this morning and they predict that if i've got it right, by 2016 there will be 2 1/2 mobile connections per person. okay. so that with the transformation of mobile services to broadband this clearly means that this is the path, particularly for the developing world, to participate in the benefits of the internet, leap frog the right investments are made. it's clear from the mckinsey study and other world bank studies that the effect on gdp growth is the greatest for the developing countries for each 10% increase in broadband you get a 1.4% increase in gdp in developing countries. so, all of this is happening, we've got this enormous potential to move to the internet on mobile. in the meantime, countries of course are trying to figure out what to do about internet policy. that's not that surprising.

and not that surprising of course that the itu is doing that. what is a concern, of course, i'll drill a little deeper maybe on some of the proposals and the opening speakers, is the concern that some of those proposals will in fact constrain economic growth. a couple examples, if legacy style regulations are imposed on the internet then that will create disincentives the investment that's needed to grow the mobile internet. if there are disruptions in cross border data flows by throwing up barriers at the border t global kmektivity and information exchange won't happen f. there's government control over routing of traffic and network design and management, then many of the tools for innovation won't be there. and in the proposals that are now on the table, there are elements of those three things put out there. so it may not be about ican's

functions but it's about many of the functions of the internet per se. so, my engineer colleagues would say but those won't work over the long time. they will be bad policy, they won't accomplish the stated purpose. but for that to play out in the meantime, it will deprive economies of the benefits of things like cloud services which interestingly enough are most being taken up in latin america and asia, access to the digital trade routes, the benefits of direct ip to ip connection, not forced to go through gateways at the border, another idea out there. and will eliminate the current handshake agreements that make the network of networks that is the internet, will eliminate that as a way that the system functions. so what would be a successful outcome and how do we get there? couple of themes that you'll

hear that i think are important, that is to keep the treaty to high level principals. second, to strengthen the itu's key role, training, standard development, and i hope this will be part of the rest of the conversation, i think it will be, in the meantime preserve the multistake holder models for different organizations in ways of doing things that are out there. we believe that this is possible, we think it's challenging and it's a multi-year process, but by working together with existing allies, developing other allies across that multi-stake holder grouping, and that that is very possible, we need to do a low lot of actual addressing of real concerns, talking how the economic and technical issues really work, and by applying ourselves, that's one of the

reasons i'm so pleased to see a full room, ourselves here, ourselves globally, that it will be possible to get a positive outcome. so i'm always an optimist, have to think optimistically when you have challenges ahead. thank you. >> thank you. i know a lot of the people in the room heard me say before that i'm always an optimist too so there are at least two of us here in the room as well. so next we're going to hear from gigi. i want to say a lot of you in the room probably also know that, i don't always agree with gigi on everything, we have different perspectives on a lot of issues. she's been my friend for a long time and i'm always glad to invite her to events. i think this is one, though, probably where i think our perspectives, you know, the perspectives of a free market

oriented think tank like the foundation and people at her organization, public knowledge and herself probably share some of the same concerns. one thing that i'm hoping that gigi and/or rick together will do, we referred, i know i started out doing this referring to the multistake holder process. i talked about the privatized multistake holder process. i think everyone else has done that. but i think for some of us in the room and our c-span audience they may wonder what more specifically is this multistake holder process. so, in the context of your remarks maybe one or both of you will explain that a little bit while covering the points you want to make. >> sure. good afternoon everybody. it's great to be here, great to see so many friends out here in the audience and so much interest in a topic that i agree

with the others is really critical. i have to say some great things about commissioner mcdowell, i consider a friend, his leadership has been enormous, one of those times where it took a few months or a year or more for people to start to listen. now people are listening and you really have a lot to do with that. to also say that mr. baird, his knowledge of the itu is encyclopedic. my spouse said to me dick knows where the bodies are buried. your phone's going to ring more than you want because now everybody in television land knows this as well. so, several people have alluded to, this is one of those rare kumbaya moments and u.s. policy making where everyone, government, industry, civil society, right, left, center, agree wholeheartedly that the

itu's jurisdiction should not expand to encome pause internet egglation or government. some of the proposals though not fully baked as mr. baird said that we heard about, if they were to come to fruition would do great damage to the open and decentralized internet that we know and love and that is a great engine for economic growth and education and health care and all of the great things that we love about it. now, among the many reasons why this jurisdiction shouldn't expand is that the itu is highly politicized and also grossly undemocratic. one of the things, i'm not sure was mentioned today, was that in the itu, as in the u.n., it's one country, one vote. so tuvalu and butan have the same vote as china, the united states, india, and that is not very democratic when you think of the difference in populations. the other problem and the other

reason why we believe the itu is quite undemocratic is that there is no role at all for civil society unless you want to pony up $34,000. and my organization and most of the civil society groups that we work with certainly don't have that kind of resources to participate. and still have a vote. you get to participate but ultimately you don't have a vote. so, but given that there's really violent agreement on this core point that the itu should not expand its jurisdiction to include internet regulation and governance i want to sound two notes ever caution. the first is i think we have to be really careful not to simply dismiss the efforts to give the itu a greater role in internet governance and some plot by china and other regimes to control the internet. there are countries in latin america and africa and elsewhere that have concerns that the u.s. and u.s. corporations have too

much control over ican. we've heard that. some of the groups also share that concern. this the one of the things that public knowledge would like to do as we get more ramped up here is work with our allies, particularly in the global south, brazil, latin america, to try to convince those civil society groups that no, this is important, this is about freedom of expression, an open internet, not some u.s. corporate plot to take over the internet and please, talk to your delegations and express those concerns. that's what we see our role in. >> the second note of caution i want to put out there is that we have to be a little careful, not to hold up multi-stakeholderism as sort of the magic coin that solves all matters of internet policy. randy asked, i'll take an extra 30 seconds to explain what groups do. they are basically groups that

include industry, civil society, public sector government, that come around to table or many tables, to discuss sometimes technical issue, sometimes governance issues, sometimes policy issues. so, they are very, very big round tables where sometimes decisions, many times decisions that actually govern the standards that control the internet, the technical decisions are made with other than having government at the table they don't have many other rules. >> excuse me. you can take another 30 seconds but just a few minutes ago you referred to ican and just for the benefit of our television audience explain briefly what ican is and what it does so everyone is on the same page. >> okay. you may even be the better one. >> we can leave it.

>> go ahead. >> i'll turn it over to you. >> ican is a group, a multistate group of sorts, that has fairly limited functionality. there is a misnomer that it controls the internet which is not the case. there are certain elements in terms of identifying and using the certain types of resources to ensure the traffic flows, data flows to the right places in the internet, roughly speaking for the tv audience, and ican makes sure that that happens. representatives from a variety of sectors from around the world, it's in operation for many years, through a contract with the u.s. department of commerce. and there have been periodic attempts by folks to say that's not the right model. we should something represent fwid united nations or other body. >> getting back to my core point about how while multistate groups are very important and in fact i'm the co-chair of the broad band internet technology

advisory group, which has a technical working group which looks at issues of network management and whether network providers are reasonably managing their networks. this came out of the net neutrality debate. so i obviously have a belief there are places where multistake holder groups are important. it's not the be all end all for everything internet. and everything internet policy related. groups work best where most groups are singing from the same song book, there are no or few miners and losers. that's why i think it's important and i hope people pay attention to what's going on there. 3 are doing important stuff. the other concern i have with throwing all internet policy questions to multistake holder groups is the imbalance in resources. civil society just cannot be at every table in full force. so i'm the co-chair of the

betag, on another group t board for copyright information dealing with an agreement between internet service providers and hollywood and the recording industry how they warn people when they violate copyright law. i'm one human being. unless i'm like you can cut me up i can't do it. so civil society is a really at a disadvantage if every internet policy question is going to be decided by a multi-stakeholder group. that being said, i think on some policy questions it's good to see where organizations and companies agree and disagree. government has to in some cases serve as a backstop. questions of net neutrality, of copyright, property enforcement, i think those are places you can have multistake holder convenings and discussions but

at some point somebody has to make the ultimate decision on what is the policy and more importantly, love to hear dick beard talk about this, who is going to enforce those norms or principles or if it turns out regulations? i think we have to think a little harder with what mul multistake holder groups do, what they are best at doing and what maybe, what the roll of government is when there are multi-stakeholder organizations. >> okay. thank you, gigi. so rick, you're going to wrap up the initial segment and you can expand upon multistakeholder groups or ican or whatever you please. >> i lose 23 seconds from talking about ican? >> you do. yes. >> i'll talk fast then. good afternoon. it's a pleasure to be here. thanks to our distinguished government speakers today who have been leaders on this issue.

in ways that you probably can't even imagine. in terms of the long hours they spent talking to people at cocktail parties. often a lot of these conversations lead to outcomes. i'll be very brief. one thing i wanted to focus on is sort of guiding principles coming at it from the google perspective. we're an internet company, over the top as opposed to under the bottom like our friends at verizon. sorry, a joke. we look at the internet and we look at it as sort of this thing that developed over the course of over 40 years now, through the very good work of lots of experienced engineers, through what's called rough consensus. through bodies like ican. i-etf, there is a constellation of acronyms that represent what these folks have done. the one spraz we could leave you

with they should respect the integrity of the internet. the way it's put together over time. there are certain design attributes of the net which i'll touch on, that make it what it is today. that empower all of the innovation, free expression, the user empowerment and human fulfillment you see using the internet as a platform. one is the end-to-end principal which allows data to flow freely between networks. the other is architecture of the net so that application cans be built on top of existing arrangements. third is the voluntary interconnection of networks. there are millions of networks that comprise the internet all done voluntarily. these are large and small who agree to sign up to the basic core principles of the net and joining that larger community.

the fourth is agnostic protocols, my colleague vince surf once said ip on everything. get that image out of your head for the moment. ip has become this global unifying protocol. sorry, gigi. >> i'm slow. >> which runs on all networks and on which all kinds of applications and content and services can run. so these are the four governing principles of the net. our concern about what's going on with the itu is many of the proposals would attack and potentially hinder one or more of these principles. of these attributes in ways that then would have negative effects as all of our speakers have commented on, on all of the benefits, the things that we like about the net, try to preserve. if we try to interests integrity of the net, act with the regulatory humility that commissioner mcdowell suggests we can avoid a lot of the problems. i thought it would be helpful to

touch on what can we do about this. we talked about the multistake holder approach. eleanor olstrom who won a nobel prize has written about a similar but somewhat different area, polycentric governance. decentralized power so that you have one or more seats of authority within which the operation of the various rules and principles around in her case commons and i think we can talk about the internet in a similar way, i think that area should be explored. i think there is rich literature there we could profit on and allow some folks who have not been involved in some of the day-to-day conversations among the power brokers to have more of a seat at the table. but there are things we can do as well just as common citizens and as concerned policymakers, we can of course support our friends at the state department and the fcc, ntia and other government bodies here in the united states. members of congress, they can use their contacts and influence around the world with their

counterparts as an opportunity to discuss these issues. i think a key aspect this cannot be the u.s. against the world. if that is the formula, we lose. plain and simple. this has to be something where we engage with everybody around the world, all of the communities of interest who have a stake. whether they know it or not the future of the internet we have to find ways to engage them. if you're a global business, make the case where you can where you have your ability to have some influence and sway in countries where you operate. civil society groups can partner with those engaged. we've been doing that in the u.s. find ways to expand that influence outside the united states. academics, you could help us make the case as well. there are a ton of great academic stuld es but a ton more that can be done, analysis that can be written. the academic world can be fruitful in the next 6 to 9 months as we head toward dubai. one last note. i agree with commissioner

mcdowell, december is not the ends of the game. that's the next step in this process. this has been a process for many years now through other fora around the world so we'll get past december, we'll i think hopefully breathe a small sigh of relief but only small because the threats will continue to be out there, other places they will develop. and we have to be ever vigilant. >> thank you, rick, and all of the panelists for those initial remarks. when i started, in trying to capsulize what we were discussing today, i contrasted the existing internet governance model which i called a privatized bottoms up multi-stakeholder approach with a top-down inner governmental control approach that we want to avoid. and then rick witty comes along at the end and described google as an over the top provider and

what, under the bottom or on the bottom. >> referred to as over the top repeatedly so -- extend the analogy to our friends. >> over the top company that p's on everything. >> remember we have a television audience here. here today. >> okay. now, also remember, i appreciate everyone who has been so rapped and haven't been e-mailing their wives but if you want to tweet while we're -- while here, remember it's #fsf 0 owe fsf net governance. no. that's it.

now, i have probably a question or two then some from the audience. i wanted to ask our panelists whether they had anything that they want to comment on or respond to that was said initially. commissioner mcdowell. >> i want to make sure there is a clarification especially for the press in the room and folks watching at home that indeed many member states of the itu, 193 countries as was mentioned earlier, have offered ideas and proposals for internet governance to be sus soomed by some sort of u.n. type body whether it's a new body per the resolution by india or resolutions by china and uzbekistan and also if you look at the arab state proposal from february 1, within the context of the wicket, so there are different angles you can attack this from. there is a general u.n. resolution, there might be the process of the wicket. you look at the arab state

proposal that came there, which is to change a small slight definition, change the definition of the itu's jurisdiction to subsume processing. that would be computing that is pretty much everything within the internet itself. so, while it might not overtly say internet governance, it does plant that seed of expanded itu jurisdiction and as this sort of small, maybe even seemingly innocuous change that we have to be wary of, it's going to be insidious, this wonts be a full frontsle assault, i'm testifying tomorrow before the house energy and commerce committee. you'll hear me say that tomorrow, it's going to be in the long run whether between now and december or years from now, it will be something small and seemingly innocuous and we is to be vigilant. this can't be the u.s. versus the rest of the world or industrialized nations versus

the developing world. and the sick twisted irony here is that such proposals actually hurt the developing world the most so. we need to venture out beyond washington, d.c. certainly, especially into the southern hemisphere, to find allies within developing nations, to let them know and give them platforms for disseminating the notion that an unfettered internet the best thing for their countries and living standards. >> i want to ask dick this question. first, just as a practical matter are there proposals that commissioner mcdowell just referred to, are they on the itu website if people want to follow this and see what's developing? where do they find the proposals? then i have a substantive question as well.

>> that's a question, randy, that was posed. i was in geneva and colleagues from the civil society at that point raised questions about access to information regarding proposals coming into the itu and the wicket. the situation today is the following. that the counsel working group operates within counsel rules which is that you have to have first of all be a member of the itu. but sekly have access to their messaging system, and that is password protected. that's the situation. now, the access to the proposals of course as i have done and others have done, is if you ask me i'll give you those proposals. i don't want you to have a flood of requests coming in from the

room or from those in the television audience. >> i thought you were going to say you were going to give us the password. >> i can't do that. but let me tell you exactly what then followed up because it was a very important discussion that took place in geneva on this point. and civil society has, through the auspices of the groups affiliated in that context, i don't know who all of them are. they have written the secretary general a letter essentially in large part going to the issue of transparency. what i told them was representatives from civil society i would through the auspices of the united states and being the counselor at the itu i would make a proposal at counsel to try to make available those proposals in a public way. i expressed that to itu officials as well, giving them

indication that we will be making that proposal. we haven't yet worked out, that hasn't been agreed to by counsel and we haven't worked out the modalities but we're very aware of this. i think basically the process benefits by making available those proposals. >> my other question is this. you can tell by virtue of the interest we have here today and in other places that in the u.s. there's beginning to be a knowledge about and concern about potentially the proposals that can be raised. and we mentioned some of the countries from which there might be concern or proponents of the concerns we have. but just really briefly, around the world are there countries in

which they are as united and working the same way that the u.s. government is working to be prepared to address these and maybe you could just name the countries if there are some briefly. or comment on that. >> the answer is question, the united states is not alone is the first part of that answer to your question. it's always the old problem of naming names, you'll never be able to get all of them and i don't want to offend anyone. i will say this. by region, that we have considerable support out of asia pacific northwest. particularly countries that have -- are leaders in internet deployment and broadband deployment. we have obviously considerable number of allies in europe and

in our own hemisphere there are beacon beacons that reflect positions that we take. and receipt me focus and i think this is important. let me focus on africa. for those of us who spent their lives international lee in public policy over many years. one of the things that has been most notable i think is the response of africa to the internet. if i can put that the way. and principally as commissioner mcdowell has indicated as a global matter through mobile access to the internet. with that it seems to me there is a practicality coming from the continent, as to how to deal with these issues. we may not always agree on how to deal with them but that's a function of differences of where we sit many cases.