The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Good morning. We are starting in a few minutes. Please sit down. (pause).
>> HENRIQUE FAULHABER: Good morning. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin this morning's main session on the important topic of Internet economy and Sustainable Development.
I welcome you all here today, and I'm looking forward to our discussions. The value of ICTs and Internet to social, economic and Sustainable Development are difficult, whether it's for infrastructure for economic and social progress or in providing tools for programs, such as Government, health, finance and education. That value has grown with time due to the vast improvements in technology, including new service like social media, big data and cloud computing.
The Internet provides a platform for the growth of ICT and for an emerging digital economy in which production, distribution, consumption depend on broadband networks and services.
Clearly, information communication technology is a critical enabler of Sustainable Development. While attention needs to be paid to the Internet and to the Internet economy role in meeting information needs and facilitating agriculture, health, education as well as diverse business activities, Internet economy in Brazil is very strong. As a representative of ICT sector in cgi.br, I should mention the Brazilian companies to play a more significant role in this field, not just as consumers of global ICT industry; in fact, we urge to strengthen our position as a provider of solutions for Brazil and abroad.
I think our goal should shift to more participation in the global market of ICT products and services alliance with other economies' aspiration, even between the developed nations. I hope this morning we will have an important and interactive multistakeholder discussion addressing a number of policy questions pertaining to these important and pressing challenges.
I'd now like to give the floor to assistant Secretary‑General UN DESA, Mr. Lenni Montiel. Please, the floor is yours.
>> LENNI MONTIEL: Thank you, Mr. Chair. And good morning, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Allow me also to thank the moderators and the panel members for this great opportunity we have this morning to discuss these very relevant and timely topics.
This main session is of a major importance to IGF 10, and definitely to the ongoing WSIS overall review by the General Assembly. The results of this main session can provide a valuable input to the preparatory process of the WSIS output document.
I want to highlight this point very much. For those who follow the WSIS overall review in New York at the UN General Assembly, you know that if there is one subject on which there is an emerging consensus, it is this consistent emphasis by member states and stakeholders on the close links between the WSIS follow‑up and the follow‑up of the 2030 agenda, the follow‑up on the implementation of the Sustainable Development, SDGs.
During the WSIS preparation so far, the role of ICTs and the Internet as an enabler of Sustainable Development has been repeatedly emphasized by both developed and developing countries, by state ‑‑ by governments and stakeholders alike.
I want to thank our Brazilian host for highlighting the relationships between the Internet economy and Sustainable Development.
I think the contributions of the Internet economy to Sustainable Development are well documented. I will not go into details here.
Indeed, more than a dozen UN entities, including UN DESA, ITU, UNESCO, UNCTAD and others have worked together and developed a matrix linking specific WSIS actions, action lines to individual SDGs.
There is a very handy reference tool, and I strongly recommend colleagues to take a good look at it. It is available in the WSIS Web site. I'm quite confident that UN General Assembly will agree on specific steps to link WSIS follow‑up with SDG follow‑up. At this point, let me take this opportunity to share a few personal thoughts on the Internet economy and Sustainable Development.
First, I think we should take a more serious look on how to use the Internet as an engine for job creation, for income generation, for economic growth, that is inclusive and equitable and for providing equal opportunities to women and youth.
This is the unique power of the Internet economy, and its potential for fostering entrepreneurship is yet to be fully tapped.
Right now, the Internet economy remains dominated by a few giants and by large economies. The question here is, how can we extend this power to developing countries, LDCs, to Africa and more generalized groups. This is in my view a central challenge.
Second, we need to do more to tap the potential of the Internet economy as a social and economic equalizer, as a tool that encourages and fosters education, cultural development and that provides a digital space for our rich diverse realizations to flourish.
Right now, the Internet content is dominated by a few languages, and there is a serious lack of local content. The negative impacts on learning, education, knowledge sharing, and ultimately on preparing the youth for future employment are far‑reaching and widespread.
This is of course part of the digital divide that we will be addressing in another session. But I want to highlight this here. If we do not breach this digital divide, there will be no true globalizing Internet economy, and there will be no contribution of Internet economy to Sustainable Development in the democratizing way that has been associated with the Internet.
If that will be the case, then we will continue seeing an Internet economy for some, and not for all.
Let me conclude by underscoring another point, this is dear to my heart, and this is capacity‑building. Many have and will continue to highlight the importance of capacity‑building, and I fully share this. I think we at the UN could have done more and indeed should do more in training and capacity‑building that ultimately allow people in developing countries to create economic opportunities online, to create wealth online and to secure profits online.
Without the knowledge, skills, be they programming skills, technical management skills, applications, etcetera, the workforce for the Internet economy will be always missing in many developing countries, further aggravating the digital divide.
These are just a few points to share with my fellow panelists and participants. I look forward to a rich discussion this morning. Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you all. My name is Joseph Alhadeff, and I chair the ICC Digital Economy Commission, and I seem to have a day job with Oracle Corporation. I'm here as the moderator for this panel. Just so that everyone knows the logistics we are going to use, we have asked for panelists to make two three‑minute interventions on different topics. We are providing questions as a roadmap for those. A couple of speakers, due to the need to leave early and also because they wanted to go into greater depth on one topic, will be speaking for a longer chunk on one topic as opposed to two topics.
But we will highlight those as we go along. At the end of each group of questions, and there will be three groups of questions, there will be time for audience participation. We ask all of our panelists to use the questions as a guide, and to feel free to be interactive in their use of the three minutes as to how they wish to provide the answers, and may do so in commenting on comments that have been made, etcetera.
With that, we will open up the programme. I am going to do a disservice to what is a very, very distinguished set of panelists, because if I had to introduce the distinguished resumes of every panelist, we would finish the panel at the end of introduction. Each has notoriety to be found on the Internet, and I suggest you look up what are very impressive biographies, but we just don't have the time to go into that at the moment.
With that, our first topic, and so the topic will have a number of questions underneath it, is the global vision. I thank the Assistant Secretary who set out a very good press of what the global vision is and what the challenges and benefits are. We hope we can capture your comments. I think you summarized the panel already. But hopefully we can engage in greater depth on each of the topics.
The first question under the global vision concept is how do we foresee the information economy as we move towards 2030, and what are we seeing as the trends in that direction from 2015? I'd like to start with Helani Galpaya, the CEO of LIRNEasia, who has done quite a bit of survey and research on the topic, and while these are issues in developed and developing economies, we will be focusing mostly on the literature in the views of the developing economies in this panel.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you. I will speak based on household surveys, representative of people in countries in Africa and south Asia, and a few countries in southeast Asia. These are different worlds. The developing world doesn't look like one developing world. There are regional differences. There are cross country differences and there are within country differences.
We really do need to take a differentiated approach to these. But inasmuch as the regions go, the mobile phones have, we know, been a success story. Prices are low and over 90 percent of Asia, including the poor, are making calls.
The numbers are less so in Africa. Historically the competition levels in Asia have been high, lower in Africa. This is directly reflected in the affordability of prices of mobile phones. The economic benefits through systematic reviews on, for example, rural income and livelihood is positive. So we are not just seeing this in the developing countries. We have systematically reviewed the literature, and it is having a positive impact.
This is mobile phones which are primarily used for voice and SMS. The Internet is a different story. We have made progress. In 2006, 72 percent of the poor in India were saying they had not heard of the Internet. In 2011 this number had come down to 24 percent.
Similarly, in other countries, in Pakistan, 36 percent, down to, in 2011 everyone saying they at least know the Internet. Awareness is there and increasing. We have crossed that barrier.
What about youth? There we have a huge barrier to cross. We have come a long way, but still overall, in the countries in south Asia and southeast Asia, Internet access is under 20 percent. That is under 20 percent of a country's population is using the Internet.
This is a huge problem. This is the mobile Internet, so getting a mobile phone in the hands of these people is key. In Africa the numbers are lower. And in surveys, why do you not have a mobile phone and use it, in Asia the top reason given is, I don't see the need for it.
In Africa, interestingly, they are not even at the need position. They are at, I can't afford it is the top reason. I don't have coverage where I live is the second reason. Electricity, I can't charge it in my house is the third reason. This is representative sample survey data. These are all barriers we have to cross. That should show you just how different Asia and Africa alone are, because in Asia, we have met some of the affordability bars.
There is Internet available for under 5 percent of income, and still we have 20 percent of our people online, only.
Market innovations currently done by private companies, unfortunately not Government actions, are bringing people online, limited access packages that are driving people on to the Internet.
Social media is the biggest driver of the Internet use, and interestingly, it is acting in great extent as a substitute for traditional communication, because other alternatives are truly expensive for most people. So people on Facebook coordinating their activities, communicating with people, and using it as a substitute for SMS. This is how the evolution of the information economy has evolved for a majority of the world's poor. I'll stop at that.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I'll go to our next speaker, Sergio Quiroga da Cunha, head of Latin America for Ericsson, and Ericsson has ‑‑ apparently my eyesight is no longer good enough to read a card that far away (chuckles).
But Ericsson has done very interesting research in this space and I believe has looked at perhaps Latin America. If you could perhaps see some of the trending that you discovered in your research, and some of the ways to perhaps bridge some of the gaps, that would be great.
>> SERGIO QUIROGA da CUNHA: Yes. Good morning, everyone. It is good to be here. Ericsson, of course we are good at forecasting what is going to happen with the telecommunications world, what is going to happen with the mobile programs and so on.
Think about 2020, that there is the gap that we need to fill. We said that and we realize that 90 percent of the world will be connected through mobile broadband by 2020 for sure. If 90 percent of the people is talking now, in four years 90 percent is going to be connected via mobile broadband.
We, together with Columbia University, we did one study on how can we direct and guarantee that the 2030 goals on Sustainable Development are connected to that, so the answer of this study is that the business as usual will not be sufficient to achieve the Sustainable Development goals.
So we need partnerships. We need Government. We need the private sector, and of course, academia, to work together. So the things that we should do, of course, it's in the Government side, we should go to connectivity for all public facilities by 2020, yes, together with what we talked about.
ICT training for the public officials for sure, ICT‑based delivery systems for healthcare, education, infrastructure, the third point. Development of Internet of Things, for sure that this is coming. And encouragement of university to scale up education incubation relating to the ICT solutions, with partnership with private sectors, and last but not least, the deployment of the ICT‑based Sustainable Development Goal information system that connects public service and facilities and private sector and public.
These six items are the biggest findings of the study with Columbia University.
With that, we believe that, yes, everything that we are doing in the Telecom sector will go toward the Sustainable Development Goals that we have, and why Ericsson is there, because we are leading in the advocate of technology for good.
This is my role here, and this is the role of Ericsson, with full commitment from the top to bottom of the company on that.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. I think we start seeing problems and trends towards solutions, and I think we are going to see convergence of the conversation as we go along.
As we were looking through our speakers, Adjunct Professor at Division of Finance and Economics at the Columbia Institute of Tele‑Information, Raul Katz has the word "economics" in his title, we thought this might be a good topic for him to give us some of the economic thinking that might be related to some of the trending that he sees both today going forward and to the future, and if I could ask you to start the three minutes, please.
>> RAUL L. KATZ: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Three minutes will be tough, but I'll try to give you a glance. I thought the best way to start thinking about 2030 is to see what the situation is in 2015, to see what areas we see that are going to evolve in some way, shape or form.
My sense is that from an infrastructure standpoint, broadband coverage is fairly advanced around the emerging world as well. My numbers in Latin America indicate fixed broadband ranges between 75 percent in Mexico to 95 percent in Argentina. Mobile on the other hand ranges between 70 percent in Paraguay and a hundred percent in Chile. Infrastructure is being deployed. However, quality of the facilities is uneven. In general on a prorated basis, Latin America gets on the fixed side 2.6 megabytes of service, while mobile gets 1.7, with wide ranges between Bolivia and Uruguay. Uruguay is advanced in that sense.
The key issue that we are facing in the development world is the demand gap, is the people that could buy, could access internet and could buy broadband services and don't, and the demand gap that Latin America is on the order of 40 percent for fixed broadband and 45 percent for mobile, meaning people have the wire coming from their house but don't actually purchase it. Why is that?
The main barrier is economic, and not so much because prices haven't dropped, because prices have been dropping like around 10 percent a year for mobile broadband, ever since 2010. The issue is one of affordability and has to do with the bottom of the pyramid phenomenon.
Only Latin America we have 165 million people whose average income for household is $325 per month. That ranges from 94 to Bolivia to 460 in Uruguay. Essentially, these people cannot afford buying no matter what the prices are going to be in terms of those dropping and whether there is enough competition. And that is where the Governments, the state has to intervene in some way, in order to alleviate that kind of economic concern.
Beyond those we have two other barriers; digital literacy, 22 percent of nonadopters indicate that they do not access the Internet because they don't know how to, or content relevance, they don't see what they would do. I'm going to come back to that, because in fact, when you see that, let's say Latin America by our studies of the 100 top sites on the Internet, only 26 have been developed locally. The number is 27 in the Middle East, 27 in southeast Asia.
We have an issue in terms of how do we develop content that is actually not only linguistically but culturally attuned to the needs of the population, particularly at the bottom of the pyramid.
What is my view for 2030? First, I see a convergence. I don't ‑‑ I see that when I look at the trends, both in Internet adoption, in broadband adoption, year after year, the emerging world is closing the gap with the OECD countries, clearly notwithstanding the issue of the bottom of the pyramid, which remains an economic barrier that needs to be addressed, but nevertheless I see that what we label the globalization of consumption is really permeating the rest of the world.
Now, having said that, with the issues and the imbalances that occur in the development of local content, we need to accentuate the development of entrepreneurship in order to develop more applications, more services, more software in the region. Here, we as Latin America, as an emerging market player, have a lot of barriers to face that have nothing to do in my way, in my sense, with cultural factors. The much noted concept that says that emerging markets are, entrepreneurs in emerging markets don't want to face risk as the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do, is not true. The key issue is one of resources. And it's not resources on the public sector side, because by my count, the public sector in Latin America is spending $20 billion a year in the development of ICT applications. It is that money is badly spent. There is clearly coordination failure, redundancies, lack of visibility, so, lack of alignment between development, targets and where the money is being put. And the secondly, the second issue is that private capital is not there.
For instance, Latin America is spending today, the VCs, venture capitalists in Latin America are spending only $400 million a year in ICT. That is a drop of water. That is a drop in the bucket related to what we need. We need to create the right conditions for private sector to intervene, to accelerate their investment, to be willing to take risks in these new environments for developing applications and services.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. We have seen the trends where there is technology that isn't sufficiently used, there is investment that isn't where it needs to be, to help promote some of these things. There is infrastructure that isn't necessarily capitalized on as well as it could be. When we think about this, this isn't the first time we have had development goals.
We had a rich history of the Millennium Development Goals, and we had lots of other development opportunities and movements related to that. Perhaps we can think for a second as we look forward to the Sustainable Development Goals on lessons we may have learned that may address some of the issues as we go forward. And with that, I'll turn the floor to Jimson Olufuye, who is the Chairman of AfiCTA, and if you would start your three minutes, please.
>> JIMSON OLUFUYE: Thank you very much, Joe.
Really, there has been progress made, substantial progress made when it comes to a maintenance of the MDGs, not least in Africa. I would like to defer a little here. The figure is not about Internet penetration in Africa, run about 27 to 30 percent in Nigeria alone, 50 percent penetration level, and this has helped to eradicate a lot of issues, health issues. People are well educated. There are a lot of awareness. Social media content has increased. General outlook is very good, and there is great optimism that the goals set forth for SDG will be more rapidly achieved if we learn from experience, which is very important at this moment. As we review MDG, there are a lot of lessons we could learn.
Number one, a lot of organizations involved in MDG coordination were working on cross boxes. There is need for more opportunity for all agencies, maybe at national levels, to come together to streamline the operations and streamline their budget, have appropriate metrics that will help in knowing how far we are making progress in this project.
And also, there is the issue of corruption, that steps in from that, because a lot of resources will be used and you don't see much results. Going forward in SDG, if there is more transparency and accountability, then it will be easy for everyone to see the outcome of huge resources that will be budgeted into this focus.
Then also, there are a lot of policies that need to be developed going forward at the national level. So this needs to incorporate all stakeholders as we have been discussing yesterday, the private sector, the public sector, the Civil Society, they all need to come together, and also academia, and evolve this policy work together, and also implementation of these policies.
There is a lesson I think we can learn from an event in Nigeria, and the ICT sector, we do have what is called the people's Parliament, is an opportunity for everybody to come together, once any quarter, different regions in Nigeria. The users, they listen, they express themselves. The operators, they listen to what the users, users idea to moderate, so lessons we are taking home and to review afterwards.
So, in the rural areas as we all know, we need to use this universal service position phones effectively to construct or build more infrastructure into the interior, to enable more people to have access.
Finally, I know that before 2030, we can actually achieve these goals if we put all efforts on the table. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. Another group that has been highly involved obviously in both the Millennium Development Goals and now in the Sustainable Development Goals is UNESCO, and I turn over to Lydia Brito for her thoughts on these topics.
>> LYDIA BRITO: Thank you very much, and good morning to all. I think this is a very interesting question, because it's good to look at lessons learned as we move to I would say even a more ambitious Development Agenda.
The MDGs, as it was said, they had an impact. And clearly in many countries and in many regions around the world, we were able to reduce poverty. We were able to improve access to education, to clean water and sanitation, to all services.
In my view, there were some positive aspects that I hope we will retain. One was the political commitment towards the goals. I think in that respect many of the governments and stakeholders in the countries really said these are goals that give us some vision for the future, and we need to commit to those goals.
I think this political commitment is a very important factor for success. I also believe that with all the issues and fragmentation that indeed happen in the beginning of the implementation of the MDGs, the reality is that towards the end, more partnerships were being built, both at national, regional and global level, and the reality is that in the SDGs, partnership is now one of the goals, how to strengthen the partnerships in order to, together, to be able to reach that.
I also believe that another interesting factor of success was the investment in capacity‑building, in all the aspects of the Millennium Development Goals, national capacity to deal with policies, with implementation of policies, and very importantly, with the monitoring of the achievements and the ways and coming with alternative solutions to go.
Where are the less positive lessons and the ones that I would like to put forward as UNESCO, one of the feelings for us at the organization was that, very important, because in the traditional areas, as education monitoring, etcetera, of course there were successes, but we missed other areas that are building blocks to public policies. The scientific knowledge, the capacity, the science capacity in the countries, the communication and information opportunities, culture for development, these were cross‑cutting areas.
And in my view, really they are building blocks towards sustainable agenda. That is why during the SDG discussion and process, UNESCO really pushes forward the importance of having the different areas of science as permeating the SDGs, culture for development, a very important area, communication and information, and clearly, ICTs in the different, the overall specter of the technologies.
And since we are in the IGF, the transformative power of these technologies for development, they were not captured in the MDGs. And although we see much more permeation in the new agenda, I think the challenge will be how can we make sure that the public policies, both at national, regional and global level, indeed are able to use this transformative power of these technologies.
That is why, when we were talking about, and UNESCO, I'm very happy to say that our channel conference just approved the concept of Internet universality, that is really based in four pillars. One is about rights, human rights. When we talk about Internet and universality, it is to make sure it is about rights.
And also the fact that it is to be open, it needs to be creative and changing. It needs to be accessible. We already heard earlier about content, language, you know, the capacity for people to be really active actors in this Arena. Finally, the multistakeholder participation, that I think is fundamental.
But so, I think there are good lessons and lessons to change the way we went forward. Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. The previous speakers have just set the stage for the next topic which we are going to address, which is what regulatory and policy issues need to be addressed to improve the ecosystem. With that, I will turn to Bambang Heru Tjahjono, Director General for ICT applications, MCIT Indonesia. If I could ask you to start your three minutes. Thank you.
>> BAMBANG HERU TJAHJONO: Thank you. Good morning. Yes, we have the policy, but the policy now we are changing. The policy is not just regulate, but we are making some empowerment. Before I start with the policy, Mr. Moderator, based on the global index, around 144 countries, Indonesia in 2014, 2015 is ranked 34, compared to the year of 2013 and 2014 on 38 ratings.
So from twelve pillars of the global index Indonesia still has two of the four pillars, namely infrastructure, secondly, technology readiness for awareness of the people, also, like higher education and training and also innovation. Indonesia is now formally ICT for development in the supporting of the SDG with Indonesian plan, to create our system by 2020. The plan seeks to harness the full potential to the integration of IT infrastructure for the public facilities, and then mention logistics and transportation system for improving national economic growth. Ladies and gentlemen, Internet economy has grown up also very rapidly in Indonesia, since three years ago, starting from the growing the Internet users from 60 million to almost 90 million now by 2015.
As everybody said that mobile user of cellular market is rapidly increasing with penetration estimated around 150 percent of our total population, reaching approximately 350 million subscriber, subscription, while the broadband users have reached almost 50 million, broadband is expected to have 30 percent this year and around hopefully 70 percent in 2020; and also followed by increasing the use of number of utilizing social media in my country, which run almost 50 million users this year. So by utilizing the social media, therefore just making communication and socializations, we also make effectively that the social media offering the selling or promoting goods now especially for the small, medium enterprise.
E‑commerce transaction initiative in 2014 also now reaches 18 billion U.S. dollars, and expected 24 billion U.S. dollar this year. The player is mostly micro, small and medium enterprise and also start‑up company, in order to be, this gives opportunity to improve people economic in remote area, and also we want to increase the productivity by the adoption of the digital technology.
Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. I think we see some promising numbers, and some using infrastructure and technology readiness of the population as two important factors I think; very helpful comment. We now turn to the honorable Professor, Deputy Minister Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services for the Republic of South Africa, if you could start your three minutes, please.
>> HLENGIWE BUHLE MKHIZE: Thank you very much, Chairperson. In my understanding I have to address issues beyond technology challenges as to what is to be done.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: I think you can see what issues you think need to be addressed as part of the Sustainable Development goals. The questions are a guide, not a handcuff. Please feel free to go off question as you wish.
>> HLENGIWE BUHLE MKHIZE: I think the first point to add based on really lessons learned is the question of we are looking at how to improve education outcomes, so as to ensure that we produce a large number of young people with critical skills which are needed for the jobs of the 21st century. And for us, having met the MDGs goals, and we feel that is the area where we will concentrate, and of course, the question is how to do that, how to achieve that, besides investing in our own education system.
We see opportunities of using our bi‑national and multi‑lateral partners in ensuring that we revive exchange programs, and ensure that as many of our young people as possible have an opportunity of being exposed outside our own universities and companies.
The production capabilities is closely related to, that. Incubation and ensuring that we create sufficient space and we have adequate resources for young people to be able to come up with relevant applications and produce local content. So that is where we will be also spending a lot of time, so as to ensure that we remain on the forefront of the new agenda of using technology in first striking and achieving accurate results.
Also, we are looking at the importance of data in policy formulation. With the MDGs we spent a lot of time not setting realistic targets, and losing time, and towards the end, we picked up. But now with the SDGs it has become important for us to look at all ICT information and many other development agencies, their report, and try to come up with clear targets of what is to be achieved by when.
Policy implementation, when we look back, some of the results were delayed by the speed, the rate at which we implemented our good policies, and one of the things we have started now looking at how to achieve repeat results, looking at the Malaysian models and many other countries that have come up with those, and also providing leadership in ensuring that we closely monitor and evaluate the partnerships that we have developed and make sure that we cement it, almost in line with what we see with the operations of the IGF. And also looking at human rights, adopting the human rights centered approach in line with the constitution with a good Bill of Rights. And we are hoping that the WSIS process and action line follow‑ups will remain relevant and be aligned to the identified sustainable goals and targets, and support provided through activity multistakeholder action and collaboration.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. For the last speaker on this panel, we turn to Mr. Daniel Sepulveda, Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. coordinator for International and Communications Policy for the U.S. Department of State.
>> DANIEL SEPULVEDA: Thank you very much. First of all, thank you for the opportunity to participate on this panel. I think there has been a lot of useful ideas distributed already this morning. I would like to just add my voice to some of those concepts.
First of all, I think as we heard from our colleague from South Africa, digital strategies and ICT strategies need to be about more than ICTs. They need to be about skill development, creating an environment for productive activity and for skills that people can have to create content and to participate as market participants on the Internet.
I think the second important point that others have raised is that the experience across the developing world is not monolithic. There are nations in the developing world that are struggling and nations that are doing well. From Estonia to Singapore to Colombia, to Chile, Kenya to Rwanda, you see public policy strategies that are working and that are not in a number of countries. Those countries that have public policy strategies that are working have a couple of things in common. First, they embrace market competition. You don't see a lot of countries with monopoly control of the telecommunications market doing well in this space.
They also encourage private sector participation through a regulatory and legal model that allows the private sector to come in, be able to anticipate what the legal and regulatory environment will be over time in order to make investments that they are secure and relatively risk‑free, relative to environments in which they don't have that degree of certainty.
The last point is a market of light touch regulation, whether you see ‑‑ again, you can look at market effects and you see data localization efforts. Those raise the cost of cloud services. They raise the cost of SMEs. They raise the cost of governments using technology services to deliver services.
Taxation policies that treat digital products, whether that be computers, tablets, phones in a different manner than other services, raise the cost again for individuals, testing regimes that don't comply with international testing standards and require the added cost of conducting testing for services or products in a specific market by market case.
Again, you are denying the economies of scale to and the value that that derives to your people and proper spectrum management. If your nation has not transitioned, conducted a digital transition to date, then it's time. Maximizing the returns to the use of spectrum and ensuring that that wireless infrastructure is available for operators in your country is critically important.
Of course, there are always going to be market sectors due to geography or poverty that are just not reachable by the market and it needs to be functional universal service funds to ensure that individuals in those spaces are receiving affordable services.
But ultimately, it comes down to those three key things: One, market regulation, ensuring that the space is there to have the proper investment in the delivery of services; two, skills development, so that what we are trying to do here is not in any one country build an ICT sector specifically, but to create an environment in which any sector can use ICT effectively to be more productive, and if possible, ICT sector can organically be developed in that space.
Three, accountable institutions; institutions that are open, institutions in which market actors can participate, be heard, and know what is going to happen and invest with some degree of certainty.
I think again, you can look across the board of the developing world, whether you look at Raul's studies in Latin America and see disparities of outcome effects across a wide region, from a hundred percent mobile penetration in Chile to low mobile penetration in other countries, or you look at Africa or southeast Asia, no matter where you are looking, you see vast disparities in outcomes, and you can tie outcomes directly to public policy.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. We have had a vibrant conversation among ourselves, and it's now time for the audience to stop being freeloaders and get to the mics and ask some questions yourself. We are running a little behind time, but we have time for a few questions. If you would like to ask a question, please come to the microphone. Before the first question, let me ask, my colleague is a remote moderator in a darkened booth who we cannot see from here.
If the remote moderator would like to tell us whether there are any questions that have come in online, please chime in, as appropriate, to let us know. You will be the voice over the loud speakers. But with that, let me please take the first question. Could you please identify yourself when you start the question. If I would ask you to limit it to maximum two minutes.
>> STEVE ZELTZER: Technology here. Okay. Now it's on. Thank you. My name is Steve Zeltzer with LaborNet APC San Francisco and also labortech.net. The question that I have and I think needs to be raised here are, what is social implications of, in the global economy, of apps and temporary workers, because more and more workers are being transformed into a situation of being gig workers as they call it.
This means more temporary workers in the United States ‑‑ now there are 30 percent, there are growing numbers ‑‑ and more temporary workers in Japan, Korea and many other countries.
Workers are being marginalized and their living conditions are deteriorating in the United States, in part because of the introduction of this technology. We don't believe it's sustainable without regulation. That raises the question of companies like Uber and others who want to disrupt regulation, and basically want to just use their technology to make greater profits. They say they are helping society.
The question is, counterposing regulation to protect social rights, rights of working people internationally and the introduction of new technologies, and how that is going to be addressed in an organized way so working people and majority of people will be protected with the introduction of new technology, and the question of deregulation and relationship to that. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. We are going to take a couple of questions, and then we will ask panelists to see who would like to answer them.
>> Thank you. My name is Subi Chaturvedi, member of the MAG, and I come from India. My question is addressed to Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda. He spoke to the point of predictable accountable public institutions and policies which are not retrospective. He talked about open market competition and embracing the environment.
We do know that statistics reveal that they are not on all of the same page, and then there are statistics, and statistics. We can counterargue that in lesser developed countries, which are still embracing new technology, the learning curve is much steeper.
How do we balance the idea of, I'm not arguing for licenses, I'm not arguing for protection in this environments, but how to allow local content, local start‑ups, SMEs from local regions to develop and scale up, because they cannot possibly compete with the Foxes and Disneys of the world. Even when we are talking about putting more content, we are putting more local services online, that has to be a balance between policy, how do you speak to that question? Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I will ask that this, we freeze the line on questions now, because this is about the amount we have time for. But we have two more and that will be fine. Let me just not answer the questions to be posed but also point that in our next chunk of discussion topics, local content will be a large discussion topic. I do not want to limit Ambassador Sepulveda's desire to answer, but I want to indicate it will be a topic of discussion on the next round. Please.
>> JUAN FERNANDEZ: I'm Juan Fernandez, Ministry of Communication of Cuba. I congratulate the organizers for having assembled a diverse group of panelists. I think it covers all the angles of a problematic, that it's a really multi‑dimensional, as they said. The objective is not ICT for ICT sake but to use it in development.
I want to focus my question in one issue that was mentioned by Professor Katz and also the Ambassador that there is a need for pertinent use, pertinent local content, that is not only, this technology used for all the nonproductive uses. Of course, all those uses are okay, but we have to encourage the development of pertinent Web sites, pertinent applications that are really relevant, not only cultural but economically.
And this in a way joins with Subi's question. Unfortunately, the market base strategies for having access not always takes into consideration this. It's only to increase the number of users, no matter what for what is being used, and there are some other tendencies that even tends to reduce the options of using this Zero‑Rating and all these things, that it goes in the opposite direction of having real pertinent and real development oriented, yes, development oriented applications.
My question for the panelists is, how can these policies take this into account, especially financing, for financing this local content that sometimes is very difficult, as Subi said, because of the competition for the already‑made content that is from elsewhere, that is really not relevant to our cultures and economies.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. As I had said before, we only have time for one more question so this is the last question on this round. You will have opportunities in the next round to ask a question. I will remind people, local content is a big chunk of the next round. Please.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Thank you. Giacomo Mazzone, European Broadcasting Union. The Ambassador mentioned before the spectrum. The spectrum at the moment is already used by many other users. I think that is important to consider that it needs to be an arbitrage about the public interest, about the various group of interests, about users of the spectrum. Spectrum is a common good. It needs to be treated in a fair way.
The last consideration is that I've heard not so much about the role of the Government. I think that the Government probably from the European perspective have a important role to play, and would like that this would be even considered more in this discussion. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. With that, I'll turn it to the panel. I think Ambassador Sepulveda has won the popularity contest in terms of having been named. Raul Katz was mentioned in terms of economic research, but I'm not limiting answers to those two participants. But I will start with them since they were the names in the questions.
And on content, please be aware there will be a much larger discussion on content in the next round. We will have a little bit of discussion here, but there are lots of other people who will be speaking. We will catch the remote at the end of this. On the remote, we will take this round of questions, and we will take the remote because the remote obviously didn't hear about the last limit.
>> DANIEL SEPULVEDA: Joe, you mentioned there is going to be a conversation on local content in the next panel. I'm going to reserve my comments on that space in the next panel.
Relative to the role of Government, like I said, we believe that the role of Government is to create a legal, regulatory, investment environment to secure private sector investment and ensure the people have the skills to use the capabilities made available to them by the innovations that the private sector is bringing to the market. We don't believe there needs to be a specific industrial policy in given countries to develop a specific type of company or a specific type of sector.
The vast majority of the benefits of the deployment of ICTs, 75 percent of the benefits go to nonICT sector companies. It is the use of ICTs that is critical to the development of a nation, not the creation of ICTs.
Second, relative to the public interest and the management of spectrum, yes, it is absolutely true. In fact, it is our primary obligation in the management of a public good like spectrum to ensure that it is used and deployed and licensed in a manner consistent with the public interest. We believe that modern technology, and the fact that, yes, spectrum has been licensed out previously due to a long history of how spectrum was licensed out, largely in ways that technology has made either irrelevant or significantly inefficient. The modern digital transition and ability to take what was once a broadcast signal that took six megahertz to take up to send has now been dramatically reduced, freeing up space in the spectrum for other purposes. And again, those were spectrum licenses that were granted for free as opposed to the multiple mechanisms in which we grant spectrum licenses today.
There is a long debate about what works and what works well. Broadcasting and traditional mechanisms are centralized distribution of information, to many that remains a critical public good, particularly in cases of emergency or in use or in centrally filtered information that you need to have in that way.
The Internet provides a many to many mechanism for communications, and has revolutionized the way we provide information to each other, inform and educate ourselves, and needs to be a critical space to that as well.
Relative to Subi's questions on LDCs and the need to develop and scale services online, and this gets to some of the local content question, the premise that has been, my colleague from Cuba and Subi have questioned is, can the market enable and create an environment in which you have socially just outcomes. Those socially just outcomes include ensuring that people can provide services to their own people in their own voice in their own way.
That is a socially just outcome that we also support. What we believe is that the market today for the Internet as an open and flat platform enables a structure in which that is possible. Then what you need is investments in skill development, and if people have the skills and where people have the skills and they have an open platform and the freedom to use it, they create local content. They create local services.
The services in Kenya were not created in the United States. The services that we see all over Latin America, in southeast Asia, relative to agriculture and farm production, using locally derived applications, were not created in the United States. If you create the platform in which people can use their human ingenuity and capacity and desire to produce, they will produce.
If you limit that environment, if you close that down those services and you make them more expensive to use, you will limit that, those socially just ends that you are trying to produce.
I have a bunch of other thoughts. Oh, but quickly, on the, relative to the labor market and independent contractors as they relate to platform providers for the delivery of services of individuals providing services, that is a significant and real question. Senator Mark Warner in the United States and FTC have been doing significant work in the space. There is questions about having, ensuring there is a socially available safety net that is being reduced relative to traditional employer provided safety nets. We can have a longer conversation about that.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thanks. We are running close on time. But if anyone wants to make a, I would ask the comments to be kept short if possible so we can get back to time.
>> SERGIO QUIROGA DA CUNHA: On the issue of Government, I think it's important, all the work that I've been doing in the past couple of years particularly, and there I agree with Ambassador Sepulveda that the key explanatory variable on how countries advance more and others don't is public policy and institution of founders. It's interesting because some economies say institutional factors, since we don't know how to measure it, we will eliminate it from the models. But nevertheless it's the most important one.
What does it mean, institutionalization of these policies? On one, policies need to be somewhat centralized. There needs to be more coordination. Every single country that I've seen, particularly in the developing world, has ten ministries touching on the topic with no central authority. There is no by chance that Colombia has advanced because they have a central authority and endorsement from the executive branch. So in that sense, the role of Government is critical. And I would agree with what was said before, maybe we underemphasize it. On the issue of local content, I think we all agree on local content. The issue is where to focus.
I think underlying this discussion is somewhat of a notion, should developing countries go and develop their own version of Google or Facebook. I think that concept is wrong. I think that per se Google, YouTube or Twitter, Facebook, are multi‑sided platforms that can be customized, that are willing to accept the development of local content, as and in fact need that in order to become viable in the developing world. And I believe in that sense we need to look in the developing world at those sectors, those niches that really add value to our own societies, or where we have an advantage. I think of commerce where the Brazilians have made big strides, social messaging, video distribution when there are indirect network effects, and more importantly digitization of production processes. Even for opportunity to pick up, we need to make sure that whatever we do in the ICT field goes from the consumption side to the production side, and here we have a big to‑do.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I want to check to see, the remote moderator I think tried to send us a signal. Was there a question that the remote moderator had?
>> ELIZABETH THOMAS-RAYNAUD: Yes, we have two questions ‑‑
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: We only have time for one. The first one.
>> ELIZABETH THOMAS-RAYNAUD: Okay. The first one is from Ben Benin from Ramanou Biaou. The development of ICT today had an impact on climate change. How do governments think together and encourage the innovation of the Internet that uses screen technologies?
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Since we are going to get, do more of that in the next round, I'm going to park that question until the next round; please ask it again. What was the second question?
>> ELIZABETH THOMAS-RAYNAUD: The second question is from Akinbo Cornerstone from IGF Nigeria. His question is when we do not set up mechanisms to ensure the reduction of digital, of the digital divide, as it concerns IP blocking, without consideration for the development status of the source, we undermine the economic benefits from such a part of the world. Who gets to address the blacklisting of developing or underdeveloped countries?
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Okay. That question too we are going to park for round 2, because it will be on there. But at the beginning of the question period for the next round, please have both of those be the leadoff questions because we are going to address how to bridge some of the gaps, and I think they will fit more closely to those topics.
We had two requests, one minute, and I will be Draconian in your one minute.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: The response on app development, I think more than worrying about how we are going to compete with big American companies, we need to look at our countries. It is not helping that Telecom operators insist on keeping 70 percent of the share and giving 30 percent to the developer. It couldn't help that people couldn't get payment from Pay Pal by selling apps; possible in India, not possible in other countries. There are a broad spectrum of issues that we need to look at.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: 20 seconds. Excellent.
>> LYDIA BRITO: In the question of the role of governments, I think to create the right environment is very important, and definitely is a very important role of governments. But I'm not sure that I agree that it is only about using ICTs.
I think all the world needs to put the brains together, to bring the technologies, new knowledge, for the very challenging world we live today.
So I wouldn't say, and I'm really, I really don't agree to say that it's only out to use ICTs. I think we need to tap on the creativity that we have in all the regions of the world. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. We are going to bridge into the next topic. The next topic, the general concept is the Internet role in the economy, challenges and successes in delivering Sustainable Development Goals. We took the topics a little out of order, because one of our speakers does have a pressing time constraint and a commitment on another panel, and will have to be leaving us. We are going to start off with the concept of intellectual property, and the question is innovation is an essential element to the digital economy and the information society.
How can innovation and developing economies that will be essential to the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals be supported through intellectual property? What consideration should be taken into account in developing intellectual property regimes?
That is the question. We are going to be a little indulgent and suggest that five minutes, because you will not have an opportunity to come back for a second round. But, Creative Industry Sector of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the floor is yours. And it will be for five minutes.
>> MICHELE WOODS: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much, the organizer of this main session, to give us the opportunity to tackle this very important issue of the relation between intellectual property and Sustainable Development.
Of course, it is a theme that is close to the World Intellectual Property Organization, as our mission is to work with together 188 member states to promote an effective IP system that enables innovation and creativity for the development of economic, social, culture of all countries.
While a functioning IP system provides guarantees and incentives for innovation to take place and creativity to flourish, but a well‑functioning IP system at the same time provides for flexibilities and limitations to the scope of protection that aim at guaranteeing that the interest of society and the general public are also taken into account.
In recent years we have seen that intellectual property has become a quite popular topic in public debates, especially when talking about the digital economy. This should not surprise us. It is a reflection of the growing economic and social importance of the intellectual property.
From the economic perspective, we see a growing awareness of the contribution of creative industries to national economies. The review is developed, a methodology to measure impact, and studies across more than 40 countries in developing transition and developed economies show us that on average, creative industries account for 5.2 percent of gross domestic product and some 5.3 percent of total employment.
More evidences are provided by the Global Innovation Index, GII, produced by the World Intellectual Property in partnership with Cornell University and INSEAD, is that measuring the innovation performance of 140 countries, reinforces the idea that innovation is a key driver for economic growth, especially digital environment, and not only for developed economies.
The GII vision of innovation is a broad one, and includes Internet access used, Internet freedom, knowledge diffusion, and online creativity.
Of course, creating an efficient innovation environment is a quite complex and ambitious goal, that depends on several elements and/or innovation inputs, to use the GII jargon, such as the contribution of institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market and business sophistications.
Although it's only one of the variables, public policies and regulatory framework, including the IP system, play a very important role in promoting innovation.
From the social angle, I believe it's even more pervasive. People around the globe wake up in the morning and start dealing with copyright issues in their daily routine, whenever they update an application, they post a picture on Facebook, they access a library Web Page to find a book for their exam or subscribe to a new online service.
Against this background, it's essential first to raise awareness of the IP system, and second, for Governments around the world to provide an appropriate framework that can face the challenges and take advantages of the opportunities of the digital age.
Much can be said about the important role and positive role of the intellectual property in connection to other important issues like access to knowledge, cultural diversity, accessibility and disability issues.
Of course, due to the time limitation, I won't be able to dig into those topics. But the key for having an IP system that actually promotes Sustainable Development is to strike a balance of course between various interests, while maintaining the necessary incentives for innovation and creation on the high value compelling content and technology we all want to enjoy.
This is not an easy task. In fact, our member states are continuously working to improve the IP system to work towards the objective. Although we are aware there are not magic formulas in this field, I think there are good arguments to believe that a balanced and effective IP system, far from being a barrier, is in fact an enabling factor for creating a healthy and wealthy digital environment.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. Well within time. Thank you very much for that also. We thought we would also take another view on the topic, and I'll turn the floor over to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director for Center for Internet Society from Bangalore.
>> SUNIL ABRAHAM: Before I answer the question, I'd like to provide a brief critique of dogmatic multistakeholderism, and the critique goes like this. If you really believe in the multistakeholder model and you think it's appropriate for every aspect of Internet Governance, you should be advocating for the dismantling of the World Intellectual Property Organization and repealing of all international IP law, so that we can build them all up, ground up, using the multistakeholder model.
Of course, that is a joke. We can't undo 400 years of history. What intellectual property does, as Ronald Coase tells us, it prevents the tragedy of the commons by introducing property rights, but more recent scholars like Michael Heller tell us we live in a good economy, we have too much property rights and the subtitle to the book, Gridlock Economy, is how too much ownership wrecks markets, stops innovation and costs lives.
That is a serious cost that we are paying for too much intellectual property in our lives. What we need, as was said, is the other side, the business that doesn't happen at the World Intellectual Property Organization, access to knowledge. Clearly referenced in the Geneva but strangely missing in the latest draft of the WSIS outcome document, the Geneva declaration had section B3, titled, Access to Information and Knowledge. It had paragraph 25 and 26 that is explicitly referencing the public domain. Paragraph 27 spoke about free and open source software. Paragraph 44 spoke about open standards, and paragraph 28 spoke about open access. All of this is key to the innovation that is the Internet, and further integration that will be produced from the Internet.
I'll give you two examples of why flexibility and reconfiguration of the intellectual property regime is critical. In India, we have sub hundred dollar phones. One of the phones is called the spice.com M line 1000. At a hundred dollar price point, you will get a phone with a pico projector, support for dual sim cards, with a receiver for terrestrial television, receiver for FM radio with a loud in‑built speaker. It ships with a tripod stand, external speakers, laser pointer and torch. If the average mobile phone which doesn't have any of these features sold in the U.S. market, has 36,000 patents, this innovation from the Indian market, of course produced in Chengjiang using Chinese entrepreneurs, might have 50,000 patents. But if this entrepreneur wants to license some of these standards, such as the 4G standard, the voluntary pooling of these patents is no longer working.
There are four competing patent pools. Even if a manufacturer licenses from one pool, they will be sued by others. Therefore, we have mapped all the patents in the mobile phone, and we are advocating to our Government that, just like the Americans to win the world war established or encouraged the creation of patent pool and established a compulsory license a hundred years ago to produce military aircrafts, today, for India, to bridge the digital divide, we need to also establish a similar device level patent pool and have a compulsory license. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. Whenever Sunil Abraham says "but this is a joke," I always start to worry a little bit (chuckles) I sometimes don't find myself laughing at the joke.
Because one of our speakers is going to have to leave on this topic, let me get a clarification. Silvia, did you want to intervene on local content versus this? Or, I thought you wanted to do a bigger intervention on local content.
If there is one burning question in the audience, we will take it out of sequence because one of our speakers is leaving. I see someone racing to the mic. The question must actually be burning.
Oh, you are not going to the mic. Okay. (chuckles) Sorry.
Never mind.
We have one question. Excellent.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Hi, thank you so much for the comments, and all the ideas.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Can you identify yourself?
>> LOUISE MARIE HUREL: My name is Louise Marie Hurel, and I'm part of the youth at IGF program funded by ISOC and cgi.br. I'm also part of the Youth Observatory, and it is our goal to empower the youth as a legitimate voice and create a common space where we may articulate ourselves and make sure that our voices are heard. This is why we would like to highlight all of the speeches that contemplated the youth and that take into account our space in the future.
We would like also to highlight the speech of the Assistant Secretary‑General and the Deputy Minister of Telecommunications and Postal Services of South Africa. Thank you so much for your speech.
I guess this is more of a remark and reminder, rather than a question. But as youth, we urge that when thinking about trends and the possible future, we think about the place of the youth today and tomorrow, and how this intrinsically relates to Sustainable Development and the SDGs.
Thank you so much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Okay. Thank you for that remark. But this was one burning question about the IP topics. If there isn't one, we will continue on. There doesn't seem to be one. Call me shocked.
But that's fine. Thank you. And whenever you need to leave, please feel free, and thank you very much for adjusting to us for this conflict.
In terms of just in time, we now turn to the next topic which is Internet and ICTs. We agree that they can support all of the 17 SDGs, and but we want to see which ones can make the maximum contribution and ensure their rapid achievement, and also how can ICT capacity‑building in those areas best be delivered. And Gary Fowlie, the Head of Member State Relations at Intergovernmental Organisations for ITU, has joined us, and if you can please address that topic.
>> GARY FOWLIE: Thank you very much. Just to correct the record, I'm actually the head of the IG Liaison Office to the UN. For me to pick out which I think is the most important reference to ICTs in the SDG agenda is a tough one. But because ‑‑
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Can you speak a little closer to the mic?
>> GARY FOWLIE: How is that? Better? I'll repeat. I'm not the Head of Member State Relations. I'm the head of the IT Liaison Office to the UN. This would be, I wouldn't be representing Doria here. We will get the record straight.
Picking out the most important ICT reference is a bit of a challenge for me, because it was a long hard fight to get these four references in there. It's very encouraging to see the level of support that, now that they are in there, they are gaining; also the importance that science, technology and innovation took on in both, has taken on in the SDG outcome document, but also in the financing for development document. It is very encouraging, and the role of ICTs are highly noted.
The two that are most important, but the first, probably the overriding one that I think will have the biggest impact is in goal 9, which reflects infrastructure and the target that we should have, universal and affordable access to the Internet, in targeting the least developed countries, who have been calling for that since 2010, or 2011, in the plan of action. That was out there. It was nice to see it codified. And yes, that will make a huge difference once we, if you give people the tools of connectivity, they will use innate intelligence to solve their own problems with this. There is lots of proof to that.
But I think overall, the most important one is goal 17, the means of implementation, where ICTs are recognized as a tool of implementation and necessary means of implementation across all 17 goals. That gives us the opportunity to point the finger at each one of the goals, and say, okay, how have you implemented that, how have you improved health using ICTs? What can you do to improve health using ICTs? Then being accountable for it, and that will be the key. How can you be accountable for using ICTs across all 17 goals, all 169 targets? That is going to be a big challenge.
I think we are looking at the ITU through the WSIS Forum to begin to deal with that, how we manage to combine the WSIS action lines and SDGs. I'll come back to that. But means of implementation, we know here, inherently this is a tool of empowerment and tool of implementation. Now the world knows, now we have to put it in action. Thanks.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. As we consider the concepts of implementation, obviously one of the concepts is the first thing you have to think about the implementation of is the concept of access, because without access, many of these other opportunities do not actually exist.
With that, we want to talk about how we can expand the role of access and make it more available, and our first speaker will be His Excellency Minister of Information, Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, if you could do your three minutes, please.
>> H.E. JUNAID AHMED PALAK: Thank you very much, Moderators. Excellencies, and ladies and gentlemen, actually, what I was wondering for the last few minutes, that we have excellent innovations and excellent job done by the private sector in the ICT world. But the point is that how to deliver this innovations to the public, the public that means the rural people, women, etcetera.
The major hurdle at the moment is content development. Another is ICT illiteracy. Another is accessibility, and of course, the women need to be brought to the empowerment of men. Then having said that, another is the necessary backbone and proper legislation for ICT; illiteracy, the Government needs to intervene. In Bangladesh we have 22,000 schools. The Government is investing free of cost to develop computer labs. That helps to educate. Content development, they are a challenge. That is to be developed. And here the Government should come again to facilitate to develop content in mother tongue. Accessibility is a very important thing. In Bangladesh, we are setting up eCenters by the Government, at the rural level. Almost 5,000 eCenters have been set up.
And from that eCenters, the people can come and get the services. Apart from that, we need to develop specialized eCenters. We are farmers. EAgriculture centres, eHealth centers, that has also been set up by Bangladesh Government. 3,000 community clinics are already set up across the rural area. Where eHealth center is working and eCulture center, this is where all departments can get all the information regarding crop and the market. Well, and for the services by the Government, the Government needs to develop Web sites. Bangladesh has developed a Web portal with 25,000 Web sites, that helps the people to get services and information from the Government, and that bridges the gap between the Government and the people.
Well, having said that, the important challenge for a country like Bangladesh and other island nations, how to apply ICT to climate change phenomenon in Bangladesh and across the world. Here ICT is doing an excellent job. Here the private sector is here. But the community reduces the cost of bills, mobile phones, and ICT applications at the coastal build that helps to adopt, to mitigate the climate change phenomenon. And that saves life and property, and that disseminates knowledge.
Well, lastly I should say that the role of media is very important. That has not been discussed as yet, how the media should act to enhance and monitor SDGs. Throughout the year, reports of how the Government is doing, how the nonGovernment sector is doing, how the private sector is doing, that will enhance implementation of SDGs. Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I recall that we had a comment from our colleague from South Africa about the fact that they were actually looking at the data related to policy implementation, so again another way of measuring and monitoring these items, which is very important. I turn the floor over now to Madam, if you could please.
>> KOTCHOFFA AMEHOU FELICITE: Thank you, Mr. President, Mr. Chairman. I am the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies and Communication. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to talk about the current situation of Internet Governance in Benin. But before this, I'd like to tell you that the view of the head of state, Mr. Boni Yayi, is making Benin the digital country in Africa by 2025.
The digital market provides three categories of products, fixed broadband, wireless and mobile. In Benin, fixed broadband moved from 4,700 in 2013 to 46,997 in 2015, a growth of 894 percent. The penetration was assessed in .25 percent in 2005.
Broadband moved to over 1,911,000 in July, 2015.
This is an increase of 202 percent. And the penetration is assessed in 18.95 percent on the 30th of July, 2015.
Considering the differences of progression, we may conclude that the access to the Internet has faced in Benin a great improvement. The Benin administration since 2011 has established the Internet Week that aims at promoting and disseminating the Internet as well as other information technologies and communication.
The 2015 edition or version had as a theme connecting Benin, a dream to be fulfilled. The factors that have contributed to the development of the Internet in Benin are, amongst others, the adoption of the law on economic communication, and postal office, the development of 3G, the entry and functioning of the installation, and functioning of underwater cables, and the deployment of IXP, or Internet exchange points in the country.
The next development of transportation network of high flow is also one of the next steps. And this will allow the access to an Internet connection with high‑speed, and I would ‑‑ we would need for this to generalize the use of fiberoptics and also develop access technologies, as well as ensuring the permanent availability of electric power, as well as quality.
I must talk about the Internet quality in Benin, that should still be improved. The second, the 10th actually, IGF is the ideal medium to speed up the quality and accessibility of the Internet. Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. And this is very interesting to hear your observations, because this is something we can insert in the access in the context of everything that can be done to promote access. Thank you very much for your important words.
Let me first find out, do we have a remote participant on this one who is coming in remotely, Mohammed Tarek, and I don't know if he's joined us in a remote fashion. Is there any way to discover that? Perhaps some people try to figure out whether we have him remotely or not. Let me continue on to Jari Arkko, the Chairman of IETF, please.
>> JARI ARKKO: Good morning. I'm happy to be here. I have a very positive vision of the ongoing development. The future is bright. I don't want to minimize the current problems or the issues that we have ahead. But I believe broadband for the majority of people on the planet is a reachable goal.
Looking at the growth of mobile broadband, as Sergio mentioned earlier, Ericsson's research predicts that by 2020, 90 percent of the people on the planet can have mobile broadband available for them. This is a good situation, even if getting there still means a lot of work ahead.
But, I want to take a look at things a little bit beyond this. And I think there is barriers. The first one I want to mention is that it's easy to have a too rigid view of the Internet services and what they are today and modern day vision.
For instance, we tend to focus on only the people. In fact, I think the real situation that we need to look at is a broader picture, on things, the Internet of Things for instance, agriculture, environment, things like that. And some of those issues are, or application areas are very important in developing world, for instance.
I think the question is not just how to connect everybody, but how to connect everything, how can we ensure that the crops in Africa in some field are doing okay, that they are under best conditions, and how can ICT help in monitoring and caring for them.
That is the challenge. There are technical and economic aspects of that.
I know that we are discussing access, but I wanted to briefly highlight that this is not just about access, so I don't want to dispel the myth that, as long as we give people bits per second or whatever that everything is fine. What is in those bits does matter.
Some of the bits that do matter is that, for instance, the Internet retains its natural ability to allow permissionless innovation. That is the engine of economic growth, that is important here. Secondly, I'm here as a chair of the IETF, an organization that improves core technology. One of our focus areas is security, ensuring that we have technology that can keep communications over the Internet private.
As a way of one example here, in the 1990s we at the IGF had a heated debate about whether we can use encryption in Internet for various things. At the time, several agencies were opposed to that. But fortunately, we made of course the right decision that we need these kinds of tools for eCommerce and so forth. Some decades later, of course, we are glad that those decisions were made at the time.
These debates continue today, and we still need to continue to make the right decisions around those things. While positive, I want to caution that we have to go beyond people. We also have to go beyond just delivering the bits. We need also the right bits. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I think we start to see a trend forming of it's technology, people, processes, creativity harnessed across all the sources we have available.
Then we have the potential to do many interesting and beneficial projects and applications that may help close the gaps and advance the Sustainable Development Goals. We have specific sectors like health and education that may benefit from such applications, and we also need to promote innovation across the technologies and sectoral applications, and we may need to consider what best or good practices are available in that space.
With that, if I could turn again to Sergio Quiroga da Cunha from Ericsson, to talk maybe about some of those examples, perhaps from Latin America.
>> SERGIO QUIROGA da CUNHA: Yes, thank you. We can divide the examples in enablement‑related and Internet economy related.
If I go to education, for instance, we have a project called Connect to Learn, starting in Brazil six years ago. We installed one base station, one single base station here close, from here it's a little bit closer, but it could be in the middle of nowhere. That one base station in Belterra, triple the population, triple with just one base station. It was a place that the operator would never touch, would never go install, because they see no business there.
Today I'm happy to say that they have this Connect to Learn is business, it's health, it's eCommerce, etcetera. They have three base stations. Together with projects like this we have similar things in Chile or Mexico. This is SDG number 4 that we consider that.
Talk about SDG number 5, we have the gender equality. And we have a big program inside our company, Ericsson, that we are quite pioneering things. And now of course the diversity inclusion, we have a target of 30 percent of the Ericsson population, in technology and service company, 30 percent must be women by 2020. It's a difficult task, I can tell you.
It's perhaps the most difficult thing of the day. We have reduced inequalities. We have the SDG and number 10, that we have the problem of penetration, connecting the unconnected and bridging the digital divide in Brazil's lands. And it's amazing what we do in Brazil with very huge projects. And we see that the traffic there in the favelas and sometimes in the jungles, I'm talking about Colombian jungle as well, that we had untouchable base station installed there, that not the army nor the guerilla could touch because it was the way for communicating to the outside world. It's amazing reduction of inequalities is even in this sense.
Talk about jobs, we have of course the problem, together with World Bank, we are following what is happening with increases in the base station, the number of base stations connecting to the problem of the world, and the problem increase to 10 percent penetration means in economies increase of 1.38 percent of the GDP. So increase 10 percent, the GDP will grow. Wow. It's difficult sometimes. It's a seesaw thing, because, okay, GDP growth, and creates Telecom. I go the other way around. Unfortunately, we have governments that do not prioritize the ICT sector. We are screaming for that, because ICT prioritized means economic growth. Just see what is happening in countries like Sweden, Korea, etcetera, that had examples on innovation and infrastructure, that they were quite pioneer in that.
We have some examples here in Brazil, in cities like San Campos, that here outside Sao Paulo, that we have a complete security from one place that we are helping a lot there. In terms of transportation systems, with connection of Volvo and Ericsson in Goias, access San Pedro, connection between us and telephone, we put smart parking and smart lighting, and that is a very big smart city. Santiago and many countries here in Latin America are already in the sustainable communities and cities that we are, of course, with the partnership. Using partnerships now, we are starting to talk about 5G, 5G in Latin America.
We announced a big time with American mobile we are going to start tests next year. That is a little bit of the examples we have.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you.
>> SERGIO QUIROGA da CUNHA: I have ten more seconds.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Our colleague has decided to be generous and give everyone five minutes instead of three. That is the problem. If you are speaking, do math, the only one who gets an exception from the math is going to be Silvia, because she wanted to actually put all her comments in one spot. Silvia will get the five. All of you, it's the three. I know that all of you are masters of math and can do that subtraction.
So and our colleague in the back has now become a master of math as well. With that, I did want to say that since there was a smart transportation system, I'm going to turn to Helani Galpaya again, because I think that may be one of the things that you have also looked at in some of the research, some of the concepts of how transport logistics can be helped, and some of the data that you may be able to glean from it and analytics you may be able to bring to it.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Let me take a broader view. That ICTs can help certain SDGs is without question. We have a real issue of how do we monitor our progress towards all of these SDGs. Here, ICTs can really contribute. The work we are doing takes whole detail records that is CDRs, that is the digital trace we all leave when we make a phone call, SMS, have Internet browsing session. This is a very rich data set. It is, has almost universal coverage, because most of the people, including the poor, which is very important, are using phones. This is one of the few data sets that is representative of the poor, depending on the question you are trying to answer.
Because of the universal coverage, it allows us to really combine with other traditional data sets, like income expenditure surveys, household surveys that are done every four, five years. We can actually take the data from that and extrapolate to the larger population based on big data, because analytics are quite rich.
It tells us about movement of people. We can look at what happens when a new highway is built. What happens to mobility, we can look at migration, be it long‑term or short‑term migration, if you are talking about cities in SDG 11. If we are talking about poverty, the analysis of core detail records combined with the reload data is turning out to be a very good indicator to develop multi‑dimensional poverty indices, as Christopher Smith's work has shown. We can really at a granular level measure poverty.
And it is very high‑resolution. That is the other thing. Unlike census data or survey data which stops at a particular enumeration area, particularly in cities we get very granular insights, so we can look at over time how a particular very small area, almost a part of a signal area, a cell is changing from a residential area to a commercial characteristic.
What does that mean in terms of delivery of public services? So, it's universal, it's high‑resolution and it's near realtime. So this also then helps with disasters. What is happening, can we obviously, other than warning people, big data, where are people congregating? Where are people moving? How can we then deliver services and information to them? All of these things can help.
SDG 9 talks about infrastructure and getting financial access to small industries and small businesses in emerging economies. The biggest problem that these small industries, SMEs have, is lack of access to finances, because they are asset poor. They can't get loans. When you combine variables created from cell phone data, including expenditure data, top of data, last remaining load, etcetera, you get good proxy indicators about a person's creditworthiness.
This is being used already in Brazil to extend credit, microloans to entrepreneurs. The monitoring and actual implementation of some of the SDGs is hugely enhanced by the availability of a specific form of big data that is generated through mobile phones and people carrying mobile phones acting as sensors.
Imagine the possibilities if this is now combined with a lot of other data, data sources, like putting sensors on buses. Majority of the poor people travel in buses. The fact that they arrive on time or the knowledge of when the bus is arriving can make a huge difference in a person's life. These are some of the possibilities.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much for that. You are so far at the gold star level for keeping on time.
Our next participant will be a remote participant. I think he is in the remote room. And if we have the technological capability, I give the floor to Mohammed Tarek from the Misr Elkheir Foundation.
>> MOHAMMED TAREK: Thank you for giving me the chance. I'm not sure if you can hear me.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Yes, we can hear you.
>> MOHAMMED TAREK: To put this into perspective, I can tell you that in the last years Egypt has been developing in terms of IT infrastructure, and accordingly, there were a lot of solutions that provide also actually accessibility to education and healthcare, and also more importantly the crowdsourcing of challenges and solutions. Internally we have supported four main initiatives in that sense in the last two years, one of which is called Monetizer, which is a solution that connects all NGOs and have been accessed to the Internet, and also connect them with volunteers, which all of them can participate based on their interests, and also connect them with programs, corporates that are interested in these projects or problems.
The second one is another start‑up that is incubated in one of our programs here in MEK. They have a solution and that transfers any surface, regular surface into an interactive white board, and you can save all the data taught. And with that, you can have, all students can have access to all taught data. We are currently applying this in 50 of our schools that is built by MEK.
Another solution is also related to education, which is providing access to children that have no access to schools. We are talking here about more than two million plus for only basic education. So the solution is mainly about providing a tablet or a device that can be given to facilitators and through which all facilitators can have regular meetings with children and teach them through the curricula stored inside these tablets.
The final one, which is related with healthcare, it's more like a preventative solution for fraud donation. So basically donors can have some privilege in Egypt, like a free meal or something. So they basically, if they have capacity, for example, they would go from one bank to another and provide a donation which costs a lot in terms of tests and retesting again.
This platform provides an alert in the system, because we cannot afford with limited budgets several tests.
Outside MEK we have also multiple solutions regarding access to education as well. But we have never seen a scale up, even in any case health. So the rule here is never fail but never escape.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much for that. I have come back again at this point to Jari Arkko from IETF, to perhaps talk about some of the applications, especially perhaps in sectors like health and education and also concepts of driving and preserving innovation.
>> JARI ARKKO: Thank you. Once again I'm approaching this question from the techie angle. This determines the interesting opportunities in enabling the Internet of Things, on education, open sharing of information or participation.
To cover examples, healthcare is one of the key application areas for the Internet of Things, giving you one‑button import example perhaps. Better tracking of health parameters allows more focus on prevention, care at home, and consideration of hospital resources on the critical cases. Environment protection, another case for the Internet of Things, both in terms of monitoring the situation, prevention, as well as optimizing various industrial and other society processes for less environmental burden.
Education, I believe we are at the verge of a major change, transformation, when we disconnect physical presence from education specialization, and to some extent also economies of scale start to have an effect.
Many many more people will be able to have the best possible education in the world that they need in their particular field because of this. In order to enable these changes, there is obviously both technical and other challenges or work ahead.
We are working on that, on some of these aspects, with the rest of the ecosystem, on enabling technologies for these fields at the IETF. For instance, with video and realtime communications from browsers, or with protocol suitable multiple devices that are used in various Internet of Things for health applications, but it is not just about underlying Internet technology. This is a big project that encompasses also the fields themselves.
They have to do it all. For example, when you take IT technology into a business, it's usually not just about supporting the business as is, but it's about transforming the business itself to doing something in a very different way.
The same thing applies here. We have to transform education, transform healthcare, so it's not just about the Internet. We have to do it together, hand in hand. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. You are rivaling for the gold star now too.
This is the long‑awaited topic. Let me remind everybody, we had a couple of questions on the topic of local content. And one of them had to do with the policy environment, and one of them had to do with pertinent local content, and there were also some questions for financing.
I wanted to lay those out for the speakers who are going to be addressing local content, just if they wish to address any of those aspects in their comments, it might be helpful to the questioners who were providing questions on local content in the last panel.
Obviously, we are developing these applications, we are looking at projection, looking at beneficial solutions that are going to be applied in a local area, and obviously the development of local content and local application plays a important role. We don't always have regulatory and investment regimes that help support that development, and so what can be done to improve the chances of successful promotion of local content and applications. And I'll start this by asking Sunil Abraham to give us a three‑minute intervention.
>> SUNIL ABRAHAM: I've been following language technologies and local content for about 15 years now. And progress is painfully slow. Perhaps this is one clear case of market failure. There are language communities that are too small to be a viable market for proprietary software companies. In specific, for the last three years, we have been working with five wikipedia communities thanks to a grant from the community foundation, and we are trying to grow these communities both organically and inorganically. That means, inorganically would mean having existing encyclopedia relicensed and integrated into the wikipedia.
The problem is huge. Just to give you an idea of scale, 20 official languages in India, 200 major languages, and for most of those languages, apart from the first 20, there are no forms, no input methods, no dictionary, no thesaurus, no voice to text, to text to voice, no machine translation and no voiceover. There has been substantial progress though from the proprietary software industry. Google's Translate today supports, Google's OCR technology today supports 200 languages. That is a significant feat.
Also, Google's Translate works very effectively, thanks to its ability to leverage a crowdsourced corpus of information.
The complication is, using proprietary technologies comes with a surveillance overhead, and there is an infringement of the right to privacy. And while we can't wish all of that away, governments have to start working on the solution. I have three recommendations.
The first is to use the money we get from spectrum auctions in the area of language and content development. In the last spectrum auction the Indian Government earned $14 billion. That shouldn't be used to balance the deficit budget. It should be used to invest in information societies.
We could also have regulations and procurement mandates in the European Union. I'm told that any phone that is sold must support the 20 official European languages. We can do similar things in Myanmar, for example. When governments buy technology, they could have a long‑term strategy to building free and open source based language technologies. And finally curriculum, if we have neutral curriculum and transform students from being computer operators to computer scientists, they could contribute to free projects and also establish credentials globally. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. I now turn to Silvia Rabello, President of the Rio Film Trade Association, and since you chose to concentrate your comments, could you please give us a five‑minute comment.
>> SILVIA RABELLO: Good morning. Thank you very much for giving me time for my presentation. I am going to address all topics that we have been hearing so far, but in a lighter version, so to speak. I'm going to speak on the perception of independent audiovisual producers, and how that can be a sustainable activity.
The topic, sustainability, refers to the topic of future. This is the environment of where we live, based on what we have had in the past. This is where we perform professionally and personally. We have to maintain the environment or try to improve it for future generations. There is at least three dimensions within which we can consider the topic of sustainability. To be sustainable, an activity has to be environmentally correct, socially fair, and economically viable.
It's a triple borderline. AV industry feels very comfortable to operate within this concept, because we focused on a very low environmental impact activity. Economists might say that we have more positive externalities than negative externalities. Rather than polluting, we inform people, including about pollution.
Concerning our relationship with planet, species, natural resources, we are doing quite okay. Social justice is a more complex concept, which really considers some level of subjectivity. However, there are some international parameters to which we can abide by.
Social justice is related with dignity, living and working with dignity. Technology is within ourselves in all our activities, but it's not an end.
We have content. It is not simply neglecting technology, but leveraging the human development of the productive chain. This is why our jobs are not easily replaced by machines.
We really depend on human beings. I don't know if you know, but in Brazil, AV industry generates 200,000 jobs. It's a lot; the same as tourism, for example, which has always been relevant for job generation. Content is absolutely key. This is what drives us and takes us to the third dimension of the concept of sustainability, economic sphere.
What is our business is to bring together talent, transforming them into a piece of work and showing that to the audiences. In this process, we obtain rights over text, songs, image. We select, organize, edit, and finally, we get to a final product whose market value can be then commercially traded according to the return on investment strategy that we all have, and according to the rules of the market.
Therefore, legal security is very important. So for AV industry as well as for any other kind of industry, and this is why the discussion about intellectual property and copyright is really important for content producers and generators, if we invest time and money, usually a lot of both, in developing a film, a TV series, a soap opera or a documentary, it does not feel flattered when the product of our investment is simply copied and be distributed without our knowledge, because it's exactly when broadcasting our products that we expect to have resources to pay our initial investment and start planning for future investments.
Technology has brought a number of new opportunities for AV production. We have different possibilities and different opportunities where we can interact with our audiences. The content of these dialogues is absolutely key for our process of collective development. And this is why sustainability of this industry responsible for creation, production and distribution is really of all level interest, because we do not listen to iPod or iPads. What we see is what they show. We listen to songs using our iPads. So we really have to protect the product of human minds. As we have heard from the Brazilian singer, no electronic brain can really help us with glass eyes. Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. There were questions about the economics related to local content. It has been raised in one of the questions. Professor Raul Katz, might you be able to address those concepts for us in three minutes?
>> RAUL L. KATZ: Yeah. My comments are not going to counter those that were mentioned before either by Mr. Abraham or by Silvia Rabello, because they are relevant when it concerns linguistic idiosyncracies or protection of intellectual property.
I'll just add another layer to the problem. I think that content development is something that we all agree with on the need, but maybe still we haven't done a good diagnostic as to what the barriers are. I wanted to give you some numbers, to frame the discussion.
As I mentioned before, there is limited private sector investment going into the development of local content or local applications. As I mentioned before, Latin America has only $412 million that comes from venture capital. If I normalize that number, in Latin America it's $1.67 per person. In India it's $4.63 of VC money. Israel is 818.
So, there is clearly an issue of critical mass and resources. Obviously, Israel has seven million and a half people. But nevertheless there is not enough private sector money going there. We need to think about how do we stimulate the flow of private sector money, particularly VC money into this sector.
Second, and as I mentioned before, we have coordination failures in the allocation of public capital. $20 billion are going annually in Latin America, for instance, to the development of applications, content, scholarships, even scaleability and export promotion. Of those monies, 13 percent only goes to projects and start‑ups.
Very little is assigned to that particular part that is critical in the value chain of development of new applications and content.
Third is, I'm referring my example is Latin America, we have a very high attrition rate on projects. I analyzed the numbers of start‑up Chile, one of the most successful incubators in our region. And of the projects that are coming up as ideas and up front in the funnel, only .3 percent make it to the point where they receive some infusion of private sector money.
That attrition rate is very low. That says there is a lot of creativity, but we are very bad at taking that creativity into projects that are viable business models.
The pipeline is spread too thin. We have an issue on human capital. We are producing right now in Latin America 150,000 engineers per year, of which Brazil produces 58,000. These are UNESCO numbers. The economics indicate that we need 200,000. Just to give you a benchmark, the U.S. is producing 300,000 on an annual basis.
So a country, so we have a issue of critical mass, that if we don't overcome, this issue of development of local content is not going to materialize.
Recommendations: I think we need to rationalize public sector spending. We need to add all these $20 billion and assign it in a proper way linking it back to development goals, and reducing the frictional cost that exists between different Government entities, the subnational entities and the like.
Secondly, we need to avoid tropicalization. In the developing world we tend to imitate a lot. And we need to come up with a situation where we can actually develop things that are linked more to the needs of our population in our regions.
Third, we need to increase the project success rate. We need to improve the practices and incubation. I could talk quite a bit more about that. Finally, we need more of a digital strategy. What is our vision, what is it that we are trying to achieve? On what areas are we going to focus? How are we going to solve the human capital gap? Those are critical things that we need to address.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. That was helpful. We have looked at the strong potential for benefit from ICTs, looked at hurdles that have to be overcome technologically, but we also have looked at other concepts which include the need to invest in human capital development for needed skills to make productive use of ICT. We have to think about the obstacles that may exist to entrepreneurship. We have to eliminate perhaps the barriers to equality, whether based on gender or other factors.
Part of the question is, are there thoughts on how to address these or other issues which you see which stand in the way of obtaining the benefits of ICT and Internet support for the SDGs? I'm going to lead off on that again with Bambang Heru Tjahjono, Director General for ICT application, MCIT, Indonesia.
>> BAMBANG HERU TJAHJONO: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, we are fully agreed regarding the development of ICTs are so complex. In my country we are a little changing regarding the policy, because before we decide that policy, so at least that we should have a lot of data; like the Ambassador said, IT is many to many.
So inform all of things, not only the ‑‑ all of the people itself. So before we decide the policy of regulation, better that we cooperate with the multistakeholders, from the development, the players and other things from the academical, in order to set up the roadmap itself. It means that it takes a long time to decide, but it could be better if we have some of the result with the, agree with others for the multistakeholder, so that way, that now regarding the eCommerce, because the eCommerce, we set up the mission of the eCommerce, inform a lot of parameters, a lot of institutions. But this is along the roadmap itself.
So after four or five years at least, that we have some of the, a good policy regarding the fulfilling of the Internet itself.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. I will say that southeast Asia is very fond of roadmaps. Every member nation has, and to your credit, you keep to your roadmap. So well‑done, and good planning.
I now turn the floor to His Excellency, the Minister of Information, Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, if you could give us three minutes, please.
>> H.E. JUNAID AHMED PALAK: Thank you. I did mention that the major hurdle for the process of the developing world is that the ICT literacy and content development, and that sense of necessary ICT backbone, and also necessary absence of proper ‑‑ ICT developing Internet economy, and at the same time, ICT is developing as hyperspace which needs to be peaceful.
Here, we need certain steps from the commit side, because as I said, in Bangladesh, 20,000 schools are equipped with computer laboratories. And if we look into the matter, from eight, nine, ten, grades, so three years, so if we started this year, these three years, so that the boys and girls are equipped with ICT literacy, but the point is that how to apply ICT, how to apply, that is another question there. We have targeted, we cannot go for a targeted approach.
For example, turning up boys and girls at the grass root level, and targeting women, one laptop, one woman, can become a, women can be empowered. We are approaching in that line. We are empowering 100,000 women with laptops so that the women can become part of the digital society. At the same time, we need to develop a training program where the young generation at the grass root level, rural level can learn how to, learn the applications. Here we are not as yet taking any firm stance because the Government cannot do it. We have the private/public partnership as necessary. We have asked major giant ICT companies to come up with the solution to keep training. But apart from this, the important thing, the proper utilization is necessary to back up the ICT market.
That is also not done. So coming back to all the original question, how these services can be given to the people quickly, for that I have already said that eCenters are spread across the country. Any country can do their industry intervene, here the private sector is not coming up. We have set up eCenters, and I will tell you that Bangladesh has mapped the whole agricultural field. And with the click of a mouse the farmer can get the information, what type of manure, what type of water, what type of seed is to be planted, for what crop in that particular area.
The whole Bangladesh have mapped the quality for 89 crops. So spreading of eAgriculture centers at the rural level can empower farmer not only with the knowledge of farming but also the market. The farmers can have access to the market also.
EHealth center, I said there is another important thing, 12,000 communities have been set up across the country with eHealth centers. The rural people and the women can have a primary knowledge of health problems. I do know that Bangladesh has been successful in MDGs, child, maternal, we have achieved the target.
Last year, I should say the reducing the bandwidth causes important issue. In Asia, the submarine cables is a main connecting fiber. But if we can develop information highway in Asia with 32 countries, more than 200‑kilometers, that will drastically reduce the bandwidth cost issue, because in other countries the bandwidth is cheaper than submarine cables.
Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much as well. We now turn to the Deputy Minister from South Africa, and please give us three minutes as well.
>> HLENGIWE BUHLE MKHIZE: Thank you very much, Chairperson. I'll try not to repeat what colleagues have said. We, in closing, it's important to emphasize that we move from the premise that information and communication technologies including Internet are key enablers of development, and also that they are catalyst for accelerating outcomes of all three pillars of Sustainable Development, that is economic development, social inclusion, environmental protection.
We have a population of more than 50 percent which is still not connected; hence, the priorities is to roll out the broadband to those communities. Of course, in line with other colleagues, who are putting a lot of emphasis on eGovernment strategy, whereby we are creating a demand by putting services online for everybody, and strengthening our e strategy whereby people acquire critical skills of being able to do, to use the mobile technology of which ICT as I said yesterday were more than 20 percent penetration of the mobile technology.
Investing in that for e‑learning, eHealth is priorities and of course the justice. But the eCommerce is a critical one, where we are trying to work, to deal with what we see are priorities for economic inclusion. The small business enterprises, we see them as the driver of the economy, and we are using Internet to make sure that people learn from each other in terms of financial management, also how to access the markets and also what they need to grow their economies, how they access their major players.
But of course, included in that is this whole area of the partnership between Government, education system, and the private sector, which you see as a major area of concentration, where sometimes even the institutions of higher learning, they do not really give you what you require if you want to scale up.
So treading carefully in that area, we are a new Ministry focusing on monitoring and evaluation, working very closely with the statistics of South Africa, so that where we see as gaps we are able to close them. And we are interactive on a ongoing basis with institutions of higher learning. And of course, students have captured that area and started talking about that, if we want to succeed, education should be free immediately. They are using the hashtag, again technology, to put pressure on governments to quickly move towards a free education.
And the question, well, I hope as we move forward we look at also the question of affordability of Internet usage, especially in developing countries, because if we oversimplify that, we might miss an opportunity of how investment should be directed, and in which areas in developing countries if we are to close the digital gap, not to widen it. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much.
When we considered these issues, I think there is a theme in the two comments you have made, and clearly people in the Ministry are measuring, and they are keeping tabs on where things are, where gaps exist, quantifying them and thinking how to address them.
I think that is a valuable lesson across the table, and also thematically referenced in a number of other comments about how we have to deal with these issues, because we first have to identify them, quantify them and then deal with them. I think that is a very important concept.
If Mohammed Tarek is still on the phone, I was wondering if there were any issues he would like to address under this. Mohammed, are you still with us?
>> Hello?
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: We can hear you, Mohammed. Go ahead. Did you hear the question or do you want me to paraphrase it for you?
>> MOHAMMED TAREK: Yes, thank you. I can hear. Basically, there are many stakeholders in terms of taking a solution for these problems, with these challenges.
From my perspective, I can speak about entrepreneurship perspective or the supporting entities for entrepreneurs, and also the NGOs. Regarding entrepreneurship, I think there is a very huge room for moving the entrepreneurship system to solve local challenges, by addressing the real challenges in the market, and studying what is in each sector the real challenge, and where is it, and how to tackle this for entrepreneurship.
The second issue here regarding NGOs, they can work also on raising awareness about the importance of ICT sector as a whole, and how multiple challenges have been solved through ICT sector. Also the promotion for existing solutions, so we have multiple entrepreneurs that are working on real solutions, but they are lacking the accessibility to local communities. So NGOs can help a lot in that field.
Also, they can source the real data about their challenges, in order to make it clear how the challenge is big or not, and how specifically they can tackle these challenges.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much for that. We have been speaking now for quite a long time. And it's time to go back to the floor. I remember we had two questions that were parked with us. I actually think two of the interventions have answered the environmental question.
But remote moderator, could you remind us of the first question that had been asked, which I don't think we dealt with, because I think it dealt with blocking access to data, if I'm not mistaken. And also remote moderator, are there any other questions accumulated in the interim? Those who would like to make a intervention, please head towards the mic.
>> ELIZABETH THOMAS-RAYNAUD: Okay, so there are the two questions. One of them is dealing with climate change and the other one was the IP blocking.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Right. I'm suggesting the climate change one has already been addressed in comments. But I don't think the first one was.
>> ELIZABETH THOMAS-RAYNAUD: This question is, when we do not have a setup mechanism to ensure the reduction of digital divide as it concerns IP blocking, without consideration for the development status of the source, we undermine the economic benefits from such part of the world. Who gets to address the blacklisting of developing or underdeveloped countries?
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: So the question for the panel is, who wants to address this question, if anyone? Jimson Olufuye is brave.
>> JIMSON OLUFUYE: Thank you very much. That is a serious issue in developing, where a lot of IP addresses is blocked and not usable. What we have found out is that the country responsible, outside the African region, the bases where they capitalize on the capacity level, capacity in developing countries, to address this. And it brings about reputational damage. It is a serious issue.
I think we need to broaden capacity, and to getting this challenge, increasing know‑how, network configurations, and how to remediate and tackle repetition damage this brings about.
So it's a serious issue. We need to work on capacity, improve the know‑how of administrators, network administrators and techies in developing countries.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. Did anyone else want to address that? If not, we will go to the mic. Please go ahead. Identify yourself. I can't figure out whether you wanted to also address the question that had been asked.
>> JUAN FERNANDEZ: No, I want to follow up in my previous question. My name is Juan Fernandez, from the Ministry of Communication of Cuba. Following on in my previous question, it was given some answers by Ambassador Sepulveda and also Professor Raul Katz and some other, of some of the indispensable conditions needed for this local content to flourish. It was mentioned the openness of the market, that this is a condition of course, capacity to do that.
Professor Raul Katz mentioned the need for institutions and institution to carry out the problem, but my view is that all those conditions are necessary, but for us are not sufficient, as we see, as we say in science. I think that there is a need for some affirmative action in some way, in order that the bits that goes on, it's like the colleague for IGF said the right or the bits that are really needed.
For this, for to put more precision to my question, I'm going to tell this paradox. I've been following in Latin America, there is an award called the Freida award that makes, every year that gives awards to very nice projects on Internet and ICTs.
I have found out, those awards mainly are the ones that are mentioned for agriculture and mainly free, not paying, not services that you pay for. They are free and useful award for fishermen, in Trinidad, for sign readers, a lot of those, very interesting and very good applications and Web sites.
But we have found out that mostly all those projects have been financed through grants, through donations, and when that source of funding finished, it cuts out, the project dies.
My question for the panelists is, because this is different conditions in different parts of the world, in the U.S. there is a huge advertising company that fuels companies like Google, Facebook and others that are able to do, to give wonderful services for free. But that condition does not apply in many part of the world.
So I ask the panelists, how can they envision a way, a model of, for economic sustainability, because it was mentioned here that the Sustainable Development has three parts, threes pillars, the environmental, the social, but also the economic sustainability of this project.
So I ask the panelists how they envision, not with the view from advertising fuel that is only in a few countries. In the rest of the world, how do you see the sustainability financially to have this free Web site, the right bits as my colleague said before?
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: If we can take a couple more questions at the same time, and then we will do a round of answers. Please introduce yourself. Thank you.
>> GIACOMO MAZZONE: Giacomo Mazzone, European Broadcasting Union. Because you said this was the appropriate moment for question about local contents, I want to bring to your attention that again European model, that is one I know more, in Europe we have every year from the broadcasting sector around 40 billion Euros invested in local content production. This is a model that could be replicated in other parts of the world; in South Africa for instance, we have a strong presence of public sector in the broadcasting areas.
This money goes mainly to local producer, to local authors, to local screenwriters, etcetera, etcetera, people that could develop creativity. And then where is the link with our work in the discussion of today?
20 years ago, the Government of the UK discussed with BBC how to enhance the quantity and quality of the contents on the online world, and asked to BBC because BBC knows how to do it. BBC invests and today is the biggest access point for content over the Internet.
So this is a very simple model, and synergy with existing reality that immediately could be implemented. And I address this point to your attention, and community radio, because in some countries we have strong public sector, but in others we have communities. Bangladesh is a place where the community sector is as important as public sector.
The second point that I want to, is simply thank Ambassador Sepulveda what he said about spectrum. Unfortunately, there is a mislink of communication with his representatives in Geneva, that WRC today are asking to use all the rest of the bands spectrum for broadcasting for other uses for Telecom use.
There is a problem. I hope that Mr. Sepulveda could send a link to Geneva and then the position will be more homogeneous.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. We have one more question at the mic. If anyone else has a question, please come up to the mic now. We can take about one more.
(no English interpretation).
>> INTERPRETER: Apologize for no interpretation.
>> AUDIENCE: Amessinou Kossi. We can take care of the challenges that are both in electricity, and the spaces to be able to receive the data and the Internet traffic for to access the data, and how from the technical standpoint, and from a financial standpoint as well as strategic, how can we face such challenge.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: I would like to have an answer regarding this question. Thank you. This round of questions, we have had two questions based, actually three questions based in economic models and how you may finance creativity. And then there was one question on spectrum allocation, which I'm going to lead with that one because I'm sure that is a somewhat narrower answer. And I'll ask Ambassador Sepulveda to answer the spectrum allocation if he wants to do that, or answer it bilaterally at your own time, whatever you prefer.
>> DANIEL SEPULVEDA: I will answer both questions and in exchange sacrifice my time on the next panel. European Broadcasting question, what is going on at the WRC, the question is whether or not nations can themselves determine whether or not they want to reallocate aspects of the broadcast spectrum, all of it, some of it, any of it for mobile broadband purposes. That will be a decision made up by each individual nation. As you may or may not know, in the United States we have a incentive auction system for the reallocation of some parts of the broadcast spectrum, to meet the growing demand for mobile spectrum.
As it was presented, there is a proposal before the WRC to take away all the broadcast spectrum, make it mobile spectrum. That is factually incorrect.
Second, I wanted to address Juan's questions. I'd like to hear what Juan's proposal is. There is a proposal embedded in the underlying question I think. But I would point to how the successful models that we have seen relative to content creation and economically sustainable mechanisms for local content creation, and I want to make sure I address the point raised by the colleague from UNESCO. When we talk about encouraging the use of ICTs, we are talking about encouraging the use of ICTs for local content creation, for local creativity.
Some of the greatest creative works in the whole world have come out of, my family is from Latin America and some of the other parts of the developing world, but relative to Juan's question, I'd look at private sector initiatives, like wire incubator initiatives. I've been doing incubation centers where telephony voluntarily creates a space in which you have entrepreneurs creating and developing services delivered over the Internet from a local space. I'd look at start‑up Chile which is an initiative out of Chile. They encourage start‑up businesses from around the world to come to Chile, create their business in Chile, and in exchange, tutor and mentor Chileans themselves for creation of start‑up programs. I would look in Colombia, another example in which you see multiple investments in creation of the use of ICTs within Colombia across sectors for local content creation. Three successful models. I'm not sure if there were other models that Juan would like us to look at. We would be happy to have a conversation about it. I didn't understand the third question. I wasn't able to hear it.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: The third question actually I think went to some of the similar ground, but was looking at the breadth of potential economic models related to the development of local content and was looking at strategy and other issues on that as well.
I think I've got Professor Raul Katz willing to opine on that one.
>> RAUL L. KATZ: Not only on the last one but also on Juan's question. I think that Juan pointed specifically to issue of scaleability. What happens when we have a business model that has been proving it's prototyped and we have to take it to market. Who is funding that scaleability?
Clearly, there is a problem. On start‑up Chile, they detected that and created a fund which was precisely addressed to the notion of taking it to market. But we have a gap. I'm saying private sector of VCs are not going into the scaleability.
Even the public sector, BNDS doesn't fund these things because they consider them too risky. We have an issue there, as beyond getting to the prototype on the business case, proven business model, how do we take it to market. The funds aren't there and we have to change parameters.
In the private sector and VCs, the VCs go when necessary conditions exist. When there is capital markets that is developed, when there is good taxation treatment for the investments, where is good bankruptcy procedures, where there is no corruption, and there is a fact today that VCs in Latin America are shying away from this sector because they see that there is not appropriate transparency and visibility. We need to change those.
As to the question from the gentleman, I don't see the economics of servers or IXPs being the interconnection points being a barrier for LDCs. These are very scalable pieces of infrastructure. We have developed and implemented those starting with a very small investment, and these servers grow. You pay as you go.
I think that this is a little bit of red herring. I think there is no barrier, and as Sergio will attest, prices are dropping on infrastructure. We can handle them.
I'm not very concerned about that being a barrier.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. Did anyone else want to add anything to those questions?
>> SERGIO QUIROGA DA CUNHA: Thanks for remembering that the prices are dropping. I'm used to one base station for one million dollar and now it's in the 20,000‑dollar. But whatever.
But prices aside, and everything that we are talking here is mobility, broadband, and cloud. The mobility I was talking at the beginning of the session here, if we talk about regulations and development and Sustainable Development, all the convergence and the public sector and private sector must go into convergence towards this development because we will not be able to regulate this technology that is happening. How to regulate the cloud? I heard a comment on jobs or job loss in many countries. Talk about Brazil, the labor laws from 1943, and now, and now remote jobs that we are buying services from India let's say, and whatever. Come on, it's impossible to regulate that.
And this is worsening and worsening and worsening. We need to prepare the world for cloud as a reality, that they will create this ecosystem, that we grow together.
>> JARI ARKKO: I want to briefly add the answer to the question. I agree with my colleagues on the panel of course. The one thing that I wanted to say is that many of these innovations are not freestanding alone things, but they are actually part of something else, a part of industry, part of the healthcare system, part of agriculture, part of something else.
I think part of the answer is in trying to figure out in those industries exactly how they allocate money, and where they put their resources and figure out what they actually need. There is a clear local need, as this existing funding for a particular industry already, and being able to use ICT technologies there is crucial.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. We have one last bucket of questions which is a small bucket of questions, which really goes to how the IGF and other Internet Governance organizations might better support the Sustainable Development Goals. I want to first call on Jimson Olufuye, because of some interesting work being done in Nigeria on how to actually use the IGF, local IGFs, and most interestingly subnational IGF as a vehicle for actually having these conversations with local populations.
If you can give us three minutes.
>> JIMSON OLUFUYE: Thank you, Joe. The African IGF lead the presence in African continent and from Africa IGF to Nigeria IGF, and specifically this year we are motivated to go subnational. And so we add the first subnational IGF in Canoo states Nigeria which belongs to the northern part. I was actually last week Tuesday there and brought in about six states around that zone, and they came together to see what is this all about, bringing discourse to the local community, what is the perspective of the private sector, concerning IGF, concerning topics of Cybersecurity, of freedom of expression, IP rights, etcetera, what is the perspective of Civil Society, what is the general rule for the Government dealing and also the people themselves. So this is opportunity for all citizenry to have their voices heard. It will only lead to the SDG that we are talking about now.
I think it's a good example for many of us to emulate. It brings more awareness. It gets people more better informed, and we are going to expand that process next year. Thank you, Joe.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. As the last part we are going to take the concept of identifying the synergies between the SDGs and WSIS action lines, and more importantly the practical measures towards their implementation.
A number of the speakers around the table have spoken about the importance of implementation. Having theory is insufficient. We need theory to become practice.
So, with that I'll turn the floor over to UNESCO, and if we could have three minutes, please.
>> LYDIA BRITO: Thank you very much. Let me say that first of all, I know that we were only speaking about Internet economy in this panel. But for example, for UNESCO, one of the very important SDGs for ICTs and for Internet in particular is the SDG 16 that is related to peace and justice. Because we are talking about Sustainable Development, we have to have the economy but also the social and the environment.
Once again, there and maybe in line with a comment that was done on the existing draft of WSIS, is that the target 16.10 really talks about ensuring the access to information and knowledge, and also to the fundamental rights. And again, if we want to have wholistic approach to the importance of ICTs and Internet in the new agenda, we need to also bring this social and cultural and education component that needs to be addressed.
That is why yesterday we made this point during the consultation.
Practical issues, a lot of people mention the importance of monitoring, and I did so also in relation to MDGs. One of the issues that UNESCO is working now, it's how can we develop the indicators that really allow us to support member states, in seeing how Internet is really being used to Sustainable Development, and taking into consideration what in UNESCO we talked about the principles for Internet universality, that is precisely the human rights component, freedom of expression, access to education, through the technology, cultural diversity, language and so on.
Also, the question of being open and again, we were not only talking about producing local content. We are saying that people have to produce also new technologies. There is still a lot of space for new ways of developing and using technology. So we would defend that it's not just about capacity to use, but this capacity to produce new technology and different technology and different contexts.
That means that human skills, it's also not only about illiteracy. It's also about capacity to program. Someone today or the day before, during the high level meetings, said why not to say that all, everybody should know how to program from young to old people, like learning how to read and write and do things, not just to be programmers, but to really use the best, in the best possible way, the technology.
So we are one concrete area; it's really how to develop these indicators, that do allow governments to see how they are advancing and what are the gaps and how can we reform, change that.
Also very concretely, really work in this awareness how these technologies can be indeed enabling tools for Sustainable Development, and the need to look at it in the three pillars of Sustainable Development. Thank you very much.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I'll give the chair to Gary Fowlie, if you want to give us three minutes on the aspects of this topic you would like to address.
>> GARY FOWLIE: Thank you. I'm not prepared to speak on behalf of the whole UN system, UN colleagues, but UN funds, programs and agencies have been asked how they are going to align their policies, programs to the SDGs, so that at the highest level that is the point of the beginning of the implementation within the UN system.
For ITU, what we did or have done, started and continue to do, is to take the WSIS action lines ‑‑ I'm going to hold this up to show the matrix that we are working on which combines the Sustainable Development Goals and the WSIS action lines SDGs on the, going down, like across the action lines and asking all of the ‑‑ I know. It looks like a dog's breakfast, I know. But one has to, often has to start with the dog's breakfast before they can get global Internet connectivity maybe.
Anyway, the idea was to ask all of the action line coordinators to look at the SDGs and propose which WSIS action lines, which of the SDG goals would align to one of the goals, which targets might fit into the particular box, doing that matrix and looking at the action lines and the SDGs and doing that matrix. Where do we start? Which of the ones are going to be most meaningful to ICT implementation?
That matrix has been done. The action line coordinators have provided that input. It is available for your comment and your consideration at WWW.WSIS.org\SDG. If you have a look at that, so what happens next? In the short term, I think we need to populate this matrix with case studies and best practices and applications. We have to identify existing research that supports it. That is a big area where there is many gaps.
We need better and more research that will support the matrix and the confluence of these SDGs and WSIS action lines. The intermediate term, we need to be cognizant that each of the SDGs have targets. There is 169 targets. We need to drill down on the targets and which will be most easily achievable with ICT access deployment.
The longer term, and I'm talking about March of next year, each of the targets will have at least two statistical indicators which will be the proof points. That work will have to be done to determine whether these goals and targets have received ‑‑ at that point, when these indicators come out, that is going to put a focus on what Helani Galpaya was talking about. We really need all the kinds of ICT data that are going to be generated to not only measure those targets, those indicators, but to determine whether or not they have been successful or not. That is what we have to do, in the short term, medium term and long term. Then at the WSIS Forum next year, we will I'm sure look at this.
In June, there is an integration segment of the ECOSOC where we are going to look at how digital technologies can be harnessed for Sustainable Development. All this SDG work feeds into the high level political Forum of the UN next July, to give you those milestones as we go forward too.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. Our speakers in the second half have been incredibly well behaved on time. Because of that, we actually still have some time.
Ambassador Sepulveda, if you would like to make remarks, you are welcome to.
>> DANIEL SEPULVEDA: I'll defer to my colleagues from the UN system. We will be working with them to support assuring that there are synergies and linkages between the WSIS and ICT action lines we are trying to effect and SDGs.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: At this point we have time to take questions from the audience. If anyone, remote moderator, do we have anything new that has come in? I'm sorry. You have a frequent flier program now. (chuckles).
>> AUDIENCE: Juan Fernandez. I'm sorry, but well anyway, I received a question from my colleagues, so I may ask ‑‑ I may answer that. He asked if I have some idea. As a matter of fact, I was asking them, because they have, and I think that the program that he mentioned are very valuable, and also Professor Raul Katz mentioned VC, venture capital.
But this goes mainly to projects that could generate revenues, not the project that I was talking about.
I think that we need, because my colleague asked what my idea, this is a rough idea that I'm throwing around for you, as food of thought. We need some green field funding. We need something maybe to reinvigorate the digital gateway that World Bank had for many years, but maybe specifically for this kind of projects that are not‑for‑profit, projects that are free of this kind of the use of the Internet that you don't pay.
During WSIS, the first part of WSIS, there was this idea of the digital solidarity fund, that maybe something like that could come again.
Also because I feel that the money is there. Everybody talks about how vibrant is the Internet economy, so the money is there. So but it has to be moved around to some of them for these purposes. Maybe with all this auctions of domain names, in which the word "baby" is getting income and money, maybe all those monies or part of that could be part of this fund of the new World Bank for this kind of investment of green field investment in projects for social return, not monetary return.
That is some idea that I think that the policymakers here and everybody, all stakeholders could think around, because everybody talks how vibrant is the Internet economy. Okay, let's get that vibrance and put it into work. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. The floor is open for responses. Sunil Abraham.
>> SUNIL ABRAHAM: I'm not particularly sure whether projects like this can depend solely on funding from grant‑making organizations. I think there are several layers to the problem, and I'll start my story from Hoskote, 20 kilometers from Bangalore. If you go there and turn on the television, apart from all the licensed TV channels, there is a local pirate TV channel, playing the latest movies, and that is funded through local advertising, the local barbershop, local tailor, advertises on the pirate TV channel.
Therefore, I don't buy the argument that you can't unlock advertising revenue in even depressed or poorer economies and markets.
So what is the problem? About 10 or 20 percent of the Chinese made phones available in India have receivers for terrestrial television. For about two thousand dollars, the lab in my center has created a pirate television station. That is how cheap it is today.
But slums and villages in India cannot create their own community television station. That is prohibited, because of the way spectrum is regulated in the country. So if we allow that to change, the forward path in terms of demand of what movies they should seek or go over IP and the return part of video heavy content, which is not good on IP networks, could come through television channels.
So we need several pieces of tinkering. We need to allow these type of business, we need to legitimize them. You wouldn't have cable television in the U.S., if it won't first have compensatory licensing. The innovation of cable TV in the U.S. happened precisely because of those exceptions in intellectual property law. We need similar exceptions that would allow communities to set up their own infrastructure, and that is prevented today because of what I earlier referred to as the excess of property rights.
Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Other comments around the table? Other questions from the audience?
Anyone at the table have any comments they would like to make that they haven't had an opportunity to make? We do still have a little bit of time.
>> RAUL KATZ: I don't know about property rights on content, but one stimulation could be this spectrum that is unlicensed that can give entry to all the innovation. In the U.S., the economic value of unlicensed spectrum has been quantified at over $140 billion. From wi‑fi that we all know to RFID to wisps to a number of things. I could see some of your proposals being taken from that part.
This is something that clearly the emerging world we are looking at white space, but the licensed spectrum isn't something we are considering yet, but is something I'm starting to propose more to foster some of these.
The other thing, going back to Juan's point, I think I insist that the issue is less so how you fund the start‑up through the point that they get to the launch. I think that the burn rate is relatively low until you get to the priority. The issue is how you fund the scale, the scaling part of it. And unfortunately, I don't know whether either public sources or ‑‑ you can't do it through grants. You need to create necessary conditions for prior capital to gravitate to that area, and those aren't there yet, as we all know.
There is some things that could happen, like I could see development banks playing the role of market‑makers in the sense of ensuring some sort of reliability of how those funds are being assigned. But if we don't have the pension funds, if we don't have obviously venture capitalists, if we don't have private equity trying to put into the market, we are not going to have the necessary resources.
It's everywhere. The fact is it's not only governments that haven't set the right frameworks. It's that private capital doesn't understand the market either, particularly in a region, I'm talking about Latin America because I know better, they don't understand what the digital economy is all about. It's very little. The people that are investing are the people that could monetize earlier exit strategies, but not new capital. New capital is going to cement construction, steel, things that they know and they sort of understand and there is somewhat of a lower risk. That is something to be considered.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: I have one new question. I'll ask you to make a short question, not a remark but a question. We will give the floor to South Africa and U.S. and anyone who wants to further respond to that question. If you can give your question, please keep it as short as possible and tell us who you are.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Jose Eduardo Rojas from Bolivia. The spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum is divided into parts that is divided by the law, the state, private sector, and Civil Society.
This shows scenario to balance the market for service providers, telecos putting new players to be able to render services not necessarily aiming at profit, but my question is, how do you see the outlook of the Bolivian state and the distribution of the electromagnetic spectrum to insert new players in services which could significantly change the criteria of information or ICTs, directed not only towards profit but to access information.
In Bolivia, what we are trying to resolve today is how to fund Civil Society and communities, and enable them to have service rendering companies, not aiming at profit, but access to information. How do you see this kind of challenge and how this could contribute to our debate?
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: I'll allow you to make the intervention you were going to make at the time. If you would like to answer that question too, feel free to do so. But I know you had already asked for the floor.
>> HLENGIWE BUHLE MKHIZE: Thank you very much, Chairperson. I wanted to say, I hope we really don't miss the opportunity to pitch conversations among the multistakeholder community for sustained interest.
The question keeps on coming, how to ensure that we have got money which we will use to invest into a social, cultural level.
I have flagged the issue of partnerships with the private sector, and I'm hoping that as we move forward, we will have critical information which will assist all players, even the private sector, to begin to understand responsibilities beyond commercial benefits. If we really want to bring a new agenda of how the use of ICTs helps us to step up our efforts, to equalize and create a sustainable society, we have to deepen our conversations as partners, and as to what responsibilities do we bear, how do we measure the commitments?
Often when talking to the private sector, we talk about spectrum allocation. And we have had those opportunities, and people have moved out, and left huge gaps in society. But I'm sure as we move forward, we can step up efforts in such a way that we begin to share benefits and begin to create dignified societies that are sustainable. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you very much. Ambassador Sepulveda.
>> DANIEL SEPULVEDA: I wanted to add to some of the things that Raul was talking about in terms of the challenge and how to meet it. I agree with Juan that the money is available and the technology is available to deploy these services to people around the world.
And once you build a platform, human ingenuity will take root and market demand in those places will drive the development of services. But there is a fundamental challenge to the degree of how easy or how hard it is to invest in infrastructure and to deploy services in any given market.
The reason in the United States that you can build a service and that it's deployable across 50 states and 300 million people, makes it a very attractive place to invest money. India, you have 750 billion people connected to a single network. There is a lot of money being invested in China in the development of Chinese companies and Chinese services delivered over intellectual property, I mean over the Internet. You are going to see the same thing happen in India once the digital India initiative is deployed effectively. You will see the same thing happen in Brazil once you have the economies of scale in Brazil. If you can piece markets together the way they are trying to do with a single digital market in Europe, if you can do it in Latin America, other parts of the world, you get the scale necessary to attract investment, but you need easier regulatory spaces to do it in. You need significantly more open markets and significantly greater certainty of investment. Otherwise the money won't come.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. One last opportunity if anyone wants to make a further answer to the question that was posed.
>> JIMSON OLUFUYE: Quickly to say from the private sector perspective, really support the last two speakers. The private sector is always looking forward to enabling environment. Once what we called E‑frictions are removed, like cases of multiple taxation, indications where there is no transparency, even in policy, or no political will to see a policy driven to the end, challenges. I want to note that.
Secondly, to say that the issue of IP black list is a very serious issue, because you are strong as a weakest link. We need to underscore the need for more capacity in developing nation, with regard to the Internet economy and Cybersecurity particularly. Thank you.
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Thank you. I'm going to make a couple of observations of terms and concepts I've heard without making any conclusion related to them.
And then I'll turn it over to Hossam Elgahmal for a slight summary perhaps of actual conclusion and then for a closing to our host chair.
We heard that SDGs were relevant across, sorry, ICTs are relevant across all SDGs, that they are key enablers of development across all three pillars of Sustainable Development. But that we need practical implementation and need to be accountable for implementation. There are issues of metrics and measurement which must be had. There needs to be a diffusion of application and technologies. We saw examples of how sensors in buses and crowdsourcing of mobile phones using the digital exhaust of those phones could be beneficial and provide new applications that could help individuals. There were discussions of applications including local applications that are, quote‑unquote, pertinent because that was one of the questions, are the applications pertinent. They were in agriculture, traffic and e‑Health and used to broaden market access.
There was a question of access to ICT, access to Internet, access to broadband, access to knowledge as a separate concept, the need for e‑commerce, economic inclusion especially for entrepreneurs and small and medium size enterprises and obviously also at the educational level and also across gender divides.
There needs to be skilling. There were questions raised from the audience about dislocation aspects of new technologies and sharing economy and how skills gaps may affect that.
The fact that there were concerns of local economics, local economies may not supply the continuous funding basis for all of the models. There was some dispute as to whether that is or is not the case. But there was an agreement that sustainable funding for models is important whether it comes from venture, commercial or other sources.
How to develop the right business and investment ecosystem for local players, whether green field funding might be useful, the use of ICT as a means to creativity, to digital economy and societal benefit, but also the importance perhaps of having some ability to participate in the production elements, whether in programming or other concepts.
The ideas of cloud emerging technology and the innovation ecosystem, whether you need and how you develop a facilitating policy ecosystem, for those kinds of developments, how we can all capitalize from these benefits while still addressing privacy, security and fundamental rights, and how in partnership with the private sector you can have developments, but also understanding the role of the private sector in the SDGs that goes beyond commercial interest in those SDGs.
That was by no means a complete capture of the breadth of topics and ideas, but I can only write so fast.
I'll turn it over to Hossam for a few comments. He did all the heavy lifting for organising this panel.
>> HOSSAM ELGAMAL: Thank you for the moderation and thank you for participating, especially all the panelists, ministers and all the guests, and it was a very rich panel.
Some of you have attended yesterday's Opening Session. I put a word, it was related a little bit to our session. But mainly now, I just want to summarize in a few what I understood. We have three main approaches, or depending on the maturity of different economy, it seems.
So we have heard regarding countries and places where the change is not about expanding the access, but about having basic requirements in testing. I think approaching those types of challenges might be different, and this is what was expressed. How can we provide this with a very cost effective manner, so that we can help those areas develop much faster, and benefit from the Internet and ICT.
We have the second path is regarding the policies empowering more access efficiently and with competitiveness, transparency, security, openness, and providing ease of investment plans, so to encourage investment to come in, and to bring the next billion online.
It's very important for many countries to have better policies in order to really engage further multistakeholders.
But we have heard the third one, which is many developing countries who have already invested in access are currently looking for beyond the access, and looking for the result in their development, in their societal and cultural development.
And they have a problem, because they are not able to develop their own ICT industry, that current ecosystem is not helping. So they need economic development, social inclusiveness, environmental protection. And all of those business models are not available easily. They will need help and assistance in order to be able to implement the information society, to enable societal and economic development.
How to ensure local Internet content and ICT industry development with the proper ecosystem investment tools, to raise industry sustainability and competitiveness with the idea of the international cooperation. I think that there is a social responsibility on the international cooperation, to work hand in hand with developing countries in order to be able to provide Sustainable Development goals through ICT and Internet.
And by this, I do thank you and I give it to ‑‑
>> JOSEPH ALHADEFF: Have we missed anything, to our Rapporteur?
(off microphone).
>> HOSSAM ELGAHMAL: Back to the chair. Mr. Chair, thank you.
>> HENRIQUE FAULHABER: It's time to close the session. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for a very informative consultation session, and thank you, all the partners and the panelists and moderators for making the discussion so informative. I thank the moderator and the organizer for this that they provide. I have my thanks to all of you being here this morning, and your valuable contribution to our important discussion. It is now my pleasure to close the session. The meeting is adjourned. Thank you.