INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2010

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
17 SEPTEMBER 2010
Speaker Dr. Bill Drake
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/content/article/102-transcripts2010/715-18
PRINCIPLES OF INTERNET GOVERNANCE DIMENSION OF OPEN KNOWLEDGE
ENVIRONMENT IN BRIDGING DIGITAL DIVIDE
Good morning everybody.
I'm happy to be here, even though I'm not a fan of 9 a.m. panels.
This is my fifth year in a row of being on a panel organised by CAST, which has been a very
interesting experience. I'm always happy to talk with Chinese colleagues on matters of
openness and information flow and related topics. I think this is all very important and it's
precisely the thing that the IGF is for.
Last year's panel we talked about Open Knowledge Environments in a little bit more lower
level operational way. And I spoke in particular about questions of mass collaboration and
Wiki knowledge and some ways of trying to operationalize that.
This time I understood the topic to be about principles that would be guiding for both the
sustaining of an Open Knowledge Environment or building one and sustaining it, and as well
as the global digital divide tackling that. These two are somewhat different spheres, and the
kinds of policies and programmes that you might pursue with regard to one are not
necessarily always going to be directly targeted to the other. So it leads to a certain amount of
dispersion in terms of focus, but that is fine. In the end, everything is interrelated.
I guess I'm going to then try to talk a bit about some principles that I think are important to
these particular environments and questions. Some of which pertain to the governance of the
Internet per se, some of which pertain to governance on the Internet, you might say.
Governance within particular social formations or groupings that exist in the network
environment. And then some are just kind of broader, cross-cutting principles.
And here I have to say I strongly agree with the Lithuanian colleague before who was talking
about, you know, we should not just think about this in relation to high level scientists and
University people and so on. We have to think about it and an Open Knowledge Environment
in a broader sense and one that engages citizens. Increasingly, the boundary lines between
organised education and other parts of social life are becoming more blurry in some respects,
and should be.
So let me just start by offering a few guiding principles with regard to infrastructure. And I
have to say I apologize at the outset, none of these are new or interesting. They are the ones
-- you can spend a lot of time thinking about principles. Ten years ago, I worked for the World
Economic Forum on their global digital divide initiative and wrote a report that went to the
heads of state at the Okinawa summit of the G on how to bridge the digital divide, and all of
the principles that I wrote then were all very generic and they're still the same things we talk
about today. So when it comes to principles, it's not obvious how much evolution you can
really get. I could just repeat the things from then and it would probably work.
But these are just a few points that I'd like to make that I think are particularly apt here.
Clearly, one cardinal principle with respect to the infrastructure that has to be preserved is
security and trust. And this is obviously an essential bedrock. You can't have an Open
Knowledge Environment when people are not sure, A, that the infrastructure is going to be
stable, reliable, and they are not going to be infected with malware and they will not have this

-- they will not download something that is going to track them around the Internet, et cetera,
or that the infrastructure will crash et cetera. So stability of the Internet and stability of
systems attached to it is an open bedrock for an Open Knowledge Environment.
One thing I have to say is that when we ensure and lock things down and make them more
stable, that we have to be aware of the risks of successive securitization. There is a tendency
in many countries, including the United States, to view everything through a security prism,
which foregrounds controlling access and uses and so on, and backgrounds other kinds of
considerations, openness, flexibility, dynamism, et cetera. And this can lead to impediments
being established, which may work against an Open Knowledge Environment. So I
emphasize that point.
Secondly, I think it's important, to the extent that one can, to preserve the universality of the
Internet. One has to be realistic about this. You know, we talk a lot in ICANN these days in
the context of discussions of morality and public order and issues of universal resolvability
and everything has to be reachable everywhere, and so on. But the reality is more complex.
The Internet is becoming more fragmented, also neomedieval in its organisation. But as a
goal to aspire towards, we want to try to preserve universality, avoiding all gardens of various
sorts, whether they are established by corporations or other organisations or exist at the level
of nation states.
Third, Internet operability of the infrastructure. There is the increasing risk of closed
proprietary platforms, technical standards and so on, leading to barriers that would limit the
ability of people to access all kinds of knowledge and information they might need to leverage
the unique benefits of the Internet.
A fourth one I would emphasize, and it's been discussed elsewhere in this forum, is the notion
of network neutrality and the end-to-end principle. This is a broader concept. It's not specific
to Open Knowledge Environments. But nevertheless, if an environment in which increasingly
network operators are choosing to discriminate against particular types of applications, uses,
and so on, you are taking the risk that certain forms of knowledge, certain forms of
information, resources that may be essential to supporting innovation, dynamism and growth
and so on will be more expensive, more limited to work with. So network neutrality is really
going forward going to be one of the important questions with regard to Internet governance.
To date it's been largely an issue that has arisen at the national level.
You know in the US there has been a robust battle and debate about what network neutrality
is and how to promote it. And it's happening in other parts of Europe and other countries. We
have not tried to take it on yet as a global norm, as a global kind of transnational issue, yet
the issues do reach across national frontiers. So we will have to think down the line exactly
how we deal with the questions of network neutrality and discrimination.
Turning from the infrastructure itself to the use of the infrastructure for your information,
communication and content, I would raise a few other principles. And again, most of these
are fairly obvious. One, of course, the cardinal principle from my standpoint would be the
protection of freedom of expression and privacy protection are essential to any kind of Open
Knowledge Environment. Of course, freedom of expression is guaranteed in international
law. But it doesn't necessarily mean so much. Increasingly in the contemporary environment
we are seeing more and more forms of barriers to the open flow of expression and chilling
effects that arise from various forms of surveillance, et cetera. So without a sense of personal
security, without a sense that one can engage in the activities one wants to, how does one
then really participate effectively or construct an Open Knowledge Environment? This is very
difficult.
Another principle that has to be preserved is the user centricity of the Internet. It has to be
fundamentally about empowering people. Andrew McLaughlin in the opening comments used

a phrase I liked very much: Innovation without permission. I thought that was very nice. If
there is anything that has led to the development and growth of the Internet, it's been the
ability of people to engage in innovation without permission. If one looks at the history of
global communications, when we had national PTTs and national monopolies controlling
precisely what you could attach to a network and how you could use it and what rate you
could send data and how you could connect circuits and all sorts of things, there was such a
corpus of kind of top down regulation that restricted the ability of people to engage in
innovation, that it really stifled and misdirected the rate and direction of technological change.
I mean, if one looks at the ways in which, for example, existing technologies and investments
in, for example, telegraph impeded the development of of the international telephone and so
on, you get in those kinds of environments, people essentially were trying to protect their sunk
investments at the expense of innovation. And what we have had in the Internet is a different
environment. One is much more open and allows people to do things from the bottom up.
That has to be preserved. It's important for developing country, I would argue, if we're going
to talk about bridging the digital divide, you can't bridge the digital divide if people are limited
in what they can do with the net and resources.
Unfortunately, Hung Ju left, but she raised a point that I emphasize as well. Access to
knowledge. It's a general kind of principle. And it's, as she noted, it's a large scale
transnational social movement around this. And it's very, I think, important. Because we are
constantly dealing with the reality that, you know, in the effort to protect intellectual property,
sometimes the kinds of measures that are put in place may prove a bit restrictive in terms of
people's ability to utilize, deploy, remix samples, add on to and alter forms of information. And
this can limit, in particular, the ability to engage in mass collaboration and the kind of
decentralized production and sharing of knowledge that I think is essential to an Open
Knowledge Environment.
So, as we think about how to do this, preserving access to knowledge and avoiding a
situation in which we have got a lot of kind of top down barriers being imposed, while of
course it's a matter of balance, while of course protecting intellectual property, but not
necessarily. You want to protect the property rights of the creator, I argue, and I know there
are people in the room who disagree with me, more than sort of large intermediary
organisations that might position themselves to leverage those resources.
Open network research tools and programmes are increasingly important. Collaborative
efforts and developing open source tools, et cetera, and establishing rules for how these
things are managed are really key, ensuring rapid disclosure of research results and
compiling things in open, accessible digital archives, these are the kinds of programmes and
initiatives that have to be supported.
More generally, openness and higher education, I think, is very important. It's been very
interesting for somebody coming out of an academic background to see the transformations
that happened in recent years. If you look at things like what MIT has done with its open
courseware initiative or what other institutions are doing. Or even now you can like go on
iTunes and go to the iTunes University, which is a funny idea, if you think about it, and
download pod casts of people lecturing, et cetera, this is an extraordinary thing in terms of
Democratizing access to higher education and knowledge. It's a fantastic thing. But we need
to do more to preserve and expand openness of access to higher education and its outputs.
Part of the problems here are internal to higher education. It drives me crazy, being an
academic, that the professional norms that exist within higher education, the way people get
rewarded for work, you know, that all the incentives are to sort of treat your informational
outputs as proprietary things. They are positional goods, rather than sharing and making

them open, et cetera. You try to protect them, lock them down, et cetera. And this is also
supported and furthered by the journals that we have. My God, you can't -- I -- I'm organising
a course right now that I start teaching next week in Zurich, and I tried to find materials to
assign the students. Even my own articles, I find out that the journal that I published in costs
$500 a year to subscribe. And if I would like to assign a copy of my Article to the students,
they have to pay $3 each. Now, $3 each doesn't seem like a lot.
But times all the things that will be assigned, it starts to add up. So we have to do more in the
way of promoting more open journal, open ways of sharing information, et cetera.
With regard to higher education, I'm a big supporter of the open movement with researchers
and students. Efforts to try to limit how many foreign students come into the country and
control what they do are problematic. We need to expand access to education on a global
basis, on a transnational basis.
Cultural linguistic diversity also has to be supported not by regulation, not by trying to limit or
control some information providers and their ability to send things out, but rather by
supporting from the bottom up the ability of people within developing countries to produce
local products, local information forms within their languages, cultures and so on.
Turning to a couple cost cutting principles, and they are all obvious, multi-stakeholder peer
based design planning is essential to an Open Knowledge Environment. You can't have an
open knowledge environment that is designed by one set of social actors with the exclusion of
other social actors. There has to be a cooperative relationship.
Development has to be viewed as a cross-cutting imperative, applicable to both infrastructure
and content. We had a main session on Internet governance for development in which we
tried to, at least for the first time, broach the idea within IGF of what does it mean to view
Internet governance through a developmental lens and to prioritize development and to try to
think about how do you add that into the mix as a sort of imperative when assessing and
choosing policy initiatives and programmes and designing procedures? And I think that this
has to be furthered substantially and that includes capacity building.
Finally, we need to maintain multilayered and highly differentiated patterns of international
cooperation. We have to recognize that all the different types of international institutions and
processes that we designed play an important role, and that mix has to be somewhat stable.
In her introductory comments, Professor Liu Chuang raised the point about an integrated and
coherent policy system. That sounds great. I think everybody likes the idea of coherence.
But we have to recognize that increasingly in the contemporary environment, if coherence
means harmonization, it's going to be hard to achieve. At the global level, we find that there
are just too diverse set of interests involved and too many dynamics to sort of lock in kind of
fixed global harmonized approaches. And we have to recognize and live with a more
differentiated and distributed architecture of governance mechanisms, and figure out how to
interface those effectively and live with the differences.
Variable geometry I think is the future, if not the present.