative, and I think that, you know, one might argue that that was
politically connected.  Obviously, there were was state pressure to
generate -- there was state pressure to generate that standard, but we
recognize more needs to be done on that.  That's probably the most
significant we made in that area.  Obviously the open standards we applied
to that.  We put most of our due process stuff inside of that. We -- you
know, the general due process standards. We also placed an obligation on
companies to apply their content rules consistently.  It's very -- it's
okay to have content rules, but you can't be arbitrary in the way you apply
them, and that requires some attention and effort and resources as a result
in the way that those standards are applied, so, you know, if you're going
to set up content standards, be prepared to apply them properly.  Yeah. We
had a little bit more on that, but I'll skip that for now. On state
attacks, I don't think we had anything really radically new.  We talked
about human rights impact assessments, we talked about providing user
information only where that was legally required, so not sort of
voluntarily cooperating beyond that, you know, no one else does beyond
what's legally required, so I think that's a fair standard.  We call for
some pushback, sort of advocacy pushback, legal pushback, in other words
subject to court in legal limits or whatever, and in it extreme cases we
called on companies to consider breaking the law. I mean, obviously, that
sounds a bit radical, and for an individual, you know, sort of when you
break the law, you're sort of -- you know, you're subject to the law or
whatever, but with companies, I think, you know, it's more of a power
struggle about the law because we're talking about a human rights
illegitimate law by definition, and sort of breaking the law is a challenge
to the state, and of course, if you lose the case of breaking the law, you
may have to pay something or do something or whatever, but it's a way of
fighting back and in extreme cases perhaps to leave. Privacy, which I have
purposefully left for the last of my comments, my view is that the whole
privacy space is a big mess legally and practically, and I have published
those and I will be happy to share those.  Within the privacy Europe,
there's a massive confusion over privacy issues, even to the point of
massive confusion even at the level of privacy and information commissions
about the difference between privacy and data protection.  Okay.  And
that's within sort of the strongest part of the world on this issue. There
is, obviously, a basic rift on privacy between Europe and most of the rest
of the world and the U.S. on the other side, and the practical implications
of -- practical impossibilities, sorry, of realistically achieving informed
consent, which is the foundational basis for the, you know, application of
privacy rules, I mean, it's just not going to happen.  Even if you make a
user click off an I Agree", stand on his head and sing a song, the person
is not going to understand the things that they're signing up for.  I
arrived at my hotel a few days ago, I signed on to the Internet, and I
clicked, of course, so I think that what is required here are regulations.
We cannot -- so this myth that we're operating under, I just don't think we
can continue to do that.  The privacy Commissioner of Canada is having a
consultation on this right now.  When I gave my comments to that, I said
very, very strongly, this is an area which needs regulation, and you need
to be leading on that.  They were very, very happy to hear that.  I was a
little uncomfortable with making them so happy, but I think it is the only
way to go. In terms of our standards, obviously, the --

>> LUCA BELLI: (Off microphone)

>> TOBY: Yeah.  Obviously the transparency staff, in addition to the
regular transparency rules, when companies make claims about privacy, they
should be clear on them and then they should deliver on those claims.
Sometimes companies make very bold claims about the privacy interests that
they're protecting and then don't do that.  That's not acceptable.  We
called on them to educate users about security and about the importance of
privacy, and to immediately inform in cases of a privacy breach, which
hasn't always happened. In terms of great minimization, we agreed with many
of your recommendations on that.  We called for companies to limit the ways
in which they process data.  Automated processing is much less of a privacy
invasion, culturally or socially speaking than sort of human processing.
And we called for companies that use privacy as a basic business model, so,
you know, trading your privacy for the service, to consider providing
options for customers who would prefer to pay so they would opt out of that
privacy tradeoff. We -- I mean, in terms of security, again, we shared many
of your points.  We did -- I mean, I think -- we believe that research is a
very important public interest area of privacy invasion, let's say, or a
balancing of privacy, and we think that in addition to anonymizing data for
research purposes, in some cases that is not enough, and researchers --
either you can't anonymize the data or researchers need to have data that's
not anonymized.  In every other area of life, you know, governments -- not
every, but, I mean, most governments have ways of giving researchers access
to data that is not anonymized, that is a privacy-invading exercise, but by
placing them under a sort of cone of secrecy, and we think the companies
should consider the same things. We had quite a few recommendations on the
right to be forgotten.  Basically, briefly, we called on companies to do
what the European Court of Justice failed to do, which is to establish very
clear standards for how they are going to balance.  I think it was a
radical failure of the European Court of Justice to sort of hand this thing
over to search engines and to not even give them clear direction on what
the standards were, the court not having done that, the companies should.
Thank you.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thank you very much, Toby, for giving us a lot of material
to start this meeting, so as Toby was mentioning, there are a lot of
initiatives like Toby's initiative that are trying to tack am this issue on
how to concretely allow platforms and intermediaries to behave responsibly.
There are a lot of civil society-led initiatives.  We will also hear some
governmental-led initiatives during the meeting, but what we have tried to
do after having elaborated a set of recommendations last year on Terms of
Service and human rights -- by the way, they could still be updated and
modified, so thanks a lot for your critique because it is something that we
take and actually we could work on it together. Besides that, we decided
also to last year at the Center for Technology & Society in Rio, we decided
to provide some concrete evidence, some data because there are a lot of
initiatives to provide guidance, but very few that analyze actually what
are the state of human rights, what are -- are they respected or not by
intermediaries.  We decided to have this -- to produce this booklet on
Terms of Service and human rights that can you freely download at
Internetifangovernance.fgb.dr, which has the book of human rights that we
elaborated last year ig could.  It's a study of analysis of 50 platforms in
Terms of Service, and the principle investigator of the studies is there at
the end of the table, so if you want to compliment my points, feel free to
do it, but the -- the point that -- the basic consideration replicates that
as Toby was mentioning, Terms of Service are the basis of the relationship
between the user and the provider, but we consider it a little bit farther
than this.  It's not only the basis of the relationship, it's also a sort
of private regulation.  It's private ordering that put the platform
provider in a position of a sort of private sovereign that has a quasi-
legislative power because it unilaterally defines the rules that have to be
respected in the platform, a quasi-judicial power because it can decide of
the conflicts among users using the rules that are uniformly defined by the
platform, and it also has a quasi-executive power because it can implement
algorithmically the rules of the unilaterally are defined by the platform,
so our main consideration was how to understand how those rules, those
private rules, impact the human rights of the users in a are already
defined by international standards, so the first part of the methodology of
our study was to identify relevant human rights standards, binding
standards, and also -- the Council of Europe guide on Internet users, and
it has been produced in partnership with the Council of Europe, so that was
precisely meant to feed the Council of Europe work and also implement the
guide. So after having identified what were the main documents in which you
could work, we have reduced all the elements of this document to a yes-or-
no question.  We have the analysis, then, with three different teams that
were working independently, and then we have crossed the results of these
three teams that were not speaking amongst each other, so they could not be
in France -- we have crossed the result, and we have included only the
results that were a clear no or a clear yes with the percent that it was
superior of 75%. And then we have elaborated some conclusions, and here are
some -- well, let's start with some general conclusions and then I will get
into some more interesting details. So the general conclusions are that the
documents, the contracts are usually quite vague and include some very
technical terms, which is sometimes very difficult also for lawyers to
understand.  It is not very easy to identify what are all the entire
documents that regulate the relationship between the provider and the user
because the documents are not very well referenced, and sometimes it's not
easy -- they're not easily accessible.  And not all the information that
are necessary to form one's own consent and to express one's own consent,
not all the information is included in the document, so, for instance, the
-- the platform providers frequently say that they will share their -- the
personal data with third parties, but without identifying who are the
particular parties and how the data will be utilized, so that makes it
virtually impossible for a user to express informed consent on how the data
will be utilized, and it turns -- in terms of reference into a sort of
waiver on data collection and processing by the operator. So to get into
some more concrete results, we have defined the study with the same three
pillars of the recommendations, meaning freedom of expression, privacy
protection, and rule of law and due process, and the due process part is a
very important one because I think we are the only center that has done a
study tackling due process. So starting with some consideration on privacy
-- sorry, on freedom of expression, we have noted 70% of the platforms
allow users to report abusive content, but only 48% states that when the
content is removed, the content owner will be notified, so your content
could be easily removed, but you are not aware of the reasons why or when
it is removed. And 88% of the platform explicitly states that they can
terminate accounts without identification, so that is a reason for not only
freedom of expression but also due process because you cannot know why your
account has been terminated. With regard to anonymity and the anonymous,
which have been highlighted as something for freedom of expression by the
latest report of the rapporteur of human rights -- sorry, of freedom of
expression of the United Nations, only 32s of the platforms are allowed to
use anonymous -- anonymous feature, and, therefore, it makes it very hard
to express yourself without other people knowing who you are, that it makes
it extremely hard to fully enjoy freedom of expression. With regard to
privacy, 66% of the platforms explicitly state that they will keep on
tracking you on other websites and that they allow other third parties to
track you within their website, and basically, using social plug-ins, like
the funny Facebook button or Twitter button, that means that every time you
are on a third-party website, Facebook or Twitter are tracking what you're
doing and see perfectly what you do. And 80% of the platforms state that
other third party will monitor your activity in their platform without
saying what are those third parties and what are they doing with your data.
And 62% of the platforms states that they will share data with other third
parties, again, without stating who are the other third parties and which
kind of data will be shared. With due process, and then I would like to
conclude with this, we have also in the recommendations stated clearly that
an essential element is that an individual has to know the rule of the
game.  You have to know what are the rules and if they're modified, how
they're modified, and only 30% of the platform commits to notify you when
the Terms of Service are modified, and we have noted that in some
platforms, rules -- Terms of Service are modified basically every week, and
only 30% commit to the notification, and 12% ex police explicitedly said
they will not notify you. Another area of concern is 26% of the platform
include a dhangs is a waiver for class actions, so if any of the conditions
are disrespectful of your rights, you cannot, by contract, raise a class
action, and that is something that is illegal, I think, under almost every
consumer protection -- consumer protection law, and 86%, finally to
conclude, define a specific jurisdiction where the platform user has to go
to seek redress, which is generally California, and that makes it extremely
hard to have access to justice for a user. So with this, I would like to
conclude and to open the -- maybe we can have a couple of -- a couple of
questions or remarks because I know we draw here in the room other people
that have done very good studies an initiatives on this, so please, if you
have any comments.

>> Hello.  I'm Yan from the digital council.  I have a question on the two
panelists who have expressed themselves so far.  It is on how you have been
taking issues of B2B relations also into account into your works because we
have talked a lot about how platforms relations should be regulated with
users from the side market, from the consumers, but there are also issues
that are sometimes similar, notably issues of transparency, with spli, so I
would like to know -- suppliers, so I would like to know what do you think
about if there are things that are different from B2C relations that should
be addressed also.  We have been working at the French Digital Council on
these issues for, like, three years now, and there have been a lot of
notably entrepreneurs that have contacted us saying that they had issues in
the past where they didn't understand when the turnovers was diminishing
and how they were referenced by a platform, for instance, or issues of
stability of APIs.  Also, when platforms are using open innovation models
to develop services, so I would like to know how you have been working on
these issues.

>> LUCA BELLI: Maybe I'll take other two comments and then I'll handle,
please.

>> ALEJANDRO PISANTY: Thank you.  My name is Alejandro Pisanty from Mexico.
I have a very general broad comment.  These things that you are looking at
are actually very deeply rooted in the way the Internet has been built.
Going back one -- to one term, the public sphere, there have been great
hope on the Internet that the Internet would provide these new great --
this new great space for deliberation of the whole society, that one
particular point is that we have built it on private property, almost all
-- almost all of the Internet works on private property, whether you look
at the cables, whether you look at the servers, whether you look at the
software and the services and the hosting of your information. The
alternative is worse. (Laughter) I mean, you can think of the alternative
and see countries that are actually trying to build that alternative, so
bringing in the state is something that will have to be done with extreme
care. There is the possibility of solving parts of the problem you are
dealing with in the coalition by agreement, by a covenant.  One could take
the GCIG concept of a new social compact, but one of the risks there is
that you will actually only be protecting the people who sort of live in
the good countries, and the bad countries will have even more incentives to
do their stuff.  Thank you.

>> LUCA BELLI: I'll take another comment.

>> I'm Berton, the executive director of Internet and jurisdiction.  I have
just one question and then asking for a clarification on something you
said, Luca.  You mentioned the situation where an account is taken down
without notification of the user.  There's an ambiguity on the notion of
notification because it covers two dimensions, one the actual notification
that the decision has been taken, but there's also the notification of why
the decision has been taken.  Did you explore the distinction between the
two?

>> LUCA BELLI: Maybe you can reply directly to this and then take another
comment.  Just we analyzed when a notification was provided on the removal
of content or on the eraser of the account.  Then, in Terms of Service
explicitly state there will be no notification, it means there will also be
no motivation, so for sure a notification should have an indication of the
content and indication of the reason, and indicatio --

>> BERTRON: So you actually meant --

>> LUCA BELLI: No notification at all.  Another here.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to talk about the privacy because you both
talked about the privacy breaches by these companies and also the need for
them to be transparent about what they capture, what they store, what they
share with others, and also, you know, any breaches of security should be
immediately publicized rather than covered up, but I just didn't understand
whether you are arguing against their business model as such and what is
the alternative to this because, you know, I quite like this, you know,
German recommendation. I don't know if there are any German speakers, so
sorry about that.  (Speaking non-English language) but they should only
capture what they need and the burden of what they need should fall on
them, and also for any security breaches, they should be liable, so if you
hold the data which you don't need or you can't demonstrate whether you
need and somebody sues, you should be liable?  Is that what you talk about
when you talk about recommendations in terms of privacy?

>> TOBY: So maybe start with that one.  I didn't go into all of the things
because -- especially, I didn't delve too much into the ones which are
similar between our two sets of principles, so looking at where we were
being more innovative.  So we don't go against the business model but we do
otherwise generally support this principle, so if your business model
relies on reselling private data, then it is an operational need of your
business and you can justify it in that way, but if you're collecting just
sort of randomly in case you may in future possibly need it or just because
you can't be bothered to tailor your collection tools, he I think you would
be in breach of this tool, and we talk about that, we have a whole section
on data minimization. Just to comment -- it just came up for this meeting.
It's not just that the -- you know, the Internet is built on sort of this
public space model, it's built on private proshingts but it's built on a --
property, but it's built on a privacy invading model, which a lot of
internet services, we trade our privacy for the service, and that's a
model.  It emerged -- I mean, it has some benefits and, you know, my kids
probably like it because they can get stuff for free, but it has some huge
costs. There was never any part of a public debate about -- we're probably
erevokebly locked into that now, but -- irrevokebly locked into that now,
but we probably got there by corporate decisions that had no public debate
and no whatever, and there would have been other options, so I think that's
for me sort of the biggest public space issue with that. On the B2B, we do
call on the sort of transparency in the privacy space, especially, for
transparency about the types of third parties that companies will share --
that platforms will share your information with and how the information may
be used.  We actually had quite an intense internal debate about that, and
some of my staff felt that that was not far enough and that we should have
said much stronger and constraining things about that, and I and some
others, especially me, felt that we weren't quite ready to go there yet,
but we definitely realized that it is a whole area where more needs to be
done, and then just finally on the notice, I mean, I'm -- to be honest,
it's interesting looking at your statistics.  I'm shocked at the low level
of commitment to that and that there are groups that refuse that.  I don't
know whether it's a resource constraint issue.  I mean, we do -- in our
recommendations, we're, you know, fairly sensitive to resource constraints
and obviously technological constraints and legal constraints, you know.
Companies have to sort of respond to those things, but absent those, I
really can't see any reason whatsoever why you wouldn't provide both kinds
of notice.  The first kind of notice, I mean, for termination of your
service, it's unnecessary because your service isn't there, so you kind of
know that that happened, but obviously, you want reasons.

>> LUCA BELLI: Just to provide two quick replies to Yan's comment and to
Alejandro's, to Yan's comment, we haven't analyzed the B2B because it was
to analyze the impact it had on individual's human right, and to build on
what Alejandro was saying, yes, for sure, the Internet has been built on
private relationships, but there is a big -- this but, we all know that --
and it has also been clarified by the human right council number, 31 u,804
that states have also an obligation not only to ensure and protect human
rights but also to protect individuals against the violation of other
individuals or of other private entities, and this has been very clarified
by the guide on human rights for Internet users over or the Council of
Europe, which was one of the main documents we analyzed that does not only
state that states in Europe have an obligation to protect individuals
against other individuals or other private entities violation of their
human rights, but it also precisely states that human rights prevail on
Terms of Service, and that is a very good point on which this work has been
built. So having said that, I just -- I see there are two more comments.  I
will ask you to be very, very quick so then we can go to the second
segment.

>> CHARLIE: I'm Charlie from the French digital council.  It was just to
ask for clarification.  You mentioned that some kind of great on privacy
and I understood the consumers or the users should be able to pay in order
to -- to not to make this privacy tradeoff.  Could you explain more on this
because it feels like some kind of slippery slope, like how should you --

>> (Off microphone)

>> CHARLIE: Like should you pay for human rights, so if you could explain
more on this. (Laughter) And my second request for clarification is about
the -- the fact that the private sector should be legitimate to their own
standards, as long as it's not politically or ideologically based, but I
can't find any standards which would not be politicallybased, actually, so
if you could -- and also, what do you think about the idea of community
standards that would be constructed by the whole community on platforms?
So thank you.

>> BARON: Baron, tech freedom. Since the Dynamic Coalition is about
platform responsibility, don't platforms have a responsibility to stay in
business, to provide better services and tools to their users and, you
know, if Twitter took all of your suggestions and especially on things like
data minimization and providing choice to users and cutting back on
advertising, they might very well simply go out of business, and so this is
all very fine talk, but if at the end of the day you wind up losing
platforms that are actually in the case of Twitter more protective of
speech and you have one less option in the marketplace, who's really won?
So high level, how do you think about the responsibility of platforms to
invest and innovate and thrive and provide choices to users, and how do you
balance those with all the things that you're talking about in here that
come with real economic costs, and I don't just mean notification.  I mean,
that's a relatively marginal cost.  I'm talking about things like
justification.  Those are expensive and it's true that those teams at
companies that do content moderation are extremely expensive, but I'm
talking about things like data minimization and things that cut to the
heart of the business models that, you know -- it's easy to, as we say in
the U.S., to Monday-morning quarterback, to second-guess the decisions that
companies make, but quite frankly, you're not in the boardroom and you're
not there trying to talk to Yahoo.  Look at -- Yahoo went out of business,
right?  They're selling themselves out to Verizon, and things might have
been different if they had made -- if they had been more bold in
experimenting, and it may have been things that made people in this room
uncomfortable, but maybe they would have been a third stronger player out
there in the search market, so I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on
those balancing issues.

>> TOBY. ON THAT ONE, WE'RE NOT IN THE broorm p boardroom, but on a panel
we had quite a bit of boardroom people.  I didn't keep saying that as I
presented the standards, but most of them, which have cost implications,
sort of say subject to resource -- reasonable resource constraints, and
none of this -- I mean, just to reiterate, and I already kind of said it in
response to Barbara's, none of this cuts to the business model.  We're not
saying minimize data collection if that data is part of your business
model.  What we're saying -- so if you're reselling data and that's your
business model, go ahead and do that, but don't collect stuff that you
don't need that's beyond that need, but we accept that basic model as the
way -- I mean, I made a comment about that as the public space and the
direction we've gone that wasn't discussed publicly.  I think that is a
huge problem, but we are in that space now and the businesses are operating
that way and that's fine, so I don't think that we're posing a threat to
the business model.  Read our recommendations, and if you have specific
business comments on them, I'd be very happy to receive them. On the opt-
out and paying for human rights, I mean, this is the kind of contradiction
here because you're not -- you know, you have accepted, okay, that, you
know, when you sign up for Facebook and for Twitter and for whatever, you
know, I don't know what I gave away when I signed up for my Internet in my
hotel, but something probably. (Laughter) My first born or something.  I
have no idea what it was.  They'll claim that when I leave the hotel, can
we have your child?  No, okay, I'm being a bit facetious, but you do -- but
the theory here is that you have consented, okay, and when you consent to
the use of your privacy, it is not a breach of your human rights, so you're
not paying for your human rights. What we're saying there is instead of
only having one way of, let's say, using Facebook or being a user of
Facebook, offer another option.  One is you can give them your first born,
and the other is you can say I'm going to pay, you know, $10 a month or
whatever it would be for this service, so you're given a choice, you know,
for the service.  That was the idea there. And in terms of the objective, I
mean, I think, you know, we recognize -- we wanted to push that idea out
there because we think that companies have, you know, free choice as
companies to set the standards on which they operate, but because of the
freedom of expression implications, not unlimited free choice.  There needs
to be some proper -- and I recognize that's a completely uninformative
term, but there needs to be some basis for the content rules.  Family
values, okay, as undefined as that is, I think that's -- and that was the
example we gave.  And I don't think that's political, I think it's a social
choice.  You know, it can become political, obviously, but I don't think
it's inherently political.  You know, if I want to set up a discussion
forum to talk about horses, okay, and I'm not going to let people talk
about cows, that is not a political choice in my opinion, it's a fair thing
to do. So -- but we need to go a lot further in terms of doing it, and
finally, I don't think that community values or community standards are in
any way a productive way to go with this.  I don't think it's going to
bring us to, you know, a -- and a possible quagmire.

>> LUCA BELLI: One brief comment and then we'll pass to the second segment
because some speakers have to go away. I have to discuss another option
that was in the article for the World Health Organization is that you
utilize technical standards, not only contrasts, and there are some very
good examples if you will look at the My Data Movement, if you look at the
solid project by team berners Lee.  It's technical standards to allow the
user to which kind of type of his data can be used, so I think there are
also technical solutions that should be taken into consideration. I would
like to skchlt Megan to start the second segment.  Thank you, Megan.

>> MEGAN: Thank you, Luca.  Am I on?  Nice to be here, of course, and a
very interesting discussion.  A couple of points that were raised already
in the first session, I don't want to belabor the issue because it's been
raised, but I think one of the reasons this is such a complex and difficult
issue to address is exactly because it is private-sector actors, primarily,
people who participate in these activities do so voluntarily.  There's no
obligation to do this.  There are other fora to express yourself and have
freedom of expression. There's an element of caveat emptor.  On the other
hand, we absolutely insist in Europe and in many other jurisdictions on
strong and secure consumer protection provisions for anyone using, whether
it's a service or a good or whatever it might be, and those can include
things like human rights protection, et cetera, et cetera. So this is what
makes the whole issue so very complex. On the other hand, the private
sector has an interest too in making sure that its consumers stay with it,
that they have trust in their products, and, therefore, I think this is why
we have a very interesting approach and a very interesting issue here.  We
have to look at the private sector's interest and their commitment; the
government's interest and their commitment, and I see I'm the only one
speaking from a governmental point of view.  Let's put it that way.
Everyone else is on the side of the angels and the good. (Laughter) So we
have to really look at how this relates.  Governments as well have an
interest and obligation of protecting their citizens, et cetera, et cetera.
What I thought I would do in this context is briefly explain where we are
in Europe with respect to platform responsibility, which is a huge area to
address, but we have, for example, an eCommerce directive, which has
existed since 2000.  Of course, things have changed in the technical spear
in 15 years very much.  Nonetheless, article 15 of the eCommerce directive
says quite clearly that there is no general obligation to monitor the
content or what is being used if you're an information service provider,
and then it goes on to a whole series, so I'm going to use that as a gross
simplification of what the eCommerce directive says, but it puts it into
the context that these are platforms and there's no real obligation on the
part, no legal obligation, and Member States cannot impose special
obligations to monitor on platforms. This is quite different from what we
have in, for example, awedee-visual media services directive where there's
an editing obligation and activity and these services have a real
obligation to make sure that what they put out has been vetted and, again,
if you want to have a newspaper that only looks after horses and no dogs or
only chickens and no turkeys, I don't know. (Laughter) This is governed by
different rules, so you have quite different rules and regulations in an
area that is perhaps -- I don't like to use the word "converging" but has
many similarities, and the similarities are becoming greater and greater as
we go forward.  So this is, again, something that makes the whole issue
rather complex. So one of the things we have done in Europe is -- well, let
me start again.  The other element that I wanted to go back to relating to
consumer protection is there is a whole series of competition laws in
Europe, and again, I'm speaking about what specific jurisdiction, and I
think jurisdictional issues are going to be raised in this context, so if
you have abuse of dominance of a position, then there's certain competition
law provisions that allow you to take certain actions, but let's go back to
the other issues. On the digital single market approach, we have a whole
series of issues looking at how to make a digital single market in Europe.
One of the things that was going to be looked at in that context was the
role of online platforms.  What were online platforms doing, was this --
was there a dominance effect, was there an abuse of dominance, how were the
relations B2B, how were the relations B2C, and what were the implications
here for the digital market. As many of you in the room know, this was
immediately conceived as an attack against American platforms, which are
used even more extensively in Europe than they are in America, believe it
or not.  I think something like 90% of searches in Europe are on Google;
whereas, in the United States they're only about seventhy%.  You see
there's a -- 70%, so you see there's a real difference. A couple of things.
In that online platforms assessment and review, there was no decision at
the end to go to regulation.  It's extremely complex.  There are many
things.  Everyone said the eCommerce directive is there, it exists.  We're
looking at how and what and if some things need to be addressed, but one
thing that was identified in the online platform assessment was the B2B
relationship.  This was identified as something that had the potential to
be looked at in much more detail, maybe better provisions. Now, in theory,
businesses are independent, have the capacity to negotiate and contract
themselves, this he don't need consumer protection per se, even though some
of them are consumers in different ways, so this is something that we're
still looking at.  That's one thing. Then the over is that we have a series
of codes of conduct from various companies, most of which are online
platforms.  One relates to protection of children online, so we have a code
of conduct for online platforms and other Internet companies, which relates
to illegal child abuse pictures or statements or websites.  That's one
aspect.  No one disagrees with that. Then more recently, something called
the European Internet Forum was established, which is a voluntary code of
conduct that was developed by -- with Commissioner Avarmopolis who's
responsible for cyber crime and things like that, and this online platform
code of conduct was addressed at taking down illegal hate speech online,
and this is because in Europe we have very clear and -- I know the
Americans think it's very restrictive -- provisions on hate speech.  Just
as an anecdote (Speaking non-English language) which you will probably
appreciate.  In the hearings on the IANA transition in the Senate on the
15th of September in the United States, Ted Cruz ranted and raved against
the European hate speech provisions because he said it was a violation of
Amendment Number 1 of the U.S. Bill of Rights.  It restricted freedom of
expression of Americans. Now, if you -- now, I know he did it entirely for
political reasons, but if you have that kind of approach, you have -- and
I'm looking at Berton now, you have the ability of the jurisdictional
cases, which are very complex in the Internet world, so what happened in
this case of code of conduct?  A number of online platforms agreed to get
together and develop this code of conduct on countering illegal hate
speech.  They're Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, and I'm going to
read a little bit -- I don't like to read usually, but to make sure it's
absolutely correct, the freedom of expression is not limited, it's only
illegal -- illegal hate speech which is limited, and the three that have
signed up so far have agreed that to the extent they are informed of
illegal hate speech online, they will take specific action to make sure
that those who have posted this will be informed of it and that they will
take down that content. So even though the European Court of Human Rights
has said that the right to freedom of expression can include speech that
offends, shocks, or disturbs the state or any sector of the population, it
does not extend to protection of expressions that incite hatred.  Now,
one's man incitement of hatred is another man's freedom of expression,
particularly for Ted Cruz, but -- (Laughter) -- so that's another case.  So
on the 31st of May, that's when this code of conduct was established, and
the commitments are to combat the spread of illegal hate speech online in
Europe. This is particularly important, I think, given the current
political situation, not just in Europe but in the United States, in other
countries.  We've seen a rise of pop ulism, we've seen a -- populism, we've
seen a rise of unfortunate comments which may be racist or sexist or zeen
phobic, whatever they may be, so I think that's one of the reasons why
there was this particular concern, and in Europe as well, we have had, of
course, a huge issue relating to refugees and migrants, which, of course,
has also started some kinds of antagonistic hate speech online.  Yeah,
don't worry, I'm coming to the very end. So by signing the code of conduct,
these companies commit to continuing their efforts to tackle illegal hate
speech online, and they have a series of internal procedures, it's
discussed with all the parties, and the position really is to ensure that
the decision on racism and xenophobia allows the majority of valid, valid
notifications for removal of illegal hate speech to be taken down in less
than 24 hours and to remove or disable access to the content, if necessary.
So that's really where we are on that.  That's just one element.  thanks.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thanks, Meagan.  I would ask to -- I know he's leading --
he's chairing the Council of Europe group of specialists on intermediaries
to provide us some insight on what the Council of Europe is also doing on
this.  Thank you.

>> So thanks so much for including us, and as you said, I will not talk
about my research on this issue but a little bit on our deliberations and
the committee of experts on Internet intermediaries set up by the Council
of Europe, and it's great to share that, especially with colleagues like
Carmen & Berton, so we are a committee of the subcommittee, so you have
access to all our ideas. We are in the preliminary stage, so what I will
talk about is not something we have agreed on right now but is just ideas
we have tossed around.  Our mandate is twofold.  We have to prepare a draft
recommendation by the Committee of Ministers on Internet intermediaries.
That's the first one, and the second one to prepare a study on human
rights, the mention of computational data processing techniques, especially
algorithms and possible regulatory implications, and it's obvious there are
a lot of interconnections between those, both tasks but there are different
things -- different products we are working on here. I will briefly talk
about some issues we have discussed when it comes to the first one to the
draft recommendations on Internet intermediaries.  Our idea right now is
that we address both the states on the basis of their duty and the
intermediaries on the basis of their responsibility, a term that is not so
easy to understand, and human rights methodology, but nevertheless, that's
our starting point because we are basing our work on the Council of
Europe's documents and they clearly state the responsibility of business
entities in their documents. First point I would like to bring up when it
comes to the duty of states responds to things we can see in some countries
of Europe right now, that they are informal requests by the government to
somehow clean the Internet because of some things that might offend the
majority of the publication.  Draminia for example, it's not so clear when
the minister of justice visits Facebook whether it's just about hate speech
under German regulation, like imagine pointed out right now, or whether
it's about we want to get rid of this hatred in the net, which is a
completely different thing to do, and I think it's likely that we come up
with a recommendation that there has to be a legal basis and that there
should be no informal push by government to rate the Internet.  I think
it's important given the fact that some governments, even in Europe, tend
to go there. I have attended a conference in Germany recently, and one of
the prime ministers of Germany made this argumentiation saying Trump was
possible because of Facebook.  We have these right wing parties in Germany,
so we have to regulate Facebook to make sure that everything stays stable.
I think that's a very, very slippery slope, and this time really down and
not upwards, and that's not the general thing in Germany.  I don't want to
give the impression that everything is -- (Laughter) -- but some --
sometimes you have the feeling that it's these simple politicians Siligism
that's working here.  Second point and in connection with the first one,
there is more and more on a European level but also on a national level the
trend to enforce self-regulation or to go to co-regulation.  I personally
have done a lot of studies on co-regulation and self-regulation, and I
think that this instrument can be very powerful, it can be very good as
regards human rights' standards because it gives leeway to the industry how
to react to demands, but nevertheless, there is an inherent risk, and the
risk is a kind of blurring of responsibility. And the second risk is that
something you don't want governments to impose formally is done informally.
For example, monitoring of content, so a recommendation is likely to be
that we say that when Member States consider a self or co-regulatory
arrangement, they need to make sure they don't have a monitoring of content
without somebody -- somebody has made the provider aware that there might
be a problem. And not surprisingly, because everything is based on the
Article 10 and other articles of the European Convention on Human Rights,
we insist on not only a legal basis but also on the proportionality of the
measures and that -- they mentioned that already -- to make sure that when
there is content removal request that it is really based on infringement of
law and not just on something that is offensive or shocking and things like
that. Seems obvious, but nevertheless, as political discussions are, I
think it's important to state that anyway. The last point as regards the
duties of the state is transparency of a take-down request.  We believe
that it is from a human rights perspective something that is extremely
important.  We know from the Ranking Digital Rights project that there have
been at least for some private entities progress as regards transparency
about take-downs, but with the states it's still a problem, and that's why
we at least consider including recommendations as regards these kind of
transparency about takeover -- take-down requests as well. And very
briefly, to the responsibility of the intermediaries, one idea we are
discussing is that we see it as a responsibility of an intermediary to do
-- to engage in human rights, do assessments to get an internal procedure
that makes sure that all the things, including codes of conduct are really
in line with that and not only for the products they have but also for the
product development for new services. Secondly, a thing we have discussed
is that Internet intermediaries should clearly and transparently inform
their users about the operation of automated data processing.  That's an
idea that is already in the general data protection regulation --
regulation.  I'm not so really fond of, like Toby said.  It's prolonging
and a broadened concept in new ages, but in many ways, but there are some
interesting things, and one is this transparency requirement, and this
transparency requirement is only formerly to a personal data -- covers only
personal data, and we want to expand that and say that this -- to make
clear what the operation actually is behind that to the users is important.
And finally, we have talked a lot in our last session about access to an
effective remedy.  That's a very important point, complaint.  Mechanisms
must comply with safeguards and include the right to be heard and things
like that.  We elaborate that, and that's very likely in our recommendation
or draft recommendation as well. Finally, three cross-cutting issues and
then it's -- it's done.  First of all, we have talked in our first session,
at least briefly, about what is an intermediary and that we believe that a
kind of functional approach is called for because it's not really feasible
to say Facebook is an intermediary.  It does so many different things.  It
can fall in the category of editing if they provide services in a specific
way under the AVMS or future AVMS or whatever, but other things are
definitely not this kind of editorial offer, so it's very dangerous to take
the intermediaries types we have right now and try to associate that with
specific forms of regulation because they are hybrids.  Most of them are a
hybrid, so our suggestion is that Member States recognize that and apply a
functional approach when a kind of intermediary function is in question.
Then the recommendation shall apply that we have drafted or will be
drafting. Toby already talked about this responsibility aspect and the
shalls and shoulds.  That's something that we will consider in our next
meeting, I think, deeply, that has not been decided right now, how we deal
with that.  Just wanted to make clear that we are aware of these problems
and that we have a similar discussion as you reflected from your efforts as
regards that. And my last point, something I believe we will discuss in the
next session as well is whether we want to have these general approaches,
as you decided to apply, to just come up with recommendations for all
intermediaries or whether we consider to see that there are different types
of intermediaries, and something that has been discussed in many panels
here on the IGF is we see that there are some intermediaries in a have
quasi-state function in a way, maybe should be bound in a different way to
human rights than others.  This horses example or cats and dogs that they
use very often or they have an example of  Catholic search engine, if
everybody knows that they discriminate in a specific way be forced to be
neutral?  I don't see anything that makes that a requirement, and a pause,
you mentioned that before, there's always the risk that a very, very tough
set of requirements for intermediaries leads to advantages for the big
market players because it's costly to implement that.  That's a tradeoff
that we have to be aware of.  Thanks.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thank you very much would have gang, and -- wolf gang, and
just in regard to the shall and should, the things we stated last year
clearly define this approach and says shall is something already seen by
the international standard and should be done, in some -- and some
intermediary already does.

>> WOLFGANG: We will take your recommendations into account and have done
already.

>> LUCA BELLI: Excellent.  Carmen, you can provide us your insight and more
concrete detail based on your experience.

>> CARMEN. HI, EVERYONE.  MY NAME IS CARMEN.  I'm also in the same
committee as Wolfgang and so Luca wrote me that maybe I should discuss some
of the examples that the courts have done recently or what the new
initiatives are from the Council of Europe that were used, so I picked
some, and so I'll try to give you examples of those just to make the
discussion going later on, because the Court of Human Rights and the Court
of Justice have been quite active, starting from linking to matters and
then so forth, but now I'll take the Court of Human Rights.  So the Court
of Human Rights had not really dealt with Internet issues until 2012.  The
first case they had was in Turkey, and after that, the next one was
actually about intermediaries and liability for user-generated content. So
before that, I think just as we were discussing before where we had
eCommerce directives, we were all kind of feeling quite safe and sound
already in Europe because we thought that we already had the standard, so
we had, like, two very underlying ideas that there is no general obligation
to monitor, as was explained already, and the liability cannot follow if
it's -- if the service of the company, intermediary service would be
neutral, it would be automatic, and no knowledge could be attributable, so
we would see no liability following.  Whatever the users would be doing,
then, on the platform. In 2015, the court of human rights, granted a
chamber of that comprising 17 highest human rights judges in Europe, made a
decision other way around a bit, so what they decided was that if on the
platform there are users who would be reporting to a speech that would be
clearly unlawful, then the knowledge condition doesn't really matter
anymore, so the platform would be obliged on their own initiative to remove
those comments -- to remove that content in order to avoid liability --
that was Delphi vs. astonea decision. Six months later, the court of human
rights did have an option for a redo.  That was index dot 2 vs. Hungary.
One of the judge on the panel, they did try to mitigate what was said in
Delpi, and they said even though that exists, the decision exists, still
that would be like an extraordinary circumstance, so in normal
circumstances, where it's not about hate speech, it's not about direct
incitement to hatred, it's not about direct threats to physical integrity,
then the normal notice and action procedure would suffice in order to
perform diligently on the market, so they did try to mitigate, and I think
as a second try, it was better than the first one, so I think the Court of
Human Rights, we are looking at them hoping that the third one would be
even more taking into account how Internet really works.  Probably that's
why the Council of Europe convened a committee to try to find a way for
those two decisions to have a recommendation for the states that would
actually be doable for the companies without hiring hundreds and hundreds
and thousands for some, so that's from the Court of Human Rights
perspective.  That's 47 Member States. 28 Member States we're still kind of
hoping and coping with well.  We have eCommerce directive, so we are taking
those two principles, no knowledge, no liability, no obligation to go
through that, all the information stored, but European Union has some
initiatives that at least from the freedom of expression and freedom of
association and all those other human rights that users would appreciate
very highly, some of those are to concern to many human rights lawyers, at
least, so I'll take a few may -- maybe took note of that code of conduct
for hate speech.  I know that bar bore has left, think.  I know from her
point of view, the process was quite questionable because it's mandating
the communication on online platform.  It's mandate's responsible behavior
from online platform to protect the core values.  Of course, this raises a
number of questions, who's core values, which core values, what is a core
value, is it freedom of expression or right to privacy, who is to make that
decision, so how is the platform supposed to be responsible for everyone's
core values?  It can't be done. The next initiative, what was also
mentioned, was audiovisual media service directive.  The proposal to it.
And, yes, generally audiovisual media services, we are talking about the
person who is owner of the content, author of the content, so it's a
totally different thing from being an intermediary, which means you are not
creating, you are just sharing or making it available; however, in the
definition of the proposal, it says something different.  It talks about
video-sharing platforms and the definition says that, well, you are a
video-sharing platform if you are storing large amounts of user-generated
content, and, again, for those video-sharing platforms, there is a separate
obligation in the proposal.  Most important one of them is that a video-
sharing platform in specific is obliged to introduce measures to ensure
protection of all citizens from illegal content. So that will be fun to see
how to protect every single citizen, but if I'm not a citizen, then I
don't, so it's a -- it's quite interesting from that. (Laughter) So migrant
-- yeah, it's a number of interesting questions, I think, that you could --
you could think of. And the final initiative that has made quite a number
of academics quite active, as was just presented to commissioner in
parliament on corporate directive -- new corporate directive, and there was
actually meeting taking place in 6th of December, so some of us who were
not in Mexico were able to go, and so -- in Brussels, so the main problem
with corporate directives is also, as we started -- Madam started very
right on that.  The basis of everything that we are thinking in Europe
about intermediaries is this Article 15 and eCommerce directive that there
is no obligation, the state cannot oblige you.  The Court of Justice
decisions have followed this to a degree and sometimes better than them,
sometimes not at all, so let's keep that one.  So the directive tries to
circumvent it.  Whether it was the idea behind it from the start or not,
but it does circumvent it, that's for sure, because what it does, it makes
everyone who is storing large quantities of data or information or user-
generated comment -- there are two obligations for them, and this is, of
course, just regards to corporate works.  The first obligation would be to
put in place appropriate measures and appropriate technologies to make sure
there is no violation of corporate taking place on the platform, and
secondly, to conclude agreements with right-holders that would also force a
reporting of the misuse cases, which is kind of a -- I'm not sure how
general data protection regulation would even go with that. So the measures
listed for those measures or technologies use examples of effective content
recognition technologies.  The content recognition technologies, we don't
really have any of those that would be able to make sure that it is
actually corporateable.  It's not a use, it's not a use for library, it's
not a fair comment, it's not making fun of incorporated work, so it's not
done, and if we take into account every such technology would go very
deeply into the privacy issues, we are talking about packet inspections and
so forth, so how can it be done in accordance with all the other fields of
law around it and, of course, the eCommerce directive that is still in
place but with the new corporate directive if it would go into force like
this, the eCommerce directive would not be applicable to the Intellectual
Property field at least anymore, and I think the idea behind eCommerce
directive to try to be horizontal, whether it has succeeded or not is
another question, but try to be cherished, and I think would like to end
and just with discussing with everyone.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thank you, for going into the jurors prude earns and latest
evolution with regard to the proposal.  I would like to ask Alanna to have
more elements so we have the last few minutes of debate among us.  The
ranking of digital rights have been done so far and the last digital that
you had with your survey.  Thank you.

>> ALANNA OLEMAN: My name is Alanna, I'm with ranking digital sites
projects and we're working with global standards of how we should expect
free expression and privacy, so we produced a corporate accountability
index, and I have copies of it here if anyone wants a cop.  We have English
and Spanish, and you can check rankingdigitalrights.org and see the
documentation going along with that. We produced the first index in 2015.
The next one will come out this spring in 2017 and will evaluate 22
companies, which is an additional six from the first report, and another
addition is that it's going to look at what we call mobile ecosystems in
addition to Internet and telecommunications companies. So the aim of
projects such as ours is to identify gaps, to identify where companies
could be doing better, for users, for advocates, for policymakers, for
investors, and also for the companies themselves to identify changes that
they could make to improve. And so we also seek to identify regulatory
elements that might be preventing companies from providing additional
disclosures and scoring higher, and while this doesn't affect the
companies' scores, it does provide additional context, which we include in
the report. So how we do this is we evaluate companies based on their
public commitments and disclosures.  Since part of our project is also to
encourage the companies to be more transparent about their policies. So we
look at the Terms of Service as well as other public documents, such as
privacy policies, transparency reports, help center documentation, and
more, and our methodology, which, as I mentioned, can you read in full on
our website, includes indicators that are grouped into three categories,
which is governance, which includes indicators on grievance and remedy
mechanisms, human rights impact assessments, among others; as well as
separate for privacy and for freedom of expression.  And so there are
different elements within each indicator, so for the example before about
notification for content restrictions, we look at was the user who posted
the content notified, was there justification, and also is a user who's
trying to access the content as not the one who posted it, are they
notified that they're attempting to access content that's been blocked? So
we've also made some changes to the methodology since last year's index, so
we have some new indicators this time around, including one on network
shutdowns, which has been a popular topic here at IGF, as well as
disclosure around data breaches, among others. So just really quick to
summarize a few things that we've learned from the first installment,
unfortunately, the big takeaway was that there are no real winners.  The
highest score that we found was 65%, and across the board, there was
significant room for improvement among all companies.  We found that users
are really left in the dark about many company practices that affect free
expression and privacy, and for us, even with a team of detailed
researchers working dedicated to this project, it was often really
difficult to find documentation for a lot of the indicators were were
looking for, if not, you know, impossible for certain companies. However,
there was also some good news.  We found that every company does at least
something well, even the ones that scored less than 25% overall.  There was
usually still at least one area in which comparatively they actually ended
up doing a bit better than some of the others. And as was also mentioned
before, that transparency reporting is becomes more of a standard practice.
However, no company that we evaluated includes reporting on content
takedowns that result from their Terms of Service violations.  That's still
an area that there's significant room for improvement, and it would be
really great to see -- to companies to really come forward on that and to
be a leader in that regard. We also found that all companies have room to
improve their performance in the short- to medium-term, even without any
legal or regulatory changes in their operating contexts. So if you're
wondering if any of these changes have been made that we identified in the
last report or how any of the new companies fare, just stay tuned for our
next index release, which will be in March 2017, right before Rights Con to
find out the answers to that and more.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thank you.  There is comments.  I see there is a comment.

>> EMMA: Hi.  My name is Emma, with the center for technology, and I had a
couple of questions for the panel about a couple of developments that have
happened in the platform responsibility space in this past week.  First on
the hate speech code of conduct, earlier this week the EU Internet forum
released an initial report on kind of their survey of how companies who are
participating in this code had been responding to content flags that they
received, and they tracked 600 flags that were submitted to the companies
by about ten or so nonprofit organizations to track the rate at which the
companies took down those flags, and they found, I think, something between
5% for one NGO and 70% for another NGO, but, you know, there was a fair
amount of variability, and not all the content came down, which is
interesting, and I think there's a lot more to kind of dig into into
looking at that, but then the commissioner made statements about how this
clearly points to the need for companies to do more, which seemed to
presume that any of the material that was flagged under this process was,
of course, illegal, and so I -- the dynamic here is I'd be very interested
in other's thoughts because on the one hand you have NGOs flagging content
as illegal; you have private companies assessing whether they think the
content violates their Terms of Service or possibly the law; and a
government official saying this was illegal content, no courts are
involved, so where is this kind of surety that this content is illegal?
Where is that coming from in this system that seems very different from
what we typically understand to be a way to declare content illegal? And
then you also, I think, as Toby mentioned, are probably aware of an
agreement between some of these same Internet companies to start sharing
hashes of extreme and egregious violent terrorist propaganda amongst
themselves.  My organization is very concerned about this agreement because
of the way it can act as a centralized point of potential censorship of
material across these platforms, which do take up such a big share of kind
of the environment for speech online. So I'm curious to the panel's
thoughts on the responsibility of platforms in these kinds of projects as
well, what should platforms be thinking about when they're looking at, on
the one hand, how to improve their content moderation practices and address
speech that has raised many concerns, particularly in Europe, but also the
kind of creation of these new systems and forms and centralized processes
that could absolutely be abused in in any number of ways.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thank you for the comment, and I take just two other
comments or questions, and then we can have a quick round of replies.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello.  Good morning.  My name is marta Capello, I
represent the European telecom network communicators association.  I have
two short comments.  The core business model of telelecoves is not on data,
and I'm not here to defend the platforms that have their core business
model based on data, but I would like to highlight sometimes in these
debates we have a false assumption.  As some of the panelists have said,
this is a private-sector environment, nothing is for free.  You always pay.
You pay with your data. So actually, the opt-out option that you were
referring, for me at least as a consumer, would be very interesting. And we
need to have more clarity in Terms of Service, of course, but we need to
understand that some restrictions on the processing will also impact the
business models and, therefore, consumer choice and availability for new
services, so this for us is a very important balance that we need to
strike. My second point is the focus on transparency that I've seen around
the table mentioned by most people that we think it's -- that is actually
what we need to work on. Consent, it's a privacy matter, but maybe it's not
like the right thing to do because we see that the tools do not work. In
Europe, we are now doing the review of the consumer rights directive also
and of the unfair commercial practices that have, you know, measures on
transparency.  Maybe those in this exercise, this is a suggestion for the
commission, could be adopted to the -- to the online world instead of
doing, you know, sector-specific regulation on platforms or other sectors,
so for us horizontal consumer protection rules focused on transparency is
really the way to go.  Thanks.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thanks a lot.  I think (Off microphone) has a comment, and
then -- a very quick one from Bertron.

>> Hello, everyone.  I'm Bruno Biono, legal advisor for the center, but I'm
speaking on myself related to that issue.  I would like to take a step back
because I'm a little skeptical how we are framing this debate and building
a normative on (Off microphone) from the rights implementation on
accountability.  I think it should take a little bit more clear what is --
does this mean?  I mean, the accountability reports and the CTS research
project is great.  It's like the first step, but there's one aspect of
human rights who wish to reduce asymmetry of information, but this debate
is also about reduce the asymmetry of the power.  That is about personal
data protection and the transparency, but transparency is meaningless if
you are not able to empower citizens and the consumers to have at least a
really true choice, so that thing as some guy said goes to that point, and
just to sum up and to raise some good examples to deal with that, very
recently, update on WhatsApp terms and services, up-to-date of Uber
services, okay, I was informed -- I know how the guys will monetize my
data, but at the end of the day, I didn't have any choice, you know.  I was
not empowered to take back, and in WhatsApp case is a really good one
because they shifted the business model.  After that they capitalize it or
get a really ranged audience, so I would like to hear some thoughts in
regard to that issue.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thanks.  We only have one minute to go, I would ask --
(Laughter)

>> (Off microphone)

>> LUCA BELLI: Yes, so Megan to you.  zbr Megan: Just a very brief comment
and that relates to the comment that you made.  The report I saw was from a
German NGO on the German hate speech cases, but maybe you're referring to
something else, and there's a whole review of how the system has worked
that's going on now and it's supposed to be, I think, even this week
reported on, but I --

>> (Off microphone)

>> MEAGAN: On the 6th of December.  So anyway, I will take back your
comment to my colleagues because I don't actually deal with it, but I know
what you're talking about, and I'll mention it to them.  Thanks.

>> LUCA BELLI: So I will have -- I will ask the panelists to have a tweet-
like comment if they want to close the debate, and then we will -- Toby,
did you want to say something?  (Off microphone) do you want to say
something?  Okay.  Please.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, Bertron because it was a very good point you
were making about the hate speech.  I can give an answer.  This is how I
explained it to my client after the court of human rights decision because
that was about 20 companies.  One of the comments was (Off microphone) and
the court of human rights said of course, all of these comments were on
their face unlawful, clearly unlawful, so bastards, so that's the answer of
everything that's not really nice and pink, it's probably hate speech.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Very, very brief statement.  We intend to have a public
consultation of our recommendations, everything that could not be said due
to time restrictions today, please let us know.  Thanks.

>> LUCA BELLI: And let me give you a final reply also to what Emma was
saying.  In the recommendation we did last year, we precisely said that in
case of take-down, the content should be not only -- the notification
should contain the idea of the -- ID of the content, the justification why
the content's been taken down, and also mechanism to have redress should
the comment taken down would not be illegal, and also, we also precisely
state that private mechanism should be allowed in order to take the
comment, but to have redress should not be the only way of having redress
in human rights violations, be complementary to courts, so that's a point
we should consider.

>> TOBY. TO REITERATE, DON'T MAKE take these back to Canada, please.

>> LUCA BELLI: Thank you for the wonderful comments and great debate.  See
you later.

(Session concluded at 1307)

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