Transcript - Global collaboration plenary

APNIC 32 Conference
Monday, 29 August 2011
14:00 (UTC +9)
Global Collaboration Plenary

Keith Davidson: Good afternoon, everybody.Gosh, quite a full room, quite surprising after a lunch like that, I thought everyone would be heading off to have a bit of a sleep.

I do see a lot of faces that I don't know, so please let me introduce myself.

My name is Keith Davidson and I'm InternetNZ's International Director and that role involves me in a number of international environments. I'm the chair of APTLD, the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain association.

We have just had our meeting here in Busan. I'm also a member of the CCNSO council of ICANN, I co-chair the ISOC advisory council and I have been engaged in the IGF and WSIS arena since its inception. I'm also on the organizing committee of the Asia Pacific Regional IGF and I was the chair and organizer of the Pacific Internet Governance Forum earlier this year and also involved in organizing New Zealand's Internet governance event last month.

I'm also a member of the New Zealand IPv6 task force and I think I qualified for that on the basis that I could spell IPv6.

InternetNZ is the .nz ccTLD and it works in a broad range of public policy areas including Internet governance as a concept.

For this afternoon, there is a Jabber session operating, so welcome to any online participants there and for those who are Jabber users in the room, if you keep yourself logged in, and help any online participants with questions and queries, the questions can then be put in the room here.

This session today is entitled "Global Collaboration, Where Are We Now?"  The answer is obvious, we are here in Busan, the beautiful city in South Korea, but I don't think that's the point of the question. I think this is trying to create a road map forward from here and possible greater engagement in Internet governance for APNIC and its members.

The challenge for my panel this afternoon is to provide the community here an overview of recent Internet governance discussions including how APNIC activities fit into the wider world of Internet governance, how you can participate in a wider Internet governance discussion, collaborative efforts with inter-governmental organizations to encourage IPv6 deployment and build capacity amongst stakeholders, the continuing evolution of the Internet Governance Forum, Regional IGFs in the Asia Pacific and how IPv6 is being progressed as an Internet governance activity.

I have the pleasure of chairing today such an excellent panel and in fact, all week, you will not see a more attractive or younger panel, so make the most of this fine occasion. Our panel does include top expertise in aspects of Internet governance and each bring their quite unique and critical view of this very broad topic.

I think just to clarify what Internet governance is and what an Internet Governance Forum is, I'll walk through the steps that have led us to now.

Historically, I think most of us will recall the multi-year process, the World Summit of the Information Society, the thing that we abbreviate so often as WSIS, and also its conclusive work in the 2005 Tunis meeting, which set the path for the first five years of convening an annual global Internet Governance Forum.

The five-year mandate concluded last year and its renewed program of meetings commence this year, in fact, next month in Nairobi, Kenya, from 27 to 30 September.

Each year there is a theme accorded to the Internet Governance Forum. This year's theme is the Internet as a catalyst for change, access development freedoms and innovation.

As well as the global IGF, there are forever increasing local and regional IGF events being convened, including many here in the Asia Pacific region at a regional, subregional and in-country basis and we'll hear some reporting from those events during this panel discussion.

The concept of Internet Governance Forums is really quite critical. It's to provide a true multi-stakeholder dialogue where governments, the private sector and civil society participate on an equal basis.

Discussion is the key and IGFs are noted as not being decision-making forums. In the global IGF, the program for each year's event is created by the MAG, the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group; this group being around 50 global experts from Internet governance with backgrounds in government, business and civil society, but mostly picked for their commitment to the concept of Internet governance and the Internet Governance Forum.

That group calls for participation in each year's events, so any organization or individual anywhere can apply and seek to run a workshop during the global IGF on a topic that's aligned to the agendas set by the IGF and the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group then finesse those applications to ensure that there's appropriate coverage tied to the IGF themes and that there is specific focus.

Multi-stakeholder Internet governance has been endorsed quite broadly recently. The US Government had its international strategy for cyber space released in February this year, followed in May by the G8/G20 summit also endorsing the concept of the appropriate mechanism for Internet governance being multi-stakeholder dialogue.

I see just recently, the OECD has confirmed its commitment to undertake multi-stakeholder dialogue as the appropriate methodology for Internet governance.

Then getting down to some greater detail of possible relevance to this community, at a local level, at last year's ITU plenipotentiary meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, after considerable discussion, several of the ITU's resolutions incorporated the ITU's commitment to multi-stakeholder dialogue for Internet governance, with four resolutions, specifically including the wording, when mentioning multi-stakeholderism, including, but not limited to ICANN, the RIRs, IETF, ISOC and the W3C on the basis of reciprocity, which was quite a significant move by the ITU to endorse and name the organizations in which it saw it would seek to collaborate more on Internet governance issues.

The four resolutions are entitled: facilitating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6; Internet protocol based networks; the third was the ITU's role with regard to international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet and the management of Internet resources including domain names and addresses; and the fourth was the role of administrations of member states and management of multilingual domain names, which perhaps isn't so critical to this audience.

But notwithstanding the ITU now has a committed set of resolutions to fulfil and it was very interesting that during our Pacific IGF convened in New Caledonia in April this year, we were fortunate to have the Secretary General of the ITU, Dr Hamadoun Toure, Peter Dengate-Thrush, the then Chairman of ICANN, and of course your organizational leader, Paul Wilson, coming together and committing their organizations towards closer harmonization and collaboration on issues of mutual concern in the region.

So now the challenge is for us in our own communities to further explore Internet governance and avenues of collaboration that will increase the safety, stability, diversity, access and ongoing development of the technology that binds us together.

Today, our panel will be presenting on some specific aspects of their engagement in the Internet Governance Forum.

The presenters I know will stick to their allotted time, so we should have some fairly concise presentations leaving a very good period of time for robust Q and A at the end of the session, so please can I ask you to hold your questions if possible and then we'll open the floor once we've been through the presentations.

We have a panel of four.  We have Markus Kummer online who will join us shortly, we have Kuo-Wei Wu to my left, to his left is Hisham Ibrahim and to his left is Sala -- and I won't even try and take on the whole name again and we don't have that much time.

To start with the discussions, initially, we had a couple of other speakers for this panel who unfortunately for various circumstances, haven't been able to make it.  The first was Dr Eun-Ju Kim, who is the regional director of the ITU regional office for Asia Pacific and is based in Bangkok.  Dr Kim is totally unable to join us today, but has provided the presentation that she was going to make today and she will be here tomorrow, so please welcome her tomorrow to APNIC 32 and if you get a chance, review those slides and if you have questions, I'm sure she'll be most willing to answer them for you.

Moving ahead, we also had Ravi Shanker, the CEO of NIXI, the National Internet Exchange of India, and India's country representative on the MAG of the IGF and on the GAC of ICANN; that's the government advisory committee in ICANN.  But unfortunately, due to his travel complications, he hasn't been able to arrive in time for this panel discussion.  So we're left with a nonetheless very good looking, very young and very articulate panel.

We will first move to our online speaker in Markus Kummer.  Markus is the Internet Society's Vice-President for public policy.  He comes with an extensive background in Internet policy at the global and regional and national levels.

Until joining ISOC earlier this year, Markus was the executive coordinator of the Secretariat supporting the United Nations Internet Governance Forum or in other words, he did the work to create the IGFs logistically and coordinating the activities of the MAG.

Previously, Markus held the position of envoy for the Swiss Foreign Ministry in Berne and was very influential during the WSIS process especially through his chairing of the working group on Internet governance which was the international working group working within WSIS to define Internet governance and the proposal of Internet Governance Forums.

Markus, I understand you are on line and are you hearing me OK?

Markus Kummer: Yes.  Good afternoon.  Yes, it's Markus here, I can hear you fine.  I hope you can hear me as well.

Keith Davidson: Yes.  That is a great sound check, so Markus, I'll hand over to you and your presentation is up and running.

Markus Kummer: Thank you.  Thank you for the excellent introduction you gave on this issue.

I have started with a slide explaining a little bit the Internet Society, but I suppose you are fairly familiar with it and Keith himself is co-chair of the advisory council of the Internet Society.

To cut it short, we want a future where everyone has access to the Internet and can use the Internet to improve the quality of life.

We are here working to support the next billions to come on line.  Until all 6 billion people have access to the Internet, our job is not finished.  So enabling access is our number 1 priority.

We have to be aware that the Internet is changing.

Now we have 2 billion connected.  I remember during WSIS, we were celebrating the first billion online, now we have doubled that, but there are 4 billion more to come online.  That will create both new opportunities and new challenges to the Internet as we know it.

We have to be aware that the majority of the growth will come from your region, from Asia Pacific and non-English speaking world, China, India -- big countries where many more millions will come online -- but we also have other big countries, which are Russia, Brazil and the African continent.  The consequences are there will be more languages and there will be different cultural values.

The slide is a bit messy.  My apologies for that.

This leads me to our strategic directions.  We are here to promote, to validate and to defend the open and distributed underlying architecture of the Internet and to promote, validate and defend the distributed, bottom-up participatory governance model that relies on voluntary collaboration of many institutions and where no one is in charge.  We like to call it the Internet ecosystem.

The Internet Governance Forum we are talking about is very important in this regard, because it actually validates all the values that are important to us.

One of the key characteristics of the Internet is its ability to continuously spur innovation and creativity.  This is the heart of the Internet's success.

The next billions need to have the same opportunity to innovate as the first billions.

To do this, it is important that we maintain the key elements that have made the Internet such a success to date.

It is user centric and user driven.  The user shapes the Internet.

It is an unprecedented and empowering tool.  It encourages and thrives on human ingenuity, inventiveness and curiosity.

Why is this so?  It is successful due to its unique model of development and deployment.  It is built on a common set of values and processes, on open technical standards, on shared global ownership with no central control, on collaborative engagement models, on freely accessible processes of technology and policy development, on transparent and collaborative governance based on multi-stakeholder involvement.

This is a short slide that gives in pictures what we call the Internet ecosystem, where all the organizations collaborate; and, of course, APNIC is one of these key organizations for the distribution of Internet addresses.  It would take too long to go through each of them, but the main idea here is to show this collaborative effort.

It describes the organizations and communities that guide the operation and development of the technologies and infrastructures.  All the organizations listed on the previous slide are the actors that have shaped the Internet and contribute to its success.

Multi-stakeholder governance is what has made the Internet what it is today.  It is based on open, transparent, collaborative processes and the use of products and infrastructure with dispersed ownership and control.

The key characteristic of the Internet is its openness, openness in all dimensions.  The principle of openness encourages innovation, growth and free flow of ideas.

The Internet is based on open technical standards and open, transparent and collaborative governance models, expertise driven, with freely accessible processes.  It's open to the exchange of information across borders.  Here I would like to quote article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was negotiated more than 60 years ago at the time before the Internet existed and when you read it: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

This sounds as if the negotiators back in the 1940s had the Internet in mind when they drafted this article.

The Internet of the future, as I have already alluded to, will be different.  It will be more multilingual, it will have more domain names based on non-western characters, the new Internet users will have different cultural and societal views.  This will influence the global policy debate and influence policy making.

There is also the not yet invented game changing innovation.  We have to be aware that the Internet is from a technological point of view, still in its infancy and we cannot foresee the future innovations that will come out of it if we keep the key characteristics.

There will also be technological challenges and more mobile or wireless connections and the huge growth in scale and the growing prevalence of mobility.

This brings me to the conclusions.  Bearing all this in mind, we have to be aware that change will be inevitable as more billions come online.

The increased importance of the Internet for all countries makes the increased involvement of governments inevitable.

The economic weight of the Internet will lead to increased economic pressures and we have to be aware that not all governments, not all corporations are comfortable with the Internet as it is.

While changes will happen, our mission is to defend the essential characteristics of the Internet, that is its open architecture and its open and collaborative governance model.

These characteristics have served the Internet well and are in the long-term interest of all Internet users.

Don't take this for granted, but we, the users, are the Internet and we have to speak up for the Internet we want.

Again, in that context, we have seen the IGF as an important platform where all stakeholders can come together and make their voices heard to speak about the Internet they want.

With this, I end my short presentation.  I thank you for your interest and I will be happy to engage in discussion afterwards, to answer any questions you may have.  Thank you.

Keith Davidson: Thank you very much, Markus.  So you are happy to remain with us for the duration of this session and take questions at the end?

Markus Kummer: Yes, this is fine with me.  What is the timeframe?  How long will the session last?  Could you please clarify?

Keith Davidson: We have about one hour and five minutes to run.

Markus Kummer: This is perfect.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Markus.

So in the interim, would you please join me in thanking Markus for his presentation.

APPLAUSE

Keith Davidson: Moving to our next speaker, Kuo-Wei Wu, I guess Kuo-Wei is no stranger in this environment, but he does have a technical management and policy background in the Internet industry and one of the pioneers of HPC Asia, TANET, TWNIC, APTLD and CDNC and in terms of board memberships, he's been a board member or Executive Council member of TWNIC, APIA, TWIA, COSA and has served on boards and Executive Councils of PIR and APNIC.  He is now more involved than ever before, but has been one of the founding participants in the ICANN model and his day job, whenever he gets time for that, is as CEO of a non-profit organization NIIEPA in Taipei, which conducts research and consulting services on Internet policy.

Kuo-Wei, the floor is yours.

Kuo-Wei Wu: Thank you.  Of course, I'm very happy to come back to the APNIC Community.  This is where I'm from in the very beginning.

Before I talk about this presentation, I would like to tell you the reason I do that is, first of all, because we know the v4 depletion and a lot of people keep asking, "What is the v6 progress?  What is the status right now?"  Not only from the industry, also from the government, even from the users, they like to know what is the v6 progress and status.

So in Taiwan and outside of Taiwan, and I'm thinking about can I come out with one index which can at least let us know what the status is and what the progress is.

As many of you know, some of the data is very sensitive, it's not easy to get.  For example, if you want to get traffic, if you want to get access to the ccTLD server or something like that, it is kind of sensitive.  So what I did is I show you what my working is on this.

First of all, what I actually did is I checked the 1 million most popular websites published by Alexa and in the very beginning, I took it as once a month and also tried to see if any of those popular websites provide v6 services or not.  How I did it, of course you can use the NS look-up to check the domain name and see if they turn on the v6 services.

After that, I used that v6 address from that website to map into the IR -- you know, APNIC, RIPE NCC, ARIN -- the v6 address block and see where they are located.  So that is the methodology I'm using.

In the beginning we do it once a month, but we turn more frequently to once every two weeks.

So this is the number we saw.  You can see that in the beginning of this year, in the 1 million Alexa websites, we see about 1,883 websites provide v6 services.  On v6 day, June 8, we seen the number jump almost 700 per cent, from 2,825 up to almost close to 20,000.  But unfortunately, two days after, we grab the 1 million to check those websites is still v6 available.

We found the number drop almost to one-third, so from the 19,216 down to 6,402.

But fortunately, after June 10, we look at it every two weeks, you can see the number keeps growing, actually, the last number I got is August 3, that is 9,397.  So when I see this number, I really like to know what happened?  We move from the 2,825 to 19,216.  What happened two days after it dropped?

So as I told you, I used the v6 address to look at those websites where they belong, belong to APNIC, ARIN or RIPE NCC and see what the dramatic changing.

So here the next one, I see it.  That is the reason I want to make this presentation.  The first presentation in APNIC.  I really like to ask our members, you know, the APNIC members, because in the v6 day, the Asia Pacific leading in the v6 services to 13,163.  But two days after, what did you APNIC members do?  You turn off the v6 to 235 only.  Because if you look at ARIN, the number didn't drop.  816 keep going, you know, around that range to 850.  AfriNIC might be 8, 3 and coming back to 9 and it remain around 8, but LACNIC you can see around 50.RIPE NCC, I think Europe is doing a very good job.  Maybe RIPE NCC really do a very good promotion in Europe, so you can see the number is really growing in the RIPE NCC from 4,772 up to August 3, that is 7,864.

So from this index number, I really like to ask a couple of questions to our APNIC members and also of course we can hear what RIPE NCC did.  So first of all, why we turned off after v6 day.  You know, you turned it on, you turned it off.  Why?  Is that really making the trouble for you and you need to pay more attention, hire more staff to monitor your v6 website or you're not comfortable with your v6 to be services?

But somehow, you can see the Europe at least data looks quite good.  So I think that is interesting when Keith ask me to give a presentation here, I'm thinking about what I should talk about in this meeting.

As an old member of the APNIC Community, you know, on v6 Day, I'm quite happy about that, but after that, I really question myself what's going on.  So I think that is the presentation I try to bring to the audience and we can keep talking about it and see what we can do.

Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Keith Davidson: Thank you very much, Kuo-Wei.

We now move to the African continent and Hisham Ibrahim.  Hisham Ibrahim is the IPv6 program manager for AfriNIC and a founding member of the IPv6 Task Force from Egypt.  His work focuses on developing IPv6 infrastructure and opportunities and working through the adoption stage.

So we have an opportunity to hear from Hisham on how AfriNIC is engaged in Internet governance with a specific focus on IPv6 and also how Internet governance is progressing regionally and in country in Africa.

Hisham, the floor is yours.

Hisham Ibrahim: Thank you very much.  You'll hear a lot of words like openness, like common, like collaborative, like multi-stakeholder being said over and over and over in this panel and no matter how much they're said, they cannot be said enough because this is the essence of what the Internet is, the multi-stakeholder.  Anybody that's on the Internet and has a stake in it has a say on how he wants the Internet, how he wants to see it.

This is why forums that discuss Internet governance are very important.  But I know of course I don't need to mention that to you, because the fact that you're here in a public policy meeting means that you're aware of that fact, that anybody could write policy that could change how their region allocates space, for instance, or even the policy could go to a global level and influence the entire world.

Other examples other than the RIR meetings are the ccTLD meetings also in the African specific region, the AFTLDs, where the top level domain people from all over Africa meet together and talk and try to come up with a unified voice into how they want to address their issues that they're facing, whether it's IDNs, whether it's ccTLD normal business and all that.  You'll find a bunch of links to them at the end of the page.

Another initiative AfriNIC is actually still engaged in is the AfriNIC government working group, where we get governments to sit together also and they discuss amongst themselves the topic, so we have an African government work group held after our public meeting, where we bring back the topics that were discussed during the meetings to that forum and try to find ways to get the governments to collaborate more and inter-cooperate more on the topics, such as, for instance, for this year, AfriNIC has three main themes, which are IPv6 deployment in Africa, the second theme is interconnecting Africa and the third theme would be cyber security issues in the continent.

Also, for the IGF initiatives, we have a bunch of regional initiatives as well.  We have at least three Regional IGFs in the AfriNIC region.  We have the West African, we have the East African and we have the South African forums, which are all regional forums.  We have also a bunch of national forums and for a link of other national and regional forums, you can see the link down there.  I visited it before I did my presentation and I saw there was the Japan national IGF and there is also the Asia Pacific Regional IGF amongst the list.  I don't know if it's updated with all of the Regional IGFs in Asia Pacific or not.

Also in the AfriNIC region, this is the second time that we are hosting a global IGF meeting.  The first was in November 2009, which was held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, and the overall theme of that was Internet governance creating opportunities for all.  This year, again, we have the second time to host an IGF meeting which will be held in September in Kenya, Nairobi, with the title and theme of "Internet as a catalyst for change, access development, freedoms and innovation".

So we would like to invite you all to come to the AfriNIC region and participate at the IGF meeting.

This is the local host website for the IGF.

Quickly, the NRO has a bunch of workshops that it's proposed for the IGF and that will be held during the meeting.  The NRO is the Number Resource Organisation that has the five RIRs collaborating together and working together.  The three workshops we have proposed are: enhancing and understanding, facilitating Internet governance through openness and transparency; we also have a workshop on Internet resource certification; and also another workshop on IPv6.  You can find the links to read more about them on the presentation.

AfriNIC in particular has three workshops which work along the three main themes that I discussed earlier, because we already have an IPv6 workshop through the NRO, we did the interconnecting Africa, because for so long, Africa has been fighting for access issues and now with the fibre cables locking in, now it's evolved to the second level, which is trying to interconnect the countries and trying to get access all over Africa.

The second workshop would be a SWOT analysis of the impact of mobile Internet or Internet governance, especially given that the African region has a lot of mobile Internet influence in its region.

The third would be cyber security and safeguarding developing countries from threats.

Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Hisham, so much.  That was a very useful and pertinent update to us here.

We now move on to our last panelist speaker, Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro.

Salanieta Tamanikaiwaimaro: I just want to say it's a real privilege to be in South Korea and it's quite exciting because I just read before coming to South Korea, that South Korea has the highest broadband penetration in terms of, I suppose, 50 per cent.  Back in my country, the penetration rate is at 30 per cent and that's where South Korea was in the 1960s.  So fairly interesting.

It's also been good to try the Korean eel, so I highly recommend it to those of you who would like to sample some Korean delicacy.  The open fish market is just around the corner.

I will be speaking on why the IGF is important for the Pacific and you can substitute -- I'm not saying that the IGF should have its name substituted, but you can sort of think of the IGF process as a sort of global collaboration forum.  I think the previous speakers have touched on it.

Very quickly, that's the structure of my presentation today and in the event that you find that I'm skipping a few slides, the presentation is already pre-loaded and you can access it easily from the website.

So I'll be going through the introduction and talking a bit about the benefits, current positions and achievements, successes and requirements for success, strategy for the future and then I'll conclude.

We've all heard and we all are aware that broadband is the next tipping point, that it's an enabler for economic growth and development and South Korea in itself the country which we are privileged to be meeting in, is a classical example of growth from a 30 per cent penetration rate to more than 50.  Today we sat during the Opening Plenary and we heard the future of the Internet and we heard about case studies from China, South Korea and that in itself for the developing world, is a sign of hope in a sense.

If I were to quote from the ITU Secretary General, Dr Hamadoun Tour?, this is something he said: "Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology.  It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity, and underpin long-term economic competitiveness.  It is also the most powerful tool we have at our disposal in our race to meet the millennium development goals, which are now just five years away."

If I may, if I could just define Internet governance according to the UN Working Group on Internet Governance, they were mandated by the then UN Secretary General to study the field and come up with public thematic policy areas and I feel that it's critical that I define this, so that we can have an appreciation for the context of why I think that the IGF process is critical for the Pacific.

Internet governance is the development and application by governments -- key words, development and application -- by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programs that shape the evolution and the use of the Internet.

By itself, that definition alone speaks of powerful collaboration.  It speaks of inclusiveness, no one is marginalized, no one is left out.

If you Google the WGIG 2005 report, you'll notice the public policy areas that the working group came up with.  I won't go into it, but of course one of them is critical Internet resources, and we hear the IPv6 at the APNIC 32 meeting in which a key theme is IPv6 and transitioning into IPv6.

So why collaborate?  Why should we collaborate?  In the Pacific, I feel that it works and for countries who have minimal resources, it is far cheaper to collaborate and produce results.

It's commonsense.  If you have this much, you must be able to prioritize and for countries in the developing region, often you will see funds and finances divested into infrastructure like roads and schools and healthcare, but often ICT is put on the backburner, but we know that studies show that ICT is an enabler for economic group.

Of course, improved policies and laws, heightened sense of understanding for analysts, policy writers and appreciation for the role that all stakeholders play.

As you would have heard from Keith, we recently had the inaugural Pacific IGF which was in April in New Caledonia which was such an exciting event.  Keith of course founded and coordinated the Pacific IGF.

Some of the issues that my fellow Pacificans, I suppose, raised during the IGF forum, you can see carved into the canoe.  So I won't go into it, but when you have the time, feel free to go through the presentation and have look at some of the issues raised and a lot of those issues are common to the issues that Asia and also that Africa and Latin America face.

Observations and inferences.  We've all heard collaboration, collaboration.  I'd like to introduce something that I came up with myself and it's what I call the manicured hand syndrome, which we face in the Pacific.  What do I mean by that?  OK, imagine a hand and imagine having two fingers perfectly manicured and the rest not manicured at all.  Beastly.

Anyway, in the Pacific, some of the things that I have observed is you can have model laws, model policies, industry specific training, but I find that those in themselves are not the answer and that development in the region must begin with the end in mind and I think this was very neatly put to us during the Opening Plenary, when the professor spoke about the future of the Internet research, where he said that the industry must be committed to excellence.  Outreach and advocacy must address all stakeholders within the Internet ecosystem, otherwise you won't get the necessary traction to produce a robust information economy and what you would see is people working in silence and for developing countries this is a no no.

Ripples from the Pacific IGF.  The Pacific IGF in my view, since April, has been tremendously successful in triggering a range of catalytic events that have brought not only the NOGs together but alongside the civil society and alongside other stakeholders who were at the Pacific IGF, and there were even those who were not at the Pacific IGF, but if I were to describe it, it helped to activate catalysts in the region to bring about discussions in terms of a more harmonized way.

Take, for example, IPv6 and APNIC.  One of the challenges that the region faces, especially network operators, is quite aside from the technical training which currently PacNOG in association with the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association faces, quite aside from the technical training, operators have to decide on the types of architecture and of course we heard the intervention from APNIC's Chief Scientist about appropriate models and things to consider and impact on product procurement and that sort of thing.

The thing is, if governments are not looped in, what you'll find is there may not be effective outreach in terms of standardization and what comes in and education for all stakeholders, so in a sense, the IGF, in terms of just bringing parties together where decisions are non-binding, helps in triggering discussions in terms of moving ahead with development.  So the way forward is collaboration, collaboration and collaboration.

I'm also happy to say that last year, remote participation to the IGF, whilst there was only one country streaming in, Vanuatu, this year, we have more than five countries.  In fact, one country American Samoa will have more than a hub, so remote participation, even though transportation costs are quite expensive, but with ITC enabling people to access the IGF, this is key, so that they can share resources, share learnings from counterparts, from Asia, from Africa and from Latin America and the Caribbean.

If I were to make a call, I would say I would like to encourage the NOGs, SANOG, PacNOG, I would like to encourage the NOGs and the technical community to get behind the IGF process, support the initiatives and civil society as well and get into discussions in our respective regions.  If there's anyone who is interested in supporting the remote participation from the Pacific, feel free to talk to me after.

And with that, I would conclude, whilst individually we are one drop, together, we are an ocean.

Thank you.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Sala.

APPLAUSE

Keith Davidson: Thank you, panelists, for your presentations.  I would like now to open up the floor for any questions.  If there are questions, if you can come to the microphones, remember to introduce yourself and please either address your questions to an individual or whether you're addressing it to the entire panel.  Remember, we still have Markus remotely connected to this session.

Are there any questions?

Randy Bush (IIJ): I just can't resist.  When I hear "multi-stakeholder", "open", et cetera, too many times, all my alarms go off.

Keith Davidson: Thank you.

Are there any further questions?  Any issues that you feel are relevant to your local community?

Any observations from panelists?

Kuo-Wei Wu: I can start it.  I can ask the audience here, we know in the Asia Pacific region we spend a lot of money on IPv6 projects in several of the countries.  One of the most popular IPv6 summit meetings is in the Asia Pacific region.  That means we have money, we have resources, we have people, we have energy.  I would like to ask our APNIC members here why our performance is not matching the resources we put in?

Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro: It seems that we are talking among ourselves -- just kidding.

I think the gentleman from the Philippines, when he presented his presentation, he did mention fear and I suppose that could be it, fear, fear of the unknown.

Kuo-Wei Wu: Of course you can say that, but, you know, I was in the AP region and if you look at those of the major participants in the Asia Pacific region, you know how long we spend resources on the v6 promotion, deployment, research, conference.  It's enormous.  We spent more than 10 years.  The most popular of the IPv6 summit meetings actually in Asia Pacific region, from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, you know, Singapore, Hong Kong.  Well, I think if you have a fear, you should fear when you get the money from the governments.  Why you don't get fear when you get the money from the government to spend that money on the deployment, to run the summit meeting, all kinds of stuff and then when really the time is coming, you guys just disappear?

Keith Davidson: Good point.

Dean Pemberton (NZNOG): I just wanted to address the point that there seems to have been a lot of money spent on IPv6 in Asia Pacific.  As you know it's a region showing that their task force and summits are very enthused about it.  In New Zealand, anyway, we are starting to see that bear fruit and it has actually been a long time of getting that awareness up, but we are now starting to see that awareness turning into capability, turning into deployment.  It's just like anything that you are building, it's a very slow start, but then once it starts to get rolling, you move further up the curve.

So I take the point that there has been a lot of money spent, but at least we still have a very, very high level of engagement and a very, very high motivation and at least in our economy, we are seeing that starting to turn into actually providers turning on v6 services and end users making use of them.

Thank you.

Keith Davidson: Thank you.  Any observations from panelists?

Kuo-Wei Wu: Of course you can always find a reason to give yourself an excuse.  You always can say, well, because we spend more money, we spend more resources.  So you know you should fear to turn your v6 on.  That is maybe one of your excuses, but, you know, as myself, I come from the Taiwan, I know the Taiwan government spent a lot of money on the v6 project for 10 years.  Come on, 10 years, not one year, OK?  So if you have a fear many years ago, you should be fear, not now, you know.

So that actually -- well, I don't understand, really.

Keith Davidson: Sala.

Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro: I'm going to put on my other hat.

By day, my day job is I provide legal counsel to a telco back in my country that owns an ISP.  In terms of transitioning into IPv6, one of the challenges I found is whilst PacNOG has been doing trainings for the technical people, the ISP engineers and that sort of thing, I'm finding it a bit difficult to convince the rest of the stakeholders within the company itself in terms of why transition into IPv6 now and why start planning now?

But fortunately, in terms of the cross-collaborative approach that's stemming from Internet governance, I'm finding that it has been much easier to persuade them now in terms of advocacy.  So the critical thing is getting everyone within the company to understand that, hey, this thing doesn't only affect the equipment infrastructure, it also affects the applications and, you know, how are the customers going to react?  That sort of thing.  Are you going to retain your customers?

I suppose in a broad sense, that's where we are throwing the gentleman from Philippines comments in terms of fear.

I think the greatest weapon against fear is outreach and positive outreach and strategic outreach and cross-collaborative outreach.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Sala.

Just a personal observation from myself.  As an ex-ISP owner and operator from back in the 1990s, there is no easier day to introduce a new technology than today, because tomorrow your network is more complex and it's more difficult regardless of what's happening on it, so re-numbering and reorganizing is simplest sooner rather than later and I hope that's a message that we got through in both the Asia Pacific IGF and the Pacific IGF, that with a number of developing countries, embarking on their broadband plans, there's no simpler time to deploy your IPv6 than right at the start of building a network.

So I think that's a key message to take home.

Kuo-Wei Wu: I just put it into Facebook.  Here is the return ...

The first question: tell me about the routing?

Well, I don't know.  I think it's basically I just look at the v6 address turned on in the domain name section.

The second question is: tell me about the server and where they are located.

But the same question, I really like to know, because in Europe, the RIPE NCC, at least you can see the number actually continue growing in a certain path.

That is totally different to what we see.

Keith Davidson: I think that follows on, having been to the trouble of doing it, why not just keep doing it?

Sala, and then we'll move to the floor.

Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro: The other observation also is, in terms of from a network operator's perspective, and this is something that we touched on during the IPv6 tutorial yesterday when Jordi was facilitating it, you have all these sorts of methodologies for migration and what's the most cost effective way and how do you know that a tunnel broker is not going to blindside you and that sort of thing, so I suppose that adds to the fear factor, but, sorry.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Sala.

Kenny Huang (APNIC EC): Kenny Huang, Executive Council of APNIC, but today I'm speaking in my individual capacity only.

Since quite a long time, we are sending the message to the community, saying we need to implement IPv6, we need to transit to IPv6 as fast as we can, as much as we can, just implement the IPv6, don't ask any questions, without any doubt.  But basically, this kind of approach, I think we need to review whether it fulfils or strategy in the long term.

I believe IPv6 definitely will be the future, but what we do for our community is we only offer one option.  I believe it is a time we need to figure out, to create another option to the community.

That's it.  Thank you.

Keith Davidson: Thank you.  Any observations?

Can we perhaps start steering the topic a little bit away from IPv6 -- well, we'll have a last question.

Owen Delong (Hurricane Electric): Owen Delong, IPv6 evangelist, Hurricane Electric.  I have heard a lot of speculation about why people might have turned IPv6 off after World IPv6 Day.  I would be really interested if anybody in this room is bold enough to come up and fess up as to having done so and why they did so.  It would be nice to hear real data on why people turned it off, rather than just continue speculating.

Keith Davidson: I think there's a very good challenge.

Anyone up to taking the challenge?

Ma Yan (APNIC EC): My name is Ma Yan, APNIC EC member, now also just in my personal capacity.

I'm working in university and, really, we are working on IPv6.  So I personally don't think we should be so pessimistic, we should be moving forward.

However, people worry about it.  Personally, I don't worry about it.  Whatever, we have to move forward, so people work on what they need, if they need it they work for it, so if we need it, we are working for it.

In my part, I'm operating one of the paths in CERNET, CERNET2, China education network, I just looked at the figure yesterday, it's come to 9.6 giga of pure v6 traffic and keep growing, so this is really we need, so we plan not only in the higher education, and recently the China government also put more effort to promoting more v6 connectivity, we have the plan to connect not only the higher education, but also middle and primary schools.  According to some of the standard data, only 30 or 60 per cent of middle schools and primary schools are getting connected to the Internet, so we still have a large content of IP address really needed for connectivity for students -- nevertheless, to say for other residential areas.

The new data released by CNNIC is come to 34 per cent of the Internet penetration in China.  So we still have a long way to go.

Several providers side, China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile and also some other middle smaller ISPs, they are working on that.  Although there is no very large-scale commercial deployment yet, but as a trial, we deployed both v4 and v6 and also the transition mechanism.  We tried 6rd, DS Lite and IVI, different kinds of things, so we are ready for the massive deployment yet.

I think we should not be so pessimistic, we should be thinking really more about what we need, we should do it for ourselves, we are not doing anything for others.

So I think as long as we need, we shall work for that and also we are happy to work in more collaboration with the industry, with the government, with all the people interested.

I also read newspaper over the net.  The former CTO of China Telecom, Mr Wei Leping, also made a public announcement or appeal that he would like to join or participate in a kind of coalition among worldwide tier 1 or tier 2 or interested parties to set up the promotion organization, really moving forward, not only for the pure v6, but for the next-generation Internet, for the whole Internet community.

So I would like to convey his personal information here and also if everybody is interested, please contact him or through me contact the interested party.

Let's work together for a better future.

Thank you.

Keith Davidson: Thank you.

Hisham Ibrahim: I was actually quiet, trying to listen to the comments from the floor and hear what input and feedback you had on the proposed questions.  I actually have an answer to the question why a lot of the content providers turned off IPv6 after IPv6 Day.

This answer was given to me by one of the major content providers that participated in IPv6 Day and his answer to me was simply that was a plan all along, to turn on IPv6 just for one day and then shut it off the next.  Although it was a success and it wasn't a surprise to anybody that the day would be a success and that nothing will break and things will work fine, although that was their plan, to turn it on for one day and I think that is the problem that we are still dealing with IPv6 as something that we are still experimenting with and seeing if it works or not.  We know IPv6 works.  The issues of awareness and education and newspapers and all that, let's face it, we are way beyond the phase of just doing this for testing or just doing this for awareness or just having an article in newspapers somewhere.

We are prolonging a process by investing a lot more money than we are in IPv6 and in IPv6 deployment into other solutions that are just prolonging the process of not deploying IPv6, which is becoming more problematic than it is solving anything.  As far as some major players in the ecosystem or the Internet system are concerned, as long as it is still working and as long as they're still getting return on investment on whatever they had already invested in, why go with the future?

However, the thing is we need to take that step and go along.  It's not fear, it's just everybody waiting on everybody else.  That I think is the main problem.

I'm pretty sure and I'm pretty guaranteed -- and we have been saying this for a long time -- that once a country or a region or a continent or whatever get their act together and start deploying IPv6, then everybody else will follow.  To tell you the truth -- and saying this coming from a region that has a lot of IPv4 space coming up, still with us, and I'll be talking about that in our RIR report -- a lot of the world is looking to Asia Pacific to take that first leap, because Asia Pacific is going through a lot of IPv4 first.

It's just that, everybody is waiting on everybody else.

Keith Davidson: Thank you.  I think in closing the conversation about IPv6, and getting onto a more general Internet governance theme, perhaps the challenge has been thrown down quite strongly, that speculation about the reasons for switching off after IPv6 Day are one thing, but having some concrete information about why people did would be very useful.  Perhaps in an APNIC survey in the future, there could be two questions: did you participate in World IPv6 Day; and if you switched off after IPv6 Day, why?  It could be a very useful question to ask and then having some response to that in due course.

In steering the subject -- is this an IPv6 question?

Dean Pemberton: It was a clarification, so I might just sit down while you steer somewhere else.

Keith Davidson: OK.  I'll try and steer the conversation away from v6, because I think undoubtedly in this environment we'll be talking about v6 a lot in the next few days.  But one question I quite often get that I'll pose to the panelists, is why would you come together for four or five days in a global Internet Governance Forum with senior political civil servants, business leaders and civil society representatives to talk and not make a decision because of this non-decision-making forum?

That does provoke some interest and certainly that has been a theme within the Internet Governance Forum about its future after its first five years.  So could I invite anyone from the panel who has an observation on the non-decision-making concept of the IGF?  Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Markus Kummer: This is a question that has been with us since the IGF started and it's still with us.  Some say it's a weakness of the IGF that it's not a decision-making place and I would say the opposite.

It's actually its strength.

Because there is no pressure to come to a conclusion, so it allows for a free exchange of views that you don't find in a negotiating forum where you actually negotiate positions, people are very tense and careful to what they say, whereas the IGF lends itself to thinking aloud, to explore new ideas and also just to plain listen to what others have to say.

In many of these issues, we are simply not ready to make decisions, so it is important to explore the issues before you actually can even think about negotiating towards any globally applicable decision.

All these issues are very multifaceted, very complex and I think in many ways, it's more important to avoid a wrong decision being taken that would stifle further developments of the Internet, further innovation, than not to take a decision.

So, yes, people go there not to take decisions, people go there to share information, to exchange views, to listen to each other and to learn from each other, and to take home with them what they have learned and to implement the ideas they have found good.

I have heard many examples of people who went back home from the IGF and set up an Internet exchange point, for instance, because they learned it's not that difficult.  It's a good solution to bring down costs and so on and so on.

So there is much merit in this kind of platform for the exchange of ideas and let's not destroy this essential character of the IGF by going further towards having some kind of negotiated conclusion, because it would destroy the very character of the IGF.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Markus.  Sala and then Kuo-Wei.

Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro: I would agree that the IGF's greatest strength is that it's non-binding.  The thing about the IGF, in my view, is that it doesn't take from the government its role, governments continue to govern; the private sector continues to engage in the private sector; and civil society continues to engage in civil society representations.

If I could just give a practical example.  Take for example the ITU.  When the ITU has its meeting, you will see government representatives or ICT ministers.  When you have World Trade Organization meetings, you will see Ministry of Foreign Affairs representatives at that meeting and negotiations that occur in that meeting, take, for example, WIPO, World Intellectual Property Organization, when they have their meetings, of course again you have the representatives and with something as vast as the Internet ecosystem as Markus presented during his presentation, the beautiful thing about the Internet is that no single unit, no single entity owns it and it's diversely the different stakeholders as Mr Ibrahim alluded to in his presentation.

Because of that, the IGF presents a beautiful opportunity for all the stakeholders and much more and many more to get together to discuss issues that may have been omitted and that sort of thing.

I for one, from a developing country perspective and from the Pacific region, I really truly see the benefits of going to such forums and seeing how other countries have actually learned from best practices and that sort of thing.  So we don't have to re-invent the wheel and we don't have to go through certain things, but we can accelerate the development process and if South Korea can increase their Internet penetration from the 1960s until now, 2011, to what it is today, I think it's around 51 per cent, why not for Africa, why not for the Pacific?  Of course, all kinds of interesting issues get discussed, such as interconnect costs and that sort of thing.

Over to you, Mr Chair.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Sala.

Kuo-Wei Wu: I think for the governance issue, actually, individually or some of regional, they do actually already make the decisions.  Is it necessary to go to the global, you know, making the decision?  I would say making the decision before a solid foundation is not necessarily a good decision.

I think right now, for the Internet is still in the development and still in the growing.  Frankly speaking, making the decision you might be making the big trouble for yourself in the future.  Let me give a couple of reasons.

You heard the French government make three strikes, right?  What happens?  Deadlock.  I think you also heard in the United States, they're talking about five strikes, if you have downloaded illegal stuff, then they will slow down your Internet connection, make it so you cannot do anything.

So making the decision must be a right decision.

It's not only making the decision.  I think that is very key and very important for us facing this Internet governance issue.

Let me take one example, what has happened in Taiwan, just about one or two months ago.

One or two months ago, in Taiwan, the Taipei government forced Google, every app downloaded from Android market must allow the consumer to have seven days to test if they like it or not.  If they don't like it, Google need to refund the money back.

Well, the government made a decision, but is this a good decision or not?  Actually, from the different stakeholders, you will see very different, you know.

One of the responses by Android or Google, they withdrew from the Taiwan app market.  Doesn't that mean that Google is not going to sell the app in Taiwan?

Come on.  You can go do it somewhere and now the consumer is even worse.  You cannot complain, you cannot go to fight, you go nowhere.  So I mean IGF or any governing issue, making the quick decision is not necessarily a good decision.

Very important: did we make a good decision?  So I have no worry about we have to make a decision in every case, because sometimes we even don't know what the issue would be happen.

Keith Davidson: Well, coming from one of the countries that's just enacted the silly three strikes law after two years of it being around and thrown out and coming back in in different forms, I can tell you -- and it's just starting literally this week, two more days.  So all the Kiwis in the audience, download like crazy while you are here.

But that does show the power of governments being exposed to lobbying by vested interests and their ability to create laws that are not always sensible and not always in harmony with things like the universal declaration on human rights and these are some of the issues that get debated.

But anyway, sorry, I have been holding you up, Geoff.

Geoff Huston: I have some news for you that you might find interesting and educational.  We deregulated.  Most of the money that goes into the Internet comes from the private sector.  The money is discretionary.  I don't have to invest in your country.  If the conditions for my investment in your country are less favourable than in another country, I won't.

What decision-making power do you have left when in fact you abrogated the ability to build this infrastructure with public money and said to the private sector: come and do it?

As soon as you did that, as soon as you took that step as a public policy step, to say the money is not ours, it's private sector, your ability to control the agenda virtually disappeared.

What you got back was a sector that was once again interested in consumers, as distinct from your old monopoly telco that treated your consumers with haughty disregard and arrogance.  What you got back from that was all of the strength of competition, but what you also got was a future that gets determined by the interplay of market forces.

Realistically, for the IGF to meet and say, "No, we have decision-making power, but we choose not to use it," is actually nonsense.

The amount of power you really have is astonishingly limited because every politician, indeed every regulator, looks at this situation with fear.  Because the fear is that if they make conditions in my country slightly more hostile to private investment than in another country, investment in my country disappears.

Because money is mobile.  Money chooses where it wants to invest for the greatest return.  That's the price of deregulation and handing over this to private sector investment.

So decision-making and ability without actually having the money to call the shots seems largely to me to be a mythology.  You know, look at the folk who are making the investments and actually making those decisions as to where and how to invest and ask them why they make decisions.  Because those decisions are getting made every minute of every day.  Understand that and you understand this business.  Ignore that and you can prattle on forever about why we choose not to make decisions but ultimately you don't make decisions because you have no money in the game and that really limits your ability.

Thank you.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Geoff.  I think when it comes to the narrow band of infrastructure and infrastructure investment, it's really hard to argue the point you make.  However, non-decision-making over whether it's appropriate to block traffic and in what circumstances, or public policy issues such as identity theft or identity requirements in order to get a domain name or an IP address and all those other things are not being controlled in the same way.

Certainly the Internet Governance Forum provides a vehicle for discussion on those topics and probably, quite interestingly, what it does release governments from is the treaty organization concept of coming up with a mandated multilateral agreement to modify behaviours.  Rather, it leaves countries as independent states to evaluate what they hear and say, "I like this piece from this country and this piece from this country and even though they're not trading partners or we have no affinity, we can go and leverage from their experience and adopt those as policies for home."

So there are some occasions where non-decision-making is actually more beneficial than decision making.

I think too it's really important to remember that in this community we are very used to our multi-stakeholder approach and the robust nature of our ability to debate issues and come to conclusions.

I think governments are the least comfortable with this new way of engaging in Internet governance and have the most to fear that they are giving something away by allowing equal participation and discussion.

But that's enough ranting from me.

Are there other questions?  Are there any other observations?  Any last comments from the panel?

Sala Tamanikaiwaimaro: I suppose another way of putting it is that having a forum where decisions are non-binding provides a platform for robust discussions, and robust discussions equate to powerful information sharing, and information is power.  The best decisions are usually the most informed decisions, because it also equates to lower capexes, lower opexes, it equates to holistic policies, it possibly equates to public interest being covered and catered for.

Having said that, whilst the IGF process and the IGF model is non-binding, it doesn't take away the fact that there are critical players who turn up who are also exposed to a lot of this, not only just developing countries -- I'm talking players like the ITU, the World Bank, OECD, APNIC, registrars, registrants and that sort of thing.

They go back and their policies are also affected because at the end of the day, everyone benefits from the rich information sharing.  That was all from me, Keith.

Keith Davidson: We're really at the end of our time, so quick comments, please.

Kuo-Wei Wu: I think maybe I put in the wrong question in this meeting, so everybody is quiet.  I'm not worried about v6, actually, I'm not worried.  I just mean it's compared with last 10 years, in this region, we spent so much money in there, we must have some reason to explain what we did and what happened.

So I wish this is information we can share with all of you and in the next step, I will go into every country to see how you work.

Thank you very much.

Keith Davidson: Thank you, Kuo-Wei.  Watch out, he's coming.

In winding this up, this has been, I hope, for you, a session that will start you thinking.  With governments and law makers, we should never be surprised with what they can serve us, but in terms of our Internet, the technology that binds us together, there is a platform for us to influence the way governments think.  So the answer as to whether you want to participate in that forum and help influence governments to make better decisions or you choose to ignore it is really over to you, but I think ignoring it is at your peril.  If you're not engaged, don't be surprised with what you're served, like three strikes policies for copyright infringement.

We are over time already, so I think I'll have to just draw this session to a close and leave you hopefully with some food for thought.

Please join me in thanking all the panelists who have done a great job today.

Thank you.

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