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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>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Does everybody prefer this last slide? Or we have no preference? Okay. Well, why don't we get started. Thank you all for being here. It's been already a very productive week and certainly a productive day and I particularly appreciate having so many experts here, our planned speakers. And I just ask folks to move up who are in the audience because I hope we can also have conversation with others as we look at these very interesting and important issues.
And let me just give a sense of the format that we would like to follow here. As the title would suggest, there's a lot of territory we want to cover, a number of all different issues that are all intertwined. The title is Internet Governance 2015: Promoting trade, Inclusion and Trust.
We have had workshops on this cluster of issues in the number of the recent IGFs, and I think one of the things that's beneficial here is to revisit these topics every year actually and see what has changed, what we have accomplished, what may be new issues, new barriers, to the global availability of data and information, its availability and the interest in people for accessing that data and trusting the systems that make it available. So it's that cluster of issues that we were hoping to discuss.
We do have as an objective here to try to come out of this workshop with a collection of good ideas that come up in the many sort of brief interventions that we will have. And at the end we will say, okay, let's have 1 or 2 sentences or takeaways from each of those speakers.
So let me just start by pointing out that all the speaker biographies are available here through this link. I myself am Jackie or Jacquelynn Ruff. I'm with Verizon Communications where I lead the international public policy function. And I spend a lot of time trying to think and work on the issue of the cross‑border of data flows and so on as well as other aspects of Internet governance.
We will have ‑‑ let me see how this works out ‑‑ four blocks of conversation with different experts commenting in approximately three minute segments. And then at the end, as I said, we will have this sort of collection of takeaways.
So what I will do is beginning of each block say what it is intended to be and who will be the speakers, and then try to keep it flowing so that we get everything done within the time allotted. Okay. Any questions before we get started?
I would like to give thanks at the beginning to Barbara Wanner who is here with me who is with U.S. Council for International Business and really did all the work in preparing this, did a really wonderful job. So I hope we do the preparation justice.
So the first segment that we are going to cover is ‑‑ actually, let me just step back for a minute and talk at least from my perspective as to why this is important. I pulled out a couple of stats on trends that I think was significant. And we all know them but just to kind of keep them in mind. The IP traffic is of course growing exponentially and growing much more in the emerging markets than in the developed markets at faster rates. For Latin America the growth is 25%, central and eastern Europe ‑‑ 25% between 2014 and 19. Central and eastern Europe 33%. Middle East and Africa 44%. Another interesting idea is I found that data as a key component of services exports is extremely high, particularly in emerging markets. India 90%. Brazil 60%. All the bricks, it's just the services and those enabled by data are really hugely growing.
The other thing we know that we probably didn't know a year ago because the studies came out just this year is the negative impact ‑‑ that's the positive ‑‑ the negative impact when there are barriers to cross border data flows.
A recent study found that in Europe those types of barriers would bring GDP down by something between one or a little over one percent and would bring European manufacturing exports to the U.S. down by 11 percent. So, again, a few things to orient us to the economics side of all of this.
So we are going to turn first to our participant here from the OECD, Josie Brocca, and now in the OECD working on the ministerial that will take place next year. And will give us a little bit of the background on what you call the evidentiary of policies and training issues. And Liesyl Franz who is at the State Department in the U.S. as a senior policy advisor in the office of cyber issues. She'll follow on from that particularly with respect to the security guidelines of the OECD developed. So it's all yours.
>> JOSIE BROCCA: Thank you, Jackie. I'm going to cover ‑‑ the OECD has a number of two rules that helps support the development to the digital economy and support particular trust in enhancing trust. And I'm going to focus on some commonalities that I think provide a good frame particularly for this issue talking about mostly the privacy and security guidelines. And then I'll touch briefly on some work we have recently done on (?). So from the beginning our work on privacy and security has really been a shared vision approach that provides the right level of trust without undermining or limiting potential digital economy for innovation growth and social prosperity. We have recently revised our two major tools in this area and there are three elements that I think are progressive and new that are common between the two revised guidelines.
The first one is that there's a need to move away from solely technical (?). So the case of privacy a lot of countries will have privacy as part of their international digital strategies but nobody actually has a national strategy dedicated to privacy. So what the focus on is the laws and enforcement but not actually having a full society approach that takes in all the different considerations in points of view while providing a flexibility to be able to use emerging technologies.
National privacy strategies would help focus our efforts and help focus authorities and other actors to be able to look at this in a new light and again not just focus on the laws (?).
In the case of security we just released a new council recommendation that is now about digital risk management as opposed to focusing on cyber security, we are moving away from that and Liza will cover a lot of the process and elements. But in regards to that what we are calling on countries to do is again move away from cyber security strategies and really focus on the risk management element of this and not the technical pieces of it. So to attack security in the same manner that you would in any other risk that you would have your business organization, government, et cetera.
The second point that I wanted to make is that high level engagement is important. So for these strategies we are calling on a national approach so at the highest level of government coordinated across ministries so it's not just one looking at it. And in the cases of companies and organizations really elevating to the sea level so it's not about the technical aspects. The third part is the multistakeholder engagement. So all of our tools are developed in a multistakeholder manner. We have officially at our table, business; Civil Society, the internet technical community and trade unions and we think this approach is necessary when talking about these issues and creating any framework tools that you're going to develop to support digital economy in particular.
Despite the fact that we have these in place, there are still a lot of new and emerging issues that are coming forward and most recently we have done quite a bit of work on data driven innovation. If anyone has read the report, congratulations, it's over 400 pages. But we do have online for your reference a shorter policy brief. And really what the report focuses on is that there's a need to encourage investments in data, to promote data sharing, and to reduce the barriers to cross border data flows. The report points out that companies that use data efficiently will have 5‑10% productivity gains which is pretty substantial when you think about it.
But at the same time while we are encouraging all this we need to strike the right balance between these benefits as well as protecting individuals and organizations who have legitimate concerns like privacy and security, and it may limit some of this openness. And of course addressing this is really complex.
So this goes back to the three previous points that I made that, regardless, you still have to look at a national approach, you need to engage all stakeholders in this dialogue, and that it needs to be raised out to a level that is high enough that they're able to coordinate all of the different interests and bring everyone together. And I think with that I will let Liesyl discuss the security element more specifically.
>> LIESYL FRANZ: Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Pleasure to be here and join this group. I hope that it will be as interactive as Jackie will allow it to be. But I thought I would focus on three elements with regard to the, I guess, abbreviated terminology on the security guidelines that Josie was just talking about.
I would like to cover a little bit of the process because I think the process that the OECD under took to come to these new guidelines was important. I'll talk about the shift in focus to the risk management approach that Josie mentioned. And then just quickly talk about how these guidelines can be basically taken forward, not only in the OECD but globally as well.
So the OECD put forward its last security guidelines on network security in 2002 and they were focused ‑‑ they had a series of nine principles that the membership felt were guiding principles for all stakeholders or leaders of any kind of organization whether it be government, industry, or academic or civil society organizations on how to manage their security of your networks.
In true OECD fashion they took a look at those guidelines five years later and thought, okay, at this point do we think that these need to be revised in any way? And there was a general consensus that they were okay, that that point they had a certain amount of relevancy still and we'll take a look again in another five years.
So essentially that's what they did. Ten years later the OECD put out a questionnaire asking the member states and stakeholder groups what they thought about the currency of the 2002 guidelines and what they might want to do about them.
There was quite overwhelming consensus at that point that it was probably time to take a look at these guidelines in the intervening ten years and see if there was a way they could be updated and revised to reflect the growth of the Internet and ICTs and how that affected how the OECD might adjust principles on security.
Then they undertook a year of review process. And in that review process they extended the ability to participate in a written and in person consultations not only with non‑OECD member states but stakeholders and experts from around the world that had either come into contact with the security guidelines themselves, had come into contact with security issues on their own. And so there was a diverse experts group that participated in review of looking at the old 2002 guidelines and seeing where they may be a benefit of being updated. And through that process was where it came to what we need to do is focus on the fact that we know that there's no one stop shop, one solution, one silver bullet for addressing security.
And we know every time we talk about security we are also talking about things like Human Rights or privacy or economic drivers or innovation. So we need to capture all of those elements in our update as well.
So after the benefit of that one‑year review and sort of intense interaction and engagement among these stakeholders and experts, then the OECD and its member states and stakeholders undertook the task of revising the guidelines in a way that reflected those discussions.
So I talk about that process because I think, A, it was deliberative, B, it was inclusive, and, 3, it was global and it brought in the experts and interested parties that felt like they had a stake in the process, and the output, the personal perspective output. When we talk about the shift in risk management approach I think that's clearly the trade work of these revised guidelines and the resulting recommendation for states to take on an effort if they haven't done so already to develop a national strategy to addressing digital risk, digital risk management approach to security. And that I think is ‑‑ I think will be OECD's guidelines trademark as we take these conversations forward. And I think some of those elements have been discussed here this week and will be done so as we take the guidelines forward, the OECD will be posting additional ministerial in June of next year and the security guidelines can pull in elements of this risk management approach and will be a part of the discussion in the workshops and in the events taking place there.
So that will be another opportunity to talk about the elements of these principles and why this risk management approach is so much more effective and what is in a dynamic evolving ever‑changing environment.
Let me run through the principles for you so you have a sense of how these elements were captured. They divide it into general principles and operational principles borrowing very heavily from the guidelines of 2002 but updating them with the developments since then. The first is awareness skills and empowerment. And I think it's important that awareness and skills and empowerment was the first one because if you don't have the education, if you don't have those foundational aspects of building up your constituency from the beginning, then it's much more difficult to address these issues going forward. I think that's true. We are hearing a lot about that this week as well.
Second is the responsibility principle for leaders to take on the responsibility for the management of their digital risk environment, and what that means for their own organization and how their own organization interacts with others in this interconnected environment.
The third one is Human Rights and fundamental values because anything that we do in this space has to take those elements into consideration as well. And the OECD took those from the previous guidelines and has a foundational component in their work, so we wanted to be sure to reflect that.
The third one that is also important is cooperation, and cooperation across kinds of relationships, whether it's among states, whether it's within a state between stakeholder groups, the technical community, globally. So whether it's an operational realm or the policy realm. So really taking the cooperation principle a step forward as well.
More operational principles deal with the risk management aspects of this approach more directly. One is risk assessment and treatment cycle. Sort of a light touch on risk management methodology.
The sixth is security measures, what kinds of things should you consider when you're talking on security measures to mitigate the risks that you've just assessed.
Seventh is innovation. How can new technologies both ‑‑ when we think of new technologies, a lot of times people talk about the risk that comes along with them but how can new technologies also address that risk?
And eighth, preparedness and continuity. Making sure we don't just stop when doing one risk assessment. Making sure it's something we do on a continual basis as the environment evolves.
And finally recognize the recommendation for developing national strategies in a Multistakeholder and a comprehensive way that addresses all of these principles.
The United States was very pleased to take part and be an active participant in this process. We were very glad that it included this Multistakeholder and global review process, consultative process. And it was a very roll‑up‑your sleeves and tireless, I suppose, working environment in the drafting process to come up with the resulting guidelines. And Josie kindly shared her version with me. Of course it's also available online. So I'll stop there, Jackie. Thank you.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Great. Thank you both very much. I will say personally that I find it extremely valuable to have the types of guidelines at the OECD and other organizations produce their own guidelines. APEC, for example, does a lot of this. It's very helpful particularly in talking with government officials or other industry members or representatives from Civil Society, whatever it might be, to have something to point to and that frames the issues well and can react off of. So very much appreciate it. I think it's got tangible benefit and we will come back to all of that. But I'll keep moving on through into the next segment.
So this is what we just talked about is sort of policy frameworks on key issues that are relevant to trying to keep as much data, as much communications flowing across the Internet globally.
And now let's just turn ways of building that Internet itself. So whether it is infrastructure, new services doing that in a way that is increasing inclusion to the maximum extent possible, that is fostering and welcoming innovation. And ultimately these days of course having in the back of our minds how is all of this connected to the sustainable development goals all which can be very much advanced by having Internet capability, ICT capability. It's a lot to be thinking about at once.
But let's turn to ‑‑ we will hear from Sylvia Bidart who is with the federation ‑‑ it's an ICT federation of Ibero‑Latin America Association. We will hear from Dawit Bekele, the regional director of ISOC, the Internet Society of Africa, and the ‑‑ why don't we go with that part and then we'll do ‑‑ Matthew, and now you have also Carlos Affonso Souza.
So we could do all four, I think, maybe together. You're doing trust. So we will do some ways of encouraging infrastructure, services, including of course an emphasis on Africa. And then some of the trust and confidence in those infrastructure and services.
So I think I've included everybody. Sylvia, would you like to start us off, please?
>> SYLVIA BIDART: Yes, thank you. Also vice president of (inaudible), my colleague from other regions. So I will focus on markets like Latin America and the Caribbean in order to identify policies and practices to open up opportunities for socioeconomic development in this area.
What is the situation in part of the immersion markets? The situation is we have an asymmetry and maturity of this system. Even the industries united and we gather and we have an agenda.
We also see symmetry in each country. We have different kind of countries, for example in Brazil, Mexico, Columbia and Argentina; and then they have other economies like the Caribbean or Paraguay or Bolivia. So the symmetries also in the region.
Governments also face different kind of maturity. And they are also different kind of governments working in this ecosystem mainly if they have it as a matter of state or not. We have recently our colleagues from Mexico (?), but it's not the situation in other countries in the region.
So why is this situation? Because the higher up in the government is this kind of debate and practice. The country will have more chances to make a leap to access to this advance (?) which we all know what, was going out. So when the private sector and public sector worked together, this is for emerging economies because other kind countries do not face this situation.
But we see to enforce this kind of environment, public and private sector must work together in every kind of the stage making the plans to plan together working together in implementation of the action plan, monitoring and also evolving constantly.
So I would say that the things that happen in this kind of asymmetry, in this kind of part of the world, is how many have implemented electronic invoice for example or digital records or affordable broadband infrastructure or effective transferring. Even those are different examples; these are the kind of debates that we are dealing with in this part of the world.
And many will focus that also in innovation because innovation is a key issue. In the last decade and a half much of the growth of the economy has come from companies that are based under this economy, we all know that. Today Internet contributions between 2 and 2 1/2% of the GDP in countries like Argentina, Brazil or Mexico but in the case of (?) the figure is double and this is another kind of symmetry we found.
I would like to remark that innovation needs investment. The two words start with I‑N, innovation and investment. We need human resource in capabilities and in financial resources as well to sustain the effort of transforming, to create the ideas to go to the market because we are afraid but we need to go to the market.
So the other part I think talk about it is about (?) that report using Internet to grow nine times faster (?) More than non‑users of Internet. So promoting Internet (?) is really important in the markets as well.
Latin America needs to create (?) and today Internet contributes 7‑8% in countries like England or Korea while in Latin America about 2%. I don't know the situations of other nations but this is the situation in Latin America.
So we must work to expand the use and production of technology and tools and generating local added value which is really, really important also because if you do not promote local added value we will also be users of technology, not producers. And producing technology we all know that this is an industry that creates quality jobs that gives a lot of employment and has a lot of benefit.
So what are we doing to face it? What are best practices or good practices in this case? We have not just the federation that's working along with different organizations, but also we are very involved in WSIS process. You have heard that WSIS process Latin America is done by (?) secretariat, and in this process we have also an IT task force that is leaded by the Columbian government along with federation of the ICT industry.
And the last plan of action that we proposed in the last ministerial last August, we are started to work on two objectives, one of them is strengthening the IT industry with eight dimensions we normally all practice. And the other one, the other option is to collaborate with the expansion of the digital economy as a key to productive transformation. This is essential.
In ALETI we also provide this process. We have an observatory that generates a public policy IT industry report. The example is not just Latin America but also in Spain and Portugal. So if anybody would like to receive it, just please send me an e‑mail. I have a lot, but I will stop now because of the time. Thank you.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: I know you want to ‑‑ I need to make myself heard. And I would say can everybody who is on the chairs there, can you hear us okay? Good. So now let's turn to Africa. Let's ‑‑ Dawit, can you tell us what you're seeing and what you're thinking are good ideas from Africa's perspective.
>> DAWIT BEKELE: Thank you. With regards to infrastructure, Internet infrastructure in Africa and also access for example internet penetration currently starts at 27% which is almost half of the world average which is around 45. And access to broadband, to mobile broadband is 19%, which is ‑‑ can be said as low. However, this is a great improvement of what happened a decade ago. You might recall that ten years ago only one percent of the world Internet users were Africans, while ‑‑ almost a quarter of the population of Africa. Today 10% of Internet users are Africans. So there has been a major improvement. And what this has to do with economy, in fact, the last ten years have also been exceptional in the economic front as well. On the average African economies grew 5% or more in the last ten years. So this is not just by chance; it is related.
I cannot say that only Internet produced that but Internet and mobile definitely had a major contribution.
So why? Why have they contributed? I think it's because they have unleased Africa's (?). Africa has been isolated. We don't have other infrastructures to connect with the rest of the world, even physically. Now Internet ‑‑ okay. Okay. Internet has enabled Africans to really connect with the rest of the world for the first time even with neighboring countries because even neighboring countries didn't communicate before. And Internet has enabled to close some of the barriers that have been put in place and that were not welcome anymore. For example, it was practically impossible to do trade between neighboring countries and Africa because of the lack of agreements on the table. Today it is impossible because you have the digital economy that really cannot ‑‑ well, does not obey to the laws that exist.
And it also brought solutions that others didn't bring. For example, you might have heard that most Africans don't have bank accounts; and because of that, it was very difficult to trade if you can't exchange money. But with mobile money, now almost everybody can exchange. And because you can exchange payment, you can trade.
So it has had a lot of, you know ‑‑ it has created a lot of change and economic improvement and really related to those changes that have existed in connectivity.
Now, there are also some challenges that you have to acknowledge. For example, there is disparity as it has been indicated in the case of Latin America. There are countries that have connectivity and penetration that are on par with the rest of the world like Kenya, Morocco and some island states, while there are others where Internet penetration is less than 1%. So the disparity is considerable.
It is still very expensive. Internet is probably the most expensive even though Africans don't have that much expendable income. And you might have heard that sometimes even for local communications the traffic has to go to Europe or North America to come back to Africa. There are legal and regulatory framework issues. For example, responsibilities of intermediaries that has to be solved.
There are some cross‑border trade limitations. For example, the payments have really solved local issues but you cannot make payments outside your country which is a problem. We have major skill and innovation and knowledge gap that has to be solved. Our universities are not really producing the skills and knowledge that we need. For example this is what India had that we don't have currently and we really have to work in those areas.
Trust issues, security, privacy, Human Rights, are all problems, and we need to work to mitigate the risks that exist. We have including amount of homegrown and other criminals that try to attack African businesses because ‑‑ well, the drawback of having more presence on the Internet is that it becomes a bigger target.
Solutions. Well, a major problem that exists currently is that not all stakeholders acknowledge the power of the internet; and for this reason some governments are trying to create barriers, and that is a major danger.
Reliability affordability is a problem. Unless Internet is reliable, we cannot really do business with it. Legal frameworks and skilled human resources, as I have indicated, and security. In fact, one ‑‑ I think a problem that exists currently in Africa is that some stakeholders believe they have to take this issue by themselves and find solutions.
For example, governments believe they can't find a solution by themselves, but we need to have collaboration in order to create security. So all stakeholders have to collaborate. Governments, yes, they need to create the laws, et cetera; however, we need operators that are the one who have to fight every day but even end users have major roles because sometimes end users are the problems without even knowing it.
So we need to have framework of collaborative security and internet societies working on such a framework that it is trying to promote around the world.
I'll stop here. Thank you.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Great. Thank you, very much. So that sets up the trust issues for our analysts here, Matthew and then Carlos. Thank you.
>> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank you, Jackie. Matthew Shears from the Center for Democracy and Technology. So, I'm going to combine a couple of issues here. I'll talk a little bit about trust inclusion and economic growth and what is needed to achieve that with a particular kind of Human Rights angle to it.
How that is? Is that better? Yes. Okay.
So I think there ‑‑ at the IGF now we have been discussing about the WSIS and obviously the WSIS review. I think there are two key lessons we can take from the WSIS review that can touch on the issue of trust, inclusion and economic growth.
The first is that there's absolutely no doubt that economic growth and technological developments over the past ten years have contributed greatly towards realizing that goal that was set up in 2003 about a people‑centered, inclusive and development‑oriented information society. Now, we are not there clearly but significant progress has been made. The thing is that technological developments increasing the availability of ICTs have contributed not only to that goal but they have also enabled and encouraged developments and individuals and community empowerment, governance and society. And it's the increasing interconnectedness, if you will, of nations and people, the greater available of ICTs and particularly with growth and mobile connectivity and use of ICTs to innovate that have really driven this. And this is one of those key takeaways. The other key take away is the notion of partnerships and working together as stakeholders. This is something we saw acknowledged, reinforced and in fact really supported. I think it was the WSIS review document from UNESCO that said that stakeholder partnerships and Multistakeholder approaches are really essential to addressing issues affecting the knowledge and Information Society.
And I think this dimension of stakeholders ‑‑ and we are not just talking about Multistakeholder approaches, but the dimension of stakeholders and partnerships is really what has driven the ‑‑ it's really brought about the development of thriving ICTs and particularly the internet, and it's really been due to favorable economics and partnerships and stakeholders working together that we have got this ability now to see a much great empowerment of people learning, trading, creating, finding community and contributing online. So it's a burgeoning sense of community, of economic growth, of ICTs and also stakeholders coming together which we haven't seen in the past.
There are some still fundamental challenges of course. As I said, we are far from there. And that same goal applies today just as it did in the past. So we still have fundamental challenges in terms of protecting and promoting Human Rights and providing connectivity and access to information and knowledge. And these are key factors to establishing trust. Without the realization of rights, without connectivity, without access and the ability to realize your rights and really use those rights to get education, we're lacking in the trust dimension in its broader more holistic sense.
I think the other thing that we noted in the coming out of the WSIS is again a challenge from a trust perspective, is that there's a great need for changing governance structures and governance systems. And there are states that will continue to debate the importance of good governance and the open Internet and the importance of Human Rights to development despite the research and the voice of experts. And that resistance to these key elements is really undermining trust and we need to work on that.
So what do we need if we are ‑‑ what are the requirements, if you will? What are the key priorities if you want to have this mix of trust and inclusion and economic growth?
I would say there's probably six things. The first and probably foremost is protecting, respecting and reinforcing Human Rights both offline and online, not only in and of themselves but also because of their importance to realizing economic and social development.
The second is ‑‑ and it's a corollary, establishing and enabling environments based on the rule of the law that facilitate economic and social opportunity, promote agile, adaptive and collaborative approaches to policy. Again, we are coming into the kind of Multistakeholder partnerships. And provide key ‑‑ much of what Dawit was saying ‑‑ and provide opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship.
The third one is really about encouraging and building models of governance at national, regional, and international levels that are open, transparent and inclusive.
The fifth is ensuring that the Internet remains open and secure, unconstrained by burdensome regulation, free of limitations on what, when and how users can communicate and access information and build community.
And the sixth is improving availability and quality of connectivity to the Internet and to information communications infrastructure as well as a provision of capacity‑building including digital literacy.
I think when you're talking about trust in that kind of a holistic sense; it's not just one piece. You really have to look at the whole. So those are just some kind of high‑level points that I think that kind of build that notion of a community in which there's trust, there's inclusion, and there's a potential for economic growth. Thanks.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Great, thank you. So Carlos Affonso, you are with the Institute for Technology and Society, Brazil.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO SOUZA: That's right.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: And the Getulio Vargas Foundation Law School, if I have that right.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO SOUZA: Yeah.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Go ahead and share your thoughts with us, please.
>> CARLOS AFFONSO SOUZA: Thank you. So I'll be very brief since Matthew has tackled a broader picture of the issue of trust. Let me try to focus a little bit on the case of Brazil because it's quite usual to us to think that innovation happens and then regulation follows. And it follows only for a specific interest is being affected if Civil Society and raising a campaign around something. And that's definitely a caricature; it's a way to portray things that are lacking complexity on how innovation happens because it lacks the view on the investments, on the years that it takes for innovation to happen. And at the same time it lacks the complexity that regulation may be felt especially by a technical community as someone that comes to restrict freedom to innovate when it can be quite the opposite. It can be something to guarantee that fundamental rights, the rights and values the Internet has enabled us to enjoy are maintained for future.
And that's the case of Brazil, if I say so, with the Brazilian Internet bill of rights, that it was created as a principles‑based legislation so it's a federal law, it's a hard law, that it was created through (?) that was started back in 2009. It ran up to 2010. And it was really interesting because it was a truly multistakeholder experiment not only because it was the first time in Brazil in which every single sector needed to come to light and say what do you like to see in this legislation? And why don't you like or dislike the specific wording of the law because the actual wording of the law (?). And it was really interesting to see how Civil Society, private sector and technical community ended up engaging in this discussion.
So the very collaborative nature of the Marco Civil was interesting. And now that the Marco Civil was approved, I have to say the draft bill of law was sent to congress in 2011, it took three years for it to be approved, and it was approved in 2014.
But the Marco Civil is just one example. And Brazil has gone through some economic crisis. And it's interesting to see that with the Marco Civil approved, we see on the economic side a really clear growth in e‑commerce in Brazil and especially related on those activities related to the so‑called sharing economy. And this is really interesting because if we're talking about trust, when you talk about a law that was created through the influence of different stakeholders, they definitely don't see it this law as something external but quite the opposite. It's something that they helped to build.
And when it comes to sharing economy, the same thing happens. Trust and reputation is crucial. When it comes to Uber and other activities and other companies, it's interesting to see how the trust that we are talking about here is crucial for the business because if the users don't trust those companies, they are ruined. And not only the company, but those who end up using the platform that's provided by those companies. That's why reputation is so important for those companies.
And if I can just conclude on that. The issue of loyalty of trust is so important that even though it is not, I would say, expressly there in the Marco Civil, even though the Marco Civil has a very strong language on fostering innovation, you see that in a draft bill of law that is under consultation right now in France. So I would like to invite you all to look at Article 13 of the draft view of law that France is opened up for consultation right now under the (?) initiative.
And it's really interesting to see they are proposing an amendment to the protection of consumer’s code in France in order to bring the digital economy inside the broad framework, the broad umbrella of trust in the services and in the Internet platforms in the services that they provide.
So I believe it's a very interesting moment for us to take a look at those issues. Hopefully Brazil can serve as a good example but it's interesting to see the discussions worldwide.
That's it.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Great, thank you very much. These are all really interesting topics for discussion but I feel like I need to keep moving along and get all of the inputs out on the table, unless somebody really wants to suggest or push otherwise for questions. Quick questions?
If not, what I'm going to do is we have two other groupings. We've got a conversation or putting out of ideas on challenges faced by emerging economies and expanding participation in the digital economy. We've some points on that already. And then the one after that will be about digital content services in the e‑commerce as related to cross‑border data flow.
So let's do more on emerging economies. We will have Rohan Samarajiva from LIRNEasia.
>> ROJAN SAMARAJIVA: Thank you, very much. One of the things that my organization which is regional research organization dealing with ICT issues and now increasingly with broader infrastructure issues, one of the things that we are looking at is how small actors, micro enterprises, those who are not normally connected to the export value chains can be connected. And obviously one of the important ways is through the ICTs.
The two areas that we are specifically looking at these days are agricultural export supply chains and business process outsourcing and software supply chains where again the users are outside the country and the producers are within a country. Our research shows that on the agricultural side there are actually much bigger issues, regulations and so on, that hinder participation much more than ICT so I won't talk about that.
But when it comes to the IT‑based, that is software and business process outsourcing or business process management services, one of the critical issues is quality. I think quality was mentioned earlier.
What happens is that if your connectivity is mission critical and the quality is poor, what you have to do is reinvest in multiple backup systems. This is also the case with electricity where in certain countries that we work in the electric system is quite poor so you have these people who need to have the connectivity and to have the organizations running all the time investing in backup facilities. Additional costs that (?) in more prosperous environment does not have to pay.
So then the question rises why is broadband quality or Internet quality in most of the countries that we work in, Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, all these countries, why is it poor? The primary reason is that international costs in Asia are give or take six times those in Europe. So while these prices are coming down, the input costs are six times higher than across the Atlantic.
In addition, there are points that affect the connectivity which is the cables that go through sewers, the cables that go through the Taiwan or Luzon straits on the other side, earthquakes, human activity, in some cases actual sabotage can break these cables. The minute that happens, your quality goes down.
So these issues ‑‑ so on one side you have a reliability question with cables getting cut rather frequently, and as a result the ‑‑ and as a result or in addition to that we have high costs so that pretty much everybody in Asia is paying Singapore plus or Hong Kong plus pricing. Even though Hong Kong and Singapore have the lowest prices they are not as low as North America or Europe.
So we have been working with the UN economic and social commission for the Asia Pacific to get this on the agenda so that we have terrestrial connectivity being looked at without the old reliance solely on submarine cables because even though Asia is an enormous land mass, compared to Europe and compared to North America we barely use terrestrial cables. We behave like we are not a big land mass, that we are peninsula geographies.
So as a result our costs are high and our reliabilities low. So while these problems are being worked on, it will take ‑‑ we have made progress. A number of hybrid cables have come in ‑‑ (no sound).
(Portion of audio lost due to Internet disruption.)
>> ‑‑ I believe we need more of Civil Society focusing on development, not just Human Rights, into the IGF in order for us to foresee their best practices and results on the ground.
I believe that we need to also embrace other industries like people coming from health, people coming from education, people coming from the banking sector so we can hear them when we are multistakeholders. But we are multistakeholders who are in one main industry. We need the other industries with us.
We certainly want policies; it helps to have open transparent and competitive productivity. We certainly need security and privacy, and for that there are different sources. Some government wants to have treaties maybe. But business maybe prefers standards so we have some things that we need to think about having common standards at least where we all in a multistakeholder approach are able to put so that we can then implement easily and swiftly and maintain a trusted Internet.
And last point is we need certainly to create more awareness on the local level for the different stakeholder. So why do we have local IGF in some areas and regional IGF? There is not enough outreach and awareness for most of the citizens. Thank you.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Great. Thank you very much. So, Kathleen, perhaps focusing I think on digital literacy may be a theme, if you would like. I understand you've done some work in there, but whatever you would like.
>> KATHLEEN McINERNEY: Sure, I'm glad to work on digital literacy. I'll open with a little bit of audience participation. So as the hope is that this session be interactive, I have a few questions for the audience to kind of set the stage. First can you raise your hand if you have ever done a search, sent an e‑mail or posted a comment or content online?
I'm surprised that not every hand went up. Okay. Now, keep your hand up if you believe that that experience should have been dictated by your location or the technology you're using to access the platform.
My final question is, now raise your hand if you believe there's only one global definition for the following terms: Trade, inclusion and trust.
Now as expected ‑‑ oh, we have some dissenters, as well. (Laughter). So we can talk about that in a minute.
I ask these questions because our experience as users of the Internet is not the same globally. And unfortunately it's often determined as something as random as geography. We are here because we don't believe there's one definition, except for you guys. We believe that there is a need to actually contextualize these conversations.
For a global company like Yahoo! this brings incredible challenges as well as opportunities. And at Yahoo we have two central commitments, defending our users' rights to privacy and their right to express themselves freely. Today over 1 billion users are on our platform expressing themselves through a variety of tools, including e‑mail, Instant Messenger, Flickr and Tumbler. And 600 million of these users come to us through mobile. That's more than half.
When we think about the future we think about mobile and part of this is due to the reality that there are areas of the world in generations yet to come that will only experience the Internet through their mobile device.
At Yahoo! we have a different way of thanking about this than some of our peer companies because we don't have either infrastructure or hardware interests. Our interests are purely our users' access to our platforms and making sure that access is the same regardless of the technology they use to access our services.
Since my region for Yahoo! I did public policy for Latin America; I tend to focus on how access changes in developing around mobile technology and mobile connections. So as many of you discussed, there's still a very large proportion of the population Latin America that's not yet connected. It's over half. And so we think about the future when we bring people online in this big boom of the new people that are coming online, how are they coming online and how are they going to integrate them so they have the same experience even though the technologies they have to access it are not yet imagined.
So I would go through these other topics but I'm going to go off script and address your question, Jackie, which is what can ‑‑ in terms of how can we as a community both as government and the private sector, how can we work together in order to address some of the challenges that come about with bringing new technologies and new access of services to users internationally and especially in emerging economies where our political and geographic locations and our access to technology is vastly different.
And one of the things that we found to be highly successful is working in cooperation with governments to start establishing by law or by practice digital literacy programs in schools at the youngest ages to help bring capacity building to users regardless of their location and working with governments and schools to start implementing these technologies.
One of the things in this that I think is really important is when we think about how people interact online, generally what do people want? Generally people want to search and access information without national or artificial barriers, they want tools for self‑expression, and they want their experience to be safe and data‑protected. And it's the last two points that oftentimes we find the most challenging because having your data be ‑‑ have your experience be safe and your data protected often depends on the user's ability to navigate sites and to navigate privacy policies and to know how to keep their interactions online safe.
So although most of the major companies do have very extensive centers where you can go online and find out how to protect your privacy, where a lot of mobile users are now interacting online are through applications or startups that may not have their policies outlined as clearly using startups that may have not have their outlines so clear as some of the applications you access through a desk top computer.
So those are some of the challenges when you think about digital illiteracy, because it's not only how to use technology, start a business, get an education but also how can you keep yourself safe while doing that whether it's by keeping your identity anonymous, protecting yourself from content that you may not want to be exposed to, or revealing too much about yourself online.
So being sure that we actually think about some of these issues and we think about how as a community we can come together and increase digital literacy not only in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship but also in terms of safety and user experience. Thank you.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Thank you. We are going to turn to shortly our two speakers on content issues. I want to recognize and appreciate the fact that our speakers have been trying to weave in ideas for good practices, good ideas and so on, because we won't have time to do a sort of go around and get those ideas from you. But I think those have been coming out. Chris, I hope you've been picking them up. I know Barbara has been taking excellent notes as well. So we have got a lot of very rich material. But why don't we go to Ellen Blackler from Walt Disney Company to hear about content, and then to Bobby Bedi. Thank you.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Hi, thank you. What I thought I would do is talk about the free‑flow question that was originally posed and make the observation that a lot of what we talked about here really relies on interoperable rules for businesses and consumers.
When consumers travel around the internet which is traveling around international borders and when businesses try to work in many countries what really becomes the significant difference is their ability to comply with all the laws without imposing a whole lot of cost. So that relies on governments seeking to make their policies interoperable with each other.
So I'll put that on the list of our best practices. And there's so much opportunity to do that. The OECD started, I think, talking about the security framework, we've got the OECD's Internet policy making principles that layout foundational policies for Internet policy, we have got the soon to be adopted E‑commerce rules that the OECD has done which layout recommendations for consumer protection rules.
APEK has similar frameworks for privacy and data protection, and that is an area that I think is very easy for policy makers to look at and really impact the policy environment that businesses work in by trying to make their rules both protective of their citizens but interoperable across the globe. It improves the business environment and their consumer experience in there. I'm going to end there. I'm watching the clock.
>> BOBBY BEDI: Thanks. I get the last three minutes. I come from India. India's population is 1.25 billion people. Interestingly a diaspora, people of India's origin is 50 million people. That's more than the population of Australia and many, many countries. This is an interesting diaspora and is significantly present in 30 countries. I come from a state called Panjabi. India's parliament has 13 Panjabis. Many leaders of corporations, countries, et cetera, have come from India. As we speak (?). He's of Indian decent.
Much of India Diasporas are regions that fly different flags but (?) relying on it for a continuous cultural and emotional connect. (?) for the latest (?) and keeping up with contemporary music.
This is a perfect example of a cross‑border community. These people are immigrants, children, grandchildren of immigrants. It's important to understand that the economic status of an Indian diaspora is very high and it means that there's some number can account for revenue as high as 40% of Indian entertainment. (?) Is accessed selectively on television and on the Internet. Sadly most of this is from pirate sites. Enough has been said about the dangers that accompany these sites, studies about the relationship between pornography and child abuse terrorism. (?). All I'm going to say is that over 2 million people work to create (?) content. Barring a few hundred the rest are free‑lancers who can rely on (?). Improper monitorization of their work makes it difficult.
The world's experience in the music business has shown that if access is made easy and the price is reasonable and the business models (?). A collapsed and nearly dead music industry (?).
All this leads to my final submission. There is substantial social and economic benefit in (?) of digital content and therefore present and future Internet governance systems must insure, one, a healthy playing field for E‑commerce of digitally distributable intellectual properties, two (?) so it's fair and transparent, and compensation is ensured for all stakeholders. Three, an innovative (?)
Four, a robust international (?) as if they were your own.
Much of this is probably happening in the developed world already. Equity, diversity and sustainability required that it becomes a global and inclusive process. History has shown as long as a production (?) That is not artificially limited and is (?) it will be affordable. Unfortunately for us (?)
I find that IGF and similar organizations have very low participation by content creators and that too is often limited to a defensive role. I believe that a lot of value moves across the Internet, capital that will help the world understand each other better and help shrink it. (?) and need a much larger presence on IGF. Ladies and gentlemen, I conclude with the hope expressed by John Lennon 45 years ago, "Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do."
Thank you, very much.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: A great way to wrap it up. Actually, let me take a moment to see. I know we were having trouble with remote participation. I don't know if our ‑‑ is there anything on that end that we should be aware of?
>> Not yet.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Okay. I would like to highlight quickly ‑‑ well, do a reminder on the fact that the OECD will have this ministerial meeting in June of next year, it will be in Mexico. I'm thinking of things between now and our next IGF. I encourage everybody to follow that, think of ways you might participate or get your governments to participate. Of course it's not ministerial like that, it's not of interest solely to the OECD member countries but it's of greater interest. Would you like to make a comment on that?
>> Sorry, thank you. Yes. In addition to the 34 member countries, we have invited 19 non‑member countries, 12 international organizations and tons of people from the Business Civil Society Internet Technical Community. We are actually having an open forum tomorrow at 9:30 on the ministerial specifically in which three stakeholder groups will be giving their views on the four themes. The four themes are internet openness and innovation, building global connectivity, trust in the digital economy, and jobs and skills in the digital economy. So a lot of the issues that were raised here are going to be part of the discussions that will happen at the ministerial. If you're interested on more information, please come tomorrow at 9:30.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: Other comments?
>> Yes. I would like to point to initiatives that that deals with trade that I would like to point. One is (?) taxation on imports and exports and goods and services. It's something we are going to start working (?) along with the governments as well, because we think it's a tax on development. So I invite anybody who is interested to join us.
And the other initiative we are working with UNCTAD is to bring the ministers of foreign trade (?) which deals with a lot of issues, culture, coffee, whatever, but they don't deal too much with the issue of ICT sectors. So we are starting to work together on a ministerial with the private sectors. Thank you.
>> JACQUELYNN RUFF: So I will add to that, that I'm sure many here are aware of the recent completion of the negotiations of a new trade agreement, the trans pacific partnership agreement, and in that there's a very strong chapter or section on E‑commerce that has some provisions that have been in such trade agreements for a while but also some new language protecting cross border data flows and trying to protect against requirements to have data facilities only in the originating country.
These do take into account the fact that of course privacy also needs to be looked after and have commitments along those lines in a trade agreement. So I would urge everyone to look at those and follow them with a trade agreement. Of course they affect the countries that sign on to them but it's also a way of having what becomes an example or soft law for other countries to look at.
So many thanks to everyone who participated here. I think we got a lot of great points out, shared information on recent studies, reports, looking at issue spotting. So we will have our rapporteurs report. That will be the summary of that. Is there anything else we should add? Barbara, anything you would want to?
>> BARBARA WANNER: No. I just I'm grateful for all of the speakers who generously contributed their expertise. This planning has been under way since February or March of this year. And I'm just gratified that everybody hung in there and delivered an outstanding program. So my thanks to all the speakers. And those who came in at the last minute and saved the day. (Laughter)
(Applause)
(Session concluded at 17:35)