2013 Internet Governance Forum
Opening Remarks - "Building Bridges - Enhancing Multistakeholder Cooperation for Growth and Sustainable Development"
Bali, Indonesia
October 22nd, 2013

Mr. Chairman, Honourable Ministers, Excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen,
I am proud to be working with you all this week on important topics relating to the Internet. I 
would also like to give my personal thanks to the Indonesian hosts for having us here. Indonesia
 is a special place for me in many ways. The people, the culture. And nature. Many visitors love 
the beaches but I love the volcanoes.

I could talk about many things today, but I wanted to focus on two important topics: future innovation and security.

We all talk about how the Internet has enabled incredible innovation, how it has pushed 
'significant economic growth, social development, and how it has given tremendous benefit
 for so many users. The open and interoperable nature of the Internet technology has made
 this possible. When we talk about governance issues this week, it is important to think about 
them in terms of what the future will bring and not just today's Internet. I wanted to highlight 
something that we see at the technical community and the IETF very clearly: the speed of 
innovation is increasing. For instance, the web protocol stack is undergoing significant change
 with the HTTP 2.0. Voice-over-IP is moving to browsers with WebRTC - real-time communication 
for the web. The Internet of Things is working its way to more and more devices. Fundamental 
changes in even the basic networking technology are on the way too, such as moving from IPv4 
to IPv6, some of the changes we've implemented on TCP, and so on.

Many of these changes have fundamental impacts to Internet governance. Governing an almost 
limitless address space is very different from managing scarcity. Having any web server be capable
of becoming a voice provider will have an impact on regulating voice calls. And I think the 
engineers at IETF and elsewhere have realized that they cannot work on the technology alone 
in all cases, and that things like emergency calls are something that we have to work on together
 in the larger community.

The second topic that I wanted to talk about is security. The revelations on pervasive monitoring
 of Internet users and traffic have obviously been a hot topic this year. I do not think we should 
react to specific cases, and indeed the problems are perhaps more wide-spread in the world than
 one would assume by reading newspapers. But our commerce, business, and personal communications
 all depend on the Internet being secure and trusted. So the reports about large-scale monitoring of
 Internet traffic and users disturbs us greatly.

But we are taking this as a wake-up call. Since September the IETF has been discussing the topic
 extensively, and we will devote a big part of our time in the upcoming Vancouver meeting for it. 
And we are not just talking - we are looking at technical changes that will raise the bar for monitoring.
 Small things, like removing weak encryption algorithms. Bigger tings, like making support for secure
 connections mandatory in HTTP 2.0. And perhaps the notion that the Internet is by default insecure 
needs to change. For example , today, security only gets switched on for certain services like banking.
 Should we change that assumption? And indeed, with the ongoing developments in the web protocol
 stack and the attention on security, this might be possible. If there is a moment in our lives when we
 can have an effect on the security of the Internet, it is now. Let us use the moment wisely.

Obviously, technology alone cannot solve all problems. We invite you at IGF and other organisations to
work together with us to build a secure Internet.

Thank you.

Jari Arkko, Chairman of the IETF