FINISHED COPY
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR ENHANCED
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
05 SEPTEMBER 2014
11:00
WS 198
SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE ISSUES IN GLOBAL IG
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This is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. 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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>> PARBIR PURKAYASTHA: We are just going to start shortly, just about another three or four minutes, because I'm told people are still having coffee and tea.
Okay. Friends, I think we will start now. Thank you so much to come to our workshop which is on as you know, social and economic justice issues on the Internet. Now, the general ‑‑ not the general proposition but a proposition has been there that Internet Governance is something which will take care of this automatically because the Internet is structured in a way that makes democracy easier; economic justice, rest of it, will take care of itself. The kind of techno-optimism that has for a long time been something that people have held. The potential of the internet would bring democracy. The Internet would allow people of all kind to be able to propagate their views, their opinions; it will break the monopoly of the few, and so on.
But the reality of today is we also see new monopolies emerge, we are seeing a kind of homoginization of the net by which English is about 55 to 57% of the world websites while it’s only 12% of the world’s speakers. So you have this economic and social power coming into some hands and I think that's something we all need to really think about. So this is the genesis of this workshop. I will introduce the speakers who are on the dais. Parminder Singh who is from ID For Change has been involved on these issues for a long time, and he is also the one of the founder members of the Just Net Coalition. Then we have Pindar Wong, who has really, really illustrious career, he's done a hell of a lot of things. He's one of the Internet pioneer, he's been on the global commission on Internet Governance, has been in various capacities in ICANN, including member of ICANN board 1999, and is active currently in web payments community.
We have Cristiana Gonzalez from the University of Sao Paolo, she's a part of the research group on public policies, special advisor to Brazilian federation of librarians associations for copyright and internet issues. And Norbert Bollow who presents the Swiss open systems group which is in Switzerland, the leading organization for open source software.
So these are my four panelists. I will request Parminder to go first and express his issues on regarding social economic justice.
>> PARMINDER SINGH: Thank you. Before getting into describing one of the issues and how they pan out, I think the way the workshop has been structured as well is about a problem of there not being an adequate recognition of the area itself in Internet Governance space. And we would be using our discussions as a point of depart your of trying to go in a new and different direction. We should otherwise be so mainstream in terms of it is every political space and socioeconomic issues are prime but in this area because of some of the reasons which Prabir started to allude to, it's a focus on (cell phone) well, diverse from ‑‑ I mean even social justice issues, Internet is recognized as kind of a technology which is beneficial we have it, we can use it. If we are living in an apartment we need electricity, we need the plumber to do the plumbing.
Internet Governance is those kinds of management issues but what is missed is Internet is causing huge amount of social changes around us and the nature of that change corresponds to the nature of the architecture of the Internet. And Internet Governance should now move into these actual social structure changes rather than plumbing and management issues of the Internet. Most of the discussions that Human Rights should be included. In the end they will say let's bring in a Human Rights perspective is a kind of salt that should be mixed to food kind of a thing. If you ask most of the groups here what Human Rights should be involved, freedom of expression maybe. But in other places a human amount of them being social rights, culture rights, the right to development which should be a blind space in this area and we should start talking about these things. I would briefly touch two or there are areas as illustrations. Cultural diversity causes some changes which are not understood and spoken of. There was a UNESCO treaty a couple years back.
Not that I'm taking a position it should be this way or that but those kinds of issues have not been articulated. Second is personal data. We hear a lot of stuff about privacy as a kind of negative but I think personal data is also a means of social control and also a personal resource. And there are no formulations around understanding personal data as an economic resource, who is making money, who does it belong to? And if so much money is being made on personal data, what kind of distributional aspects should be captured here? And it's true in the case of what impact Internet is having on health, education, et cetera. I'll come back to some of these subjects but the fact that we need to start formulating Internet Governance specifically on these areas is the point that I think this workshop is speaking and we will looking forward to a discussion on this.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: Thank you. I would like next Pindar Wong to tell us what his views are and I'm sure he's going to be provocative.
>> PINDAR WONG: Good morning everyone. Just to clarify everything I'm about to say is my personal opinions and views. So I believe that the Internet mirrors society. In some sense mirrors the existing injustices that are already present but in some instances actually amplifies them. So my belief is the following that technology does impact society, I think it should be self‑evident, and the societal values need to be considered at the beginning of the technical development process and not at the end.
So let me give you an example. So I'm interested in the development of web payment technology, which is to be able to use the Internet to basically route money. The upside for that will be that you can send money like you send e‑mail. The cost of doing so being increasing I turning to 0 over time and hopefully that will unleash the new economics and new opportunities to access value for the next one and a half billion to come online. The same one and a half billion people are probably also going to be the ones that are so called the global bank. It's not common to see them as traditional banking customers, what we did yesterday which was before the technical development of the protocol itself is to solicit views of the people here at the IGF, why do we want to do so? As Norbert will say, he has a big thing on spam.
Now, the people who invented e‑mail what were they thinking. And so what we are trying to do is avoid making the same mistake as with e‑mail for this web payment network using and the course of its development what that means is vehicle considerations can no longer be just about security and without security there is no privacy, I think that's somewhat false. In so far as we know from last year in Snowden, it doesn't take much skill to spy on an open network. Okay? It's open. Some would argue if you're open, why would you need security? You're open?
So these are the kinds of tensions. So while I see in the technical developments is if you look at the Internet documents there's in these requests for comments in the technical standards which is really the route of where a lot of the technical development occurs there's a line at the bottom called security considerations, what I believe is the future is that all of the policies that are being developed that help I hate the word govern but to help administer the Internet there's a similar RFC structure to mirror the technical.
Why that is important is because if a document looks completely different from a technical document, you're not going to get engineers to read it or take interest into it. But in the new policy documents or what we hear called best practices there's a specific line. And this specific line is Human Rights consideration. And this is part of a standard document. In other words, any future policies come out must contain a line Human Rights consideration. If we do that one simple thing, this raises the profile because technology is to serve humanity, I hope. Slightly different windows, machine to machine but for now we are the biggest users of the Internet.
Why is this important? So let me use another example. There are I play in these Angel space. How many of you have a smart phone? I don't. I use a two G phone. I live on the other side of the digital divide. For those that have a smart phone in term of mobile payment there's over 800 companies delving technologies in mobile payment. You may have heard recently of Amazon local register to have a cheap way of accesses credit card on your smart phone or companies like square. But your smart phone these days has various types of biometric censors, fingerprint scan. It's your private data but it's captured some way.
What are the consequences of doing that? There are startup companies that are looking at, for example, attaching a device that monitors how much exercise you do and adjusts your life insurance premium accordingly. So what we are seeing right now because of globalization is all this technical innovation and it makes things very convenient, makes it easy. I would say the pathway to hell is made very convenient. That cost of convenience has a consequence. When you couple all that biometric information with payment you may have unforeseen consequences and you need to consider the social consequences the social economic justice of that up front. In some countries now to register for a sim card they need to take your fingerprint. Who made that decision and where does that information decide and what happens when that data repository is packed?
So the long and short of it is the social and economic tensions that exited previously I would argue are made worse by the Internet. It not the fact that the changes are a cowering it's the fact what the right of change is going to kill us. Why? Because the societies are not geared to adapting at the same rate. The generational difference, the way my kids use computers and the way I use computers, the underlying assumption is should any of this infrastructure go away like you lose your smart phone, there's an incredible digital disorientation.
So I would say the smart phone is not necessarily smart because if you lose it do you lose all your intelligence? Somebody is responsible for thinking about the unintended consequences the social consequences of the technical development. It's not acceptable to leave everything in the hands of engineers because we are all society. And they’re good at designing protocols. So my concern is the future we are building for example for our children will actually be a form of digital slavery. What I call slavery 2.0.
In other words, should you take that technology away will they be able to function in analog world? They make their friends now digitally, sometimes super fishily. If we lose power and I like to use Thailand as an example because my wife is from Thailand. When you become to depend on any infrastructure wholeheartedly when that goes the way when the payment network goes away, when the electricity goes away what do you do? We are not exactly sure what to do. Some of us I think we have a special responsibility. Why is this? I think we are the last of the analog digital generation. We are on the cusp. We can remember that when the power goes out we bring out the petrol generator.
Our children do not have that experience. So when they lose the digital identity or the digital infrastructure it is incredibly disorientating and debilitating so my interest in the panel today is to avoid that and that's by telling them you have to live and assume it's not there. That's why I use an analog phone. I don't need the latest and greatest. I can function quite happily with voice. So as I said before, I think their pathway to convenience leads a certain direction and those have a certain moral obligation to consider the consequences of their actions. It's not clear to me where that dialogue should occur; I hope it happens here at the IGF. And by demonstrating it in yesterday's web payment I hope we are not going to make a colossal mistake with the web payment technology we are using. So please help us avoid unintended consequences by participating in expressing your views.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: Pindar has given us also a bit of techno pessimism that technology has amplified the existing social and economic injustice that existed in the world and I would argue that that's something we really need to address.
>> PINDAR WONG: I'm actually an optimist. I do want to end on a positive note. The Internet is an entirely human construction. Barring the speed of light or the speed of gossip which I'm not sure which is faster there are probably no known constraints. In other words the problems we solve and the fact we are having culture clash, generation clash, technology clash all rolled into one or a very tight two minutes to midnight, the actual solution to these problems I also believe is actually in our ability to use the Internet to find solutions. Thank you.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: So it's good that you gave that finishing point because it's true that if it is going to amplify and you are passive then there is a serious problem so also you are arguing if you don't do it right then it can do the following things and I think that's a very important point of departure. I will ask Cristiana now to tell us about her experience and research as well as what she thinks about these topics.
>> CRISTIANA GONZALEZ: Hello. Hi. Good morning, thank very much for the invitation for joining this panel. I'm going to give you some an overview on the key issues that we are facing now in Brazil regarding the Internet. Economic and social justice development related to the Internet in Brazil. So I highlight some points and bring you data that could show how information and communication technologists Internet could help to us develop and where it's not working very well. So the first problem that I would like to point out is accessible Internet in rural areas. When you look at the general numbers in Brazil it seems like when we have like 60% of access to Internet in Brazil but when you look at the regions in Brazil like the provinces that have this access we can find like a huge disparity in the north part of Brazil we can find only 36% of houses have access to broadband.
So I would like to say that access to Internet is still an issue in Brazil. Part of the fact that developing countries that itself is in the centre of Internet Governance and you're not facing these issues in provinces. In spite of the fact that 36% of the north part of Brazil has Internet, you have indigenous populations that are developing great projects presenting their material on the Internet. I'd like to point out they are developing (?) And also they're developing open education resource to spread information about their culture. So those are true good amps in how they could use information ICTs for development in these so small isolated companies.
The other point I’d like to highlight here is the public and free access to Internet. Brazil just the government is abundant on these centres and public access. I started working with libraries in Brazil and we are trying to build working groups to train libraries and convince policymakers to use their space to expand that public access to Internet. Because when you look at the numbers also you find that 50% of the low income population in Brazil doesn't have access to Internet and 68% of this low income population doesn’t have access to Internet because they don't have a computer. And why they don't have a computer, 48% of these people don't have a computer because it is too expensive.
So if we provide those people with public access to Internet, for example in libraries that have an infrastructure for that, you can try to solve the problems, almost half of the low income population don't have access to a computer. So the other problem is the software development in Brazil. We are extremely dependent on the development. We have only two companies in Brazil with free software and five companies developing national software.
On the city hall and the majors in the city you have about 5,000 and only 53 are using free software. So it's really dependent on international countries and developing countries, private companies. So why I'm talking about software because when we talk about the right to privacy and freedom of expression it's really important to not be so dependent on United States. So it's also development issue that having national softwares and not being extremely dependent on technology.
Also our technology device and hardware is you have no national production of hardware in Brazil so it also makes us very dependent. We have some good policies, we have almost ‑‑ we have 23 Internet exchanges points in Brazil which makes Internet more resilient, faster and sometimes expensive but it doesn't solve the privacy problem. The other problem is open access to research. We are also very ‑‑ it's like ‑‑ it's a very dependent on the science publications from Europe and US based publishing house. You have five major publishing houses in the world and they sell these materials to public universities in Brazil but most of the times we have to struggle with these publishers in order to have the right to store this research material in our libraries and repositories. And if you just not have a contract with these publishers anymore, you're just lost all the material that you have attained. So this is also a problem that you are facing now in Brazil and trying to develop a better policy on open access and copyright. And other issue is some statistics say that we look at that and you have 70% of women having access to Internet while you have 73 of the men have access. So it's quite balanced. But when you come to the development of software engineering and things like that that also is important for economic and social justice we have only seven% of women enroll as a computer engineer in universities in Brazil so it's a pretty small number. And so what are the solutions? Well, of course you advocate policies on that but in Brazil the government also presents the private‑public partnerships as a good solution. The findings most of the time there's little Civil Society participation on those private partnerships. And also they are no very transparent on their results and what are they really doing? I mean, what is the product of those partnerships? The money they are spending and things like that.
So I'll leave for debate to have lots of issues.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: Thank you, Cristiana, for bringing out the fact that even when the figures don't look so bad they could hide really sharp disparities within them. So indeed therefore for policy interventions in different ways in different areas. I think that's a very important point that's not enough to look at the numbers but look at also what is happening behind the numbers. I only add one point that we must consider that for a lot of the developing countries access to the Internet is not going to take place through the computer but probably you look through that thing that Pindar was talking about on the smart phone that makes us not so smart. So I'll hand it over to Norbert to tell us more about these issues, particularly what is happening on payments and other issues which are of vital importance to the world. So how do you really address that? Norbert is also passionate about that.
>> NORBERT BOLLOW: Thank you. I would actually start by mentioning that Switzerland, even though the Swiss statistics they look wonderful actually shares a lot of the problems that Cristiana has been pointing out, especially in my area of trust which is software. We are also in this position of dependency. Switzerland does not like to be counted among the developing countries but really if we are honest, I mean, we don't have Microsoft, we don't of Google, well, there is Google big Google plant but still the decisions they are made in the US. We don't of control of the software on our computers except for the relatively few of us who like the use free software on our computers, we have some freedom. We can change the operating system when we like with the not so smart smart phones. It's a bit more difficult because they try to prevent us from putting the software that we want to put there. So that is a problem.
Going back to what started the whole idea of process, the world submit Information Society that actually also started in Switzerland in 2003, we had the first of 2 summit events in Geneva, there was a Civil Society declaration that clearly pronounced the people centric vision of Information societies so really since 2003 Civil Society put out this we want people centric thing, the opposite of slavery 2.0. To be honest not so much has been happening with that. When we read that document again it has aged very well, it's still a very good document, has a very good section on free software, free in the sense of freedom. This is not a matter of price, it's a matter of the freedom to be able to change the software to make it do what you want and that is also important for people who are not programmers because they will probably know somebody they trust to give them advice.
And if it's free software that trust the person can give them something that they can trust. And you can never trust a corporation; that simply doesn't work. So in order to have a people‑centric society, we really need to move away from this slavery type of software system. It's a whole business ecosystem and we must move to assist them that actually gives people the freedom they need in order to be able to trust whatever they have.
Coming back to Switzerland, Switzerland has some advantages. One big advantage is it is a small land‑locked country which means it never had a neighbor power. It never was tempted to get colonies and make the world afraid. It was also small enough that people never got afraid, nowhere in the world there's a country that is afraid of Switzerland. So this gave us the chance to get a reputation of neutrality, a reputation for pursuing through diplomacy, peace and understanding between societies. And I'm really wondering maybe we could build on that and take a bit of lip in the world in promoting free software, in promoting a vision of technology that is not greed‑based but is based on the idea of actually asking the people what their concerns are, very similar to the standardization approach that Pindar has been promoting.
So my question to all of you here is what could be a vision for Switzerland to connect with the rest of the world to engage in a way that could create some kind of global movement that moves us towards this vision of a people‑centric society, a society that is no longer characterized by technologists making injustice worse, but that is where there are useful governance structures actually directed to solving those problems to the extent possible. I would really like to hear from you on this. And also ideas for concretely applying the international Human Rights law that we have.
We have Human Rights law and social and economic rights, how to bridge the gap between those wonderful instruments of international law and the practical things that happen I would admit it's in Switzerland like probably everywhere else in the world the programmer does not think about how man rights when he's taking code there. Maybe a need to create some bridge between that. One idea I really a appreciate is the Human Rights consideration section, maybe there's more that can be done. I think I'll stop here and listen a bit to how you will react to this question.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: Thank you very much, Norbert. And with that we have come to the ‑‑ now we hope to have the other that you tell us what are the issues that you think are important in social and economic justice on the Internet and how do you think we can address that. So the floor.
>> We have wireless microphones. So let me be the runner. Who wants to go first? If there's ‑‑ anyone? Start the ball rolling.
>> Okay. I will start the ball rolling and then do the running. What we have increasingly seen with these discussions on varies panels it's like the predominance of the corporate sector. You have monopolies in various areas then issues with software, with things not being opened, things people are not being able to change anything when prices being so high. So especially when it comes to the area of Internet Governance, and issues like open access and copyright, where there is people are not able to access when you look at the developing countries especially.
There's a problem with people not being able to access knowledge online, people not being able to access because of the repositories are held by a few companies. So what is it that we can do to move this dialogue from a corporate‑centric dialogue to more people‑oriented which would have the society in a better way?
>> PINDAR WONG: Can I jump in there? In Hong Kong we are working hard to establish a form of democratic selection. It's not going so well. But before we learned to vote with our hand, in Hong Kong first we learned to vote with our feet, what I mean by that is the power to determine what you buy is actually with you. So you can also determine what you install on your machine. But as I said, it may not be as convenient as some other software so my point on halfway to hell is paid as convenience means we have to work and improve upon for example the open source stuff so we can make it more convenient on our terms so we know exactly what is running. So the point here being is what can assist it is you have the power through your purchases to vote in some way on how you can equalize or help make less disparate the traditional business sector. I'm not antibusiness. So open source is great but if you polish it, the rate which you polish it it can be as good if not better than others available.
>> AUDIENCE: I've be volunteered it seems. I don't have so much a question. I'm just thinking about when it comes to open source, so I have a windows machine at the moment and it's actually a dual boot because before I had this machine I used to ‑‑ I had to buy a new computer. I couldn't get my mouse to work ever. And there's a whole bunch of luminaries who looked at my machine but nobody got the mouse to work. I think it's not just I mean the problem is much bigger than this is just a choice and you can make a different choice. It's also about the way hardware is configured. It's a whole ecosystem around it.
Part of the reason, everything said and done I'm not convinced there's enough of a push to really become mainstream. I meet a lot of techies who have a real joy of being in their little bubble and being seen as the Van Guard over a particular movement and I think that also holds us back. I think there isn't enough of an effort to be really user‑friendly. So I use for example ‑‑ it does all the things I need to do and I understand how it works. That works for me. It's good enough. I don't need it to be perfect. So I think it's a combination of things. We criticize the corporations but I think also the movements who work on these things there needs to be more connections with other movements and other groups to actually open this up so that you get a broader movement where it doesn't just become like a cult school but really beyond that. I'm not sure even people in that cult, enough people into that cult do that. Enough of them do. It's just a comment.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: More questions?
>> I'm sorry I didn't make this announcement. Will you please identify yourself before the question.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm George from the Internet society of Australia. Just a couple comments. First I'm interested in the open source comment. In Australia we have had a preponderance of commercial software and I'm not sure that's a matter being forced on people. It's very hard for us in the open source world and in my private capacity as an organisation we are avid user of open source. We are regarded as weirdos in term of it's not Microsoft. So there's a culture change that needs to take place. A very quiet culture change is taking place at the government level. Very quietly they snuck in a recommendation now that all government departments make their documentations standard ODF. Now, it went with a whisper. And the organisation at GMO which is involved with it has effectively quietly put it throughout knowing that there's going to be a substantial amount of resistance to it. And our understanding is their taking a fairly subversive approach.
We have also tried to promote it especially in areas where there are low economic status in places. The problem we have is Microsoft almost always comes to the rescue giving a free licensing process. Maybe an open source servers a better idea than Microsoft. I think there's a fair amount of structural change that needs to take place in attitudes and I don't think it's a cultural corporation. Microsoft is the only thing we know. Just on a different matter Pindar raised the issue of what happens if the Internet goes away.
Well, it did in a town in Australia for a few weeks. A city burnt down. It literally put the town out of action for 3 to 4 weeks. The financial impact on local business there's was massive. It ran into the millions. And the social disconnection was well documented. There were a few comments, Pindar, from all the members of the analog generation saying it was really nice to be able to sit down and talk to my kids -- (laughter) -- but the majority of people felt what the dislocation was significant enough to warrant a major inquiry into why the exchange burnt down. And there are now serious discussions about how we make the net more resilient so that sort of thing doesn't happen. As far as that's concerned the local council took a leading role both in social and economic rebuilding of what occurred so it was very significant. You're right in pointing out that analog stuff needs to be sort of reflected.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: Any other? Louis?
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. The insecurity of the Internet. Let's say a small point. Microsoft is dominant. Microsoft is proprietary. XP is no longer maintained or distributed. Software abandoned by the producer should not be copyright for 95 years. It should automatically be an open source improved by volunteers.
>> Could I jump in there?
>> We will have the panel respond. (Off mic.)
>> I'm going to throw in one more question that yes, free and open source software has its problems. Is there something we need others to do like governments to support something which is not proprietary, should we not have policy like the Australian government talked about, that there's a need for public policy and nod just a need for open source. The second is if free and open source is one answer is that the only answer to the question of social and economic justice on the net? So what are the other things we need to do? Who needs to do that? Can the panel address that? I'll start with Norbert first and then Christiana and then Pindar and give the last word to Prabir, the moderator.
>> NORBERT BOLLOW: There were so many things said and asked it would be difficult to remember them all. I'll start with Anya's comment and ask a question back, yes, but how? In our group, in our community there have been quite a few attempts to convince other Civil Society groupings to try and join forces in some way, not only by trying to convince them to use free and open source software because it's somehow more Civil Society, there have been lots of idea and it hasn't really worked so well we so are quite interested in ideas that would work for this.
I would comment a bit on the idea that maybe the governments should do something and this is actually very much related to the broader question of society because in a democratic society at least in the idea there will be a public discourse that informs the actions that governments take. We all know that the concrete practical existing implementations of democracy are not quite that totally based on the public discourse, they are to a significant extent based on lobbying the companies that have a lot of money and that is typically companies that have a monopoly position. They use that money to lobby the government so the government cannot do anything that would endanger the monopoly. This is kind of a vicious cycle. So one thing that has been done Switzerland is to create some serious lobby work. There is since a few years a parliamentary group on digital sustainability. It's an officially parliamentary group of the Swiss parliament. All of the major political parties have some members of parliament who participate in that group and they regularly make interventions in parliament to promote open standards and open source and all that. Also privacy and a lot of other good topics come out of that group.
So that is one way to try to bring this whole kind of concerns into a mainstream political debate. Another issue is that if we hear about open source simply not being user friendly enough, I think we need to recognize that making something user friendly takes a very significant investment. It takes ‑‑ it's relatively easy for a programmer to hack together a bit of code that does what he wants it to do as long as the person using it knows exactly what happens inside. It's not so easy to remove those assumptions. It takes investment. One way to get that investment is actually for governments or really any large customer to say we want something that has good usability and that is free software. There's no reason why that cannot be said. And if the demand is there, then producers will be there. Put out public procurement for a system which has this and this and these properties which must include usability which must include a free license.
And if you do that, what will happen is you will not only get software but you will also get local competence. Because if it's free software, suddenly it will not only be the big international technology companies who have the competence to deliver and develop and improve such a solution it will also be local companies within you create local demand for example by means of a government policy of precluding such say thing then you also create local competence. I think it's a pretty promising development strategy not only for this kind of developing country where I come from, Switzerland, but also for the more traditional type of developing country.
>> PRABIR PURKAYASTHA: We don't like Switzerland becoming a developing country particularly for what you've done to the banking industry for the last couple of years but we will let that pass. (Off mic.)
>> On the questions about policies and what could be done, I mean, what could be done, I think you have so many layers of actions. You have like the law reforms or we could work for copyright law reform international, international forums. In Brazil software is not protected by copyrights. We could have five policies so it's connected to our relationship if it's governments and how we are going to pressure them and how democratic institutions really functions in the countries so what are the channels for participation and influencing those public policies?
In Brazil they have the labor party which is kind of open for forums in inviting the Civil Society and experts on development of policies but their just mostly more consultation. So this layer of public policy is possible but we also have taking into account as you said you have lots of lobbying and pressure from development countries from governments and from the public sector. So we try to implement a policy of free software used in public administration and then the Microsoft and they abandon this policy.
So yes, sometimes it cannot confront these companies. And the other layer could be the training for the digital literacy problem that's also related to how to make people more engaged in coding and get closer to the free software logic and in the spirit of that I don't ‑‑ they are not user friendly. I mean, in general terms they are not, but they have improved a lot in the last year. You have so many interface that are helping us to use more free software. So it's hard, technology is hard, all these Internet Governance is difficult, requires lots of technological knowledge.
But I pretty much agree you need to do more training but sometimes it does not have the human resource neither the economic resource should do that. So that's the other layer. The activist layer. If you are a free software activist, if you are a user, just talk to your friends, your family, the ones that are close to you. I did that in Brazil and I have a lot of people use free software and they are free software activists now. I think that was that. Thank you.
>> How many of you remember a programme called WP 5? Word perfect 5. So you had money. Louis raises an important point that is the expiring of XP. I make two observations. Should we lose those platforms we are actually losing access to a lot of our heritage because we look access to the computing systems that captured that point in time. So I think the suggestion of looking at how proprietary software falls into the public domain needs to have some serious consideration. So I would look at shortening the period of copyright from the 50 years which is where in many countries to a period of five years. Why? Because I've got nothing against Microsoft. I think there's great software they innovate. And that innovation needs to be rewarded. But I talked about the rate before which is the rate of innovation.
Five-year software is a long time in the software industry and the ability to monetize that is probably going to be 80% in the first five years. Why? Because the rates of changed. So I think one of the root problems is the length of the copyright period which in theory after the copyright expires I think should fall into the public domain. If you have a construct of 50 years we are probably doing things with vacuum tubes in 50 years. So 50 years ahead with the technology cycle and mobile. The reason for us being very focused on open source is to be able to access to the content that would be able to develop at the time. So copyright and the period of duration of copyright is one that has to be seriously looked at. I believe in peaceful co-existence. This is my lap‑top. It's zen. And I run a virtual machine running other machines.
It's a lot of work and it does need to be reworded but the question is after the period you've rewarded you've invested your infrastructure on it and that platform goes away like an XP, that's a huge social cost. The problem is with the accountants. I think we need to look at how we align incentives by changing the way we keep score. If we purely value things in the monetary terms we, if had you to pay an hourly wage or rate for the time your mother spent raising you, how much that is worth to society? I believe in looking at the ways in changing how we measure these societal contributions does need to be looked at.
Let me give you another example. I helped introduce creative commons to Hong Kong and we have been trying to introduce copyright exchanges to legally have copyright instead of ripping people off. The interesting thing is going back to the payment, the cost of routing the money. But the accounting as sect, the United States last June changed to a new accounting measure by the UN that has an alternative measure for the valley of intangible assets and the numbers went up. That's purely by the change in how to keep score. So I think the creative aspect is how do you like interest for societal interest maintaining the commercial interest in innovation. And the recent example is the measurement of the value of intangibles. The other reason why this is important is what do we trade on the Internet?
We trade information goods, virtual goods. Digital consent and that's owned by someone by nature of copyright. We have a fundamental interest because unlike the analog world the digital world we have an unlimited resource whereas the physical world we are limited by our access to national resources. So if developed economies like Switzerland can continue to grow they must find a way to measure the production and sale of non‑Tangible, intangible goods because that can also continue beyond the access to resources. So fundamentally how we measure these intangible contributions what I would like to call an accounting issue, is how I believe the key to aligning societal interest and corporate interest. Thank you.
>> That we actually treat the Tangible resources, the common resources like air, water and so on as if they're infinite. We treat the digital world which is infinitely capable of reproducing itself as if it's finite. So we have this fundamental dichotomy. I would ask Parminder to give us his views on the topic after having heard all the questions.
>> (Off mic.)
>> Yes, I mean, I'm thinking of the questions and I remember the top ones and I'll try to respond to them. When he was talking about how to move away from a business centered dialogue in the Internet Governance space. And many of the discussions later on including the last one of Pindar involving a different manner but who can do it in the highest political systems which can only do that kind of a thing? And it's important the see that the last about ten years of Internet Governance dialogue is coincided with a huge amount of the lost paradise of the Internet period where consolidation and centralization of the Internet has taken place. Those are the lessons you learn about how that dialogue from what is a problem going on outside and how little that dialogue is about this and it's allowed business to come in and make the whole discussion driven by business interests and keeping away issues by those very businesses. And when up capture the discourse you have captured the most vital layer of the whole political activity.
We heard Cristiana talk about localisations and Norbert talk about the benefits of social economic benefits of socializations but how are they made to look like a fraction of the Internet? You can't do that. There are slogans and banners out. Therefore it's greatly directed towards the interest of those few digital corporations are who consolidating on the Internet and we need to move away from this business‑dominated discourse. We are people who come into a dialogue basically knot thinking about their own interest but about a public interest. And the whole political system exists to figure that out but at least you step in for the purpose of public interest and not private interest without that happening. Second question was Anya's about using free software and the responsibility of the community. And I think this allocation of roles to the actors have to be considered in some depth. I think the role of people or activists in general are to create alternatives and push policies and make structural changes and their made by the governments. When we are sitting as activists we can do those discussions but there's a limited capacity which a movement has to build the technical structures of this world.
We cannot be thinking it's the health activists who should be producing good medical practices and monitoring health practices. They could make models but finally it goes to the policy area. The talk we have had about ODF and the Microsoft, I really see it takes biggest feeling of policy that in 15 years no policymakers in India and most developing countries can enforce a simple thing about Microsoft that you have a dot ODF reader. It's a simple policy enforcement, you have an ODF reader. We are not asking to go any further. But if somebody gets an ODF document he should be able to open it on that system. This is not happening and because of that I can say the percentage of people who would like to use that and other Linux systems ‑‑ then a lot of people whose main document is I sent documents in ODF and nobody is able the read it.
Very simple things have not been possible because Microsoft has been able to work its way into and control policy making. They're giving them more and more access. In the networking area we all know it's the Google that's the plus plus plus of Microsoft space. If you go around, Google has so well used the multistakeholder principle matter spaces that it blunts the civil society's actions and pronouncements of what needs to be said and therefore we enter a world of new normal where we started to accept very unequal systems. The biggest thing that needs to be done is a push back and get business out of major public policy discussions and dialogues. Other than listening to them as the information they have to provide and it should be for us to move forward.
>> I'm not going to give ‑‑ use up all the remaining minute. You have something? (Off mic.)
>> AUDIENCE: Anya, from the Internet dome address project in India. I completely take Parminder's point that there are a whole lot of stuff to be done on the policy level when it comes to open source. Also the person from Australia was talking about how much of a difference it with make if there's a lot of government up take. We have also seen that in parts of India so I think those are really important things. I was earlier responding to the idea that we have a choice. I choose open source. But if I would have stuck to that, my computer would still not be doing anything or I would not be able to use it. So that was my point. That we make it seem as if it's just a choice and actually that's not true. And if somebody like me who has so many contacts among techies and people who are part of that movement and willing to spend time and look at my computer and don't ask payment for it doesn't get it to work what does that mean about the average person? We shouldn't over estimate what we can do that because it isn't working seamlessly enough nor the average person. It is not a real choice at the moment, that's the point I wanted to make.
>> I think that's a point which I think Norbert also addressed that essentially to make it user friendly and a need for investment. And unless public policy changes and there are ways the channel investment it difficult for geeks to really solve the problems of the world and that's a given. It's really the ecosystem we need to address in a larger way.
>> May I say something? Why not start with develop open hardware, maybe this could be a good policy to help this problem. It's an idea.
>> There's also address the other problems. Unfortunately proprietary software ‑‑ I will really not address the specific issues, I will only say what the discussion has said that you need national policies to support free and open source initiatives. But there at the national level because governments can do that, it's not an international level. International level can push for this but it's really at the national level that we can do it. We had a big international battle on the document format. Unfortunately it became 50/50 but really it's a national battle we need to fight. Similarly when you talk about how the Internet has to have justice built into it, what Pindar was talking about, Norbert talked about it, that techies have to be addressing issues of justice when they do the code. If you really take that into consideration, again issues follows into net neutrality which really address some of the issues coming out that you should not be able to use the net unfairly. Again they are national issues in the sense that all the country today's have laws in which deal with these issues or regulatory system which deals with these issues and we need therefore to real fight at that level. The last point I think to me that's a very important point that we need to also address that originally Internet was supposed to be connecting the edges.
Now, if you connect the edges, then each edge form comes into some national jurisdiction and therefore you can control them. Today as the Internet centre of graffiti seems to be shifting from YouTube to FACEBOOK to various other platforms and finally the Cloud what is happening is clear that all the major Cloud or Internet big companies are essentially from one country. And which is the United States. If it is from one country, then all the regulation that applies on it, only laws that applies on it are the United States laws, no other laws. One of the consequences when you come to things like mass surveillance, 4% of the world has the protection but 96% of the world does not.
If the gravity moves to the middle space, unless you have international treaties and international regulations I don't think we can come either to police power, the security power or the United States on the net, or we can curb the monopolies on the right to regulation which you can do nationally. I don't think we can do it internationally particularly as a US policy today is monopoly is not too bad as long as it helps the American economy they're not going to address it. So I think we need both from the point of view of mass surveillance but also for economic reasons we need to think how internationally we can address the monopoly power of certain companies and the niece need for national treaties, but also the monopoly part of the companies, net neutrality. What about platform neutrality. What about neutrality of ranking which it can make one company much more profitable than another. And I think there's a huge policy space for global issues which we still have to tab with too two new emerging architecture of the Internet we are seeing. Of course we have already the issues like hope hardware have been flagged, legacy software. And I really think the five year copyright issues have been flag. All these issues we need to address. Thank you very much for coming here. We have thanks to all of you for listening so patiently to all the speakers and also asking questions. Thank you.
(Applause)
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This is the output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. 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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