The third meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values at IGF Baku was chaired by the Internet Society President and included on its panel Nick Ashton-Hart, Sebastien Bachollet, Vint Cerf, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy, Alejandro Pisanty and Paul Wilson. The Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values is organised to debate on questions such as “What makes the Internet what it is? What are its architectural principles? What are some of its core principles and values and what's happening to them in the process of Internet's evolution?” The discussion on Core Values is about openness, transparency, collaborative processes, bottom up, local processes that is embodied in the RIR processes and the distributed nature which is central to how work gets done across the Internet ecosystem. Over time, some of those principles and values have been threatened, with or without intent. Changes happening all around us - regulations that are proposed, legislation underway - threaten to alter the core values considerably. Internet is new to us and Internet is new to governments so there are several departments handle different policy aspects of Internet, often without sufficient coordination between the departments. For example, in Germany, six different ministries, in France, three ministries. Core Internet values are harmed when policy changes / proposals [for example India's proposal] are made with insufficient coordination, with inadequate understanding of how the Internet works. Also, different countries, democratic or not democratic, come up with a decision to make a law every time there is some trouble on the Internet, adding one law on top of another. Internet as a single global accessible network that links every point of the Internet to every other point. It is a neutral network, where the Internet - the actual infrastructure of the Internet - is separate from and can be separated from the applications and the content that run across it. These and other values are enabled both by the original design of the Internet and the way that it has been maintained. The only reason why the Internet has been absolutely the only reason that the Internet has been so successful is because of the values that are either implicit or explicit in the way it's been envisioned and the way it's run, so the Internet is thriving. The growth of applications, of content, of usage and the user base of the internet is phenomenal. Today we are doing well. Over time, we might see a sort of fragmentatation of the Internet with more complex interconnections between them than exist today. That could happen due to policy regulations that start to break the Internet up. Network neutrality is also under threat. The threats are very concrete. They are pervasive, they are of a permanent nature, and they are of a recurring nature. The visible threats interfere with the end to end principle and network neutrality. The values are continuously both being built up and being threatened. Internet is a general purpose technology that affects everything, not just some things. It is completely transforming everything about it, and not everyone wants to be transformed. The challenge is to recognize that we need to a have common understanding of the architecture of the Internet and the core characteristics which must be respected in order for it to be used for any purpose everywhere. Social norms for what people use the Internet for will vary widely and there are societies which are not willing to accept a globalized concept of the individual at the same pace as others. Different cultures are going to define their norms slightly differently even if we don't agree with them, otherwise we will see the Internet balcanized, and see private Internets like in Iran. How are they able to be able to feel comfortable with the globalized parts of the Internet that do work for them and for everyone else? This is going to be a key policy challenge. The world has agreed on a common time and there is no sovereignty over time. Why are we conceiving of the Internet based on sovereign nation state boundaries? Can we get beyond the idea of the nation state? Online, we have the potential to have something different. The notion of sovereignty in a highly connected environment may have to change because actions taken on the sovereign grounds may have impact on others outside of the territory of that sovereign domain. The Minister for Communications and Information Technology of India has felt that the concept of sovereignty is no longer appropriate in the Internet environment. However, if we want to adopt a non-national kind of environment in the Internet, we have to emulate at least some of the protections that are given to us under the notion of sovereign social contract. There are a variety of other social order elements that show up in this social contract. The Internet is created out of real things. It's made out of abstractions but it arises from a real, physical system and the real physical system does lie inside of nation state boundaries, in the near term, they have the ability to do a certain amount of control. You are not your Avatar. You are you. It's inescapable that the Internet is routed in a physical world. So if we are going to move away through purely national boundaries to legal jurisdictions, there will have to be some amount of multilateral or global agreement about social norms and at least legal norms that will allow abuses to be dealt with in this cyber environment. There has to be some changes in how laws work on the Internet. Technically the Internet is the transport layer of the Internet. It is the single global mutual network that allows any point to connect to any other point and actually that thing is what we are working to preserve. It's one network. Internet has been an enabler. It's been a facilitator and it's meant different things to different people. Internet is a layered architecture, as you work your way up, you abstract from the behavior of the lower layers. There are emerging properties that come out of those abstractions. When you get up to the point where you are in the application space, you are in a universe that's nearly unbounded because it's an artifact of software. The consequence of this notion of emergent property is that, on the jurisdictional aspects, how you go about enforcing some practice may vary from one layer to another, which is why, for example, we might tolerate an ITR that's focused on the layers of physical interconnectedness, and then we might not tolerate something that says something about what we can or can not do or say. Order arising out of this abstraction and emergent properties will vary from one layer to another. The Internet has evolved successfully over the last 30 years of its operation primarily because it's a regulation-free environment. Most of the decisions that it made are freely made among parties. The protocols invented and adopted are a consequence of consensus in the IETF and the decisions are entirely open.
