IGF 2024- Day 1- Plenary- IGF 2024 Orientation for Newcomers

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Good morning.  Thank you for coming, I'm Chengetai Masango, head of the Secretariat of the Internet Governance Forum, and we are in part responsible for this. I would like to introduce ...

>> CAROL ROACH: Good morning, I'm Carol the 2024 MAG Chair. And welcome. And I hope you gain a lot of knowledge, share a lot of knowledge and enjoy yourselves. Thank you.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you. I don't like lecturing. I like seeing what the audience has to say. So my first question to the audience is, of course, how many of you this is your first IGF? 

Okay. Thank you. That's good.

How many of you have not even attended a Regional IGF or a national IGF? 

Okay. Great.

So would somebody    those of you who did not raise your hand up, volunteer on what is the IGF and how did it start?  Anybody? 

Thank you. Okay. We have a mic there.

>> ATTENDEE: Hello. Okay. My name is Omar, I'm working with the APNIC Foundation. Originally in Afghanistan. I attended the first WSIS in 2003, when I was young, part of the youth caucus there. That is how I got introduced to the whole process. The second phase was in 2005, in Tunis, where it was decided it should be an annual Forum. And then the UN took responsibility of doing it every year. It started as a Global event, which brought all five stakeholders, the Government, Private Sector, Civil Society, technical community, Academia from all around. Since then, all of the stakeholder come together to discuss the Internet Governance issues and the Regional IGF started, organizing different places. The first IGF Global IGF was in India. And my first IGF was in 2012. Since then, I stepped away for a few years. I'm here again since 2018.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you. We go to the slide. The IGF is one of the outcomes of the World Summit, the Information Society. The ideas of the WSIS came out of the plenipot in around 2000, the one in Toronto. And Governments and participants of the ITU were seeing that there was this thing called the Internet and also a growing divide among the people that have the Internet and those who don't. So the Internet at that time around the turn of the industry, 2000 was increasing in relevance, economically, socially, it was no longer just an academic network. And we had our first, you know, MySpace and et cetera. I don't know if you are old enough to remember those kind of things.

So this was when Kofi Annan was Secretary General.

The Secretary General decided that yes, they would form a World Summit on the Information Society and ITU was one of the lead organisations with UNDP, UNESCO, UNDESA, et cetera. As was said, two phases.

Phase one in Geneva, when they were discussing, they found out that okay, we're discussing something called Internet Governance, but what is Internet Governance? 

Nobody really knew what Internet Governance was. So what they did as in all good UN processes. They formed a Working Group on Internet Governance. This Working Group was actually made up of multistakeholders. Government, Civil Society, the Private Sector as well as IGOs.

And they came up with a report, which was presented in the second phase in Tunis.

Which also formed part of the Tunis Agenda and the mandate of the IGF is written in paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda, which called upon the United Nations Secretary General to convene a meeting by the end of 2006, which would discuss    yes. We asked the United Nations Secretary General in an open and inclusive process to convene by the second quarter of 2006, a meeting of a new Forum of multistakeholder policy dialogue.

This was the most important thing, multistakeholder policy dialogue. At that time, the concept of multistakeholder policy dialogue, which was envisioned here, was new, especially to the UN system.

At that time multilateral meant just Governments speaking together and Civil Society, and the companies, et cetera, would be observers, if that. But now, we realize that for the Internet, most of the knowledge of course, was in the technical community, and also Civil Society had to have a say. So the main thing about the IGF is that everybody has a say, everybody participated on an equal footing at the IGF.

And part of it was to, of course, engage stakeholders, identify emerging issues, build capacity as well. Which was also very important, especially for the Global South, especially for the youth.

Elderly as well.

People with disabilities. We had to make sure all these people were involved and nobody was left behind. So the first meeting of the IGF and slight correction was in Athens. And so there in Athens, we had over, I don't know, about 800 people coming together. Today, we have a registration of over 8800 people. So we have I don't know over the years. Which is very good.

So the key points of the IGF, it is bottom up Agenda setting. When we set the Agenda, we do send out a call for themes and anybody can participate and say what is the theme of the year. Last year it was most definitely AI. The year before that, it was Internet fragmentation, et cetera.  So each year, there is a new hot topic. And we also do emerging issues, which is also very important, and we have capacity building.

I don't know. I have been talking a lot. Would you want to say a little bit of what we do? 

>> CAROL ROACH: This is actually the most exciting part about the IGF, I think. The intercessional work that we do during the year. It is not just planning the Global Forum which you are here now. We have the Best Practices Forums and policy networks. And what we do is we look at hot topics, things that we think that you and the stakeholders in our community would be interested in. And the MAG decided on which types of Best Practices Forums and policies. So what we do is come up with what is the Best Practices, do standards, comparisons of them, and we produce a report. So I encourage you to go to the IGF's website, and you will see the different work that we do over the past few years.

They change after a while, but the Best Practices Forum that we have today is Cybersecurity for policy networks, we have three.

It is AI, Internet fragmentation, and ... meaningful access.

So then we have the cooperation of the NRI, and Dynamic Coalitions. I encourage everybody to also, again, go to the Internet, go to the website. And to see if your country has    or your Region has a national or Regional IGF and participate. So you don't have to just participate at the end of a year. You can try to be active during the entire year. We have moved on.

Okay. So then we have the two Major Groups. We have the IGF leadership panel and the Multistakeholder Advisory Group. The MAG, I'm the current Chair. And the Chair is selected based on the cycle we are for each stakeholder Group that we have. So currently, I'm actually Government stakeholder. And that was for this year. And we have the leadership panel, which we collaborate together, in order to come up with the great stuff that we have today, and that you see here today.

And as you can see, the Chair for the leadership panel is Vint Cerf, one of the Chairs.  And the Vice Chair is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa and we also have a selection of people that represent each stakeholder Group. For Africa, we have Gbenga Sesan.  For the business community, we have Maria Fernanda Garza, and the Secretary General Envoy on technology as an ex officio member and the three, the past host, so for Japan, as currently changed a bit, the present host and today, we will also have the next host, which is Norway joining the leadership panel.

And as it says there, the IGF Secretariat is based in Geneva. We're I have very small Secretariat. Only seven people full time. And then we have consultants. We depend on community support. We're like at Internet, open sourced. They ask for people full time. But most of the people are volunteers. Like Omar was. And that also has helped.

Again key principles, key stakeholders, inclusive, transparent, noncommercial, community centered process. We do not charge anything for the IGF and also nationals and Regionals don't charge anything for the IGF as well.

These are where we started. We started off in Athens. Then we went to Brazil. And last year we were in Kyoto. The year before in Addis Ababa. We try to move the IGF meeting from Region to Region to make sure people do have access. Because if we have it, okay we have it here, for instance, people from South America, it is very difficult for them to come. But when we have it in Brazil, it is the other way around. We do ensure that people can come and participate physically if they want to more easily. And over the past years, this is when we had COVID, so we had an online meeting. From then, we have actually increased our online and remote participation. So that it is seamless between the two. Next.

Yes. So over the years, Secretary General has attended. This was in Paris where we had the President of France there. And of course, Angela Merkel from Germany as well. As I noted remote participation is also very important. We'll go to the next. Right.

>> CAROL ROACH: Right. That brings us where we are today. The MAG looked at the topics from the community    that the community sent in. What we thought this year is that since there is so many cross cutting topics, that we would look at it as a holistic view. So we ended up with building our multistakeholder digital future. And as Chengetai was saying, the multistakeholder part is important to the process. We have enhancing the digital contribution to peace, development and sustainability. And advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age, harnessing innovation and balancing risks and the digital space. Improving digital Governance for the Internet we want. And we thought that these four will help us to build our multistakeholder digital future.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: One of the    so we discuss and it has been at the beginning, at least, you know, talk shop, et cetera. While we're not just a talk shop, but also nothing wrong with being a talk shop. It is very important to have stakeholders who normally don't meet to discuss issues and learn from each other. And go home and discuss what they have learned here and implement it at their home station.

And this is the third mandate of the IGF and we're due for renewal next year and we have had studies to see what is the actual impact of the IGF, and one famous example, which I always quote is that for instance, the establishment of the Internet exchange point in East Africa was because they came    that the regulatory Authority came to IGF met at the clearing house, had a discussion, went home, continued that contact, and IXP was established. And the effect of the IXP was that usually Internet traffic would come directly from England, et cetera.

Now, that    and even if it is local if I wanted to send an email and I was in East Africa next door, it would go to England and come back.

With the establishment of the IXP, the traffic was local which brought down the cost of the Internet, because there is no intercontinental traffic, et cetera. And that is also something that we are proud of    I will say I am proud that the IGF has managed. Can we go back, sorry.

I'm taking too long.

(Chuckling)

Okay.

And also, we do have output as Carol just said, we have Best Practices Forums and highlight bad practices as well. This is important to see.

The world is not a uniform world, there are some where economies of scale can happen and we also have small island developing States where it is very difficult to have that coordination.

But people have faced those problems or faced those challenges, and it is very good to have that knowledge exchange on how they have solved that problem so people don't have to reinvent the wheel.

As part of our outputs, we do have the IGF messages and we try and procure our output so they can be inputs into other processes. We have also seen that the IGF has been mentioned in, you know, G7 processes. In African Union processes as well.

We do see the effects. That is why I say, the biggest effect of the IGF is the second order effect that we have.

Yes.

You want to take this one?  No? 

>> CAROL ROACH: Next slide.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Okay. Yes (chuckling) as we said. These are the different parts of the IGF. It has grown over the years. As I said, in Athens, we had about 800. Now a factor of 8,000. And grown by a factor of 10. In Japan we had over 8,000 business engagement. We have sessions for business and because it is very important, we have a parliamentary and judiciary track. Parliamentarians are the ones that set the public policy instruments. It is very important they have an understanding of how their laws can affect normal Internet life. For instance, how do you set laws to combat counterfeiting, et cetera, if you just block IP addresses from a server. You might block not just the server selling fake Gucci handbags, but a whole lot.

The same server might have a hotline that helps people with disabilities, et cetera, et cetera. So how to combat those and also how knowledge sharing amongst Parliamentarians. There are some who are more advanced of the European Parliament is quite well known for having good policy instruments, you know the GDPR, et cetera. They can share how they did things. Of course, newcomers, they're here. We also try and encourage newcomers to go around. Remote helps for people who cannot make it. Instead of watching the IGF by themselves, they can gather, Universities or some businesses and actually participate as a Group, which we find actual encourages more debate and more interaction.

We do have travel support. I know some of you are here with the travel support. It is not as much as we would like. It is something to bring people in. Youth engagement, youth are our future of course. And we really do want them to engage.

And ... (no audio)

There is South school, and EuroDIG for Europe. And inclusion is of course something that we actually do look at. After every single IGF, we look at statistics, we see who has participated, we see who we are missing. Then we look and see how can we include them for the next IGF. That is very important for us.

>> CAROL ROACH: If you are wondering how to continue your experience from today,

This is multistakeholder and you can join a best practice Forum. There are mailing lists, you can help to formulate the outcomes. There is also the policy networks as we said on Internet fragmentation. Meaningful access, artificial intelligence. So if you want to be a part, if you have something to offer, if you need or want to learn something, then one of these Groups, you should join. And participate.

Then we have the Dynamic Coalitions, 32 of those. And they cover a range of topics, blockchain, child rights online. Connectivity, Internet values, data, health, DNS, gender. There is something here for everyone. We really encourage you to please join the mailing list and let your voice be heard.

Here we have the multistakeholder Groups. Civil Society, Academia and research organisations, tech companies, Intergovernmental and international organisations, Governments, industries, and technical communities.

So we're all part of the IGF.

So what we try to do as well when we form the Programme is to also look at SDGs in order to help facilitate meeting the goals for 2030. So we discuss your issues that shape the digital future. Accountability, accountability and trust. Trust is very important these days. Innovation. Even though we talk about issues, we can't let the issues downplay the innovation that technology will allow you. So we try to do a balance between that and find out how we can balance. We look at standards and values, which is very important, what is the norm of the country of a Member State, culture, we can't leave those out. We brainstorm and form a digital future today that the future could enjoy.

So we have partners and Corporations that help us in this endeavour.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Right. We have over 174 national and Regional IGFs as you can see from all over the world. And I think one of the    Saudi Arabia did join a couple of weeks ago. So there is an IGF there. And the other one that is one of the later ones is Ireland, the Irish IGF was formed. Is there a Norwegian IGF?  Okay.

So please, when you go back to your countries, see where the national IGF is. If there is no national IGF, you have two choices. Join the Regional or sub Regional IGF. For instance, in Africa, there is also a southern African IGF and North African are IGF, et cetera. Please do join and participate or just come to the website and see where you can join. And if there isn't, make one. Because the Internet is for everybody and we will help you form that IGF.

>> CAROL ROACH: Youth.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Yes, youth, national, subnational, and Youth IGF as well.

Back. Yes. So please join us. I know it may be a little bit intimidating. We have over 300 sessions. Just go take it bit by bit. And in maybe not this year, but in a year or two, you will be able to navigate seamlessly throughout. Talk to people. Like Omar here, or anybody else. We're approachable. Myself, even, Carol, the Chair, we're approachable. We will talk to you about things. Yes.

IGF and other processes? 

Okay, as Carol said, we try and join with the UN 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. Each session is aligned with one or more of the SDGs. We're currently behind, and there is a question whether or not we will make the goals, but as you know, ICTs are seen as an accelerator. So we will see how and as far as our partners are concerned, we have internal, basically the whole of the UN is internal partners, we work very well with the ITU, UNESCO, UNDP, UN habitat. UN environment as well. We work outside with the African Union, as I said. EU, we work with the Region    like ... Economic Commission for Africa, Economic Commission for Asia. Economic Commission for Europe. Et cetera. Companies, we work with Google, Meta, Disney, and even the small companies as well.

As I said, the person on our leadership panel is actually (distorted) Mexico. (Distorted)

Did mention the idea as one of the methods that can help with the implementation of the GDC. Due to the strong body stakeholder as well and we look to seeing how to do that and we look forward for how to help us with that as well. Next year, starting, actually, there is the WSIS + 20 review. And WSIS will be the main focus for next year. And it is also coming up to the renewal of the IGF for next year. We don't know how long it will be renewed for. But hopefully we will see, I will not even guess. I will not speculate. But we do need your support for that to help.

So if you find the IGF useful, please help and support us for the renewal, during the course of next year. Thank you.

And with that, I also would like    we have got 13 minutes for questions. Anything you would want to talk about, we're here.

>> ATTENDEE: Very interesting. I'm a first timer at IGF. I was looking at the SDGs and some of the values you have. For example, standards, values, I was wondering whether it is time to include ethics as part of, you know, the overall aspirations of the IGF.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Ethics is important. The policy network is talking about, because we need an ethical Internet. We need ethical AI. And we are looking at ways of how to integrate that into all of our processes. So that it is designed that way.

So ethics, we are human rights based as well. So everything that we do, everything that the UN does, one of the Foundational Documents is the Declaration of Human Rights. And that also seeps its way into what the IGF does as well. That should include ethics, yeah.

>> CAROL ROACH: If you could go to slide 9. Sorry.

Now keep going. That is the one with the topics.

Right here. So you will see here, things like advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age, you will find in that part, you will see a lot about ethics. Also in digital Governance, it is ethics is covered there.

And we do have an online.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Can we get the question? 

While they're figuring that one out.

>> ATTENDEE: Good morning. Appreciate your efforts. We are considered the consultative status and participating in this IGF since five years ago. And I take this opportunity to call you to our booth because we have launched a platform for protecting intellectual property in the digital era, aligning with the IGF recommendations. And I call you to know about this platform. And it is our pleasure to be a volunteer for IGF leadership. Thank you.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much. We had one hand up there.

>> ATTENDEE: Thank you. Hi, can you hear me? 

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: At the back. You see that?  There.

>> ATTENDEE: Hi. Can you hear me?  I'm a first time IGF attendee.

(Overlapping conversations)

>> ATTENDEE: I'm from Nairobi, Kenya. One thing I would like to appreciate is I come from the association of freelance journalists, and I really want to appreciate Carol, and the team at IGF for having the media caucus, come and joins IGF for the first time. Thank you for the support that you have given the journalists, we really appreciate, because I guess it is time that the IGF stories are able to be told from the inside, not from the outside.

I mean, from the outside, in, everyone is saying things. Now the journalist will have an experience. And I hope the experience, it will be many more. Maybe we create a caucus for the media. I would like to let you know that we currently have the African media. We have several journalists in that Group and we meet on WhatsApp and we get to share what is happening in the different IGF itineraries that are happening.

One thing, I don't know if it is too early to ask if one of the    so the caucuses that you already mentioned, that you talked about the Civil Society, Private Sector, and all of the others. Let's have the media also be part of that caucus, if it is possible.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much. And also, is it possible to have the online people speak. Is it possible to have the online people speak? 

>> ATTENDEE: My name is Ishmael, I would like to thank you. As a first timer in IGF, I have two questions, please. First of all, country who in the IGF, I would like to have information how to join IGF. That is the first question. The second one is, is it possible to share a brief story, like the brief story with IGF, how can I get it, if you have like website, or if like to pass IGF or something like that.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you for your question. We will put it on the website. So you will be able to find it and download it. And if you want to join the national, and Regional initiative, the lady sitting in front there, please just approach her and she'll show you how.

Is it possible for Nina to speak.

>> ATTENDEE: It is, I believe. Can you hear me.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: We can.

>> ATTENDEE: We can't seem to activate my video. That is fine. Hello, everyone. My name is Nina, I come from the Internet. I have to wake up early in my current location to join you online first because I'm a person and show you, you can and I wanted to share two thoughts with you, especially those who are joining recently, I have opinion participating in IGF for the past 19 years, actually I was there before IGF started, so it is a good thing for us to listen to our incoming colleagues.

I want to raise one thing. Thank you for the one who raised ethics. Every 20 years, every improvement in IGF has been community motivated. What we have as Best Practices Forums today was not called Best Practices Forums earlier on. It was called beds of the same feather. These are people that think an issue is important, they caucus, just like our media colleague and they bring it up to the Secretariat and we integrate it.

So please, if there is a new idea, if there is a new dimension that you want to see in IGF, please do not be shy, speak up, find beds of the same feather, familiar spirits or kindred spirits caucus together, bring it to the floor, and you will see it materialize in IGF.

There is something else on the IGF website, you have a lot of reports, one of the things you want to do is to read a lot, read up on who is doing what, look the intgovforum.org has a lot and past IGF sessions are also there. You want to find out who is doing what where and get connected to them. Most of us are online. Most of us are approachable. Most of us are resource people. Please make use of that. Finally if you happen to be in any IGF it is a great place to bring media, to bring attention to what you are already working on. You are meeting new people, you are meeting the people you have always wanted to meet. And if you are launching a book, if you are launching a report, that will be a good place. And there are a lot of things that do not show up in the official IGF Agenda, so your organisation may use this to have a Partners' meeting. You have one on ones. You have a lot of other things to do on the margin of an IGF. And that explains why most people use that opportunity to even have a team meeting. If the organisation is working in a digital space, that is a good time to have your Partners' meeting, a good time to have even your Board meeting. It is a good time to combine IGF with your team retreat. Because it cuts down your costs. So please, if you can't do the Global one, do the Regional one. If you can neither do those, do the national one. Please participate. If you can't do it in person, just do it online like myself thank you very much.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you, Nina.

And now we have, if I can read ... Mohibul. Sorry if I do not pronounce your name online.

(Distorted)

If not, we will go to Anju.

>> ATTENDEE: I'm a first time attendee at IGF. It is fantastic. I will be in Riyadh in a few hours' time. I want to find out if we can include distributed ledger technology as part of a Forum because that is a massive parallel revenue stream or economy that is going on. Certainly requires this kind of multistakeholder engagement. Thank you.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Can you repeat, if we can include what? 

>> ATTENDEE: If we can include distributed ledger technology such as blockchain. As well as others into this Forum as a discussion point because we do have    I'm also a Ph.D. researcher. So hence the interest in this area.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Blockchain was a big issue at the IGF a couple of years ago. I think about five years ago. We had been in workshop sessions on blockchain and distributed ledgers.

As we mentioned before, it is quite easy to reintroduce that. We do need to have a protocol of massive people that are interested in it. For instance, next year's IGF we will have issues. And if you look at the blockchain there. And distributed ledgers and other people do so and it raises, you know, to the top or near the top, then yes, we can introduce it as a theme    (distorted)

>> ATTENDEE: Sorry. I cannot hear you. There is a disturbance, please.

>> ATTENDEE: I will try again. I think the technical people will.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: So we will have a call for sessions as well. And you in your (distorted) individual capacity can apply for a session. A workshop session. To apply for a workshop session and next year. The final thing you can do is have a day 0 session. Where the requirements aren't that stringent as such to discuss distributed ledgers. For that, it can help pick up the momentum for that.

>> ATTENDEE: That's great. Thank you.

>> ATTENDEE: Hello?  Mohibul.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Okay. We'll have you and then someone present. And then we'll close.

>> ATTENDEE: You called me at the time, it was muted.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: It is fine. Please state your question.

>> ATTENDEE: Yeah. Okay. So I'm from Montreal. It is almost 2:00 a.m. here. So yeah. Yeah. My question is I'm from the technical community. I would like to know how can ICANN and IGF work together to make the Internet course systems like domain names more secure and accessible (background noise)

(indistinct chatter)

>> ATTENDEE: How can IGF and ICANN work on the technical issues.

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much. (Distorted) actually we work closely with ICANN. At this meeting, you will see in the opening session just now, we will have the incoming CEO and President of ICANN making a speech. There a large contingent of ICANN staff and also Board of Directors here at the meeting. (Distorted)

The IGF and those two ICANN meeting as well. (Background noise) (distorted)

But since we're somewhat similar in the way we organize our Conferences, we also give each other Best Practices and how to do things better from both perspectives.

So to (distorted) answer your specific questions.

>> ATTENDEE:  

(Overlapping conversations)

>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: In our meetings and the summer schools and intercessional activities. Our last question and then we have to go. Sorry.

>> ATTENDEE: May I ask or somebody else?