Out. I did work in the united nations. A i helped technology for i had an internet policy project mostly in the former soviet union. And the director of icann for the last seven years. Presumably as a retired person. But in fact as nearly a full time person working with icann to help the Domain Name System and identifying system flourish. When you bring as he said, technology and the internet to another country how do you do that . It depends when you do it. I put in First Computers in some african countries. It is working with vendors, making sure you have the right prerequisites like electricity. Making sure that there is a process that they have to happen and people are dedicated to it. And then making it happen. With the internet is a little different. There are people in the country who are champions of the country. And we did that primarily when i was a trustee by training people and in developing countries how to do this, how to bring the computers online. Hugs he developed their networks and how to give governance. We call the Network Administration at the time. Work from the ground. We accelerated helping people understand what they have to do and what they needed to know. Is this a case where you literally have to lay a wire or a cable into the country to get the internet into a country . Not initially. The internet wrote for the most part an existing telephone system. The initial connections between many developing countries and the Global Internet was by means of a modem over a regular wire. Preseason to access the motives but these countries use them to access the internet. We went on to Better Things with more bandwidth. And now it is interesting how the roles have been reversed. Much of the Television System runs on the internet not the other way around. Now egypt essentially cut off Internet Access to an entire country how did that happen . In this case, the minister of it at the time was one of our students and he comment were both trustees together. He now works for icann and you have a close relationship. He came in and said, the president has ordered you and National Security to take the internet. And he said it was the law. I had to do it. Now i think, we had never talked about this in detail but i suspect that he had not done it it is it the case of flipping a switch or turn off a server . For those of us that dont understand the technical part. If you dont have, its one thing if you have equipment that does not have power theres no way it will be able to keep the Network Connection up. There are integrated ways in which you can check. It is turning off the power that is probably the obvious one. Can you do that in the United States . I sure doubt. No, absolutely not. In the case of egypt there was one connection to the outside world. In the case of the United States, we have a very Robust Network with lots of cross connections. Lots of alternate routes to go from place to place. You cant do it. What are your Major Concerns about the future of Internet Freedom . I would say the problem with Internet Freedom is that you have to get the whole world to agree on it. Let me go back. At the moment we still have a world dominated by asian states. They are our form of legitimate governments. Whether you like certain aspects of it or not. Or whether we like certain Internet Freedom is not a shared concept. Or that is not is it a shared concept and that people can bring service to but it is not something practiced in the same way in different countries. And i think we need, once we have a global agreement, a greater global agreement or a greater global consensus on freedom of access to information, then the internet is going to take care of itself. Effect internet behavior is a reflection in many ways of noninternet behavior. The fact that we have divisions among countries and societies is reflected both in the behavior of people off the internet as well as on the internet. So i am concerned when countries try to shut up Internet Access. Or when they tried to monitor the internet in a major way. That is not my concept of Internet Freedom. Although the current method of government has the right to do it. You mentioned your work or your experience with russia. Is the internet governed heavily in that country . From what i know, the internet is much more leaky in russian than it is in some other countries. Leaky . Leaky in the sense that it is not totally controlled by the government. I think china has a much better control over what happens in the internet. In china than russia does and i think they probably have a very good sense of what is happening in the internet in this country. Has the icann system worked . Well, yeah. Lets talk about what you mean by the icann system. Icann is an organization that was set up to manage, to administer the identifiers, the unique identifiers that make it possible for one person on the internet or one location on the internet to go to any other location on the internet. It is an addressing system. There are two layers to it. Ip addresses which internet routers understand and the Domain Name System which is things that you and i can read for the most part. We understand that and the domain name cistern can change mechanisms to translate one to the other. And icann has developed policies for how this network should be managed, how the identifiers should be managed and specifically the domain name space. And the industry how it should operate. I think it has been moderately successful. I think that there are certain things that i might like to see differently. Certain things i think all participants would but is working out and giving rise to this stakeholder nation of governance. Which i hope will work in the future. Your support for the multistate i am. Lets take that up a little bit. The multistate holders is a code word for everybody who sits at the table. Well decide what is best for us, the collective us. Icann operates under a specific instantiation of the multistakeholder system. Where a number of constituencies deal with things like global level domains and the governmental advisory committee, Civil Society has a role and users have a role. They get together according to the way in which the icann bylaws and put them together to sit at the table and make these judgments to recommend policy with regard to the identifiers system. And so far i think it has worked for a while. I just hope that it continues. One of the concerns i have is that it orders, in order for this to work come participants have divined to the fact that sometimes not everybody is going to get their way. And part of the discussions are going to be really difficult because there would multistate holders. There would be one stakeholder. And we have no trouble knowing what we are doing. Final question. When you hear people say we will turn over to china or over in north korea what is your response . I wish they knew what the truth was. I think it was Daniel Moynahan who said youre entitled to your opinion. But youre not entitled to your contacts. And i think this is a case of that. We havent turned the internet over to anybody. What you are talking about is the transition from a department of commerce having a contract with a piece of icann. And that piece was really really limited and in effect only to whatever there was every country club. The department of Congress Said is icann follow its own policies . And if the answer is yes, no problem. And the answer was never no. So the change is, this it was a big political issue here. It was not a tactical issue. It was not even a political issue in terms of over the internet should be governed. It was a very minor tweak, the United States government still has as much influence and is much to say in what happens to icann as any other government. So im frankly somewhat mystified. Sometimes people go on to something because it reflects a different opinion that they have or another point that they want to make. Just is not true. Thank you for your time george sadowsky. Thank you. We have professor milton mueller. What are you doing here at the state of the net . I am an expert on internet government and i was invited to be on the panel of the internet government. And i consulted with the guy who puts together the program here. He asked me who you should put on these panels and the Washington People on and i tell him, i try to get people from other countries and other parts of the internet but you know im just joking about that. We do have a european on our panel. So you are with georgia tech. What exactly is internet government . How the internet is shaped in terms of not only the policies that govern how you act on the internet but also some of the technical underpinnings. So in order to get a domain name, somebody has to coordinate to make sure the domain name is unique. In order to get my t adjuster you have to make sure that those addresses are handed out in certain ways. And issues like cybersecurity, most of the government is kind of hard to understand and people are confused about this issue with internet governing and what it means because it is distributed differently. It is lots of different people making decisions, there is no centralized government. That is why we call it governance it is a softer form of government. At the 30,000 foot level, how does internet governance of fact regular users . Partly, it just helps to make sure the thing actually works. If you dont have a consistent consolidated coordination of some of these functions, the United States might be disconnected from or even canada. You have certain forms of management and policy to make sure everything actually is compatible. Everything actually works together. That is the most fundamental form of the way it affects. So most people do not know about it because most of the time almost all of the time, it is working and they just take it for granted that they can put that enter key and the packets will go from there house to wherever they are sending the email. They dont even have to worry about how it actually happens. And then there are times when there are problems or crisis. For example you have an attack on these video cameras a few months ago. That means people have to suddenly Work Together and coordinate things to solve the emergency. And again, that is a distributed form of government. Meaning that the domain name it might mean the ip address registers are giving information about where these developers are on the internet and who is in control of them. It might mean that Law Enforcement agencies are waiting a commandandcontrol center. It might mean that the Internet Service providers are doing technical things to block the flow. There are a lot of Different Actors involved and of course theyre all standing different jurisdictions. It is not like long government can say heres what we are going to do. So it is a distributed system, does it work better in your view than perhaps a centralized system . Definitely. I think it is much more flexible. And it is much more conducive to freedom. To Internet Freedom because no one person can seize control. And just say okay this is the way its going to be. If youre going to get control, you will have to get agreement and even consensus from a large number of people. Has the icann system worked . Yes, icann is in, is a new institution. It had some rough times. It had issues because it was a pioneering kind of an institution. It was meant to be global. Set the internet identifiers will Work Together. It has to be global, it cannot be fragmented. It cant be a canadian, french and canadian icann. You have to have a global icann. But you have to be accountable to Internet Users so how do you do that . And there have been many different ways of trying to make Global Institutions accountable. The oldfashioned way is to have a negotiated treaty and in the treaty is followed voluntarily by each state. It doesnt really work on the internet. The governments really dont know whats going on technically. They get too political. They want to drag internet stuff into geopolitics. And if you are pro internet you want to avoid that. And the same thing is, it is just not close enough to the actual operators. In a need to be, have direct input from stakeholders that are making decisions on how the Domain Name System works. In the registries, Internet Service providers and direct users and customers of the system. So its really a new form of government and we have been developing this. I think the final move from the us government, when they give up control, i think we found gets the point where we can say this is a successful freestanding institution that is accountable. Reasonably accountable to the people. If you are as you say current Internet Freedom, should the chinese allow the New York Times act to be downloadable in china . Of course they should the problem is that but do they have the right to say no . In the universal declaration of human rights they do not have that right in the sense of the power in the sovereignty right. But there is tension. It is a Global Institution to coordinate the icann stuff. We did not want sovereignty. We wanted uniformity and global compatibility but unfortunately in a world of nationstates it is still divided into territorial sovereign. If they decide to do all kinds of bad things to the population, theres not much the rest of the world can do about it. Even with wifi and wireless . Even with wifi and wireless wifi transmitters have to be set up on chinese soil and it is a very short range form of communication and im sure that china licenses are somehow controlled. Consider wifi and that designates the internet and they set up functions that somehow controls. But they do have little holes in the system. For circumventing. And that is one of the interesting Foreign Policy issues of internet governance in the us and they were promoting circumvention. Through the state departments. And of course chinese didnt like that. So that was a point of tension. We dont like it when the chinese do espionage and cyber espionage. They break into our systems is still data. So its a lot of interesting, these are internet governance. Is there press on pressure on the editorial side when it comes to content . Oh, yes. I think unfortunately, freedom of expression is always kind of unpopular. Because it is always something that somebody doesnt like. That will get said or printed or published. So the latest thing for example is terrorism accounts on twitter and facebook. In some sense, yeah, they have the right to remove these accounts because they may be illegal organizations that technically have no right to exist. But what if Somebody Just says, i am in favor of isis. Under the First Amendment it is actually not illegal to say that. Of course it is illegal to behead somebody or kill somebody. But it is not necessarily illegal to just say i support islamic fundamental and believe in the program of isis. Pressure on the intermediary. Facebook, google, twitter to suppress the communication of these people who are pro isis. And so that is all of these fine lines that you have to draw in internet governance. Number one, one of the key features again, it is the intermediaries i have so much power. So theyre having a very interesting debate about filtering and censorship or regulation or motivation of contents intermediaries and how far it should go. And whether it is acting as a private actor or whether they are actually more like because theyre getting all of this pressure governments to do this. Where do you fall . I am on the side where i think the states should not be pressuring the intermediaries to do their own dirty work. To do this censorship. I think that it is okay for a private entity to say this is my property in my space and im going to moderate the content in order to make sure that my customers think this is a good place to be. That to me is legitimate. That is editorial discretion. Its a cspan probably exercises discretion. But unfortunately theres a wedding between states and the private intermediaries and frequently in negotiating these private agreements. And the free speech advocates are not at the table. It is more of a private conversation between Law Enforcement and the governments and the intermediary. So i dont like that. I think we have to be a little more open and that. The panel you are on at the state of the net conference, there having an open forum on governance. What are you hoping to achieve this week are you hoping for . And going to talk about cybersecurity after the last 15 years and people spoke about internet governance primarily they meant icann. And to me as one of the original people involved in building it and making it work, and also someone who is participating directly in the transition, that chapter is kind of closed in a sense that we know what it is, we reformed it, and pretty much we have to keep an eye on it. But icann is not that interesting as the centerpiece of the internet governance. I think cybersecurity is. And i think the question is are you going to get pulled back into a nationstate driven system of internet governance because internet governance is linked to National Security through these cybersecurity concerns. We have to talk. Could we have some kind of a icann institution for Cybersecurity Governance . Directions instead of more militaristic and nationalistic direction. Atlanta and georgia tech, what is the role in this . Georgia tech is really a leader in cybersecurity. We have the first masters degree in cybersecurity and that started more than 10 years ago. Now we have just revise that masters degree which was Computer Science degree. Now expanded it to include policy and the kind of stuff that i do. And energy systems. So the cyber physical, the energy group and so on and so forth. And we have something thats called the internet governance project. Which i run. There is the institute for Information Security and policy. Which is an Umbrella Organization for research about cybersecurity, policy, technical aspects. Of course it is really a very engineering dominated school. So there is tons of highly Technical Research going on there about things like attribution, how do you decide who actually didnt attack . And we just had a big debate about that with russia. And there is Research Going about with socalled information warfare. How governments can mitigate the dialogue of other countries. So a lot of interesting stuff going on there. Milton mueller, a professor georgia tech cofounder and codirector of the internet governance project. If you like to see more of cspans communicators programs go to cspan. Org. And look under the series link on the homepage. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. And is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Coming up tonight on cspan2, attorney general Jeff Sessions speaketh that the ethics and followed by members of Congress Speaking to constituents at town hall meetings. Gary palmer followed by joe barton and then ted deutch. Tuesday a panel of set us