IGF 2020 WS #338 Keeping us together: Internet infrastructure in emergencies

Relevance to Internet Governance: The world has been facing a series of challenges in the past years with the increased amount of situations in which people and countries are pushed to their limits in terms of coping with natural disasters, man-made accidents, disease outbreaks, and so on. And there is no evidence that the coming years will ease it up. Situations like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, the 2017 hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, or even 2015 and 2019 dam disasters in Mariana and Brumadinho, in Brazil, are some of the examples. More recently, the world has been facing the coronavirus outbreak, in which the COVID-19 disease is quickly spreading throughout the world and putting pressure on governments and people. Major consequences of the mentioned situations are related to inevitable constraints in society interactions, urban organization, households, and so on. So as to overcome these challenges, nations are grounding efforts in innovating and developing technology, procedures and processes that could improve resilience of modern life standards, especially with regards to more sustainable modes of living, in line with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. There is a huge belief that this change in practices could minimize emergency situations, be them nature- or human-led. The issue of infrastructure is at the heart of this context, be it related to water, electricity, construction, and food, among others. On top of the aforementioned elements, there is one core system: the information infrastructures, especially telecommunications, ICTs and the Internet. The Internet is probably the most important tool for communication and collaboration nowadays, as it plays the role of a crosscutting element for virtually every social process in modern human life. As the Geneva Declaration (2003) addresses, attention should be given for countries and regions with special needs as well as to conditions that pose severe threats to development, such as natural disasters. The Tunis Agenda (2005) also highlights the intrinsic relationship between disaster reduction, sustainable development and the eradication of poverty and that disasters seriously undermine investment in a very short time and remain a major impediment to sustainable development and poverty eradication. The NETmundial declaration (2014) established security, stability and resilience as a core principle for the Internet. According to the document, it “should be a key objective of all stakeholders in Internet governance”. The declaration also states the need for an enabling environment for sustainable innovation and creativity, reinforcing that “enterprise and investment in infrastructure are essential components of an enabling environment”. Within this scenario, the Internet ends up being responsible for a significant part in structuring responses and mitigating negative effects of disasters, like through offering new ways for people to organize, communicate, exchange, consume and so on, but also in fostering networks of collaboration to innovate and put on new solutions for human problems. Despite the current demands posed to the Internet ecosystem by the COVID-19 global pandemic, there is also an increasing dependence on the Internet infrastructure as a tool to circumvent problems and provide solutions on emergency situations. Those solutions range from work alternatives, such as home-office and platform-based opportunities, the relevance of information and communication technologies for keeping citizens updated about a given emergency (how to help, how to find help, what to do and what not to do, etc.), up to the several IoT-based solutions which have been developed and depend on connectivity. In an interconnected world, the benefits of the Internet demand a solid and resilient infrastructure, regardless of whether they require more or less bandwidth, and of where and how they operate. After hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, one of the main concerns of the local and global communities was the communication infrastructure, as a series of telco’s transmission towers, cables, as well as power grids were all down, leading to connectivity issues not only locally, but also regionally, as several submarine cables were damaged. In this sense, whole areas remained totally disconnected for long periods of time. NIC.pr, the country code manager for the top-level domain .pr, was able to keep its services running, applying several workarounds to make it possible, including a special initiative helping customers to protect their registered domain names. This case was unprecedented, and ended up launching a whole new track within the domain name ecosystem, with ICANN meetings starting to hold specific workshops focused on post-disaster recovering measures for top-level domain operators, as well as assessing extraordinary measures to adapt Registrar rules so as to protect registrants in emergency situations. More recently, ICANN Org has been also applying research efforts to prepare the domain name ecosystem to face the shortage of resources and deal with risks and dangers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries have also been discussing and applying measures to mitigate the fallouts inherent to the period of severe conditions posed by the coronavirus outbreak. For example, some countries put in place agreements along with very big application providers so as to ease the traffic pressure on national networks, seeking to leverage the resilience of their networks in a time of great demand for traffic. In Brazil, for example, government authorities like the national telecommunications regulator (ANATEL) have been convening several different stakeholders in task forces to design and apply measures to face the new challenges posed to the national infrastructure. Additionally, Brazilian connectivity infrastructure also relies on a broad ecosystem of Internet exchange points (IX.br) spread all over the country, designed to handle heavy broadband traffic. A shared set of principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes established prior to an emergency is key to achieve timely cooperation in adverse situations. Lessons learned on emergency situations and negotiated on a multistakeholder perspective are useful both for immediate solutions as well as for the Internet long-term evolution, following the best current practices in Internet governance worldwide.

Relevance to Theme: This session could very well be placed in more than one of the proposed tracks for the IGF 2020, as it refers to crosscutting discussions that could impact several distinct contexts. Nevertheless, we have chosen to submit this proposal to the environment thematic track, as it relates to ongoing and of global scope discussions in which society and humans in general are at the crossroads. Bearing in mind the actual context of pandemics and worldwide emergencies, human agency and the interactions with the environment may have caused a set of imbalances for life on Earth, and people are exhorted to find new ways of organizing themselves, especially in urban environments, seeking more sustainability and resilience to face the challenges posed by development of humankind. In this sense, one of the aspects we chose to address is that of information infrastructures and modern society organization for life, work, social interactions, and so on. We believe that our proposal directly relates to one of the listed Sustainable Development Goals for this thematic track, that is SDG 11 - Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, which is also directly dependent on SDG 9 - Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. Therefore, the proposed session adds to the thematic narrative as it reinforces aspects already raised, such as the sustainability of cities, at the same time that raises additional topics, such as information infrastructures and innovation to support sustainability of cities and human interactions, especially in emergency contexts.