These are unedited transcripts and may contain errors.
The Cooperation Working Group session on 4 May, 2011, at 2 p.m.
MARIA HALL: Anyway, hello. I think we can start a little bit after 2:00, so I think we have to move on. We have a lot of interesting discussions, I hope, today. Anyway, very welcome to the RIPE Cooperation Working Group, I am one of the co chairs, Maria Hall, I am working for the Swedish Government, the Ministry for Energy, I want to present my other co chair, that is Patrik Falstrom sitting in front. He is a little bit disabled right now so he won't move that much. Anyway, I am very happy to see you all here, actually, and I think it's going to be very interesting to see other things, actually, on the agenda today. We have been talking about many things which we need to cooperate with the public sector and business and technical community, a lot of these multi stakeholder discussions but things are moving forward and we have many things that I find very interesting to discuss today, and one of the very things I think is going to be good to hear your point of view and your input is about the intermediaries' role so that is upcoming next. I want to say thank you to Chris who is going to be taking care of the minutes and I wish I could have your approval also for the last, the minutes from the last meetings, do we have any objections from anybody? No? Very good.
I think I'll just move forward and I'll let the floor over to the moderators for the next session, that is going to be Patrik and Paul.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you very much. There is a lot of discussion around Internet intermediaries and I need my presentation.
And one of the reasons why we would like to talk about this is because of feedback we got at the previous sessions. The Cooperation Working Group, as we know all, a lot of people here, thank you very much, is supposed to be somewhere, a place where people that normally work in different organisations and different places, different processes, can exchange information about something. Something that they feel is important. And one of the things we have not been talking about so much is who is responsible for what. And one of the things that, what I mean by that, is, for example, which I will come back to, for example, if it is the case that someone has committed a crime on line, who is responsible to do something and what kind of tools do that party or those parties have at their disposal? There is a lot of discussion regarding integrity, freedom of speech and other things going on, so let me give a background I would like to talk a bit more about it and show you what I think the problem is.
In, one of the things that happened the last couple of years, is that I claim that we have seen a change in how Internet is in use because, historically, Internet has been very much used by IT companies or people like many in this room, including myself are really happy when can issue a ping and get a response and then I am done. There are some other people working with websites and those kind of fluffy things but that fluff that I call fluff is what today drives the Internet very much. And not only that, I claim the last year, we have seen Internet and the agent to use the Internet is needed for non IT companies and and more traditional processes. For example, one example that I normally use is that the major one of the major milk producing companies in Sweden, nowadays in the evening if one evening, one of the chefs in on TV is using yoghurt in the recipe, they needed to use the Internet and contact the various factories they have and produce an extra amount of yoghurt than what they normally do and make sure that the shops nowadays compared to five years ago have extra amount of yoghurt in the morning the day after because, historically, if the chef used it or salt or whatever the next day, it was immediately ran out. That kind of thing, not only in time delivered but changing what you are producing is something that was probably not possible to do without the Internet. So, Internet is nowadays, I claim, much more needed than it has ever been before.
We also see that the number of hosts that we have connected to the Internet, I have used a normal Hostcount and many people in this room now that is not going on any more so what I have done I did Hostcount and extrapolation from there, so, well, my master isn't maths, I know this is wrong but the graph is nice.
So, but there is sort of no one that objects to the idea that we have sort of exponential growth and the additional number of hosts or nodes connected to the Internet, people of course ask so why are what is the growth coming from, and it's coming from, of course, all these smart phones that are connected much longer times, instead of having 100 phones chafing same IP address, 100 phones connected all the time. Internet of things which is actually the normal serial base systems that nowadays control houses and ventilation and stuff and air conditioning is now turning into using the IP protocol and there are various other growth factors as well. The introduction of this I heard about it like IPv6 thing or something, maybe, yeah.
But the interesting thing, if you look at this graph, everything up until 2010 is actually numbers that I have been able to find. It is that people talk about the dot come boom was so serious and we didn't really know in society how we could take care of it and still it's not even noticeable. So even though we had an explosion or implosion point in 2001 the growth is still happening. So just because we have all of this happening, everyone needs the Internet and the search engines, blah blah, the Internet providers. People in OECD, in the European Commission, many places have started to talk about Internet intermediaries and specifically intermediaries as being parties that are wholesale providers, they are not supposed to, within quotes, touch the traffic or what other people are doing and we have, in the IETF context talk about the end to end principle where we have intermediaries in between. And now a question to all of you, I want some of you to raise your hands: How many you in here do think that you have sorry, how many you in the room do believe that you have a view of what an intermediary is? Can you please raise your hand? OK. Good. Because we are going to have a discussion, now, I am going to tell what you OECD claim an intermediary is. This is a good start and you can compare what you thought with OECD. It has a couple of papers, and they have been divided intermediaries into, you can see yourself, Internet access and service providers, data processing and web hosting providers, etc., Internet search engines, web eCommercial intermediaries that are divided in two different groups, eCommercial payment systems which are divided in three different groups, participative networked platforms and the last bullet, in turn, is divided in these sub bullets. Okay, from a technical perspective, it doesn't maybe make much sense but this is verbatim from their documents.
For example, sites allowing feedback on written words. We know from like an Internet point of view, we don't really know what a written word is, right?
So, but what we do see is that more and more people are using Internet for pretty important things. So this is a picture I found that, the picture that from a a progress in Cisco where we help with cellphone build outs. We see, this is a wine merchant uses the Internet to know how much of the grapes he uses he's actually going to sell and how much he is actually going to produce wine himself, depending on the price. And another change, of course, is that everyone of us would like to access the services where we are, which is the end to end principle so various changes, so everyone sort of believed that the Internet should be like at least on the northern part of the northern part of the northern hemisphere have something called ice sometimes and we think this ice hockey rink is pretty cool, can use it for various different times, maybe not at the same time but at least we can, all of us, play there. We would like to have it open and free and everyone can do whatever they want.
This leads to the requirement that of course, the end user is the one that make the choice of communication and because of that the intermediaries must be neutral. But on the other hand, if it is the case that someone has committed a crime, as you know there are a lot of parties that the intermediaries do have a role; for example, blocking access to illegal consent and services, doing things like data retention and legal intercept which we have found in the communication world. So we have sort of, one group that talks about how neutral intermediaries are and another one on what role they have. And then I have added, so normally you see two axe he is and the question is how to calculate the balance but I added a third here which is coming lately with Apple that is sort of collecting things, the position, you have Facebook and many other like businesses that make money by have a business interest where the goal for the businesses is to maximise the revenue for the shareholder, if you extrapolate all the bit. I claim we have 3 different axeees here and many people, including probably us in the room, including myself, is advocating mostly for only one of them, and if you look at various documents that are published, normally it's only in the viewpoint of one of these access. So the overall question I would like to see: Where do and how do we calculate a proper balance between those three forces?
Here is one example: The other day, Robert Madeline in the European Commission said this. You can read it yourself. So obviously, he is arguing that the Internet is bad. We have to do something about this. His warning, we don't really know what that implies, but he is walking people that talk from about freedom of speech and open Internet. At the same time, about network neutrality, we see these kind of things. This could include the prohibition of the blocking of lawful services". Of course, the wording is chosen very, very carefully so you have the people talk about we need to block illegal content and illegal services and we need to ensure that we have neutrality and openness, but in reality, I don't see, for example, this document, talk about how to handle non lawful services.
And a lot of people talk about, like this one, that talks about the Hungarian Presidency talks about building a big firewall at the border of Schengen, the question is what to do with UK and Switzerland. So here it talks about whereby the Internet service providers would block illicit content." Wait a second. The ISPs, those are the intermediaries. OK. So once again, freedom, openness, businesses want to make money and law enforcement agencies have some needs.
Can we go back?
So with that as an introduction, please. Anyone have anything to add or say, what do you think, what should be done, is there anything we should do in the RIPE region, is there anything you know is happening that you are worried about where you are in your part of the world, etc.?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Niall O'Reilly. I don't know where weather this would be a useful contribution or not but when I see three axes like that because of my mathematical engineering background, I think where are the curves, are the surfaces that show how moving along one of those axes is related to moving along another one? And depending on the shape of those curves we may get something that tends towards optimising two of those and not doing too bad Lyon the third one or tends to excluding two of those while optimising only the first one and we have to look at finding the right kind of shape for the surface in the space that those axes map out. I don't know how to begin to do that, probably other people have better ideas.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Do you see a follow up question, do you see anyone thinking about that problem? And if not, do you think do you see do you have some kind of view of who should do it because awful us talk about multi stakeholder models, everyone should participate in that, do you see anything happening or as an information?
NIALL O'REILLY: Is that you singular directed at me or plural directed at the moment?
PATRIK FALSTROM: Well, directed at the moment, but you are at the microphone.
NIALL O'REILLY: I am the wrong person to ask, he who lives in a cave.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Ignore my question.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Benedict, freelance IPv6 guy. There is one problem with regulation that I find rather frustrating that it doesn't get considered two separate issues. Now, there is a problem about regulation that is concerned with net neutrality and everything, that is one discussion, and it gets with law enforcement and other things. There is something else that I think we could actually and I know a lot of you will hit me for this, where I think we could actually need some sort of regulation and the regulators don't do anything about it. In Germany, we have large numbers of ADSL providers offering telephone knee services over ADSL as well. Now, they offer these with a reliability of up to 99%, which means they guarantee me about 90 hours per year of downtime, if we take it literally. If you have to make an emergency phone call, what they sell as replacement telephone service is long way away from it. And I think there is something else we should take into consideration here, which this is going to sound old fashioned but responsibility and responsibility in a way that is directly conflicting with the money making business.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you very much for adding that. I actually hear you saying two things: The first one has to do with the responsibility and the other one I hear is information which, in the new telecom telecom directive that is implemented, I think it's called transparency, which means that the consumer should be informed before buying what the actual differences are. So I think you talk about both of them.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: It's not so much about informing the consumers because they always go for the cheapest stuff, if they don't understand the business. You do the same if you go shopping and buy some sort of thing you never heard before, you go by price eventually. I thinks responsibility for the regulatory bodies to ensure that people aren't sold something that is dangerous to them.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you. AUDIENCE SPEAKER: You just brought up the plain or optimalisation bit Oh, my name is Olaf at Internet citizen I would say in this context. The first thing that came to mind is public benefit as sort of a plain that goes through this three dimensional thing and my feeling is that in the non Internet space we have quite some experience in the tussle between the law enforcement access and the freedom and openness axis, to find for each specific problem space, the sweet spot where the best public benefit is, and of course, that is a political question, in most cases. How that works into the of business making money and so, so on, that is also where regulation comes in and that hooks back to what the previous speaker said about IPv6 and ADSL and those kind of things. Making available technology that is actually in the public benefit in the long term. I am not quite sure if this is usual contribution, but thinking in terms of public benefit, and ultimising for that is probably something that at least politicians are in the business of and probably most of the technicians that are in this room are, too.
PATRIK FALSTROM: So that public benefit is sort of this surface plain that Niall was talking about earlier.
JIM REID: I think he is right when he says public benefit that is a phrase that can mean many different things to different people and what we consider here might be different from what the government of China considers to be public benefit, so there are problems here but I think to go back to to the point I was intending to make here, is that the three dimensional axis you have here, Patrik, might be a bit simplest I can, I think there might be many more control plains than this and that scares me a bit and I don't know how we are going to get these things to intersect in a way that means meaningful sense. An example, at least that happened in the UK: The government passed a law to, amongst other things, for us ISPs to start whacking people about the head if they were doing too much illegal downloading and two of the biggest tuning the government to court to challenge the legality of this law. This was about good old BT standing up for net neutrality and all of the rest of it, what it was about was BT trying to avoid excessive costs and businesses make money. So the alliances there kind of change. That is my personal perspective. I don't know if any of this is true, so don't go back and say this is what I said is happening here. So there may be differences of opinion where an alliance towards one, might want to associate themselves with law enforcement to gang up against businesses or to align themselves with law enforcement against freedom and openness people have thank have competing interests here and additional dimensions. How to deal with enabling the Internet for people who are disabled or don't have the ability to use the Internet in the way that we have the ability to use it, how do we deal with getting the Internet to people in the developing parts of the world and there is a whole new set of problems there and I don't know how we get these things together. Obviously this Working Group can have some kind of forum for this dialogue but I do think we have to find some way of getting to other organisations in and bringing them in or finding some other forum to discuss these things.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you. One simple example I do regarding the problem you talk about is, if you look at one of those axis, regarding what law enforcement agencies do, having so many documents and statements saying no one should block lawful content and services, and the problem is the deaf figures of what is lawful and not is not harmonised in the world, such a simple I think that creates for me headache.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From the NATS and chair of the working party in the RIPE NCC. I think what you are showed us on the graph there is exactly we are basically running into each other at every meeting. What you hear everywhere. I think it shows us we are moving into a new world, like you said in 2010, 2025, from a raw enforcement side, whether industry side or government side or sort of dancing around each other to find out what we should be doing together on this topic, and I think that the Cooperation Working Group, as it is, could be a right forum, together with the round table, to get the right people into the room and look to these topics that we are now all shouting about and you showed some strange examples from the European Commission recently, that need to be gone to in depth and together and I think only when you start talking about this in a constructive way and reach out to each other like the cybercrime working party is doing, towards law enforcement agencies which is actually changing the way the RIPE NCC is looking at the topics that law enforcement thing is important but the other way around, law enforcement is now starting to understand how RIPE works and that they will actually have to participate, which is something completely new and alien to them because they are not used to that, they are used to saying want this from you and now, it doesn't work that way. For governments, that is the other angle, I think that the RIPE or RIPE NCC could actually help governments make the regulation that is undoubtably coming one way or another. All these threats are now vulnerabilities are shown on the Internet in the past only weeks from Sony, to RSA, whatever, it's a trend to publicise it, so that means the problem is going exponentially faster and the awareness of the public is growing exponentially faster. So if we can get together in a room and when the real major incident, if it ever is going to happen, happens, then maybe politicians and policy makers will not be panicked because they are already dealing with the topic in a constructive way with the people that should be dealing with this. I think the Cooperation Working Group is a very good forum to try and get the right people in and start discussing these sort of topics and help each other where it's possible because industry has knowledge that governments don't have and the other way around.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Constanze from German government. What I learned from this discussion is that we get awareness to all the topics we have to discuss in the next time, and I think we have to figure out hour roles in the governments, what we shall do and what we have to do in a common way. I think we have to find out hour responsibilities that we can use the freedom of the Internet in the complex way, but on the other hand, we have the responsibility to that this freedom is not abused, so we have to find the right way to find resolution and to discuss it. I think the best thing is we discuss in Germany the net neutrality theme and cybercrime and in the Internet many things happen without regulation, and we don't know what it is, but we have to find it out and I think we have to find it out together and so this discussion helps to find the right way.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you very much. Let me add that as many of you know, I am also, since a number of years back, helping the Swedish Government as an advisor. And I agree with you, inside the Swedish Government and I look at Maria and see whether she is going to hit me in the head or thank me for saying this you have one group that talk about openness, competition issues, freedom of expression, and then there is another group that talk about cybercrime issues. So you have inside one government that is within one cultural region that should have, should be more harmonised than the global world that Jim was talking about, not even there we managed to sit around the same table and sort of do the correct calculation of the benefits. So I agree with you, yeah.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much. I just want to have a comment, I said what Constanze from Germany said and Patrik. I think it's severe for us for the government working with legislation because that is what we do. Most of the things we do is going to end up in some kind of legislation and sometimes I get the feeling that we, as a government, officials, we don't actually know how Internet works and then, you know, understand it's going to be such a big problem to kind of create legislation without understanding, how it works. Who is owning the cable and what responsibility does that party have, who is running the IP level and so on. That is something I meet very often inside my government offices, together with my colleagues, that sometimes it's lack of understanding how it works. So that is one thing that is very, very important for us, having this kind of discussions and for me having feedback from you, actually. And another thing I just want to add before handing over the floor, I am sorry, is that sometimes I also get the feeling do you want do we actually really want another legal framework for the on line world than the off line world? Like, why does it have to be different? Why can't we just think in the normal way. Who is the criminal activities? Who is doing criminal activities? Who has the legal responsibility for taking decisions? And so on. And that is something that sometimes struck me, like Internet something completely different. And I don't think it is actually. Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I am from Canada, here to see how you all do things because the perception is in many years, IPv6, Europe is much further ahead. Most I think that gives me a licence to ask a few questions. From where I sit the Internet typically tends to work pretty well most of the time. I don't think that's different in Europe than in Canada. How is cooperation and intermediary discussion been done until now? And I don't dispute the need for this to happen going forward but I am wondering how it has happened until now and why the discussion today; is it just that we are worried with Patrik's graphs of growth continuing to go vertical, that mechanisms we have had until now won't scale and won't be good enough or we have just been lucky until now and there hasn't been any proper mechanism to discuss?
PATRIK FALSTROM: I think the short answer is from a European regulatory perspective we have looked at intermediaries from a competition perspective. Like universal service obligations and other things and extrapolated from there, looked at the need for opening up the copper access and other kind of things, and then there have been a separate discussion regarding responsibilities regarding corporate infringement, various court cases in some countries in Europe regarding search engines that have been forced to remove material from their caches, so it has been all over the place and a bit unfocused. Started to become more focused, law enforcement agencies have started to talk with businesses and technical communities and regulators because now when we do have some hands on real needs, then of course people actually sit down and talk about the real problems pause there are real knees now and that is why it's sort of from my perspective it has started to become much more constructive, the last six months or; than earlier. Earlier, all over the place. And also that EECD bring things together.
PAUL RENDEK: Paul Rendek from the RIPE NCC I wanted to add a little to that from the OECD perspective because the RIPE NCC is one of the organisations that is a part of I tack which is the advisory advisory group inside of the OECD, part of the technical advisory group to the OECD, they have civil society and business all feeding in. The OECD published a paper on intermediaries some time ago and this was distributed through the technical community and they asked for our feedback on that so they are active in what they are doing, what their definitions and working with all the different areas. That has been happening.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you, I am Malcolm hutty. Amongst my various hats I work for LINX, the London Internet Exchange and president of represent the interests of Internet service providers. I was so pleased to see someone from government taking the microphone, how delightful it is. Maria has, for many years, been a stalwart at RIPE meetings, but it's hard to develop a cooperative relationship that can develop ideas for approaches how the community can work with government develop issues of public policy. If the people who you are not supposed to be cooperating aren't there to work with, so it's delightful to see people coming to this meeting but I wished there were rather more because looking around the world, a couple of vulnerable exceptions I would like to see more. Please concentrate on encouraging and please bring your friends.
PATRIK FALSTROM: We actually had a couple more government people that wanted to come but unfortunately there was a high level group scheduled in Brussels a few weeks ago, for today, so we have a couple of cancellations for people that couldn't come. But that meeting was scheduled the same time as this, or vice versa, it might also be an indication that we don't do enough good job.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I wasn't trying to be critical of anyone.
PATRIK FALSTROM: I'm just trying to inform, with a bit more luck we could have had a few more.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Can I turn to the substantive question, and I don't want to deal with network neutrality which is going to complicate matters here but on the question of liability and it's really building upon the point that Maria made around developing frameworks. There is a question here of the justice system and I don't mean justice as a goal, I mean it as the system, the legal framework, what kind of justice system do we want for the Internet? Because there is no doubt there are bad guys out there, and they they do bad things and have content that is against the law and they perform activities that are against the law, and various laws, whatever, we won't go into the details and jurisdictional things but there is stuff that is prohibited, content and activity and there are people whose responsibility it is to suppress that illegal activity, law enforcement officials of various natures, and there are private organisations and individuals whose rights have been infringed as well and they want to say yes, that is bad over there, can it be made to stop, please. And we have to decide, well, what is the mechanism by which that happens; if it is direct to the intermediary, then what are the mechanisms to determine whether or not that is indeed true that it is an illegal activity or not or mistake or justified, whether it's been malicious allegation been made; how do you judge those things as an intermediary? Can an intermediary that is private sector network operator call in evidence, compel witnesses, hold hearings and so forth? Are these decisions going to inevitably be made ex parte, that is without the presence of the person who is accused of being doing the illegal activity? And who action is going to be taken against if they are, at the request of the person that is making the complaint? Should they have a right to be heard and be heard and according to what standards and how is this framework going to be held? If you place the intermediary in a position of the adjudicator, you have to ask all these questions around the development of an administrative system of justice that have been developed over the course of centuries, frankly. So, while I appreciate that it is attractive for those that have a large log of complaints that they would like to make, whether they are law enforcement agencies or intellectual property holders or other people that have legitimate reasons for wanting to make complaints, to go direct to the intermediary and ask them please can you take action against this directly. If we as a society, as an Internet society, we create a system whereby that is what happens without any form of adjudication, then we have really changed the system of justice from the on line world from the off line world to the on line world, we don't have an actual process of justice and that I think would be something we should look at very carefully before we go into that. So I would like the responsibility for this at government, actually. It is government's role to design systems of justice. It is government's role to define where it is that action should be taken ex parte and all only only having heard the person who is to be action is to be taken against. It is government's role to balance the necessary and important needs of law enforcement agencies against the rights of the citizen not to have action against them taken without a fair hearing. These are the areas for government, and right now, the issues that governments are dealing with are hearing complainants of various types saying stuff bad stuff is happening on the Internet and can you please make intermediaries take action. Governments need to take a more balanced and longer term view of this as to how we would want to go about this in a way that is actually sustainable rather than that is just simply in the on line world giving any complainant direct control of the system of justice themselves.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you.
(Applause)
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Niall O'Reilly again. I thought until the last half minute or so that what Malcolm was saying, which was very important and which I was one of those who applauded, was going to be was going to have no overlap at all with what I wanted to say, and I emphasise his final point, that it's governments and the whole policy formation staff that they have working for and with them, that have to face the responsibility that Malcolm has outlined. And another responsibility that I would like to see them facing and it's not just on the Internet, but in other areas, but it's especially on the Internet, is that we have to have not only government taking that responsibility clearly and doing so with the right amount of consultation in preparing the policy positions which give us the framework for the justice system or the other regulations we are going to need, but we need some kind of evidence based review, because when Maria says that the Internet shouldn't be different from society at large, which is something I agree with, the difference, the thing that is different between the society that we have experience of and the new expressions of that society that the Internet provides, is that we don't know what will be the effects of the policies that we bring in to regulate what is going on the Internet, unless we have review and evidence based revision of those policies and I think that is going to be hugely important, as well.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you. OK, two last people. We are a bit running out of time. Then we close this.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Alexis. I come from Finland, which is usually, I understand, viewed as a pretty open and fair and progressive society, but a couple of years ago, they the government introduced a child porn filter that, you know, all operators were supposed to be using and it didn't take long for things other than child porn to be filtered by the same system. And also, the sites that are in there get on the list a bit too easily, otherwise as well, so this is sort of a warning case that these things can happen. And that actually, what hutty said is how it should be happening instead of how it's happening right now. And the other point I wanted to make is that the Internet is a global society whereas governments are local, basically, and morals and laws and so on are local, as well, but many of the operators present here, for example, are multi national, so they have to operate in many regions which have completely differing, sometimes even conflicting, laws, about what is legal and what is not; for example, child porn, the age limits of what is child porn differ hugely. I think there is a lot of other issues that I am not sure well, they will be technically very, very difficult for those big operators, for example, if they are forced to do something.
PATRIK FALSTROM: Thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From Estonia, I just wanted to illustrate this talk in one of the examples what we have in terms of facts, copper facts in the wall, what says that the Palestinian government would like that you would turn off some ASs from routing path.
PATRIK FALSTROM: I will let you speak.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Just one comment from me. It's necessary to discuss this all because the key I give you some key words. Internet as a biosystem, no borders, different cultures, self regulation, democracy, all these effects that I couldn't give you an answer to your question, and I think there won't be an answer. I think necessary is that we discuss all these points and to see all these key words and to find a way to react in this world we want to live in and I think this is necessary and, therefore, we need to learn, we need to learn from governments, from the technical community and the technical community can learn from us on which points we could give support. For instance, not only in regulation; for instance, to moderate a process or to bring in some new sites or new views in effect or in a problem and I think so we can behave in the new world. I think justice or laws are not only the solution and I am happy to discuss this in this community. Thank you.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much, Constanze. You wrapped it up in a very good way. I am happy for the discussion that we had because this is an issue that we are dealing with all the time, more and more, in different kind of sectors for the government side. Of course we need to continue this discussion in various ways. We have RIPE NCC, thank you very much for providing all the platforms and we have to do it at home in our different countries, with our stakeholders on a local level. Talking about legislation and talking about the roles of different players, I would like to give the floor for Patrik, has a few minutes before we have to legal about the data retention. So what is going on.
PATRIK FALSTROM: It's a little bit unfortunate that I had to just because of the events on Dam Square and I need to go to the airport, the hotel told me if you leave after 3:00 we cannot guarantee you can leave. I wanted to give you update on where we are with data where the data retention directive is, and what has happened is that we got the directive 2006, we also have the ePrivacy Directive 2002, which are together, all of this is supposed to be implemented in the various Member States. You can, at the URL at the bottom, you can find all the others and pointers to all the other to all of these documents. What the Commission has done is review of how this directive has been implemented and as part of that review, they created an expert group on data retention and I am one of the members of that group. So if you want to know more of what is going on and how the review of the directive has gone, you can contact me separately.
So if I summarise: We have one good example, Sweden. There was, by the way, one of the countries that took the initiative for the directive from the beginning, has not yet implemented it. The Commission is dragging Sweden into court because, of course, as a Member State of the European Union, you must implement the directives. Sweden has not done so. It was voting in the Swedish Parliament and they decided to delay the voting another year, so Sweden cannot, if I am correct the earliest implement the directive is spring of 2012, as it is at the moment.
In a few other Member States the implementation has been questioned by having court cases against the government, and there are a couple of them.
What hags happened lately was that the 18th of April the Commission presented a report of the directive, which is the actual review, and as part of the I will show you the actual summary of that, that report. One decision the Commission has done is to let the expert group continue its work and the next meeting is on May 17, so it's just and that will be the first meeting after the Commission released its report so I don't have any more or much more data from the expert group itself on because it's a bit unfortunate that the dates are like they are. This is an excerpt of the actual report from the Commission and what they say is that it's my emphasis in bold "the contribution of the directive to the harmonisation has been limited." What the Commission said, no, we are not going to change the directive or write a new one, but we recognise that it has not led to the harmonisation that is expected with various directives so we will write more documents that help countries and Member States understand how they should do the local legislation. Thank you.
MARIA HALL: So, do we have any questions for Patrik about the Kath retention directive or any other things around it. We have one question here.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: From RIPE NCC. I just want to ask something which has come up with discussing with law enforcement, data retention and IPv6 issues. They are very concerned that actually the logging part of IPv6 may impact such the data retention that it won't be balanced any more. I would like to hear your opinion on how you see that because they are asking us quite often about this matter and I would like to hear your opinion on it.
PATRIK FALSTROM: There are two different things that are discussed. The first one, the first question, the first issue that is brought up in the expert group is how can we know which what ISP a certain IP address is used by so the first thing they are asking, what is the quality or the RIPE Whois database and they have been there have been some initiatives and some parties have, for example, pointed us in the expert group and said, we need something else than the RIPE Whois database because it is not good enough and this is one of the reasons why I personally have advocated both in all the RIR regions that you should every ever come up with any policy regarding IPv6, like change of holder of IP address blocks, for example, that has any impact on the quality of the database. You must make the Whois database higher quality or else you will get requirements that that data is stored somewhere else. That is the first a part of the question. In Europe at the moment people are happy with the Whois database, that is my personal feeling but they would like to have the quality higher.
The second part has to do with, given that you find the ISP, what requirement do the ISP of logging of who is using that IP address and yes, that is a big problem and there is no one really knows how to solve that, what is the proper balance between the cost at the moment most implementations say the ISP must keep track of what individual and what household and contractual end party had what IP address at what point in time.
MARIA HALL: Actually have one question for Patrik before he leaves: Remember when we were sitting in the expert group me and Patrik working with this solution for the Swedish, which has not been implemented yet, one of the things we were discussing was how do we use the wordings in the legislation that is going to keep for a long time, that is going to target the information that the law enforcement needs and how do we divide it; do we have it horizontally, which we did in Sweden, which was a bit unusual, or like the EU Directive, so I just want to know what this discussion is going on in the group?
SPEAKER: What Maria points out is the way the directive is written, the there are different rules for retaining data for a telephone call to it's voice over IP or fix the IP or telephone knee, that is not very good, because someone that provides telephone knee probably uses the same equipment for all three so what we did in Sweden was that the proposal that is not implemented say these are the rules for telephony, regardless of more technology neutral which means the Swedish implementation differs from the directive and this is one of the biggest problem with the directive, it's not technology neutral and that has forced each one to do their own interpretation to do with more technology neutral legislation and that in turn I think personally is one of the biggest problems regarding harmonisation. I should answer your question, maybe, as well. I feel, I feel that in this expert group, for example, and the people I talk to in the Commission that really work with this, they think that it would have been better if it was the case that it was more technology neutral which means the way we did it in Sweden. It's easy for me to say because that is how I want it and that of course I see everyone else is saying the same thing as me.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much Patrik. I think this is actually one example, it's so very important that we from the government side writing the law on the legislation knows how things work and that that was not really the case, as far as I could see, personally, when the directive was written and going to be implemented in the Member States, that is also one of the problems, I suppose. I am sorry to say that Patrik has to leave, otherwise he is going to be stuck here, because of the Queen's the memorial day today, so that is the problem, the door is actually going to be locked, the front door, which I suppose is also going to be a problem for us, but they might have back doors for us if you want to go out. Anyway, thank you very much, Patrik.
(Applause)
So, let's move on and the next agenda item is actually the critical infrastructure directive, another one that is going to be discussed in multi stakeholder environment so we have Kurtis that could give us a bit of information about that.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: He is also a little bit disabled by the way.
CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: I am the external relations officer at the RIPE NCC. This is just a very quick update on some involvement we have had and other members of the community have had with critical infrastructure directive discussions that are going on in the European Commission at the moment. So basically, interests an existing directive on critical infrastructure, European critical infrastructures, this has been in place for a number of years now and basically covers the transport and energy sectors. It's due for revision next year and there has been some discussion about extending that to cover the ICT sector as well and so the work that is being done now is preliminary to those discussions in the parliament, but it's been going on through the European Commission which has convened, what I have got down here, the European public private partnership for resilience so that was established in June last year and from the title, that is certainly the way we like to see these sorts of organisations work a public private partnership which is bringing in input from the community as well as from governments, and so we have been very happy to go along and take part in those discussions.
The relevance that it has for the RIPE NCC and for the RIPE community is in terms of what the what the definition of critical infrastructure in terms of ICT covers and whether it applies to anything that the RIPE NCC is involved with. And other RIPE community members, as you will hear shortly.
One of the key areas is Internet registration. And so what that could mean, conceivably, is it would apply there would be legislation or a directive applying to the physical infrastructure of the RIPE NCC, including, if you want to describe it, as physical infrastructure, the RIPE database. One of the characteristics of the directive at this point is that it defiance critical infrastructure as tangible assets and what one of the discussion points that has been had is that Internet registration is more of a service than a tangible asset, and so there is some question about whether it makes sense to actually apply the existing directive to Internet registration as it currently exists. And so that is one of the points we have been raising in these discussions. And actually, even if it's a services does it meet the EU's definition of what is critical, which really comes down to quite a strict definition of a lack of service for in hours, some short period of hours would actually cause a failure of the Internet, from our perspective it's unlikely that a short term failure of the RIPE database would bring the Internet to its knees and there is some question about whether it should fall under that definition.
The other area which affects the RIPE NCC is the DNS and particularly our role as a route server operator but Kurtis can speak a little more about this as another route server operator.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: From NetNod. The EP3R was started last year and split into three Working Groups, which one looks, for example, at sharing of methodology and best current practices, but a more interesting one is one of the Working Groups look at trying to define the criteria for what is critical European infrastructure and it's defined as basically, infrastructure that will affect, was it more than two Member States. As far as I know, the working documents are not published, I am not sure how much I can talk about it without going in there, but basically, it talks about things that cross border links, exchanges points and the DNS route servers, not the DNS system but route servers, and how to identify these and why they are critical. The I feel a bit fun fee standing talking on behalf of the Commission. The group was set up, their aim was to not have all organisations in Europe being members but, rather, have representation from industry associations, centre is there, etc.. so that is few of the groups that represent us and all the Member States are there, and then there is a few direct organisations like us as route servers and RIPE as RIR for Europe who are directly been invited to participate as well.
I think this work is actually some of the work is, the intentions are good, but the I think we have got to be very careful some of the wording in there and careful how some of the actual definitions are being made and rather than I would prefer that maybe we don't look so much at this particular items as route servers but rather look at systems, I think there is some split views in this group, but that is some of the things that are happening. I think it's good to be aware of this and make sure that whoever you believe represents your organisation is following this and you, through them, track this work. I think that is about it.
CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: I think the only other point I'd make is the work is ongoing. I think the next meeting is scheduled for June so we will certainly try to update the Cooperation Working Group list on any major developments there, where possible.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: It would be good to get them to come here and present themselves, too. Another thing that might be interesting, is of course a player, someone who an east at that, on this topic issued a report in April, somewhere in mid April, on the critical infrastructure in Europe, doing some ams SIS on how this work. It is public on her home page and I guess, the intention is to service input to this work as well.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much, Kurtis. Do we have any questions to Kurtis and Chris? Sorry Chris for not introducing you. Sorry.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: ICANN. I have a question: Is the directive intended to apply to organisations based in the EU or to infrastructure located within the EU, because I can see a difference and while I expect that we want the infrastructure we operate to be at a stonkingly high standard anyway, it's just something that I'd like to know.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: That was actually a question I had. Again, I am not sure how much I say this without breaching what is supposed to be confidential, but my understanding is that it's targeted towards the infrastructure, not the organisations.
CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: I think that is probably where I mentioned the characteristic of the directive, that it applies to physical assets, that is probably why that is actually in the existing directive.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: I mean, again, most of this work is targeted towards the cross border connections, not so much targeted towards the services side, although that is mentioned, too, but a lot of the work is happening on targeting cross border connections and sub C cable systems, etc.
MARIA HALL: Just I have a question, if I don't see any other questions from the floor, I have a question to you, Kurtis, just for a few minutes, for you, being a participant from the; do you see any problem, I know that many of these kind of things is confidential, you can't talk about it openly in all the ways that we would like to know a lot of course, but do you see any problems in the dialogue or lack of information flowing between different bodies? These are good questions, I think I know the answer but I want to hear from you.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: If the business side agrees, of course there is divergence of views and we always joke with Maria that she is from the government and is here to help. To some extent, I get the feeling here they are from the Commission and are here to help. To level it up a bit, I think that some of the sharing of knowledge, the best common practices, the harmonisation of standards in Europe, of course is good; I mean, I think that is a really good goal and I think, therefore, I feel the directive has some merit and trying to achieve something that is valuable. The devil lies in the details and what comes out of the Working Groups, but that is an ongoing document. I have some respect for the fact this is at least a project we are invited by the Commission to work together to formalise these goals and if I look at the business side who is represented, we don't agree on everything, either, right, we are not a coherent single side of the group. There is a lot of interest tries to fit into the critical infrastructure part. I think a lot of discussions are good. Would I rather see the commission did all discussions in public forum like RIPE meetings? Absolutely. This is not current process, this is the best thing to happen. There was also a meeting two weeks ago in Hungary on critical infrastructure with the ministers from Member States and there wasn't that many ministers but it was ministerial meeting and the Commissioner and I was invited as one of the speakers and the discussions were quite interesting because it was very much sharing and trying to harmonise regulation and make a level playing field in Europe, which I think is good because I think regulation quite varies quite a bit so that is good. And there is going to be this is going to be a joint European US exercise before end of the year in trying to see how critical infrastructure is handled and cordinated.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much, Kurtis. Do we have any more questions from the floor? Otherwise, we can move on to the next
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: And sometimes following all this from distance and out of curiosity, you mentioned the words, as well, Kurtis, this all the time, this talk about the things about cross borders and but like the still and if you talk to some of the people, as well, it always, always feels like people are national telecom industries which don't really talk to each other and which are completely isolated island with only have somewhere in borders spot where they connect to each other, in reality for the most telecom organisations borders don't exist apart from regulation, so isn't that a bit strange?
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Yes. I think that the aim here is, I mean, there are asfiscal assets that clearly affects more than one country, if there were like sub C cables, for example, and there are depend an sees and close the single point of failure and in more than one Member State's interests to build redundancy around these and identify them, I mean, it's easy to make fun of it saying on Internet layer, a much higher layer obviously you are right there is no borders and we route around it, there is no single port of failure but if you look at cable map of Europe you start realising there isn't that many routes in some places and where in a country where most hands up beach resort here, rest of otherwise the rest of us are pretty.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: What I mean is that, I don't want to make fun of it, if you look at the map, as you said, you will notice that the whole structure and various points, I am not really defined by the borders of the countries but more by companies who are the infrastructure and then talking about national borders, it looks like
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Right, but the directive and the work is talking about infrastructure that has the potential to affect more than two, I think it's two Member States, so it's not necessarily talking about borders per se; it's talking about some geographical coverage and it's actually quite clear and the Commission is quite clear they are not interested in trying to regulate infrastructure that only depends to one country or the actual passing of physical infrastructure between two countries so that is out of scope. This is for a higher level of infrastructure failure that might affect multiple countries.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Still if you talk to some of the national people, they still have the mind sets of borders, the borders of the nations, the technical structures.
KURTIS LINDQVIST: Absolutely. I don't disagree on that.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much, Kurtis and Chris. And actually, on the agenda now we should have an update from the Council of Europe, their activities, but Volk was supposed to be here in some kind of remote way but that is not going to happen so maybe I could just hand the mic to you, Chris, and maybe you do some update.
CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: A very brief update here, I don't have any slides or anything. Wolfgang Kleinwachter, an academic from Germany but has done a lot of work in Internet governance over many years has convened an expert group under auspices of Council of Europe, and basically, they are looking at, initially, defining a set of principles for Internet governance and so he has been they have been holding this smaller expert group in a number of meetings over the last year or so, and last month held a larger conference at the Council of Europe headquarters in Strasbourg to basically get some more multi stakeholder input into this draft set of principles that they have come up with and which they hope will eventually be put out as declaration by the committee of ministers in the Council of Europe.
I think the general feeling at that conference was that there is nothing too objectionable about any of these principles. It's at a quite sort of high generalised level which I think is part of the aim, sort of to come up with something that is quite generalised and avoids too much controversy and then can be used to down to fine grained policy. I think the general feeling was also it's better not to take this to the level of say a treaty or some sort of binding agreement and it was noted that there are a number of other organisations, the OECD among them, currently coming up with similar sets of principles for Internet governance, the Brazilians came up with its own principles which will be discussed in more depth at this year's IGF. And so, there is some there was discussion then about how what relation these various sets of principles have to each other and maybe it's more a matter of defining, through various sets of principles, a more common framework or idea set of what Internet governance should be based on.
There were some other people in this room who were there, possibly have something further to say? Otherwise, no. That is pretty much I think the summary that Wolfgang would have given you.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much, Chris. And I think this question also touches upon do we need some special legislation for Internet so could we kind of apply other legislation or treatees or whatever to all existing in the off line world so it's very important and I am very happy that some of you were actually participating in this work. The work the council is doing is very, very good and we are really trying to support them in the way we can but it's also to not drive it too far away but to further too further away I don't know how to say it because we might happen to end up in a situation where we are going to have some special treatment or Internet things, for instance, human rights issues. We have treatees for that one, it should be a word as well as on Internet. That question is really very important and we try to follow it up.
Anyway, so, as we didn't have Wolfgang here to support, thank you very much, Chris, so I think we have a few minutes, maybe 3 or 4 minutes for you because I know you have been very active in the CSTD Working Group and I don't know how many of you have been following the IGF development and the general assembly said yes to five new more mandate for the IGF but the format is still on the question, CSTD Working Group is working with that and a lot of interesting questions to solve.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Thank you. I work for NetNod in Sweden. And I will just assume that all of you aware of the IETF and some of its intricacies. So some of you may be aware, the IGF got a five year mandate to start with and that was renewed last year, but with that, also came well, came this initiative to improve the IGF and late last year was decided that a Working Group would be put together to look into the improvement of the IGF. At first it was agreed that well, agreed it was decided there would only be government representatives in this group, which caused quite a reaction, obviously, throughout the community, given that what was so unique for the IGF. It had this multi stakeholder model where all these different stakeholders were represented. So, it was then decided that there would be representatives of other stakeholders groups in this Working Group, so, for example, the technical community got five representatives, the business, civil society, inter governmental organisations, etc.
So I was one of the five that were selected to represent the technical community, it was me or /SKRA*RP from LACNIC board and Mexico, from APNIC, Constanze from ISOC and /PWA* /HAO*ER from ICANN, based in Egypt. And Patrik was also on the group, but as representative of the business community and so was Teresa Swineheart as some of you may know. It was very interesting exercise in many ways so the structure was basically that we were going to meet twice, two day meeting in end of February and two day meeting end of March and the idea was we were going to produce this report with concrete suggestions on thousand improve the IETF and from the representative of the technical community this was, it was a little bit tricky to know what approach we should have because, well, first of all, we actually think that the IGF has evolved within the IGF processes, the first was very different from the one you see now, you can see the discussions have matured, etc., but also through this sort of evolutionary approach and through having this open consultation you receive input, you know, that feeds into the next IGF. So we had mixed feelings about these things being discussed in a closed Working Group to start with.
One of the things we decided we were going to do live tweeting, I think this is the second time I mentioned Twitter in a talk, which I also have mixed feelings about, but so basically we are going to live tweet from the meeting just as a way of actually making people aware of what was going on in the meeting. So the Chair circulated this question fair, suggestions, how to improve, the secretariat, funding, participation but also things like meeting format and a few things like that. And we all responded to this. We, again, while we see there is certainly a lot of improvements can be done to the IGF, we think this should evolve within the IGF process and as representatives of the technical community we don't necessarily feel the need to be any revolutionary changes made to it.
So we met, we didn't have a lot of time. The idea was we were supposed to have these two meetings, February and March, and then end of March and the 1st of April the report should be produced. We all did our homework, wrote our response to the questionnaire and then went to the meeting thinking that we were going to discuss substance, and realised quite quickly that there were a few people in the room who were not interested in discussing those issues. So we, without going into all the gory details, we spent most of the first day discussing what we were going to discuss during these two days and at the end of the first day we hadn't agreed on an agenda for the first two days which was a little bit frustrating for us because we wanted to discuss this substance and the second day of the first meeting, we actually did manage to discuss some substance but it was very clear that the very diverging views on a lot of these issues, so we shall I keep it shorter?
So in summary, basically, what happened was that a new set of questions after a lot of discussions about what should be discussed in the meetings, a new set of questions was circulated which we all had to respond to again and then the second meeting at the end of March, most of the time was spent sort of discussing general issues and only towards the afternoon of the second day, the very last day we started discussing what some actual wordings. It was very clear there was no agreement on wordings and at the end of all this we did not manage to produce a report.
So this means that what has happened instead is the Chair then writes a report or a summary of these two meetings. We have come out and said that we think this is a big failure, that we really wanted a report, but this means, the.implications is that these things will be discussed in the actual CSTD meeting where we can attend as observers but obviously we are not representatives of any governments. And it sort of puts the ball back in the hands of throws it back into the UK structure so to speak, and we think it's incredibly important that this, that these changes happen without the IGF. What was incredibly frustrating at the meetings as well, it was clear that some of these government representatives have very strong views about how the IGF should change had never attend an IGF. I won't go any further now, but this means we will meet in May, we will see, we have asked for an extension of this Working Group to see if we can produce some sort of report.
In short, I think no short, what this means and this whole process and the failure of producing a report is I think what we need to be doing is first of all reaching out a little bit more to the governments who are involved, what we can see, as well, is that depending on what representative of the governments we hear different views, so even with those, what we have built up relationships, in this case it was the Geneva delegation who attended the meeting and people who are not normally involved in the IGF process. Where we technical community, some sense the business community has failed, is actually reaching out to some of the civil society representatives, because it was clear also that there were very good intentions among a lot of the civil society representatives but I am not sure if they had the same view or understanding of the political context of where this was discussed. So, I guess that is work we have ahead of us. If you wanted to read any of the tweets, hash tag is CSTGWG, come and speak to me and I will give you the gory details.
MARIA HALL: Do we have any questions from the floor about the development on the IGF? We don't. What is coming out from this work with the CSTD Working Group and the development of IGF is very important, is trying to make this multi stakeholder dialogue work on global level and we think it's very important to maintain the way IGF is but it's about to be seen and I really hope Working Group is going to come with something good.
SPEAKER: It's hard work to convince the Chief to go to IGF and we had a Germany meeting and we could conveyance our boss to go there and I am very proud of this and I think it was necessary and the feedback was very good.
SPEAKER: Well, I think another thing that is really important is, by working, by starting to improve some of the things in the IGF itself we can avoid these types of processes, and it's clear it's one of the challenges of the IGF, making it clear to people what value it actually has and, you know, creating those linkages, those die logs. So, by actually doing that work within the IGF, you can hopefully reduce the need for discussions of that in other parts of /STRUBGTers.
MARIA HALL: That is a very important point. The very better dialogue, the better it's going to be on other arenas when we had discussions about legislation or treatees or whatever we have. Anyway, so I know I just have a few minutes for myself here, trying to do a really quick update what is happening in the ICANN environment and I want to say the GAC is you know of course who ICANN is and maybe the GAC also but it's a government advisory committee and since a few months back we have a new Chair, she was interim Chair before, and this is Heather Driden working for the Canadian government. It's Alice from Kenya and me and our colleague from the Singapore government. And also from just a short time ago, we have a new secretariat and that is so good. I don't know anybody from the secretariat is here, Jeremy and Ruth, taking care of all administrative things and respond to ICANN board in time, a lot of things we need to do in certain time lines and it's very important we think from the GAC side that we respond to the Internet community to ICANN in a good way. By now it's approximately 109 members, and members is like governments or countries oratries, so that is also very good, we would like the whole world to be able to raise the voice concerning Internet governance things in the ICANN environment. And the one thing has been very much on the agenda is new gTLD programme and a lot of different versions of the applicant guide book and it's called, we have some response from the GAC but when they said before Christmas now we actually going to have the last version, so of course, we immediately from the government side that we, even though we have so many members from different cultures and political systems, there were some outstanding issues that we didn't agree upon and many have to do with processes, and also comes together and connected to pretty much what we have been talking about up until now, having transparency in the processes, having dialogue with different stakeholders and so on. So in I am not going to go through all this outstanding issues but you can see for yourself. It's both technical things, it's public policy things, it's of course things are connected to trademark issues, names and having processes, how to handle when you preach a problem or reaffects what do you do, how do you handle that. Do the system, is it do we have security networks so to speak for having to handle all these kind of things when they show up and we city think, then what? We have had some meetings and we had a meeting just between the GAC and the board in Brussels for two days, actually ended up three days' meeting at the end of February, beginning of March and we have been sending documents back and forward, the GAC score card had questions on the board, that were responded to that had another document, so this way it's been going on pretty much during the spring and so the next thing coming up is the Singapore meeting. Now the ICANN/GAC meeting in Singapore now in June and they launched actually, they really say this is the applicant guide book version and since I think just a few days ago, actually now in the end of April, and now it's public consultations and I don't know whether any of you is respond to go that or maybe some of you have reason read it, several 100 pages, but as far as I can see when we go through it really quick there are still outstanding issues we are concerned about from the government side so we don't know what is going to happen. Maybe it's going to be a government decision, ICANN board decision at the meeting in Singapore but we don't know. We try to follow this and try to send this document back and forward. Going too far teleconference in the GAC but we still are concerned about and we are going too far teleconference meeting with ICANN board. This is going back and forward all the way. So, hopefully it's going to learn us something good in the end, we certainly hope so. And of course the other things, Patrik told a bit better about the Whois database review team, the Whois review team going on in the ICANN community and that is of course something we need to look upon and come with input and probably hopefully some of you are doing that already working with those guys and of course we had IANA contract and I was hoping that we could have time to have some discussion about IANA contract but we don't. Please, if you have any input, because I know it's an open consultation that ended at end of May and I think the NRO, Paul, you sent input to this. And today when there was a response.
MARIA HALL: When European Member States except Sweden, me, we have another representative, we are hopefully going to have some European response. But I was hoping to get your response. Maybe you can send an e mail what you think about this and how to move forward. I would be happy to hear some of these things about IANA contract, what is going to happen in the end. So Paul, do you want to say something?
PAUL RENDEK: Just that the response to the NTIA, notice of inquiry for the ICANN contract renewal, we did formulate a response of the RIRs did as the NRO and that response is located on the NRO website so if you would like to take a look at it, it's there, under the new section you will find it.
MARIA HALL: Well, I just want to wrap it up in a few seconds here because I don't think we have so much time for any questions unless you absolutely I would like to hear if you have a question by the way but if you can stay a few more minutes? Do we have anything from the floor right now?
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: Just Steve Nash from Arber Networks: There is clearly a lot of work going on but I would say that the e mail list has been pretty silent over the last six months if we could see more of it it would be great.
MARIA HALL: That was one of my wrapping up things that I knew I was going to talk about. I mean, apparently, as you can see, we talked about a lot of things today, the intermediaries' role, data retention, the IGF, it's necessary for us to have a good dialogue between the technical community and so on, for me and us it's absolutely necessary so how come the mailing list is so silent? I don't know. But from now on we will really try to use it because we have some kind of similar Swedish national reference group that is very active between the meetings, sending stuff to each other and responding and that is very helpful to me so I really hope, with the RIPE of RIPE NCC, that we could cope this mailing list alive and would also make me puts kind of give me a kick also to use it much better. So thank you very much for raising that question. And thank you very much also for Chris making the minutes and having the presentations that he had and thank you very much for RIPE NCC, as I told before providing this platform. The government round table meeting, when the government come to listen to what is happening in the RIPE community, this Cooperation Working Group, that we, from the government side and from the Cooperation Working Group side, can have the whole of you from the RIPE community to give us to response to certain things, I thinks really complimenting each other and I think it's perfect. Thank you very much for that, RIPE NCC.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: I promise I trigger the mailing list.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much, thank you.
AUDIENCE SPEAKER: This is chair of the /TKO*RBG, I have two comments: One I think that to make it more active as you have already said there, not very much government people in the room, so I think that coming up with certain topics which are being advertised by the people now here present in their own community is a way to challenge them to actually come here and participate. Not he we but you have to reach out a bill bit more into that realm to make sure that they understand why they need to be here and what they are missing if they are not here. The other one I wanted to react to, Mr. Hutty isn't here any more, but I think that there is one major differences for law enforcements compared to drug bust or murder or whatever is the usual law enforcements work, is that when you go into the Internet, you may have to go to addresses where the actual perpetrator isn't there because he is maybe in Russia or China or Australia or America but here in the Netherlands in Amsterdam or in the Hague there is a hosting provider with a control and command server on his network, which he can't do anything about because he has a contract with a customer so how do you actually take this down if there is nobody to arrest because you can't arrest director of the company? That is a major difference with a drug bust where you have a few people in the room or in the plane or at the container or in the harbour. What is true is who is the command and control server has to be taken down and that is role for law enforcement and governments make sure that industry is provided with the right information to take it down or take it down together and that is I think the role that governments and law enforcements should play by providing the right information to and that is something we have been discussing on template that you need to be made, we have been discussing that for three years by now and there is not even a hint of a template, how come if a need is so bad that nobody takes the initiative to start working on it and they all keep talking about it whether it's on the domain name system or PI addresses.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much.
JIM REID: Not wearing any hats or representing anybody at all. This has been something which I will post on the list so we can hopefully try and generate some are more list traffic, one of the things that is getting quite clear is government and regulatory types probably feel uncomfortable coming to a meeting like this and expressing their concerns in public, maybe we may want to take a slight difference of attack can we take part in open public mailing list and all the stuff that goes on with that. We know the NCC holds round table meetings with government representatives at regular intervals. Maybe some of the people who are in the room here just now is perhaps trying to figure out a way they could come along to one or two to try and facilitate dialogue that way.
MARIA HALL: Yes thank you very much. That is very good idea, actually, I must say, because the government round table we see much more governments coming there, so of course this kind of discussion could be very welcome there for sure.
PAUL RENDEK: That is very good suggestion Jim and it actually does happen. We do do two government roundtables a year and I think at times we can see as much as about 27 governments represented when they come. It's quite vibrant discussions that go on. It is a closed meeting, it's something that the governments asked us to provide to them. We felt that whatever would be discussed in that session could then brought into the Cooperation Working Group here /PU what is happening is we are seeing that the topics that they want to talk about broadening, they don't only want to talk about v6 so they are actually looking for the RIPE NCC to go through its community and find the experts in certain areas that they want to talk to and invite them to these round table meetings so this is definitely something the RIPE NCC and very much willing and already doing.
MARIA HALL: Thank you very much. Anyway, wrap it up wave little bit more time we had more time than we had from the beginning. But thank you very much everybody for participating and hope to sigh soon again the next Cooperation Working Group. Thank you.
(Applause)