______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Session: APNIC Member Meeting Date: Friday 3 March 2006 Time: 4.00pm Presentation: NRO & WSIS review: way forward Presenter: Axel Pawlik ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: OK. I think we can get started again and, as promised, we'll start off with the prize draw for the illustrious and tiny iPod - it can't be any good if it's so small - and the other USB sticks that were found. Has anyone got an evaluation form that you haven't submitted yet? OK. I'd like a volunteer to come - RAY PLZAK: One moment. We found amongst the ballots a member evaluation form so... PAUL WILSON: I need a volunteer from the floor. CONNIE CHAN: I'll pick one. PAUL WILSON: This will be the iPod. CONNIE CHAN: Shiu Wai-Kay. APPLAUSE GINNY LISTMAN: I'll draw one. PAUL WILSON: Ma Yan. Toshi-san. Toshiyuki Hosaka from JPNIC. APPLAUSE Kenny Huang. APPLAUSE I know. It looks like an inside job. APPLAUSE Thanks, everyone, for filling the forms in. That is very useful information, I hope. And we'll hang on to those. OK. Back to business now. Axel Pawlik is here as the representative of the NRO and the RIRs, to talk about the way forward for the NRO and WSIS. AXEL PAWLIK: A few words about the NRO and then a bit of retrospective about WSIS and a few words about the future which is, of course, we don't know so what can I say. The NRO is Number Resource Organization established by an MoU - you know that - well, 2.5 years ago roughly. It's a lightweight tool for RIR coordination, a contact point for external parties and all that. We like to call it a coalition of the RIRs. It is very, very lightweight. It is not yet incorporated, although we've heard there are incorporation documents being circulated among the RIR boards and we are hopeful that it happens soon. There are a number of functions. I am a simple member. Raul is chairman today. Ray is secretary and Paul is treasurer. So I will have no function and I'm not sure why I'm here. You should do this, Paul. You're the local man. The NRO fulfils the functions of the ICANN Address Supporting Organisation. So the NRO Number Council members are acting as the ICANN Address Council members. You know all this stuff. The activities over the last few years, last few months and in future, also ongoing is something that I call a hobby. ICANN contract drafting is something that we have done previous to the NRO, I think, starting in 2000 already and we don't have a contract yet but we have a draft nearly ready and they'll go out to the RIR boards and we'll see what happens. Two main points in there - the level of the RIRs or the NRO contribution to ICANN and also some service levels that we expect from IANA and what happens if not, if it doesn't happen. Then, of course, we have been having lots of fun with the World Summit on the Information Society, WSIS. We have been monitoring, coordinating and influencing as much as we could. Actually it was an APNIC meeting where I saw the first e-mail that said, "The governments are doing a summit on the Internet and information society," and I thought, "Oh, my God." Well, we know now where that led to. We have several coordination groups - communications, engineering - they coordinate our external communications and some joint engineering that is going on. The Executive Council of the NRO meets regularly, mostly by telephone, sometimes face to face. We have meetings of those -- minutes of those meetings and they are published. Slightly lagging in time but... So the World Summit history. The big issue that was concerning us, obviously, was Internet governance, whatever that means. There are also other issues there - capacity building, financing of development and things like that which are slightly more to the, well, left field maybe. What happened after the Geneva summit is a working group, the Working Group on Internet Governance was set up with 40 participants, in the end, from all walks of life with interest in the Internet governance issue. So we were in there as well, through Raul, which was a very good thing. They came up with a report that they all agreed to, which was amazing to us already. It was published in summer last year. You can have a look at it, if you haven't done so yet. Basically there were four models in there. They couldn't agree which one to favour so they put them in there and there was a discussion forum for issues about Internet governance. Now, that led, then, last year, to the finalisation to the last summit in Tunis. Before that, we had a lot of PrepComm in Geneva. Amazingly, there was still no consensus on Internet governance, what to do with this thing. There were three main positions. The US said, "The UN will never run this, our Internet" and slightly more benignly they said they will continue the stewardship they have shown before and they recognise other states, sovereign rights. Then there were a group of countries that have a stronger regulatory stance, among them Brazil, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Iran and a lot of others and basically they said, "Well, it's all organised but we need some more strong governmental control." And what happened in Geneva one evening the EU stood up and called for a new model, in between other positions and that surprised us all quite strongly and I hear the guy who was pushing this is currently not so very... well-liked by many people in Brussels, as it was not a success at all and we all scratched our heads and said, "What?!" OK, going to Tunis. We felt we had to go there. There was another PrepComm before the conference proper but we wanted to show people that the people who are running this Internet - Internet is running, apparently they coordinate between themselves and successfully so, but we need to show them, the world, that we do coordinate ourselves and what way to show that better than coordinating an exhibition booth. So we did that under the umbrella of the Internet society. Paul Rendek from the RIPE NCC semi-volunteered and said, "I've done similar things before," so he coordinated the booth effort there. We had the ISOC there, the RIRs were there, basically all our friends in the Internet technical community. IETF was there. I probably forgot somebody. So we talked to a lot of people, which have showed some flash presentations and lots of leaflets there and very nice socks and I think it was a success and met lots of people, gave interviews to the radio, TV and the like. And what happened inspect the end was magically late at night people agreed on a Tunis agenda. And the process they used was, again, "Last night, buses are going, so we have to make progress. This is the paragraph . Everybody, please? Fine." This was something we didn't like (refers to slide) and we were trying to negotiate out and it didn't happen in the last minute there. Now, it says, "We call for the reinforcement of specialised regional Internet resource management institutions." That is great. That is us. We love that. "To guarantee the national interest rights of countries in that particular region to manage their own Internet resources, while maintaining global coordination in this area." That's something we find a little bit odd but we know there's lots of interest, lots of governmental interest, so what we say is we have to indeed go out and do enhanced cooperation, talk to the governments - I mentioned that this morning already and make sure they're as happy as possible, with our work. Then there was a call for the Secretary-General to establish the Internet governance forum, that's the forum that keep out of the WGIG report and of course you can't just call for one. There was - I think a week ago, an open consultation on the convocation of the Internet governance forum. The idea is to have a non-decision-making discussion forum. Fine. It should be open-ended, multi-stakeholder, everybody should be part of it. Those were the underlying ideas there. The Greek participants in Tunis stormed forward and said, "We'll do it. We've done the Olympics. We can do this as well." This one may be easier, we think. That's apparently where it's starting. Very likely, as Paul has pointed out already, 24 do 26 October this year. This needs to be confirmed by the Secretary-General of the UN, not formally but I think this is the date. Open consultations have been happening, as I said, last week, in Geneva again. There was some consensus, I felt, that was emerging. It should be around three days. It should happen once a year, not too often. Likely it will go around the global. There should be a program committee of sorts preparing it and on that committee there should be representatives from all the four sectors that were of the governments, business, civil society and the Internet community. Very good. And the first topics might be multilingualism, spam, things like that. So nothing about IP addresses so far. Which is good. Of course, sitting there in Geneva and you get to know these people and a week before I was in Malta on a similar topic and we knew there was some consensus about to happen - funnily enough in Geneva, Brazil stood up, or spoke up and said, "We agree with all this. It's all fine, but we feel that these parties - the existing arrangements have grown into a field that should really be the playing ground for an international treaty organisation." So we don't know what this Internet governance forum will give us. We, as Brazil want the treaty organisation. Luckily for the time being, that was ignored during the rest of the two days. So we might just get away with this. Alright. The way forward - I had the feeling over those last two months that this focus of the Internet governance forum is hopefully moving away from our field of work. It's about other topics. People are not unhappy with what we are doing. So maybe we don't have to go to all those meetings. That would be great. And I'm dreaming. And seeing that the Internet community, as that phrase, should be part of this program committee, I have grand hopes for the Internet society as - I hesitate to say it - a representative of the technical community there, to keep this in check, to monitor this and maybe shout out loud if we are needed, then, of course, we are happy to go again. Maybe that's my wife speaking who wants me at home more often than over the last years. We don't know where this is going. But currently it feels as if the heat would be turned down a little bit. We'll see. If you have any questions, comments, I'm happy to answer them. Thank you very much. PAUL WILSON: Thank you. KUO-WEI WU: So for participants of the IETF still need to go through WSIS so-called certificate through the ITU-certified organisation? AXEL PAWLIK: No, it doesn't look like that. You hope you can get in because physical space was limited. But, yes, that was also a consensus. More or less everybody said that we don't want this to be a UN event with all the UN ITU rules and things like that. "We do appreciate," they said, "that there is multilingualism here, the ITU in the UN. That's something that is treasured and likely we are going to get something like that but without all the ITU/UN paperwork. KUO-WEI WU: So it will be kind of open forums? AXEL PAWLIK: It should be an open forum. Everybody should be able to come. Yes. We'll see how they implement that. PAUL WILSON: Are there any other questions or comments? AXEL PAWLIK: Thanks, a lot. PAUL WILSON: Thank you, Axel.