Seventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
6-9 November 2012, Baku, Azerbaijan
7 November 2012
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Seventh Meeting of the IGF, in Baku, Azerbaijan. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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Chengetai Masango: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to start the critical internet resources main ssession, our chair for the session is Mr ... president of [inaudible] company.
THE CHAIRMAN: Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. We will now resume the meeting. I open this morning's session dealing with managing critical internet resources. This topic has been at the centre of our dialogue at our forum. I hope we will have a lively discussion. I am looking for what to our discussion about these important issues. They have been a central part of the IGF since its origins in the WSIS (World Sound Information Society). However, our discussion today will focus on four new issues, and I think we can learn a lot. We will hear about the new top level domain name programme operated by ICANN, let's consider what are the key public policy concerns of this programme. What are the controversial aspects of the programme. Their transition from IPV4, from IPV 6 has been discussed at past IGF's but it is our second topic today. We think about a secondary issue, secondary market for IP addresses, this is an issue of global importance and global interest which takes the takes us to our third topic, one that is often misunderstood, the upcoming world conference of telecommunication in Dubai, I hope our discussion today will clear up a few misunderstandings, explain the WCIT process and help us understand what the real impact might be.
The fourth issue is the concept of the enhanced corporation as described in the Tunis agreement from the World Summit Information Society . We will talk about what has been done to date, what more we can do and the possible role of the IGF.
I would like here to add some information connected with this issue regarding to Azerbaijan, the most important thing is the critical, these resources of IPV 6, you know, and I would like to let you know that a year ago, our main backbone provider, Delta Telecom, which connected to almost 80% of the internet traffic of the country, they finished full migration, from IPV 4 to IPV 6 and they are working to with the second tier providers, some of them already made this transfer but okay, you know, this will maybe a question and subject of discussion that this process can be take too long time and maybe we will not finish forever. Yes.
This is the question, this is the things which we are discuss today and I hope we all will be very active and our remote users will provide interest to this issues which is very very interesting for all internet society.
Now, I would like to introduce our moderators and turn the session over to them.
Let me introduce our two moderators, Mr William Drake, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Chris Disspain, CEO of AU Domain Administration Limited, AU Domain Administration, Australia, who will lead us for the rest of the session.
We also have a row mote moderator, Cathy Handley , from the North American Internet Registry (ARIN) , who will introduce comments and questions from our remote participants.
Chris, Bill, Cathy, you have the floor.
DISSPAIN: Thank you, I hope you can hear me. I can hear myself, that is a good sign. Welcome to the critical internet resources session, I will do a brief introduction, then I will throw you into the hands of Bill who will lead the fist topic.
Just so you know, we have a long panel here and I will introduce them in a second. It is not intended every one of these panelists will speak on each one of the topics that we are going to discuss today. If that happened there would be no time for questions or comments from the floor.
Those of you who have been to the critical internet resources session at an IGF before will know that part of the joy of this session is that we get you to talk and contribute so we would very like you to do that and remotely, as our Chairman said, if you are participating remotely Cathy will be able to fill us in on your comments so I will go down the line here and introduce you to people. I am taking my computer, I will forget peoples titles if I don't.
I am starting at this end with Jeff Houston. Jeff is a chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Information Centre or APNIC.
Next to Jeff is Milton Mueller, who is a professor at Cyracuse School of Information Studies and a partner in the Internet Governance Project and from the U.S.
I was about to say that next to Milton is Fiona Alexander who is the associate administrator, for the Department of Commerce International Telecommunications and Information Administration Office from the government of the United States of America.
Then we have from Brazil, Ambassador Benedicto Von Secca , who is the director of the partner for sign... for Brazil.
Anriette Esterhausen sp who is the Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications, South Africa.
Alice Munya, who is the chair of the Kenyan Internet Governance Steering Committee, Ministry of Information and Communications from Kenya, everybody knows Alice, surely.
David Gross, who is a partner at Wiley Rein sp chair of the US CIB ICT Committee and the former ambassador from the United States of America.
I will skip over our Chenga Thai and our Chairman because you all know who they are already.
Luigi Gambardella is the Chairman of the Executive Board of European Telecommunications Network Operators from Belgium.
Finally, but by no means leastly, Pedro Veiga sp is the Professor of Computer Networks works at the University of Lisbon and President of the Portuguese Foundation of the National Scientific Computation in Portugal.
Finally, finally, my co moderator Bill Drake. Bill, over to you.
MR DRAKE: Thank you very much, Chris.
We are going to begin today's extravaganza of four topics I have just discovered I am on the French translation, one second am I here now? Yes, that sounds like my voice.
Good morning, everyone. We are going to start our extravaganza by talking about the new GTLE programme in ICANN. This has been the subject of some great discussion, a lot of mobilisation of energies and attention all around the world and there has been some controversy as well so we thought we would try to open the session with a little discussion of the nature of those controversies pertaining to the applications that have been received in the first round for new GTLDs.
To do that, we will spend about 40 minutes or so, 45 minutes on this and we would like to have enough time for you to participate as well, perhaps about 30 minutes or so with the Panel, a little more.
I would like to start off by asking perhaps Milton Muellerr to give us a brief overview to get everybody on the same page as to what the status is of the new GTLD programme, where we are with the application process, the character of the applications received and so on. Why don't we start the, Milton, could you?
MR MUELLER: Thanks, Bill. Can everybody hear me all right?
Let's begin by explaining what do we mean by a new TLD for those of you who don't know. The top level domain is the farthest to the right part of a domain name. You have probably heard of.com, you have heard of your country code, .cn or .pt for Portugal. These are all top level domains and we realised many years ago, really you can put as many names in the top level as you could in the second level. Although you may not want to do that. There are many people who wanted to propose or offer new top level domains that weren't currently available. People have had the idea that you could have a top level domain for .music, for example, or you could have top level domains in scripts of different languages such as Chinese, Korean or Cyrillic. For 6 years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) developed policy in its generic name supporting organisation as to how we should go about adding these new top level domains, while technically this process is very simple, there are a lot of policy issues regarding trademark rights protection, free expression, for what can you actually say in the new top level domain space? Geographic and country names, who should own them or control them. How do you decide among competing applications. How much do you charge these people to have a top level domain? How should you licence them? What kind of requirements should you place on them? Then there is the issue of the role of the Governmental Advisory Committee in reviewing the names and either vetoing them or censoring them. So, after finally working out most of those issues and several attempts to push us back to the starting point again we have now actually received applications. The applications were revealed this summer. There were actually 1,930 different applications for 1,409 different top level domain names or strings, as we call them. Only six per cent of these were internationalised domain names or what should properly be called multilingual domain names, Ian to HERE The names proposed from ranged from .lol,to Chinese and Korean .idn's to .app and .book. Interestingly .app was the most desired top level domain with 13 applicants going for it. Now currently we are in a period of public comment on the applications that may have closed recently, but you could look at all of the applications and express your opinion about them and the Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN is also looking over these and issuing what they call early warnings which sounds ominous but, simply means that some GEC members may not like what they see and that they may get into trouble with the GEC later on down the road. As far as I know that is where we are, there are a lot of technical and detailed things, but I think that is enough to get started.
MR DRAKE: Thank you Milton. One of the first questions I suppose we might want to ask is the notion of expanding the TLD space in part is driven by the desire to broaden international engagement in the GDLT marketplace. One has to wonder whether that has been effectively achieved. One of the points that have been raised by a number of critics of the GTLD programme is that when you look at where the applications have come from, there is a certain amount of geographical concentration. So the question becomes: are we succeeding in bringing in the developing world in particular, to the GTLD marketplace and if not, what more could be done? I believe there was a programme established in ICANN to provide support for needy applicants to be able to afford the fees to apply and I believe we only had 3 applicants for that programme. So, it seems there is an issue of outreach here. One of the questions that is sometimes is asked both within the ICANN Community and in the wider world is: What is going on in terms of broadening participation? Would somebody on the panel like to address that point? Perhaps Alice, is this something coming from Africa is this a point coming from a Vice Chair of the GEC, is this a point that is perhaps close to your heart?
MS MUNYA: Thank you Bill and thank you everybody. Great pleasure to be on this panel. Yes it is a concern, it has been a concern for many of us from the Africa region. We only had Sheryll up to here 17 applications coming from the African region and I think 24/27, I don't have the exact figure now coming from the latin America and Caribbean regions. In terms of creating the level of diversity, I think there is a challenge there obviously, the GEC has been on record actually advising and urging ICANN to increase the level of outreach and awareness in developing countries. We could see that that hadn't be done effectively and efficiently enough by just the numbers.
But then again I can't place the blame completely on ICANN because when you look, for example, on the Africa region, I think we have been dealing with completely different issues and I think having that level of participation in terms of applying and getting more GTLD applications coming from the region was not going be happening at this time because for the last 4 or 5 years we have been dealing with issues of connectivity and access.
This is when we are beginning to now, we feel we have got to a point where we are having more, more of us using the internet and perhaps in the next rounds we may be able to see many more applications.
There are a lot of efforts currently now taking place like we have an African working group working on an African strategy. One of the strategic objectives is to increase the registrars in Africa and to increase the possibility of more applications in the second round.
What was disappointing was also the jazz working group, realising there were only three applications after so much hard work the GAC had put into it.
MR DRAKE: That would be the applicant support group?
MS MUNYA: Yes, sorry, the applicant support group and then having just three of them. The three applications, were like insiders. That also I hesitate to call it a failure, but challenge as well that we need to look at going forward.
MR DRAKE: I wouldn't be adding editorial words like blame or failure quote marks or anything like that, I am simply asking to characterise the situation at the outset because there is a question that has been raised by many observers. Maybe we could talk for a second you said the Africans are focused on other matters.
What are the barriers, why have we not gotten more participation from the developing countries and from the non western world in this first round?
Mr Ambassador, would you have a view on this?
MR NETTO: Thank you. Well, I would like to add some words, maybe not the same vein that was just expressed by Alice and which I think is very interesting from the point of view of a GAC member. What I would say from the start is that our assessment is that this decision to adopt this large number of GTLD's is not a response to a demand from developing countries, so I think maybe the easiest answer why there was not so much overwhelming response is that this did not meet a demand or did not meet something that was being requested from.
I would say and I am speaking of course as a government respective, I am not, I do not have the ambition to speak on behalf of other stakeholders although I know their positions is that our initial reaction was negative. We did not think and we still do not think there was a need to enlarge the number of GTLD's.
The decision being made, we are engaged with the process and according to the procedures we will engage but we are still convinced this was not the right step.
I think this takes us to the larger question, which is one of the issues we have raised. Does this entail a larger question? I think yes. I think this shows that the multi stakeholder approach we are aiming at still has to be refined.
We are not looking in regard to the Government's role in ICANN to veto or to censor anything. We are modern really to work with the other stakeholders but on a more equal basis as part of a government and I feel the same sentiment is shared by a number of other governments. We feel rather excluded from the decision making process.
I think there might be some further I think this is not the right moment. I think ICANN has been going through some changes that point to the right direction but not in the speed and to the extent of like, but we would visualise an organisation in which governments should have a say. We are engaging in a process we did not initiate but agree to, but we are engaged. I do not have the exact numbers of applications that came from my region. I think probably they would be a little higher than Africa. We are supporting some of those, for example, the one that was proposed by the Mayor's Office in Rio de Janeiro, .rio. We are in support of that, as we are of course in support of .london that is proposed by the Mayor's Office of London.
We have some concerns in regard to other GTLDs that are being proposed like .amazon and we share the concern for South Africa in regard to .zulu, .patagonia. I think those names should be not for grabs by some individual organisation so, we are engaged in the process, but I think the basic point is that this does not meet the demands of the part of the developing countries.
I am sorry, I think I have been speaking too much but I have been listening a lot and this message has been heard by me and we would convey this, that we should not, as governments, rush to the decisions that will impact on others but in this case it was the other way around, we were overrun by a decision and now we are trying to address but it was not our it does not answer one of our needs [fran ches coa]
MR DRAKE: Thank you, you have actually raised quite a few issues, some of which we will return to later of a broader character. I just want to finish on this point.
Maybe David Gross, you are a close observer of this arena. What do you think really are the reasons why, as the Ambassador suggests, there was not enough demand perhaps in other parts of the world? Are there barriers we can look to eradicate soon? Should we be reasonably content with this first round in terms of what we have got and in terms of the spread? What is your view on this?
MR GROSS: Thank you very much. First of all it is a pleasure to be on this Panel and to be here in Baku, I thank our hosts very much for this opportunity.
Let me answer the question in a slightly different way if I may, which is I think the experience we now have a lot of data that we did not have before. I think it is useful for everyone to step back and analyse what we are actually seeing in a marketplace way in terms of the demand, the geographic issues, the cost issues, the interest expressed which I think it is fair so say in some respects was greater from some quarters than had been expected.
I think this is an opportunity for to everyone, to some degree, to take a breath and try to understand better, which is I think the focus of your question, to try to understand better are there barriers that are worthy of eradication or is it the marketplace telling us there isn't sufficient interest regardless of barriers?
I don't know the answer to this. I think Alice's comments were particularly instructive on this. I think there is a lot to be analysed and a lot to be learned from this and I look forward to trying to understand, as I think everyone is, better what is it we should be doing going forward, what lessons are learned? What actions should be taken?
MR DRAKE: Thank you very much. Well, I think efforts certainly were made to do outreach, but obviously more will have to be done. In any event, there are clearly a lot of considerations in different markets as potential entrants consider whether or not they want to bother to go for it.
Obviously, in this case, in the fist round, this first experience, those players that were already fairly primed and aware and had the resources ready to go were the ones to jump first. This is not entirely surprising and one expects, as we go forward, further progress will be made in this record.
Let's turn from the question of distribution to the reactions. You have seen in the wider press environment and in the responses of some governments, views expressed that some of the strings that have been applied for are controversial and raise social, cultural, political concerns that they find are rather problematic.
I would like to perhaps focus our attention on that. There has been a lot of discussion in the mass media on these kinds of questions. For example, concerns have been raised about strings that have broad meanings like say, for example, .book, where in particular, when an applicant has a closed or exclusive use kind of business model, some people say, well, maybe this is not consistent with the public interest. This is a privatisation of the use of words and so on. Others saying, no, that is not really a legitimate concern.
As I looked down the row I think, Milton, would you have a view on that topic?
MR MUELLER: Well, I do. I have a view of that. Let me tell you I am teaching a class in information policy with graduate students and I tried to get them interested in this issue.
If you take somebody with a completely clean mind who is not deeply involved in the ICANN space and you say to them, quote mark, should somebody be allowed to register a generic name in a top level domain space like .book? quote mark They look at you and say, quote mark Why not? What is the problem there? quote mark Then you try to explain to them why this is controversial in the ICANN context.
There is actually no way to explain that without pointing out that under the old system you had a class of registrars who had guaranteed access to register names, names like .com or .org, and these registrars wanted to maintain that guaranteed access to these terms. In other words, this isn't really about dominance of the language or anything like that. It is about business model competition. It is about whether you are going to have different business models in the name space.
Let's just take a generic term like, snarkyprofessors ? Suppose I wanted to register snarkyprofessors and I wanted to control who got names in that space and I put IAN TO HERE up 185,000 dollars and spent another million dollars to, you know actually get an application through ICANN. Who is to say that is wrong? Okay, what is the big deal?
Now, obviously I am somewhat trivialising the issue a bit. Let's be more serious and let's talk about .book. There are various ways you can run .book. You could simply have an open name space in which anybody can register who gets there first and that is when you get all kinds of trademark problems and get all kinds of who gets to say you know, who gets to register Harry Potter, is it book retailers; is it the authors? Is it this or is it that? So all you do when you have more restricted approaches to the top level space, is that you internalise these problems you give the person who registered the name the right to decide, we are going to manage the name space this way and we are going to try and maximise its value by trying to run it in that way. I think that is actually a good thing to have competing business models some of them open and some of them restricted and closed. I don't see any monopoly power issue here. In other words I don't think anybody monopolises the market for books simply by controlling the top level domain name .book.
I will leave it at that. Thank you Milton, but still I have to wonder, those clean minded students of yours who have never been involved in ICANN; it is one thing to talk about the registrars, the competition between business models, but there are others who have expressed interest who are not registrars. There are others who expressed interest, for example in civil society and particularly I have heard in developing countries, another people expressing concern, somehow they see this as a change in a kind of privatisation of a linguistic common heritage. You hear that kind of argument. You are shaking your head. Others that believe it could be a good turn. Anriette, coming from South Africa and being deeply involved in social society, have you heard concerns expressed about these kinds of issues?
ANRIETTE Esterhuysen: I think yes, but may be I will speak from the perspective of one of Milton's students and as a librarian which is my training and it seems as what has involved in ICANN and it is expressed by the GTLD process, it is a kind of distorted demand and supply relationship. It is where the supply of tools that should ease access for information in the public interest is kind of become driven not by making information more readily and logically available, but, by competition for names that are perceived to hold riches for those who own it and who can resell it. So there is a certain you know lack of logic in that, for me. I am not sure that that, and this is the librarian in me, that process of making information more fairly and equitably accessible belongs in the marketplace. I like Milton's idea. I think there is a space for mixed business models and I think competition between business models is good and that it enriches both the sort of public interested oriented ones as well as the profit orientated ones. I think completely losing the fundamental principle that the internet and domain names are there to make it easier for people to access information.
Needs to be considered from a public interest perspective. If earlier classifications systems, like duodecimal or Library of Congress were developed driven by an open marketplace competition process. They would have looked very different. I know technology is very different but I think humans still relate to information, and process and accesses information in very similar ways.
MR DRAKE: Okay. I think that it is fair to say okay, Mr Ambassador, you would like to get on? Let me also say let me say to the other panelists if you have something you would like to add quickly, if I didn't look at you on a point, just give me a little indication. Mr Ambassador?
MR AMBASSADOR: Thank you. What I would like to comment is that I think to most people I know if the kind of question was put, was framed the way, it was framed by Milton, the answer would be the opposite. People would be surprised that someone would be entitled to exert the monopoly on some TLD. I think one interesting approach took in the Human Rights Commission was that was is going on off line, should go more or less on line. So it is very, I think, it is not realistic to think that in the real world someone on our worldwide basis would be entitled to hold monopoly on book or hotel. So it is rather surprising from people that are not involved and are not in the business of this and I think this is a matter that encompasses other issues than exclusively the business model. So it has to be looked into not only from a business perspective I think. One of the challenges when we are dealing with multi stakeholder approach is not to let the process be hijacked by one of those perspectives. I think one of the important things in this regard from the point of view is, that we do not see really the, the meaning. I think I am listening to what is being said, I think it is very important but from the perspective of a country that also supports the notion of open data, open government, it is rather, a perspective that is not exactly favoured by us, but as I have said we are participating fully. We are engaged in the process and we look forward to what is being decided upon on those issues.
MR DRAKE: Part of what you just said that resonates with me a little bit is people who are not involved in the process. Those of us who are involved in the process may feel that well, we spent years developing this whole procedure and there is a way in which people can go about filing objections to strings, and this is all very structured and it will be taken into account in a very transparent manner etc, but for those who are not participants of the ICANN process and are not particularly aware of what is going on; they wake up later and find out that oh, this word has become the property of so and so and then express a concern. I don't know if there is anything anyone can do about that. The fact that some parties are not aware of or participating is not easily overcome immediately. I see Milton feeling a little bit agitated on this point. So I want to go back to him and also I want to ask Jeff Huston, who is a close observer to these matters, whether he has a view?
MR HUSTON: Yes, I just want to clarify, the business about having a monopoly on a word or owning a word. That is not what is going on here. That is simply an incorrect way of framing the issue. If I register a .book, I have an exclusive assignment of the TLD string .book. That doesn't mean that you can't use the word book; it doesn't mean that police break into your store if you put book on the front of it. It doesn't mean you can't register the book in Spanish or 16 other or 27 other languages and what I have to also make clear here is that exclusive registrations are an inherent part name of the domain name system. You have to make an exclusive assignment of the string to somebody. So we are not debating whether somebody has a monopoly on it. Monopoly power means, a level of exclusivity that simply doesn't exist merely by registering a name. It does give you a technical exclusivity. And finally, let me point out that these generic words were registered at the second level. Basically when .com was the only thing, it was almost the default route. There was a book .com; there was an Amazon .com.
Now it was interesting that the Ambassador thinks that a private company should not get that, but maybe a government should have a monopoly on it because the Amazon river flows through the territory; I am not sure what is his position on that?
I think we have to not confuse the exclusive assignment of a domain string with economic or political monopoly power; that is simply not the correct way to do things.
MR DRAKE: Geoff, what do you think about that?
MR HUSTON: Is this a case of search and denial? Because quite frankly, folk don't use the domain name system to find out things; they use search engines. Domain names strike me as the horse and carriage of the car industry. Honestly these days, all they are are tokens that you use once you have found what you found. I don't actually think they convey much. Unlike a twitter message which has at least 140 characters, domain names are shorter than that and they are generically useless. They don't actually convey any information and it always surprises me that such an amazingly large industry has sort of started up around a system whose real utility come and gone. Search engines these days are what you really should be wondering about. Search engines are the underlying issue of why is my content visible or not visible?
Interestingly governments have let search with property of private industry now for over a decade and have never really looked at the underlying issues of to what extent that search function has relatively vast economic implications. Yet we are happy to spend millions upon millions of dollars mucking around with domain names. Perhaps domain names are simple and easy and that is why we love to spend so much time and fascination on them. But honestly, they don't do much. Search is everything out there there; domain names are just vanity labels.
MR DRAKE: So are you suggesting that after spending all of this money launching the TLD, the value of the TLD to any given applicant might be reduced by the number...
MR HUSTON: Well I find it pretty weird, that the whole system around generic names was an outcome of the failure of .US and then almost every other country just quite neatly aligned their domain names underneath the top level country domain name and figured out internally, yes we can sort things out. Then to suggest somehow that we need more generic top level domain names, then assert unilaterally that the rest of the world needs them too. Seems to be a little bit of assertion of demand without the substance. Then to say, the other countries didn't follow along; maybe they are missing out on something. I would suspect that the other countries didn't follow along because maybe they understood something and that realistically generic top level domain names is not the saviour of tomorrow's internet; it is irrelevant.
MR DRAKE: Thank you Geoff, that was suitably provocative. There have been other kinds of names that have also have been subject to some controversy or concern. Fiona, for example, concerns have been raised about regulated industries, like financial industries and so on where there is the possibility of consumer protection questions,etc. Do you have thoughts on those kinds of questions? I know in the government advisory committee questions have been raised around regulated industries and the names pertaining to them. I can't tell if it is better to keep this on or off? I think maybe perhaps some historical framing is useful. This is not the first time there has been an expansion of the top level domain name space. By my count this is the third time. My recollection of the history of this system was one of the founding principles of ICANN was to actually introduce competition in the domain name space by introducing new TLD's. So I am little bit of a loss as to Geoff's view about the failure of that US, but this could predate my time a little bit. So again, I think it is important this is not the first time this has happened. I think it is the first time it has happened in this way and this many. I think what you are seeing is the consequences of previous rounds in the way that ICANN went about doing it. Sheryll edited to here Concerns that those weren't effective, the six year policy making process, leading to the results today, which different people can argue are not perfect but it is where we have gotten to as a stakeholder community, and agreed as the way to go forward.
What we have right now is each of the stakeholders having an opportunity to express views, whether it's public through the public comment process, which is closed now, or governments through the tools which are available to them, which is to express their individual government early warning through the GAC, which again the purpose of the early warning is to let applicants know governments may have a problem.
There is a possibility in some cases of remediating that application in particular with geographic names. Then the subsequent process in the April time frame is a GAC consensus objection, which presumably if the GAC as a consensus says this shouldn't go forward, will not go forward. That is the process as a whole.
I think what you are seeing and I wouldn't want to speak for the GAC as a whole, what you are seeing in the GAC is different governments going through their own internal processes. In the United States we run a monthly meeting monthly DNSR agency meeting and we went through the applications, all 1,930 as a government, to figure out what strings and what applications we may or may not have concerns with in anticipation of participating in an early warning process, the results of which will be out November 20 or 21.
I don't want to speculate on what people would or wouldn't do but I think it's fair to say governments have concerns about consumer protection, consumer fraud and consumer harm. Any time you are changing something I think governments want to make sure there are protections are in place.
I think it is important to not lose sight of the purpose of the programme at the outset and people can be disappointed in the resilus of who applied and who didn't apply. I think that's a fair question and one that will need to be addressed in the review of the programme.
I do think the fact that you had 1,930 applications with a significant number of companies, a significant number of money means that someone somewhere believes there is a business model, perhaps Geoff doesn't, but there is a business model in some cases and in other cases the TLD's have particular uses for communities.
I think if you look across the applicants there is not one purpose for each of these TLD's. Each TLD tends to have a different purpose depending on who has applied. It is hard to talk about them in the abstract as well.
MR DRAKE: Okay, that is why I asked you a concrete question which was pertaining to regulated industries, are there what are the specific concerns that governments might have with regard to applications pertaining to regulated industries?
MS ALEXANDER: I think governments collectively will want to make sure that any string that purports to represent a regulated industry, has appropriate consumer safeguards in place.
What those safeguards may be or may need to be may be different from country to country perspective and may be different from sector to sector, perspective. Those are issues the GAC is grappling with in Toronto and will be grappling with going forward.
Alice actually participates in the GAC more than I and can speak to that probably more specifically but that is the set of issues they are discussing.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, we will return in a second to the GAC and more generally the process of reviewing them. I just wanted to get out on the table some of the concerns that have been expressed about the types of strings. One other we have heard some expressions of concern about, well, actually two perhaps, geographic related and also those that have potentially religious or cultural salience.
There have been a number of expressions, we saw, for example, I believe it was Saudi Arabia objected to a rather large set of applications and said a number of these had raised cultural concerns about appropriateness and so on.
Would anybody like to speak to those kinds of questions? Or I can just Alice if she would like to help me address that question? Or somebody from the audience.
Are you pointing for a reason?
MS MUNYA: I am pointing to our GAC Chair, Heather.
: Yes, the GAC is actually considering whether the applicant guide book has sufficient provisions for public policy issues and some countries are going to be looking beyond consumer protection issues but also strings with religious terms that don't have the support from the relevant organisations [muya] or community, geographic names that don't have support from, you know, governments as well, as well as obviously strings that have multiple meanings. Again, that could have geographic connotations and at the same time there is the commercial then each member country is doing that at the national level to where the GAC offers its advice. We are calling that of course early warning which will allow GAC members to interact or the applicants to interact directly and then there is going to be advice on that, yes.
MR DRAKE: Okay. Let us talk a little bit more then about okay.
NEW SPEAKER: MG. I would just like to refer to our concern with regard to .amazon that was referred to by Mr Mueller. Well, first of all, Amazon is not only a river, it the whole of a geographic region that spans many countries including Brazil, so we of course are objecting that some private institution own the internet domain and of course we are not objecting that any book store names itself Amazon or hotel names itself Amazon or any kind of business but if somebody is entitled to unique internet domain, to own a top level domain, I think this is a problem for us, not only for Brazil but the whole region.
I would like to just make two comments with regard to other issues that were touched before. One of the barriers of course is the cost and I think this is one of the reasons why there are not so many applications coming from the developing world. This is something that might I think have been discussed in this illuminated environment of ICANN and all over the years.
By the way, we have been participating actively, not only from the perspective of Government but also we have a very robust civil society private sector that has been fully engaged in ICANN.
When I am speaking as the Government and challenging some of the decisions and the process it is not because of lack of participation but rather because the points of view did not have the exact place to be considered and we are not duly considered. These were overruled in the process.
I think one of the question that were asked and one assumption that was made is that we need to assign some names to different institution because this is the way to run things. Is that really a need? Do we need that from our perspective? The answer is no.
MR DRAKE: Why don't we talk a little bit then about what is the process by which objection and evaluation takes place then. We've got a set of we've got 1,900 1,930 string applications. They are going to have to be reviewed in the ICANN process. A very elaborate approach has been mapped out for that and it includes several bases for filing objections by different parties and includes also a fairly wide scope of possibilities for governments it seem to me.
The Government has seen in Toronto, we've learned there's not just advice but there also requests and other things, so there are all kinds of ways governments and other parties can express concerns.
Could somebody, perhaps Fiona or Milton why not, Milton, perhaps you could describe little bit just briefly the range of objection processes and how we'll go about doing these evaluations going forward.
MR MUELLER: It's a very disturbing process, if you ask me. I think it is basically governments are getting together in a room as the Governmental Advisory Committee and they are basically making or trying to make international law, enforceable international law, enforceable through ICANN and its control of the route, without going through a democratic process.
They are saying, "This is the advice of the GAC and basically what that means is a few of the more active and dominant governments in the GAC are saying this is what they support and nobody else objecting.
Then they are saying, "We don't have to pass a text or a rule that actually expresses what we're trying to stop. We're simply going to say, 'We don't like this guy, we don't like this applicant' or 'we don't like this string'" and they don't have to take it back to their national legislatures and get ratification of a treaty.
There's no accountability. You don't even know how the different governments voted or stood on this particular issue, so you get an advice, let us say the GAC decides they don't like .gay, okay. Is it illegal to say the word .gay? Obviously not. In fact, in the US it would probably be illegal for the GAC to stop anybody from using that word simply because they didn't like hom*osexuality.
This is you know, I sort of agree with Jeff Huston that the issues here are not about whether we get this domain or that domain. That is not really very interesting to me. What is extremely interesting to me is the authority of governments over the ICANN process because on the one hand we have the United States and many other western countries on the war path about the ITU and the WCIT process because governments are taking over the internet and yet we see the GAC within ICANN asserting more and more authority, now deciding that its advice would have to be overruled by a two thirds vote of the board and asserting more and more authority over the top level domain name process.
I think there's an absolute double standard here that on the one hand we're saying governments should not be involved in the governance of the internet when it comes to the ITU or other institution but inside ICANN we're saying governments are going to have a kind of arbitrary yes, it's a veto power. There's no rules that tell you what is allowed and what isn't. It's just they sit around say, "Do we like this or don't we".
That is kind of an arbitrary veto power that doesn't have to be ratified through a democratic legislative process. I think that more scary than what is happening at the ITU.
MR DRAKE: So you have a view about this matter then is what you are saying. I think we will definitely have to hear from Heather in a little bit.
If I could maybe try to get a few more people in just on the process of, so everybody is clear, how we're doing, how in ICANN the evaluation and objection process will work. It's not a foregone conclusion that all these things go in. Obviously, there is competition between various applications and so on so. How are they being reviewed?
David, could you perhaps maybe just briefly illustrate how the review process and the current range of objections that applicants can be made to applications, just so people know.
MR GROSS: I'm the wrong personal for that one on this panel.
MR DRAKE: Okay, then Fiona would be the right person.
NEW SPEAKER: Heather. Oddly, I think that may be the case on this particular Panel. Just to keep in mind the time lines and I don't have the exact dates in front of me because these date will have shifted most recently but applications were due in the spring time, the application process is closed. Anybody in the world was able to file public comments on applications that were submitted. There was a request for an extension of the public comment period. ICANN granted that extension and the public comment process is now closed.
Now the ICANN staff has outsourced to a variety of contractors to review these applications, so the applications my understanding was each application was probably about 300 or 350 pages per TLD by the time we filled it out. Each application has to go through series of financial and technical checks to make sure the applicant is able to actually run a part of the internet critical infrastructure.
This is all part of the initial evaluation. Initial evaluation results, I understand, are probably due out in March now of next year I think is the time frame for that.
Also during this time period this an ability for people to raise objections to a TLD.
Separate and apart from the GAC process which Milton has inaccurately described there is an ability for stakeholders to file objections. I can never remember all four of them but the two that come to mind are the legal rights objection, so if you are a legitimate trademark holder you are able to file an objection based on protecting of your mark.
There is also an opportunity to file a public interest objection, so based on the public comments if other people weren't able to pay to file the objection ICANN has hired an independent objector to review the public comments and file objections.
There are two other vehicles for filing or methods for filing objections as a stakeholder. I just can't remember them off the top of my head. Governments for their role, as I said, have two processes.
This isn't about governments having a veto power. It's about governments having a place inside the multi stakeholder model. In this case it means governments having a role and a voice inside the new GTLD programme.
So the first vehicle is governments individually being able to express early warnings through the GAC. The second opportunity, which will be in the April time frame, is governments collectively saying, "We think a particular string is not in the public interest, therefore, it shouldn't go forward" and then the ICANN Board will consider that advice. It is presumed the ICANN Board will take that advice, if however they're not going to take that advice you have to have that bilateral consultation. That is the process as it's laid out.
Again, the GAC process is not about vetoing or governments telling people what to do. It's about governments participating in the model and that's what this is about. You can't have a multi stakeholder model that doesn't include a role for governments.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, Fiona, that was very helpful. When you say it is presumed that the GAC advice will be followed, how does one characterise that presumption in relation to the larger questions that are raised around this issue of governance and the role of governments vis a vis the multi stakeholder process?
MS ALEXANDER: I'd refer you specifically to the text in the guidebook actually gives very specific wordings when it describes the role of governments and the government objection process.
If the governments collectively have a consensus objection there is specific wording that the Board has agreed to do. I don't want to disport that. It is important to take a look at those words specifically.
MR DRAKE: I think we should at this point we have thrown enough on the table to start to get audience engagement in the process so I would invite anybody who would like to address these question to do we have microphones? Are the mics roaming around? We don't have mics standing in the front.
I'd first like to turn to Heather if we could. We have I will come to you, Parminder, after but we have the Chair of the GAC here. Can we get her a microphone the microphones are in the back of the room, I am told. I don't know why.
(pause: audio problems)
MR DISSPAIN: While we are waiting for Heather could I remind everybody that there is a workshop this afternoon at 4.30 precisely on the new GTLDs for more information, thank you
MS DRYDEN: sp Can you hear me now? Okay, excellent.
All right, so now I feel there is more pressure now that I'm up at the front. My name is Heather Dryden. I am Chair of the Governmental Adviser Committee at ICANN. I'm also from the Canadian Department of Industry.
Thank you for giving me a chance to talk a bit about the Governmental Advisory Committee in a way that will really complement what you have heard from my Government colleagues on the Panel.
Regarding the Governmental Advisory Committee, it has been increasing in it effectiveness and this is really important because if it's not effective, governments won't participate. So for the multi stakeholder model to work it has to be an effective means for governments to influence and advise the board at ICANN.
However, it important that there is balance established between the committee and other parts of the organisation and if there isn't a balancing of influence, then I can see how there might be concerns about that.
In terms of the new GTLD process it's important to remember that the mechanisms that have been described by my colleagues called "early warning" and "GAC advice" are really the result of extended discussions, advice, consultations, about how to address some of the concerns that governments are raising about the process.
In fact, this was not the first thing that governments proposed in order to better address some of the concerns about what might be applied for and whether that would really be in the global public interest for those applications and those strings to be introduced into the domain name system.
So to talk a bit about those mechanisms specifically, it is useful to think of the early warning process as being a low bar or a more lightweight signal that governments can provide because they have concerns.
Hopefully, many of those concerns can be addressed so that if there is communications within an applicant and those early warnings by the way are going to be published. They will be made public. You will see what are the early warnings that are going to be filed. November 20 is the date for communicating the early warnings as a whole from the GAC to applicants.
It's, as I say, a lightweight process for that and for those issues that can't be addressed or that aren't going to be addressed, some of those may be proposed by a GAC member for broader discussion within the GAC.
If you are talking about a consensus objection so we're not talking voting; we're not talking about vetoing anything but if you're talking about considering an application for a consensus advice coming from the GAC, in particular an objection, that's really difficult to accomplish in a setting like this.
So it's a high bar or a more strict level of agreement needed among governments and that is deliberate. That's by design and we think it should be that way. Yes, so I think that hopefully will give you some facts about how the process will work.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, Heather, that is very helpful.
So there is a differentiated range of possibilities here in terms of Governments' responses to these issues and of course as was pointed out by Fiona there are many other processes as well for people in the international community to raise concerns about the strings and there is an elaborate review mechanism established under the applicant guide book to deal with these kinds of questions.
I would like to take a couple more questions and then we will turn to IPV4 markets.
I see Parminder is standing pu over here and if there is anybody over here also.
Parminder, do you have a mic? Also we have Raul.
Parminder Jeet Singh: Parminder. Thank you, Bill. First of all, I am Parminder from IT For Change, an NGO based in Bangalore. I think one thing we should make clearly to the audience who may not be very familiar with what kind of problems are we really dealing with here: there's a particular category of new GTLDs which are both private and closed using generic names. That's the most problematic and that's the one which has attracted most adverse media and civil society attention.
These are GDLTs like .book, .beauty where not only they use generic names they can be taken up by a company who would then not allow anybody else or may not allow anybody else to register second level domain names under it, so this is a particular category which is attracting the criticism of privatisation of names.
Now to the comments from the panellists. I have been arguing with Milton Mueller for a long time and he says it is a matter of technical exclusivity. It is the same as the second level domain name. Both we do not agree with and Milton has claimed for a long time that domain names really don't have any semantic meaning and there are so many people so much exercised by the generic name domain names they think the companies are going to use this label to kind of exclusively dominate a particular area and has competition issues.
However, I would then come to Jeff's comment that domain names are simply not important enough any longer and Milton kind of approved that approach but if that is the fact then should we put domain names out of the critical internet resources bracket and put search engines into the critical internet resources bracket and we should have sessions on managing and governing search engines here and not really the domain names.
I would very much like to have that approach and also would like to listen to your responses on it. Thank you.
MR DRAKE: I can see Chris likes that idea but, Raul, could you share a view with us.
Raul Echeberria:l. I guess that I can speak in Spanish?
MR DRAKE: I presume.
Raul Echeberria: . Yes, I wanted to take this opportunity to say that I thought that the comments made by our colleague in red were excellent. It seems to me that we can't look at internet issues only from the free market perspective. I think we also have to take into account other interests. Of course, this would include new generics. If we look at this from the view point of making money in other words, from a free market view point this would be a very impoverished vision of internet.
What we are trying to promote is a much broader vision and I see this is coming up in the content of the workshops we're having here; in other words, innovation, investment, learning, all of this is very important. We take them into account but we also have to take into account that there is even more than this.
We shouldn't look only at the interests of individual persons or corporations that want to make money in accordance with free market principles.
We can understand this but account must be taken of all the other interest that have been expressed here and of course there can be other stakeholders as well. Thank you.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, Raul. I think that point of taking all interests into perspective and having a process that's inclusive is a good one to end on for this particular topic. Can we just briefly because we need to move on to IPV4 markets?
NEW SPEAKER: MG. Absolutely, Mr Chair, I will be as brief as possible but I would like not to leave some of those things unanswered. First of all, I would like all my comment to be seen from the perspective of a representative of a country that practices, not only preaches but practices multi stakeholderism, that believes in IGF, that believes in the institutions that run internet governance.
We do not by any means looking at initiatives to curtail the activities of any of those institutions, so I think this is the basic framework in which my comments I would like to be seen, first of all.
Secondly, I think it's not helpful if some of the comments are made, some attempts to disqualify the comments, for example resorting to assumptions such as that only the US and western countries are working in the ITU to prevent intergovernmental control. This is not the case. In my country, we also have, as my colleague yesterday said, he has to prepare a position for the ITU meeting but our approach is more or less conservative in the sense that we want to be in line with the constitution, not wanting to expand beyond its boundaries. So I think it is not just accurate and it's not fair to say that only the US and Western countries are concerned about some of these aspects.
Finally I am sorry I would like to say that I think this has already been touched by Fiona and Heather in regard to the GAC procedures but I would like also to say that the approach my country takes to this exercise within GAC is not the one that was described. It is not an authoritarian approach. We want to if we issue early warnings or we participate in the consensus, we feel it needs to be fully informed in a way that would entail an endorsem*nt, not because of the authority of the GAC because it has none, it has not a decision making power, but because its argument will be heard and agreed that. So this is basically the approach we are taking towards this exercise.
MR DRAKE: Thank you. Where you are coming from I think is understood by anybody; so there is no problem with that.
This is obviously a big topical area that we're only scratching the surface on but we wanted to get it on the agenda for this main session. Now we turn to another important and controversial matter and I hand over to my co moderator here.
MR DISSPAIN: Thank you, Bill. Just to repeat, it is an interesting topic and there is more discussion to be head on new GTLDs and there are a number of workshops happening during this week, including one this afternoon at 4.30. So if you want to know more, if you want to ask more questions, then please do come along.
We're going to it is really quite hard to actually talk and hear yourself at the same time, so I take my headset out.
We're going to move on now to IPV4 and IPV6 addresses and secondary markets, a topic that those of you who have been around for a long time will know that the critical internet resources session at the IGF has always had a section on this. Remarkably on this particular occasion, whilst we have Axel and Paul and Raul and various other people from the RIRs in the room, none of them are up here on this Panel but I suspect we might call on them at some point.
Geoff, would you be prepared to just very briefly introduce the topic of IPV4, IPV6 and explain for those who don't necessarily understand?
MR HUSTON: Thank you, yes. I am Geoff. I am from APNIC, one of the regional internet registries. You know, we're not running out of domain names soon. There seems to be an infinite supply of names and quite frankly anyone that actually argued the last domain name is going to be registered next week would be kind of silly. But you can't say the same about the fundamentals below that which is actually the addresses because, for the internet itself, it doesn't negotiate names as packet that move through the network, it negotiates IP addresses. So every service, no matter what it is, if it's a public service it needs an IP address.
Now, when the internet was first designed and this is going a long, long time back the original address base used was 32 bits. At the time, the world was full of mainframes and there were a few thousand of them; so to use 32 bits was considered to be crazy talk. Other protocols at the time used 16 bits and they thought that was just fine. 65,000 mainframes would cover most of the surface of the planet. The idea that you had 32 bits and 4.3 billion possible address devices just seemed incredibly large.
But you and I now know that computers are the size of inside your pocket, computers are now single chips that sit inside your passport, computers are literally everywhere and most of them want to talk. Most of them want to communicate one way or another.
So it is now no surprise that those 32 bits are looking not just finite but, in some cases, we have run out. Addresses were centrally managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). They administered blocks of addresses where each block is 16.7 million addresses, what we call a "/8". Its last blocks were handed out into the RIR system in February last year, 2011. In the RIR that services the Asia Pacific area, APNIC, we handed out our last conventional address in April of last year, April 2011.
That doesn't mean addresses are completely unavailable but the policy we're now using inside that region is far more restrictive and each and every applicant can get at most 1,024 addresses forever. That's it.
The ripe NCC that services Europe and the Middle East has now encountered exactly the same situation and their available pools of address base is down to their final block as well. That happened in September of this year. So they are also now down to a policy of, at most, 1,000 addresses to any person.
The others RIRs in the North American area ARAN AFRINIC in Africa of course and LACNIC in Latin America and the Caribbean over the next two years we expect them to run out. The run out projections vary slightly but it is basically a here and now problem.
The theory was that we were going to all use IPV6. This is an address protocol that has 128 bits of address space, enough addresses if someone said that if they were all grains of sand, you could not only construct the earth but another 300 million planets like it. It's a huge address base but we're not using it. About the most optimistic metric one could give of IPV6 penetration in the world today is still under 1 per cent. Realistically when we try and measure the amount of IPV6 out there, we're calibrating our measurement instruments down about as finely as we can to detect this. So we're in this paradoxical situation where we have a network that is growing out of control. Last year, I believe we hooked up more than 800 million devices, a lot of them mobile smart phones but many other devices as well. The address base only grew by 150 million. So most of those devices sit behind various forms of network translating units and similar. The amount of IPV6 last year grew by a much lower amount.
So somehow we're managing to drive ourselves into a rather strange situation in this world where the old transparent end to end internet is no longer clearly evident in much of the internet and the drive to use an address base that would restore that transparency isn't really being picked up by industry.
MR DISSPAIN: Thank you, Geoff. Pedro, why are we not using RPV6?
MR VEIGA: Thank you, Chris. I don't have a clear answer to your question but I will try to describe my affiliation with IPV6 that began in the beginning of the '90s.
As you mentioned initially, I am a professor at university but I have other roles that are more related to your question. I began following the crisis of IPV4 and the initial work on what was called by that time IPNG IP Next Generation. So it was understood that IPV4 was going to last only a few years and we arrived to IPV6 that has been just described.
We began shortly after doing some academic work. I had a student that wrote one of the first implementations of IPV6 in the Linux kernel and, shortly after, I have been appointed to manage the Portuguese Research and Education Network. My initial temptation was to put IPV6 in operation. It was not easy. The products were not in the market but one of the critical dates was 2003. In 2003, the European Research and Education Networks had already a lot of experience in the network was running both protocols. So it's technically to called dual stack. We could run IPV4 and IPV6 in the core network.
But I have another role. The other role that I have is I manage the top level domain of Portugal. Also, to prepare our infrastructure for IPV6, we updated our information system to allow IPV6 glue records so that the user in addition of putting to a given domain name the IPV4 address of the server put the IPV6 address.
This happened in 2004. Now, eight years after, the number of users putting their IPV6 address there is rather short. There is not a motivation. That I will try to cover later on.
At the same time more or less, the European Union created an IPV6 task force. There were some political documents stating that European industry should move forward for IPV6. The task force basically vanished after a few year.
So what is happening now and trying to answer to your question. The ISPs in my country, we are a medium sized country but we have a good deployment of broadband in cable, fibre, wireless. To date, the ISPs are still installing in the premises of the customers IPV4 only routers. When I contact them to know the reason, they say the routers that support IPV4 and IPV6 are expensive, are more expensive than the other ones and they want to delay the investments. Maybe now that the IPV4 address space is being exhausted there will be an incentive for them, but the market is trying to delay investments more than it can.
I would like to finalise with something. In 2008, our Research and Education Network was wishing to do a public tender to connect the same institutions, around 400 institutions in the country, and we have to make a public tender and in the public tender we discussed internally in the organisation if IPV6 should be mandatory or not but, I must confess, we were afraid if IPV6 was mandatory there were no valid tenders.
So we decided to ask for IPV4 but favour the proposals that had already IPV6. The company that won proposed to have IPV6 but then it was a nightmare implementation. Although their core network was prepared, the routers were compliant, the problem was with their technical staff. They had many difficulties. But basically the market is very slow because they have to invest some resources in training staff in buying maybe slightly higher equipments and they want to delay that.
MR DISSPAIN: Thank you, okay. So my understanding, and I am not an expert on this, but my understanding is that although IPV4 addresses have been distributed, there are a significant proportion or number of those IPV4 addresses that are not actually used and one of the topics that we're going to discuss today was the emergence of a secondary market where somebody who is given a bundle of IPV4 addresses many years ago can now create a market in those addresses and sell them; thus maintaining the ability to continue to use IPV4 for longer.
Does anyone on the Panel Milton, would you like to have a crack at addressing that before I move on to someone else?
MR MUELLER: Yes. So picking up on the previous speaker, the problem is actually even worse than he suggested in the sense that even if you implement IPV6, as long as there are a lot of other people out there who have not implemented it, you have to keep running IPV4 in order to remain compatible with them.
So that means that when you're running what they call dual stack, you still need these IPV4 addresses. So it becomes extremely important to put those addresses to the most efficient use. In the early days of the internet, before there was a more formalised contractual system for rationing addresses, the address box, the number box were basically handed out fairly liberally and that means that there's a lot of people, especially in the North American region, who have surplus addresses. For example, before there was such a thing as a business commercial ISP, any organisation with a substantial network had to basically run its own internet service provider and therefore they would request addresses, large number blocks, /16s and so on, and as soon as there were commercial ISPs they didn't really need those blocks anymore but they didn't return them because there is no incentive structure in the current system to make them return them.
So that means there are literally over a billion, or at least one fourth, maybe one third, of the IPV4 address space is actually available for continued use and, because of the slow implementation of IPV6, it is pretty clear that we're going to have to use them. So the transfer market has been a way to move these resources out of these unused spaces and into places where they need them.
MR DISSPAIN: Thank you, Milton. I am going to go to Geoff and Pedro but I also want to go to the audience. I know there is at least one person who wants to talk. If you can go and stand by the microphones if you want to talk, I'll wager that Raul wants to say something too. Geoff.
MR HUSTON: Certainly we've run short while at the same time the foot is firmly pressed on the accelerator of deployment. Last year, we added more devices to the internet than we have ever added before and this year promises to be even bigger. But it is not quite as dire as you think. If you look at your iPhone, if you look at your mobile device and if it has something like an app that tells you its IP address more than likely you will find the IP address being used is private, that a lot of the growth of the internet is already being absorbed into network address translators. So that even though two very, very large part of the world have run out of addresses and we actually do have policies that permit folk to transfer addresses, to buy and sell, we actually haven't seen an awful lot of transactions so far. Don't forget in the Asia Pacific it is now about 18 months later.
What we do see, which seems quite reasonable in terms of a response, is that folk are deploying more and more of these carrier grade net and that folk are indeed working in more and more middle ware into the situation as distinct from trying to buy more addresses.
Because if you think about it, there aren't that many addresses compared to how fast we're growing. If we really tried to give everybody a public address, every Mac, every iPhone, every Android, even if we managed to pull in another billion addresses into the pool next year that would last for 14 months tops.
A market like that wouldn't really address the needs of an end to end transparent network. All it would simply do is fuel more net NAT? deployment one way or the other, so folk haven't really leapt into the market because the carrier grade NAT solution has been a more convenient solution at the day.
MR DISSPAIN: Thank you, Jeff.
Pedro quickly and then we will go to the floor. Did you want to respond?
MR VEIGA: I have in front of me a message I received on 21 October coming from a company that has an address IPV4 rent dot D . It says:
"Dear sir, as you might know the IPV resources are depleting and ISPs all over Europe are affected by the situation."
Basically this is proposal that I rent some of the address space that I am not using. This is happening now and this is very important to discuss.
MR DISSPAIN: I thought it was going to be a rant but it turned out it was rent.
Milton, just quickly and then we will go to the floor.
MR MUELLER: Yes, I just wanted to provide you with some facts about the growth of the market. It's actually much more extensive than Jeff may have indicated.
We recently did a quantitative study of this and really all of the major RARs, that is to say Asia Pacific, arran and ripe have passed transfer policies allowing these market transfers only in the last three years and APNIC only depleted its free pool in the last year.
In that year we've seen a growth of a market that is currently valued at at least USD 100 million and if it continues to grow at its current rate it would easily reach a billion dollars next year and if it continues at that other rate for another two or three years it could easily surpass the domain name industry in market value.
So think about all the fights and all the battles we've had about domain name policy and it's happening because of the money involved. Now translate that into the terms of the IP addressing world and I think you're going to see major institutional changes, changes in rules and regulations and changes in industry structure in response to that.
It is really important and Pedro's comment should be built upon there's all kinds of new business models being proposed, leasing of addresses and so on. I think we really need to focus on how to do transfer markets right. I don't think it's the only issue but it's certainly an important one.
MR DISSPAIN: I am going to take a comment from the floor in a second but before I do I just want you to think about, those of you who want to comment, why should anyone care? What is the first thing I am going to notice, not as a person involved in ICANN or in the RIRs or anything just as a person. What is the first thing that is going I am going to notice that is going to make this matter to me, even a tiny bit? Because a lot of is happening in spaces I don't even understand.
We need to have this microphone working, please.
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you. Paul vicsi Arran Board of Trustees. I wanted to put my own stamp on why V6 is not being deployed. It is because it has a significant last mover advantage. Right now, the cost, in recent years, the cost of deploying has been high, the benefit of deploying has been low. The reason we connect to the internet is to talk to other people so there's a huge advantage of being the last person to convert from V4 to V6 because then you will be able to talk to everybody with V6, so we are, in a sense, all competing to be the last person.
That creates a huge population of non movers and, yes, as Jeff said there's a lot of carrier grade net and other trickery that has been used.
There's also a belief some people have that V6 is not inevitable. There is the idea that perhaps we will fill the entire routing table with all 32 bits of space accounted for by someone. That turns out to bring perils of its own because the routing system cannot tolerate the massive deaggregation of the tiny little prefixes we would get there. What we have at the moment is three unpleasant alternatives that everyone in the world is being asked to select among.
MR DISSPAIN: Thank you, Paul.
Raul, is that working up there for you?
Raul Echeberria: I'm going to speak in Spanish again. First of all, I would like to introduce myself as I didn't the first time. My name is Raul . I am the CEO of LACNIC which is the regional internet network for Latin America and the Caribbean. I would like to reiterate my previous point and that was the risk of analysing internet programmes only from one perspective.
In a recent panel the comment was made that the addresses that have been assigned are necessary ones and I wanted to correct that because I don't think they are necessary. First of all, I think in a number of regions there are smaller registries. In the smaller regions, again, we have smaller RIRs .
Those organisations that have IPV4 addresses want to transition to IPV6 and they are connected to both worlds, if you will.
For a long time, the assigning of IPV4 addresses were done in very small blocks and this would help them to adapt, help the providers to adapt their respective networks. In my view, I think these addresses, allocating these addresses is necessary and they need to be made available on the market. We have to facilitate rules for this transfer from 4 to 6.
Now, in some regions, these rules are being implemented and they are being observed but in other regions they are still being discussed. We need to have principles so that we can ensure that these the process by which these addresses are allocated are consistent across regions but I would like to reiterate that I think what is necessary here is to adapt to the situation.
If we focus on the importance of the IPV4 market, we may be hindering the application of the IPV6 deployment. Thank you.
MR DISSPAIN: Raul. I am going to take a comment from Jeff and then I am going to go to the gentleman on the floor over here. Jeff, for you first. You wanted to comment, yes?
MR HUSTON: I wanted to very quickly respond to your why should we care? What's in it for the consumer? It's going to cost you. In the short term it's going to cost you. Typically right now an ISP in the US makes USD 400 a year from a customer, they make from profit from that from their annual return around USD 140 AUS D per year per customer.
Whichever way you look at carrier grade net , V6, even buying addresses on the market, the cost when you amortise all of the costs and syphon it back down is around USD 40 per year per customer. In other words, what you would see immediately is around a 10 per cent price rise but the longer term is more dismal because in the last 20 years what has happened is you have actually seen an open system at work, there can be good ideas in a dorm that creates a billion dollar industry next week, the Facebooks of this world are because the network is open. As soon as you put carrier grade nats and other forms of middle ware right inside the network, what you will lose the next second is openness.
The current incumbents can buy a place at the table. If you are Google or Apple this is great, but the barriers to industry are then supreme. Nothing gets gets innovated, nothing happens. If you thought the telephone world of the 1980's was dismal, if you thought that Microsoft represented a huge regulatory problem over monopolies, if that is your outlook, you haven't seen anything.
If you managed to monopolise the current environment where the world of telecommunications and information is now incredibly rich and place it in the hands of a very very small number of providers simply by virtue of being inside a network that can no longer innovate, life is over. That is the long term risk that you as a consumer face.
DISSPAIN: So, in simple terms, if I invent something that needs a large number of IP addresses, I can be held to ransom because those IP addresses are privately held and I have to buy them? Is that effectively what you mean?
MR HUSTON: Where do you put your servers? Because you can't put them out there on on the open net because all of a sudden the carrier grade nats aren't working very well. The limited ports are actually set to let the Googles of this world through. Once you get scarcity, scarcity becomes something that is exploited.
DISSPAIN: Gentleman at the microphone, then anyone else on the panel that wants to say something, you don't have to be an IPV6 or 4 expert in order to speak.
Sir?
NEW SPEAKER: Yes, Martin Levy sp from Hurricane Electric. I have probably spent 10 years focussing on IPV 6. It is 2012. I just want to correct something that was said earlier and go with a different vector than Geoff has gone.
The reality is that it is 2012 and most of the time through classic standard technology refresh with inside the Telecom world, with inside the hosting world, less so with inside the consumer world we have now got equipment that is capable of talking V6. There is an effort to convince people to type the commands to enable V6 but the graphs are at least up and to the right and show there is more V6 being built into the core of the network. There is more V6 being built into some of the major sources of information, sources of web sites such as the players that supported World V6 Day, World V6 Launch, the major content players.
I just want to push a little bit of a positive message towards V6 and say, sure, there is a classic. You could be the last moving and say everything is fine, but in reality, the water is warm today, come on in. There are a lot of people that put a lot of effort in it.
My argument would not have gone anywhere four or five years ago. Four or five years ago I would have had technology against me in reality but it is 2012 and I do think, solidly think, I have technology in my favour today.
Last thing, last panel today, 99 V6. Come on in and join in.
DISSPAIN: Advertise your panels here, I started it, it is my fault.
Demetri? sp
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you I want to comment this idea to interpret IPV4 as a huge market. For me it is like, there are 4 billion addresses formerly. But it is like to compare we have 4 billion Coca Cola bottles and imagine market with 4 billion Coca Cola bottles. It is one side, from another side we simply ignore and some people who propose and pushes that technically in predictable future we can use only no more than 16 million prefixes, IPV4 is scarce and we can use it for future, thank you.
DISSPAIN: Thank you, Dmitri. .
Amritte?
NEW SPEAKER: Chris, I have a question and I have limited understanding of the implications, but what we have heard quite often in working with people in the internet who are supporting secure online communications for human rights defenders or for activists and journalists in countries where there is quite a high degree of unprocedural surveillance and interception of online communications, that IPV6 comes with a danger that it could be easier for repressive regimes to trace and track how users are using the internet, what content they accessing.
Does this imply that we need to also invest in public policy with stronger protections for rights of privacy and anonymity in the internet, once IPV6 has been deployed?
DISSPAIN: Sure, let's deal with the technical question first, because you don't need to invest in all that stuff if the assumption is incorrect. I will go Geoff first. If anybody else wants to comment, please do. Geoff?
MR HUSTON: Nothing would be further from the truth. If you are behind a carrier grade nat, that carrier grade nat knows everything you do, every web site, everything, every add, every e mail, every site you went to at any point in time is logged at that carrier grade nat. That carrier grade nat is not your nat. It is owned by your operator.
If you are worried at all about somebody else having the knowledge of what you are doing, then maybe sitting behind a carrier grade nat is a cause for some concern on your part, perhaps it should be.
Behind IPV6, deep packet inspection is an option, but when you have got an end to end protocol and you are desperately concerned about someone looking inside then you encrypt. That is what folk do.
As long as you have got an end to end protocol, you can encrypt. If you haven't got an end to end protocol encryption won't work.
Nothing could be further that the truth that V6 is the problem, I think you will find V6 is the only thing you could deploy at this point. The solutions we have in V4 for this, things like onion routing and so on, are relatively gross hacks on a theme that rely on the kindness of strangers to function, which in terms of privacy is not a good place to be.
DISSPAIN: Thank you, Geoff. I am going to take Milton very briefly then the gentleman at the microphone and we will wrap this up and head into the next section.
Milton, first for you.
MR MUELLER: Yes, I just want to emphasise I agree with what Geoff said about carrier grade nats and the industrial implications of the growth of this kind of cludges on the internet. That was why I was somewhat surprised to hear him say we didn't need the V4 market. We could just deploy carrier grade nats.
The first best option is to make totally efficient use of the V4 space and the next to migrate to V6 so you maintain the end to end system.
The question we really need to be thinking about, the question I want to put in everybody's mind here is, what is the date that you can turn off V4? Think about when that date occurs? Is it I cannot come with too many reasonable scenarios under which it is less than ten years from now. Some people say 25 and of course some people suggest never but we are talking about 10 to 25 years at least of a transition period.Ian from here
DISSPAIN: Thank you, Pedro, briefly, then take the yes man fist.
NEW SPEAKER: Peter Timish, I have a bad case of larn gin jiets, I come from large rex, the largest marketplace in the world. We have seen a metrix that should matter, we only represent network operators and service providers which is the core of our business, with expressions of interest from little more than 650 companies around the world in the last 12 months an we have seen remarkable uptake in the European region, so it is possible that there is a market plowing up quickly in regardless of what goes in this room, the questions we get are dramatic and the concerns they have are remarkable. So. Using address sharing tools but the immense number are looking for direct access to large number box. Thanks.
Pedro.
NEW SPEAKER: Pedro: we are in 2012, I remember that when the IPV 4 crisis started, when the line was 1988 if I remember well, everybody said, we have to solve a problem until 1998 but we then with a lot of reengineering with the protocols for dynamic location of addresses in, we have been, watching the years moving and it seems like doing a race in the finish line is moving forward. In this is a bit difficult for example, I have been contacting politicians, stating that governments should put in place policies for the public administration to be a promoter of IPV6 but when I approach politicians, from time to tame, they change. But the line is changing, [Veiga qbs, after the IPV lounge that occurs, in we seesaw increase in traffic, we run a domain interchange point in Portugal: now from the network, 10% of the traffic is IPV6 so it has been tbroaing rapidly but there is not the killer application, that is a problem.
DISSPAIN: Thank you, we will take one more important because it is you Paul.
NEW SPEAKER: Thank you, I have got a few more comments to make, we know a couple of things of IP vks 6 one of those we have always known as the transition to IPV6 works best if everyone moves at once. Learned more recently that no one really cares about IPV6 until they run out of IPV 4. The benefit of the active transport market in IPV 4 is more about the spreading the motivation for IPV6 for a successful transition, rather than it is about providing ak ses to IPV for the sake of IPV 4. So hopefully that will be a relatively short term situation.
As for the price of IPV 4 adreses, there is a supposedly a market price around at the moment of 11 dollars per address, that sounds cheap, but it goes to hundreds of millions of dollars for large blocks, we are not seeing the transfers happening. We have a dutch auction where the price is going to come down until we really see transfers happening and we can look forward to that day because I sksP's, who don't have ak ses to V4 who need it are going to benefit by that.
I think the idea of the IPV 4 transfer market moving to the sort of craziness that we see in the domain name world is also really unrealistic. What we have is two options we have the option of buying IPV 4, we have the option of transitioning to IPV v, to imagine that IPV 4 is escalating in an unlimited way, it is like horses , there is a cost to transitioning to IPV6, if the 4 is too expensive, then IPV6 becomes the solution which is a good thing.
So, I think the beauty of that is actually that it is sort of rationalises the choice of IPV6 among ISP's who are making the choices between options that are hard to cost. As for the transition, the length of the transition to IPV6 maybe there is a long tail as m ton says, you might think about ISP dial up modem access to the infrastructure, I don't think they do that anymore. They make an active decision to turn it off once they have a handful of users, they don't have to main the two protocols anymore. That is an easy answer, more than we don't care about IPV 4 anymore than we have to worry about how long it is going to last on the internet.
DISSPAIN: Thank you Paul. Thaks very much, I will pass you back to Bill who is going to move on to the next topic.
MR DRAKE: Thank you Chris and I must say, I really took heart from one thing I heard in that session which is that there is such a thing as a last mover advantage as a perpetual last mover myself, I feel very comforted.
Speaking of questions of adaptation, we will now turn to a very uncon stro ver cial topic which is the international telecommunications and the forthcoming world conference on international telecommunications in Dubai in December you should the auspices of the international telecommunications union. There has been a great deal of talk about this topic and obviously in the global sphere both in the political environment, including at the national level, various governments debating thes issues in the Blogg sphere, in the mas media et etc. and of course within the international telecommunication union itsz where governments have been engaged in a extended process of debating the revision of the ITR's, which were last updated in 1988 and since I believe 1999 there has been a series of experts groups and council working groups and so on, looking at the question of whether or not the sper national telecommunications regulations which are after all a binding international treaty should be adapted to updated and adapted to the current environment and this is led to as I say, a great deal of discussion and debate among many parties. We had a very lively workshop on this yesterday and we thought that it would be good to raise some of the questions here with the panel as well.
Given the laps, the way time is going here, I think we will squeeze the last of our 4 topics enhanced co operation at the back end and I think that is probably fine. We did enhanced co operation last year in this C IR main session for some time, so I think we can be fairly broav on that one, this one I think will probably engender a bit more discussion.
Let's start with the basic question of, can somebody give me, just, in the event that there is anybody in room who has not been following this. Perhaps David gross, give a brief overview of where we are, what the process is about, the time lines, etc. etc, that would be helpful to make sure everybody here is on the same page?
MR GROSS: Yes, this is actually a topic I feel more confident to address, thank you very much.
When they first disclose that because I am a member of the U.S. delegation, the views that I express either are or should be interpreted as being completely consistently with the U.S. views on this subject. Take that as you will and Fiona being on the panel also a member of the U.S. delegation can correct anything I might misstate by pure accident.
In terms of background, the ITR's were established the most recent version was established in 1988 about 24 years ago, they are a short treaty document, they have awrch been viewed as having the flexibility that has allowed for the extraordinary changes in the telephony industry, almost the quarter of the century since they were established in Melbourne Australia, in 1988. There has been over many years an increasing call for the world community and particularly the governments involved, the 193 governments involved at the ITU, to relook at whether or not there should be changes made to those ITR's in order to bring them up to date. As a result of decisions made by the ITU at the plan ten share ri and elsewhere, the decision, to have a WICT on world telecommunications, beginning in Dubai, going from December 3rd to the 14th. As you can tell from the dates it is an extraordinarily broav treaty writing conference, only 2 weeks long. For those who are familiar with the ITU quickly recognise that because of the need to do translations into all of the UN languages and the need to have legal reviews by all governments prior to signing of those agreements, that in fact we only will have about 8 days for governments to ne goash Yate those agreements.
Because it is the ITU it will be a government only negotiation, although I understand that certain number of governments like the U.S. government will have private sectors members on those delegations.
But ultimately, it will be an intergovernmental negotiation.
There have been proposals made for now, the better part of a year or longer by a large number of interested parties. The process was opened up to allow for submissions to be made by basically any interested party, governments and nongovernmental groups alike. However it is important to recognise that the document that will be the source of the actual negotiations in Dubai will reflect proposals made by member states; that is proposals made by nongovernmental organisations are for the purposes of informing the dialogue and discussions and could be adopted by member states but there is no requirement that they be a part of the actual negotiations.
So we will be going to Dubai in just a couple of weeks for what will be an extraordinary important as illustrated by so many of the discussions by the IGF and we will have a decision on what if any, changes should be made to the ITR's, by the middle of December.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, that was helpful I guess since you made a disclosure, I will add a small addendum, some governments have civil society, in the technical community in their delegations and as a member of the U.S. delegation, I will say nothing I am saying here has any opinion behind it what so ever. So therefore I think I am covered.
Okay, so let's talk about a bit about, first of all, a topic that was raised at some length yesterday in the workshop that we had, why are we talking about this at all at the IGF? What is the, what the is the concern with regard to the internet and internet governance that arises with regard to the proposals that have been put forward? P some folks are argued there is no connection, that internet governance is just names and numbers managed by ICANN and theIRR's. There is not a question, others said, there is a droft set of governance, if you have treaty provisions that directly impact the regulation of the global level of the internet that this constitutes internet governance, let's talk about some of those proposals, the issues around them and let's start for example with the question of definitions?
There have been a number of suggestions in both during the preparatory process and the council working group and now in some of the national proposals that have come out to adapt the definition of telecommunications that is long been in the international instruments to include such things as "and processing", which implies information processing and there go the internet and/or to expand the definition to say telecommunications/ICTs,.
So I wonder if that kind of language is included in this treaty, how might that interpret how one reads all the treaty provisions and their implications? Who would like to address the definition of a question. Well David we can come back to you and then see if we can get others.
MR GROSS: Let me say you are correct, the definitions an important part of the negotiations at WICT. There are at least 2 important aspects in terms of the definitions of telecommunications you are referring to. One is that, I think it is always important to recognise that the term telecommunications is defined in the convention and in the constitution and I believe it is now well recognised that there is no opportunity to revise that definition in the ITR's as an effective matter, because otherwise defined or defined in the primary document for the ITU.
Having said that, there seems to be at least 2 methods that people are using to try to expand the jurisdiction or at least arguably expand the jurisdiction of the ITU in this area. One is that some are trying to suggest that the term telecommunications already includes ICTs, information communications technologies and I would refer for example, to the recently submitted proposal by the Arab state administrations for the work of the conference.
I would read they say, although the the term, "... in its definitions of the ITR's and the...... already cover IC T's,".
Reflect this by saying, telecommunications/ICTs.
In black and white the Arab states, a very significant and a very important part of the ITU community of course. Takes the positions that the term that was been long defined by the ITU, well before internet I would submit, already includes this. So, if that is true, that means the ITU has some extraordinary jurisdiction, at least argument in favour of them having some extraordinary jurisdiction in the internet issues, as you pointed out, there are a number of propoa shales to create a new definition for something called telecommunications/ICT that looks very much like the established definition of telecommunications but includes the word processing, which I think most observers would...
There are 3 possible intersections, one is if you adapt the definition to explicitly cover internet then of course the entire instrument applies, secondly, if you are a government that is of the view that the term telecommunication already entails the internet, that the, then of course, from your standpoint in implementing the agreements you could say that we are going regard this as applicable to the internet. Thirdly, specific proposals the number of governments made, directly related to the internet and cannot be understood in any other way, such as defining terms like spam, IP interconnection and so on and putting them into the international telecommunication regulations, all of which raises some interesting questions I think.
One example, routing. Now, there are countries, there are governments have said, you know, we have problems with identifying where the traffic is coming in from and in the telephone environment this can include concerns such as you know, people who get these, these telephone calls from unidentified number and it turns out they get a big telephone bill at the end of the month because it has come from some shady operation in a foreign country and they have been billed very high and they go and complain to the governments. The carriers would be able to know where the call is coming in from. The revenue aspects, the carriers used to get a lot of money from settlements are concerned it is harder o to see where the traffic is coming in from.
In the telephone environment there is one set of concerns. If you expand this to the internet then you have a question of identifying where the bits are coming from. And some of the proposals been made by national governments suggest that carriers should be able to do this. So I would like to, I see Geoff smiling, so I wonder if Geoff has a view on the feasibility and practicality of that kind of an approach.
MR HUSTON: In many parts of the world, folk to bring down the cost of international traffic, use web proxies, a well known technology, intercept the outgoing HTTP request, have a look inside the location, deliver the content directly, the packet never heads to the intended DES naiks, the consent comes from the local web page. The customer enjoys is happy, enjoys a cheaper service.
The packet didn't go to its destination. If it said, should go to where it is intended, then the proxy is contrary. Then this is rather weird in saying.
We also talked a few seconds ago about the use of carrier grade nats. The use of a technology that deliberately alters the addresses in a packet, deliberately sends different information that was at the source. So under the regulations that insist that nothing is changed in the packet. We couldn't do this? This is this kind of exercise of regulatory insanity where the folk who actually understand the technology and the folk who are working a t the regulations come from not just entirely different departments but from entirely different back grownds and entirely different understanding and that what we actually do inside the network to make it work, sometimes seems to be entirely contrary to some of these regulatory proposals which perhaps for the best of motives, espouses answers with the profound implications that cut across most of the current security and operating practices we use in the internet today, that seems to be the hideth of building a regulatory framework with no idea of the foundation on which it is meant to be constructed.
MR DRAKE: There well there no doubt some people have raised questions bt, about whether or not the revision of the ITR's, in accordance with the proposals made might impact internet freedoms. I think the routing question is an interesting one in this context. Those who have raised concerns about human rights, freedom of speech, things like that, see the possibility that all communications routings would be identifiable as potentially impractical. Anriette, have you got a from a civil society point fnlt.
NEW SPEAKER: I think Geoff has put it well, there is a lack of feasibility of this process, but also just even the attempt to do that type of tracking and tracing in an internet environment has very different implications from doing that in a traditional telephony environment. I do think, it is of great concern to those of us who believe the internet is an incredibly important platform for freedom of communication and one of the rights that is very important is the right to privacy and then also the right to anonymity. But I think they are broader concerns and the ITR revision and I think it relates to the definitional issue. Also relates to the introduction of, issues such as cyber security in the ITR's. These are issues that go beyond basic telecommunications and they can have profound impacts on how people use the internet and what they do on the internet.
I don't think the IT uks is the ideal body, to make regulations about the public policy issue. I think the ITU, the universe of telecommunications and the universe of protocol don't operate in separate dimensions, but I think there is a big difference between the ITU being involved in a process that discusses an issue such as cyber security and on the one hand and on the other hand trying to build that in, into the regulatory framework.
I think perhaps another point that has brought up for civil society the WICT process, is multi stakeholder participation, you know I think the ITU was the institution that created the precedent for multi stakeholder decision, around the... with the WSIS, this process demonstrated there isn't sufficient cas pasty for nongovernmental forces to be part. That is going to be one of the lasting outcomes of the process, that it is hopefully making member states as well as the ITU rethink how it facilitates effective multi stakeholder participation.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, well the routing question relates to a broader kind of issue and certainly been one of the overarching or... droiving aspects of the, it is the funding of applications, where is the money going to come from and so on. You see that some parties have been concerned about the changes in the global environment and how they impacted carrier revenues and trying to think about what kind of business model and what kind of regulatory structure would be needed to try and preserve the financial position of the telecommunications industry in this rapidly changing environment and I know we have here on the panel with us, not had a chance to speak yet, Louis gee, who is the... et know, made a proposal for the consideration of the governments which has drawn quite a lot of attention to try to think about how new business models might be developed. Perhaps luigi you would like to explain a bit, what your thinking has been and what the status of your proposal S.
GAMBARDELLA: Thank you, I am glad to be here and to be here in Baku and to attend this panel. Even if we are here at the IGF more to listen, mainly to listen rather than speak, sometimes it is more interesting to listen rather than to speak. If I may say a few words to answer your question. Following these days in very interesting days in IGF, I think that the one of the main message that is coming from these meeting, is that we need to work altogether and really I think that we all of us have the same goal. Preserve the internet of today.
I was reading now of what O'Bama has been re elected, "the best is yet to come", but things needed to change.
Internet is global. And require global solutions. Now,.
I think we believe that WICT Baku conference, should be a success and has to be a success and we are confident that WICT Baku conference will be a success. I see in the room, in the first row, [name inaudible] he is the director general of TRA of UAE and he is the Chairman of WICT and we are sure that under his leadership this will happen and the Dubai conference will be remembered as a big success.
But, we should work in order to have a win, win result for all the stakeholders it is not only about one part who has to gain and another lose, we should all of us try to win.
I liked what the new Chairman, the new chairman of CEO, said, it is important, we have to say also the tone of our conversation, not only the substance. The tone is important as the substance.
When he said, a new season of cooperation and engagement is needed we believe that this is true and we will work in order to have such kind of new season of co operation and engagement. Let me spell some words first to clarify from our point of view, what is our proposal and then when we are and what we expect from few minutes, the result.
As has recognised, everybody agree, that the market and the Telecom industry as a whole is undergoing a fundamental shift.
[inaudible] the ability of a higher bandwidth connectivity, new applications and services are being enabled that go far beyond the traditional services of voice calling. In both, the consumer and on the price segments services such as voice over IP, social networking, instant messages and the rise of the application have changed the way customer use their mobile and fixed connections.
This development is significant and Telecom operator need to adapt and rebalance their tariff structure between voice and data services.
The aim of the proposal is to and has been to contribute to the achievement of what we call, what we call and I am happy to listening the speech of Larry Strickling yesterday, he has even recognised the important to us and such important as a more sustainable model for the internet.
Let me very clear on one point which has been misinterpreted communicated in the wrong way. Et no has never asked for increased regulatory intervention but the aim of our proposal, to establish a clear method for clear communications, the current model as some shortcomings that need to be addressed. Today there is a huge disproportion amongst revenues and a clear shift of towards players who are not contributing to network investment. Traffic and revenue flows need to be... in order to ensure the viability in the infrastructure invest pt and the sustainability of the whole eco system. Etno believe that the reniezed NTR should have these challenges, the receiver for carrier traffic and operator rev knew should not be disconnected from the investment needs caused by rapid internet traffic growth. I was saying participating from the floor, to the workshop of yesterday, just to guv you a figure that only the European Telecom operators only invested in one year, about 44 billion.
The IT lks should be flexible enough to encourage future growth and the sustainable method of market, expecting the guiding principle, the successful development of the internet, private sector leadership independent logistical government and commercial agreements. And we are as I said, certainly not asking for any change to the current internet governance model which is based on private sector leadership and multi stakeholder dialogue.
Just to come back one second to what you are saying on the beginning on the finish, and for example, you know that the, in Europe according to the EU framework, I p international is a Telecom service, not a internet service. To let you know what problems we have and why we are having such difficult and complex discussions.
So, as I said, in the paradox of this discussion is that we as a Telecom operators European Telecoms operators we want to avoid the decision that would prevent new business model from emerging and would hamper the inference offers and limiting consumer choice and there is a risk of an economic and technical operation of operator rights terms and conditions will be much higher if the development of the internet continue to be jeopardised by the lack of sustainability and or by the lack of end consumer satisfaction.
And we just to be clear also this point in particular here in this place, is important to the firm, we have reiterated on many occasion, our commitment to an open internet and to continuing enabling consumer to access services, to their choice as well as being.
MR DRAKE: Can you describe the main point of your proposal,.
GAMBARDELLA: Yes, I was already there, but just for a few minutes was important from our point of view, to use the occasions, our proposal calls for a new internet connection system that provoid end to end quality of service delivery in addition, in addition, to best effort [inaudible] enabling the best valued service to both and consumers and player and content providers.
Sorry one word, we believe that the operators should be able to negotiate agreements to achieve sustainable service for Telecom service. By that proposal, that is not asking to impose any premier service obligation on the because the quality of the service delivery based only on commercial agreement.
MR DRAKE: Okay so we have,.
GAMBARDELLA: If I may, a few words on how we see the situation now. As has been said by David Gross, who has a big experience on this, we are not a member of, we are not state member, not yet, we are observer. So we made our proposal. We welcome the fact that several member states, several member states not on Europe, also outside Europe have agreed with the issue that we have raised and, not only on the relevance but on the fact that these issue is relevant, it is very relevant for the future of the sector and has to be addressed. Within ITU and/or in other some for.
Now will be up to the member states to decide whether such kind of proposal should be added also within the ITR and this we will leave to the member states and the discussion they have in Dubai. Fv thank you.
MR DRAKE: So the core concepts that have attracted a lot of attention, the notion that the regulations would include provisions that explicitly mention a centre page sort of principle as a possibility in the negotiation of what you call fair and sustainable compensationened a a recognise of quality of service as a key concern as well. And some of these ideas have come up in for example, proposals from some countries in Africa and elsewhere that have picked up on some of these points although not the centre pace part but the other bits.
I wonder if, just briefly?
GAMBARDELLA: Just one small comment at this. We also just to be clear on this point, we saw, we see the ITR has high level principles right, and we saw, let me say, the constitution right, so in the constitution you can put some rights, some rights. For example, in the Italian constitution it is written that all Italian cities they have a direct work even this means that not all Italian have a job ks. But it is important for us to z underline we believe, that is the reason why we made such proposal, we believe it is posht to the to the firm that the operators have the right to negotiate commercial agreement without limitation.
We don't support further regulation just to be clear on this point thank you.
MR DRAKE: Okay thank you very much. Well, I am wondering from a developing country standpoint, how would this notion of having a centre pace type of approach, officially recognised as an option, in the international regulations, would that help to promote in the voo us of the panel, ak es to and access to resources in the rest of the world. I wonder if the ambassador has a view on this and also milton and...
NEW SPEAKER: Ambassador: in the Dubai conference, our position is to be finalised, however, they are some parameters that will guide our participation in the conference. Well first of all, we are decides having mute stakeholder preparation lay out by the Brazilian regulating agency but in full consultation with stakeholders we are also discussing and we have, with the nation nalg partners from the various groupings and regions in order to best refine our positions. One, some of the basic parameters is that we would as I have said before, take a rather conservative approach in the sense that we agree that the ITU constitution, the basic elements about that should be retained, that the ITR should be aligned to the existing constitution and rules so we are not aiming at, as an outcome of Dubai, to enlarge the competence of ITU. We think the competence, the areas to be dealt with by ITU should be restricted to those technical aspects that are being dealt by ITU. We do not seek an expansion in that regard.
We have a particular concern about costs, the roaming costs. We are putting forward a proposal on that. We would like to discuss the issues that is of concern to, we understand, not only Brazil but to the developing world in general. This is one of the specific items we would like to discuss but, as I have said, in the overall framework of, let's say, conservative approach in regard to the mandate and to the areas in which ITU should play a role in this. Thank you.
MR DRAKE: Thank you.
Milton, do you have a thought on the possibility of a sender pays sort of a model in which inter alia I love this new term over the top players would also play a role in helping with the financing of the build out of the environment? What are your thoughts on this?
MR MUELLER: Okay, so literally speaking, I mean, if somebody is really pushing for a sender pays principle on internet based packet communications it is simply not viabiable. It is a nonstarter. It is not going to happen and I am actually confident that Telecom Italia and other supporters of the ETNO proposal will back off of that thing very quickly and realise that it was a mistake to even put that phrase in the proposal.
When it comes to quality of service, quality of service, my question or ETNO and for the supporters of that and for the opponents is sort of what is all the fuss about? Can't they do that already?
In other words, if they have a service to sell to an over the top player who can come to them and say, "I can guarantee or prioritse your service", and those over the top players want to utilise that service, what exactly is stopping them? There's nothing in the ITRs, there's nothing in Article 9 that stops them from negotiating that.
In certain Government there might be national laws of the net neutrality sort that might stop them from prioritising in a discriminatory manner.
So it seems to me that what ETNO is asking for is some kind of recognition of this principle and we can have fruitful debate about that but it is not you know, as long as sender pays is out of the picture, this is not the end of the world. You know, like so much about WCIT, the whole thing has kind of been blown out of proportion.
MR DRAKE: I see, okay.
Anriette, you would like to reply?
NEW SPEAKER: Anriette. I think three hour panels should give the panellists coffee in the middle. I think I agree with the Brazilian approach, I think general principles, I think that roaming, however, is an important issue. I would be delighted if regulators can compel European operators to reduce their roaming charges but to come to centre place from a developing country perspective I think the implications are dire and I think on top of a growing broadband divide I was in a workshop yesterday where we discussed a recent OECD report t5hat looked at the growing broadband divide between developed and developing countries.
I think implications for access to information and knowledge are really serious but I want to ask the moderator to give the floor to a colleague of mine who is in the audience from a policy think tank in Asia, Rohan Smarajiva sp, who wrote a very comprehensive and well argued paper recently that describes very clearly why sender pays is going to be very bad for developing countries.
If you don't mind, just give him a moment to explain.
MR DRAKE: I am perfectly happy to do that. Rohan, would you like to make a comment please?
Rohan is a former regulator from Sri Lanka and wrote an interesting paper detailing some of the potential implications. Unfortunately, we have a tradition here in this session of the non functioning microphone.
NEW SPEAKER: Rohan. Thank you. The basic issue is that everybody is concerned about investment. I appreciate Mr Gambardella's concern about the need to invest in the infrastructure that will connect us, connect the poor of the world, the people that I work with, the people in my region, to the internet.
What will yield investment are good business models. What will support good business models is demand. What will yield demand, as we have seen from the research that we are conducting in places like Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh is attractive content.
Today what we have is a situation where, just to illustrate using a case, a young person in Indonesia will be requesting a video. The video would most probably have been made in Indonesia but it is sitting on a server in another country on YouTube.
When this information is being requested, what the sender, sending party network principle says is that that network has to pay the network in Indonesia.
Does this make any sense? Information is requested by a customer of Indonesian company and payment is to be made by somebody else.
In addition, what this will do is that the transaction costs I know that both the Arab states and Mr Gambardella's organisation are talking about commercial agreements but how many commercial agreements would have to be entered into? Today we know that the peering agreements that are entered into are not based on written texts. They are handshake agreements.
Now we are talking about thousands upon thousands of agreements that will have to be entered into by companies and I have been in the middle as a former regulator of trying to mediate some of these issues with regard to voice telecommunications. I know how complicated those agreements were.
Now we are going to have another layer of complicated agreements. At some point, particularly for the poor countries, particularly for areas that are not seen as having high advertising potential, there will come a time when networks and all the top providers will say, "We can't do this anymore, transaction costs are too high. The Government regulated, the Arab states proposed that its Government must consider appropriate the access charges. The Government regulated charges are too high, we will no longer provide our services to these areas. What you are going to get is a Balkanised internet. With a Balkanised internet, we will lose the driver that is bringing our people into the internet through a normative business model. What I would say is if your current business models are not yielding investment, you might want to rethink them. Thank you.
MR DRAKE: Thank you Rohan. I think we should focus on the principles and not any particular organisations in this context but, nevertheless, the point remains. Balkanisation of the internet is a possible result of changes in the charging arrangements. By the way, this also ties into the question of how we define who is subject to the agreement and whether or not it is just going to continue to be administrations that recognise operating agencies as before or operating agencies more generally, in which case all these things become rather different. I see Fiona waving at me. Perhaps you would like to add something.
MS ALEXANDER: Sure. I think that's exactly where I was going. There's two foundational issues for the discussion in Dubai. One is the definitions and the second is scope and that's who these obligations are actually applied to, recognised operating agencies or operating agencies and both of these issues are foundational to the US position which was articulated quite well yesterday in a session and is fairly well known terms of what our position is.
With respect to the APNIC proposal, the United States has said repeatedly it would not support this kind of proposal for the ITU and for the ITRs. I appreciate Luigi suggesting that we have a shared objective of preserving the internet of today. Putting a toll booth on the internet, which is kind of what his proposal would do, doesn't do that and, as very eloquently articulated by the gentleman in the audience it doesn't help development. We all agree we have to discuss sustainability of the internet and sustainability of broadband but doing it in a treaty document amongst Member States is not the right place or the right venue. Doing it in a place where 95 per cent of the people in this room could not speak does not seem the best way to solve a problem on internet policy and that is one of the reason we will not support this proposal at this conference.
MR DRAKE: You have raised another important aspect of this. There may be legitimate concerns behind some of the proposals that have been controversial and debated, particularly with regard to financial aspects for developing countries. The question becomes is this particular instrument the appropriate place to try to address them or may there be better way to approach some of these questions? I just put that on the table.
Alice, I would like to go to the audience pretty soon because we're actually, believe it or not, moving towards the end of this session and we do want to have time for the discussion with the audience, and we have the Chairman of the conference here as well, but I just wondered, I know I've talked with you about some of the discussions in Africa about the ITRs and the concerns that have been expressed by some of the ministries and administrations there about changing the telecom environment.
Given the kind of response that we've had here, how can we go about then trying to accelerate development and what role do the ITRs perhaps play in helping development from the standpoint of the Government's you have been talking to?
MS MUNYUA: Thank you, Bill. First a disclaimer to say that I cannot really speak on behalf of the Africa region, neither can I speak on behalf of Kenya because Kenya hasn't actually developed a position and we are still, you know, planning on having multi stakeholder consultations that are going to be led by the Communications Commission of Kenya which would mean then currently we are supporting the Africa common position but that is going to change depending on what proposals are presented by the various stakeholders of the national level. So I think we are in the same position similar to Brazil.
I think that's what's important in terms of ensuring that quite a number of the stakeholders are able to contribute to some of these discussions and the development of national positions which then obviously automatically would be linked to the view or the view or the vision we have for ICTs and Internet for development.
Taking into consideration, especially for African countries, to remember that communication networks, you know, deliver all types of services and so most of these issues are actually quite important for a lot of the African countries, but I am very sure you know, I'm I think quite positive that none of the African Governments, especially at least the Kenyan Government, I going to come up or support any proposal that are likely to have an outcome that curtails development especially looking at how far we've come at the national level in terms of the varu innovative and creative ways we've used the internet.
Just to mention some of them is mobile money and you know mobile applications for development and so, you know, I know for sure that the Government and various stakeholders at the national level would be very keen to ensure that the proposals they support, or at least we support, support development generally.
MR DRAKE: Kenya has been very progressive on these issues. I was not asking you about the national position, just to reflect some of the sentiment that I've heard in the region. I do want to go to the floor but I think Luigi has had several people direct comments to him. I should give him a quick minute to respond and then I will take a couple of quick points from others and then we'll go to the floor.
MR GAMBARDELLA: First of all, I would like to say a few things regarding the African position and of several countries. We have a lot of respect for them and for everybody because I think it's not up to us to judge what is better for them. I think it is up to them to decide what they believe is better for them and we are sure that they are only instrumental the knowledge to understand what is better for them. So this will be discussed and judged by them. Obviously, what are the concerns in general outside Europe. The concern and the question is what is happening and has happened in Europe will happen also in our region, will happen also in our country. The telecom operator will start to fail, will start to reduce revenue, who will invest in local infrastructures? There will continue to be the same level of local investment.
So this is the question that they are raising and there are some concerns regarding this. What is the right way to solve the problem is up to them and up to the Member States to decide.
Another thing is this: when you speak about sending party not to pay, we have to clarify also this point. We never asked to regulate sending party pay/not to pay, but always we said on commercial basis with commercial agreement. As far as I know in the US, already operator are using this model. So this is already happening. Thank you.
MR DRAKE: I think we can all agree that the telecom industry certainly does need to find new sources of revenue and this is certainly Geoff doesn't think they need new sources of revenue, they should just probably retire.
MR HUSTON: No, the telecom industry used to be a vertically integrated industry that had services as well as transmission; it was a complete one stop shop. But on the other hand, my water company simply delivers water. It is a commodity utility operation. Perhaps the challenge is to take those former vertically integrated, vertically bundled companies and instead of spending large amounts of money building infrastructure the consumers actually neither want nor value, the real thing is to actually go, "Maybe we should just become a commodity utility company and stop yearning for mythical dollars that simply aren't there.
MR DRAKE: That seems so much less attractive than expanding into new markets.
MR HUSTON: Obviously, it is less attractive but, you know, that is really the pressures that are going on in the industry.
MR DRAKE: I really do want to go to the floor but everybody is waving at me. David and Milton just very briefly, please, and then we will go to the floor.
MR GROSS: I will be very brief. I want to of course associate myself with the terrific comments that Rohan made. I think that is very much along the lines of our thinking as well. I think in terms of one of the points that I certainly agree with that Luigi made is the importance of WCIT and the importance of having an outcome that all can agree with, a classic ITU win win, is certainly what we want and we are tremendously heartened by the extraordinary capacities of our Chairman at WCIT. I have known him for many years, he is extraordinarily effective and good and we will be in his hands to make sure in this very brief conference that we will be in very good shape. So it gives me great encouragement.
One of the points that there are two additional points I think are very important to be made with regard to what Luigi was saying. In the claim, which I can certainly understand, that there is no attempt to try to have new regulations, nevertheless this is the International Telecommunications Regulations. It is a treaty, it involves rights. When there are rights being provided, I can't speak about the Italian constitution, but in all of the legal agreements that I know when there are rights given, there needs to be a dispute mechanism for the enforcement of rights as a matter of course.
Whether that dispute resolution mechanism is domestic courts or the ITU, which has never been involved in such matters before, I think it would be an extraordinary and very dangerous precedent for all of us us, not only in this area but in areas generally.
Because we're about to go to the floor, let me point out before we leave that there is another very important issue related to all of this that goes right to the internet related issues which are proposals that I think are ICANN related that have been now made. For example, one of the proposals made by one of the regional group says, among other things, that Member States shall shall if they so elect be able to control all naming, numbering, addressing and identification resources used within their territories for international telecommunications/ICT services.
So in terms of internet related issues that are of course of great interest here, another piece that is going to be the subject of active discussions in negotiations in Dubai.
MR DRAKE: That sounds like a proposal likely to win great consensus in Dubai. Just very briefly, Milton, and then let's go to the floor.
MR MUELLER: Okay. I hope my standard of briefness is not the same as Ambassador Gross'.
I just wanted to say that I don't want telecom companies to become commodity utilities. I think it is essential for the dynamism of the market that network operators continue to innovate and to seek new services. Of course they are not going to do that by going backwards towards telecom or telephone based pricing structures but there is in the US in the mobile sphere a repricing of bandwidth that is going on attendant upon the transition from dominance of voice to dominance of data and I think that the companies need to look at that kind of repricing as the source of the solution to their problems and that if regulatory systems in the EU or in specific nations impede that repricing, then that is what the companies need to be looking at.
MR DRAKE: So you shouldn't get regulatory relief through an international treaty is what you are suggesting? Let us go to the floor real quick.
Chris, did you have something you wanted to say before we
MR DISSPAIN: Are there people out there who want to make some comment because if you are come up to the microphones but I have a question for you. How many people in this room are going to be at WCIT? Because it's a real shame this sort of discussion can't happen at WCIT and you might want to tell all the people at WCIT how much of a shame it is that we can't have this sort of discussion at WCIT. Taking that message would be great.
MR DRAKE: Actually, I would like to call we have the Chairman of the WCIT here and I wonder he was in our workshop yesterday and we discussed the question of public participation and so on and other matters. Would you like to say anything and then I will come to you. Unfortunately, I am sorry, sir, you have to go back to the mic.
NEW SPEAKER: What I said yesterday is that every country has got its own accreditation process and its own also consultation process that goes all the way until they submit their current proposal to their region groups and then the regional groups get together and discuss this multilateral form and reach their consensus. So there are proposals and then the regional groups get together and start negotiating on the proposals.
Now, I just want to highlight something. Every party, and I'm not talking about Governments right now, every party has got an interest. So you have the TIMCOs has an interest, we have OTTs has an interest, we have the civil societies and the people who have concern over the future and innovation that happened for the internet has also got interest that they want to continue having that.
Believe it or not, with my experience of the history of all these treaty conferences that I participated in, we come together with a lot of polarised positions and at the end of the conference we get to a fantastic text that is agreed by all parties and everybody goes happily after that and countries ratify those treaties.
We have seen that over and over and over and over again and I am hopeful that the Dubai treaty on WCIT will one of those treaties. I just wanted to encourage one thing is that governments should engage all their stakeholders in their deliberations and their submissions and for what they have is a position in order to engage everybody in this process. We, as a country, we have engaged everybody in the process and I am sure that and I am talking now on behalf of the UAE, and we have done that, and I am hopeful that others do the same. But we should not leave the momentum of the spirit of co operation. We should not just say something and stick to it. We need to sit together and discuss that and understand the other position and be open to discussion to reach to a consensus and reach to an agreement and that is where everybody wins. This is the spirit that we will go into the conference having all the regional groups get together or even all countries get together and discuss this on a consensus manner without bias to anybody.
So that is the philosophy that we have been working on the past months in order to reach a successful conclusion on WCIT and I will be happy to get any questions that you guys have.
I cannot comment on any of the specific I would love to but I would not speak as a Chairman of the conference, I would speak as its administration and this is not something that I want to do now. Thank you.
MR DRAKE: Thank you very much for that, Mr Chairman. Okay, yes, please. We have five minutes and so let us just take quickly if there is you know, inevitably with the CIR main sessions we try to cover a lot, we knew we might not get to the last bit on enhanced co operation with the big Panel. That is fine, but we would like to get as many statements from the floor as possible. If there are people who have any concerns, please just get up behind the mic and we will take them all quickly and then we will do a response from whomever. Go ahead please.
NEW SPEAKER: Hisha Ibrahim AFRINIC. My question to Luigi would be about the ETNO proposal. It just stands to reason that mature telecos will probably be charging less than developing telecos. So what guarantees would I have from a developing region that my traffic won't be routed half across the world to when contents are selecting which market it pushes its traffic through to get me and I find my traffic get bounced all around.
My second comment, really quick, is about the meeting here actually. A lot of people are complaining they can't get on the internet because IPV4 in the meeting has run out. Doesn't it stand logic the we implement IPV6 here, so that you get more addresses so that people can get connected? Thank you.
MR DRAKE: Yes, please go ahead.
NEW SPEAKER: My name is Walter (inaudible). I am a private consulted and moderated session 87 yesterday on enhanced co operation. Because we can't discuss it in a very large way, I'll try to sum it up very quickly.
What we basically discussed is that everybody has to get out of their silos. We had governments, we had industry, we had regulators, we had, et cetera, et cetera, international bodies and everybody always talks in their own private silo, except at the IGF apparently; so maybe it is an idea to do that more often so that people actually have more interaction, learn what their actual problems but also their actual knowledge is that the next experience that they bring and influence each other's thinking that way. I think the IGF once a year is a great event but maybe it should happen more often at different sort of conferences where usually everybody sits in their own little world.
That was, I think, the main conclusion yesterday where everybody agreed upon and certainly no world treaty for the internet. We had eight and a half points out of nine points there.
MR DRAKE: Are there no other questions? Everybody is thinking about lunch. That's fine. One more is coming up to the mic, I think, and then we will get to closing thoughts from the Chair.
NEW SPEAKER: Michael Candy with Analysis Basin. Another question for Luigi. You've talked a lot about sustainability of the internet and how what is going to happen in Europe might happen elsewhere, but I am wondering the only number you've given really of definition is that you're spending 44 billion in investment which is divided between voice services, internet, European obligations. So I'm wondering how do you quantify this and how much do you think you can raise if this works out? How much money would come out of it? Are you thinking that you'll be able to cover all your investments, half? If you can just get a little more specific what do you mean by "sustainability"? What is the problem that could come in other parts of the world that follows from this?
MR DRAKE: Thank you very much. So, Luigi, you seem to have attracted a lot of atention today, so if you would like to
MR GAMBARDELLA: If I may, I will start from the last question that is very interesting because it comes from a consultant and they should know these things but it is good that he has addressed such kind of issue.
What we meant for sustainability of the internet, basically that there are two things to consider. First are the revenue and second are the cost investment. What is happening, and if you want I can give you all the numbers and I think you should have by the way those numbers that, for example, in Europe and these have started to happen outside Europe this will be the fourth year that the telecom operators are losing revenue, between 2 and 3 per cent. On the other hand, you have, I think, imagine you have the data on the boom of the traffic, I think you should have that, but we can discuss how much the traffic is growing, is booming and what does it mean in order to the investment they are needed on today's network.
Then we have to guarantee investment for the new networks like LTE, fibre, and you know that the level of our investment in infrastructure is a certain percentage of our revenue which is about 15 per cent. So we invest about 15 per cent of our total revenue, our investment and investors for infrastructure. If we reduce the level of revenue, we will reduce the level of investment.
This is I think extremely, extremely easy to understand and we believe that this system, how it is now, does not work and I agree with Milton Mueller what he was saying before that has started to happen that several operators in other regions of the world are repricing it is nice (inaudible) this wording repricing their offer.
MR DRAKE: Thank you, Luigi. Let me hand it back to the Chairman to close the session.
THE CHAIR: Thank you very much, dear moderators and the panellists. Thanks to you today we have a very open discussion on important issues which are of interest for all of us.
First of all, regarding TLD domain operated by ICANN we should be we know that it is from one point we would like to provide a transparent and open and fast way to just update these generated domains or from another hand we should be very careful with the privatisation and bringing into the open market to avoid any speculations.
Another thing is the role of the Government and the rights to objective of the Government regarding that IPV6/IPV4, we all know that this scarity(sic) of the IPV6 resources but we know that it is quite complicated to support and it required a lot of investment from the operator, from the market, to support both IPV6 and IPV4.
From another point of view, we just heard from (inaudible) that really one third of IPV6 resources is still available. So the question is: how, let's say, to get to give it to who needs it.
Also thanks for this open discussion. I think being more close to the Dubai event I think this very active discussion will help us and helped us to come to consensus in the Dubai event. I would like again with these comment to conclude this section of critical internet resources and again thank you for excellent moderating and thank you for all the floor participants, all the participants and valuable discussion.
I call the session closed and pass the microphone to the IGF secretariat.
Chengetai Masango: Thank you very much. No housekeeping notices. We resume at 3 o'clock. Thank you very much. Have a good lunch.
(Session closed)
