The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Where Is Paolo? Thank you very much. If you can take your seat. We are just starting the next session.
I'm Giacomo Mazzone, the co‑chair of the PNMA, with Neema, and she could not be with us and she cannot be at two places at the same time, yet.
Thank you for being with us. The topic, as you can imagine, is complex and we will have multiple voices to go for it.
Just to resume a few words what will be about, the concept of meaningful access has been defined in various ways, let's say, during the years. But we have some consolidate ‑‑ the last speaker arrives.
We have consolidated a lot about that, and I seen how that has been treated in many other workshops and discussions across all the IGFs.
So what we will try to do is to try to bring to discussion of this afternoon, the richness of the debate that has been going around at the IGF and, of course, across the globe. This is why we have the distinguished list of panelists with us that will try to represent the richness of the debate.
I start from the extreme right, not politically meaningful, that is Robert Zambrano with us. That is the remote moderation. And I thank him for having accepted to be with us.
And then we have our friend Keisuke Kamimura, representing the Japanese IGF.
Then Paolo Lanteri from WIPO.
Then we have from the ITU, we have Martin Schaaper, is in charge of the statistics.
And then Onica Nonhlanhla Makwakwa from Global Ditigal Inclusion Partnership.
We have Laurent Ferrali from ICANN.
And we have Maria de Brasdefer from IFLA.
I would not waste so much time with the presentation, but I will go straight in the main threads. We will start with the video contribution from Vint Cerf, the ‑‑ that not only is the Chair of the Leadership Panel, but is also one of the members of the group of the PNMA. And last year he was with us in presence at this same panel. This year he cannot, but he was able to send a very short contribution.
The contribution of Vint is linked to the points that we discussed last year with him. One was about the problem of the ‑‑ one of the reasons for the difficulty of access and meaningful access is the affordability of the devices. And the second is, the second question to be related to the main topic of this year IGF is if the arrival of AI in a massive way could be improving and help to solving the problem of accessibility and meaningful accessibility.
So, if the control room can start the video, we can see Vint Cerf's contribution.
>> VINT CERF: On accessible systems. We have to take into account economics. So, affordable systems are important. If you can't afford the devices, equipment and service, it gives you access to a meaningful and useful internet, then you don't get to use it. So we need to drive costs out about a number of ways, it could be making things less expensive. It could be subsidizing income but who deserve access to internet and all the services. We have creative thinking that is needed in order to make things affordable to the general population.
Meaningful access to artificial intelligence means understanding something about the way in which it works. As an example, one of my friends and colleagues has written books on causality and on the book of why, this is about understanding how these large‑language models and large‑machine learning models actually work. And understanding that without a causal model, all you have is probability and correlation. The correlation and causality are not the same thing. So, using these tools requires to you think about causality as you apply the output to conclusions.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: As a TV journalist, this confirming my doubts about the shooting videos with iPhone is not the same than shooting with the professional camera. But these are the results. Prejudice, could be.
So, I hope that you followed what Vint was saying through the subtitles and his contribution is quite interesting because linked to what we said last year.
So, this is the first contribution for our debate. But go back, going back to the mainstream debate, we have now Onica that will start first, and we will talk about some experience that she is following and some report, interesting reports about meaningful access. Please.
>> ONICA MAKWAKWA: Great. Thank you. I will just get to it. So, one of the ways in which we actually define someone who has meaningful access is a person who has adequate speed to connect, a person who has a smart device like a smart phone as a minimum entry point, and has the ability to access the internet on a daily basis if that's what they choose to, as well as has access to unlimited data.
And the research that we have done, actually, shows that we need to recalibrate how we are defining access in general, if we want to focus on meaningful access to make sure that people have the right device to be able to connect as well as the right speed and the unlimited access to data.
The experience that we have seen is that the people who, actually, have meaningful connectivity, those users are more likely to be able to use their access for things that can truly help improve their lives, such as looking for a job, taking a course, looking at health and wellness information, as opposed to those who have just a basic access to connectivity.
But one of the great challenges we need to address is the access to affordable devices, amongst all the others, but access to affordable devices remains one of the greater challenges for people to be meaningfully connected.
At the moment, especially in the low and middle‑income countries, we are still seeing entry‑level Smartphones at 20 to 25% average month household income, which is extremely unaffordable, especially for those on the lower income quantiles in those countries. I will pause there for now and engage later on this. But just driving the issue of affordability to access as well as affordability to the devices.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yeah, that was exactly one of the points raised by Vint Cerf in his introduction.
Thank you, Onica, and thank you for staying in the time.
We are in Japan for the first time for the IGF. And Japan is one of the few countries that also in the IGF that has a language that is not Latin language. The previous one we had was in Arabic.
The question is, being in a country like this, is the fact not to be Latin character language a better year and how this affect the access and the meaningful access for the Japanese citizens.
>> KEISUKE DAMIMURA: My name is Keisuke Kamimura. Thank you very much for inviting me on this panel. I'm professor of linguistics at Daito University in Tokyo. We have a somewhat linguistic perspective on this issue. Let me share my personal reflection and observation with you.
I'm a bit concerned whether what I am talking ‑‑ what I am going to talk about fits this panel well, but let me try. As he mentioned we use a combination of scripts and writing Japanese and how did this affect the access to interpret in Japan. Maybe there are two aspects to this issue. One is technical and the other is social and cultural, but let me focus on the first one here, technical aspect. We once had technical problems in enabling with Japanese characters on computer systems and internet applications. I remember. I remember computer systems and my computer and applications did not process the Japanese language in the way it should when I was ‑‑ when I was a student, particularly.
And even if your computer is ready for dealing with the characters, your application programmes like word processing software or whatever may not handle the language effectively. So, you can't write papers. So, you can't use spelling, spell checkers or other correction functionalities for Japanese if the language was not ‑‑ is not supported. And I also remember email messages in Japanese often ‑‑ were often broken on the way of transmission, and web pages in Japanese were often rendered to what we call gibberish. We surely had many troubles in dealing with Japanese characters at the technical level. At early stage of the computer and internet. But many of these technical problems were eventually sorted out by the efforts of various commercial and noncommercial developers.
But that was done before the internet became available to the wider population. So, I wouldn't say we had no problems. But they did not remain too long. So, the trouble with characters and languages was quite annoying but it was not prohibitive to the extent that it blocked out the Japanese from accessing the internet effectively.
But if you look at things differently, ordinary users in Japan were confident enough to use their language on the internet because technical issues had been resolved before they turned to the use of the internet. So, if we had not had the Japanese capability in computer and the applications of internet, many of us in Japan may have been hesitant to use the internet as we use it now.
So, we sorted out the ‑‑ we did have problems, but we sorted out well before the internet came. But if you are facing the trouble now, it's going to be a very big issue.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much. That's a very real witness of what can happen in this country. But I am glad to understand that is the contest is also important because the fact that you are in a country where you are affluent, you have the tools, you can afford the right devices and the right software, this diminish the impact of the risk of being excluded, of course. This is not the case in other countries where the same conditions are not gathered.
So, if we are lucky now, we have a remote participant with us, and is representative of the government. Steven Matainaho, that is secretary for the Papua New Guinea Department of Information Communication Technology. He's connected on remote, and he will explain us some experience that they are doing with the assistance of some experts with us in the room that are trying to help Papua New Guinea to go ahead and try to minimize the exclusion of the citizens from the internet revolution.
Please, Mr. Matainaho, you have the floor.
>> STEVEN MATAINAHO: Thank you, Chair. Can you hear me?
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, perfectly.
>> STEVEN MATAINAHO: Thank you. Good evening all the way from Papua New Guinea. It's great to be here online and to be participating in the IGF.
I just have a few comments, and, of course, my experience and professional experience and insights will generally be from the Geneva Papua New Guinea facing. For those not aware, Papua New Guinea is an island nation consisting of multiple islands and one main land in the south Pacific north of Australia and east of ‑‑ and sharing land mass with Indonesia. We are roughly around 11.87 million people.
Interestingly enough, Papua New Guinea holds about 12% of the world's language and that's roughly around 846 languages actively spoken. And you would think that this would be a challenge in terms of exclusivity. But I would like just to briefly speak on meaningful connectivity and what that means to Papua New Guinea.
We have had connectivity as a government priority since early 2000, 2003 when mobile network ‑‑ first mobile network operator was introduced. And later, through the introduction of competition, which was in 2009. And something interesting is that since 2009 and within that 10‑year span, an interesting insight indicated was that the most searched and accessed sites in Papua New Guinea from that 10‑year period covering 2009 were three websites. The first website is BSP.com and for those around the world not aware, BSP is one of our main banks in Papua New Guinea.
The second most accessed website is NRL.com. NLR is the National Rugby League in Australia. And Papua New Guinea is very avid fans of rugby.
And the third most popular site was Facebook. This was consistent for over 10 years, and it tells you a lot of things. But one of the things that our government took out of this was why are we not accessing ‑‑ there's a lot of information out there on the internet. There's a lot of services that can add value to the people's productivity, that can add value to the livelihood of our people. Why are they not accessing it? What is government not doing to provide those, make it easy or inform our people or, better yet, provide services that would be made online.
And out of that, you know, our meaning of meaningful connectivity is about having connectivity with a purpose, you know, in the sense that can have access and add value to their livelihood, add value to their productivity of the country. And this is where in 2009 we started to look at how can we shift, how can government shift from a connectivity, sort of, traditional, I will use the word traditional connectivity model where we were focused on expanding our infrastructure, how can we shift that so that it's about being service driven and purpose driven. So, we introduced the digital transformation policy in 2020. We started working on that. And is followed by a digital government act in 2022 and followed by a digital government plan 2023 to 2027. What we essentially did was we shifted and said let's not talk about connectivity. Let's talk about let government be the leader in bringing meaningful services, digital government services to the people, putting citizens first, making services fast, simple and clear. And driving that demand to connect.
We shifted that and this is where we are. We are working in 2023 on words to roll out the wide range of digital services. And I think that's from my perspective and Papua New Guinea's perspective that we shifted from connectivity to our, sort of, what we think demand driven and service driven, and for us, that's our approach towards meaningful connectivity.
Now, there's so much to touch on in terms of our culture and diversity and how we are addressing all those issues. But I will stop there. Thank you very much.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much for your contribution. I see that you put the rugby as one of the fundamental rights of the citizens and for Italy, that is not a rugby nation. But I can understand. For us, would be futbol eventually. Thank you very much.
I hope that you can stay with us, because we have other question for you in the second round. But now I would give the floor to a specific section of this debate, that this is section dedicated to international organizations. Because we believe that the international organizations are playing a special role in creating or supporting best practices, nurturing them and making available to in other countries.
We will start from IFLA, that is the association of librarians, Maria de Brasdefer is with us. And I leave the floor for explaining some of the best practices cases. Thank you.
>> MARIA DE BRASDEFER: Thank you, and thank you for the invitation to this panel. I think first of all because in the case of libraries it is important to talk about what meaningful access means in the context of libraries, so in this sense, I would really like to say that I think it is very important to take into account that libraries have been and are still in constant development. So, I think in 2023, they really shouldn't be seen as spaces for books or archives, but more as spaces that have really adapted to the technological developments of today and also spaces that have an ultimate purpose of serving their local communities.
So, also for this, I think it is also important to note is that libraries can be a door of access for those who need it most, yeah, for those who need most to access meaningful information, but also for those who are most affected by the digital divide. So, I guess in a way you could also say that libraries could be seen as a multipurpose infrastructure that serves to access and provide needs to local communities, but also that has a lot to offer in terms of meaningful access. And so for now, I would like to discuss two cases with you briefly. So, one of those cases is the case of the GLN. So the (?) libraries network and this is a case that is going to be introduced by my colleague Don Means, who is in the audience and also the founder of this initiative.
And the second case is the case of digital skills at your local library project that was a case that was an initiative implemented in Uganda. So, it was an initiative that was originally funded by the Uganda communications commission but it was expanded in 2021 via the agency. In the sense, this strategy start, it had an objective of giving extra infrastructure to public and community libraries and to also equip the country with computers and internet connection but also other facilities with community use. That was the first phase of the project.
And then the second phase of that initiative was training of trainers. So, strategy for a training of trainers for local librarians was implemented and this was a very important phase of the project, actually, because it really allowed to localize the training to ‑‑ and also to adapt it to the local needs of the community, because even though the needs were similar across the country, of course, every community has particular needs.
And then shortly after that, there was an outreach campaign that was done and it also started in 2014, and this was, actually, an outreach campaign that was launched by the librarians who had been training by the training of trainers, and that outreach campaign was done to reach the community in general, but also a lot of people who wanted to access skills, to improve their businesses and also to access education. So, right after that outreach campaign start, a lot of people were trained. So, so far in terms of results, about 14,000 people have been trained across Uganda and a lot of them have reported that they have started initiatives with small and medium enterprises, at least 200 people of those 14,000 have reported good results after they received the digital skills training and a lot of people have also used the training they received to access higher education in other places.
So, I think in the sense that gives a lot of context about why libraries are important in terms of meaningful connectivity.
And I would also like to talk a little bit about the GLN initiative. So, for this, I would like to give the floor to my colleague, Don Means, who is in the audience.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Please do come to the mic over there.
>> DON MEANS: Thank you, Maria.
The point made about the role of libraries as aggregators ICT resources in a community is extremely relevant when we are talking about meaningful access, because it's unique in that regard.
Our group, the gigabit libraries network is an open consortium of innovative libraries using emerging telecom technology to expand internet inclusion as well as to increase community resiliency against disasters and outages. We have begun deploying low earth orbit satellite kits in libraries in Africa, starting in Nigeria. Our position is every community should have at least a single point of no fee, low fee internet access like a library, and it should be resilient against outages.
The point is made by esteemed climate activist Bill McKibben. He says, I think connecting libraries as a community access hubs for resilience is a good idea and highly relevant. These communities may not be contributing huge amounts of carbon, but they are the places where it's growing faster and more to the point there where people are suffering most of the effects. We seek guidance on this implementation and this exploration, a single LEO unit needing only about a lightbulb worth of energy canning operated for around 50 to $100 a month in developing markets as this whole area, these whole systems are just arriving and developing themselves.
A single unit can provide impervious 100 megabit connection to places suffering from disastrous weather which would otherwise be entirely cut off from outside information in communities.
We work through national libraries in each country to implement these plans. We are not agents of any company or enterprise, which only to help people in the highest risk with the least resources to cope with the terrible challenges of climate‑driven disasters.
Perhaps a useful policy environment to support this can be found within the UN COP28 declaration on adaptation. This is the point that, yes, mitigation is critical, but it's really late. It's too late to reverse the changes that we are experiencing today and will continue to experience. So the strategy of adapting to these changes is commonsensical and having this kind of a resource in every community is doable. It's entirely affordable and the benefit besides increasing just the normal services that people can have through the internet to this resilience factor we think is really worth exploring. Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you, Don. Question for you, because this project is one of the oldest, trying to improve the librarians and in the field of meaningful access, which kind of policies would be needed in order to strengthen, to make more effective what are you doing? Because we as policy network, we are looking for policies that could be the most effective in making happen this everywhere.
>> DON MEANS: Certainly the policy of the rights of access are key to this. The policy framework that I mentioned within the context of the UN's allocation or pledge of tens of billions of dollars to address climate adaptation would cover a lot of connectivity. So, advocating on behalf of that approach, I think, would be a very direct way to go about this.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much.
>> DON MEANS: Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: So, we have seen the IFLA contribution.
And now we go to another more structured, more official agency of the United Nations, that is the ITU. But the ITU, I asked them bring us some best practice cases and they say no. We can do better for you. And they send me Martin Schaper. Why? Because the explanation was for them and I agree with them, the statistics are an important tool. If you want to make appropriate policies, you need proper statistics and data. And Martin is exactly what he is doing, and ITU is working already since a couple of years on indicators about meaningful access: Can you explain a little bit about that?
>> MARTIN SCHAAPER: Yes, I can. Thank you very much. Coming from the ITU data analytics division I think it's quite obvious that I think it's we important the role of data and statistics for meaningful access. You may have seen the latest internet use data that we released about a month, month and a half ago that says that 504 billion people are online but 2.6 billion are offline. That means 67% of the world population is connected to the internet.
Yet, 95% has access to some kind of mobile signal. This already is a clear case about missing people. Among the people that are connected, not all of them are in a meaningful way connected. May be issues with quality of the infrastructure, with the cost, maybe don't have enough data to go online as often as they want. And so on. It was already raised in the first intervention as well.
So, two year ago, we launched a set of targets together with the UN office of the Tech Envoy, a set of targets on what we call universal and meaningful connectivity. This was in the framework of the digital cooperation roadmap of the UN Secretary General. It is now become a project with the EU. It's coming from the EU. So, we have a set of targets that we now come to put into practice and try to disseminate among policymakers in the world.
We are coupling the data and the statistics to the policy perspective. In our set of targets, it's a set of targets on people using the internet but also the quality of the internet connection, we have a set of targets on the cost of an internet package of the skills needed and so on.
And this is important because if our goal is to achieve universal and meaningful connectivity by the year 2030, which is very ambitious and we know that, you need to know where you are and from there on, you can go on a path into reaching targets so you know where you need to go.
But how to get there, you need to know where you are and you need to also see that the actions you are taking are, actually, leading you to where you want to go, so you need to constantly monitor as well your policy actions.
So, these targets go in two directions. We have a set of target on universal access, which means that we want everyone to use the internet and everyone means all people but also businesses, schools, communities, and we want to do it in a meaningful way. And for that, we have five enablers, infrastructure, affordability, skills, device, and safety and security. And on almost all of these aspects we have indicators and targets.
We already have created a dashboard, the UMC dashboard which you can find online on the ITU website. And in the dashboard, you can take any target that we have and you can see for that target where are all the countries, where is my country, but where is my country in respect to all the other countries as well. Or you can take a country of your interest and you can see this is my country, these are the targets, and on some targets we have achieved universal connectivity, but on others, we are, actually, far away from it or even at the start. Or for some indicators we don't even have the data. And that's all information that needs to channel into the policy perspective.
And another very important point of the data is you can break down the data by socioeconomic groups. So you can have a look at the digital divides. So, we all know that there's a gender digital divide. More men are using the internet than women. How big is the divide in my country and how does this change into if you move along the globe into other countries. We know that younger people are more avid users of the internet than older people. But how bad is it in my country? Do we need to have special policy objectives to connect our senior citizens to the internet?
There's also difference between urban and rural areas. Is that because the infrastructure is not good enough in rural areas or is it for other reasons? And the data can tell you to a large extent how that is, where it is and especially where the gaps are. Where we need to do the policies, where we have to set policies and then over time monitor and see if our actions actually are leading to an improvement or not.
So, that is the product we are having. That's the good news. There's also bad news but I will keep that for maybe my next intervention.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much. That is very interesting. I think this could be a very interesting source of information for everybody that want to deal with this kind of information.
Laurent, it is now your turn. As I can and especially your project digital Africa, I guess, what are you doing in the field of making better condition for meaningful access? And by the way, you use the data of ITU or ‑‑
>> LAURENT FERRALI: Not yet.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: What we want to do is it increase the exchange, in order not to repeat the same problem.
>> LAURENT FERRALI: ITU is part of this with digital Africa so make things easier. Thank you very much for the invitation.
I will report what we did for the last 10 months with this collaboration with Africa. We launched this coalition during the last, I guess, with ITU the extension of Africa universities, the African institution of the association of African CCFDs and, yeah, among others. Now we have something like 11 partners.
We have currently seven, actually, projects. And, of course, all of these projects, I mean, the aim of all of these projects is to develop a meaningful connectivity, meaningful access in Africa.
The one which is very important for me is the support we are providing to African country code top level domain registries. Because we had this week a lot of discussion about infrastructure in different workshops sessions. But, I mean, I think there is a missing part in the discussion, which is the the (?) of this. And I don't know an example of successful country time of services and national digital economy which is not able to rely on the registry. It's a very important part of the national infrastructure and a missing part of the discussion we are used to have about infrastructure in Africa.
We are providing this support with different partners. The idea is to provide a kind of ‑‑ I mean, ICANN did that from many years, but from a technical perspective, we are providing technical capacity building supports to different facilities. But it was clear for us that we need to have a more holistic approach and work with different partners in order to be able to provide more than technical expertise and technical capacity building support.
And so we are helping to instill these. That's one project. Another one is access to local content. Of course ICANN is not dealing with content, but you maybe know that we have international domain names and we have an issue with the use of these IDNs. This is the universal acceptance issue. We need to be sure that people will be able to have access to these international domain names.
Another project which is important for me as well is what we are doing in terms of quality of service and cybersecurity. We have two projects. We are deploying some ICANN managed server facilities in Africa and we are hoping (?) Africa to better protect their infrastructure.
And ‑‑
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Can you keep something for the next round. Keep something for the next. If you do everything now, then what you say later?
>> LAURENT FERRALI: I can stop now and come back.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. Now, you mentioned contents, that is not your specialization. But access to contents is important. And this gives me the right angle to bring the discussion to WIPO, because WIPO is dealing exactly with contents. Can you tell us what are you doing in this field, Paolo?
>> PAOLO LANTERI: Absolutely. Thanks a lot. It's definitely a pleasure to jump in the discussion from a very different perspective here. Very happy to bring to the floor the perspective of the World Intellectual Property Organization has seen this discussion on meaningful access as intrinsically linked to, actually, the creation and the distribution of meaningful content. Of different nature, educational, news reporting, pure entertainment like music, video games and audiovisual.
Content is meaningful if it's relevant, forensic in terms of cultural identity, accessible because you have read the language and inclusive. WIPO participated and contributed to this debate for many years, providing an assessment as to why any policy that as objective providing meaningful access should also keep an eye on what is behind that, making sure the compelling content we all want to enjoy is continued to be created and distributed in a sustainable way, at the same time also providing certain flexibilities.
This is the key aspect, because without the content we want, I think it's very hard to conceive any meaningful access. I will skip all the part about reflection of content and the flexibility it provides to facilitate fair uses, open access and many things that are enriching our lives and I will focus only on projects, successful examples that we have in place, and particularly on those that have already been reported in this framework as facilitating meaningful access.
So, we lead really many cross‑cutting initiatives in this space. So, it's very hard to cluster them in clear cut categories. For ease of presenting them, I divided in two big, broad, rough groups. One are initiatives directly relevant to inclusion. The first, possibly the best example of something effective with concrete results is the accessible consortium, accessible consortium called ABC is a public‑private partnership led by WIPO and counting on the participation of many partners, including IFLA, of course, and organizations representing the blind community, the European Union.
The ABC goal is only one to increase the number of books in accessible format, such as digital, Braille, e‑pub audio books, and to distribute them to the people that they need around the globe, and we do through a variety of lines advocacy for inclusive publishing, but the most impactful activity we do is the ABC global book service, which offers an online catalog of books in accessible formats available at no cost to serve the blind around the world. The service has nowadays more than 800,000 titles in 80 languages available for cross‑border exchange without the need for clearance, any formalities related to copyright. Out of the authorized entities who have joined the consortium, 70 are located in developing and least developed countries and just in 2022, this meant that 140,000 accessible books were distributed to individuals around the globe.
Then we have a beautiful story to tell about open access. We, WIPO, lead working group filled by over 100 individuals from over 25 international organizations, many of them represented in this room. The membership is constantly growing. What do we do? We facilitate the debate and exchange of good practices among OGOs on how to make our content accessible and moving open access. WIPO and few other IGOs now went ahead and launched new collaboration with Wikimedia, for instance. We have in‑house Wikimedia. And, basically, releasing all we produce through their global platform boosting accessibility, of course, but also the possibility for any third parties to translate the content to local languages and to adopt it to any need they may have at the local level.
That's one part of the story. The other part of the story, very important, is what do we do to assure that we promote production and distribution of local, meaningful content, okay? Traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions are a big part of our work. WIPO's work on this field is growing stronger than ever on top of the policy and norm setting activity, we lead and support practical initiatives such as digitalization projects of traditional knowledge and mentoring awards, all sorts of stuff. And then we have our core initiatives in the context of the development agenda, for instance, we are about to relaunching doubling the funding of the AV, audio‑vision market, of (?) production. We launched specific tools for sectors like digital publishing for small publishers in LDCs or like we heard these days with the maintaining a creators. While the case of all this stuff report project will be submitted in writing, basically, we can say that the progress on all these initiatives is steady and positive and, more importantly, the appetite of our constituency both governments and stakeholders is either strong or very strong.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Paolo. There are funding for audio‑visual in Latin America but unfortunately the experience is in Africa. Do you have funding for African experience?
>> Not yet but we can work on it.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Do we have online Meme Kagga and Nana Kagga McPherson? No. Connection issues. Access problem. Then can you explain to us, what is this experience from Uganda that you recommended us?
>> BERTRAND MOULLIER: Yeah. I'm Bertrand Moullier. Not there to explain what they do, they will do so with formal charisma and passion and I would be able to muster. But I will do my best, so Meme and Nana Kagga are two recovering civil engineers who have decided to change career a few years ago and became audio‑visual producers in Uganda and they have been trying to run a company which is entirely female led. They are the two directors and the entire staff is female. And making local content for local audiences in culturally relevant languages including Uganda, which is spoken by 5.6 million people locally as primary language and another 5.4 are fully conversant with it and their contention and ours is the ability for companies like theirs, which is called Savannah moon to thrive and survive in the marketplace is an essential component of meaningful access. Once you have accessed the broadband infrastructure, you need meaningful content that reflects your lives, your pre occupations, your cultural themes and by making fiction drama by feature films or through television series, they are doing just that.
They have found that although their market has increased a little bit in the last few years, they are hobbled sometimes by a few factors. One of them is that the broadband infrastructure where they live is still tentative, at times defined as unexplained bandwidth throttling for technical reasons. So you are losing signals, which makes it uncomfortable to take in relevant audio‑visual content and there's also, from their perspective, they want me to reflect this, a pricing issue if you are buying AG's worth of data by the time you have run through two episodes of a television series on the mobile telephony network which is the way most people locally take in their content, you will find that you have almost run out of capacity. So you will need to purchase more. And there is not necessarily an adequation between local spending power and the ability to enjoy and access the content.
More, I think, strategically in order for these companies to fulfill their social utility function, in this case as two women who are very, very committed to can dramatizing, reflecting issues experienced by women in their country, in their region, there needs to be an enabling climate to make sure that these SMEs are able to use their position at the forefront of cultural development, to reflect and dramatize those.
So, they believe that there is no meaningful access without a meaningful local audio‑visual production capability, which, actually, not only is incidental to what internet content can deliver in general but is central to it. And therefore the question of economic sustainability of their activities, the ability to offer people career tracks, these women are ‑‑ have left potentially lucrative careers as engineers to devote themselves to audio‑visual content. That needs to be factored into the ecosystemmic equation when looking at the accessibility and certainly the meaningful access component and by giving two examples of films that they recently made, one is called empower B, is the story of a young boy who after a difficult birth in a village in Uganda develops a condition, neurological condition and becomes neurodivergent and the family hits against local incomprehension, perhaps a deficit knowledge about these type of conditions and it's the story of how they try to address these issues and educate themselves and protect their sons and afford them a good childhood.
Another one is about the story of a young woman who rebells against a notion that having lost her husband in an accident, she by traditional is meant to marry the man's brother and wants a different kind of outcome for her life and to empower herself.
So, these are films that are really trying to dramatize things that people are living out every day. And they are utterly relevant to the meaningful access agenda that has been highlighted here.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Perfect. Thank you very much, Bertrand.
This brings us finally to the content side that we have neglected until now a little bit. Roberto, you are monitoring with the help of artificial intelligence all the universe of internet. What he what are the questions that come from the world.
>> ROBERTO: I think we have Carlos Alfonso online. So, if we need his intervention, he will be ready to.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Did he ask for the floor?
>> ROBERTO: Not yet. Maybe for the section that we have exchange, we can do that.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Okay. Any question in the chat?
>> ROBERTO: Not any yet.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: We can go to the question in the room. I see already one volunteer, please introduce yourself and tell us straight the question.
>> AUDIENCE: Okay. I'm Cosi, I am from Baneen I'm the economy (?) in Baneen. I have two questions. We are talking about access.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Meaningful access.
>> AUDIENCE: Yeah. But when we are talking about access for me, you have two challenge. The first one is internet. Is it available or not for us in our region in Africa?
Sometime we see the signal but we don't get anything. What that mean? We are talking about video, film. We make some good thing in capella. What is the data. The data that we collect. What is it? In Africa, which data centre in Africa? We need to have our data in Africa. Everything we collect in Africa supposed to be in Africa to be used, for Africa people and for others.
But when we collect it in Africa and put it in data centre outside of Africa and call Africa people to pay for internet, to collect that information after again is two way. We pay for information you have is not normal. We supposed to make things very clearly, very open for everyone in the world. Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. Onica, I think this question is straight for you, huh?
>> ONICA MAKWAKWA: Thanks for raising that. I think, I want to respond specifically to the question, but I think what you are bringing is the fact that we have to also look at the financial model of how we are connecting everyone. We seem to have continued in an economic system that has essentially been very extractive without using this new opportunity of the internet to begin to collect some of those embedded inequalities that come with the existing market structure.
So, I think as we look at developing access more, we have to be open and willing to look at different digital technologies, but also be open to look at different fiscal, financial models that will ensure that we are, actually, developing and innovating in the continent where we are building innovators and not just content consumers online. And I think what you are talking about is a discussion that's been going on within the region around the region being able to keep its own data, and I think if we go back to the intervention I made on affordability of phones, the reality is that the minerals that are used to develop the Smartphones, actually, come from the continent. Yet, Africa at the moment is spending as much as 40% for the cheapest Smartphone that's available. So, fixing the economy, I think, goes hand in hand with us being able to participate equally in this digital transformation.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. Who else want to add something on that? Martin, you have statistics about data in Africa, how much data centre exist, this kind of information will be available in your database?
>> MARTIN SCHAAPER: That's part of my second intervention which is there are gaps ‑‑
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: I don't want to make a spoiler, but ‑‑
>> MARTIN SCHAAPER: No. We have recently been discussing minimal connectivity indicator and we are just developing a work programme around it. We don't have the indicators yet. We have indicator on bandwidth, which is part of the issue here. But how the data is channeled into data centres and how it comes to, let's say to the last mile that is part of the indicators that we are going to develop in the coming years but we don't have not a lot of good, solid indicators on that yet.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Okay. Thank you.
I would like to get back to minister, if possible, so we can free him. He's still online with us? If he's online with us, the question for him is now, he said they were doing a lot of interesting things, including rugby. But the problem is about infrastructure, I guess. For island state, the problem with infrastructure is a very big problem. Are they using satellite, I would be curious to know more about the technical solution.
>> STEVEN MATAINAHO: Thank you. Please confirm again if you can hear me.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Yes, we can hear you loud and clear.
>> STEVEN MATAINAHO: Okay. Thank you very much. In Papua New Guinea, our connectivity, I would like to first say that since the advent of mobile network coverage, we have, sort of, skipped the fixed line era, and so we have much of the access coming in mobile network coverage.
Our current population coverage is around 76% of population coverage, but it's a mixed range between 2G, 3G and 4G. Most of our growth rate is contributed to competition. And so, there are two major interventions that we have made to make this happen. One is through ‑‑ and, of course, in our telecommunication retail and wholesale space, we are guided by open market policy. And so we first had to introduce as much competition as possible into the retail space, to increase those numbers.
The other aspect of connectivity which I want ‑‑ actually, I wanted to highlight, if you may, that because there was some comments on affordability of devices. Sorry. I am directing to something slightly different.
But I also want to flag that in Papua New Guinea, what we have noticed is the threshold for affordable is around, and these are mainly data coming from operators, the cheapest affordable Smartphone that we have been able to get out there is ranging around 60 U.S. dollars, and this is like stripped‑down Smartphones that have the basic smart capabilities. And we found that at $60 and downwards, there's a huge increase in purchasing power, and I think a combination of infrastructure, infrastructure access, plus affordable devices are factors that should be attributed in developing countries.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: You mentioned affordability of the devices. Is there any policy in place in your country to support the accessibility ‑‑ the affordability?
>> STEVEN MATAINAHO: We are currently looking at next phase after introduction of our digital services. The next phase would be starting to look at how we can provide text reduction incentives for devices, importing of devices. And I think that would be the next phase 2023, 2024, 2025. That would be the next phase as we, you know, going back to meaningful connectivity, as we provide content and services, the next step would be to bring the cost of the devices further down.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much. And I give you a good news. Vint Cerf, I asked him if he will be available to give suggestion and advice. So, if you want to ask Vint something about affordability, we will bring the question to him and we will give you back the answer.
Thank you for being with us. We know that you are busy. If you have to leave, we will apologize you, don't worry.
Okay. We have another question from the room. Please introduce yourself?
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Dinesh. We are community networks near Bangalore in India and I have three questions. One is to the minister from Papua New Guinea who said you have so many languages and I'm fascinated by hearing that. And you said you have ideas on how to deal with bringing internet to this many languages. I want to hear about it in great detail. Because that's the first time I hear that there is somebody working on languages, which probably not literal. There's no, you know, techs for it. I'm just guessing. How are you dealing with it?
Number two, to the Japanese minister. You have Japanese and English here dealing nicely. What are you doing with the others who are older who need voice, who need content and audio visuals, mostly audio.
And the third one is based on the African comment. We have community networks. We have in India about a billion low threat people and it includes that, but what are we doing about technology, internet reaching to these people? That's the meaningful accessibility for us.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. And it's important to remember that you have one of the cases in the report that is providing some solutions. So, I suggest people to go to the report and to have a look at it. You want to make advertising for it, for ‑‑
>> AUDIENCE: I'm sorry? Shall I ‑‑
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Do you want to advertise for your project, 50 seconds?
>> AUDIENCE: No. Thank you. So, you read it.
So, I think internet firstly as a web is all about hyperlinks, hyper text it starts and it's, you know, and internet has not gone further as standards and technology to reach nontext people. Okay? How do you ‑‑ I can talk about it a lot. We have to ask technology people push this forward. And we are trying, but it can be in a small thing. It has to come together. And how do you do hyperlinks when you have media as the thing, and what is the internet in the small? Like if you are in a community networks, how do you bring this within the community as a first class protocol based internet? Like, a decentralized web is what I'm saying, to say it in one word.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. I think you can get some answers from the second round from the panel.
Roberto, any sign or life from the universe?
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANO: Yes, we have a comment from Carlos Alfonso. He says, major challenge in universalizing connectivity which may many digital inclusion programmes forget once a person is connected, he, she should stay connected. Many universal connectivity programmes do not make sure persistence of connectivity together with quality is fundamental. A connect or school or remote community ought to be connected and stay connected. Thank you, Carlos, for these remarks.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Perfect. We have the perfect example of Uganda. They were connected at the beginning of the session and when it was their turn, they were not connected anymore.
Okay. Before to make the second round, I remember that Martin want to bring in the discussion a point that is important just for memory that is the IDN question. Can you take the floor, Martin? I remember to the audience that last year also with Roberto, we mentioned this as one of the point on which we need to improve. So, which are the last news from the front?
>> MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: Okay. My name is Martin Botterman.
Yes, IDN is an important aspect, of course, that they will be able to be used by people who don't use the Latin script as we call it, the Latin above and that may not be useful worldwide. But in particular, more and more of the internet also serves local communities. And maybe solutions can be fine, for they do resolve in local communities, maybe even faster, before they resolve anywhere.
It requires a lot of collaboration because the internet is a mess of a lot of different applications. Now, with ICANN's work on the IDN tables to make sure that addresses can be found. But the addresses also need to be found in the web browsers in email addresses, in applications that support.
So, it requires quite an effort and we are very happy to facilitate efforts by also supporting the steering group which in its work goes well beyond ICANN as such.
But if you allow me, I would like to make another point here. Other aspects of meaningful accessibility are also in power, eastern of power, you see that's different in different parts of the world. And as in affordability, as you rightly said. I must say, India is in a good position that at least mobile access is amazingly affordable compared to some other part in the world, for instance, in Africa where if you have this mobile phone, it's very expensive to use it. It's not thinking in terms of electricity there, but also is accessible affordable, next to the other IDN point if you allow me.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Please. Thank you, thank you very much.
Martin, do we can expect that for the next round of GTLDs there will be a push from ICANN about IDN TLDs?
>> MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: My expectation and, of course, it's the market who will come with proposals, but we believe that this is an opportunity for, in particular, the next billion to be reached and that next billion will need to have access to the norm characters and we do what we can to support that in that. So ‑‑
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: (?) they say in other parts of the world. Thank you.
This brings exactly to the point with our Japanese colleague. You see that the problem is seen in different ways, in different parts of the world. Can you add something?
>> KEISUKE KAMIMURA: Yes, IDN. Remember, IDN is just a piece of the bigger problem. So, I guess we should take care of other issues, issues other than IDN that the problem we have with IDN in Japan is like this. Internationalize the main names in Japanese characters are not well accepted locally. So, we, many of us do not ‑‑ most of us do not use internationalized domain name in Japanese characters.
I don't quite remember any of the major local websites identify themselves with IDN. I believe these websites have their names registered in IDN for protective or defensive reasons. But that's about it.
And for me, I don't know if this is true to others, but for me, it is comfortable to use Japanese characters for search strings rather than for URLs or identifiers.
And so when you write Japanese, you have to use a combination of the alphabet and symbols and the Japanese characters. So, if you want to use IDNs, we have to produce a combination of these scripts anyway. So, I mean, you have to use the Latin alphabet anyway. So, you have to switch back and forth between Japanese characters, the Latin alphabet and other symbols. So, it's very cumbersome to use IDN in Japanese, in Japanese. So, that's one issue.
In addition, you can easily identify URL in the Latin alphabet in an article written in Japanese because it just stands out the rest of the text. So, it's easier for you to locate URL from written Japanese.
So, and if the URL are written in IDN, maybe ‑‑ you may be find it difficult to find out where the URL is. So, that's another issue from a practical point of view.
And, actually, when you write Japanese, you often switch from one script to another to emphasize the word or phrase in a middle of a sentence when you write Japanese texts. So, we are used to switch from the Latin alphabet to Japanese characters into Congie so, we are quite used to using the alphabet for any purposes. So, that may related to the low takeup of the IDN in Japanese. This is my personal observation.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you, Professor. The time is tiring. We need to give the floor to the others.
>> AUDIENCE:
>> MAARTEN BOTTERMAN: May I add to that? I appreciate your experience and Japan is a case where well skated people have good access to computers and manage to do what you say right now. And I think when he talked about the longer term, where the mobile is the device, where it's more difficult to fix and a world in which we see that increasingly voice commands will be taking over, et cetera. So, I think for the longer‑term, we may not ‑‑ I remember I used to put the telephone on the modem and that worked. But I am glad I don't have to do that anymore. So I think you give an excellent example. But for the longer term, I think we can't avoid, people will earlier be able to learn an adapted internet and that everybody will be able to use ‑‑
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: I think we will have to come back to you for what we will rye in the report. So, we will need your help for the finalizing the report on this point. Thank you very much.
So, Martin, please, we are very late so if we can be short as much as possible, just to mention something that you have no time to mention, I will do for you. There is a pilot experience that ITU is doing with UNESCO in the Pacific area where we are combining data from your database and the UNESCO ROAM indicators that is a very interesting combination of content and access from the technical viewpoint. But please complete your presentation about the statistics, as short as possible.
>> MARTIN SCHAAPER: I will try to be short. I mentioned the (?) we have a lot of data on universal and meaningful access and unfortunately meaningful connectivity as we call it. This includes a lot of data on prices on packages, mobile packages. We have a very rich dataset on that. But the bad news is there's also a lot of data gaps. And that's partly because the data aren't there. Partly because the data are there, but we are not coordinated, we don't have access to the data, we don't have ‑‑ we don't get the data from the source or we don't have a relationship with the source and that's something that we are working very hard on, for example, anything to do with speed measurement, actual speed measurements, those kind of places, we need to continue to working with them. Hence the ‑‑ we have had a lot of contact with The World Bank what used to be A for AI before and that's certainly work that needs to continue.
We are working on big data. The power of big data to also be able to get more granular view of what's happening in a country, within a country, within a community even, we are work very hard on that.
But very importantly, I mentioned digital divides and digital divides is about people, you need to know who the people are who are using the internet and what they are using it for and who is not using and still the best source for that is surveys. Surveys of people often run by statistical office and from that we have very good data from all the high‑income countries and not a lot of good data from low‑income countries because surveys are expensive. So policymakers will see the importance of data for achieving universally meaningful connectivity, should also add funding statistic offices in the programme.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: That's fundamental.
Onica, how you can complement this experience? You can compete with the ITU in providing the collecting data?
>> ONICA MAKWAKWA: Ya yeah, I will add one thing, gender segregated..., very important if we have a chance at closing the gender digital gap.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Your report can be seen as a complement of what ITU provides?
>> ONICA MAKWAKWA: Certainly. So, we are, actually, currently in the process of collecting data on the cost of what we are calling the cost of exclusion. Looking to calculate the economic impact of excluding women from the digital economy, but also humanizing that experience by looking at qualitative research and ethnographic students to be able to print a picture and tell a story about what we are looking in I economies by not being inclusive in our digital development.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Remember that ITU Secretary General is a woman so if you send to her, then she will ask Martin to look more in deep for ‑‑ Laurent. Are you scared about what our Japanese professor said, that the domain name will be overpassed by research engines?
>> LAURENT FERRALI: Yeah, this is something we know. It's like, you know, using mobile phone now with apps, make domain names invisible.
But this is not to set out, to make a comment on that. I mean, we have in the context of coalition, we are working with a session of continuities, and for them, it makes a lot of sense. So, I mean, if Africa, I mean, have some interest for IDN for us, we will try to help them to develop (?) and et cetera. It's not up to ICANN so say we don't need any more domain names or whatever. We are work with partners. We are very nimble in our approach. We are asking people what they need and then we are trying to help them to bring them what they need to support their needs.
What we are doing with all the detracts all this coalition. We are coming with technical knowledge, expertise, and we are used to go through needs assessment phase to better understand what they need. And at the end, I mean, the different organization, the different countries, it's up to them to decide where they want to go. We can just bring some expertise to them.
So, I think that for these people to come back to this ‑‑ to your question, I think for some years in Africa makes a lot of sense to have access to domain names in local scripts. So, that is important. Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you.
Maria.
>> MARIA DE BRASDEFER: Yes. Thank you. Well, I think in terms of data, I would only have to add to what Onica said. I think it is important to have disaggregated data, not just in terms of sex, but also in terms of gender, because there's also other minorities, for example, that are invisible to this and there's not enough data on that. And but also talking about the context of libraries, we also need better and more data in regard to what is the amount of libraries, for example, that are connected, currently connected to the internet. And from that amount of libraries, also maybe better indicators to assess inside which of those facilities there's a meaningful access to information. So, I think that is something that I could also add in that sense.
And maybe also adding a bit to what my colleague Don mentioned before in terms of policies. Something that we also serve and think that could be useful would be to consider mentioning libraries explicitly in policies, digital cooperation policies, but also digital inclusion policies because very often the term libraries really gets buried on the term of public access facilities. And this is something that really makes libraries invisible at a higher policy level. So, this is also something to take into account.
And also finally, just to add, it is also important to notice that the public access infrastructure development initiatives should also really include skilling of staff to run and also to facilitate digital inclusion and capacity building initiatives at a local level.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much.
Now, I have to ask for patients because we ask to free people from the room distinguished friends of us to listen carefully to what has been said and to tell us the feedback about what they retain as the most interesting points that we can include in the report.
So, can we start Jane, that I see is ready to tell us? Just a few minutes of patience.
>> JANE COFFIN: Yes, I will be very brief. One, solving the connectivity gap will take a multistakeholder approach, much like the PNMA itself, and our panelists here today and the great speakers we have heard, problems are being solved through coalitions to regulatory and policymaking from Papua New Guinea to Betna to help balance out markets. Changes need to be made from extractive only policies. Data must be gathered to identify gaps. ITU, ICANN, and others are doing this to help us look at better solutions to identify what those gaps are. Partnerships are key. And innovative financing approaches need to be made to support and build networks including CCTL data centres. Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Jane. This was about connectivity and about digital inclusion, Carlos Rey‑Moreno.
>> CARLOS REY-MORENO: Hi, everyone. I feel a lot of the discussion today has been about digital inclusion, and many topics have been touched upon, the universal acceptance and everything that has to do about people being able to communicate with scripts that are other than Latin, to be able to do it online and not only about IDNs but many other hardware and software elements. A lot of discussions around purpose‑driven content, supporting the production, as well as the distribution of relevant content, e‑governance services such in the case of Papua New Guinea and services elsewhere. A lot of discussions in relation to that, about incentives, funding that you may go and talk to Paolo about, as well as sustainability of those content producers. As well as an outward campaign to understand and to make people aware that this is possible.
Also the comment from Laurent about the importance of having a strong national CCL documents develop the digital economy and include people that might be related to using the country level domains. And the importance of cybersecurity although it hasn't been pointed out there is a lot of elements around data inclusion that have to be in cybersecurity in the context of gender‑based violence and all the work and all the policies required on that front. And accessibility, all the projects from WIPO around making books available for blind people. And some discussions also around fostering innovation at the local level. I mean, we heard (?) but we have been hearing the importance of how local people can come up with their own decisions and this conversation about meaningful access and meaningful connectivity shouldn't be an only top‑down one. Thank you very much.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you, Carlos, very useful. And very right and proper comments.
Now about capacity development. Margaret will give us her hints.
>> MARGARET NYAMBURA NDUNG'U: Thank you, Chair, highlight for all capacity building that technical skills are needed to understand emerging technologies and make them address and offer solutions. Training of trainers on digital skills is critical and with these localization of this training to address local needs.
Technical capacities support for internet registries is already happening through the project digital Africa. Digital skills are needed to ensure quality of services and address cybersecurity challenges. We need a holistic approach on capacity building to ensure that we are addressing the needs that are needed as statistics are needed to determine skills needed for meaningful access and use. I know I have ‑‑ then there was discussions around hyperlinks and how they can be used to address issues of language and Japanese characters and a study has been written that is part of their report.
Again, it was said that internet is a mess of a lot of applications and diverse digital skills are needed. And that is about it. Thanks.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much, Margaret. Very useful.
Please, if you can send us your notes, will be very useful because we have to produce very quickly a first report and what you say are perfectly making the picture.
Roberto, there is life from the ‑‑ in the universe? Or they already went to sleep?
>> ROBERTO: Actually, there is one more comment from Steven but he wants to read it and it says, a great interventions from other participants on the need to increase production on local audio and video content. This is a key intervention, Papua New Guinea is taking note of and should take to improve meaningful connectivity across more than 800 languages and cultures. Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you very much. Okay. So, we are ‑‑ on my Swiss passport, I have to say I have not been too good because I'm two minutes over. But on my Italian passport only two minutes delay, I am a lot better than the usual performance.
I want to thank all the participants here, all the speakers, and especially Daphnee. Can you stand up, please, Daphnee. Thank you.
And Roberto, that volunteered at the last moment, as usual, to support us and all the speakers and all the participants. Thank you very much.
I see that Jordan is here too late. We are already closed. But your session, please send me the conclusion and we will include in the report, we will hyperlink ‑‑ sorry, the hyperlink will be put in the report because what you said in the session earlier today was very important and relevant for us.
Thank you very much to everybody for the passions. Goodbye.