A weve been looking forward to this those of you on the trigg trigger. I get to moderate this fabulous discussion today, and we are here to launch the book the global struggle to governee the internet. It was Rebecca Mackinnon spoke also a new america book and i was struck when i was reading through the acknowledgments to see in the consent to say few people have had as much influence on online thinking as that book and i thought that is wonderful and you have to have returned that before you knew we were doing this event. We are going to have a discussion and then we will turn it over to you. I want to begin by framing the debate in terms of these two books because i think it says a lot about how to. In 2012, the question is internet freedom. When i was at the state Department Working for secretary ainton, i was very involved in her speech where she talked about the right to connect, and we thought very hard about the importance of being able to connect to the internet as a freedom and that remains important this is 2012. It is the struggle to govern the internet. Obviously freedom is still important as this democracy and we will talk about that in a minute. But its striking to me that the focal point has shifted from freedom to be free from restraint to governance. So, that to me tells us something about how the internet has the gold in ways that none of us might have predicted. We were just talking before larry seems to have predicted a lot of it and rebecca predicted to somthe sum of it as i will tk about. Davids book is speech police, and in the book and often online we encounter these issues as speech issues and in the United States that means you encounter them as First Amendment issues more broadly, and i want to talk about this you talk about human rights issues, freedom of expression issues. But thats just the portal for the real discussion. The real discussion is the protection o of speech, protectn of privacy, the maintenance, preservation, by validation of democracy so the Second Thought i would leave you with us as we move from freedom to governance, and governance is about participation in governance, and what does democracy look like, liberal democracy in a world that is as much online as offline. So just thinking about the evolution and some of the things we will pull these out in conversation and then as i said it will turn to you but before i do that, i want to properly introduce both of our speakers, and i will start with rebecca is thwho is the director of the Digital Rights, ranging Digital Rights is and index it exemplifies what new america strives to be. Rebecca is a big finger in this book. Before that, she was the cofounder of Global Voices which is how i first knew of her in the foreignpolicy. She was the cnn bureau chief from 1998 to 2001 so she was living and working in a country where questions of censorship. Shes a big finger and a lot of us if you go back to consent of the network its striking how much she saw. She strives to connect thoughts to action which is why i say its where new america strives to be to take the big ideas about democracy, about consent and speech but then to turn them into something that is more practical for actually does bring the companies on an annual basis. The one of the work, an and its important both intellectually and practically in the right of opinion and expression, you all are a specialized audience but i am willing to venture that many apople do not know that there is a special from the un on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Its a clinical law professor at uc irvine and he teaches internationaldi human rights law and protects the clinic as you might expect given that hes a clinical professor in international justice. Hes lectured all around the world at the un as the International Criminal court. Hes taught at many of the law schools. He cofounded the International HumanRights Program at ucla and began his career as a lawyer at the u. S. State department practicing international law. One of the things i will be talking about towards the end is how importantan it is both of yu come out of an International Human rights frame, not just a u. S. Legal frame. With that, we will begin our discussions. I want to start by framing the debate. There is a quote that you can see this book is dogeared already. Theres a place wherthere is a e talking to the commission and you are talking about the code of conduct and its interesting because the. Hes talking about the difference between the u. S. Approaches to freedom of speech, which of course we have by far. In other words we protect the least of the most speech of anyone in the world. We limit the speech and he talks about words that lead to violencece and how they understd this much more than americans do. These are general societal politics. Theie bodies have to own up to e view for regulating it then he says, and this is where i want to start. It isnt whats best for the internet, its what is best for society. The book is to govern the internet. Do you think of it as the internet or mobilee lee . Its kind of remarkable thing to people that have shaped major fields if the debate over regulation which is practically nonexistent in many respects withd new changes around competition policy in the United States but debate about the regulation is robust in europe and their approach is the the dmpanies have a massive impact on the public space and whether we get into debates about publishers or whether they have the Public Square they see what they are doing on their access to information and on the rights of how do we protect our society and individuals and public space and institutions and so forth and they are having a robust debate about it. This is the whole point of why we like the internet. We are supposed to be good for people and empower people into democracy in whicin thedemocracd governance because if you dont have governance, its nasty and short for everybody but the biggest and. Its enabling people in communities that used to be cut off and marginalized with no hope of breaking out to do so but at the same time, we need to make sure that as it is being constructed a and governed but e power is heldd accountable when somebody exercises power of what i canct say or do, whether it ia corporate actor or government they are called appropriately accountable and also the rights of everybody on the network. Its happening everywhere else, so in the middle east and asia and so on theres a lot of concern of human rights activists in countries that are not democracies or where leaders are picking up on regulatory debates and misconstruing them. One of the big challenges and david has written about this, i pointed out the Legal Systems are based on the nationstates and borders. The approach to constraining power and the approach to the law and geopolitics thats the purpose when it comes to protecting rights and constraining and holding the power of accountable across the Global Networks and thats one of the major questions david is taking much further. If we think about it as it is and just the Internet Society anInternet Societyand its intee point you refer to companies as custodians of important public spaces, which i thought the idea that this is a mixed reality and the line also between this isnt just one country, this is global so we are not talking global democracy lets talk about than who participates in the governance lets accept that it needs to be a broader conversation than it is now what is the role of the company, theres a part in the book where you describe facebooks legislative process. I was reading it like this is a civics book where we say you go to capitol hill and there is a draft of the law and you describe a number of people through facebook and led by monica who was a student of mi mine, so i hopef i told her civl procedure very well. But there is a member of facebook people from around the world that are very earnestly trying to decide what should be taken down and worship the left up so maybe you want to describe that a little bit more immediately. That has to be part of this as long as the companies are there. Who else needs to be in the rooms or do w where do we disple conversations from those entirely . Our Public Perception generally is that theyre making by then seatofthepants decisions. The truth of the matter is they are incredibly bureaucratized institutions with extensive sets of rules. The contents policy team particularly facebook which might not surprise anybody they are basically making the rules and evaluating the interplay of their goals with the experience so they were performing a kind sof governance. No matter what happens with the companies, that is going to continue to be a part of the way content is evaluated notwithstanding the then moves which is funny like crossing platforms. No matter what happens there they are governing on their own in a major challenge right now i think of it as democratization. How do they open up their space so that more voices are a part of the decisionmaking around with the rules should be and how the rules are enforced. Its one thing to say this group of Extraordinary People make decisions about what happens in the United States but then when you extrapolate over the 2 billion users in their communities around the world, how do they think through applying those rules which i think should be rooted in the human rights law, the norms for how to go o about enforcing thoe if your question is an important one, how do they go about involving the people that are most affected by the rules . Before you take a crack at bat with the ask a question. One clarification is to describ, there is somebody from dublin. So its not just americans in the room at least. Its facebook people from around the world. Thats true. Its dominated by people that are marinated in the firstst amendment culture. To be accountable for its different types of decisions and at the end of the day Mark Zuckerberg how do we think about that and the impact all around theri world . To make that is a terrifying thought it all comes down to Mark Zuckerberg. [laughter] but that you are working hard to achieve those become glass walls that we can see who was there and the decisions they are making. In my book i talk about the and one sovereignty that they are exerting over people to consent or to participate there iss a number of issues there and with the un framework to behavior in policies and practices. We are looking for that commitment and to provide evidence that they are implementing those in a certain way. Looking around human rights risks not just what they are taking down for content or moderation policy for what they are taking down in response to government demand and the human rights Impact Assessment and facebook does ,network initiative to do Impact Assessment. So they provide no evidence no with the content of their terms of service how they enforce their rules so what did take down and what not to take down his downstream and not show about the implications of human rights they are doing human rights assessment and theyre not doing human rights on the targeted Business Model that has a lot to do and how you Police Things and also the grievance mechanism so in order to do the Impact Assessment how will my communities affect anywhere else . With affected stakeholders and communities around the world to understand that. Had to understand we have an Early Warning system who will help us come up with a solution . There needs to be a lot morest transparency whats been taken down and how to be enforced and with that accountability and risks and impact is not just happening in a systematic way right now. Im trying to get a sense but with that human rights assessments they are getting more information for how they make those decisions and then to compel that decisionmaking with the entities that are not Public Squares in the sense uke the capital mall so they can restrict speech far more than the european government. How do they go into the actual decisionmaking process quick. G one answer is government regulation. From the American Perspective talkingsp about speech and information but that is where it becomes problematic and now thinking about ethiopia and one respect with the oppressive regime and there has been a lot of robust states on the platforms the speech and Ethics Division and this is where i think rebecca is right. Again the platforms the platforms always have a First Response the volume is so ridiculous they are always in that position but thats that they should be doing they should be evaluating what is the impact of facebook on the political situation and how do we address that . To give them a playbook for the assessment but also be signed off for youtube and twitter to have that accountability mechanism to say we are evaluating the impact but its a Company Decision and well be held accountable for our decision that is fundamentally the problem. So even if this is even solvable i dont want to go too far quite yet. [laughter] but i do have a question we talk a lot right now in the us in the New York Times oped about breaking up but there is another possibility witches breaking down how do we get it closer to the committee is not just insight and access to the decisionmaking in the rulemaking but how do you do that while preventing government . And thats why its not a onesizefitsall or in democratic europe it might not work it would not work as a model. There isnt an overall global answer. As Mark Zuckerberg used to say facebook is a community. Everybody would roll their eyes at that. It isnt one community. And with abe scale of two. 5 billion users do they have the tools to really manage that kind of process . Those tools to engage people so it looks more democratic for the regime than those that are actually affected. But you do suggest country teams that made me think it is a mini state department. I think that is right and then they actually have a presence in the jurisdiction and then to figure out a way to have a presence its not just language that f only gets you so far its around the social norms and all sorts of memes that develop you need to know a lot more than that but then again if they go to the country there is the riskk to be captured literally and facebook executives could be arrested. It is a very complicated stance in the way so far it has not been making the full effort not just at the National Level but localll leve. But you are actually doing this . It is the way to hold Companies Accountable that is not government regulation. It is benchmark to help inform governments how do you think if you are wildly successful, Companies Pay attention and again both of you are using the Global Human Rights framework not the European Convention framework where do you imagine your Watchdog Group participating inin the larger project quick. If you have the tools it is the data in the framework and the standards that includes advocacy, regulation, all kinds of things. In a way you see sustainability benchmarks on how they are doing with their Carbon Footprint that is quite successful to have a huge impact not only their policies and practices but to help influence regulation for what impact is regulation actually having on practices or going beyond their means. So that is what we modeled on with those benchmarks with labor practices and you see again, again, alone having a benchmark isnt f doing all the work you can see for example with our data this year we could make initial observations on what impact privacy and regulation had and the impact it had and which are going above and beyond with that compliance that they interpret. So it is part of the tool to understand what companies are doing and also a framework around which to have debates because we keep updating the standards we are using about what best practices should look like so we are adding indicators to targeted advertising that we didnt have. It is a lot of consultation and research so the indicators that we have right now we had to build a lot of detail into that talk to technologist and companies andd what represents a general consensus know if they are accountable and osponsible all the way people speech that someone speech could be manipulated or constrained that somebody might know something about the activity through maximum transparency and accountability if that is an indicator but it is based on that it is on the work of others that has been sconsidered to be come to be known as best practice. There used to be a smart set of regulations. Content regulation by government with repression as speech but what they are doing is not only modeling what they should bek doing but the government wants to think about that regulation for a more robust and domestic public debate. I dont have a problem to say this is a requirement for our jurisdiction is to be transparent. Any legislative forum in america is just as important but i will push you further so how do you think about that from your Vantage Point at the un . So you are at the un, 194 countries, facebook is the biggest even by market cap even by population it is way up there than most of the countries so how do you think the un should engage and the many ngos and there are plenty of governments at the un who wo