European and national priorities for Internet governance: Towards a pan-European agenda 2020 – Opening Session 2011

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30 May 2011 | 9:45-11:00
Programme overview 2011

Session teaser

Converging regulations for converging markets (telecom industry, services, content) and roles and responsibilities of various institutions

People

Key Participants

  • Milan Janković, Director, Republic Agency for Electronic Communications
  • Tamas Ivan Kovacs, Deputy State Secretary for European Union and International Relations, Hungary, on behalf of the EU Presidency
  • Nedeljko Cubrilović, Minister, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina
  • Giacomo Mazzone, European Broadcasting Union
  • Gregor Virant, Faculty of Public Administration, Ljubljana and a former Minister of Public Administration of Slovenia
  • Wolfgang Kleinwächter, University of Aarhus
  • Andrea Glorioso, DG INFSO, European Commission
  • Jan Kleijssen, Director of Standard-setting, Council of Europe
  • Philipp Metzger, Vice-Director, Head Telecom Services Division, Federal Office of Communications, Federal Department of Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications, Switzerland
  • Jens C. Koch, Norwegian Post and Telecom Regulatory Authority
  • Jovan Kurbalija, DiploFoundation
  • Bram Tullemans, Netherlands Public Broadcasting
  • Frederic Donck, ISOC
  • Dixie Hawtin, Internet Rights and Principles
  • Elvana Thaci, Council of Europe
  • Bart Schermer, Considerati

Co-moderators

  • Vladimir Radunović, DiploFoundation
  • Leonid Todorov, CCTLD.RU

Session report

Three key issues were identified among national priorities: e-Governance, net neutrality and end users’ rights. Some main achievements and challenges facing the Serbian IT-market were highlighted, and IT literacy was emphasised as one of Serbia’s key advantages in the context of European and worldwide competitiveness.

Internet governance decisions in Brussels on net neutrality were seen as a promising step. However, the problems of security and trust in digital environments persist and require new approaches and new public authority cooperation mechanisms. Roles and responsibilities for the management of crowded IT highways need to be further defined. New EU funded projects on building academic and research networks on open access and to ensure Internet for all in 2020 were appreciated.

An ideal formula of Internet governance was posited: a maximum of rights with a minimum of restrictions. Unfortunately, the reality appeared far away from this ideal noting the threats to security. While Internet Governance has become a main driver for economic development in the EU, terms like Internet Governance remain difficult to comprehend for the majority of EU citizens. It is therefore imperative to translate abstract discussions on Internet governance issues into practical, meaningful policy which is coherent and inclusive. Another important challenge is the communication of these policies, programmes and decisions to the broader public of the EU.

Representatives from the European Press stressed the need for equality of access to Internet and guarantees for freedom of speech. Any intentions to build digital walls in Europe (like in other parts of the world thus erecting a demarcation line between a morally good and morally bad Internet) should be opposed; a European Charter on Internet Rights and Principles was highlighted as a way to safeguard fundamental rights as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Various models such as the Slovenian e-Government implementation observed that IT technology is just a tool serving better public participation and promoting access (one-stop government, etc.) without undermining citizens’ and businesses’ rights. Problems of ensuring privacy can be solved by proper data protection mechanisms. All data access and use needs should be traceable, transparent and accountable. There are widespread concerns about such technological frameworks and the role of dominant IT companies and proprietary software (including excessive licence fees) for e-Government applications. It is stressed that there is a need to better balance advantages and risks of e-Government systems. Public authorities should not depend on the expertise of large IT service providers and becoming highly dependant on their advice. The primacy of the public interest and control must be guaranteed in such public-private partnerships and public data sovereignty should be assured.

A comparative analysis on the priorities of international organisations highlighted the following: the Council of Europe (CoE) concentrates it work on human rights and the rule law, the OECD on economic aspects, and NATO on security. To avoid a conflict of interests, it is necessary to consider different decision-making mechanisms such as the “bottom-up” approach and the enhanced cooperation model emanating from the WSIS process. International organisations cannot prescribe solutions/frameworks alone. It is solely the “triangle policy framework”, based on multi-stakeholder cooperation, that can provide balanced and appropriate solutions for the challenges of the Internet age. Just a decade ago, the majority of Internet governance stakeholders rejected the idea of having any common principles for the Internet. Nowadays, the need for common approaches is obvious. Participants even voiced the possibility of a pan-European Internet referendum as a new form of direct democracy.

Transcript

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


>> Good day everyone. Again, welcome to Belgrade. We’re pleased to see you. We apologize for a bit of delay of this session. It will be short and quick and hopefully very effective.

And we will depend a lot on you, because the topic of this session is the European and national priorities when it comes to Internet Governance.

Now, in the first part, in the previous session, you could have seen or kept it related, reminded yourselves of what the Internet Governance process is about and what are the Internet regulation issues and troubles.

In this part of the session, we’re going to try to listen to what are different European priorities and national priorities when it comes to Internet Governance. But we will also touch upon three particular questions, three particular topics that are hot on the political – on the Internet Governance agenda, and then we will probably touch upon them in the later sessions throughout this EuroDIG. And these are eGovernance, network neutrality and openness and Internet rights and principles.

Now we have a number of distinguished guests here who will help us frame this discussion. And we have a great number of distinguished guests of course over there.

Leonid and myself will try to guide through this discussion, try to play devil’s advocate as much as we can. For the beginning, I’ll give the floor to Professor Jankovic to give an instruction of what the regular authority in Serbia sees as the challenge as it comes to Internet governance and issues.

Professor.

>> MILAN JANKOVIC: Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure for me to be able to address such a distinguished meeting which is being held in the Republic of Serbia for the very first time and to present our regulatory activities in connection with the Internet.

Let us say a few words about the market, which the agency for electronic communications is regulating. It was 2.1 billion Euros, and the Internet was 9 percent of the market. When we’re talking about the number of users, it’s 2.4 million users. And the penetration is about 32 percent. We have 192 operators. And the income from the Internet and the telecommunications sector was about 130 million Euros for 2010.

Since this is one of the major activities in all countries in the world, and that all relevant stakeholders took the position that this is one of the elements that we have to take care of in the future, we hope that in the forthcoming period after adopting all the documents that refer to this area – the new law in electronic communications and the development of the Information Society and the electronic communication until the year 2020 – that we will be able to adopt in addition to action plans that should accompany those laws other elements that should also take care of broadband communications. This is the basis of development of each country in the world.

In view of the fact that they call for major funds, we as regulatory agencies are facing the task to enable the quickest possible development of the Internet and its governance. And also to ensure that the state invests in the development of broadband communications and to use all the country’s resources for the benefit of its citizens.

Since the end-user should be satisfied with the service that is provided by the operator, we should take care to protect the end-users. We have adopted the law on the protection of consumers and the consumers will be protected regarding all those issues. When we are talking about the development of investments, you know that funds for the development of electronic communications have been allocated from the government funds, and the Serbian government will try to find the best possible solution to ensure the development of electronic communication in different areas of life and to use and develop the broadband communications.

In cooperation with the United Nations, the European Union has given recommendations as to the way of developing this. The Commission for Broadband Approach was set up, and in order to assist this the Serbian agency has had this brochure translated in order to enable the widest possible number of users to use broadband communications.

Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: We will see the differences in what priorities are when it comes to southeastern European and different countries. It’s more about infrastructure and in other areas it’s more about rights and principles. But in the end when we come up with infrastructure, we again come up with Rights and Principles.

We have the distinguished delegate from Hungary. This is Dr. Tamas Ivan Kovacs, Deputy State Secretary for the EU and international relations. He will come up with an introduction on what are the key priorities when it comes to the Hungarian position in the EU.

Dr. Tamas.

>> DR. TAMAS IVAN KOVACS: Thank you very much. I do not know, ladies and gentlemen, whether I’m part of the fluffy or just the boring part of officialdom, but I was returning from Brussels where we had the only formal TT council meeting, which is where all the telecom people are meeting in Brussels, and some of the topics mentioned in the beginning were discussed. Net Neutrality was discussed over lunch with the Vice President Commissioner Cruz and all the ministers. So, whether fluffy, whether part of the officialdom, it’s great to be here to represent not only the Hungarian position but the presidency positions on the Council of European Union, the business exchange information, or just enjoy our vacation time.

It’s amazing how much the Internet systems and services that work with the Internet help us, separate us and serve our needs. If you try to identify the engine between the success, probably the governance structure would not be the first one. However, the core is small, simple, decentralized without a real structure, under a hierarchy or responsible person or bodies. No government exists in the world of the Internet. This means that the secret of the fast Internet community group is in a free structure. Or if it’s lacking of a real governance structure, its free and open operation is a structureless structure. So it’s difficult to define what Internet Governance really means.

Today, much value depends on the robust operation of the Internet. When we witness different accidents and bad attempts to damage the operation of the Web or to corrupt data and information on it, and we hear about other types of threats, we have to attack all of the problems to sustain operations and the robustness of the Internet.

Nowadays, we find further and more of a more highly complex services like the cloud computing or the other services emerging. The quality and value and cost have the prime impact on the progress of our economy and society.

Just to mention two questions that raised these issues: How to ensure robustness of the service, security of data, protection of privacy, affordability and quality of services, trust and safety of the users. How to ensure equal opportunity for the people, regions, to become and be full fledged citizens of the digital world.

We speak about the broad range of services offered by professional service providers and individuals on the other. We touch different content and we talk about users from different cultural and economic and educational backgrounds, all of them entering into a person-to-person relationship in this new richer world. If we want most of them to be present in the Internet world, then we have to offer safety, trustful connections for the benefits of users, along with the economy and society. What we can do in such a colorful cultural rich behavioral and economically diversified communication with various expectations, we can do what the WSIS or Internet Governance, the WSIS, IGF process, what they do. The stakeholders and decision makers come together to sit down, discuss issues, see and try to assess the present and future developments of the Web, try to find ways to create security and trust in the Web environment.

Since the world’s first World Summit on Information Society in 2003, the Internet developed a lot. New systems and services emerged. My firm belief is that the issue of information and network security and the security of physical information is one of the most important issues in today’s world.

We need to identify what we regard for critical infrastructure and critical service, how we ensure robustness and which services are critical. Also, we have to identify how to manage resilience of the critical services.

Seeking for answers to these questions has been one of the top priorities of the Hungarian EU Presidency. We have discussed the extension on the operation for the European network and the agency, and also organized a conference on the security of critical infrastructure programming. The conference provided a forum to take stock of the progress achieved, assess lessons learned and the challenges ahead and the priorities and next steps. It’s a way forward to engage all stakeholders, in particular the private sector, to address problems of security and trust in the fast changing digital environment.

However, critical information infrastructure and security is only one of the current issues that attract attention of the experts in the field of Internet Governance. In Hungary, we work on the hot topic security. Changeover to IPv6. The conversion from 4 to 6 is the task of the private sector, yet the responsibility of the public sphere in e-Government assistance. And if necessary, the creation of policy guidelines for service providers and users. We plan to start consultations at a national level on issues like cloud computing.

The other very broad area of future development is called the Internet Governance Forum. The Internet Governance Forum is an outstanding event where different stakeholders gather from all over the world to discuss current issues. This year, the IGF will be in Kenya 27 to 30 of September. The IGF process was extended until 2015 by the UN General Assembly in December of last year. Based upon the high value of the European contribution to the IGF process, it’s easy to anticipate the active role of the European Union. We are pleased by the fact that this is the force among the six annual IGFs, which is to be held in a developing country after Rio, here, Sharm el Sheik in 2009. The topics of Internet Governance show that they also share the view on the high importance of digital technologies and services for their economy and society for open ways of economic process.

The closer we bring our interests to each other, the views and problems tackled by the developed and developing country representatives, the more we are sure of the usefulness and development of the Internet.

With these words, I wish you a lively and fruitful debate and a successful delegation at the Nairobi discussions.

>> MODERATOR: One of the key questions when it comes to Southeastern Europe is the capacity to deal with the questions and how they cope with the priorities and whether they should try to fulfill some of the

Wishes. I’m back in the Southeastern Europe. Mr. Nedeljiko Cubrilovic, Minister, Republic Srpska, Bosnia, Herzegovenia.

>> NEDELJIKO CUBRILOVIC: Good morning.

I’m pleased to be able to be with you today and to participate in this annual conference on EuroDIG 2011, one of the greatest events in this field, which is being held in Belgrade.

I’m also glad that we can see a lot of young and intellectual people from all parts of Europe who want to learn a lot and who use the Internet in their everyday work. Knowledge and education in the modern society is measured by the degree of their information literacy, and it cannot be imagined without the development of the Information Society. The development of the Information Society encourages competitiveness as the precondition of the survival of a transitional society such as ours.

It is very important to define the rules of the game, and respond to all the challenges and the societies which give priority to the new forms of business operation. And they are leaders in the transformation of the society and turning it into the Information Society. It is unusual but also challenging to bring the Internet and democracy in a causal relationship.

A lot of people who are informed about the width of the changes and the challenges that are encouraged by the information technology are aware of this. The government of the Republic of Srpska is aware of the importance of the Internet and the information technology, and in the past five years it has invested a lot in this field. It has thus encouraged the domestic industry because it will be one of the basis of our future economic development.

Also, the Republic of Srpska government has made a lot of efforts in spreading information literacy among its people, recognizing that this makes the Republic of Srpska competitive both regionally and internationally.

Allow me to quote to some of the activities that we have implemented in the past five years period. The Republic has adopted a set of laws and bylaws creating a full legal basis for all e-Business operation. The strategy of e-Government in the Republic of Srpska in 2011 was adopted and is implemented as well as the Internet Safety Policy.

In the parliamentary procedure, the law on the electronic document of the Republic of Srpska, the law on electronic business and signature were adopted.

And in August and September of this year, the law on information security of the Republic of Srpska will be adopted. A lot of bylaws were also adopted: The Agency for Information Security of the Republic of Srpska, the rules on certification, the rules on keeping the certification registered, the rules on the protection of electronic signature.

The laws of the level of compulsive insurance and implementation of technical certificates rules the granting of certificates in the Republic of Srpska. All the regulatory preconditions have been made for the use and upgrading of Internet services and the service of citizens.

We are one of the rare countries outside of the EU which has introduced the electronic tacograph.

I would like to wish success to the conference.

>> MODERATOR: This was a good overview of the government perspectives to some extent. The lucky thing is that it’s not only the governments here, we have the business sector, users, civil society. It happens to – I know that there is someone also from the academia here who has quite a different thing to mention when it comes to the priorities and it is science.

Now, I’ll call upon our colleague on behalf of the academia to raise a short issue of when it comes to the science and how we can improve science and does it fit into the Internet Governance as well. Present yourself.

>> MILAN JANKOVIC: I’m Milan Jankovic from Serbia. I would like to welcome you all here in Belgrade and to, in a few minutes, to tell something about research infrastructure. Of course, the Internet itself is dedicated to a wide area of users for all of society across Europe and to achieve a goal of this – a goal of the European agenda, which is to create information Society.

But I would like to say that one important part of this creation of Information Society is research society. And today we can say that in Europe we have maybe the most widely spread network, dark fiber and fast Internet. And in the last six to seven years I would like to just inform you that the European Commission leads one new idea, which is to create e-Infrastructure so-called, which consists of several layers of Internet, from a hardware to middleware and application, just with the basic idea to create new services for users like cloud computing, which you mentioned, or HPC, which is hide computer facilities.

So, it’s very important – I would just like to say that it’s very important to develop Internet forward. We have one distinguished level of developed Internet, but we can go further. And thnks to this cloud computing and other services, we can make a truly Information Society upon this 2020 for all European citizens.

We are joining also here in our southeast Europe area. We are following all programmes that are dedicated to the search and innovation, like the framework programme and et cetera.

And we are doing our best, you know, to go together with all other information – all countries across Europe.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. So shall we take it that basically you hinted that our speakers sort of deliberately or just by accident omitted that very important issue, that science and research plays a great role in the Internet’s development, perhaps of the same importance as lawmaking? Right?

>> MILAN JANKOVIC: Yes.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Well, it’s an interesting perspective. And also, I just want to ask the – we have the Council of Europe here, because they embrace the conference. And perhaps they may be – you might be willing to use a more general perspective?

>> MODERATOR: I’ll just remind everyone to say clearly the name. Because we have remote participants, a number of them. You can watch them and they can’t know who you are. Also for the speakers again.

>> JAN KLEIJSSEN: Thank you very much. Good morning everyone. I’m Jan Kleijssen. I’m director of standard setting at the Council of Europe. Of course that has to do with rules and standards.

And what we have been trying to do over the years is to provide guidance for governments on how to address Internet issues. The main overriding theme for us is a maximum of rights with a minimum of restrictions, which we would like to see continue over the years, despite a number of efforts, which we have all witnessed in recent months, perhaps due to the countries with less rights. We hope to have in November of 2011 a major conference in Vienna to launch the Council of Europe overall strategy.

But what I would like to touch upon here is a more immediate concern. It is the empowerment of the end-user. A lot has been said about industry, about the science community. As you know, the Council of Europe in 47 countries is foremost concerned with Human Rights. What about the Human Rights of the Internet user? The Internet user is more and more – or users, they are more and more dependent on the Internet. But what are the remedies if things go wrong? Who can we turn to, as regards to Freedom of Expression? There is the European Court of Human Rights, which is the ultimate remedy, but it can take several years before you get a decision.

What are we doing to ensure that citizens have a remedy if things go wrong? And if all the rights and if all the necessities for Internet, for instance, he has to fill out his tax forms on the Internet, he has to vote via the Internet, expresses opinion, social network, but if those are interfered with, where does the citizen turn to? We want a charter of Internet rights and users. This is being done by others, also, but to have enforceable rights that citizens can claim and effectively claim to be guaranteed.

>> MODERATOR: More rights. Less restrictions. I wish Nicolas Sarkozy was in the room.

We have someone from the European Commission, right?

>> You can also mention Sarkozy but you don’t have to.

>> Does it work?

>> MODERATOR: Yes, it does.

>> AUDIENCE: I’m from the European Commission. I would not mention anything about the President of France and other participants of the G8 process. I think we should have a more advanced approach to that issue anyway. But it doesn’t matter.

I would like to make perhaps a bit of a cheesy comment on European priorities or Internet Governance. I think that our European priorities should be to actually build a European priority, to make these issues a European priority. Because, quite frankly, my feeling from the trenches of the European Commission is that there is not yet – and we can certainly discuss it – but there is not yet an overall feeling amongst policymakers as well as the public administration, which I think is worth it to remember.

Public administration, and I mean government, the functioning of the Commission, everybody that works in the public administration has a huge role to play here, because policymakers, back at home I’ll be punished for what I’m saying, but policymakers can do whatever they want. But if they don’t have the backing or understanding of the administration, nothing is going to happen. This is the harsh reality of life.

Now my feeling in the Commission is that there is a tiny subset of people that are actually, A, interested in the governance of the Internet; B, more or less understand what it is about; C can make the connection between what we’re discussing here and the actual impact on lives, on business, public administration.

What I would like to see is, again, I apologize for using Euro jargon, is for this to be front loaded. This means that we should be interested in Internet Governance, because it’s a basic driver, an engine of the European growth. We are working on that. I can’t say that at this moment that Internet Governance – the Internet is, but maybe Internet Governance is not.

But then the question I ask myself and everybody, I’m interested in what the President of the European Commission does or does not. I guess other people are interested in other top policymakers.

My question is how can we actually turn these discussions, which are not fluffy but sometimes are a bit obstructive, into concrete priorities? It’s good to have an action plan. Coming from the European Commission, I can’t criticize anyone to have programmes, because we lead on programmes. I understand the need to have a strategy. But then we have to turn the strategy into concreteness.

And one plea that I have, let’s please forget – if I can be provocative – let’s forget about the term “Internet Governance,” which is a technical term. Not many people understand it. Let’s think about “Internet policies. Internet related policies.” And if you think about Internet related policies, in my opinion you would discover that all policies are impacted or impacts somehow on the Internet. It’s there that we have to build our priorities inside Europe. And also something that is close to my heart, in the way in which Europe projects itself in the world, towards third parties, towards third countries and towards other members of the international community.

Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. That’s what was indeed a very provocative remark.

Any other questions from the audience?

Any comment of what you think are the European priorities? And I believe that the “Internet Governance,” the term, should it be replaced by “Internet policy making?”

>> MAXIMILLIAN KALL: My name is Maximillian Kall from the European Youth Press. I was one of the colleagues with the New Media School that took place this weekend.

And regarding replacing the world “Internet Governance” it probably does not make so much sense to replace one buzz word with another buzz word. I’m sure you’ll find more and more of these. But this does not shape the agenda in any way.

I want to come back to the saying of more rights and less restrictions. And what you said, to set up a charter of Internet rights and restrictions. A charter of rights and obligations, from our point of view, it must cover equal opportunities to access and the guarantee in the widest possible sense of Freedom of Expression on the Internet, which is not always guaranteed and which seems to be endangered at least to us. When we come back to what has been discussed at the G8, the EG8, the claim of a civilized Internet, that massively scared us. What shall this mean in the end? What is a morally good Internet and a morally bad Internet? We don’t want this distinction.

And, also, we were scared by the Hungarian presidency suggestions that are on the table in the Council of Europe, setting up some virtual area and some great firewall following the Chinese example that somehow covers Europe. So, for the priorities also seeing my own background, I’m from Germany, we have always seen when it came to data retention, when it came to Internet blocking and filtering, that it did not work to impose Internet legislation, law, policy, on the people. And it also is not sufficient, it’s not enough to do what we are doing here, to have some advice by civil society and some consultation. In the end the top priority must be to combine those Internet discussions with some ways of direct democracy. Because Internet reflects direct democracy.

So my question would be, it might sound naive: If there was some all European, whether it’s Council of Europe or European Union, charter of Internet Rights and Obligations, whether that can be made a referendum in Europe so people actually not just are consulted in one way or the other, but actually decide on their Internet rights themselves.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Well, I believe it’s a good reason for you to speak right now, because basically I understand that the question is twofold. Well, first of all, some Hungarian initiatives and second whether it’s – does it make sense to hold an all European referendum on basic rights on the Internet?

>> TAMAS IVAN KOVACS: I was called a great many things in my life, but I guess none of it was scary. That was not among them, but you have to start somewhere. I don’t really understand where the part of what I have to say was scary to you.

Of course, we are talking about critical infrastructure and protection. All of us were elected to be a government and represent their policy in the council. It was the extension of the agency, which is responsible for critical infrastructure protection, which I think you would understand. There is also a citizenship right to have your electricity working, your energy provided, and maybe if there are cyber attacks from a third country or somewhere else, to be protected against what we were talking about. And what the EU is planning on these things is exactly that. It has no relation to content or anything that Europe referring to.

Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Very good assurances. By the way, electricity and energy and all of that stuff, I mean, this naturally brings us – we are trying to keep up with the schedule. So it naturally brings us to a new issue we would like to raise, and that is e-Government. And to this, we have a representative from Slovenia, a country that ranks high in their global ratings for preparedness. I can see some ladies laugh over there. Are you from Slovenia? No. Okay. That’s fine. Good to know. Thank you. Please.

>> Yes. I guess so.

>> GREGOR VIRANT: I’m from Estonia. It’s Estonia and Slovenia always have been competing in the area of e-Government. Sometimes they are on the top, sometimes we are on the top. But it’s normal. It’s life. So really my emphasis will be on e-Government.

I would like to share with you my experience. I worked in the area of e-Government for about four years. And I have a few suggestions – of course it’s my personal opinion – a few suggestions about what the basic guideline, the underlying principles of good e-Government development should be. And what are the most frequent mistakes that countries – that governments do when they develop e-Government?

Well, this was the data from 2007. This was the time when we were before in front of Estonia, the European Commission in that year placed us – ranked us number two, just behind Austria. The data from 2009 are a little bit less satisfying for Slovenia, but nevertheless.

So my first suggestion would be that those who work in the e-Government area should not understand e-Government simply as an IT issue. E-Government is not mainly about IT. We understand e-Government as use of IT to develop, to have a better public administration in terms of openness, transparency, efficiency and user friendliness. So it’s much more about processes, about simplifying processes than it is about IT. IT is a very powerful tool, but it is only a tool.

I can give you one example. In 2008, one of our projects, it was one stop shop for business, was awarded a UN prize as the best project in the area of moving the services closer to cities and businesses. It is a project which was also very, very supported by our business community. And it was successful mainly, in my opinion, mainly for the reason that we followed the basic principles. We did it by the book, I would say. We didn’t start with tendering for an IT solution, for software. We started by analyzing the processes, in partnership with the business community. When we analyzed the processes, we asked them, the companies, the businesses, the chamber, the SMEs and so on, we asked them what kind of processes they would like to have.

We redesigned the processes. We drafted a new flowchart. And of course we amended the legislation, because public administration works on the basis of flow. There is a principle of legality. And if you want to change a process from A to B, of course you have to amend the legislation. You have to change the legislation.

After that, we – only after that, we provided an IT solution, a software, a very integrated solution, which works in the back office as well as in the front office.

Then of course we trained the civil servants, the employees who work on the spot, who work on the so-called one-stop shops. And from the very beginning, when we started to implement this idea of one-stop shop, we immediately started to collect the feedback from our users. So, we started to survey their satisfaction, we started to collect comments, proposals, and so on, in order to be able to improve the service on a daily basis. So it’s a process of constant improvement. This is the way I think things should be done in the area of e-Government, if we want to be successful.

The second thing which is very important also is that we have to put the emphasis on not only on the front office, which can be very popular, which can be attractive, but we have to put emphasis on the back office. If you have a lousy back office and if you put processes and services on the Internet, the only thing you will get is that the users will be able to see your processes in a more open and transparent way, which is something that you don’t want to have.

So the most important thing about the e-Government is the back office, the register, the interoperability of the register, openness of the registers, and of course you have to support the basic processes, G-to-G process, the processes inside the government. And then you can move to the front office and offer some attractive services to the citizens and businesses.

Thirdly, for the governments, of course it can be politically very attractive to provide services for the citizens. Because citizens are also voters. By providing attractive services to citizens, you can obtain points. But in reality how many times does an average citizen meet public administration each year? Maybe you meet public administration once or twice a year. On the other hand, the businesses interact with the government, with public administration, on a daily basis. So if you want to make a real impact on e-Government, you must focus on G-to-B, on government to businesses processes and services.

And of course if you want to show something also to the citizens, you have to choose – you have to pick up the services with the real high impact, those who are more frequent, who are used by citizens on an annual basis at least.

Fourth, you must have a coordinated approach. It is not good if every institution develops its own solutions. You must have an institution, a body, which has the coordinative role in e-Government. Like for instance in our country it was the Ministry of Public Administration. In some other countries these are agencies for e-Government and so on.

And a good example of this is always the functioning of an e-Government portal, which has to be very well coordinated from one point. But on the other hand also has to be managed in a very specific way. So there is guidance on the portal, but according to the same methodology. It has to be coordinated and on the other hand decentralized.

It’s practical to develop some genetic services attached to the e-Government portal. Only once. Not to leave it to different institutions to buy their solution, five or ten times, fifteen times.

For instance, there are some generic services which are attached to the e-Government portal in our country, like generating electronic applications, like electronic identification and authentication and electronic payment. These are the services which are connected to every single Internet service provider, to the citizens or to the companies.

And, finally, the services that you provide on the Internet for the users, for the citizens and businesses have to be user-friendly and simple. Quite many times, just to do some marketing, some political marketing, to put on the Internet, services are put on which are not fully right for the production. So if you come to the government portal as a user, and you try one of these services, and you find it difficult, you find it complicated, you find it user unfriendly, you will most probably decide for the old fashioned classical way of dealing with this issue. And you will hardly come back to e-Government in a very short time.

So, I wanted to be very brief. Afterwards I can give some examples on what kinds of services are available in the most developed European countries, the most developed from the perspective of e-Government.

And just a final word to come back to this important – the importance of back office. Our one stop shop is – which was a successful e-Government project – is not only a front office project. Only 5 to 7 percent of users are company founders, use Internet to register a company and to do all the rest which is needed to start up a business. So the rest, 90 and so percent still use the old fashioned way. But they can do it on one spot. They can do it in 45 minutes. They can do it free of any charge and they can do it without filling any forms. They do not do it electronically. But they have an excellent service, an excellent service due to a very good back office procedures and information system.

Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I think this provides a number of challenging opportunities that are coming. And I’ll try to put myself now in the user perspective and say on one hand I like when you mentioned as a user that companies do all of these things and probably vote over the mobile phone and so on that is coming.

On the other hand, I’m scared, because of all of these things that we mentioned about the privacy, about human rights, about – well, at least our rights to protect the privacy and data, what happens if these services start exchanging our private data and maybe using them? We have a huge system over there where we have public and private partnership between governments and business. And to be honest, not all the users always trust the governments or business. So how can we make sure we as users, that the system will work on our good?

>> If I understand well, this is a question for me. Well, this is one of the biggest issues of e-Government. The issue of data privacy. I’m sure you are referring to the issue of data privacy. I think that when we talk about data privacy connected to e-Government, we often exaggerate. Namely, the data privacy issues are as actual and as important in the area of classical or physical business of the government as well as in the e-Government.

So, in e-Government, the processes which we had in the classical forum are only translated to the electronic forum. So we have to secure the data privacy in the same way. We need the rules, of course, we need the regulation. All European countries have the data protection acts. We need a strong control by data protection inspectors or commissioners or whatever.

And, of course, all the information systems have to be adapted to these rules. For instance, access to personal data has to be traceable. So that if I as a citizen come to certain authority managing a data register, so that I can have a record who, at what time, for what reason, who took a look at my data. And the same right for the inspector who can come to the same agency, he or she can ask for the record, who accessed the data register in a certain period of time and for what reason, and so on. So it’s a question of regulation and a question of control. We should not be afraid of e-Government from this point of view, but we have to, of course, take care of regulation and control.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. We have a question from the remote space. Ginger, do you have the microphone? Probably not. We will come up with the microphone. So we have a number of people which are watching us and contributing over there. You can see. And we have one person who is the avatar asking questions.

>> REMOTE MODERATOR: From Edward in the Ukraine, his question is more directed to Dr. Gregor Virant, but it goes in with your comment as well. What frameworks do you use or do you use any frameworks like the IT infrastructure library or Microsoft operations frameworks which would then incorporate some of your protections and concerns?

>> You mean in Slovenia or our country –

>> Well, for you – (Off microphone)

Dr. Gregor Virant.

>> GREGOR VIRANT: That’s me, yes.

>> MODERATOR: Sorry. Yes, it is for you.

>> GREGOR VIRANT: Well, if the question was if we answered the – if we used the Microsoft framework, the answer is yes. I’m not able to tell you the details about – the technical details of the protection, because I’m a lawyer and specialist in management and in public administration. But the thing that I can tell you is that I checked quite a lot of times in practice that this protection really works.

So if I, for instance, want to know who was looking at my data, and for what reasons, I can get the records from, I don’t know, 2000 or ’98 and so on. And I really believe in this protection.

Of course, there is always a possibility of fraud. There is always a possibility of misuse, of course there is. But it’s not only in electronic business, it is also in physical business.

We had a lot of debate on, for instance, using the digital certificates for different services . In our country, many services are available without the use of digital certificates. Basically, all the services which cannot produce any kind of misuse.

For instance, buying an obligatory insurance for your car. Do you really need a digital certificate for this service? I don’t think so. Because if anybody from this hall buys and pays car insurance for me, I have no problem with this, if you know what I mean. So there are a lot of services which can really be available without any complication in terms of identification or authentication.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you.

We have another question from the lady up there. And I saw someone was raising – from Annette.

>> ANNETTE MUEHLBERG: I’m the head of e-Government at the Trade Union ver.di in Germany. And I’m a member of the Commission of the German Bundestag.

I was very much interested in your speech on e-Government. We are discussing in Germany on a national level all of the chances e-Government has, but also the problems occurring. And privacy certainly is a huge problem. It is not just something you said. It’s a question of regulation and control.

It’s not as easy as that. The only really safe way to keep privacy is not producing and storing this data. This is the only real safe way.

The second step is that you have to implement privacy enhancing tools and that you have to plan privacy right from the beginning. And I want to add privacy for the citizens as well as for the workers who are dealing with all of these tools, this is an extremely important part.

And we are far away from really making this happen. There are huge problems everywhere. And we have these problems on the national level, but we also have these problems on a transnational level, on the EU level, where we have the working together now with the EU services directive. There are not even well-developed plans how to deal with the problem of working together via the Internet on a transnational level and to keep the privacy here.

So, the privacy really is a very, very, very important issue we did not solve yet. That’s one thing.

The other thing I would like to address is the issue of – I mean, I would be interested if you have an answer to that, do you plan to keep the public administration independent, independent from software companies, or are they somehow taking over your own infrastructure? Are you dependent on those folks or not? Are you really independent? That is another issue I would like to know about.

Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Well, we’re working on the theme. Well, my understanding, first of all, the most critical issue is how to ensure the people’s right, I mean the right for privacy, which really brings us to the third main issue of today’s discussion, and I will just like to give the floor to Wolfgang. Your second question can be taken up separately. Please.

>> WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: I want to be brief, because if it comes to rights and principles and duties and responsibilities and freedom, then always the user is in the center and this is just a continuation of the debate we had around privacy.

I’m thankful that Jan raised this issue about the rights and the plan to have an instrument to define in more precise ways what are the rights of the individual Internet users. Because this is a weak element in the multi-stakeholder model. The governments and businesses have their strong positions. The user is always on the weak end. So that means if we want to have a balance, then we have to strengthen the role of the users.

I’m chairing a group, and we defined what was discussed in the last two years of whether it would make sense to have an instrument which would define general principles for cross-border use of the Internet. Because there is no national Internet, there is no Internet for Serbia, there is no Internet for Germany or one for Europe, so this means that it’s a global Internet. And we have to think about general norms and principles which would channel the communication flow over the Internet.

There is always the idea to draft a legal instrument, if it comes to international cooperation. But, on the other hand, if you look into other experience, like the outer space or the law of the sea or the international criminal law, then you are confronted with the challenge that this takes 20 years before you have a legal instrument. So it means that we are looking for alternatives. And the outcome is now a draft declaration on guiding principles for Internet Governance, which has been discussed in a high level Council of Europe conference in April in Strasbourg and will be adopted probably in a couple of days in June by the CDMC, the development committee of the Council of Europe, and discussing what are the guiding principles.

So we realize that after ten years of debate, meanwhile, there is a certain wish among all stakeholders to have a consolidated version of various experiences in this debate. And so that means – while ten years ago a majority of stakeholders or let’s say some strong stakeholders rejected all kinds of regulation or, you know, guidelines for the Internet, today people have realised that it’s a good idea to have some kind of principles. The question is then: What kind of principles?

And it’s very natural that the Council of Europe has put the human rights on the first place of its ten principles. And the second principle is multi-stakeholder governance, which includes the role of the users. And I think it’s interesting to observe that not only the Council of Europe has reached this point where – that we need some principles, but also other organisations. And we have seen now similar processes in the OECD, similar processes in the NATO, and all these groups come up with ten principles. And interesting, if you compare the draft declaration from the Council of Europe with the principles of the OECD and the ten principles of NATO, then you discover that all of the three organisations put different principles on the top. They have similar principles in the body of the document, but on the top of the Council of Europe is Human Rights. And the top of the OECD principles is innovation and competency. And on the top of NATO is security. So you have an interesting triangle. Human rights, economy and security. And I think the challenge on the global level is to find the right balance between these three values: Human Rights, economy, and security.

And this stands also for three stakeholders. Because the economy, this is the business sector. The security is mainly a task for the governments. And Human Rights is for the civil societies. That means the multi-stakeholder governance model comes back, if you compare the various values which are touched by these principles. So it means that the future, in the next couple of years, certainly, we have to go deeper in the discussion, what are the values which we want to have formulated in terms of principles and values, and how to balance this. Because very often you have a conflict of various values.

If I go back to the EG8 discussion last week in Paris, there was an understanding debate between Jon Peter Bono on the one hand and the French cultural minister about IP rights. And we are talking here about European priorities. And I could imagine that a lot of European stakeholders would be behind the arguments of Jon Peter Bono or for free Internet, which allows all kinds of innovation and not extreme big hurdles for the Internet. While on the other hand a lot of IP laws in the United States would probably support the French minister Mitterrand, which says that we need strong IP rights which ignores a bit the rights of the users.

So this is complex. And the only way that I see and what is the experiences from the work in the Council of Europe is that we have to have new forms of policy development and new forms of decision-making. And while I fully agree with Andrea that this would be a good idea if Mr. Barroso would be more aware of the Internet issues, I think we should really, you know, not have this narrow-minded thinking that if the government decides or if the President decides, then everything is okay. This is the traditional top down process. But the Internet was from the very early day a bottom up development. We are all stakeholders and are involved. And I see the interrelationship between top down and bottom up, you know, my forecast is that if you let it in the hand of the governments alone, this won’t work.

The Internet is much bigger than the governments, and what you need indeed is the collaboration among the various stakeholders. And I think this is the way the Council of Europe now is moving forward. We have a discussion whether the declaration of principles, which will be adopted by governments, could be enhanced to a framework of commitment, which will be supported by all stakeholders, by the big companies, like Google and Facebook, by the technical community, like IGT and ICANN, by self society organisations like Human Rights Watch and APC and others. This is not yet the referendum of what the speaker proposed for a charter of Internet users, but I think we have to go beyond traditional intergovernmental negotiation processes and have to open our eyes for this involvement of stakeholders to find the right balance between the top down process, which will not go away. We live in a world with nation States and the nation States will not go away, but the nation States also operate now in a broader environment. And they have to understand the other stakeholders in their respective roles are sometimes on equal footing. It’s a good idea and it is needed to reach sustainable solutions.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. You raise a lot of issues. We will have brief comments and then try to wrap up with Net Neutrality, just a short comment. Andrea?

>> ANDREA GLORIOSA: Thank you. Very briefly, the point has not been top down or bottom up. The point is that if you do not involve public authorities, this will not work. And to involve them, you need to have them, whether it’s Barroso or Sarkozy or someone else. They are well aware. They could be better actors as we all could be.

We have the citizen initiative. If you collect 1 million signatures, you can put forward a law proposal to the European Commission, which would consider it. And I would encourage the young gentleman from the audience to consider this opportunity.

Last but not least, I really think that – and I don’t mean to sound arrogant – it would be good if everybody actually read the G8 declaration and did not focus on what was discussed at the EG8 forum. The G8 declaration does not speak about civil rights of the Internet, and I’m sure it could be better in some parts. It’s the product of compromise as everything. I think people would be pleasantly surprised by reading that declaration.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. We will end up this discussion today with just mentioning an issue. We won’t have time for a deeper discussion, but let it stay for the next meetings, which is on the network neutrality and the rights of users to get everything that we want from the Internet and not be limited to the services that someone else wants to impose for any reason.

Now we wanted to get in the remote participant, but we have a problem with the video. We have Giacomo Mazzone from the EU Broadcasting Union who will give us a brief intro and what is the concern. And then we will leave it in the air to discuss in the next meetings. Giacomo Mazzone.

>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: It’s a pity, because Bram has been involved in the Netherlands.

Just to pinpoint on the same line of what we said in the – with the previous speakers, from the point of view of the citizen rights, the Net Neutrality issue, apparently in Europe we have a certain guarantee that comes from the telecom packages where the net neutrality is guaranteed. But we know that in the US this principle is at the moment under heavy pressure. And there is a background that brings us to consider that it could be a problem in the near future, especially if we linked it to the more and more crowded infrastructure and insufficient infrastructure. So the investment needs to be made in the new generation networks.

If this happens, then we need to be ready to address a certain number of issues that are very sensible. Who will manage the priority in this crowded highways of the Internet? This priority will be affecting the access to content. This priority will be made on the basis of the census of the people that access the Internet, who pays more get more. Who pays all get all. Who pays only a minimum will get less and so on.

So, very critical issues that I think that we need to consider very tightly in the near future, that we will face problems in the future.

>> MODERATOR: As usual, we are running out of time. So we have really no time for questions. So let me briefly wrap up and focus on some take-aways from this session.

Well, first of all, once again, as we had government representatives zoomed in on the legal framework for the Internet, which is quite understandable, although it stirred some concerns among our young people in Europe here – and I’m sorry, we haven’t heard anything from the pirate party, those ladies and gentlemen in the purple T-Shirts there in the rear seats. Unfortunately, they kept silent.

Anyway, so we do understand that e-Government, it’s not an easy thing to do, and to maintain it, a balance between the Big Brothers’ powers and the people’s natural rights is a tricky thing to do. And we are just moving in that direction, and we have some good examples of that. And we have some competition even in this room, we saw that, between leading nations in this respect.

Then I believe a very interesting concept, very insightful, which really needs to be taken into account that was Wolfgang’s idea of that new triangle: Government, business and users, with their perspective concerns, rights and interests, which again should be somehow balanced in the cyberspace.

And then Giacomo introduced a very interesting question for me, which is who will manage the crowded highways on the Internet and at what price and for whose benefit? I believe this is one of the critical issues behind the thriving Internet businesses and their natural desire to expand on the net.

And, finally, I would say, which perfectly resonated with my understanding of what we should do as participants in these forum, and that was what Andrea from the European Commission said, how to effectively or to market efficiently these forum or such like events so that to get more people involved, so that to reach out to every single user. Again, this is to make him or her believe that his or her voice is heard and is taken into account by all other stakeholders. So this is, I guess, a very important thing to do or we should just take care of that. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. That was the end of this session. And we go for the opening, don’t move from the seats, you can stay sitting, we have coffee. But we will start in a couple minutes. Thank you.

(Applause)

The next session will start in ten minutes because of the speech of the Serbian Prime Minister. So please be quick. Thank you.

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