The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. 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 to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MAXIMILIANO MARTINHAO: Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Maximiliano Martinhao, Secretary of Telecommunications of the Ministry of Communications of Brazil.
I would like to ask you all to take your seats. We're about to begin.
I would first like to greet Mr. Lenni Montiel, UN Assistant Secretary‑General for Economic Development. And I would like to greet my colleagues on the panel, ladies and gentlemen.
Distinguished members of the panel, we start this session on intersessional work entitled Policy Options and Best Practices for Connecting the Next Billion.
I would like to welcome you all in Paraiba, Brazil. I'm quite excited regarding the works we're going to start now. The Internet is a democratic instrument of access to information with reducing geographic, social, regional differences. In addition it has fundamental rights as education, healthcare, employment, culture, leisure, freedom of expression.
We're aware of the fact by the aim of 2015 over 3 billion people will be connected. However, we still have 4 billion people far from the Internet, prevented from benefiting from this virtual environment. Including these people is more challenging because citizens currently disconnected represent as a rule the poorer part of the world population. We see that the socioeconomic issue is in many cases in the roots of the digital gap. This year the Policy Options for connecting the best next billion has a multistakeholder resolve designed by all of the Internet community.
The Best Practices for the IGF have actually yield many results for the community to serve other pertinent forum and drivers to regulation that are a designed development and response to cyber-attacks, development of mechanisms of multistakeholder, implementation of traffic exchange points. The purpose of this session is to bring the IGF community to a roundtable to have interactive debate and guided to result aiming at seeking paths for conducting or Connecting the Next Billion to the Internet from the Brazilian perspective I would like to bring some inputs from the debate.
The intersectional programs have identified five parts for connecting, increase of investment, public‑private investment, increase use of availability, availability, citizens to use applications, development of local content allowing online inclusion of all based on Human Rights, youngsters, women, age, disabled, affordability and the open character of the Internet.
The Brazilian recommendation regarding infrastructure is the focus of the satellite of defense and strategic communications operating on the band Ka covering territory with the ability of connecting any citizen at most remote places in our country. As a way of getting increasing connection in the northern area of the country without compromising the environment we are developing the Amazon Connected Project which to the largest connection of communication project in the eastern hemisphere with over 7,000 kilometers of fiberoptics in the Amazon Rivers. It is a creative, innovative form of connecting 20 million people that are isolated around the region of the forest, the rain forest. We have this undersea cable, transocean cable between South America, Africa, South America, Europe, in addition to this South American cable to connect the countries in the region because we believe that the interconnection effort cannot be made isolatedly. It is important to have the coordination between the countries to identify connection roots to the benefit of all Internet users.
With regards to the recommendation of increase of use by citizens in Brazil, we highlight a set of policies to develop applications with start‑ups in various categories, and the development of digital plants and parks that have potential of becoming positive arrangements that are local. This is the few measures and highlight the policies to expand infrastructure and access, but also of capacity building people to be able to use all the qualities of the Internet. Regarding the need of ensuring protection of Human Rights and the digital world as well as Internet access of global quality and open for citizens to be connected. The passing of the Internet Marco da Civil in our country was an important step, we have supported and taken various measures for reduced prices, reducing the tax burden and allowing access to terminals that connect to the Internet. However, we alert that high cost of interconnectivity internationally as well as having data being housed from the house in point make it difficult to reduce prices and improve quality for the access by the end user. Brazilian Government has worked in the definition of the broadband for all with a goal of updating the goals and instruments of the national policy to broadband access. The focus is to broaden the network structure for ‑‑ in terms of distance and also expanding the access of users. This is some Brazilian examples. We want more. We want to share and learn from other experiences. We are, therefore, open to debate, endeavoring to have the best results of the session with identification of bottle next and opportunities for the expansion of world connectivity.
To conclude, I would like to express my satisfaction to be part of this panel, and to say that we should move forward in concrete actions for the issues brought up here.
After these opening remarks I would like to give the floor to Mr. Lenni Montiel, UN Assistant Secretary‑General for Economic Development in the department of the Economic and Social Affairs.
>> LENNI MONTIEL: Thank you, moderators, panel members this afternoon for being here.
At the outset let me express my appreciation for the intersessional activities carried out in advancing the IGF work on this important topic. This morning in our discussion on the Internet Economy and Sustainable Development we talk about the digital divide. My view, Connecting the Next Billion is a strategic approach to bridging the Digital Divide. This session, in my view complements well our discussion this morning and I want to commend, again, the MAG and host Chair for this session. Likewise, I hope the results of this discussion will be a valuable contribution to the preparatory process of the WSIS outcome document. In fact, addressing the Digital Divide was featured prominently in the Zero draft of the WSIS outcome document. In the preparatory meetings as well as in the informal interactive discussions with stakeholders, delegates and speakers called for intensifying efforts to bridge with the Digital Divide, including the gender Digital Divide.
There is no doubt about the fact that we have had remarkable progress over the last decade. It is aptly recognized also in the Zero draft.
Member States agreed there have been many ICT enabled breakthroughs in eGovernment, eBusiness, eEducation, eHealth, eEmployment, eAgriculture, eScience allowing, of course, greater numbers of peoples access to services and data. At the same time, there was general agreement that large Digital Divides remain in place including within and between countries and women and men. This indoubtly slows down Sustainable Development. Both the remarkable achievement and the continuing Digital Divides are well documented and substantiated by a range of data and statistics.
The key question, what to do? Some of the answers emerge in the discussion this morning, and I think that the WSIS action line and the SDG matrix that I referred to this morning that's been prepared by a group of UN entities that's available in the UN WSIS ‑‑ in the WSIS website lays out specific areas for focusing our action. Let me reiterate a few points which I think are essential to our strategies to connect the next billion.
First, it may sound cliché, but I don't think investment is crucial, and I don't hesitate to say that private sector has a major role to play there. Governments also have their roles in putting in place and enabling environment that encourages and facilitates business investment in infrastructure. I also want to stress that investment in physical infrastructure on its own is not sufficient which brings me to my second point, training and capacity building.
We talked earlier about capacity building, about multilingualism, about education, training. I believe we should also do more in investing in human capacities. Is there a role for international cooperation and official development assistance in this area? I know by asking such questions I'm stepping into controversial territory these days. Personally, I do feel that there is much space for international development cooperation in bridging the Digital Divide. Just as ITC and the Internet can play a powerful role in enabling progress in SDGs, investments in official development assistance channels, the Digital Divide can be productive investments in SDGs and our sustainable future. For example, I think training capacity building, it is an effective use of development resources for overcoming the Digital Divide and accelerating process in ATGs.
Third, we need targeted action, in fact, in hunger, poverty, Human Rights, the international Human Rights abuse ‑‑ sorry, the international community has developed many targeted initiative. We need similar actions to inspire support for overcoming the Digital Divides. We need IT engineers without borders. We need digital peace. We need global efforts for helping women and youth acquire digital literacy, creating jobs, income, livelihood online. We need incentive and measures to promote affordability and working to increasing access to ICT, that at the end of the day is to connect the next billion.
We can do it if we have the will. We can do it if we work in partnership, and that's why we strongly believe in multistakeholder approach. The UN, multilateral family, is large enough to embrace multistakeholders. Once again, I look forward to a rich discussion, and I thank you for your attention.
Thank you.
>> MAXIMILIANO MARTINHAO: Let me now give the floor to our moderators, Ambassador Benedicto Fonseca and Constance Bommelaer.
Ambassador, please?
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you very much.
I will speak English.
Thank you to Constance Bommelaer from ISOC. I was honored by the Chair of MAG to lead the team that prepared the document on policy actions, this is further explained by my co‑moderator, Constance Bommelaer. I just wanted to say it is an honor for us to be able to present to the IGF the outcome of this work which indeed we think should constitute a piece of work that should be improved and serve as a useful tool for all of us.
With this very brief initial word, I would like to turn to Constance Bommelaer.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much, Ambassador.
I think I'm going to start perhaps by taking a step back to talk about the essence of the IGF intersessional work, basically why we have done this.
We have seen over the past decade with acceleration of Internet deployment and new usage a number of issues whether technical, policy focused emerge. With this, a strong appetite of stakeholders all year long to have a place for solutions. This is a place to discuss Best Practices and Policy Options, it gathers all relevant stakeholders and we could not imagine tackling Internet issues without all expertise required at the table. This evolution is in line with the mandate of the IGF which leaves room for it to grow, and here I will state ‑‑ I will quote paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda, the mandate of the forum is to identify emerging issues, bring them to the attention relevant bodies and the general public and where appropriate make recommendations.
We conducted a Society this year on Internet governance which was widely taken. An overwhelming number of respondents felt they needed the global network of IGFs, national and regional, and also, of course, the global IGF to be strengthened as a platform where the community could work on the formulation of non‑binding recommendations to tackle existing, but also emerging Internet issues. This confirmed the consensus of the Working Group on improvements of the IGF calling for more tangible outputs to embrace ‑‑ to enhance the impact of the IGF on global Internet governance and policy.
In light of the renewal of the mandate of the IGF to be discussed this year at the WSIS+10 in December it was critical for the IGF community to address this call for the IGF to evolve. In this context, the MAG rolled up its sleeves this year and decided to launch a new program on intersessional work all year long intended to complement existing work.
Over the year experts from all stakeholder groups have gathered working in a bottom‑up multistakeholder fashion to develop six Best Practice documents, all supporting the overarching goal of connecting the next billion. Today we'll present and discuss the outcomes of the year‑long effort from the IGF community, the Policy Options for Connecting the Next Billion and Best Practices on multistakeholder mechanisms, mitigating spam, establishing, establishing successful IXPs and encountering abuse against women online. In terms of next steps, comments from the audience will be welcome, and we'll enrich all of the documents that will then be finalized in a few weeks after the IGF, then all disseminated, shared with relevant stakeholders and organizations as requested by the Tunis Agenda.
Thank you, Ambassador.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you, Constance, for setting the scene and for those background context remarks.
I will now turn ‑‑ we will ‑‑ we will initially focus on the document on Policy Options for Connecting the Next Billion online. The version we will be examining is available online at the IGF site and reflects the work that's been done so far and the idea is that should be a living document that should be continuously improved.
In order to also set the stage for the discussion on the document I would like to invite Dr. Pepper, Vice President, Global Technology Policy, Cisco for initial remarks.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Thank you very much, Ambassador.
Thank you for the MAG for putting this together, this session, which I frankly believe is the most important session this week because it is addressing in a pragmatic way how do we close the Digital Divide. Unless we close the Digital Divide, all of the other issues are secondary. Everybody has to be connected.
I also want to thank you, personally, Max for doing a great job as host. It is a second time for the IGF in Brazil. This is wonderful.
Let me start with ‑‑ we have already heard why this is important. We know it is important. I want to point out what we call sort of the income inequality paradox of the Internet. There is some work that a colleague and I did earlier this year that was published as part of the World Economic Forums Global Information Technology report in which we looked at what happens when people connect to the Internet in a country. If you get over a 20, 25% threshold, the more people that connect in a country, it increases the standard of living in that country. Connecting to the Internet is an income multiplier. It closes the income inequality gap between countries. Countries rise if you're over that threshold.
The paradox is that as more people connect in a country, it widens the digital divide, the income inequality in a country. At first people say how can that be? When you think about it for a moment, the people connected improve much faster than the people who are not connected. In the name of equality we're not telling people to disconnect so there is only one option, everybody has to be connected. That's ‑‑ that really goes to the heart of this session. It is about Connecting the Next Billion, but frankly, that's too modest. Let me explain why.
Every year we conduct this study, a five‑year rolling forecast of everything to do with the Internet. We have done it for ten years. We actually can go back and report out what did we forecast, how did we do, we're usually within 10%. I'm going to say I'm pretty confident in it.
We're forecasting that between now and 2019 1.1 billion more people will be connected to the Internet. That's organic growth. If we do nothing, another billion people will be connected. I actually think we need to be more aggressive. Number one, maybe we should ask the question how can we accelerate and speed up Connecting the Next Billion so we don't wait for five years; and then beyond that, we need to connect the next billion after that and the next billion after that.
How do we accelerate Connecting the Next Billion? How do we get more people? There is very specific challenges and they are addressed in the IGF Policy Options because of all of the intersessional work. It is a combination of supply ‑‑ what I call supply and demand.
If we look at the data here in Brazil, for example, there was a really good study published by the Regional Center for the Studies in the Development of the Information Society. What it found, it was that 90% of people in Brazil have access to some form of 3G. You know, the quality will vary if you're at the end of the line, it is a long link. 90%, but only 52% of people are using it to connect to the Internet. The question is, what's keeping them back? The first thing people think about, it is affordability. People can't afford it. Well, it turns out that that's only a very, very small part of why people are not connected. People have the option to, you know, respond to multiple answers. 70% of the people who could have it but are not connected say they don't see the need, they're not interested, the Internet is not relevant to them. 70% of people said they lack the skills to connect and use and benefit from the Internet. Less than 20% said it was affordability. Affordability is important but there are other things that are even more important that I believe are low‑hanging fruit that we can do much, much more to close that gap. What are some of the challenges?
There's a project that I'm involved in ‑‑ I'm also speaking on behalf of at the World Economic Forum ‑‑ called the Future of the Internet Project. One of the actions, one of the project's within that future of Internet initiative it is a project that we call Internet For All. We debated a million, 2 billion, we said no, Internet for everybody. We identified four challenges, infrastructure, access, if it is not there, that's the prerequisite, you have to have the ability to be connected. Second challenge, affordability, if you can't afford it, even if you think you want it, you can't get there.
By the way, the infrastructure is the supply side; affordability, really the demand side.
And then the other two are clearly demand side, skills and capacity building, and then the fourth is awareness, right, and content that leads to relevance. Again, we have already heard a little bit about that. When we look at the Policy Options on what to do about it, right, it goes right to those.
There is an additional piece here. That's we have also took a look as part of our study looking at this income inequality. One of the things we found ‑‑ I'm glad it was already mentioned ‑‑ in some countries ‑‑ not Brazil ‑‑ but in some countries, the gender gap in the use of the Internet essentially disenfranchises half of the people in a country. It harms that country economically as well as socially, and that the Digital Divide in gender using and benefiting from the Internet is a huge gap. What we do know empirically from the work we have done, when women and girls connect to the Internet, they use it for more things like education, information seeking for healthcare, and for activities that actually are beneficial to the family and themselves individually and their communities. That's a really important focus. I'm really glad it was already mentioned.
How do we do this? You know, the IGF as the multistakeholder organization group ‑‑ hardly an organization, but a collection process ‑‑ it is the way to do that, and the intersessional work.
Some of the other work that we've done, back in 2013 I said on the UN broadband ‑‑ I sat on the Broadband Commission of the UN, we studied national broadband bands and digital strategies. A finding of that study was that if government tries to do it alone or if the private sector tries to do it alone it is not as effective as when there is a public‑private partnership precisely for the reasons discussed about investment, about filling gaps, enabling policies, but it also must include all of the stakeholders as well as local communities.
You know, we really have an opportunity today with the Best Practices ‑‑ although I must say, I actually don't like Best Practices, but a menu of good practices, there is a collection and every country is different, you can't say this is best, that's better. There is a menu of really good practices and things that we can do to intervene both governments, private sector, Civil Society, technical community, working together and through this intersessional process to make a difference, and we can't wait. It is urgent. It is essential. I want to accelerate Connecting the Next Billion. I don't want to wait five years.
With that, Mr. Ambassador, I turn it back to you.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you, Dr. Robert Pepper for your presentation, and for inviting us to raise the higher ambition of the task we have assigned to ourselves.
I would like to before returning to the presenting of the main findings of the document, I would like to acknowledge the participation of other MAG members that contributed to putting together this document.
So first of all, I would like to acknowledge Constance Bommelaer. I think we should all know that Constance was a real force behind the preparation of this document, and I really thank you for this.
Also I want to acknowledge participation of Lynn St. Amour, Carolyn Nguyen and Marilyn and others as well who assisted in the outreach for the regional, national IGFs.
With this, I would like to turn to Brian, the Secretariat for the presentation of the document.
>> SECRETARIAT: Thank you, Ambassador Benedicto Fonseca, Constance Bommelaer, Dr. Pepper, as well for the introduction.
To frame this a bit, I'll invite everybody here and participating online, if you do have a laptop or an iPad, something like that in front of you, to go to the IGF website, to the home page and there you will find a tab across the top which says Connecting the Next Billion.
When Ambassador Benedicto Fonseca refers to the output, it is actually a collection. You will find three things there. There is a compilation document which is the collection of inputs and contributions which I will detail more in a bit. Many of the organizations and individuals who contributed to this compilation, they're actually here at the table. Some of you are in the room. I think that was the biggest success that we had in this process, was the amount of contributions that we got to this theme and this work which was very important. The theme came from the IGF community. The compilation document was framed, the structure came from an open mailing list group and drafting group that decided on the structure. The structure was based on the initial inputs we got from the community, how they defined the issue and the major subtopics within Connecting the Next Billion which as we found means very different things to different people depending on where you are in the world and what kind of access you have already.
So thanks to everybody for joining, in particular to the more than 80 individuals and organizations that contributed to the process. It was really fantastic. On the IGF website you can find the compilation document which is very long, and some may think it is a bit boring. There is a five‑page document, and then there is a list of contributions of the more than 80 contributions in full that are all very interesting that give unique perspectives. They outline both opportunities and challenges and recommendations from all these different groups, multistakeholder groups, about how to tackle this challenge.
Following, again, what we have online, we got more than 80 contributions. Five regional IGF initiatives took on this theme at their meetings in the last year, since the 2014 ninth IGF in Istanbul, the Asia‑Pacific, the African IGF, the Latin America and Caribbean IGF, the European Dialogue on Internet Governance, the EuroDIG and the Arab IGF. That was great. National initiatives from Zimbabwe, Mozambique ‑‑ I won't list every contribution here, please go to the website to see all of those that contributed and we'll hear from them in detail shortly.
The governments from Mexico, from Brazil, from Uruguay, the ITU, World Bank, World Economic Forum, Civil Society groups that are doing great work on this topic, the Alliance for Affordable Internet, APC, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Again, I'm not intentionally leaving anybody out, but I'm just presenting some highlights. We have contributions from Google, from Microsoft, from Telefonica, from the EBU, Facebook, and a lot of great individuals from around the world shared their perspectives. There was an online forum that many filled ‑‑ form that many filled out with guiding questions to serve this.
Our findings, the compilation is a mosaic or puzzle of highlights and collections from the contributions that, again, can be found in full on the IGF website. They follow a structure which you can see in the paper online, but there are five sections. We begin with deploying infrastructure, then move on to increasing usability, enabling user, ensuring affordability and then the last section, which is the longest section focuses on the Policy Options, the policy recommendations for creating an environment for Connecting the Next Billion. The Secretariat put together a short list you can read and a shorter list of highlights and specific recommendations, conclusions based on the inputs. I will go through them now quickly and then we'll move on to our speakers and give the floor to the audience talking about their individual contributions and what's important to them.
In the deploying of infrastructure, many said that much more investment and public private cooperation is necessary to strengthen national backbones in the developing world and in particular rural populations and to increase and scale up cross‑border connectivity. Infrastructure development is a key driver for a socioeconomic growth and access to that infrastructure is paramount to development. To increase usability it is important to ensure the availability for the applications to stimulate the local content and service in all languages and to implement strategies for safeguarding access to people with disabilities.
Policies that promote and continue creation of locally relevant content should be encouraged, including protections for the freedom of expression, the press, privacy and Intellectual Property, the development of eCommerce infrastructure, consumer protections and entrusted online ‑‑ and trusted online payment systems.
This is some recommendations, highlights we extracted that permeated through many of the inputs received.
To enable users online emphasis should be placed on the promotion of Human Rights and enablement of young people, women and girls, the elderly, Persons with Disabilities. Access to the Internet is essential for the full realization of human development and facilities, facilitates the exercise and enjoyments of a number of Human Rights and freedoms including the rights to freedoms of expression and access to information, peaceful assembly, association, fostering public access points, for example, in public libraries, community centers and promoting the spaces and digital literacy and local content production will also secure better conditions for Internet access and use of interconnecting the Next Billions to the Internet to ensure affordability in addressing the Digital Divide, increased efforts in investment are necessary to increase supply and lower the cost of access. Increasing affordable Internet access is essential if countries are to achieve the social development and inclusive knowledge‑based economies they desire.
Many of the challenges and improving Internet affordability requires innovative policies and methods to make the strategic innovation guys reality. There are many well‑known benefits to infrastructure share, lowering industry costs, to encourage this practice and make operators more amendable to sharing governments can put in place guidelines and regulations to support infrastructure sharing and introduce new business opportunities.
Finally, in creating an enabling environment, future connectivity efforts need to ensure that those coming online have access to the entire global and open Internet, access should be universal, equitable, secure, affordable, high‑quality on the basis of Human Rights and the rule of law and respect should be given to privacy and freedom of expression.
Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but just highlights that we pulled from inputs. We can give the floor to many speakers. I hand it back to you, Ambassador Benedicto Fonseca. Thank you to all that contributed. Looking forward to a good discussion.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you, Brian, for this.
As you have indicated, this document represents a collective work, outcome of collective work that have assisted us and evolved in putting together the document, establishing parameters and guidelines, but basically it was populated by contributions coming from all of you. It is a collective achievement. I think we should all take pride in that. Beyond this, to be continuously stimulated to improve the document. I think by doing this we should take the call by Dr. Pepper to seek to accelerate and raise the ambition of our exercise continuously.
I would like to turn to those participants that have been collaborating closely in the development of the documents. I would start by calling on Mr. Makane Faye, Knowledge Management and Library Services, UNECA, you have the floor.
>> MAKANE FAYE: Thank you.
I would like to speak on behalf of the African IGF Secretariat hosted by the African European Commission and ECA.
On Connecting the Next Billion session, we had a panel which was moderated by the President of The African ICT Alliance who also gave a statement, and we had Constance who gave us a global perspective through video conference and we had a coordinator from Uganda and others. The African ICT was organized with the support of several partners, including the Centrality of South Africa, APC, ICANN, ESOC, UNESCO and others.
Following the presentation of the panelist we had given the floor to participants and asked those indicated by the previous speaker there were recommendations which came from the participants. We had 150 participants from multistakeholder groups, private sector, Civil Society, technical community, academia, government as well as other communities which is a business stakeholder in Africa.
We had eight recommendations: The first, Connecting the Next Billion should be viewed as a program project by countries and stakeholders, and as such the approach should be used using a program project, Best Practices and methodologies.
The second, department in charge of communication and IT should review the ICT and broadband policy and plans through enhancing multistakeholder cooperation involving diverse multistakeholder groups because we have seen as indicated earlier, in some places government will just work isolated or they'll give it to the private sector or private sector will work with the government without involving the stakeholders which have Civil Society, for example, and technical activity, they have a very important role to play in making, bringing inclusiveness.
The third one, there is a need to develop strategic partnerships between government regulators, network operator, technical community and Civil Society to support infrastructure development to have the access and connect the underserved communities at the same time enabling access affordability because affordability may not be an issue in some countries, but in Africa, it still ‑‑ because when you go to a country where someone will pay $80 U.S. dollar to have a 2‑megabyte bandwidth a month, it is recommended that people should not spend more than 5% of their salary, $80, it is maybe 150% of most of African salaries. So affordability, it is an issue in Africa.
The fourth recommendation was to enable sustainable use of ICT implement and application. Power grid capacity should be boosted through diverse sources because there is no need to have a recommendation if there is no power to make them sustainable. There is a need to also look parallel when talking about ICT to look at the electric dimension.
There was also a local content. We said that you cannot just develop the road without cars, and I believe that this is important here.
We had number five, local content development and eLearning initiatives are necessary to promote the creation of local content online to boost the demand in order to promote inclusive access. Also there is a need to produce content locally and translate external content to local languages and in other formats to reach a maximum number of people because we have a large Internet population and they will understand what you give them in their local language but they may not be able to read it.
In addition, there is need to invest in local developers to promote innovation. That's also one way to boost local content development and eLearning initiatives.
The number six is increased access to information and knowledge is a social pillar to the sustainable development, however. Not everyone has a smartphone or commuter to help them get online in Africa, hence public access to ICTs is needed to help more than 4 billion people in the world who do not use the Internet individually because even in the developed world we are going to the U.S., you see people going to the public library to be able to have access, to look for jobs, so on.
So here what we said, the libraries worldwide provide public access and should be supported as spaces to provide access to the Internet, but also access to information and knowledge and also can provide capacity building to the users.
The seventh, we should explore the creation of a continental free Internet platform with telcos and other stakeholders to preserve the identity and unique cultural heritage of Africa.
The final one, it was in order to follow‑up the implementation, successes and failures, there is a need to have a monitoring and evolution program using online realtime reporting.
Thank you, Mr. Chairperson.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your statement. I thank Africa for the contribution to the document. You have been providing us with good examples of solutions, and we certainly are aware of the challenges. We certainly wish that this document will be useful for you and others in Africa. Thank you very much for this.
I would like to turn now to other panelists that also will make interventions on this topic on the document. I would like to ask to the extent possible that interventions should if possible not extend 2 minutes. We have a large number of panelists and we would like also to give the opportunity for the audience to make comments on this.
We would like with this to turn first to Dr. Tomas Lamanauskas from the ITU.
>> TOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you.
Not yet a doctor, but hopefully in the future.
Also thank you to the General Secretariat and to Constance and the contributors for the excellent compilation of the policy practices that could be used to connect the next billion or more. That's the thing, also something to discuss in this panel.
Also, I think it is very timely discussion, of course, with the Sustainable Development Goals which we recognize the need and the importance of ICTs for the Sustainable Development overall, especially goals 9C and 18.8 which clearly say that we need them.
We have many good stories: We have 3.2 billion online. Also, I think ‑‑ I like Bob's optimism, but I also like to be optimistic but we also have some other sides of the story. Another side of the story is 4 billion people are still offline and if we look at LDCs, 10% of the people there, only 10% are online.
When you look at the graphs, they decelerate, it is not optimistic, but if we see that it actually ‑‑ the growth is not accelerating, but decelerating which is something that's interesting to see how it is a problem and how to deal with that. That's not surprising. You know, every next billion is more difficult, more rural, more remote, less skills. It will not be easier, but will be more difficult. That's why it is, again, a timely discussion to have how we connect that.
Again, when you look at the broadband, it is not just about having people connected. Now it is about what are they connected to. Broadband is not the same broadband any more. If we count the 3G connection on a smartphone as mobile broadband users, whether ‑‑ does that mean they can use all of the abilities of the new communications? Whether we actually need, you know, high speed broadband connectivities. When we look at the gain, for example, in new opportunities like Internet of Things we see a number of connected devices, some regions actually not even ‑‑ we're not having a catching up, but a widening of the Digital Divide. It is not to paint a optimistic picture, but to say we came a long way, but there is a long way to go and it is very early to say that, you know, now it will be easy, we just have to push. We need to work together on that.
Also the good thing also about that, more and more stakeholders recognize that. Especially we saw a flurry of initiatives saying that we want to help, and we want to be connected, and we have a few people around this table who will speak about their initiatives. It is not up for me to refer to them. What is important though, for all of us to work together and look for synergies and how to contribute to that and we'll try to also do this week with our connecting workshops.
On that, I'm kind of ‑‑ another aspect I want to mention, important to have a vision. There is a vision of 1 billion connected, but what's also important from our perspective, have a clear, measurable indicator of where you want to be. In ITUs, the meeting last year, it came with Global Agenda for connecting and it sets targets for connectivity in general, but also inclusiveness as well as sustainability and innovation.
Just to try to wrap up a bit, this is important, having a vision, what's the tool? Some tools, again, I would ‑‑ the speech will lack something if I wouldn't mention what's now happening across the ocean in Geneva. We have a World Radio Conference happening which is coming to agreements on the new Spectrum for the mobile broadband, the next generation. We agreed on 29th of October what ‑‑ how this third generation will look like. Now this conference, World Radio Conference, we'll find the Spectrum for that. That's enabling a generation of opportunities and faster speed to everybody, Spectrum.
Also, Bob mentioned, it is important, national leadership, national broadband plans and again, we have good traction in 148 countries not having national broadband plans and 6 countries developing them. And I will go along with what's in those plans but leadership, it is important.
To finish, I think a few things, it is important, part of the discussion here, we have in other sessions also, small stakeholder engagement, not only about business, academia, Civil Society, within those, we have different stakeholder, we have the government, we have the communication, finance, education, health, they also need to have them around the table to tackle the demand issues and supply issues.
Also ‑‑ and the last thing just to ‑‑ the real last thing, sorry, Constance ‑‑ the really last thing, it is that we also want those people that are connected not to be users, passive consumers of the content, but want them to be active contributors and active participants of the economy. From ITU we're launching partnership was another seven partners from various stakeholder groups, public sector, Civil Society and again, this is a discussion of how ‑‑ it is encouraging to hear from Africa, that this is something that's recognized as important and how to together work towards that goal.
Thank you very much.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your statement.
I will keep calling you doctor, especially since we're in a forward‑looking exercise.
>> (Laughter).
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you. I touch now to you, you have the floor.
>> AVRI DORIA: I look at this report. I'm fascinated and impressed by how much information we were able to collect. And then the question occurs now what?
One of the thing is, we're here, we're talking about it, we'll get a good report out of it. How do we take it forward? Especially looking at what Dr. Pepper mentioned in terms of using this stuff to accelerate the work, some of these things came out in discussions, we have an IGF meeting and we absorb a lot of information, but we don't take it further. We then have perhaps another next year's IGF regionals, nationals, we collect more information. Somehow we have to find a way, I think, in taking this to sort of, A, pinpoint some of the objects. There is an immense amount here, you hand, you know, the 27 pages of the full report to people. Where do they start? How do we take this material and actually do something about it that's useful? How do we build on it? How do we next year sort of take it and go down a level? Some of these options are at a very high level. How do we take it down?
Especially when I look at the issues I'm very interested in, how we avoid the problem of while narrowing the gap internationally we're increasing it nationally. That's been a trend that's been going on for over a decade now when it was first noticed in terms of women within countries, now it is a general tendency. I really think we have to now start focusing in on some of these narrower issues and find the smallest thing we can fix for improvement.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your statement.
I will give the floor now to Carolyn Nguyen from Microsoft.
>> CAROLYN NGUYEN: Thank you, Ambassador. Thank you for allowing me to participate in this panel.
First I would like to thank Constance and also the tremendous work by the Secretariat to organization and collect this tremendous collection of information.
I would like to share Microsoft's perspective and also completely agree with Avri's question on what's the next step. I also completely agree with Dr. Pepper's challenge with respect to commemorating and the need to compulate the conversation in the Digital Divide and it is now where we're at the point of moving the conversation to how and this document, to your point, and ‑‑ it is a unique value and invaluable asset in addressing that question of how.
Firstly, just to share Microsoft's perspective, we have been actively participating in the process. We fully believe in addressing the Digital Divide. Our mission statement is to empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. It is completely aligned with the goals and objectives that's been shared thus far. As a company we're focused on creating innovative ICT solutions and initiatives that are inclusive by design and help to realize the full potential of peoples around the world while enabling sustainable socioeconomic development through partnerships with all of the stakeholders. It is in that spirit that we submit a contribution in to the process and into the intersessional work addressing specific examples of issues on both the supply side in terms of how to provide affordable access to remote areas, including very practical solutions such as using solar energy to enable access to areas that have no utilities, infrastructure. We also address a demand side with respect to capacity building.
Here just to share a couple of statistics with respect to economic growth, furthering on the information that Dr. Pepper shared earlier, for example, we note that for every 10% increase in broadband network penetration in the country the World Bank estimated GDP growth between 1.38 and 1.8% for developing and developed countries.
The impact, it is ‑‑ it is a network effect. To give you an example, again, in Africa, for every $1 that Microsoft makes, between 9 and 11 is made by local partners. That's a network effect we're looking at in looking at ICT to enable the Sustainable Development. Bringing additional 600 million women and girls online could boost global GDP by 18 billion according to the ITU.
Those are some of the objectives and the concrete examples as to why we contributed and why we firmly believe in this.
Our contribution also had specific examples under role of ICT in addressing SDG goals 8, 9, 14 and 16. I want to do a high level review of what was hour thinking.
With respect to our thinking, with respect to Avri's question, what's next, answering, trying to put on the table the ‑‑ and answering Dr. Pepper's question of accelerating this, it is to do it by evidence, it is about evidence‑based policy making. This ‑‑ because around the world each region, each nation, each city, community, village, they're starting on this effort at different stages of development. It is not possible to say what is the single best approach. We cannot debate it. There is no single best approach. There is Best Practices ‑‑ there are practices I should say, and that's why I really, really like the example of the title in terms of Policy Options. Where you are, you can find examples in other countries, et cetera, and get some examples as starting points again focusing on how and acceleration.
Another point that I would like to make that was very unique about this document, it is that it is ‑‑ it has a framework that addressed the issues related to connectivity holistically. If you look at the outline, what's included in here, it is essentially almost a framework, a set of tools that countries, communities can use for addressing this issue from everything from infrastructure to policy. If you look at that in terms of what's needed, again, it is a helpful tool as people ‑‑ as countries, communities, policy regulators, as they look at how to implement this Digital Divide.
The third point is that through this process, which is unique, there's been a unique platform for communication and information sharing between multiple stakeholders. Everybody is participating. There is no centralized ‑‑ there is no central headquarters. If I may use an example, it is almost ‑‑ it is accessible, like Wikipedia, information is out there, but also people contributing information and there is also opportunity to say what worked and doesn't.
Going forward, one of the questions I would like to put on the table is how can this platform for communication and information sharing be continued?
Constance, in the opening remark you mentioned finalizing a document. I think it is a living process. The question is how to make the information accessible, what is the platform that enables contributions and modifications. It is that Policy Options.
The WSIS review, it is ongoing right now. Part of this question, it is how can this information be shared more widely with policymakers? One of the questions I would like to put on the table for consideration is if we look at the draft of the current outcome statement, look at the evidence that's presented here, some of the evidence somewhat contradicts what's in the draft today. How do we reconcile that? You know, there is a set of very, very clear evidence and example sharing right now.
Lastly, to look at the question of, you know, what next? Asking the questions, should this be ‑‑ can this be some sort of a set of connectivity principles, a framework, a tool set? I think with that, that's my last question.
Thank you very much.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you. Thank you very much for your statement.
I would like to just remind all those who make interventions to stick to the 2‑minute time we have set. We have provided a clock to help you, to discipline to the extent possible.
I now turn to Manu Khardwaj from the U.S. State Department.
You have the floor, sir.
>> MANU KHARDWAJ: Thank you, Ambassador.
Max, I want to start by recognizing the terrific work of the Secretariat and Constance and putting together this terrific document for all of us to use today, facilitating a productive discussion.
To go to the question that was asked by a fellow panelist, what next? We thought hard about this question at the IGF U.S.A. a few months ago. We had wide consultations on this issue of Connecting the Next Billion both in a closing panel, closing plenary, a lot of the discussions we had at the IGF U.S.A. reflected the recommendations here and also the discussion that's occurred so far.
After these consultations, because of the IGF is the premier venue for international Internet policy making and because the stakeholder community wanted us to really do more in terms of the development we have launched our U.S. State Department joined by major development organizations launched a new Diplomatic initiative called Global Connect seeking to bring an additional 1.5 million people online by 2020, internationally agreed upon goal. Through this effort we're also recognizing the critical importance of the Internet in achieving all of the SGs at our launch and the IGF U.S.A., all of the stakeholders involved, we have been thrilled with the support from so far 22 global NGOs, Jim Keim of the World Bank, President of Tanzania, other foreign dignitaries from the developed and developing world. As part of Global Connect we're increasing our own development assistance. Since the Secretary of State's speech, major U.S. development organizations including Opic announced major commitments for financing in Kenya, other, and we hope to continue to provide this level of development assistance to mainstream the view that the Internet is as important to every country's economy as energy, electricity, highways, roads, and we need to prioritize the Internet infrastructure on the Agenda and that resonates with all.
In terms of going back to Avri's question on what's next, this is a terrific set of policy recommendations to potentially guide initiatives like Global Connect, other efforts underway, we should all now think seriously about how we might operationalize this as global community to really build more support that, you know, these types of government policies are the ways to unlock digital growth and expand the benefits of connectivity to the world and we look forward to working with partner countries, stakeholders as we continue to not only our initiative global connect but the IGF's important work of Connecting the Next Billions.
Thank you, Ambassador.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your statement very much, your comments.
I turn now to Mr. Jack Deasy from O3B Networks
>> JACK DEASY: Thank you.
It is a pleasure to be here. I second all of the congratulations to the Chair and the group that put this document together. The breadth of information gathered here, it is really striking. I would like to comment briefly on the infrastructure at the beginning of the document. There is a lot of important commentary about the importance of additional investment in infrastructure. I think that the other striking comment that I heard was that the incremental difficulty of Connecting the Next Billion is notable, it is harder as we add the billions in.
The good news is that part of the solution of that is a significant range of new investment going particularly in the satellite industry which up until now has lagged in terms of ability to support real broadband and this is all long‑term investment. There is a significant number of new initiatives over the satellite industry to improve the offerings by the satellite to these particularly unconnected, more difficult to connect communities and that's an important part of the work going forward.
I also want to comment just in discussing here at the table as we were getting ready, when you connect communities with significant broadband from a standing start, the importance of the menu of good practices that's been presented here becomes even more important. The communities have to absorb essentially overnight what a lot of communities have taken 10, 15 years to absorb. The work that's been done here to put that in a manageable, accessible format is really valuable I think to the communities going forward.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your statement.
I turn now to the last speaker on the panel, and then we wish to take comments and questions from the audience.
I turn now then to Mr. Kevin Martin from Facebook.
>> KEVIN MARTIN: Thank you.
We agree with the multistakeholder approach being critical in solving this problem ,and we appreciate the reporting recognition of the multifaceted nature of the policy necessary to address it. I think the Secretariat described it as a mosaic in the report. That's not surprising considering that the challenges are so different in connecting.
As Dr. Pepper outlined before, that the challenges for the remaining people that aren't connected yet to the Internet vary dramatically. We at Facebook see that is three buckets of people, a billion of people that lack access to the necessary infrastructure to be able to connect, about a billion people who cost is the significant barrier, but the largest group of people is actually 2 billion that live within a signal as Dr. Pepper indicated in some of his remarks, but that relevance and awareness are the biggest barrier to connectivity. We think that the policies and actions need to reflect the fact that you have such dramatically different problems. We at Facebook have initiatives trying to be multifaceted and efforts to address the lack of infrastructure with the connectivity labs for satellites, for drones, app, other technologies to lower the cost of access to those that are currently lacking the access to that infrastructure. We also have significant programs to try to address the issues that we're talking about in the report about increasing usability, enabling users that would try to address the relevance factors that Dr. Pepper alluded to.
We have rolled out a service of free basic service, an open platform of basic content that's available for free to consumers. Those ‑‑ that basic service includes news, education, health, jobs, government sites. There is a couple of key characteristics of that program, it is not exclusive, open to any operator in the countries that we have rolled it out. It is non‑discriminatory, an open platform. There is only limited by the technical standards to participate. It is free. It is ‑‑ Facebook doesn't pay the operators and content owners are not required to pay and the consumers are able to access it without any data charges.
Most importantly, going to Dr. Pepper's questions of how do we accelerate this people coming online, we have eventually seen that it is working in the countries where we rolled it out, the 29 countries of accelerating access. We see a 50% increase in the rate of people coming online for the operators who actually rollout the service and most importantly, that's because 50% of the people that try the service become full Internet subscribers within 30 days. We think this is exactly the kind of program to accelerate the very challenges that would have been outlined in the largest group of people unconnected and we think that the policies should reflect the approach that again is multifaceted and involving a mosaic of solutions to a multifaceted problem.
Thank you very much.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
We would like now to offer the opportunity for those in the audience to make short comments or address questions or remarks to the extent possible to improve the document or an input to the discussion. We have microphones on two sides of the room. I see a gentleman standing.
You have the floor, sir.
>> MAX SENGES: Good afternoon.
Thank you, Chair.
I'm Max Senges. I work for Google Research and report on the research project that I do as visiting Fellow with the Stanford Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.
First of all, I would like to congratulate everybody who was involved in this important work. We agree that Connecting the Next Billion is a very important, if not the most important step for Internet governance and for the future of the Internet.
Allow me to tell you about our pilot project that is on access to the next billion, the results of which we would like to offer to complement the work that's been done so far by the IGF and the collaborators, it is built on expertise of two Stanford professors, Larry Diamond and Dr. Fishkin who is with us, the director, they're world‑known experts on democratic practices in the globalized 21st Century and I'm on the Advisory Board of which IGF stakeholders believe the methods are interesting to add democratic practices which has been discussed in the variety of formats to the multistakeholder governance practices that are occurring here.
This is a scientific method that's been applied and developed further in 23 countries and more than 80 iterations with all kinds of policy proposals over more than 20 years. We chose access for the next billion as topic for this first deliberative pole because we agree with Dr. Pepper and the distinguished panel that we have here that access is one of the key priorities right now. The deliberative pole is designed to gage the sample of what it would take, what it did take, we did the pilot, if the positions were informed by balanced information and structured discussion with peers and experts. The project touched on almost all of the options that are discussed in the report, Zero Rating, how to evaluate access projects and how to fund them.
We conducted the pilot both online and face‑to‑face on day 0 and allowed us to learn a lot where we were happy that we tried it as a pilot this year and hope to improve the application and discuss with the community how to further have it rations and adopt a method nor particular community. We would like to analyze that data quantitatively and qualitatively.
We think that anyone that witnessed the depth of the discussion on Monday and online will be impressed with how engaged the participants were in discussing the trade‑offs and the quality of the questions that were produced with the questions with the experts we provided. To give you a taste, it was a wide range of access discussed, the questions as discussed in the report.
We cannot share with the preliminary results right now but we'll do so in a workshop on Friday morning from 9:00 to 10:30 and we invite critical feedback, constructive feedback from the community and we'll be in workshop room 4.
With that, I would like to close my comments.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your contribution.
You have the floor, sir.
>> ANDRE LUCAS FERNANDES: Hello. I'm from the youth IGF program and from the Observatory of the Youth in Latin America.
I would like to ask the members of the session about an issue of the expansion of the Internet with the connection of the next billion, and its process. A specific point that bothers me, I mean, specifically, will this process be guided in a way to respect the principles of the Internet, the social, cultural particularities of the country and the people that are out of the Internet or this process will go as a vertical expansion that ignores the particularities and imposes the prejudice and other standards to specific countries and in the world. If I think about the expression with the participation of the youth or others, they said digital natives, we see a second way, there is a discussion in multiple ways about the youth and Internet and the expression of the Internet, but the youth is not effectively listened or participating in the process of the construction of the policies in this sense.
I would like to know what you think about this.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
I think we'll take a few comments and questions and try to answer collectively at the end.
I see that the line has grown rapidly.
I think that maybe at this point in time we can take only those that are already in line. I would like to close the list after those five participants will take the floor.
You have the floor, sir, on my left.
>> MIKE ENSON: Thank you. It is Mike Enson from the Association of Progressive Communications.
I was very disheartened to hear the comment by the representative of the ITU that we have to look at the type of connection. Connecting the Next Billion is not a binary problem. I feel we have billions of what we call that are barely connected rather than just fully connected. We have to address their needs as well as the people that are not yet connected today. In doing that, as mentioned by the panelists, we have to be pragmatic rather than comprehensive in the possible Policy Options. We have to focus on some of the key ones that really are going to make a difference than look at those that will follow through afterwards.
From the perspective of ours, there are three, one, in very great importance, it is increasing the competition. It is not sufficient to just have one form of infrastructure available. This doesn't provide the level of choice we need to provide downward pressure on prices and to create an affordable type of connectivity. Part of that solution is also opening up the Spectrum so that it goes beyond providing Spectrum for mobile broadband, but for other types of wireless infrastructure as well as we have seen already by the huge success of Wi-Fi.
The third option, it is to promote infrastructure sharing. This isn't just infrastructure sharing between Telecom operators, but also infrastructure sharing between Telecom operators and the operators of roads, power lines, where there can be huge savings in the deployment of infrastructure. We found, for example, in a recent study we did on this that if you just add a duct to road deployment project, it increases the cost of the road deployment by only 1.5%, there is huge savings made by ensuring that every new road, every new power line that's put in place has ducts for fiber, has provisions for passive infrastructure.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your statement.
I recognize Ambassador Janis Karlins who Chaired the MAG, the preparatory Committee for this meeting, you have the floor, sir.
>> JANIS KARLINS: Thank you very much, Ambassador Benedicto Fonseca. Thank you.
I would like to address the question what next. I think I remember in '91 when we asked the first Ambassador of Germany how we can put the name Latvia on the world map. The answer was simple. You do good work and tell the rest of the world about it. Then here, we have done very good work with assistance of national, regional IFG initiatives with the contribution of a number of countries.
We have gathered together information what's worked and what's not. What we need to do now, we need to disseminate that information as wide as possible.
Here I think that United Nations system in general, through the SIRTS, committees, ITU, through IT council, through UNESCO, through council meetings can disseminate this information and make public officials aware of what's worked and what circumstances and what's not. This would be most probably the best way of going forward.
That's my contribution in this discussion.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you, Ambassador, for those important comments.
I recall that in the MAG one of the things that we discussed continuously was how to make the work of IGF known to people outside of the IGF community, how to make sure that other participants from other sectors, those that are involved. I think as you have said, Ambassador, that the work that we have produced, an output that's available tool should ‑‑ we should think of ways of making it known to people outside of our community those that have been involved more closely with IGF and with the IGF brand name. This is exactly what we want to make known through concrete outputs. The kind of work that it is possible to achieve through the stakeholder cooperation within the context of IGF.
Thank you very much for your comment.
I would like to turn to the lady on my left side.
Please, you have the floor.
>> EVELYN NAMARA: Thank you. I'm Evelyn Namara, I'm an Internet Society Ambassador. My comment, it is I read the document, it is very good.
I would love to know what strategies are being put in place after Connecting the Next Billion in terms of governments and different companies and countries thinking about moving forward. What are the strategies being put in place after the next billion has been online in terms of training, capacity building, are those strategies being made now? We have to start thinking about those discussions right now.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
I would like to give the floor to the gentleman on my right hand.
>> PAUL MUSAFIRI NALWANGO: Mr. Ambassador, I'm from the Democratic Republic of Congo, I'm the head of cabinet, chief of staff of the Vice Prime Minister in charge of ITCs.
I would like to ask, I'm here to ask that the Internet or the connection and the connection of the next billion should not be in the sphere of this panel a difference, in my opinion, and as it has been decided, the Internet connection should be an element not ‑‑ not an element that should bring differences, but an instrument that allows us to bridge the gaps and barriers between people just as the lady that just has spoken. I would like us to be pragmatic regarding the solutions that we're going to come to at the end of this panel so that we can ‑‑ we can think of what we can do for the countries that have no possibility of connection.
We have discussed this in the African panel. We know that 1 billion people will be connected, but we should take into consideration what the starting point is. We have illiterate people that cannot read or write, thus we should actually tackle illiteracy, we have to fight against this. Otherwise, the connection will only increase the divide between those connected and those that are not. There are many people in the world that cannot even read or write, most of them in Africa. There are many people that have no access to electric power. This should also be taken into consideration.
The document, it is very good.
It is full of interesting contents. For it to be understood, we must take into consideration the fight against illiteracy and the need of access to electric power. All of this so that the IGF endeavor can be indeed useful. Otherwise, this will have no local practical effect. There are people that don't even know what Facebook is and we must work considering all of these realities and being practical regarding that.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: The person on the left side for the last intervention on that section.
After that, I'll turn to my co‑moderator for comments in regard to the questions and the comments that were made and as appropriate maybe some panelists also would like to make very short interventions with regards to the points raised by the audience.
You have the floor, sir.
>> NICOLAS ECHANIZ: Hello.
I'm Nicolas Echaniz from Argentina.
We have been working for some years now, especially with community networks that are grassroots networks built by the same people that need connectivity. We are actually working with an international team from Italy, Catalonia, North America developing free software to enable communities where they have no people with special skills to build their own networks so they can actually build the networks without more education on the matter than just a few videos, the video tutorials that would help them build antennas and infrastructure. This has been actually working very well in the places that it has been tested.
We believe it would be interesting to have more relation between this grassroots initiatives and other strategies that don't usually take this possibility into account like in our country, for example, the Argentina connection plan that's installing fiber optics all over the country, they don't have a specific plan for very, very small towns where there is no local player, yes, there is no ISP, small ISP, nobody, and those are the specific situations where community networks are a really good option.
I just wanted to mention this and I would like it to be considered in the document.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much for these interventions, comments and for the questions.
I think I heard four questions from the audience. What I would suggest is that we redistribute to them to some panelists since they have been involved with this work very, very closely.
The first question, perhaps, is for me, whether or not this is a living document. Absolutely. The first thing when the MAG started this track of work on Connecting the Next Billion it was agreed that the document should stay open, should stay alive. This is intersessional work and the Policy Options need to adapt to the environment.
I also noted the very good suggestion to move from the terminology Best Practices to perhaps good practices. I thought that was very interesting and perhaps something we can take on board for intersessional work leading to IGF 2016.
I heard another question about I think how do you respect national specificities, how do you take into account the national local frameworks when you think about Policy Options for Connecting the Next Billion. Here perhaps I would like to turn to my colleague Lee or Christine to highlight perhaps the importance, the chance we have at the IGF to have this coverage of national, regional IGFs and this is really the trick, we have substance that's really important, because we have the national, the local IGFs and then I'll bring the other panelists in.
>> CHRISTINE HOEPERS: Thank you, Constance.
I'd like to share my experience in trying to facilitate the contribution from EuroDIG to this exercise because ‑‑ further to the call to the MAG to participate in this exercise there was agreement to include a workshop in the EuroDIG, the European Regional Forum on Internet Governance, but of course we were immediately faced with the need to adopt the title ‑‑ adapt the title, to reframe it a bit, it had a very strong developmental focus and we needed to adapt it to the European local and regional context to make it also relevant for participants in EuroDIG.
We adjusted a bit the title, instead of Connecting the Next Billion we organized a workshop on Policy Option for Digital Access and Inclusion. This allowed us to enlarge the scope of the discussions and to address some of the challenges that we have in Europe, in particular beyond the mere physical coverage for Internet access which in Europe is relatively high and, therefore, we could extend the discussion to issues like how to increase usage when the infrastructure is already there. In this context, EuroDIG held this workshop with a number of panelists that address the various digital gaps that still exist in Europe. This is due to, you know, the variety of the continents, so you have north, south, east, west, you have rural areas, urban areas, there are differences which relate also to the geographical realities. You have small countries, big countries, island countries, panelists trying to address solutions, how are solutions being implemented to address all of the different kind of challenges.
A lot of examples were mentioned also related to the different aspects that create digital ecosystems, not just the technical layer, the technical infrastructure, but also the logical layer. The role of the technical community in this sense, for instance IXPs, the importance of IPv6, all aspects that were mentioned and very specific examples of national, local and European level. What emerges is that indeed there are what we could call digital agendas for all the different layers with different solutions, different ingredients and for sure a lot is going on, a lot of attention is spread to these issues and everybody is trying to find the solutions that are best for their realities.
I think that also an important aspect to mention is that we had a wealth of data available. We really started from data, statistics, clear indicators also on broadband access, from there we could move to issues like how to include people with disabilities, vulnerable peoples, so on.
Of course I don't want to cover all of the aspects of that, of what was mentioned in the report. Maybe another point, the international organization, among the various parties that are necessary to facilitate the connection of an inclusion of everybody international organizations also on a national level, they show the benefits of investment and they can transfer expertise and technology and facilitate the development of public‑private partnerships.
>> LEE HIBBARD: Just to add to that by saying that I think that the workshop was also discussing the context of access to, you know, being a catalyst for the exercise of Human Rights and freedom of expression in particular. That it informs the access parts of the service value of the Internet and now I think of the NETMundial statement, the Internet as a global resource, should be managed in the public interest, and we dealt with access to Internet but access to what actually, access for access sake, do you want to ‑‑ we talked about literacy, skills, and the importance of making sure that are giving access means democracy, censorship, critical thinking regarding content questions, et cetera.
U.K, there is a higher penetration rate in the north of Europe, rather than the south, and of course, rural, urban, it is distinct. It seems from terms of the infrastructure questions that it is different combinations of actors, it is a public‑private partnership, led by the government, led by the private sector, but not one‑size‑fits‑all, and therefore there is no silver bullet on how to do these things. We had good case studies from Slovenia on access to Internet on rural areas and Latvia, not disturbing the competition for the market, but there was sort of healthy competition between the push for fixed and mobile, access to the Internet and the same time they were introducing new public access points which was having an effect on the access to mobile 3G access. There are correlations between the push for public access points and fixed and mobile broadband.
Thank you very much.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much, Lee.
Before we weave in the discussions the results of the Best Practices that support the Connecting the Next Billion, I think that there were two other questions:
One, how do you define Connecting the Billion, it was a gentleman from APC, Tomas, you started your intervention with your definition, I think the question was oriented to you, with the Policy Options for Connecting the Next Billion we tried to have a broad understanding of the issue. If you would like it share a few comments.
>> TOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thanks a lot.
Just that we should understand it is not a final goal, a moving target. So the connecting next billion, next billions, it is a process not ‑‑ that will never ‑‑ we'll never reach it. It is about not only connecting but about bringing better connectivity. We can see ten years ago, connectivity, now the connectivity talk, and in some ways, you know, we moved faster than we thought we would. Now everyone in the world has access or most of the people have access to mobile telephones, yeah, it is already connected, now again we say it is a new Digital Divide, Digital Divide, that's important to appreciate.
I don't think we'll reach the point in time where we say there is no Digital Divide. There will always be, just ‑‑ we'll always have to chase that point, that target. I think that's important from that regard.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you.
The other question I think from the audience was now that we have all of these Policy Options and thinking of the sense of urgency that Dr. Pepper conveyed well. How do we move to the national strategies.
Manu, can you share thoughts on moving from understanding the situation and actually moving to strategies?
>> MANU KHARDWAJ: Thank you, Constance.
I just also wanted to iterate we should have a national strategy, and the IGF community could even help with the international aspect of how to come together and build momentum for connectivity efforts everywhere. This is to encourage all countries to view the connectivity as central to their national development strategy and encourage them to think of the Internet and ICT not as a siloed aspect for their own country's economic growth and development but to consider the cross‑cutting nature of it in terms of how its impacting all sectors of the economy. We look forward to partnering with organizations like the alliance for affordable Internet which we actually helped support four years ago when it was first launched and others in terms of showcasing the types of policies that are out there that can really spur economic growth and unlock digital development.
I wanted to also touch upon two things. One, I very much support the statement that was made from the floor that whether it is the multilateral development banks or national countries as they kind of do traditional infrastructure projects they should think about how to integrate the Internet connectivity within the elements.
I also heard and thought Ambassador Karlins' statements on how to share the work that you have done, Constance, and here, but with other companies, banks, other folks, spreading awareness on the IGF's work as well. I wanted to make those two observations.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you so much.
Dr. Pepper wanted to add a few suggestions.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Very briefly.
I talked about the Internet For All project at the World Economic Forum. The next phase of that, it is very, very pragmatic, it is to develop very specific multistakeholder country programs to work with specific countries that are ‑‑ that are in a work in gross to figure which ones, to work in country, with governments, with Civil Society, with the private sector to drive up Internet extension and access and adoption in the countries. It is a very wide open process and anybody who is here will have the ability to participate. That, again, pragmatically, a way to approach this, let's pick places, work together, make it happen, lessons learned, then, you know, really drive it in partnership with other countries.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
We would like to turn now to the second part of the session. One in which we'll hear from the leaders of the Best Practices streams, a report on the outcome of their work and making the link with the issue of Connecting the Next Billion and we would like, of course, to also reflect the next steps with regard to the work being undertaken by that particular stream of work.
I would like to start with Avri Doria from APC who led the Best Practice forum on the topic. You have the floor.
>> AVRI DORIA: Thank you.
I'll try to keep this brief.
Basically, this was two years that we were working on it. I think we early on accepted the notion that we weren't really talking Best Practices and in fact we're looking at what practices worked, what practices didn't work quite as well, and trying to understand that.
The first year ‑‑ and that was last year ‑‑ was basically mostly a theoretical year. People talked about multistakeholder approaches in a broad stroke. This year we started to look at cases of what would worked, what hadn't, what were some of the issues that you ran up against, and out of that, Brian basically put together a report of them. We came up with certain issues that provoked a lot of discussion.
For example, when we talk about multistakeholder processes we're constantly using consensus, rough consensus. What did we mean about those? Were there steady definitions of them? Was that something that really each group needed to find on its own, how it would determine, you know, we ran into concepts like people talking about bad actors. You know, what was meant by that? How do we not confuse being frustrated or not understanding and how do we avoid the accusations and avoid the situation. So we got into practical issues.
What came out of it, basically ‑‑ we had a session, I guess it was yesterday though time is stretching out it seems like much longer ago at this point, but basically there was very strong support I would say for the report and for doing something with it. How do we get this to other people? There were changes. There was a request to say this is not about multistakeholder practice at the IGF but more in general about multistakeholder practice. It would perhaps generalize it a bit more, that we have webinars, some such where we actually explain this, where we make this useful in some sense to many efforts national, regional, otherwise that are trying to build multistakeholder processes and how could we help with that. There was really a push to make this output go further, explain it, talk about it, and perhaps even to work further on coming up with detailing some of the options and how they could be used or built upon.
Hopefully that's a quick recap. It was quite satisfying to have the discussion. It was a very good meeting, a lot of people participated. Throughout the year, you had these meetings with good outputs.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for leading the Best Practice and discipline in conveying the important points in a very concise, short. It is really appreciated especially because we want to take this opportunity of this meeting to hear some comments and questions that could be addressed to the leader of this Best Practice forum.
I would like to open the floor for panelists that may wish to comment in the first place and then we'll take interventions from the audience.
Do any of the panelists ‑‑ yes, Dr. Vint Cerf.
>> VINT CERF: An interesting question that you and I, Avri, discussed in the past, capturing experiences in IGF and making an archive, making it accessible, something of such. Is that still something that's on the Agenda for improving the utility of the multistakeholder process as we experience it here?
>> AVRI DORIA: Thank you.
It wasn't something discussed as part of this, but certainly the work being done by friends of IGF and bringing the stuff together in a searchable way, certainly we do have transcripts on everything, we do have a report on the multistakeholder processes just as there is a report on this. That was also going to remain a living report with continuing running commentary on it. The intent, I think, is of everything we're doing is to make it, but what ends up needing to happen, is to actually have good ways of searching on it, of finding things because we are really accumulating a mass of words.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
Do any of the panelists wish to make any comment or address questions to Avri? Otherwise I'll turn to the audience.
Jac.
>> JAC KEE: I'm wondering in the process as well if you examine the question of intersectionality? Did you look at gender, youth, not just between the stakeholders but also between the sectors within the stakeholder groups whether that was something that was examined?
>> AVRI DORIA: We had some discussion, not deep, not extended. We did have some discussion when we got into talking about stakeholders and the kinds of stakeholders and the fact of being multistakeholder all the way down. That it wasn't just a notion of Tunis Agenda, defining 3 plus 2, that was the end of it, in every one of the circumstances that were different groupings. We didn't talk about women as stakeholder, youth, others, but basically talking about the fact that stakeholder breakdown is really something that goes further deep than the top level.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
I would like to turn to the audience.
We have one participant who would like to make an intersection.
>> GEORGE SADOWSKY: George Sadowsky from ICANN. You
say you have a mess of words, a lot. If you had to boil it down into either an elevator speech, 30 seconds of what are the most important things that you learned from this in terms of doing, not doing, understanding.
>> AVRI DORIA: Elevator pitch?
So basically the thing that I learned most about it is the variability, the flexibility in the process, the need to listen and the need to be able to adapt to the variety of stakeholder experience you run into.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
I don't see any further requests for the floor.
I would like to suggest ‑‑ I would like to thank Avri Doria for leading these Best Practice group, and I would like to turn now to Julia Cornwell McKean, eSafety Commission, Australia and leader on the mitigating spam forum.
>> JULIA CORNWELL KcKEAN: Thank you.
The 2015 Best Practice forum, it carried on work from the 2014 IGF which we identified 16 challenges and 11 recommendations.
The terms, they are referring to written unsolicited communications that are carried on in the Internet including and not limited to messages that spread malware or have other nefarious purpose, we have focused on two streams: Statistical and numerical data scaling the problem, and current examples of multistakeholder cooperation attempting to resolve the problem and the future of the unsolicited communications, the next billion coming online, challenges for the developing world.
Rather than provide a new set of Best Practices that must be followed, the 2015 Forum has made use of established practices providing examples of where there have been successful so that others are encouraged to consider what may work in their own environments. An example is provided for the most part through a series of case studies. They represent contributions from the diverse array of participants and are annexed to the forum's report.
The forum is selected and presents data from a variety of sources regarding the scale and scope of spam, phishing, malware, infections around the globe. While some data was available indicating, for example, that the time of writing that the button related spam is decreasing and the reason for this is unclear and it may be a temporary respite, but what became clear is that despite spam being a global issue accurate quantification is a significant hurdle. No single dataset can reliably measure the scope nor the scale of the problem or the cost or the impact on economies for both industry and government to mitigate it. Further research is recommended by this BPF in that regard.
The BPF held the view that the problems likely to be encountered by the next billion are likely similar to those that came before. Spam, infections, malware, cybercrime will invariably be prevalent, perhaps more so in developing nations as measures that have been deployed over time to address the issues may not be implemented prior to the broader deployment or broader broadband connectivity.
The BPF wanted to learn about the needs and wants of those coming newly online, and solicited input from developing nations working with ITF Africa and sending a survey out and carried out. The results are detailed in the BPF report and were found by the participants as reflecting the real situation in Africa. The results indicated a desire of leadership to resolve the problem of unsolicited communications.
Training has been flagged as a particular need. In order to give more focus to the topic we organized a matchmaking session on Day 0 of this IGF. This session discussed many issues that have been highlighted in the forum's report and form recommendations, in particular, capacity building for developing nations coming online in the form of technical, consumer, regulatory, other learning needs are identified, as was the need for industry to fund the initiatives, there is willingness among many to collaborate and move the issues forward.
The forum session at the IGF yesterday focused on a discussion of its 11 draft recommendations. ID rating sheets were distributed for a clear view on the attending views on the recommendations and an opportunity to provide feedback without giving a formal intervention. The draft recommendations cover many topics including but not limited to the scope of future BPFs, training, education, the value of litigation centers, cybercrime reporting, desirability of further region specific surveys and the benefits of multistakeholder arrangements both public, private, private, private, exampling of which is mentioned above or in annex to the forums report. The recommendations were received and many will be nuanced in response to the productive, candid discussions that resulted.
There was much discussion at both the matchmaking session and at the forum's broader session about the future of this work. In particular, it was acknowledged that in order to facilitate the implementation of the recommendation there was a need for a regular check in or review. However, it was agreed and it is a key recommendation of the 2015 BPF that if the IGF decides to continue this work that there is more value in expanding the topic to encompass broader cybersecurity, including crime and safety issues. As communications are only one aspect of the many issues relating to the protection of infrastructure and citizens online unsolicited .
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your presentation, and similarly I would like then to open the floor first to panelists who wish to make interventions or ask questions to the lead of the Best Practice forum.
Yes, please.
>> VINT CERF: I was distracted a bit. I may be asking a question that you already answered.
With regard to spam in particular, one of the things that appears to be helpful is that if you are an aggregate server of e‑mail, you can actually detect what is spam and what is not spam because you're seeing a lot of things and, you know, many copies of the same thing going to lots of people. It may turn out that identifying the mechanisms by which this stuff can be identified will be valuable because people who are on low‑data rate services at the edges of the net, they're the ones that are most harmed by getting a bunch of spam mail chewing up the capacity and maybe costing a lot of money. The implication is that to mitigate that, since we can't really stop people from sending e‑mail is that you need to go through some service that has the ability to process all of the incoming mail and filter it out before it reaches you, downloaded to you. I assume that must have been covered in the report, but if it wasn't, I would make a small footnote.
>> JULIA CORNWELL McKEAN: In fact, the report focused more on those things, the issue, we tried to look more at the partnerships, the practical solutions rather than getting into the nitty gritty. Certainly that's something to note.
>> VINT CERF: Most of the solutions that the problems involve a lot of nitty gritty.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
Are there any other interventions from the panelists? I see none.
From the audience, I don't see either.
I would suggest that we could move to the next Best Practice forum.
I call upon Christine Hoepers, General Manager of the Internet Steering Committee, you have the floor for talking about this.
>> CHRISTINE HOEPERS: The Best Practice for establishing, this is a forum running for two years now. Last year our focus was on getting the community together, to clarify what this is, talking about the level of service and what are the major topics CSIRTS work on. The work of 2015 was built on the recommendations of the 2014 report, especially for focusing on this year, to clarify the possible misconceptions that could have among different stakeholders about the roles and responsibilities of CSIRTS and on the topics of privacy and relationships of C. As a note of great outcome of the 2014 forum was that we ‑‑ that the report of the Best Practice forum was used by the Government of Serbia as a background for the definition of cybersecurity policy. This was not an intended use of the report, but was one of the examples of how IGF and Best Practice forums are having a real impact on policy shaping in the world.
The key outcomes of 2015 were on the basis of consensus. The first one is a consensus among the participants that of those CSIRTS there is a lot of sensitive data and a lot of potentially privacy issues when dealing with information. CSIRTS is one of the major custodians of privacy and CSIRTS contributes to add privacy and every time you add more security you add more privacy as some contributors have said.
Also another major consensus is that CSIRTS are only effective if there is trust, if there is trust among experts or security experts or from the community in general. Trust is the basis for any work of a CSIRTS work.
Another topic that was debated a lot was teams with national responsibility and the need for stacks when creating such teams to carefully looking at the impacts or the trade‑offs resulting from where the CSIRTS is located.
And there is another point that was raised especially today in the session that we had and the feedback from the report, it is that to reinforce that CSIRTS, it is only one of the actors. It is not an organization and a team that will resolve all of the security problem. They have a special function. They have a lot of organization. There is a need to have everybody involved in the security and in improving security of the ecosystem.
There is also a lot of discussion on the similar care to be taken when CSIRTS cooperate with law enforcement, really not to be mistakes and not to have any issues with privacy. The group as a whole felt the need that we should continue to have a dialogue with all of the stakeholders, a dialogue here, it is still to be discussed how that would be best, if that would be a Best Practice forum or any other forum, but there is a great need for really keeping a dialect open about the roles of CSIRTS and how to improve the community with all the stakeholders.
As the major topic of this section here, it is Connecting the Next Billion and billions, and I think one of the major challenges for the next billion would be how to have then ‑‑ them more secure online. The learning curve is cheaper. We'll have people less aware of the problems that especially when we think about the digital literacy, how they know about the technology. One of the major challenges for security, it is really computer literacy and in our age now, it is any device literacy, how to deal with it, identify the threats.
Then there is another major issue that is technical capacity and how to have people that can recognize threats. We see instant response teams as a key point for having people there ready to help new people that will be connecting to the Internet and I also ‑‑ also helping to provide more technical capabilities for the next ‑‑ with new people connected, we have new technical people, new professionals that we need to form and that we need to bring in to the table.
Thank you very much. That was the report. Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you for your presentation.
I would like to turn first to the members of the panel for any questions or remarks in regard to that team?
Yes.
>> SUBI CHATUVERDI: Thank you for that excellent presentation.
I'm Subi Chatuverdi.
This is a valuable report. When we see any kind of crisis unfolding especially developing countries and emerging economies the first responses almost is always to block. I do want to know what is the kind of participation that you saw from law enforcement agencies and others and there is a proactive engagement that you're seeing in terms of recommendations with terms of crisis and if its traced back to content shared online. What is the kind of new approach that's developing?
>> CHRISTINE HOEPERS: This year we didn't have that many engagement from law enforcement. I couldn't report in every detail of our report. You see in the report that one of the points, one of the stakeholders that we need to talk more is law enforcement. One of the points that was really how to consider because some people think that instant response teams are part of law enforcement, they work with in some countries they work in a lot of discussion, especially the mailing list that's public, it was on how actually ‑‑ how close should this work be and what was the role. From the CSIRTS, from the teams participating in the forum, most reported that actually they provide technical assistance but don't do actually any policy work.
We didn't discuss in the forum specifically the issue of blocking. Today in the session there was discussion but then there was a lot of conversation also that blocking is not the answer for everything. We should all be working toward a more healthier system or Internet and a more reliable, not necessarily just adding barriers and blockings and really working with all of the agencies and trying everyone to understand each other's roles and as a complimentary role I think is the way to go forward.
I hope I answered your question.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
Are there any more questions from the panel? Remarks?
Then we turn to the audience. Yes.
>> GEORGE SADOWSKY: Thank you.
George Sadowsky, ICANN.
This is clearly a work in progress, as is all of our work with regard to cybercrime no matter the form it appears in. It seems to me that the CSIRTS offer a major leverage on the ability to deal with cybercrime and to track down perpetrators, but it depends ‑‑ given the borderless nature of the Internet, they really have to be able to work together because a cyber event, a bad event hops from country to country and there has to be a way to establish that trail to find out who is doing what to whom.
The question is, really, what have you found with respect to CSIRTS being able to operate together across national boundaries through a chain of countries?
You mentioned the role of trust. I'm sure that that is really pivotal. What else can you say about what ‑‑ what does it take to make that work and work really well? To what extent are there things that get in the way, national politics, other things? I don't know. The question is to you.
>> CHRISTINE HOEPERS: Thank you for the question.
This I think was one of the major topics of debate in our conversations through the mailing list and on all of the conference calls.
In the report we note that most of the CSIRTS that are established for a long time, they work well together, they cooperate a lot. This is built on trust, and trust is built on knowing each other's capabilities and knowing that each other has the right, dealing with information, that you protect data, we talked about importance of sharing information and that we have to have the information flowing but we cannot have too many detailed information flowing. There is always a balance. All of the cooperation work ‑‑ and it works with teams that know each other and there are a lot of forums that are bringing this team together. We have in our Best Practice forum to thank the first community, that's the security teams, most of the teams, they had come to our mailing list, they participated in the calls and they provided a lot of input with real cases and scenarios on how cooperation works.
We have a case study submitted from Switzerland, Korea from the Netherlands. We had a lot of very good discussion, but there is not a recipe on how to cooperate cross‑borders. What we're doing, to meet a lot, trying to get a common ground on what could be a better way to cooperate among the CSIRTS and for sure, a point, it is that depending on where a team is located, as I said in my report, that would help or hinder how much information can change, how much information others would change with a team. This is really one of the major points in the report that needs to be more conversations among policymakers and among CSIRTS for each other to understand the importance of sharing the information, to what extent the CSIRTS can help the policymakers and what extent that the policymaker also help CSIRTS be effective. This is why we say there needs to be more dialogue, needs to be I think more awareness of everyone and there is a lot to do, to be done in the future.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
You have the floor
>> KOSSI AMESSINOU: I'm Kossi Amessinou from Benin.
Thank you very much.
CSIRTS work, is it a formal type of work or informal? In the countries where we have no CSIRTS, how can we have cooperation? Are these countries left aside, is there an international structure that will work to ensure the safety or the security of the data. How does this take place?
For the countries that require CSIRTS, do we need a formal structure? Is it a structure of the public sector, the private sector? Are they technical players that have the ability to filter information and need to work with safety? In practice, how does this work? Can we have details on it?
Thank you.
>> CHRISTINE HOEPERS: This topic was discussed more in the first year, the first report.
One of the major points that we had in the report was exactly the difficulty from developing countries, the information that still don't have teams, that usually they also don't have the means to participate in the forums because as we said, CSIRTS work based on trust and trust is built from people that work together, that know each other and that are participating in forums.
This year we specifically reached to three organizations from Africa specifically. We had a participation of Africa cert as lead expert, participation of some input from OKOWIS from eastern ‑‑ western countries of Africa and we had feedback from the UN Economic Group from the region. We're trying to work with the teams. There are a lot of organizations that are doing first capacity building and I'm doing a lot of work in Latin America in going to the conferences, bringing the work, where people need and trying to provide training and material.
One of the calls from last year in the report, it was for even countries that don't have formal CSIRTS, they still don't have a cybersecurity strategy, you can still have a points of contact, what we call the CSIRTS of last resort, someone, a team, an organization that will be recognized or that would have a tradition of working with ICT that's a point of contact when someone needs help. A lot of ‑‑ every country is different on how the team is created. That will should be in the 2014 report. We have teams from governments, from private sector, from the international teams, not‑for‑profit, there is not, like, one model. There are several ways that a team can be created and can be effective.
I welcome everyone to read the reports, done tact me, any of the other leads of the CSIRTS Best Practice forum that we can provide more detailed information.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
Yes, please.
>> VINT CERF: If I could make a short intervention.
One thing I have found historically, the effectiveness of the CSIRTS is a consequence of informality and the issue of trust is important and a point taken. When you create a set of rules you have a situation where you're not effective anymore, everybody is checking the boxes. I'm not trying to be ‑‑ what's the right word for this ‑‑ you know, completely without any rule set at all.
The informal nature of many of the organizations has permitted many different players to participate in a useful way. I hope we don't lose that recognition, but again it only works because everybody recognizes the need for confidentiality and trust ‑‑ they trust each other to maintain that confidentiality.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
I think with this we have concluded the discussion on that particular Best Practice forum.
I would suggest that I invite you to turn to the next Best Practice on the topic of enabling IPv6. I will turn to Susan Chalmers for a presentation.
>> SUSAN CHALMERS: Thank you.
In over the past 67 months our work grouped to develop a 9‑part document on Best Practices for IPv6 adoption. We did this through discussion on our open mailing list, over four conference calls and collaborative drafting.
We were also able to collect experiences from all around the world through our Best Practices survey from Saudi Arabia, to Venezuela, Japan, Canada, from many, many countries.
So the topics we cover in the document include IPv6 task forces, Best Practices for content providers and ISPs for when they want to start deploying IPv6 and we examined the helpfulness of projects that are designed to measure IPv6 usage across the Internet.
The document is written for the non‑technical reader. The importance of IPv6 adoption should be well‑known not only to the technically minded but policymakers, end users as well. Now I'll turn it over ‑‑ turn this over to my colleague who will explain a bit more.
Marco.
>> MARCO HONEWONIG: Thank you.
I am a contributor. It is my pleasure to share the outcomes of the document.
Of course the most important and obvious conclusion to be drawn from this process is that we need IPv6 to connect the next billion. That said, we focused on elements that we think would create this environment of promoting the IPv6. A thing that we have identified and especially important, besides the international coordination is to cooperate at the national level as well. Local IPv6 task force provides an efficient way to exchange the experiences and distribute knowledge amongst the local operators. It is a great way to coordinate amongst different parties involved.
We have identified several things that exist. For example, between providers of access servicers and those that provide the content and coordination on the milestones, cooperation between the players to align efforts to greatly increase the effect of the IPv6 deployment in a local context.
That said, focusing on the topic of this afternoon's discussion, the policy options that contribute to IPv6. Our group identified two areas where governments specifically can contribute to create an environment that's a positive attitude to the IPv6.
The first thing would be to deploy the IPv6 yourself. Governments are a large user of Internet themselves and by employing IPv6 in their network and their services. They could provide an incentive for equipment manufacturers and service providers to deploy the IPv6. Showing leadership gives local markets as IPv6 is an option and stimulates them to adopt the IPv6 in their products and services as well.
A second policy option is to carefully evaluate existing policies and regulations for protocol and more importantly obstacles that would prevent or discourage people from deploying IPv6. A local IPv6 task force could provide great venue to discuss, identify any issues and to discuss solutions that would be satisfactory to the objection for all stakeholders involved leading to a widespread adoption and use of IPv6.
Finally, we also discussed the continuation of the IPv6 Best Practice forum itself, and more importantly any area where is we think that this future work could focus on. We think that the intersessional work and tangible outcomes produced are a current contribution to the human institutional capacity building and the document we have the comments which were well received by the community and several stakeholders have submitted comments in support. We would like the IGF to continue this work to the 2016 session. More specifically we would like to suggest to focus on the economic decision making process that's behind the decision to deploy IPv6. We feel that the potential financial impact of IPv6 adoption is a key factor for the decision of many businesses and other stakeholders make and further studying and documenting this mechanism could be a great contribution to achieve the goals of the global deployment of IPv6 and finally in Connecting the Next Billion users.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much. This idea of exploring the economic incentives of IPv6 implementation for next year, it may be a way forward.
Before we open the floor for questions from the audience, are there any panelists that would like to react to this ‑‑ what a surprise! Please.
>> VINT CERF: First of all, it is really an important topic. We need IPv6. I hope that the report make it is clear that we need to have duel stack if we're going to have a fully connected network at least until we finally get everyone up and running on IPv6, you're saying yes, that's good to hear.
The second point, the Internet of Things is going to drive this demand, as that tidal wave hits that will drive incentive as well. That's important and this does not ‑‑ this is very important to understand.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you.
Another question from Dr. Pepper.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: A quick comment.
If we think of the IPv6 deployment and adoption, three legs to the stool, right, one is that the devices, and as pointed out, there is no new devices or machine to machine things that are being deployed that don't have ‑‑ they're not V6 capable.
The second though, it is the networks, right? It is not just the public networks but it absolutely is ‑‑ it is the private networks, government networks, enterprise networks, the incentives and the point of getting governments to do it themselves first can be a huge driver. It is not until those two things underway, that really it is the third leg of the stool that will pull and drive the broader adoption and that's the applications and the things up the stack that have to convert.
Some of the application providers have already done that. Many, many have not. It's the chicken and egg issue. Crack the first two, then pull through, have compelling content providers and application providers convert, that will create sort of the critical mass that's going to accelerate further.
I'm optimistic, but I'm very impatient. I call ‑‑ I call myself an impatient optimist on this one.
>> (Laughter).
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
Any other reactions from the panel before we move to the audience?
We have a question from the floor, please, start by introducing yourself.
>> XIAODONG LI: I'm Xiaodong Li. I'm a professor for Chinese Academy.
I want to add a comment for that IPv6 deployment, of course the IPv6 deployment is important for the next billion users. It is very important of how to deploy that IPv6. The first comment, it is, you know, I can remember the mystery of four years ago, the allocation, the work, now there is still some IPv4 addressed for the IPV, before the transition, but maybe it will be out next year. It is a very good time to evaluate if that IPv6 should be deployed next year.
The second comment, you know, now the price for IP is expensive, it is $10 to $12 U.S.A. It is higher than the minimum price.
Even with .com, it is about $10 U.S. dollars. How expensive for the users can be accepted? 10, 20, 30? If that cannot buy an address in $50 U.S. dollars, I cannot accept it. It would be an important thing for us to deploy the IPv6.
Another common issue, I don't think that IPv6 is unique factors for the next billion users. But it is a very important thing, but not a unique one.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
Would you like to react to that?
>> MARCO HONEWONIG: A response to Dr. Pepper, we put such focus on the coordination, to align the effort between the players.
And in the response to the gentleman, I think that you raise a very important point regarding the price of IPv4 which is why we suggest the further work on the economic aspects that drive the decision.
To your comment, to clarify the status of the small pool that's left of the IPv4, it has ran out, there is no others available. Like I said, we hope next year that we are allowed to look into the economics of IPv6.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you.
We have another question from the gentleman on the left.
Please introduce yourself
>> AUDIENCE: I'm a consultant for German Government to introduce IPv6. One of the governments which do it for themselves.
I have a comment, perhaps it is not a key factor to bring people in the Internet, the IPv6, it is important but not key factor. From my perspective, it will be the key factor to a huge part of economic sectors in the countries to provide machine to machine connection in the next decade.
The question is somehow should we change the title of this to connecting that next 100 billion machines?
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
We'll take the following question and perhaps close the queue for now and then redistribute the questions before we move to the next Best Practice.
Please, introduce yourself.
>> DAWIT BEKELE SERBESSA: I'm a director of the Africa Bureau of The Internet Society.
My comment is with regards to what Marco said, I think there was recommendation on what governments should do. What about the other stakeholders? I know for example the Internet Society led an initiative a few years back to promote content, that content within IPv6 with the IPv6 and what are the next things that are recommended for other stakeholders to have more content available on IPv6?
Thank you
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
I think ‑‑ ‑‑ I think Dr. Pepper wanted to react.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: Sorry. It is the Pepper and Vint thing.
>> (Laughter)
>> ROBERT PEPPER: I mentioned the forecast, it goes to the point of machine to machine and relates to something earlier about the Digital Divide.
With the forecast, what we're seeing, it is that by 2019 there is 10.5 billion IP‑enabled devices connected to the Internet and billions more in addition that won't necessarily, you know, like the chips with no IP addresses, but what's important here, it relates to the broader session of Connecting the Next Billions 43% of all IP addresses in 2019, that's the global average, some countries it will be like Korea 72%, Europe on average, 50%, U.S., 58%.
There is, I fear, an emerging new Digital Divide in machine‑to‑machine devices being connected.
What we're forecasting is that in Latin America it is only 31% of things connected and Africa 17%, India, 13%. If indeed these new types of devices will add real value because of the positive sides of the Internet of Things with all kinds of applications for things like food security, water security, disease detection, we can't afford a new emerging third version of the Digital Divide in the Internet of Things and machine‑to‑machine devices.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: You wanted to react, please.
>> VINT CERF: I want to reinforce this observation.
It may be that you will end up with ‑‑ with skipping over the history that other countries have lived through with regard to Internet. This is kind of happening when you watch people getting online with the mobile and a smartphone, they're passing over 30 years of history in other parts of the world.
One possible scenario in response to what Dr. Pepper mentioned, it is that the devices that are available on the market may come with IPv6 built in because you can't get one that doesn't have that capability. Then the question will be whether it has any utility at all. If there is no network capacity to make use of that kind of protocol it won't serve in the same way as it would when fully connected to the rest of the net. It may be that we'll see a more uniform adoption of this set of enabled devices simply because they're the only things available.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
Susan, then we'll move to the next Best Practice theme, please.
>> SUSAN CHALMERS: Thank you.
Briefly to respond to the audience's question.
In the paper we not only provide the Best Practices that were mentioned for governments but we also canvassed Best Practices per stakeholder group. So I would encourage you to check the document out because it is a pretty robust document. We do cover all groups, including businesses as well.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
It was a very good discussion following the presentation on Best Practices.
I would like to move to the next theme, Best Practices for establishing successful IXPs. A small team worked on these Best Practices, and here today we have Malcom Hutty from Lynx and Jane Coffin.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you. Thank you.
You mentioned our small, capable team, not sitting with me here today are Guy Hernandes, Kyle Smith and others who were core to that team, and Malcolm, of course.
The intersessional work that we undertook formed a strong team of people, very important to this human aspect, yes, who spent time discussing the issues and more importantly listening to each other over six months on monthly, almost weekly calls over the last two months and through a survey done by the IX federation which was very helpful.
These Best Practices should be viewed as setting the stage for establishing enabling environments, to establish successful IXPs, Internet exchange points. Like the IPv6 team, our Best Practice report is not meant as a how‑to on the technology, not a how‑to to build an IXP, but they're a baseline and a foundation related to enabling environments to establish IXPs. These Best Practices complement the excellent IGF workshops that have been held since 2007 by colleagues like Bill Woodcock and others. The successful work is done around the world to establish the IXPs and level them up. This is a framework to look at those environments. Simply to summarize our Best Practice report focuses on the role and benefits of IXPs, lowering costs, increasing quality of service, increasing competition, building local technical communities and forming partnerships.
Identification of main stakeholders and roles, IXP operators, coordinator, technical community, government, regional associations and experts, environmental constraints, challenges and opportunities, power, human capacity, policy and regulatory challenges, how to shift those challenges into opportunities to build out Internet exchange points and a robust Internet ecosystem. Indicators of successful IXPs, growth, peer, locally relevant content being built and the development of more local technical experts.
Case studies and reference documents and links to helpful materials are contained in the report, and we know that during the Best Practices forum session yesterday we had excellent questions from colleagues from Afghanistan, from ‑‑ with remote, local experts who helped amplify questions that developing countries and emerging markets do have. How to develop that community of interest and those IXPs.
Key policy messages articulated in the report. This is not by any means final. There are a lot more that could be articulated.
IXPs do not provide international transit connectivity directly. A need for an IXP is driven by local and market conditions. No IXP is the same around the world, the communities are similar but different.
IXPs need time to mature. It can take two to six to seven years to develop one just depending on the local circumstances.
Neutrality is essential. Location management of that particular aspect on neutrality, that's super critical.
IXPs are a piece of the puzzle, not a single solution. Internet traffic is not an accurate measure of success in an IXP.
There are licensing and policy issues as well that we articulated and we know that there is more work that can be done on the issues.
To summarize, IXPs are not a Panacea, a magic solution, but they're part of the value chain. What's the nexus between the best or good practices as Dr. Pepper said in Sustainable Development and in Connecting the Next Billion, how do we accelerate, speed up that connection? We have seen a formula that's worked for targeted development and that formula is building connectivity, the infrastructure. Building communities, the people, the stakeholders, the capacity development, the training, the face‑to‑face, online training and the policies that enable them, bottom‑up governance, local and national government and other factor. This works through partnerships with people.
We have seen that through the Sustainable Development process, the Sustainable Development Goals process in the United Nations and this is a way that we can enable that process for development and through building human trust networks, it takes people, seeing each other eye to eye, our colleagues on the CSIRTS team articulated that well. This is critical, building the human trust networks. We have an opportunity to strengthen and amplify and accelerate Connecting the Next Billion and the final billions.
With respect to IXP good practices, what's next? We offer a caveat that, again, all countries are different, but we think there is a lot more to do with focus on some of the key challenges that have been articulated, questions raised, for example, landlocked countries, small island developing states, countries that have satellite connectivity almost solely, how do we reboot the IXPs that are dormant.
Thank you very much. We'll keep it short. Those are some of the aspects of our report, the issues we have identified and a formula we think is helpful for Sustainable Development.
Thank you very much.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much, Jane.
Now I would like to open it for questions from the panel or from the audience.
We're a little late on schedule, and you have to leave, please.
>> VINT CERF: I'm hurting myself, I understand.
Just a question about ‑‑ IXPs and the content distribution networks, the two have some relationship and in some cases an IXP is useful as a CDN and that also has benefits.
>> JANE COFFIN: Thank you. That was in the report and articulated in the Best Practice forum and in a workshop today, very important factor, CDNs are attracted by IXPs and it starts this visitor virtual cycle of the Internet economic ecosystem, more CDNs, content, up take, more use, lower prices, more user, more up take, more use.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
Since we're a little late on the schedule, apologies, but then we'll move directly to the last Best Practice absolutely on countering abuse women online.
Please, first.
>> WIM DEGEZEUE: Thank you. I'm a consultant with the IGF Secretariat, specifically to help the Best Practice forum only IXPs and IPv6.
An observation, a personal observation, that's accounting for the two ones I have been working with, but I think it is for all, this discussion, it is here around the table, we're focusing very much on the Best Practice document, the Best Practices we have collected. I think something very important also is to look at the process that went before that. My personal feeling is that during those six months we ‑‑ when I say we, me as a consultant and colleague consultants together with the coordinator, we were obliged to reach out to people, experts, that are normally not attending IGF meetings, that are normally not involved in the IGF process and I think that's been valuable, that's a valuable part of the end document that's there, that's based on people that now cooperate on something that's produced by the IGF that normally are not involved. I think that Susan, Michael said it ‑‑ Marco said it clearly, we had discussions on the list, we were obliged to say it to the technical people, normally, they're so happy to discuss hours and hours on IPv6 in the technical meetings and communities to say again we have to say the same thing but in a language that those people of IGF that will understand. Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
We have one additional question from George Sadowsky.
>> GEORGE SADOWSKY: A comment more than a question: I didn't think of the CDN complement but I thought of root servers, shadows and root servers and other commercial issues that may come up and may benefit from the colocation. Are you finding do you have any evidence on the IXPs, the nature of the organizations of the IXPs that are formed public, private, for profit, not‑for‑profit, governmental, non‑governmental, et cetera?
>> JANE COFFIN: Yes. Non‑profit bottom up IXPs from a non‑commercial nature, commercial, governmental, others. There is a mix across the board we have found, and this was articulated well today in a workshop. Bottom‑up are the most sustainable and most successful; top‑down, it is difficult. It doesn't mean when there is a partnership with a government saying that is important for our economy, let's do it, it is the partnerships that are critical, working together with the technical community and the stakeholders.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much, Jane.
Now I would like to turn to Jac Kee who led the Best Practice Forum on Countering Abuse Against Women Online, a very successful session this morning. It was absolutely on fire.
If you could share a few thoughts, a few findings from the groups and ideas for the future before we move to the conclusion with Vint.
Please.
>> JAC KEE: This is the first year of the BPF. We spent nine months gathering a community of stakeholders through a mix methodology of talking about the issue of online abuse and gender based violence.
We had virtual meetings, we had used open and digital platforms, survey, receiving input from 56 respondents from 25 countries, case studies from different countries, from individuals, multistakeholder communities and a contention multimedia campaign.
We produced a document. I won't go into it, but I want to look at some things specific in the production of the document covering the topic of the definition, the underlying factor, the impact, the consequences to individuals, communities, some emerging responses, solutions, strategies, we're not good or best yet, we're at the moment of emerging. Looking at public sector, private sector, community led initiatives and intergovernmental initiatives facilitating multistakeholder participation. I want to share some of the related insights, the question of access, because of the focus there.
If you can just bear with me, I'll have to read, I hope that's okay.
Although great strides were made to improve around the world, this has resulted in the increased use of technology to infringe Human Rights online, reducing the Internet's potential for development. This includes the increasingly recognized and documented issue of online abuse and gender based violence which is the focus of this work.
Online abuse and gender based violence is understand as linked to Human Rights and the violence broadly which is a manifestation of correlations between inequality between women and men leading to discrimination again women by men and the prevention of the full advancement of the women rides. This is from the declaration.
In addition to existing structural inequality and nondiscriminatory and the decision making over the technology development are all factors that are playing a part in the manifest takings online and through the use of ICTs, this is disproportionately affect women on online interactions. Online abuse and gender‑based violence can limit women's ability to take advantage of the opportunities that ICTs provide for the full realization of the women's Human Rights and access to exacerbate the gender digital gap and violate Human Rights and reproduce and reconfirm gender stereotype. It prevents women to access justice and online and off line and lack of effective, timely remedies to address the issue and obstacles faced in collecting evidence related to them.
It also effected and impacted women in different ways depending on the context and intersectional factor, age, income, sexuality, this is where access gaps play a role. For example, women in rural contexts face multiple challenges in terms of access to the Internet, including access to available, affordable infrastructure, importantly different gender norms applying with who is prioritized for using the technology and the existing disparity on income and neutrality.
As a result, digital device effect women more than men in rural context and further women in rural context may be subjected to greater social and cultural surveillance that can result in far greater impact and harm in incidents of online abuse and violence.
When compounded with existing gap in access to and control over technology, in also significantly impacts the capacity to take action and to access redress.
Because the root cause of online abuse and gender based violence is discrimination and inequality it is impossible to address this without also addressing the access gap on the basis of gender. It begins by locating the gap within social, cultural, economic and political context.
Conversely, it is impossible to address gender disparity in access to participation in and decision making over Internet development and governance without addressing the issue of online violence.
Online abuse and gender based violence. We had a good discussion in the workshop this morning. We looked at in terms of the challenge of the definitions, how do you actually pin this down, we looked at the tensions between freedom of expression, anonymity with the need to look at this issue and the measures needed and the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders and this included a range of practices from digital literacy and awareness raising to better understanding and balling of the different rights and interests to utilizing the existing law and more effective ways to greater commitment by Human Rights standards and the collective creation of better standards and behavior and communication ethics. There is no simple solution to this complex and changing issue. Different sectors, actor, stakeholders, they need to come together to understand, conduct more research, collect data and develop solutions in a way that's transparent, that's consul active of users, including the Civil Society and participatory that could respond to the issue to provide access to justice, redress, remedy to those that face them. As well as to develop a free, open Internet that enables, promotes, respects the Human Rights of all, including the Human Rights of women.
So, some recommendations specifically to the BPF is that there was really a recognition in seeing the value of the BPF, the facilitating of the multistakeholder conversations, this topic is key, we're seeing a lot more interest and recognition that we really need to look at this now and it requires the kind of participation, various different stakeholders and the BPF is a good vehicle to kind of ‑‑ good and timely to facilitate this to some extent, there was a need to continue the work, but the focus on looking at good practices in solutions and responses.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much. Thank you for offering as well some options for the future for the way forward.
You wanted to add a few words, please.
>> SUBI CHATUVERDI: Thank you.
Thank you jack, Andre, the entire community to make sure that this BPF actualized. When we started out two years ago it was a response to paragraph 35 of the Tunis Agenda to look at IGF and to look at intersessional work and how it is that we can create value for all stakeholders, be it women and youth. I want to briefly respond to the question first that was raised earlier about how we can amplify youth participation by this young gentleman behind me.
It is important that you are here. It is important that you are speaking with us at this table and it is important that you are asking the questions. Both when it comes to women pain youth and marginalized communities, being there at the decision making table, so when we're Connecting the Next Billion, connecting them is the first step, when we started out with the BFF, as key issue to look at, problem definition and was to look at violence and what happens when you bring young girls, young women online and then they are in an environment where there is a lot of online violence and abuse. Do they come back to that environment? What is it that we can do in terms of affirmative action as a community? Why is it that this is not just a gender based issue, why is this not just a Human Rights, a women issue, when we talk about the robustness of the Internet, the first thing we try to do was also to bring in stakeholders from across communities to look at how is it that each of them could contribute, whether access to legal recourse, whether it is access to technology, and what is it that we could do in each of our country experiences.
Jack mentioned that there were examples taken from state interventions, examples from different countries where they had different experiences. I strongly urge all of you to go back and visit the BPF website and to look at the fantastic document that's been produced and with the hope that we'll be able to make this document a constant, where we will look at more Best Practices, good practices, and to keep adding to the work that's already happened.
Also to afflict the complacent who believe that there is no issue, there is no problem. One of the biggest successes is to mainstream the issue and to clearly create more awareness about the challenges that occur when we bring young people online, whether it is bad, legally framed laws which look at mitigating unsolicited communication but end up sending young women to jail for posting content which is constitutionally valid.
The kind of challenges that you would not imagine that are keeping people from getting connected and this is also with what happens off line in developing countries and emerging economies, the same kind of behavior exerts online.
The kind of way forward we're looking at is constant engagement and more solutions and also engagement from across stakeholder groups.
Thank you for your participation.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
Do we have questions from panelists, from the floor? Any reactions? Comments?
Please.
>> WOUT DENATRIS: I wanted to talk about the process. I think we had six excellent examples of how BPFs can work, but I would like to stress that instead what happened last year, is that we ‑‑ I think I speak for many, that we have an evaluation of the internal process also. I think there are a few points that could be better and we all agree on that sort of. That's not to discuss here, but not to forget it when the MAG comes together again and we have the chance to discuss the process of the whole BPF.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
I think definitely the question of the methodology, the continuously fine‑tuning it year after year, it is critical, a related issue, of course, is the resources, the resources of the IGF Secretariat, the experts such as those that have contributed, making this possible, that we have the resources to continue intersessional activities.
Any ‑‑ yes, please, on the right. Introduce yourself.
>> JAN: Thank you. I'm Jan, and I work with APC.
I'd like to commend the IGF for undertaking the process of this particular Best Practice forum. I think six years ago when trying to have these conversations they really didn't happen at all. It is great to see not only within the space here, but the number of workshops which are really addressing this issue, not narrowly looking at online abuse but also looking at the intersections with other kinds of issues.
Just the last point in terms of the process, I think it also will be important to look to see at how intersessional work can be more permanent within regional IGFs because that's a value of this kind of work to bring regional specificity so that we can all develop regional specific responses.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you.
Another question?
>> ARSENE TUNGALI BAGUMA: Thank you so much.
I'm an IGF ISOC member to the IGF. I'm glad to be here today.
A quick comment on the Best Practice forum on women and online violences. I would like to just say there is a lot going on in Africa especially from where I am from, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the same issue of women's participation and women's access to the same privileges as men, it is still going on in Africa. When talking about object line abuse, there is an issue for women to access first education and women are not accessing the education, they're not able to access or to even think of being digitally literate. Those are the things that I keep on ‑‑ that women are facing violences.
If your organizations, if the people, if they can keep on encouraging women to have access to education women participating as well on all of those heavy access to everything that's men not having access to, that can help to reduce the violences offline and online.
Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you.
I think we'll have the leaders perhaps react to that very quickly and then Vint will kindly conclude the session before he has to disappear unfortunately.
Would you like to react to the comments?
>> JAC KEE: I couldn't agree with you more.
I think that's exactly what we were also finding, that you really need to locate it within existing inequalities and how technology play as role. It really is looking at the interrelation between how technology can actually empower or disempower and either address discrimination or sort of exacerbate them.
Different contexts, I think ‑‑ I could go on and talk about about ‑‑ I guess a lot of different cases and experiences. Yeah. I really appreciate you bringing that point up.
Thank you very much.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much.
Jack, Subi, all of you, all that have worked on this very important piece.
I would like to ask ‑‑ we really have ‑‑ I'm very sorry. We have to wrap up.
I would ask Vint to help us conclude the session with a few thoughts about Connecting the Next Billion, of course. The different themes we heard about that feed into the priority Connecting the Next Billion and also the role of the IGF in reaching the targets. Please.
>> VINT CERF: Thank you. I do have very little time.
Let me try to summarize a few things.
I'm getting feedback. Sorry.
I need to ‑‑ yeah.
All right. Now I'm back online.
First of all, the discussion leads me to think that we have mislabeled this forum, it should be the Internet stewardship forum, everything you talked about it seems to me has a great deal to with stewardship and making the Internet continue to be a constructive environment for everyone.
Second, I want to observe that this notion of Connecting the Next Billion is really a funny concept. It is as if you were saying we're only going to connect the next billion in a certain location or something. This is a distributed connection and it means that the next billion will be coming from many, many different parts of the world and they'll be connected by many different means. So none of this is uniform, and it is a continuous kind of process. We're aided in this effort by the fact that technology keeps changing and costs keep coming down, the speeds keep going up. The consequence of that, it is that everyone, not just the next billion but all of the billions that are already online should encounter an extremely useful experience in the Internet environment.
The question on emerging trends, it should be obvious by now that we're seeing more wireless availability, more speed, more frequencies available, satellites and the like. In fact, outside, I hope you'll visit the O3B Networks tent to see what's possible with the lower cost and satellites, we have 400 megabits down.
The point of literacy, it is vital. When we talk about infrastructure, it is not about the technology, but all of the things that make the Internet useful, which includes access to electricity among other things.
The problem of illiteracy must be overcome, and only will be overcome by education as will many other deficiencies.
Accessibility, it was what brought up many times, it is a broad topic. Getting access to the Internet if you have a disability is a big challenge and that's partly a technological problem. Some of what we heard about particularly the last item on violence against women, this is a societal problem, this is not a technology problem. This is a societal problem and changing societies is something that's hard to do, it is vital, but it is not just a matter of throwing a switch or adding a new piece of software somewhere.
In terms of catalyzing the effort that's already gone on, the notion of intersessional work is fundamental, it is vital. We can't get enough done if we only meet once a year. I want to congratulate the groups that have been making it possible to make progress in between these annual meetings. I think we should be thinking also about the regional and national IGF meetings which have sprung up on their own as another source of energy and ideas and initiative.
In terms of what the IGF can do, in this particular group, what they can do, in helping to move forward on making Internet available and useful for everyone, one is to work on framing the issues, the challenges which you have done admirably with these six topics. Let me ask to you do one more thing, you cannot understand the problems and you cannot understand the solutions until you understand the incentives of the parties who must act in order to solve the problems.
So spend some time analyzing the incentives, the lack thereof for parties who have to decide to do something whether it is deploying IPv6, finding business model for deploying new technology for access, whether it is tackling the societal issues that have already been alluded to, analyze the incentives and find ways to create incentives to get the outcomes that you're looking for.
Reporting, this is something that's vital. What works and why? You must not skip the why part. If you report to someone this worked here it may not work there unless the conditions happened to be conducive. We must understand why things work so that we know when to adopt these suggestions and when to consider alternatives.
There is something that I had been told about today having to do with legal frameworks to allow various things to happen, specifically with regard to law enforcement and for improving electronic commerce and the like, there are so many different rules and so many different countries that all of us are faced with, there is nothing uniform about the world that we live in, nothing uniform about the Internet's environment, understanding what the variations are in legal frameworks all around the world can turn out to be a very, very useful tool for figuring out what each company, for example, can do in each country in order to forward the objective of making the Internet useful.
The idea of codifying what the rules are in various places, just so people can know what is allowed, what's not, it is another example of useful data gathering.
Let me just finish up by saying that this particular effort is possibly the most constructive one I have seen come out of the IGF in the ten years of IGF's existence. I hope that you will continue this work between now and the next time we meet in Mexico and that you will let all of us know what we can do to contribute to this effort.
Thank you.
>> H.E. BENEDICTO FONSECA: Thank you.
I would like to thank all of you, particularly Robert, Vint, the leaders of the Best Practice forum, all that contributed to this document. This is a collective work, one that should continue and we're encouraged and challenged by the presentations that were made and I think one of the topics to be discussed in preparation for Mexico, for the Mexico meeting. It is the streams of work that should be continued, that's strengthened and to identify other streams of work that should also be embedded in order to improve the output that we're assigning to the world out of this IGF.
Thank you very much.
I declare this session closed.
Thank you.
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