The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Hello, everybody, and welcome to workshop 5. We're about to start our streaming in two minutes. Just a little advice before. If you have a question, please talk into the microphone. If you have a table microphone, talk loud and near to your mouth, and if you're in the second row, you can wait for this microphone to come to you. This is for streaming quality. So we'll start in two minutes. Thank you very much.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this session on ESCRs and the Internet. The session is called working from the national and local experience to policy considerations. The reason we framed it as that is because it's also the launch of the GISWatch report, which I think you might ‑‑ some have at the front there. We'll tell you a little bit more about that later. So basically this is framed with ‑‑ framed in terms of the authors for the GISWatch reports, so we have two or three report authors here and a number of country report authors here. We will go around and let them share their brief interventions around their reports, their country reports, and what their experience is at the national level in terms of the country.
When it comes to economic, social and cultural rights on the Internet, I don't know if anyone went to the human rights session yesterday, the main session, and the point there was that we were trying to show ‑‑ it was organized by APC. Well, in terms of it, I understand, but the point is a lot of emphasis is given to civil and political rights on the international and global level in terms of Internet policy development and APC has over the last couple of years tried to raise the profile of economic and social and cultural rights to put them on a level playing field.
It makes complete sense that freedom of expression is not more important than the right to food, for instance. So we've been investigating over the last couple of years how this impacts on Internet policy development. In a sense our kind of findings are contained in the GISWatch, at least in the thematic report level. You will see the research we've been doing framed in different ways, and some of our conclusions so far on the topic.
I would like at in the point to introduce Anriette, who will give you a rundown on ESCRs and the Internet. Talk as you wish. That's fine.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Good morning. Sorry I'm late. I think talking about the perspective is really the ABC perspective is emerging from the chapters in the book. So it's not a ‑‑ we don't have a fixed perspective. I think the main concern has been and Alan has outlined that already that human rights is approached scattered something important in the IGF space but in a narrow way. We want to broaden the perspective. I'm sorry. Did you cover already GISWatch?
>> AUDIENCE: He did.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Can you ‑‑ so ‑‑ so just briefly to tell you about global information society watch, APC initiated this after the world summit. The background was I'd like other social summits that the U.N. convened, they did not produce a clear set of indicators or targets for governments to deliver on. We were concerned that there was nothing to actually hold governments accountable for implementing what was known as the people‑centered human rights‑oriented information society.
We then thought, let us create a space as APC, as a major social society network involved in the WSIS with Civil Society perspectives on whether there's progress or not could be captured, and that's the background of GISWatch. The first topic for GISWatch, when the first edition was released in 2007, was actual participation, because one of the outcomes of the WSIS process was that there was a recognition that you cannot actually achieve change in the information society without all stakeholder groups being involved and participating. So we initially our first measuring exercise was looking at participation.
Since then we've looked at access, freedom of expression, access to knowledge, surveillance, women's rights, sexual rights, and ICTs and environmental sustainability. I think that's, you know ‑‑ I don't have to say much more. I think what is important about GISWatch is the format. It captures thematic chapters that analyze the issue. We often work with people that are experts in their field, but then we have the country chapters, and country chapters are really very open‑ended.
We give the authors a very broad topic, but we want them to define the terrain. The purpose of GISWatch is not that you contribute to a comparative research study, but that you engage in writing something which is meaningful to you in your context, your country, your work, your organization at that particular point in time. You'll see that when you look at the country chapters that the angles that people take very enormously from country to country, and we like it that way because we want it to be relevant to you. I think that's all.
I can tell you that the theme for next year's global information society watch will be community networks, so that's exciting. Thanks.
>> ALAN FINLEY: Thanks. Just to say the APC is working in this area is sponsored by the IDOC, and we have someone from ISOC.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm a senior program officer with the international development research effort. I think most of us know and I don't have to say, but we're a crown corporation that became a government, and we support development and research grants in the Global South.
Really just like to thank APC or organizing the work in publishing this report. I went through it last night, actually, just before the party. We all enjoyed the party and I found it interesting that Jac Kee is in the story particularly in the context of dataification and we're looking at how to counter users and collective rights to look although and resisting this sort of fetish about collecting data by default.
I don't want to go on. I assume there's a format where the chapter speakers will be presenting. I'd like to thank APC particularly for that, Roxana that and Valerie for their work and Anriette, so thank you very much.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks. Okay. So just a brief overview of the content of GISWatch. As Anriette mentioned, I think that you have expert thematic reports here. We present APC's perspective, and a lot is research.
We look at education and the delivery of textbooks in South Africa and issues of digital heritage. We have Stuart Hamilton here from who wrote that chapter, sustainable development goals and the Internet and ESCRs which David Souter couldn't be here. Those frame the key issues here.
What has emerged over the course of the research is that more key issues are becoming relevant, so I think in the future it would be interesting to look more strongly at copyright and issues like that algorithms, for instance. In terms of the country reports, there were a wide range of themes that were covered, but there was some that could be grouped, so there was a lot of interesting indigenous languages and how the Internet could be used to preserve or to encourage the speaking of those languages.
John Dada is here. They're right‑to‑work, whether garment factories in Cambodia or telecommunications companies in the DLC. How they outsource and manipulate workers in terms of outsourcing. Why don't trade unions use the network for networking and information sharing.
The problem is Facebook is 3.5 million human resource accidents waiting to happen, which was quite nice. Education. Quite a negative perspective on the education program except in Uruguay, and it's connecting in the process of education is connecting the poorest households in Uruguay, some 50% apparently now are connected to the Internet through the education program.
Some on gender rights and new 3D technologies in preserving culture heritage in Syria. Crowd funding is used to fund social programs. In Lebanon some social program would be crowd funded. People outside of the country choose what they want to fund in terms of social economic programs.
Algorithms, you'll hear just now about Poland and how algorithms are used in the social services due to the negative effect. I would think the most important thing for me, anyway, and if you look overall in the country reports is that the Internet is being used by citizens to enact and express their rights.
When the state is in action, which is an interesting phenomenon, that it enables this expression of rights. For instance, in Valentina is here in Bosnia, they opened a national museum, because the government doesn't want to fund the national museum. For me, that is the real take‑home of the Internet around citizen‑centered initiatives I would say. The country report authors, want to get a sense where they are. Okay. You're thematic. Okay.
So we'll start from left to right and just the country report authors will. Just one, yeah. Okay.
>> VALENTINA PELLIZZER: I'm Valentina Pellizzer. For the watch in year my colleague and was not me directly that wrote this part of the report, although we did contribute to the thematics, so I'll keep it really short. We wrote on the health system in Chile and how it's ‑‑ a new proposal that relates to providing a health system through Televia by using Internet and television service. This seems like a good idea in theory, but in practice we found that there are some problems in the implementation.
First, that the primary care units have poor or no connectivity. So that's always what is first, right? We're trying to solve a health problem, but then if there's poor connectivity in rural areas, then we have to start a step back. Secondly, the current provisions are outdated, and this presents a lot of problems because health‑wise those provisions that regulate right now in Chile are probably 70 years old. How are we going to apply this to remote in a way for health services? So while thinking about health as a social, economical and cultural right, bringing into the terrain of the Internet, we found out that access is one of the first challenges.
So I'm going to leave it here. You will hear about me also in a while.
>> SPEAKER: My name is Nicholas from Poland dealing with data protection and that kind of stuff. In this edition of GISWatch, we wrote about Polish efforts to build professional administrations and welfare and assess it from the human rights perspective mostly from the right to social protection and the right to work. This process of building the tools both offline and online, application to apply for benefits and new big databases and new web pages with information about benefits, but also algorithms used for automatic decision‑making when people are applying for benefits.
From human rights perspective those tools can behave like double‑edged swords. Many of them can be beneficial for people if well designed and implemented and under proper legislation. They can give some better access to benefits and to make easier for people to navigate through this very, you know, complicated bureaucratic system.
But, for example, algorithms used in the automatic decision‑making process, they can create very serious risks and threats from human rights' perspective.
To give you a very short introduction to this problem, if you are unemployed in Poland, you go to the job center, and every unemployed person is categorized ‑‑ is assigned to one or two or three profiles. A profile determines what type of help you can get from the job centers. The categorization is made by a job center, and it's based on data, which is collected through the registration process and through the computer‑based interview.
To each data there is assigned a score, and after the interview, the competitor is counting the scores and giving the profit to the person. The whole process is not transparent both for workers in job centers but also for unemployed persons. There is no way to change the profile.
The people are staying in their categories, and they cannot change that. There is a great risk of discrimination and real one, for example, single moms and the disabled persons are cut off because of the specific way of data processing. You will look at this in the report in more detail.
What is also very bad in this whole idea is there is an assumption that the computer is ‑‑ clerics will be better than people and they will not take into account a variety of complexity issues and complex life situations. I will now stop here. Thank you.
>> CHENAI DHAIR: Good morning. I'm with Research Africa based in cape town. Originally I'm Zimbabean actually to put it out there. Together with my co‑author we wrote with determining user capabilities in order to achieve ESCRs.
This is based on a study we did the in the western cape in 2013. We decided to take a sex aggregated approach looking at male versus female. We found people who were Internet users used it to achieve their ESCRs, and for women it was looking at health and educational services, women who were Internet users in comparison to men. We also asked people if they had the potential to have unlimited Internet access, whether there are Internet users and not non‑Internet users.
A lot of them use it to achieve ESCRs, but it was more men than women. It showed that even if you have the potential to have Internet access, women would still be left behind in order to achieve their ESCRs.
We also looked at the barriers that impact Internet access that limit Internet users from achieving rights, and we found that cost, affordability for services is still a major barrier, and one thing that for me personally is a great concern was that more women than men were concerned about privacy and surveillance online, which would definitely limit of scope of use of the Internet.
Then for barriers for non‑Internet users, we found more women than American were non‑Internet users. The main concern for women is they don't know how to use the Internet or don't have access to the resources in order to use the Internet, which re‑affirms the point women should still be targeted when it comes to increasing enter knit access to close the divide.
The recommendations are there still needs to be better policies or reworking the policies around affordability and access to focus on women and men, and also that we call to action people who were content curators and Civil Society working around health services to actually find out what kind of information is online that women are ‑‑ that women and men are accessing with regards to health information in order for them to achieve their ESCRs. Thank you.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Valentina.
>> VALENTINA PELLIZZER: I'm sorry. Our GISWatch was about our right to culture, and we went looking into cases. This is very complicated. It's a post‑war society, so the culture, the traditional culture institutes and museum have been during this 20 years after the war constantly under discussion. Who would finance them? Seven years ago the decision was no one will. You have all the history to the last word was very interesting was just closed down.
It stays like this. There's a different process, and then one group that has experience decided to animate and to use the Internet to call people. So it's been organized 40 days of activity campaigning. Without the Internet it would never happen. Also, this campaign was calling everyone to come and to be ‑‑ to volunteer for one hour one day to the museum and to show, to guide people. So anyone if you're from the U.N., embassy, representative to people from the, you know, folk or music or anchorwoman, anchorman and ordinary citizens and teachers bringing classes. At the end of the 40 days the museum is open.
Without the Internet it wouldn't have happened, because the Internet put all the actors that were doing their blah‑blahing behind closed door in the eye of the public. Of course, this initiative also succeeds because it's a national treasure, and people identify with one another.
The other case that was an archive on the women and the women during the parties online in the second world war. It's an archive that we did with a collaboration of the institute, but this archive doesn't enjoy the same kind of support or public understanding, which is clear.
The one is sitting in a traditional concept culture and the other one is a feminist perspective in a war in a country that's in a transition. It's trying to re‑evaluate and forgetting sometimes the past. For us, it shows that the Internet is really powerful, and when used even the most, you know, traditional tools like Facebook, they can help really connect and overcome the silence and the unwillingness to help and to do what you're supposed to do, finance other institutions. Thank you.
>> JOHN DADA: My name is John Dada. I'm from Nigeria and I work with a rural women's organization. The topic of our research in GISWatch is the seven of minority languages in Nigeria. It has over 500 languages, and three of them are the most dominant, and, of course, this gives them political advantage with the three. Where we work is deep rural, and there are about seven languages spoken in that area. The youth in that community have had access to our computers and trainings and so on. We've had a problem that the older generation have no access to the information we have on those computers.
So this is where the issue of localization came in for us, and this is also where the issue of the community networks came in. At the moment in Nigeria, the three dominant languages have a lot of advantages, which does not devolve to the other communities. The other issue of languages has been used very effectively by politicians to divide and rule the people. So there has been a further disincentive to develop the minority languages until we came on board and encouraged the people there, look, your language is ‑‑ some of have not even been documented never been digitized.
We were willing to work with them to begin to document and then digitize some of the languages. That's how the project called ZITT language came about. It was working with seven communities in that area that spoke seven distinct languages, and we've begun to document them. But in the course of working with this minority language, we realized that even the major tribal languages are having a problem. Suddenly English has become the elite language, and you find in homes they speak English language.
Their kids can't speak their own traditional language. So there is a gap with the major languages, which the minor languages do not have. This intergenerational transmission of culture and language has become a major issue even with the major languages and also with the minority languages and this research highlighted that chasm beginning to grow between the older generation and new generation of both the major languages and new languages.
Our work has been to begin to document these languages and digitize them and then begin to have them develop their content within the community network so that they can develop relevant content in their language and speak to each other within that context. The communities here have very little culture, they have culture wars. The culture is extremely rich, and having a voice in a community network helps to preserve that aura of culture for them, and this is the stage we're at.
For me, the fact that this research has shown the gap which the three major languages have is a plus, because it also means that they can come on board to help us preserve this, the smaller languages, because in the technology we use to preserve this language is something they can also use to begin to communicate to their children. Thank you.
>> SPEAKER: Good morning. I'm from Panama and working with Central America and Latin America in Panama. I didn't write the paper. It was my colleague named Grace Matthews. Maybe she is watching the transmission from Panama. We wrote a paper about the telewar in Panama because we don't have a relation to this topic. This is an international center when we have a lot of international and multi‑national companies based in our country.
They used to practice this work, but we don't have any information about this topic. We hope with this paper the Panamanian government and the labor minister read our paper and take the correct measure to learn about it working in Panama. Thank you.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Leandro.
>> SPEAKER: Hi. So the reporting from Spain from this year was about on approach that was on (indiscernible) and it was about that typically we see it often that our social life happens in private spaces. It happens disconnected from the local community. So this is called the scale thermometer, and it's an interesting combination where children in schools they do real work, let's say, with the community, and they take this meter around the school and create a map of resources like safe places for children when they go to school or if you're allergic to pollen, which paths you can take to get to the school and not suffer from it.
And knowing about the history of the neighborhood and mapping out those things in a local application so people can find out. I mean, it's a located system, and I think it was a very nice experience because students realize that they can expand their local community not in the sense of community networks and computer networks but in the sense of social neighbors and their uncovering learning, talking to people, and reporting locally about local things that matter and otherwise that's what it's about like you see about culture and about empowering children to just do something for their communities.
>> SPEAKER: Hello. Good morning, everybody. I have a good final day this year. My name is (indiscernible) and I'm representing an organization based in Costa Rica working in the central American region.
In our case the purpose of our report is about economic rights and the Internet, and especially it talks about first of all the need to deconcentrate the opportunities of IT sector because the IT sector opportunities are very concentrated in urban areas. They're very concentrated in men and also in white men. Then we have a very particular case in Costa Rica in the northern region in the rural area where it's have been developed what we call our rural part of the digital economy.
Then what we did was to study which are the conditions that create these particular cases where the IT sector is becoming the first economy in these rural spaces. Then we check the conditions that have a play in this case to have these specific opportunities to develop the digital economy and to base our rural base in the digital economy.
Then we study the case, specifically the case. This is a place where our cooperative works, and we work trying to create more women leadership in the rural areas and in these very specific rural areas where it is this digital part. The conditions like universities with informative careers and like some conditions and like the interest for the young people to stay and not migrate to the urban areas, for instance. Those are some of the conditions that have created these possibilities to have these IT economies in these rural parts. Thank you.
>> SPEAKER: Good morning, everyone. I'm working in Colombia. Our report in Colombia this year is about the role of ICTs in the Colombian peace process. It's a very challenging topic for our situation in our country. Since 2010 the Colombian government was holding private conversations with armed revolutionary forces of Colombia.
In September 2012 our president Santos was elected and re‑elected in 2014 announcing the association of negotiations with FARC, which began in November 2012. Four years later on August 23 this year the negotiations was ended with an agreement document. Then on November 29th the definite bilateral cease fair has gun. The same day the Congress of the Republic approved the agreement. On September in 2016 the signing took place in the secretary of the United Nations and more than 15 heads of state.
On October 2 a national referendum was held to verify if Colombian citizens are in agreement. In this referendum it won the option unfortunately for us. After the referendum the negotiations continued including the representatives of the other option. Then a new agreement was signed between Colombian government and FARC. Last November the new agreement was broke by the Congress of the Republic.
Next Monday, next week in December the constitutional court will decide if the legislative act for the piece to facilitate the agreement can be executive as the government is proposing. This is the situation of the peace process with the group FARC in Colombia at this moment.
Okay. If the agreement is approved, there will be a long process of repatriation, reconciliation and social inclusion in order to be granted for a long‑lasting peace. This report analyzing how ICTs can contribute to the peace process in order to promote the dialogue and achievement of a long‑lasting peace. Seen some years ago, there are initiatives use Internet to promote a peace you feel culture and education for peace.
Other initiatives have supported actions for peace building in the territories, charting knowledge, facilitating the dialogue between different actors, disseminating inspiring stories and offering better opportunities to people. This year our document, our report document some of these initiatives because ICTs will have an important role in the process of the implementation of the agreement. We invite you to read our report. There are document different initiatives on these initiatives implied by the NGOs in Colombia. Thank you.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thank you. We have two remote authors, one from Romania and the other from Kenya who will give their brief presentations. Rozi is first. How does this work? Rozi is first.
>> ROZI BAKO: Can you hear me?
>> ALAN FINLAY: Hello. Yes, we can hear you.
>> ROZI BAKO: Hello, everyone. I'm Rozi Bako from Romania. I participated for the tenth time in developing this report, this country report for Romania. I would go back to Anriette's first words were when they presented the introduction of GISWatch. The first report was on participation, and I was thinking, why is that the tenth report of the Romanian GISWatch in 2016 is, again, about participation. Did we not make any steps further since 2006? Why is it so relevant to talk about participation after ten years?
And thinking about this issue I realize that, in fact, participation is the core element and core benefit of the information society and of the Internet. The way in which we tackled the issue of participation in 2006, 2007, ten years ago, it was a broader ‑‑ from a broader perspective from the perspective of stakeholders, key actors who are playing on the field of providing Internet, providing infrastructure development, content development for the online spaces.
Now, after the mobile revolution and at least (indiscernible) the sharp increase to Internet devices and broadband Internet in the country, we can bring the discussion of participation to a ‑‑ to the next level. We can talk about participation in terms of social inclusion and economic inclusion. Kemly was talking about the inclusion economy.
John Dada talked about the inclusion in terms of cultural inclusion for languages. And for Romania, there is still a problem of access to infrastructure and in the mountainous areas and who have technical issues in accessing the Internet. Economic problems for those left behind both economically and socially who have scarce means to pay for the Internet and let alone to understand the comment and meaning of it.
We highlighted our 2016 reports on the Romania population who is the most disadvantaged community in the country. I would say the most ‑‑ not only me, but the reports that the most disconnected community in the country. And also to other socioeconomic groups that are not benefits from the information society like the elderly, who are not ‑‑ who are not really ‑‑ who are not really benefitting from the access, skills and understanding of what Internet could mean to them.
According to the national statistics institute, in 2015 73% of elderly people have never accessed the Internet in Romania. This is a country which has a pretty good infrastructure and also a few more capital indices according to the latest 2016 E‑government report of the United Nations.
So Romania ranks in the first third of the countries around the world, but still, there are significant groups that are history behind. Ethnic groups like the Roma and age groups like the elderly and also rural communities.
The rural is also a space where there is a lot to be done and Civil Society actors together with government initiatives are very ‑‑ are akin to move these disadvantages forward. So I'm glad I could participate and I could reiterate this year the issue of participation in this GISWatch Romania report. Thank you.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks, Rozi. Our second online contributor is victor from Kenya.
>> VICTOR CAPIO: Hello. Hello. Can you hear me?
>> ALAN FINLAY: Yes, we can hear you.
>> VICTOR CAPIO: My name is Victor Capio from Kenya. I'm from the Kenya ICT Action Network, and the thrust of our piece was basically what role the Internet is playing in primary schools, and how we can harness ICTs for the next generation. Ten years ago mobile phones and computers were reserved for a few, and today, for example, the Internet and mobile penetration is ‑‑ has exceeded 85% of Kenya's population. And the government to trying to leverage the niceties for the right of an education.
Kenya passed a new constitution in 2010 which providing very clearly and the right to education, and we were looking at how in the implementation of rights that ICTs can be used to follow these rights. At the same time to look at a few case studies of young children who have leapfrogged and how they are using technology to do this has already exceeded some of the measures proposed in the article.
It is important for the government to recognize how young children use mobile phones and computers and to adapt the system and current learning program they implement to take into consideration those particular nuances that young kids even two years old can download apps from their play store and use them. As such, the digital Linux system should not just be textbooks on a screen, but we have to also look at how kids' new ways of learning over and above just reading a book to make the learns systems more interactive, but also at the same time to prepare this because you cannot cure lack of access to education by throwing or thrusting a device before a child. The infrastructure proper investment must be made to ensure that even the teachers understanding these technologies to ensure that the infrastructure is there and there's electricity across the schools and there's broadband Internet.
You have to look at the entire core system, and that's why we were faulting the government. Their approach has to be comprehensive that looks at all the factors and not just simply giving a tablet to a kid. So we provided several recommendations and we hope to share this with the minister of education.
We hope that they will take them into consideration and probably do something about it. Thank you.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks, Victor. Those are some of our country report authors. It's impressive, I think, with the diversity last year and the year before. We did a similar launch of GISWatch, and it's really nice to see people from different countries in the room speaking about their reports. We have a couple of thematic authors here, but I wanted to know if there were any questions that anyone wanted to ask about the country reports. Is that a question? No. Avri who wrote on technical institutions, do you want to see a few words about your report here?
>> AVRI DORIA: Sure. Avri Doria, I'm a researcher with a foot in the Civil Society and advocacy for the last 15 years. Basically what I was assigned to look at and happy to look at was whether the Internet organization sometimes called the IStar organizations had any ESCR type of commitment activity relevance. Of course, they're not rights organizations, so in the first place, as not being rights organizations, it really took a little bit more of digging. One of the things that I went back to was looking at human rights and looking at the notion of who has duties, who has responsibilities, who needs to respect, who needs to enforce?
Though they're not states and, therefore, they did not have, you know, and were not duty‑bearers, they are responsible in ways for a public core of the Internet. Something that is vital and has been by some considered to be a public good. So in that sense while they can't be said to have duties, one could look at there being responsibilities and such.
In looking at the organizations and I looked at four specific organizations and also one type of organization. I looked at the Internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, ICANN. I looked at the Internet Society, ISOC and liked at IATF and looked at the IRTF and looked at the regional Internet registries which there are five commonly known as the IARs.
ICANN has been working on human rights responsibilities. In the most recent version of its bylaws it basically indicated a need to respect human rights. Now, ICANN hasn't figured out what it means yet and there's an ongoing process now, but in terms of activities, you can look at it, and they've put a lot of effort into making sure that the internationalized domain names, the IDNs were available, and they have an effort going to make sure they work. In that, it's a contributory.
One of the things that basically showed through this is that the Internet organizations were providing very much a base on which the Internet could be used for the ESCR, and without which it would be more difficult to do so. So with the IDNs, there's also been a certain amount of worry lately that in the distribution of domain names that the developing economies and such had not been reached, so there's a lot of conversation going on within ICANN about how are they reached? The Internet Society is the only one of the organizations that actually has a certain commitment to ESCR written into its charter where it talks specifically about development and open development and making sure that the Internet is available everywhere for everyone.
It's very specific. Within its goals it works a lot on education and works with the global network of chapters to try and understand the issues, the problems, and work with local communities in terms of trying to make sure that the Internet is available in many places and to understand the issues with making it available.
The IETF ‑‑ I'm going through this. IETF is harder to who looking at. This view, and this is a view stated in many sentences, when the Internet works better, the world can use it more. The world can use it for more things.
It doesn't directly in any sense talk about rights, yet, when, you know, there was a problem with surveillance, it definite worked on how do you make Internet protocols more supportive of privacy? But basically its goal is to make sure the Internet works everywhere for anyone without impediments. That feeds over to the research task force and they're basically sister organizations where in the IRTF is where they don't establish protocols.
They're looking at issues and doing research. There's two groups in there whose work is pertinent. One of them is called GAIA, and it's basically ‑‑ I forget what it stands for. We also have cutesy names and words that apply for the acronym. So, yes, it's an acronym in the IRTF, but I don't remember it.
There's looking at how, indeed, to make the Internet work. How to sort of help it spread and basically make sure that the economic factors, that the market factors that would help it spread in various places is there, again, with the basis that the Internet is necessary for every right and to be furthered to enable it, not that the rights can't be enabled without the Internet, bullet we have seen that the Internet has become a necessary component.
So what's missing? What can be done to do that? The other group it's got is the human rights protocol considerations. It's taken the task of saying while engineering trying to say protocols are neutral, we kind of all have learned that protocols really aren't neutral, and that a protocol can enable rights or pose a barrier or disable righting.
It's doing an in‑depth analysis of the IETF protocols and sort of trying to find out what are the elements that make a protocol more enables? What are the elements that the goal of that group is to produce recommendations for protocol designers and for architects to say these are things you need to think about when you're designing a protocol so that the protocol will enable as opposed to disable. Of course, in designing a protocol or an architecture, that people are constantly doing trades‑off, and what we're trying to say is that human rights enabling is, indeed, one of the things that you have to consider in your trade‑off.
Finally and I know I'm probably talking too long, the IRRs, they are responsible for distributing the numbers, the IP addresses. They work on a regional basis, and within each region the main goal is to make sure that connectivity is everywhere, and that there is an IP address for anyone that needs it for any service that needs it, for any computer that needs it, and part of their whole program has been the IPV6 as a vehicle saying, here.
There are enough numbers. We just need to get them distributed. The other type of number they distributed, the autonomous system numbers, the ASNs are the numbers that every service provider needs. Making sure there's a big enough group of those and they're distributed. All of these organizations, while only one specifically says they're working on human rights and even ESCRs are all basically trying to make sure that we have an Internet that is useful for rights and tries to enable them. So that was the perspective I took in this short article. Thanks.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks, Avri. Would you like to talk about your thematics? Thanks.
>> AVRI DORIA: Very quickly, I also I did a thematic report regarding intellectual property rights. It's one of my favorite discussions because I believe human rights attacks are being perpetrated by intellectual property law, and for me, it's been really interesting to see the power schemes that ‑‑ and the lobbying behind treaties like the TPP that a lot of people say it's now dead because of Trump.
It's probably the only good news of the Trump election, but I don't think it's something that is going to go away. We've been seeing this tendency in other. In Mexican and Peruvian Congress, the senators want to pass the legislation. They want to copy the TPP on legislation, even the TPP is dead and nobody is going to ratify it. So, for us, we wrote shortly on how treaties like the TPP impede the access to culture and the access to scientific knowledge, especially the intellectual property rights. I don't know if many of you know, but this was negotiated in secret for six years.
It's very worrisome, because it's decisions that affect us all.
So it's even going against the same logic of our democratic regimes, and in countries like Mexico, at least, there's sum democracies just to override them with international treaties is a crazier idea, and especially where we documented here. It's very short.
I mean, I think we've studied this topic so much I could write a book about me complaining on the intellectual property chapter of the TPP and economic and social rights, but this is like five pages. It's a good summary. If you want to read it, I encourage you. First, I'll make three or four points on it.
First, the provisions that ‑‑ in intellectual property chapter that impede the production of generic medicines. Well, this is in ‑‑ it's called biological ‑‑ I don't remember the name in English. Sorry. It's these medicines that cannot be created 100% synthetically. They have to come from a biological process.
So the TPP have new intellectual property right provisions for that knowledge, right? So this in practice would mean if tomorrow they discovered a cure for HIV, Ebola or Zika or cancer, the TPP would impede the generic medicine for six years. This is a matter of life and death for people that can't pay the high at that time pent prices of medicine.
Regarding Internet rights, I mean, this is the ‑‑ this visual is tremendously serious, but in our arena there were very worrying things, especially the exportation of the DMCA model. I've been saying all along the IGF how the Mexican presidential office used digital millennium copyright act to censor where the president makes mistakes and confuses CDs with states and states with countries. So the TPP had provisions that exported these with no ‑‑ they just exported the really bad things with no exportation to say put it in a way of the fair use in the United States, which is rich in terms of exceptions of parity criticism that most Latin‑American countries do have. I don't know. I can literally go on forever.
I'll live it here, we have the digital log provisions in the TPP. In the beginning when the intellectual property chapter first leaked, we saw that there were ‑‑ there was a proposal to put in jail users that unlocked digital locks. So unlocking a PDF could get you in jail in Mexico where El Chapo escaped two times from jail. This is conflicting. Fortunately, the leaking by Wikileaks allowed us to pressure and push back. But this at the end resulted in very high monetary sanctions for final users as well.
So generally speaking, treaties like the TPP as we see them today do impede ‑‑ they favor the interests of certain multi‑national companies over the interests of culture in general. We cannot access culture in very tight copyright schemes, so that's ‑‑ it's only four pages, so yeah, I think it's a very good exercise to link it with economic, social, and cultural rights. Thank you.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks. We're happy to have Stuart Hamilton from IFLER.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thanks. This goes on quite nicely from her comments, I think. I'm speaking on the two authors of the paper that we did for GISWatch, Steven Wieber and Julia Brooms. You can find our paper on page 36 and it's about an issue not addressed enough, which is the long‑term preservation of our digital memory. We've set this issue within the context of the sustainable development goals, particularly target 11.4, which looks at protection of cultural heritage.
Within the library community I'm here at the IGF talking about access and increasing access to ICTs, basic Internet access, but preservation of information is really one of our fundamental sort of obligations as information professionals. We've been doing this for hundreds, if not thousands of years with the shift to digital information environment. Of course, everything changes, so our paper is about how can we cooperate in this new environment to sort of protect people's right to access the digital cultural heritage.
We laid out three areas of what we call the digital heritage challenge. One is an antiquated copyright system and one is the ever changing nature of digital technology, and the other is just the shear mass of digital content now available. Whether it comes to copyright, the fundamental position that we have is that our global copyright system and, in fact, the vast majority of am national copyright systems are completely outdated whether it comes to dealing with challenges to preserve the digital information environment.
Many, many cases copyright laws don't help us in a print environment, but we can do a lot more with print materials than with digital. Things such as digital legal deposit is still very much in the infancy, and we really run into problems when a lot of information we received is via licensing systems from commercial content providers and the conditions and obligations on those licenses actually override the exceptions to copyright that exist in law that help us do our job.
So preservation activities in particular, but also sharing information with other libraries across borders are often restricted by commercial contracts. When it comes to digital technology, it's actually easier for us sometimes to read a document from 1500 years ago than to read a floppy disk from 15 years ago.
That's something we're not hearing enough about in Internet Governance conversations, which is about interoperability of formats and how formats are limited by licensing and commercial terms in order to be able to preserve things. There was an issue in Australia with Grier's materials to the archive and libraries there. It was in a disk in a world processing format. There's major problems to get that in a position for future generations to be able to access.
We should be discussing more and it's mentioned in the paper about issues, degrading digital material over time and link rot, which can be addressed with permanent link identifiers, but there's still a major issue to get us to move to this. We discussed that in the paper. Finally, that third challenge, the massive content, what is there to preserve? How do we make the decisions on what is good, what tweet is good?
The Library of Congress is archiving all tweets. They must have some tremendous material in there. What a challenge that is.
What do we pull out of that and keep and get rid of? We pull out in the paper a cooperative project which we've been involved with UNESCO, a number of governments and a small part of the private sector called the persist project, and that is a project beginning to tackle the thorny question about what we preserve. That's one of the solutions we suggest to be looked at.
The other solution we're strong on and I mentioned in the session on human rights yesterday is fundamental copyright reform and if IFLR is work ago the property organization for an international agreement on a new copyright framework for libraries and archives. There's a great deal of support from there from Global South, Latin‑American Caribbean and ocean that but a massive pushback from the Europe Union and United States, and in some ways that's another conversation.
It's interesting that at this point yet we're not able to agree on what an international common framework would be for copyright that could actually move us towards a shared digital heritage online.
I'll finish there and say I have noticed consistently within the IGF and we put in workshop proposals over the years turned back that the issue of digital memory is not really registering here. I'd like to see more emphasis on it in the future years, and I hope that our paper on page 36 could be useful. Thanks.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks very much, Stuart. So does anyone want to make a comment, a contribution, ask a question? Sally.
>> AUDIENCE: Just taking up some of the issues that have come up at this table but also in discussions during the week on these issues of economic, social and cultural rights, and I think the ‑‑ the issues of community control versus civility and scalability have been present since the beginnings of the Internet. We moved from essentially a model of community control to one that's become largely corporate controlled and is now sort of pushed back to take back some community control.
The experience is the ‑‑ the country experience is that we presented mostly show how Internet provides a framework for approaching economic social and cultural rights and strengthening them. But the study and some of the more global focuses also show how an economic rights provide a frame, not the only one but a frame for approaching Internet rights as such. And this concerns both the positive affirmative aspects such as access in community control as well as the negative aspects such as how the recent revolution of the Internet monopolization and concentration of power and violations of privacy, data extraction and privatization, nontransparent algorithms, et cetera, et cetera could affect both economic, social and cultural rights and political and civic rights such as in the erosion of labor rights, cultural and linguistic diversity threats to the democratic process. The right to reliable information, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think the economic, social and cultural rights approach the book is exploring combined, obviously, with other approaches and other rights, social justice focus, et cetera from both these positive and negative aspects could be an effective way to bring a community organization social communities, other Civil Society actors to take on the the importance of looking at the Internet as a political issue and not just an instrument.
It's important to ‑‑ something that's important to mobilize around and take back control of. Including movements that don't see the Internet as a political issue or don't understand how to approach it. So I think it helps to visualize the dominant concentrated model isn't the only one possible. Also, that it's not sufficient in a globalized well and organized Internet to look only from the community focus.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thanks, Sally. Any other comments? Anriette?
>> ANRIETTE EXTERHUYSEN: Thank you for those remarks, Sally, because that's what we hope to achieve with the project. I have to say it's an extraordinarily difficult project, which I think is a reflection on economic and social rights that involves so many. It's a rage of rights and processes, but it's also a reflection how we started to work in the Internet community and how we approach Internet rights. I think the enormous preoccupation that we've had were violations of privacy, the impact of surveillance, the shutdowns, the way in which regimes in some parts of the world are fearful of the Internet as a tool for protest and for change, a political challenge, and that's incredibly relevant.
Really we had to step back from this Civil Society preoccupation with freedom of expression and sole political issues. We did feel we need to take a conscious step back and look at human rights on the Internet in a different way to get at the broader framing. I think that in itself, the fact it's been such a challenging process is also for us a learning process. What we've seen now, actually it's huge.
Looking at labor, labor rights attaches on organization of labor, which has changed. The world has changed, and how the worker ‑‑ how worker organization and trade union movements operate as social change agents now is very different from how they did 30, 40 years ago.
So I think that we actually are just beginning the process. We need to deal with the fact that so much labor is unorganized and the tally work in those cases. It's taking us into the Internet and right on the Internet but also on how do we bring about social change? What are the challenges? How has that changed in the last 20 years? I think that exploration needs to go much further, I think.
So we were hoping this would be a project where we came up with a new monitoring framework and expand the rights charter and influence the IGF agenda and that would be it, but, in fact, it's going to take a long more than that. It's going to take a lot more than that.
>> ALAN FINLAY: Thank you, Anriette. We have a few more minutes left and I'll hand over at this point to Roxanne that, who is the GISWatch product coordinator, who will give a quick overview of ‑‑ are you? Okay.
>> ROXANA BASSI: Okay. Good morning, everyone. So I'm Roxana, and this is my third year for GISWatch coordinator and I'm very well‑known for pestering authors to deliver on time. Like Anriette said, it's a challenging year because GISWatch is a process. The book you have is not the final product. It's one of the products. What comes before that is capacity building of the 45 organizations that participate in this project.
So the way we do that is we create content and we research for them and we prepare a kind of framework in order to organize their work. While doing that, we realize that there seems to be a contradiction there. There's so much to say about economic culture and social rights and the Internet and ICDs, and at the same time there's so little documented. So we couldn't find good sources or reliable sources or updated sources, so I think we really hope that is this is a starting point for local research and regional level and hopefully at global level.
We want to ask your help in disseminating the report and its findings. If you follow our website, we can have local events that take place and translation of the reports as well. I don't know. If there are no further questions, I think we can close this session. I'd like to than the IDOC and CEDA who supported this project and the whole that helped us and Alan who worked 25/7 sometimes and editing weekends and very long nights and, of course, all the authors. You're a pleasure to work with.
Let's continue this project next year like Anriette said on community networks. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Session concluded at 10:22 CT)