Maintaining a Unique Global Network – Pre 01 2021: Difference between revisions

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28 June 2021 | 10:00-11:00 CEST (TBC) | Studio B<br />
28 June 2021 | 10:00-11:15 CEST | Studio Bruges | [[image:Icons_live_20px.png | Video recording | link=https://youtu.be/_ub3UBB_rRE]] | [[image:Icon_transcript_20px.png | Transcript | link=Maintaining a Unique Global Network – Pre 01 2021#Transcript]]<br />
[[Consolidated_programme_2021#day-0|'''Consolidated programme 2021 overview / Day 0''']]<br /><br />
[[Consolidated_programme_2021#day-0|'''Consolidated programme 2021 overview / Day 0''']]<br /><br />
{{Sessionadvice-Pre-2021}}
Working title: <big>'''Internet 1o1'''</big><br /><br />
== Session teaser ==
== Session teaser ==
This Internet 101 will focus on the needs of legislators and explain the different layers of the IG ecosystem and their roles.
The session will focus on the needs of legislators and explain the different organisations that form part of the IG ecosystem and their roles. You will hear what it takes to maintain a unique global network and current and potential challenges to keeping it open, interoperable, neutral, free, secure and un-fragmented.


== Session description ==  
== Session description ==  
Until <span class="dateline">{{2021-Date-02}}</span>.
The key feature of the Internet’s core functions is maintaining “uniqueness” of identifiers - the numbers (e.g. IP addresses) and domain names - which ensures global interoperability and connectivity. A large part of the Internet’s success is due to it being a “network of networks” with no central command. Its strength and value increase exponentially with the number of participants (network effect). Trust in these identifiers being unique and in the governance system that coordinates these functions is vital for the Internet to function and for it to remain the globally connected unfragmented network it is today.


Always use your own words to describe your session. If you decide to quote the words of an external source, give them the due respect and acknowledgement by specifying the source.
The Internet does not come without risks. Most of those risks concern what happens on the Internet, rather than with the underlying technical core functions and processes. For the latter, where risks on the stability or resilience were identified, the industry has a long track record of inventing and implementing new technologies to reduce these risks, whilst maintaining one global Internet. One could say that the ability for these core technologies to adapt to changes and scale up - as we recently experienced with the pandemic - is the foundation of the Internet’s success.
 
To recognise, understand and address these risks, both within the application layer and those of the underlying technical infrastructure, while maintaining a global network, we need to think globally. The tendency to seek legislation impacting the core of the internet’s infrastructure on a domestic or regional level threatens the global interoperability and the Internet as one unfragmented space. A national or even regional Internet would never provide the same value as a global one.
 
In this session we will cover several fronts. We will touch upon the technical layers of the Internet, we will talk about the organisations that help it run and how they work together. Our hope is to explain how things work now and what processes are in place and open a dialogue on the best way to preserve a global Internet while addressing the ever-developing risks.


== Format ==  
== Format ==  
Until <span class="dateline">{{2021-Date-02}}</span>.
Presentations followed by a Q&A.
 
== Further information ==
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAUedhcjAY/ Internet Revealed - The Euro-IX movie] (video: 5 min 20 sec)


Pre-events should give the opportunity to create synergies with 3 rd parties i.e. Dynamic Coalitions, Partners. No session principles apply. They are held on day zero in parallel to setting up the venue for EuroDIG. We provide limited technical support.
[https://www.centr.org/education/the-dns.html/ The Domain Name System (DNS)] (video: 2 min 29 sec)


Let us know here what you want to do.
[https://www.centr.org/education/cctld-registry.html ccTLD registries and online content] (video: 4 min 6 sec)


== Further reading ==
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMzgDt6UD_M How DNSSEC Works Step by Step] (video: 4 min 9 sec)
Links to relevant websites, declarations, books, documents. Please note we cannot offer web space, so only links to external resources are possible. Example for an external link: [http://www.eurodig.org/ Main page of EuroDIG]
 
[https://internet.nl/ Internet.nl] Checks if your website, email and internet connection use modern and reliable Internet Standards and suggests what you can do about it


== People ==  
== People ==  
Until <span class="dateline">20 Mai 2021</span>.
Focal Points/Moderator:
* Gergana Petrova, RIPE NCC


Key participants:
Key participants:
* Maria Laura Mantovani, Italian Senate
* Chris Buckridge, RIPE NCC
* Adam Peake, ICANN
* Gerben Klein Baltink, Dutch Internet Standards Platform
== Video record ==
https://youtu.be/_ub3UBB_rRE
== Transcript ==
Provided by: Caption First, Inc., P.O. Box 3066, Monument, CO 80132, Phone: +001-719-482-9835, www.captionfirst.com
This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.
>> Are we visible?
>> People can see us. Hopefully they can also hear us.
>> Studio Bruges, can you hear me?
>> Hello. We can hear you.
>> Super. Nice to see you.
>> Hello, everybody. We are testing the start thingy for the next day. So this is why we are meeting you here at our very nice amphitheater. Hello, everybody.
>> Studio Belgrade, can you hear me?
>> I can hear you.
>> Good morning. Loud and clear.
>> Oliver, you are not the studio host.
>> Hello, Valada.
>> He belongs to Belgrade.
>> It’s good to see you. And I see that you have nice weather in Belgrade.
>> Yes, a little bit too hot.
>> I wish you a very, very successful and nice day today. See you later.
>> Okay. And we have a last studio to check. Where is Trieste.
>> We are here. Hello. Good morning.
>> Good morning.
>> We still see Belgrade.
>> Yes. Hello. Good morning. Nice to see you all.
>> Nice to see you.
>> I see you are in Italy already. But we did make it. So let’s keep that job for tomorrow. Marco, we wish you a successful day. Everyone, have nice sessions and enjoy the day.
>> See you later. Thanks.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much, Sandra and Thomas, for your warm welcome and to start off Day Zero. Good morning, and welcome. My name is Nadia. And I’m your studio host live from Bruges and hosted by the United Nations Institute. We are going straight in and starting off Day Zero with the pre-event session, Internet 101, maintaining a unique global network moderated by Gergana Petrova from RIPE NCC.
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Hello. I’m Juuso, Remote Moderator. We believe in open dialogue and that’s why we would like you to follow the session rules. Here is just the main principles. So firstly, if your display name on Zoom is not your full name yet, we ask you to rename yourself. You will have a chance to ask questions later on in the session but we will get to it. You can ask for the floor by using the raise hand button under the Zoom reactions and then we will unmute you. This video is Livestreamed but the chat messages are not visible outside of this poll. You can use the chat functions to share your thoughts with the other participants. We are going to be here in the background to make sure the discussion is inclusive. With that I’m going to give the floor back to the Moderator.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Hello, everyone. Good morning. My name is Gergana Petrova. I’m – I work for RIPE NCC in Amsterdam. And today we have prepared for you a few presentations from the technical community. You are going to hear more about how the technical layers of the Internet work as well as how the organizations that run it work. Before I go to the first presentation I’m going to give the floor to one of the speakers, Adam Peake from ICANN who is going to frame the discussion for us. Is he here?
>> ADAM PEAKE: I am. Sorry. I am here. Good morning, everybody. So the discussion this morning – there is three of us. Hi Chris, Gerben. I work for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Chris works for RIPE NCC. Chris is going to talk about the role of the regional Internet registries and the work they do in assigning protocols across the European region for Chris’ case, but there is a global representation of five regional Internet registries. They are responsible for the assignment of IP addresses and other protocols that Chris will mention. Gerben Klein Baltink is from Internet NL which is an initiative of various partners in the Internet community of the Netherlands. And also the partners, the Dutch government. And he will be talking about collaboration to raise awareness around the increase of usage of modern Internet standards.
And as I mentioned I work for ICANN and I will be talking about our work coordinating and managing the Domain Name System. We’re particularly responsible for domain names itself but also other oversight role, coordinating role globally for unique identifiers generally.
I don’t think there is very much more we need to say to begin. So I think if I have the speaking order correct today, it’s on the slide that you can see. We are beginning with Chris and then it will be back to me. And then Gerben will continue. And we’ll take questions at the end if that’s okay unless you want to interrupt. And any questions you see in the chat that will be great as there may be things that need clarifying and that will be super. Okay.
I think this – with that very brief introduction straight over to you, Chris. And thank you very much.
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: Thank you, Adam. I will come straight in. Good morning, everyone. As Adam said, my name is Chris Buckridge. I work for RIPE NCC. I will get a little more in to what that means a little later on. Looking at the attendees we have, it’s early. So hopefully we will see a few more. I hope we have a mix of newcomers and people who probably are pretty well versed in a lot of what I’m going to be talking about and the others as well.
So hopefully I think what we can do today is have something of value even for those that know a little bit more about this in terms of the context where putting it in and some of the way the governance issues that we talk about. Now I’m going to try and share my screen here. So if I can do this. Share. Okay. Can you let me know if everyone can see the screen now?
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Yes.
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: So maintaining a unique global network, I think the important thing here is that that – is that context. That sort of framing of what it is we’re discussing. We’ve I guess broken this session in to what seemed like often the traditional Government spheres which is numbers, names, and standards. If you were – if you have followed any of the IANA stewardship discussion a few years back that’s very much in line with how the split went. It forced me to talk a little bit about the numbers. When we talk about maintaining a unique global network, it brings us back to a really fundamental question of what is the Internet, what is this Internet that we’re trying to ensure it remains global, remains unfragmented. And that is where the Internet Protocol comes in. Basically the Internet protocol if you wanted to define the Internet, the Internet Protocol is a pretty good place to start. It is the protocol that allows data to move from one place to another across the Internet.
And we have a box down there, which I think is a metaphor that a colleague of mine has used previously as the data packet. It is a useful metaphor partly because it shows that packet-like structure but also because you can put anything in that. A packet is a container that you can put any data. The Internet Protocol allows that data to move in fragments across the Internet. And in that sense an IP address is actually what defines an Internet connection because the Internet Protocol allows data to move from one IP address to another IP address. So the IP address is in that sense a really fundamental building block of any Internet-based service.
So that brings us to a certain very key point about IP addresses and the Internet Protocol. Specifically that each address has to be unique in the concept of that network. So if you have got an address that – let’s say, statuesplains11 and you end out your packet to that address you are going to get confusion. In the context of your network, the number you have is unique.
And in a global network, the Internet is a global network of networks. The address you have needs to be globally unique. So I wanted to just use this to highlight really the significance and importance of Internet Protocol. This is well, a version of what’s often called DSOI model. It’s a model that’s been used for many, many years. Each layer doing different things, different roles in making the Internet work.
The really key important element here is to note the narrow waste and IP there. So while on say down the bottom you have the physical layer, you have many different ways in which data and information moves from one point to another across the physical layer, whether through copper wires or fiber or over radiowaves. And at the top you have lots of different applications, e-mail, World Wide Web. You have phone calls, many different kinds of applications. At the middle linking it all together is the Internet Protocol. This is the really key element that makes the Internet work and everything passes through the Internet Protocol.
And there is that package again. And then on the side there you see a bar code that’s the IP address. That’s the thing that we need to make sure that is unique.
So this slide is actually from a different presentation. But I think it’s a useful one to throw in to the mix here because it drives home a point that can get lost, particularly in this area where we are concerned about issues like privacy and attribution and IP address is not an identity. So it identifies a point on the network but it’s not possible for you to then say that point on the network is always this person or is always this entity. If you move, your address on the network will change.
And IP address sharing is actually really common. So you have got multiple people living in your house, not a system where you can say an IP address is directly and easily used to attribute who is doing something on the network. That’s a really important point. Both because we want to find a way to get attribution, but also because it affects the way that we think about policy and think about how we govern the management of IP addresses.
So we’ve talked about IP being very central and fundamental. We come to a point that problematizes that a little. There are two flavors of IP address, version 1 and version 2. Not really. That would be easier. We call them IPv4 and IPv6. Those are the two that you will see and you need to think about.
IPv4 is the Internet Protocol and which the Internet grew and is still largely based. It was first deployed in 1982. And IPv4 address is a 32-bit address. So what does that mean? That means that there are two to the power of 32 unique addresses in the IPv4 space and that amounts to just roughly over 4 billion addresses. When the Internet was being developed, that probably seemed like a suitable number of addresses for what was at the time an academic project, even though one was obviously commercial and social potential.
Those addresses as IPv4 addresses are written as four octets separated by periods. If you see an IP address, if you see four sets of numbers between 0 and 255 with full stop separating them, that’s an IPv4 address. One of the key governance issues that has been faced by several decades by the technical community is the fact that’s not enough IP addresses for the Internet that we have come to know and understand.
We actually have need for many more addresses than that. And so the technical community in the 1990s developed an alternative, a new IP, IP version 6. And it specifically addressed that issue by moving from 32-bit addresses to 128-bit addresses.
So then you have 2 to the power of 128 unique addresses. I’m not going to try and read that number. But suffice to say it’s something along the lines of the number of grains of sand in the planets of the Milky Way. It’s a huge number. So if you see an IP address that looks like the one below, if it has colons involved, that you are looking at an IPv6 address. The issue is that IPv6 and IPv4 are not actually directly compatible with each other.
So here we come to that question of a single unfragmented global network. We’ve actually already run in to one of the really key challenges to that concept which is that we have these two kinds of IP that don’t directly work with each other. And that’s been a real challenge partly because as we have run out of IPv4, IPv6 uptake has not been what was hoped or expected back in the late’90s and early 2000s which means that that’s had certain effects on how the governance and understanding of IP address management goes.
If we look here, and I’m going to jump to the next slide, this is a slide from our colleagues at APNIC which is the regional Internet registry for Asia-Pacific. And it’s one way of looking at IPv4 deployment. This is looking at IPv6 capability based on experiments they have done doing Google ads. The main point to see here there is a lot of red on this map. IPv6 uptake has not been widespread. Certain areas that have had very good uptakes. India is bright green and there are reasons for that. And certainly research and discussion ongoing as to why those areas have had more success than others haven’t.
But overall, IPv6 uptake is still not where we as a technical community and as the broader stakeholder community would like to see it.
So how do we address that? We start with a couple of key principles. And this is where we start to get in to governance and how that model is affected by governance. First key principle, in the interest of uniqueness it is important that we have an accurate, up-to-date registry of internet number resource holdings. Who has IP address block and making sure no one else has the same IP address block. And this very much comes back to the fact that it is a global system. We need open, transparent, inclusive and bottom-up development for the relevant policies that we use for governing this space. And so the real challenges that we see, and this is things that I have started to hint at already, that exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, the fact that we ran out of IPv4 addresses for new networks. So where previously this was a common good where you could simply ask for and demonstrate need for IP addresses and use those addresses and now people are selling and making money off of them. That has led to additional incentives for fraudulent behavior.
Saying I am this person and I can change this registration and move it to somebody else when, in fact, you are not the person responsible. And so we see that now creeping in to the system in a way that it wasn’t there before, partly because the incentive wasn’t there.
Slow uptake of IPv6 key challenge. It is a challenge for the whole community but something where we see different sectors of the community coming at this from different angles with different approaches, different ideas. Finding the best idea, finding what works to increase that IPv6 uptake and do so in a way that, you know, maintains sort of access for everyone is really important.
And actually and this is where events like EuroDIG are so important where increasingly seen regulation either at the local, national level or even at the sort of super national level. So like in the EU.
Potentially coming in to conflict with the work that the RIRs do, with the role that we have. So that was a little bit of a skip ahead to the next slide. What is an RIR? If we go back to the ’80s and back when IPv4 was first being deployed, we had a gentleman who had a notebook and would write down I have given this person this set of IP addresses and this person this set of IP addresses. And by keeping this record he would make sure he didn’t give the same set of addresses to this person. In very sort of fundamental ways it hasn’t involved that much. That’s the role that regional Internet registries play. We keep a record of who has what addresses and make that record publically available and ensure that those addresses are unique for all users.
Over the course of the ’90s it was decided by the global community in a number of steps I guess that this was something best handled by a number of different regions. And looking back that’s actually going to be a really good and wise move because we see the different regions. And you can see the five regions here have had to address quite different landscapes, communities, issues to each other. So something like the RIPE NCC region that includes Western Europe and Middle East and Russia, faces very different challenges and issues than AFRINIC.
So by having those different communities served by different organizations you are able to actually provide a better service. And also to allow those communities to create better policies suited to their own specific needs.
So RIPE NCC, let’s bring it back since this is EuroDIG to the EuroDIG region and to the RIPE NCC. RIPE NCC was established in 1992. We were the first regional Internet registry established. And it was established in the Netherlands as a not-for-profit membership association under Dutch law. So this is the association of the RIPE NCC. We serve as the regional Internet registry for 76 countries. And we have around 150 staff mainly based in the Netherlands, an office in Dubai and then a number of staff also located elsewhere around the service region.
So separate to that is the RIPE community. So the RIPE NCC is the association. The RIPE community is an open, transparent bottom-up community. Anyone can be involved. Anyone can say I’m part of the RIPE community just by taking an active interest, being part of those discussions of that community. And this is more than just a community of people who come together to chat or share information. The community is responsible for making the policies under which the RIPE NCC can do its work. So those policies are developed through a number of processes and instructions.
So we have Working Groups, the number of different Working Groups, including address policy, Working Group on RIPE NCC services. Others on routing, DNS, on corporation with other parts of the industry and stakeholder groups. Each of these then have mailing lists. And so policies are actually developed on those mailing lists.
And then finally we also have RIPE meetings. So these are two meetings held every year for the last 18 months. The last three events have been virtual but prior to that there were two physical meetings every year, usually around 6 or 700 people coming together. Those have also played an important role in policy making and discussion. By making policy specifically on the mailing list it makes it more open to those who can’t join for a physical meeting. Who can’t take a week off to join us for that.
So that leads then, and I think this is a really important diagram in looking at how this all works. So you see the RIPE NCC at the top there as the organization. Now going down the right-hand side here, RIPE NCC is essentially distributing IP addresses. Now distributing registering, it is a fine line there. But basically the IP addresses that we register go to the RIPE NCC membership. If you would like to receive IP addresses from the RIPE NCC, you become a member of the RIPE NCC.
The RIPE community also includes anyone with an interest in this area. So it’s Governments. It’s law enforcement, regulators, Civil Society, technical community. Many of them are RIPE NCC members but they are also those who are not. And even those who are not members also have a say in how in those policies in how they are developed. So from that RIPE community, and this is the left side of the diagram, we have the policies created that instruct the RIPE NCC on how to do this.
In the middle I have the RIPE NCC as well as serving as a registry and registering those resources. Also serves as a Secretariat. Which means we maintain the mailing lists and coordinate the RIPE meetings.
So that’s a bit how this works. And it’s important if nothing else to come away with the notion and understanding that the RIPE NCC is separate from the community. It is an organization serving an open community and that’s true of all of the RIRs in the other four regions as well. This – I won’t spend too much time on this. But there is one other element there which is the idea of global policies. It is possible to say set global policies which will apply to all RIR communities. And the key thing, top part to know, that to have a global policy, you have to get it agreed in each of the five RIR communities. We don’t have too many global policies in place. Those that we do have basically apply to the IANA which is the top level of that hierarchical registration chain which says this block of IP addresses is with RIPE NCC or this block is with AFRINIC and those RIRs have the next level of registration.
The other point, and this is starting to lead to our next speaker Adam, to note this is where it comes in to the picture where it relates to numbers. It has a couple of roles in relation to this because not only do they run – not only are they under contract to the regional Internet registries to maintain IANA, but the ICANN board has a role in ratifying any global policy proposals that come through before they’re actually implemented.
So you see we begin to see it’s somewhat a complex web of interactions and relationships here between the technical community. But it also – I think that’s also a significant point to note in relation to how the names and numbers are very inextricably linked. This is a quite tight ecosystem. And that’s an important point to consider when you start to talk about other aspects of Internet Governance like Government regulation. If you pull on one thread you are actually pulling on a much bigger tapestry of relationships and processes. And that’s where we start to see unintended consequences of regulation or attempts.
This brings me to the end of my section. I don’t know if we are stopping for questions. But we’re certainly here. I’m here at the end and during the week as well along with RIPE NCC colleagues. Feel free to ask if there is anything that raised a question for you there. Thanks.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Chris. Very interesting presentation. So Sandra actually informed that we are going to have 15 more minutes. We are going to finish at 11:15 and that leaves us more time for questions. Do you have any questions for Chris’ presentation? Either raise your hand or post it in the chat.
Is anybody typing?
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: I was very clear.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Apparently so. Thank you, Chris. So let me give the floor to the next speaker, Adam.
>> ADAM PEAKE: Hi. Sorry. Good morning, again. And I apologize for my slightly rushed introduction at the start. I am in the Hague. I work for ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I will see if I can share my screen and find where I’ve hidden my files. Give me a moment because I think it’s going to be easier if I do something else before I try and do that.
So yes, just moving on from what Chris was saying. We have a global responsibility for overseeing various aspects of the Domain Name System, including the global responsibility for coordinating Internet Protocol addresses through the public technical identifiers group which is a subsidiary of ICANN. And it enters in to service level agreements with both the regional Internet registries and MoU with the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force for the protocols network.
This is not how I previously saw this which is concerning. Thank you, Nadia. I think you’ve found that for me. If you can put that – yeah, that will be fine. Yes.
Nadia I think put that up for me, is that right? So let’s begin. ICANN, the DNS maintaining the unique global network. Can we go to the next slide, please? Unless I’m controlling it which I don’t think that I am. Yes. So Chris told us about Internet Protocol addresses. If you would type that in to the browser you would find out it resolves to a Web page and it resolves to the Web page for ICANN. And this is one of the primary things that we’re doing here.
We’re talking about resolving a number which Chris has explained, that’s how the traffic is rooted across the Internet in to a domain name that’s more memorable and useable for us. And ICANN has the responsibility for this unique assignment of names and numbers. We have two reasons for doing this. One is to remember addresses because you are far more likely to remember icann.org, the 192.043.222, which I always have to read because I certainly don’t remember it.
And also allows a great deal of flexibility. Chris has spoken about the development over the Internet over a period of years. And if you think back ICANN was established in 1998, and at that time there were about 120 million users. There are about 4.6 billion today. So the Internet is scaled incredibly over that period. Also in 1998 there were about 2 million domain names. There are now about 360 million domain names. And these include both gTLDs, Generic Top-Level Domain Names, and ccTLDs, Country Code Top-Level Domain Names. And so we have this enormous scaling of the Internet, but also over that time you might have been using I’m sure what was the first time you use google.com or gmail.com. Those were founded in 2004. And over that time the network behind the name has evolved immensely. It is the structure of the networks that Google has.
And what this does is allows us to have a flexibility so that the underlying technical network can evolve and change and be controlled by those running those services, but our interface with it, the domain name doesn’t change. So this unique assignment is incredibly important, excuse me, because we’re – otherwise you wouldn’t get to the place that you want to go.
If icann.org if there were two of them you wouldn’t know whether you were going to go to the website that I’m pointing you to or something else. If your e-mail address was, you know, there was more than one of them, then where would your e-mail go. Who would you know who you are communicating with. Unique assignment is at the heart of what we are doing. I want to call out, the European top level registries, we often do these presentations together, but this time it is my time. So particular thanks to Peter Van Roste, Malina, for typical collaboration. And thank you to Peter and Malina. Next slide, please.
So this is what are our Internet identifiers. So the Internet as we’ve heard is this mesh of networks and they agree to communicate. This is a voluntary agreement to use these protocols. And they are using a predefined set of protocols which we often refer to as TC/IP, transmission control/Internet Protocol. It is a system of rules that allows parts of that communication system to transmit information. The most common protocol that you would be aware of would be http or https which stands for hypertext transfer protocol or hypertext transfer protocol secure if you are using https. What that protocol does is the http protocol allows your browser to ask for information from a server, from – and to be able to present that information in a way that is readable and designed on the page.
So it’s a set of instructions that take information from a server back to you as a client, to understand what you are trying to look at on the Internet. Other examples is the e-mail protocol which again is – understand that the information you are seeking or sending is about e-mail. And it will allow for that information to be transferred and also presented back to you in ways that are expected and understood.
And networks use these identifiers to name and number resources across the Internet. Hosts. Chris has spoken about this. And so these host computers can communicate. I think today there are something like 80,000 networks across the Internet. Very important to remember that the Internet is not a single network. It is about 80,000 autonomous networks each with their own policies of how they communicate and what routes they provide. And so that we have a global unified Internet that’s made up of all these different networks that are following the same protocols.
And so at ICANN, Internet identifiers are names and numbers, protocol priorities. And these must be uniquely assigned if because they are not assigned you won’t get to where you want to go or you won’t get the information that you are expected to get. Next slide, please. And this is something that we’ve – I have talked about, IPv4 addresses and you can see an IPv6 address which is much longer and we need to use names. You are not going to remember those addresses. And mapping those IP addresses – mapping names to IP addresses is called name resolution. You can see an example in the blue box of an IPv6 address mapping to a domain name, www.example.com. Can I have the next slide, please?
So this is a sort of practical example. It’s where we are today. And as I mentioned what you are seeing at the beginning in the red is https which is the protocol which is the one I mentioned for presenting Web pages across the Internet. Next we see the www which is the webserver. It could be something like e-mail or another particular type of service that’s being presented.
Then you see EuroDIG which is the second level domain name and .org, which is the Top-Level Domain name and then there is a dot afterwards which we don’t often use. It does exist there but you don’t need to add it. That’s the root name server. Next slide. This is what it looks like as a hierarchical tree. What we are talking about is that the Domain Name System is a hierarchical database. It’s a query and response database. And when you are entering in the domain name, what you are essentially doing is querying this hierarchical database. There are now I think it is 1514 Top-Level Domain names at the moment. This includes all the Country Code Top-Level Domain Names. It includes the Generic Top-Level Domain Names like com and net and org that we are very, very familiar with.
It includes a lot of new Top-Level Domain Names, things like .coffee or city names like .paris. And the thing on the left-hand side is a series of numbers. When it was represented it would be represented to you as a user that would be seen as the Chinese characters for .hongkong. So it is the international way of representing Chinese characters with the code.
At the second level you can see below typical examples of a domain name. Here we have example.com and the other would, of course, be eurodig.org. And that’s the second level. Below that we have other types of third level Top-Level Domain Names, www, mail and so on. And if you went to a European Commission, European Union website you would see at the third level they start to name their departments. So under europa.eu at the third level you see all kinds of directorates, departmental names of the European Union being used. So you can control what you want to use within the zone that you administer.
So let’s have a look at the next slide, please. And this is important. It’s about zones and administrative boundaries. And at each of these levels the owner controls the policies and what happens within them. So the policies for the root zone are controlled by the root zone operators. The policies for the second level – sorry, the Top-Level Domain Names, like .org or .se for Sweden. If you look at how EuroDIG is controlled by those who registered eurodig.org and that would be Sandra or Reina, they decide if they are going to have www for the Web services and mail and so on and so forth. Next slide.
So this is an example of what the root zone file looks like. And I wasn’t going to include this in the file today. I’m sorry about that. If you look up an entry, if you went to the file that is the controlling file for all of the entries at the root zone, what the root zone contains is information about all of the Top-Level Domain Names. It has information about all of the 1514 I think. And for each one it will contain the name server information, mapping to IP addresses and other information.
And the idea is that all the root zone file knows about is Internet Protocol addresses of TLDs, the Top-Level Domain Names that live below it in the hierarchy. So it has information about how to contact the Internet protocol addresses for all of the Top-Level Domain Names. And that’s just a screen shot from .eu. The next slide, please.
So the root itself, the root zone file is hosted on 13 identical root servers. They are managed by 12 different organizations. Actually two of these servers are managed by a single organization. And each – while there are only 13 and that doesn’t seem very much for the global Internet. These servers have copies around the world. They are identical copies. Currently 1381 copies of the server around the world. If you have a need to access the root server you wouldn’t be accessing one of the original 13. It provides redundancy and backup and the service is more local to you. So ICANN is the operator of the IANA functions. And it does this through the subsidiary organization, the public technical identifiers. And as Chris mentioned public technical identifiers has certain agreements with the RIRs and domain name operators and the domain name registries and also the Internet Protocol and technical standards organizations, the IETF and IANA functions which include the management of this root zone database file.
The U.S. Government, and this is important to remember, that the – there was until October the 1st, 2016 the U.S. Government had an oversight role of the IANA functions. And this ended as we worked out as a global community how to manage different aspects of accountability in ICANN and also transparency to ensure that the customers of the IANA functions were satisfied with how ICANN was performing these duties through PTI. And they also had a say in how ICANN was organized.
So this was an important evolution at the time and was a very important way in which the multi-stakeholder community came together to help the evolution of the Internet in a very significant way. May I have the next slide, please?
So how the DNS works this is a very stylized diagram of how you might look up a domain name. If you are sitting at your laptop or you have your device in your hand and you type in www.example.com in your browser, what happens next is the browser has to find an Internet Protocol address so that it can go to the site that you want to go to and receive that information back in to your browser window.
And often this will happen because you have information about this already on your browser in your laptop or in your device, your mobile phone. And there is also a caching which is a way of holding in memory on these devices of different information. But this sort of stylized way this would happen is an end user, you will – if you type in example.com, that request will go to a recursive name server. So it’s repeatedly asking the same type of question recursively. And the question it is asking do you know the Internet Protocol address for example.com.
And the first thing it will do in this stylized example is go to one of the root servers. The recursive name server holds the roots. Do you know where the IP address for example.com is? The root servers don’t know this. They have the IP address not, for example, but for .com. Will say no, but here is the IP address for one of the .com name servers. And that’s the information that was held in the root server file. So the recursive name server goes off to one of these .com same servers and says do you know the IP address with example.com. Within the hierarchical database record that we mentioned, it will say no, I don’t have the actual IP address for example.com, but I do know the address, the IP address of the IP – of the example.com’s name servers.
So back to the recursive name server and ask the question of example.com. And do you know the IP address for example.com and it will say yes, I do. And it will return it to your browser and you will magically go off to the website. It sounds like a very convoluted process. When it does happen it happens in fractions and milliseconds. And it will happen billions of times a day every time somebody is going to a web browser or sending an e-mail. But very – it is very unusual for a query to go to the root server. Usually it’s all solved because the recursive name server which sits at your Internet service provider or within your organization will know the answers. So it’s usually just a single query that has to take place.
It takes fractions and fractions of milliseconds to occur. It is quite important, as Chris mentioned there is a lot of legislation happening at the moment. And one of the drafts before the European Commission mentioned that there might be consideration of some regulation that affected the recursive name servers. As many of us may have those on our laptops and they may be with our organization or maybe with our Internet service provider, it brought the potential for legislation coming much, much closer to the end user. So that’s something that we are discussing at the moment with the Commission.
We, I mean the Internet community, not me as – and that’s something that is very important. When we think about the future of the Internet, is that understanding these particular operations must be known. Otherwise we may end up with types of legislation that really have unintended consequences. So the next slide, please.
And this is how the domain name industry looks to ICANN. There is a registry. And these are the databases of the Top-Level Domain Names that I mentioned. It will be the Top-Level Generic Names such as .com and .org. We have a series of registrars which are the agents that act between the registrars. And the registrant is the holder of the domain name registration. Within the ICANN registries and registrars are the contract parties to perform that function. There are also occasionally registrars that have resellers and they enter in to contracts with registrants or with us, or the registrar may work directly with the registrants.
Next slide. This important as it shows the relationships that are based on contracts. There are contracts with registries and registrars and they have contracts with the registrants with us.
And all of these are governed by factors, by contractual elements that are developed by the global Internet community, particularly the ICANN Internet community, our multi-stakeholder community. And they will cover such things as operational concerns for how registry functions to some consumer facing factors around registrants. The Consumer Protections that we need as domain name registrants.
Next slide. So this notion of a multi-stakeholder community, multi-stakeholder holder is at the heart of the policy making. It provides an opportunity for individuals, for industry, noncommercial interest and Governments to participate as equals within an ICANN community.
As I mentioned contracts and policies are developed through community processes. They are bottom-up. They are Consensus based. And in many ways it mimics the structures of the Internet itself. And it is borderless and open to all. We are structured around two basic structures in ICANN, supporting organizations which are responsible for developing the policies in the areas they represent. I will come on to that. And then advisory Committees who advise the ICANN board and community on policy development processes and in certain cases they can raise issues that they think is important. Next slide.
This is a representation of how we think the community looks. You have a global multi-stakeholder community of volunteers and this is businesses. It is representative of academia, of NGOs, of the Government, technical community. There are directors and they as policy is developed by the community they make sure that policy follows procedures and rules is appropriate and has a fiduciary responsibility, a sensibility and is implementible. ICANN org staff also support the global community and the board in doing their voluntary work.
Next slide, please. So we have these supporting organizations and Advisory Committees. Next slide, please. And these very quickly, and I am almost finished, is supporting organizations. There are three. There is the address supporting organization which Chris and Gergana’s organization are a part of. 15 volunteers that joined the ICANN. And they are as a supporting organization. They work on Internet Protocol address policy. They do so at a global basis within ICANN. The regional policies are where most of the work is done by the RIRs. The country code name supporting organization is the home for all the managers of the Country Code Top-Level Domain Names. And again like the regional Internet registries, policy for ccTLDs happens at the national level. So the ccTLD manager and their community develops their policy.
They may do so also with regional organizations. Organizations like CENTR will help guide and advice policy at the European level. And there are other regional organizations that do that. And they come together when there is a policy that needs to be addressed at the global level. For example, the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names while standards have to be coordinated across the globe. The GNSO is probably where the core of ICANN’s work is done.
This is developing policy for Generic Top-Level Domain Names. And what we see here is that this is where all the policies for the contracted parties are developed and other policies as well that may need to be done. We also do a lot of work reviewing ICANN and its processes and policies.
The next slide, please. And so we have Advisory Committees. And these give advice and make recommendations to the ICANN board on policy that’s being developed, and they can also initiate their own policy.
One of the better known of these four is the ALAC Advisory Committee that represents the interest of individual Internet users. So they have a complex set of structures representing 230 at large structures around the world. An at large structure is an organization that represents the interests of end users. They come together in ICANN to bring those ideas and thoughts in to the ICANN policy process. The Governmental Advisory Committee, the GAC provides advice from Government on issues of public policy, particularly interactions with policies in the national legislation or international agreements. I say there is 178 members. We will stick with 178 member Governments and economies and members of the Governmental Advisory Committee at the moment. They are important in bringing the views of Governments in to ICANN. The RSSAC are the root servers. And we’ve been talking and they provide information about how the root server system operates and the security and integrity of the root server system.
And finally but not least is the Security, Stability and Advisory Committee which is a group of experts, security experts who provide advice on security of the Domain Name System.
And the last slide, please. And that’s it. Thank you very much. Just some various ways of contacting ICANN. And my e-mail address was at the start of the presentation, I think. And it’s always good to hear from people. Sorry for running over time. My apologies for that.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you. Nice presentation. Let me ask if all the participants, do you have any questions for Adam? Please raise your hand. Unmute. Or write your question in the chat.
Or maybe Adam was completely clear. I don’t see any hands raised. So thank you very much again for the presentation. And I’m going to move to the third and last presentation of today, Gerben. He is from the International Standards platform in the Netherlands. The floor is yours.
>> GERBEN KLEIN BALTINK: Thank you, Gergana. Is my presentation visible?
>> Currently it’s not visible. Would you like me to set it up?
>> GERBEN KLEIN BALTINK: Yes, please. If you could do so, that would be very helpful. Just to introduce what we call the Dutch Internet standards platform, it is a really open organization, public, private where we want to focus on the adoption of modern Internet standards. And both Chris and Adam already have dived in to the basic protocols behind the Internet. And like those, most of these standards are not seen by end users. Most of the time anyhow. You may see https in front of an URL when you browse the Internet. But I guess that most – many of you never will pay much attention to the details behind it. And we do not ask you to dive in to these details. But we want to make sure that people understand why these standards enable the Internet to function.
So if I can have the next sheet. Here you will see the multi-stakeholder platform with public and private parties that came together in 2014 to discuss their worries about the lack of adoption of modern standards. They are developed. They are there. You can use them. But somehow it takes a lot of time before organizations start to pick up.
And what we would like to achieve, if I could have the next slide, please, is an open, free and secure Internet. And therefore, we think these standards are essential. So if I could have the next sheet. These are the standards. And those acronyms I will not explain them in detail. But the IPv6 protocol has been discussed already. It is a modern set of addresses. We need them to accommodate all the users and devices connected to the Internet. DNSSEC it was well explained by Adam. The other standards as mentioned. Making sure that your e-mail traffic works the way it should work. Receiver and recipient receives your e-mail. And there is nobody in between. The content of the e-mail is what was intended and you make sure that only those mails are delivered.
These are the standards we currently try to focus on. And underneath you see RPKI, the rooting protocol standards that we are diving in to. And that will be added to the list.
What we have done as a platform is established a group where we discuss these standards and the adoption level. And sometimes we start a campaign, for example, on secure e-mail or safe e-mail, whatever work you would prefer. Where we try to motivate end users of mail to do it in a better way. And to understand the importance of the security of mailing.
But the main thing we do is offer test tools and you can find them at internet.nl. If we can go to the next sheet, you see the home page of that website already developed in 2015 where we wanted to launch a test environment that was easy-to-use, perhaps not by a normal end user but at least by people understanding these standards to see if their website, their mail traffic or local Internet connection were using these modern standards. Not only security was key, but also the adoption of, for example, IPv6. And if you run the test, you get nice results. And I don’t show them here on purpose because we could have a lot of discussion on the scoring. For example, if you score 60%, is that good or bad? Is it sufficient? You can trust me if you score 100% you at least have these modern standards implemented in the right way. But that is not a necessity to have a good connection with website or with e-mail.
And any score above 80% shows you at least the people behind the domain name or behind a specific e-mail address are paying attention to these modern standards. What we have seen over the last few years is that because we offer this as an open source code as well on the GitHub, that other countries have taken up similar initiatives, reusing part of the internet.nl code, like Denmark, Portugal and Australia. And other countries are interested. We have received requests from Africa where several initiatives are looking in to how can this help us to promote these modern standards.
And these standards are not a goal in themselves. They are there to make the Internet work, to make e-mail traffic work, to have a secure connection and to make sure that everyone can be connected globally in a way that can enhance the trust you have in your connection. If we can go to the next sheet, that looks a little bit more technical perhaps because we also, besides the internet.nl website do have some batch test functionality where members of our platform can, for example, scan 1,000 different websites at a time. And do so every month, for example, or every two weeks or every six months to see what the uptake in the specific growth of websites is.
If you look at the city like the Hague in the Netherlands, they are responsible for well over 400 websites and they sometimes are not able to control all the managers of these websites in an easy way. So they run a test like this, a batch test, to see if the overall adoption of standards is good enough.
If we can move to the next sheet, please. The Government participating in the platform Internet standards has its – a little bit easier than let’s say the general public because for the Dutch Government, it has been a good way of applying standards by complying or explain. So there is a long list of standards that Government organizations have to comply to or explain why they don’t. So measuring for the Dutch Government what the uptake on these standards is one way to help them see are we doing well or should we still improve. That is, of course, not as easy for the rest of society because there is not a single entity that can tell, for example, a Dutch website that they should apply these standards. That’s not what we are aiming at either.
We want to stimulate the use of these standards and not have it regulated. If we can go to the next sheet, the basic message of the platform is the following, what we would like to achieve is that both venders, so the people offering Internet services, software and hardware, do apply these modern standards, especially standards like DNSSEC and DANE. We want to encourage end users, the customer to make future requests with those venders if they don’t see the standard implemented. And we want policymakers to make sure that they stimulate the use of modern Internet standards to keep the Internet open, free and secure.
And, of course, we understand that dealing with these standards isn’t easy. So we offer the internet.nl environment to help you. There is a lot of explanatory texts to help you understand what is lacking if you have less than a 100% score and how you can improve it. But also offering the source code behind it as something that can be reused in a different way by other organizations and countries.
And, of course, these countries sometimes need support. And we can offer them the basic support, to set up the tooling and to understand the mechanism that we have built. So working together can make sure that modern Internet standards are really taken up at a higher level than they are used nowadays.
So I would like to go to the next sheet. Some concluding remarks. We really think, we believe that the Internet should remain open, free and secure, accessible for everybody and making use of these modern standards will help you to do that. Tooling like internet.nl may assist you in becoming more aware. So I would advise everyone to check, for example, your own organization, both website and the e-mail at internet.nl. The tool is in English as well. So it should be easy-to-use. We should make sure together that policymakers can do what they can do to assist in that process. I’m not sure if there are any questions or if we still have time for that, Gergana, but this concludes my presentation.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Gerben. Does anybody have any questions for Gerben? I don’t see any hands up. So that – you can use – yes, Jose is saying use the queue for questions, see for comment when you ask for the floor in the chat.
I see one hand. Wout.
>> You should get a request on your screen. I’m going to ask you to unmute. Yes.
>> WOUT DE NATRIS: Can you hear me? And see me I hope? Thank you for the presentations. They were very clear and very well to follow and understand. I would like to put some intention, follow-up on what Gerben was saying, a lot of these standards exist for over 20 years in some cases and for some reason they are not being taken up. This is for Internet standards. There are all these applications and tools that are built and secured by design mostly as well. When you look at, for example, the creation of software, there are all sorts of rules, tools to create software that are not being used. Websites are built insecure by design mostly but there are other robust tools for that for over ten years and they are not being used. And this can go on and on and on. And it shows a sort of pattern about insecurity over the Internet.
So within the Internet Governance Forum we have started a Dynamic Coalition on Internet security standards and safety. That has the goal and the purpose to assist organizations with developing these tools in a much more swift way. So what we are aiming to do is basically to make sure that the sort of market failure that currently exists and the comments that the Internet is turning in to, to actually change that in the first way. The first way it can be done by creating business cases. And the business case is created in a way that is shown by Governments that are procuring with all these security in mind and not go from adoption.
That the same could go for major organizations and industry. When they buy new tools for their ICT and IoT that they have the security in mind. And finally, that from society all sorts of pressure needs to start to be built. And this precious legislation with the fear of fracturing the Internet. So there has to be another way and that pressure can be built through consumer organizations that they test ICT development. It can be done by parliamentarians that start asking questions to policymakers about the security in their country. It can be done through the media. It can be done through other organizations. But one of the most important things is would be to test relentlessly. They are testing the Internet and everything around them 24/7 a day and are using the vulnerabilities to their advantage. Why can’t societies like yours organize something that matches that. So hackers are used in a positive way and a repository for mistakes in products so they can do the mandate. And these are the sort of the programs that the Dynamic Coalition will be running over the next two years. There is a role of the parliamentarians.
So there was a question put to them in the announcement of the session. So I hope you have a few minutes left to discuss that and what roles parliamentarians could play in this – yes, I know. I’m stopping here. So what the role could be. So thank you.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Wout. I see a hand from Marco. You would want to respond to what Wout was saying?
>> Yes. I agree with Wout’s motion that we need to make sure people are aware of what’s out there and make sure the security standards are explored. I would like to pick on the notion that as I think I heard Wout say that the Internet is unsecure by design or these old protocols were insecure by design. I think that’s the wrong frame. The world has changed. The Internet itself has changed. And Chris explained some of these things were unforeseen. And with regards to security and privacy yes, the world has changed. And a lot of these things were unforeseen when the original protocols were developed or maybe not technically possible to use the protocols. I would not say it is insecure by design. There are mere changes and the Internet needs to adapt. We have a lot of new constraints to take in to account. Thank you.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Marco. So I just want to introduce one topic for discussion perhaps. So this is the session for parliamentarians. And we do have Maria from the Italian Senate here. So I want to introduce a quick topic for discussions for everyone when we are talking about the work that parliamentarians do and especially with the recent efforts from the EU but also other regions in the world to regulate the Internet.
What does that mean to regulate the Internet because that the internet has a lot of layers. That’s a layer that users are mostly familiar with and the other technical layers below that where, for example, the roots reserved, the IP addresses are. When there is regulation that – that it mostly concerns what is going on on the top layer of the Internet. There is also recent regulation that has tried to address some things that are going on in the technical layers. And even when politicians don’t aim certain regulation to concern the technical layers it affects them indirectly by changing things in the information layer. So it is an interesting question how we want to preserve a global interoperable internet at the same time as different regions of the world are trying to develop different regulations that is not necessarily – that might not necessarily be compatible with each other.
So it’s an interesting question how to keep the Internet one and global and interoperable. So I’d like to give the floor to Ms. Mantovani for her intervention.
>> MARIA LAURA MANTOVANI: Thank you. Thank you to all of you for this invite, this invitation. And I would like to present myself briefly. And I mean I am currently a member of the Senate, Italian Parliament since three years only. And before I served for 30 years in Universities in information technology services, in particular to build Internet for University for all our countries.
So I’m very pleased to be here today in this meeting. And appreciate very much your presentations that are done before. But the question that you asked to answer, which is how the Internet principles of global interoperability can be configured at the national level is linked to an important goal that we are trying to achieve at the European level that is digital sovereignty.
And the ambition to achieve technological sovereignty in Europe is, in fact, at the top of the agenda of the current European Commission. In her agenda for Europe the Commission precedent also stated that it is necessary to achieve European technological sovereignty in some critical sectors.
And strengthening Europe’s digital capabilities and independence in this area are an important part of its broader aspiration for greater autonomy in the global stage for world powers such as U.S. and China.
All this must be achieved respecting the barriers of the modern technological society which are as indicated in the question the global connectivity and interoperability.
In the meantime, Italy is creating its national cloud. The process for the creation of the national strategic poll, the cloud aimed to store all the application of the Italian public administration and the citizens’ data will start by July. The recovery plan allocates 900 million Euros to this operation. And according to what our Minister of Digital Transition has declared, he intends to end the migration to the cloud by 2022.
The national strategic poll will be a set of four physical data centers on the Italian ground with the capability to offer cloud services. The migration as estimated in the recovery plan will involve 200 large public central institutions and 80 local public health institutions.
Management of this cloud should be maintained by the Ministry of Innovation together with the Department of Digital Transformation. The Government plan to accelerate to each the award of the tender for 2021 and to be operational in the second half of 2022.
In addition, an important infrastructure called an Italian UNAR should be included in this national strategic hub. UNAR aims to be a positive impact on the future of Italian schools system.
Until now Internet access in Italian schools has been featured by a range of different connection types which over time have become obsolete and inefficient, unable to support efficiently the several school activities. We note also a high lack of standardization in the connection due to the existence of systematic differences linked to the territory, the grade and the size of the schools.
Also from the point of view of the expenditures that schools have to bear there are many differences between schools, some of them have financial endowment. Others not.
Lastly, often these costs are based on an old and expensive context that would need to be revised. To solve this criticality of my country, I carried on an important proposal that was approved in the context of the law for complimentary funds to our national recovery plan that establishes a fund of 135 million Euros for the creation of the single national education interconnection network.
This network will allow schools to provide advanced digital services and to achieve some fundamental goals such as interconnecting schools to each other and also to the regional schools offices in every area of Italy and to the Ministry of Education and globally to the Internet.
In addition it will be possible to provide schools with basic network services such as the DNS, for example, and data storage and cloud computing but also to develop and provide a national service for integrated digital education which offers – which even after the pandemic will continue to play a central role in teaching in general for training of all students.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that UNAR has been welcomed in Europe where a similar model network already exists. I’m referring to the Giante network that interconnects the national research and education networks for about 10,000 Universities and research centers and over 50 million users. UNAR could therefore be a model to be replicated in every European country and be adopted by the union itself to connect all European schools on the model on – of the Giante network. Thank you for your attention.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you very much, Ms. Mantovani.
>> I see two hands. Peter and Vittiro has a hand. There has been some chat comments which has been a follow-on on the discussions we had earlier.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: I see a hand from Peter and a hand from Vittiro. Please go ahead.
>> Thank you. Thank you, Maria. That was a –
>> GERGANA PETROVA: There is some music. A nice break.
>> Can you still hear me?
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Yes. We hear the music again.
>> That might be from the Geraton.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Go ahead.
>> I’m not sure where it came from. That was a very inspiring suggestion. And I think it’s important to keep our focus on educating those that will be the next generation of the people that will be implementing and developing new standards. So thank you for that. I had a comment on or a response to Gergana’s question on the potential conflict between global standards and national policies. Just wanted to point out that we have a really nice example of where – of how it is possible to avoid that conflict. And that example is that the local country codes. So while they respect global standards, which is what makes the DNS work in the end, they can set their local policies. The manager in close cooperation with their local Internet communities decides on which policies the .nl domain will set. The .eu is another nice example. They can decide on who gets to register .eu domain. And it is not in conflict with any of the global standards. So it is perfectly possible to match both of these requirements that we have set for an Internet that is global but it is also fulfilling the needs of their local – of its local Internet communities that it serves. Thank you.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you. And next I have Vittiro.
>> Hello. Thank you. I have a question. It is a double question. What’s the difference between this new UNL and existing guidelines which has been connecting schools in Italy? But the most important question, whether this new platform will put a requirement of using open source or open standards solutions. Because in many European countries there is an attempt to use new technology. And also hosted in each individual European country rather than just adopting the global platforms from the U.S. or China and licensing them. So the idea – the question is whether there will be also in Italy requirements to use open standards and open source solutions or just a procurement channel for the big technology from the U.S.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: I think this is a question for Ms. Mantovani.
>> MARIA LAURA MANTOVANI: Thank you, Vittiro, for this question. I think that there is – it is evident that it is a problem, not only in Italy. I think about the offer of commercial products for schools and in general for the public administration and the alternatives that’s offered by open source platforms and systems that has not the same power of the others. So we try as legislators to offer the possibility of a ground to build system or software open source and open platform solutions.
But we cannot make directly the solution. We expect also from the society and from the general from the business partner to observe these solutions.
>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you very much for the answer. Are there any more questions or comments from anybody? I don’t see any more hands. And I’m just aware of the time. We are a little bit over. So I think it is maybe a good time to close the discussion.
I want to thank all the speakers, really nice presentations. And I see that we have also attendees from the youth school. I hope it was useful for them to get an overview of how the organizations in the Internet ecosystem work together and also to hear a little bit more about the Internet standards. So thank you again to all of the speakers and all the participants in the discussion.
And with this I would like to close the session. Thank you for participating.
>> Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thanks to the speakers and Gergana. I would like to give the floor to Sandra Hoferichter, the Secretary-General of EuroDIG to make an announcement.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you. And thank you, Gergana and the session organizers for hosting this session. I think it was a very interesting one. Can you hear me?
>> Yes.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Perfect. There was a – in our program we have now announced that there is a Round Table with parliamentarians taking place. Unfortunately and I say that with a very sad eye we have to cancel this session because we have only one or two parliamentarians had who the time to participate in this session. And this won’t make a Round Table. That’s why we extended this session, the first one, a little bit more. And I’m saying this with a particular sadness because we were so successful in bringing in parliamentarians to the global IGF and virtual IGF in 2019 and 2020. And we could not get the same successful European IGF. I am not sure what the reason is. It might be that the end of June is a very bad timing for parliamentarians because they are just about to go in to the summer break and have to take the latest or the last decisions before the summer break. That could be one reason.
Another reason could be that a UN Forum has more attention for them and for their stakeholders than a European Forum. I think we have to assess a little bit what the reasons are. But we also have to be frank that it would make no sense to continue with this Round Table session if we have no Parliamentarians.
Our session is streamed. And parliamentarians, we would encourage them to listen to the discussion we just had this morning. And I would like to thank very much the organizers for organizing this session. I think it was a very great information, value for them, too. And we will try and continue trying involving Parliamentarians in to the Internet Governance debate. The next session will start at 11:45 as I see. Go back together and enjoy the networking and be back – no, no. It is not 11:45. It will be later. Please check the Wiki because the Round Table is canceled.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you. We hope you will stay with us. Return to the Gather Town tab that you have on your computer. Feel free to roam around our conference center. If you click on the studio name in the participant’s list and click follow you are taken to them directly. So you will be able to go straight there. Our help desk is there to assist. And you can find them by clicking on respond. If you click on your name at the bottom of the screen you can see a little tab that says respond. The next session will start at 3:15. We hope to see you back then. Bye for now.


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[[Category:2021]][[Category:Sessions 2021]][[Category:Sessions]][[Category:Side events 2021]][[Category:Technical and operational issues 2021]]
[[Category:2021]][[Category:Sessions 2021]][[Category:Sessions]][[Category:Side events 2021]][[Category:Technical and operational issues 2021]]

Latest revision as of 12:45, 19 July 2021

28 June 2021 | 10:00-11:15 CEST | Studio Bruges | Video recording | Transcript
Consolidated programme 2021 overview / Day 0

Session teaser

The session will focus on the needs of legislators and explain the different organisations that form part of the IG ecosystem and their roles. You will hear what it takes to maintain a unique global network and current and potential challenges to keeping it open, interoperable, neutral, free, secure and un-fragmented.

Session description

The key feature of the Internet’s core functions is maintaining “uniqueness” of identifiers - the numbers (e.g. IP addresses) and domain names - which ensures global interoperability and connectivity. A large part of the Internet’s success is due to it being a “network of networks” with no central command. Its strength and value increase exponentially with the number of participants (network effect). Trust in these identifiers being unique and in the governance system that coordinates these functions is vital for the Internet to function and for it to remain the globally connected unfragmented network it is today.

The Internet does not come without risks. Most of those risks concern what happens on the Internet, rather than with the underlying technical core functions and processes. For the latter, where risks on the stability or resilience were identified, the industry has a long track record of inventing and implementing new technologies to reduce these risks, whilst maintaining one global Internet. One could say that the ability for these core technologies to adapt to changes and scale up - as we recently experienced with the pandemic - is the foundation of the Internet’s success.

To recognise, understand and address these risks, both within the application layer and those of the underlying technical infrastructure, while maintaining a global network, we need to think globally. The tendency to seek legislation impacting the core of the internet’s infrastructure on a domestic or regional level threatens the global interoperability and the Internet as one unfragmented space. A national or even regional Internet would never provide the same value as a global one.

In this session we will cover several fronts. We will touch upon the technical layers of the Internet, we will talk about the organisations that help it run and how they work together. Our hope is to explain how things work now and what processes are in place and open a dialogue on the best way to preserve a global Internet while addressing the ever-developing risks.

Format

Presentations followed by a Q&A.

Further information

Internet Revealed - The Euro-IX movie (video: 5 min 20 sec)

The Domain Name System (DNS) (video: 2 min 29 sec)

ccTLD registries and online content (video: 4 min 6 sec)

How DNSSEC Works Step by Step (video: 4 min 9 sec)

Internet.nl Checks if your website, email and internet connection use modern and reliable Internet Standards and suggests what you can do about it

People

Focal Points/Moderator:

  • Gergana Petrova, RIPE NCC

Key participants:

  • Maria Laura Mantovani, Italian Senate
  • Chris Buckridge, RIPE NCC
  • Adam Peake, ICANN
  • Gerben Klein Baltink, Dutch Internet Standards Platform

Video record

https://youtu.be/_ub3UBB_rRE

Transcript

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This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.


>> Are we visible?

>> People can see us. Hopefully they can also hear us.

>> Studio Bruges, can you hear me?

>> Hello. We can hear you.

>> Super. Nice to see you.

>> Hello, everybody. We are testing the start thingy for the next day. So this is why we are meeting you here at our very nice amphitheater. Hello, everybody.

>> Studio Belgrade, can you hear me?

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>> Good morning. Loud and clear.

>> Oliver, you are not the studio host.

>> Hello, Valada.

>> He belongs to Belgrade.

>> It’s good to see you. And I see that you have nice weather in Belgrade.

>> Yes, a little bit too hot.

>> I wish you a very, very successful and nice day today. See you later.

>> Okay. And we have a last studio to check. Where is Trieste.

>> We are here. Hello. Good morning.

>> Good morning.

>> We still see Belgrade.

>> Yes. Hello. Good morning. Nice to see you all.

>> Nice to see you.

>> I see you are in Italy already. But we did make it. So let’s keep that job for tomorrow. Marco, we wish you a successful day. Everyone, have nice sessions and enjoy the day.

>> See you later. Thanks.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much, Sandra and Thomas, for your warm welcome and to start off Day Zero. Good morning, and welcome. My name is Nadia. And I’m your studio host live from Bruges and hosted by the United Nations Institute. We are going straight in and starting off Day Zero with the pre-event session, Internet 101, maintaining a unique global network moderated by Gergana Petrova from RIPE NCC.

>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Hello. I’m Juuso, Remote Moderator. We believe in open dialogue and that’s why we would like you to follow the session rules. Here is just the main principles. So firstly, if your display name on Zoom is not your full name yet, we ask you to rename yourself. You will have a chance to ask questions later on in the session but we will get to it. You can ask for the floor by using the raise hand button under the Zoom reactions and then we will unmute you. This video is Livestreamed but the chat messages are not visible outside of this poll. You can use the chat functions to share your thoughts with the other participants. We are going to be here in the background to make sure the discussion is inclusive. With that I’m going to give the floor back to the Moderator.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Hello, everyone. Good morning. My name is Gergana Petrova. I’m – I work for RIPE NCC in Amsterdam. And today we have prepared for you a few presentations from the technical community. You are going to hear more about how the technical layers of the Internet work as well as how the organizations that run it work. Before I go to the first presentation I’m going to give the floor to one of the speakers, Adam Peake from ICANN who is going to frame the discussion for us. Is he here?

>> ADAM PEAKE: I am. Sorry. I am here. Good morning, everybody. So the discussion this morning – there is three of us. Hi Chris, Gerben. I work for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Chris works for RIPE NCC. Chris is going to talk about the role of the regional Internet registries and the work they do in assigning protocols across the European region for Chris’ case, but there is a global representation of five regional Internet registries. They are responsible for the assignment of IP addresses and other protocols that Chris will mention. Gerben Klein Baltink is from Internet NL which is an initiative of various partners in the Internet community of the Netherlands. And also the partners, the Dutch government. And he will be talking about collaboration to raise awareness around the increase of usage of modern Internet standards.

And as I mentioned I work for ICANN and I will be talking about our work coordinating and managing the Domain Name System. We’re particularly responsible for domain names itself but also other oversight role, coordinating role globally for unique identifiers generally.

I don’t think there is very much more we need to say to begin. So I think if I have the speaking order correct today, it’s on the slide that you can see. We are beginning with Chris and then it will be back to me. And then Gerben will continue. And we’ll take questions at the end if that’s okay unless you want to interrupt. And any questions you see in the chat that will be great as there may be things that need clarifying and that will be super. Okay.

I think this – with that very brief introduction straight over to you, Chris. And thank you very much.

>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: Thank you, Adam. I will come straight in. Good morning, everyone. As Adam said, my name is Chris Buckridge. I work for RIPE NCC. I will get a little more in to what that means a little later on. Looking at the attendees we have, it’s early. So hopefully we will see a few more. I hope we have a mix of newcomers and people who probably are pretty well versed in a lot of what I’m going to be talking about and the others as well.

So hopefully I think what we can do today is have something of value even for those that know a little bit more about this in terms of the context where putting it in and some of the way the governance issues that we talk about. Now I’m going to try and share my screen here. So if I can do this. Share. Okay. Can you let me know if everyone can see the screen now?

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Yes.

>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: So maintaining a unique global network, I think the important thing here is that that – is that context. That sort of framing of what it is we’re discussing. We’ve I guess broken this session in to what seemed like often the traditional Government spheres which is numbers, names, and standards. If you were – if you have followed any of the IANA stewardship discussion a few years back that’s very much in line with how the split went. It forced me to talk a little bit about the numbers. When we talk about maintaining a unique global network, it brings us back to a really fundamental question of what is the Internet, what is this Internet that we’re trying to ensure it remains global, remains unfragmented. And that is where the Internet Protocol comes in. Basically the Internet protocol if you wanted to define the Internet, the Internet Protocol is a pretty good place to start. It is the protocol that allows data to move from one place to another across the Internet.

And we have a box down there, which I think is a metaphor that a colleague of mine has used previously as the data packet. It is a useful metaphor partly because it shows that packet-like structure but also because you can put anything in that. A packet is a container that you can put any data. The Internet Protocol allows that data to move in fragments across the Internet. And in that sense an IP address is actually what defines an Internet connection because the Internet Protocol allows data to move from one IP address to another IP address. So the IP address is in that sense a really fundamental building block of any Internet-based service.

So that brings us to a certain very key point about IP addresses and the Internet Protocol. Specifically that each address has to be unique in the concept of that network. So if you have got an address that – let’s say, statuesplains11 and you end out your packet to that address you are going to get confusion. In the context of your network, the number you have is unique.

And in a global network, the Internet is a global network of networks. The address you have needs to be globally unique. So I wanted to just use this to highlight really the significance and importance of Internet Protocol. This is well, a version of what’s often called DSOI model. It’s a model that’s been used for many, many years. Each layer doing different things, different roles in making the Internet work.

The really key important element here is to note the narrow waste and IP there. So while on say down the bottom you have the physical layer, you have many different ways in which data and information moves from one point to another across the physical layer, whether through copper wires or fiber or over radiowaves. And at the top you have lots of different applications, e-mail, World Wide Web. You have phone calls, many different kinds of applications. At the middle linking it all together is the Internet Protocol. This is the really key element that makes the Internet work and everything passes through the Internet Protocol.

And there is that package again. And then on the side there you see a bar code that’s the IP address. That’s the thing that we need to make sure that is unique.

So this slide is actually from a different presentation. But I think it’s a useful one to throw in to the mix here because it drives home a point that can get lost, particularly in this area where we are concerned about issues like privacy and attribution and IP address is not an identity. So it identifies a point on the network but it’s not possible for you to then say that point on the network is always this person or is always this entity. If you move, your address on the network will change.

And IP address sharing is actually really common. So you have got multiple people living in your house, not a system where you can say an IP address is directly and easily used to attribute who is doing something on the network. That’s a really important point. Both because we want to find a way to get attribution, but also because it affects the way that we think about policy and think about how we govern the management of IP addresses.

So we’ve talked about IP being very central and fundamental. We come to a point that problematizes that a little. There are two flavors of IP address, version 1 and version 2. Not really. That would be easier. We call them IPv4 and IPv6. Those are the two that you will see and you need to think about.

IPv4 is the Internet Protocol and which the Internet grew and is still largely based. It was first deployed in 1982. And IPv4 address is a 32-bit address. So what does that mean? That means that there are two to the power of 32 unique addresses in the IPv4 space and that amounts to just roughly over 4 billion addresses. When the Internet was being developed, that probably seemed like a suitable number of addresses for what was at the time an academic project, even though one was obviously commercial and social potential.

Those addresses as IPv4 addresses are written as four octets separated by periods. If you see an IP address, if you see four sets of numbers between 0 and 255 with full stop separating them, that’s an IPv4 address. One of the key governance issues that has been faced by several decades by the technical community is the fact that’s not enough IP addresses for the Internet that we have come to know and understand.

We actually have need for many more addresses than that. And so the technical community in the 1990s developed an alternative, a new IP, IP version 6. And it specifically addressed that issue by moving from 32-bit addresses to 128-bit addresses.

So then you have 2 to the power of 128 unique addresses. I’m not going to try and read that number. But suffice to say it’s something along the lines of the number of grains of sand in the planets of the Milky Way. It’s a huge number. So if you see an IP address that looks like the one below, if it has colons involved, that you are looking at an IPv6 address. The issue is that IPv6 and IPv4 are not actually directly compatible with each other.

So here we come to that question of a single unfragmented global network. We’ve actually already run in to one of the really key challenges to that concept which is that we have these two kinds of IP that don’t directly work with each other. And that’s been a real challenge partly because as we have run out of IPv4, IPv6 uptake has not been what was hoped or expected back in the late’90s and early 2000s which means that that’s had certain effects on how the governance and understanding of IP address management goes.

If we look here, and I’m going to jump to the next slide, this is a slide from our colleagues at APNIC which is the regional Internet registry for Asia-Pacific. And it’s one way of looking at IPv4 deployment. This is looking at IPv6 capability based on experiments they have done doing Google ads. The main point to see here there is a lot of red on this map. IPv6 uptake has not been widespread. Certain areas that have had very good uptakes. India is bright green and there are reasons for that. And certainly research and discussion ongoing as to why those areas have had more success than others haven’t.

But overall, IPv6 uptake is still not where we as a technical community and as the broader stakeholder community would like to see it.

So how do we address that? We start with a couple of key principles. And this is where we start to get in to governance and how that model is affected by governance. First key principle, in the interest of uniqueness it is important that we have an accurate, up-to-date registry of internet number resource holdings. Who has IP address block and making sure no one else has the same IP address block. And this very much comes back to the fact that it is a global system. We need open, transparent, inclusive and bottom-up development for the relevant policies that we use for governing this space. And so the real challenges that we see, and this is things that I have started to hint at already, that exhaustion of the IPv4 address pool, the fact that we ran out of IPv4 addresses for new networks. So where previously this was a common good where you could simply ask for and demonstrate need for IP addresses and use those addresses and now people are selling and making money off of them. That has led to additional incentives for fraudulent behavior.

Saying I am this person and I can change this registration and move it to somebody else when, in fact, you are not the person responsible. And so we see that now creeping in to the system in a way that it wasn’t there before, partly because the incentive wasn’t there.

Slow uptake of IPv6 key challenge. It is a challenge for the whole community but something where we see different sectors of the community coming at this from different angles with different approaches, different ideas. Finding the best idea, finding what works to increase that IPv6 uptake and do so in a way that, you know, maintains sort of access for everyone is really important.

And actually and this is where events like EuroDIG are so important where increasingly seen regulation either at the local, national level or even at the sort of super national level. So like in the EU.

Potentially coming in to conflict with the work that the RIRs do, with the role that we have. So that was a little bit of a skip ahead to the next slide. What is an RIR? If we go back to the ’80s and back when IPv4 was first being deployed, we had a gentleman who had a notebook and would write down I have given this person this set of IP addresses and this person this set of IP addresses. And by keeping this record he would make sure he didn’t give the same set of addresses to this person. In very sort of fundamental ways it hasn’t involved that much. That’s the role that regional Internet registries play. We keep a record of who has what addresses and make that record publically available and ensure that those addresses are unique for all users.

Over the course of the ’90s it was decided by the global community in a number of steps I guess that this was something best handled by a number of different regions. And looking back that’s actually going to be a really good and wise move because we see the different regions. And you can see the five regions here have had to address quite different landscapes, communities, issues to each other. So something like the RIPE NCC region that includes Western Europe and Middle East and Russia, faces very different challenges and issues than AFRINIC.

So by having those different communities served by different organizations you are able to actually provide a better service. And also to allow those communities to create better policies suited to their own specific needs.

So RIPE NCC, let’s bring it back since this is EuroDIG to the EuroDIG region and to the RIPE NCC. RIPE NCC was established in 1992. We were the first regional Internet registry established. And it was established in the Netherlands as a not-for-profit membership association under Dutch law. So this is the association of the RIPE NCC. We serve as the regional Internet registry for 76 countries. And we have around 150 staff mainly based in the Netherlands, an office in Dubai and then a number of staff also located elsewhere around the service region.

So separate to that is the RIPE community. So the RIPE NCC is the association. The RIPE community is an open, transparent bottom-up community. Anyone can be involved. Anyone can say I’m part of the RIPE community just by taking an active interest, being part of those discussions of that community. And this is more than just a community of people who come together to chat or share information. The community is responsible for making the policies under which the RIPE NCC can do its work. So those policies are developed through a number of processes and instructions.

So we have Working Groups, the number of different Working Groups, including address policy, Working Group on RIPE NCC services. Others on routing, DNS, on corporation with other parts of the industry and stakeholder groups. Each of these then have mailing lists. And so policies are actually developed on those mailing lists.

And then finally we also have RIPE meetings. So these are two meetings held every year for the last 18 months. The last three events have been virtual but prior to that there were two physical meetings every year, usually around 6 or 700 people coming together. Those have also played an important role in policy making and discussion. By making policy specifically on the mailing list it makes it more open to those who can’t join for a physical meeting. Who can’t take a week off to join us for that.

So that leads then, and I think this is a really important diagram in looking at how this all works. So you see the RIPE NCC at the top there as the organization. Now going down the right-hand side here, RIPE NCC is essentially distributing IP addresses. Now distributing registering, it is a fine line there. But basically the IP addresses that we register go to the RIPE NCC membership. If you would like to receive IP addresses from the RIPE NCC, you become a member of the RIPE NCC.

The RIPE community also includes anyone with an interest in this area. So it’s Governments. It’s law enforcement, regulators, Civil Society, technical community. Many of them are RIPE NCC members but they are also those who are not. And even those who are not members also have a say in how in those policies in how they are developed. So from that RIPE community, and this is the left side of the diagram, we have the policies created that instruct the RIPE NCC on how to do this.

In the middle I have the RIPE NCC as well as serving as a registry and registering those resources. Also serves as a Secretariat. Which means we maintain the mailing lists and coordinate the RIPE meetings.

So that’s a bit how this works. And it’s important if nothing else to come away with the notion and understanding that the RIPE NCC is separate from the community. It is an organization serving an open community and that’s true of all of the RIRs in the other four regions as well. This – I won’t spend too much time on this. But there is one other element there which is the idea of global policies. It is possible to say set global policies which will apply to all RIR communities. And the key thing, top part to know, that to have a global policy, you have to get it agreed in each of the five RIR communities. We don’t have too many global policies in place. Those that we do have basically apply to the IANA which is the top level of that hierarchical registration chain which says this block of IP addresses is with RIPE NCC or this block is with AFRINIC and those RIRs have the next level of registration.

The other point, and this is starting to lead to our next speaker Adam, to note this is where it comes in to the picture where it relates to numbers. It has a couple of roles in relation to this because not only do they run – not only are they under contract to the regional Internet registries to maintain IANA, but the ICANN board has a role in ratifying any global policy proposals that come through before they’re actually implemented.

So you see we begin to see it’s somewhat a complex web of interactions and relationships here between the technical community. But it also – I think that’s also a significant point to note in relation to how the names and numbers are very inextricably linked. This is a quite tight ecosystem. And that’s an important point to consider when you start to talk about other aspects of Internet Governance like Government regulation. If you pull on one thread you are actually pulling on a much bigger tapestry of relationships and processes. And that’s where we start to see unintended consequences of regulation or attempts.

This brings me to the end of my section. I don’t know if we are stopping for questions. But we’re certainly here. I’m here at the end and during the week as well along with RIPE NCC colleagues. Feel free to ask if there is anything that raised a question for you there. Thanks.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Chris. Very interesting presentation. So Sandra actually informed that we are going to have 15 more minutes. We are going to finish at 11:15 and that leaves us more time for questions. Do you have any questions for Chris’ presentation? Either raise your hand or post it in the chat.

Is anybody typing?

>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: I was very clear.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Apparently so. Thank you, Chris. So let me give the floor to the next speaker, Adam.

>> ADAM PEAKE: Hi. Sorry. Good morning, again. And I apologize for my slightly rushed introduction at the start. I am in the Hague. I work for ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I will see if I can share my screen and find where I’ve hidden my files. Give me a moment because I think it’s going to be easier if I do something else before I try and do that.

So yes, just moving on from what Chris was saying. We have a global responsibility for overseeing various aspects of the Domain Name System, including the global responsibility for coordinating Internet Protocol addresses through the public technical identifiers group which is a subsidiary of ICANN. And it enters in to service level agreements with both the regional Internet registries and MoU with the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force for the protocols network.

This is not how I previously saw this which is concerning. Thank you, Nadia. I think you’ve found that for me. If you can put that – yeah, that will be fine. Yes.

Nadia I think put that up for me, is that right? So let’s begin. ICANN, the DNS maintaining the unique global network. Can we go to the next slide, please? Unless I’m controlling it which I don’t think that I am. Yes. So Chris told us about Internet Protocol addresses. If you would type that in to the browser you would find out it resolves to a Web page and it resolves to the Web page for ICANN. And this is one of the primary things that we’re doing here.

We’re talking about resolving a number which Chris has explained, that’s how the traffic is rooted across the Internet in to a domain name that’s more memorable and useable for us. And ICANN has the responsibility for this unique assignment of names and numbers. We have two reasons for doing this. One is to remember addresses because you are far more likely to remember icann.org, the 192.043.222, which I always have to read because I certainly don’t remember it.

And also allows a great deal of flexibility. Chris has spoken about the development over the Internet over a period of years. And if you think back ICANN was established in 1998, and at that time there were about 120 million users. There are about 4.6 billion today. So the Internet is scaled incredibly over that period. Also in 1998 there were about 2 million domain names. There are now about 360 million domain names. And these include both gTLDs, Generic Top-Level Domain Names, and ccTLDs, Country Code Top-Level Domain Names. And so we have this enormous scaling of the Internet, but also over that time you might have been using I’m sure what was the first time you use google.com or gmail.com. Those were founded in 2004. And over that time the network behind the name has evolved immensely. It is the structure of the networks that Google has.

And what this does is allows us to have a flexibility so that the underlying technical network can evolve and change and be controlled by those running those services, but our interface with it, the domain name doesn’t change. So this unique assignment is incredibly important, excuse me, because we’re – otherwise you wouldn’t get to the place that you want to go.

If icann.org if there were two of them you wouldn’t know whether you were going to go to the website that I’m pointing you to or something else. If your e-mail address was, you know, there was more than one of them, then where would your e-mail go. Who would you know who you are communicating with. Unique assignment is at the heart of what we are doing. I want to call out, the European top level registries, we often do these presentations together, but this time it is my time. So particular thanks to Peter Van Roste, Malina, for typical collaboration. And thank you to Peter and Malina. Next slide, please.

So this is what are our Internet identifiers. So the Internet as we’ve heard is this mesh of networks and they agree to communicate. This is a voluntary agreement to use these protocols. And they are using a predefined set of protocols which we often refer to as TC/IP, transmission control/Internet Protocol. It is a system of rules that allows parts of that communication system to transmit information. The most common protocol that you would be aware of would be http or https which stands for hypertext transfer protocol or hypertext transfer protocol secure if you are using https. What that protocol does is the http protocol allows your browser to ask for information from a server, from – and to be able to present that information in a way that is readable and designed on the page.

So it’s a set of instructions that take information from a server back to you as a client, to understand what you are trying to look at on the Internet. Other examples is the e-mail protocol which again is – understand that the information you are seeking or sending is about e-mail. And it will allow for that information to be transferred and also presented back to you in ways that are expected and understood.

And networks use these identifiers to name and number resources across the Internet. Hosts. Chris has spoken about this. And so these host computers can communicate. I think today there are something like 80,000 networks across the Internet. Very important to remember that the Internet is not a single network. It is about 80,000 autonomous networks each with their own policies of how they communicate and what routes they provide. And so that we have a global unified Internet that’s made up of all these different networks that are following the same protocols.

And so at ICANN, Internet identifiers are names and numbers, protocol priorities. And these must be uniquely assigned if because they are not assigned you won’t get to where you want to go or you won’t get the information that you are expected to get. Next slide, please. And this is something that we’ve – I have talked about, IPv4 addresses and you can see an IPv6 address which is much longer and we need to use names. You are not going to remember those addresses. And mapping those IP addresses – mapping names to IP addresses is called name resolution. You can see an example in the blue box of an IPv6 address mapping to a domain name, www.example.com. Can I have the next slide, please?

So this is a sort of practical example. It’s where we are today. And as I mentioned what you are seeing at the beginning in the red is https which is the protocol which is the one I mentioned for presenting Web pages across the Internet. Next we see the www which is the webserver. It could be something like e-mail or another particular type of service that’s being presented.

Then you see EuroDIG which is the second level domain name and .org, which is the Top-Level Domain name and then there is a dot afterwards which we don’t often use. It does exist there but you don’t need to add it. That’s the root name server. Next slide. This is what it looks like as a hierarchical tree. What we are talking about is that the Domain Name System is a hierarchical database. It’s a query and response database. And when you are entering in the domain name, what you are essentially doing is querying this hierarchical database. There are now I think it is 1514 Top-Level Domain names at the moment. This includes all the Country Code Top-Level Domain Names. It includes the Generic Top-Level Domain Names like com and net and org that we are very, very familiar with.

It includes a lot of new Top-Level Domain Names, things like .coffee or city names like .paris. And the thing on the left-hand side is a series of numbers. When it was represented it would be represented to you as a user that would be seen as the Chinese characters for .hongkong. So it is the international way of representing Chinese characters with the code.

At the second level you can see below typical examples of a domain name. Here we have example.com and the other would, of course, be eurodig.org. And that’s the second level. Below that we have other types of third level Top-Level Domain Names, www, mail and so on. And if you went to a European Commission, European Union website you would see at the third level they start to name their departments. So under europa.eu at the third level you see all kinds of directorates, departmental names of the European Union being used. So you can control what you want to use within the zone that you administer.

So let’s have a look at the next slide, please. And this is important. It’s about zones and administrative boundaries. And at each of these levels the owner controls the policies and what happens within them. So the policies for the root zone are controlled by the root zone operators. The policies for the second level – sorry, the Top-Level Domain Names, like .org or .se for Sweden. If you look at how EuroDIG is controlled by those who registered eurodig.org and that would be Sandra or Reina, they decide if they are going to have www for the Web services and mail and so on and so forth. Next slide.

So this is an example of what the root zone file looks like. And I wasn’t going to include this in the file today. I’m sorry about that. If you look up an entry, if you went to the file that is the controlling file for all of the entries at the root zone, what the root zone contains is information about all of the Top-Level Domain Names. It has information about all of the 1514 I think. And for each one it will contain the name server information, mapping to IP addresses and other information.

And the idea is that all the root zone file knows about is Internet Protocol addresses of TLDs, the Top-Level Domain Names that live below it in the hierarchy. So it has information about how to contact the Internet protocol addresses for all of the Top-Level Domain Names. And that’s just a screen shot from .eu. The next slide, please.

So the root itself, the root zone file is hosted on 13 identical root servers. They are managed by 12 different organizations. Actually two of these servers are managed by a single organization. And each – while there are only 13 and that doesn’t seem very much for the global Internet. These servers have copies around the world. They are identical copies. Currently 1381 copies of the server around the world. If you have a need to access the root server you wouldn’t be accessing one of the original 13. It provides redundancy and backup and the service is more local to you. So ICANN is the operator of the IANA functions. And it does this through the subsidiary organization, the public technical identifiers. And as Chris mentioned public technical identifiers has certain agreements with the RIRs and domain name operators and the domain name registries and also the Internet Protocol and technical standards organizations, the IETF and IANA functions which include the management of this root zone database file.

The U.S. Government, and this is important to remember, that the – there was until October the 1st, 2016 the U.S. Government had an oversight role of the IANA functions. And this ended as we worked out as a global community how to manage different aspects of accountability in ICANN and also transparency to ensure that the customers of the IANA functions were satisfied with how ICANN was performing these duties through PTI. And they also had a say in how ICANN was organized.

So this was an important evolution at the time and was a very important way in which the multi-stakeholder community came together to help the evolution of the Internet in a very significant way. May I have the next slide, please?

So how the DNS works this is a very stylized diagram of how you might look up a domain name. If you are sitting at your laptop or you have your device in your hand and you type in www.example.com in your browser, what happens next is the browser has to find an Internet Protocol address so that it can go to the site that you want to go to and receive that information back in to your browser window.

And often this will happen because you have information about this already on your browser in your laptop or in your device, your mobile phone. And there is also a caching which is a way of holding in memory on these devices of different information. But this sort of stylized way this would happen is an end user, you will – if you type in example.com, that request will go to a recursive name server. So it’s repeatedly asking the same type of question recursively. And the question it is asking do you know the Internet Protocol address for example.com.

And the first thing it will do in this stylized example is go to one of the root servers. The recursive name server holds the roots. Do you know where the IP address for example.com is? The root servers don’t know this. They have the IP address not, for example, but for .com. Will say no, but here is the IP address for one of the .com name servers. And that’s the information that was held in the root server file. So the recursive name server goes off to one of these .com same servers and says do you know the IP address with example.com. Within the hierarchical database record that we mentioned, it will say no, I don’t have the actual IP address for example.com, but I do know the address, the IP address of the IP – of the example.com’s name servers.

So back to the recursive name server and ask the question of example.com. And do you know the IP address for example.com and it will say yes, I do. And it will return it to your browser and you will magically go off to the website. It sounds like a very convoluted process. When it does happen it happens in fractions and milliseconds. And it will happen billions of times a day every time somebody is going to a web browser or sending an e-mail. But very – it is very unusual for a query to go to the root server. Usually it’s all solved because the recursive name server which sits at your Internet service provider or within your organization will know the answers. So it’s usually just a single query that has to take place.

It takes fractions and fractions of milliseconds to occur. It is quite important, as Chris mentioned there is a lot of legislation happening at the moment. And one of the drafts before the European Commission mentioned that there might be consideration of some regulation that affected the recursive name servers. As many of us may have those on our laptops and they may be with our organization or maybe with our Internet service provider, it brought the potential for legislation coming much, much closer to the end user. So that’s something that we are discussing at the moment with the Commission.

We, I mean the Internet community, not me as – and that’s something that is very important. When we think about the future of the Internet, is that understanding these particular operations must be known. Otherwise we may end up with types of legislation that really have unintended consequences. So the next slide, please.

And this is how the domain name industry looks to ICANN. There is a registry. And these are the databases of the Top-Level Domain Names that I mentioned. It will be the Top-Level Generic Names such as .com and .org. We have a series of registrars which are the agents that act between the registrars. And the registrant is the holder of the domain name registration. Within the ICANN registries and registrars are the contract parties to perform that function. There are also occasionally registrars that have resellers and they enter in to contracts with registrants or with us, or the registrar may work directly with the registrants.

Next slide. This important as it shows the relationships that are based on contracts. There are contracts with registries and registrars and they have contracts with the registrants with us.

And all of these are governed by factors, by contractual elements that are developed by the global Internet community, particularly the ICANN Internet community, our multi-stakeholder community. And they will cover such things as operational concerns for how registry functions to some consumer facing factors around registrants. The Consumer Protections that we need as domain name registrants.

Next slide. So this notion of a multi-stakeholder community, multi-stakeholder holder is at the heart of the policy making. It provides an opportunity for individuals, for industry, noncommercial interest and Governments to participate as equals within an ICANN community.

As I mentioned contracts and policies are developed through community processes. They are bottom-up. They are Consensus based. And in many ways it mimics the structures of the Internet itself. And it is borderless and open to all. We are structured around two basic structures in ICANN, supporting organizations which are responsible for developing the policies in the areas they represent. I will come on to that. And then advisory Committees who advise the ICANN board and community on policy development processes and in certain cases they can raise issues that they think is important. Next slide.

This is a representation of how we think the community looks. You have a global multi-stakeholder community of volunteers and this is businesses. It is representative of academia, of NGOs, of the Government, technical community. There are directors and they as policy is developed by the community they make sure that policy follows procedures and rules is appropriate and has a fiduciary responsibility, a sensibility and is implementible. ICANN org staff also support the global community and the board in doing their voluntary work.

Next slide, please. So we have these supporting organizations and Advisory Committees. Next slide, please. And these very quickly, and I am almost finished, is supporting organizations. There are three. There is the address supporting organization which Chris and Gergana’s organization are a part of. 15 volunteers that joined the ICANN. And they are as a supporting organization. They work on Internet Protocol address policy. They do so at a global basis within ICANN. The regional policies are where most of the work is done by the RIRs. The country code name supporting organization is the home for all the managers of the Country Code Top-Level Domain Names. And again like the regional Internet registries, policy for ccTLDs happens at the national level. So the ccTLD manager and their community develops their policy.

They may do so also with regional organizations. Organizations like CENTR will help guide and advice policy at the European level. And there are other regional organizations that do that. And they come together when there is a policy that needs to be addressed at the global level. For example, the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names while standards have to be coordinated across the globe. The GNSO is probably where the core of ICANN’s work is done.

This is developing policy for Generic Top-Level Domain Names. And what we see here is that this is where all the policies for the contracted parties are developed and other policies as well that may need to be done. We also do a lot of work reviewing ICANN and its processes and policies.

The next slide, please. And so we have Advisory Committees. And these give advice and make recommendations to the ICANN board on policy that’s being developed, and they can also initiate their own policy.

One of the better known of these four is the ALAC Advisory Committee that represents the interest of individual Internet users. So they have a complex set of structures representing 230 at large structures around the world. An at large structure is an organization that represents the interests of end users. They come together in ICANN to bring those ideas and thoughts in to the ICANN policy process. The Governmental Advisory Committee, the GAC provides advice from Government on issues of public policy, particularly interactions with policies in the national legislation or international agreements. I say there is 178 members. We will stick with 178 member Governments and economies and members of the Governmental Advisory Committee at the moment. They are important in bringing the views of Governments in to ICANN. The RSSAC are the root servers. And we’ve been talking and they provide information about how the root server system operates and the security and integrity of the root server system.

And finally but not least is the Security, Stability and Advisory Committee which is a group of experts, security experts who provide advice on security of the Domain Name System.

And the last slide, please. And that’s it. Thank you very much. Just some various ways of contacting ICANN. And my e-mail address was at the start of the presentation, I think. And it’s always good to hear from people. Sorry for running over time. My apologies for that.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you. Nice presentation. Let me ask if all the participants, do you have any questions for Adam? Please raise your hand. Unmute. Or write your question in the chat.

Or maybe Adam was completely clear. I don’t see any hands raised. So thank you very much again for the presentation. And I’m going to move to the third and last presentation of today, Gerben. He is from the International Standards platform in the Netherlands. The floor is yours.

>> GERBEN KLEIN BALTINK: Thank you, Gergana. Is my presentation visible?

>> Currently it’s not visible. Would you like me to set it up?

>> GERBEN KLEIN BALTINK: Yes, please. If you could do so, that would be very helpful. Just to introduce what we call the Dutch Internet standards platform, it is a really open organization, public, private where we want to focus on the adoption of modern Internet standards. And both Chris and Adam already have dived in to the basic protocols behind the Internet. And like those, most of these standards are not seen by end users. Most of the time anyhow. You may see https in front of an URL when you browse the Internet. But I guess that most – many of you never will pay much attention to the details behind it. And we do not ask you to dive in to these details. But we want to make sure that people understand why these standards enable the Internet to function.

So if I can have the next sheet. Here you will see the multi-stakeholder platform with public and private parties that came together in 2014 to discuss their worries about the lack of adoption of modern standards. They are developed. They are there. You can use them. But somehow it takes a lot of time before organizations start to pick up.

And what we would like to achieve, if I could have the next slide, please, is an open, free and secure Internet. And therefore, we think these standards are essential. So if I could have the next sheet. These are the standards. And those acronyms I will not explain them in detail. But the IPv6 protocol has been discussed already. It is a modern set of addresses. We need them to accommodate all the users and devices connected to the Internet. DNSSEC it was well explained by Adam. The other standards as mentioned. Making sure that your e-mail traffic works the way it should work. Receiver and recipient receives your e-mail. And there is nobody in between. The content of the e-mail is what was intended and you make sure that only those mails are delivered.

These are the standards we currently try to focus on. And underneath you see RPKI, the rooting protocol standards that we are diving in to. And that will be added to the list.

What we have done as a platform is established a group where we discuss these standards and the adoption level. And sometimes we start a campaign, for example, on secure e-mail or safe e-mail, whatever work you would prefer. Where we try to motivate end users of mail to do it in a better way. And to understand the importance of the security of mailing.

But the main thing we do is offer test tools and you can find them at internet.nl. If we can go to the next sheet, you see the home page of that website already developed in 2015 where we wanted to launch a test environment that was easy-to-use, perhaps not by a normal end user but at least by people understanding these standards to see if their website, their mail traffic or local Internet connection were using these modern standards. Not only security was key, but also the adoption of, for example, IPv6. And if you run the test, you get nice results. And I don’t show them here on purpose because we could have a lot of discussion on the scoring. For example, if you score 60%, is that good or bad? Is it sufficient? You can trust me if you score 100% you at least have these modern standards implemented in the right way. But that is not a necessity to have a good connection with website or with e-mail.

And any score above 80% shows you at least the people behind the domain name or behind a specific e-mail address are paying attention to these modern standards. What we have seen over the last few years is that because we offer this as an open source code as well on the GitHub, that other countries have taken up similar initiatives, reusing part of the internet.nl code, like Denmark, Portugal and Australia. And other countries are interested. We have received requests from Africa where several initiatives are looking in to how can this help us to promote these modern standards.

And these standards are not a goal in themselves. They are there to make the Internet work, to make e-mail traffic work, to have a secure connection and to make sure that everyone can be connected globally in a way that can enhance the trust you have in your connection. If we can go to the next sheet, that looks a little bit more technical perhaps because we also, besides the internet.nl website do have some batch test functionality where members of our platform can, for example, scan 1,000 different websites at a time. And do so every month, for example, or every two weeks or every six months to see what the uptake in the specific growth of websites is.

If you look at the city like the Hague in the Netherlands, they are responsible for well over 400 websites and they sometimes are not able to control all the managers of these websites in an easy way. So they run a test like this, a batch test, to see if the overall adoption of standards is good enough.

If we can move to the next sheet, please. The Government participating in the platform Internet standards has its – a little bit easier than let’s say the general public because for the Dutch Government, it has been a good way of applying standards by complying or explain. So there is a long list of standards that Government organizations have to comply to or explain why they don’t. So measuring for the Dutch Government what the uptake on these standards is one way to help them see are we doing well or should we still improve. That is, of course, not as easy for the rest of society because there is not a single entity that can tell, for example, a Dutch website that they should apply these standards. That’s not what we are aiming at either.

We want to stimulate the use of these standards and not have it regulated. If we can go to the next sheet, the basic message of the platform is the following, what we would like to achieve is that both venders, so the people offering Internet services, software and hardware, do apply these modern standards, especially standards like DNSSEC and DANE. We want to encourage end users, the customer to make future requests with those venders if they don’t see the standard implemented. And we want policymakers to make sure that they stimulate the use of modern Internet standards to keep the Internet open, free and secure.

And, of course, we understand that dealing with these standards isn’t easy. So we offer the internet.nl environment to help you. There is a lot of explanatory texts to help you understand what is lacking if you have less than a 100% score and how you can improve it. But also offering the source code behind it as something that can be reused in a different way by other organizations and countries.

And, of course, these countries sometimes need support. And we can offer them the basic support, to set up the tooling and to understand the mechanism that we have built. So working together can make sure that modern Internet standards are really taken up at a higher level than they are used nowadays.

So I would like to go to the next sheet. Some concluding remarks. We really think, we believe that the Internet should remain open, free and secure, accessible for everybody and making use of these modern standards will help you to do that. Tooling like internet.nl may assist you in becoming more aware. So I would advise everyone to check, for example, your own organization, both website and the e-mail at internet.nl. The tool is in English as well. So it should be easy-to-use. We should make sure together that policymakers can do what they can do to assist in that process. I’m not sure if there are any questions or if we still have time for that, Gergana, but this concludes my presentation.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Gerben. Does anybody have any questions for Gerben? I don’t see any hands up. So that – you can use – yes, Jose is saying use the queue for questions, see for comment when you ask for the floor in the chat.

I see one hand. Wout.

>> You should get a request on your screen. I’m going to ask you to unmute. Yes.

>> WOUT DE NATRIS: Can you hear me? And see me I hope? Thank you for the presentations. They were very clear and very well to follow and understand. I would like to put some intention, follow-up on what Gerben was saying, a lot of these standards exist for over 20 years in some cases and for some reason they are not being taken up. This is for Internet standards. There are all these applications and tools that are built and secured by design mostly as well. When you look at, for example, the creation of software, there are all sorts of rules, tools to create software that are not being used. Websites are built insecure by design mostly but there are other robust tools for that for over ten years and they are not being used. And this can go on and on and on. And it shows a sort of pattern about insecurity over the Internet.

So within the Internet Governance Forum we have started a Dynamic Coalition on Internet security standards and safety. That has the goal and the purpose to assist organizations with developing these tools in a much more swift way. So what we are aiming to do is basically to make sure that the sort of market failure that currently exists and the comments that the Internet is turning in to, to actually change that in the first way. The first way it can be done by creating business cases. And the business case is created in a way that is shown by Governments that are procuring with all these security in mind and not go from adoption.

That the same could go for major organizations and industry. When they buy new tools for their ICT and IoT that they have the security in mind. And finally, that from society all sorts of pressure needs to start to be built. And this precious legislation with the fear of fracturing the Internet. So there has to be another way and that pressure can be built through consumer organizations that they test ICT development. It can be done by parliamentarians that start asking questions to policymakers about the security in their country. It can be done through the media. It can be done through other organizations. But one of the most important things is would be to test relentlessly. They are testing the Internet and everything around them 24/7 a day and are using the vulnerabilities to their advantage. Why can’t societies like yours organize something that matches that. So hackers are used in a positive way and a repository for mistakes in products so they can do the mandate. And these are the sort of the programs that the Dynamic Coalition will be running over the next two years. There is a role of the parliamentarians.

So there was a question put to them in the announcement of the session. So I hope you have a few minutes left to discuss that and what roles parliamentarians could play in this – yes, I know. I’m stopping here. So what the role could be. So thank you.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Wout. I see a hand from Marco. You would want to respond to what Wout was saying?

>> Yes. I agree with Wout’s motion that we need to make sure people are aware of what’s out there and make sure the security standards are explored. I would like to pick on the notion that as I think I heard Wout say that the Internet is unsecure by design or these old protocols were insecure by design. I think that’s the wrong frame. The world has changed. The Internet itself has changed. And Chris explained some of these things were unforeseen. And with regards to security and privacy yes, the world has changed. And a lot of these things were unforeseen when the original protocols were developed or maybe not technically possible to use the protocols. I would not say it is insecure by design. There are mere changes and the Internet needs to adapt. We have a lot of new constraints to take in to account. Thank you.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you, Marco. So I just want to introduce one topic for discussion perhaps. So this is the session for parliamentarians. And we do have Maria from the Italian Senate here. So I want to introduce a quick topic for discussions for everyone when we are talking about the work that parliamentarians do and especially with the recent efforts from the EU but also other regions in the world to regulate the Internet.

What does that mean to regulate the Internet because that the internet has a lot of layers. That’s a layer that users are mostly familiar with and the other technical layers below that where, for example, the roots reserved, the IP addresses are. When there is regulation that – that it mostly concerns what is going on on the top layer of the Internet. There is also recent regulation that has tried to address some things that are going on in the technical layers. And even when politicians don’t aim certain regulation to concern the technical layers it affects them indirectly by changing things in the information layer. So it is an interesting question how we want to preserve a global interoperable internet at the same time as different regions of the world are trying to develop different regulations that is not necessarily – that might not necessarily be compatible with each other.

So it’s an interesting question how to keep the Internet one and global and interoperable. So I’d like to give the floor to Ms. Mantovani for her intervention.

>> MARIA LAURA MANTOVANI: Thank you. Thank you to all of you for this invite, this invitation. And I would like to present myself briefly. And I mean I am currently a member of the Senate, Italian Parliament since three years only. And before I served for 30 years in Universities in information technology services, in particular to build Internet for University for all our countries.

So I’m very pleased to be here today in this meeting. And appreciate very much your presentations that are done before. But the question that you asked to answer, which is how the Internet principles of global interoperability can be configured at the national level is linked to an important goal that we are trying to achieve at the European level that is digital sovereignty.

And the ambition to achieve technological sovereignty in Europe is, in fact, at the top of the agenda of the current European Commission. In her agenda for Europe the Commission precedent also stated that it is necessary to achieve European technological sovereignty in some critical sectors.

And strengthening Europe’s digital capabilities and independence in this area are an important part of its broader aspiration for greater autonomy in the global stage for world powers such as U.S. and China.

All this must be achieved respecting the barriers of the modern technological society which are as indicated in the question the global connectivity and interoperability.

In the meantime, Italy is creating its national cloud. The process for the creation of the national strategic poll, the cloud aimed to store all the application of the Italian public administration and the citizens’ data will start by July. The recovery plan allocates 900 million Euros to this operation. And according to what our Minister of Digital Transition has declared, he intends to end the migration to the cloud by 2022.

The national strategic poll will be a set of four physical data centers on the Italian ground with the capability to offer cloud services. The migration as estimated in the recovery plan will involve 200 large public central institutions and 80 local public health institutions.

Management of this cloud should be maintained by the Ministry of Innovation together with the Department of Digital Transformation. The Government plan to accelerate to each the award of the tender for 2021 and to be operational in the second half of 2022.

In addition, an important infrastructure called an Italian UNAR should be included in this national strategic hub. UNAR aims to be a positive impact on the future of Italian schools system.

Until now Internet access in Italian schools has been featured by a range of different connection types which over time have become obsolete and inefficient, unable to support efficiently the several school activities. We note also a high lack of standardization in the connection due to the existence of systematic differences linked to the territory, the grade and the size of the schools.

Also from the point of view of the expenditures that schools have to bear there are many differences between schools, some of them have financial endowment. Others not.

Lastly, often these costs are based on an old and expensive context that would need to be revised. To solve this criticality of my country, I carried on an important proposal that was approved in the context of the law for complimentary funds to our national recovery plan that establishes a fund of 135 million Euros for the creation of the single national education interconnection network.

This network will allow schools to provide advanced digital services and to achieve some fundamental goals such as interconnecting schools to each other and also to the regional schools offices in every area of Italy and to the Ministry of Education and globally to the Internet.

In addition it will be possible to provide schools with basic network services such as the DNS, for example, and data storage and cloud computing but also to develop and provide a national service for integrated digital education which offers – which even after the pandemic will continue to play a central role in teaching in general for training of all students.

In conclusion, I would like to point out that UNAR has been welcomed in Europe where a similar model network already exists. I’m referring to the Giante network that interconnects the national research and education networks for about 10,000 Universities and research centers and over 50 million users. UNAR could therefore be a model to be replicated in every European country and be adopted by the union itself to connect all European schools on the model on – of the Giante network. Thank you for your attention.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you very much, Ms. Mantovani.

>> I see two hands. Peter and Vittiro has a hand. There has been some chat comments which has been a follow-on on the discussions we had earlier.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: I see a hand from Peter and a hand from Vittiro. Please go ahead.

>> Thank you. Thank you, Maria. That was a –

>> GERGANA PETROVA: There is some music. A nice break.

>> Can you still hear me?

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Yes. We hear the music again.

>> That might be from the Geraton.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Go ahead.

>> I’m not sure where it came from. That was a very inspiring suggestion. And I think it’s important to keep our focus on educating those that will be the next generation of the people that will be implementing and developing new standards. So thank you for that. I had a comment on or a response to Gergana’s question on the potential conflict between global standards and national policies. Just wanted to point out that we have a really nice example of where – of how it is possible to avoid that conflict. And that example is that the local country codes. So while they respect global standards, which is what makes the DNS work in the end, they can set their local policies. The manager in close cooperation with their local Internet communities decides on which policies the .nl domain will set. The .eu is another nice example. They can decide on who gets to register .eu domain. And it is not in conflict with any of the global standards. So it is perfectly possible to match both of these requirements that we have set for an Internet that is global but it is also fulfilling the needs of their local – of its local Internet communities that it serves. Thank you.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you. And next I have Vittiro.

>> Hello. Thank you. I have a question. It is a double question. What’s the difference between this new UNL and existing guidelines which has been connecting schools in Italy? But the most important question, whether this new platform will put a requirement of using open source or open standards solutions. Because in many European countries there is an attempt to use new technology. And also hosted in each individual European country rather than just adopting the global platforms from the U.S. or China and licensing them. So the idea – the question is whether there will be also in Italy requirements to use open standards and open source solutions or just a procurement channel for the big technology from the U.S.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: I think this is a question for Ms. Mantovani.

>> MARIA LAURA MANTOVANI: Thank you, Vittiro, for this question. I think that there is – it is evident that it is a problem, not only in Italy. I think about the offer of commercial products for schools and in general for the public administration and the alternatives that’s offered by open source platforms and systems that has not the same power of the others. So we try as legislators to offer the possibility of a ground to build system or software open source and open platform solutions.

But we cannot make directly the solution. We expect also from the society and from the general from the business partner to observe these solutions.

>> GERGANA PETROVA: Thank you very much for the answer. Are there any more questions or comments from anybody? I don’t see any more hands. And I’m just aware of the time. We are a little bit over. So I think it is maybe a good time to close the discussion.

I want to thank all the speakers, really nice presentations. And I see that we have also attendees from the youth school. I hope it was useful for them to get an overview of how the organizations in the Internet ecosystem work together and also to hear a little bit more about the Internet standards. So thank you again to all of the speakers and all the participants in the discussion.

And with this I would like to close the session. Thank you for participating.

>> Thank you.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thanks to the speakers and Gergana. I would like to give the floor to Sandra Hoferichter, the Secretary-General of EuroDIG to make an announcement.

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you. And thank you, Gergana and the session organizers for hosting this session. I think it was a very interesting one. Can you hear me?

>> Yes.

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Perfect. There was a – in our program we have now announced that there is a Round Table with parliamentarians taking place. Unfortunately and I say that with a very sad eye we have to cancel this session because we have only one or two parliamentarians had who the time to participate in this session. And this won’t make a Round Table. That’s why we extended this session, the first one, a little bit more. And I’m saying this with a particular sadness because we were so successful in bringing in parliamentarians to the global IGF and virtual IGF in 2019 and 2020. And we could not get the same successful European IGF. I am not sure what the reason is. It might be that the end of June is a very bad timing for parliamentarians because they are just about to go in to the summer break and have to take the latest or the last decisions before the summer break. That could be one reason.

Another reason could be that a UN Forum has more attention for them and for their stakeholders than a European Forum. I think we have to assess a little bit what the reasons are. But we also have to be frank that it would make no sense to continue with this Round Table session if we have no Parliamentarians.

Our session is streamed. And parliamentarians, we would encourage them to listen to the discussion we just had this morning. And I would like to thank very much the organizers for organizing this session. I think it was a very great information, value for them, too. And we will try and continue trying involving Parliamentarians in to the Internet Governance debate. The next session will start at 11:45 as I see. Go back together and enjoy the networking and be back – no, no. It is not 11:45. It will be later. Please check the Wiki because the Round Table is canceled.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you. We hope you will stay with us. Return to the Gather Town tab that you have on your computer. Feel free to roam around our conference center. If you click on the studio name in the participant’s list and click follow you are taken to them directly. So you will be able to go straight there. Our help desk is there to assist. And you can find them by clicking on respond. If you click on your name at the bottom of the screen you can see a little tab that says respond. The next session will start at 3:15. We hope to see you back then. Bye for now.

>> Bye everyone.

>> Thanks very much.