Should public policy priorities and requirements be included when designing Internet standards? – WS 05 2020

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11 June 2020 | 14:30-16:00 | Studio The Hague | Video recording | Transcript | Forum
Consolidated programme 2020 overview / Day 1

Proposals: #10, #40, #45 (#120, #161)

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Session teaser

At present internet standards are developed by technology engineers, largely independently of other stakeholder groups. How should public policy priorities and requirements from those stakeholder groups be taken into account in the development of new Internet standards?

Session description

The purpose of the session is to debate whether and how public policy priorities and requirements should be taken into consideration in the development of new Internet standards, enhancing the current system where standards are developed by technology engineers largely in isolation of other stakeholder groups, and ensuring that the Internet’s technical evolution follows a direction set through multi-stakeholder consensus.

This has led to a situation where some technology engineers are able to promote the adoption of standards that are designed with clear policy objectives in mind, however there is a perception by some that these policy objectives are those of the technology engineers and are not based on multi-stakeholder input. Due to this, decisions are being taken and standards developed that may override the public policy preferences of democratic states, potentially to the detriment of their citizens when it comes to considerations such as privacy, cybersecurity or parental choice.

Questions for consideration during the session:

  • If public policy priorities and requirements are be taken into consideration in the development of new Internet standards, is there a body or process that can provide the necessary public policy input to standards groups? Or should a new body or process be created for this purpose?
  • Which stakeholders should be included in such a body or process to give it legitimacy?
  • How should this body or process interact with the Internet standards groups?
  • Should it provide advance direction, or should it examine the proposed standards before their final release, or both?
  • Should its input be binding, or just advisory?

Format

We will start with three speakers briefly sharing their differing views on the topic to stimulate debate before opening up to others to gain further input. Technology permitting, we will take advantage of the virtual nature of the event to poll all of the session participants for their opinions at the start and then again towards the end of the discussion.

Further reading

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: Website of EuroDIG

People

Until .

Please provide name and institution for all people you list here.

Focal Point

  • Vittorio Bertola
  • Andrew Campling

Organising Team (Org Team) List them here as they sign up.

  • Nadia Tjahja
  • Eva Ignatuschtschenko
  • Amali De Silva-Mitchell
  • Riccardo Nanni
  • Wout de Natris
  • Sofia Badari
  • Peter Koch
  • Debora Cerro Fernandez
  • Zoey Barthelemy
  • Kris Shrishak

Key Participants

  • Fred Langford, Deputy CEO and CTO of the Internet Watch Foundation
  • Mattia Fantinati, Member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Republic
  • Jörn Erbguth, Head of Tech Insights, Geneva Micro Labs

Moderator

  • Vittorio Bertola, Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange

Remote Moderator

Trained remote moderators will be assigned on the spot by the EuroDIG secretariat to each session.

Reporter

Current discussion, conference calls, schedules and minutes

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  • dates for virtual meetings or coordination calls
  • short summary of calls or email exchange

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Messages

Messages commented and under discussion. Please see https://comment.eurodig.org/eurodig-2020-messages/ws-5-should-public-policy-priorities-and-requirements-be-included-when-designing-internet-standards/


Find an independent report of the session from the Geneva Internet Platform Digital Watch Observatory at https://dig.watch/resources/should-public-policy-priorities-and-requirements-be-included-when-designing-internet.

Video record

https://youtu.be/QSM1h9CNy8Q?t=18657

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.


>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: So I hope everyone had a good lunch break and is ready for the next session. We continue workshops with all three studios. In studio The Hague we will discuss public policy priorities and requirements.

Workshop 7 is about criminal justice in cyberspace and what’s next.

In Studio 3S we discuss social media, opportunity, rights and responsibilities.

If you would like to join any of the sessions in Studio Berlin or in Studio 3S you have to change the Zoom room. If you are fine with public priorities and requirements that is here in studio The Hague.

I see my colleague Nadia is here from the break. Were you able to relax?

>> NADIA TJAHJA: It was nice to go out a little bit. It is a little cloudy here. It’s great to be back in sessions and see what the next session will have to show us.

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: With this and without further delay, I hand over to you to open the session and introduce the moderator and the conduct and everything. Over to you, Nadia.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much.

Hello, everyone. For those of you tuning in, welcome from. My name is Nadia Tjahja and I’m joined by my colleague and remote moderator today, Auke Pals.

>> AUKE PALS: Good afternoon. My name is Auke Pals and I will be moderating this session. We have muted all participants. I can unmute you if you have any questions. You can raise your hand in the participants list and afterwards we will give you the floor.

Besides this, you can also state questions in the chat. In the chat if you are not able to use audio. Then I will read the question for you.

Furthermore, you can also use your Forum. At the Forum you can have a discussion which can continue also after the session has finished. Thank you.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Before we get started I would like to go over our conduct. EuroDIG is all about dialogue, your contribution, your thoughts and your questions make the sessions inspiring and engaging. We hope that you will choose to participate in these virtual sessions. Now that you joined the studio you will be able to see our name in the participants list. Make sure that you have your full name displayed so we know exactly who we are talking about. You can set this up by clicking on your nail and enter rename. When you entered you were muted. If you have a question, we will remove that. Raise your hand and we will unmute it. We ask when you ask your question, that you switch your video on so we can see who we are talking to be and have a discussion with. Do state your name and affiliation photograph now I would like to go to the next session.

Workshop 5, Should Public Policy Priorities and Requirements be Included When Designing Internet Standards?

I would like to hand it over to the moderator, Vittorio Bertola, the head of policy and development at Open-Xchange.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you, everyone, welcome to the workshop which is a follow-up to the one we had this morning. I’m happy to be your moderator this afternoon.

I would like to recognize Andrew Campling, my colleague with – and Ilona Stadnik, the rapporteur for this workshop as well as the one this morning. She already reported very well.

Before I get to the initial key participants and before giving them the floor I would like to summarize the topic because it is, I think, a relatively new topic for EuroDIG.

In a way, the discussion is not new. The discussion is still about the intergovernance model, the multistakeholder model evolving in the last 20 years, say maybe more.

Definitely more in the case of the standardisation procedures which date back to the ’70s and the ’80s with the initial meetings of the IETF. The discussion has been mostly should this be run by a multistakeholder coalition versus should it be run by government. Some people like to summarize by putting names of organisations into this. The IETF or ITU model. In the end there is general agreement that this is not a matter for governments alone. The multistakeholder model is good for the Internet and what has allowed the Internet to grow.

But then in recent years the concerns are grown relating to the fact that the Internet, the community often goes ahead and creates changes which are policy and social impacts, but these changes are the effect of new technological deployments not discussed in multistakeholder settings. At least this is how this is how some of the stakeholders feel.

Especially the discussion around this topic was born through the discussion of GPS and in general the great inception project which has taken under the organising the Internet are pushing for opening everything which ...

(Zoom frozen.)

>> NADIA TJAHJA: It seems that we have lost Vittorio. I would like to ask Andrew to open this up and take over.

>> ANDREW CAMPLING: Thanks, Nadia. And good afternoon, everyone. Unfortunate that Vittorio dropped just then. As you say it is very much about having a discussion as to whether we should have muscle stakeholder involved in the setting of Internet standards, contrasting the different interested parties, whether that be governments, the private sector, the tech sector specifically, and indeed Civil Society and others.

So that is really the purpose of the session for today is to get into that.

We have three key participants lined up to share with us their initial thoughts. And I would like to start first with Fred Langford, the Deputy CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation. So could I ask Fred firstly to give us your perspective? And then I’ll introduce the other two key participants if Vittorio hasn’t joined us by then. Over to you, Fred.

>> FRED LANGFORD: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you very much for the invitation. My name is Fred Langford, Deputy CEO and Chief Technical Officer in the Internet Watch Foundation, the U.K.’s hot line for receiving and seeking out reports of child sexual abuse material on the Internet. We work with industry, government, police, NGOs, and standard setting bodies where possible to be able to provide services really that protect consumers from being inadvertently exposed to child sexual abuse content. Get back to the point about whether or not we should have a muscle stakeholder involvement in setting standards. I think truly yes. For me it is a clear yes.

And the reasons being that we obviously, I am a technically minded person, technical by nature. I understand how the standards are set at the moment, but I think there’s a glaring hole missing for understanding what that public policy is. I’m not saying I have the answers to how this is going to happen, but as an example being children. Working with children. Children don’t have a voice here. And a loss of the public policy priority are around children, making the Internet a safe place for children to use such a fantastic resource as the Internet.

Occasionally what happens is some of the standard setting catch the child protection group are blind sided because they are not necessarily technical in nature. They wouldn’t be able to keep up to date with what’s happening with the standards.

Like I say, how that happens, I think that hopefully these sorts of discussions make those sorts of things really clear for us. With many countries looking at regulation, I think it is key that we start thinking about, okay, if regulation is going to come into play, how is that going to work with the current process for setting Internet standards online?

So the call that myself and the IWF have been making around this is really whatever the standards are that are being developed they should not decrease the current protections in place. They should enhance somehow, at least consider what the current policy considerations should be around these sorts of content online and how the changes in some of the standards will impact on that. I think it is a big hole missing.

I understand there are lots of viewpoints that the Internet standard setting should be a purely engineering position, which I don’t disagree with on a certain level, but it is the considerations that everybody is putting forth. If you are writing an engineering standard, you would put together all of those requirements you want to make. I think that’s what is missing at the moment is the policy requirement.

What is the policy requirement rather than a purely engineering requirement there? So if there are no sort of considerations being put in, what we end up with is this patchwork of work-arounds as people try to work around the standard that is being agreed. It is a bit like playing catch-up. It is always much neither, tidier and much more transparent if everybody can see how those considerations have been taken on board from the outset of those standards being submitted and considered by all relevant parties.

So really, I wanted to set out as an NGO point of view and sort of child protection online standard that actually how can we make sure this works?

I think truly yes, but how is the question I’m going to lead this group to discuss.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you, Fred. Sorry for disappearing. I guess the Internet was telling me to keep my remarks shorter. Without further ado I introduce the second key participant, he is Mattia Fantinati, the member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian government. So Mattia, go ahead.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: Mattia, I have unmuted you.

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: Sorry. Can you hear me now? No.

>> NADIA TJAHJA: We can hear you.

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: Fantastic again. Thank you very much, Vittorio, for your invitation. I think this is a very, very important point about the Internet standards. When we all agree that when we talk about Internet standards we are facing to the new challenges like artificial intelligence or just machine learning, IoT. What it really means, it means that we don’t know which will be the next future we are talking about.

That is a very problem for the government and for the parliament. I’m talking about legislators. And it is very difficult sometimes to draw an initiative today that will impact on the next future. You don’t know which will be the mark in that future, which you wrote the laws to. And if you don’t have a long-term vision, if you don’t set up the standards, if you don’t set up the pillars at the beginning, what you really create, just keeping the writing low is a surprise. In a sort of way you struggle with that. Instead we want to take away all the burdens for our company because we want, of course, we want to improve our market, but we want to protect human rights. That is because I really think that to take the issue to solve this kind of trade-off between the private company and Internet standard institution government, I think that both aspects are to be considered. One is that a strong reliability market to structure innovation, the government should foster and – but all the governments set up the standard of coding and what does that means? I think that transfers of coding should be relied on the human scientific vision and that means transparency.

And then we don’t have to forget that behind the code there is always political decision. And that is why the political plays a fundamental role of it. The algorithm isolation of the Internet and artificial intelligence and machine learning applies issues and this is very important. And around the world the states are very different. I think that we can analyze if we are a lot of state that are very, very larger. In Italy we have a small, medium enterprise and in Europe as well and we have to try to set up a sort of ally and to play a thing the pillars to go further. I think the European Commission has done a very good work just setting up the pillars. One is that boost the technology and industrial capacity and take the Internet across the economy.

The second is to prepare for economic social changes. So we have something new that we don’t know yet.

But a third one that is very, very important is to ensure an appropriate and ethical legal framework. That is really important. That is because I think that to do that, it cannot be done by a single parliament or single government. I think we need sharing knowledge. We need sharing experience, we need sharing – because I really think, and I am confident about that, that we need a multistakeholder platform. That is why I would like to discuss about if someone can make me some question, that is why the Italian government is going to set up a IGF structure with a legal structure. It is important. It is a multistakeholder foundation and it is really important.

Let me please conclude and I’m taking over to the other speakers that we need people believing in the Internet. To do that, we have to increase the seam of safety of the people and the protection of human rights.

Also I think that people should not only trust in the Internet, but they also benefit from the user for the personal and professional lives. This is the challenge and this is the question because if the people consider the Internet as something that is a black box, I think that it is a very bad point for the user, the new application, and for the economy as well.

Thank you very much.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you, Mattia. So we will now move to the third key participant, Jörn Erbguth. He is Head of Tech Insights at Geneva Micro Labs. Please go ahead. Thank you.

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Thank you. I think government needs to be more involved in Internet standards. Not just because they have a – but because they need to respect the Internet standards more. We see the issue before us and the GDPR you can make a law that puts some part of Internet standards, the use of Internet standards into a legal jeopardy. And we see all the government-based hacking and Microsoft Geneva digital convention that it didn’t succeed. So we see a lack of respect of Internet standards by governments. And the hope is if they have a bigger role in the Internet standards they might more respect it.

And actually, the situation currently is not good. We are paying a lot of money for IT security and then we pay again in taxes that our government breaks this IT security. This doesn’t make sense. We need good IT security and we need, of course, to reach some consensus on the policy reach. Of course, this is very difficult because some people want information, freedom, higher than others. We have to see what common policy could be. This is, of course, a very difficult task to reach.

Of course, we not only need governments but we need a multistakeholder approach. But I think the involvement of government is there to protect the Internet from government because if they are involved, if the Internet standards have a higher legal value compared to other laws we can protect the Internet better.

So I think we need to involve them more in order to give the Internet more protection against single governments that would like to abuse governments for espionage or for other things.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. Now we are going to basically open the floor to the discussion with everyone who is attending. So you have at least two different ways to intervene. First one is to raise your hand in Zoom. If you want to speak, which we would welcome. We would like to see people speaking. If you prefer to do it in writing you can also post your question to the chat. It is just put awe Q in front of it and enter into the chat.

Before we get to the questions I also wanted to say that we have some organised polling questions for you. So we will ask the studio to show the first one. I hope everyone right now is familiar with this tool. So you have to go to www.menti.com and use the cold to start this question. We would like to ask you this question, which is basically the topic.

What is your initial thought? If you could go there and say what you think we would like to note it on the audience at the beginning and there will be more questions that I will throw at you during the session.

I see the first answers coming.

Now I think we can open the floor and basically start by the questions that have already been posted in the chat. I will ask our moderator, my moderator to relay some of the questions. Please go ahead.

>> AUKE PALS: Thanks a lot. The first question is from Patrick – sorry if I mispronounce your name: The question is, we heard from speakers earlier today on the subject of development of encrypted DNS. And its impact content filtering and court ordered blocking. Oh, the chat is moving down.

What steps can Civil Society and interested groups take to participate more fully in Internet engineering tasks and W3C standard processes?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Is there anyone in the panel that wants to take the question? Fred first?

>> FRED LANGFORD: I think I should probably answer that. Hi, Patrick. There are lots of things to be done, but I think what Civil Society has which is an issue is actually expensive and time-consuming to be able to follow what is happening not just in confidentiality of the current standards but also in what is coming. You need to get up to speed with things that are coming over the horizon that people need to have that input into. I have an unusual with based in the world of NGOs and Civil Society, not many of us have a technical understanding of how these things are developed. That comes from my past life and my current role. That’s where the struggle is, finding that information and being able to understand how it is delivered because it is very technical in nature. But also to be able to have potentially even something like a centralized area whereby that they can pull those resources. Otherwise there is duplication of effort.

The main thing is for the board to understand in these organisations that actually these are very important things. They need to be able to fund those. And to be able to give people the right to be able to get involved.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Okay. Jörn?

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I think organisations are usually quite open. So you can go there and nobody is blocking you in Civil Society. But I agree with Fred that this requires resources. This requires knowledge, understanding. And to know what is at the forefront of technology, to know the impact, et cetera. This takes a lot of time, a lot of money and knowledge. But of course, in principle, those organisations are quite open. Sometimes you need to pay an entry fee to be Abe to be part of the standards process. Sometimes you don’t. Maybe there is something we could improve there, but in principle it is a very transparent process. It is not intransparent. Law making is much more intransparent than standards making.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. In the room we also have our long time IGF participant and he is willing to speak. I will be giving him the floor. Please, Wolf, provide us your comments. You should be unmuted.

>> OLAF KOLKMAN: My name is Olaf Kolkman. I work for the Internet Society, where I’m Principal of Internet Advocacy and Technology.

I have some history in the IETF, but with the disclaimer that I talk about the IETF and not for the IETF. With that in place, I can say a few words.

What Jörn and Fred just said is indeed true. The IETF is in essence an open organisation. All its materials are available online. All decisions are made on public and archived lists for all to see. There is, of course, a process. And the process is something that you have to learn. It takes true effort to do that. I fully appreciate that it might take actually, you know, a significant time of some of these resources to understand the process and get sufficiently confident to participate in these processes.

But I do think that is the case for any type of decision making processes. That is also the case if you try to involve yourself in your local municipality. You have to invest in getting up to speed with decision making processes and the way the debate is structured and followed.

Public policy trade-offs are often included in the work or drive some of the work of the IETF. I’ve got some examples. However, people cannot always see all the possible unintended consequences, so to speak, of the proposals. Having people around that can see that is actually important.

I can go into an example of a public policy need that was brought to the IETF, namely when the government got rid of the POTS, plain old telephone system and moved to complete digital, Robo calling was an issue. That was wrought to the IETF by the ITC. The IETF went off and did the work there. There is an example of a public policy issue brought into the IETF, explained in technical terms buy someone who was familiar with the process and that can be done.

We at the Internet Society have a programme in which we bring policymakers towards the IETF to get them a little bit familiarized with the process and show them that the barrier, the perceived barrier might not be that high.

A final point that I want to make. I do not want to take hold of the whole meeting. There are many types of different standards. When we talk about standards and norms, there are a multitude of them. Voluntary norms, voluntary open technical building block standards that are created in the IETF are completely different from the government sort of mandated or signed off more architectural pillars of work that is done in other standards organisations, more formal standards operations.

For some standards organisations the material is absolutely not available if you are not a member, for instance.

So with that, I’m going to leave it because I think I might be dumping a lot of information here. I am willing to answer any specific questions about IETF process or questions around technology. I happen to know something about DNS. And if that is something to be discussed, I’m happy.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: No, and thank you, Olaf. I must say we have tried to bring people from the steering group or some of the IETF leadership. And in the end no one was available, so it is really nice that you were here and you can provide this standpoint.

I had people with raised hands, but I think you know where, if I understand it, you don’t want to speak for this question. The last person is Andrew Campling and we can move to the other questions unless there is anyone else.

I will back up. I will still give Andrew the floor and let you speak. Andrew?

>> ANDREW CAMPLING: Thank you, Vittorio. I just really picking up on the point that Olaf made about the IETF being open, which in many respects I find the IETF quite contradictory in that you’re absolutely right, it is very open. All the papers are published. You can attend the events remotely, et cetera. That is all fantastically good.

I know the Internet Society does great work in trying to encourage participation.

Where I see the challenge, though, is the culture of the IETF or at least some of the participants is such that they do not welcome contributions from anyone that they might perceive as representing a government or other agencies or indeed some Members of Civil Society such as Fred is one of the panelists, I’m sure.

Organisations like Fred’s.

So we will often discount their contributions quite publicly, which I think is extremely unfortunate. So that, the other issue is the IETF has an explicit policy of not taking into account public policy requirements or indeed impacts of technologies. That’s something that is stated quite frequently in lots of the discussions. Those aren’t intended to be considerations, albeit we can argue that a number of the technologies absolutely have public policy impacts.

So my view is that they should be considered, but through policy of the IETF they are not. To be fair it doesn’t have the standards in place to do that in any case.

As I say, it purports to be diverse and open. That isn’t the actuality as I find it in the mailing lists or indeed in the meetings of the IETF. So there is a contradiction there in my view. Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you, Andrew. Now we have Andrea?

>> AUKE PALS: If I may? I suggest because we are also having questions in the chat to take turns. So one question from the chat and then one raised hand so we can have a dynamic discussion.

So this was the question from Carsten Schiefner to Jörn: Why would governments need to respect Internet standards more? They are the governments, they set standards themselves. Or do they?

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Internet only works if everybody adheres to the standards. Internet is global. Basically governments need to agree on what they accept and what they respect. And then they have to respect it.

So Internet standards should have the same recognition as legal treaties where governments also bind themselves to adhere to certain rules.

This is basically the other side of government involvement into Internet standards. Then they might respect them better.

Of course, if it is a very difficult decision what kind of policy should be followed. This is very difficult to decide on. And if, for example, there has been recently a European parliament paper that proposes an action plan. And I’m reading it. I could share it if you want it. Should we share it? No? Okay.

Basically, it reads: A European firewall Internet would first ecosystem in Europe based on data and innovation. It would drive competition and set standards similar to what has happened in China in the past 20 years. The foundations of such a European cloud democratic values, transparency, competition and data protection. And obviously the values are not information freedom. And so we have a lot of very diverse views on what is the right policy should be. And of course, I completely understand that IETF tried to avoid this fight. And it tried to promote rather a free access policy, information freedom policy by excluding other thoughts.

But of course, governments are not respecting it. They do – they intervene, they – on communication. They basically need to be bound by a certain regulatory regime, by a certain treaty. This would basically protect the Internet from what is happening now. That we are seeing that censorship is mounting. That Internet is breaking down. At least some try to break it down into national or regional nets.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So I will now give the floor to Andrea and maybe after that we can see the second question and continue the discussion.

So Andre?

>> Andre Malnacia: I’m from Portugal. I’m a part of technical communities. I’m a technical person.

I feel that all of these policies should meet standards by nontechnical people. This should, these people should also take the floor as well.

Let me just show you some negative examples on how this can turn into a really bad situation. As an example, a few years ago we had the BGP hijacking from China from someone who was probably a politician and decided let’s hijack or separate certain network traffic and that affected the whole Internet. There was no actual knowledge of all of the consequences that this could have.

Some specific examples on governments not having any technical knowledge or respect forth standards can also affect it.

One of the examples I have here is a few years ago, maybe five, six years ago, I’m not really sure, when we had that problem with the United States spying on emails from Germany and other countries. The President of Brazil actually suggested creating their own alternative to Gmail. And that, of course, didn’t work because all of the technical implications that would come to that, they ended up giving up – for that time, the sound bite was let’s do something different, let’s make us independent from Google, from any other provider. Of course, that doesn’t work.

So it is, you sometimes see politicians that want to get elected and try to intervene in standards, you know, definitions and try to modulate standards, whatever they feel is necessary to get the message across. And then something goes wrong.

Just a quick example of two other cases. So one of them is very recently with all of the virus situation. You have Zoom, we are currently using Zoom. Everyone is using Zoom.

In the beginning of March we had a lot of politicians criticizing Zoom for not meeting up with encryption standards and privacy standards.

Some of those problems, the majority of problems were very insignificant problems. One of them is that all of the sessions have password 1234. Of course, you can’t win any miracles when something like that happens.

They did fix the problem. The situation is still ongoing. So people still treat Zoom as a bad thing. In a way it is not yet perfect, but you do have negative feedback from things which are very small. Last one is one that also has to do especially with copyright. So previous years we had a lot of talk about copyrights. There was one scenario here in Portugal which happened which is very funny. All of the copyright scenarios where the politicians intervene and say we need to use AI to block things that aren’t copyrighted and we have one of our providers, our Internet providers and also television providers which provided something like, you know, maybe Netflix, HBO, something like that. They were advertising that feature on YouTube.

Then YouTube blocked that advertising that they were legally allowed to do. This was a very big ISP hearing in Portugal. It does have side effects when people make decisions, take over standard which have a lot of technical contents.

And then change it to something that shouldn’t really owe you are can. All really occur.

Although I agree that nontechnical people should take the floor an also intervene in all of these standards, the majority of the scenarios is that if they have too much capacity of decision, that can go terribly wrong.

So thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you, Andre. I ask the studio to show the second question and then we will go for another question from the chat. Whenever you are ready, try to provide an answer to the best. Okay, please go ahead.

>> AUKE PALS: Thanks a lot. Then we have a question from Michael. Sorry if I do not pronounce your name right. Governments are invited as everyone else to participate or not. Question mark. Why do they not show up? In turn they don’t invite stakeholders when they set up their surveillance standards.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Okay. So is there anyone in our panel that wants to take the question? Jörn?

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I have no specific knowledge about it. I heard there was some influence from the U.S. government in encryption standards, but I have no first hand knowledge of this. So I guess they are indirectly influencing the standards already.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Okay. Mattia, do you want to say anything?

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: Yes, Italy chooses the IGF model. I think there is always a better model, but I think that we need a model.

I would like to just a little bit respond to the former issues. I would like to have a very quick view of my personal background. As a legislator, I used to be in the previous terms a member of government. And really I don’t want to be, you know – I don’t know the word now, but people seems to be more confident when they give the personal data to the big companies of the public company. I don’t know really why, but there is a sort of, well, it is very difficult to the people who ask to all the citizens their data even if the data, 15 the proposed which the government used is –

I don’t know why, somebody says that because maybe they feel not comfortable to give their data to the governments about because in a future what could happen. I don’t really know. I think that we are facing a sort of paradigm shift. And we are doing, I’m talking like Italian government, all the things that are necessary to be transparent with our citizens. I think this is the best.

And like I think in the states of the Europe. And I really think that GDPR like somebody said previously, I think that it is a very good standard that it will be adopted by he any state of the world.

Well, if I have responded to the other question, we use the IGF model, we are going to use the IGF model like Italy. I think it is really important because I think a multistakeholder platform, as I said, is the best way to put all the people and all the representatives of the citizens, the thing that we have one more or less with the four groups of representative. One group is from – well, I think there is another question that I would like to respond later, but yes, I think we are going to choose the IGF solution.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So now we will get back to the online queue. We have Adeel. Please make your best intervention.

>> ADEEL SADIQ: Thank you. My name is Adeel. I’m a student from a university in the U.K. I don’t have experience like most of the participants in this Forum. So maybe I’ll say something that is not accurate. Sorry about that in advance.

So being a technical person who just kind of started his career into this technology world, so what I personally believe is that being able to develop a technical standard requires a lot of knowledge and in depth knowledge of almost a lot of things. So it is not easier for us being engineers and techies to be able to develop the standards and as well keep the public policy in mind. Of course, it will take a lot of time and in the real practical world time is always of essence.

The second comment that I would want to make is it seems to me that whenever I go to a conference or meet some policymakers, they tend to go aggressive on us and they try to like blame everything on technical people that the way you were developing standards is maybe one of the prime reasons for all of the problems that we are facing right now. So I would like to highlight that it goes both ways actually. So have any policymakers considered involving the technical community before making a policy? Every time they claim that organised bodies like IETF should involve more policymakers, so does it go the other way around as well?

That’s something that I believe is we are lacking, both the technical and nontechnical communities is lacking. That is the way things is. I think cooperation is very necessary, but it has to come from both sides. Blame just the policymakers or just the technical people for internet standards and the public policy concern is not the way that I think things are going to move forward. That is just what my comment is for the limited knowledge that I have. Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you for your comments and I like the students contribution to the discussion. I want to bring up on the screen for the people that want to participate in that. So then we will go back to the written queue. Go ahead, Auke.

>> AUKE PALS: Thanks a lot. The next question is from Peter Koch on the topic of DNS over https. Since it has been mentioned what exactly is the perceived miss with respect to public policy aspects when it comes to technical standards of the IETF that it produced?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Okay. We will also take a question. Jörn, you want to take it?

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: It didn’t show up. I just wanted to say I couldn’t agree more with Adeel. He made a very good opinion about both communities blaming each other and not listening to each other and not really understanding the other’s point.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Anyway, maybe we can read the question again later but maybe Mattia also wants to say something?

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: Yes, it was just the same point in the previous question. I think that we are evaluating a structure for IGF in Italy that we have four or five stakeholders. I think they are representative. One is of the comprehensive social, the private companies.

The second one is about, of course, the government institution. But like the parliamentarian institution because I think it is not government only but just with parliamentarians.

The third one is about the raising standards. This is fundamental. I really know that the knowledge more than ever is in the – center today and the European Commission is going to scale up and funding the resource center in the new standard, new Internet standards. The third would be the sectors and the citizen, it is important to have the citizen at the table because I think that the best political that government can do is just not to focus on the profits but is just to focus on the what the people really need and what is a human centric vision.

I think this is the best vision. What the need of the citizen and the human centric vision. So I think that if we focus on that, we can really, we can really reap a sort of win-win strategy with other countries in the world. Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. And Fred?

>> FRED LANGFORD: Yes. So thank you. I would just like to go back to Adeel as well. I think he’s actually got a valid point and something I truly believe in because I sit on both sides of that fence when it comes to policy decisions. In fact, the specific U.K. example is that sometimes tech is considered to be somehow separate to any of these decisions. So the decision will be made, over to the tech guys, you make this work. It is the wrong way of managing things, you’re absolutely right. Everybody needs to be involved. It is the technical communes now integral to all of these discussions.

The days are past where you can put tech as a separate consideration. It has to be absolutely in the middle which is part of this point we are making about having a truly multistakeholder policy standard group.

Just back to the point about what was missed from my point of view around DOH, it came forward because there are a number of voluntary principles that are in place which are enforced in a way that maybe very U.K.-specific. They are voluntary principles with pressure put on by governments to make sure that industry actually adheres to the principles. It wouldn’t be something that the government has set in their radar on on staying on top of the these standards, it would be something that industry and NGOs are expected to manage between themselves.

What happens, I think it fell in the cracks between that. Everybody was caught unaware that the DOH standard had been agreed and – sorry, seeing something else.

Has been agreed and then everybody else had to play catch-up. What happened was, one element of the tech community had been working on that standard, whereas the people it was going to have the biggest impact on even though they were technical people and Internet service providers weren’t necessarily aware that they were being discussed and so quickly in the process as well.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. Now I will move to Wout de Natris who will speak. Please, turn your video on and go ahead.

>> WOUT de NATRIS: Thank you, Vittorio. Can you hear me?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Yes, go ahead.

>> WOUT de NATRIS: Thank you. This is Wout de Natris, I’m an independent government consultant from the Netherlands. In the last year I’ve written a report on Internet standard deployments on behalf of the Internet Governance Forum.

We have focused on why the Internet standards in general are slowly deployed or even not deployed.

A lot of interesting answers came from that question. But we are focusing on the specific recommendation at this moment that is in the report on how the interaction between the technical community and the rest of the world can happen. And basically I think that this discussion should be looked at from two angles. So the one is how can other interested parties be involved in a very technical discussion. The other one is how can the other participants make sure that the standards get deployed?

And that is an answer that may be answered much faster if this interaction actually starts happening. Because that is the moment when governments understand that they can use procurement of products to get standards be a part of the project they are procuring.

The same with Articles that they are buying on large scale. If they start demanding certain standards or best practices to be part of that product. It will also be happening that products are tested in perhaps a different way by consumer protection organisations, et cetera.

That would drive up demand and that would make sure that the standards are deployed.

So the question I would like to put to the group is: Yes, this is still a sentence, but yes, probably the discussion is happening in the IGF and other standard bodies are too technical and perhaps too deeply technical for an average person working at an NGO or a government or regulator to fully understand. But the interaction may make clear to the technical people that something needs to happen because of the policy point of view.

The other one is that they understand the outcome better.

So the question I pose is: What would be the right format to start experimenting with a meeting like this so that the technical people do not – sorry, not the technical people deeply participate in the groups but at least there is an interaction started where the deeper understanding of both sides can happen and actually some sort of cooperation after a few meetings.

What could be the format that we could use here? Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: I think this is an interesting question. If anyone from the panel wants to take it, I’m happy to give the floor. This is partly what we are trying to do, at least gathering the remaining questions. So thanks for responding on that.

If there is anyone from the panel, please unmute yourself. Okay. Fred. Then we will move to an online question. Fred, go ahead.

>> FRED LANGFORD: I want to acknowledge I absolutely agree. I don’t actually know what the answer to it is.

I think it is how these things can happen. Individuals like working in different ways. I think what the Civil Society are really looking for, they don’t want to come across as not having the knowledge. They don’t want to come across as being easily manipulated by people who are much more technically able than them. They tend to just not get involved at all.

I think even if there is some way of somebody who is more technical an willing to facilitate those sorts of conversations to act as that go-between, I think between Civil Society, that would be a good start for me. I try and act as that person, but I’m one person and there’s many organisations and they’ve got different interests in what is happening in the Internet standards.

Absolutely, I agree, that is the crux of the problem here.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So Jörn?

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I agree. Of course, I don’t have the solution either but we need to communicate more. And as Adeel said, we need to do that also when we talk about policies.

A lot of discussion has been heard, for example, about AI and ethics, which had little foundation in the technology. So we can’t discuss those things without knowing the technology. And of course when we develop standards for technology, we also need to consider policy. So we need to interact more. We need to have Forums which provide a deep understanding in those areas.

And this is still missing.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. I see a lot of good contributions in the chat as well. So if people didn’t want to raise their hand and do it in video we would be happy. At the same time let’s move to another online question. Would the remote moderator go ahead?

>> AUKE PALS: Thank you, we are having lots of questions in the chat as well. The first question that is next is from Patrick Tarpey. The question is: Is the IETF actually entering public policy via the STIR standards?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: I don’t know if anyone knows what they are.

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: I don’t know, please.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Yes, also neither do I. Maybe if someone wants to ... Is the author in the room? So maybe you can jump in on video?

>> FRED LANGFORD: I’m not the author, but he’s on a secure –

>> AUKE PALS: Patrick says it relates to the comment earlier by Olaf.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Anyway unless anyone on the panel has an answer, we will move to another question.

Okay, please go ahead with another question.

>> AUKE PALS: The next question is from someone who says: Which governments and international standard body be responsible to?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Anyone wants to take that? Don’t we shy.

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: Well, standards bodies are not responsible to governments. But of course, the essence of the question is how can we make sure that we have some kind of equal participation in there, not just some governments putting some resources in and then dominating the field.

And of course, in order to have some standards to be binding to be respected we might even need some other legal form of treaty that governments will subscribe to apply and respect those standards and not use for example, wrong routing information to be able to intercept all the traffic because they maybe the other new servers believe they are the shortest connection to everything.

So we need to have in respect of governments of standards, but this respect doesn’t come from itself. It needs that governments decide actively that they are going to respect those and the parliaments will say, of course, we are going to respect that standard because we believe that the standard is fair and we believe that the standard should be respected by every country.

>> MATT: Do you mind to explain the question? For me it is not very clear. If you can have some example or some different details?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: No, I think it was being a little provocative suggesting that governments want to give edits and give orders in a way to standards organisations.

If I nay, I think the point is, each of the sides is afraid of the other side. In a way also the policy side sometimes complains that the technical community is just taking decisions that the LLMCs, a way of giving orders to the policy people.

The problem is, how do you get the two sides to talk to each other in a way that is both good for both sides. If you want to comment, go ahead.

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: No, I said previously, I think that – well, it is not easy to talk to a techie for the politician and it is not in our nature.

But I am talking from my experience, of course.

But I think that the political view is important. That is what I – for instance, I’m talking as a politician. The politician doesn’t give the details what we have to do. Just they give the vision, just they give the end product. That could be a distribution. If you, in a sort of way it is not your decision but you share with the decision with other stakeholders. I think that the solution could be better for everyone.

And this is why the politicians must be not technician because it is different.

Well, I do know that behind a coded political decision, but only the political decision, not the technical decision. And it is very different.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So I think we can show the next question for the Menti. So people can provide the answers. I expect people to provide this. While you think the answer I will give the floor to Patrick to clarify the question.

>> Good afternoon from London. I was addressing the point that Olaf made. This is the Voiceover IP standard. That strikes me that that is the great example of the IETF moving into standards that were organised and dealt with by other international standards bodies such as the ITU. Do we see now given that the efficacy of some of these standards will only be improved with international cooperation that there is an argument of more formal organisation of the IETF’s role? Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So unless I don’t see anyone in the panel wants to say anything at the moment. We can maybe move to another question.

Then let’s go another online question. So please, Auke?

>> AUKE PALS: I guess Olaf also wants to respond to earlier comment made. So I am unmuting Olaf if that’s the case.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Okay, let’s do it now.

>> OLAF KOLKMAN: No, I was thinking of asking a different question, asking a question that is slightly different take on previous pieces. I am not going to respond to, or I can not really respond to Patrick’s question a minute ago because that was a question to the panel, I guess.

>> AUKE PALS: Okay. In that case we have a question from Michael Rotert: Do you have any comments from any government yet? I guess that is also ...

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: We have one panelist coming from the parliament. And also, so I think we have. We would welcome any other comments from any other government that might be in the room.

But this is, if I may also, this is a part of the discussion because there are also different ways of getting engaged. People representing governments often can not just jump into a room and say something. They need to have time to consult and get approval. Part of the reason why this is hard, also the ways of work are in print are different, in ways that are okay for both sides. I this I we can then move to Olaf?

>> AUKE PALS: We have another question from also Patrick Tarpey. His question is: Are standard bodies at risk of capture by large tech firms as they have the deepest pockets and resources. The majority of RFCS are out-sourced by large tech firms which would suggest that individual participation is small.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: That’s a good question. Anyone in the panel? Fred maybe? Go ahead.

>> FRED LANGFORD: Yes. I would say yes, it is a huge risk, absolutely. I think it is – I mean, it is a risk in general, I think, monopoly has slowly become – not necessarily in this space, but smaller number are ably to push forward. It comes back to my point about how smaller Civil Society organisations can focus on public benefit, might not necessarily have the resources to be able to keep up to date with what is going on. So we find a Catch 22 situation.

You are absolutely right. It is a problem and somebody raised it earlier around the number of SMEs in Europe in comparison to other places. And something I am aware I think it’s around 90 percent of the business in the U.K. are SMEs. It is potentially a barrier to innovation. And there is something in the U.K. taking place to try to change that as far as the safety tech environment, to try to accelerate the benefits to SMEs to be able to push that out.

But yes, absolutely agree. I do think it is a huge risk.

>> AUKE PALS: There are no questions in line in the chat. I do have Olaf Kolkman with a raised hand.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Yes, we have Olaf and another request for the floor.

>> OLAF: As a follow-up to the point you made, Patrick and Fred. This is an issue with any standards organisation or any big organisation where people gather in general. And with industry consolidation going on, I think that is indeed a risk. Big players can be that at the same time smaller players cannot. That is true.

From personal experience, and than experience is already a little bit older, I can tell you that as a small SME, as a leader of a band of about seven people, we have made significant contributions to the technology of the interSEC together with smaller companies in the IETF. I do think that is possible.

But it depends on the area of work.

The point that I actually wanted to have the microphone for was I have always been inspired by a paper which is called A Tussle In Cyberspace. That’s how I refer to it. I pasted the link in the chat. It is a paper from Dave Clark from 2002.

It makes the point that if you do technology standardisation, technology development, you have to design for the policy tussle. That is, when there are several policy choices to make in the implementation of the standard, the standard should allow them all to be made so that the market or the policy environment can figure out what is best in the case of deployment.

This paper came back to my mind in the context of DOH, DNS over http. Because that standard allows a multitude of different implementation models. It is in the implementation models where the venom is, where Fred runs into the problems that he runs into.

So I sort of would like to invite reflexes of the – reflections of the panel with the thesis Dave Clark makes there. Should you design narrow or should you design for the tussle?

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Does anyone in the panel want to comment?

(There is no response.)

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Maybe they want to read the paper first. It is an Italian paper so I also advise people to read it.

Maybe we can go to another question? Someone wanted to speak? Can we unmute?

>> MERIKE: Yes. Hello, everybody. I just want to say that I have been a participant in many of the various Forums that are technical, operational, as well as policy related.

So the IETF, ICANN, the Internet registry, AP neck and ripe NCC, internet governance Forum.

One of the things I have seen over the last decade, there has been a lot of cross-pollinization between some policymakers who do send their technical advisers to the technical Forums. Some technical folks who do attend policy related meetings. The last IGF I was part of a panel that was discussing cyber norms and how policymakers and technologists should work together. So I was very happy to see all of this work that has been ongoing.

Relating the IETF, the technical standardisation has gotten so complex because you have to take so many aspects into consideration that do take deep technical experience. So it is not very easy for somebody that is nontechnical to really get involved.

But I very much also liken what Olaf was just saying. It is not necessarily the following design and architecture that is the problem. Primarily it comes down to the implementation.

And when you are creating any kind of technology standard, you are always taking into account the balance of convenience versus privacy versus security.

Right? So you almost always create something that is rather wide. But it is the implementations that narrow it down. I think the implementations need to also be understood, not just the technology architectures themselves. Thank you for that.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. Thank you for these points. I will now bring up the last question on the Mentimeter. This is the last thing I want to ask and I’m sure this one will provoke some reaction.

Now I think we will go back to the queue of online questions, written questions. Please, Auke, go ahead.

>> AUKE PALS: Thank you, Vittorio. At the moment there are no questions in line, but I would encourage everyone to raise their hand or write a question in the chat. Or we also have the Forum. And the Forum we can have a discussion also after the session.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Yes, we still have let’s say about ten minutes because then we want to give the floor to our rapporteur so that she can make the messages known.

But I would welcome some really good thoughts in the chat. If anyone wants to just raise their hand and start saying something to the room, I think this would be very useful.

So is there anyone? Also anyone in the panel that wants to add anything?

Go ahead.

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I think the main issue is how to arrive at a policy that we can agree on. How can we arrive on a consensus that says. We don’t have this consensus yet and now we are blaming technical people that they don’t implement what we cannot agree on.

So I think that we need to find a way to find a global consensus on Internet policy and if we can reach that I don’t think the technical people will put any barriers on implementing that. It is just that there is no consensus. Of course, technical people don’t want to implement just one side’s idea because they are pushed to do that. And they try to take a on more neutral, maybe not more liberal stand that they don’t want to implement a specific policy.

But as Internet becomes a more integral part of everybody’s life, this doesn’t kind of go on. We need to have some part of consensus-finding on the policy and policy in the light of, of course, in the available technology. And that we can agree on how to implement and how to find a consensus with technical people as well.

But as far as we are now, we don’t have any agreement when, for example, governments should be able to interfere with communication and we have rather a situation where government agencies basically take all this communication at the same time. We think they don’t. And this makes the discussion very difficult to guide.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Mattia?

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: I fully agreement because the government country is very, very difficult. There is no one people that decide to do one deed or one action because there are a lot of people, a lot of agencies, a lot of points of view that are sometimes different.

I would like to respond to the question if the standard, should the proposed standard be looked against principle public policy and requirements. Italy has an agency that has real power to stop alone if you go – stop a law if it goes against, if this law is against the property rights. But they are a government agency.

Well, I think it is really difficult to fine out a common understanding in other places, in other places of the world.

I think that we can find out a vision, a common vision of most of the countries of the world. That could be, yes, it could be easy.

This is really my opinion because I think that, the U.S. mindset and respect even mind set, sometimes they are wider. Sometimes they are closer about the Internet standards. So sometimes it is very difficult to find a common line because the vision of the market, the vision of the property rights are totally different. But they are different divisions, but they are, the balances are really different.

But I think that it is not very easy to find a common consensus for all the countries.

It is very easy to find out a vision, yes. It is. And also I would like to make a sort of – I would like to ask a point as I said before. If it were for me GDPR could be a standard of, a standard of global. Every country should be referring to the GDPR. I think this is a bit extreme. But I think that the GDPR I think it is a very good point, a very good law for property rights protection that Europe has.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. Now we still have to get to an dress, not more than one minute at the most. And we need to close and final close the session. Andre, go ahead.

>> Andre: Hello again. One question I wanted to mention or comment I wanted to mention, we are talking about Internet standards. We need to understand how they occur. In some cases they occur because the technical community is experimenting on something, maybe to improve its products like IPV6, et cetera.

Later on people who are not technical come in and include other things as well.

But there is also the other way around. So sometimes you have a needs and nontechnical people define priorities, they define requirements, et cetera, to create something. It is up to the technical community to actually intervene.

The point I want to make is that there are two types of timings in which public policies need to take place. One is before or during the setting of standard setting. One is at the end of the standards and after the standard is set to maybe guarantee that those are actually deployed.

So just to mention that these two timing aspects. Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. Then we have Wout.

>> WOUT de NATRIS: Thank you, Vittorio. Wout de Natris. Coming back to the consensus part. And the last question. In my opinion looking at the world as it is, it is almost impossible to reach where the Internet is concerned any form am consensus or even rough consensus. It may be when we are talking about standards because everybody in the world wants something else.

And so yes, I think two things. And then I’ll shut up. The first is that when you consider ideas, then any stakeholder should be able to bring those ideas for standards where they think they are necessary to the IETF to be considered, to be taken up. And second is that yes, it would be good to have an interaction so that everybody understands where it is going.

But the third thing is that the IETF and other standards bodies have made standards that make this Internet work as it does. It does work extremely well, in my opinion. Look how awfully well we are conversing with even other in this virtual EuroDIG. Compliments for that.

It is about interactions and understanding even other better. But when things really get down to it, most likely the technicians will know best how to move forward. So the question is: Do we need consensus to make the Internet work? The consensus is already there. Because just look at us.

So it is about interaction and learning and implementing, deploying faster. And that will happen through understanding. And I’ll come back to the sort of Forum that we may need to start experimenting with that. Thank you, Vittorio.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So now I believe I give one minute each to the panelists so they can make any final remarks. Be very brief and I will go to the rapporteur for the messages. Start with Fred.

>> FRED LANGFORD: Thank you, Vittorio. Picking up on a few points that Merike made. I absolutely agree it is about implementation. Was it Olaf that made that point as well? Absolutely agree. Having that understanding when thinking about how the policy is made is really key. On the final point, I didn’t have a chance to dive in.

I think waiting before an Internet standard or a technical standard is made for public policy considerations. I won’t flip on the other side here a little bit. There are some considerations. Just be thinking about if that were the case and we were to wait until the public policy considerations have gotten in place. Look at what happened in the last two or three days around the facial recognition and bill and the web services asking for that to be retracted until there is an agreed standard amongst governments.

It can go both ways. I wanted everybody to, I wanted to leave that for everybody to ponder.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. Mattia, a few sentences from you?

>> MATTIA FANTINATI: Yes. Just to sum up, I think that we are certain way we are facing a pirate ship.(?) There are some benefits we can grab from that. We are all aware about that. But I think that a lot of concerns can arise. And we have to sort of way protect the people in sort of way we put aside from this revolution. I think that for the government the best way that the government can do is the transparency. As I say, they keep straight on the transparency because I think that government in a legal structure can do any action that it thinks that it has to do. But if there is transparency, if the people can see in the box what is happening, can see how a technology works, if the people can understand where the data, how it can be used and so on, I think that it would be very, very important point.

As I am going to conclude, like we did, like the Italian government did with the I-Muni, the tracing for the COVID and the software is open source and you can check, you can control how your personal data will be used. Thank you.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. And finally, Jörn. Go ahead.

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: I think these are valid points. I think we are arriving at a consensus it is very difficult. We can’t just wait for political consensus to start working on standards.

The current approach is that we try to make standards as policy-neutral as possible in order to avoid conflicts. This is not a bad strategy in general. But of course, we have some issues where we can’t avoid the conflict. There we need to basically agree on something and having a global technology requires a global consensus. And if we can’t reach this global consensus, we will not have a global Internet in the future.

As we see it breaking down in China, as we see it breaking down in – well, it is not breaking down yet, but there are propositions breaking it down for Europe. I think having a global standard could avoid that.

So but of course, we shouldn’t put policy in every small standard. Then we can’t advance anymore. But we need to have a Forum and a legal recognition of certain standards, certain bases of the Internet to protect it.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Thank you. So, well, thanks to all our panelists for all the discussion and to everyone, I think it was a pretty good discussion. We will give the Forum to the rapporteur, Iona Stadnik.

>> ILONA STADNIK: I’m Ilona Stadnik, and I am working for the Geneva Internet session, I am providing a summary of four conclusions.

Before I will read out the messages for this workshop, I would like to stress is that they are all subject to public commenting after the EuroDIG. So stand by and look for the updates.

Can I have the next slide, please?

So I have three slides. Probably for a smoother process I will stop after each one so you can agree or disagree with this with the messages. Let’s go with the first. There is a general consensus on the inclusion of public policy priorities in the development of Internet standards.

Civil Society and governments should participate in the development of Internet standards, though with important reservations. Policy requirements must meet engineering requirements, keep Internet safe and resilient and avoiding political manipulations. For this purpose, policymakers should have along term vision of on economic and political life. For this point, everybody is okay? Everybody is agreed? – for this purpose, policymakers should have along term vision to digital future and impact of technologies.

We can move to the second slide.

Okay, we need to keep in mind serious limitations of such participation: Lack of specific technical knowledge, time, and real participation mechanisms within the existing standardization groups.

Should we agree on establishing a new body dedicated to provide public policy input, it must be based on multistakeholder principle, ensuring equal participation within stakeholder groups.

Any objections?

(Pause.)

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: I don’t see any. So thank you. I think this was a really good.

>> ILONA STADNIK: I have the last slide, please. And this one was based on the menti meter results. This is a general consensus on direction of public policy providers, there is a general consensus that direction on public policy priorities should be provided in advance of Internet standards. Development and however there is no consensus on whether proposed standards should be reviewed against public policy requirements before their final release.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Those are the points, of course there is no consensus on creating a new body. It is unlikely that there will be in the short-term. I think at least the good thing in this discussion was that there is general agreement that some discussion needs to be made on this point.

>> JÖRN ERBGUTH: It wouldn’t be true that there needs to be consensus before, but there can be different procedures. But of course, consensus would be very helpful.

>> ILONA STADNIK: Anyway, if you have some really strong objections you will have the opportunity to comment on them have I.

>> VITTORIO BERTOLA: Well, I think we can thank everyone again for the participation and being available and give you two minutes of your life back before we get into the coffee break actually and then stay with us for the panels in the rest of the day. Thank you all.

>> AUKE PALS: Thanks a lot, Vittorio, for the moderation. And also for the excellent collaboration in the session.

Also thank the participants for enormous interaction and thanks for the key participants for your support in any way. It made this session really great. Next up is the coffee break. And after that we are having a keynote. So we would like to see you in this room again and we are now heading to Sandra. Are you around?

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Auke? Can you hear me? Wonderful. Good to see you. So what we could see from a distance, it was also a good session, interactive and a lot of discussion.

>> AUKE PALS: Yes, it was definitely a great session, a lot of interaction and a lot of interaction online on the chat. That was made this session really great.

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Okay. Perfect. For everyone who is in the room of The Hague, the studio of The Hague now, this will be the studio where we continue with our programme today, Studio Berlin and Studio Trieste are going to. As Vittorio said, the next will be a keynote speech from the European Commission and then a Plenary and then the day is done. Auke, I leave you in your coffee break and we try to overcome some technical glitches we had in this session and nobody discovered, right?

>> AUKE PALS: That’s great. I am going to grab coffee and see you back soon.

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: In a minute. See you soon.