The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. 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: So, again, welcome to this Open Forum about protecting the public core of the Internet. My name is Michiel Steltman. Four people will join me, Mr. Dennis Broeders, Mr. Bastiaan Goslings, Pranesh Prakash from the CIS and Marilia Maciel. I would ask everybody to come forward and join us around the table which will make it more enjoyable and interactive. So if you kindly would join us around the Forum table, we will start introducing ourselves, our associations and we will start and we will start discussing the topic.
Let me start introducing the concept of digital infrastructure. What is digital infrastructure? Well, in the Netherlands, we have what we call a Dutch, a third main port. A very strong digital infrastructure. It's not just about access to the Internet. It's a whole industry that is grouped around Internet exchanges, carriers, and if you look at that, it consists of digital services delivered mostly to Europe. All of the large brands have to pass through the Netherlands and at the other end of the spectrum there are users, Internet of Things, all sorts of devices, equipment, mobile users connecting to the services.
And what is actually connecting them? Well, we think of that as basically the Internet, but if we think of that as a bigger concept, we introduce the concept of article digital infrastructure, and digital infrastructure is a concept that is not just along the connection, but also consists of the whole ecosystems of companies, foundations, associations that constitute let's say how digital services reach and users. Those are carriers, exchanges, telecos, registrars, data centers, hosting companies, Cloud companies, associations that are involved with technology, a large let's say economic, economic association. So we asked a year, year and a half ago to join forces because we noticed that all of these different companies, associations have in common. So AMS-IX, the Dutch Hosting Provider Association, the Dutch Data Centre Association, the ISP Connect, the SIDN and the registrars and ServeNet, a large network connecting science and education have joined forces into an association to be the unique voice from these companies to the Dutch Government and to other stakeholders.
So if we look at just a brief introduction of what we call the third main port, we discovered that these whole ecosystems of companies has an enormous impact on the Dutch economy. Billions of dollars are being spent by these companies and also already a $30 billion which is grossly, it's more than 10% of the total gross, it's a fair percentage of the gross product of the Netherlands is being earned by digital services around that ecosystem, and that's why the Dutch Government has now adopted that as a concept called the third main port.
And we found out this is really important for economic development, that there are three factors that influence and strengthen each other that is the digital infrastructure itself, the services that use the infrastructure, and online usage by companies and consumers and individuals. And once you have one, then each of these factors start amplifying each other and start building a very strong digital economy. If you look at that, many of the large brands have found their place in the Netherlands for delivering digital services across Europe such as Netflix, Facebook, Google, Spotify, Akamai, Microsoft, SoftLayer, all of these basically found the third main port.
And that has impact on economy, it has impact on business use of Internet, it has social impact and impact on individual use all of the concepts which gather us here today in the IGF. One of the programs is promoting the Netherlands as digital gateway to Europe. At the global Conference in the Netherlands earlier this year, we believe we promote the free, open and secure Internet as a foundation for economic wealth and for economic growth. Secondly, we believe that there are some concepts that we need to address such as how not just the Internet in its core is being governed but also how other layers such as platforms, data centers, Cloud companies, platforms need to be, let's say, governed or rather how they need to interact with Government.
We all have models that we think apply for the economic structure, how new markets are being organized. It's not just about telecom industry. It's a whole new different concept of layers and individual roles and functions. That is one of the concepts that we like to promote and present today. We believe in security that the chain is as weak as the weakest links. All of these companies and all of these roles play a role in Internet safety and Internet security.
It's Governments, data centers, the hosts, the Cloud companies, the end users, platform, they all have to play their part to make the Internet a safe place for everybody. Another concept is the multi‑stakeholder model, which is not just the instrument to govern the core of the Internet, but applies to other layers just as well. It is important that how industries interact with Government all on layers not just the Internet itself.
And also, that's why we promote public affairs from let's say point of view of these different companies, education about how this whole ecosystem works, trust, which is about safety, security, but also about fighting cybercrime and joining forces on how to battle abuse and cybercrime. And multistakeholder as the core business model, how to interact with Government.
And this is a concept that in IGF in the Netherlands we are promoting, expanding on and talking about a lot with Government and stakeholders in the Netherlands. It's a successful model and we see a lot of the traction and success for fighting abuse, fighting cybercrime and a lot of conceptual models start to evolve. So if you look at the threads and all of the things being discussed, how Governments, how data and privacy, how should, how should this concept, how should it extend to the other layers? So I would like to hand to professor Dennis Broeders who is a professor at Rotterdam University and is also the council for senior fellow researcher for the Council of Government Policy Research.
>> DENNIS BROEDERS: If I could ask people to move forward. If you are cozy there, that's fine. I will give you an introduction on the public core of the Internet which is the idea we will be debating today. It's a concept that's been devised by the Netherlands Scientific Council for Scientific Policy and which is a think tank, and the idea is to write a report that would inform and advise Government on foreign policy agenda in terms of Internet Governance and cybersecurity.
So that's the report. It's available online. There is little leaflets where you can find where it lives on the Web. I have a few copies here so if anyone is interested you can seek us out later. I will just start with the basic idea of the report, and the report basically says that we should see the Internet as a global public good or more precisely, we should look at a number of core protocols, a core part of the Internet, infrastructure that can be considered a global public good. Not a global public good in a strict academic sense of the word, but much more as an impure public good as it is also used sort of within UN language as something that is beneficial to all end users and that is in need and also worthy of protection.
So when we talk about the Internet as a global public good, we don't mean the Internet as a whole. So everything, we don't mean the Internet as an international public space or as a medium for speech. What we really mean sort of a set of core protocols that are sort of inevitable for all, for everything else we sort of build on top of it. We need this core to function for our Internet economy to function. We need this core to function for our Internet Civil Society to function.
So we all sort of have a vested interest in the maintenance and protection of the integrity of this public core. And for the Netherlands which as you have just heard from the presentation by Michiel, the dependence on the integrity of the Internet Ecosystem is so important that we can call it an extended national interest. So the nationality interest is perfectly aligned for the global public good. For the national interest for the Netherlands, it's vital that this public core keeps functioning and maintaining its integrity.
So why do we need to talk about this? I think an important reason why we need to talk about this is that the international political context in which we talk about the Internet has changed significantly in the last decade or so. We picked out a few trends in this report, obviously there are other trends that you could also highlight, but we picked these.
One is a shift going on on the Internet, and the other one is development of securitization and the third is datafication the element of the demographic shift is something much debated here at IGF and is about the next billion users or the next billions of users and its fairly obvious that the next billions of users will not come on line in the north and west, but they will come on line in the south and east. And that is not just a matter of just gaining new end users in different places, it also means that the stake of these countries and the political outlook of these countries become more important about Internet Governance and thinking about cybersecurity.
So that's one trend. A related trend is securitization. I think about 15 years before if we would talk about the Internet, it would be much more talk about innovation, platforms, technology and about the Internet economy. Nowadays, it's much more about the threats emanating from the Internet, the vulnerability of critical infrastructures, the dependence of normal offline life with online life, the presence of military actors, security actors on the Internet, and also sort of the language of cyber warfare and cybersecurity. So it's a very different sort of language.
And when states use the word national security, that does something with the way they look at something. It's a very important imperative for states to look differently and act differently in terms of Internet Governance. And the third I will just briefly stipulate is datafication, everything we could increasingly gets translated to data. The Internet of Things is becoming more and more reality and that also does something with various partners within the ecosystem. It's interesting for companies and for Governments.
So if we take on board these sort of developments, then the question becomes if there are something like a public core of the Internet, if that's a viable concept and something that's worthy of protecting, then how do we go about this? And that sort of has two layers. One layer is sort of the actual protection, the demarcation of what the public core is and the protection of how do we shield infrastructure and logical protocols from unwarranted interventions by states. The other leg that is attached to it is by doing so how can we maintain, uphold, improve public trust and confidence in the inner workings of the Internet. How do we insure that people continue to feel that the Internet provides, provides the services as we think they should provide it.
And that sort of plays out in a number of policy problems, many of which will be very familiar to you. I use Laura Denali’s distinction between the governance of the Internet infrastructure and governance using the Internet infrastructure, and there is a number of problems playing out in both concepts that relate to the trends I talked about earlier.
For example, within the governance of the Internet infrastructure this is classical Internet Governance. There is problems with the transition to IP version 6 which is a collective action problem, but also, for example, there is debate about the IANA transition. There will be much, much debated in the coming days as well which has everything to do with questions of international political legitimacy, how do we deal with this sort of core infrastructure and the names and numbers, and when do we consider it to be internationally politically legitimate and accountable? So that's a big one that's playing out within the infrastructure.
And the other one is sort of problems emanating from states using the Internet infrastructure for their own national interest, be it for economic interest or be it for national security interest. And then you talk about things like IP and DNS blocking whether for copyright protection or surveillance. You may talk about national routing which may interfere with the way the Internet works in terms of routing protocols and then there are a number of issues loosely related to what is going on as well, so we hold a debate about insertion of back doors in hardware and soft, the current debate about encryption policy so the debate between the companies, end users and the state, especially security agencies, and also the debate about the stockpiling and trade and exploits of zero‑rating by various actors.
So that's sort of the main issue we would like to talk about, and we sort of worked that out in two main questions. One is more about the idea of the public core itself, and the other is more sort of how can we sort of set up basic norms and rules for the interaction between states especially and sort of core players in this Internet Ecosystem. So if we look at the first, that would sort of be a definition of what the public core of the Internet is. Even though this report is called the public core of the Internet, you will not find a part and parcel definition of what it is.
I think it is for various reasons, for one, I don't think we could have, and for another one, I think it should be part of a debate to sort of determine where the concept begins and ends. A number of protocols, for example, are fairly common sensical that they would be in such as TCPIP, DNS, but it has fuzzy edges. It's not a given what is in there and what isn't in there. That's a matter of debate. And then it's a matter of if you decide that these are things worthwhile protecting internationally, then how do you go about it?
How do you organize a layer of protection and also what does that entail, for example, for states? It probably means at least some form of self‑restraint, maybe also devising of norms, maybe a norm of non‑interference should be guiding in this when it comes to the Internet Protocols, but it's something that's up for debate. The second question is much more about the definition of proper interfaces so if you have a number of vital key players within the Internet seek could system such as ISPs, Internet exchanges, CERTs against the background of, for example, securitization and sort of the shifting use of basically Governments using the Internet infrastructure, then we are also sort of in need of sort of definitions, okay, what it would be a proper interface between these various parties. How do you organize that? What is and isn't is allowed? At national level there are various debates about it, but increasingly you feel the need to think about norms and benchmarks that would work internationally and how would you define a proper interaction between these various parties.
So that's sort of the main themes for the debate, and with that I hand over back to the Chair.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Dennis, I would like to hand it over to Goss who is the governance policy of the Amsterdam Internet exchange and can you highlight a little bit more about the scoping.
>> BASTIAAN GOSLINGS: Good day, everyone. Thank you very much for the introduction. I am indeed working for the AMS‑IX. For the people who are not aware, I know that ISPs are quite a hot topic at this IGF, so I don't want to miss the opportunity to share some information with regard to my organization. So what we basically do is facilitate the intersection between autonomous systems.
Autonomous systems are actually the networks that make the individual networks that make up the Internet, the Internet that we know as a network of networks. Although the AMS‑IX has been successful at interconnecting networks in its way, it is distributed over 11 data centers in the Amsterdam metro area so the platform is quite complex and in order to keep is resilient and redundant level it's quite a technical challenge.
The basic functionality is the Ethernet switch in the middle that these networks connect to in order to exchange IP traffic with each other. As I said, AMS‑IX has been quite successful and as such we have become one of the largest in this space at the heart of the digital infrastructure in the Netherlands as Michiel explained at the heart of the digital main port was recognized and there was a resolution towards Government to officially recognize the Dutch digital infrastructure as the third main port. So as such, I think the Netherlands has a nice showcase to offer to others.
The AMS‑IX started to keep local traffic local at the time, but you can imagine the Netherlands is quite itself a small country with a limited home markets and by now more than 80% of the networks that use the AMS‑IX services are from abroad and they come to the Netherlands to interconnect each other and do business on line with each other. That's just to emphasize the international aspects of this particular complex.
AMS‑IX is just a neutral facilitator, neutral switch in the middle. We have no insight into the traffic itself, the content of it that passes on via our platform. We are not involved in the commercial considerations of the networks that plug into the switches and exchange traffic with each other and that is actually essential of this particular mobile that we have. It's essential for these networks that AMS‑IX is completely independent, it's neutral, and the only thing that we need to care about is to offer this continuously running Ethernet switching platform that is scalable, that we can insure the integrity of it, and that provides competing networks and opportunity to trust this particular platform in order to do business with each other.
And those are very important values with regard to what we need to offer to our customers and members other than price and quality of service. So some of the characteristics of AMS‑IX is it's a non‑profit organization in the form of an association. I mentioned it's neutral, independent. The trust element is very important. And besides that, the focus on resilience and redundancy is essential to keep the platform up and running.
I think besides the non‑profit aspect, AMS‑IX being a non‑profit organization, the other elements I used are applicable to the rest of the Dutch digital infrastructure. This role of the infrastructure is meant to neutrally facilitate the digital economy. Players that I can think of data centers, carriers, hosters, Internet exchange, Internet service providers, the academic network, researchers, but also maybe C cable operators, fiber operators, it's the nuts and the bolts of the Internet, if I can put it that way, the physical part, the underlying, under the hood aspect that's essential for all of the other services and communications run on top of it.
As such, maybe hidden for a large number of people to an extent and for public policy makers, and that's why alongside of us we decided to join up the DINL in order to facilitate a common voice towards policy makers. I think legislation in the Netherlands towards the sector has been benign over the years mainly focused at D regulation of telecom sector, fair competition and as some of you a net neutrality law in the Netherlands. I despite these factors we see in the Netherlands an increase in Government engagement with the Internet to protect citizens against crime and abuse and to protect economic infrastructures which was described also by Dennis can have concern consequences which we would, preferably would not like to see on the so called core of the Internet Ecosystem.
I think as the infrastructure is owned and run by private entities, it is essential that from a public policy perspective, policy makers in the Netherlands in our case, but also elsewhere have to engage with the sector owners, the private sector, and DINL was set up such to create a platform towards such policy makers towards Brussels and other stakeholders. I am skipping through notes. How much time do I have?
>> MODERATOR: We started late.
>> BASTIAAN GOSLINGS: Now in the Netherlands and I think DINL has been successful example of that under our numerous public‑private partnerships in order to focus at the lesser desired effect of a well-functioning infrastructure, and I think make Michiel can go into details in regards to what we have in the Netherlands and I think that's essential to battling certain problems. If it comes to the core of the Internet concept as such, I don't think I would be an advocate to turn that into official legislation.
I for myself, there is not even a fixed definition of what an ISP is. I certainly believe it would be very beneficial if there would be some form of declaration in order to confirm that any form of intervention is actually necessary in proportion, and I do think we will go further into details of principles and other examples but that element is certainly very valuable in an international context, in an intergovernmental context if principles like those could be endorsed, I think that could be valuable, could be used as a yardstick in certain international discussions.
>> MODERATOR: By now you see that the concept, we feet really strongly about the concept of infrastructure, facilitating, neutral, agnostic to content. So dividing the world into companies that provide services that actually carry data and information and the companies that simply facilitate, carry the bits that are neutral, agnostic, and don't really care about what is better, but are really involved into reliability, into connecting end users to services.
So there are other ways, another concept that illustrates this line of thought is the concept of how to protect intermediaries, so I would like to give the floor to Pranesh Prakash Director of CIS who was instrumental in forming the Manila Principles. Can you highlight that a little bit?
>> PRANESH PRAKASH: Sure. So my name is Pranesh Prakash, Director of Center for Internet and Society which is a Bangalore based Civil Society organization. Now, we were amongst the NGOs that were part of the steering committee of this declaration called the Manila Principles which included seven different NGOs including Internet Civil Society from India, electronic frontier foundation under the U.S., Article 19 which is a U.K. based international NGO, from Argentina, ONG digital list from Chile, Kenya ICT action network from Kenya. And open net from Korea. We helped steer this statement of principles, but it's actually something that was developed not by us, but by a huge group of Civil Society actors and including some input from people working in the private sector as well, some lawyers working in the private sector to actually put this together.
What are the Manila Principles? Well, first before answering that, I will give a little bit of background. As is obvious to anyone who has been working in the space of Internet Governance, the Internet is essentially while we might think about things like the public core. In reality, it is private corporation after private corporation after private corporation on whose property in essence that we are traveling, that all of our data is traveling through, and who are actually building this network of networks, and on top of that, private property.
It's all managed by contracts. So the difficulty comes back when we are trying to bring in ideas from the era of states and protection from, you know, bringing in ideas of human rights, et cetera, which states can guarantee and states can provide to us. And trying to apply those sets of ideas against private corporations. There is obviously going to be ‑‑ so, and at the same time, we see that for any kind of censorship to take place for surveillance to take place, well, these intermediaries are the best place to conduct this kind of censorship through and surveillance through because they are so embedded in the system that you can't actually be part of the Internet without going through intermediaries. That's just not possible because everyone who is between you and any other person you are communicating with, the Internet.
And for this, we, there has been a growing recognition that these intermediaries need both protection from liability for third party action and these intermediaries also owe a kind of duty to users, to Internet users at large in terms of when and how they will take down content.
And it's around this idea that the Manila Principles were evolved. So to look, to inform debate when there is any kind of development, adoption, reviewing of whether it is date based policies or even corporate practices in the form of terms of service, in terms of service policies or even practices in terms of when they actually based on policies take down content. And when all of these kinds of things that this set of principles may actually inform that debate and guide them.
What do these contain? I will very quickly run through the six main principles given that I don't have time to elaborate on them, so I will just flag them at a very high level and later on in the discussion perhaps if there are questions, I will go into more detail about them. So one, the simple principle that intermediaries should be shielded from liability for third party content, that when an intermediary isn't in the process of creating the content or isn't involved in the process of editing or otherwise affecting the content, that they should be shielded from liability.
Two, that content must not be required to be restricted without an order by a judicial authority. So this second principle, again, applies to Governments that when Governments and states are forcing some content, that has to be after an order from a judicial authority, however, that authority may be defined. Three, requests for restrictions of content must be clear, be unambiguous and follow due process. So this goes beyond just, so this goes beyond just states for any kind of request for content, and lays down some procedural guidelines as to what they must follow that you can't have a request that is overbroad. You can't have a request that doesn't identify what precisely is being asked to be taken down, because I can tell you from experience that in India, if you go to block posts that CIS has put out that what actually orders for the Government have been for two ISPs to remove content, some of them identify image tags. They aren't even proper links.
They don't even say what exactly has to be removed. So they identify an HTML tag. So it's that kind of thing shouldn't be happening.
Number four, laws and content restriction orders and practices must comply with the tests of necessity and proportionality. This principle applies not just to Governments but also to the practices being followed by intermediaries and that, I think, is an important element in these principles that we go beyond just the state to actually arguing that some of these duties are owed by corporations as well. And the test of necessity and proportionality are international, are tests which international Human Rights law and I won't go into further detail on that. Five, laws and content restriction policies and practices must respect due process.
And there is a great deal of elaboration as to what that includes in five different, I'm sorry, six different sub heads, so, and I won't go into that in detail. I'm sorry for want of time. Transparency and accountability must be built into laws and content restriction policies and practices. So there must be some way of knowing what is happening because without that kind of transparency, I have argued in the past that we might, that we have headed into a situation of invisible censorship where we have situations through the laws in multiple countries and without laws in others where the content gets removed, you don't even know that that has happened.
So at least when the Government bans a book, you can challenge that in the courts. You can make jokes about it, you can be subversive, but you can't do any of those things if you don't know that certain content has been removed or blocked, et cetera. So trance appearance and accountability or very important principles now, under each of these heads which I have very briefly gone through, there are multiple sub points so I would greatly encourage everyone who is on the Internet right now and connected and looking into their Smart Phones and laptops to head over to Manila Principles.org. That is Manila Principles.org and if you have any questions flag them and we can take it up later on.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Pranesh for explaining these principles, I think this there is a strong case DINL, we make a strong distinction between the bits and information. The content doesn't exist until an intermediary is being told it is a certain amount of content. If we have time left we can expand on that later. I would like to hand over the floor to Marilia Maciel and you made a very interesting point in claiming that DNS system which we all agree on, there is little discussion that DNS is one of the core protocols of the Internet needs to have diplomatic status. We don't have a lot of time left, I'm afraid, but I'm interested in your take on that and the background and what do you think of that and how that should be done?
>> MARILIA MACIEL: Thank you very much. First, a little background, this idea was firstly shared in a series of meetings that led to the global Conference in cyberspace in The Hague. And I should have written a paper on that by now, but because I had other commitments, I could not finish.
I'm sorry, but it is good because I got the chance to present the ideas here to you and I know that there are a lot of people here that are involved and I see Vladimir over here, I see Tony Holmes so I am sure that I will benefit from your thoughts and I will see if it makes sense or if it's an idea worth pursuing or not. I started thinking if there is something related to critical infrastructure that should be protected and we are not discussing it and to me DMS seemed straight forward first of all because of the importance of the DNS like a translation of numbers into names which is fundamental to the function of the public Internet, DNS would fit easily into any category or concept that is widely accepted of critical Internet infrastructure, and I think that discussions have not gone into this direction for political reasons because of the U.S. oversight over the root zone.
But because we are leaving a purpose of transitional IANA stewardship, there is priority to start discussing the company. The idea departs from the fact that the DNS resolution system presents different components that are hierarchically organized to we can disparity from the DNS roots. We have DL services that hold services to GLD, we have name servers, ISP recursive servers and the assumption or one of the ideas that these components should be protected through different mechanisms. If you think of recursive centers that your ISP make available for its clients, these services or this service circumscribes to a small base of users and these servers fall into nationality jurisdiction. If we think about the root zone I think the international implications related to the root zone are very clear and I think that some level of international protection should be necessary to protect the root zone.
If we think about DNS root, we are talking about basically two components of first of all the server that hosts the root zone file and the root zone file itself, which is a file that contains the IP addresses and names of all TLDs. And the concerns related to the integrity of the DNS root in my view they are of two natures. The first of them it's more widely talked about, which is the possibility to have unilateral changes introduced to the file made by the country that exerts jurisdiction over the root which would be the U.S. but I think we are kind of moving over this transition.
The second one would be cyber operations that somehow corrupt either the server or the content of the root server. Some people say that we should not worry about the consequences of a cyber operation because the DNS system is widely based on redundancy. We have many servers hosting the same roots on file, but we know that there can be more than 13 servers even though the servers can be metered by any cast technique, but there are just 13 servers, and all of this any cast servers, they need to use the IP of the root of servers to be able to access the global system. So the problem would be that disabling one of these 13IP numbers will also affect the other servers that meter them.
So a key point to consider is that the impact of an operation against the roots server always has a global impact, maybe it's not catastrophic impact, but it's an impact related to the need to deviate the traffic somewhere or in interprets of a reduced performance globally speaking. So there is also a cross jurisdiction effect if you kind of target a root zone server. So it's true that even if you disable all root servers globally, you could still rely for a short period of time in recursive ISP servers, for instance, but that would gradually lead to vulcanization of the system so it is not sustainable in the long term. If we think about legal analysis of this, I think that an attack on the root zone system could fail to comply with necessity and proportionality that was explained to us before, and would fail to comply with the careful considerations that need to be taken into account when you attack dual use technologies and technologies that have a military and civil purposes. So in terms of what is the response that could be put into place to that, I think that there are different avenues that could be explored. First thought that I had would be the idea of exclusion zones but going to the manual, it seems there is a more consolidated understanding that exclusion zones would be an instrument that is harder to apply on line.
And I think the idea of diplomatic interoperability and this is something that I derived the idea from a paper, I think he was the one that put this idea forward in the first place, but the idea of interoperability that fall below the threshold, which is a good thing because many of the cyber-attacks will not cross the threshold of armed attack. And what would be the availability about. It should be against national interference of infrastructure. So maybe we should create an exception to the principle that the state exerts jurisdiction over the product that is located in its territory, maybe an exception would be important.
And also international availability and that would be the extent of the availability, what it would cover, we should protect the DNS system as a logical resource. So the 13 IP numbers should be protected. First of all, with regards to the place of the corporation of the company that is administering them so even if it's a U.S. company, for instance, and the U.S. is more against ‑‑ in war against another country, it should be available, it should be protected regardless of where the root server is physically located and it should be protected against a place before the localized ‑‑ where the localized servers are located as well. That would be the scope of the protection of the logical resource.
In terms of content, of course, the content of the root zone file should be protected and lastly, the hardware that hosts the file should be protected as well. So logical, the content and the hardware would be the three layers we are talking about. Of course, in terms of mechanisms, how we get there, we see from experience that Internet Governance is very complex for us talk about treaties. Treaties are very hard to negotiate. They take a lo lot of time, but that could be an option and that would kind of harmonize the approach or maybe we could go for a more soft instrument such as I declaration that little by little would kind of create an internationally and maybe we could get a law in the short term or if we I have a multi‑stakeholder document or declaration I think it would be good as a starting point because I don't see this particular point being covered anywhere. So it's a global Conference in cyberspace would take that on board and carry discussion forward would be something interesting. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you very much, Marilia. This shows she clearly the need so have certain areas of the Internet to make them immune to Government intrusions and to governance, Government interactions by intelligence services by legislators to protect the functioning like Dennis explained. We have still a few minutes left, Pranesh.
>> PRANESH PRAKASH: I have a question for Marilia, this is for the record, from CIS. I find this very interesting and this is a conversation about this before the panels and realized that we at CIS are working on very similar lines on this, but, and we too are focused on the root zone, but many of the ideas that you are expressing apply not just at the root zone level, but also apply at the level of regular domain names and registries. So to give an example of why this is important, when in a country, you know, and I'm not sure how bound by certain UN rules I am, but I'm going to violate them anyway. Such as Egypt when there is a cutting of the Internet that happened, or in countries where they greatly restrict through practices like having a great fire wall.
When that happens, well, who gets affected? People of that country, nationals of that country, residents in that country. Even when Egypt cut off traffic, the traffic passing through Egypt still continued to flow. It was only traffic coming into Egypt that was affected and traffic going out of Egypt that was affected and within Egypt. But traffic going through was not affected.
However, when the U.S. Government through, which it seizes domain names and it has done so more than 700 domain names, when it does that it exercises some kind of territoriality ‑‑ extra territoriality because it affects citizens who are Spanish citizens who bought a domain name from a domain name registrar and because it was a dot com address with the registry being based in the U.s, well, the U.S. Government unilaterally asserts to seize the domain name despite a Spanish court having held it to be perfectly legal. Despite a court decision on this issue, they still seized the domain name which affects people of other countries.
I see a lot of similarities here between what you said about root zones and what we have been thinking in the context of the IANA transition, but also in this context. So could we, could some of these ideas at least be expanded perhaps, do you think, to root zone but also regular domain names and registry data?
>> MODERATOR: I'm afraid we have to wrap up. We are out of time. The light is probably a clear signal. I think I will take a moment to summarize. When we start to introduce the concept of digital infrastructure, a public core, a set of goods or a public good that is required to keep the Internet as a whole secure, available, and open, we agree that not just DNS, but probably a whole list of other elements and protocols need to be protected from improper influence.
We need to acknowledge the fact that we are talking about infrastructure and bits and not about the content. We need to acknowledge that BGP, DNS, Internet exchanges need to be protected from things that compromise the entire ecosystem. So I hope this is just a start, a good start, a way of thinking about these core values, about the public core. We can extend this idea into a list of things that need to be protected and we can extend this discussion about thinking how then Governments should interact according to perhaps the Manila principle or other ways how they can interact with digital infrastructure, to intermediaries to ban cybercrime and to protect children and other things that need to be done for which we feel responsible as well.
Well, thank you all very much for your contributions and I hope we can continue discussion outside this whole, this venue. Thank you very much and thank you very much for coming here.
(Concluded at 12:00 p.m.)