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# IGF 2018 WS #275 Before you know it, Internet governance will be irrelevant

Format:

Round Table - 90 Min

Theme:

Evolution of Internet Governance

Subtheme:

MULTISTAKEHOLDERISM

Organizer 1: PABLO HINOJOSA, APNIC
Organizer 2: Farzaneh Badii, Internet Governance Project

Speaker 1: Wafa Ben-Hassine, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Christian Kaufmann, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 3: Geoff Huston, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Additional Speakers:

Speaker 1: Wafa Ben-Hassine, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Christian Kaufmann, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 3: Geoff Huston, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG) (remote)

Speaker 4: Representative from IETF

Relevance:

The decentralized and distributed nature of the Internet made it possible to reach a historical global interconnectedness. There is a danger however that the distributed nature disappears or weakens. In the last years more and more traffic moved to Cloud Providers and from there get delivered to Internet end users via various Content Distribution Networks. (Refer to Huston blog on this issue, referenced below) If this trend continues then more and more traffic flow will bypass the public Internet (transit and Internet Exchange Points). If just a handful of global companies exchange the majority of the traffic in the world then technical standards bodies such as the IETF might become irrelevant and policies from the Internet governance processes might become ineffective. Only few actors will have incentives and the power to get involved with the standard setting at the Internet architecture level. All in all we will see fewer actors that can get engaged with Internet governance and the bottom up, global Internet governance might slowly be replaced by few corporations standards and rules. Policy questions: 1. What policy issues does the death of transit create? 2. What policy recommendations can overcome this issue?

Session Content:

The session will start with laying out the problem statement. It will discuss whether and to what extent the centralization and privatization of Internet traffic by a handful of organizations will harm standards settings, Internet governance, and Internet rights. It will address the following questions: What changes does the consolidation of transit bring in Internet standard setting and Internet governance? How would this change affect our Internet rights? Would we have better privacy protection, freedom of expression and balanced copyrights enforcement? Should we prevent the death of transit from happening? In case we want to prevent it from happening, what policy steps should we take?

Interventions:

The moderator starts with setting the agenda and laying out the issue. The technical and business community (Geoff Huston from APNIC and Christian Kaufmann from Akamai) will discuss how the consolidation of traffic is happening and why it can be problematic for Internet governance. The representative from IETF (Alissa Cooper) will provide her viewpoints about this issue and the problems it can raise for standard setting. Civil Society representatives discuss why centralization can affect our Internet rights and which rights are affected. Other stakeholders representatives that align with the opinion that consolidation of Internet traffic is problematic for Internet governance or have a different opinion will be encouraged to attend the session.

Diversity:

We have madae sure that there is diversity among the speakers and the participants in terms of gender, stakeholder group, and region as well as diversity of view and opinions. We have confirmed participants from IXPs and IETF (the chair of IETF Alissa Cooper) and we are planning to invite others who can bring different perspectives, not necessarily as presenters but as participants and discussants.

Online Participation:

The moderator will come up with a strategy for better inclusion of online participants in collaboration with the online moderator. The strategy (briefly) includes: 1. Publicize the session and the remote participation details across all the stakeholders and networks (the technical community, civil society, others) so that online participants know about the opportunity to get engaged online 2. As well as WebEX, we identify other platforms that should be monitored for remote participants to comment and get involved with the session. (for example Twitter and we will publicize a hashtag for our session) 3. Reach out to established remote hubs to see if they are interested in attending the session and if they would like to submit questions before the session 4. We will include the online participants in all the activities that will happen during the session and the moderator will prepare them in advance of the session 5. The moderator will also monitor the remote participation room

Discussion Facilitation:

This will be an unconventional roundtable, it is not necessarily a fishbowl nor a shark tank, but while the speakers take turns to speak, at any time the online participants or the participants in the room can make comments related to that segment (the moderator keeps the time to give equal time for each segment) We will provide statements in the end for the online participants, participants and discussants to agree with or disagree with and based on the answers we will shape the outcome report of the session and take our next policy steps.

Onsite Moderator:

Farzaneh Badii

Online Moderator:

A representative from APNIC

Rapporteur:

Farzaneh Badii

Reference Document: https://blog.apnic.net/2016/10/28/the-death-of-transit/

Session Time:
Tuesday, 13 November, 2018 - 16:40 to 18:10
Room:
Salle III

## Archived Content

- 2017 IGF: Geneva
- 2016 IGF: Jalisco
- 2015 IGF: João Pessoa
- 2014 IGF: Istanbul
- 2013 IGF: Bali
- 2012 IGF: Baku
- 2011 IGF: Nairobi
- 2010 IGF: Vilnius
- 2009 IGF: Sharm El Sheikh
- 2008 IGF: Hyderabad
- 2007 IGF: Rio de Janeiro
- 2006 IGF: Athens

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## Contact Information

United Nations
Secretariat of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)

Villa Le Bocage
Palais des Nations,
CH-1211 Geneva 10
Switzerland

igf [at] un [dot] org
+41 (0) 229 173 678