Global Internet Governance Academic Network Annual Symposium | Part 3 | IGF 2023 Day 0 Event #112

Dennis Riedeker

Adio De Nica, an authority on African digital infrastructure, and Dennis Riedeker, prominent for his work on human rights online, presented a concerted paper on regional Internet governance and post-colonial consciousness. Their concentration was particularly drawn towards the African Declaration of Internet Rights and Freedoms. Their goal was not limited to highlighting the significance of digital rights, but extended to examining these rights through an exclusively African lens.

A defining element of their study involved dissecting the origins and unique attributes of the African Declaration, as well as observing its advocacy implementation and overall reception. This study, although autonomous, received partial funding from the EU’s Remit Project, denoting international interest and collaboration in understanding and bolstering Internet governance in Africa.

The pair conducted their research under the guide of digital constitutionalism. This innovative ideology seeks to adapt fundamental rights and principles to our escalating digital realm, giving thought to multinational corporations as well as nation-states. The views of pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah, who advocates for unification and decolonisation of Africa, were also utilised. This distinctive combination of notions fundamentally drives their research.

De Nica and Riedeker underscored the pivotal role of the African Declaration of Human Rights and Principles in crafting Internet legislation across Africa, by offering a framework that respects Africa’s unique perspectives on human rights in the digital world. They also acknowledged its sway on the 2019 revision of the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access of Information in Africa, and its citation by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. Their paper underlined the powerful influence of strong advocacy strategies in achieving such accomplishments.

Moreover, the researchers emphasised the utility of national legislation as viable solutions to tackling Africa’s challenges. Specifically, they referenced Nigeria’s digital rights and freedom bill, which, regrettably, failed to procure presidential support, as an example of their innovation. However, they remained hopeful for Pan-African initiatives such as the African Declaration.

Nevertheless, the efficiency and implementation of the African Declaration sparked critical discussions among those who saw it more as an objective than an enacted law or treaty. Regardless of critique, De Nica and Riedeker stood firm in their endorsement of the strategy of undertaking multiple levels to gauge the efficacy of varied plans. This methodology personifies their pragmatic approach to research and policy enforcement, whilst simultaneously championing the cause of African digital sovereignty.

Stephanie Arnold

The examination pinpointed the broad-ranging influence of the European Union (EU) on digital policymaking globally. This influence is particularly conspicuous in Africa, primarily due to the EU’s Digital for Development Policy (D4D). This policy is designed to further digital infrastructural development, enhance digital literacy and skills, foster digital entrepreneurship, and exploit digital technologies for sustainable development – all of which significantly benefit African countries.

However, throughout the discussion, an urgent call for a precise definition and categorisation system for digital policies became apparent. A discrepancy emerged on what constitutes a digital policy, ranging from an ICT regulatory tracker score to freedom of expression. This highlighted the necessity for future research to evaluate not just the quantity, but also the quality of these policies.

Contemplating digital policies at the national level, particularly in African nations, was put forward as a method of protection against digital colonialism. It is a term defined here as the susceptibility African nations face due to their dependence on foreign technology and finance for digital advancement. Notably, digital policies at a national level are believed to strengthen African states’ resilience to such potential exploitation.

The part played by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was another focal point of the analysis. The BRI stands as a substantial influence on the adoption of ICT policies, especially in regions across Africa. Factually, regions outside of Africa that are BRI members reportedly outperform African nations in terms of ICT policy adoption. These regions have less interaction with the EU, demonstrating the BRI’s potential either to enhance or mitigate the EU’s effects on ICT policy application.

Both the D4D policy’s geographical focus and the Belt and Road Initiative contribute positively to digitalisation—in need of further regulation—and policy adoption. The unique perspective of the D4D policy is argued to produce positive outcomes, while being a BRI member evidently correlates with boosted ICT policy uptake.

Another remarkable perception from the discussion was Africa’s apparent resistance to digital influence owing to a multitude of alternative options and foreign influences. This contradicts the earlier mentioned susceptibility, thereby hinting at an intricate and fluctuating digital landscape in Africa. Lastly, the dialogue underscored the need for broadened research into digital policies in developing countries, notably within the Global South. Current research is limited in scope, unable to consider all digital policies in these areas, hence suggesting significant potential for future examinations.

The mixture of viewpoints provided a balanced appraisal of the roles played by the EU and China, reflecting the complexity of the relationships between these significant drivers and developing regions worldwide. Both the EU and China are portrayed in neutral lighーas neither solely beneficial nor detrimentalーsignifying an equilibrated comprehension of their influential capacities in shaping global digital policies.

Adio Adet Dinika

Kwame Nkrumah, a prominent figure in Africa’s liberation movement, provides indispensable insights into African independence and sovereignty. His ideology, notably articulated in his book “Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,” advocates for African self-determination and independence. Nkrumah’s significance stems from his role as the first Prime Minister and President of an independent Ghana, marking him as a key actor in Africa’s historic struggle for autonomy. He firmly believed in digital sovereignty, outlining a framework for African states to control their key digital systems, an argument of increasing relevance in today’s digital era.

However, this optimistic view of Africa’s potential is shrouded by the menace of digital colonialism. This notion exposes the encroachment of conventional imperialism into the digital domain, where foreign entities wield control over Africa’s technology regulations and digital rights. Colonialism is metamorphosing from being physical to digital, raising grave concerns about Africa’s digital rights.

Despite these impediments, Nkrumah’s belief that foreign aid can be beneficial if the conditions align favourably with Africa’s interests is still pertinent. External support could conceivably aid in the execution of benchmarks like the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms (AfDec). The AfDec represents an African-initiated policy aimed at bolstering understanding of internet rights and freedoms within African states.

Nonetheless, the core issue lies with Africa’s digital independence. The term ‘Digital Colonialism’ is instrumental in sparking debate about power dynamics, particularly in the context of foreign-owned platforms dictating policies in Africa. This manifestation of a power imbalance stems from market forces and illustrates that ‘Digital Colonialism’ is not merely an analogy; it inherently outlines power dynamics.

Furthermore, disconcerting phenomena, such as data extraction undertaken by tech giants like Facebook and TikTok, which exploit and utilise African data beyond the continent’s borders, underlines the urgent need for Africa to concentrate on its digital sovereignty. Africans should not be constrained to use tools within a particular linguistic, cultural, or economic context, thus stripping them of their digital rights and independence.

In conclusion, the complexities of digital sovereignty in Africa, spanning from self-determination to the influence of foreign entities and power dynamics, unveil a significant need for Africa to assert control over its own digital landscape. This includes databases, technology, and policy to enhance equality, justice, and robust establishments, thereby aligning with several of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These factors combined signal an urgent call for action for Africa to fortify its digital sovereignty, ensuring it is not just a site for data extraction, but a significant player safeguarded by a set of respected and upheld digital rights.

Nicola Palladino

Digital sovereignty, which refers to the control and regulation of digital technologies, is a pivotal concept in the current era where digitalisation increasingly permeates our societies. Sovereignty in the digital realm allows states to control internet traffic, nationalise internet operators, enforce data localisation practices, and implement mandatory risk and safety assessments.

Nonetheless, the transition of state sovereignty into the digital domain is fraught with challenges. Whilst control of the digital infrastructure can protect fundamental rights, it can equally lead to policies of mass surveillance and censorship, thereby setting a precarious balance between digital constitutionalism and potential digital authoritarianism.

Moreover, states often project extraterritorial sovereignty beyond their borders, potentially exerting their influence through legal principles, tech regulation, and use of national tech companies as agents of their digital policies. This showcasing of extraterritorial power reveals how digitalisation can both boost and problematise traditional concepts of sovereignty.

Regrettably, the realisation of digital sovereignty is accompanied by geopolitical conflicts and tensions, resulting in escalating legal uncertainty. This hampers global cooperation and poses a threat to efforts to secure fundamental rights within the increasingly vital digital environment.

In light of these obstacles, states are encouraged to responsibly utilise their digital sovereignty, fostering international cooperation to regulate digital technologies and establish consistent rules for engagement. A cooperative stance can prevent escalating geopolitical tensions and present a unified response to uphold international human rights law.

The lack of wide-ranging international laws has catalysed demand for constitutionalising the international law order. This aims to preemptively avert state-led digital violations and interferences. In acknowledgment of these tensions and conflicts, Nicola champions the need for inclusive policy-making in the digital world, advocating for the broad participation of diverse societal actors, encompassing civil society, the private sector, and the technical community.

However, the inherent power inequalities within the digital landscape raise considerable concerns. Digital initiatives are often seen to favour a select group, primarily big tech companies and the US government. This fuels mistrust at an international level, constituting a significant hurdle to accomplishing comprehensive international digital agreements. Addressing such inequalities should thus be a focal point in any efforts to promote a digital sovereignty that is mutually beneficial and universally accepted.

Moderator

The GIGANET Symposium panel centres its discussion mainly on topics of digital sovereignty, digital colonialism, and regional internet governance mechanisms, specifically as they apply to the Global South – regions that encompass Latin America, Africa, and the Asian Pacific. This comprehensive analysis lauds Jamal for his industrious leadership in guiding the programme committee’s activities.

The panel’s moderator, despite being hindered by jetlag, conveys appreciation for the research carried out by academics Dennis and Adeo. Their work scrutinises the pan-Africanism movement driven by Kwame Nkrumah and its implications for human rights within the framework of Africa’s digital territory.

The panel highlights Stephanie Arnold’s impressive presentation on the impacts of the European Union’s Digital for Development (D4D) policy on the Global South, particularly Africa. Arnold, a PhD candidate at the University of Bologna, investigates the global impact of the EU’s digital policymaking and how it may have formed digital spaces, chiefly in Africa.

The EU’s digital policies, as examined by the panel, have a profound influence achieved through strategic tools which are integrated into their policy framework like the D4D policy. This has had significant effects in Africa which are largely dependent on foreign technology for digital development.

A refined aspect of the policy adoption narrative, however, considers the role of other initiatives, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The panel suggests that these initiatives might have also influenced the adoption of ICT policies in countries not significantly focussed on by the EU.

The geographical emphasis of the EU’S D4D policy encourages discussions on bespoke policy implementation strategies, inclusive policy follow-ups, and robust impact assessments. The panel identifies a clear difference in the handling of IPv4 and IPv6 policies — with a comparison drawn between North-based Internet Routing Registries (IRR) and the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

Going against a technical mandate, the panel iterates potential political implications of the grey area within the remit of the technical community’s role in internet governance. This extends beyond simply fulfilling a practical mandate.

The panel further probes the depth and breadth of the issue of digital colonialism and geographical power dynamics, with states playing a critical role in exerting digital sovereignty and freedoms. Reflections on the African declaration on internet rights within this context emphasise a fragile equilibrium between necessity and intention in shaping digital policies.

Additional critical discussion revolves around the quality of digital policies and their processes, the complexity of IPv6 adoption, and the discrepancy in the volume of governance literature available. These concerns are raised amidst calls for more rigorously evidence-based findings, and address fears that quantity does not necessarily equate to quality.

Importantly, the panel underscores the crucial importance of incorporating perspectives from the youth and other marginalised groups in internet governance. Various avenues for enhancing youth engagement such as the implementation of voicing mechanisms, are seen as crucial in shaping future governance decisions.

The panel concludes with thoughtful reflections on the legal aspects of internet governance. This includes acknowledgment of the influence of specific educational practices, such as U.S. legal education, on legal writing styles and the use of footnotes. Concerns are expressed about the undeveloped nature of research on ‘jawboning’, a form of informal rule-making, outside of the US. Legal complexities arising around regulatory threats and their consequences on transparency and accountability, as evidenced in cases such as the Missouri dividing case, are scrutinised. Finally, the need to formalise state and company interactions as shown in the Digital Services Act concludes the discussion, suggesting further research is necessary in this domain.

Nadia Tjahja

Nadia Tjahja conducted a detailed study, tracing the journey of youth participation in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) ecosystem with a concentrated focus on platforms like YouthDIG, EuroDIG, and URIDIC. Analysing a selection of 40 participants, her study encompassed different stages of involvement within the IGF ecosystem – ranging from new entrants to those in leadership positions. Her research was orchestrated around the ‘Pyramid of Participation’ framework, treating the IGF as a consistently evolving, rotating ecosystem.

Tjahja’s findings illustrated that youths’ initial education regarding content, processes, structure, and community-building principles came from URIDIC, an essential facilitator in promoting youth participation. Subsequently, they were urged to delve deeper into the IGF ecosystem, often via regional events, backed by networks or mentors.

However, the research uncovered persistent challenges. Despite the mentoring and opportunities for engagement, many young individuals faced shortcomings in establishing meaningful connections within the community and battled the spectre of tokenism. Identified and involved due to their unique characteristics – like gender or other minority traits, rather than the value of their skills and contributions, they often felt pigeonholed. Such issues could potentially discourage future youth participation and therefore demand sincere recognition and remedies.

Tjahja’s study advocates that meaningful participation within policy-making needs redefining. She employed Malcolm’s definition as a core reference, emphasising the necessity for a truly democratic legitimacy of multi-stakeholder processes to ensure authentic youth participation, given their crucial role in the development of policies.

Furthermore, she urged for a concentrated focus on engaging other minority groups and the elder demographics. The research denotes ample opportunities for growth within these areas, recognising the need to establish a connection between internet governance and cultural diversity to help reduce inequalities.

Tjahja’s study was crucial in highlighting the necessity of understanding cultural nuances and adopting a regional approach in policy-making for facilitating momentous engagement. The use of the European framework in her methodology stood as a testament to her regional approach.

In conclusion, Tjahja’s analysis accentuates the need for the IGF to enhance their efforts in guaranteeing inclusive, legitimate youth participation, while circumventing tokenism to fortify institutions and contribute to promoting peace and justice.

Audience

In the recent conference, a multitude of pivotal themes was brought forth, including the paucity of IP addresses, Africa’s transition to IPv6, digital colonialism, and the notion of digital sovereignty.

When discussing IP address shortages, the audience fundamentally challenged Jan’s suppositions regarding Africa’s endeavour to transition to IPv6. Jan’s affirmations were disputed, taking into consideration the considerable financial resources required for such a network upgrade. A transition from IPv4 to IPv6 necessitates a significant overhaul of the existing tech infrastructure, an endeavour which might not be financially feasible for numerous African countries. Several participants referenced an existing body of literature on IP address shortages and markets to support this critique.

A key discourse arose around ‘digital colonialism’, a term that elicited various responses. Audience members sought clarification on this concept, particularly in the context of Africa’s tech development and global inequalities. Certain participants questioned whether there were differing conceptions of digital colonialism, and if potential biases might be shaping these perceptions. Digital colonialism was broadly defined as a situation where regulations are set by a dominating entity with insufficient capacity for the rest of the world to engage in negotiation. This encompassed themes of power and market relations, which notably affects the global south’s ability to participate in crucial international discussions, such as cyber security and diplomacy.

The concept of digital sovereignty also sparked interest, with Nicola championing two distinct interpretations in his paper. The traditional perspective underscores the right of the state to control digital infrastructures and data flow. In contrast, a more rights-based perspective links to the capability of citizens to influence the digital processes in which they are involved. This juxtaposition raised concerns about the credibility of states and their role in debating digital sovereignty, particularly their capacity to represent a global public interest. This in turn prompted questions about whether states’ authority over the digital landscape renders them lesser transparent and accountable.

Alongside these themes, Nadia’s groundbreaking work on developing a participatory research framework for youth participation in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was positively received. The framework aims to ensure inclusivity of underrepresented voices in policy decisions affecting future generations.

Towards the conclusion of the conference, a participant from Queen Mary University of London posed an intriguing question relating to the role of multi-stakeholder platforms. The enquiry sought to comprehend the potential of these platforms to solidify the concept of digital sovereignty, without escalating geopolitical tensions. This reflects the persistent balance between advancing digital inclusivity and avoiding exacerbation of global inequalities.

Jan Aart Scholte

South-based regional internet registries (RIRs), including AFRINIC launched in 2005 with 2,240 members, APNIC introduced in 1993 boasting 7,800 members across 56 territories, and LACNIC established in 2002 with a network of over 12,000 operators across 33 countries, play critical roles in internet governance. Crucially, these RIRs are responsible for tasks such as allocating IP addresses and autonomous systems numbers, offering training initiatives for internet engineers, providing grants for digital innovation, measuring internet usage trends, and implementing cybersecurity measures, all imperative to sustaining the functionality of the internet.

The operation and impact of these RIRs depend significantly on their legitimacy, believed to be extremely important by 84% of respondents. In the absence of legitimacy, resources, public participation, decision-making efficacy, and adherence to rules are typically hindered. Conversely, the presence of legitimacy strengthens mandates, enhances resources, and increases participation, enabling these bodies to function proficiently.

In the global governance arena, it’s evident that multi-stakeholder governance structures have expanded considerably, now significantly outnumbering the traditional intergovernmental organisations, whose resources and capacity have remained stagnant or declined in past decades.

One RIR, LACNIC, demonstrated satisfactory leadership in adopting IPv6, ceasing the allocations for IPv4. This strategic move has conferred remarkable advantages in the realm of internet governance. The implementation of IPv6 policies could potentially benefit other RIRs such as AFRINIC, albeit amidst potential obstacles due to technical complications related to internet governance.

However, the interplay of RIRs isn’t limited to the mechanics; it is deeply woven with wider social-political and fiscal matters. The knowledge produced by RIRs and their intended audience often bring to the forefront geopolitical and cultural issues, emphasising the expansion of internet governance into wider societal aspects. This is also conspicuous in the context of the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities, subjects of significant economic importance and intrinsically linked with IPv6 deployment.

Nevertheless, inequalities and power imbalances prevail within the digital landscape. The prevalence of digital colonisation presents issues, typified by practices such as ICANN’s expensive GTLD application and insurance policies, which seem to favour territories outside Africa and North America. Similar instances can be identified within the cable-laying industry, reflecting contemporary forms of colonialism.

In conclusion, it is essential to recognise and address the inherent inequality and power disparities within internet governance. Understanding these imbalances and striving towards a more equitable digital world is an indispensable task for the future of internet governance, one that spans the spectrum from the technical to the deeply political.

Ramiro Ugarte

The provided analysis offers a comprehensive examination of the myriad perspectives surrounding regulatory threats, focusing essentially on patterns of governance and their relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Of particular emphasis is ‘SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions’, thereby anchoring the discussion within a global sustainability framework.

Regulatory threats, within the sphere of governance, are perceived as a standard norm. They are generally wielded as a mechanism by public authorities exercising regulatory control over others, striving to guide behaviours and ensure compliance. The exploration surrounding these threats has remained a core area of research since the 1970s, most notably among economists engaged in regulated industries.

Nevertheless, a central paradox embedded within these regulatory threats tends to challenge fundamental rule of law principles, including transparency, accountability, participation, and stakeholder engagement. A central argument posits that, if excessively employed, these threats could potentially undermine such cornerstone principles. They may conversely encroach on individual or corporate rights, verging on illegality or unconstitutionality at times, thus laying the foundation for potential abuse, ultimately fuelling a prevailing power symbiosis between public officials and the entities they regulate.

The discourse also proposed the necessity for empirical research to determine the correlation between regulatory threats and corporate responses. It is suggested that documenting cases of these threats, combined with an analysis of corporate response strategies, could produce invaluable insights. Specifically, comprehending the global context of these threats, extending beyond the ambit of the United States, could equip us with a wider range of perspectives.

The analysis momentarily diverts to examine tendencies within US legal training. It was highlighted that US lawyers frequently lean towards the extensive utilisation of footnotes, a tendency that may be attributable to techniques used within their legal educational framework.

Veering onto the topic of internet governance, it was revealed that discussions and discourses on this subject are relatively scant outside the United States. Despite internet governance possessing universal relevance in our progressively digitised age, it was noted that only a limited volume of research (such as the works of Michael Karanikolas in the contexts of India and Canada) have broached it from non-American perspectives.

In a more granular context, Latin American electoral authorities’ successful utilisation of the ‘Mexico model’ to govern internet companies attracted attention. Reportedly adopted in countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, the effective application of this model may lead the way towards a more proficient governance mechanism for internet firms.

Lastly, the analysis communicated a positive sentiment towards the formalisation of interactions between states and private companies, witnessed in the Digital Services Act (DSA). This formalisation appears as an opportunity for augmenting transparency and documentation, potentially easing the often complex dynamics between states and corporations and perhaps decreasing some regulatory uncertainties.

Moderator:
Hello. Now we’re good. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome for the panel, the fourth panel at GIGANET Symposium. And this panel is going to discuss a little bit of digital sovereignty, digital colonialism and the regional mechanisms that are going to be worked especially in the south with Africa, Latin America and Asia Pacific experiences. I do have two preliminary notes before we jump in for the panel. The first one, I want to applaud the work done by Jamal, who is just on the back right now and was in the previous session. Jamal has been leading the work of the program committee. It’s really a huge effort and a great leadership with high stamina and efficiency. So thank you very much, Jamal. I want to take the time to applaud you. And then the second preliminary note is that I arrived in Kyoto at 1 a.m., coming straight from Brazil, and it’s 3 a.m. there. So I don’t know how much coherent I’m going to stay in the panel, but anyway, keep me responsive. And without further ado, let me start with the first presenters. I would like to have Adio De Nica. He is online in Zoom, if we can have him on screen. I have the presentation. Can we make him also his video? We have Adio De Nica. He is one of the participants in Zoom. Is it possible to pin his video? Okay, so while they’re sorting this out, I might start with Dennis. So let me introduce them. They’re going to present their paper about regional Internet governance and post-colonial consciousness. Oh, my God, I’m not coherent at all. And Rick and him, analysis of the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms. And I have here on site Dennis Riedeker and online Adio De Nica, and they’re co-presenting their paper. Please, Dennis, start.

Dennis Riedeker:
Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. Thank you for organizing this fantastic panel. We look forward to giving our paper, a paper that is a work in progress, but relatively far already progressed. We’ll be talking today about regional Internet governance and post-colonial consciousness, particularly a Nicomian analysis and critique of African Internet governance, specifically also focusing on one document, the African Declaration of Internet Rights and Freedoms. What brought us to this paper? What’s our origin story? Basically, Adio is an expert for African digital infrastructure, for digital labor. He works on AI, on platforms, on Internet infrastructure, an expert in digital sovereignty, particularly with respect to Africa. And I work on human rights online, Internet bills of rights, and what we heard earlier already, the concept of digital constitutionalism. In my dissertation, I worked on a number of those initiatives, these digital bills of rights and how they were being made. And when Adio and I talked about the African Declaration of Internet Rights and Freedoms, we realized that there’s really some to analyze, to bring our different perspectives together and so this is why we do this paper. The research questions are both descriptive, some are descriptive, some are more analytical. We ask how the document came about, what were the reasons to draft it in the first place, what sets it apart from other documents, what’s the content and how does the advocacy with it work, how does the impact, if we can ever in political science measure the impact of something, what kind of impact does the document have. Analytically we’re interested in questions such as is that really a pan-African document and what does it mean to be a pan-African declaration, why is that important to that a document on human rights online is pan-African specifically and how does that all relate to African digital sovereignty. This project is a disclaimer or acknowledgement is partly funded, a small part funded by an EU project, the Remit project and I just need to mention this, very important. What I’m going to talk about today in the next eight or so minutes, we quickly discuss a conceptual framework with a few key terms, shortly describe our empirical strategy and then talk about the findings and discussion that we present in the paper and then also outline some limitations and ideas for future research. On the right hand side you actually see Kwame Nkrumah, the core thinker that we adopted for this paper, we’ll talk more about him in a little bit. The general three concepts that we try to relate for this paper are post-colonial critique, particularly the thinking of Kwame Nkrumah, then digital constitutionalism, this kind of ideology that we need to adapt fundamental rights and principles to digital environment and the so-called digital bills of rights that have come up in recent years and thirdly African digital sovereignty. And I’m going to hand over to Adil now. Hello, can you guys hear me? Yes, Adio, we can hear and see you on the screen. Welcome. Thank you.

Adio Adet Dinika:
All right. Wonderful. Thanks for that. So, quickly moving on to the Crimean postcolonial critique, basically Nkrumah was the first time Prime Minister and first president of independent Ghana and a towering figure when you talk about African, the African liberation movement as a whole. So Nkrumah penned this book, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism, in which he laid out his ideas and his vision for what he believed is true African independence. And so it is because of his ideas and his role in African independence that in this day when we’re talking about internet freedoms, internet rights, digital sovereignty, there’s no more suitable thing from the African continent to think about than Nkrumah. So, what Nkrumah spoke about is that Nkrumah was basically saying that in most cases, when Africa is juridically free, but really is still under the hegemony of colonial colonizers, how do they do this? Through policies, through culture, through economy, where despite being independent on paper, many African governments are still dependent on their former colonizers. And I would like to hazard to say that when we look at these former colonizers, this also extends to other countries which were not necessarily colonizers, but however, let’s say global powers, which also extend this particular hegemony. China and the U.S. come to mind here. So Western aid, according to Nkrumah, was actually one of the tools which are used to coerce African interacting in a certain way that is more beneficial. for the former colonizers than for the African continent. And so what Nkrumah did or what he spoke about is he was warning about how this whole situation of neo-colonialism was actually particularly prevalent. And also he saw multinational corporations as being tools which would extend this hegemony. So now today, when we talk about the digital sovereignty, it is essential that in this thinking, we also think about organizations such as the Gatham, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, even though a couple of those have changed names. So quickly, when we talk about digital colonialism, basically, we are talking about how colonialism has moved from being a physical colonialism, which we’re all familiar with, which many African states shaked off the shackles of in the 60s, to what we have now where foreign powers, foreign entities, that is both state and private players, are actually exerting influence over African digital norms, digital rights, technology. So when we talk about digital colonialism, we then quickly have to talk about digital sovereignty. So sovereignty basically refers to how a state can have control over its own critical digital systems. And quickly, I’ll mention that without really getting into the depths of this, digital sovereignty has many facets. For example, data sovereignty. Where is the data kept? Is the state in charge of the data generated from their territory? Is it kept there? Tech sovereignty, the tools that this particular state is using, are they for the state? Are they made by that state? Please, when I say- the state doesn’t necessarily mean that the government is making them, but are they made in that particular country? And are they serving the interests of those people? When we talk of police sovereignty, who is determining the police that is directing the particular developments in a particular country? So basically, this is part of the framework that we’re going to focus on. Dennis, I’ll throw it back to you. Thank you. And the last one is digital

Dennis Riedeker:
constitutionalism. We’ve heard a little bit about it. It’s an ideology that translates core principles of contemporary constitutionalism in the context of digital society. This is from Celeste. In contrast to traditional constitutionalism, it also focuses on multinational corporations, as Adil just said, so not just on nation states as it used to. And digital civil rights are these documents that come out, and it’s kind of a set of documents that came out to articulate a set of political rights, government principles, norms, and limitations in order to drive forward this movement of digital constitutionalism. I’ll speed up a little bit, because in terms of time, there are at least five of these digital rights, bills of rights, that have come out of Pan-African or African national processes. There’s a larger database of the digital constitutionalist network, where this is from, with 308 documents, but those focus on Africa. Among them, the African Declaration of Human Rights and Principles, and that’s the one we’re going to look at today. What we did is essentially literature review of all the publicly available materials that we could find, and also in-depth interviews with so far four members, core members of the African Declaration Coalition, but we’re in the process of actually finishing up some more interviews. What did we find? Why was this document created in the first place? One of the interviewees said that it was important to have African voices in the process and to actually lead a normative African initiative when it comes to human rights protection online, one interviewee, Anette Esterhuisen, said localizing human rights discussions was important and also to create a document to policy makers who increasingly in the African continent started to make legislation with regard to internet rights and that process that was 2013, 2014, and then to guide them. And also to take an African view. The process essentially came up with a document published in 2014 at the IGF that has 13 principles, a preamble, and it has a focus on affordability, access, and cultural and linguistic rights, and it also has a strong call on various stakeholders what to actually do in order to implement those rights. What were the impacts and the advocacy related to the document? The coalition that formed when the document was drafted was created with a secretariat and the coalition started doing advocacy both on local, national, and transnational African level. Significant impacts were a great influence on the 2019 revision of the Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression and Access of Information in Africa by the African Commission on Human Rights and People’s Rights in Banjul, which is an important human rights instrument or accord in the African Union in Africa. Citation also of the document by the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression. These kind of things are successes and an influence on policy on a nation state level. And that’s the last two slides for Adio again. So this particular prophet appearing on your screens, one of my favorite African prophets from Nigeria. So until the lion is on storytellers, the tale of the hunt will glorify the hunter.

Adio Adet Dinika:
So basically when we talk about internet freedoms, internet rights. Nkrumah spoke about this idea of neo-colonialism and about how Africans need to shake off the shackles of colonialism, not just the physical ones, but also in the internet. So basically the Aftik was basically Africa writing its own story. So when we talk about Pan-Africanism and Aftik, we’re here, we are looking at a document that is written, as Dennis already explained, focusing on guiding principles for Africa by Africans. Because as we have noted many times, many African states still lag behind when it comes to the understanding that rights offline are also rights online. So issues like focusing on cultural and linguistic diversity are actually what makes this document particularly Pan-African, given how Africa is not a country and how Africa is a diverse place full of different languages and different cultural issues. So, however, the issue here, which Nkrumah perhaps would raise an eyebrow about, but I think maybe not, is that there have been the involvement of foreign entities. From our earlier slides, we mentioned how Nkrumah identified Western aid as a tool for continuation of this hegemony. But, however, Nkrumah was very clear that we should not risk throwing away both the baby and the bath water. So what did he mean? He meant that aid from foreign entities could actually be accepted as long as this particular aid came in the conditions or terms and conditions which were favorable for Africa. So in this case, assistance from these foreign entities can be viewed as assistance to further the goals of Africans by Africans for Africans.

Dennis Riedeker:
Thank you very much, Adeo and Dennis, and to keep on time and to share your, you had more, sorry. If you give me 10 seconds, then I will do that. Just some limitations of future research. I mean, we do acknowledge that Kwame Nkrumah also has other legacies, particularly an authoritarian later style of government, so what. This is not necessarily in congruence with the ideas of human rights online in Africa, just an important limitation, obviously, but we really focus on the Pan-Africanism of Nkrumah here, and some other things that we look into. We’re still doing interviews, so this is a little bit of a work in progress.

Moderator:
Thank you. And I might get from your last line that if you have more interviews, suggestions, it’s open to receive them, so it’s good to showcase here, but thank you again, Adeo and Dennis, for your rich presentation and to share your early findings and the work in progress that you are developing. About the flow of the session, so we have three articles, three papers that we are going to present. I’m going to give ten minutes each. We just had one. Just a few teaser, provocative questions that I’m going to throw to the presenters, and then I would like to take from the floor and from the presenters itself, because I think the papers are going to speak to each other. But the second one I’m going to call to present is Professor Ian Art Schult. The paper and the co-authors have presented is Governing the Internet through Self-Based Regional Private Regimes, Legitimacy at AFRINIC, APNIC and LACNIC. Professor, if you want to take the floor. Okay, great.

Jan Aart Scholte:
I need to screen share. Dennis, you apparently know how to do this. Yeah, I did that, but it’s one participant share at a time. Okay, there we go. Okay. I only see myself. There we go. Good. Okay, good. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks very much to Jamal and the rest of the organizing committee for putting this all together. This paper is written by five of us, a team spread across the regions, Debra, Irene-Christine in Indonesia, Hortense Jonger in the Netherlands, Naima Nassiemento-Faleros in Brazil, Gloria Nzeka, DRC, and currently at the University of Maryland, and myself. It’s a project funded by the Swedish Research Council for which we’re grateful for the funding. And we’re actually doing something quite similar, I guess, in terms of regional south-based autonomy direction in the global internet governance. In this case, looking at the three regional internet registries based in the global south. So, I’m going to say something about what the regional internet registries are, because have people heard of the regional internet registries in this audience? Some yeses, some noes. Say a few things about them. Say what the study is about, why we’re looking at the question of legitimacy, and a little bit about the data collection. These are the five regional internet registries. They are based in North America, ARIN, Europe in the Middle East and Central Asia. RIPE NCC, LACNIC in Latin America and the Caribbean, AFRINIC in Africa, and APNIC in the Asia-Pacific region. And what’s interesting here, as you notice, is that three of these bodies are in the global south. It’s a regional approach to global internet governance, and it’s based, it’s non-governmental and multi-stakeholder. And that’s quite a unique combination in internet governance, if you think about it. And the RIRs actually make rules that matter. That’s the other thing to say. There are various other regional constructions of exchange point associations and CCTLD associations and the like, but in terms of significance for rules of the global internet, they are not, so they’re more trade associations. These people actually make a number of rules. Originally, the RIRs were two or three, and you see that in Africa and Latin America, they came up somewhat later, indeed, on the argument of largely regional self-direction and self-determination. The three south-based RIRs are the Asia-Pacific Network Information Center, launched in 1993, has 7,800 members now, spread across 56 territories, so pretty big. The Latin American Caribbean Network Information Center, LACNIC, is launched in 2002, and now has more than 12,000 network operators spread across 33 countries, so again, big. The African Network Information Center, AFRINIC, was launched in 2005 and currently has 2,240 members. And again, there’s a question that comes out of all of this, so here we have south-based. Does that mean more autonomy in internet governance outside Europe and North America, and do we have here an important force for countering digital divides? Briefly, for those of you who are not so acquainted with the RIRs, what do they do? They allocate the. numbers, the addresses, on the global internet, the IP addresses and the autonomous systems numbers, so that we have unique numerical identifiers for all devices connected to the internet on one system. Without this one system of coordinated numbers we wouldn’t be talking with each other on the internet. That just wouldn’t happen. There’s an important transition. It started with Internet Protocol version 4, IPv4. This was the number version that was used mostly initially, but there’s only 4.3 billion of these. There are 5.4 billion regular users of the internet now, so you can do the math and see we’ve got a problem. So IPv4 addresses have become insufficient, and a new version 6, IPv6, with a larger capacity. So we have 340 trillion trillion trillion IPv6 addresses, and we should have enough of those for a little time to come. But the fact that IPv4 has run down so much means that in the last 10 years there’s been a real scarcity issue and a secondary commercial market that has arisen there. And that leads to all kinds of interesting scenarios that, for example, a China-based company has set up a shell company in the Seychelles, has absorbed about 10% of the internet numbers in Africa, and is selling them secondarily in other parts of the world to a tune of millions and millions of US dollars, which leads to various charges of digital colonialism and the like. So it’s not just there’s a political economy behind all of this, which is quite intriguing. You say it’s only the numbers and registering the numbers. No, the RIRs actually do quite a bit more. They’ve trained tens of thousands of internet engineers worldwide over the years. They’ve given grants for innovations for startups and the spread of the internet in less-served areas. They measure internet use and performance. They’ve done all kinds of things on cyber security. Their 30 years of meetings have been very instrumental in building up the internet community of regulators and managers. And they’ve been a major place of building up multi-stakeholder governance processes in the internet. So if you put all of this together, you kind of have to wonder, why haven’t we had more research on the RIRs? There’s actually very little. Milton, in the back, you wrote a couple of short pieces, 10, 15 years ago. There’s been a couple of PhD, two PhD theses, and a couple of short histories here or there. But otherwise, we don’t actually have any anti-academic inquiry on the regional internet registries. Certainly not the things that are comparable to the IETF or ICANN or other bodies. So there’s a gap there. And again, it’s particularly intriguing because these bodies take a regional approach. They take a multi-stakeholder approach. They have a south-based in three of the cases. And as I said, they’re important. So we are trying in this study to look at on what basis and how far these three south-based internet registries are attracting legitimacy. So how far are people having approval, confidence, trust, belief, faith in these alternative ways of organizing internet governance? There’s a larger body of literature coming up on legitimacy in multi-stakeholder global governance. So that feeds into that literature. But also, there’s this underlying thing. If we could show that indeed, a lot of legitimacy is attracted or not, and the basis on which this is done, then could a regional multi-stakeholder south-based approach to governing key global resources perhaps be transferred to other areas and be part of a more general south-based initiative on dealing with critical global resources? To that extent, one hopes there’s some larger stakes involved in this work. at the rise of multi-stakeholder global governance, sometimes I don’t think people necessarily get the specifics of this rise as clearly as they might do, the dark line here in the middle are the numbers of intergovernmental, traditional intergovernmental treaty-based organizations. And you see that basically they’ve plateaued since 1990, there isn’t an increase in their numbers. Also if you look at their resource, their material resources, and if you look at their institutional capacities to take decisions, those have also remained stable if not declined in the last couple of decades. In contrast, you see the dotted line of multi-stakeholder global governance arrangements, and they’ve grown enormously and are now more than twice as numerous as the intergovernmental organizations, and indeed often have increasing resources and capacities at the time that multilateralism has stalled. So it’s worth looking at this area of global governance. Again, we’re looking at the legitimacy of the South-based RIRs, that’s to ask, you know, how far people believe and perceive that they have a right to govern, and that they exercise that right to govern appropriately or properly. If these organizations have that underlying approval, it gives them much more strength and stability and security. If they lack it, well then things are probably more fragile. Legitimacy, again, we look at it because, although it’s not the only thing that makes governing tick, if you have legitimacy you can expect to have a more secure mandate, you can expect to get more resources, you can expect to have more participation, you can expect to be able to take decisions better, you can expect to get more compliance, thereby reach the goals that you have and probably advanced problem-solving, and hold yourself against competing institutions. In a way, at the moment we see AFRINIC, the African Network Information Center, is having some considerable legitimacy challenges. And if you look through this list, you can see they are struggling with their mandate. They’re struggling to get resources. They’re struggling to get people to participate. Well, actually, they’re under an official receiver at the moment, and they can’t even convene a meeting. Yeah, they’ve been unable to take decisions because they don’t have a board. Compliance is hard. Other people are also starting to say, we want to set up another organization. So you can see, without the legitimacy, an institution gets to be in trouble. We have, in interviews with people, been asking them whether they think that legitimacy is important. And then I guess it’s reassuring to our research to find that 84% of the people say extremely important. And well, it says 86 here. It’s actually dropped to 84 with the latest couple of people who have had a few more doubts. But they’re quite important. Basically, almost everyone is saying that it’s extremely or very important. The research that we’re doing, we’re doing extensive interviews with people, asking them about their levels of confidence in these RIRs and looking at a number of ways in which they, a number of sources that might be driving their legitimacy beliefs. We’re asking them how much confidence they have in these organizations. We’re also asking them how much they care about the organizations and how much they feel affected by the organizations. This is perhaps getting into little intricacies of legitimacy research. But a lot of legitimacy research on regional and global governance has only asked people how much confidence they have in the organizations. It hasn’t asked how intensely they feel about the organizations. So you end up with these results that say, oh, people’s average legitimacy beliefs for, I don’t know, the United Nations is the same as their average legitimacy for their national government. But our hunch is that people probably care about and feel more affected by their national government than by the United Nations. that you need to ask those additional questions. So we’re doing that in this research and seeing what’s going to come out of that. These are the interviews that we’ve done so far, 321. We were meaning to come here with more concrete results, but it’s really hard to do this research. I mean, to get people to sit down with you for 30, 40 minutes and do an extensive interview about all the different aspects and so on. In addition, the conditions in AFRINIC at the moment, because of the fragility of the organization, people are understandably a bit shy, necessarily, to come to Patut. I mean, we do anonymous and confidential interviews, but nevertheless, a lot of people are quite exposed. And so you have to be very careful in research ethics terms, too, about how you do this. So I cannot say to you now, these are the results. I can say that we find variation in the levels of confidence between these three RIRs. You can guess how that might be going. We find variation between stakeholder groups. So depending on whether you’re coming from a government or a civil society group or a business group or an academic, then you find our technical engineer, there tend to be differences amongst those groups in terms of how much legitimacy they give, and some social categories. So differences by age, by gender, by language, and so on. And then we expect, again, can’t go all the way here to say what the drivers are, but on the basis of other research and initial findings, we think we’re going to find that institutional drivers, so people’s perceptions of the purpose and procedure and performance of institutions, that those are the main things that drive these confidence and legitimacy beliefs, though some other psychological and prevailing societal norm drivers probably figure as well. Ask us again in a year.

Stephanie Arnold:
here. Thanks. Perfect. Thank you so much, Professor. You already advanced one of my questions regarding the drivers, so I’m going to skip that off. But anyway, thank you very much for your presentation, and we are going to have more time for questions in a moment. Then I would like to call the last paper with Stephanie Arnold. She’s going to be online. Stephanie Arnold? Yes, can you see the screen? Yes, now we can see you and see the presentation also. Stephanie, welcome. Stephanie is going to present her paper about localizing digital policymaking, the impact of the European Union digital for development policy in ICT policy adoption in the Global South. Stephanie, welcome. You can take the floor. Yes, thank you so much. Good morning from Brussels and good afternoon to those who are in Kyoto. My name is Stephanie Arnold. I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Bologna and a PhD fellow at the United Nations University, CRIS, in Belgium. So I will talk a little bit about the EU’s effect on digital policymaking globally, and especially in Africa. And I try to do so a little bit through the lens of digital sovereignty and digital colonialism. And here I would like to thank my co-panelists for giving such a brilliant introduction to those two concepts, and I hope that my presentation will complement a little bit what they already said. So let me see if I can move the slides. Yes, so we know that there’s no very clear concept about digital sovereignty, but the understanding of what digital sovereignty means varies across regions. Now I’m going to focus on the European Union, and I would argue that in the European Union we notice that the European Union as such, but also the member states, argue for more state sovereignty over the digital space. And this is especially to counterbalance the increasing power of big technology companies, especially from China and the United States. So to this end, over the past few years, the European Union has adopted a series of digital policies, most famously probably the General Data Protection Regulations, or GDPR, and more recently than the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, and so on. And the objective was basically to protect individual rights in the digital space and yes, to protect, to extend this to the digital sphere. So we also heard about the Brussels effect, and basically the Brussels effect, through the Brussels effect, these digital policies have reached a global influence in a way and set the benchmark for individual rights in the digital space. However, what I’m going to argue is that it is not only through the Brussels effect that the EU digital policies have a global reach, but actually the EU has also devised some tools that facilitate the spread of the, let’s call it European governance model, to other regions, in particular in the Global South. And here in particular, I have looked at the European development policies, so the Digital for Development Policy, and then more recently, the Global Gateway and the Digital for Development Hub that has been set up within the Global Gateway. And if we look at this, let’s take the Digital for Development Policy for a second, which is already a little bit older, it dates back to 2016. We noticed that the Digital for Development Policy aims to promote access to digital infrastructure, literacy and skills, digital entrepreneurship, digital technologies for sustainable development, and so on. But at the time, and this has now actually changed with the Global Gateway, at the time, there was no. dedicated funding for this. The idea was really to mainstream digital technologies in development policy more in general. I think we’ve heard in our first contribution that there was European funding to civil society organizations to promote digital human rights. This could have been one of the ways how it worked through the support of other organizations. What we notice when we look at this digital for development policy is that there’s a strong focus on Africa. This slide shows the D4D mentioned, so how often a certain geographic region is mentioned in the D4D policy. As you can see, Africa outnumbers all the other regions. In fact, Latin America and the Caribbean for instance are mentioned four or five times compared to Africa that is mentioned over 70% of the times. This does not match the development fund flows because as we can see here, the EU development fund flows mainly go to Asia and European neighborhood policy countries, which is the bar on the very right. Then we still have the official development aid by member states, the purple bars. Those go mainly to Africa, but still it’s not necessarily the majority of funds have gone to Africa in this sense. If we take the stance from Africa, what we need to bear in mind is that most African countries depend on foreign technology and foreign finance for their digital development. At the same time, we have a rather fragmented cyber governance, even though there have been various initiatives, especially also on the Pan-African level, so through the African Union, for instance, there has the implementation of national governments at the national level has been rather, yes, let’s say, hesitant. For instance, if we take the Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection, there is only one country, namely Rwanda, that has ratified it so far. Now, these two factors together make African states quite vulnerable to digital colonialism by big technology companies to extract data, for instance. And I would argue one of the main ways to avert this are digital policies at the national level. And this is why I look at what affects digital policy adoption at the national level. The research questions in this regard were, does the geographical focus of the D4D policy affect the ICT policy adoption in African countries and therefore make them more resilient against digital colonialism? And to what extent does Chinese influence through the Belt and Road Initiative enhance or mitigate the EU’s effects on ICT policy adoption? So what I did is a multivariate regression analysis. The outcome variable was taken by the ICT regulatory tracker score. So that’s sort of an index compiled every year by the International Telecommunication Union, which looks at different variables. And I looked at a change of the score from 2013 to 2018 to see, OK, have there been improvements in the ICT policies, or have there actually been declines? So the explanatory variables to see whether there is a different effect in Africa compared to other regions are, on the one hand, the ITU macro regions. To double check and to make a robustness test, I also used the UN Statistical Division Geoscheme. And then I checked whether there’s a difference with BRI membership. And then I had some control variables of economic relevance. Just briefly, this is what I found. So if we take Africa as a benchmark up there with zero, so compared to Africa, so being located in, let’s say the Arab states, being one of the Arab states would yield a much lower percentage of ICT policy adoption compared to Africa. And the same goes for East Asian Pacific and the former Soviet space. And arguably, this could be, and here I’m still conducting analysis, this could be exactly because Africa has this additional influence, this additional attention, for instance, by the European Union through digital for development policy that encourages digital policymaking. But now let’s see what happens if we scrutinize for membership in the Belt and Road Initiative. And what we notice is that if we only look at BRI members, regions outside Africa, so the East Asian Pacific, as well as Central Asia, essentially, they perform much better than African countries. But if we look at non-BRI membership, we have exactly the opposite trend. Again, I’m still looking into this, why this is, but I think an early explanation could be that areas that receive less attention from the EU, they rely very much on initiatives such as

Moderator:
the Belt and Road Initiative

Stephanie Arnold:
to promote the digitalization at home. And with more digitalization, of course, also comes the need for more regulation. In Africa, Africa might be more immune to this influence exactly because they have various alternatives. multiple influences from from abroad. So the main takeaways the geographic focus of the D4D policy does make a positive difference in Africa at least and the BRI membership boosts ICT policy adoption where interest EU interest for digitalization is is low. That’s from my side thank you so much for your attention and I really look forward to your questions and suggestions. Thank you

Moderator:
very much Stephanie for joining us and there are some applause from the room for the three of you and and thank you very much again. I’m glad I alert you that I was sleep-deprived because in the beginning I forgot to introduce myself so my name is Raquel Gato and I joined Giganet many years ago 2007 I was in your shoes presenting my paper at the time and I Jeff Rio and my my master and my PhD is about the internet governance and the sovereign sovereignty principle. We were just a few of the researchers and sources that I could grasp at the time and I’m so glad it has expanded and now we have more people to dialogue with about it. And so let me start just some teaser questions and then I’m going to invite the audience to to come to the microphone and also make their questions. Just a few reactions first on Dennis and Adil I think he’s still with us. Sorry Adil I can’t see you but just to mention first you’ve also used the Marcos Review of Internet the Brazilian view of rights as one of the experiences and that I can speak closer from from my experience and in fact Marcos Review fits into this principle based legislation right there is happening into the digital colonialism idea but then it was not only about shaping a good policy let’s put that way but it’s also about how it is implemented and then follow up, right? And I think in your paper and the presentation, it’s pretty clear also the two dimensions between the process of shaping the policy, right? And then the implementation and follow up and the impact, whatever you can measure of this impact that is really important. And what strikes me as a curiosity, if you are going to expand or have a little bit more on this two dimensions, and then what can be more intention based and more replicable also to others, other countries and other regions to draw from. And what I mean by that is usually, for example, even the African declaration, it’s been kind of triggered by a necessity and not necessarily an intention, that a process that you start and build and a continuous process. And also if there are takeaways that you can replicate that in other places. So is that clear? Okay. And then for Professor Ian, and then some of the, I mean, there was a lot here to take on. I’m trying to keep to two, but I don’t say in the coffee if I’m going to make more. But I think the first one that I want to react in regards also to the IPv4 and IPv6 policies, not to go to the nitty grits of the African situation, but then also if you were considering comparison with the North based IRR, so ARIN and the RIPE, right? Because I can see some of the differences, for example, now from my side of the world, LACNIC and then ARIN. and how they’re also taking different policies in regards to the IPv6 leftover market. And so this is very interesting also to compare how those regional policies are really happening and what is the impact, right, and these approaches that are different from the South. And my second question, I’m probably going to put together two of them and try to explain why. But what I find interesting also in terms of the background in this paper is that it puts the IRRs beyond their tech mandate, right, their technical mandate. There’s one thing on the technical community and it’s pretty straightforward, is the internet needs to function and we need to have the addresses and we need to have the technical policies for it. But then there is this discussion about the role of this technical community also in the gray area of policies and political policies, right, I’m trying to be redundant here. And then I think it’s where you were going, but I want to check if that’s the consideration in the overall research that you were taking. But also in terms of the context you were mentioning and how these technical-based organizations are understood in the broader community, the perception that they are only technical communities or if they are, you know, beyond this mandate. And I’m saying that because I see also from experience that there is this kind of bundle tech lash, the IRRs, the… CCTLDs and all those technical organizations are considered part of these digital platforms and then they are considered part of, you know, just a mushy, mushy place. Anyway, so that’s kind of my very broad but curiosity in your paper. And then Stephanie, sorry, I don’t, ah, now I see you, so I can also address to you in the prompter here. But so some of the questions that I had in regards to your presentation and your paper, it’s a very elementary one, but let me explain why. My question is, what is considered digital policy? So I was also curious on one basic difference, right? In particular, when we’re thinking about the different law regimes, if you’re talking about common law and civil law, and not necessarily everything is kind of mapped as a digital policy in a narrow way, in the narrow concept. And I’m not sure if you are considering some sort of classification on this front, but if you are, I would love to hear. And then my second question is regards the difference between quantity and quality. So one of the strengths, and that’s very interesting, that you are trying to bring the numbers, right? Evidence-based research, and those are very interesting findings that you brought. But then I kept the questions, if you are also considering an evolution of the research, to also consider the quality. You were mentioning the positive effects, I think by the end, of those policies to be geo-based. But also if they are, in terms of the content itself, if there is going to be any, any evaluation. So I think those are the teaser questions. I don’t know if you want to start in the reverse order, just to hear and then invite the public. Stephanie, can I start with you? Okay. Yes, well, thank you so much. Yes, very, very interesting questions that I have not very

Stephanie Arnold:
much reflected upon yet, but I will try to see. So with regards to digital policies and the ICT policies, in fact, I do believe there is a discrepancy, and especially also based on what we’ve just heard. I think we also need to distinguish between, for instance, the ICT regulatory tracker score also takes into account, for instance, the competition environment in the online space, right? And I think that is very much different from, for example, the freedom of expression. So I do think in going forward, I will need to introduce a classification or at least a specification of what exactly I mean. And I think that is closely related also to what you said that, well, not all laws that touch the digital space are explicitly digital policies. So I think that that goes hand in hand. And then this would mean to actually look at the content, the quality of those policies, not only the quantity. I think that’s a very, very valuable comment, one that I will need to address in going forward. So far, the limitation that I had, and this is still a project, let’s say the earlier stage of research, the limitation I had so far is that I cannot really consider all the digital policies of all the developing countries in the global south. So that was one of the main reasons why I limited the analysis to the quantitative. and just relied on the tracker score. But now that I know that, for instance, African countries tend to perform better when it comes to policy adoption, even when taking into account development level, yeah, and so on, I think I can maybe limit myself to that region and then look at the content. So thank you very much.

Moderator:
Thank you, Stephanie. Professor? I had a 50% chance. Good.

Jan Aart Scholte:
Yeah, thanks very much, Raquel. The issue about, we limited ourselves to the three South-based RIRs. Yes, ideally, one would have looked at all five. We’ve chosen a method of deep, qualitative, mixed methods research face-to-face in the meetings very often. The resources needed for all of that are just very high, and we wanted to also do large numbers of interviews. I won’t tell you what the research, I mean, the research budget just to do the work that we are doing is already very high, so we chose to prioritize the South-based. And that, of course, has certain limitations at some point. On IPv6, I was trying to chase up the data here, but I believe it’s right that, in fact, LACNIC leads the way on IPv6 as a proportion of, and I don’t think they’re even working with IPv4 allocations, new allocations at all, and that gives them a great advantage to some extent. If AFRINIC, for example, had done the same and thrown itself deep into the IPv6, then a lot of the problems that they have at the moment would certainly recede, if not disappear. So LACNIC has made a strategic choice to go for IPv6 in a big way, and that seems, in their political economy, to be working in their favor. You know, yeah, the RIRs are described as being technical and technical mandate. Once you look at the wider issue. So then you realize, as ever, nothing is ever purely technical. It’s political. It’s economic. It’s ecological. It’s cultural. And one sees that in these organizations. So what kind of knowledge are they producing and for whom? They’re deep cultural, political questions that come up here. Deep economic issues, IPv6 is core to the development of Internet of Things, smart cities, smart homes, so-called Industry 4.0. Huge economic interests involved in this, so the narrow technical business. And then questions of power. Who’s making these decisions for whom? Who gets the voice? Who doesn’t? Is it a multi-stakeholder process? Is it a multilateral process? They’re deep, deep, deep political questions. So of course, that makes it much more interesting. The technical circles in the RIRs would like to say, oh, we’re only technical. Leave us alone. But they’re much more than technical, so we don’t leave them alone.

Dennis Riedeker:
The train has passed. And I’m trying to answer your two questions, essentially. So you brought up the national, Marcus Seville, national document, also entailed in this larger database that we have on digital bills of rights. It is part of the, I think in that sense, part of the conversation, but in the sense of looking from this analysis that we do, it is a national document, and it’s very different from this pan-Africanism that we want to look at. When we look at African documents, we have the Nigerian digital rights and freedom bill that was never actually signed by the president, but that would have been rather an example that would be comparative to kind of see, and then also how do you amend legislation, how do you actually implement legislation afterward? This in effect is an advocacy document, and it has a very different role to play in that sense. But it brings up the question that Stephanie also said, national legislation in Africa is the solution. So we have to look at where is this actually happening or not. And from that kind of promoting… African Union or pan-Africanism, maybe not. Maybe you should actually solve the problems across the continent in a way. I think that’s the thing that those who wrote the African Declaration had in mind. I think the second part is, how intentional is this when you start drafting a document? Do you know where this is actually going? I think there are two things that happen at the same time. I’ve studied many of those documents, and not just this case. People have a clear idea what they want to do, what they want to achieve, how, and why they write the document, but things then change, and so they have to change their plans. But at the same time, these coalitions often do many things at the same time, trying to involve policymakers on the local, national, regional level at the same time, and so you almost have this effect of throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks, because you target many different levels. People still have an idea and a hope for how things will be adopted. Usually, people believe that it would be great if this would be law or if this would be a treaty. That’s often the main focus of these documents. Thanks. Thank you, and thank you very much for the further consideration and clarifications. Now, we already have people in the queue.

Moderator:
Milton, you want to take the floor, and then if anyone else from the audience wants to make questions, please. There are microphones in both aisles. Yeah. I have a comment on one paper and a big question about another one. Is that okay? We have time for it? Sorry?

Audience:
Do we have time for it?

Moderator:
We do.

Audience:
Okay. So the comment is about the IP address registries. I think, Jan, you totally understated the amount of literature that already exists on this. There’s a lot of literature about IP address scarcity and about IP address markets. We’ve published two papers about that. And there’s a detail paper, not a short paper, as you said, about the application of Ostrom’s theories of self-governance to the IP address space, looking at IP addresses as a common pool resource. And another thing is that you indicated that if Africa had gone into IPv6, that it wouldn’t have had these problems, and I think that’s just completely wrong. Number one, IPv6 is not being adopted because it’s not compatible, and in order to upgrade to it, you have to spend a lot of money, so of course Africa is lagging behind because it doesn’t have the financial resources to suddenly convert all of their networks into an incompatible protocol, and keep running the old protocol at the same time. Anyway, we can talk about that more, Jan, but I really wanted to talk about digital colonialism. I think this thing is thrown around, people sound very progressive, they’re against digital colonialism. I don’t know what it is, because I see on the one hand people implying that if people in Africa use Google, they’re being colonized, and I think this is kind of a weird notion. When I think of colonialism, particularly European colonialism in Africa, I think of troops marching in and occupying territories, about killing people and about establishing governmental structures, not about market transactions between end users and some foreign company. So can we get a better notion of what exactly we’re talking about with digital colonialism? What kind of a power relationship are we talking about? How do you distinguish between market relations and political relations? And I realize they’re related, of course, I’m a political economist, but can we have a sharper distinction between when people are just engaged in politics and when they’re Asian market transactions with foreigners and when they are being oppressed and dominated by foreigners? And one other element of that is, like, the paper about Europe sort of implied that if Europe runs these development programs for Africa, that’s protecting them against colonialism. But if China provides this kind of development aid, that’s colonialism. So it’s like, what’s the difference? Thank you very much.

Moderator:
There is another question, very short one, and then I go for, yeah. So it’s a… Can you introduce yourself? Sorry. Yeah, sorry.

Audience:
I’m Andrea Calderaro. I was the discussant that came later. So now I feel the pressure that I have to say something. No, but I’m Andrea Calderaro from Cardiff University and also European University Institute. Quick reactions to Milton’s comment. For me, digital colonialism is when somebody sets some standards and there is no capacity for the rest of the world to engage in negotiating these standards somehow. This is at least my own interpretation about digital colonialism. And actually, it’s very much linked to the conversation we are having here today and is maybe a question to Jan-Art and Dennis. My question for Jan-Art is whether, how do you see these negotiations happening at the regional registry level, coordinated or complementary to other conversations, forms of international cooperation that are happening in other fora, negotiating totally different stuff, let’s say like discussion about cyber security, the ongoing discussion about cyber diplomacy, but there is lots of inequalities there also from the global south in engaging in these other processes. Thank you very much, Andrei, and I was almost myself answering a little bit on the mutant,

Moderator:
but we can do that over coffee. So now I’m going to take then perhaps Professor Ian first and then Dennis and Stephanie, who is online, and I’m going to ask you just very short reactions, two, three minutes, and then we can continue offline. Thank you. Yeah, no, it doesn’t. Thanks. I do want to recognize my colleagues, Deborah and Hortense, who are online, so if they want to jump in on any of this, they should do.

Jan Aart Scholte:
Milton, on the literature, thank you, and let’s talk and let me get the … I’m wondering whether this literature is on governance, though, so how much it’s on governance as opposed to more technical aspects and economics and so on, but let’s see. My comment was related to the governance literature and my sense is that that’s quite limited, and of course, what you say about IPv6 and the technical complications of adopting it is, of course, true. I was kind of saying a what if kind of comment rather than meaning to imply that it could be done so quickly. The bigger question that you raised on digital colonialism, I mean, I think there’s a lot to be said about all of this, but just give two examples, and maybe that illustrates a little bit. When ICANN sets up its sale of GTLDs and says you have to pay 185,000, this is back in 2012, you have to pay 185,000 US dollars only to apply, and it takes over a million US dollars to get to the end of the process, and you set up insurance policies which are not available easily outside of Europe and North America, then surprise, surprise, you get less than 10 GTLDs in Africa. That’s more than market forces, that’s power relationships as well. Or when I attended the AFP meeting recently, one of the people from a cable-laying company got up and gave an account of how by laying the cables, they were opening up Africa as Stanley and Livingston had done a century before. And seemed not to feel any discomfort in discussing the situation in those terms. I just give a few anecdotes to say that I think there are moments when people think, yeah, there’s something not quite right going on here.

Moderator:
Thank you, Ian. And I’m sorry I didn’t acknowledge Deborah Hortense and others who are online. If you want to take the floor, please open the mic and say it. I’m not looking Zoom right now. But then I’m following with Dennis, and we can come back if anyone wants to take the floor who is online. Okay.

Adio Adet Dinika:
Oh, Adio, sorry, Adio is going to take the question. Thank you very much to the colleague and the audience. I didn’t get his name for that question. And also thanks to other colleagues, Stephanie and Ian, we’ve already sort of answered this issue on digital colonialism. I would like to fundamentally differ with the colleague in the audience, particularly when he mentions that this issue of digital colonialism, that it’s just market forces. I feel like that is an oversimplification of a very complex issue. Because when you talk about digital colonialism, what we basically are talking about is issues of power. So he juxtaposed this with troops marching in. and chains and everything. At the base of that, what is at the base of that? That’s power. So what we’re talking about is when we say digital colonialism, we are simply speaking about the power of foreign-owned platforms in determining policies and the rules of the game in Africa. For example, Facebook. When we talk about Facebook, when we talk of TikTok, I think really, to really put this into context, we have seen how Facebook, TikTok, and all these other major platforms have got in trouble with the GDPR, for example, or with the US being summoned to Congress. Why is this happening? Because these are issues of power. So what then happens with these particular platforms is when they come to Africa and convert Africa as a site of data extraction with the data from Africans being merely harvested and saved and utilized outside of the continent without prior regards to the needs as well as the rights and determinations of the Africans. So also in my definition of digital sovereignty, and which also touches into colonialism, I spoke about the issue of tech sovereignty and police sovereignty. So who is developing these tools that are being used in Africa? And who are they servicing? Can I get tools which can allow me to communicate in Tigrinya or in Shonor in African language? No, but however, at the end of the day is that the Africans are forced to utilize these tools in a particular language, in a particular cultural and economic context. And that is what we mean when we speak of digital colonialism. Thank you very much. Oh, sorry, Adil. No, it’s okay. It’s okay. Okay, thank you very much, Adil. And it was Milton Miller. who made the question. He is a very known scholar and one of the founders of Giganet. And very known to touch some open wounds, which is good. We need to discuss this openly. And so last, Stephanie, do you want to take the floor? And I’m sorry to push you for two minutes. We need to close and go for the next panel. Thank you.

Stephanie Arnold:
Yes, thank you so much. So maybe I will just limit myself to address the comment on my contribution. So I did not mean to say that the EU is some, let’s say it’s good Samaritan that comes in and saves Africa from digital colonialism. And neither did I mean to say that China is the evil player that comes in and colonizes Africa, not at all. What I meant to say is that digital policies are one of the ways that can help avert digital colonialism. And what I found in my analysis is that the EU through, for instance, the Digital Core Development Policy encourages digital policy adoption. Now, as I also specified in my previous comment, of course, we would now need to look at the specifics of the content of the digital policies. But just to add to this, the European Union does not pursue this way because yes, they are, again, the good Samaritan, but I think it’s rather because they do not have such a powerful position in terms of big technology companies. Those are mainly located in the US and China. And with their own digital policies, I think they try to curtail the power of those companies. And by contrast, China, for instance, they have less of a focus on regulation, on digital policies, which does not mean that they automatically like colonize others, not at all. In fact, the other findings that I’ve. found is that where we look at the BRI membership, so Belt and Road Initiative membership, we actually have more policy adoption compared to non-BRI members. Except that in my opinion, this is because the digitalization requires more regulation and the BRI membership enables more digitalization. I hope this was somewhat clear. Thank you. Thank you very much, Stephanie, and thank you very much everyone who joined us in the panel and the audience. Now, let’s go for the next panel with our colleague, Luis Barbosa. Thank you very much.

Moderator:
It’s been on the stage for a while. It’s been a while. Okay, good afternoon. I think you’re looking forward for a break, but I promise you that the panel will be worthwhile to assist. So welcome to the fifth panel. My name is Luis Barbosa. I come from the United Nations University Unit on Digital Governance, located in Portugal. And it’s my pleasure to introduce these three papers on somehow related or unrelated topics. We’ll discuss digital sovereignty, ways of pressuring governments, and youth participation. These three different topics will make sense together, I do think. So we’ll start right immediately with the first speaker. which is Nicola Palladino from Trinity College, Dublin. I think, Nicola, you are online, can you confirm?

Nicola Palladino:
Yes, I’m online, can you hear me? Yes, very well, so you have 10 minutes, please, thank you. Okay, okay, thank you very much for allowing me to have my presentation by remote. I’m very sad to not be there with you, but I hope we can have anyway a fruitful discussion on this topic. Well, without losing time, I’m going to share my presentation with you, okay. Okay. Oh, well, in this presentation, I will argue how in the digital world, states translate the concept of sovereignty, but in practice of territorialization of the cyberspace and in extra-territorial projection of power. And I will also point out how digital sovereignties are double-edged sword that could serve to realize both formal digital constitutionalism and digital authoritarianism. And I will also illustrate how states and because digital sovereign practice give rise to conflicts and legal uncertainty, which impede cooperation and undermine global effort to guarantee fundamental rights in the digital environment. Well, I want to apologize in advance because to stay in the two minutes limit of this presentation can just provide a spotlight for each of this point. But if there is some topic you would like to deepen, I will be very happy to discuss them during the question time. Well, let’s start saying that digital sovereignty has become a popular concept international relation and beyond. And that’s without being the process of digitalization of our society and we become more and more aware about the challenges and risks that it poses, an increasing number of subjects vindicate greater control on data and digital technologies. And while when we come to state digital sovereignty we can see that it seems to combine two apparently competing conceptualization sovereignty. On the one hand we have a conception based on the classical notion of sovereignty as the exercise of supreme political authority on a territory which focuses on the capability by states to control data flow, digital infrastructures, and operators within their boundaries. But on the other hand we have a netherodox conception that disentangles sovereignty from territory and shifts the focus on concepts such as autonomy, self-determination, resilience. Well this confusion between these two different conceptions sovereignty is well illustrated by the concept of digital strategic autonomy that according to Timmers could be considered as the operationalization of states digital sovereignty and consists of the ability to decide and act autonomously on the essential digital aspect of a country long-term futures in terms of security, economy, and institution. Well given that today the digital world is still composed for the vast majority of transborder processes and flows, the underlying assumption in the concept of digital strategic autonomy is that to exercise digital sovereignty states must not only control the digital activities on their territory but also try to influence processes and subjects that are beyond its borders. And so digital sovereignty is then operationalized through two complementary processes. On the one hand we have the territorialization cyberspace and on the other hand we have the extra-territorial projection of power in the digital world. Well the territorialization of cyberspace consists of the process of bringing back aspect of the digital world into configuration of authority and power linked to territorial space. On a more practical level, among other things, it may consist of the control of the internet traffic, meaning that states may impose internet service providers to block or filter the access to the terminated IP addresses, the nationalization of internet operator by requiring that they have legal representative on a country territory, promoting domestic champions or rising market by way to foreign companies, data localization practice requiring provider to store and process data within the borders of the country in which the data has been generated or collected, and by implementing also mandatory risk and security assessment to ensure that ICT system and infrastructure meets certain security standard that are aligned with the national interest of a country. While on the other side, the extraterritorial extension of digital sovereignty may occur in different way. The first one is by resorting to well-recognized international law principles such as the active nationality principle, the passive nationality principle, the effects of the train or the protective principle. And the main point here is that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. States already have legal basis for the extraterritorial claims of sovereignty, but it also means that the potential conflict that may arise may be solved within the framework of international law. Well, then the extraterritorial expansion of digital sovereignty may be realized through the regulation standardization of technologies. In this case, if our state is successful in imposing the rules and standards that which technologies is developed, deployed, or used beyond this border, it could embed its own value principle within the socio-technical architecture of such technology. And so it could also define the related possibility and constraints. Well, a third way is by using national tech company as a proxy of power. And in so doing states can extend their digital sovereignty using the transnational technological infrastructure of tech company to pursue their goals. Well, so we observed how digital sovereignty refers to both policies of territorialization subspace and territorial extension sovereignty. Now I would like to point out how digital sovereignty could be considered as double edged sword, meaning that it both enable people protection and control. The control of digital infrastructure data flow is crucial to safeguard fundamental right and serve the rule of law, but the same practice at the same time can more likely led to mass surveillance censorship policies and can be used to perform on new interferences on other state or to conduct cyber warfare operation. And in short, an effective digital sovereignty could be considered as a necessary, even not sufficient condition to realize digital constitution is, but it could also easily reverse into digital authoritarian practices. In the last part of my presentation, I would like to show our state’s resource strategically to different digital sovereignty conception practice and to this purpose, I focused on the data sovereignty related policies of China, US and European Union. While we can see that in all the considered cases, states part in place, bus territorialization of the cyberspace and extra territorial project of power practices, in particular, all of them reaches some form of data localization, even if through different means. Chinese are resorted to legal obligation in the case of the European Union. This is a second, more a second data effect of privacy requirement for data transfer than make for companies more. convenient to store EU data locally. In the case of US, data localization did not require any particular legislative intervention, but it’s due to the fact that, of course, the largest internet companies are already based in the United States. While also the ban of foreign technologies and security assessment of foreign hardware and software are common practice in all the three cases considered. Moving on the extraterritorial expansion of sovereignty, we can note that both the United States, European Union, and China will vindicate digital sovereignty in their own territories. But at the same time, they advance explicit extraterritorial claims based on one of the international law principles we mentioned before. For example, in the Article 3 of the GDPR, on the Article 10 of the Chinese National Intelligence Law, or in the US Claude Act. Instead, one of the most relevant differences between the three cases is that the US and China leverage on their digital champions as a proxy to fulfill both domestic and extraterritorial enforcement, intelligence, and security operation, while the European Union tend to exploit more its regulatory power. And overall speaking, we can say that the EU is closer to the digital constitutions model, in which digital sovereignty practices are mostly used to safeguard the safety and the privacy of its citizens, while the US and China, in different ways, use their power to conduct a surveillance intelligence operation. So in the current landscape, we have overlapping digital sovereignty claims that feed geopolitical conflict and tension. Some examples of that are the competing claims on tech companies to store locally and transfer abroad data stemming from the GDPR, the Claude Act, and the Chinese National Intelligence Act. Another example could be the ban war between the US and China. And furthermore, this ambiguous strategic use of digital sovereignty by states, by jeopardizing fundamental rights, protection in the digital ecosystem, posing at least two main risks. A first risk concerned a weaponization of privacy and data protection. This is particularly evident in the case of the Chinese personal information protection law. These laws, indeed, are very advanced in privacy and data protection principle, very similar to GDPR. But they are mostly used to constrain the operation of domestic and foreign tech companies to prevent data transmission abroad, rather than to safeguard Chinese people’s rights. The second risk concerned grounding the safeguard of fundamental rights on power relations and power sources. As we know, the European Union is supposed to exert a kind of extraterritorial power to the so-called Braxel FED, which consists in the capability to leverage and combine a series of key factors, such as the value of internal market and regulatory and administrative capacity, to force foreign countries to adopt this global standard. But this is a risk, because at the international level, it will replace international law with power. And power sources are unstable terrain on which to ground human rights protection. Nothing prevents that in the next future, the Braxel FED could be replaced by Beijing FED, and that tech company will force it to adapt to Chinese rules and standards, as it is already happening to some extent. Well, to conclude very shortly, I think that the best way for states to solidify digital sovereignty without escalating geopolitical tension and jeopardize international human rights law could be to use this sovereignty to engage in international cooperation to reach international agreement, setting back rules to solve disputes and regulate the functioning of the digital technologies. I know that it might sound utopistic, but some example as the discussion that we have on the digital, at the Global Digital Compact or about the Council of Europe Convention 108 would be a good example for this way to move forward. Thank you very much for your attention, and if there are some aspects that you are deeply interested in, I will be very happy to answer and question you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. We’ll take questions in the end, so let’s thank the speaker first. And now the stage goes to Ramiro Ugarte from the Centro de Estudios en Libertad de Expression y Acceso a la Información from Buenos Aires.

Moderator:
Thank you. Thank you very much.

Ramiro Ugarte:
Let me first read this thing. How do I do this? All right. Okay, so I’m going to discuss regulatory threats. This is a paper that tries to conceptualize this, looking forward to an empirical and comparative research project. Threats are normal. Threats are a mechanism of governance in all sorts of fields. They have been mainly studied since the 1970s by economists working on regulated industries and other areas. I have found evidence of the use of this concept all over the place. And this is the definition we propose of what constitutes a regulatory threat. It’s any kind of public or private utterance or action by public officials who hold regulatory power over others in which they express, suggest, or imply, clearly or vildly, their desire to see a subject’s conduct move in a particular direction. direction. This is a compass that we have created to try to understand what kinds of public officials’ conduct fall under this definition. It is a very simple compass. It’s organized around formal and informal processes and private and public actions. We believe that in our definition everything falls here and we have built our definition broadly, basically against three authors, against Timothy Wu. First I should say that Americans call this area of the law jawboning because of the jaw bone that we have here and that we use when we talk. We think that a broader concept is necessary. Against Wu we do not exclude opinions or reports. He has in a paper that he sort of defends the mechanism of jaw boning. He considers only very formal kinds of actions and he excludes opinions for reports. Against Halftech we do not talk about legislative threats but rather regulatory threats to include all sorts of public officials. And against Bambauer we rejected normatively loaded taxonomy. Bambauer claims, uses a concept in which jaw boning is bad when it’s normatively charged, when public officials ask for things that they could not ask in theory. We adopt a much sort of neutral conceptualization because from our point of view pressure via regulatory threat is a normal part of the political life of a constitutional democracy. The issue is more or less under-theorized. It has been studied mainly in the US by legal scholars. There is a lack of empirical studies but there are a bunch of US judicial cases in which this issue has been extensively discussed. The Writer’s Guild case of 1976 is a very interesting case on the FCC and how the FCC was pressuring television and broadcasters’ owners into adopting a, quote-unquote, voluntary policy of the family hour view. And then we have the Missouri versus Biden saga, which is there are a couple of decisions that are of the last few weeks. These practice of job-owning or threats of regulations challenge basic concepts of the rule of law, and we believe they involve a paradox, because we want our public officials to be effective, we want them to talk to those who are regulated by them, but at the same time we don’t want them to use this mechanism as the only way of achieving public policy goals. And that’s why we have formal processes that are created to ensure transparency, accountability, participation, stakeholder engagements, and so on. When only these mechanisms are used, and when these mechanisms are very successful, all these values are sort of sacrificed. And of course the reason why job-owning or regulatory threats is an issue is because of the potential abuse. It is the problem that concerns the scholars occurs when public officials ask from individuals or corporations for things that they could not ask or could not get through the formal processes of policy making, either because what they ask is illegal or would be unconstitutional, or because what they ask would allow veto players in the formal process to block the initiative. And when they succeed through these informal processes, all those opportunities of objection basically get lost. This seems to be obviously a thing. In the last few weeks there has been a case by… a federal judge that ordered more than 40 public officials in the federal government to stop talking to corporations. The decision was severely restricted by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but it still stands and it should be reviewed by the Supreme Court, I guess. Now, this case law, we don’t really go into the case law itself. It’s basically a case law that’s based on drawing a line between what is permissible government speech and what is an illicit form of threat. This case law suggests that this line drawing is possible, but it’s difficult. It doesn’t seem to be leading to any manageable standard and certainly not towards clear-cut rules that can be administered by those who would be subject to it. But we take all, basically, this literature and our conceptual paper to do comparative research about it because we believe that this is a regulatory mechanism that every country uses. Every country threatens companies with actions and companies are generally very receptive of these threats. They want to keep those channels of communication open and generally, our basic premise is that companies dislike regulation. And so what we want to do in our empirical research is to document incidences of regulatory threats and document company actions that respond to those threats in order to detect correlations and linkings between them. And we believe this will allow us to better understand how the mechanism works outside of the United States. Now, this has a lot of challenges. First is how do we build that database? We already have a database on change of terms of services and policies by corporations. This is a database. that CELE has that has been capturing for quite a few years now. We have a database of Latin American bills on all sorts of internet regulation proposals and we are building a database of policy announcements, basically taking stock of the blogs of big tech companies. This poses a few methodological challenges. How do we get, how do we manually load basically data points? Should we have a time limit constraint or should we constrain ourselves by theme? One of the very important findings that we have produced so far is that this issue really comes out through judicial discovery and this is of course very limiting from the point of view of researchers. In this graph, which basically is redder towards the upper right portion of the graph and whiter towards the lower portion of the graph, basically what is more red in this graph is what we can see, what we can observe. What is whiter is much more difficult. These are informal meetings, informal emails. They only come out in judicial discovery in the cases that I’ve already mentioned. So we have a challenge in terms of how we would be able to document the data that is needed to assess how the practice works. But what we have so far is basically this, is bills that have been announced but maybe not formally presented, legislative inquiries linked to a specific proposed legislation or not linked to a proposed legislation, official administrative action, which is of course one of the most important parts of how regulatory threats happen, and later public comments and speeches. This we believe is observable. We can look at it, we can do research about it, internal emails, internal communication. and so on really won’t come out simply by looking at publicly available information and issuing freedom of information requests is really impossible for the kind of scope that we’re proposing. And the actions produced by platforms are much more documented and can be documented in a much easier way. That’s it. I’ll look forward if you have any kind of comments or suggestions, especially in terms of the methodological challenges that we have, will be highly appreciated. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Moderator:
And our last speaker is Nadia from When You Crease, I believe, and she will talk about youth participation in the IGF ecosystem. Thank you very much.

Nadia Tjahja:
So this article comes at the end of my PhD, so this is my last PhD article, and I’m very excited about sharing this with you. It’s part of a series. Last year, I presented a paper on meta-participation at the Internet Governance Forum. I looked at the processes at the IGF and how stakeholders can participate specifically looking at youth and how they started to create their own spaces when they felt that the status quo couldn’t be changed in the processes that already exist. They would create their own. But now I would like to look at youth participation on a regional and global level. So first, I looked at the participation and how they were creating new spaces, but I was actually looking this time at the flow of how participants enter these spaces and how do we continue their participation starting from your environment at an entrance level, so in this case YouthDIG, the Youth Dialogue on Internet Governance, which is the EuroDIG, the European Dialogue on Internet Governance pre-event. So The reason why I wanted to study this is because the United Nations Secretary General is asking, in our common agenda, to look at mechanisms for youth participation engagement. And so this participation study started in 2022, which was the EU Year of the Youth, and the ASEAN Year of the Youth, and continues into 2023, which is the Commonwealth Year of the Youth. So there’s been a lot of focus on how participation of youth can change these different spaces that we’re seeing different regional areas focusing on. So starting with YouthDIG, I wanted to look at a group which I can navigate through. So starting with YouthDIG, which was institutionalized in 2017, until now there have been 150 YouthDIG participants, and I thought, I’m going to send them all an email, because they’re all on the same mailing list. I thought that was easy, but it is not. I learned from this mailing list that youth over time change. Youth is very varied, and some people submitted their university emails, some people submitted their student union affiliation, or the company that they had set up, or their youth organization affiliation, and over time, which can even be six months, YouthDIG is in June, and then of course in September is the new academic year, or you start your new job, you just graduated. So then youth change. So the survey was not an option to try and identify them, and trying to find 150 people by email is not always a possibility either. Instead, I created a database, and in this database I collected the names that I have from YouthDIG, EurDIG, and the IGF, which is all public data, and I mapped them. mapped which youth participants, how many times did they go to URIDIC, how many times did they go to the IGF, and from this I was able to identify 40 people who were able to meet the criteria that I set, which was they must have attended URIDIC three times or more so that they have a little bit of the feeling of what it is to be at URIDIC and at the IGF. Or they attended URIDIC and the IGF, or they did not come to URIDIC after their initial year, or they never attended an IGF. So based on these criteria, there were 40 people who met these criteria, of which only 20 people accepted. The 20 people who did not accept ranged in reasoning. Some of them said that they were not allowed to participate in a study because of the job that they have or a particular affiliation that required them to be independent. Some people I couldn’t, weren’t replying, so I’m not sure I actually had the right email address or if I was addressing the right person, because sometimes names are very familiar and then you think you know someone and trying to reach out to them, so that’s also a problem. And for those who are questioning why there are 21 people in my citations, it’s because there are people who are anonymous in there who wanted to make public statements but also private statements. So based on this, I used the interview data and desk research data to map participation across a pyramid of participation framework, and I’ll elaborate a little bit more about this later. But I just wanted to stress the limitations that I’m not talking about all youth. I’m not representing everybody that is part of what we see as the youth stakeholder group, because of course for every individual, especially for youth, it is very personal. also, it comes from a very European perspective. So the model that I used, frameworks that I use, is a Western framework, and it has particular ideas behind it, such as individualism. And this might not represent accurately the manner of participation of youth in other settings. And this was also noticeable in one of the examples, that there was one particular event, and two people responded to it in the same year at the same time. And they both responded differently to it based on their cultural acknowledgment of that particular opportunity. And I went, in that case, with how they felt about their opportunity, rather than acknowledging that those are two very different cultural components. I focused on the feelings of participation, of how they felt that their purpose was in the participation. I also want to note that the data includes COVID-19 times, which means that there were two virtual youth takes that meant that there is an overlap, or well, there’s a separation, there’s a difference between those who were able to attend on site, which is far more cultural, and far more community building, and that type of engagement, and those who had to do it online, and be far more individual. And I mentioned before, this is public participation data, but that comes also with its limitations. As a registration form, you can choose whether you’re not publicly listed or not. That is then a limitation, whether or not we can actually find participants according to the database. So I would like to introduce to you the pyramid of participation, which is a revision of Arnstein’s ladder. Arnstein’s ladder is very famous in a variety of different fields of sustainability, and working on community work, and very many other places. The reason why I chose to do a revision of Arnstein’s ladder, which looked at non-participation. and there is a lot of notion that it is a ladder, so you build yourself up. And the examples that are used to map across Bernstein’s ladder is always per step of the ladder. So there is a step of the ladder, and there is an associated point. A step of the ladder is another associated point. But how I see the Internet Governance Forum, I see it as an ecosystem. I see that there is moments in time, and even at the same time, that people navigate themselves through this ecosystem. So if you look at the pyramid, you see, as a newcomer, you’re integrating into the system. So you’re informing, so you’re sitting here today, right now, and you’re listening to me talk about something that I find interesting and that I want to share with you, and during this, you’re being informed about the different content points, but also about the process of seeing how things work. At the same time, you may decide at some point that you want to do an intervention, so then you’re contributing something to the content of the session, so then you’re forming part of integrating by consulting, you’re consulting the rest of the group. But at some point, perhaps next year, you decide you want to participate at the IGF, and you want to organize a session yourself. You go into the different roles, taking on leadership roles, and then you can go into perhaps partnership, where you’re working together with other places, or even delegated power, that you are given a role in the IGF, and then you go into the partnership, and you’re working together with other places, or even delegated power, that you are given a role by the IGF to take on specific topics, such as the people who are forming part of the dynamic workings, or who are individual experts who then participate, so you see that throughout the time, you’re both, you have the opportunity to be part of the ecosystem that is continuously evolving and rotating, and even though perhaps, at some point, you’re in a position of leadership, and so you see that throughout the time, you’re both, you have the opportunity to be part of the ecosystem that is continuously evolving and rotating, and even though perhaps you’re in a position of leadership, in another point at the IGF, you are just starting to integrate. You come here in the IGF, but maybe you will go back to your regional organisation or your national IGF to be involved in this. So I think that’s an important point. So I think that’s an important point. to kind of contribute there. What is outside the scope of this paper is the complete top of the pyramid, which is meta-participation, because that’s the paper that I’ve written and presented at GigaNet last year. So if you were interested in looking how different spaces were created at the IGF by youth, please, you can look at the presentation on the GigaNet website. So what is outside the scope of this paper is I look at meaningful participation, so I’m not looking at tokenized purposes. So when meaningful participation has failed in this process, then I am analyzing that through the lens of why and how they were not able to meaningfully participate rather than going into the particular processes. So using the framework, I created tables in which I outlined, and you see a very tiny example. I’m sorry, I couldn’t make it bigger. It’s a far bigger table, but it basically analyzed and looked at the different purposes. And then I looked at specific topics, participants informing and consulting at URDIG. So using the interviews from the URDIG participants, they expressed that when they are participating, they’re learning content and processes. They talk about the structure, accessibility, and community building that leads to particular responsibilities. But when we’re looking at what makes them fall out of this ecosystem is when personal reasons come up. For example, if you’ve started a family and can’t leave them, or structural reasons when there’s so many information or documents that you can’t manage. You look at URDIG participants submitting an issue. Proposing issues are easy, but it’s not always easy to take up leadership positions. And when URDIG org teams get involved, for them what is really great, they have delegated power because URDIG alumni organize the URDIG. So, it’s always created by the people who went through the process themselves in its last iteration, and then used that information. How would they have organized the event if they had the chance to do it? This is them doing it. I looked at the IGF as well, and for this I have a separate table navigating what was the purpose and how youth thought about their participation. Among the examples are participants that come from a regional event often attend the IGF because they have particular connections or mentors that encourage them to participate, especially by inviting to volunteer or speak, but sometimes the struggle they face is lack of meaningful interactions, or they’re encouraged to be token actors, so I am LGBT, I’m a woman, and that’s why you should go to the IGF, and that really discourages young people to participate because they feel that they’re being put in a particular space. So, as my last remark, this was the final article of my research on youth participation, and tomorrow I will actually launch my final publication, which is a URIDIC publication that specifically looks at the philosophy of youth participation at YouthDIG, and if you have any questions, please feel free to let me know, and I’m very excited to continue this discussion over the next few days. There are several other sessions that the IGF is conducting, the IGF itself is presenting a case study later this week, and the Youth Atlas, it’s in its second iteration, will be presenting about youth activities at the IGF, I hope to be able to see you to continue the discussion on youth participation at the IGF further there. Thank you very much.

Moderator:
the three speakers, I think we have a very interesting, three very interesting papers, very well written, a pleasure to read, actually. I will briefly try to emphasize some ideas and raise some points that the panel may like or not to address in a later stage. So starting with Nicola’s paper, his starting point is a very clear conceptualization of digital sovereignty from two different perspectives, a very classical one, emphasizing the right of the state to control digital infrastructures and data flow, claiming their need to protect critical infrastructures or in a more ambiguous way, to protect their way of living. And the second one, broader, if I can say so, a more rights-based one associated with the capability of citizens, communities, civil society dynamics to control and decide about digital processes in which they are involved. Then the paper identifies a number of ambiguities in interpretation of these two perspectives that places this debate in a sort of a minus field. And I think this is really interesting contribution of the paper. For example, the classical conceptualization goes a big step forward to what Nicola’s called extraterritorial projection of power, which has some points with Ramiro’s paper as well. And on the other hand, the rights-based conceptualization is actually differently perceived depending on which part of the globe we are. One may feel reassured with active privacy protection, for example, with European GDP or with the New Zealand protection of indigenous communities which is something that you may like to sit in the paper. But on the other hand, I agree uncomfortable with increasing state control by digital means. On the other hand, and from a different point of view, the not-so-uncommon appropriation of this sort of rights-based approach by transnational private tech companies featuring themselves as potential civil society agents. There is a bunch of literature about this misunderstanding that maybe it will be interesting to look at. So, coming to some, raising some issues. I would say that if the romantic view of the self-governing internet is neither true nor operational, as Nicholas also claimed, the current state of affairs is a source of serious problems, misunderstandings, and eventually conflicts. And we are left with a lot of questions. To begin with, the role of states is unavoidable in this game. But quoting from a definition, I think from the Stanford Encyclopedia that comes in the paper, their authority is obtained, and now I quote, from a mutually recognized source of legitimacy. And this is the crucial point here, yes? To what extent states can be trusted, we may ask. Do they actually represent a global public interest in cyberspace? But if not, who do? And this is a concern. A second issue may be related with the fact that this debate is clearly an arena for international institutions and dialogue, namely in the increasing decisive United Nations context. You already mentioned Digital Compact in the presentation. Is there a possible roadmap? In it, there will be a place for nations without states, for refugees, for displaced people, indigenous communities, as the New Zealand law I mentioned, and so on. Okay. One of the means that states use. to shape global digital landscape is regulation and standardization, and Ramiro’s papers focus on a specific kind of processes states resort to constrain this ecosystem, discussing, in the paper, regulatory threats of very different flavors. I think you did a great job in characterizing them in a very precise way, as a specific but largely diverse mechanism of power, and I will underline this largely diverse mechanism of power, which is particularly relevant in terms of Internet governance, I think, and so relevant in this forum, in particular around what Ramiro calls enforcing voluntary schemes of compliance with public positions and goals. And it might be interesting to expand research through systematic discourse analysis as one perceives from your examples, language is always performative, we know this from the 70s, and do it in concrete case studies, I liked very much your detailed illustrations, but probably one will need to go a step further in research to be able to identify and document concrete correlations, if there are correlations, effectively. Methodologically, for me, this is the most interesting domain for case studies, even if they are not trivial at all to carry on. Threats are characterized in your paper, along these two axes you have shown, public-private, formal-informal, providing an operational tool to somehow guide understanding and acting in this domain. Threats are ubiquitous, often effective, often producing results quicker and even more informed than other means, and on the other hand, as we all know, they reduce transparency, institutional accountability, and so on and so forth. My point is that in some sense they also are unavoidable, at least as Ramiro rightly recalls, through the implicit threat of revision, underlying an illegitimate process. So the point is, how to raise awareness of civil society around this. Extremely important, from my perspective, but I don’t know if you agree, is how to increase digital literacy, informed, empowered citizens and dynamics, to protect democracies, in your case, and if you come back to Nicola’s paper, but also because we doubt that this rights-based perspective, claiming more self-determination and distributed power, will not flourish anyway. Again, we could ask, is there a role in this area for the international arena, in particular for the UN, as at the very least a collector of good practices and an instance of debate? A side note to the way you put the references along your footnotes, I found it a bit strange from my taste, but very effective in providing a very interesting reading. And the last paper, at first sight, Nadia, your paper seems thematically a little bit on another side, but I think this is somehow illusory, because you discuss through a very concrete and planned participatory research framework that you explain, and is part of your PhD, as you mentioned, what ensures youth meaningful participation in the IGF family of events. So that’s a very concrete focus. IGF, with its distributed format at regional and sectorial levels, provides, I agree, a most interesting background to discuss all these issues. If extrapolation is possible, and certainly this is a qualitative research, we always need to be a bit careful about that. So, this has the clear merit to provide unexpected insights and raising crisp questions, and the outcomes of this work can help to make operational, as you mentioned, the statement of our Common Agenda, somehow to enhance youth engagement and to take future generations into account in policy decisions participation. Again, we can look at this paper, also quite well structured, within the very clear borders, the IGF ecosystem. But what, in my opinion, makes it relevant for this debate this afternoon is the identification of mechanisms and conditions for what you call meaningful participation. As youth, of course, that’s your topic, but also we could probably extend this or put the same questions for participation of old people, or pensionists, or different sorts of minority groups, or disabled people, or refugees, or whatever. This is possibly not a challenge for Nadia, even if bringing this sort of voices within IGF could be interesting to consider in the future, but in any case, designing and implementing more effective and meaningful voicing mechanisms for people and communities, providing them with time and voice, is becoming a major issue for the governments of Internet itself, and that’s why I think your work is well-connected within this session. So this is how I see these three very well-written papers, as I mentioned. Thank you very much for them. We may also open the floor to the audience for any questions, and then we’ll go for a second round between the panellists. Yes, please. My question is to Nicola. Can you please identify yourself? Yes.

Audience:
My name is Barna Akcalagir from Queen Mary University of London, and I really enjoyed Nicola’s paper, because I’m also… I’m looking forward to reading the full paper, but I also try and analyze these same concepts and materialize them through case studies. So it was an interesting paper for me. So the one question I have for him is that in what capacity does he think that multi-stakeholder platforms can contribute to solidifying the digital sovereignty concept without escalating geopolitical tensions? Any other question from the audience? Okay, so we can now go. I was going to propose it in reverse order, but as this question was directed to Nicolas, maybe we can take the same order this time. Nicolas, please. Thank you, thank you very

Nicola Palladino:
much. Thank you very much, Luis, for your very enlightening comments, and in particular, I think that, yes, at one point you raised a very important issue in this dynamics and debate, and this is the role of state, and as you say, it is really unavoidable, but it could be also really tricky, and I think this dynamic needs to be understood together with, as you underlined, with the weakness and ineffectiveness of international institutions that, in the last decades, have been, for several reasons, unable to create a common framework for the Internet and the digital world, and this created the rooms for the rise of digital sovereignty claims that, as I tried to show in my paper, they create tension. and geopolitical conflicts that make even harder than to reach an increment that is very needed at the moment. And it’s not easy to identify a way in which to move forward also because the tensions seem that are deemed to increase also in the following years. But anyway, I do not see any other paths than a constitutionalize also the international law order and then to arrive some kind of agreement in which yes, states could accept the digital sovereignty because this is absolutely necessary also to guarantee the right of their children, or to guarantee the fundamental right in the digital world, but they need also to be constrained by some superior law and rules that impede that digital means and use it to violate human rights and also to conduct due interferences in the life of the other countries. And I say, yes, there are some discussion as we underline on the global digital compass, but we know it could be too much ambitious to be maybe unreleased into things that we can really reach an agreement that is able to achieve these goals. Another solution that is what I suggested with the Convention 108 is to create some more limited regional agreement, but between like-minded states and nation to have at least something that is fragmented, but it could be also strength enough of a critical mass. to be attractive also for the other country, proposing a model that is based on digital constitutionalist principles. And while coming to the other question about the capability, the capacity of multidisciplinary to contribute to this process, I think that what we are saying is doing also in part that the failure of the model of the multidisciplinary also because, yes, to be clear, we need the participation of a wide range of different actors and a good model could be framework convention under the United States, umbrella like us already happened in the environmental international policymaking. And in this process, there’s also room for the participation of civic society, private sector, technical community, and also the possibility for them to give the contribution in something that, in some output that is binding. Yes, but when we come to the internet and digital realm, we can see that the multi-stakeholderism very often has been used or just to create initiatives that have no binding outcome or in other contests where they are more related to the concrete management operation of the internet. They also, they reproduce some power inequalities between the different members participating to these initiatives that in the end left the effective power of the internet. And of a few actors, very often we know big tech companies and also the U.S. government, and this is another factor that can contribute to create mistrust at the international level and impede the reach of international agreement. So I think we have to move forward. I think we have to try to recover the role of international institutions and ground any further step on international law. Thank you. Thank you.

Moderator:
I’ll just very briefly, I’m glad you noticed the footnotes.

Ramiro Ugarte:
The footnotes are to blame in my U.S. legal education. That’s how U.S. lawyers write for some reason, and I have captured that habit. Now on the question on how to shed light on this, I have to say I have almost not seen the issue discussed outside of the United States. I have found literature that has discussed it in other contexts, but on internet governance, the only one that I know that has written about it is Michael Karanikolas. He has written about the jawboning in India and Canada. That’s as far as it goes so far. Now in terms of how to shed light on this, in the U.S. this is a legal problem, and because it is a legal problem, it leads to litigation, and it leads to litigation because basically people feel that they are in a way harmed by the outcome of this informal process, processes of rulemaking, and this is what the Missouri dividing case is about. It’s a bunch of people who are claiming that they were censored by companies, but the invisible hand of the federal government. government was behind that censoring, and that is an interesting case. I haven’t seen it elsewhere. What I have seen, though, it’s threats being made as a mechanism of governance outside of the United States. Of course, this is used everywhere. For instance, in Latin America, I have seen bills presented as a way of forcing companies to sit at certain table. I don’t know what they get out of it, but I’ve certainly seen bills being introduced to force companies to sit at certain places. The judicial litigation in Latin America about intermediary liability, for instance, is an obvious source of potential regulatory threat in a different form, in the form of a judicial decision that sets a specific standard. I know officials in companies do perceive this as regulatory threats, and they pass that information up the ladder. And then, perhaps the most interesting case that I have seen is the way electoral authorities in Latin America have successfully managed to persuade corporate internet companies to sit at certain informal mechanisms of coordination around this information. Like, this has emerged as the so-called Mexico model, but it has been done by Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, at least. And this works, and this creates channels of communication with companies in which the potential of pressuring is obviously there. What we have seen in terms of possible avenues for further research is that processes and interactions between states and companies are increasingly being formalized. The DSA is obviously a good example. The DSA establishes a bunch of claims and prerogatives and obligations on corporations and create a formal process in which this can happen. There is an opportunity there in terms of thinking about forcing these processes to be documented, to see if these processes are transparent and so on, but that’s the research that we want to do. Thank you very much.

Moderator:
So Nadia, please.

Nadia Tjahja:
Well thank you very much for your kind comments. I’m very pleased that my research is now done, but also I’m excited at the challenges ahead for the United Nations, but also regional organizations worldwide who are looking to foster youth participation in their policy making. Notably, one of the things that I hope to achieve during this IGF is revisiting the definition of meaningful participation, and specifically I was looking at the definition by Malcolm, which aims to capture the extent to which the processes in question are effectively designed to incorporate the viewpoints of youth participation into the development of Internet governance policies in a balanced way, this being the essential feature from which this sublet of multi-stakeholder processes can claim democratic legitimacy. And I think that starting with this point of meaningful participation and adopting that as a definition, then using the framework to kind of further reflect on the manner in which we’re allowing participation within the Internet governance ecosystem, and I quite concur there is opportunities for this type of growth into the elderly or minorities, and that would be very welcome to me, and if there is someone who would like to fund me to do that research, I’m perfectly happy to do so. But the thing that I would, what I did want to emphasize with the methodology is that I use the European framework, and different cultures are extremely very important in that regard, especially when we talk about minorities and how they interpret the manner in which we engage with each other and how we perceive our participation and what meaning that has to them. So the purpose that I looked at was something that I was familiar with by I think it’s important for us to be able to understand the nuances and nuances of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and how we’re doing it and how we’re contributing to it by living in that space and therefore I would encourage that if there was a researcher looking at another region that that region would also be supported by someone from that space that is included to ensure that we understand the nuances that come from body languages when we talk about our understanding of our purposes within Internet governance and how we’re doing it. So that’s the very start of how we can contribute further and I’m very excited to see it happen. » Thank you very much. I don’t know if there is any other

Moderator:
questions from the audience. I guess that some people in this room, maybe people as old as myself, recall a movie from the 80s, I think, the movie in which at some point it says, oh, the movie is about cyberspace. I don’t know if you remember it. I don’t know if you remember it. So I think we leave quite a lot of this feeling in cyberspace governance. So I thank you very much, Nicholas, Ramiro, Nadia for your participation and all the audience and I think we can close now. Thank you. » Thank you. » Thank you. It’s been great fun to work with the programming team. Robert’s here, Nathalie is here, and there’s a large number of other people, so thank you. And then, thank you very much to everybody who was part of the programming team, who helped to review all of the abstracts. That’s a crucial part of the project. There are a number of other people who I’d like to thank. Thank you very much to the team here. For making the last minute co-hosts. And I don’t know why the person behind me is here. Thank you very much.