IGF 2019 – Day 3 – Convention Hall II – Emerging technologies and their interfaces with inclusion, security and human ‎rights (NRIs Perspectives)

>> ANJA GENGO:  Good morning, everyone.  I advise you take the headsets because some of the speakers will be speaking other languages than English so if you don't understand all 6 languages, you may want a headset.

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.  I believe we all have taken our seats and we can officially start.  My name is Anja Gengo.  I work for the IGF Secretariat and one of my primary responsibilities there is to have a pleasure to work with now more than 120 National, Regional and Youth IGFs, or as we call them shortly, the NRIs.  The NRIs work throughout the year on a number of objectives, one of them is the organization of the main session every year since 2016.  I have to apologize for my voice.  I don't sound very pleasant this morning but at least I project something this morning.

And I don't think you will be listening to my voice mostly, the majority of the colleagues here will be taking the time until 11:00 this morning.

I have a pleasure that next to me is my online Co‑Moderator Ms. Lianna Galstyan from the Armenian IGF and the Southeastern European IGF.

We are also very thankful for the help of our two Rapporteurs, helping to write the report of this very complex session.  I can tell that in advance given the number of speakers and the differences on the economics that exist across countries and regions.

Mr. Tracy Hackshaw from Trinidad and Tobago IGF and Mr. Joshua Joshua from the West African Youth IGF on my right side will be helping us to report on this session of course in communication and in agreement with all the session organizers of this session.

I have to recognize also a very unfortunate fact this morning.  As you know, throughout the year we have endorsed two Co‑Moderators for this session.  One of me and another one was Ms. Marilyn Cade.  I think majority of you probably know Ms. Cade.  She has been a co‑coordinator of the National U.S. IGF, but aside of that, during her time on the MAG, she was helping to strengthen the network with its integrated success.  Unfortunately, Marilyn couldn't join us today due to health issues, but she is streaming us, and we all are wishing her a very speedy recovery.

But that's why I'm kind of relying on my online Moderator mostly and of course on all the speakers.  Before we start the formal part of this session, which are the exchanges on the topic of emerging technologies, I would like just very, very briefly to tell you who are the NRIs in case there are those who are not familiar with the concept on National and Regional IGFs.  I hope you can see the presentation that's just behind me.  And if we go in the next slide, maybe the most simple wording for all is that the NRIs are the IGFs organized all around the world.  We are very happy we have a network of more than 120 NRIs that are multistakeholder, bottom up, open, transparent, non‑commercial, inclusive of course, in organizing their processes on Internet Governance, but also the annual meeting of their National and Regional IGFs, just like the global IGF.

So as I said, we have actually 122 as of recently recognized NRIs with more than 87 countries having successfully running their National IGFs, 17 Regional IGFs, 17 Youth IGFs which are extremely important to our ecosystem, and three more countries that we are hoping by the end of December to have also joining our network.

On the map that's shown ‑‑ maybe we can go to the NRIs map showing the geographic view of the NRIs ‑‑ a well-balanced spread that is giving confidence to the IGF that we're in a position to address the Internet Governance issues that are very different across countries and regions very successfully, and we are very proud to have a very good communication and collaboration with all the NRIs that are completely independent.  They have their autonomy but there's a good awareness on all sides that if we don't work together, we cannot achieve a lot.

With that, I would like to go back then to the topic of this session and formally start this session.  The preparation for these sessions started shortly after the 13th IGF in Paris.  Through a bottom‑up process, all NRIs have identified the topic of emerging technologies to be of interest to everyone and that is what we are addressing today.

Especially we are looking at the interfaces of emerging technologies on country and Region with inclusion, security and human rights.

I am now going to ask firstly a few of the NRI colleagues to help us to set the stage and make us all aware how the emerging technologies are not evenly spread and present in all countries and regions, how the threats and concerns that we have are different, and how the digital divide is very much present when it comes to the application and utilization of emerging technologies.  Every single NRI working in the past 10, 11 months, in actively preparing this session, has submitted a written case study and put specifically for this session, because the goal of this session is to actually show that the emerging technologies are supposed to serve the people and that in some parts of the country, they're already serving very successfully people making a radical transformation of their social, economical, cultural even political development.  Through concrete case studies we will see how the emerging technologies are impacting people, not exclusive groups but everyone that have access to it.

So with that, I would like to storm with probably one of the part of the world that is benefiting now rapidly from introducing the access connecting more and more countries and with that bringing you technologies which is the African Continent.  We are having today with us Mr. Makane Faye that's coordinating the African IGF.

I will ask Makane to reflect on the diversity of the African Continent and how emerging technologies are critical in some parts for improving basic living conditions.  Makane, can we hear a word from you?

>> MAKANE FAYE:  Everyone, thank you, Anja for giving the floor.  I'm giving an example from the African IGF which was held in Chad in September 2019, about making available Internet coordinated through Internet.  This project was presented by Chad according to the monitoring program report released by UNICEF and WHO to monitor the SDG targets, 2 billion, 200 million people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services.  This relates to 80 countries in the world and 49% of the world population.  There's a lack of access to clean water compounded by water related diseases like cholera, hepatitis, and typhus.  For Chad alone, 62% of the population drinks surface water or water from the well.  To overcome the situation a project on access to drinkable water using emerging technologies was put in place and the project consists of putting in place a central server powered by solar energy in Chad, using ultrasound equipment and drones to Gage the water quality, the findings with low power wide area data network and cloud, analysis of the findings from the server and online consultation and dissemination of the results.

The main objective of the project is to assist the Government, improve the planning process to add building and digging water wells and drillings and dams.  Educate, share information, and give everyone about good water, its availability and consumption, and reduce children deaths through bad water and related diseases.  Chad is being used as a testing zone and is proposed to expand the project in 2023 to other 5 African countries, in 2024 to another set of 6 African countries, in 2025 to another set of 6 African countries, and in 2026 to 4 countries of the Middle East and Central Asia.

The project information is available at afigf.africa web site.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Makane, thank you very much.  And I'm thanking you firstly for a very fascinating example but also with sticking with the agreed time, of speaking no more than 2.5 minutes and I'm going to ask all colleagues to just take care of that as well, although I'm also timing here.

Listening to Makane was very interesting, and you can see how the life of people has been transformed, something that many of us are taking for granted because we have access to clean water.  And I would like to now ask Jeff, I think he's with us from the Vanuatu IGF, to share the perspectives from this part of the world. 

Jeff, Vanuatu is a very small island, developing country, with beautiful nature and wonderful people for sure of around 280,000 inhabitants, and around more than 120 languages.  That number of languages can be very important for the utilization of Digital Technologies, local content and I would like to see what are the perspectives coming from the country?  And how do you see the application of emerging technologies in Vanuatu?

>> JEFF GARAE:  Thank you very much, Anja.  Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this session again.  As you've rightly said Vanuatu is a small Pacific Island country, very small population but I guess the challenge around that is the spread of island which is around 83 different Islands spread across Vanuatu and while emerging technologies is currently a buzzword for basically users, the Government organizations already facing challenges around the current use of technologies.

As it stands, Vanuatu, the first thing that has been the mainly installed or established is the e‑Government services and for emerging technologies we see the introduction of IoTs, user drones, blockchain and at times visiting services in terms of reality and augmented reality in the too field of medical and a bit of AI but those are very small.  At this stage, everything revolves around IoT for Vanuatu, and the use of drones mainly.

However, I'd like to touch a bit on the benefits, which is pretty much benefits around enhances business operations, or introduction of such technologies, and in a sense affordable technology, and business process and you can also say the unserved part of the Islands can actually gain technology service especially of mobile smartphones and also social media.  Social media has been a big part of enhancing services in the country, especially for farmers, and it has a big impact to the people of Vanuatu especially in the remote areas.

However, with benefits there are also challenges, and I guess the big one is for remote rural areas, emerging technologies can also be an overwhelming experience, or it comes with a wow factor.  And having said that, there are questions.  Due to how Vanuatu culture and the people of Vanuatu live, privacy is something that is of concern, and also like many other countries, security is a concern as well but I'd like to share a use case in terms of emerging technology which was recently done this year by an NGO, they've introduced blockchain, a service.  It is a joint initiative with the donor partners, the Australian Government.  They've introduced that for support service in terms of disaster recovery.  As you all know, Vanuatu is ranked number one in terms of disaster recovery and that service has been through two phases already.

The first one, cards were allocated to communities in Port Vila, the capital city outskirts, and it's up to around 40,000 vatu, $40 equivalent, that can be used in shops at a time of disaster recovery, and the second phase of that was used in other remote areas on the island of Tanna, which was done a month or two ago, and with such services, we see the both benefits and also the challenges around it, and that is something that for the country I guess in Government level or higher level it's something yet to be discussed and a lot of discussion has to go around that, especially there are existing policies and regulations but there are some gray areas, as well, which the country needs to focus on.  Thank you, I'll stop there.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Jeff.  From using the emerging technologies to getting clean water to resistance to natural disasters, I'd like to move now to completely another part of the world.  Let's go to Eastern Republic and see how is the situation in North Macedonia regarding the presence of emerging technologies.

>> PREDRAG TASEVSKI:  It's a great pleasure for us especially.  We are a very young Forum, and we are very young group established in 2017, and of course we are representing the Balkan Region.  Emerging technologies in Macedonia are very widespread, and the use of Internet is 70% around the nation.  Then also we have mostly people using the mobile phones or accessing like 80% which is quite big for such a small country.  Subsequently the emerging technology and interface are constantly growing in the country and for this reason we have established the IGF Macedonia, and the annual Internet Governance Forum event was first time introduced in 2017, with the main focus openly to discuss the Internet Governance issues between all stakeholders.

First annual event was addressing the digital identity and diplomacy, digitalization of governance services, cybersecurity methods, and presenting the first Macedonian Cybersecurity Center of Incident Response, MKD‑CIRT, copyrights, fake news and illiteracy.  The second in 2018 we discussed cybersecurity and trusted services by introducing three pillars, technical, academic and Government, and then later on, this year in October, we emphasized on governance Action Plan against spreading information followed by media society discussion, presenting the high availability of Internet connection research platform and cybersecurity, legal aspects and human rights.  On the whole we can see that Macedonian IGF plays an important role in the country by raising awareness and promoting a better understanding of Internet Governance among all stakeholders by highlighting the importance of human rights, access to technology and Internet, security and privacy.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Predrag, for bringing these very interesting perspectives especially the focus of North Macedonia is to protect their online end users.

After north Macedonia, I would like to for all of us to visit the Region of Latin America and the Caribbean and to go to the Dominican Republic, Federica is with us, to see how the Digital Technologies are impacting people in that country in that part of the world.  You have the floor.

>> FEDERICA TORTORELLA:  Okay.  Hi, everyone.

Good morning.  I'm going to speak in Spanish.  As a Representative of ISOC in the Dominican Republic, I have to say that the influence of the new technologies is strong in our countries.  One example, in traffic and transport, new technologies have been very important, and also for accessing new markets.  It's been mostly about the fact that in the past, taxi drivers offered a bad service and just took random taxi prices were just random.  That has changed with new technologies but it is still important to assess and analyze the situation properly to see how new technologies impact our lives socially for example and also what's important is to assess effects on vulnerable groups of society because of course these technologies can build a very good bridge, but they can also have negative effects.

One example, in our country, we made several efforts, because these ‑‑ there was little awareness of these technologies, not a very good understanding, and instead of getting us closer to each other, and instead of fully benefiting from the advantages of new technologies, we often have been rather divided by technology.

I'm talking about very, very high taxes on telecommunications.  Today, we are working on reducing this kind of tax.

We decided that this kind of high tax, we found that this high tax keeps the poorer part of the populations off the Internet and this is why we've been supporting several projects for two years.  So we are getting closer to our objectives.  We want to establish a local group and we are mostly working on digital literacy, because new technologies are very important in education, in this day and age.  But we also know that we of course have to talk about technology but also address other issues, connectivity is not ‑‑ cannot always be taken for granted in our country especially in more rural regions so we can work together with the regions really.  We need to make our Government understand that we live in a new modern reality now.  This is a development that we have to make good use of, because it is a positive development for us, especially as a developing country.  Thank you very much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Interesting inputs from the Dominican Republic.  Just following what Federica said very interesting examples but you mentioned something important we're not equal not on a local level, on the level of a country in terms of having access to technologies and some are underrepresented and unrepresented.  But not in just technologies, in basic living conditions we're not even and I would like to turn to the Italian IGF to see how are they using the Digital Technologies to improve and balance having access to basic living conditions in the country for everyone.

>> ANNA CARBONE:  Good morning, and thank you very much for the opportunity to talk in this meeting, very real event for our National community to be here and represent this very basic problem, which is the availability of food to everyone in every country, even the let's say the highly developed countries.  We can see also in a very rich city like Berlin that there are many people around us asking for food.  I'm not staying in this hotel.  I'm in the Alexanderplatz, and every morning I travel here I can see someone asking for something, so distribution of natural resources is a main point, and this was addressed by the African National IGF, water is another important resource, and food is coming from our natural resource as well and is very related to the availability of water and I'm here in particular to report the results of our National community, the Italian, that met one month ago and to one specific issue that we discussed was how the ICT technologies and the emerging technologies might help to improve the distribution and reducing the imbalance of food, because we are in a very let's say unpleasant situation where more people are without food, basic food, and other people waste food.  This is a situation quite common all over the world.

So how to improve the distribution of the food supply chain, this is a very important point, because food supply chain is a very complex distribution line.  So over the chain we must ensure that we can get secure and safe food, and we can also ensure worker rights.  Talking for example for the conditions of the workers in our fields, this is a problem for every country, not only for Italy.

And other security issues are coming with new technology, also.  You may also know that we have surrounding our cities distributing foods to our home so the condition of these workers are very insecure.  Probably in some cases they are also exploited.  They are not paid ‑‑ they are not provided with security and insurance rights, as it should be the case.

So in our country, we have a specific initiatives trying to address security and insurance issues, and also our Social Security institutions, the Governmental ones, are issuing decrees in this direction, and working at creating a National platform for the management of the worker rights in this specific field.

So we have the technologies, blockchain technologies, artificial intelligence, to manage the distribution of chain, but we also need to have the right regulation in order to avoid that imbalance and insecure working conditions that are in place, despite the openness and accessibility of the digital platform, so this is an aspect that is very, very understood and many people are working at the Governmental level, and so we hope ‑‑ and we are probably, as we know, the first country that is providing a law between the National institution and the local institution, the cities, in order to guarantee the security of the worker and the equal distribution of rights.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Professor Anna, for these very interesting examples coming from a country that's considered to be developed, but still trying to respond to bringing the basic living conditions be equal for everyone.

In addition to these very interesting examples, I would like us to go back to the Latin American Region and to one of the biggest countries globally speaking but also for that Region, to Brazil, to see how they are addressing primarily the use of artificial intelligence in the interconnected systems.  José Luiz is luckily with us today and he will be telling us more about the nature of the discussions happening at the Brazilian IGF in this regard.

>> JOSÉ LUIZ RIBEIRO FILHO:  Hello.  Good morning, everyone.  Thank you, Anja, for inviting us, and introducing.  The Brazilian IGF is held annually since 2011, in the last two years the Forum held discussions on various themes and tracks such as privacy and Data Protection, infrastructure and connectivity, Internet Governance, ecosystem, multistakeholderism, Internet jurisdiction, cybersecurity, education and Capacity Development, human rights, among several others.  There were activities approaching the definition of principles and ethical guidelines for AI systems and also dealing with facial recognition technologies and practice.  Ethical guidelines and principles for those technologies are hot topics in Brazil given that there are ongoing actions within the Brazilian Congress and the judiciary regarding those issues, as there are several concerns related to AI data collection, analysis and processing which may conflict with privacy and Data Protection safeguards.

Well-known Brazilian research institutions and groups have been studying the effects of artificial intelligence in Web based systems with the primary goal of categorizing human beings such as regular image seeking online services or even tools used by police institutions to fight crime and how these type of systems can impact social interactions in terms of diversity and respect to minorities.  Additionally as crucial discussion topic with broader effects for society in general the use of artificial intelligence in communication and social interaction systems have been deemed responsible for influencing Democratic processes especially National elections, by the spread of fake news and information.  Multiple events and public debate along with the Brazilian IGF, IGF workshops have been held in the country in the last two years as a result of a general fear of biased consequences in Democratic processes.

The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, CGI.VR for example has fostered multistakeholder dialogues and sponsored specific activities that gathered multiple experts and produced concrete outcomes that have been supporting public debate and specific actions by the Brazilian Congress and the Government in policymaking.  It's worth noting a public controversy related to the use of facial recognition by companies in some public services in Brazil.  There are different stakeholders undertaking measures in the country with the aim of upholding the rights of Brazilian citizens with regards to the use of those technologies in diverse social contexts.  For example there are consumer protection organizations explicitly using companies that deployed facial recognition technologies potentially disregarding privacy and other citizens’ rights in different areas such as transportation, aviation.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much for these interesting inputs bringing to these session.  Sometimes indeed the emerging technologies when they take a massive turn are quicker than us and having that kind of scientific research approach to researching and seeing what actually people see as a concern, how are they applied is very important to for seeing other consequences that can come in the future.  The Brazilian example is a very good practice for all of us to follow.  With that I would like to move further north, the American Continent and Nancy from the Canadian IGF is luckily with us so we'd like to ask Nancy to tell us more about the priorities regarding the emerging technologies for the communities of Canadian IGF.

>> NANCY CARTER:  Thank you.  Good morning.  My name is Nancy Carter, and I have the privilege of Chairing the Steering Committee.  One of our priorities in 2019 was responding to security and privacy concerns around consumer Internet of Things, or IoT devices.  The international data corporation estimates that in Canada, we now have more than 114 million installed autonomous intelligent and embedded systems, or IoT devices and this number grows daily.  It equates to 3 IoT devices for every adult and child in the country.  The promise of opportunities related to IoT devices and the Big Data that they produce is very real.  However, these opportunities and conveniences come with serious risks.

For devices, security or privacy, if it's included, is often designed in after the fact.  On the user front, there's no way for users to differentiate between secure devices and insecure ones.  Finally, security weaknesses can have severe consequences.  Bad actors can compromise sensitive user data, and perpetrate harm.  These exploitations pose a real threat to users and to the Internet as a whole.

In Canada, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority has been active with the community in developing a new secure home network framework to protect or IoT devices from attacking the Internet, and conversely to protect or IoT devices from Internet and home attacks.  Building on that, the inaugural 2019 Canadian Internet Governance Forum engaged the community with a Panel Session that focused on creating effective security standards with consistent labeling for or IoT devices.

The panel discussed the creation of or IoT standards and labels to define clear security and privacy capabilities and features for or IoT manufacturers.  To support user adoption, the panel emphasized the importance of plain language and multilingual educational initiatives, global harmonization and increased manufacturer transparency.  Using a pan Canadian multistakeholder approach a separate initiative convened by The Internet Society analyzed the challenges in enhancing or IoT security posed by consumer or IoT devices and they emerged with four broad recommendations.

Focus on international standards.

Improve network resiliency.

Create consumer‑friendly labels.

And take a multistakeholder approach to consumer education.

In order to carry out the recommendations of this group, an implementation Working Group was formed and will be leveraged to coordinate and contribute to several initiatives, including Canadian participation in international or IoT security initiatives.  The conclusion from the Canadian IGF's perspective?  Multistakeholder efforts like the Canadian IGF and the Canadian multistakeholder process on or IoT security are vital to improving consumer or IoT privacy and security.

Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much firstly for speaking about a standards which are extremely necessary but also about the multistakeholder approach in approaching the or IoTs and how they should serve people and not the other way around.

With that, listening from the Canadian IGF, I would like for us to go back to the Asian Continent.  I have the pleasure to have Mr. Eun Chang Choi with us from the South Korean IGF that are going to tell us what are the priorities for South Korea in terms of the utilization of emerging technologies.

>> EUN CHANG CHOI:  It's a pleasure to be here in terms of emerging technology development.  As one of the most tax heavy countries of the world, South Korea already has a lot of effort to enhance security and the human rights protection on the same time we develop emerging technologies.  In January of 2019, South Korea Government announced National plan to foster data driven AI economy.  This is a very important technology.  The future Region of the safety country that makes the most of the value of data and AI together to prepare the future impact of AI South Korea has three approaches. 

First of all, we launched AI open innovation hub.  This is integrated platform to provide the open data which is anonymized and synonymized.  This is very important resources for AI tech companies and software companies and any other startups.  And secondly, as a part of the Big Data platform center construction process, a wide range of Government Department agencies together with municipal Government continued to disclose public data for the public use.  Secondly, so open data Plaza and public data centers after data analyzing process is also one of the steps we made.  Therefore ‑‑ violence, medical, weather and all together provide for the public use.

But on the same time, Government try to draft amendment of the data privacy law which we try to achieve the decision of GDPR from European countries.  This is very important ‑‑ this is really important standard to protect personal data in terms of AI development.

While the ecosystem depends heavily on valuable data personal privacy regulations are very important.  South Korea seek to strike a balance between data privacy and ensuring value of data.  The South Korean Government provide standard on deidentification of personal data.  This is technology standard, this is law.  Every data processor should satisfy this.  This is asked from the South Korea, this is the way we reflect the voices from the multistakeholders.

And on the flip side emerging technologies are producing enormous security risk.  Businesses face unpleasant volume, in order to address growing of the cyberattacks, the President east office drawn on National cybersecurity strategy the end of last year.  This provides laws that are safe and a more secure online environment.  The Government has continued to foster cyberdefense capability by building a system to detect response to cyberattack in real time.  This is a process you actually need private‑public partnership essentially.

To this end, Korea has invested substantial budget of developing state of the art AI best technology to Big Data analysis and the very interesting part of South Korea is South Korea's Internet Security Agency already developed AI system to detect malicious attack on a real time basis.  This is very useful and we disseminate this tool to the University level and college level and opened an Academy to share its best practices.  This is one of the examples that we already make most of AI technology to detect cybersecurity attack.  In the same vein, South Korean Kr‑IGF already focused on this issue of sustainable Internet.  And this year's theme of the Kr‑IGF was sustainable Internet, governing together, and to address a lot of issues emerging from emerging technologies, we addressed malicious use of cybersecurity and responses and cybersecurity and Democratic governance and the economy, in post‑industrial revolution and tutorial session also included AI application and ethics of Government of AI which I delivered in front of people.

And this is our portion of South Korea and South Korean Government do many things to cover the issues of the emerging technology, also in the same time Kr‑IGF covered precise optimization about emerging technologies.  This is how we are.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Eun Chang, for bringing also these important questions.  I think it can relate also to the Macedonian IGF input focused on cybersecurity and safety for the country and the open data for sure will stay for us for a long time to be addressed by the multistakeholder communities.

This segment will be concluded by the very last but of course not the least input coming from the Latin American Region, from the Colombian IGF, Carolina is with us.  I know you invested efforts in increasing the Internet penetration through legally reforming the ICT sector in the country, and we would like to see what role the emerging technologies played in that action.

>> CAROLINA BOTERO:  Thank you very much, and thank you very much for the invitation.  I am very glad to be here on behalf of the IGF community in Colombia.  We did our fora last October, and to report back we would like to ‑‑ we choose the issues of connectivity, inclusion, specifically on the topics of community networks.

All the actors in Colombia from a multistakeholder perspective agreed that inclusion is a key topic and because of the penetration of Internet has reached over 50% of the population in Colombia, the digital divide is centered mostly now in virality and effects mostly or more, women and ethnic minorities.  Therefore it's an important social problem to address.

Because of this last year, the Ministry of ICT presented a legal reform on ICT that has as a key address issue to deal with the digital divide, with the model of facilitating commercial connectivity.  This was very well received by ISPs and private sector.  Still those community networks were working in the Region trying to address from the last mile in a bottom‑up approach.  Connectivity issues were worried that this legal frame was not facilitating the access, direct access, of these communities to the spectrum.  Therefore, community networks gathered together and started a campaign, an advocate campaign, to be included in the law.

Needless to say, in these fora, that network communities are key actors from a bottom‑up perspective, and their connectivity they can provide is facilitated by emerging technologies that are now accessible to anybody.  However, there is a point where they need access to the spectrum, and this can only be facilitated by law.  I'm not going to go in deep on the model that it facilitates through network communities, but I would just highlight that Latin America has had a very successful history of bridging the digital divide through these kinds of models.

The advocate campaign was not successful completely, because we did not manage to make the way into the law for an express mention of the communities, nor we have currently direct access, autonomous and direct access to the spectrum.  Still the campaign was able to be civilize the problem, the legal aspect, and both Government, the Congress and even private sector acknowledged the need for this direct access for the community networks, and opened a small window in the law that had facilitated finally a pilot that is being deployed by Civil Society and Government for a mobile community network in a very far‑away, rural Colombia.  Apart from this and because we were ‑‑ we are worried that this knowledge should be broader, we started a demand to ask the court for this recognition through addressing an unconstitutionality of the law.  We in Colombia believe that if the court decides on this, we will have an important and broader recognition of communities as important actors, bottom‑up in connectivity, and this case can be a way of seeing this problem from a multistakeholder perspective that allows several and different approaches to the inclusion problem.  Thank you very much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Carolina, thank you very much, and we are looking forward to actually see the final outcomes in terms of connected people in Colombia at the end of the time line of this interesting project.  Thank you very much.

With this, we are concluding this first Section of the session.  As said at the beginning the purpose of this Section in agreement with all the NRIs was to show case to all of you how emerging technologies are serving people in various countries and regions, and how priorities are completely different.  So you've seen while in some parts of the world we are using emerging technologies to bring clean water or to make food affordable to everyone, in other parts of the world on the other side of the planet we're using it to combat, hurricanes, tsunamis and other natural disasters while in other parts we're using the AI to increase first of all the Internet penetration connect people especially focusing on vulnerable groups and people living in rural areas where the infrastructure is still very expensive to bring in.

But those are still very expensive ‑‑ those are still very encouraging examples, because this means that the multistakeholder communities in more than 90 countries, 17 regions organizing the National and Regional IGFs have not just the awareness about the importance of the emerging technologies to transform our societies in a positive way, but also that they're taking concrete actions to do that in a multistakeholder manner.  And I think that's excellent and the progress is promising for the application of emerging technologies to grow across regions.  Joshua and Tracy, I hope you're catching up with the notes.  This has been quite a complex discussion and we're going to make it even more complex in the second Section of this session because we're opening now the floor.

All of you coming from certain parts of the world are most welcome to tell us how the emerging technologies are being used in the companies, organizations where you work, in your cities, in your countries, in your regions.  I was going to say that I will prioritize the inputs that are coming from the NRIs that have submitted written case studies that will be subject for a unique publication to be developed and finalized shortly after this session concludes at the IGF.

There are three standing microphones in the room for those that don't have these microphones, mobile microphones, or the desk microphones.  Whale you're preparing and thinking that you would like to take the floor, I'm going to kindly ask our colleagues from the Belarus IGF to briefly address the emerging technology topic discussed at just recently held National Belarus IGF and tell us in general what is the situation in the country and whether there are any concerns and threats present there for people.

>> HELEN BELSKAYA:  Thank you for letting Belarus IGF be part of this discussion.  As you said rightly the Belarus IGF was just 10 days prior to the global IGF and we focused not only on the emerging technologies but generally how technologies influence the inclusion and accessibility of data and information in our country.  Belarus is only starting the discussion of this topic how inclusion is perceived and what types of it exist.

Generally we talked about technological inclusion and language inclusion, and here are the main conclusions that we have after the Belarus IGF.  One of the first examined the main port partner is despite the rapid development of technologies in Belarus and Belarus ICT sector there is a noticeable gap between the technological development of the country and the level of inclusion of not only the Internet itself but also those technologies that provide the technological leap in the country.

Despite the existing state standard for the Governmental web site that include the compulsory version for visually impaired people business does not consider it necessary to create versions not only for the visually impaired people, but also for elderly people, which is making up to 30% of the Belarusian population.  Focusing on the positive impact of new technologies in digital inclusion and accessibility was one of the most important innovations of this year was the electronic population census, which became available due to the applying of the inter‑bank system of identification.  Millions of people had an opportunity to log into the electronic census with their passport data which were confirmed during the login and to complete census without leaving home and the last but not the least, the first step of the language inclusion which also was discussed during the Belarus IGF was made in 2015, when the National domain Bill was introduced in Belarus.  This makes Belarusian Internet segment more accessible environment for those who have difficulties with Latin symbols.  More and more significant projects choose the domain and the case of the census that have just talked about that use the site was one of the brightest example of the advantage of the domain of National language after four years of introducing the BL domain.  Thank you very much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Helen, thank you very much also for bringing inclusiveness as an important concept of the IGF and in that sense the importance of local content for the people in certain countries.

The U.S. is of course a very important geographically speaking but also politically speaking technologically speaking important part of the world and I would like to ask Melinda, the Co‑Chair of the IGF USA, to tell us more about what are currently the discussion priorities for the community of the U.S. in terms of the emerging technologies.

>> MELINDA CLEM:  Thank you, Anja.  At IGF USA we talk about emerging technologies pretty much every year.  We've had a strong focus in the last few years discussing the Internet of Things from the specific applications, the ethics and the security.  The emerging technology that's getting most of the attention right now throughout the United States is artificial intelligence.  We have today the applications are seen in the Financial Sector, the IT community, education, and throughout the specific Government technologies.

The federal government has issued a call to provide more insight and research into defining artificial intelligence.  That includes the core of:  What is it?  What does it actually do?  Where can it be most efficient?  And how you can apply it throughout the federal government?  The White House has also ‑‑ as part of a broader technology initiative, is encouraging the private sector to focus on things like ethics and safe deployment and security.

Today, the technology and academic stakeholders play the largest role, but it's very important that both Civil Society and Government all work collaboratively, particularly in the area of ethics.  We think that a couple of the areas that we need to have more stakeholder inclusion is representing all types of users, particularly the applications that affect both older populations as well as our youth.

So in our session, there was an acknowledgment for a need for more definition, more standards, but the conclusion was that this should be happening much like everything else does in the technology development in a multistakeholder process, rather than through additional legislation or any regulation.  And so that we have the public, private, and Civil Society groups coming together to collaborate, define standards, usage, and ethics.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Melinda, thank you very much and especially for bringing the concept of ethics in the application of the emerging technologies.  I would like to ask Lucien to maybe follow up on this.  The French IGF especially centralized the ethics in their discussions in the recently held ‑‑ well, recently, a few months ago ‑‑ held the French IGF.  Especially I'm referring to the important announcement of the President during the 13th IGF in Paris last year that also relates to the application of new Digital Technologies.  So, Lucien, can you just bring us a bit that concept here, especially refer to the standards in France, just to be able to compare it with the standards coming from the U.S.?

>> LUCIEN CASTEX:  Hi, everyone.  Thank you, Anja, for breaking that up.  Indeed, French IGF was held 4th of July, so this year.  We had a number of workshops, actually 12 workshops and a number of plenaries, and, well we decided to have four main tracks to allow and enable decision.

The first one was on the responsible digitalization following up President Macron and the last global IGF in Paris at UNESCO.  The second track was focusing on digital inclusion.  The third one was on data governance mirroring obviously, so the global IGF and the last one was between governance and regulation.

So basically, the idea is to follow up on international and French initiatives at global and local levels, we announced the Paris Call for security in cyberspace last year, at the global IGF and there is a number of new initiatives going on including the Christchurch Call of which France is a part, and terrorism.  We also had an initiative in France at the local level including a law on disinformation, fake news, during the elections and a law being discussed at this time on hate speech, so there is a number key concerns being discussed.  I'll focus on two.  The first one very quickly obviously is content regulation, as you may have guessed, and reflecting on that second one is artificial intelligence as it is used for content regulation, and broadly in the economy.

So on hate speech and also content regulation, while there is quite a debate in France to bringing all stakeholders to the table to be able to really discuss these issues as it is most likely problematic with human rights, there have been a number of discussions at the French level with the French Digital Council, with the French Commission, and this mainly focus on the use of artificial intelligence and automated algorithm to spot content and to obviously infringe free speech so this kind of debate is still ongoing in France and is having a number of global debates also.

That was one of the main topics for the French IGF.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Lucien, thank you, thank you very much for bringing the inputs.  I encourage everyone to actually read the final report of the French IGF which is very interesting.  It brings some even innovative concepts but also questions for all of us that I think just kind of adds to our concerns that we already have in terms of the human rights standards applied when we're speaking about the application of emerging technologies.

We already heard from the Southeastern part of Europe, thanks to the North Macedonian IGF and Predrag's excellent input, but then the issue with these emerging technologies that's actually a challenge for all of us is that even in local communities, as I said, there is a digital divide present.  It's always difficult to address everyone to make a Forum let's say or a process that's going to address concerns of everyone, those living in rural parts of the country, in urban parts of the country, those maybe that don't traditionally see themself in the role of discussant on Internet policy.

So we also need to raise awareness there.  Those maybe that don't know how to use the emerging technologies despite the fact that they have access to it, bringing the digital literacy there.  So with that, because that part of Europe is very interesting and diversified, we heard perspective from the Balkan Region but I would like to move outside of the Balkan Region and to ask for help from my colleagues from the Southeastern European IGF SEEDIG, just to give us a few inputs.  What is happening in that Region? 

I remember when we talked I know that the SEEDIG will be held in Moldova next year, and Moldova is an interesting country with a great startup community which is not that much common for other parts of the Region, so maybe you could just briefly reflect on that. 

>> SORINA TELEANU:  Thank you.  Good morning, everyone.  Thank you, Anja.  Indeed we have just announced our next annual meeting is going to be in Moldova, and we are actually broadly a Developing Region.  It's not like we score very high in rankings of developed countries around the world but, yes, we're making a step to supporting more Capacity Development activities around the Region and the choice for Moldova is part of those efforts.

Now, going back to the topic of today's discussion, emerging Digital Technologies, there was a question, there is a question, that we're also supposed to address today on how emerging technologies could support the engagement of vulnerable groups at the National and Regional level.

At SEEDIG this year, we had a discussion on accessibility, on accessible, available and affordable Digital Technologies for all, and I will just give you a few examples of specific cases that were presented and discussed at this session of how technologies have been used to support the inclusion of vulnerable groups.

And I'll try to be as fast as possible.

So there was a quite nice quote from someone at the session and I will just read it.  If for most people technology makes things easier, for People with Disabilities, technology makes things possible.  We think that was a very good reflection of what Digital Technologies can actually do for vulnerable groups and on this note there was an example given of an assistive technology that can improve accessibility.  Motivation Romania Foundation and Vodafone Romania Foundation managed to promote and introduce an app called EVA Facial Mouse.  Once installed on a mobile device, the app uses the device and incorporates the camera to track the movements of a user face and basically use it like a mouse so being able to use electronic communication device independently allowing users with disabilities to be empowered and better exercise their rights to information, education, privacy, online.

Sticking to Romania, there was an option a few years ago introduced by the National broadcasters allowing users to enable the captioning for news and other content being presented on the screens of their TVs and that was specifically beneficial for people with hearing impairments, and then of course we're all aware of YouTube, Netflix and other similar services captioning options as examples of good practices when it comes to providing accessibility for people with hearing impairments.

A few other examples were brought to light during our discussions of cases in which Persons with Disabilities managed to successfully advocate for their rights to access Digital Technologies or products.  For example in Georgia, and we have our colleagues here, a local NGO representing persons with visual impairments has sued the Ministry of Health for not making their web site accessible.  Not asking for financial retribution but rather trying to make sure the Government is paying attention to ensuring that digital products that it procures are accessible for Persons with Disabilities.

Maybe you, Chang, will follow up on that if there is more accessibility now.  Likewise in Turkey, student NGO advocated to enable students with visual impairments to take University exams in alternative ways, because initially such tests were standardized in written form and that's not really accessible for everyone.  Now thanks to these campaigns, students with hearing impairments are able to take the exams assisted by audio technology or through use of the Braille alphabet.  That's another achievement of initiatives and advocating for the rights of people.

And on that note, the message from our community and our discussion was that sometimes or most of the times we tend to ignore these kind of issues because we don't think beyond our own perspectives but for People with Disabilities, it is really important for all of us to look a bit more into what can be done to empower them and encourage them to use Digital Technologies because at the end of the day they do benefit everyone.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Sorina, for bringing perspectives from other countries we didn't hear from that you can see are very different.  I encourage you to read the messages from SEEDIG which are very concise and very interesting and following those messages also participated online listening to very vibrant discussions, I know the 5G was one of the hot topics and not all countries unfortunately have the same approach that either they have the National digital strategies that could help for that to implementation so I think probably when you meet in Moldova that's going to be again on the agenda so very much looking forward to interesting inputs.

So with this, I think we've heard from a lot inputs from the Eastern European parts of the world.  I think there is one online participant, is it, Anna, who would like to intervene?  Not for now. 

Then I'm going to turn to Lianna later for online participants to give them the floor, but I would like us now from Europe to move again to Latin America and Caribbean, a very interesting part of the world especially the Caribbean Region because of its geographic position.  A lot of small Island Countries which just are very challenging by their nature regarding the infrastructure, and in that very important for all of us, and maybe I would ask the Guatemala IGF, I don't know if Lia is here or somebody else.  You can use that standing ‑‑ yes, you can sit there, just to tell us Lia what are the priorities in Guatemala and how are the emerging technologies helping people there?

>> Remember that I am from Panama, not from Guatemala.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Let's then move to Panama and then I'll ask for Guatemala later.

>> I'm going to speak in Spanish because it's my mother tongue.

In 2019, we had the second edition of the Panama IGF.  This is an initiative that was founded in 2017, after we had hosted the IGF for Latin America and the Caribbean.  The main issues on our agenda, which issues that are very important for the people in Panama and in Central America throughout the Region, are as follows:  Privacy, protection.  We are located between Mexico and Colombia but we do not have any legislation that would be tailored to our current needs and we have a lot of security issues in our Region.  Our Government wants to resolve this by surveilling people so by deploying surveilling technology on a massive scale in all our countries and this is something that we find to be much too invasive and intrusive for our citizens' privacy.

Very often there's also a lack of knowledge on the part of citizens who are not aware of their rights, and the Government thinks that this could resolve all our problems, and this is why our IGF has focused on these issues, so data privacy biometrics, and also on raising awareness amongst the population, so that people should know that these are technologies and technological applications that should serve the people, not the other way around.

This is exactly what Federal Chancellor Merkel said in her opening speech of this IGF so these are our main priorities.  This is what we're thinking about so what do we want to do in order to make our cities, cities like Panama City, to Smart Cities, into Smart Cities, without attacking our citizens' privacy?  So Panama is in a strategic location between the two Americas, between North and South America.  And this Government and also the previous Governments have wanted to make us a technology hub for the Americas, but in order for this to actually happen, and in order to attract tech companies to Panama, we will have to meet certain requirements, not only fiscal requirements, that's already in place, but also at the level of public policies.

This is necessary in order to actually attract investment, and also raise the attractiveness of Panama and so far this has not been the case, which is why we are having a session which will be dedicated to exploring how these technologies with open up these opportunities while also protecting human rights so that the Internet can be more open and more secure.

In Panama, we still have 7 indigenous tribes.  We don't have that many indigenous people as Guatemala, for instance, but we want to make sure that these groups too have access to the Internet, and we are exploring measures that could be taken, so Internet Society is actually exploring this, so that we can take the Internet to these tribes, so that the Internet can be open, free and universal for all, including these groups.

This is how we want to give these people access to work and to a better quality of life, so this would be my summary of the issues that we have been debating in the Panama IGF.  Thank you very much, Anja, for your work that you've been doing all over this year.  Thank you very much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  ‑‑ just underline once again, I don't know if we have anyone from Guatemala IGF here.  It would be good to hear also since we're in that part of the world maybe to conclude on that.  But it seems not.

Then I'm thanking Lia a lot.  Maybe just to stay in the Region before we go back to Europe, and conclude this Section and then allow all of you to ask either questions to our colleagues or just share the inputs from your side, maybe Roberto from Bolivia IGF, you also hosted the Latin American IGF and maybe you could tell us in the country, because it's also geographically quite interesting, an interesting part of the world, to tell us more about the presence of emerging technologies, and maybe reflect a bit on the Latin American Region, because you hosted the Regional IGF very recently.  I was very ‑‑ I know the topic was discussed widely with several countries being represented there in a multistakeholder nature.  So it would be interesting to hear from you on that, as well.

>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA:  Thank you very much, Anja.  Well, actually, as you well said before, there are a lot of difference between one Region to another and one country to another, that's true, and in our cases I will say, in Bolivia, we're in the middle.  I will say that there are isolated efforts about facing the or IoT advances and artificial intelligence too, mostly based in the universities.  They are working a lot with different research projects.

And one of the things we wanted to do last year was to ‑‑ I mean, last year and this year, too, was to get together to all the different multistakeholders.  We arrange about 4 workshops, I'm talking about of the work that we made the Bolivian Chapter, and we worked with the regulator, the Bolivian regulator, the Telecommunications Vice Ministry, and a couple of universities so what we aimed to do by that time was to provide a draft in order to perform tests to or IoT devices, to provide a draft to give some sort of regulation that all of the sellers of these devices should comply.  That was the idea.

So I think that was a really good experience around that is going to allow us to work with the subject in the future.  The other thing that I think wasn't covered and I think that's another important in thing in terms of inclusion is as an emerging technology, this new 5G mobile technology.  Again, we are really far to get 5G implemented in our country, but we tried again to gather all the different Sectors in Bolivia.  We had a couple of meetings we invited to have their different points of view, and of course, we found out that we still have a lot of work to do regarding particularly spectrum proliferation in order to provide the bandwidth that this technology is going to need but again, it was another place to remember, as community, that we still have another technologies like the recent 4G that we're not taking advantage yet, as we should do, as a country, perhaps because of the pricing model that we still have that we need to change for the future, because that's going to support a lot the inclusion for the people that still is not connected in Bolivia, and I think the same happens in other regions and countries.

And about our Regional IGF, I think we also ‑‑ we didn't have several panels regarding to emerging technologies.  Most of them were related to private issues, as Lia said before.  There were indeed a panel talking about in general terms, all the innovations, actions that we're providing in the Region, and I think this subject has not been faced in general, because as we said before, we have different situations in our different countries about how we are dealing and how we are taking advantage of emerging technologies.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Roberto, for also bringing the overall perspective from the Latin America.  I think that it's important also for us to address the diversity in the market in terms of introducing the emerging technologies especially the 5G and the mobile access in that regards so maybe later we can also hear from other perspectives.  Thank you so much for queuing there.

I would like to if you agree maybe to just stand there and wait a few minutes, just to conclude with two, three very important inputs coming from mostly Eastern Republic, and with youth perspectives and then we are opening the floor for everyone.  We're still very good with timing.  We have around 40 minutes so I think we'll have plenty of time to hear from all of you.

So if you would then allow me, I'd quickly like to ask, actually before I move to Armenia, Youth Ukrainian IGF and Russian IGF to kindly is if anyone from Ecuador IGF is here.  That's you, perfect.  Maybe you could follow up on what Roberto said because you're close physically as countries to see if there are similarities or maybe you have completely different priorities.

>> Thank you, Anja.  I will talk about Ecuador in Spanish, my mother language.

Yes, some of the questions that have been asked were also raised in our country and they're also questions relating to vulnerable groups.  In Ecuador we have some groups that are simply not connected.  60% of people in Ecuador are connected to the Internet but the rest isn't.  What about these people?  The public authorities in Ecuador sometimes provide information about the family structures of peoples, and these information were wrong, so they were simply taken over from fathers to sons to grandsons, and we have so many people in Ecuador.  Not everybody is connected to the Internet.  In Ecuador, information about people who pass away still remain on the Internet, and this is a massive problem for us.

On the other hand, we also debated new technologies, emerging technologies and how they can pose a threat.  As you know, and we heard it in a different panel, or someone else said, about the problems that exist for People with Disabilities.  There was even a hype with regard to biometric capturing of personal data, and now we're talking about access to public services, in particular access to biometric data of People with Disabilities.  So these people use their biometrics to navigate the Internet, and their data is sometimes available on the Internet without these people having consented to their biometric details being used in this way, so this means that the public sector could have access to this data, and there's absolutely no safeguards in place.

So what can we do to curtail this?  The multistakeholders and the IGF Ecuador dedicated its fifth session to this issue and we concluded the following ‑‑ 

First of all, we need to put better protection in place for private data of people in Ecuador.  And it's extremely important to include biometric data in this protection, particularly biometric data of people, of minors and of People with Disabilities, so people who cannot give their consent.

>> ANJA GENGO:  I think we're often forgetting that all those not connected to the Internet doesn't mean they're not there present online.  They are being used sometimes even in commercial purposes and it's very important, as under the social contract of every country and globally that we made those people aware first of all and then to work on digital literacy to connect them and to secure that they're educated how to use the technologies safely.

Thank you very much.  We can, hopefully we will be back to that very interesting concept and important.

I think I would conclude this section with covering the Eastern European Region, parts of that Region we didn't hear from.  So with that I would like to hear very briefly, so Lianna is actually multitasking here so she is our Remote Moderator, very thankful for that help.  She's also running a very successful National IGF with other stakeholders in their country.  It is the Armenia IGF.  It's a country that's developing so the implications of emerging technologies and I would like to give the floor to Lianna to tell us more about the priorities in the country.

>> LIANNA GALSTYAN:  Thank you, Anja, very much and I will speak on behalf of the Armenian IGF and my capacity as a Coordinator.  So emerging technologies have multiple implications for the economy and society, and they open up opportunities for new business models.  They enable sociocultural development and have immense potential in the educational sector.  During the 5th Armenian IGF that we had this year in October, we discussed about augmented reality, AR, as an emerging technology, and its impact on digital economy and education.  AR has seen significant process over the past decade and is now increasingly used in areas such as business, logistics, gaming, manufacturing, retail industry, et cetera.

More and more technology experts and companies are becoming aware of the potential of AR, and they are looking into developing new AR applications or using existing ones to enhance their businesses.  Armenia is known as a country with a very rich cultural heritage and history.  Recently, an Armenian based AR company and the Ministry of Culture have started working on a project dedicated to creating an AR depicting famous national artists and their masterpieces.  Museums, galleries, and the historical monuments in the country need to be more attractive to locals and foreigners and of course the young generation to be able to better promote Armenia's cultural heritage of around 3,000 years.  Integrating innovative technologies such as AR brings depth to the artwork present in the cultural institutions around the country and make them more attractive and fascinating for both locals and people who visit the country.

Another project planned in cooperation with the Ministry of Education aims to make textbooks and the overall learning experience in schools more attractive by using AR technology.  Any informational data can be passed on to learners in real time through the use of multidimensional visualizations that allow them to get a better understanding of the studied object or phenomena.  The pilot project covers physics at this moment, and it is meant to provide students with an opportunity to learn the phenomena and principles of physics with the use of AR technology.

Depending on the success of this pilot, other subjects in the school curricula will be enhanced by the application of AR, thus making the process of teaching and learning easier, more engaging, and unforgettable, so this were the discussions we had this year.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Lianna.  I think you also mentioned the importance of youth and young people, having them educated and equipped for discussions like this but also for the utilization of emerging technologies.

The NRIs globally as a network are also very important that the sustainability of these processes relies on having the young people involved from early stages in these processes so that later, somebody can successfully inherit what you made and continue to build on it and hopefully make a safer environment for all of us.

So with that I think it's important that we hear also from youth perspectives in this session.  How is youth perceiving the emerging technologies in Ukraine, there's a Youth IGF in Ukraine that are doing excellent job and I would like to give floor to.  You're going to speak?  Ukrainian IGF.

>> Hi, everyone.  My name is Valerie.  I'm from Ukraine, and I'm the Moderator of Youth IGF UA and here I am a participant of Youth IGF Summit.  First of all, I want to thank you, Anja, for mentioning youth participation, because this morning we had some meeting with Vint, and it is really important for us for the youth to be able to speak and to be able to be heard, because it is really important.

And just briefly about our achievements, this year we discussed a lot about inclusiveness during the Youth IGF UA and, you know, we had a group of pupils and they had an investigation of Governmental web sites, how they are designed for visually impaired users, and, you know, not all of them are on their High Level, but I'm really happy and I'm really proud that we have taken this first step in the long way of our process to be ‑‑ to put this issue of inclusiveness on a high level, and my message will be the next one.

I want everyone, every stakeholder, to be together to ‑‑ in order to reach this aim, because, you know, only when you are together we can do everything.  So, yes, thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  That's a wonderful message and it will definitely be useful for Joshua and Tracy to put it in the report, something that's extremely important for not just youth, but also for this more senior community gathered around the IGF and of course broadly.

With that, let's just conclude on that Region.  The Russian IGF this year marked its 10‑year anniversary.  The agenda was quite rich, international community was also in Moscow this year discussing among other hot topics the emerging technologies.  Mr. Leonid is with us and he will tell us more about the importance of Digital Technologies for Russian community and concerns that you have in that regard.

>> Leonid Levin:  Please allow me to speak in Russian, which is my native language.  I would like to tell you a few things about the Russian IGF and the Russian Internet.  We are not only celebrating 50 years of the Internet this year, but more than 20 years ago, the first RU domain was given out in the Russian Federation.  It was first only used by research organizations, and now for 25 years, this Russian Internet has been a unique ecosystem with a huge diversity of services, social networks, mail servers, online trade platforms, and many, many more.

It is important to underline that the Russian Internet, as we see it, has been and remains a part of the global digital space.  We are open to startups and investment, and this openness is a priority for our policymakers.  One of our top politicians recently supported that, and stated it at the Russian Internet Governance Forums.  The organizer of this Forum is the coordination center for domains in the Russian Federation which is, amongst others, a commercial task which has the responsibility to develop the Internet and the global Internet Community, as well.

It is important to understand that if you want to secure functioning of the Internet, you need to embrace promising technologies such as AI.  It is important to underline that we've discussed this in the context of the Russian Forum, the IGF, and we took these results into account, for example, in developing the new Russian strategy on AI.

The next important issue that needs debating is data protection and the fight against Cybercrime.  We believe that a good solution can only be found in the context of international cooperation.  And this is why it makes sense to have permanent Working Groups with International Organizations, groups that represent National Governments, in order to develop balanced and nuanced solutions that serve the best interests of all stakeholders.  We believe that the multistakeholder approach has been successful in solving Internet issues, where states are considered of guarantors of legal protections.

On the one hand, any regulation has to ensure secure and Sustainable Development of the Internet, and the protection of citizens and businesses, but you also need to look at the other side of the coin, which is to provide incentives for further development and technological progress in a competitive environment.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much for bringing the inputs from Russia to our session.  I think it seems that data are across the countries and regions very important.  The Russian IGF is also good example of the involvement of all stakeholders that work together, the technical community is critical in terms of organizing and running the process.  The Government is very supportive and represented, has High Level of representation actually at the meeting which is very good for the importance of the National IGF process.  With that, I believe I've exhausted my list of those that submitted a very good case study inputs but there are a number of those who would like to take the floor directly from the NRIs.  I see colleagues are queuing up.  I will give the floor now to Shabana from the Romanian IGF.

>> Hello.  Thank you, Anja, and please accept our apologies for not being here due to arriving late to here, but I would like to talk about the history of IGF in Afghanistan.  Afghanistan IGF is the National IGF of Afghanistan.  This provides a platform for multistakeholder dialogue and developing the news of Internet in Afghanistan.

IGF is launching in Afghanistan in 2020 and it has been recognized by the United Nations IGF Secretariat and National IGF Afghanistan is to create an actively engage multistakeholder in Afghanistan.

The first IGF took place in 2017.  We are more than ‑‑ participants came together to discuss the issues related to IGF Afghanistan.  Going on, the second IGF was organized in 2018 in May.  IGF National IGF which we had was in July 2019.  We are 500 participants representing various stakeholder groups such as Government, private sector, Civil Society and technology community, joined to discuss IGF Afghanistan.

The reason IGF our IGF 2019 in Afghanistan demonstrated a broad scope of discussions on how best to ensure good Internet Governance practices considering things such as accessibility and affordability, technology and regulatory matters, consumer protection, equipment development for all and a range of other challenges requiring Multistakeholder Cooperation.

It's worth mentioning that IGF Afghanistan is the only National IGF initiative which has a kids Academy, a stakeholder of the IGF.  The other sessions which were heard during third IGF in 2019 were cybersecurity, trust.  We had a total of five sessions going on human rights agenda and youth, evolution of IG Digital Government, development, innovation, and economic issues, media and content, digital inclusion, accessibility, and emerging technologies.

IGF 2019.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Can I jump in here?  Because I have streamed the Afghanistan IGF and it was such a vibrant set of discussions for a country that has I think less than 10% representation in terms of meaningful access.  Can you turn to what exactly was discussed in the context of emerging technologies in Afghanistan?  I know that AI was on the agenda and broadly discussed.

>> Yes.  As emerging technologies, AI and or IoT was discussed and also as mentioned it was discussed through different representatives from Government and also from private sector, and also on the creation of the infrastructure, and also most importantly on the accessibility and affordability of Internet was discussed in order to use and have these technologies in the country.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much.  The Afghanistan IGF report will be online soon on your web site, on the IGF web site.  I'll encourage everyone to look but mostly maybe to stream your meeting because it was very fascinating in terms of also the gender balance in Afghanistan and the discussions discussed.  Thank you very much Shabana for your inputs.  Roman is also with us our MAG Member coming from Russia representing Government.

Can I ask you, yes, please, to take the floor.

>> Thank you very much.  It was really interesting to listen to how you develop your IGFs in your countries and your communities and a lot of efforts I see and a lot of experience and best practices which I'm sure Russia can also take into consideration for our future fora and looking to the map, I would like to add that Asia Pacific Regional IGF also took place in Vladivostok, and we have our booth here where we have all outcome documents of the events which were made up together by the efforts of multistakeholder communities, so you can have a look, and many ideas which were announced during the previous presidency in France during the Paris Call, during this new compact for the Web and other initiatives outlined by Mr. Altmaier and Joe Kaeser.  Actually very much things are interconnected and I recommend you have a look, but I would like to also support my friends from Armenia, honorable speakers from Belarus, from Ukraine, from Moldova, and I really like your parts about cultural heritage and how young people can stay involved through the Internet and I would love to really join our efforts to promote saving of our cultural heritage, of languages, using the modern technologies and also calling to you, calling to Russian National coordination center I would like to propose to invite each other throughout our Eurasian space to the fora of each other because it will be a really interesting exchange of opinions and of course the whole world is very welcome to come to the Russian IGFs and other events we host in Russia.  Thank you so much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Roman.  That's actually a very good point practically speaking for the Secretariat's work.  The pins on the map are where the Secretariat for a particular NRI is but we could actually do that by the location, move the pins which is important.  I know we have a couple of requests from colleagues that are sitting around this table.  I would maybe give floor to colleagues waiting in line and standing and then come back to you.  I would go to Mary.  I know you were waiting for a while, and then to Sandra.

>> Mary:  Thank you, Anja.  I want to say that I'm so happy about this exchange we're having here.  My name is Mary Uduma, as well as West African IGF.  In community and environment we are really particular about what the new technologies can bring to solve our immediate problems.  We have some problems.  We're Agrarian in nature and we have seen technology companies coming up with drones to water our farms and fertilize our farms, and this affects our farms, so that's one of the things that the new technology is doing for us.

But we still need to solve problem of security, security in terms of life and properties, and we also need to solve the problem of power, if new technologies could bring that also.  And I want to suggest that it would not just be exchange, exchange.  Maybe the network, the NRI network, will look at, will this bring about collaboration, networking, and seeing how we could help one another?  I like what Italian IGF is doing, what Chad IGF is doing, what Russia IGF is doing.  Can we take up as intersessional work where we could also exchange and see whether technology companies working in one part of the world will help the other part of the world?  That's my intervention.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you, Mary.  This is how it starts, the collaboration starts from a dialogue.  I think this session will make us all aware of the excellent work happening on the NRI levels and hopefully prompt some concrete maybe projects among the NRIs.

I think there's a colleague here waiting and then we'll go to Sandra.

>> Good morning.  My name is lily Botsyoe from Ghana, and I coordinate the Ghana Youth IGF.  Thankfully we had a meeting edition in Ghana of the Youth IGF this year and I just came from a very insightful meeting with Vint and the youth were fully represented and the discussions were really fruitful so concerning emerging technologies, this year IGF was on the team, the future of work, digital jobs and youth inclusion.  So we understand that we are playing in the post‑industrial revolution where everything is moving from manual to digital and in my part of the world, when we're talking about emerging technologies we look at the very root.  Even talking about connectivity, inclusion and more.

So the very infrastructure that even holds our makes emerging technologies possible is what we try to explore for first, so in this meeting of the Ghana Youth IGF we had people to come share with us how possible it is to work towards harnessing the benefits of emerging technologies and to use it to our benefit especially because people will think about, or would fear, emerging technologies taking over the jobs but that's not the case.  We want to look at this as an enabler and offering more opportunities for young people and so that was where the conversation was actually geared towards.

And afterwards, we actually had the opportunity to convene another meeting at the Africa Special Data and Internet Conference where we spoke more on harnessing emerging technologies also in shaping Africa's digital future so the conversation has been more of, how do we deal with the limitations we have because of our geographic location and still working towards joining the world and meeting or reaping from the benefit that emerging technologies such as or IoT and AI has to offer.  Beyond that, we are looking at sustainability and continuity.  The talk has to be implemented but from which angle?  And who sets the pace?  Who gives the finance?  Who gives the grant?  And how do we continue to actually implement all that has been spoken about?

So we are actually taking everything that we've been discussing from April this year into consideration and we're looking to meet more initiatives hear that we could partner to do other things and I think we are going in the right direction.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much for bringing the inputs from Ghana to this session that are also very interesting and important for us to hear.

Sandra is here for EuroDIG, from the European IGF, and I would like to give floor now to Sandra.

>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER:  Thank you, Anja.  And I hope it's not too late to welcome all of you to my country, because it happens to be that I'm German, and what you just shared with us here is also very enriching for us here in Germany to listen to, so thank you for sharing your results from your meetings.

I will now not speak about what has been discussed last year at EuroDIG.  You can get our brochure at the booth, but we also promoted it otherwise.  I want to use that opportunity to take an outlook at what's coming next, and there are two aspects I would like to raise.

First of all, when speaking about emerging technologies and how are we going to implement it in our lives, there is one stakeholder group that plays a particular important role, which are the Parliamentarians in your countries, and you might have recognized that we have a significant amount of Parliamentarians from across the south ‑‑ sorry, globe, in particular from the global South here at the IGF, and I encourage you to meet them.  You will have possibly the best opportunity tomorrow morning in the legislative main session where they will also convene in a Summit and basically summarize what kind of conclusion they will take back to their National Parliaments.  I would encourage you to connect with them in order to involve them in your National and Regional IGFs.

And secondly, under the light of the discussion and the conclusions on the High Level Panel report on Digital Cooperation, I would like to raise the opportunity that we have today at lunchtime, besides the Global IGF, also EuroDIG did a consultation process that we will discuss with the global community today during lunchtime, and in particular, the Regional IGFs are about to think what this report means for our future work.  The Latin American IGF has made a review of their initiative, and together with them we decided to hold that very informal gathering but taking into consideration the results of the UN panel report on Digital Cooperation, what does it mean for Regional but also for National IGFs?  And I would like to invite you these two discussions, first of all reviewing the High Level report, but secondly discussing what is going to be the conclusion for our work today, lunchtime, in Room I, and I hope to see you there.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  We will definitely be there, Sandra, and also, thank you for bringing the notion of the legislators.  I've witnessed how difficult it was to engage all legislators and it resulted in a great success so Sandra and the team in the Host Country to have them present and I encourage all NRIs to approach Sandra, the best would be Sandra or me and then I'll connect you to Sandra, because this is a unique opportunity to engage the legislator from your countries into your processes, and to have them there as active participants.

With that, I think maybe we can continue with this side.  Then we'll go here, finish this.  Also you.  We have a formal time five more minutes.  I think we can go 5 minutes over time so there will be in 10 minutes we have to wrap up this session.

>> Thank you very much, Alexander from Federation representing Civil Society.  Russia is missing such emerging technology like a real National Regional IGF.  We haven't even called Russian IGF but it's completely controlled by Russian ccTLD and Parliament.  There is no inclusiveness, no possibility for discussion.  This year there was no open mics during this event.  It's completely a Government controlled event.  I would like to ask Secretariat of IGF to control how these societies called NRIs.

Also I would like to thank Mr. Levin and Mr. Chukov representing Government to come here and speak bravely.  I would like to mention a few emerging technologies they have forgot to mention.

First of all, it's massive censorship which is being implemented with the help of Government in Russia, also emerging technologies of mass surveillance, including facial recognitions, repressions based on Internet posts and up to the Internet shutdowns and emerging technology proposed by sovereign Internet legislation.  I hope with help of IGF Secretariat next year our IGF will be really multistakeholder and will be possible to discuss all emerging technologies or real emerging technologies with other NRIs are able to discuss.  I'd like to thank the IGF that came to Vladivostok, that was how an example how IGFs are running.  I would like to thank IGF of Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine where Russian Civil Society may come and discuss their common problems.  Thank you very much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you for your inputs.

>> Right of fair play?

>> ANJA GENGO:  I think I will not allow first of all because we're focusing on emerging technologies.  We're not focusing on the nature of the NRIs or anything else not focused on the topic.  Out of respect of the work of 1250 NRIs that work for the past 9 months very actively on organizing this session I'm going to kindly ask you to respect their work and allow them to focus this session on emerging technologies.  Quickly Alexander you raised very concerning statements here but I do find them as statements.  I don't find them as arguments.  The IGF sec stair yacht does not control the NRIs.  We collaborate with the NRIs.  We look that principles are respected and specifically for the Russian IGF I have to say that our communication was not with one person, not with one organization but with a multistakeholder community gathered around that organization but it could be it's highly possible that maybe we don't have the same inputs so I would take this session our offices are always open to all of you for any discussion related to the NRIs.  Thank you very much.  Roman, if it's going to be in 20 seconds, yes.  If it's going to be more, please.

>> Yes, thank you very much.  Alexander we know each other, we speak with each other and first of all I think I saw you at our Forum and I was not one of the organizers but I was kindly asked to Claire and moderate one of the sessions and there were many questions from different multistakeholder communities so I don't see a point in criticizing this nature of the Forum and quite vice versa, I invite everybody to come and check because I am as a young person I'm a Civil Society diplomat, I'm not here representing the Government and I am about fact checking so that's a good intervention.  Everybody is kindly welcome to come and check how we do work in Russia and of course I share some of your concerns with regard to the future of Internet globally, because really different countries understand Internet Governance and make it they try to compare it with censorship, I don't see any censorship in Russia.  I think we can express all of our ideas including your resources, your Internet web sites are working.  Your Instagram or telegram channels which are also working and I don't see any reason for such comments.  Let's join our efforts and try to make it really multistakeholder.  I'm keen on working with you as well.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you.  Thank you, Roman.  Let's work together, exactly.  Maybe before I come to you, Jen will speak about the APrIGF.  It could have a natural linkage also to the Russian IGF and work they're doing, and then I will come to all of you, but please do direct your inputs to the topic of this session.  We worked for almost a year on this topic and out of the respect of the co‑organizers please do direct your remarks to the emerging technologies on the National and Regional levels.  Jen?

>> JENNIFER CHUNG:  Thank you, Anja.  My name is Jennifer Chung.  I'm part of the Secretariat of the Asia Pacific Regional IGF.  I want to thank colleagues who have mentioned APrIGF from this session.  We've heard from the colleagues from Vanuatu IGF which we had the pleasure of visiting last year.  We've heard from the Russian IGF which had the pleasure of hosting us this year coinciding with our 10th anniversary and also the 25th anniversary of .ru, and they were very gracious hosts and we had really vibrant discussions as was mentioned by Alexander and other participants so we're very happy to do that.

Of course next year, we're going to the landlocked state of Nepal, so you can see that there's a lot of diversity within the Asia Pacific Region.  The challenges that we face within the Region is so diverse that when you're talking about emerging technologies, it is really the full spectrum, but I will concentrate a little bit more on what was discussed this year at Vladivostok so we talked about the ethics behind computing machines which is interesting because IGF USA also mentioned that they had this discussion around ethics.  For us it was the discussion was very vibrant.  The multidisciplinary approach was critically applied on the training of ethics and we were talking about how to incorporate it into the education curriculum.

We were talking about the accountability of AI lying with the human and also that ethics is not static.  The social norms are changing depending on relevant innovations to the era which is actually questioning these ethics and another topic we talked about on the emerging technologies is the multistakeholder approach for the governance of cryptoassets, so this is not a topic that is typically discussed so much within APrIGF.  It's a rather new topic but because of the characteristics of cryptocurrencies are decentralized, open, peer to peer, there are three entry barriers for newcomers, it was very interesting to think about how the governance of this can evolve.

So there was talk about security incidents in the APAC Region.  It was elaborated that the expect root causes of them was phishing emails and attack to Credentials and so on and so forth.  We also received the regulators' perspective from Japan, because they had the outcome of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting.  They were talking about the governance model for blockchain based financial systems, and they basically set out three major goals:  Maintaining financial stability, protecting investors and consumers, and also preventing financial crimes.

The third topic we talked about on emerging technologies was the or IoT security.  I think that's something that a lot of colleagues around the table and in this room talked about it.  Of course a lot of NRIs are interested in.  We talked about particularly from the end user perspective, we received some updates from Taiwan.  They have a civil or IoT project which identified security requirements in the or IoT ecosystem, along with solutions on how to address these security issues.

There was also a very vibrant discussion highlighting around the UN GA Resolution 68/167, that states that unlawful and arbitrary surveillance and/or interception of communications as well as unlawful or arbitrary collection of personal data as highly intrusive acts violate rights to privacy and to Freedom of Expression, and may contradict the tenets of a Democratic society so there was very good and vibrant discussion around these tenets as well and lastly we talked about how to build the concept of an AI society so how do we do this for the global good?  We talked about the classifications of AI, how to tackle bias, and the subjective interpretations to base it on human need, rather than human greed, and we talked about the principles of responsible stewardship of trustworthy AI, and how this can play out across National policies and international cooperation for this.

Lastly we talked about the challenges in the global cooperation of AI, how it can also improve global health care and thousand to achieve this using this AI and also data to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.  And I guess lastly I would like to invite all the colleagues to do come to APrIGF next year, because we're going to another new country, Nepal, so next May in Kathmandu we welcome all of you, APrIGF.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you, Jennifer, and we'll hopefully see you there in person if not there online.  We are basically over time.  Colleagues I would love to allow for all of the comments so if you can be very brief in a few seconds, not more than one minute to give your inputs, we do have an input from the online participant.  Lianna, is it a comment or somebody would like to speak?

>> LIANNA GALSTYAN:  It's just a comment from Alexander from North Macedonia.  We had lovely discussions here about the emerging technologies and universal acceptance, what's happening and talking about the IGN that they have, and the Minister of Administration and Information Society are making a massive project on digitalization and raising the lives of citizens and communication with the State or all other social services via Internet.  The slogan is:  Go Digital.  And the Government was an active contributor for the last IGF in Macedonia and we were talking that with this discussion could be in different languages and so that it enables the new technologies enables everyone to understand like instantly, so that will be a great investment of technologies.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much, Lianna, for reading.  Thank you, Alexander, for being online with us from Scorpion.  Let's go to two colleagues I believe, if you could be very, very brief, because there's another main session here, so we have to free the space in the next probably 2 minutes at the latest.  Thank you.  You have the floor.

>> Thank you, Chair.  I will try to be very brief.  I start with a confession:  I don't represent an NRI, so I'm Mohamed Shareef from the Maldives so if you look behind you and in front of you on the big map you will not find us because we are not there.  We are a country where the land mass is 1% of our oceans so although we are often referred to as a small developing state we like to think of ourselves as a large ocean developing state.  So our challenges are numerous and we are very inspired.  This is the first time we are here at IGF and we are inspired by what's happening regionally as well as nationally through IGFs and we would like in the coming year 2020 to have our first National IGF as well as connect with our Regional and National partners and Global Partners.  In fact going to the topic, emerging technologies hold the secret to our survival.

We would like to see emerging technologies discussed especially in the cross‑cutting and where several disciplines touch each other, that of food security, that of transport, that of energy security, and that of surviving climate change.  So with that, thank you again.  Thank you for inviting us.  Thank you for inspiring us, and we look forward to be part of this family.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much.  And let's please have a chat either today or tomorrow.  Maldives are in underrepresented as far as underrepresentation.  Thank you for excellent comments as well.  Yes, sorry.  Please if you could have the next comment.

>> Thank you for this opportunity.  I will be really brief.  So I would like to ask if could be possible to in order to announce the ethical standards of development strategies to announce the transparencies of the strategies and be able to participate in order to reduce abuses, and to be able to rescue victims of harassment as there are millions of people who are being ‑‑ were being till now victim of abuses, violence, of electronic harassment so would be nice to reduce inequalities, injustice and let these processes like an opportunity for everybody to enhance living conditions and like to contribute for good purposes.  Thank you very much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you.  I didn't hear, from where are you coming?

>> Sorry, I forgot to present me.  I'm Elizabeth.  I come from Italy.  I'm a Member of the EMA, an Association that is doing research for cybersecurity, and so EMA.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Let's finish this queue.  We're going here.  Very, very briefly we basically have 30 seconds because colleagues are starting in less than 5 minutes.  You have the floor.

>> My name is Maureen Abba.  I represent the Civil Society of Chad.  I have one concern.  In Chad we do have fiber optics, fiberglass, but prices are too high and quality is too low and that is a hindrance to new technologies.  In Chad, there is also large amount of control and as I said prices are high.

Let me be brief.  I would like to thank you for inviting me.  Thank you. 

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much for bringing that from Chad.  Let's go to my colleagues here on the right and those will be the last interventions.

>> Hi, all.  I am from Chad.  I am the General Coordinator of Youth IGF Chad and representing the National IGF Chad in this Forum.

We organized our fourth edition of Youth IGF Chad this past 10 August and the 5th edition of National IGF on 9 September 2019, where we discuss about access to Internet, why Internet still is expensive in Chad, how to involve the multistakeholder to take seriously this issue and how to promote youth participation.  I attended IGF last year and this year is my second year to attend IGF and I am very happy to participate and discuss with young people who come from all around the world with different skills and backgrounds in order to bring ideas together to promote youth engagement.  For that I would like to thank my German colleagues who organized, invited and supported us to attend the Youth IGF Summit.  Thank you, Anja, for your collaboration to help us promote our information and we're working with group with Joshua and his staff to have those African countries who are unconnected to set up youth in their respective countries and for that we really need your collaboration.  Thank you so much.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much.  It's an honor to be part of your team and of your NRI and I'm just hoping for the future collaboration.

Let's have a final comment, 20 seconds and we're done, colleagues are already gathering for the next session.

>> Thank you, Anja.  I'm the Steering Committee head for the Ghana National IGF.  My name is Kofi Asafu‑Aidoo.  This year in the interest of inclusion we had the IGF, we had a lot of discussion but in interest of time there's not enough time to go through all that, but when it comes to emerging technologies, the key thing was to have the youth and everybody else eliminate the fear of new technologies and learn new skills to equip themselves to deal with them.  The other main thing I want to say is that the Ghana National IGF is represented here.  We are learning a lot and we're ready to network with other NRIs to move forward in the next year.  Thank you.

>> ANJA GENGO:  Thank you very much for your inputs.  Can I ask you to go to the last slide?  And instead of conclusion I'm taking 10 seconds for an information.

Today at 4:40 in the Estrel Saal B, I believe we're gathering for the NRI coordination session, discussing the NRIs and engaging with the International Organizations that are among the largest donors to the NRIs to see how to go forward and how to ensure the sustainability of the NRI processes which are recognized as important.  Because colleagues have to host a main session now I'm going to ask all the NRIs just to come join me here so we can have a joint photo and then we can leave and hopefully I'll see you at 4:40 in the Estrel Saal B.  Thank you to the online participants, to Lianna, Tracy and Joshua for all their hard work.  Thank you.

[ Applause ]