The 3rd Internet Governance Forum was held in Hyderabad, India on 3-6 December 2008. As many as 1,200 plus registered participants from 94 countries attended the Forum.
The Forum participants focused on five principal themes:
- Next billion Internet users (issues of ensuring Internet access and expansion of multilingualism)
- Cybersecurity and enhancement of confidence (combating cybercrime, ensuring protection of the right to privacy and personal data, Internet’s openness)
- Governance of critical Internet infrastructure (transition from IPv4 to IPv6, governance of the DNS system, governance of the root servers, Internet standards)
- Assessment of achievements and outlook
- Plumbing issues – Internet of the future.
On the first day of the Forum, the participants discussed issues of increase in the number of Internet users to the next billion through deployment of multilingual Internet and expansion of access to it. Panelists admitted that creation by the global user community of content in national languages and ensuring broad access to this information was paramount. In addition, the participants noted that it was equally important to provide users with such localized products as software, browsers, keyboards, and search engines, etc. The launch of domain names, which employ symbols of their national scripts (IDN), is also critical for the expansion of multilingualism in the Internet.
The first day was also marked by a panel on issues of accessibility and openness of the DNS system and launch of alternative identification and addressing systems . For example, DOI, Digital Object Identifier, identification system of the Internet content. This issue is not only about the DNSSEC project but about the legal and technical problems which emerge during its implementation. It is also about deployment of “alternative” addressing and numbering systems, which provide a more convenient deployment of network resources.
On the second day of the Forum, the participants focused on the main theme, that is discussion of cybersecurity and combating cybercrime. Panelists discussed methods of combating gravest threats to cybersecurity (such as spam, bot-nets, viruses, DDos-attackes, identity thefts, and other types of fraud), as well as issues of illegal content. The discussants focused on combating child pornography. It can be ascertained that at least on this issue there is broad consensus, which is based on a large number of national legislative norms. They may be incorporated in the legal systems worldwide. This fact ultimately contributes to their harmonization.
Discussants focused on the fact that the basic legal problem of ensuring cybersecurity lies in jurisdiction and geographical boundaries and a slow adaptation of legislative tools to the rapidly changing technological situation. In addition, all panelists admitted the fact that law enforcement agencies always fail to catch up with criminal activities. It is therefore critical to have an efficient international cooperation in ensuring cybersecurity, cyberconfidence, and cyberintegrity. Many discussants supported the idea of paramount importance of such organizations as CERTs (Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Russia has its own RU-CERT). In the context of global flows of information, it is critical to have a network of various interconnected organizations tasked with ensuring a rapid response to cyber threats.
The panelists once again noted the importance of the Convention on Cybercrime of the Council of Europe as a harmonizing instrument designed to solve issues of jurisdiction in regard to criminal acts. With regard to civil law relations, the participants advised to deploy norms of international private law. In addition, each state enjoys full jurisdiction over activities in the Internet that violate the law of that state.
Currently many states deploy Notice & Take Down procedure (when at the police’s request the service provider removes any content on the Internet without the court’s decision) when deciding to remove any content on the Internet. Many experts acknowledge this procedure as a new form of censorship, under which the police replace judicial authorities and ISPs are implementers, and therefore call upon the states to review the mechanisms of this procedure.
Along with issues of ensuring security, the participants discussed the balance of measures taken to ensure security, the right to privacy, the right to information, as well as the right to freedom of expression. All experts expressed concern that by ensuring security, the balance of protection of other important human rights - privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of information - is broken. In this respect, international experts practice distinctive approaches in treating identification and authentication, when these concepts are not mixed and do not appears synonymic. That said, European experts referenced to a rapid pace of technological progress and to date there has been no explicit need to run an " inventorying" of already outdated legislation on protection of personal data. Development of such social networks as YouTube, MySpace, “Odnoklassniki” and “Vkontakte” speaks for the need to change the approach and model of regulation. It often happens that the use of voluntarily provided by the Internet users information downloaded from such social networks leaves them unprotected, "naked". That is to say, this causes a complete lack of anonymity, even in cases where anonymity should be provided and protected. The issue of protecting Internet users’ personal data of now poses one of the most profound challenges to the European experts.
The issue of transition from IPv4 to IPv6 was in the focus of discussion. The participants tackled the problem of critical InternetI infrastructure. Despite the fact that countries such as USA, India, Japan, Korea, and some European ones are in transition from one protocol to the other, this issue is controversial and often causes a lot of claims and stirs disputes. Various experts assert that transition to a different protocol is an extremely costly exercise, not giving any commercial edge to service providers. In addition, the lack of uniform standards and regulations represents yet another obstacle to the worldwide deployment of IPv6. As a result, some experts expressed the view that the process of the final transition to IPv6 will never come, with both protocols, IPv6 and IPv4, in coexistence. A representative of the Ministry of Telecommunications of Japan re ckoned, in turn, that their plans are designed to make IPv6 a uniform standard for the Japanese users and companies by 2010.
The participants focused on issues of the Internet’s development and development of legislation on Internet relations in the coming year. Most participants acknowledged that in some countries the Internet is often regarded as a political tool, which is why those countries impose significant restrictions on the Internet, including a disproportionate decrease of the users’ anonymity and restrictions on content. The Asia-Pacific region, excluding China, boasts of the most open Internet.
As far as issues of legislation on the Internet in the short run, then the most pressing problems of regulation differ significantly due to the degree of the Internet’s maturity in a given country and the effective legislation. For example, in the U.S., where the Internet law is very mature, e-banking, e-shipping, and a further improvements of electronic commerce and electronic transactions should form pressing regulatory issues in the near future. Besides, revamping national normative bases in the light of the need caused by deployment of IDNs will shortly form an urgent global challenge.
More detailed information on the Internet Governance Forum and its background is available at: www.intgovforum.org.
