JUNE 14, 2011 INET NEW YORK ****** 16:30 Closing discussion >> Next I'd like to introduce Lynn St. Amour who is the president and CEO of the Internet Society. She spent a half her time in the ISOC office in Weston, Virginia and the other half in the Geneva, Switzerland headquarters. Has extensive experience in global IT business with positions at highest level of international sales and marketing, strategic planning, partner management, manufacturing, corporate restructuring, and start-up management. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you, David. Truth be known I spend two-thirds of my life on an airplane, getting off them or getting on them. This is the last session of the day. I appreciate there are still so many people in the audience. I know it has been quite a long day. I've had a great day myself in terms of listening to all the panelists and speakers and lots of great questions coming in. I'm sure this session will prove the same. I have a couple of quick introductory remarks, and I want to ask each one of the panelists to comment specifically on the theme for this subject, and then we will open it up for general questions either among the panelists themselves or from the room or back channel. You will get one final chance to pose some questions. This particular session, was actually meant to debate the user-centric Internet, and multistakeholder governance model. Specifically, the question was, can it persist in the face of what I would call often ever more aggressive government controls or business models, and if you believe it can persist what can we do to support this? The Internet is helping to shape our future as a Democratic global society, by supporting fundamental human rights such as freedom of opinion and freedom of expression. That has been shown very aptly in events over the last five or six months in the Middle East and North Africa. Clearly, empowering users is a key component of the Internet's success, and obviously a lot of growth and activity in the world. At the same time, and I'm going to put a plug in for the D.C. chapter, on June 18, there is another session, sorry, did I say D.C. chapter? New York chapter, there is another event called the beyond the bleeding edge confronting the ghost in the machine. There is an announcement in your packet, but there is a great quote from Carl Sagan here which gets to some of the comments with respect to user centric. I think some of the complexities that we actually see in some of the discussions. The quote specifically is: "We have designed our civilization, based on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while. But sooner or later, this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." Given all this, and given the overwhelming support we heard in the room today for an open Internet and freedom of choice and access and transparency, and this overwhelming pace of change, both technologically as well as what it's actually supporting in business models and in social developments as well, what are the panelists' reflections, a few minutes each from each one of you with respect to the user-centric model, challenges we are facing. Can and should the user-centric model persist? If you still have the energy for that, what do you think we might do to support its continued development? I don't think I need to introduce the panelists. They have all been here today. I'm happy to start with Vint as the first, and go down the line. >> VINTON CERF: First of all, yes, the microphone works even if the little light doesn't come on. First thought is that, I think about the history of the United States, and setting aside the American revolution for just a moment as part of our history, in which it turns out anonymous speech was quite important. Some people forget that. But when you look at pioneers and settlers in the general taming of the west, what happens is that brave people go out to a place where there isn't any control, it is not terribly civilized, and those are the pioneers. Then things sort of settle down a little bit, and folks who are slightly less willing to accept risk go out and settle, but they are relying on a certain amount of law and order. Eventually, we create a more civilized environment, at least in Democratic societies, there is a belief that safety and order are important to a successful society. In the Internet world, we may be leaving the pioneer stage, finally. It's penetrated fairly deeply. Maybe we are at the tip end point. Maybe not. But it seems to me the issues we have been talking about all day today, show that there needs to be more, users of the Internet are understandably expecting an environment which is more predictable, about which they have reasonable expectation of safety and privacy. The question is, how can that be accomplished? I think the dialogue has to be multistakeholder. But I think that to the extent that we rely on legal systems in order to make our societies safer, that governments have an enormously important role at all levels, because that is what governments are supposed to do. In societies that are authoritarian, freedom of speech is very much a threat. And what we saw during the Arab spring or North Africa and Middle East is an example of what happens in a nonDemocratic society, when people are free to speak, what they have to say. You can see it led to substantial turmoil, social turmoil and political disruption. And for some folks, that is a good thing, because it gained them a more Democratic opportunity, more Democratic society in which to live. But you can be sure that some regimes will continue to feel that this is a threat. I think in a Democratic society, we have to have both rules and law and we have to have freedom to speak and has to balance. So there is a role for all parties to play. >> To the question as to whether the user-centric Internet can and should persist give a resounding yes to both. I agree with Vint's observations about the evolution we are going through now. But the demands of the public for a predictable and safe Internet, I don't think in any way conflict with the model we are talking about. What we have to do I think are three things. One is we have to value what has gone before. We have to keep talking about how we got to where we are at today. The institutions, that got us to where we are at, and keep reminding people that this is not, this has not been a case where this all happened without any human intervention. In a speech I gave a year ago, I raised strong objections to the term, Internet ecosystem because of the idea that it gives this conception that things take care of themselves, and that is not the case. What we are, where we are at today because of the involvement of so many people through the institutions that exist, to get to the state we are in. Granted it was not one of top/down government regulation and for that we should all be thankful. But it didn't just happen by itself. It happened because of the organizations that have served us so well. Number one, we have to keep talking about how we got to where we are at and why it's so important. Secondly we need to be very vigilant about the threats as they arise to the existing models. We have to look for them even in places that are uncomfortable because some of these can unintentionally arise in our own country. It doesn't just happen from foreign governments hitting a kill switch on the Internet in Egypt. There are things that every day we see and we are being asked to take actions that one has to ask how do they fit in the overall scheme? Gigi talked about her work on protect IP. Very troubling provision, that's been laid out in that law. While the administration hasn't yet established a position on it, quite obviously, it is something that requires a lot of study and we have to understand before we engage in some of those tactics as a nation, exactly what it means. What are we losing when we do things like that? Third, this is I think something that I take as my responsibility, as a government official, is we have to work very closely with other like minded governments, to preserve the model. This is under way. I think the OECB effort that the United States has largely been, the prod on, is a good example of getting governments together to talk about these issues and keep perpetuating and promoting some of these concepts, but it takes everybody working in this area. Everybody being vigilant and everybody understanding the issues as they arise. If all fails we have Eben to do carpet bombing. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: User centered, so when the user generated content, web 2.0 took off and it became the stuff of all the conferences were discussing what is really cool about the current web, I think it was very, seen as user generated content was, had put users in charge. Recently, people have looked and realized the users are in seat mode that they are grazing and providing fertilizer for the grass and not in charge. So when you talk about user centric, in a way, contradiction in terms because people from the outside, I believe very much in the Internet which happens on the edge, and so I feel the users at the edge. I am concerned that you can't, it is not just a question of saying we should put users in charge. I think we need a whole lot more (inaudible) all the same, not just a question of, no, it's not just a question of creating a revolution in the sense of destroying things. Revolution depends on which side you are on. I notice, refer to the American (inaudible) had to happen differently, I suppose the victors refer to themselves as patriots, would have been the patriotic military and previous peacekeeping force which landed on the East Coast had they won, and they would have been going up to Lexington and Concord in order to seize the insurgents, stockpile of reference. Depends which side you look, which glass you look at it, which is the revolution, which is the revolutionary and that which you support and which is the revolution that you don't. We are not always good at picking these. So when we build a multistakeholder system to run (inaudible) multistakeholder, why, what does that mean? That means there are all kinds of organizations of different shape involved, in making the decisions. That means that you have got a certain amount of safety line there, in case one shape of organization fails. If you build a completely government controlled thing, if your government system failed, as it did in, for example, in a very carefully constructed system, in the Soviet Union, which was put together, carefully designed by thinking people in order to work, affect other systems equally well. We could design other user- based systems which also fail, and I think wikipedia is frantically always trying to revise its own process, things like the IETF and W3C always, we should be revising their own process. So multi stake itself isn't (inaudible) it means we have several strings to our bow, it means if the governments are very badly behaved, the more (inaudible) NGOs can get together and (inaudible) as people started to assume that the blogosphere would keep the press, hold the press accountable. Now they want to know who is going to hold the blogosphere accountable. These are not simple questions to ask. Who is in charge as we build, how do we build, we do have to build structures, yes, we need to look at where we have come from. We don't need to assume that the systems we have in the future have to be the same shape as the ones we have had in our old geographic based path but we have to change very carefully, because so many times, when you look back at countries, whose societies have failed and produced something very nasty, which endured for quite a long time, that gives me sufficient pause for thought that I'm concerned now that we are doing again, we are trying now to construct a society, we called it a multistakeholder one maybe, we have a new tag on it. But this time we are trying to do it for the planet. So we have just one goal. So if we can track our process and it goes horribly wrong, then there is no other country across the sea which is going to sail in and bomb us to pieces and take over. So we have to give ourselves ground rules about moving carefully and some metrics, that each system as we go on, is meets metrics of respect and democracy, and so on. I don't know whether we have it, combined experience through all this history that we go back on, to give us the wisdom to do it properly. >> VINTON CERF: It's not what you think. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Yes, it is (chuckles). >> VINTON CERF: I have three points I want to make. First of all, those of you who remember Marshall McLellan remember one of the terms he used was the global village. He was referring I think to a lot of connectivity that wouldn't otherwise be available. But I don't know how many of you lived in small villages, that I spent six months living in a little town of 3,000 people in Germany, and I can tell you there wasn't any privacy there for two reasons. First, everybody knew everybody else. And the postmaster not only saw all the mail but he had to place all the phone calls because there was in 1962. Nobody had phones in their homes. They had to go, so he knew what everybody was doing. So when you think global village, we have returned to an earlier era. Second point is the transformational effect of having access to information. Court cases in this country are considered public documents. They are not necessarily all that easy to get to, in the past, they were paper and you had to go in and get to a filing cabinet and so on. But it's there, all on-line and readily searchable. A lot of the information in those court cases despite the fact we treat them as public have personal information in them which could be used for identity theft and a variety of other things. The point here is that the technology transforms our view of what should be public and what should not be public. The last point I wanted to make is generally about Internet. There is a story told about a house, built by a programmer, and the theory was he pull the nail out of, any nail out of the house, the whole house would collapse. We probably have a few nails in the Internet that could be pulled out and that would not be a good thing. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I'm going to ask one more question. There is a number of questions coming in through the back channel. Those of you that are participating, if you want to vote on them, most of them are not getting many votes, it will help to increase some interest and I will take questions from there first before going to the floor, to swap it about a bit. One of the things we hear when we talk to policymakers and when something happens in the Internet or to users that make somebody uncomfortable, the first reaction is tighten down, restrict, control, look at policy or legislation. One of the hardest things we have is explain we would all be better off if they would lean into the open Internet and values and principles that gave us the Internet in the first place, that that is the most robust response to some of those challenges and that it supports innovation, multiple voices. This is a call out to everybody in the audience, I'm interested in whether there are comment from the panelists, any help you can give us in how we can actually make those responses and make this open Internet model and things we all value and frankly are quite intuitive to us, accessible to so many other people. Many many people, it's been said over the course of the day, don't understand, don't think about it, aren't concerned about things we think they should be concerned about. It is because we can't make some of the principles accessible to the average person. Call out to everybody, now or later, and in particular is there any quick responses from the panelists? I'd love to hear them. >> Let's talk about privacy. We will use this as an example for any number of Internet policy activities. One of the things, and this is a role government can play and indeed it's the role that we have set out in our privacy green paper, is the idea of the government facilitating or convening the resolution of some of these issues. I think if we had an environment existing now, such that every time one of these privacy issues emerges from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, that if one of the first things that could happen would be stakeholders immediately coming together to discuss the issue, work it through and perhaps in a short period of time, having some statement of conduct emerge from that sort of discussion through the multistakeholder process, that would go a long ways towards validating what we are trying to do, as well as perhaps reduce some of the pressure that natural response of politicians, which is there ought to be a law and call a hearing and bring people in. Part of this is because we don't have in place some of these other processes, that could serve to show that people are coming together, trying to work to resolve these issues, and actually getting results and implementing them. That is what we would like to be doing in privacy. Similarly if anyone looked at our cyber security paper from last week, it is what we want to do on cyber security. There is any number of Internet policy issues where these processes I think go a long way towards reducing the current reaction which is in the absence of some other mechanism taking hold, that's, that has the imprimatur of enough of the participants that natural calls for information or legal action but I think it's because we don't have a well- defined alternative. >> VINTON CERF: I certainly endorse the idea of having that multistakeholder conversation. I must confess that from time to time I get the impression that our legislators are good at only two things, passing laws and passing gas; and in which order, right. You would never know which is which. One of the hardest things I think, which confronts the legislative world, is understanding enough about the mechanics of the Internet or how it's used, to really pass laws that make sense. And here it's, I blame us in the technical world for not doing a better job of conveying in terms that are understandable, how things work, what is possible and what isn't possible with the present instantiation of the system. This isn't to say that it couldn't evolve in some direction that would make it better from the legislative point of view. But it has to of evolve and you have to understand the revolutionary needs. My sense is we have work to do in that domain. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Half the problem tend to be like various things nationally based and I've certainly working with open government data, I found that government data of course also is nationally based, and getting, so getting somebody to talk about opening the data out there, people talk about open, have great enthusiasm sometimes have great funding, great projects and they will end up producing wonderful open data projects. However, there is absolutely no way in which they can think or be paid to think about how this data is, connects to something outside in other countries. So when things are done nationally, changing the esos, so they are actually doing their bit so it fits in, and yes, working out what national would be is all very well, and probably the best thing to do is to do a national one and then try and program how they connect together internationally, because that is the only way to do it in reasonable amounts, be able to respond in a reasonable amount of time. But, just to have always anybody who is working for a national government in the back of their mind and have, spend 5 percent of your time talking to people doing the same thing, the governments, please, if you are producing data, talk to them about whether (inaudible) do it is Celsius, not Fahrenheit, little things, talk to them about data structure, so that when you release your kind of change data (inaudible) interested in today. >> VINTON CERF: You don't mind if we go on a little more. Let me argue a little about the, do the national one first and then do international, if I've understood you correctly. The reason I would resist that a little is that architecture counts, and it creates interoperability and consistency. If you don't have some idea of how you want some of these ideas to work on a global scale, you may end up with such diverse choices of design and rules, on a national basis, that they don't fit together at all well. Our friends in Europe have an interesting situation because they are a two- layered architecture. They have the European Union, and commission and so on. They have the parliament. Then they have the national administrations. Although I wouldn't say that everything they do works necessarily well, there is at least the possibility that having a general European-wide model of things which is then adapted on the national level, has a higher probability from at least my engineering point of view, of working, than a collection of independently arrived at practices, and legal structures. So I guess I would kind of not want to have the international conversations delayed. I'd rather have it go on in parallel with some of the other national considerations. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: In fact, if we pursue that which is something I thought a whole lot because there is lots of people that (inaudible) depends, you know well standards are painful to make. They take a lot of time and effort. So you pick your battles and you do standards where you have to, the sensible thing to do is look at which of the things, which are the columns in the databases, if you could have 100 columns agreed internationally and those would be done by international group, which those hundred, those columns, when you have that, that would take a lot of time to get that done. Meanwhile, national, stalling (inaudible) so that you only do that for things like latitude and longitude and start time and end time and GNT, things like that, standardize very quickly, and then you have other things which you do, not necessarily national, smaller, financial sectors or scientific sectors and you end up with various sets of standards which come together, and then you sew them together like a quilt. That actually happens in plenty of time which if you start at the top and try to make a standard for everything, then it's, so I think you end up with a balance between things and you are absolutely right when you have to have the overall architecture, you have to have to have in mind from the get-go. >> VINTON CERF: You are caught in the middle of the debate. (Chuckles). I think places like IGF coming up later this year is a good place to have discussions on an international basis from which you can harvest ideas. That is why I think about doing things in parallel. I want to harvest ideas that come out of this discussion that brings a lot of international perspectives together. I hope we are not in complete disagreement that we should be able to pursue both these things. You are a government representative, what is your reaction to all this? >> LAWRENCE STRICKLING: Just watching. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: I'm going to take one question from back channel, then to the room. There are two ties, one was in first and early, that question, what will the Internet user centric look like in the next ten years (inaudible) serve demographics like India and China, and says China doesn't want multistakeholder model by the way. That was submitted from the mail. Comments? >> VINTON CERF: There was a lot in that one question. First of all, one thing we see today is remarkable empowering of the users of Internet, the ability to build apps, innovation that takes place if you have access to the network and can put up products and services without getting further permission from the access providers or even the backbone providers. I don't see that going away, unless there is a dramatic change in the way the network is managed. I believe this openness and this freedom to try things out will continue to drift network over the next decade. At least I hope so because that's been the core of the cornucopia of ideas that come out of the net until this time. The question asked about India and China. There are more Chinese on the Internet than anywhere else in the world, 450 million and counting. They make heavy use of it. The view that we may have of the controls and the like, from the perspective of a country with first amendment rights here in the U.S. and the like, may not be the same attitude that the Chinese citizens have, at least a lot of them. Some of them plainly want what we have. Others seem to be very comfortable with a more controlled environment. I don't think though that is going to stop user-centric experimentation from happening even in those countries, because as long as the technology is readily available, we will still have an opportunity to try out new ideas. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: I think it's picking up some of these points, though one of them, hinting that some countries will try to take control and I can imagine that we end up with a free Internet and within it, areas which are very different and in which there is not so much good connectivity, and it may be that we just have to watch the, like so many (inaudible) created in the past which looked to be a good idea at the time but ended up being stifling to anybody inside them, might end up seeing some countries being controlling about their Internet, what watch goes on, restrict people's access to the Internet and ability to have service, you may find their economic growth slowing as a result of that as compared to being part of what is the rest of the international world. I imagine we will see experiments of attempts to control it. But I imagine the openness in the end will win. It's always fascinating when as we get lots of different languages on the web, of course we do, one of the phenomena which I'm concerned about is the one of completely independent plains that if you go to, wikipedia and look up Tiananmen Square, it's there in Chinese and it's there in English. (Inaudible) I gather they are not, they don't say the same thing, because there is a Chinese culture, which has actually, in which not out of coercion but just out of, maybe out of (inaudible) there is a more gentle reporting of Tiananmen Square and when it's done in the Chinese language. Maybe we will end up with language differences, different cultures which end up becoming, each becoming international but not actually touching each other. Interesting questions. The technology side is, will Google end up just translating it all? Google I think turned off the, we had a chat, Internet related chat in W3C which we were prototyping, Dave wrote one which was translating into everything, using Google API, the API got turned off, so that's no more but the idea, around the corner, machine translation, is very interesting. The project, put them next to each other, wikipedia projects which many pedia allows you to go and look at wikipedia in different languages to see how, look at it in your language and look at it in another language automatically translated, build bridges between these different things. >> LAWRENCE STRICKLING: On the ten year question, I won't answer that, it's totally speculative. If I got asked that in Washington, I would say call Vint Cerf or Berners- Lee. First, two observations. First we have to be careful that we don't take actions that in some way hasten or create a pathway to Vulcanization and fracturing of the Internet. ICANN was established with the goal of preserving a single Internet. Yet, we are quite concerned and I stated this publicly, that this rush to extend top level domains without understanding government reactions to it in effect creates an opportunity under which governments will think they legitimately now have a, there is now an expectation that they can take actions to block at the top level, which could, if unchecked, could lead to some bulkization of the Internet which we would all regret which is why we are all focused on this issue, is one there needs to be a process to preserve the single Internet in creating a meaningful objections process for government, with the goal not just to give governments the chance to object, but in the higher value of preserving the single Internet. Related to that, I will share an anecdote with you which is we met with the Chinese vice minister in charge of communications in the Internet a few months ago. We took him through some of the policy making principles that guide us here in the United States, and we talked about free expression, and his response quite directly was, in China we believe in free expression too, of lawful content. Now, whether you think he was being disingenuous or not, clearly we have some differences in terms of what is lawful content, to be expressed. But at least we are using terminology that we can share, and we can talk about. Perhaps there is some hope here, that by continuing to engage all these nations and continuing to get a lexicon of terms that, the meanings that attach to them that we can share, maybe there is hope that we can find a way to navigate our way through this the next ten years. It is not easy but we have to be talking to other countries. We have to point out again, we have to tell the story. China faces a lot of economic issues right now. I'm sure the idea of the Internet being an economic engine for them is very important to their economic planners. It's just a question of how do we get other policymakers comfortable with perhaps more freedom of their citizens to express themselves, recognizing the trade-offs. It's a tough issue, but I don't think it's one we should give up on. >> VINTON CERF: Several things immediately come to mind. I remember a conversation that was related to me about a discussion on freedom of expression in Russia, during the Soviet period. The Americans said, in America we are free to criticize the president. The Russian said we are free to criticize your president here too. (Chuckles). What's the problem? I wanted to come back to a term that you despised to be extreme, that was Internet ecosystem. I want to suggest to you that there is at least one interpretation of ecosystem that it is not without rules. These ecosystems evolve in accordance with pressures and mechanisms and so on. It is not unconstrained. You wanted to focus on the man-made structures that have involvement of people in their evolution. Just for a moment, think about the Internet as an evolving technology. Think about its impact on social and economic structures. There is a kind of coevolution which I think will derive out of this. The change in economics, for example, going from paper to on- line, is dramatic, at least in some industries. Newspapers and magazines and the like. It has a big impact. Internet will have these social and economic effects, and we will evolve management and government structures in reaction to that. Part of our task is if we have to craft what some of the evolutionary responses are, since you are quite right they don't just happen, but we have to recognize that it is an evolving system. There isn't a single solution. Is it going to be something we have to keep up with, because it's going to continue to innovate and continue to have surprises. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Which is why we love it. Go to the room now. There is a gentleman back there. Trying to get some new voices in here as well. >> Hi, I'm Tom, director of connecting.NYC, New York state not-for-profit advocating development of NYC top level domain as a public resource. I learned today the city is going to sponsor a Website, NYCspare.org, not ready yet, enable all ISOC members within the room to participate in thinking about how the dot NYC TLZ will be shaped. We have a new ecology. Not sure if it's good or bad. We can figure out how we govern an Internet resource. My question is, from those on the panel, whether they have any thoughts on multistakeholder model or what the appropriate model might be for city TLD considering that city TLD also have possibility at least in the case of New York for a regionalization impact. >> VINTON CERF: I don't have a specific response for .NYC because I don't know whether any of the other community would share an interest in that top level domain besides the parties who are here in New York. Although those who want to market to New York City residents might want to access to that top level domain. I have talked to the dot Berlin people who have been pushing for that top level domain for quite a while. They made a change in policy or made it more clear to me, others who also had claim to the term Berlin, for example, Iowa, is it, that, New Hampshire has a -- yes, okay. So they said that they would welcome participation by those other parties who had reason to claim that name. So I think here if you are going to do a top level domain like that, one of your challenges will be to make it useful. My guess is that we will experience a number top level domains as this process unfolds that don't turn out to be useful. But we may not know that ahead of time. We certainly discovered some of the other top level domains that were introduced by ICANN since 2000 had varying degrees of success and uptake in the community. So anyone who believes that having a large number of new top level domains of any kind, city and otherwise, will generate guaranteed explosion of economic value, probably should be a little more cautious in their expectations. You are doing an experiment, because we haven't had any top level city names before. You should treat it that way. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Another question? Can I go to the back of the room there? Apologies to knows that are not going to, but I'm trying to get new voices and questions in. >> Not necessarily a new voice but Shawn from New York City called (inaudible) enable Internet street (inaudible) Swedish registry as Internet street address domain. So before the TLD existed I thought that would be a great place to (inaudible) cities, dates, streets, towns. One thing I came up with figuring that out is what Vint brought up, this idea of easement for someone else named, another entity that has a Berlin, right to Berlin, this idea easement through domains. It relates to data and semantic web and creating accessibility and understand ability with domains, and URIs. So if we can create these URIs or URLs or domains that are understandable both by humans and also possible by machines through easement, create linked data, way of communication technology, that was (inaudible) in general, link data, semantic web and the new top level domains, do we have an opportunity here to make technology more accessible to regular people? >> I think people know well my first, immediate response to top level domain is why. No. Why? As Vint said, when you look at a piece of real estate, and you see, imagine that you are running Lyndon apps and you are looking virtual, really valuable stuff, which you have created, and you create it out of bits and when you look at the fact that, there is so much value represented in the dot-com, so much business going on, if we can make a dot-com too (inaudible) a little bit of fallacy going on there. It's pretty much the same, if you look at all the back nets in circulation you think there is a lot of value in those. Each of the dollar bill is worth a dollar. If we print the same number we have twice the amount of value. So no, you wouldn't. You would have half the value in each one roughly. The idea is that you need to create, need to, running out of room in dot-com is silly because every time you say that this year it's going to be cool to have slightly longer domain names by a factor of one, it grows back (inaudible) so actually, the idea, you are running out of names, as domain names is ridiculous argument too. What is interesting is if you say I'm going to come with a completely new business model and completely new, I'm going to build a piece of the domain name system, which will be in a way whole lot better for a lot of people and to do that I need a top level domain because I need to have a completely different contract. For example, I have something, if you come along and say I want dot permanent and it comes on to ICANN and say look, we set up for these things and you rent, we are not going to rent them out, we are going to allocate them permanently and have social structure and we are going to put together these things, never die, used only for Websites which have information which will be offered up under an open license and, so to do that, we have to completely have a different contract, we are not renting them. We are allocating them in perpetuity, then that sounds like a reason for a top level domain to me. But it's cute, throw your hands up for people who use dot LY, hands up people who use, tweet using the, and get shortened to (inaudible) nobody? Yes, you do, how many of you realize that meant you are routing your name, the trust to Libya, people, you probably did realize (inaudible) did realize Libya was involved. How cute, it comes out dot LY. (Pause.) When you are expressing, the way the semantic web works, it does not encode information into the names. The names do not themselves encode information. So that you can allocate a name and then change what you say about it, encoding, not encoding information, web architecture in general is that UIs are opaque. So not very keen, not very -- (pause) >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: One more response from Vint and one more question. Then unfortunately we are going to have to wrap it up. >> VINTON CERF: One small observation. The domain name system when it was first designed was very much bound to computers and destinations on the net. The natural binding to specifically an IP address came out simply from the way in which the system was designed. It may very well be that creative uses of identifiers shouldn't use that particular paradigm, that there could be alternative ways of identifying objects, that don't necessarily rely on having any idea where the object might have been at any one time. The fact the domain names are not necessarily stable is a real concern. If you have ever written a paper, you made references to URLs, and then later tried to find them as you look at the paper years later and they don't resolve because the domain name has been abandoned, or worse, it's been taken over by somebody else, and you go to what you thought you were going to, and what shows up isn't what you were expecting. So the only reason I'm chewing up your time on this is to suggest that creatively speaking, we should be thinking about a full range of possible ways of identifying things of interest and binding them to where we can find them now, and maybe hoping to bind them in a way that is more permanent. This isn't to say we should abandon the domain name system but it might be we would benefit from an alternative kind. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: One more question, is there a question specifically to this topic? I don't think we have time for another. You had your hand up. While the microphone comes, I'd like to then ask the panelists, it's appropriate, if you want to take 30 seconds or minute to give any final thoughts. >> What was your reaction to WikiLeaks? >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Follow-up of sorts. (Chuckles). >> VINTON CERF: I had two schizophrenic reactions to be quite honest with you. My first reaction was that the leak was done by somebody who had been trusted and was not trustworthy. You can make arguments about whether this is a good or bad thing to have done, and of course the Pentagon Papers are what could now be considered a counter example. My first reaction was that person really violated trust. My second reaction, the person who put the information into the system without paying attention to access control showed a certain level of, well, stupidity. Or ignorance. Not understanding that the material which in many cases was pretty sensitive was going into a place where it was more accessible than they realized. The last thing I would say, is that in any of these, sometimes there is value in the spotlight of transparency. So as I say, I was very schizophrenic in my reaction to all this. Some of the things that were revealed were probably important for people to know. And other things less so. But here we are with the system that didn't perform the way it was supposed to. >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Yes, a lot of what he said. Also a lot of what I said in response to the same question when it was asked at my keynote more or less. I talked a lot about, anonymous, which is related, we need in extreme circumstances, one needs the right to be able to blow the whistle, oppressive regime, and I don't think in this case that was, the leak counted, in my book, I didn't, I don't think that the guy is going to be (inaudible) because in fact he was blowing the whistle on an oppressive regime and shedding lights on human rights violations but he was in fact, it was egregious breach of an employment contract. But the other end of the scale, the question is, what about WikiLeaks which is a site where you can put stuff. WikiLeaks if it were just a site which allowed people to upload stuff, in a way, would become, if they hadn't got a filtering service, then they would in a way be able to protest that they weren't in control like a lot of sites. A lot of sites do, allow people to post things. The fact that they do in fact, they have a group of people looking at whether they can post everything out suddenly makes them open to criticism, and to my mind, I think I want to preserve the rights of newspapers to put, firstly when there is material which is public once it has become public, you should not criticize a, a newspaper distributing it and a Website like WikiLeaks (inaudible) work like a newspaper (inaudible) freedom of the press. Things for WikiLeaks, when either a newspaper like WikiLeaks releases the stuff in dribs and drabs so as to be sensationalist, then for me, that loses some of the credibility which they had as doing something for the public, and suggest that they are doing it for their own advertising revenue as opposed to when it's done in sensationalistic way so there are a huge number of different feelings one way or the other. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you. Larry, would you like to respond to that question? Or do you want to move to your 30 second concluding remark? >> LAWRENCE STRICKLING: There are people at higher pay grade levels than me that deal with WikiLeaks. I don't think I should anything to the discussion from the perspective of the U.S. government. I think it's clear from what the response has been, where the USG is at on that. In terms of final summary, I think this has been a terrific discussion today. I'm thankful that I was able to sit here and listen to much of it. It's always very helpful for me to get out and not just drop parachute in and give a talk and leave, but to actually be able to spend time and hear the issues that are being debated and discussed to get a better sense of where folks are at. My only I guess last thought is everybody, please stay engaged. Please stay active on these issues. The community has to be heard on these, all of these important issues, so you need to stay involved. You need to get other people to get involved as well. These are going to be difficult years, but we all have to pull together and work through these issues as we confront them. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Tim? >> SIR TIMOTHY JOHN BERNERS-LEE: Keep up the good work. There are some areas, lots of areas where we need to keep jumping up and down to keep for example, net neutrality, openness, openness of government data. And everybody can push a little bit. There are some areas we have to deploy technology, which like for example, Vint recalled in his keynote for being able to do things with public keys, actually using public key technology. So for example, everybody started using TPT, including my bank, stuff which we can, in some cases, clear that there are good things we can do. Other places like privacy, where we have to design some systems here and we don't know, maybe there is a neat solution in a privacy system. We have to do a search, it's not as though it's a question of jumping up and down and shouting we want better privacy. We have to continue lots of discussions about what we mean by better privacy. We have to do lots of creative engineering to invent clever systems which give us the best of both worlds. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Vint, one of the fathers of the Internet as well as fathers of the Internet Society. We will let you close out the panelists' comments. >> VINTON CERF: None of which means I have anything useful to say. (Chuckles). But let me first of all, I really enjoyed the day. This is a good opportunity to wrestle with some hard problems. I think that our biggest challenge and our biggest obligation is to understand as deeply as we can what it is that has allowed the Internet to be such a vibrant source of new ideas and creativity while at the same time trying to figure out how to make it a safer place for all of us to use. Those two things are so important to our descendants, so to speak, that we really are obligated to try to sort that out to make a system that will continue to evolve, but it will evolve in a way which makes it safer in which to operate. >> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Not only our descendants of course but the 4 billion people that aren't connected today, catch them before we lose them. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to David and Sally I think to say good-bye and thank everybody. I simply would like to take the opportunity to put a call out to everybody to be active, be vocal. Help us forge the Internet of the future. I'd like to recognize all the efforts of the New York society chapter, particular (applause). >> DAVID SOLOMONOFF: Like to thank Sally and Lynn and the Internet Society staff for making this a fantastic event. This is a breakthrough event for the New York chapter of the Internet Society. When I became involved six years ago, I was drawn to the society because of their principles of freedom of expression, privacy, security, and open Internet but the local chapter wasn't active. I complained a lot. They decided to fix my wagon by electing me president. It has been a long, I'm going to say struggle. Number of people have worked with me, brilliant, talented. I want to thank a couple of them now. John McFee and Evan and Joseph. (Applause) For working hard and it's been an uphill struggle at times to bring us here. And we can't stop. Obviously, the question is, what do we do next? My most fervent hope is that when people leave here, they don't say that was interesting and let it go at that. If you have met people here who share your interests or views, hopefully you can, that will be start of collaboration or synergy. If you are not a member of the Internet Society, please join. If you are a member of the Internet Society and didn't sign up to be a New York chapter member, please do. Obviously. We need lots of help. It's a small group of volunteers currently. We do some cool things. But only scratching the surface in terms of what the Internet Society mission is, in the New York City and actually our turf is bigger than that. We cover, until you get to another active chapter such as Philly or D.C. that is all our turf now. If you live in New Jersey or Connecticut, we would love to have you help us and expand in those directions. The next questions, this is nice so what do we do next? We have another event, scheduled on Saturday afternoon at NYU entitled beyond the bleeding edge. It is free, open to public, and from 1 to 5. We have a number of presenters and panelists. Please come and thanks again. (Applause) >> We are ready to close the day. I hope that you found the discussion as interesting as I have, that you have had an opportunity to be heard, that you will, as David said, not look at this as a one-time event but look at this as a call to action, and a call to participate in the global Internet Society. We have a mission. We hope that you share that mission. You have heard a lot of different aspects and the challenges that we face. We can only do it through dialogue, through collective action, through working together. So we will be reaching out to you. We hope that you will join the New York chapter. Many of you are new Internet Society members. We welcome you. We hope this has whetted your appetite for a lot of exciting opportunities going forward. I'd be remiss if I didn't at least acknowledge once again the efforts that went into making this day possible. It takes a village, as they say. And really, David Solomonoff, the president of the New York chapter (inaudible) McFee, Don Morrow from the tech council have been extraordinary partners, identifying speakers reaching out to the community, getting a really high caliber group of participants today. I want to thank you for that. Thank you all for coming. We will be in touch. Good night. (Applause)