The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good morning, everyone. On behalf of team of speakers, I would like to welcome you to this Day Zero Session Preparing Your Internet for the digital of Tom. I am ‑‑ from the Middle East region and I will be joined by my colleague Danny as online moderator from Jordan.
Today this session will seek to impact a critical but often underemphasized question; how can we ensure that the Internet infrastructure is robust enough to support the digital ambition of tomorrow.
So the discussion today will be grounded in the belief that technical preparedness is not a luxury but is a strategic necessity.
We'll discuss connectivity around security IPv6, 5, capacity building, all of these issues that create a robust ecosystem. Without further ado, please let me introduce and welcome our speakers online and onsite. We have Mr. Frank Stein from Norway, we have Ms. Sophia Berenguerer from NRO Adiel Akplogan Rodrigue Guiguembde. Welcome. And thank you to the rapporteur for this session.
I begin with Mr. Frank. Good morning. Thanks for hosting the IGF in Norway. My first question for you is how the Norway today is addressing the scalability and the security of the Internet infrastructure? And we know that you are coming from the Regulator from Norway. We would like to have your insights to kick off this discussion today.
>> FRANK STEIN: Thank you, Tawfik. Yeah. Welcome to Norway, everyone. Today we discuss a very critical topic, preparing our Internet infrastructure for tomorrow's digital economy. Norway recognizes that a robust digital infrastructure, both fixed and cellular, is crucial for leveraging emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and digital services.
Firstly, Norway is significantly investing in providing broadband Internet to everyone. Today, Norway provides at least 100 megabyte per second broad hand coverage to 99.1% of households with gigabyte reaching 98.2%. The goal is everyone to have Internet access by 2030. 80% of the geographic area has 4G or 5G coverage and practically all households have immediate access to 5G or 4G connectivity.
Our extensive fiberoptic infrastructure complemented by an aggressive 5G rollout ensures highspeed connectivity, essential for all bandwidth intensive and latency‑sensitive applications of AI and IoT.
Secondly, cybersecurity remains paramount. Norway's Government has enhanced regulatory frameworks, including aligning with EU NEISS 2 directive and secure act. Starting August this year, the rerised radio equipped directive will mandate rigorous cybersecurity standards for IoT devices such as smart phones, smart watches, and connected toys.
Requirements should also include robust authentication, secure storage, encryption and secure update mechanisms. The fourthcoming cyber resilience act this year will A, further strengthen our cybersecurity landscape, ensuring resilient and trustworthy digital products.
Thirdly, infrastructure resilience is key. We work in close collaboration with a major network operators to actively strengthen the transmission networks with enhanced network redundancy and ensuring multiple autonomous nationwide transmission networks.
Specifically, emphasis is laid down in ensuring that densely populated areas will be served by at least three independent transmission networks, providing critical redundancy. Mobile operators are encouraged to diversify their traffic across the networks, significantly boosting reliability.
Moreover, proactive spectrum management is crucial in mitigating wireless interference, in particular as IoT adoption is in our societies increasingly more dependent on wireless communication services, both from land and satellite by effectively detecting and removing unauthorized devices and signal jammers, the spectrum in Norway remains clean and dependable wireless communication.
Finally, regarding AI regulation, Norway has recently defined clear responsibility among Norwegian communication authority, Norwegian digital agent and data protection authority, and this collaboration will ensure effective implication and oversight of the AI act fostering responsible AI integration across sectors.
So, in conclusion, Norway's approach combining ambitious infrastructure and expansion, comprehensive cybersecurity regulation, and robust network resilience and clear regulatory governance for emerging technologies will position us to strongly to power tomorrow's digital economy, driving innovation and benefits across our nation. Thank you.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Mr. Frank. Thank you for your insights and remarks. Yeah, this is a good example of how governments with the different stakeholder groups with work. Thank you. We'll stay with governments and regulatory.
I'll go with Mr. Guiguembde from Croatia. With the aim subject, how can agile regulation Internet development in safeguarding.
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: Thank you, Tawfik. Can you hear me? Okay. Excellent. You will hear now another regulatory view on this topic. I'm currently at the Body of European regulators, so national regulators from the European Union, candidate countries and some EA countries. There we have several working groups, one is a cybersecurity working group, and we reactantly changed the name of this working group to cybersecurity and resilience working group just to stress the importance of this issue of the resilience because normally when you look at the economy and competition from the regulatory point of view, you look at how to motivate market players to cooperate, not to build a double infrastructure, not to duplicate infrastructure, which is the most expensive part of the networks. But when it comes to resilience, there we do exactly the opposite, we try to build some connections that should be used maybe in some emergency situations.
So, they are not economically, let's say, justified by itself. So, this is a really hot topic that the cybersecurity and resiliency working group, we will be looking at it. We have some good examples among BARC members, one is Iceland and the other is Norway, of course, who have developed some rules. What we would like to do is to develop some kind of methodology that would be really a sets of recommendations on how to balance this issue of what is economically fine for operators to invest and what is safe for a country, because there are several levels of investment. The first one is the investment of the operators, they invest in the network to be optimally to get the return on their investment as fast as possible with a lot of money. If they lose some city or village for some time, okay, that's fine for them. But then we have a next level is the level that the regulator would be happy and then another level which is probably the national security level that national security agencies would be happy. So we need to see where to find these balances.
So it is also very important to understand, we at BRC are working closely together with the Neise group with a group of representatives from each European Union Member State, and so this is a bit narrower group and just European Union Members, the European Commission and the Cyber keep security Agency in Athens. This group is critical because you already know the national security and cybersecurity is sole competence of the Member States, so it is not possible to develop any kind of mandatory requirements or regulations at the European Union level without consensus of all Member States.
So, one important point to the directive, encourage it has been fully transposed, we were one of the first Member States to do that. And also the 5G tool books is also a good example of the of the European level, how to develop something that each Member State can apply in each national market so that you have it which is flexible, agreed by all, and which can be modified for national situation.
One also important topic is the trusted vendor issue, and there regulatory authorities, we can only help other authorities in each Member States like national security agencies when they do the assessments of which equipment is safe in the national market. So I think that would be enough to start our panel all from my side. Thanks.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much. This is a lot to digest. We know that EU is busy with all of this regulation and policies, and you mentioned a lot of interesting topics and issues, balanced collaboration, agile regulation, and so this will be a good start to see or to chain with other stakeholder groups, the technical community with our colleague Sophia from the Member Resource Organization with joint activity from them. Sophia are you with us?
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: I am.
MODERATOR: We can't hear you.
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: I am.
MODERATOR: Can you speak?
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: Hello? Can you hear me?
MODERATOR: Still, I can't hear Sophia. Waiting to fix the technical issue. I'll stay with the technical community but with ICANN. With our colleague. So Mr. Adiel, to chain with Mr. Frank be and Mr. Zdravko mentioned now, what role does ICANN see for the collaboration with governments and other stakeholders in fostering connectivity and in encouraging the agile regulation and policies.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Thank you very much for the question. To answer, we see the multistakeholder approach.
MODERATOR: No sound. Please. The room, we can't hear Mr. Adiel.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: (off mic) hello? Hello ‑‑ so thank you, again, for the question. The short answer, first, is that the multistakeholder model is critical for sustaining ‑‑ yeah, for a stable, secure, and resilient infrastructure globally. For us, we can see that because as you know, one of the critical missions that ICANN has is to coordinate the unique affair system globally, including the DNS, the multistakeholder model has been at the center of that coordination, and the DNS has been operating for more than 40 years and it has been stable, sustainable, resilient over those years. Which shows that when we bring different parties, different actors around the table to discuss issues related to those critical infrastructure, it works.
The DNS glue those identifiers together, of course, and ICANN in its operation as a facilitator and coordinator of policy related to those identifiers in the DNS practically, use the different constituencies to identify issues related to the resiliency and the security of the DNS, discuss them, and translate them into policy. Then the operators implement or follow voluntarily.
So we've seen it has helped protect that infrastructure globally. The DNS, we usually explain it or define it as a simple, you know, address book, but it's more complex than that. Not only that, over the 40 plus years the DNS has evolved significantly, adding layers of security, privacy, addressing some abused channels, and challenges. But the multistakeholder approach has helped work around those issues, being from the IGF where new evolution of the DNS has been developed to implemented on the basis of the DNS to make it more secure, to add privacy to it, being from user perspective or registration perspective by tackling abuse, for instance.
All of those evolution have been developed through a very wide multistakeholder approach; so again, it shows that bringing different parties around complex issues helps build solutions that does not disrupt the stability of the global infrastructure. That is at the global level.
To go back to the context of the previous intervention, that approach needs also to be translated to the local level in how policies are defined locally, because the same complexity applies at the local level; although the Internet is a global network you cans it's a global network made of small independent networks that are connected, and that operated at the local level.
So, applying the same multistakeholder approach, ensuring that different parties impacted by the Internet in general, about its operation specifically around the table to think, to share ideas and to look at what are the different aspects of implementing or addressing challenges that be can be seen. We from ICANN perspective continue to promote the multistakeholder approach in how we address the issues but as how we engage at the local level with different operators to ensure that the DNS and the infrastructure in general, the unique identifier operation, remains stable, secure, and resilient.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Adiel. Thank you so much for the remarks and highlighting the importance of the multistakeholder approach in working with governments and regulators to secure the Internet infrastructure.
So, I'll go back to Sophia. Let's see if we have Sophia back online. Can you hear me, Sophia?
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: Yes. Can you hear me now? No? Hello? Yes? Hello?
MODERATOR: No.
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: We can hear you online.
MODERATOR: No. We can't hear you. Let me check online if we are okay. Dany, can you hear me?
>> Dany WAZEN: You can hear you. Can you hear me?
MODERATOR: Dany, you can you hear me?
>> DANY WAZEN: I can hear you.
MODERATOR: I believe we have a problem with our online colleagues.
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: Hello? Maybe I can try on my side?
MODERATOR: I will follow up and check ‑‑ let me check with Mr. Rodrigue, Smart Africa if we are lucky if you can say and check for voice.
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: Yes. I don't know if you can hear me?
MODERATOR: No. Okay. So I will go back to my esteemed colleagues here and change to some discussion with you. I go back to Mr. Frank. We know that you are coming from the national SIRT from Norway. How is it coordinator infrastructure, security, across public and private sectors?
>> FRANK STEIN: In Norway, we have a bit strange solution when it comes to SIRTS with national conversation and responsibility. We have secretary toral within the sectors and they're all coordinated by the in addition nach nsm CSC. The reason we're doing that is that we think that they need sector‑specific knowledge and also need to know the sector and also different sectors are different so the secretary toral are also very different and at the same time we're cooperating with them very closely. One advantage is that we can handle incidents and attacks on a very low level when it's ‑‑ when we don't need to extend it outside a certain sector, so it helps with the scalability. But when different ‑‑ when attacks or problems are hitting multiple sectors they will then work together, and it's also of course very important that dirn sectors work together and we're doing that online more or less all the time.
Bh critical incidents are happening, and we need to escalate, then typically the national SIRT will take lead and get support from the secretary toral SIRTS with all of their knowledge and competence about different sectors, so we think that this combination really helps us to combine the private and public sectors, as well as government, important government functions, and it really makes or enables us to handle sophisticated threat actors and sophisticated threats.
MODERATOR: Thank you. This is how it should be done in collaboration as a regulator with the other stakeholder group that you are working with. Going to Croatia, same question. But I want to just reframe it. Can you give us some examples of how this works on the ground?
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: One could be emergency situation where the network is down and there was situation in neighbor Slovania two years back and it was very important to enable national roaming for all of the subscribers in the country because then you can combine all the parts of the network that are still operating, so I think we have to have mechanisms to such situation, it is always that we have to to build something for event that happens, and has huge impact and we need to plan in advance and have good measures to deal with that.
MODERATOR: Thank you. I would say the awareness is ‑‑ can come from end users and this awareness can be encouraged and can be purity by the regulators. Is there any like collaboration or let's say webinars with the society?
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: We. We have a lot of such actions in Croatia together with our partners, with Croatia academic network, with police, with ministry of interior, and give courses really even from the national regulator, and regularly to schools to primary schools, to secondary schools and local governments in countries and Croatia, because as you said, it is very important to have this broad awareness and not just among networks and among operators, they know it's their work and their job, but as among the general populations and the users of electronic communication services.
MODERATOR: Thank you. I will take this and go to Sophia. Sophia, can you hear me now?
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: I can hear you.
MODERATOR: Perfect. Thank you. So once again, Sophia is from the IP resource organization that coordinates activities of 5Rs. We're talking about security and resilience. O so what can you tell us on the NRO global cooperation on NRI and how it works with governments.
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: Thank you, Tawfik. I would like to start by setting the context about why it's necessary to secure the Internet routing before I can introduce what it is. As Adiel mentioned, the network is a network of networks. And BG is protocol used by the networks to decide where to send the traffic in order for it to reach the destination. And the way that networks learn where other networks are is through BGP announcements. The protocol was not designed with security m mind so there is a need for a layer of security to be added on top to ensure the traffic reaches the intefnedded destination and that all of the systems in the digital economy of today that rely on the Internet can be still working.
So Resource Public Key Infrastructure, adds that missing piece of security and does that by allows prefix holders issue kript graphically verifiable statements on the route intentions, and then that information can be used by the routers that receive BGP announcements to verify whether those announcements are legitimate. And so these allows to stop routing issues and stop the routing is redirected or intercepted.
The it was developed more than 8 years ago and however many organizations have yet to adopt and deploy the technology. A few weeks ago when I checked statistics, around 50% to 60% of the unique prefix origin pairs were covered by route origin authorizations that are the on thes in ARBCAI for establishing the route on the origin of routes, and then the other side of things that is using that information to verify announcements is route origin validation and the statistic is as of a few weeks ago was less than 25% of those networks in the Internet that collect autonomous systems, less than 25% were fully protected by route origin validation. So as you can see, there is still room for more of the adoption of the technology to achieve maximum benefit of it, and an adoption can be encouraged in different ways, through support, through reputation‑based approaches like for example the Manners initiative, some people may have heard of that. Through regulation‑based approaches like the White House road to enhance route and security. In particular supporting adoption through providing training, technical support and resources show and engaging with member associations, governments and others. The NARI program was created to create a space of more structured collaboration across the fiber on RPICAI.
MODERATOR: Yes. I totally agree with you, let's say this collaboration and multistakeholder between the RARs and especially governments and operators are paying off. We see the increasing of ARPICAI topic is taking place the importance of it taking place within the regulator. I will get back to you but thanks no mentioning Manners, ARIPCAI and mentioning the collaboration.
I go to Rodrigue. Smart Africa, can you hear me?
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: Yes,ky hear you.
MODERATOR: Excellent. Good morning, once again. And what Sophia mentioned about multistakeholder and partnerships, so being working and being member of Smart Africa, how the stakeholder partnerships, such those under the Smart Africa advance the regional infrastructure development.
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for this question. I'm sorry about the connection earlier. I think the Smart Africa we believe that the multistakeholder partnership the foundation for this inclusive digital development in Africa. We trust it, and the currently brings as you know 40 countries, 40 Member States representing 1.1 is billion African citizens all committing on the same vision to create a single digital market. One of the flagship we have currently I wanted to sort out here is the One African Network. It's a project which currently includes 11 countries and this initiative is still ongoing and this initiative aims to eliminate roaming charge and promote cross‑border intervention and joining developed by industries, Telecos and communities. This is a real good model on this multistake hold are approach, it's an example on that.
We are also developing a program for a sovereign data center and green data center. This is another one that we can give in terms of examples. Building partnerships with private and public sectors and designing to meet environmental starts. This projects are of course integrating technical, economical legal and climate resilience organization which are crucial for Africa sovereignty, so this is another example.
All this one is just to tell you that we are putting in a center with this multistakeholder approach and of course for the Internet governance part because the Internet is the base of everything, we are trying to launch initiatives called Council of Internet Governance Authorities and this council we start to build since 2024. This is a unique mechanism. We want it to bring the government, regulators, academia, technical experts, and Civil Society to sort of make some action for to challenge the Internet governance issue across the continent. These are just some examples I just want to give you and just tell you that in Smart Africa, we are really focused on this multistakeholder approach. Thank you.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much. These are great examples and I will come back to you to ask about how to balance between the different levels of advancement in the African countries. I'll go to my colleague, Dany, online. So once again for our audience oifn, if you would like to ask a question, put the question in the chat room or raise your hand. At the end we'll have a Q&A session and we'll be happy to answer questions.
Dany, any comments or anything that we have online? I leave it for you. I know that you are handling the UNDP activities in the region, and you have announcement or can share your plants related to what we're talking about in the session. For you.
>> DANY WAZEN: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on this esteemed and important panel on this topic. I see online we have two insights, and one question, which is the really important one wrote by the first insight wrote by Timothy and can be a question to the panel. So asking about would it be good if there ises an infrastructure to ensure the communication of the IoTs. So to be able to be managed by the owner of the IoT itself could be great if we can have this option.
Another question which is very much related.what are the needed digital skills and what are the essential digital skills in the Internet future? So we're talking about all of these perspectives and dimensions on how connectivity can prepare for the future, so what are the skills?
MODERATOR: Gentlemen, anyone want to take the questions before I give the floor back to Dany?
>> FRANK STEIN: Well, I can start with the last one about the skills. I think we will always need people with broad knowledge. My experience in from security as cybersecurity as you already know, it's important to understand different fundamentals because Internet is really complex and in order to find weak links when you're kind of putting up a ‑‑ scalable, scalable system is really to understand how this works.
So I think, but at the same time, no one will ever be able to understand everything, so I think to have specialists in different areas and make those experts working together will always be very, very important and probably more important than actually a few people knowing very much.
MODERATOR: Mr. Zdravko, please.
>> ZDRAVKO JUKIC: Thanks. To continue on this. I think not everybody has to be cybersecurity expert and to know techniques and hack computer system. But I think what is general for the population, for general users to know some basics because what problems we face in Croatia, the European Member States, like I said, the world of people that receive simple short message like old short message service. The message says it's very important to type in credit card number. They do it. So some basics should be applied and everybody should understand what it means and how it's done, then we have resolve I don't know maybe 90% of the cases. Very advanced if I can come into the system by some back door that's another issue, that's an issue of this company if they have all the methodologies and rules in place if they are taking the business seriously because it will happen, we'll never have absolute security in any cooperation or any company, but we have to do our Best and try to mitigate as much as we can.
MODERATOR: I think Adiel can do a lot in trust building so maybe you can share on this.
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Definitely. We are pretty much engaged on capacity building. I just want to mention, again as well, there are two challenges in capacity building. There is one about the usage of the Internet; right, that is a more broader capacity and awareness that is needed for users to know that, you know, the same questions that apply in real life is also important to bring into the virtual world because it's not always clear in the mind conscious that that capacity needs to be reinforced.
The second is the operational ‑‑ the operating the network and making sure that people who operate the network also develop and gradually increase, practically coming from developing and emerging nations, beef up their knowledge and expertise on this complex technology in operations to be able as well to have security and resiliency in mind when operating a network. For me we put a lot of emphasis on this. Last year reran more than 200 workshops on capacity building and background on DNS of registry, and it's something that we will continue doing and not at the global level only. We try to bring in a regional flavor to it because we know that the needs are not the same across all the origin, all the countries, the challenges are not the same, so we try to translate our engagement to focus on the need that we see in each region and in each country. What we have seen, you know, bringing more and more positive through it is beyond the capacity building and also providing support to those who are particularly creating the infrastructure that are critical for the navigation and supporting the Best practices. It's key to bridge that gap but as important to us to take it from different angle, local and user and global.
MODERATOR: Thank you. You mentioned a lot of interesting, let's say, words, regional flavor, local capacity building. I go back to Dany with the UNDP and your initiative which is the main pillar that UNDP is now leading is the capacity building and infrastructure development. Can you give us or just sum up what you are doing or how you are dealing with what Adiel said, the regional flavor.
>> DANY WAZEN: Thank you very much. Very interesting insights. So UNDP, we have a lot of regions we have launched recently a new initiative called digital for sustainable development. As the name says, it's how we can harness the power of digitalization to advance the SDG agenda and accelerate the achievement of the goals.
And what is it about? It's a network of partners with convening partners from government, private sector, public sector, NGOs, academia, experts, to come together and brainstorm and put and develop together impactful projects for the Arab region, and under each, like what can we do on digitalization.
The connectivity and infrastructure is really a laying foundation for any digital transformation. We can build the most advanced solutions, but without a secure, safe, inclusive connectivity, we cannot advance. If we look into our region, our region is one of the least connected among the other regions in the world, 50% of the Arab region, 100‑million are not connected to the Internet. We have recently launched two initiativeses, one of them we are planning right now with RIPE as a partnership. Basically, the initiative is about connectivity for digital inclusion and to address these challenges, we wanted to work on access. The first one is related to scalability which means scalable connectivity to be more inclusive. The second is to allow sustainability for the connectivity through a different approach and then a safe and security.
For pillar 1 we want to adopt the promotion of IPv of with awareness and capacity building and support of transition of these toward IPv6 and on the second pillar and sustainability, we want to promote and as we heard from the colleague on the panel, the IXPs, the and the role of like this Internet exchange points in order to provide lessor global costs and also reduce the dependence on international links and make further connectivity, and we are planning to support countries as models and between the UNDP and RPKI, as we heard the security which is very much important and we're looking through this initiative to engage further with more partners on launching awareness campaigns and doing the capacity building for the security of connectivity.
Basically, there is a project that literally it's a ‑‑ it will be impactful for the region to increase the connectivity.
Another entry point that we are working on for the connectivity and inclusion, digital inclusion, is a new framework, a regulatory framework that we are designing with different partners, GSMA, Mobile Telecom Operator and others, basically how we can build countries a legal framework, a digital policies framework that can support the company advancing on their digital economy by investing or designing policies and regulations for the connectivity and for the data centers and using also the data and AI.
So, basically these are two main or two key interventions that we are planning into the Arab region, and definitely we're looking to engage further with the partners in order to implement it in different context.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Dany, for the insight. Just I want to highlight here that there are some countries in the Middle East and African Region they don't have yet the basic infrastructure, where here we are discussing AI and Internet of Things and Cloud computing, we still have countries without basic infrastructure, so that's why we're working with the UNDP to just make these countries ‑‑ to join how we say the developing countries.
So, we still have 10 minutes. I see that we have a question. I will give for each speaker one minute to just recap and give me one priority based on the discussion is that we have during this session.
Mr. Frank your final remark, please.
>> FRANK STEIN: Yes. I probably should say something about regulation but my heart is in cybersecurity. So, I think we have addressed for a couple of years the need for intelligence and information sharing among peers and among people across borders. I think we have a way to go in that field. It's improving everything, but I think still there is a lot of work to do to cooperate and share information and intelligence. That would be my mind.
MODERATOR: Thank you. Mr. Adiel?
>> ADIEL AKPLOGAN: Yeah. I think I will highlight the fact that having a multistakeholder approach, bringing different parties around the table to discuss this complex issues are more than, not only at the global level, but we need to translate into local and regional levels in designing each aspect of regulation or technical design that will impact the global stability of Internet. Stability is key and Best practices is very important and framing a way that people can actually implement them is another key. So if you mentioned Manners there is also another one for the DNS which is Kindness which try to bring the Best practices in a framework that can be easily implemented that will help small operators that don't have the same resources as the bigger ones and decide everything what to do and have simple and easy entry point.
The third point is the partnership. Beyond the multistakeholder approach, the partnership between different players is key in helping advance those ‑‑ we hear about the UNDP and RIPE partnership and ICANN has the Digital Africa which is also broad framework for the partnership in Africa region, the partnership with UNESCO and IDN and so on so forth are a way to actually combine our resources to make sure what preaching and advances reaches an area that one organization alone cannot push. Let's continue strengthening the multistakeholder approach, and I think we will all contribute to the stable resilience and stable Internet.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much. I believe we will have some takeaways from what you said now, but I'll give the mic to Mr. Zdravko.
>> ZDRAVKO JUKIC: From the discussions it seems like this is education for general population, and users and capacity building for everyone seems to be very, very important. For us regulators, I stress again, we will be very busy now number coming days and months with the resilience issue and how to build more resilient networks and develop more methodology that will enable national regulators to apply some rules to have more resilient and redundant networks in the end. Also we can have more trusted vendors, something similar with the 5G tool books, development of technical and strategic measures, agreeing that those measures at the union level and then each Member States will apply them according to the national situations and national judgments. Yeah. Geopolitical situation. So I think that's all. Thanks.
MODERATOR: Thank you. It's a collaboration between stakeholders and regulators and collaboration between ‑‑ amongst regulators themselves. Sophia, I'll give the one minute for you.
>> SOFIA SILVA BERENGUER: Thank you. I guess from my side, what I would suggest prioritizing is the implementation of Best practices. For example in the space of routing security to join a program like Manners to engage with the RAR for your region and seek support if needed. Also, there is lots of good documents in the space of ITF documenting Best practices, BCP, Best common practice documents, because what we've heard is that sometimes although technical people might be very convinced of the RAR, and It's hard convince commercial stakeholders within some organizations because the benefits may not be evident or immediate, so there is a need and as the other panelists mentioned for more capacity building, more awareness raising, so any efforts in that space, that will help bridge that gap between very technical content and not so technical content we allow decision‑makers to understand the importance in implementing Best practices.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Sophia. Mr. Rodrigue?
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: Yes. Thank you very much. We have a lot of things to say, but as earlier we didn't ‑‑
MODERATOR: 1 minute.
>> RODRIGUE GUIGUEMBDE: 1 minute. Okay. Sorry. As we look to the future, one thing is clear, no single person can build African infrastructure alone. The complexity of the infrastructure, connectivity gaps, regulatory fragmentation, climate imperative and advanced risk and agile to have inclusive approach e. it's very important. At Smart Africa we're turning action into vision. Aligning government or private sector and developing partners and communities around concrete high‑impact solutions. Could be through African networks or data centers as I already said, harmonized spectrum challenges. Is we see the partnership ‑‑ sorry? Yes. We see this partnership not as a choice but a necessity. This is very important, so so finally, if we want to prepare our infrastructure to this demand of economy, the digital economy, we must invest not only in fiber and data centers, but in trust, coordination, and local capacity. Build together with purpose.
MODERATOR: Thank you for the words we'll keep it in mind. Sorry to keep you waiting. We have one question in the room. Please go ahead. Please can you introduce yourself.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you hear me? My name is Ven, s Fartuna work at Google jigsaw on resill yen and privacy. Currently when you use HTPS, encrypted HTP, domain goes in plain text and leaks, and that's like with the advancement of AI that's becoming very serious threat. Like ran a experiment analyzing my own domain names and put it on LLM and created profile about me and it's scary that you can tell the persons employer, the health conditions, political associations, religion, sexual preferences and gender and all sorts of things. So there are two technologies to solve this, like encrypted DNS and encrypted client hello, so I'm wondering what your organizations can do to help promote an adoption of this these technologies by online services or the Internet service providers.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much. As we do not have anymore time, I believe we'll take this after the session ends, and I'll be here with my colleagues to answer the question. I see another question, please. Go ahead. For 30 seconds, please. Be sure that we'll answer the questions after the session.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: All right. Thank you. My name is Rindig from Malawi, the youth Ambassador and inclusion practitioner and member of Malawi youth IGF. So my question is basically going straight to you UNDP and Smart Africa, I was following with very keen interest and more especially on the projects underway to bridge the digital divide, especially in the remote areas. Most of the projects bh they're being scaled, they're being done in the urban areas, so I would really want to find out what are the policies or the laws that you have put in place to make sure that when you are scaling these things about the projects to do with digital transformation, you are channeling these initiatives to reach to the people that are living in the remote areas because those are the people that are suffering from the poor infrastructure when it comes to Internet and at the same time even the data is very costly which they cannot manage to access, and at the same time also the issue to do with digital gadgets, so my question that I would really want to get an answer. Thank you so much.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much. Once again, we'll be here with our panelists to answer the question and I'll be sure to give you the contact of my colleague Dany Wazen so you can be in direct contact with him. Thanks, again, to everyone for the audience in the room, audience online, and for our speakers. It was really an interesting discussion. We will have some takeaways and some recommendations, but just to summarize, collaboration, partnership, IPv6 and Manners and should be in the public infrastructure plan and last one is long‑term investment and capacity building. Once again, thank you so much and I believe I'm on time. Thank you.
(Applause).
