Institute for Internet Policy & Law @ Beijing Normal University

Council of Europe organized the “Internet Freedom Conference: From Principles to Global Treaty Law? Content, Stakeholders and Form” on April 18-19 in Strasbourg, France. The Conference Video is now available online. I joined the conference and presented at “Panel 5: International lawmaking in their respective roles and responsibilities.” Although there are documents available, I’d suggest everyone take a look at the videos that are much more revealing.

The Conference is interesting in several aspects. Firstly, CoE published two background documents for discussions. One is “Internet Governance Principles” and the other is “Protection and Promotion of Internet’s Universality, Integrity and Openness.” According to CoE’s interpretation, the former one is applicable to all stakeholders while the latter primarily applies to the Member States. These documents are no doubt thoughtful outputs on Internet Governance, although they are obviously still under construction. Some contents are missing and some needs to be adjusted. Secondly, CoE is now taking brave steps to measure the possibility of having a “global” treaty law on Internet governance, after the successful enactment of Cybercrime Convention. Although the name is weird to legal community–there has no global but “international” treaty law, it may open up our mind as I stated on a few critical governance issues, such as cyber-peace, cyber-security and cyber-openness. Thirdly, it is really interesting to watch the extremely diverse reaction from different stakeholder groups. Governments seem naturally supportive to treaty regime while business community casts serious doubt on it. Civil society and academic have different views and mixed feelings about “legalization” of Internet governance. Finally it was a very fruitful and inspiring brainstorming. It is amazing that there could be so many participants from Europe community. I talked briefly with the two other colleagues from Asia. We all agree that it would not be possible for Asia to reach the same level maturity in any near future.

The city of Strasbourg is lovable. I took a boat trip with Bill on the picturesque Ill River and enjoyed watching the water leverages learned from China. Wow, knowledge wants to share! The chatting afterward was as pleasant as the weather.

ICANN opened its first 2011 meeting at Westin Hotel on 335 Powell Street, San Francisco. The meeting in Spring attracted more than 1000 participants from around the world. I spent a very busy week. Many people saw me running from one meeting room to another, which proved both the hectic schedule and my hard-working.

I spent most of the time at At-Large Meeting series of course. I chaired the APRALO Monthly Meeting on March 15 (17:00pm local time) and invited the Chair, Associate Chair and a group of Members of NomCom to do an outreach to the AP Community. I led the all the policy discussions on IDNs, IANA Review, Geographic Regions and new gTLDs and allocated the works to pertinent working groups or RALO members. However, actually all these works bounced back to me. On the at-large or apac mailing list, everyone can see that I myself drafted almost all the policy statements (recently on At-Large Response to GAC-Board Scorecard Consultation on trademark measures), responded to questionnaire (recently on NTIA Questions on IANA) and edited and organized the regional responses (recently on geographic review). With respect to planning of APRALO showcase, although a talkative VC blurred his allocated program agenda item on outreach and jumped to this item, I managed to invite the Chair of NARALO Organization Committee to give a briefing. His talk was very helpful to focus the work on organization, sponsorship and outreach. I’ve circulated the messages to apac list but only one person who is not affiliated with any member ALS volunteered. Pathetic! How long can I take pains to make the whole organization operate, despite all the free-riders? I had been looked forward to being replaced by March 2011, but all the people wanted to use me for longer time. The election must be completed in May and I will step down as the Chair of APRALO on or before June 1, 2011.  That is FOR SURE.

I attended the Joint RALO meeting and pointed out that those inactive and non-participative ALSes should either be de-certified or withdraw from the RALO. It is ridiculous that an entity that had applied for to be certified as an ALS and committed to the RALO disappeared or refused to participate anymore. It is pointless to argue for loss of interests. If so, the uninterested ALS should leave at-large system voluntarily.

Among the policy meeting, the ALAC-GAC Joint Session was interesting. Most of the time was on the Scorecard consultation. I made a point that was supported by most at-large representatives from Europe, Latin America and Africa. I pointed out not all the governments in the diversified GAC had the same level of demand for trademark protection in new gTLDs and as a result they may not share the same views, but the people outside hardly heard from the those government that don’t seek overwhelming trademark protection. The response from the Chair of GAC was that IPR issues may have been traded off for negotiation on other issues. Well said, it has always been true among other international law and policy setting.

At other policy sessions, I made the comments, suggestions or asked questions on IANA Review, Government Objection against community-based new gTLD strings, IDN ccTLDs, ICANN bylaw review (WT-A), geographical area review (triple dilemma in AP: a cross-regional Small Island Chapter, a subregional or independent regional West Asia or Arab and a want-to-join-Europe Central Asia), interpretation policy and UDRP review, etc. What a busy week!

On Wednesday March 16, I took Caltrain to go to Stanford Law School. The trip was so smooth that I found the Law School Building effortlessly. At the Caltrain station, I got on the Stanford Shuttle and correctly got off at the Student Union near the Law School. The meetings with Stanford Law Professors were interesting and productive. The campus is indeed beautiful and magnificent. Hopefully those imported palm trees could survive the chilling weather Palo Alto.

2010年网络使命征文大赛－法律、社会与公益－获奖者揭晓

Winners of  IIPL-NetMission Essay Competition on Law, Society & Public Good

Institute for the Internet Policy & Law proudly announced the winners of the founding yearly essay competition for the students of master-degree and above. The competition aims to promote students’ participation in charity programs via Internet technologies, enhance social responsibility and stimulate public services.

The Competition attracts more than 20 participants from a number of universities in Beijing. The papers submitted covers electronic commerce, intellectual property, free flow of information, management of critical Internet resource and Internet for Development. The Expert Evaluation Committee is very impressed by the students’ knowledge, enthusiasm and strong wish for public good. We sincerely appreciate evaluation experts for their kind contribution of their precious time and energy. Despite all the difficulties we encountered, we are confident in the success of the competition. At Awarding Ceremony, a group of experts on e-commerce, domain names, jurisprudence and Internet policy made very insightful comments on the selected winning papers.

All the winners were awarded the Bilingual Certificates and the prizes kindly donated by CNNIC.

Two winners were later invited by Asia Pacific Network Group (APNG) Camp to present on Beijing-Hong Kong NetMission Join Forum on February 23, 2011. APNG Camp was concurrent to APRICOT 2011, which is the largest Internet conference series in AP Region. Prof. Xue gave a presentation on the NetMission Essay Competition and Youth’s Mission on the Internet. The Director Jiyi Li, Department of Youth Affairs, Liaison Officer of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong SAR and Director Florence Hui, Department of Civil Affairs, Government of Hong Kong SAR were present at the Joint Forum.

Winners/ 获奖论文

一等奖 1^st Class Winners：

唐慧俊 对外经济贸易大学博士研究生《论电子商务中消费者知情权的法律保护》

Huijun Tang, Ph.D. Candidate of University of International Business and Economics

刘磊 北京师范大学博士研究生《互联网环境下著作权保护博弈对最不发达国家教育资源利用的影响》

Lei Lu, Ph.D. Candidate of Beijing Normal University

二等奖 2^nd Class Winners：

刘娟 对外经济贸易大学博士研究生《不同所有制企业基于互联网的商务运营绩效分析》

Juan Liu, Ph.D. Candidate of University of International Business and Economics

伍梦璇 北京师范大学法学硕士研究生《让所有人看见互联网－著作权的社会责任》

Mengxuan Wu, LLM Student of Beijing Normal University

姚志伟 北京师范大学法律硕士研究生《互联网上外国影视作品的著作权保护》

Zhiwei Yao, J.M. Student of Beijing Normal University

三等奖 3^rd Class Winners:

吴冬梅 北京师范大学法律硕士研究生《“错案”之外——由“王鹏诽谤案”引发的一点思考》

Dongmei Wu, J.M. Student of Beijing Normal University

赵璐 北京师范大学法律硕士研究生《P2P软件提供者的版权侵权责任研究》

Lu Zhao, J.M. Student of Beijing Normal University

耿珊珊 北京师范大学法律硕士研究生《论网络环境下商业秘密的保护》

Shanshan Geng, J.M. Student of Beijing Normal University

Warm Congratulations to All the Winners! Thanks to CNNIC for kindly donating the prizes for winners!

Thanks to all the participants!

ICANN’s year-end annual meeting is happening at Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, December 5-10. This is one of 3 ICANN global meetings held yearly. Cartagena must be a nice city. I can see the Walled Old Town with Towers, Churches and cannons on the Wall, which is opposite to the Convention Center. But apart from enjoying the sunshine of Caribbean Sea at the breaks, I have been at the conferences or en route to the conference.

IDN fast track process review is one of the sessions. ICANN staff chaired the session. Senior Director on IDNs presented on the following aspects of fast track process:

– Transparency
– Community Support
– Meaningfulness
– Determination of the IDN ccTLD manager
– IDN Tables
– Disputes
– Confusingly similar string
– Objection/re-evaluation rights

Although there were less than 30 participants in the plenary room, the session brought up interesting information. At the end of the presentation, there were questions raised on the Internet referred to .бг (applied Bulgaria IDN ccTLD string) case. The staff restated that they were not supposed to comment on any specific case.

I then asked a procedural question. Although the String evaluation done by DNS stability panel (according to their guidelines) is a technical decision, it is a decision made on behalf of ICANN and has (significant) policy implication. If such technical determination is not subject to reconsideration or independent review, wouldn’t it be an accountability issue, as highlighted by ICANN at the opening ceremony?

To my *rough* memory, both replied that fast track process should be sufficiently simply, without objection or re-evaluation. And, surprisingly both ICANN staff replied that anyone would be available to reconsideration or review. I assume I heard their reply clearly. The audio record at the link is broken unfortunately.

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Interestingly, ICANN staff made a statement on December 4, 2010 on Internet Governance list: “The Fast Track Process is a limited process set up for the initial implementations of IDN ccTLDs. It was a factor in the community development of the process that there should be no reconsideration process included specific to the Fast Track process because it was a limited approach to only those requests where no dispute, questions, or otherwise concerns existed.” “Now, the process is a year old, and hence we are conducting a review of how well it functions and if any changes should be made. There is a public forum online and also a session scheduled in Cartagena. We will discuss all aspects of the process there.”

ICANN Senior Director on IDNs later responded in following two bulletin points:

• The fast track process was built limited in nature and for those applications where there is no concerns or no disputes of any kind. I also said I believe this is an appropriate approach for the initial IDN TLD delegations. It does however not mean that things should be more liberal in the future, but it is always easier to expand a program than to narrow it after the fact.
• Anyone at ICANN who are unhappy about a decision and not able to solve this with staff, can always go to the Ombudsman or seek reconsideration through the process for such. For details about these general processes, which are non-dependant on the fast track process, but part of ICANNs Accountability and Review Processes, please see the link.

The case reveals the ICANN’s matrix of Ombudsman, reconsideration, independent review or other “accountability mechanisms” (if any). There are built-in appeal systems for a specific program and there are others generally applied.

Global Internet of Things Conference (GIOTC) was held on November 23-24, 2010 in Beijing National Convention Center. Hundreds of people, most from business and administration, joined the conference and side exhibition. I did not come to the confusing-structured conference hall until the afternoon of November 23, missing a couple of presentations from European Commission and many companies. In the afternoon session, the first half, chaired by Rob van Kranenburg, comprised of 6 full presentations on technological developments or business applications. Mr. Kranenburg manage to mobilize his panelists to respond questions and generate new thinkings.

At around 16:30, I took over and chair the last panel on policy discussion. Unfortunately the panel is still more about technicality than polity. The speakers, in sequence, talked about IPv6 application for IoTs, operational side of IoTs and China-EU Joint Expert Group on IoTs. Later, 3 discussants from EU-China group, M2M and ESTI, joined the panel. I tried hard to open up the policy discussions on privacy, security, trust and policy-impact of standardization, but it does not seem attracting much responses.

It is interesting to see how IoTs suddenly become an eye-catching term in China after the high leader gave a speech with reference to it in April 2010. The speech cannot be googled for I always get an error page after inputting the relevant keywords. Weird enough. Anyway, government is making huge investment on technical development and industrial application with the aim of creating a new booming point for the economy.

The agenda and introduction of my panel is attach.

Internet for Things: Standards, Trade and Legal Issues

16：30-17：30 ( Discussion group: 60 mins )

Panel moderator:

Dr. Prof. Hong Xue, Director of Institute for Internet Policy & Law, Beijing Normal University

Speakers

1. Mr. Xiaodong Lee CNNIC

2. Prof. Jian Wang, Director of Center for International Business Studies, University of International Business and Economics

3. Mr. Hui Zhang, Secretary-General of working group sensor Network (WGSN)

Discussants

Mr. David Boswarthick, Technical Official of M2M standards group

Ms. Margot Dor, Director of Strategic Projects, ETSI

Mr. Philippe Cousin, European experts for the EU-China Internet of things Export Group

Introduction

We are impressed by the prospect that the Internet of Things is going to reshape the future of our technology, economy and society as a whole. The tremendous social impacts of IoTs signify the importance of establishing suitable governance regime to ensure progress, competitiveness, privacy and all the other essential values of information society.

This workshop will be specifically focusing on a few critical aspects of governance issues. As highlighted by European Commission’s “Internet of Things — An action plan for Europe”, governance addresses:

a)      Identification and identifier mechanism (IPv6);

b)      Privacy and personal data—right to silence chips

c)       Trust and Security, especially in trade operation

d)     Standardization (not necessarily be based on a deterministic or syntactic model but would instead be based on the context of the event; event-driven architecture )

Tim Berners-Lee made a presentation on November 22. When applauding for the long live of the web, he reemphasizes the value of universality. The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. When we move to communications between objects, standardization process need to keep delicate balance between the values of openness, interoperable and those of security and privacy.