Transcript

• Tuesday 1400-1530
• Tuesday 1600-1730

Tuesday 1400-1530

SRINIVAS CHENDI: We are going to start the session at 2:30 because the last session was a little late and also there is more time for the guests to come into the room. And, we will be starting late, but if you're in here already, please remain in the room, and if you would like to move forward, it'd be appreciated. It looks much clearer as well.

OK, I think we'll start, all the speakers are here. Good afternoon, I'm Srinivas Chendi. Welcome to the Internet Governance Pulong.

First of all, I would like to thank our partner, ISOC. They've been with us since we started Internet Governance in Delhi at APNIC 24. And I would like to thank our special partners, CNNIC, an NIR, and TWNIC. And to make this so good and APTLD. There are many new faces, so I would appreciate it if you would like to make any comments or if you would like to speak, please approach the microphone, clearly state your name and your association. That's optional if you would like to provide us with that information, that's optional. But please speak clearly because we're recording - as you can see on my left here, we're recording with stenographers, so they can record what you're saying.

Now, I would like to introduce the chair for this, Mr Randall, my good friend. He will be chairing the first session of this Internet Governance Pulong and then we'll have a tea break and come back and follow up with the next session. So I now hand over to the chair, Mr Randall.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you, and good afternoon to everyone, and I would like to welcome those of you who are first timers in the Philippines, I hope that you are having a good time in the Philippines, and for those who are here for some time, welcome back. So, this afternoon's session will be about the Internet Governance Pulong; and in local terms, it is about the Internet Governance forum. So the Internet Governance forum is a session that we normally discuss the things - what are the things going on in the Internet? Which direction? And what will be the motivations, and how people can use it effectively moving forward.

So we have several speakers here in front. I will introduce them as they will give their piece of discussion, and I would like to encourage everyone that if you have a question, you can just write it down and then once all the speakers are done with their discussions, we can discuss your questions one by one, and you can address it to the person to whom you would like to address it. Again, the first speaker will be a person from the Philippine Government from the CIDC, and he is a very well-known guy and very active in doing the v6 for the Philippines. He is the director of CITC, so please welcome Mr Philip Varilla.

PHILIP VARILLA: Thank you for that generous introduction. I would like to say welcome to the Philippines. I am from the telecom sector. I am... the Government has just, well, it is not that new, but the Government Forum and the agency on ICT in 2004, and we started the operation. That agency in 2005. So, thank you again for the introduction. It is really an honour to speak before you on behalf of the Commission on ICT. On behalf of the governance on the Internet, we would like to welcome you to Manila. This is a very good time for you to visit Manila because it is not too hot, and the sale of goods are still, you know, going, so we can visit many months.

To start, the emergence of the Internet has also seen the emergence of high value. There are many new and emerging technologies. The use of ICTs in the Internet has been delivering efficient and effective Government services. Since the inception of the Commission on ICT, in 2004, the Philippine Government was the primary policy for implementing and regulating the entity that will develop the great ICT systems in the country. This is a continuing effort with the stakeholders.

The ICT to introduce our organization, our group focuses on the areas of development in terms of fully implementing plans and projects on ICT. These are the areas of the Government, the cyber services and information infrastructure.

The overall vision is to have a society where the society has access to the development, efficient government service, and quality service, and a better way of life.

We believe that the information and communication technology is a very important tool that shapes the global economy. ICTs must be accessible and available and cater to all the needs and value the stakeholders in strategic places with minimal places. ICTs should be secure and interoperable at the same time as the policies and standards and make sure that the ICT services are safe, secure, and trustworthy. However, ICT services must also link seamlessly with each other and across different agencies that are operating as one unit.

It is in this way that we can expand the horizons and agendas. If we are able to get the agendas through to a secure and developable way, ICT systems should be studied and developed to still be functional years after it has been deployed. This is where research and innovation will come in to enable modification in the present and future ICT systems.

The provision of the infrastructure is key to ICT development. Also essential to the system is the Government services and information and education through the use of appropriate and affordable ICT technologies. The Philippine Government is committed to ensuring universal access to ICT and will prioritize and support the ICT use.

This year, the ICT questioned a board of investment with the trade industry to include the provision of the broadband services as part of the infrastructure for this plan. Giving incentives to companies that would set businesses on the provision of accesses the surveys. Municipalities that don't have access of the services as of December last year.

We can expect more telecom companies to invest in these areas and make it possible for them to access the broadband service.

Once the Internet connectivity is there, it is important to have efficient routing and delays are minimized or the risk of connectivity is minimized. It is very important to get the connectivity. The CICT has been appointed as the Philippine implementing agency for the project framework for ACN, International Telecom and National Disaster and Recovery.

The telecommunications lines in many countries. The earthquake that shook Taiwan had damages and inconvenienced users. This was needed to satisfy the problem in the future and diversity and also to mitigate the effects of any disaster on national or international connectivity.

On the local front, they had to connect all the Internet service providers in the Philippines through a common backbone or Internet exchange around 1995. During Internet Society, ISOC sponsored workshop which was held in Hawaii. The Internet exchange access point that allows local traffic in a given geographic area, in most cases traffic within a country or city without the host server, either in the USA or another country. This is highly undesirable especially to small ISPs, considering the expensive costs to the international list circuits. We can only afford the relatively low, which can not accommodate the growth in traffic. And then the introduction of an IX or an Internet exchange, it's a measure for the growth, to increase efficiency and the local Internet users to access users in the delivery of information.

Now the Department of Advanced Science Technology has the Philippine Open IX will allow the traffic in the free market environment among local data providers to promote lower operator costs and competitive price and advance networking and reliable connectivity. And I'm glad that the session tomorrow afternoon will discuss this.

The Internet age has given birth to the society in which practically anyone and everything are connected through digital infrastructures. Over the years, the Internet has had traffic and ISS exhaustion coming to the need of the IPv6. IPv6 is seen as the solution to the short comings of IPv4. Dominant IP entities. The main improvement by IPv6 is the much larger address sizes of 120 bits which can support a larger number of IP addresses for an ever increasing number of Internet devices.

The Philippine Government through it for the recognized opportunities offered by IPv6. In our medium-term Philippine Development Plan, one of the statements is to deploy and expand digital structures as well as the advance of communications, technology, cable TV and other technologies to realize the full potentials of ICT as a tool for knowledge in the future.

In response, the reviewing in the Philippine infrastructure to a certain advancement in areas of improvement related to IPv6 deployment. The advance of science and technologies leads to the universal deployment.

The National Telecom Commission and the telecom's regulatory body to develop and move forward the IPv6 deployment. Its migration and identifying the transition progress. We are committed to our agenda by IPv6 with the telecom operators and ISPs. The same co-ordination that other ISPs and stakeholders recognize the need for appropriate policies, tools and regulations of IPv6. And having the possibility of providing areas for IPv6 adaption.

ICT needs to be fully exploited and implemented in the Philippines. We are much a part of the global economy. It is essential to engage in collaboration with international organizations. The international telecommunications ITU serves as a primary forum for IPv6 communication with the needs of other standards and development organizations, in the promotion and deployment and development of IPv6.

There have been some consequences. One in 2002 Marrakesh and in 2006. Where the telecoms assemblies and the world telecom conferences made relevant resolutions and permeated the resolutions which related to IPv6. And in Russia, just like the one in 2008 last year in September to force the collaboration and dialogue between the stakeholders and the implementation of IPv6. This enabled participants to have more information about the IPv6 system and the Internet. And the Government promoting the deployment of IPv6.

We also monitor the progress being made in ITU on the back of IPv6 on NGN. And seeing that a part of the ITU study group team which studies future networks including mobile and NGN. IPv6 would be useful for the future fix and mobile environments. From the surveys and application aspects, the necessity of IPv6 will be increasing for the future networking including the ubiquitous network. And the forums such as APNIC and the Philippines ASTI for inviting us to speak. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you very much, Philip. If you have questions for Philip, or if you have further clarifications on what Philip has said, please reserve it for a while and then we are going to have our Q and A or the question and answer portion after all the speakers have given their talk.

So the next presenter will be discussing about going green with the data experience of green computing, so our speaker is the President of Bistop Inc. Bistop Inc is a very popular organization here in the Philippines being a Microsoft MVP for Windows and projects and certifications and products. And there are over 20 certifications and the last one is the project management certification from BMI, and they have... they're streaming the geographical balance over places like the US and Europe and the Asia-Pacific. So ladies and gentlemen, our next speaker, please welcome Mr Wilson Chua.

WILSON CHUA: Let me present my agenda and I'm going to discuss the motivation of why we had to go green, and then, why were we not able to implement this sooner rather than only in the recent years?

Next, we will talk about how we actually implemented our initiatives at our data centre. And then, share with you the benefits that the project of migration and server virtualisation and consolidation gave to both us and our clients. We will also provide a final slide that shows some of the resources available just in case you need to be interested in the going green initiatives and would like to learn more.

So why go green? In a sense, next to bandwidth, the cost of operating a data centre would be the electricity and power cost. I remember as the cost of bandwidth was going down, the cost of electricity was going up. And at a point in time, it counted as the second highest cost factor in the data centre. So from our perspective, it is never too late or too early to say we have a social responsibility, and so that was one of our major concerns in going green. Now, from the latest S R research data, apparently the carbon foot print of one small server is equal to that of a midsize sports car running at 15 miles per gallon. So think about it - in our data centre, we were able to migrate and permeate a lot of servers, so that's a lot of sports cars!

Now, being able to reduce your power consumption not only makes it more environmentally friendly, it also helps the bottom line because we don't have to pay a lot in electricity, we are able to save money and pass on those savings to our clients. And surprisingly, one of the unforeseen benefits of going from server consolidation and consolidating all the servers is that we were also able to provide performance gains to our host and application clients.

Finally, for our network monitoring team, they said it is now a lot easier to secure, maintain and administer a small physical number of servers. And because we have a limit of space, by being able to retire a lot of servers, we have been able to in effect, expand our capacity.

So, what stopped us in the past? Simply put - the hardware and the software was not there. The available hardware and software three or four years back did not allow us to seamlessly migrate all of the applications and put them into one powerful server. That was all stopped, started early in 2007 with the introduction of Intel chip sets.

Also, speaking about software, we were also hampered by a lack of issues and bugs with the server virtualisation software that we were using, and what happened is that it increased the number of support calls and in the end, we decided the virtualisation there, but then did not produce any significant savings for us compared with the additional headaches, but that was all in the past.

How did we do it? Simply also said, we just took advantage of whatever was available. We did not have a lot of money, so we did not go for the broader solutions. We had to customise our own servers, and so we took advantage of the new products in the market by upgrading our servers from Pentium 4s and Pentium duos into Quad Core Xeons. And at the time, the cost of memory was going down, and the server consolidation software that enabled us to slice a physical server into seven or eight servers, virtual servers.

We also implemented some smart cooling procedures where our staff noticed that there was 3-4 degree difference in temperature in the tropical areas between day time and night time. That enabled us to reduce the number of air handling units by reducing something like 33% of our air-handling capacity.

So let's dig a little deeper into the details. What are the specific technological advancements that we took advantage of? First and foremost, the Intel Quad Xeon chips and they now give us enough horse power to run several applications, several virtual servers at the same time without slowing the processes down. There's a newer one, Corei7 from Intel, but these are more for Desktop applications. I included this in the presentation just for completeness sake. And the next one is something that I learnt in Singapore. I attended a Fujitsu Going Green seminar, where they highlighted the fact that 2.5 inch hard drives are more energy efficient than the 3.5 hard drives. And finally, down the horizon, our initiatives will have us looking at solid state defies - SSDs.

In terms of software, we've been able to use the first two, Windows 2008 now has hyper-V technology that allows technology, but the parallels which now remain parallels Virtuoso and allows us to go into seven, eight or nine servers depending on the hardware. VMware is a well known server product, but we haven't tested it in the centre. In terms of lighting, we have gone from the CFLs, compact fluorescent light bulbs where we could get energy saving and in the future, we plan to convert those into LED fighting.

Now, as a brief background, I'm not sure if you can see the highlighted part, but the Intel Quad Xeons use anything from 18 watts to 105 watts. This is virtually the same as the older Pentium CPU. However, this is Quad Core. This offers a better price per power ratio.

And also, over the horizon, AMD is scheduled to roll out a SIP Energy CPU available second quarter of this year. And it is supposed to be using under 55 watts, so this is 50% more efficient than the Intel Quad Xeon when it is out.

Now, speaking about advances in storage devices, one of the major savings we were able to expect was by integrating the 3.5 drives to 2.5 drives. The 2.5 drives are the ones you see on the laptops. Now, in terms of power, the 2.5 uses only 1.5 watts versus the 3.5 which uses 9.5 watts, so if you do the maths, it is 85% of the power. Plus, it has a longer mean time between failures. 1.4 million hours versus 5,000 hours. And because it has a smaller size, it has a lower surface temperature, which if you deploy a lot of the servers using a lot of the smaller drives reduces the cooling requirement of the data centre, it makes sense.

So the only problem or issue that we encounter when we migrated from 3.5 to 2.5 was the fact that all the servers had adapters fit for 3.5. They didn't have any kit or bracket for the 2.5, so we had to ship them in by air.

Now, you did notice that I mentioned that the power savings, the power usage of 2.5 is 2.1 watts. However, it would surprise you even more to find that the 2.5 has the energy built in so that it reduces the power consumption. So if it contains the 2.5 drives and you have a data full of centres, the savings in electricity is significant.

Now, this is something that we're planning to do, mainly because the price of SSDs right now are very high, but we are looking carefully and monitoring the price points, and as soon as the price drops to a certain switch, we will also migrate over to SSDs. So for our efforts, we're using the Intel 25E. It has lower power consumption, 2.5 versus 0.06 watts. It has even higher mean time failure, two million hours. And these are the direct replacements for the drives. If you want to see the advantage, there's a YouTube link there.

Server consolidation, this is where we migrated 20 servers into four quad Xeon. And so if a server uses somewhere around 3,000 to 3,500 pesos in electricity, we were able to generate 50,000 pesos every month.

It also reduced wiring jumble and attack footprint and it increased the server performance, because if you notice, each of our servers in the data centre, 60% of the times, it is idle, but by consolidating it into one server, each of them can take advantage of the spare capacity that is not used by the other virtual servers, thereby enabling the individual web applications to take advantage of the higher processing speed. And then, going into software, we're looking at Microsoft's Windows 2008 PHP turbo charging of the fast-cgi. And reporting 50% faster than the older version and using litespeed instead of Apache. If you look at the graph, you can clearly see when we shifted over from Apache to litespeed which was sometime early Wednesday.

Smart cooling procedures - as I said, there were procedures to go into the handling units. This is where we used Cisco's unit to benefit. So we were able to use a smaller number of servers, reduce the carbon foot print and save on electricity, and give even higher web performance by sharing the Quad Xeon processors. These are our resources for reference for those of you who are interested in finding out and my time is up!

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you for that very informative system. About going green, but I can see a lot of Macs, so we have to seen green Apples later on. How are you guys? Are you still doing good out there? Yeah, one more! You feel sleepy!

Don't worry, you know what, I will have some entertainment - probably! OK, so let's continue. We're going to hear from a guy who will discuss with us the advocacy of ISOC or the Internet Society of...

OK, I'm sorry. So this is the advocacy of the Internet Society deployment chapter for IPv6 and the Internet. Our speaker - our next speaker is currently working in the energy sector connected with Covanti Energy Philippines and he is a very respected individual with so much interest in corporate governance of information technology, information security, IPv6 and service management. A well-rounded IP individual and a member of the Internet Society and information systems security. Ladies and gentlemen, let's all welcome Rodel Urani.

APPLAUSE

RODEL URANI: Thank you, Randall. And good afternoon to all. A pleasure to be here and to speak with you today.

So this is my agenda. It is the ISOC-PH agenda. I would like to mention the generosity of APNIC for giving me an opportunity to join this once in a year happening within Asia-Pacific, this APRICOT. Many thanks to my manager for allowing me to participate in this event. The opportunity, ISOC-PH for Internet Society for giving the Philippines chapter an opportunity as its own chapter in the Philippines.

For a few minutes, I will be sharing and talking about the advocacy of the Philippines Chapter of the Internet Society. Many of us have heard or read enormous information about the Internet and computer networks from its very conception up to this moment. Enough about it. Now it has been capable to work with the use of the information facilities that can be used in the insemination and working from hope and keeping track of our friends and loved ones and business in every corner - to name a few.

All of these things are possible now with the careful and strategic utilization of the Internet. We are now moving forward to the adaption of IPv6. This may or may not be at various stages of the Internet, especially us, the end-users. However, we must support it and as stakeholders, give the share in order to extend the longevity.

Internet use and users are just starting to go through it and experience the importance of existence and usefulness.

The Internet model I just would like to say a little - as you can see, show that every area has a fair contribution, including the individual and particularly Government. The Internet is for everyone. However, we can only achieve this noble idea if all stakeholders work together and share our common goal and objective.

The Internet no longer just applies or is developed within our planet earth. There have been initiatives to expand getting off to Mars that will interconnect interplanetary Internet. In not a long period of time, we will be able to witness if it becomes successful - what the other planet looks like through the Internet.

The Internet becomes not only a primary driver for the economy and distances, it can even be an inspiration by the next generation to innovate more, advance learning and allocate property - poverty, I mean in the world like the United Nations is benefiting from the presence of the online volunteering program, and Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopaedia provided for everyone.

Many businesses and industries in the country and in the world market have in their mandate, wherever they branch out in China or India and the US or more. Or from those countries coming to the Philippines. Accordingly, through Internet, financial transactions and investment can go fast and can make any country, the richest or poorest in the world, with just the click of the mouse. Enterprises can reach out to the other country and do business of any form, like partnership, business product outsourcing and others.

All of these events are happening specifically because of the Internet. Through social networking sites and mobile phones with the capability to access the Internet, particularly 3G, Filipinos are starting to get connected again with their loved ones living abroad. Accordingly, the Internet will continue to be an economic driver in the world and in the Philippines. The receptiveness in the country to businesses and end-users continue to harness and adapt new technologies to compete to the world, in terms of the utilization of the Internet.

Cellular operators seem to be continually building their businesses, not only within cities now. Go to the south or north and you can still access the Internet. The Philippines is known to become the text capital of the world, as mentioned by one of the plenary speakers yesterday. And there are 53 million users of mobile phones recorded in 2007 alone. Imagine this 53 million using a 3 G phone and can access the Internet. With the Internet, you can now finish your degree without attending schools and attend conferences or meetings without leaving home. Universities in the country have made mixtures of courses available online and from a bachelor's degree to post graduate degrees and they're still growing.

However, there are concerns about the use of the Internet that it can be used for many reasons. Accordingly, governments, international organizations, researchers are working non-stop to make the place even more secure for the new users.

The IPv6 or the next generation Internet Protocol was all an idea until the first specification has been released to the Internet community in 1995. Then it became replayed or obsolete with the current use accepted in 1998 which is the RFC 2640.

There is certainly an increase in numbers from IP addresses and accordingly, can lament the life of the Internet for more decades to come.

A few of the advantages of IPv6 over 4 are the jumper payload which provides means of having such large payload lengths. That may be attached to links with areas greater than 65,000. In order to allow the transition of the IPv6, with pay loads between 65 and 4 billion octets in length.

In IPv4, this is limited up to 64kb of payload only. Accordingly, the use of jumper can be increased with the high network.

A high use of IPv6 can be used for the State configuration or the so-called ATC 6 (sp?)

It can only be performed on the interfaces. Other messages indicated where there is the address configuration, protocol should be used.

So now, talking about the Philippines, running through the Internet activities, there is a strong indication that IPv6 has been considered, accordingly as a national interest in the long-term economic advantage. Accordingly, planning and discussion started a few years ago and countries like Japan and Malaysia to name a few have laid out the road map for their IPv6 infrastructure and going to be operational or completed.

There was recently chartered, One of the goals is to create an open dialogue with the stakeholders of the Internet in the Philippines, and we'll push that working group to assist in all Internet related activities including how IPv6 is in the country and being supported.

The continuous participation of the designated member if any, in the Philippines to the IPv6 forum is a good sign that the country is not behind in all this concerning the adaption of the next Internet Protocol.

However, Asia-Pacific IPv6 task force seems to have not been updated since the middle of 2007. And the Philippines accordingly has not participated or created its own IPv6 task force. Accordingly, Japan has established alliance with Europe and moving as a juggernaut to primarily drive the next generation Internet, and force the deployment worldwide. Accordingly, the Philippine Open Internet Exchange is being supported and shared with numbers of ISPs and it is open to all prospective members to connect at the same time and encourage the Philippine Internet community to join and take to take further steps towards the development and improvement, if any, the infrastructure to compete with other countries efforts like the US, Japan, Malaysia and many others who have already taken the lead.

There is a good tolerance with the Philippines, when it comes to innovation, not only the continuous development and promotion of good process and being beneficial. Through the Internet, Filipinos can send mail and do bank transactions with the use of text messaging. The mobile phones have limited capabilities compared to computers. The one of the most important things in my case is that I can still read e-mail, read news using RSS feeds, and there has been a dramatic adjustment on cost and access to the Internet through mobile phones which are no longer that expensive. Many have said, including rich countries and international organizations that early adoption of IPv6 is important and will contribute to drive the economy worldwide.

Despite the present world economic situation, accordingly, organizations need to maintain and continue to bolster innovation, particularly taking IPv6 in their agenda. Failure to adopt it will have more subtle effects. However, in the long-term, it will be more significant.

One country will have halve the Internet economy if it fails. We're a dynamic institution and accordingly will have the announcement of unique and competitive services and advertise to the world and propagate to the world in just a matter of seconds.

The APNIC - one of the five regional Internet registries around the world urges stakeholders to adopt IPv6. RIR primarily and other spaces serving the only jurisdiction and APNIC has the second largest IPv6 allocation when it comes to sizes and numbers. A strong indication that countries within AP are growing and actively supporting countries and the deployment of the next generation of Internet.

So, I'm just going to make this quick. I also want to mention that the continuous utilization of the IPv4 might be more expensive, particularly for individuals and users due to many reasons. So IPv6 is supported by international organizations and developing countries such as European Commission, 3G PP and others.

So, allow me to mention an OECD information technology highlights for 2008 for Government online, Government as model users and broadband. It was in the top ten ICT policy procedures so we would like to bring the measure, all of us, the Philippine Internet stakeholders to diligently plan non-stop to make it with IPv6 including resources and guidelines, continuously improve everything to all prospective users in the country. Thank you.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you very much for that.

APPLAUSE

RANDALL LOZANO: That's very good information about IPv6, but there's more that you will hear and I would like to remind everyone, that if you have questions, please reserve your questions until all the speakers Have delivered their part We be able to entertain your questions so in order not to forget your questions, just write it down on a piece of paper, and later on, if you're not really comfortable stating the questions by yourself, we can go around to get your questions and read it aloud.

So our next presenter will be a lady - I guess you would know who she is. I think we have only one lady in the panel! But she is also a member of ISOC and she's an artist, a writer and a researcher and her work deals with the social and political dimensions of technologies. She was a Professor of computer art in the University of the Philippines and she's a member of the research group, a network of researchers activists dealing with the negative effects of copyright in the global south. So she is also the newly elected President of the Internet Society for the Philippines Chapter. So we would like to give her a round of applause for that.

APPLAUSE.

We welcome Fatima Lasay.

FATIMA LASAY: I would now like to present the streams and their convergences within the broader questions of Internet governance in the Philippine context. The context which effectively reflects the reality that those who have got on the Internet are impacted by the effects and apparent exclusion that can easily lead us to the issue of the digital divide. And the all-too-obvious solution of digital inclusion.

However, before moving on to two core elements of governance that I would like to discuss today, I would like to say the word "digital divide". As a relationship issue and that's simply an access issue, pervading the politics of participation among developing and less developed countries and countries of the English-speaking and developed world. And the relationship informs the allocation, as well as the diversion of resource s from food production, housing, basic education and basic education and healthcare towards installing, supporting and maintaining ICT structures. Such ICT structures and projects have like wise become the new cargo hold for disempowered communities. And certainly, they have become the new milking cows for corruption in Government and private sectors alike. They have also served adds the impetus for public policy and legislation on cyber crime, data protection, anti-terror, intellectual property rights and education. Which are often framed within technical and economic terms, neglecting the unseen social and cultural effects.

Via the four streams of ISOC of advocacy and the initiatives towards a collaborative Internet, we at ISOC hope to contribute and engage discourse in active participation in the broader questions of Internet governance. Questions that will seek the challenge, and the advocates to take into very careful consideration and the world and the politics that exist outside of the Internet, that by simply trying to bridge or bring that world into the Internet, but by looking at the much bigger picture of governance.

Here in the bigger picture of governance, I propose the two elements, meaningful participation and cultural plurality. First a bit about cultural plurality which is related to cultural diversity. The difference between diversity and plurality is very well expressed by Rustom Bharucha of Kerala India. He says "On diversity, this is a sacred cow on one of those words that falls into a "feel good" category. We live in a country, India, where diversity is a given but all of the diversities do not amount to a plurality. We need to distinguish between diversity and plurality. It does not mean that we are harmonious or toll rant. India is sectarian and if not racist, and we can not say that diversity has allowed people to live more harmoniously. If you want to work towards plurality, we must work through negotiation and arbitration, diversity comes with inequity. This is where the element of plurality in governance comes in."

That it is not a feel-good factor. It rather signifies what comes with diversity and it demands that it weighs up on the types of participates that we must undertake in local and global forums. Meaningful participation is there in cultural plurality and I should also add that participates is meaningful only if participation is acknowledged and hear.

In the introduction to the book 'Internet governance: Asia Pacific perspectives, published in 2005. In particular, for historical reasons, the various bodies usually associated with Internet governance, ICANN, IETF and ISOC have been dominated by participation from English-speaking North America and Europe, while these market the inclusivity and openness, they nevertheless fail to reflect the diversity of the users of the Internet within key positions of power. This has significant effects on their decision-making capacity in areas that primarily affect non-English speaking users. On this, I should say that the potential to represent the expertise and needs apart from the technical and economic questions that have been considered in Internet governance, include diverse cultural interests and the rapid social cultural challenges that mark Filipino life today.

Our membership reflects the physical labour and identity. Each of us speak more than one language. Our leg contribution would be on the basis of a shared culture or the principles of openness and commonality or the ideas of individual participation or of local bottom-up inaccessible development. Because in a truly diverse scheme of governments, these principles are and will always be challenged. Hopefully we can bring to the Internet governance, productive dialogues to have a culturally open approach to the diversity and conflict. And a friend recently told me, between saying and doing, half the sae sea. So it is going to be a difficult test of actually negotiating and managing a complex multi-stakeholder environment. We will have to provide practical solutions to questions such as - how can we deepen the involvement of the technical community and questions of public policy. How can we strengthen the development and understanding of the efforts to transform existing Government regimes? How do we transform political struggles and development goals to the problem solving processes for our communities? And how can our communities make a direct input into global Internet governance processes?

Crucial to the investigation of these questions is ISOC with the relationship with the Government, private sector and civil society. After having undergone the international processes for recognition with Rajnesh Singh who have seen us through the rejuvenation process and Rodel Urani of course, it marks the point of co-operation. And I can confidently say that ISOC PH can work with you on key issues of the Internet and not purely Internet governance questions. These are number one, the impact of Internet governance and cultural plurality and diversity and Asia-Pacific languages and cultures. The intellectual property is important as demand grows for IP and wireless increases. This also brings us to the issue of intellectual property.

Unless these are in the public domain, it will remain a barrier to localisation.

Number two, intellectual property regimes and alternative and collective ownership structures which brings us to policies on free and open source software and open standards especially in Government procurement and public access. And it also leads us to the need for more careful and diverse analysis on intellectual property and the control of content online which have so far been determined by private organizations in the WTO. Cultures reduce and circulate a whole range of property in diverse ways and harmonisation of commitment to international regimes could be a threat to cultural diversity online and offline. Number three, IP address management and IP management and responsibility in IPv6 allocation, which leads us to global allocation policies under IPv6, and whether new proposals for remaining IPv4 space provide responsive mechanisms. And also, DNS management. The question - when will the domain be opened up in the contest of the ph Monopoly and the local and national issues.

Number four - quality of service by Internet service providers and particularly the cost of access and service arising from the lack of diversity and cross border and interregional cables as well as the status of ISPs as customers of AP Stream ISPs. And the role of human rights and civil liberties which leads us to the freedom of information act of 2008 and the Presidential veto to the clause of the General Appropriations Act. And the enabling of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of information.

And finally, number six - the role of education. Formal and non-formal. Not only in promoting the Internet, but more importantly in understanding and debating the broader questions of governance in the impact of the ICPs and social diversity. For example, there is an ever increasing demand for education towards supplying the global information labour market. But, as it becomes easier to transfer jobs to different geographical locations in such a global and mobile outsourcing market place, the companies in regions on the top of the ICT value chain take the best advantage in accumulating capital, while it gets harder and harder for dependant groups to retain knowledge and capital. So what is the role of ICT education in this brain-drain? These are some of the questions in ISOC that the founding members consider important and certainly ISOC members have varying ideas on this. And going towards a more open and intelligent discussion with the issues and hopefully moving towards a more culturally open process in global Internet governance. At this point, I would like to take some time to introduce the founding members of ISOC at PH.

We have: Lieutenant Ferdinand Abad, Lisandro Adamos, Maureen Bello, Josie Cacdac, Ramon Cerezo, Krstoff Thomas Chazez, Vera Cruz, Dann Diez, Attorney Michael Dizon, jol Galgana, Aris Ignacio, Rachel Khan from the University of the Philippines. Yours truly, Korakora Orga, Randall Lozano, Dr Alvin Marcelo, Jan Martinez, Ian Pamintuan, Michael Perez, Charmaine Reyes-Urani, Glen Michael Tan. Of course, Rodel Urani and Winthrop Yu from the Philippine Internet Commerce Society.

And our incoming active members with the remote participation working group and the Diplo Foundation. She's also blogging the session right now. We have Yen Sayson. Wheng Romo and Trevor Batten. This is the new and rejuvenated Internet Society Philippines chapter. We look forward to the work and the challenge.

RANDALL LOZANO: OK, as we continue with the spot light of Internet governance forum in the Philippines, so we would like to give you the last speaker for this particular session. And the network operator for the Philippines research education and Government network. And he would share as a newcomer to the Internet governance forum. It is a worldwide initiative and it has been happening in the past three years - if I am not mistaken and last year was held in India. So, to call on the person to share his experience in the Internet governance forum, let's welcome Bani Lara from ASTI.

BANI LARA: So good afternoon. I was asked by APNIC to give my experience on attending the IGF in Hyderabad plus to reimburse my travel costs! Anyway, so my outline, how I was able to attend the meeting, some important points during the meeting that I learned and my thoughts about IGF.

OK, so I applied for the APNIC fellowship program for IGF and I think this is a very useful fellowship program, because countries like the Philippines do not have a big budget in terms of travel costs, especially from Asia and going all the way to India.

So during that time, it was the height of the Mumbai bombing in India. I got a police escort, but my friends tell me that I look more like a kidnap victim there!

So some important points I learned during the meeting, especially with talking to the IX guys. So IXs have a very big impact in terms of local routing, because actually my personal opinion, the established IXs in the Philippines, do not really connect with each other, so I think they're a bit under-utilized, so we need to work on that.

Another important point - actually, these are not my comments, these are something that I learned earlier. "No single Government in the world should govern any critical Internet resource" so I think this is all still under discussion.

And the distribution of IP addresses was quite an event. and prioritization given to the issues. So also, I learned that in some other countries, the CCPL are not concerned by the Government which is the same case here in the Philippines, so I asked around and some had a good experience with the set-up. Some didn't have a very good experience. So for the Philippines, I'd rather not comment!

I attended this session on SPAM, and actually, I am a technical back ground, so when I look at SPAM, I look more on the technical solution, but the guys there emphasized that with the technical solution, you also have to have a legal solution in there. So that struck me, because in the Philippines, our cyber laws are not that well polished right now.

OK, so another thing they mentioned there in making IP laws, you can actually base from the countries who already have the legal frame work in place - but of course, the speaker emphasized that you can not just take it and implement it in your country. You need to put in the local reality, so one thing that he mentioned actually which was quite emphasizing was the virus that was all over the Internet and the author of the virus was somewhere from the Philippines, so the case there was that he mentioned FBI from the US went there and tried to arrest the guy, but the Philippines had no legal frame work back then, so they didn't really do their job on trying to go about the investigation.

So one important thing there is to check the local laws in the country. Another point that I learnt there, there are two groups that ran the Internet - the technical people who actually run the routers, the switchers, the servers and so forth, and the policy people trying to regulate it.

OK, so sometimes they understand each other, sometimes there's a gap. Most of the time!

OK, so another thing that they mentioned there - time needs to be given to research on access for disabled people. OK. So there are - I got the figure from the meeting, around five billion people that are still not connected in the Internet right now.

OK, another one mentioned about gate keepers, actually this was a controversial topic. They were trying to define what a "gate keeper" was in the Internet. So somebody said that a gate keeper in the Internet is someone who can block access control, block access or has the control to block it from the user. So they were actually trying to sort it out, like with would an ISP be considered an gate keeper? Because if they turn on your link, just a link at home or in your office, then you have no Internet. Or should we go up - are content providers gate keepers? The ones who give us back the things we are searching for? Like Google or Yahoo? So again, since it was a forum, there were a lot of discussions and actually, they left it in a grey area, no real definition.

OK, somebody raised a question with Google in that forum and he asked about Google collaborating with the Chinese Government in blocking some of the content. And inside China's Internet for the Great Firewall. And Google's answer was quite interesting - Google said that they needed such forums as IGF in order for international policies to put into place so they wouldn't get cornered by such demands, because Google can not just give up China, because it is a very large user-base for them. So they have to bow down to such demands.

Some commented that Google should open up the search algorithm to public scrutiny since Google is such a big part of the Internet now and give back most of the information that we are looking for. Someone was asking - is it random or do you prefer the information sources of this group A versus group B? Something like that?

Another strong comment during the IGF meeting was filtering should not be done in the Internet. So there were some areas that they were talking about, not some ISPs and they block a lot of content inside the network. Not to inhibit access from the users, but to save on bandwidth, because the large pipes that some of the richer countries actually take tore granted, in the file peens -- take for granted, in the Philippines, large Internet bandwidth is quite expensive and limited, so they actually have to block YouTube during office hours and block Facebook and so forth, so this is actually a grey area. I mean, what content should be blocked and not office related? What content should be allowed access?

OK, another comment there and the multi-stakeholder model was adopted at IGF. It had a body before the WSIS and people there felt that not all of the voices were being represented.

OK, there was also an observation on how things were decided on the Internet, like the technical people write the RFCs, the technical documents and so on and so and sometimes, the solutions they produce pose -- proposed, the technical solutions, they do not factor in the political, economic and social consequences of actually implementing it. And also, on the other side, the policy people, politicians sometimes decide on something they do not really fully understand based on the over-simplification of a technical write-up.

OK, so this divide between the technical people and the policy people should be bridged and IGF is a good forum to bridge this gap, since you have everybody there.

OK, my thoughts on IGF. Actually - there was a comment again there that IGF was more of a talk shop, where it was all discussion and at the end of the day, you decided on a good way to do things, how do you actually implement it? Or is it more of a recommendation and leave it to other groups to actually implement the solution.

So they mentioned that if you attended the meeting, if you came to IGF and attended the meeting and listened to the debates and listened to the topics and then call back to your own country and did nothing to implement locally, then if that country attended to the IGF, being branded as a talk shop.

So, IGF is a good forum for Internet decision makers to meet and discuss the future of the Internet and personally, I feel that since I attended it through APNIC's fellowship, then it is my burden to try to help the Philippines Internet on a best-effort basis through ASTI. So that's my last slide, so thank you for listening.

APPLAUSE

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you Bani for sharing your experience of the Internet governance forum. Internet Governance Forum as I was saying earlier, it's something like a really complicated discussion because there are a lot of things happening over the Internet and there are so many stakeholders, you know that it needs to be considered when we discuss about the Internet governance forum.

Now, since all our speakers have done their share, Philip, Wilson and Fatima and Bani. I would like to ask nip with any questions that you would like to clear out with our speakers, please do so. And while we're all waiting for the questions, I would like also to share that something is happening in the Philippines right now in terms of the Internet Governance. In the lower house or the House of Representatives, they have just approved the anti-cyber voyeurism block, so something to prevent you or doing or sharing the scandal, you know those scandal things over the mobile phones! So you might want to think again if you want to share those videos that you have, because that is punishable by law by five years imprisonment or a 500,000 peso fine if you're caught.

And there are other things as part of the Internet Governance Forum in the Philippines like the CITC is now being just an inch away from being a full-blown department. So that it can really come up with its program for the information, for the governance of information in the Philippines. So are there any questions that you would like to raise or any clarification that you would like to ask our speakers here in front? Or will there be anybody interested to know about the Internet Society chapter in the Philippines.

OWEN DELONG: I want to ask the guy who did the presentation, the two and a half inch drives and the solid State drives you were talking about using, we've seen performance problems with them versus the three and a half drives and the solid state drives, and about the reperformance than even the 2.5 inch drives. How do you work on those positions?

WILSON CHUA: We did have as a matter of fact, some initial phases but I think we were able to resolve that by changing the rate adaptor card itself, and apparently there was some problems with that before. But having changed the rate adapter charge and firmware, we were able to get solid performance ever since, and so, I haven't done actual speed comparison tests, but in terms of delivering the job and in terms of the power savings, I'm very happy with it. So I hope that there's a sharing of that. Maybe you would like to also check up the cable - sometimes the cables get loose or something. And then in terms of SSD, not all SSDs are alike. There was a reason why I chose the Intel X 25 E because it deployed some algorithms working faster than SSDs and you're right, some are in fact slower, but the Intel one is I believe faster but more expensive. However, the nice part about the SSD, Toshiba has come up with 512 gigabyte. Which is, you know not fit for a data centre, right.

RANDALL LOZANO: OK, any other questions or clarifications from the audience? OK, going once - twice? OK, so if we don't have any questions or clarification, I would like to thank all the speakers who have shared their experience for the Internet Governance Forum for the Philippines and in a while going to the Internet Forum Governance Experience within the Asia-Pacific. Thank you. Good afternoon.

APPLAUSE

SRINIVAS CHENDI: We'll take a short break because we're running late of time. We'll come back at 4:15 please. Thank you.

Tuesday 1600-1730

SRINIVAS CHENDI: OK. We are going to start the session. It is almost 4:20. Welcome back, those who are in the room. The chair for this session is Randall Lozano as well. And I would just like to recognize and acknowledge the sponsors for the session are APTLD, CNNIC, Internet Society, NII, and TWNIC - thank you for your support.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you again. Once again, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the second part of the Internet governance pulong, which this time, we are going to highlight the Internet governance in the Asia Pacific. We have a number of good speakers and good-looking gentleman from all over Asia - all over the world. And I would like to introduce to you our first speaker to share with us the internationalised domain names. He is an independent consultant, following a distinguished career with internet architecture Vice President at AT&T, engineering fellow at MCI WorldCom and principal research scientist as MIT. He served on the Internet board and was its chair from 2000 until the end of his term. Earlier, he served as IGF for applications and was chair, co-chair for the working groups on messaging and processing issues. He was involved in the earlier procedural work for DNS systems, top-level definition and was part of the committee that worked with the transition of USC, ISI and what became the International Association for Assigned Names and Numbers. For most of the years at MIT he was involved in advanced computer applications for the social and policy sciences and statistical incentive for data management. He is a fellow of the ACM, a senior member of IEEE and a member of the American Statistical Association and the International Association for Statistical Computing. Please welcome Dr John Klensin.

JOHN KLENSIN: Good afternoon. I am pleased to be an honourary Asian for the day. An overview of the internationalised domain, at least from a policy standpoint, as from a technical one. The technical version of the discussion takes about two minutes, which I will try to provide, takes hours, which I will skip, which is probably good for both of us. So I am going to do quick review of the standard. The standard is called Internationalised Domain Names for applications, IDNA - the reason will become clear in a few minutes, talk a bit how it works. We started a revision of the protocol which is ongoing now and why the revision existed is important. None of it is a substitute for an in-depth tutorials and I will give you pointers where to find them. It is a review of some of the things going on in AP, someone else will have to do that job for you if you need it. My focus is on issues, things you should probably understand from a policy perspective.

IDNA itself intended to provide a mechanism for non-ASCII domain name labels without disrupting DNS operations and existing applications. It is harder than it sounds because virtually every protocol on the Internet assumes internally that names are ASCII and ASCII only. It works with DNS activities. It means limits on lengths of fully qualified names. There are severe limits on the use of punctuation and characters in the labels. What we are working with, ultimately, is mnemonics, rather than words. Large current domain names are not words. We don't expect it to change. Experience confirms that.

The original standards published in 2003, fairly widely implemented and deployed in many zones in DNS. Please remember as I go through the talk, when I talk about registry or a zone I am talking about the same thing and there are millions of them out there, not 200 or 300 of them.

It was clear in early 2005 that there are issues both conceptual and protocol regarding the original standard. The first problem was the Unicode came out frequently without changes. Having an upgrade path became very important. The upgrade path could be not be, "Congratulations, you stop everything and switch to the new protocol," - was very important.

There was confusing terminology. We know with the Internet, where there are opportunities for mischief somebody will take advantage of it. The way in which the protocol was designed and people used it misunderstands how the DNS actually worked. I am going to talk about the combination of these two standards, there are not a lot of differences.

The basic approach of the original standard is we weren't going to make changes to DNS. Doing so was much too disruptive to applications and would lead, everyone thought, to a long and very difficult transition. There were other possibilities with how to do things that were rejected because they would make the transition too long. It wasn't clear the right decision was made about transition time, although it is more clear than it was five years ago, that the right decision was made for other reasons.

When the application sees a string in the local string and character set, which is intended to be treated as a domain label, it takes that strain, converts the Unicode. It produces U-labelling. That label is then converted to a special ASCII form. ASCII-compatible. There is an algorithm called Unicode. It is a conversion algorithm, not a thing.

So we call the ASCII compatible form plus the prefix an A-label. The only things stored are the A-labels. They have a property, rather than the plain ordinary application. It thinks it is an ordinary ASCII label which is a host name to them and it can go ahead and process it. Applications find A-labels, going to display the users converts it back to U-label form, if it knows how to do that, and haven't made a policy decision not to.

Only the A-labels go into the DNS. The interpretation, coding and decoding of the U-labels and the A-labels are form. All of this is subject to all the restrictions the debugs as posts on the labels. Labels can be up to 63 characters long but because of the IDNs, it is a lot fewer in practice.

Lookups are an exact match. When we match things in the real world we make allowances for spelling variations, for case variations, and scripts that have case, we make allowances for markings and decorations on characters which may not be present. The Domain Name System is very literal. You ask it to look up something and it gives you an answer for that thing or get back an answer no.

Processing of things, which we think of as words, or think of as part of language, that is very inconvenient but it is the way it works.

The DNS is a hierarchy, as most of us know. The matching process has got to be hierarchy. You can't have something which has different matching rules and is used under another top-level domain. I've given versions of the talk where I have a slide that says 'Delusions' on the top and talks about popular ideas how people will make things work. One of the delusions is you can have a different set of rules to determine things according to what language it is in. DNS doesn't know anything about languages. Another rule is you can determine the level. The resolution can't do that. Again, this is about mnemonics and not words. There have been domains that require as condition of registration the label can be something looked up in a dictionary. It hasn't worked well.

We hear a lot about IDNs in what people say is multilingualism. Bad word! DNS is a tool for navigation. It is not good at finding information by main-guessing, although people try to do it. It is worse for IDNs, that situation is worse for IDNs because of the exact matching. Having IDNs will not make up content in the language if that content doesn't exist. It may make it easier for people to find and identify the content using things in their own script but doesn't make content that isn't there. When we get the real language issues that cannot be identified. It can be closer to the user and the identification with the languages. Many internationalisation problems, even with the naming. The IDNs are a good solution and the best solution to a small number of those. But the best solution is that they will solve some solutions. Sometimes the best solution to a problem is determined by who benefits. A different way of saying that is that the answers you get depends upon the questions that you ask. If one has a registry which is dedicated to making profits by selling as many names as possible, confusion is a benefit. If one is a user, confusion is usually not a benefit.

Another thing that's closer, the delusion slide is people who say, Well, I will have two trays in DNS and one will be in English and the other will be in my language and they will represent the same language and the same content the same way down. It is basically impossible to make that work reliably.

There are three major models in the alternatives of top level IDNs. They're very different. The current ICANN model completely ignores two of the three. Maybe that's important - maybe it isn't important. It depends on your goals and objectives. Even DNS internationalisations is not about naturalised domain names. You have to have the domain names or you don't have anything else. But to make these things work right, that's what so many other things on the Internet, one has to worry about the number of angle and the number of groups of people and people with different categories have to work out how to cooperate with each other. You have to have a standard protocol and everybody has to be more or less using it.

Registries have to understand the scripts that they're supporting and have to adapt reasonable rules about how to use the script and enforce them. Registries have to take a certain amount of responsibility about whether the business they're in is to improve things by navigating smoothly or improve confusion or some other objective like fishing or confusing users or routing things to other places.

Applications and processes would look things up in the DNS or look IDNs up in the DNS are an important part of the process as well. One of the problems with this ASCII encoded form is that they're ugly, and when you look at them, they don't convey any information to you about what's going on. Many vendors have decided that they needed to display that in the four-character form for domain names that they don't trust the way that the do mains are managing. The new version of the standard is designed to improve their criteria for what they trust and don't trust. But there's no guarantee that an IDN will display as IDN - either because of a browser vendor distinction or because you don't have the right fonts installed because something else has gone wrong.

As I've said before, the strings are still mnemonics, not literature. One should be able to embed the great novel in one's particular language into the DNS and are unlikely to succeed. We can provide better tools for efficiency, but we can't solve the problems. The tools help.

We're working on a revision now, because there were a number of issues IDN 2003. Some of the issues are very important to specific communities. There's at least one script which is part of national language of a country which was completely excluded from being written - used in domain names by a mistake. We had to correct those kinds of mistakes. Some others have very general impact. Our goal is to keep the balance and improve the balance between having mnemonics that are useable or as many languages and script as possible, but to have identifiers which are still safe and reliable and easy to use and predictable. If we lose the domain name system as a system for identifying objects on the network, because we had gone off into some fantasy about fancy names and strings and scripts, then we're in very bad trouble indeed. So the time spent talking about what we would do under those circumstances, you don't want to know!

So the key issues of the structured definition - the fact that it is very dependant on a particular version of unicode. The new version is Unicode Independent or largely so. The 2003 standard is based on the assumption that the versions would know what version they're running over and we've discovered that they generally can't tell. They provided for looking up code points which weren't defined which is an opportunity for all sorts of interesting mischief and makes it impossible to unicode independents. People have had a very poor ability to understand what's permitted. What happens to it going through the system. IDNA 2003 provides the mapping with the characters. That's all gone in the new version.

One of the difficulties is how we get from the old version to the new version. If you are for example a registry which has been very conservative and behaved carefully, or an application writer or content writer who has been very conservative, there is almost no chance. If you're someone who is has taken advantage of the mapping, doing extremely clever and cute things, then it is going to be a disaster for you and we don't now know quite how the transition occurs. We're working on that and that's the key issue holding up and finishing the set of standards right now.

The discussion is extremely difficult. One of the things we have always felt with IDNs is that we start talking about scripts and then about language and we're soon talking about culture and people are passionate about culture. We start talking about scripts and language and people start worrying about whether they can spell their own names correctly - and people are passionate about spelling their own names correctly.

I spent a number of years working in the food composition business and we found the same passions there and realized that because of the scientific issues, the number of people in the world who have strong opinions about food and food composition and recipes is roughly equivalent to the number of people in the world who eat. The domain name problem is not quite that bad.

But some of the things that I'm saying in this presentation about 2008 may change. As I said, this is not a finished standard. Our key goals are to get a standard unicode that is independent, that's easy to understand, that's more predictable with regard to what happens and is what is permitted. It is more adaptable to the local conditions. It is realistic about interoperability. There's a lot of theory in 2003. You will never display an ACSII code to a user that happens any way. The application will figure out whether or not it can display a name. Operating systems often don't work that way. We deal with the issues discussed earlier to the extent that is possible, but some of them just aren't possible. The plan is that this is the last big revision. It's version 2 - there will not be a version 3 except the fine tuning to adjust to the unicode in the environmental phase, but no restructuring after this. Can we promise it? Well, we can't promise anything but there are reasons to believe that that may be true.

Current status revision effort is under way. It's mostly a matter of tuning from here on in. It's been mostly a matter of tuning to get here too. If existing applications are careful, it's largely invisible except that it needs more characters available in more ways. Some changes as I said earlier are still being debated. IDNA 2003 compatibility for strings stored in files is top. Raising transition for things that may be around for years.

And it raises issues about what advice we have in migration and convergence. And on sensible days, it can tell us what it can and can't do and explain why if you do particular things, it will get you into trouble. Explains why you might work with some things and explain the trade-off and then rely on you to make reasonable decisions. There's an important policy matter buried behind there which certain organizations and the Internet Government space haven't figured out yet.

The greatest protection against abusive behaviour on the Internet is governmental behaviour through the standard organizations responsibility is to protect consumers and other groups against abusive behaviour. From the standpoint of something like an IDN specification, our situation is that we are going to go and specify why something might be a bad idea and then if people decide to violate those conditions and do those bad things, it becomes a Governmental problem in very standard Governmental ways.

The advantage the governments have in that kind of context is that they own things like peace forces and judges and jails. The traditional Internet Governance organizations who spend a lot of time talking about these things do not own those things, and when they say "If you do a bad thing, we will punish you", nobody pays any attention to them - correctly. So if you're a registry, what this new standard does is get more explicit responsibility to validate names. The "guess what I mean" properties of the 2003 mappings go away. Most responsible registries know that this is not a change. The enforcement model is that if you do bad things to users, then probably bad things will happen to you.

There are new characters coming in. That's a consequence of unicode changes more than IDNA changes, although there are four and exactly four exceptions. Those new characters may require special consideration with the labels that are already there. You may want to ban them, you may want to create sun rise systems, you may want to do something else. Specifications outline what some of the options are but they don't tell what you the best thing to do is.

There's a potential for better handling of scripts. There are characters that are important in some uses of Arabic script and some uses of the index scripts that are very difficult and possible to handle than IDNA 2003. Those mechanisms are tricky in IDNA 2003 because the same script which was expecting it was becoming visible. And the dream of somebody in the fishing business is to have a character to prevent things from matching that look to the user that look like they match.

We've also moved back to an inclusion list which got us the letter digit hyphen or host DNS was deciding which characters were permitted, rather than trying to permit everything. No more punctuation and unicode compatibility characters, just letters and the hyphen although in a wider area than just ASCII.

So if you're interested more in this, there are more definitions of IDNA 2008. A document which describes the rational of this business and provides registry and context, and a protocol definition and specification for right to left characters which is revised, and the character definitions and tables. Part of the unicode table is that there are rules to figure out what works rather than a list of characters and seeing what happens to them.

We want still more reading to better understand some of the alternatives to IDNs in the top level. There's a draft of that URL. There's a document discussing the multilingual IDN in it and there are several in-depth tutorials on the DNS and balanced consideration policy issues, but one of the best ones is this long thing:

And that's it, thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you very much, John. And we just heard a very, very informative update on what's going on with IDNA. If you have questions, please reserve it later on until all the speakers are done with the piece of discussion, and now we're going to proceed with our next speaker to give us the APNIC and the Internet Governance update. He was appointed as a Director General of APNIC in August 1998, bringing with him some ten years of technical and business experience. In 1989, he became a founding staff member as technical director and later on in 1992, as chief executive officer of Pegasus Networks, the first private ISP to be established in Australia.

During the period of eight years with Pegasus, he oversaw the successful growth of the company as a provider in Australia. In 1994, he worked with the International Development Research Centre, or the IDRC on their Pan-Asia networking program in support of projects in Mongolia, Cambodia and Nepal and China as a primary consultant of Internet projects to help to introduce Internet services for the first time in several of these countries.

He joined APNIC in 1998, the APNIC Secretariat has grown from six to more than 60 staff members and now serves over 1,600 of the largest ISPs in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2000, he was inducted into the Australian Internet Hall of Fame for his contribution to the development of the Internet. Ladies and gentlemen, let's all welcome Mr Paul Wilson of APNIC.

APPLAUSE

PAUL WILSON: Thank you, thank you. OK, I've got a brief presentation which is about some aspects of Internet Governance in the Asia-Pacific region, and I suppose I'll be showing some of my bias and some of the bias of APNIC towards the more technical infrastructure related aspects of Internet Governance, and certainly in the presentations we heard in the previous sessions, we see that the scope of interest in Internet Governance covers many social and developmental aspects that I won't be able to cover here, although I am here to be talking about Internet Governance generally in the Asia-Pacific region generally.

I'll be talking about the history of the Internet Governance and how is it defined globally and how it is seen in the Asia-Pacific region. We're very interested in focusing on this region - obviously we're located in the region, but as we all know, this region accounts for some 40% of Internet users and it's going to be more and more as time goes on and it's been observed many times as participation in the Internet Governance from members and citizens of this part of the world is lower than you would expect. The debates about the Internet discussions globally and playing a role and an important role with things like the IGF in the last year and the coming year, and topics of discussion within the areas of Internet Governance and some of the future activities that are coming up.

Now, a bit of background, there was something called the World Summit on Information Society sponsored by the ITU. That started in 2001, the best part of ten years ago. It actually did not start with anything about Internet Governance in the platform. The whole aim of the WSIS conference was to look at the communications technologies on the world, on the formation of the information society particularly in developing parts of the world. But quite deliberately I think, the phrase Internet Governance was more or less promoted strongly in the first part of the WSIS, so that by the end of that two-year period as the WSIS phase one area ended, we had the awareness of the Internet Governance and it told us that the international management of the Internet should be multilateral and transparent and democratic, etc.

There was a plan of action which said that the United Nations should set up a working group on Internet Governance to define what Internet Governance actually is and that it should be preparing a report on its findings by the end of the second phase of WSIS. So very quickly - although we started looking at ICTs generally, we had Internet Governance being promoted and pushed as something that the summit should be focusing on.

So this esteemed work, the working group on Internet Governance which had a very wide-ranging participation, including quite a lot of members from the Internet technical community, the RIRs as well. It came upon the definition which I think has been recited many times over saying that the - to define Internet Governance, that the development and application of the Government and civil society in their respective roles of shared principles, norms and rules and decision-making procedures and programs that shaped the use of the Internet. Now, I apologize for that. I've heard it so many times, it's almost meaningless, and I think it is written very much in diplomatic speak. But in more common words, I guess in more... it is something that you might relate to more. Really, Internet Governance really covers any aspect of the Internet which requires some kind of regulation or co-ordination or oversight. And by way of examples it includes cyber crime and everything related and includes the content of the Internet and everything related, including commerce and trade and taxation. It includes the kinds of telecommunications and regulations and competition regulation that we've traditionally seen in telecoms. It includes development issues and accessibilities and last and one of - only one of the aspects is technical standards and co-ordination which is the sort of area which is the area that we in the technical community are more used to dealing with. But what we always said during this discussion is that what we do is certainly a part of the overall sphere of Internet Governance, but there's a heck of a lot of other issues which are probably at least as important or more important, which are outside of this immediate area. This diagram here is something that came up during the time of the WGIG working group on Internet Governance and it shows an incredibly complex view of the Internet, with all of the different actors who are to take part in building the Internet, and there's a guy called Lawrence Lessig - my apologies for the fonts there. But the top layer there which encompasses almost every layer there, the content layer that involves the use of the Internet, the content of the flow of the Internet and copy right and crime which is on the Internet.

The next layer is the code layer and that's where the Internet standards bodies and the applications standards exist and the physical layer in the bottom is really just the wires and so forth.

So, we sit within the RIR community and the related groups for instance around ICANN and other groups sit within that code layer. Once again, I apologize that that is not quite as visible as it should be.

Now, that WGIG on Internet Governance produced the report and submitted the report into phase two of WSIS and that phase ended duly after two years in 2005 with a declaration that recognizes Internet Governance s as more than naming and addressing which is something that we argued very strongly, recognizing also the effectiveness of the existing Internet Governance arrangements which was a very good thing. The outcome of that - to propose yet another process which was a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue known as the Internet Governance Forum.

During the process, what was observed in the Asia-Pacific region, there was very little voice of Asia-Pacific individuals or areas in the global area in spite of the incredible rate of growth of the Internet in this part of the world. APNIC collaborated and strongly supported a project which was undertaken by the United Nations Development Program and the APDIP which was called the Open Regional Dialogue Internet Governance. It was specifically about remember forming consultations and analysis within the Asia-Pacific to provide input into the phase two of the WSIS. And it was quite successful and it was quite interesting. Now, unfortunately, I can't say that something has been done since then in the last four years to update these results, but I think that it probably would be interesting to do that.

The ORDIG project involved some surveys and they had a very structured survey which looked at concerns and priorities on Internet Governance. I'm not sure if you can read this, but this is a ranking by level of dissatisfaction of various key words and concepts within Internet Governance, and so at the top of the list, with 94% of people dissatisfied with the issue of cyber crime. And as you go down the list you see virus, spam, illegal content, privacy, availability and cost, reliability, wireless, availability, e-commerce, local language, IRP, local content, Internet telephony and net work interconnection and so forth, down to in the last three places, IDNs - international domain names, DNS management and last but not least - or last on this list is IP addresses.

And those last three which I have to say are some of the political footballs if you like on this whole Internet Governance debate were shown by the extensive survey to rank last on the list of concerns among the Asia-Pacific population. So in terms of dissatisfaction, they were way down. In terms of satisfaction, they ranged around equal highest, in terms of DNS management, and that was a really interesting result to put all of the different concerns into context and to look at what people out there in the region are really worried about and that I think is quite interesting. It would be worth while updating that list at some point - maybe with an identical survey so the comparative points could be put together.

OK, so Internet Governance today - we have this IGF Internet Governance forum which is a road show going around the world. It started in Athens in 2006. Last year in Hyderabad and later we'll hear about what happened from Ravi Shanker. And I think since that is a five-year process and there is yet planned for after the 2010 meeting, I guess one of the results we can expect to see out of 2010 is what's next and the mind boggles as to what kind of new incarnation of the Internet Governance we can have, but I think we can all count on the fact that there will be something, there will be a new form of this particular set of debates and consultation and so forth that will keep going after 2010.

But this is a very active area and there are various other groups, very notable multinational and international organizations like the OECD and the ITU who are very actively undertaking their own Internet Governance related activities, so the ITU in particular - the World Telecommunications Policy Forum that's coming up. That actually is adopting an increasing focus on Internet Governance and ICANN and related issues which we are also going to have to start taking a lot of notice of from now on. Of course, ICANN and the RIR meeting have been going on for many years and will keep going on to cover the particular set of interests that we have.

OK, at APNIC, this is where I start to talk about the particular issues that we are interested in, and I hope that all of you in this room would be interested in. You're obviously concerned acutely with Internet resource management in particular, and we have debates going on. And this week in particular, we have a lot of discussion about IPv4 exhaustion in particular and how the policy process will take into account the effects of the v4 exhaustion and how it will mitigate the effect ors plan for the future.

IPv6 deployment is something that we will be addressing a more - let's say creative manner because the v6 challenge has got to do with promoting deployment as rapidly now as possible. We have a session on that tomorrow morning. But APNIC has always been concerned with the development, the best development of the Internet in the Asia-Pacific region, so we have more many years, for the last ten years or more looking at what is geared towards that. So training and education are areas that are of great priority to us. Liaison with Government is increasing. And network measurement and monitoring to inform the community as to how the Internet in this region in particular is going. And to some extent, infrastructure services as well.

Now, all of these activities are ones which are sort of extracurricular if you like, over and above APNIC's surveys but we have just undertaken the fifth APNIC member survey and we will be announcing the results of the survey this week and that reiterates the importance of the surveys and the liaison and monitoring and important services that APNIC is providing as a result of the survey and certainly will continue to provide in years to come. OK, IGF 2008, we'll hear more about this. But we did have an active role in Hyderabad. There were four main topics. Some emerging issues.

And APNIC actually sponsored a workshop about the challenges facing Internet operators in developing countries where we had speakers from network operator groups and IXPs talking about issues and training and education and infrastructure, costs and regulations and geographic constraints and so forth. We also participated in panel sessions on Internet infrastructure, on the evolution of the root server system, and with our colleagues from the other RIRs through the Number Resource Organization, we had a very substantial presence at IGF 2008 and will do so again in 2009.

Critical Internet resources - now the current IPv4 issues which will be some of these discussed during this week - involve the access to the last /8 s in IANA. And the recovered IPv4 space. The use of the last /8 address in APNIC is an ongoing discussion in addition to ensuring the efficiency of usage of the existing held address space or those who are requesting more address space. But last but not least is the address space and extensive discussions going on and ongoing about how particularly after the last of the addresses of IANA have been allocated, how existing IP address allocations will be able to be transferred around the community.

We are also talking about IPv6 issued in particular tomorrow. As I said, this is much more a creative issue of how to deal with capacity, educate, raise awareness and train people to use IPv6 and record on the state of the IPv6, and in the policy, there is not a great deal of discussion to be had. The policy frame work is stable and no-one from any form is suggesting that there's policy impediments or problems with the current IPv6 frame work.

Just back to the APNIC survey, the results are being announced now, but we have three propositions as a result of the top ten. We've been told that APNIC should be involved with activities and events and ISP associations and Government groups. This is the liaison groups. We should have higher level representation to lease with the groups and show the interest of the groups in the global forums so this reinforces the mission that we have to keep providing a coordinating role, to keep coordinating a role and conduct this kind of meeting point for people who are interested in these topics where APNIC can help to represent the results back on the wireless stage.

So just very quickly in conclusion, the Internet Governance issues that we see, they're obviously issues of global scope and are common to the Asia-Pacific and we have a whole set of concerns that have been fairly well quantified. APNIC is here to support the continuing growth of the Internet and in the Asia-Pacific region in general, but these days in particular, it does include discussions into Internet Governance, but carrying on our roles in training and education, in information sharing and information gathering as well. There's nothing more important to informed debate than information - in other words as my father used to say, there's nothing like facts to spoil a good argument! And in fact, we don't need as many arguments in this sector, we just need facts and that is what I think can help to do. So thank you very much.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you very much, Paul.

APPLAUSE.

Again, before I call on our next speaker, I would like to remind the audience that if you have questions, please reserve your questions later on and after all our speakers Have delivered their piece, we are going to get your questions one by one and I believe we have a very interesting discussion with Dr John. And we are very lucky to have with us here this afternoon, a representative from the Government of India to give us an update or an overview of what happened in the Internet Governance Forum in India last December 2008. Ladies and gentlemen, let us all welcome the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Communication and Technology, Mr Ravi Shanker.

N RAVI SHANKE: Thank you, chairman. After a very lucid presentation by Dr John and a very well synopatised PowerPoint presentation by Paul, I thought I would use my portion to talk about inter-Internet Governance Forum, IGF continuity and change - continuity in the sense the teams that were developed at axis, diversity, openness and security, carried forward to the next IGF at Rio. The team of management of critical Internet resources was added on at Rio. And at Hyderabad, taking queue from these two IGFs, a broad theme was developed. It was called Internet for All. Looking at the subthemes as Paul presented, reaching the next billion, fostering security, and also dwelling on the subject of the Internet of tomorrow.

In the chairman's summary, at Hyderabad, the summation was on capacity building and ICF. This was in the overall context of the Internet For All as a theme, which is why the chairman's summary didn't just focus on this particular facet of development and capacity for the benefit of this audience.

I would like to develop a little on what India is doing, because if that becomes very essential to where we are heading in the Internet world. Yes, India is recognized as a major IT power, but the Internet usage in India is not very large. We have a population of over a billion, but the Internet penetration is low, users are just about 60 million. 60 million is large in number, statistically speaking, but comparison to a billion population, it is not very satisfied. Broadband penetration is only 5 million.

But there is another positive side. The positive side is the growth of mobile. We are going at a rate of 10 million additions every month. This 10 million addition, at this in time is over 350 million mobiles in India. I do expect the group of 10 million will hold on for the next two to two and a half years, at the latest 10 million. As you can imagine, we will reach 500 million plus somewhere at the end of 2010. And bringing these statistics into play, to give you an idea of what Internet is headed for in India. We have a perspective on how we wish to take the Internet to the people, access, Internet for All, access. It is our central theme. Can we afford a laptop or a desktop for every user? Obviously, not in our socio-economic setting. We have our own innovative ideas.

We are a nation with 600,000 villages. So we come up with out-of-box thinking. In the 600,000 villages, we will develop what is known as common service centres in the villages. Typically, 100,000 common service centres, 1 per 6 million in an area of 15 to 20 kilometres - a kilometre is 0.6 of a mile, for those on a mile basis. One per 6 villages would be the common service centre. And with this, we do hope to have the public access system and our own concept of Internet For All and access being taken to the public at large. Our ambition is to ensure that by the middle of 2010 we should be able to roll out 100,000 common service centres. As of today, more than 26,000 common service centres have been rolled out. That, to us, is the access reach we wish to get to.

I would like to give another interest statistic. In a population of over a billion people, less than 100 million understand English. Yes, we would constitute one of the largest English-speaking populations in the world, statistically speaking but not all speak English. It gives another dimension of the IGF, which is diversity. We have got an opportunity solution to have access through the public service common service centres. We have our own process to go ahead with ensuring that the digital divide on account of the linguistic barriers are breached.

The first speaker mentioned about the INCCT. To us it is a very important development. A nation which has 22 official languages, we are able to get our point of view across at the ICANN. And believe should be a process by which all the official languages of the country are taken into the fold of the ITCC.

We are hoping for the fast-track mechanism to take place. A lot of groundwork has gone in to see the diverse linguistic groups and its variant tables have all been analysed and studied so that we are able to ensure that the technology development in the Indian languages will aid those on the other side of the digital divide to actually benefit from technology. We want technology to be a democratiser, to be a neutraliser.

I would like to mention that while this is one aspect, we would also like to see that content development takes place in the Indian languages. Here I must give you another dimension of the Indian socio-economic growth, which will give you a flavour of what it is. Being a language-diverse country, we have a number of TV channels in our country. TV channels or the entertainment channels are very, very developed. Now, we would like to see that the exponential growth in the TV or media gets transmuted into the Internet world. We would be able to get a lot of digital content to be driven in the local languages in order that people who get access in the various villages, since they will belong to diverse linguistic groups, get the benefit of content which is there in the local language. That, to us, becomes an important driving point because there is no point in just having access if we don't have content.

Again, it is only Anglo-centric and only in English, they will be on the other side of the digital divide. We must breach the digital divide with a combination of access and diversity blended together to take them across and see it transmitted. Technology should become a neutraliser.

I would like to move to the aspect of security and openness. Security becomes very important, a lot of developments occurred with the Information Technology Act in India recently. These amendments tried to ensure the facets relating to security get embedded. We will have to develop rules for that in consultation with the industry. So that it is calibrated into actual regulation.

I would also like to dwell on the role of critical Internet resources. We talk about IPv6. Coming to that, I would just like to say with the growth of Internet users and the diversity group, a lot of emphasis is there that in India we need to have a NIR. It becomes for us a very important critical Internet resource. I think these are the ways in which we feel we should move ahead. A lot of technological options are coming about, I would like to say the mobile growth gives the role of mobile Internet coming into play. In diverse language groups, it takes us across the Internet world. There is an exponential growth anticipated in the imminent future.

I would like to develop one more aspect. When all these exponential growth begins to take place, we need to see how to develop the Internet of tomorrow. Yes, I must mention one thing here. That all of the Internet relates to text but it is also moving into the digital, music and other aspects. Can you not think of the voice web. Technology should move in a manner, translation and across languages so that we move voice mail. We hope the IGF in the future would look at integrating technology policy and societies. Thank you.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you for the update. Now, as we continue, we are going to proceed with our final speaker for this afternoon. Our latest speaker joined the Internet Society in 2008 as a regional area for South and South-East Asia. Prior to ISOC, he held executive management in the technology sector and has roles in power infrastructure, business strategy for medium to large companies and organizations in the Asia Pacific region. He worked with Asia Pacific Internet community and has held several leadership roles including chair of ICANN's Asia Pacific at large organization, chair of the Pacific Island chapter of ISOC and IPv6 forum. His interests are policy, developing and emerging economies, effective business strategies for developing markets. He is a linguist, he speaks English, Hindu, Urdu, Punjabi and French. But he doesn't look French, of course. Let's all welcome Mr Rajnesh Singh from ISOC.

RAJNESH SINGH: Thank you. It is amazing the amount of information that is put forth when introducing the speakers. I didn't know some of that, so thank you. OK.

So I am here speaking on behalf of the Internet Society. We have already made quite a bit of noise in the first session where we had two speakers from the local chapter here, so you will have to put up with me too. What is the Internet Society? Founded in 1992 by several Internet pioneers, our primary objective is to ensure the open development, evolution and use of Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world. We operate as a not-for-profit organization. We are made up of organization members, which numbers some 90-plus at the moment. We have 26,000 individual members and 80-plus chapters around the world, including of course, ISOC, Philippines. We have decided to set up regional bureaus. The first one was Africa, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean and also South-East Asia.

Why engage with ISOC? We have worldwide presence and impact, we have an influential relationship with the technical community. Some would be aware ISOC the home of the IETF. We are a respected voice in the policy community. We are part of organizations such as OECD. We have a whole range of Internet decision makers. We have an historical record for making a difference. And I can safely say ISOC is a respected leader in shaping the future of the Internet. I would invite you to become a member of ISOC and build a future together. Membership is free in the global category. So I invite you to join us.

The Internet, we all say, has been very successful to date. From our point of view, the reason for that is largely due to its unique model. The Internet model, as it is, has some key characteriztics which are shared global ownership without central control, collaborative engagement models, including researchers, business, civil society and academia in policy processes and development based on open standards. We have some key principles we believe in, including the user centric and end-to-end principle. We believe in a true multi stakeholder process. It is free, bottom up and open.

If we look at the Internet today, it is a complex system and evolving very rapidly. You cannot say that the Internet is a legacy system because it is constantly changing. It is a network of networks which works cooperatively.

Intelligence is predominantly at the edges, not at the core. It has proven to be flexible and adaptive to needs. But the Internet model does present a challenge to some traditional governance plays and mechanisms. It is global, trans-jurisdictional. Of course, there are exceptions of what is acceptable such as child pornography.

The challenges can appear to be new. Speaking about Internet governance, what does it cover? The Internet today and how it will evolve tomorrow, a secure and stable Internet available to the world at large and one which contributes to socio-economic development. But it is more than just enacted by governments. The Internet use is not just homes - it is businesses, corporations and it is used to make money. It does include social and cultural norms and covers all sectors of society. It is important all deliberations and decisions that are carried out need to be transparent and democratic with multi stakeholders.

So it begs the question, why does Internet governance matter? For the most part, the Internet is now the communications medium of choice. In many forms, for a large part of the world, we can talk about email, Internet telephoning, blogs, web portals, video, stream, messaging, conferencing - they are ways we use to communicate and for a large part of the world today, the Internet is the medium to do it. According to Internet statistics there were some 1.57 billion Internet users, representing nearly a quarter of the world. With such a large public focus, this then, the Internet becomes an important global public policy issue.

If we look at the Asia-Pacific region, we have some 670 million users, representing 42% of the world. The Asia-Pacific region represents a very large part and I dare say, half of the world's Internet population. It is a significant part of the world economy, more of the world depends on it: eCommerce. Today you can put the letter E in front of anything and you have a new word which is in existence. Companies like Google, Yahoo would not exist if the Internet did not exist perhaps.

If you look at the report which Paul mentioned earlier, they defined four broad areas where governance issues could fit into. I won't go into all of them but reading them out, one is Internet infrastructure and resource, issues relating to the use of the Internet, issues with wider impact and issues with developmental aspects.

It is not just about names and numbers but more than that. How we interact socially and culturally. There are some challenges today which have the potential to impacts distributed and end-to-end and open nature of the Internet. NGNs, how do we unbundle the last nine and of course, competition. There is the notion we could move into a closed proprietary network model which would not breed innovation. It is what the technology or the concepts would bring about.

There are vast changes in Internet usage patterns, new methods of consumption and creation. Right now it is video. Of course, the video takes up much bandwidth. There will be an impact on Internet architecture and of course, on business models. There are security and trust and identity issues. Are you really who you say you are on the Internet? How do I know you are who you claim to be? There are issues of confidence, privacy and of course, data protection.

Last but not least, bringing the last billions online. It is not a matter of the next billion but the next billions to bring online. So there are three broad areas, from ISOC's point of view, to take on the challenges and to ensure the integrity of the Internet for the future. They are network scaling in particular, trust and identity and user choice. I will expand on them a bit, but I don't have much time. Network scaling is everything from ensuring continued global addressing with a routing infrastructure that keeps pace with growth to support the many different uses, applications and services. In response, ISOC has come up with a major initiative, called Internet works. It includes a global addressing program, a common Internet program to ensure the Internet remains open in its development and innovation and security and stability to ensure it continues to grow as it should.

Trust and identity, which has many facets of information sharing, particularly the security, identity and accountability required to be sure we can carry on our electronic lives with the individuality, rights to privacy and confidence we have in the physical world. ISOC has a major strategic initiative with trust and identity, architecture and trust, looking at the technical aspects, looking at the current problems and solutions and trust, to see we don't disenfranchise people and issues and that we are all inclusive. Of course, identity and trust itself, about what I said earlier: are you who you claim to be on the Internet?

User choice is the third one. It goes without saying the next billions of users will be very different from the first. Predominantly coming from developing countries. They may not perhaps be as technically savvy, coming from non-English-speaking and non-European backgrounds. To maintain the Internet as the engine of innovation, to be vital to maintain users' ability to choose the levels of service.

Multi-linguism issues. Again, in response of this, the three programs, technical capacity, building, supporting the training of engineers around the world, for a long time, APRICOT through sponsorship fellowships. We support a whole lot of groups in the region, SANOG. Looking at how we need to influence policy makers to make the right decisions for now and for the future. Of course, enabling access for communities to make sure all parts of society have access to the Internet. Special needs, accessing other languages and other forms of access, where one might not be able to access the Internet to see what it is about.

That is my last slide.

We talk about APNIC governance, we talk about it things like IGFs, the global forums or forums like this. It is equally important. There is no point in waiting for an IGF meeting or an APRICOT meeting to talk about these things, we need to see the people on the ground, talk about them, so when it comes to regional and global forums we are able to have meaningful input and, obviously, meaningful outcomes. I wish you well for the rest of the week.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you, now after our speakers, it is now time for the chances for questions, that you need to address to any of the speakers we have here, you may do it now. Any questions from the audience? Or clarification. Yes, sir?

TREVOR BATTEN: Good afternoon. My name is Trevor Batten. I am an independent artist. I am very interested in the concept of naming. I am here - a linguist, I heard from India. And I suppose this is really - it is more the philosophical reflection question. Because as far as I can see, that language is a none to logical thing about how people look at the world, but also the grammar and the way that the way the language is structured is very important and that's the reason I guess you can't go as the MIT speaker with a pyramid of concepts and identical in the other structure, and yet, the whole of the Internet is based on the concept of splitting out the three levels which we saw so beautifully done in the diagram there with the top level being contents. Underneath that the logical layer and underneath that the hardware layer. And I suspect that that is a really deep fundamental philosophical error and I suspect that asking people to discuss these at local levels, etc - I mean, quite honestly.

Listening to a number of speeches here - apart from the first one which was about domain languages and I understood that as being technical and that was concrete information. But to be honest, most of the other speeches seem to be an up-summing of cliches which somehow or another, you're developing a nice language of people going around and talking to each other in Internet Governance and you're all reinforcing each other, but completely losing any contact with anybody outside that circuit and that is, I believe because that interaction between form and content which is in your language and also in the structure of the Internet building is completely divorced and therefore, completely out of contact with any structures. So I just wondered if anyone can understand even what I'm saying or if I have any reflections or thoughts on that, thank you?

DR JOHN KLENSIN: First of all, I obviously wasn't clear in my comment about hierarchies. The problem there has nothing to do with definitions or language, it has to do with the property of the DNS. Now, that property of the DNS is the synchronization mechanisms for connecting primary and secondary or the servers, is sloppy with regard to updates. And files are kept separately, and the combination of that sloppiness of tiny updates and the way the files are organized makes it in practice impossible to keep two separate trees synchronized. And that would be true, whether those trees were in the same script or in different scripts, and indeed, all those could be numbers and that problem would still exist. So that's not a language problem or ontological problem.

I made two observations, the first is that the main theme of that part of my talk is that the domain name system a system for naming of objects and we popular in the domain name context and other contexts, get ourselves confused about the relationship between signing a name to something and therefore adding any meaning at all to it.

It's just assigning a name and that name has semantics or doesn't have semantics on other things, but the fact of having a name to an object doesn't tell you anything about the object that you know already, and that's a different and deeply philosophical problem, but not a linguistic part in the usual sense. The language issues of the network are very interesting and very important, but they have to do with content, and that picture which you found profound was intent by the author as a joke, and that may be a profound observation about the state we find ourselves in. But the language contents of the Internet are context plural and are like the real world, mostly good at facilitating communication among people who already understand how to communicate with each other, rather than opening up barriers or language or culture or relevance or indifference or whatever the various dimensions are in which people choose to communicate, are able to communicate or choose not to communicate or find that difficult.

RANDALL LOZANO: OK, any of the speakers would like to comment on that?

RAVI SHANKER: I would like to comment, coming from the diverse languages; I am trying to understand the contextual flow that would come out of it. Here I go back to a very major work authored by John Mastot, where he says "Hi-tech, high touch". Taking fuel from that, technology should be the driving force, but ultimately, it's the people's way with words which are more important.

During my talk, I did mention why we feel that the transition to a multilingual Internet is important. And also, mentioned about the need for text to speech and speech to text transmission.

Behind all of this is work to be done by linguistic experts and people, we in India while developing the technology in the Indian languages have worked with linguistic experts when we did ground work to develop the areas in the Indian script and Indian languages to get ourselves in a position for the 22 official languages. We can add one more dimension to this. Even within language groups, as you mentioned, there are cliches. A language as popular as Hindi has variations across the country. I'm sure the language of English as spoken in Australia would be at variance to what is spoken in the UK and similarly so in Great Britain.

These nuances need to be understood I would think that there would be the degree of data and techno interpreters who need to be in the intermediary role in actually getting the translation effectively done from one language to another language and this is where the role of linguistic experts come and multi-linguists also have a role to play. In India, it would be very common to see people at ease in a number of languages, as Mr Rajnesh Singh has been mentioned to be.

So this particular issue which you have raised, I take in a cultural context like ours, we have the nuances to tide over. But I would like to say that maybe the issue is less technological, it is more socio-culture.

RANDALL LOZANO: Thank you. You have another question there.

OLE JACOBSEN: I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective on this. There is a difference between the multilingual Internet in terms of the content and the multilingual Internet in terms of the streams that we use to identify websites and e-mail addresses. And you only need to talk to John for a few minutes, John Klensin that is, to appreciate how technically difficult it is to do that. So while it is popular to say that all problems can be solved as soon as we can sign conji dot something in the domain or Hindi characters, isn't perhaps the most important thing in the multilingual development of the Internet.

Look for example at what has happened in Japan in the years since the Internet was developed there and there's never been any strong desire to adapt IDNs or those types of things at that level and I'm not even sure that there will be after IDNs are completely said and done. So I think it is - I just wanted to point out that there's a trap here where it is a very popular notion to say, let's have IDNs and let's have it yesterday. But it's actually a very small part of the problem - just like we have most places in the world have Roman numerals on telephone dials and nothing really else. ASCII characters for identifying websites are for the most part perfectly fine.

RANDALL LOZANO: Any comment?

JOHN KLENSIN: Thank you for saying that much better than I did. The content tends to be what's important, whether we're talking about content from the stand point of the base material with the language of what was written. The machine we use to find that content the second most important thing, and the machinery used to label that content by name is way, way down there in priority and IDNs ultimately have to do with nothing but labelling the content by name. Labelling the hosts, the virtual hosts with which the content is located as distinct from the mechanisms used to find the content or the content itself. If the content isn't there, neither of the other two things count. If the mechanisms for finding the contents aren't there, the domain names don't count. And part of what I was trying to say very gently, and I will say slightly less gently but still generally, let me say it non-generally.

The people who believe that when they have IDNs, believe that they suddenly have content and connectivity by magic are playing tricks on themselves. And sometimes tricks on everybody else

RANDALL LOZANO: Yeah.

TREVOR BATTEN: Yes, I think there's a great confusion of levels here and I was very grateful for your clarification, because I think on one level, it sounded as if I was wrong, because you know language and content could be separated out to the language you're using. But philosophically, it undermined it. But I've been involved as an artist, a kind of amateur computer programmer for 30-odd years, and one of the most important things that I see about computer programming is the nature of the structures that you make. The technological solution is that you choose, limit or encourage solutions and things like that. And that's actually the level of language that I'm talking about. That's why I say - the ontology is very, very important because it is the way you design the world, the way you design the concepts, the way the structures interact and the way the structures communicate with each other.

And that is very, very important. It is very, very important in technical systems and it is very, very important in human communication systems. And unfortunately, I think to be honest, for commercial reasons, the whole IT world has thought - you don't need to worry about the machine, it is all a technical layer and the whole Internet thing is being done on a net neutrality kind of thing and I personally find that very worrying because it denies the interaction between form and content which I think is very practical on a technical level and I think is very important on a human level too. OK. Thank you.

JOHN KLENSIN: The difficulty there is that the balance runs in both directions. If one starts talking about the meta level of the meta descriptions of the linguistic structures, one deteriorates, or if you prefer - advances very quickly into the plain language games in the classic sense of the term, rather than communicating or playing language games to demonstrate the communications are possible. But we know in practice that the communication works most of the time, despite of the fact that it is possible. And again, there are issues and classic theory here, which have nothing to do with the issues in linguistic theory, but get confused when we start talking about things and the names of the things and the things which is another classic philosophical problem in some branches of linguistics and elsewhere. So there are some areas where I completely agree with you, and another area where I would say that that is correct and it is important, but with regard to some of the issues, it is a distraction. A different way of saying what I said earlier is that the issues would be to say that the issues which we are talking about are extremely important and the naming issues are a distraction. It depends on what the problem is trying to solve, and that's not intrinsically a problem with the desired network. My background is peculiar in that when the first designs on what ultimately became when the Internet started, I was working for the guy who launched that and they said that are all these people working about networking and why don't you go over and join that group.

And that led to a long conversation which I told him I was far more interested in what they would use computers for and using that net work for, rather than trying to make the packets work or how to make the pipes work or how to make the plumbing good again. And that's another view on this. But it's important to remember as you make the kinds of statements you're making that the genesis of the resources to build what became this network came out of cognitive psychology in the fields and not out of people whose interest was electrons and wires.

RANDALL LOZANO: OK thank you, I wish we had more time to have such a nice discussion, but the time has come for us to end the session, and I would like to thank the speakers for sharing their very informative talk with us this afternoon. Dr Klensin, Mr Shanker and Mr Singh and for being involved in the Governance Pulong for APNIC 27.

SRINIVAS CHENDI: Thank you Randall for chairing this. Thank you for the participation and those who participated remotely. We had a good response over the remote participation.

I would like to once again thank all our sponsors for the session, CRNIC, TWNIC and APTLD and our partner Internet Society. Please give them a round of applause. Thank you.

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Just a couple of reminder, the online voting for the elections will be closing tomorrow at 9:00 local time. If you have been nominated as a proxy, please ensure that you receive a clarification, confirmation from the APNIC Secretariat. If you need any help, you can see the member services staff outside on the Helpdesk. And also tomorrow, we will start at 9:00 with the APNIC plenary IPv6 in 3D. Thank you for being with us.

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(End of meeting)