View source for When the public sphere became private – WS 01 2014

12 June 2014 | 14:30-16:00 <br />
[[Programme overview 2014|'''Programme overview 2014''']]<br /><br />

== Session subject ==

[http://www.eurodig.org/wiki/Talk:When_the_public_sphere_became_private see discussion]

== Session description ==
 
The present session is aimed to address the issues and current structural changes that are viewed within the public and private spheres. The session will be focused on the current changes/transformations in the public/private provided by the points of views of the representatives of the main stakeholder groups (state/interstate – business- users/public) and their possible solutions. 
Over the last years more and more public fields and services became private or out of public sovereignty and control. IT infrastructures and services provided by municipalities and public authorities are not based on open source and standards but proprietary brands and norms. In certain cases, public services are even outsourced to private enterprises like Arvato (“a leading international service provider that thrives on digital technology”) what is usually called “public-private partnership”(PPP). And while the public is usually informed about “advantages of such PPPs”, key questions like WHO owns (sovereignty) and controls public infrastructures and services are not even raised. Or should public data (from registration or tax offices etc.) be run and managed by private service providers and under what conditions?
Some assessments (Berliner Manifest 2008) observe an “usurpation of the public sphere” with fatal consequences and loss of public sovereignty when its services depend on private IT infrastructures and proprietary systems. It raises concerns about eGovernment models and applications, transparency, open access, safeguarding critical infrastructures etc.)
In a broader context, traditional public services like education, transport, health, housing, broadcasting, libraries etc. are “sold out” while municipalities cannot afford its maintenance any longer – water supply is a worst case. On the other hand, access of the public and provision of basic supplies is understood as a human right in the digital age. 
The outlined problems will be discussed during this WS in order to provide relevant responses and perspectives. Or what are the limits and borderlines of public-private partnerships?

== People ==
* '''Focal point''': Plamena Popova, University of Library Studies and IT (UniBIT)
* '''Live moderator''': [http://www.eurodig.org/gry-hasselbalch Gry Hasselbalch, the Danish Media Council]
* '''Rapporteur''': Plamena Popova
* '''Remote participation moderator''': Viktor Szabados
* '''Digital facilitator''': [[User:Lorena|Lorena]]
* '''Panelists/speakers''': 
*Rikke Frank Jørgensen, Danish Institute of Human Rights  
*[http://www.eurodig.org/annette-muhlberg Annette Muhlberg, ver.di]  
*[http://www.eurodig.org/minka-stoyanova Minka Stoyanova, Fulbright Fellow]  
*Dr. Till Kreutzer, iRights

== Format of this working group at EuroDIG ==

Workshop

== Protocol. Discussions ==

[http://www.eurodig.org/wiki/Talk:When_the_public_sphere_became_private see discussion]

== Further reading ==

[http://www.governet.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ver.di-Berliner_Manifest_en.pdf Berlin Manifesto]

== Messages == 
Reporter: ''Plamena Popova, University of Library Studies and IT (UniBIT)''
# It is essential to define the public interest. A clear definition on the public interest is the first step towards understanding of the current characteristics of the public/private ratio in the digital fora.  
# The balance between Intellectual property rights (especially Copyright) and the public interest in the Internet sphere is currently challenged and in the same time important for the balanced (in a view of the ratio private – public) development of the digital sphere.  
# There is a necessity of development and support of infrastructure(s) related to the digital sphere build on democratic standards and human rights. Public administrations should be considered as a key player in this direction. It is of critical importance the development of such infrastructures and as a whole-models to be based privacy impact assessments.  
# Regulations on Internet as digital environment should be performed in line with the human rights’ principles and standards. However, any further attempts for regulations on the digital sphere require more effective international regulative community. One of the mentioned ways lies in the direction of the multi-stakeholder model. 

== Live stream / remote participation ==
 
[https://intgovforum.webex.com/intgovforum/j.php?MTID=m6912a7a844b2b41c7d212c89c9ac44fd Click here to participate remotely]

== Transcript ==
Provided by: Caption First, Inc., P.O. Box 3066, Monument, CO 80132, Phone: +001-719-481-9835, www.captionfirst.com 



''This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.''



>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Okay. I think we’re getting ready now. Is it on? Yeah. Okay. Well, welcome to the session with the title When the Public Sphere became Private. And I’ve been really excited about coming to this session, not only because I have to moderate it, but because it’s a superior interesting topic. So what is the topic of today? We’re going to talk about the public sphere, which is no more, no less than an ideal. It’s a space that potentially could be open to all uninhibited and to a certain extent also critical. Of course, if we look at the public sphere throughout how it’s evolved throughout the history of modern democracy, then it’s never been uninhibited and always characterized by specific power relations, concentrations of powers and so on and so forth. 

Now, if we look at the role of the electronic media, this is crucial to the reorganization of social space in the public sphere. Of course, we’ve had what some have called the breaking down of walls between the public and the private sphere and breaking down of walls between different sectors in society. And the result is, of course, a new type of power relations in increasing the public sphere. 

Now, if we look at the early writings in the history of the Worldwide Web, and I’m thinking here about the early cyber manifesto, it was an open, free, infrastructure. But I think we’ve reached a moment in the evolution of the Internet where we can honestly say that the Internet both restricts and empowers people as they interact in the public sphere. 

Now, so what will we do today, this is a very broad topic. With me I have some very interesting perspective, very interesting people, who can bring some light to some of the challenges we see in this structural change of our public sphere. 

And I think that all we can do, we have one and a half hours. And so all we can actually do is to try to create some kind of roadmap of challenges. It would be great if we could come to some common solutions, but I think this is too much to ask for one and a half hour. 

The way we’ll do it now is I will introduce my panelists and we’ll have a few minutes each to talk to their perspective about key challenges. Then we’ll open up and hope everyone here can participate. And I’ll try to catch up on some of the things that people have been talking about. 

Just to introduce everyone here at the table. I have sitting here from the Danish Institute of Human Rights, Rikke Frank Jorgensen. She’s a special advisor at the Institute of Human Rights. And she has worked with human rights in the information society for many, many years and been involved in the business processes and the Internet Governance Forum for many years. She is also the author of a very interesting book called Framing the Net. It was published last year. 

I also have Annette Muhlberg. And she’s head of eGovernment. And she’s also a member of the Committee on the Digital Society on the Internet and Digital Society in the Parliament. Her organization is interesting because in 2008 it published this manifesto, the one we mentioned. 

I have Minka Stoyanova. She’s a Fulbright Fellow with open access and she’s an academic thinker, an artist also, very interesting. 

Then in the end, last but not least, I have Dr. Till Kreutzer, the editor of Info Portal, Copyrights in the Digital Age. He’s a lawyer dealing with a lot of copyright law, personal rights law in the digital age. 

So let me start off by passing on the mic to Rikke Jorgensen. 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: I need a mic. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. 

What I’d like to touch upon in this brief intervention is some of the changes of the public sphere from a human rights perspective. So by now there’s common agreement, I think it’s fair to say, that human rights apply online as do offline. We no longer need to discuss that. Yet in practice there are some significant challenges to human rights protection on the Internet due to some of the specific characteristics of the Internet. And I want to mention and speak to three challenges in tech. And the first group of challenges relate to the fact that the Internet infrastructure and public sphere is basically governed by private companies. That’s fundamentally different from the things they were thinking about or performing our public life prior to the Internet. That puts Internet service providers, access providers, various types of Internet companies in a very unique situation, vis-à-vis, human rights standards. 

One core challenge is, therefore, the human rights compliance of these companies. How do they relate to – how do they deal with human rights protection? And this is a discussion that’s been going on for some years. In all fairness, I must say that the Internet companies and the Internet service providers, etc., have addressed this and also addressed this seriously for the past five years or so. 

There is an increasing amount of initiatives globally, regionally, within Europe that speak to the human rights. The role of Internet companies in the online public sphere, vis-à-vis, human rights protection, in particular, freedom of expression and the right to privacy. However, even though companies increasingly address these issues, there are still some very core challenges that remain. One of them is that to basically get more information on what’s going on. So transparency – there has been a huge focus on transparency and the transparency agenda of these companies. However, transparency reports that we have seen published in recent years are by far enough. We really need to move into much more specific assessment of the rules and procedures within companies that govern public infrastructure and the public sphere to look at the impact they have on human rights. 

Another aspect relates to how to ensure – this pertains particularly to Europe. How do we ensure that rights that we have in human rights law within Europe are protected on platforms that are located in countries outside Europe. I mean, that’s another core issue. 

And then a final issue I want to mention in relation to private companies is the challenge of freedom of expression standards, vis-à-vis, the social norms or the ethical norms that are implemented in companies as part of their code of conduct that we as users ascribe to when we use the platforms. So that was the first challenge I would like us to address, is the fact that the online public sphere, the online infrastructure, is so much governed by private companies. We have private companies that in many regards commit to human rights standards, yet in practice there are a number of challenges related to how to get knowledge about how these rights are enforced and protected and places to go to enforce the rights. 

Then another group of challenges relates to the rule of law. Human rights and the rule of law are two sides of the same coin. Yet we see an increasing amount, not least within Europe, of self-regulation, on the Internet, meaning basically industry are asked to play a very active role in implementing or supporting government practice and government policy with implications on human rights. 

Examples of this could be blocking and filtering of harmful content. It could be intellectual property rights enforcement. And many of these measures don’t have the sufficient due process standard. How do we make sure that these practices uphold basic principles of human rights law of two standards that we don’t get a Wild West, where we have a varying degree of company practices that basically implement and restrict rights according to standards that are not consistent with the standards stipulated in human rights law? That’s another core challenge, one related to the practice of self-regulation. 

Then the last challenge I want to mention is from a user perspective, the challenge of enforcing your rights online. We also talked about it in the previous session that the lack of effective remedies is related to many issues. It’s related to the transnational character of the Internet, but also the claiming of the right for a private company. The budget oversight are not sufficiently resourced to deal with this task and to protect human rights to protect from outside the territory where they are based. 

To strengthen access to remedy for users, vis-à-vis, a public sphere or public life that unfolds within the commercial realm is the third challenge I would like us to address. 

Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Passing to Minka Stoyanova. 

>> Minka Stoyanova: Hello. So I’ve kind of modified some of the things I was going to say based on the dialogues that have already been going on. I’ve been frantically tweeting all morning. Starting out, I just want to say kind of touching on your point that when the Internet began, it was essentially a lawless base. And I kind of look at it as this petri dish of an anarchist ideology. It was about self-policing. 

As it’s grown, governance itself has been reactive as opposed to proactive process, oftentimes where existing physical laws are then trying to be applied to this digital space that’s inherently very different. Furthermore, when we talk about privatization, we’re really talking about a lot of different layers of privatization. There’s the physical infrastructure, but then there’s also the emergence of corporate interests and enterprise within virtual space itself. And those two are not always in line with each other. So sometimes one of those interests may support civil society or support government or be opposed to them. 

So I was asked to actually kind of talk about this in terms of civil society, which for me feels like a huge amount, because civil society is everything from education and academia to social innovation to activists, etc. And I would include all of those people in that realm. And I feel that that realm is generally given the job of being the catch-all for what government or law and enterprise aren’t capable of doing at a given moment. 

So moving from there, we would really like to believe, and this is coming out of kind of the discourse we were just having. We would really like to believe that government at the table as a stakeholder is really speaking for the people, but we have to recognize that government, because of bureaucratic focuses, ends up speaking on part of itself. Civil society becomes the voice of the people as far as being a stakeholder in any discussion of Internet Governance. 

Some of the challenges – I think the key challenge for civil society in terms of the privatization of the space is the interdependency of government and enterprise with civil society. Those government agencies and those enterprises are completely reliant on civil society to defend rights, to point out when rights are being trampled on, to educate people. We have reached a point where – this is in parallel, but slightly different – where Internet access is not really – it is a right. I thoroughly believe that Internet access is a human right, but access and understanding is a requirement for functioning in society. It frequently falls to educational organizations, youth organizations, social innovation, to not only ensure that Internet access remains open and free and available, but also that the individuals that are going online are properly educated and know what faces them in that space and what the rights are in that space. 

So those are the challenges that I would just like to – like us to address. Also, to remember that whenever we’re talking about digital space, there are parts of digital space and there are also physical infrastructure that can exist that are completely outside of governance, micro-Internets or Darknet or whatever, things that are happening that we’re not aware of that we’re not governing that are going to trickle up and affect what’s happening in the broader Internet. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. Annette? 

>> Annette Muhlberg: Does it work? It does work. I don’t hear it. Interesting. All right. Much better. 

All right. Well, we already heard the discussion that Internet became a public space, but it’s run by private entities. So we have to look what does it mean for the user, the citizen. The citizen feels like he’s entering a public space, but, for example, in social media, but in reality, he enters a private place with private householders rights. The user has national law, as Rikke already said, but human rights you could apply on this, but how do you realize those? 

We have a lack of a truly public space in the Internet. The digital agora where citizens meet and discuss is currently under private householders rights. But it must not – a digital agora must not by definition underlie a business model that includes surveillance and behavior targeting. We need more public innovation, search and support of infrastructure that is oriented on democratic standards and civil rights. 

For that, we need politicians and decision-makers in public administration with broad media competence. We need employees in public administration with knowledge of IT, of law, and privacy standards to be able to build this good infrastructure for its citizens. 

The public administration should be a role model in how to plan and how to implement digital infrastructure that includes that from the very beginning there should be a technology assessment for democratic standards. There should be technology assessment in the way that you can realize privacy and anonymity in all processes. We need open standards and transparency. The state should translate legal rights as technical requirements. I think this is the big amount of work we still have to do. This is what we have all to help all the – all those who set up the infrastructure and the decision-makers. So it’s a work of translation in a way. 

We have a deep gap between the repeated – well, my English, that’s the problem right now. I’m sorry. We have nice laws; let’s put it this way. We do have wonderful laws, and in respect to data retention, the German constitutional court said yes, data retention is a threat to democracy. It is a threat to freedom of opinion. It is a threat to press. It is a threat to the source of the press, for the safety of those sources. Therefore, you have to deal really carefully with this issue. 

Now we have the European court saying it is a threat to democracy. So they repeat and repeat, yes, it is a threat to democracy, but they do not translate what are the technical requirements in public administration as well as in business models so that we can avoid this threat to democracy; so that we can in the opposite fulfill and take our rights of freedom of expression and freedom of opinion. 

So this is the one big branch of work we have to deal with. And the other thing is I think a very positive one. We have the chance with the digitalization to open up government, to use open standards, to use free software that is also possible to share with the citizens. So on the one hand you can open up the government itself, but you still have to be careful that you – that the structure is independent from private organizations, that you do not create new dependencies. 

Here we come to the problem that as there is not enough normally in the average, not enough qualified personnel, employees, in the public space. So they do a lot of outsourcing. There is a famous whistleblower who last year said, well, there is a problem with outsourcing, because if you do not have qualified people in your own house, you have to rely on people who just do that as a job. And they have access to all the data which might be data the state wants to protect. And this might be in the interest of the citizens that this data is well protected. 

We should in respect to open government also be careful that the money we spent, that this money spent is not just spent in a certain procedure in a certain software, but that this money is spent only under the condition that then the software is under free license so that it can be used by other people, by its citizens but also by companies. Why not? 

So in the whole and to sum it up, the state should itself follow the law. To say that sounds like a joke, but it’s a severe problem, as we learned, as the state must not practice but does it, a state within the state. The state should, therefore, enable citizens to enforce their rights by offering and providing end-to-end encryption and anonymity tools. I think this is a proposal we should pick up. 

Finally, we always talk about safety and security. We really have to discuss the issue of critical infrastructure. And we do have to discuss the problem that certain services do have an interest that that the digital infrastructure is vulnerable. There is an interest in insecurity and at the same time we do need security. We need really safe infrastructures. We have to make a technology assessment, risk assessment on the vision of smart cities. Smart cities sounds wonderful and it’s great in a way when everything works to – everyone works together with everyone, with public and business administration and so on and so forth. But we have to take care right in the beginning of these projects, we have to take care that the interest of citizens and their privacy rights are considered. This is something we’re right at the very beginning. Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. 

>> TILL KREUTZER: When I was first invited, I asked myself why I was invited, because I’m a copyright lawyer and don’t deal so much with these things in my professional life. When I had a first glance on the speaker’s list, I fancied that they might have been desperately looking for male speaker in order to, well, you know, balance the gender ratio. It’s quite awesome this time. You should appreciate that, because in all other cases it’s always criticized. 

But to come to the point, yes, I’m dealing with intellectual property rights in my everyday life. There is a big issue about the public versus the private sphere as well. Although we address that in a different way, we talk about open on the one hand and closed or proprietary on the other hand. There is a distinction between public versus private or open versus proprietary. 

The difference is quite important, because open is publicly available and can be used more or less for free. And closed and proprietary is like locked away; right? You can use it only under the conditions that the rights owner will place at the content. So this dichotomy applies at both the public and the private sector. There is not a difference between these sectors. I have to say where private interests are involved, open is a very different and important matter, no matter whether the rights are owned by the state on the one hand or by private companies on the other hand. 

We talk a lot about open initiatives and open principles which are like open access or open content, open data, public knowledge and stuff like that. This is a very important discussion. You have to keep in mind this is not enough as a discussion to talk about open strategies, because I have to remind you that all these open principles are only evading mechanisms against extensive intellectual property laws. They base on the idea that an open contribution is always voluntary contribution. That means, who doesn’t want to be open will not be open. He does not have to be open. It’s just your personal decision as a right holder, no matter where you’re a state, a company, or private person. 

My argument is that the problem of extensive copyrights or patent rights, on the other hand, that curtail inappropriately public interests won’t be solved by these open strategies in the end because most of public and private players, rights owners, won’t go open voluntarily. If they won’t, most of the content that is on the Internet or in other realms will stay closed and will not be opened in the end. There are a lot of examples for that, one of which is I just looked it up whether it’s still true or not because I couldn’t believe it in the first place, but it’s still true. In Germany there are public databases – well, public databases by the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Constitutional Court with their decisions; right? They place them online and you can look it up. 

When you look into the terms and conditions, you will find out there’s a wording that says you can use that for private purposes only. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you have to pay a fee; right? Why is that so? And the question I always ask myself, especially when it comes to the constitutional court, the fact is that court decisions are public domain on the German copyright law. However, open public databases that are containing these court decisions may be not. There is some jurisdiction about that, but it’s not clear whether you can use them in any way or not. 

So what they do is like to put a layer of intellectual property rights on public information, which might not be even there in the law. So this is far, far away from going open voluntarily. In the end, one must ask why is there even a copyright for public information in the first place? Copyright is something that was made for individual authors in order to earn money with their content right. All the stuff that is created – produced for states was paid for by the taxpayers anyway. So I don’t see any reason for copyright when it comes to public information. 

Second example, public sector, you might have heard all about this directive, the European directive about public sector information. It’s supposed to lead to a situation where open data is really open. And you can use it like it’s in the public domain. But when you look it up, you will find out quite soon that all these rules that are made in the public sector directive end where copyright starts. It says where intellectual property rights are involved, this directive is not applicable anymore. And that means that in this and the other case as well, copyright outweighs public interest. And I think that’s significant problem. 

The third example is digital heritage. You all heard about these big programs about preserving the cultural and informational heritage by institutions like, for example, Europeana and others. It’s common sense that the European, for example, cultural heritage shall be preserved and made available online for everybody on a nondiscriminatory basis. But then there is no copyright exception for that. And the result is that projects like Europeana spend a lot of their budgets for clearing rights in order to make the stuff available online. Maybe they are able to preserve it and lock it away somewhere in a vault, but culture that is not available to the people is not doing anybody any good. 

The copyright comes into place and copyright says, well, if you want to do that like that, you have to clear the rights. And the transaction cost to clear the rights for millions and millions of artifacts are so high that they spend – I heard the numbers once, but I don’t quite remember it exactly – but they spend a lot of money in this rather than fulfilling their public interest aims. 

Here again, copyright also outweighs public interest. So my bottom line is then that stopping the extension reducing IPR is overdue. We are facing increasingly lockup of cultural data, whether they are owned by the state or whether they are owned by private stakeholders. The more this appropriation of public information will take place, the harder it will be to turn back and shift the values, because reducing existing property rights is always an extremely, extremely difficult thing because of constitutional challenges. So that’s what I want to say. Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Well, thank you all. Before we open up to the floor, I would like to just give my panelists here a chance to comment on each other’s interventions. If you have any ideas, something that came up from when you heard your different perspectives.

>> I would like to ask Till something. Thank you for an interesting presentation. Did you see any signs of forces pushing the other direction, so to speak? I mean, in Europe we celebrated the defeat of ACTA as a big victory, and we have creative comment regimes being implemented in many European countries. There are other examples like that, open access content and in the academic world growing, etc. But still you seem to have a rather pessimistic note on the overall picture. How do you see these small victories in the larger picture? Are we going in the wrong direction or are there also signs and forces that we can cling onto? 

>> Till Kreutzer: Well, I’m dealing with these things for a lot of years now. I do see that the wind’s changing somehow. But if you look at ACTA and these things, you must have in mind that it’s all these interventions that were successful in this area were only stopping the further extension of these rights rather than reducing them. We’re far away from any common sense in the political area that some rights should be even abolished again, like the database right, from my opinion, or other things, or only reducing things. Another example is like most of legal scholars are of the opinion that the term of the rights is far too long for 99.99% of all cultural goods, a term for like a hundred or 120 years case of doubt is far too long, or 50 years for sound recording, stuff like that. 

But what the European Commission did was not to reduce the term. They extended it for sound recording, despite all the legal contributors have said and all the experts in this area said this is not a good idea. There is no evidence that this would be good for anybody but for the Beatles and their producers and some other extremely successful people as well, but for everybody else, especially from the perspective of the public interest, it’s a very bad idea to extend it, not to mention to reduce it. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Okay. I have Annette first. 

>> Annette Muhlberg: I do not like the idea of confronting public interest and authors’ rights. I think they have both rights. They are both legitimate interests. When times are changing, then, yes, you do have some conflicts. What makes me really angry is that we cannot agree on a new form of licensing products, because it is absolutely possible to pay an author well for something that will be digital online and widespread. So for the future, I think a solution is quite easy and it is possible. And this should be something agreed on that we have free licenses and we have to talk about payment. 

And the example you gave with the constitutional court decisions, this is really a bad joke. This is something about not being honest about the costs of the digital age and public infrastructure. This is something we have to talk about that public service does cost money. Also, in the digital age, you cannot say we take that old business model and just continue and it will not cost us anything. This does not work. So we have to be honest about the money impact. This is my question to Rikke. When we talk about translating, as I tried to explain translating the laws into digital requirements, I think it’s also a matter of money, again, that we should agree on that there should be a project – a real project that does cost money and you have to have qualified people who do this work. It will not happen just by a goodwill of a few people here. We have to organize it. Do you see any possibilities to do that? 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: I’m not sure which specific work you’re talking about that we need money for? 

>> Annette Muhlberg: The European courts, they thought retention was a problem to human rights and to civil rights. But we do not have a guideline for businesses. We do not have a guideline for public administrations, how to organize and how to set up their ID infrastructure. What are the models they should use to avoid certain types of data, gathering, and things like this. So you have a model and guideline how to set up infrastructure either private or public. 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: I think to conduct assessment is important for anyone to do, in particular a government or state party who does a huge infrastructure project. We’ve been advocating in Denmark for years that privacy impact assessment should be absolutely fundamental when you propose new legislation or when you implement a large public ICT project. I mean, there are countries like Canada where there has been mandatory for years. There are many guidelines and standards. There are also a number of companies that do it. So yes, privacy impact assessment should definitely be a core recruitment in the public sector for legislation, just as they have an assessment of environmental impact of new legislation. The same type of assessment could be made with regard to data protection and should be there up front.

>> MINKA STOYANOVA: Kind of actually in relation to privacy as well, but also in relation to this idea of the public good which you put up against copyright, but also in a lot of my research I have found that particularly when it comes to open data initiatives and public sector directives, that there are privacy concerns that come into play and end up getting caught up in that, particularly in terms of corporations and documents which by which one standard would be in the public record, but then once they end up in these very transparent open data databases become a privacy issue for a corporation or a company or the contract holders. 

I think even this idea of defining something as being public good is something that we actually have to discuss. And to what extent are we willing to give up other directives that we’ve made or step back on privacy or step back on copyright in order to allow for things that we have decided are in that public good sphere. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Well, thank you to all of you. I have two questions from the room. It’s – three. Max, in the back, you were the first.

>> MAX SANGIS: Hello. Thank you. My name is Max Sangis. I work with Google Research. I have three short comments related to the overall framing, one to Minka and one to Annette. I think the public sphere, the difference that is happening in the digital space is framed in an interesting way here, but let us consider for a moment that it always used to happen or in most cases does not happen in this ideal state. Most of the exchanges happen in privately-owned media and newspapers, etc., in academic journals. There’s always a context, even when you exchange directly when you’re in a coffeehouse, when you’re somewhere, there’s always a context. That context is different online, that’s true. But it does not fundamentally change. It doesn’t change the way you can express yourselves necessarily in such a fundamental way, I think, as has been described, especially when my third point that I would like to move a little bit before is mapping, and that is the open standards point and the interoperability. Both in terms of identity and content, the second that you get interoperability of content, you can post wherever you want and it can be used in different contexts. Even more important; right? Second, that you choose the identity in which you participate in any online discussion, then you choose what to disclose about yourself, etc., etc. So I think there lies a big, big opportunity in coming closer to the ideal of a real public sphere where you can have participation by all kinds of people and all kinds of identity, which obviously creates incredibility. I wanted to make a comment about Rikke’s critique of self-regulation and the fact that it has come up or is on the rise, I think you said. I think it’s on the rise because the word is used more and more. That doesn’t mean that there’s actually more self-regulation. I think it’s just framed in that way right now. This is just normal policy, whether you go in the zoo, it has a policy how it wants people to behave, etc., etc. That was never framed as self-regulation. You’re absolutely right, and I think that’s, again, a smart observation that needs to be due process and standards. And I think the chance and the positive view to see multistakeholderism is now everybody can see these policies and can question them and voice – the voices of all stakeholders should be considered. Flaws are identified and we have to improve these self-regulations or simply policies of different entities about the space and the practices that they engage in. Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. Do you need the microphone?

>> STEFAN HEVICK: I’ll try this mic. Hello? Can you hear me? 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Please introduce yourself. 

>> STEFAN HEVICK: My name is Stefan Hevick. I’m an analyst. I have a small record label. I have a comment about the extension of the expiration of the sound recordings only benefitted the Beatles. There was, like, a petition of 35,000 artists at the EU who had asked their rights to be extended and harmonized with the copyright rights. The composers and the authors of music, the ones that write the text and the lyrics, at 75 years the people owning the sound recordings had a shorter term. It was harmonized. It was not only for the Beatles. It was for many other artists who said these rights should be synchronized. 

My main issue is the topic of the panel. I like the topic, when did the public sphere become private. I would like to reverse it. It could be when did the private sphere become public? Because the balance between these issues, public sphere and private sphere, is a balance that works in our carbon world. It does not work in the Internet; right? But a lot of basic functionalities are dependent on these balances; right? And that is why some of the human rights don’t work. If you go back into history and if you see at where this distinction comes from, if you go back into philosophy that there is, like we are human beings that can do as we please, but sometimes our interests clash with others so what do we do to mediate those interests. Sometimes our interests are more valued if their in our private sphere than if they are in the public sphere, etc. They need to be regulated differently. 

There is no such distinction. Let’s take telecommunication law. It does not set apart public communication or private communication. Right? Let’s say if you read the e-commerce directive, there is no such distinction. So my theory is – one of my basic theories, and I would like to throw that back into the podium, is I think what we should start to think of is the Internet also needs to have a public sphere when there’s one to one communication, for instance, that needs to be as secure as my public sphere in my world. But there also needs to be a private sphere in come there has to be accountability in which there can be anonymity, but I don’t think anonymity should be a default for all communication. I think that comes with a high price that we’re seeing on other layers. So what I’m trying to say is I want to bring back that notion, shouldn’t we discuss that? How do we implement a public sphere? How do we implement a private sphere? Then we can talk about how we can implement the functionalities of societies that lie above that or that come from that. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. Does any of the – yes? 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: A couple of remarks to Max first. Yes, the public sphere is an ideal developed by German philosopher, as we know. Yes, part of – a big part of it was always private in terms of media cooperation, coffee houses and so forth. Yes, I will still say there are differences. The differences in the public sphere, if we use that rather misleading picture, there are various ways for citizens, for groups, etc., to gather, to discuss, that are not within a commercial framework, so to speak, where you are not entangled in a structure of recording, where you can speak without being recorded as a default. That’s the fundamental difference. When you are online, you are recorded by default. And unless you are really, really Internet literate and know exactly which corners to hide, that’s the default for most people. That’s the difference. 

In terms of the self-regulation on the rise, of course there was always self-regulation, but if we look at the origin of the notion, self-regulation is used to describe an industry regulating itself. Self-regulation and industry regulate itself. Self-regulation now is an industry regulating its users. That’s fundamentally different. That’s a shift from what self-regulation is. And there are several comparative studies of European practice by legal scholars that speak to the increasing number of examples of self-regulation in the latter understanding of the word, being applied and encouraged as a policy measure across Europe for a number of reasons, whether it’s to enforce copyright regulation, whether it’s to fight sexual abuse content or for a number of other reasons, that there are simply many, many examples of this. And the list is growing. So that was on the point of self-regulation. 

Then the gentleman there on when the private sphere became public. I think you’re absolutely right. On the Internet it’s very easy to be public. It’s very difficult to be private. Yet, I would say you referenced the e-commerce directive. I think you can still find in the regulation of the telecommunication. The way we regulate our telecommunication operators, there is still the fundamental premise that they are not allowed to listen in on our conversations. So in that sense you have private communication as one big part of the picture in some instances of the regulation. But, yes, there is the whole thing related to the public part of the communication where you don’t find it. So that was just a reflection on that remark. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: We have two comments from the audience.

>> Hello, I’m from the free and open software from Poland. I’m happy that the topic of API, open standards, making different services interoperable. If we look at the social networks right now, this is not a single market. It’s not like I can buy different cars from different manufacturers running on the same roads, etc. I have three different monopolized market. I feel strange when I heard Google talking about that. When I heard Microsoft, I asked the question, when will Skype protocol get open? API, I have to ask the same question about Google+ and why is it being moved out and many other such actions from Google. But I like that the interoperability is here. 

My content submission was named Blurry Line Between Private Service and Public Infrastructure. I think we’re all circling the same problem. But that I feel it was said today that it’s easy to be public and hard to be private in the Internet. I think there’s a problem with the word private meaning two things here. First of all, it means private as in privacy. It’s hard to be private and keep my privacy on the Internet. In the context of this workshop, the other meaning is owned by private entity; right? So we have problems with being private as in privacy on the Internet because the infrastructure is private, as in owned by private entity. And I think we need to find ways to differentiate between those two meanings, otherwise we might completely miss each other’s arguments. 

I love the idea about privacy impact assessment. This is a great idea and I would like to throw another crazy, completely crazy idea. If we get a list of ingredients on what we eat, what we buy in grocery store or whatever, maybe, and I say this is a completely crazy idea, and there will be tomatoes flying in a moment, maybe we should get source code to the software we use, just on the same level. If I can see what I’m eating, I should see what I’m using as a tool today, every day; right? So this is a choice I can make today. But maybe this is something we is this float as an idea and in 10 or 20 years this will become law. Thank you very much. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Okay. One more and then two comments up here and one down there. Please remember to introduce yourselves.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. I’m from the Danish Forum. I have a question for Annette. Annette, you said something about public administration to build public infrastructure. Do we mean it in such an extreme way that you also think that the actual infrastructure should be nationalized or international allied? Should it be someone like ICANN that controls it, or different nations or also be the different Internet protocols? Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Maybe you could answer this with the other comment. 

>> Annette Muhlberg: Wow. Well, first, no. When I talk about public infrastructure in the first sense, it is rather something that – okay. There are many levels. Let’s take the municipal level. You do have an infrastructure, for example, for the rent system – is it rent? The pension, when you get old and you cannot earn money any more, you live on a pension. Is it rent? Pension. Okay. So you have to exchange data between an employer. You have to keep this data in a public administration, and you have to organize that. So we have to discuss this. We have public services where a citizen can order things online or has to walk by authentication right there to the public administration. So we have many different ways of public infrastructure. Many of them are unfortunately not well designed. And this is something where we really have to look after and with the EU, it’s getting worse, because there is the EU services directive. And they have really crazy requirements on how to make it possible that a little business bakery in Portugal has to have the right to have an online formula to open a bakery somewhere in Poland, and all this has to be organized online by law now by directive. And it’s totally unclear how to keep the privacy there, how to keep the data saved and so on and so forth. This is the one part of public infrastructure. The other thing is this is a really difficult, huge issue, if you talk about ICANN and who runs it and who rules it and how we govern this, I think that is a bit talk too big for this forum. Annette shows one outcome that at least we understand it is a big issue and we all have to deal with it. Yes, we do have to do it in a multistakeholder approach. I can’t hear that anymore. But, yes, I can do – I can say that in a very qualified way because I was Internet user representative at ICANN and initially part of multistakeholder procedure, but in reality, you can so limited just because you do not have the money to buy expertise. You do not have the money to buy your freed only of the job to really do that work, which really is a full-time job and so on and so on. 

So multistakeholderism is a first step we have to define how multistakeholderism is really implemented in the sense that civil rights people who do not earn money by certain activity by lobbying something, they have to have an infrastructure – research infrastructure. There has to be a shift, which is something that brings us to the problem, I don’t know in Europe, but in Germany we have a real problem with universities not being free in their because they have – in English – they have private companies ordering certain research and it’s really hard for them to do a public interest research which might contradict the interest of that company research. So we have a problem of independency here. In the whole, I do not think that we should have a big state infrastructure, but we should define public interest, and we have to be very clear that this public interest has to be implemented also on private-run infrastructure if this privately-run infrastructure is of public interest. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: And I would like to hear in the back.

>> TILL KREUTZER: I think it’s extremely important what you ask. And the difference that you made up is what is the question; right? What’s the right question to ask traditionally, the question is who owns the sphere? Who owns the realm? Who owns is who controls. But maybe that’s not the right question when it comes to Internet infrastructure. If you would say, okay, this should be the – the Internet should be a public realm, then in the traditional way it would say okay then the states should own the infrastructure. But I don’t think that this would be a very good idea. In an extremely dynamic environment like the Internet, technical environment like the Internet, there was word of the “Schlutnet” in Germany, some fools had proposed to have an state Internet infrastructure for Germany. Only the idea is ridiculous enough. None of us believed this would be a good idea and this would be very effective like G-mail, which is German made provisions. You know what I’m talking about. The difference might be between public and private sphere and who makes the rules and on that principles basis these rules. So what I see is not a lack of ownership in the public hands, but a lack of effective regulation on the – basing on the principles of public spheres and public realms. That’s the problem. And then when you realize that, it’s possible to make a private sphere function like a public sphere when you have that effective regulation. When you differentiate on that aspect, I think we might come to better solutions and the right discussion in the end. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Yeah. 

>> Minka Stoyanova: I think I said this in my initial talk, but I think what you were talking about the privately owned infrastructure, and we have a term for that. And it’s public/private partnership. The private companies that own the infrastructure that run this sphere that ought to be public are actually working for public interests and the public good. When the governments come in to regulate them, or they should be. They’re not, but they should be. But I think that’s the way we need to look at it when we look at what we require of them as governments. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Do you strongly want to comment? I’ll get back to you, Annette, but I would like to hear from some of the remote participants. We have Viktor, you have questions or comments? 

>> Viktor Szabados: Yes. I have a question from Romania. George Ripa is asking, how do you see the efforts of the Russian government to limit the freedom of government? Middle East Europeans are quite afraid and their lobby is quite different in Brussels. The rest of the European see their policy, we are experiencing Communism so we are very afraid when we see such policies. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Okay. Anyone care to comment on this? 

>> Till Kreutzer: That shows that the state, as the owner of the infrastructure, is not always the best proprietor; right? Depending on the system and let’s say the level of democracy that is actually happening in one country or the other, it can be very bad idea if the state controls the infrastructure. Again, it’s another aspect that opposes this idea to have the state public authorities as the owner. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: I have to ask you, if the state doesn’t control the infrastructure, do you have any suggestions to the model? 

>> Till Kreutzer: I would differentiate between ownership and control; right? Ownership is like it’s mine. So when it’s mine, I can do with it what I want. And if I’m working public interest only, then I have to obey some rules. Okay? I don’t have to own it. I don’t have to provide it as a state in order to make rules that are appropriate from the perspective of public interest. So what we need, for example, from my perspective, is like more human right to access to Internet right. If we have had that, then the states would be forced to have more and more effective, especially more effective regulation. This should be worldwide internationally human right that should be accepted and should be in the big treaties and stuff like that. And that would be a good basis to start from to say, for example, you state you don’t have to own it and you don’t have to provide it. It wouldn’t be even a good idea, but you have to have a guarantee, a certain level of human rights on the Internet, whatever you do it, however you do it. But you have to do it. 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: Could you also say that a private company such as Google, for example, or Facebook, had a de facto public infrastructure should then adhere to some public interest norms developed and agreed by state authorities? Would that be a way forward? 

>> Till Kreutzer: It’s no new model, we had that before. Like the emergency sector or telecommunication sector that are monopolies, sometimes in the hands of private companies, sometimes state owned, and always when there’s monopoly, the level of regulation is higher, especially when it comes to essential facilities; right? If the Internet is acknowledged as an essential facility in this sense, then there’s – they’re supposed to be very high level of regulation. There are authorities who shall serve or shall guarantee that this regulation is enforced. So this is not a new situation. This is quite happened all the time, especially when it came to technical infrastructures, and we managed that. The bigger problem is that we have a worldwide environment. So a regulation cross-border is in many cases not very effective. Try to regulate, let’s say, a company that is streaming movies, which are just in the cinema for free over the Internet, and that sits in Tonga, in the south Pacific; right? It’s a problem to regulate them. Therefore, we need a more effective international regulative community, let’s say. 

>> Annette Muhlberg: Well, I fully agree with what you said. When there is a monopoly, then you have to – if it is of public importance, that is the point, then you have to not only the right, but also states have the duty and there are many laws on that. I mean I have no idea what that is. It’s the same in English, cartel – antitrust law and so on and so forth. So there are many laws. But we have to define first public interest in that sphere. So that is the issue. You have to first make clear what is the public interest and then how to actually regulate this. 

There is another thing. I wanted also to answer to Max. Yes, interoperabilty, is there, but there is a real difference in the analog world and the real world, when you walk along the street, it’s a special sphere and almost a same problem as in the Internet world. It’s not. We have lack of definition on how a citizen, a user, consumer, can move in the Internet world. And I think that correlates with what Till just said about the need for regulation. 

We have to define certain business models. I think it’s totally ridiculous what Google Analytics, a little bit regulation now, but it’s totally ridiculous that you open a book, the Internet, and you’re registered. It’s just unbelievable. That also was, I think, eBooks that should be at least promotion of free use of books that you can read and you can make notices without being controlled from remote. This is essential for free thinking. And we have to start defining these really essential criteria for technology developments. Some has to be regulated. Some has to be promoted. And I think there’s a wide sphere. Certainly not while everything has to be done and run by the state, but it can be supported. 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: Could I make a small comment? I’m not sure it’s good to use the analogy of monopoly. Technically speaking, we’re not talking about monopoly. If you want to pursue the idea that Internet companies that via the role has very great implications, for example, on human rights protection, and that and are very related to a general public interest, then they should be regulated. I don’t think we can use our old monopoly regime and railways and the state authority or railways, etc., and how that was delegated, because it’s very different of infrastructures and we’re not speak monopoly where things that are very dominant in our part, so the criteria as we used for defining the actions that should be subject to the public interest applications we agree on should be different, I think. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: I have many comments here. We don’t have too much time. I have four comments in the audience. What I would like to do in the end here is also just so you guys can think about it before we get back to you, is for all the panelists to think of one key thing that they got out of this discussion today, and then we have a reporter with three points taken out of the discussion. But you have been waiting for a while now. So is there – 

>> I would like to speak to a few comments that Rikke made. I share your concerns about self-regulation and about the use and misuse of the term, which has a very positive connotation, but that increasingly is being used to subvert the principles of safe harbor and liability, certainly by the European Commission, that is trying to bulldoze through on a yearly basis legislation that is encouraging this industry to promote these self-regulation system. 

But I also wanted to – I’d be curious, I don’t know how many people in the room have heard of the EID regulation. It’s something that was recently adopted in parliament. But you might be interested to know with respect to privacy impact assessments that this regulation is going to impact every European citizen because it’s creating a whole infrastructure for making electronic IDs for all of its citizens. And there was a privacy impact assessment that was requested by the European parliament, and over the last few years 24 million Euros were spent on this assessment. None of the recommendations were addressed. It was completely ignored them. 

>> I’m from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here in Germany. So this is a home court meeting today for me. I’m obviously not civil society and I must say I profoundly disagree with introductory remarks of Minka staying that government in general was basically thinking focusing on its own subsistence and not thinking of people’s ideas in the next step. So civil society being the actual representative of the people, I find it very difficult, I do not feel represented by large parts of civil because I answer to someone who has been voted or presented himself to national elections who has one these election. It’s quite a difference between individuals deciding this is important, I want to fight for this, which I admire and is important, which is why we support this multistakeholderism. 

What I find puzzling is what do you expect the state to do? In one hand I see a profound doubt of anything the state may do because there is no such thing as trust into the actual effectiveness of democratic control of a state action. At the same time I hear asking for deep legislation, really very-going legislation and technical. I get really puzzled about detailed application of human rights standards in the field of privacy protection, for example, on a technical level. I don’t see how, frankly, how government officials should follow technical developments in this field. 

So where do you draw a line? If you deeply mistrust the state and mistrust civil servants in following the will of what people have voted for, and you want the government to legislate, what are we doing wrong? 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: I’ll take the comments from the floor first. Maybe when we go back to the panel. Take you first.

>> Thank you. I’ll try to keep it short. Sorry for taking the floor the second time. First of all, technically speak, yes, we are talking about monopolies. If you want to ascertain yourself about the fact that we are talking about monopolies, ask your friends why they won’t quit Facebook. If you don’t have a monopoly, you can find another similar service. You cannot find a similar service, because no other service will give them access to the same friends, to the same group of people, unless they all move. So this is the problem. Had there been interoperability, you can change e-mail servers, but you cannot change between Google, Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. You have to have all of them to be able to connect with everyone. I would say that is the problem; right? That is the problem. Who makes the rules? I would ask the question, what choice do we have? Right now those corporations are making the rules, but it’s not as much important who makes the rules as sometimes the more important question is if I can change the one that makes the rules; right? If I can change the Internet provider in a much better situation than, for example, Twitter. I don’t use Twitter. This is another point, I don’t use Twitter and I cannot take part in the digital discussion here. So maybe we should start with the small steps trying to find interopable services for things like that. And I would just like to underline as my last remark that use of that governments needs to pass human rights as technical requirements. I believe this is important and generally rights should be backed by technical solutions in the way that technical solutions should be made in a way that are not possible to use against the people, in the way that undermine the rights and a simple example is the Internet. Censorship doesn’t work on the Internet because it’s not centralized. Technical solution works here; right? So we should think about also these solutions, because the laws themselves will not be enough. Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Okay. Thank you. I have two comments here and then I’ll get back to the panel, which hopefully you’ve been thinking about your key points or one key point to get out of the panel. 

>> Till Kreutzer: A little bit explaining what I meant with the public sphere has always been about context. I think it’s the same online. It’s just that the media literacy that we hopefully all develop makes us decide what sphere we are in and how to behave in that respect. I agree it would be good if there would be more and easier access to public spaces where you can have a conversation that is just a formal in that moment, but it does exist and there’s no problem to increase that if there is demand for that. 

Then I wanted to very quickly throw something in the discussion when the conversation was about Google and other companies that provide these services. I think it’s really important to help get everybody and every stakeholder in their respective role to take up their responsibilities. For example, when we’re talking about YouTube and freedom of expression and the public sphere or pseudo-public sphere that is there, it’s important that everybody can report a video to, say, I don’t think it should be here because of that and then there is a discussion. I think there is a lot of ways to go to improve the governance of that system. That really shows how to implement a scalable and practical solution where civil society plays its part, where the government plays its part, where the provider plays its part. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. Very, very short comment. Sorry for putting you on the end.

>> Maybe it’s good I’m finishing after Max right now. I think at the moment I would like to get back at the distinction between public sphere and private sphere and the information that lies within it and who gathers it. And I think that makes a huge, huge difference. For instance, I cannot control what data Google aggregates once I’m in the ecosystem. On the Internet also criticized data retention. I think the problem with data retention, and if you look at what the German Supreme Court said, they actually – they actually sketched data retention regime that would have been constitutional. The Supreme Court they did. Nobody followed it up, though. Also they didn’t divide between data aggregated from the public sphere and from the private sphere. The main point is the definition of what is public sphere and the definition is what is private sphere? That is one of the key elements for regulation. I would like to close with one last remark. When I came into this building I was searched. And there was a very good reason for that, because like it’s a public building with a very specific function; right? If I go into a fast food restaurant, I’m not getting searched. 

Last point, when I was making my first words, you asked know identify for that. It was also a very good reason for that. So that’s what I’m saying. With public sphere, private sphere. We will have to discriminate or we’ll have to delegate and then make the rules based on that. We haven’t. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. And so this will be ultra-short. I’ll try to keep it in two sentences maybe. The key idea from this session and then do you have three points from this session? I’ll start with Minka. 

>> Minka Stoyanova: First I’d like to respond to your statement, because actually I think that moves to my kind of overarching point. Governments are really big. They have a lot of priorities that, of course, I believe that governments are trying to do whatever they think is best for their country, their nation, the people. But I think that the role of civil society in our broader society is really to be the local voice, to be on the ground, to have that kind of immediate feedback that government can’t necessarily get. And so my reference there was most directly, actually, to governments making decisions based on military priorities, which we’re not – for instance, which I as a voter may not necessarily be deciding on when I vote, but those decisions are going to be made and enacted on my behalf. 

And I think that that’s where civil society can come in and question, as they should, because it gives that immediate feedback. And then this goes to my overall conception and the thing I keep writing down here as I listen to people, which is about education and literacy. I mean, for me, the point of civil society is really about education. But even ideas about what is big data, we have this – I love the idea of being able to read the source code of every piece of software that I download. I think that’s amazing. That’s great. I could read the source code. I know that probably 80% of the people that would have that access wouldn’t be able to read it. But we teach children how to read nutrition labels, so this is getting into what does each of these things mean? What does it mean for my data to be collected? If I walk through the door to a museum – if I walk into the door to a museum, it’s tracked that I walked in there. Maybe not me myself, but that somebody did. So when we talk about smart cities, when we talk about Google Analytics, we just need to figure out what connections are being made, what we are willing to put out there, and then educate our individual people that are online, our users, to understand and be able to make those decisions. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. Till? 

>> Till Kreutzer: Is this the closing remark now or the remarks on the contributions? 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: One key thing that you got out of this. 

>> Till Kreutzer: Yeah. Public/private, everything is fine, is great. Maybe the difference is in the end it’s always about the how more than about the “whether” or “if.” What I mean is if you decide that there should be regulation on essential facilities and you decide that Internet access is like a human right and stuff like that, everything boils down to the question how do you realize that? How do you guarantee that? And what kind of regulation, in what way do you implement in order to reach all of these goals, which are attached to that, which is a really, really difficult thing. That might be a remark on your contribution as well. Who makes the rules? Can we change that? I deal not with the question of what regulative systems can be in a nongeographical place like the Internet. I do see a lot of nontraditional way of public state ruling especially. But I also think that there are a lot of concepts which we do not know yet between the traditional way of state regulation and this in most cases very inefficient self-regulations by the companies. There’s a lot of room between. And I’m just trying to figure out what that room could be like and what concepts could be efficient on the Internet. And we’re researching on that a lot. Maybe we’ll come up with some results in the future. 

>> Rikke frank Jorgensen: I think it’s been a very interesting discussion. We, as citizens, have a right to claim and to expect human rights compliance from our governments. That’s a fact. Whether they live up to it or not, we have that right. So it’s not detailed at all to expect that any new law, any new practice, is completely compliant with data protection. It’s stipulated, for instance, the recent judgment from the European court of human rights. That’s the type of thing that legislators have to go through. And that’s a very reasonable expectation from citizens, vis-à-vis, the state. 

With regard to private companies, I think we can have a similar expectation when these private companies provide core facilities in our societies as they do on the Internet. So there we are more influx. I think we can argue for that expectation, but it’s not a legal or practical reality at the moment. To a much larger extent to think of ways to make sure that the public interest – that the fundamental values that our societies are built upon and the human rights framework are also incorporated in these practices and in these entities as they do their business. 

>> Annette Muhlberg: Yeah, I would like to give an answer to the lady of the Foreign Ministry. I totally agree with what you said about representative democracy. I don’t think anyone really wants to get rid of that. So there is a certain responsibility by the state and its representative and its ministries. So that is a very important part, but civil society has an extra role. And this is something that has to be taken into account. 

I do not – I’m not sure why we are not totally agreeing on the same thing in respect to what Rikke just said and what was the discussion here. Yes, it is absolutely important that first we define public interest; second, that we translate this public interest in the digital world, that we say what does it mean in technical requirements? I think that is absolutely crucial. It is essentially for what we’re doing here, and I would like to pick up the idea of the Polish colleague over here saying, yes, source code is an important issue. It is about transparency. It is something we can also translate as a role model for transparent procedures in a whole. It’s not only about source code and not everyone has to be – has to have the ability to understand it, but it is enough that some people understand it and can point out where is the problem. 

So I think that is very important. I would not like to overestimate the role of media, what is it – literacy. It is good. It is important, but it is not the most important. I think choice is more important. Thank you. 

>> GRY HASSELBALCH: Thank you. We went a little bit over time. So I just want to thank all of you for showing up. And thank you for our participants in the discussion. 

(Applause)

== Pictures from working group ==

Link

== Session twitter hashtag ==

Hashtag: #eurodig_ws1


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