______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT APNIC Member Meeting Friday 9 September 2005 9.00am ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the APNIC Member Meeting, the last day of APNIC 20, the 20th APNIC Open Policy Meeting. Thank you very much for being here. I'll start the meeting now with thanks to the gold sponsor for today, VNPT whose contribution to the meeting today is very important. So thanks to VNPT and also to the three silver sponsors that we have for today - JPNIC, NIDA, KRNIC with NIDA, and TWNIC. All three are silver sponsors, so I'd like to say thanks to all four of those organisations for their support. Thanks. APPLAUSE Now, before I just explain the agenda for today, I'd like to mention a few housekeeping announcements. We have an election happening today for the NRO Number Council. There will be one member elected for the NRO Number Council and all attendees should have an election form for that. Voting will be opening as of right now and continuing through to the end. So, if you have any questions about that, I'll be explaining the voting procedure in detail just before lunch and in addition, you can also find some details about voting procedure at the registration desk outside, where you can also post your ballot papers. So you've got all morning to do that but please don't forget because voting will be closing at 2pm, immediately after lunch. In fact, I'm just being shown the ballot box is at the front of the room here below the screen. We've got a lucky draw for a lucky person who fills out the meeting evaluation form, so please help us out by filling that form out and let us know your honest thoughts, good and bad, about this meeting. And some kind of wonderful gift could be yours and that will be drawn at the end of today. And there'll also be another lucky draw, which you may have heard about already. That's sponsored by Nominum and the prize is an iPod. So once again, please enter that lucky draw. It closes at midday today. And we've also got winners of the APNIC web hunt, which was announced in the newcomers' meeting. I think everyone had to find out where Champika Wijayatunga was. Maybe one of the questions. And that will be announced at the end of the meeting today. OK, so let's move on to the agenda for this morning. The APNIC Member Meeting is a meeting open to everyone, of course. Normally the business of the day is to discuss member issues of various kinds so we have reporting from APNIC and from other RIRs and also reporting from the business of the meeting that's gone on over the last few days. But this morning, we've got a new feature, which is a special panel session on Internet governance. Now, why are we doing this? Internet governance, as you may have heard, is a hot topic these days. It's come about particularly through a very large United Nations conference, the World Summit on the Information Society, which has been going on in two phases, since a couple of years ago and up until the end of this year. And that WSIS summit is a major intergovernmental conference about all aspects of the information society, about the impact of ICTs - information communication technologies - on social and economic development throughout the world. It looks at all sorts of issues of human resource development, economic development, the digital divide and how these new technologies have some effect, what the roles and actions of governments and non-government organisations should be. So on and so forth. Now, the conference isn't about the Internet, but it features a lot of discussion about the Internet and, in the first phase of the summit, which ended in 2003, there was a lot of discussion about the term 'Internet governance' and that is a concern shared by many people - that the Internet needs to be managed appropriately to achieve the best results on behalf of all citizens of the planet, I suppose. So that was a shared concern of many people. The outcome of the first summit was to form something called the Working Group on Internet Governance, which was a special, high-level, very diverse group, which examined various issues of Internet governance and produced a report earlier this year. And that report is input into the second phase of the summit, which is coming to an end this year. Now, this is all quite important because there are various recommendations in that report and various conclusions. There are various discussions going on about specific aspects of Internet governance. And ÔInternet governanceÕ, as you will hear from our panellists, is a very broad term in itself but it does include the aspects and issues of Internet resource management, the sorts of tasks and responsibilities held by ICANN, by the RIRs, and by other counterpart Internet organisations. So we are a small part within the Internet governance world, which is itself a small part within this overall WSIS process. But what for us is a small part of this process, what the Internet governance discussions and conclusions mean, is not quite clear. So the idea of this panel session is to bring together six individuals who can shed some light on this situation. I hope we will hear something of the background and issues around Internet governance generally and also in particular what does Internet governance mean for IP addresses? So, on that note, I'd like to open the panel and ask the first speaker, - let's go in order from the far end of the table, I think. And I'd like to introduce Raul Echeberria, who is the CEO of LACNIC, which is, of course, APNIC's counterpart Regional Internet Registry in Latin America. And Raul was also one of the members of the Working Group on Internet Governance, so Raul. RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you, Paul. I didn't prepare any slides. My presentation maybe will be more boring than the other speakers. But I would like to start remarking the importance of the process itself. All this process regarding Internet governance has brought new ears to the Internet discussion regarding Internet issues. But also methodologies for discussion that can be applied for other issues. When we met - as Paul said before, I was one of the members of the Working Group on Internet Governance created by the United Nations - the first time that we met in Geneva, it was a very interesting meeting, because there were not enough power supplies for connecting all the notebooks. There was not good connectivity for wireless connectivity. So it was a very nice experience introducing new ways to work; ways to work that were unaccustomed to them because it's life to take minutes and store the scripts of the meetings to publish them on the Internet or publish documents on the Internet in order to receive public comments. Those things that are very normal, natural for many people were very strange in the environment, the UN environment, and this was the experience of the multistakeholder world. This has been a point of change because those ways to work will continue being applied for those issues but also in other areas. Now it is - everybody accepts that it is difficult to organise a meeting to discuss Internet governance in the United Nations environment without some kind of openness and transparency. And this is one of the most successful things that, after the meeting. Speaking about the report itself, one of the - in December 2003, when the governments met in Geneva for the first phase of the summit, maybe people didn't evaluate in the right way the importance of what was agreed at that moment - what is now by the name of the ÔGeneva principlesÕ. It was included in the declaration of principles of the summit that any kind of governance should be open, transparent, democratic and with the full involvement of all stakeholders. Maybe at that time, the governments of the people who promote the discussion of Internet governance in the summit was thinking only about domain names and IP addresses and root servers. Then they claimed to have more participation of all stakeholders because they felt that some of the stakeholders were not participating in equal footing. But when the discussion started, really, we started to see that Internet governance was a much more than domain names and IP addresses and root servers. The importance - we can see really the importance of those principles agreed in 2003, because we have a window of opportunity here to claim more participation, more openness and transparency in many Internet organisations, leading with issues related with Internet governance, like human rights, freedom of expressions and many other things that, until now, the participation of all stakeholders has not been balanced. The importance of what was agreed in 2003 is something that we will remember for many years because, for 10 or more years, we will discuss how to apply those Geneva principles in every area of the Internet governance. One of the important outcomes - from my point of view - of the report was what was said by the chairman of the working group in the presentation of the report in July in Geneva, when the chairman stated that the working group was concentrated in the policy - on the policy level of the Internet governance and not in the operational level. This is a very important endorsement of how the things work from the operational point of view. It's not something difficult to see that Internet works and obviously in this kind of meeting more than others, there are many discussions regarding how to improve many areas of the Internet function. But for this, nobody can discount that Internet is working and is working well and this is one of the reasons of the success of the Internet. It is very important to receive this endorsement from the chairman of the working group saying, ÒWe have to concentrate our discussions at the policy level and not the operational level." Regarding specifically about IP addresses, there is only one concern. We have to consider the differences of opinion in the working group. Many different views were expressed in the working group by people of different cultures, different traditions, different political systems. Also different societies, private sector from different regions with different characteristics too. All these people thinking together realised they only needed to make one recommendation regarding IP addresses. This is also very important. This is to accept that the RIR system is something that has worked very well in getting the achievements that it is different aspects. The recommendation is regarding the deployment of IPv6. And it's not a strong recommendation to change something. It's more something to take into consideration by the community at the moment of the deployment of IPv6. And the recommendation is that it should be ensured that equitable access to the resources for everybody.This is something that I share 100% because it's one of the opportunities of the day for the RIRs. But it is important to remark also that the language was changed because a couple of years ago, there weren't many people speaking about equitable distribution of the resources and I, among others, were strongly against this expression because equitable distribution is something that doesn't mean anything if we don't see equitable based on the size of the economies and the population and the Internet markets. Then it is very positive the change that we stopped talking about Òequitable distribution of the resourcesÓ and we started to talk about Òequitable accessÓ, and it's a very different meaning. It's to ensure the same opportunities to everybody to access to the resources and I think it's very positive change. Regarding one of the most controversial issues in speaking about this group of issues of Internet governance that includes domain names, IP addresses and all the things which ICANN has an important role in currently, is one of the most controversial issues in this area was everything related with the oversight functions and the participation of the functions in this oversight. There is also an important conclusion of the working group that was taken by consensus and it was that no single government should take a different role in the oversight in Internet governance. And it means - the same with different words - it means that the current role of the United States Government should finish, should not continue. Everybody agreed with that but the point in which there is no agreement is, "So, who should take this role? " Some of us who are more aligned with one of the models that was proposed in the report - we say that there is no need for governmental oversight in the system. And this is because, this is because, if we apply the Geneva principles in every organisation related to Internet governance, it means the transparency, openness, participation of all stakeholders, democracy, then the community will exercise the oversight. Then the existence of a pure governmental oversight is - will produce an imbalanced relation between all stakeholders. It is proposed - one of the problems that the current systems have is the lack of coordination among many organisations involved in the Internet governance. It is proposed to create a forum to have better coordination with participation of all stakeholders on equal footing to discuss every issue and also to deal with new issues that we are not seeing today but they will appear in the next days, months, years, as it be happening until now. Then this forum is very important for the participation of developing country, civil society organisations and every - the people or organisations or countries that don't have enough resources to follow all the discussions in all the existing organisations. There will be one place, one-stop-shopping place to follow all the integrations and agendas efficiently. But, then if we combine the existence of this forum that is proposed with the application of all the Geneva principles in every organisation related to Internet governance, it will mean nothing for the whole society, the whole community to have a good level of contribution of every organisation and the opinions of everybody will be taken into consideration. To finish, I guess that I am in time to finish but I think that - as I said before when I started to talk - I think that the multistakeholder model should be the base for the beginning of the new governance model. This is one of the most important things. But the other important thing is that the ability that we should have to discuss this issue in all the - in the broader - as broad as possible because there are many issues related with Internet governance and some of them are much more important for the community in terms of development. They are more important from the point of view of the impact that they have in the society than discussing regarding domain names, IP addresses, root servers, that of course are important things. But we have a window of opportunity to discuss many issues like the impact of the Internet in development for developing countries and the application of respect of human rights and as many other things we recommend strongly to the governments that should be taken into consideration in the discussion during the second phase of this summit. Thank you. PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, Raul. The next speaker is Geoff Huston of APNIC. While Geoff is setting up, I should probably explain the agenda today for the session which is that we have six panellists and at an average of 10 minutes or so each, that will leave us some time at the end for discussion. So please, if you have any questions, they can be asked during the later part of the panel session. So hang on to those until that time. GEOFF HUSTON: Thanks, Paul. Geoff Huston. What an exciting time to be working in this industry. What an amazing set of changes have happened during our professional careers in a very, very rich, very, very massive, very, very long-term industry. The industry of global communications is not a recent invention. It goes back centuries. Up until now, it was never a commodity. Up until now, what we saw was the communication infrastructure was expensive. The investments were large and long-term and the only players who could honestly do that kind of investment was the public sector, governments. When the first telegraph system spanned the world over 130 years ago, to send just 30 words from one part of the globe to the other side, from Australia to the UK for example, those 30 words cost three weeks' wages. And the folk in the repeater stations transcribing this were not native English speakers, so you could expect that at least one-third of those words were irretrievably garbled in the process. Communications was expensive. It's now become a commodity and the investments and the players are changing. So what we're seeing here is deregulation of this industry is not an accident. It is quite natural. Now communications is a commodity. And the private sector can invest and the job of government is actually not to stand in the way of this kind of activity. Progressively what we have seen, many of you are seeing in where you work, is that we're now seeing progressive deregulation of this industry as the cost of communications comes down. So now we have competitive suppliers operating in an open and competitive market. That doesn't mean the public sector has stood back. The public sector is still there. Many countries, if not all, still have reserved regulatory powers. Markets can be distorted. Markets can fail. What do you do then? You call on the public sector, because there is always the regulatory back-up system. So, yes, this industry is now seeing a vibrant and exciting, a massive, private sector investment. The market dynamics of providers and consumers drive our industry. The moderation there is moderation through competition rather than regulation. Demand determines supply. And, of course, there are very few international regulatory levers in that kind of environment. But that doesn't mean the public sector's interests have disappeared. Of course not. The public sector is always there. It balances national interests within a common framework. There are international agencies. There are intergovernmental treaties. They're not going to disappear. They're there now and they will continue to be there. Yes, there will be coordinated regulatory recommendations. So that's the environment in which we're playing today. So there's a very big question here - do the institutions that we currently have in that space; are they the best we can think about? Are they the best vehicles for this work? One can look at the ITUT, one of the central institutions in the public policy space, and certainly critics of the ITUT could quite happily characterise it as a moribund, historical and irrelevant organisation. With the change of the Internet, with the increasing - and indeed almost dominant - private sector current activity levels, the ITUT, with its intergovernmental structure, appears to be grappling desperately for a role. So, yes, the ITUT has got critics. But, equally, one can point at ICANN and say, "There is a very target-rich environment. There is an environment where decisions appear to be haphazard.Ó Even recently with some domain name decisions, the reasons for those decisions do not appear to be logical. ÒIt appears,Ó say critics, Òthat ICANN is captured. It's captured bisector interests that are small. It's even captured by particular national interests at the expense of everyone else.Ó So ICANN is not without its criticism. It's also doesn't appear to accurately reflect our industry. Think closer. Think of the RIRs. What do we do? And how good are we at it? Critics would point out that, while we reflect the industries, the industries' objectives, the industries' interests, where's the public sector? How do we integrate industry views - which often are short-term - with the longer-term view of resource management? And, if you think that's an abstract question, think again. As we run through the remaining IPv4 resource, who should get the last /8? How do we balance the interests of developing economies, who would like to say, "Look, give us some space to make some investments in v4. We don't think we can afford to do v6 yet," against the interests of a large and dynamic industry in the more developed parts who say, "Give us more addresses, we need them today." How are we going to balance those? What's the public sector dimension? And are RIR forums appropriate to be able to discuss that rationally, properly, and achieve outcomes that reflect reasonable consensus? So I would suggest that, from the big to the small, we haven't got it right. We still have further to go. And our institutions do not reflect the full spectrum of what's actually out there as players. So should we consider change? It's certainly interesting that the WGIG reports did not actually suggest change. But maybe change of these institutions is required. Maybe when we look at these institutions, none of them actually fully reflect the broad spectrum of players and interests. All of us seem to be sectorial one way or another and the intersections aren't working properly. There may be scope to actually go back and think, "How should the international, the global communications industry accurately reflect private and public sector players? How should it reflect the consumer as well as the government? How should it reflect industry involvement, industry investment? What are our expectations?ÓÓ But a word of caution - international institutions are never leaders. They're not revolutions and they are not revolutionary. International institutions cannot take positions and remain viable with their constituencies if they constantly press every last constituency member into thinking differently, into making different decisions. International institutions are mirrors on our current faces. They're mirrors of the players, they're not leaders. And, in being a mirror, they're generally always a few years after the event. So, in thinking about WSIS, in thinking about this process, are we asking for instant answers when they shouldn't happen? Are we asking for change? Are we asking for reform in a leadership role where it is not going to happen? Where international institutions move slowly and deliberately and are reflective, they are trailers, not leaders. They are conservative, not revolutionary. So maybe we should stop looking so hard for instant change. The gratification role of these institutions is not going to happen quickly. So there are a few questions that I'd like to pose and think about here on the road to Tunis. What is the spectrum of expectations related to WSIS? Some folk would see this as the opportunity to actually get back into an agenda of the digital divide, of using the communications industry as a vehicle for structural cross-subsidisation across national and regional interests - a wonderful goal, but maybe it's historic and nostalgic. Some would see that the expectations around WSIS are, "Please don't do damage to a system that is actually working phenomenally well. Don't change things. The Internet happened simply because of this progressive area of deregulation. The private sector has managed to pull off a revolution in communication. Don't stifle it.Ó They seem almost contradictory, but both of those expectations are on the table as we go to Tunis. So what's a realistic expectation from an international body that tends to try and create common consensus? What's the lowest common denominator we can expect? I actually think that some of these expectations are way too high and that, realistically, impatience is not the right attitude here. We do need to be very patient. How do we balance national expectations and national agendas that conflict with others? Because, certainly, if you look at the world, there are a huge variety of national expectations and they're not all the same. How will those harmonise? And, equally, we are talking about technology - anti-gravity doesn't exist. There are a set of common constraints bounded in the way technology works. As I said earlier in the week, from John Klensin, ÒYou can route politics or you can route packets but not both at the same time.Ó How do we recognise those common constraints inside forums where the technology viewpoint is not there? Those folk aren't at that table. So what's fairness in balance inside such a diverse environment? Do you achieve outcomes that we can readily recognise involve compromise. What precisely are we trying to achieve here? And when we consider changes to these current structures, current institutions and current behaviours, what are the risks as well as the opportunity? As a generation - as a bunch of, in the Western world, baby boomers - we have grown into a culture of change, a culture of revolution, a culture of instant gratification. I suspect that, when we deal with institutions whose roots go back centuries, we're asking way too much of ourselves that, in trying to achieve outcomes that all of us individually, institutionally, nationally, can feel comfortable in working in, there are no instant answers and that WSIS is not an end in itself. There will not be revolutionary answers. But, when you and I meet here in 10 years' time, I suspect that things will have slowly changed. Not only will we all be a little bit older, a little bit greyer and myself having a bit less hair, not only will it happen individually; institutionally, I believe, things will change. Because ultimately, institutions survive in the international space, they are reflective of the environment, they cannot be historical anachronisms, they cannot represent merely sectorial interests as they move forward. They have to embrace a broader reality. And for ourselves some time well within the next 10 years, we have to have a rational, a reasonable, a fair and a balanced outcome about what we do with the remaining resources available to us in IPv4 and how we adequately put forward policies and processes that reflect our gigantic expectations for IPv6. It's an enormous challenge but I actually feel that we're up to it and I've looked at this 10 years with remarkable optimism. Thank you. PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Geoff. Next up is Akinori Maemura. He is working with France Telecom. Also with JPNIC, as he has gone done for many years. And he's the chair of the APNIC Executive Council. He's speaking, I think, in his capacity as a member of the Japanese Internet governance task force. AKINORI MAEMURA: No. I changed my mind. LAUGHTER And I will present something on behalf of maybe one NIR and those in the APNIC community. PAUL WILSON: Thank you. AKINORI MAEMURA: Sorry about that, Paul. PAUL WILSON: That's fine. AKINORI MAEMURA: OK. We have had a very good big picture in terms of Internet governance, but my presentation will be focusing on a quite-limited area. But it is quite relevant for us all. I titled it 'IP address governance by APNIC NIRs'. And I'd like to speak about that quite fundamental point of view why and how we should do the IP address management - very fundamental because IP addresses has a limited space, which should be shared by all. Even if IPv6 has an astronomical number, it is still limited. And it should be shared by all the globe and all over its lifetime. That's quite a big constraint. And one of the philosophies of the IP address management is to assign as many IP addresses as a user actually needs and it should not be less than they actually need and also should not be more than they actually need. And it's regardless of time or where the user is. So how to achieve this - to assign no more or no less than needed - for that, we need fairness. So IP address registries - that is including RIRs, NIRs, and LIRs - should have homogeneous, consistent and coordinated policy suite and it should be formed by the broad participation from all the community. And also the IP address management needs some technical expertise because the IP network technologies has a very rapid speed, high speed of evolution, and you know, designing the network needs some technical expertise and then also that IP address management will need the same thing. And also the addressing the IP address efficiently is quite not so easy. We need some expertise for that and also demonstrating the IP address needs need some more expertise. So we are now - you are now attending the APNIC meeting and APNIC serves the Asia Pacific region and APNIC has challenges. So what are APNIC's challenges? We should cover a variety of the economies with different degree of development, and deployment status of the Internet and also languages. So I see in the client problems with the Internet governance and also the controversy in the Internet governance. I can see some sort of north-south problem. So in the case of APNIC, we hold this north and south problem within one region. So it is a very big challenge for APNIC. So deployment status of the Internet is quite different from the various countries and we have - this means that we have a big gap in the amount of IP address needs and also the technical expertise. And also the countries has the different needs for the governmental involvement for the Internet. For example, in Japan, the government is involved in the Internet deployment very little and it is just left to the private sector. But some countries needs the governmental initiative to deploy the Internet. And also we have the variety of languages. In APNIC, the common language is English but for the many - most of the members, English is not native tongue but second language. So, to this challenge, APNIC has been taking a very big effort to developing technical expertise, especially in the developing countries, by the active involvement for the technical deployment by, for example, holding the workshops and also the hostmaster training in developing countries. And we have a very big problem for the fair participation to the policy process due the languages and also the APNIC demonstrations. So APNIC are doing development programmes in every meeting and also APNIC has the various staff who have different languages. I don't have a precise idea but we have 20 languages in APNIC? Some sort of. Yes. And also APNIC make a very big effort to making English discussion easier for non-native. You can see - we have the real-time scribe, that, if you miss some words, you can follow what the speaker says in English. And also that every proposal is to be published. And I think, I believe - that's not only because I am from NIR but also I think, as a network engineer, NIRs is a probable key solution for solving several problems. NIR is National Internet Registries who is member to the APNIC and covers a country or an economy. That brings us some benefits - it is better coverage for in-country situation. For example, in case of JPNIC, we can serve to the member in Japanese language and in the Japanese currency and Japanese contract, which is comprised by Japanese law and also we have in-depth look at Japanese situations. And, as I said, APNIC holds the different situation of the development by NIR can cover the various governmental involvement so various governmental involvement is possible for the NIRs. For example, in the case of JPNIC, we are quite independent non-profit organisation with little governmental involvement or little fund. But the NIR sub-structure of the government or national agency also can be an NIR to serve the national community. And also in that case, the very important thing is that to have consistent policy for fair distribution of the IP address for technical needs. We need IP addresses because we have the devices there and we have the network there. And for fair distribution, we need to have the homogeneous policy which needs the swift coordination because the Internet technologies that are evolving very quickly. And the swift coordination with the global policy system. That is quite precious. So I have been talking about IP address management within the APNIC region, but it is quite similar to talk about the northern-southern problem. I would like to summarise this discussion. IP address governance, as well as other component of the Internet governance should be in order to assure sustainable operation of the Internet. APNIC has some challenges in the variety of the developmental status of the Internet or something like that by country, by country, but APNIC has been making a very big effort to cover them. And, also, I would like to add here NIRs can work for better coordination of in-country situation and also the global policy coordination. That's my comments. Thank you very much. PAUL WILSON: The next speaker is Phet Sayo. PHET SAYO: Good morning everybody. Welcome to Hanoi. OK, I'm with UNDP, specifically with the Asia Pacific Development Information Program, APDIP for short. We are the regional programmer ICT communication technology for development - mainly policy and development, access issues, content management and knowledge Ð content, knowledge and management. We are initiating an initiative called Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance about a year back. It started in consultation held parallel to the ICANN meeting in June of last year. The main objective of the ORDIG initiative is to provide the Asia Pacific perspective to the WGIG and WSIS process. We are backed up by an advisory panel mixed from the region, 12 members. Very much like the sort of - we're sort of a microcosm of the WGIG process. It is pointed out in the slide we're partners mainly with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and APNIC has provided staff support and other intellectual input and we have had partial funding from the International Development Research Centre of Canada. As some of the speakers have mentioned about the WGIG report, I would like to share verbatim the definition. The WGIG process stems from the first phase of WSIS where the two primary areas of focus identified were Internet Governance issues and financial mechanisms all related to ICT development and the working group of Internet Governance was asked to come up with the definition for Internet Governance in the scope of their work. To me it seems like a very large task and as suggested by other speakers, there won't be an immediate solutions for us at APDIP, we look at the issue as a long-term process and we'll continue on as long as there's the Internet, as long as there are a need for Internet Governance. The Internet Governance is the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programs that shape the evolution and use of the Internet. I'm not sure if you're familiar with UN but this is typical UN speak, off the record. That's quite broad and we have taken the approach WISIS took to look at Internet Governance, beyond names and numbers, and it is clearly stated in the report Internet Governance uses more than Internet names and addresses dealt with by ICANN. What has ORDIG done within the last year? We have consulted within the region, had sub-regional consultations of Asia, south-east Asia and Pacific Islands et cetera, we held an online forum, 180 participants over a few weeks discussed various issues of Internet Governance. I believe some of you here were on the forum and because it was requested we open the forum in light of the WGIG report we did and now there are about 400 participants, active participants, posting and arguing in a healthy environment. We have continued consulting and we conducted online survey and a number of the ISPs responded. It was in many languages. That in itself was a challenge. It was in 12 languages and we received over 1,000 respondents and from that, I'll get to the results of the survey and highlight some of the findings. So what have we found? Essentially what we have found - our findings have been summarised in two major reports and you can go to our website to find the documents and to read the documents for yourself. Basically, there's certain - there are basically some certain needs for looking at Internet Governance on a broad level and what we've done is divided it into issues in layers Ð capacity infrastructure, content and social development dimensions. Social developments are brought to you in APNIC because that's our business. I'll roughly go through the slides because it goes into the recommendations we found. I think they will give you a sense of the scope but won't address the IP address issues. We adopted the WGIG issues of governance doesn't mean government. Let's make that clear. And that there needs to be transparency, it needs to be multistakeholder. It has to be participatory process and that it's - again, it's not just about domain names. I'll roughly go quickly through these slides because it gets into the key recommendations. The first point is that local needs deserve local solutions. Government does have a role but to what degree and what - how does that - what shape and what form is that role hasnÕt yet been defined and that all stakeholders, if possible, should be participating in the processes of governance. Preserve cultural diversity. Especially in the Asia Pacific region there's many concerns about whether it should be local content in local languages, whether that be URLs or text on the Internet, specifically in developing countries in the Asia Pacific, needs for participation and building and being involved in global forums. Infrastructure of course, there are access cost issues and in this region - probably everywhere else Ð voice-over IP has become a hot issue, wireless connectivity in regions - areas of the region that have last-mile issues. Of course you would all be more concerned with the logical issues like the domain name and IP address management. Again to reiterate, these recommendations we came up with were before the WGIG report and already it's the one point about Internet protocol management is to develop fair and equitable mechanisms for IPv6 allocations which is exactly the recommendations from WGIG. I won't go through all these. I want to get to what we found in the surveys. When we canvassed - when we solicited feedback from the region through the survey, a number of issues sort of came out. If you notice DNS management and IP address is sort of bottom of the list of issues people are - people are saying, "It's sort of fine. We don't have a problem with it." 32% of the respondents basically said, "Well, we're dissatisfied with the issue," but 40% were satisfied. That - even though that's the lowest ranking, it shows it's the most polarised issue of the bunch. This is nothing new. From the online survey, we discovered working on the basic principle IP addresses are a global resource - maybe some people argue that but that's the general consensus we had from the forum. We discovered it is more a question about perceived unfairness and perceived questions about sovereignty versus internationalising. Basically, should a country have control over block addresses? So it's become - at least in the online forum it was the most controversial point. It sort of just went on and unresolved and I don't think it sort of will be resolved because it is more of a question of perception of unfairness than it is a question of technology or - so there's a perception that existing mechanisms aren't fair. So the counter points to this - although people are saying the RIRs are doing their roles on the needs basis part - IP allocation is fine so leave it alone. Some even suggested - I'm just giving you the order of sequence of the argument - some people came back and said, "Let's adopt a national level look at it. Let's have blocks by reclamation. I'm not sure if even in second phase WSIS anything is going to be resolved. If anything the dialogue has just begun. Under the WGIG report there's only two points mentioned and the recommendation again is about equitable access to resources, as mentioned by the earlier speaker. To end this presentation, all the information information and the reports I have mentioned and the results of the survey, the archive for the forum and dialogue is all available on our website. That's the URL there. Thank you. I'll be available for questions. PAUL WILSON: Thanks very much, Phet. The next speaker is Robert Shaw from the I TU. ROBERT SHAW: Since my IBM Thinkpad isn't available I won't be giving a presentation. That's one of the reasons. The other reason is I didn't prepare a presentation for the panel. After Geoff's presentation, I'm highly motivated to go off and give a good presentation. I'm Robert Shaw in the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit part of the office of the Secretary-General. I'm here on behalf of the director of our telecommunications standard station sector, that's an elected position. He's elected by 189 member states. Of course it's nice to see many old friends and make new ones. We had a drink at the jazz club in Hanoi and got a T-shirt courtesy of Tom Vest. It is interesting to see - I haven't seen Geoff Huston in a long time and now he works for APNIC and I remember I worked with Geoff about 10 years ago and we worked on let's say one of the initial discussions on Internet Governance. Of course we didn't call it Internet Governance at that time but it was basically dealing with how you allocate generic top-level domains. The debate goes on. If I think there's any message to take strongly out of Geoff's presentation and the other presentations here is we'll still be discussing this 10 and probably 20 years from now and we'll all be a lot fatter and whatever. Anyway, over the coming years I think from the ITU stance we really hope to continue to build close relationships with the RIRs and hopefully the NRO. ITU is a grand old dame, you might say - maybe not the words in that order but we have been around since 1865. Although part of the UN, we pre-date the UN. We were originally the international telegraph union and over time we sort of take things on board and it is a very misunderstood institution. It is a very complex institution. It is basically three parts. Some parts are fairly well-known, the standardisation sector, the CCITT, is probably the best known and the smallest part of the I TU. The other part is to do with radio stations like hanging out geostations, global coordination frequencies, the fact you can use WiFi around the world comes from governments getting together and saying, "We're going to make the spectrum available." At the last radio conference they made another radio available 5 gigahertz range and so on. 10 or 15 years ago the ITU had little to do with the Internet. Perhaps we are a follower and not a leader. Increasingly we deal with the Internet and networks and 80% of our standards work is now probably dealing with IP-based networks. I came right from Geneva where we're setting a team which is next generation network or NGN work is going on. I recommend if you want to understand some of the things the ITU is doing in IP networks, go and look at the list of contributions from the last meeting. There is about 300 of them and there is a lot of them with Ipv6 and stuff mentioned in the title. I think we crossed a threshhold on Tuesday morning, I saw Larry Roberts with BT give a presentation on their QoS signaling mechanism for streaming, setting up virtual circuit type things. You get the gist. The world summit, or WSIS, World Summit on Information Society, is something originally conceptualised in 1998. This was later endorsed by the UN summit and originally plan td to be held in one phase but it ended up being split into two phases because there was not quite agreement on where to hold it. The first phase was in Geneva in December 2003, the second phase in November 2005. Of course one of the pull-out lines of the objectors of the WSIS but unexpectedly one of the - people think, "This is a great plot to deal with the Internet or something like that." One of the great unresolved issues at the first phase was this discussion around Internet Governance. We were very, very surprised and of course there's a lot of vagueness about what does Internet Governance mean? As Raul pointed out, you can take a narrow or broad definition. I have three definitions. You can take a narrow definition which just deals with Internet resource management names and addresses - you can take a broad definition which deals with fibres, spam and my third definition, my joke is whatever I'm not working on. So if you're working in IP addresses you always say, "Internet Governance is about these issues, "If you work in the other issues you say, "Internet Governance is about these issues over here." One of the things you hear a lot about is issues about sovereignty and asymmetric role of the U.S. Government. I don't think the issue of IP address management was dealt with - well, of course one of the - what happened after the first phase was the Working Group on Internet Governance was established but the issue of - I don't think the working group really has dealt very well with the issues. That's personal opinion and particularly in the area of IP address. It has barely been touched upon. They got very, very time boxed in work and the final report was basically written in a couple of days at the end of the process. I think there will be a lot of discussion about this. Then there's a lot of sovereignty discussions which is sort of a difficult concept for technical people to get their heads around. It and you might - I'm sure you've heard that reflecting some of the comments you heard. Director Zhao came out with a paper called ÔITU and Internet GovernanceÕ in reply to a request from the ITU working group on the WSIS. He suggested we reserve a portion of the v6 address space for country-based assignments and which would be assigned in no cost. Sort of a compulsion for a dual system. The details of this would have to be studied and perhaps one of the good things in this concept might be more dialogue between the ITU and the NROs and these things. That's something that's still under discussion. There was a recent workshop, for example IPv6, and at the ITU and Geoff and others were there and there was also a workshop for developing countries and they're starting to look at regional groups to advance some of the issues and reflect a regional group in the Arab region might be established as a trial with Egypt as the coordinator of the group. One of the things Dr Zhao is looking for is a better means of communication with NROs and RIRs and there are some formal mechanisms to deal with this. What does Internet Governance mean for IP address allocation? I think I'll pick up on some of the comments made by Geoff here. You really need to reflect carefully on what this data debate is about and to do that well, you really need to look back on the history of communications. Currently you can really see we are in a process of technological and therefore national policy and regulatory churn or turmoil and we're in this transition to this new communication paradigm, new regulatory outlook. I'm not sure I would use the word deregulation. That's a word that has lots of different meanings, I guess. You can see this sort of seismic shift happening now, both in our perceptions about the government role and policy role in Internet Governance. If you go back to just 1995 or 1998 which is not that long ago, a popular paradigm was governments have absolutely no role to play in governing cyberspace. That was a popular belief. We can see how fast that idea, that meme disappeared. All you have to do is follow one of these newsletters that talks about national legislative activity to the Internet and you can see there's hundreds of pieces of legislation passing every day. For better or worse, each country as a reflection of its national priority, interest groups, lobbyists, geopolitical positioning et cetera will continue to apply their rules to the Internet. This sort of ties in with this sovereignty thing. And I think something Raul said there was one of the main issues is there's a lack of coordination - Geoff picked up on this too - a lack of coordination between technology work and policy interests there. The WGIG sort of thought that - set this idea of a forum might solve the problem. I'm very, very doubtful about this. I think it is unrealistic because the ideas aren't well fleshed out at all. I think the reason a lot of people thing it might be a good idea - first of all, I think it falls into the trap of if we create another group somehow all problems will be solved. That's not true. As soon as any group becomes a focus of many conflicting interests, the first thing hat happens is people say, "What are the rules? Who gets a seat at the table? How is this funded?" et cetera, et cetera. None of these questions have been addressed by WGIG. So for the people who see there needs to be government oversight or think there should be government oversight of management names and addresses and resources, they perhaps see this forum as a vehicle to do that and other people see it as a necessity to have a talking shop in the forum. There's not much agreement on what this forum concept means. So I think I agree with Geoff that there's a lot of unrealistic expectations out there about what's going to happen and it is going to take a very long time. If you look at this shifting regulatory paradigm, the government role in NGN, just look at what's happened with voice-over IP in United States, mandate for emergency services. I remember in 2000 running a workshop in ITU. The working title was regulatory aspects of IT telephony. Immediately someone said, "You can't say that." I said, "What you think there's no regulatory aspects of IP telephony?" He said, "You can't talk about this." Five years later and there's applications of IP telephony. Napoleon said, ÒHistory is a version of past events people have decided to agree upon.Ó We forget that. We tend to compress time back. Take the history of the telephone. It took 30 years for the killer application for the telephone to be discovered which was just people talking to each other, chatting to each other. When we look back, we think it was a few years and they sorted that out. It was a primary application. I think we're in the same thing with the Internet. It is going to take a while for the right paradigm to emerge. Geoff asked the question, "What is fairness and balance?" I think this might get at the heart of it a little bit. I think the real debate here is about what is - well, what Geoff said. It is how do you elect the public policy component issues here? So what is the role here of governments? Now, I think with the current - this is why it is going to take a long time - with current technological and regulatory paradigm shifting, that's an impossible question for any sovereign government to answer today. And so basically what I think you're going to see is that they'll reserve their position for a number of years and let things settle down so I think we'll be talking about this for a long time. Thank you. APPLAUSE. PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Bob. Last but not least, it's Sharil. MOHD SHARIL TARMIZI: Thank you, Paul. Good morning. My name is Sharil, as Paul mentioned. I'm with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, which is a regulatory agency involved in the regulation of communication and multimedia sector. We cover broadcasts, telecoms, Internet and the whole thing. That also is things like DNS and IP addresses. I'm chairman of the government advisory committee of ICANN and I'm also an ICANN board member and I'm very happy actually to see many friends here. First time I came to one of the - I think the first APNIC meeting I came to was the APNIC 18 when I met some of you for the first time and after about half a day attending the courses found myself totally confused. I'm a government guy with very little technical background. What I would like to start with in talking about this topic where I think all the five previous speakers before me have covered many, many areas already, is that those of you at APNIC 18 may have remembered I started my presentation by showing a picture of an elephant. And the way I characterise Internet Governance is it's a bit like the story of the elephant. Every person in the room - have you heard of the story of the three blind men and the elephant or the six blind men and the elephant? Each blind man - one blind man goes up to the front of the elephant and he touches the trunk and describes the trunk as something. He says, "It is a very muscular thing, very big, very strong." The second blind man touches the elephant from the tail and says, "It is like a twig, like a stick. Very thin like a rope." The third blind man touches the elephant from the side and says, "The elephant is like a wall." Each one is correct. But in their own way - in total we all know that the elephant doesn't look like a wall or a twig. We know what it is. It takes all three mind men to actually see the whole perspective. Why is this relevant? Because today when you start talking about Internet Governance, everybody and his uncle wants to talk about Internet Governance. I have seen from the last time, from the summit in 2003 right up to this summit in Tunis just about every organisation that I know of has a session on Internet Governance, whether it is private, public, intergovernmental, international. There's two more happening in Kuala Lumpur next week. One is the global public policy conference where one of the topics is Internet Governance. That's from the software makers and there's another one organised by the UNIC task force also next week, also on Internet Governance so you can imagine how much interest this has created. Now, Phet mentioned the definition of WGIG on Internet Governance and I think also Raul had mentioned this. Sometimes it pays to just think a little bit about how you view in your own minds what governance means. Is governance control? Is governance coordination? What is governance? For most of us who are not native English speakers, we tend to relate this back to the story of the elephant. You have your own view of what governance is and this view is usually shaped by your own experiences. Now, even within governments, for example, within governments there are various views on what exactly constitutes governance. I can tell you that the people from the same governments that represent some of you, those go to the technical meetings are technical government people who talk about technical governance. Those who go to the political meeting are political people who talk about political governance. They all will be talking about Internet Governance but the perspectives will be different even for government meetings. In many respects, I think the views will differ depending on the development of the economy. I also would like to share with you that from what I have observed, the position in the Asia Pacific region or the Asian region generally is governments have had a very active role together with the private sector and Internet community in actually bringing the Internet to the masses. In some countries more so than others. This may not necessarily be how the Internet had developed in maybe other parts of the world but in this region, at least from my observation, there's been a lot of activity by governments. Does this mean that the governments alone control it to the exclusion of others? I personally don't think so and I think in the local environment, I think if you relate to your own personal experiences, you'll find that people try to find the right balance of how they work and I think that what is the issue now at the international level is finding that balance at the international level because national expectations you can manage within your own boundaries but international expectations, well, that's another difficulty. What I would like to suggest as we move forward in the discussion is perhaps one of the easiest things is to start finding common areas of interest. Bare in mind that little elephant again. When I walked into the GAC meetings back in Yokohama, I think it was, in 2000, you could count how many laptops government officials had. You sit in a meeting and you can count the laptops. This is similar to what Raul said about whether there was wireless in the first WGIG meeting. I remember like two meetings ago at one of the ICANN meetings I attended, the first person to complain when the wireless went down with was the government official because he was the first to discover he didn't have connectivity with his office and today you go to government meetings and find many government officials like you looking at screens, staring into the screens in the meeting. There is certainly an evolution at least, maybe a bit slower than some of you but we try to catch up. I think the common areas are important and in so far as my own identification of what the common area is - I think this has been mentioned with previous speakers - the Internet works well today and it needs to continue to work well. How we approach it then is the issue and the reasons of why they need to work will differ. For example, for most of us here in this room in the technical community, you want it to work well because you want to ensure routing is sufficient, address allocation is sufficient, everything is done in a fair and open manner so that no one is left out, so to speak. For the governments, perhaps a large area of concern is e-commerce, stability of the network, security, again you will find these are common areas of interest but the approach is coming from different angles. I think in so far as the discussion in the GAC about IP addressing, areas of interest have been efficient allocation of the resource, transparency of the allocation of the resource, clear processes involved in the allocation of the resource and no danger of capture because I think Geoff made this point if I'm not mistaken. What do you do when, you know, a small developing country comes along and wants v4 addresses and all of a sudden you say, "Sorry, we've run out."? Now, the balancing of expectations - I think if you look at our own experiences in this region, the concept called the multistakeholder concept is something many of us practice in this region. I know in Malaysia we do. The government doesn't move until we talk to the private sector, civil society and say, "What's your view on this?" We don't always agree. But we do work together. To my mind, you know, each of these stakeholder - this concept of multistakeholder is coming up in the UN system. Each of the stakeholders is very important and distinct function but just like the three blind men and the elephant, they all need each other. They all need to work together in order to succeed. I would say - this is my very personal view - the role of governments today, I think Geoff also tapped on this earlier, to my mind largely providing the framework or environment for the private sector to put in the investment. If you look at the third partner in the WSIS context, the civil society, that's largely to assist in capacity building. You need all three if youÕre looking at the Digital Divide which is what the WSIS is supposed to look at. Governments alone can't do it. Neither can the private sector. The governmental environment is not appropriate. Neither can civil society if the environment is not right. You need all three. Before I end, I would like to just point you to our GAC website - yes, we do have a website. We are not that behind. In fact we used to have IP address right up there and now we have our DNS there. I don't know what happened. This was thanks to a comment from someone from Chile last time. If you are interested, quite a lot of the areas we discuss involve areas you look at. If you go to the regional forum at the top of the page under the word committee, we're still updating the stuff but we discuss IPv6 policy and we discuss how to manage IXes as well but very, very different perspective from what you guys look at but it's about the same topic. Last but not least, I'd like to ask how many of you know who your GAC representative is? Oh, a few of you do. Very good. Those who don't, you can go to that link at the bottom left where it says 'representatives' and have a look. There's quite a few from this region. You may be surprised who they are. You may even think that they're not relevant but it pays to know. With that, Paul, I'll hand to back to you. Thank you very much for your attention. PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Sharil. We're running up against the coffee break time but I think we can extend for just a few minutes if there are any questions from the audience, or in fact from panel members for each other. Yes, I can see some people coming up. Let's hear from the audience first. RANDY BUSH: I certainly respect the hundred-odd years of history while the government and intra-government et cetera, etc. I had great fun working for a telco who had been doing it for 130 years and was not always impressed but I've worked in a lot of the poorer countries. I've worked in some of the richer countries and what continually strikes me is the system we historically had with the national monopolies, with the international colonialism - I'll call it techno colonialism where you can go to South Africa and also see France Telecom etc. Has given us the analogue divide. How are we going to do things differently this time so we don't reproduce and perpetuate it? What's different this time? How have the hundred-year-old organisations changed their perceptions? I include my government who is sitting there on top of ICANN. What are we doing differently? Have we learned from history? What's going to change? PAUL WILSON: Would one of the panelists like to respond to that one? First grabber gets it. GEOFF HUSTON: I'm not sure that politically much changes and certainly politics and human nature tend to be very, very close friends. What has changed, however, is I think economics. The difference over 130 years is that these days infrastructure doesn't cost an entire nation's GDP for a year. There is a glut of cabling infrastructure in certain parts of the world. The actual cost of putting in infrastructure is a lot cheaper. Whether that's cheap enough to actually allow even relatively small economies to invest in capable, cohesive ubiquitous infrastructure nationally and internationally is still an issue. But I would certainly say what we have done over the last 130 years is get that cost down a lot, whether it is down enough is still an open issue but it is getting cheaper, Randy, and that I think is the one change that stops an accurate replay and hopefully gives us optimism for a different outcome. RANDY BUSH: Get out of the centre of Hanoi and you can judge the result. ROBERT SHAW: It is a very, very good question and there's no easy answer to it. I mean, technological colonialism continues today as you pointed out and there is a lot of gaming in the international sphere to further international economic interests. That's just a reality of political life. In the adoption of any new communications technology, I mean it is 1 of these classic adoption curves. I don't know what you call it, not a Gaussian. There is always innovation in the beginning, over-hype and then a trough of disillusionment which we saw with the Internet at the end of the '90s and everyone after the '90s - everyone thought the Internet was going to consume all communications medium. That didn't quite happen or that it was the ultimate paradigm. That didnÕt happen. We have dipped down and now we're starting to climb up. If you look at the adoption of most communication systems, that's the way it worked and it is becoming commoditised. I often say communication technologies aren't interesting in the beginning, they're interesting when they get boring and everyone accepts they're part of our lives. A bit like a mobile phone. In many ways the mobile phone has grown faster than the Internet. We need to ask ourselves why. It quickly became a commoditised item and there's revenue sharing in developing countries. There's subsidisation of handsets so it's not like the Internet where we are all sitting there with $2000 or $3,000 laptops. I took my iBook to the service centre in Hanoi and said, "Do you think you can fix this?" They said, "41 P. I have never seen one of those?" It is a different paradigm. I think the hope is that one day the commoditisation of access to the Internet or whatever we call it in the future will become so commoditised and cheap that it will become just like the consumer electronic market but it takes time. PAUL WILSON: Sharil. MOHD SHARIL TARMIZI: Thank you. If I may, just to respond from my own perspective, what have we learned from history and what's going to change? Well, see, the government in Malaysia had all the years before 1998 looked at the telecom sector as a control environment. You need to control it. You need to control everything. Now, way back in '96 moving onto '98, we realised that we needed to change and what was it that brought about this change was actually the Internet and how the Internet worked and the knowledge in the economy it was coming or at least published by the Internet. So in 1998 we actually dissolved our telecoms laws, dissolved our broadcasting laws and moved into a converse environment where we moved from control to more of coordinate and collaborate. Now, it is still a long process. I will not say that we got it perfect. There's still many things that we learn every day but this was actually at least from our own national standpoint, a realisation of changing dynamics of the environment that was brought about by the Internet. Whether we will get it right, only time will tell. But this is at least a slice of Malaysian experience that I am sharing with you. PAUL WILSON: Next question. EDWARD LEWIS: I'm working as an engineer in the Internet for quite some time and I'm finding it harder and harder to apply new technologies to the Internet and I think coming from the discussion about Internet Governance, I understand in Internet Governance you want something stable but I want to request that technology advanced are not completely rule out of the process. There's still a recognition there's still things we want to fix on the Internet. I don't think it is built for the entire world in what it's doing so far. At least leave room for technology improvements which is there, but also to encourage that on some level. Make sure the players getting involved here are encouraged to take maybe a risky step to improve what's out there and what's reasonable for a world-wide asset. The other request or encouragement is as the discussions go on about Internet Governance and policy, I think it is very important to bring along the engineers in the different regions and get them talking to each other. In the past I have helped work on protocol development and in the past we've had input from some small communities that were not local that couldn't have used a global input and I would like to encourage global input from engineering levels, operations, technical folks. Do what you can to get those voices back into a more world-wide technical collaboration. PAUL WILSON: Thank you. Sharil. MOHD SHARIL TARMIZI: If I can just respond to that. I think I know what Raul is going to say. I was part of a Malaysian delegation in 2003 when the first plans were taking place. That was my observation where government officials were used to a political debate and did not have a clue Tasmania to how routing works for example or did not have a clue as to what IP addressing or DNS was about. Everybody suddenly wanted to have an Internet exchange and everybody wanted a route server as well in their own backyard. It took some explanation from some engineering people to explain that certain things you want can't happen because it technically doesn't work that way. That has left at least from my personal observation an improvement in the debate that's taken place since 2003 to now and I think that that was evident in discussions that took place in the WGIG. Now I'll swing to Raul. RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you. I would like to say that I see Ed's point and I think it is important when we talk about this community of the Internet and the need to take into consideration the impact of any new changes or new structures in the establishment of the Internet. We also have to think about - and I have said in some of the papers that I have - we should take care of the possibility of losing people, that is working in volunteer basis, they with working because they're in the current system and there is a risk of lack of innovation if - in some of the possible scenarios. I think that it is important to consider that there should be room for innovation for technical advanced as Ed's pointed out. PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Raul. Suresh. SURESH RAMASUBRAMANIAN: Governments, as everybody has pointed out here, do have a role. I have also observed and I think - Phet pointed out also that a lot of the complaints about governance have been about specific instances of back governance, mismanagement of root servers by a telco for example or cases of poor competition policy where the local regulators seem to be politically favouring one particular telco and things like that. And there have also been cases of enlightened governance where governance has been necessary and regulation has been necessary. For example, you have one resource blocked by cable modem companies and needed FCC intervention to resolve issues. And in cases like spam and cybercrime where there is a substantial cross-over between the brick and mortar, the real world and the online world, government and industry are essential so how do we try to minimise the impact of bad governance? Because not all governance can be good even if we try and how do we channel the efforts of governments and the efforts of other actors such as industry and civil society so that the least damage is done and the best results are obtained? ROBERT SHAW: I think you're asking the right question, Suresh. You can see how the debate has shifted from the last five years and of course governments do have a role. They were very happy to have lots of funding by governments in the early days and normally - it's acting like your definition of Internet Governance, actually I mean it is the other things. When ISPs are harmed by government policies, they're the first to say, "I think the government should intervene here." Is that regulation or deregulation, when the FC C mandates reports for voice-over IP, is it regulation or deregulation? Governments can be your friend and can help you but if you need to enter into dialogue with them and need to quit seeing them in many cases as the enemy and that applies to institutions that reflect many governments, you know, for example enhanced dialogue between organisations like the ITU and the NRO, that would be a fantastic thing, I think. You could come and say, "This is how we look at it," and the governments give their perspectives. The first step to building coordinated approaches is building dialogue. It is painful at times but needs to be done. PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Robert. I have one more request from Geoff and we'll break for morning tea. GEOFF HUSTON: Good or bad governance is an historical judgment. It is looking after the event. When you ask public institutions including governments to take leadership positions, to guess, to make wild leaps of faith, that's when you run the risk of making what is in historical perspective a bad decision. So when you try and push these institutions into making leadership decisions, into areas where there are few conventional wisdoms, that's when the risk becomes higher. Traditionally, public institutions are comfortable in embracing conventional wisdom. Reflecting back what we already know. So perhaps I would suggest that bad governance is when you do make these phenomenal guesses and leaps and sometimes you get it wrong. Maybe asking those institutions to be leaders is really part of the issue here. Maybe instead, what you're frying to do is to actually -- trying to do is actually make a system where the horizontal communication works better so the vertical messages that go up and down are at least informed rather than guesswork. PAUL WILSON: OK. Thank you. I think we need to break for morning tea now. Better late than never. My apologies for running over but I would like to thank the six panelists for their contributions to a very interesting session. I hope that you all stay around for some or all of the rest of the day and there may well be? More interesting questions later on. We have got a couple of open mic sessions so if you missed out on a question and something occurs to you, that may well be another opportunity. Let's break and come back here by quarter past the hour, please. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE. PAUL WILSON: While the morning tea break is happening actually, we'll put on the screen one of the latest multimedia productions by the team at APNIC who were working, you may have noticed, at the last APNIC meeting and at this meeting on a documentary which aims to explain and promote the APNIC meeting process so if you feel like looking at this, do so over your coffee.