IGF 2014

The Commercial Law Development Program (CLDP) plans to facilitate IGF attendance and participation by a small number of officials of one or more government and representatives of NGOs or journalistic organizations.  These attendees will likely have limited or no experience in attending IGFs.  CLDP will organize a pre-conference for the attendees, which will include presentations by and discussions with leading experts on IGF-related issues.  This event would be designed for the benefit of the invited attendees, although all would be welcome to observe.  CLDP is a part of the  United States Department of Commerce.  It provides technical assistance to developing and post-conflict nations around on legal and regulatory matters through training, consultations, and support of the exchange of information and international best practices.  In the ICT sector, it works to improve access to information and promote the development of a modern and state of the art communications sector.

This roundtable will explore the challenges that Internet development innovators faced when trying to make the leap from ideas to solutions, focusing on those ones posed by access to funding, funding mechanisms and business development.

Short interventions from speakers representing the interest from governments, aid agencies, traditional and alternative funding mechanisms, crowd funding platforms, grant and awards competitions will provide a background for funding mechanisms available for those generating innovative solutions for Internet development. Contributors will identify the strengths and weaknesses of those mechanisms.

Short interventions from the Seed Alliance award winners (newcomers to the IGF) will provide examples of the limitations they see in their specific contexts to make use of those mechanisms such as language, proposal development, business case development, regulations, to name a few.

The interventions will be prepared to encourage the audience to make recommendations.

The group will discuss how to incorporate/develop a culture of social responsibility on the IT sector. Key topics to discuss will be social responsibility on a self-regulated market; Infrastructure ownership/management models; Equal opportunities for success in a competitive industry as a key component for growth and development.

In addition to the panellists mentioned, the roundtable will be completed with up to 15 award winners from the Seed Alliance regional programs (FIRE, FRIDA and ISIF Asia). Award selection processes are currently underway to be announced 1 to 2 months before the IGF. Names, affiliations and details to be confirmed once the selection process has being finalized. All winners have their travel to the IGF included as part of the awards prize. They are newcomers to the IGF. Winners come from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and the Asia Pacific, and will be men and women of different backgrounds, all working on Internet Development.

In today’s Internet age, online safety is an important issue. With the continuous evolution of technology, society is evolving itself in an unprecedented way, towards the point where everyone and everything is connected all the time. Although there is an increasing trend in the number of people online, there seems to be a gap between children and parents in terms of Internet use and knowledge. As children have specific needs and vulnerabilities with regard to online safety, they should be empowered. Children are spending ever-greater amounts of time working on and playing with computers. Children aged 6 to 11 years have access to the Internet and online technologies with an increasing rate. Awareness is important for parents in protecting their children against inappropriate content and possible damages on cyberspace. Thus, safer use of Internet is vital for families, educators, and all individuals in society.

It is known that, in line with the guidelines of the UN Resolution 44-25 and the Tunis Commitment emphasizing the role of ICTs in the protection of children, many global and national initiatives have been set up in order to promote and protect child online safety and various best practices on the subject have emerged. Awareness rising is an important aspect of these initiatives.

As child online safety has many aspects, a multistakeholder approach, including close cooperation between governmental institutions, network operators, Internet service providers, ICT industry and non-governmental organizations are of significant importance. This session will discuss the role of various stakeholders in child online protection, as well as best practice solutions for making Internet a safer place for children and current challenges faced when implementing such solutions.

Discussions on concrete examples, with an emphasis on the pros and cons for each of them, will be held. 

A worrying and widely observed trend is that websites of news media, human rights organizations, critical bloggers, and other individuals or organizations disseminating information have increasingly become targets of illegitimate surveillance, hacking and attacks from various sources ranging from State-based actors to third parties. It falls into an emerging Internet governance concern to explore the digital safety of journalists and its significant human rights implication, particularly on freedom of expression and related privacy protection.

Built on its previous discussion as triggered at IGF 2013, UNESCO takes the occasion to launch the new research which provides a qualitative picture of cases around the world linked to guaranteeing the safety of journalists and other media actors using digital media as well as the guidelines, good practices and policy recommendations on how to respect the right to freedom of expression in the digital environment. The workshop will discuss these outcomes of the publication and how to use them to inform and empower stakeholders on the digital safety protection of journalists and new media actors. It also contributes to Organization’s on-going efforts to implement the UN Inter-Agency Plan on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity.

Agenda

5’ opening remarks by Chair
10’ Presentation by Ms Jennifer Henrichsen, UNESCO commissioned researcher
5’ Comment by Mr Geoffrey King, Internet Advocacy Coordinator and Digital Security Specialist, Committee to Protect Journalists, United States of America
5’ Comment by Mr Eduardo Bertoni, Researcher, Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) of the University of Palermo, Argentina
5’ Comment by Ms Laura Tresca, Brazil Freedom of Expression Officer, Article 19
30’ Discussions

Revelations about surveillance and mass data collection over the past year have underscored the fact that the practice of journalism, and the circulation of information more broadly, is inseparable from key dimensions of Internet governance, from the infrastructure backbone to transmission dynamics to encryption. The past year’s headlines have made it clear that both policy changes and technological efforts are necessary to address the protection of communication and information exchange amid aggressive government surveillance and private sector complicity and ensure that all actors respect the rule of law, privacy and free expression.
As “canaries in the data mine,” journalists represent one of the most vulnerable — and engaged — groups of Internet users. What happens to journalists and journalism will likely foreshadow other, broader developments. Yet to what extent do different stakeholder groups understand the critical importance that their input to Internet governance plays in sustaining an environment in which press freedom and freedom of expression more broadly is possible?

The non-governmental organization Committee to Protect Journalists proposes a roundtable workshop to explore various stakeholders’ role in resisting mass surveillance, particularly of journalists and media, and how Internet governance choices may impact on press freedom. The interactive roundtable will seek to produce an initial list of ideas about the roles of technology companies, government, academia, journalists and news organizations in protecting source confidentiality and otherwise ensuring the free flow of information from the press to the global public.

The roundtable will help inform internal policy choices at companies, in government, in newsrooms and in the field, and will seek to foster a discussion that is relevant to all at-risk Internet users.

Agenda:
Introduction to the roundtable and the questions at hand (Dr. Radsch, 5 minutes)
5 minute overview of UNESCO's conceptualization of the press freedom dimensions of Internet governance (Dr. Berger)
2 minute comments from participants on what they think are the two most important or consequential press freedom dimensions of Internet governance:
Ms. Ben Hassine
Mr. Less
Dr. Lemos
Ms. Geybulla

Input from remote participants

Synthesize commonalities, identify tensions

Open to audience (including remote participants) for additional dimensions and Q&A

Answer questions and discuss the additional suggestions with a view towards identifying the most important/consequential press freedom dimensions of Internet governance

WSIS process set as a goal enhancing the capacity of communities in all regions to develop content in local and/or indigenous languages. Greater capacity for content creation will increase the diversity of language content available online, drive more people to use broadband technologies and expand the ability of all communities to participate in the Information Society. Greater engagement with broadband and the Information Society will in turn improve the geographic and multilingual diversity of voices as a whole and the ability of all communities to participate in Internet governance.

This capacity building session will highlight some programs training the content creators of tomorrow and provide valuable lessons learned from content creators from around the globe to the benefit of a wide variety of IGF stakeholders. The session will provide a chance to learn what policies and strategies promote creative industries and contribute to the health of the Internet governance ecosystem as well as learn from the practical experience of practitioners in the field.

The proposed workshop has the format of a roundtable during which participants from different stakeholder groups will discuss the results of RIA research conducted, some of which has been undertaken with NEPAD Agency, on mapping multistakeholders participation in Internet governance from an African perspective..
Specifically, participants will be invited to consider how factors such as low level of Internet access and use, low quality of service and high prices of broadband intersect with the notion of multistakeholder participation as a form of deliberative democracy for Internet governance - which is often informed by assumptions from more mature markets and the human rights frameworks of Western democracies.
Participants will explore the evolution of multistakeholders participation through consideration of the main international, regional and national processes/mechanisms of the Internet governance ecosystem from an Africa perspective.
Some specific issues that will be highlighted include:
- What these initiatives have achieved in terms of enabling or constraining the development of an open Internet;
- what has been the level and effectiveness of participation of African stakeholders in these processes;
- why have they not been able to fully develop an African agenda on Internet governance

Researching children’s rights in a global, digital age

Workshop 56, Internet Governance Forum, Istanbul, November 2014

Organizer: Professor Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and EU Kids Online, s.livingstone@Lse.ac.uk

Theme: The panel will primarily address conference theme 6. Internet and human rights. It is also relevant to theme 2: Content creation, dissemination and use, and to theme 5: Enhancing digital trust.

Description: Policy makers rely on high quality research to underpin evidence-based governance decisions. Although many researchers and research users attend the IGF each year, research is rarely a focus of IGF activities. Thus the research agenda, key concepts, robust yet practical methods, and challenges of evaluation and application are yet to be discussed in this crucial international forum. An ever-growing diversity of evidence on children’s rights in a global digital age exists and more is needed, making this a timely moment for stakeholders to debate the design, conduct and uses of research.

Detailed overview: The round table will ask, primarily, what are the research priorities and key research questions regarding children’s rights in a global, digital age? What is good research practice in a complex domain where the Internet is fast-changing and children’s particular needs and perspectives vary hugely by culture and context? Can the methods for conducting and evaluating research that have been established in the global North be extended to the global South, now that children are going online across the globe, or do new considerations apply? To what extent can the evidence usefully guide governance decisions, whether internationally, regionally or nationally? How to strengthen and promote dialogue between researchers and policy makers at all levels? Secondarily, it will ask, how can the research community achieve greater clarity and visibility regarding research priorities, good practice research methods and reliable statistics about children and digital media on a cross-national basis? How might we collaborate through research and stakeholder networks to sustain knowledge sharing?

The session brings together researchers and research users from different stakeholder groups ((academia, industry, regulator, UN organisation, NGO, activist) and from diverse continents around the world to identify the priority research questions, reputable research methods, and key research challenges to be faced when generating a truly global evidence base to underpin Internet governance that advances children’s rights in a digital age.

Agenda
90 minutes in total


Welcome, introductions and aims
10 minutes
Professor Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the 33-country research network, EU Kids Online


Panel: Formulating the global research agenda for children’s rights in the digital age
Short presentations of 5-8 minutes each, 25 minutes in total

Patrick Burton, Executive Director, Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention, South Africa, “Facilitating children’s voices in the development of policy relating to online safety and rights”

Kürşat Çağıltay, Professor, Faculty of Education, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey: “Conducting research at a time of political change”

Bu Wei, Professor and activist, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China “Critical perspective: mapping the studies on youth and digital media and their methodology in China”

Conversation: Research users’ priorities and challenges regarding children’s rights in the digital age
A 25 minute conversation (no presentations) moderated by Sonia Livingstone

Ankhi Das, Facebook, India
Fabio Senne, Cetic.br, Brazil
Jasmina Byrne, UNICEF Office of Research (with a global mandate)
Nevine Tewfik, Egypt, governmental research user and regulator

Open discussion
30 minutes
Gitte Stald, Professor, ITU University, Denmark, will act as the Remote Moderator
Youth participants
All session attendees

 

Fostering trust: How can developing countries achieve international cooperation against cybercrime through legal frameworks

Developing Countries face serious challenges with respect to the investigation and prosecution of cybercrime especially obtaining evidence admissible in legal proceedings from Developed Countries where much of the data and services reside which is exacerbated by a lack of knowledge and misconceptions regarding efficacy of existing legal frameworks.

This capacity building workshop will:

a) Address specific questions from participants, clarify misconceptions regarding existing legal frameworks and provide substantive factual and legal responses based on the practical experience of experts regarding issues eg. transborder access to data, mutual legal assistance, 24/7 points of contact etc.

b) Demonstrate how joining and implementing legal frameworks can help build trust not only between governments but also the private sector and it can help mobilise resources for technical assistance and capacity building.

c) Address concerns of participants regarding legal frameworks for international cooperation at the previous IGF 2013 workshop by Developing Countries' Centre for Cyber Crime Law: 'Cybercrime Treaties: Advantages for Developing Countries'.

This capacity building workshop would effectively be the first of its kind for Developing Countries at the IGF since last year when all governments at the UN reached a unanimous consensus on the importance of cyber crime capacity building, a consensus echoed by business and civil society in a national context.

The interactive format would facilitate the transfer of knowledge and best practices rather than presentations or generic panel discussions.

Agenda

Presentation to set scene - capacity building:
- Means of obtaining data and cooperation from developed countries
- Value of legal vs non-binding/informal
- Elements of cooperation
Panel responses
Audience feedback and discussion
Recommendations for next interaction

How can we protect our privacy when our most private communications can be covertly collected and analysed by States all around the world? How can freedom of expression exist if every time we read a text or article by a controversial author, our actions are automatically logged and stored by the machines, algorithms, and agents of the state?

Since the Snowden revelations, many people have begun to realise that the laws of their own country provide only ineffective protection against mass surveillance and the laws of other countries provide them with no protection at all. The world is waking up to the reality that most governments treat the private communications of non-residents and foreign nationals as fair game. The UN Human Rights Committee has for the first time remonstrated the US government for failing to provide extra-territorial protection for the privacy of non-citizens and legal challenges are being brought against bulk surveillance of foreign communications around the world.

The purpose of this roundtable is to build upon these developments and discuss what needs to be done to ensure established international human rights law is respected in the context of transnational surveillance. Among the questions to be addressed are:

Should we allow the intelligence services of one country to snoop on the residents of another without restraint?
Can any country freely violate the rights of foreigners by claiming they fall outside their jurisdiction?
Are existing surveillance laws compatible with the right to non-discrimination under international law?

According to the 2013 “Women and the Web” report, on average across the developing world approximately 25 percent fewer women than men have access to the Internet. To address the gender digital divide, World Pulse is conducting “WWW: Women Weave the Web,” a campaign to crowdsource solutions, models, and best practices on digital inclusion and empowerment directly from grassroots women leaders from across the developing world.

Through World Pulse’s growing web-based platform, women are speaking out and connecting to create solutions from the front lines of today’s most pressing issues. With a focus on grassroots women, our programs nurture community, provide media and empowerment training, and channel rising voices to influential forums. Previous World Pulse campaigns have generated powerful changes, from influencing the appointment of a US Special Envoy to the Great Lakes to delivering testimonies on gender-based violence to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Our proposed IGF session will present an analysis of the hundreds of testimonies we have received from across the globe. We will share recommendations on how key stakeholders should focus their efforts to support women’s full engagement in the information society. The session will generate a discussion and reflection with key ICT actors such as technology companies, international organizations, and governments on how grassroots women leaders’ recommendations can be made actionable within the Internet Governance framework.

Online platforms, such as social networks and other interactive online services, give rise to transnational “cyber-spaces” where individuals can gather and express their personalities imparting and receiving information and ideas. By reason of their transnational dimension as well as of their private nature, online platforms are regulated through contractual provisions, unilaterally established by the platforms’ providers and enshrined in the platforms’ ToS.

Hence it may be argued that, by regulating the use of information within a specific online platform, ToS undertake a normative function that may be compared to that of the “Law of the Land”. However, differently from the Law of the Land, the contractual provisions delineated in the ToS can be applied in several jurisdictions, thus affecting platform users in spite of their geographical location. Furthermore, the private decisions that may be taken by the platform provider in order to implement the ToS (e.g. removing content which is not compatible with the ToS provisions) are not subject to the constitutional guarantees that frame national jurisdictions.

In addition, it should be noted that the spectrum of rights and remedies that are granted to platform users through the ToS may be difficult to comprehend or even read in its entirety, and similar platforms may be regulated through very different provisions that might be unilaterally modified by platform providers.

For these reasons, it seems necessary to engage in a common multi-stakeholder effort aimed at producing model contractual provisions, which can be incorporated in ToS in order to provide intelligible and solid mechanisms to protect platform-users’ human rights and foster platform providers’ responsibility.

Such an effort appears necessary to equip platform users with common and easy-to-grasp tools to guarantee the full enjoyment of their human rights. From this perspective, the, absence of binding international rules in this area despite the universal nature of human rights represents a real challenge, which can only be effectively overcome through a multistakeholder effort, taking place in accordance with the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework (endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council together with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights). Hence, the concept of “platform responsibility” aims to stimulate behaviour in line with the principles laid out by the UN Guiding Principles, focusing on the responsibility of private corporations to respect human rights and to grant an effective grievance mechanism.

Meeting Format

The first meeting will be introduced by two keynotes, highlighting the state of play of the platform responsibility debate and triggering an open debate amongst the DC PR members and the attendees.
The opening keynotes will be delivered by:
- Mr Jan Kleijssen, Director, Information Society and Action against Crime, Directorate General of Human Rights and Rule of Law, Council of Europe
- Ms Rebecca MacKinnon, Director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America Foundation

Subsequently the DC PR members and attendees will engage in an open discussion aimed at identifying the key elements to be addressed by the DC PR and jointly delineating the DC PR roadmap.Therefore this meeting should be considered as a “Birds of a feather session” allowing all interested individuals to jointly plan the future works of the DC PR.  

Particularly, the DC PR roadmap will be instrumental to plan the future activities of the DC PR members aimed at the elaboration of model contractual provisions that may be used to provide effective protection to specific human rights through online platforms’ terms of service.

All the attendees will be encouraged to actively participate to the debate, providing their inputs to the definition of the DC PR roadmap.

The discussion will be co-moderated by:
- Mr Luca Belli, Council of Europe & Université Paris 2
- Mr Nicolo Zingales TILEC at Tilburg University
- Ms Primavera De Filippi CNRS & Berkman Center for Internet and Society

One tool for conserving IPv4 addresses is called Carrier Grade Network Address Translation, or simply CGN.

This workshop will discuss the implications of the deployment of CGNs on Internet users, applications designers, law enforcement and access providers.

However, the use of Network Address Translation doesn’t come for free. However, recent research shows that Internet application developers and Internet users will bear most of the impact of CGN implementation:

• How will developers of applications, such as online gaming and VoIP, cope with multiple CGN implementations - having to find workarounds for each?
• What will consumers do when they find that applications they count on no longer function correctly and that troubleshooting those problems becomes more difficult?
• Will Law Enforcement be able to manage when they find that traditional techniques for identifying and tracking criminals no longer work in the presence of CGNs?

This means that access to the Internet, that most basic foundation of the Internet’s global success, is substantially different than it was just five years ago. What does this mean for Internet Governance? Clearly, this is an area where new technology has implications for Internet governance and policy making.

The Internet ecosystem distributes decision-making throughout the network of networks and throughout the network of stakeholders. The decision of ISPs to deploy CGN technology is an example of a case where individual decisions at some points of the network have implications on a much wider range of Internet stakeholders and users.

The ITU - UNICEF Open forum will officially release the updated version of the Guidelines for Industry on Child Online Protection. The Guidelines provide advice on how the ICT industry can work to help ensure children’s safety when using the Internet or any of the associated technologies or devices that can connect to it. The Guidelines also provide guidance to companies on identifying ways in which they can advance children’s rights and facilitate responsible digital citizenship, learning, and civic participation. Originally launched by ITU in 2009 as four sets of guidelines for children, parents, guardians and educators, industry, and policy makers, the new version for industry provides guidance on protecting children’s rights online for those companies that develop, provide or make use of information and communication technologies (ICT). The panel discussion will discuss implementation plans and follow up activities to roll out the new guidelines.

Speakers
UNICEF
ECPAT
MICROSOFT
FACEBOOK
GSMA
DISNEY
EBU

Moderator:
ITU

The proposal is to have a meeting of the Coalition during the time slot allotted to discuss the role of stakeholder contribution to preserve core Internet Values. The session will bring together Representatives from two Civil Society Organizations, two Business Corporations, two Governments, two Technical Organizations and two Universities.