Work Shop:  Internet Governance & International Organizations
 ICANN Meeting - Paris
 Wednesday, 25 June 2008
 
 >> Good afternoon, we are still waiting for all of our speakers to settle in, but I think because is short and there is obviously a high degree of interest, maybe we better get going.
 Welcome to this session on Internet governance and international organizations.  My name is Bill Graham, I am with the Internet society, and I will be chairing this afternoon.
 We have an excellent panel this afternoon for you, and I am looking for to an excellent discussion.  We will start with speakers.  We have asked them to keep down to within about ten minutes or so so we will have time for questions and discussion afterwards.
 This week's ICANN meeting is a really good opportunity to talk about Internet governance and international organizations.  Many of us came directly from last week's OECD ministerial meeting on the future of the Internet economy that was held in Seoul, Korea.
 I know others at the table will speak about this later on, but I'm going to take advantage of my role as chair and say that I found that ministerial an extremely positive event for a number of reasons.
 One of those is that it was the first chance for a group of 17 nongovernmental organizations active in the Internet's development to be directly involved with the OECD in a collaborative effort to contribute to the ministerial.  And we, at the Internet society, were privileged to coordinate those efforts.
 Together we were able to show governments that our diverse organizations are motivated by a common vision of an open, accessible, and global Internet, one that brings shared economic and social benefits to all citizens now and in the future. We all believe the policies and practices of tomorrow must grow from the shared principles and shared vision that underpin our collaboration in the Internet model.  In preparing for the OECD meeting, the participants from the 17 organizations in our community developed those principles into a formal memorandum that we submitted, and I would encourage you to take a look at it.
 Sorry.  Not used to scribes.
 I would encourage you to have a look at it on the OECD site or on our own Web site.
 A consistent message that emerged from the technical community discussions, both in the stakeholder forum and in subsequent official sessions is that the Internet is successful in large part due to its unique governance model.
 It includes shared global ownership, collaborative engagement models, development based on open standards, which are openly developed, and freely accessible processes for technology and policy development, such as we're engaged with here this week at ICANN.
 This Internet model relies on multistakeholder collaboration, and on processes that are local, bottom-up, and accessible to individuals around the world, whether they be from academia, research, government, business, or civil society.
 We believe that should continue to be the model for Internet governance.  It works well now.  It's adaptable, and it's a source of innovation and creativity that will be needed as we work together to try to ensure that the Internet is truly for everyone.
 Which brings me to today's panel.
 I hope we can talk today about what happened at the OECD.  Number one, what other developments are taking place on the international scene, and in other international organizations.
 The focus for this year's Internet Governance Forum, which will be in Hyderabad, India, first week of December.  And the opportunities to advance discussions on Internet governance in the international realm.
 So without taking up any more time myself, I want to introduce you to our first speaker, Sam Paltridge, from the OECD, who can talk to us a little more about what happened at the ministerial.
 Sam.
 >>SAM PALTRIDGE:   Thanks, Bill, and good afternoon, everyone.
 Actually, looking at the faces, I recognize many of you were at the ministerial, so I feel I am reporting back to people who were there.
 Just before I start, one URL for those of you that weren't there is OECD.org slash future Internet.  And all the documents that I mention in my five minutes today can be found on that Web site.  And there's also the Korean host Web site, which actually has an archive of the Webcast in which all the sessions are archived.  And if you want to see the video of any of the sessions, you can do so on that site.
 The ministerial itself represented the culmination of about nearly two years' work for some of us.  And probably a lesser time for other stakeholder groups but certainly a long commitment.  For us it had a number of firsts.  It was the first OECD meeting, ministerial meeting, in Asia, which we are quite proud of.  It had very good representation from high-level officials, ministers, deputy ministers, ambassadors, heads of IGOs, et cetera.
 We also had 2,300 participants, which vastly exceeded our expectations.
 Our previous ministerial in Ottawa had about a thousand participants.
 So I think that's some indication of the interest that this subject has.
 One thing Bill mentioned was the engagement of stakeholders.  In Ottawa ten years ago, we had two stakeholder groups, business and civil society slash organized labor.  This time around that was extended to a third group which is the Internet technical community.  And I am very pleased that ISOC and ICANN and the other 15 groups were able to get together and be very effective in communicating messages to Ministers, and in some ways the most effective because that group managed to get what you wanted to say down into quite a brief statement, which is always welcomed by high-level officials.
 Ministerial also tried some new things.  We actually had a YouTube channel that was made available to us by Google where we had many tens of thousands of views, and people putting up their own videos answering an Internet question along the lines that was pioneered in Devos (phonetic).  And as I said, the ministerial was Webcast.
 As to the more substantive outcomes, in an OECD meeting, the most important or substantive document for us is the declaration, what Ministers actually say and go away from the meeting saying.
 In the OECD context, this is not a binding document.  It's not like a treaty or such like.  But it does represent a political commitment from governments that they will adhere to what they are adopting.  And I am pleased to say all OECD member countries and a further nine countries in the European community adopted the Seoul declaration, and it is on that Web site that I mentioned.
 Basically, the declaration sets out a roadmap of shared core values and principles for the future of the Internet economy.  There's also another document which I draw your attention to on the same Web site, shaping policies for the future of the Internet economy, which supports and sustains the declaration, and basically adds a bit of meat to the bones.
 There are a number of other things that came out of the ministerial for us.  I don't want to go into too much OECD jargon, but OECD's peak body is the OECD council.  It's quite something for us to get a recommendation out of the council, OECD council recommends X, Y, Z.
 We got two recommendations coming out of the ministerial, one on critical information infrastructure, another one on public sector information.  We also got mandates from Ministers to encourage us to go ahead with future council recommendations in the areas of next-generation networks and empowering consumers with information services.
 I wouldn't like to sum up what was a very rich two or three days of discussion, but I think there were some key messages that came out of the ministerial.  One is that the Internet economy really is the economy for OECD countries now.  The Internet is such a fundamental part of our economies that it's very hard to disentangle discussions about the Internet from other mainstream areas of economic policy.  And that's quite something for OECD countries to come out and say that and acknowledge that.
 The second thing is the critical role the Internet has in creativity and innovation.
 We heard a lot of about how it lowers barriers for economic activity, broadening collaboration, exchange of ideas and so forth.
 And thirdly, the huge potential the Internet has for addressing global challenges, not least, climate change.  And a number of countries announced initiatives in that area.
 Finally, I suppose that I come back to the multistakeholder nature of the event, which we were very pleased about.
 The OECD has always been a multistakeholder organization, but certainly we haven't had the ability to include all stakeholders.  And we were very pleased that the Internet technical community, including ICANN and ISOC and so forth, could participate, and the challenge that our Secretary-General laid down in the final session was how do we further that, how do we institutionalize it, how do we take that forward.
 And that's something that we're going to be thinking about and working on.
 And, I guess, going forward, to give Markus a lead-in, we'll be looking forward to taking the messages of the Seoul ministerial to the IGF in Hyderabad to the meeting organized in Nice by the French presidency and so forth.
 So I'll conclude there and welcome questions later.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Good, thanks very much, Sam.  That's very informative.
 Of course, the OECD ministerial is not the only thing that's been going on lately on the international scene.
 The planning for the next Internet Governance Forum is also moving ahead.
 And our next speaker is Mr. Ravi Shanker, joint secretary for the department of information technology, ministry of communications and information technology, of India, who will, of course, be hosting the next IGF.
 India was also a prominent participant in the OECD.  So I know Ravi may have some comments about that as well.
 So I ask you, Ravi, to take the mike.  Thank you.
 >>RAVI SHANKER:  Thank you, Bill.  Thank you, Sam.  
 Taking off from where Sam left, about the Internet economy, which was the theme at Seoul, and in the context of the third IGF, which is to be held in Hyderabad in December 2008, I thought I'd take you all through a little journey of the Internet activities in India to just give you a snapshot of all the emerging business opportunities.
 First and foremost, I would like to mention that at this point in time, we are progressing fairly on the Internet connections.  And we are something like 40 million broadband and 60 million Internet connections.  The distinction between broadband is anything above 2 mbps is what we define as broadband.  And Internet connections with 25 kbps and above.  So 60 million would be the Internet connection and 40 million is broadband connection.
 I'd also like to mention that at this point in time, it's 250 million plus mobile connections in the country.  And growing at the rate of eight million per month.
 So that makes it one of the fastest-growing mobile markets in the world.
 I would like to just present a scenario that the mobile Internet is yet to make its foray.  It's just in its nascent stage.
 But if you look at the potential customer base, if you do have 250 million users of the mobile, and all of them could get connected to the Internet, then what's the type of potential that (inaudible)?  
 So that gives you a scenario as to the emerging market for the mobile Internet.
 The whole range of issues, then, comes into fore of what IGF and ICANN have been talking about.  And IGF, I just would like to mention that security would become a major issue as to the usage of Internet, for the simple reason that all those who are going to be first-time users will have to be educated on the use of Internet and the privacy issues.  And that, in itself, brings about a major point of international cooperation.
 This was a point, I understand, which our representative from the government of India would have made at the Seoul meeting.  And I think the privacy and security issues would have been featured prominently in the Seoul summit on the Internet economy, because these are common to all countries.
 I'd like to mention two or three other areas which are of interest, which is likely to be dominant when the IGF meets again.
 First, as would be evident, we have a population of one billion.  And it's just about 10%, 100 million, who are English-speaking in the country.  So multilingualism is a major factor that we are driving at.
 I'm just trying to put it in focus that even at this ICANN meeting, where the GAC had met, we had been focusing on the introduction of IDN ccTLDs.
 In a country where only 10% have facility of understanding English or English literacy, we would like to use multilingualism as a plank to actually take access and diversity aspects of the users.
 The focus and theme of the third IGF is reaching out to the next billion.
 We understand that we are one billion plus at this point of time.  
 Welcome, Paul.
 At this point of time, we are one billion plus users of the Internet across the world.
 And in the IGF multistakeholder Advisory Group, the emphasis has been that we should look at covering the next billion.
 How do we cover the next billion unless and until we have multilingualism at the fore.  So this is one particular aspect, I thought we would put this as a major plank employed in the third IGF at Hyderabad, because we have 22 official languages written and 11 scripts, and we have been pitching for the introduction of ID ccTLDs.
 The third aspect that I thought I would bring to the fore is, when we have the whole mobile market, gaming is an activity which is very importantly used on the mobile circuit.
 There is a move right now in India to have a focus on animation and gaming as the next big thing.  Since it's already the back office to the world in respect to the I.T. and ITS, we have put our finger on the plans that animation and gaming is the next big thing and we should be back office to the world on that also.
 The way in which we are going about it, the entertainment industry is the driving force behind this whole animation and gaming industry.
 Since India, with its Bollywood, is well known on the international entertainment circuit, we thought we would avail of this opportunity to see the experience gained in the entertainment industry to bring it to the information and the education segment.  So that would become a major way in which, from the entertainment, transmuting its experience to the communication and education sector comes into play.
 I would also like to look at making this a plank for bringing this an aspect for the Internet economy and how we are trying to shape new policies in our country, public policies.
 We have recently come out with a policy resolution known as Information Technology Investment Regions.  The way in which we look at this is, we wish to build new I.T. townships in India.
 The whole concept is new I.T. townships would keep -- the township has the fulcrum of the Internet economy with it.  You live and work in the same environment, and you use the I.T. economy as the fulcrum of the new townships.  So the information technology investment region would be I.T. ITS, hardware, animation and gaming as the central themes of new cities.
 I think this gives a huge opportunity to city planners, to architects, to a lot of other industries to actually come and work in India.
 I think that would open up a plethora of opportunities which I thought I would make a point here.  And the third IGF, incidentally, is in Hyderabad, in an area outskirt of Hyderabad known as Cyberabad or the cyber city.  So that will give you an idea as to how exactly Indian townships are developing with I.T. as the fulcrum of the economy.
 In this vein, I must bring to your knowledge the aspect of the development of an integrated national knowledge network.
 Taking cue from the experiences elsewhere, specifically, the United States and Europe, and continent, we felt that Indian educational sector also needs to be upped through a gigabit connectivity.
 So in this regard, the whole concept of building an integrated international knowledge network, trying to connect something like 20,000 educational institutions and research institutions across the country in a short span of time, that has been the major recommendation of the national knowledge commission.
 These are all aspects of the Internet economy which Sam has been alluding to.
 I thought that this would be an important thing to mention here, because we would expect an exponential growth in activity on the Internet usage, bandwidth, and connectivity issues in the country.  So that would perhaps give you an idea of the amount of Internet-based activities.  So this would call for governance activities.
 So the governance issues come to the fore with a plethora of users and multilingualism.
 Shifting gears to the third IGF, per se, we have been working in close coordination with the IGF secretariat and will be shortly launching a Web site on the IGF 2008, for which we are taking all the inputs from the IGF secretariat.
 We'd like to mention that this third IGF would be in Hyderabad.  Hyderabad is fairly well-connected to Frankfurt from Europe, Singapore from Asia, and Dubai from the African and Middle East areas.
 So I think that gives you an indication that Hyderabad is a fairly well-connected city.
 Hyderabad has opened a new international airport sometime in the month of May 2008.  So that gives you an indication that the whole city of Cyberabad, which is based on the Internet economy, has actually developed a public/private partnership model airport.
 So this is the type of development that we have going on.
 The venue, per se, is the Hyderabad International Convention Center, which is a state-of-the-art facility in India, and it is owned by a Dubai-based company.  So it will be an experience to see and savor for you also.  On the aspect of the various components of what the third IGF will be, I am sure that Markus has got his plate full of thoughts to share with all of you.  And maybe it's time for me to hand over the mike to him, to enable him to elaborate on what should be the third IGF.
 Thank you.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Thank you very much, Ravi, for that presentation.
 I'm --  We've been joined by Paul Twomey, who, as you probably can imagine, is extremely busy this week.  He can't be with us for long.  So I think I'll change the order of speaking and let Paul take the microphone now, and my chair as well, so you can see what he looks like while he's....
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   Yes, I think most of this audience has got version of my photograph with a target on it at some stage.
 Hello, everybody, and welcome to the -- this conference, at least welcome to the middle part, where I am.
 The -- just a couple of quick points, I think.
 First of all, thanks very much to the speakers for speaking.  And it's interesting to see the full room and participation.
 Obviously, Internet governance is a topic that's been going for some time, will go for a long time, and is an important one.
 I have just a couple of quick observations.
 The ICANN model and the organization is in some respects the original multistakeholder organization.  At least put it this way, when it was being formed and developed, we couldn't find any other one to look at.
 So it -- and I want to come back to that theme about how do you create a new organization that is unique.
 So but what's been interesting about the whole engagement of our community around the issues of Internet governance in the last, I suppose, five or six years, has been what was a unique and somewhat isolated cry, if you went three or four years ago, now is becoming something of a wave, and everybody wants to be a multistakeholder organization.  Indeed, I had an interesting conversation last night with some business people talking about how bottom-up and multistakeholder was taking over as a concept in business strategy and operations management inside large corporate.
 So it seems to be -- I don't want to say flavor of the month, but, nevertheless, it seems to be seized upon as a concept.
 And I think that's important.  And I think Markus and Nitin and others have done a great job also in implementing that in the U.N. context for the IGF, which we should not underestimate the difficulties of transforming the vocal points within or the points of view or voice within a U.N. context, which is, at the heart of itself, it is an intergovernmental organization.
 The ICANN functions are very much focused on a set of core technical and related policy coordination for the domain name system and unique identifiers.
 A lot of the Internet governance discussion is not about that.  And that's quite appropriate.
 We do, however, recognize that it has an impact.  I mean, those of us who are the organization, the NRO, the Regional Internet Registries, ISOC, and others, you know, we all play parts in that -- ISOC probably has got a broader gamut -- but we all play parts in promoting and operating some of those core operational functions.  But they have a ripple effect across economies and across societies.
 Yesterday, I had a meeting with a series of business people from the International Chamber of Commerce.  And Kim Ambler, who's quite senior in Boeing, quite eloquently said, the things ICANN does has a ripple effect right across the Boeing business, actually.  It's the heart of how Boeing runs manufacturing, because the addressing and I.P. allocation and what's related behind that allows them to do the sort of completely new generation of supply chain management.
 So I think in some respects, at least from my perspective, I think we see the statements in Seoul, and Sam would have spoken to them, I suspect Sam wrote half of them -- but when Sam spoke about Seoul, I suspect he referred to the statement, and if you look at the statement and, it was a consequence of that ripple effect.  These were the people who were being rippled upon.
 And I suspect also Ravi talked about the emphasis of Hyderabad.  Again, it's an aspect where Internet governance, I think, now is taking a much broader definition.  It's looking at how this ripple effect goes through society, how it goes through economies, how it goes through social interaction, how it goes through the business of government, as opposed to governance.
 And I think that's very appropriate.
 We should maintain that we are very keen to be part of it and to support it.  But we're also pleased, frankly, to see that we are understanding the big picture now, we're not focusing on that sort of the core technical part.
 Nevertheless, there's one final aspect of Internet governance that I would like to leave you with, which is our own internal one.
 We put up on -- last week and we talked through again on Monday the process of consultation around what's been a three-year internal discussion for a project -- the project planning for transition and this issue of the joint partnership agreement that ICANN has with the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is due to come to conclusion in September 2009.  To use the language of the Department of Commerce after the midterm review, you know, how do we finalize institutional acceptance or accountability, ensuring institutional stability and acceptance?  And the President's Strategy Committee has put forward five areas.  It's put forward some quite specific points there.  I won't repeat them here for the sake of timeliness.  But we are very much looking forward to your participation in that process.  We are very much looking forward to helping us conduct that consultation process.
 And if you've got networks or opportunity to think you can contribute to the process of operating the consultation, please pass that along to Kieren McCarthy.  We would like to hear about it.
 Part of the timing for that purpose is to have a set of community-driven proposals and recommendations by November and into December, so that we will have something that potentially we will be able to speak to in Hyderabad.
 We expect people are going to have this sort of topic under discussion.  So we're expecting that we will actually have this, be able to report back our own global multistakeholder feedback process upon those (inaudible) issues.  So please participate in that as well.
 And I think that's, Mr. Chairman, my main points to make.
 And if I can beg your indulgence, as the public forum starts now and I'm supposed to be somewhere else.  So I'm going to have to love you and leave you.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Thanks very much, Paul.
 [ Applause ]
 >>PAUL TWOMEY:   It's always after I leave the room.
 [ Laughter ]
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   I've never seen him do an encore before.
 Our final speaker this afternoon is Markus Kummer, who's executive director of the Internet Governance Forum secretariat.  And well-known to everyone in the room, I think.
 Markus, I'm sure, will update us on how planning is going and maybe have some comments about the fit of IGF with some other international organization.
 >>MARKUS KUMMER:   Thank you, Bill.  Maybe also a few words on Seoul.  He was, as many in this room, also there, and I was also struck how forceful the recognition of ministers was of the Internet and also of the Internet community and of multistakeholder cooperation.  And I think it was a long way from Ottawa ten years ago when the subject was e-commerce, much more narrowly defined.  And now it actually did say the Internet economy, but it was very broadly defined, Internet economy, and it touched virtually on all societal aspects.  You grouped your themes under the three C's, convergence, creativity, and confidence, which is a different way of doing it than we have in the IGF context with our five-theme, access, diversity, security, openness, and critical Internet resources.
 But I think, in the end, the same themes were dealt with, albeit in different baskets.
 And, basically, also what you said was -- came across very strongly that the ministers recognized the potential of the Internet as a tool for addressing global problems, and you said, Bill, it's important to maintain the collaborative, distributive -- collaborative character of Internet governance, in the same way, you can turn it around and say we have to learn from the Internet to address global challenges.
 And that also was, for me, a very strong message from the Seoul ministerial, that climate change, for instance, that the Internet and the Internet and its governance models, can play a part in addressing and tackling these problems.
 Network governance was described by some as a key to fighting -- to addressing global challenges, and I think we will hear much more about that in many years to come.
 The IGF, in that sense, can be seen as a laboratory of network governance.  I mean, it is not, as you all know, it's not a hard governance model where decisions are taken.  It is a soft governance model where you share ideas, you share experiences, you share best practices, and, hopefully, you go home with different ideas after having learned something.
 And as our Indian host said, I think you will all be thrilled to see development at work in a city like Hyderabad.  It's really an experience to go there and to -- just to see it happen, how growth happens.  I think one of your officials explained that Hyderabad Technical University turns out 200,000 engineers every year, and they all find a job.  It's amazing, truly amazing.
 Now, in terms of planning our meeting, we have learned from the past, and we thought it would be better not to repeat exactly the same formula, so we tried to group the sessions a little bit differently.  And we also thought there are sort of logical paths, like access and diversity, they go together.  And we fit that under the "Reaching the Next Billion" theme.  
 The same with promoting cybersecurity and trust.  That will deal with the balance between security needs and the importance of openness.
 Managing critical Internet resources, we'll have a strong focus on the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
 And then, as in our previous meetings, we will end up our meeting taking stock, which is more a housekeeping theme, and want to end it again on a high note.  I think last year in Rio, most participants said the last session was actually the best, dealing with emerging issues.  And we hope we'll be able to repeat that this year.
 In terms of planning, right now, we are trying to see how to organize what we call the main session workshops.  And we have approached workshop proponents and asked them whether they would be interested in pooling resources to work together to organize with the MAG main session workshop.
 Presumably, when you bring together people who have different proposals that may not be what we call focused workshops, they would be more like a classic panel dealing with relatively broad issues.
 The innovation will be that these panels will be very much coorganized in a collaborative way.  And then in the afternoon, we will have debate sessions which will not be introduced by lengthy panels.
 So, hopefully, this innovation will bring us a little bit forward in the way we organize the meeting.
 We have plenty of submissions for workshops.  We set the deadline 30th of June.  That's fairly soon.  And I know there are people in this room who have submitted workshops.  And they may not have finalize the template.  Please do so now.  After 30th of June, we will start eliminating those that have not been completed.  But we will also ask proponents of the workshops to merge so that we bring it down to a manageable number.
 But it is our --  We will make, like last year, make an effort to accommodate as many meetings as possible.
 In addition, we also set the deadline 30th of June for asking for a booth in what we call the IGF village.  We don't know yet exactly what it will look like, but we will adapt it also to the demand that we have.  Please send us an e-mail and you are interested in having such a booth to exhibit your institution or organization.
 We will have our last open consultations before the IGF in September in Geneva on 16th of September.  And we open also for comments.  Feel free to submit comments in writing, and, hopefully, then we finalize the program after that September meeting.
 As Ravi said, we will also then start the more practical arrangements, like registration.  And our Indian hosts will make available information on hotel bookings and visa information.  So, hopefully, that we have a smooth planning leading us to Hyderabad.
 I'm happy to answer any questions, I think if we have time.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Good.  Thank you, Markus.  Well, there we have it.
 There's a range of things you might want to talk about, ranging from discussion of what went on in Seoul and with the OECD process and outputs more generally.  Ravi presented some very interesting information about developments going on in India as well as the IGF.  And I'm sure he would be willing to take questions or discussion there.
 And of course Markus has just given us a very good briefing on the current status of the IGF preparations and the new format.  So I expect there may be some questions on that.
 So the floor is open, and Wolfgang, you are first.
 And there are microphones here.  It would be good if we could get a volunteer to help carry them around if people further back need the Mike.  But for now, Wolfgang.
 >>WOLFGANG KLEINWÄCHTER:   One of the things --
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Identify yourself.
 >>WOLFGANG KLEINWÄCHTER:   My name is Wolfgang Kleinwächter.  I am a university professor from Aarhus in Denmark, and I am also involved in the IGF.
 And one of the outcomes was from essence and from Hyderabad IGF was that we have to go to the ground and we have to have other activities on the local level and on the regional level.  Not only on the global level.
 Because a lot of real things are taking place in the real places.
 And this was, in particular, important for the Europeans.  There was a strong delegation of European parliamentarians in the Rio meeting, and in January of this year, in 2008, the European parliament adopted a resolution and decided to have a European Internet Governance Forum in the year 2009.
 So meanwhile, a lot of other activities have taken place and a lot of European groups have said, okay, we have to have a coordinated preparation from Europe for the Hyderabad meeting in order to prepare, more or less, an official European Internet Governance Forum already this year.  We had several meetings.  The French organized a meeting on Friday.  There was a GIGAnet meeting on Monday in the Sorbonne here.  And yesterday evening we had a special small meeting, and I was asked by the members of this meeting to inform you about how things are moving forward in Europe, because we have now already clear dates and clear ideas how to move forward.
 We want to have a similar thing like the IGF on the regional level but not on a formal way.  Do it as informal as possible, as inclusive as possible, as often as possible.  And so we decided yesterday to call this new platform the European dialogue on Internet governance.  The acronym is EuroDIG.
 And it means Europeans are digging into the future of Internet governance.
 So this will take place on October 21-22 in Strasbourg, together with the Council of Europe and European Parliament, and the European Commission.  We are doing outreach for European business organizations, ETNO, ECO, the German Internet economy association.  We want to bring all the civil society organizations from Europe together, the academic institutions, from the Oxford Internet Institute to my own university in Aarhus.  And we think this is a great opportunity really to discuss the issues on a regional level and to prepare people from the region to make very constructive contributions to the meeting in Hyderabad.  And then to get, let's say, inputs and messages from Hyderabad going back to Europe so that we have really this interaction, the sending of messages backwards and forwards on the various levels.
 And having the microphone, I want also to inform you that in Germany, we will have a national IGF in November.  November 11th.  It's called the IGFD, a similar format, multistakeholderism.  And it's just a half-day meeting but it's also a preparation for Hyderabad.
 And having also the microphone, I want to announce that during the ICANN (saying name) meeting in Helsinki, September 4 - 5, we will have a special session about the future of the Internet Governance Forum.
 So I want to say is to encourage everybody to think what they can do at home, what they can do in their region to make the IGF really as the Olympic games of the Internet on an every-year basis, that we have the best ideas and the best proposals, then, in Hyderabad.
 Thank you.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Thanks for that, Wolfgang.
 >>N. RAVI SHANKER:   I would like to respond.  It's an interesting development.  In the month of May there was this parliamentarian forum in Geneva parallel to the MAG meeting.  And the Indian parliamentarian delegation which went there subsequently when they came back they told the speaker of our parliament that we must have a new committee to draft an agenda.
 So we did mention to them that since the IGF secretary is already working on this, the IGF Secretariat may like to liaise with the parliamentarians unions outcome at Geneva.  And such development is taking place already very well, because public representatives have now begun to take keen interest in the activities of the Internet governance.
 And public policy will therefore be a very significant outcome of such interest.
 There would be, on the sidelines, I understand, at IGF in Hyderabad a parliamentarians interaction forum, and that may well be the stage where parliamentarians from across the world could, perhaps, share what are they feeling in their respective constituency and guide the whole thing.  Because ultimately, the IGF will be guided by what would be the public policy outcomes, and it will be a very interesting development.
 I think the pitch has been raised.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Thanks very much, Ravi.  I see a question back there.  Martin Boyle.
 Let's see.
 Thanks very much, Olga, if you can hand that back.
 >> It's a relay.  Perfect.
 >> Dynamic coalition.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   If you could identify yourself.
 >>MARTIN BOYLE:   It's Martin Boyle from Nominet, the dot U.K. registry.  And I certainly welcome hearing Wolfgang's introduction to the European -- general European initiative.  And I think I would actually make a general statement that if the Internet Governance Forum is going to work effectively, people have got to do a lot of thinking.  There's a big, long year in between each and every Internet Governance Forum.  And if people just do the work at the Internet Governance Forum, then it's just going to turn into a talk shop.
 Now, another word for a talk shop is a think tank.  And if we all do a lot of thinking, a lot of preparation, as we lead into the Internet Governance Forum, then we can actually really start making quite a significant difference.
 And along a similar sort of model to the model that Wolfgang was talking about, within the U.K., during the course of the last year and leading up to the Rio meeting, we did a lot of work, this has now led to the very imaginatively named U.K. Internet Governance Forum where we are doing the very same thing of trying to reach out to a very much larger community, trying to understand what real people's specific interests are, and trying to get them to engage in that overall process.
 The second part of our initiative is to identify initiatives that have come up from industry, from civil society, from special interest groups which actually help to contribute to make the Internet a more diverse or a more secure environment.
 And the final bit, which was actually launched at Rio, was launched by one of our parliamentarians present in Rio which was a commitment to walk the talk.  The walk the talk was to take the concepts of a multistakeholder engagement and to apply that on a national framework.  And in our particular case, we're looking at low-level crime, the nuisance on the Internet, and how -- the things that really annoy and irritate Internet users, and to try and help address those very issues.
 In other words, bringing it down to the individual again.
 So just really very much a contribution along the same lines of Wolfgang, but an encouragement that everybody, every country should be thinking very carefully about how to improve their engagement, really to make Hyderabad a great success.
 Thank you, Chair.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Thanks very much, Martin.  There's a gentleman on the aisle here.
 Yes, please, if we can manage to get you a microphone and if you could identify yourself first, please.
 >> (saying name) from ISOC in Sweden.
 I participated in ISOC ECC meeting last night, and many of the chapters, the ISOC chapters in Europe, would like to get together and show how we have made progress in how do you take your Internet further.
 I mean, the ISOC chapters have about ten years of experience, and we have developed, over the years.  In my country, we have looked at the year 2015.  And we would like to share that view with the people at the IGF in December this year.
 The thing is not in place.  We haven't grouped ourselves yet.  But this is in progress.  That's what I would like to say and inform about.
 >>BILL GRAHAM:   Good.  Thank you very much.
 Any other comments or questions?
 Thank you very much.  Anyone on the panel wish to make any comments or ask any questions?  There's a large audience here.  Maybe there's some questions for them.
 No?
 Okay.  Well, thank you very much for attending this.
 I've certainly found it an interesting session.  I would like to thank ICANN for the opportunity, and particularly Pablo Hinojosa for organizing the form, and hope to see you all in Hyderabad, I hope.