The open Internet enables people from different countries and different cultures, who speak different languages and have different stories to tell, who have different perspectives, understandings and ambitions, to share the content that they create with the global network. Local content development is important and should be encouraged; the social, cultural and economic opportunities available to us are greater if we can search the world’s diversity in creative thought online, as opposed to if we all consume the same content.
This Best Practice Forum session will focus on how to create an enabling environment for the development of local content. It is the culmination of a two-month online discussion in which a diverse group of stakeholders contributed on-the-ground stories and exchanged views about policies that directly and indirectly encourage the development of local content. The issue is multifaceted and complex, with many different moving parts. To give orientation to the discussion, a three-part framing of the issue emerged, where contributors were asked to share best practices under the following areas:
Internet Infrastructure - The state of the Internet service provision industry, including the presence of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), data centres, and the status of international and domestic capacity, etc.
Legislative and regulatory landscape - The effect of legislation and policy in the fields of copyright, cultural preservation, telecommunications, etc.
Human capabilities and capacities - The degree of digital literacy in the locale, of web accessibility, and the presence of innovation hubs, etc.
It is considered that the policy initiatives that are designed to encourage local content development will be most successful when they are coordinated across these three areas.
After several weeks of robust discussion among listserv participants, it became apparent that while there are a number of policies that indirectly contribute to the development of local content — for example a policy requiring all government data to be stored in-country will support the development of local hosting, which in turn will decrease latency and make it easier for people to up and download content — there are not many examples of policies which directly facilitate the development of local content. This session, the success of which will depend on active audience participation, will focus on sharing ideas about these unidentified, and yet-to-be-created, policies.
The session will be moderated by the two Lead Experts who have led the local content discussion over the past two months, with short presentations provided by a handful of discussion participants. Interactivity with the audience is paramount, and all stakeholders are graciously encouraged to attend.
Spam continues to be a significant problem for Internet users, creating a burden for developing countries, networks, operators and all end users. High volumes of unsolicited email can cause significant impacts to regions with limited Internet access as well as raise concerns for all regions with the increasing malware infections that come from unwanted email. Unsolicited email may be magnified in developing countries, where high volumes of incoming and outgoing spam can cause a severe drain on the limited and costly bandwidth that is available in those regions.
Cooperation and partnerships among all stakeholders is needed to develop strategies and approaches to mitigating spam. For that reason, addressing the problem of spam requires a multistakeholder discussion and a framework of suggested approaches, including the need to engage governments in the discussion of how to reduce the threat and impact of spam globally.
This discussion with a panel of experts will focus on the “Regulation and mitigation of unwanted communications (e.g. "spam") draft outcome document and will include examples of best practices they use to address the proliferation of spam in their regions/country’s that might be useful to include in the draft as possible recommendations.
Output expected from the session would be review and consensus regarding the draft outcomes document, feedback on the text and indication of support for the for the recommendations and next steps that the report outlines.
This year, the IGF launched a Best Practices effort on the establishment of CERT teams for Internet Security. Over the last two months, three Lead experts supported by an independent consultant engaged with a community of participants from major stakeholder groups to exchange existing CSIRT development practices and discussed ways to further collaborate. A draft document was developed based on these initial discussions. The topics identified as part of this multi-stakeholder preparatory process will be further discussed and finalized during this 90 minute session.
CERT or CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Teams) are organizations of information security personnel who aim to address security incidents as they arise, whether at an organizational, pan-organizational or even national level. They follow defined processes, combined with engineering ingenuity, to ensure security incidents are properly identified, contained and remediated. By nature, many incidents have impact beyond the constituency of one CSIRT, and thus teams often partner with other teams, as well as with private sector, government, civil society and the technical community to protect users of the internet.
This round table session will cover the various opportunities and challenges involved in the establishment of Computer Emergency Response Teams to improve internet security.
Topics to be discussed will include the role of a CSIRT teams in private sector and government, what a “national CSIRT” truly means, and the high level collaboration processes involved in coordinating widespread incidents. As output of this session, a summary document will be published by the IGF, with recommendations and next-steps on topics ripe for further multi-stakeholder debate between the technical community, government, civil society and private sector.
The session will be led by lead experts Cristine Hoepers (of CERT.br), Adli Wahid and Maarten Van Horenbeeck (of FIRST) and supported by UN consultant Wout De Natris. We strongly invite participants from all stakeholder groups to attend the session and contribute. No technical experience in the CSIRT community is required, though we recommend making yourself familiar with the preparatory document shared on the IGF web site to be prepared for the discussion.
