Internet Society Special Edition Community Event: Action Plan 2021, 3 Feb 2021

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From YouTube: Special Edition Community Event: Action Plan 2021 (English)

Description

28 January 2021

No one could have predicted the events of 2020. But throughout it all, the Internet has been the one constant in many people’s lives – an unwavering connection to the world around us.
More than any other year, 2020 has reminded us of the importance of our mission.

We must keep working to ensure the Internet is there for everyone. Our 2021 Action Plan is the next step in this journey.

https://www.internetsociety.org/events/2021-special-edition-community-event/

A

All right, good morning, good afternoon and good evening, wherever you are happy new year, 2021 everyone, we are glad to have you for our very first global community event for 2021. My name is evelyn namara manager, global sig and community engagement, welcoming you to a very special community event about the internet society action plan, 2021.

A

now I'll turn you over to our president and ceo of the internet society andrew sullivan, to kick us off andrew. Please take it away.

B

Hello, everyone and welcome, thank you for coming today.

B

I I'm delighted to be here, uh although of course, we can't see one another in person and uh of course, the reason we can't see one another in person is because of all of the events that have affected us throughout 2020 and that are still going on.

B

This is a moment in which we need to appreciate the internet and how it continues to serve us and support us in all that we need to do as people.

B

The internet has enabled us to continue to work together to uh you know to to socialize with one another to keep in touch with one another in order to uh continue our human endeavors, despite the fact that we are isolated from one another because of the realities of of the global health situation, and there have been so many people who have tried to suggest that the internet needs to be controlled under these circumstances, and yet the internet itself has shown how reliable and resilient it is.

B

That is part of its nature and part of its design. And what that shows us is how terribly important it is that the internet society and all of us all of us as a global community continue to press for the advantages that the internet brings to the entire human population.

B

So we need to continue to work to make sure that the internet is there for everyone, that everybody has the opportunity to use to benefit from the internet, and that is part of the reason we're here together today. In order to talk about the actions that the internet society is going to take in 2021 uh to to continue to make sure that the internet is for everyone.

B

So we're going to continue to work on our strategic goals. We want to make sure that the internet is open globally, connected secure and trustworthy, and that's what the action plan for 2021 is all about. We're going to continue to work on making sure that the internet is is bigger and that it is stronger all the time. uh In just a moment.

B

I'm going to uh turn this over to jane coffin, who is responsible for making uh for leading our efforts to make sure that the internet continues to grow and she will introduce joe hall, who is responsible for making sure that our efforts work in order to make sure that the internet is strong.

B

This is what we are all about. That's what today's session is about to talk about what our plans are for 2021..

B

This fundamental approach depends on making sure that the internet society itself is strong, and one of the things that we're focused on as an organization as a staff organization for 2021 is making sure that our community continues to grow and uh continues to participate in ensuring that the internet can be this vital lifeline for all of humanity.

B

So we're going to continue to work on making sure that the internet is stronger, we're going to make sure that the internet is uh bigger. That is that it is more available to everyone. Almost half the world's population still doesn't have access to the internet and we need to make sure that our community is strong and able to deliver uh on the uh on the goals of the internet society in general. uh With that, then uh next, please I'm going to turn this over to jane coffin.

B

Who is our senior vice president for internet growth, jane.

C

Thank you, andrew good, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Everyone thank you for joining us. You are part of the lifeblood of what we do our community and our partners. So thank you for being here and thank you for what you do.

C

I'm going to give you a brief overview of the grow portfolio, but I want to pick up on a point that andrew made about the internet being a lifeline. We couldn't have seen a stronger case for what the internet society and our partners do to build a bigger internet and to make it stronger due to covid. It's really amplified where there isn't connectivity, where we have wonderful communities, are staying strong to build the internet and to keep everyone connected.

C

It's been incredibly important to see how we can come together to help deploy those networks to build that bigger internet and to also build bigger communities of interest and bring our isak community to the fore to help us do that. So, where are we? We have three projects under the internet growth portfolio, the first one is community networks, and it's about the people that help build the networks as well, and this is a common theme that you're gonna see across the grow portfolio the humans that helped do this work to help build that infrastructure.

C

You can see at the bottom of this slide, I'm not going to read through all these pieces, for you, I'm just going to give you a highlight, but the bottom of the slide. You can see some of the goals that we have. This is important that you help us stay on track with that and that we're going to help you stay on track. There are some key people helping us do this at the internet society.

C

I would be remiss if I didn't mention max stuki and juan pirano, who are the project, leads for this project and austin rookstall who's, a project manager working with me, kyle, shulman and others to make sure we help manage the the bottom-up part in the organization so that they can come out to you to get the work done.

C

Basically, as you can see here, we believe that each day without internet connectivity is a day of lost opportunity, so we're going to help, try and bridge that connectivity gap with community networks support the humans that do that. Look at new and existing community networks, where we can help build that bigger internet and build a global network of cn champions through some training.

C

I also want to give a shout out to our training team, who does such great work. Ronda who's joined us recently is part of that and esther who um our people to help support our infrastructure, training and building more local capacity.

C

So you're gonna help us keep on track this year with ten supports two new and existing community networks, five new countries or orgs that we're going to be working with to help champion the cause. We need to scale the work and in order to scale that work and the message and the movement we've got to have more people on board. So that's that's what we need to do. We train and work with people, but also work with governments and international organizations, we're going to help look at training, more people 315.

C

I know we're going to surpass that, but that's our stretch goal for right now and five collaborative new partners on community networks, so we're looking forward to touching base with you later to let you know where we've met these goals and objectives later this year. This will be the infrastructure and community development team.

C

Thank you very much. This team is led by muchukimwangi and navidhak two human beings that have got a lot of experience out there, like juan and max they're, working with all of you on internet exchange points, network operator groups to support the ixps research and education networks, as you can see here, and other organizations that help build local internet. This is very important. As andrew mentioned earlier.

C

Many places around the world still don't have connectivity we're here to help change that we help build the communities that build the internet, create new and enhance existing isps and we're looking at building technical capacity and leadership. I want to take a moment to focus on that leadership. That means many of you and our chapters and our org members, our individual members and others, and our community of interest that help us scale our work through what you do every day and you're going to help us advocate for an enabling policy environment.

C

This is very important, giving a shout out also to our external engagement team. Here at the internet society. They often reach out to you. They ask you to help, come with us at a meeting to help support a certain position or help work with a local government. This is really where we're seeing some wonderful activity with the chapters. So thank you very much here are some of our. What we're going to be aiming for this year.

C

We want to engage with five new partners to help expand local and regional efforts, improve more ixps and establish new ones. That's a measure of 20. we're looking at training, 500 individuals. We did more than that last year, we're going to aim for that this year and we're going to engage with five new policy maker countries and regulators to help us amplify our work again. This is about scale. No one does it alone. We all do our work with partners and it's really important to recognize evgenya bhararanko, who is our project manager for this project?

C

Thank you very much to the team for all the work that they're doing here as well. We're super excited about this project. This is the measuring the internet team.

C

I have to say that this project has really come to the fore. As of last year, they launched a new platform where you're seeing great data about the health of the internet about internet shutdowns. This team is led by matt, ford and kenny olmstead. The project manager for that team is evgenya again. The team has got people from around the world working to try and bring all that data to the forefront.

C

We use that data to strengthen our policy and regulatory arguments. We use it to offer insights into the health availability and evolution of the internet to continue to provide a valuable platform that anyone can reference and, I have to say we're getting some wonderful feedback.

C

Thank you to the chapters that have worked with us and to our data partners, folks at cada, mlabs and other who have really and mozilla would be remiss not to mention mozilla who've been helping us get that data and to describe the importance of using that data data by itself isn't going to say much unless you tell that story and matt and team and kenny have been doing that.

C

So you help us hold us to these objectives, we're going to try and meet to release we're releasing a new version of the platform, we're going to be coming out to the community about that and we're expanding um the platform to reach new use cases, which is how we describe what we're doing with that data to describe again the health of the internet and working to give you more information to support what you're doing out there on the planet. So thank you very much.

C

This is the internet growth portfolio, we're really looking forward to all the work with all of you and we thank you very much and now it's my great pleasure to introduce joe hall joseph joe leads, the internet, strong portfolio of projects, he's a wonderful advocate for the internet and a great colleague so joe over to you.

D

Thank you so much so I run the strong internet projects at the internet society, which generally focus on security and trustworthiness of various parts of the internet.

D

There are four projects and I'll talk about them in turn, in our goals and so excited for 2021 and making sure that all of you can get a piece of this work. So if you're on this call you're, probably one of the group of us who thinks the internet is pretty awesome.

D

um If you don't think, it's awesome talk to us, but the internet has increasingly seen us through the worst of times in the best of times over the past three decades, most notably, notably during this collective pandemic, where we've relied on the internet for a variety of things.

D

The internet is now attracting attention from people who have ideas themselves about how the internet should look, and it should look differently as it grows out of its adolescence.

D

Of course, the internet is a complicated place and it changes to how it functions could have serious consequences for it. The internet is a complicated place and changes to how it functions could have very serious consequences for its future. In 2020, we worked really hard to think about what exactly makes the internet so special and we boiled out of it five critical properties that make the internet such an amazing basis for communications and innovation, and we created a way of doing impact assessments for the internet that focus on these five critical properties.

D

These five critical properties are pretty simple to state. They include an accessible infrastructure with a common protocol, open architecture of interoperable and reusable building blocks, a decentralized management in a single distributed, routing system, common global identifiers and, finally, a technology neutral, general purpose network. Those five things for the most part create this glorious thing. We call the internet in 2021 we're going to extend this work by training others about these critical properties. What are the features of those things?

D

I've said what do they mean and how to do their own impact assessments for the internet and critically we see policy and decision makers. We want to see policy and decision makers using internet impact assessments to assess the potential effects of their ideas about how the internet should look or how it should be changed.

D

Encryption encryption is a critical piece of how our digital society and the internet works. It is, for all intents and purposes, the glue that holds everything together. It's like the mortar and the digital brick, the mortar that holds the digital bricks together of our of the internet and digital society, but for almost 25 years now there have been a series of what we call crypto wars, where governments, starting with the united states in the 1990s, sought to control how encryption is used, who could use it and how strong it can be.

D

Needless to say, it's 2021 and everything from this zoom session to your health records and finances relies on encryption to enforce boundaries, to keep your information safe and ultimately ensure that bad things don't happen in the real world as a consequence of being undermined in the digital world.

D

In terms of internet society, we spent 2020 building our latent blatant encryption bench and preparing for this next crypto war, which looks like it's going to start this year in a number of different places around the world.

D

Encryption faces very powerful forces that make a variety of arguments about why we need to weaken these digital locks in 2021.

D

We are set to do really wonderful things with our partners and community and various stakeholders we're going to continue to work with the global encryption coalition, which we co-lead with the center for democracy and technology and global partners. Digital and this coalition works in eight target countries around the world where we see pretty serious challenges coming up. Excuse me. This includes the united states, canada, brazil, australia, india, the united kingdom, france and germany and we'd be very interested to hear if encryption is under threat, where you are either in those countries or not.

D

We have set pretty ambitious and goals for 2021, including increasing the adoption of end-to-end encryption by 10 globally by the end of 2021, through advocacy through pushing industry people to turn it on through a variety of things: technical standards, a variety of things in those eight countries that I mentioned we're going to measure our success by ensuring that no anti-encryption proposals come into effect in those countries. That's the ultimate goal. They can talk about them, but ultimately they will be unsuccessful.

D

If we do our job we've for a number of years now grown and incubated, something called the manners initiative, an effort to secure global routing. Whenever I talk about routing, because it's not something that a lot of people have experience with, I need to say the following things: you're, not familiar with routing you just have to know the internet is a network of networks for information to get from one network to another. These networks actually announce things. They say hey to get to 1.1.1 an example of an ipv4 address to get to 1.1.1.

D

You come over to my network. Those are called route announcements, you're actually announcing the path to get to the place where you need to go. Unfortunately, those announcements are not secure at all. Anyone can announce routes, and sometimes that happens, manners or the mutually agreed norms for routing security initiative is a normative model or behavioral initiative, where network operators, internet exchanges, cdns and cloud operators all agree to do a set of actions that will result in more secure global routing and fewer route leaks, which route leaks are essentially these bad announcements.

D

In 2021, we have ambitious goals for an ambitious agenda to reduce global routing incidents by 10 percent, to increase the longitudinal conformance of manners participants. That means they may be conformant when they join, but we want to make sure that they continue to stay conformed and we're going to seek to have a number of participants using specific technical features of routing security, including increased route, origin authorizations and route origin. Excuse me validations and ultimately, 2021 is the year we're trying to assess whether or not the community itself can run with manners.

D

um This has been an ice stock endeavor for a long time, but ultimately, it's best run by by the community. We think we're gonna figure out if that's even possible, um so we're also working to preserve the open internet through global technical standards in a variety of places.

D

Specifically, isoc is known for its participation in the itu international, the international telecommunication union's wtsa, which is the world telecommunications standardization assembly.

D

The this thing whitsa wtsa is where the next four years of work items is decided for the technical part of the itu, which is a u.n telecommunications body, because the wtsa 2021 in march in india has been postponed, obviously due to coven and the pandemic and the inability for any of us to travel, and we want to stay safe.

D

We're going to work hard to make sure that efforts to centralize or close the internet get a strong technical response packaged for these government entities, arguing that we want to cultivate and guard the internet to ensure that it flourishes not that it languishes or becomes. You know something that can't support the kinds of things that we love about: the internet, um we're going to measure our success here by counting the number of governments that actually express support for our positions. You know we need a general purpose network, it's a distributed system.

D

You know a variety of things like that: we're going to look to see at least four public statements that undergird that from governments- okay, that's it for me.

E

Thank you very much, joe um hello, everyone. I hope you can hear me well. It is a real pleasure to be here with you today. I will be covering the section of the 2021 action plan, that is about empowering people to take action for the internet itself, and it's mostly about you.

E

The internet society is made up of people who champion the internet in our community and within our staff. Our 2021 action plan is oriented towards empowering and enabling more internet champions to take action and to make the internet bigger and stronger for everyone. This year we will focus more on individual members to attract and engage them better. Our target is to get 5000 individual members to participate in isaac activities this year. This is a relatively high target. Last year we had slightly over 1 800 individual members participate in activities related to projects.

E

This year we have, we hope, to have more individual members involved and the ce team. Our community engagement team, is working on a plan to make it happen. Our chapter training program was extremely popular. Last year we will be continuing the program this year as well. This is training to empower chapters and enhance their capacity for awareness, raising and advocacy on internet issues that our projects focus on now.

E

Our target this year is to reach 500 chapter members, and I don't think this will be hard to do because last year, more than 600 chapter members from 94 different chapters participated in the training. That's nearly 80 of all our chapters, and, what's really amazing, is that close to 70 percent of the training participants implemented an initiative locally to drive impact in support of our projects. We hope to have similar results this year, if not exceed them this year. Also, we will be working on improving the function of special interest groups.

E

The six the improvements will be based on recommendations from a working group of sick leaders. Six are meant to be an effective mechanism for our global community to come together and to work together on specific topics in support of isoc's vision and mission, and the topics can go beyond the focus of our projects.

E

As part of the sig reform effort. This year, our community members will be asked to propose topics of interest that they would like to work on together. The top five topics will be selected for six to focus on via community consultation.

E

Participation in the six will be voluntary and based on interest in the topic itself. This year our staff will be working with community leaders and representatives to develop the process for topic selection and how the new 6 would function to better support our community. We will also make improvements to our software systems. We've heard your feedback, we understand your frustration, we have the same frustration and this improvement will cover our association, management and relationship management systems.

E

The improvements will give a better overall experience for all users. It will allow for more targeted communications and enhance virtual and in-person events for all participants.

E

Now these improvements will take some time as systems requirements tend to be complex, but we hope to get it completed this year, cross fingers that everything get done properly. Everything that we do at the internet society involves content, and this year we will be reforming our approach to content, support more effective participation in isoc activities.

E

The new approach will be implemented to improve the way staff plan, create and distribute internet society content to those who can help us achieve our mission, and we hope that you will notice the difference and give us feedback about it. We are creating a new division within our communications team and james wood will be leading this effort this year.

E

In 2021, we will be ramping up our capacity building and expertise building efforts. The learning at internet society program is our training and professional development program. It is designed to enhance people's proficiency so that they can become future internet leaders. We designed this program with you in mind. Through this program, we aim to reach 10 000 learners via 30 e-learning course offerings.

E

We expect to have our new learning management system deployed by mid-year latest. We hope to have it ready earlier. We will work to make course accreditation possible through partnerships with academic institutions, and we will also actively look for sponsorships for the learning program to make the courses available to more people around the world.

E

At the internet society we develop and prepare future internet advocates. This year we will launch the first cohort of the early career fellowship program. The early career fellowship program is designed for talented internet champions, who recently started in their profession and have demonstrated interest and high potential across a range of internet related topics.

E

We will work on securing partners to help support the program through financial sponsorship, contribution to the program's curriculum or mentoring and training the fellows. Also. We will continue to organize and host the network and distributed system security. Symposium ndss ndss is a very special conference. It is a top academic conference, focused on cutting-edge knowledge in network and distributed system security this year. For the first time ever ndss will be a virtual conference.

E

It will be a little bit challenging for us to transform this into a virtual format, but we hope that it will work well. We will work to maintain the ndss position as a top five academic research symposium in the world for computer and network security, and we hope to have a collaboration between the ndss research community and the open standards. Community is an outcome of the conference at the internet, society staff work on fundraising and partnership building.

E

This is because, with more financial support and partnerships for the work that the internet society does, we know that we can do more, include more people and ensure that our work responds to people's needs everywhere. This year we will expand our fundraising fundraising: outreach to a broader, more diverse range of potential funders. We will diversify the channels through which we raise funds.

E

We will also continue to pursue funds through organization, memberships, sponsorships grants from foundation and corporations, individual donations, corporate matching programs and contributions to our learning at internet society program by the end of the year. We aim to secure 10, new funding sources and 50 new partners for our work, and this is quite a high target because last year we achieved 11 new partners, but I think that our external engagement team is quite excited about bringing in more partners for the work that we do at the internet society.

E

So this is the end of the empowering people to take action for the internet section of the 2021 action plan. I now hand the session back to andrew.

B

uh Thank you to uh to jane to joe and to renega for giving us that overview of the plans for the year. This is the plan that we have developed in order to guide our work in 2021.

B

The efforts here are all around making a difference for the internet, we're going to work to make sure that internet access and the security of the internet continue to be our focus, that they continue to be the the load star of the things that we're doing we want to advocate for the true global internet. There are lots of people who want to talk about uh an internet that isn't really the internet.

B

They want to swap a simple, controlled, easily managed utility for something that gives the power back to people that gives the power to each one of us to do what we want with this marvelous technology.

B

We will continue to work to make sure that our standing is as great as it can be to influence decision making about the internet around the world and to make sure that we continue to be trusted as a balanced voice, uh balanced uh insights, balanced opinion that gives people the real.

B

The real goods about how the internet works and what it, uh what what it is like, and we will continue to make sure that the internet society improves we're gonna push forward with our initiatives, to try to make sure that the entire community is supported in making sure that the internet continues to be strong and that it continues to grow.

B

We need all of you as strong partners as strong participants in an internet society that can continue to make sure everybody has access to this marvelous technology, the internet.

B

You know it's a piece of technology, but people forget all the time what an important human technology this is. The people who invented the internet, the people who who gave us this marvelous technology did not do it.

B

I mean you know some of them were nerds and of course they did it primarily because it was a nifty technical problem. But the truth is: if you talk to them, many of them are still around.

B

You will learn how important it was to them that what they were doing was connecting people together, putting people together allowing people to collaborate across vast distances across. You know different time zones across all kinds of challenges that otherwise would have made it difficult to talk to one another, and so our global community is the critical piece to make sure that the internet and the internet society continue to move forward, to make sure that the internet is for everyone.

B

I thank you for participating today and I look forward to the remainder of the time that we have here together, so we can have discussions about this plan for 2021. Thank you.

F

Thank you very much to andrew jane joe rinalia and evelyn to your incredible contributions to this special event today and to the development of action plan 2021 more broadly, my name is lois witherspoon and I sit within the community engagement team here at the internet society and I'll, be your moderator for today.

F

I'm personally very excited about this action plan and the year ahead, and judging by how many of you have joined us on the call today, I think that sentiment is shared by our community and I truly hope that we can work together as allies to create an internet that is for everyone in 2021.

F

Now. Today's call is for you, so at this stage, I'd like to open the floor for any questions and comments from the community. We've received a few already, so we'll go one by one, but please do feel free to put your questions and comments in the chat or raise your hand if you'd like to speak.

F

Our first question today is from judith hellerstein addressed to jane on the grow portfolio, jane which new countries will you be engaging with this year.

C

Judah, thank you for the question um we're working out, which countries will be engaging with we're going to engage with the countries we worked with before on community networks and internet exchange points, but stay tuned we'll be providing that information out to the community we're in discussions right now.

C

As you know, it can take a bit of time to to get to that point, but to give you a snapshot of where we've been last year, it's greece republic of georgia, south africa, kenya, argentina, colombia, mexico, brazil, places like that for community networks and internet exchange points. We helped support. 26 ixps last year.

C

Put you in touch with machuchin naveed on that and I'll put you in touch with max and juan on the specifics for last year on community networks and that way you'll have a snapshot of what we did in some of the places we're going. But thank you for that. We we know, we've got to get that out to you. So I appreciate the question. Thank you, luis.

F

Thank you jane. My next question is for joe on the strong side of our work. This is a comment from andrew kampling on strengthening the internet. He has two concerns. The first is that the internet may not be as resilient if or when the next pandemic hits, and, secondly, that too many developments are being driven by tech companies with little or no consideration of the societal impacts and public policy priorities.

F

The question is: how do we get true multi-stakeholder input into, and oversight of standards bodies like the ietf.

D

Thank you for your question, mr kampling. um So the first one you're you point to an iab paper that I haven't had a chance to look at, so I'm just if you want to hop on async or synchronously now and describe this iv paper and have me respond to it, that's more than it's fine, but I can't do it without reading it. Now. Your second question about developments being driven by tech companies with little or no consideration of societal impacts. I just don't agree with that premise whatsoever.

D

We just saw google, for example, shut down loon, which was definitely something that they had. You know put their heart and soul into and couldn't figure out how to make the the the business end work. There's a lot of efforts like that. um I think at the same time, when you're asking how do we get more multi-stakeholder input into the ietf? I wonder what you think is missing. um Is it government voices because that's a feature, not a bug or that's a bug whatever? It would be a bad thing.

D

In my opinion, um I've seen a lot of increased voices from civil society at the ietf um it'd, be interesting to see exactly what you think is missing. From our perspective, the ietf is the crown jewel in multi-stakeholder open standard setting and technical standards.

D

Anyway, that's probably not the answer you're looking for. So, if you want to follow up with me, please feel free.

F

Thank you joe next. I see we have a few questions from markinson jean, who also has his hand raised so markinson. Please feel free to unmute.

E

Yeah, my first question is: I could work so that internet can be a tools or variable tools for everyone.

C

F

Jane, would you like to take that one.

C

Sure absolutely and thank you for the question um in order to have an internet for everyone, we've got to have more internet, so that's parting. The build and the bigger building a bigger internet as andrew had described- and I mentioned with community networks and internet exchange points, that's supporting the local infrastructure, making sure we have resiliency redundancy and networks and also cross-border connectivity, particularly um for the landlocked countries that can't get out to the sea where submarine cables are coming in.

C

And it's all about hearing from all of you on some of your ideas on how we can continue to do that scale. More projects we reach. We have great reach into different organizations like the dynamic spectrum alliance. We work with submarine, cable folks, we're working with data center operators so and fixed fixed network operators. The people that put fiber into the ground, as well as wi-fi and mobile operators reach out to us, and we can talk to you more at length about how we can do that.

C

But it does depend on you coming to us and us working with you, and I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the foundation also has great grants the internet society foundation and they can help you scale some of your work as well. So it's really up to you with your brilliant ideas and the work we can do together.

F

Thank you jane. Our next question comes from rodwin growin. The question is: is there a way to circumvent government switching off the internet, and for that I'd like to invite andrew sullivan to comment.

B

Internet shutdowns are one of the most irritating parts of my day these days, because we get them. uh We we get a lot of uh of such events and we get a lot of uh of questions about what we can do about that and uh we need to break this into two parts.

B

The the first part is governments are sovereign uh in the world and uh while the internet society does not believe that governments- or indeed anyone else, should be shutting down the internet for anyone, uh we can't do anything about it in the strict sense that we're not a government and um when governments say uh you know, why, should you tell us what to do with the sovereign government? We have to acknowledge that they are in fact sovereign uh in in their territories.

B

So so that's that's one part of it, but the most important part is something that I uh I want us to carry forward. I want everybody on in the internet society, including everybody in the staff, but also everybody who is a member of the internet society. Everybody who is interested in what the internet society is doing to remind people about this when you shut the internet off you hurt yourself, it is self damage.

B

It is harmful to your own goals. To turn the internet off, and the reason that is harmful to yourself is because it makes other people not want to use the infrastructure in your location. Again, every part of the internet is voluntary. There is no piece of the internet that has to be turned on.

B

Every network that participates in the internet does so because it gets something from it.

B

So if you as a government, decide to turn the infrastructure off inside your country, what you do is signal to everybody else in the world that that infrastructure is something that people cannot rely on in the future.

B

That other people in the future should expect that you're going to turn it off again, and what does that mean? That means that other people who are deciding where they are going to build more infrastructure are going to avoid your country they're, going to avoid your infrastructure, because it's dangerous to them to build to build their assumptions about that infrastructure, and this is not some theoretical problem. I worked in the industry we used to in in previous employers.

B

We used to make that trade off all the time and I've spoken to lots and lots of organizations today who are doing that very large technical corporations avoid certain countries because they know the infrastructure is going to be turned off and when that is turned off, it means that they can't do their own jobs.

B

So this is a straightforward self-damage that governments are doing to themselves, they're doing it to their own people, shutting down infrastructure that everybody needs. This is dangerous. It's a bad idea.

B

I can't tell governments that they must not do that, because nobody has the power to do that, but we need to persuade governments that it is more harmful to them to turn the infrastructure off than it is to continue allowing it to function. The way it was designed and more and more countries are embracing.

B

This idea that you can just turn it off and then, when you turn it all back on, it's all going to work again, it's not going to work again every time you do that you make it worse every single time and we need every one of us needs to make that clear.

B

Every time we speak to a government every time we have the opportunity to convince them not to do this because it's doing harm to their own goals.

B

This is, I think, one of the most urgent issues for the internet society, and I think we every one of us needs to make that message loud and clear. Every time we have a chance.

F

Thank you very much, andrew. Thank you. Our next question comes from michael nelson from carnegie endowment. He asks what kind of new funding sources are you seeking government corporate foundations and what type of partners renalia I'll pass that one to you thanks.

E

Lois michael, thank you very much for the question and I think that um the team, the fundraising and partnerships team at isoc are very much interested in speaking to you uh about this topic more after this session. So we are targeting all of the above, including governmental, and intergovernmental, funding, corporate and foundation funding, as well in terms of grants, particularly and in terms of partnerships. We prioritize the needs of our projects, what they need in terms of partners for resourcing expertise, knowledge, implementation on the ground locally somewhere in the world.

E

Those are the entities that we will approach and it doesn't matter what sector they operate in. We can get more specific when we discuss it later and I believe that you're already connecting with cara and chet right now. Thank you very much for the question again.

F

Thank you, rinalia. We have just under 15 minutes left. So please remember to put your questions in the chat and hopefully we get to it in this session. Our next question is addressed to jane on the growth side. What plans do we have for digital rights lawyers within the community, and how can they become more active.

C

Thank you for that question.

C

We welcome all people working with us and everything that we're doing from the digital rights side. I would actually encourage you to reach out to our external engagement team.

C

They may have a better way of linking you up with others, but we'd be keen to work with you on our community networks, internet exchange point and the measuring the internet projects in any way that you're willing to get some input, but digital rights lawyers are critical to the internet ecosystem and to making sure that we're on our game and not forgetting certain critical aspects that civil society can bring to the table.

C

So thank you for that and reach out to us and we'll try and figure out a way to bring you on with some of the work that we're doing. I'd also turn it over to joe for a sec, because he's got some great experience with digital rights advocacy. So joe, do you want to take a little bit of this.

D

Yeah, so you know I come from my before I joined isaac. I was the chief technologist at the center for digital center for democracy and technology in the us and brussels. um The digital rights community is a really important part of our ecosystem. You know they have a a very powerful and network. They have really amazing ideas. We work with them all the time as it is, and so um you know, like writing letters to governments, to persuade them to not do dumb things and stuff like that.

D

So we do work with them quite a bit. You can reach reach out to me offline and I'm happy to talk a little bit more about that.

D

F

Thank you jane. Thank you joe. Our next question is from alejandro. He asks. Are there any specific actions icehawk has taken to help promote legislation in countries on the six gigahertz spectrum band to go unlicensed or dedicated to wi-fi.

C

And louis we've answered that question in the chat a bit and we're going to link up with alejandro it's brazil and through the chapter and some other organizations that we work through, like the dynamic spectrum alliance, but we'll loop up with alejandro. So thank you. Thank.

F

You thank you jane. We have a follow-up question related to shutdowns from nikola from uganda.

F

He asks what could be done to overcome internet shutdowns, especially in times when people need it most to get updates, especially like in the recently concluded presidential elections in uganda.

F

Do you have anything you want to add on that andrew.

B

uh Well, the there is this fundamental problem that, because governments are sovereign, they will sometimes do things like this, but fundamentally we as the internet society, all of the staff and all of the members of the internet society, need to explain and make clear and make well understood.

B

You know how damaging this is when countries do that. The other thing we need to do is make sure that the infrastructure is really really robust. The more interconnectivity we build the harder it is to turn things off.

B

You know the internet wants it it's it's almost like it has a desire to connect. It's almost like the internet wants to hook things up, that it wants to make things connected to one another and it's it's kind of hard actually to get things not to connect to one another once they're connected to the internet.

B

They want to connect more and what that means, of course, is that we can encourage that kind of dense connectivity, which makes it harder and harder to turn it off and- and what's strange to me, is watching governments, uh I'm not going to pick on the ugandan government in particular, because there's so many governments right now who are trying to do this they're trying to make the internet less robust than it already is they're trying to make it weaker than it was than it than it was designed to be, and then it already is built.

B

We see governments doing that. So I think that the really critical message here is to try to teach people that the internet isn't like a system as a single system. It's not just a really big version of the thing in your home or your office. It's not just a really big, laptop or or phone or something like that. It's instead all of this dense connectivity.

B

Nobody ever suggests you know, for instance, that we should close all of the roads in the world on a given day. Nobody ever suggests that it's just ridiculous, and yet people do that kind of thing. They think with the internet all of the time- and I think that is the kind of thinking that we gotta get across to these governments. There is no magic solution to this.

B

It's not going to happen quickly, we're going to have to persuade people we're going to have to persuade governments who are prone to do this kind of thing we're going to have to work really hard at it, but I you know we really need every one of us to participate in this effort and to try to make it just unacceptable um to do that kind of thing, because it should be unacceptable.

B

It should be obviously wrong to blow things up to destroy infrastructure that we're all depending on. I think that is the critical thing. This is a social problem and we need social medias to do something about it.

F

Thank you andrew.

F

We have a question from abu bakr who's asking what are the conditions for supporting regulators to have the tools to measure capacity.

C

It's a good question I'll take a crack at part of it. If we're looking at mapping in a country to understand where people are connected or not, if you're talking about that sort of capacity, we can help with that. That's one of the things that we're going to be looking at on the community networks, project and mapping, because right now, we've seen that mapping is broken with some of the statistics that are out there and, as andrew had said earlier, over half the planet's not connected we're starting to parse this and pull apart.

C

Who is connected? How are they connected? Where are they connected because it's important to our objective of connecting more people and building more networks and so we're seeing a breakdown in some of the old regulatory regimes? The old rules do not help the new internet networks, they're old rules from the telco days, which are not helping us grow a bigger internet and keep it strong. So we're looking at how to change universal service, where we can look at licensing how we can change funding models.

C

Funding for smaller networks is not in the billions right now that doesn't mean we don't have a great understanding of funding instruments. We're working on that. We've got quite a few good partners there, but we do have to look at working with regulators to build their capacity, so we also have partners like a4ai who's, a great partner and apc, where we all band together to look at a common message that we can take to regulators and policymakers.

C

We also do this through the itu development sector, where we participate in certain of the study groups to help work with and influence, as well as we can within the boundaries of our role, to provide them with more data about the importance of a bigger, stronger internet, as andrew said, not shutting it down how to look at better regulatory form and policies, and so this is a collaborative effort across regions globally and with partners.

C

So that's an answer for you at one level: I'm not sure if I've answered your full question, but we can take it offline if you'd, like more data with respect to building network capacity, because that's something we're doing as andrew said, to build more infrastructure, get them across borders, create redundancy and resiliency.

F

Thank you jane our next question. Switching gear to the strong side of the portfolio comes from anatoly. He asks governments in belarus use dpi and dns hijacking to censor websites that some government officials found unpleasant. How do you advocate your values to those who prefer force over negotiation.

D

That is a complex question.

D

I think you know some of the things that andrew sullivan has stated. You know that you know that there's sort of an increasing recognition that we have levers of control, I'm really sorry about the the leaf blowers. Hopefully you can't hear them. um It's really annoying.

D

um I think in this case, what we're seeing is sort of a a a a a a new sort of ability for governments to control things that they didn't really think they had control over in the past, and so you see things like not just merely the worst of the worst websites being blocked, but you know political opponents and things like that and in the end those people will find ways to speak, but they're just not going to be able to speak in your in your country to your people using your networks.

D

So I guess what I would say is there's a bunch of technical ways that we can still get around a lot of these government blocks. You can reach out to me, and I can point you to resources that talk about that. Be careful, though, because that may put you you may be breaking the law in some places by circumventing some of these blocks um in the end, what we would do is go in and say similar to what andrew is saying.

D

You know we don't often shut down all the roads for some period of time, and here are the effects of shutting down some of these roads, especially roads, that that really don't pose a general threat to everyone. um It seems like the the argument you would make is that you're ultimately only hurting yourself by undermining sort of free thought and the rule of law?

D

Those are some thoughts but feel free to reach out to me. If you didn't find that satisfying.

F

Thank you joe. We have just a few minutes left, so we're gonna move on to the last questions for today.

F

Our next one is: how do you think it could be possible to avoid the content, network's distribution being an oligopoly and dominating the internet definitively.

F

Do we have any takers for that? One.

C

Can we ask a point of clarification? Is this? um Are you talking about monopoly power at the um isp level, or are you talking about content itself? um I just need a little more clarification, because this might be a joke question.

F

Perhaps if you're able to clarify in the chat- and we might be able to get to your question in the next few minutes, perhaps we can move to our last question of the day.

G

uh Thank you very much. It was very wonderful session, so I want to ask about some. The privacy concern, like the data sharing and data aspects like the social norms in the countries of the south asia, so how internet uh society is playing role in this concern to get awareness about the data sharing and the privacy concerns.

D

Hi, so um you know at the internet society we have to focus on on things that we we know we do well and there's a lot of organizations that focus on privacy and data protection, while some of us are experts in that field. Like myself, I know quite a bit about privacy and data protection. um We have to choose our battles really carefully. So if there is an aspect of this that implicates or or infringes on aspects of internet policy or technology, that's a place that we can help out.

D

If not, we can probably better point you to people who are better placed to talk about those issues in your context and things like that, sorry to kind of wave my hands, but we have to be really careful. We work on some things and that's what we presented today, um but don't tend to work on things um that we we just don't have the capacity or that we know that there's a ton of other folks working on those issues around the world. Thank you.

F

Thank you for all of your questions. Today, it's been an absolute pleasure, seeing this amount of participation on this call and I'd now like to pass the floor to evelyn namara, who will close the session out evelyn over to you.

A

Thank you very much, lawyers for moderating our q and a thanks. Everyone for being super engaging. uh The promise is that we still have more questions that were unanswered, we'll consolidate those and send responses to you. Thank you very much for being super engaging so now to close out, um I would like to ask you if you want to get involved in any of our project work.

A

Please make sure you update your profile on our member portal and let us know what you'd like to contribute to they'll send via chat right now the link on how you can actually um update your membersh member member profiles. Please go to member nova and make those updates. Thank you so much for joining this call, and you will hear from us soon. We wish you a very good day, bye.

A