FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR
ENHANCED MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
05 SEPTEMBER 2014
09:00
WS 60
GLOBAL ACCESS: CONNECTING THE NEXT BILLION GLOBAL CITIZENS
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This is the output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. 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 session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> DAVID GROSS: If everyone can gather around. We need to start. Even though it is early on the last day of the conference, we have a very full agenda here with lots of panel participants, so we need to make sure that we get enough time for everyone to have an opportunity to participate and to share.
I would like to welcome you, once again, to a global access related workshop. This is the latest in a series of workshops that govern that I think have demonstrated over the years to have success focusing on what is undoubtedly the central issue of IGF which is how do we connect those who are unconnected.
We all know the statistics and the tremendous success both wire line and over the last couple of years wireless has brought to connecting the world's people to the internet and by connecting the world's people to the Internet, connecting the people to each other
We've got a tremendously talented and diverse panel. I'm going to ask FCC commissioner Mignon, she has par paced in prior IGFs participated in discussions not only in the United States and globally on these issues and then we're going to turn to Mark Summer to give brief opening remarks, and then we're going to have even briefer if possible, opening statements by a series of people who I'll call on, and then we're going to open it up quickly for comments.
I apologize in advance if I cut anybody off or if I cut off the discussion. It is not because it isn't a rich topic but we just don't have the time.
So with that very brief introduction, commissioner, the floor is yours.
>> DOMINIQUE LAZANSKI: Guaden, or good morning. It's a pleasure for me to take place in a workshop that focuses on connecting the next billion citizens across the globe. What brings me here today is we all recognize a power of broadband, to grow our economies and expand opportunities and improve our quality of life. We share a common commitment to promoting practices and policies that will expand the common interests of broadband to everyone. I thought that the most effective use of my time would be spent by giving a brief overview of what we are doing in the U.S. to promote universal broadband access most specifically, ensuring that facilities exist and making sure that those facilities are both affordable and access elf. So just where do things stand in the U.S.
>> MIGNON CLYBURN: The latest estimates are about 70% of U.S. households have adopted fixed broadband at home and about 65% of Americans are using smart phones. These mobile devices are often a complement, not a substitute for fixed broadband and surveys indicate that all together approximately 80% of Americans now had advanced Internet access that is either by broadband at home or broadband through a smart phone. But there are still millions living mostly in our rural areas who could not get fixed broadband even if they wanted to because the infrastructure is simply not there. That is why connecting all Americans is one of the FCCs highest priorities. Since I arrived at the commission in 2009, we have been fixated on modernizing our universal fund, but that dedication to universal access is not new for us.
You see, America's commitment to universal service goes back over a century, focusing initially on connecting everyone with Voice Tel law phone service the way we support universal service is a bit unique.
In the United States we have an assessment which appears on each customer's build. Most of you have tackled this problem differently and I cannot say if we were starting over today that this current framework would be the exact mechanism we would use but it's a path we have chosen to expand broadband access.
I am proud to be able to say that in 2011 the FCC modernized the universal service programme to focus on broadband enabled networks after decades of supporting voice only.
This was a vision laid out in our national broadband plan and a fundamental change in the focus of our policies. Connecting the disconnected won't happen overnight but we now have a framework to get there in an and an annual budget to do so.
Our updated service programs have different components. The largest part is what we call the connect America fund which now promotes broadband deployment to areas where the private sector has not or will not build. The connect America fund is a public‑private partnership with an annual budget of $4.5 billion to expend broadband across America.
Even this number is sizeable as it is represents only the public side of our investment. The private sector will also invest its own capital to reach these un served communities.
To date, the FCC has authorized over $300 million in funding to serve 470,000 locations or approximately 1.2 million people in 43 states plus Puerto Rico.
We do not only want to ensure that every American has access to wire broadband, we want universal service for mobile broadband.
President Obama set a goal of 4G LTE coverage to at least 98% of Americans by 2016. Consistent with these goals, the commission established access to mobile broadband as a part of a universal service goal for the first time by creating a mobility fund. Support for this mobility fund will be distributed using market based reverse auctions to ensure funding is spent wisely and efficiently.
Finally, the FCC created a fund to reach the most expensive to serve areas of our nation. With this component known as a remote areas fund, we are open to considering alternative technologies in order to reach these harder to serve areas from satellite to wireless Internet service providers to TV wide spaces. In fact, the entire modernized universal service fund is technology neutral, and we are encouraging all providers, including electric utilities, cable companies, mobile providers and local governmental entities to participate.
Two areas where broadband holds tremendous progress for enabling new innovations are health care and education, and there are two discrete universal service programs dedicated to each.
The universal service that directly helps to connect schools and libraries is known as ERATT. In June 2013 President Obama called on the FCC to connect 99% America students with high capacity broadband that includes the latest interactive brand width intensive digital learning tools.
I am pleased to know in July of this year the FCC adopted an order of infusing an addition of $1 billion annually to make sure schools have robust connectivity or Wi‑Fi within schools and library buildings. We still have much more work to do to ensure that all schools and libraries have high capacity to and within each school and library, particularly in rural areas, but we are making substantial progress.
The FCC has connecting rural connectivity programme. We started a pilot programme to expand high capacity broadband services to health care providers and in December of 2012 the FCC took the lessons we learned from a pie lot and established a health care connect fund which will provide broadband to thousands of health care providers across our Country. The final piece of the FCC's service programme supports adoption. We recognize that ensuring facilities exist is not enough. Access means that it has to be affordable.
The U.S. Congress also recognizes and required the FCC to ensure that all consumers, including low income consumers, have access to advanced services.
Our adoption programme has focused on providing a discount off of the test of telephone service. In December of 2012, we approved reforms that establish a core programme goal of ensuring availability of broadband for low income Americans. We currently have 14 pilots underway to study this and we use these lower income populations to test the potential for expanding support for broadband services.
I must acknowledge that collectively as an international community we have made strides in recent years connecting more than 2 billion people across the world to the Internet and un leash go a tidal wave of social and economic benefit but we can't celebrate because we've truly only just begun Mr.Ambassador. I appreciate the opportunity to share our experiences in America and look forward to hearing from the rest of the panel, for together developing solutions to connect the next billion citizens will enrich us all.
Thank you very much.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, commissioner. That's terrific.
Mark, can you top that?
>> MARK SUMMER: I'm not sure if I will be able to do that. Let me share a little bit from my experience.
This has been as an observer participant in expanding broadband access specifically in immerging markets like Africa and Asia. A little bit of my background for a moment. I am from Germany originally. I ran an ISP there in a smaller town outside of Frankfurt in the early 90's. Ended up living in southeast Asia working for localized ISP there and then moved to Silicon Valley working for companies producing software and services for ISPs.
Ten years ago I launched a nonprofit organisation to narrow the digital divide we were seeing which was created in seeing the opportunity access to information and technology on as provided to me in my lifetime and felt that that needs to be extended.
Over those past ten years we've moved from making access to computing available, to focusing on broadband significantly. Just in the last year I launched a for profit company again because I see a significant economic potential, as well as closing that digital vied and think some of those tools of business are more appropriate at some point than the pure nonprofit way.
What we've seen over the last ten years is a significant change in awareness and need for access to information and communication tools, like Internet and broadband and significant change in technologies where we had mobile networks just providing words and providing broadband data service as well as those now we see other technologies, Google is experimenting with balloons and FACEBOOK with drones and all those other kind of things, but there are things like Wi‑Fi and TV wide spaces. So the tools set is becoming bigger and bigger and it is about to go the right tools from the right problem I think from a technology perspective.
Over the last few years I've experimented a lot using those different types of tools in the nonprofit, which we have been running. We've connected schools in Haiti and used those for anchor tenants for the ISPs in that country to provide access for under school rules and secondary towns that they couldn't have access to. I've seen these public‑private partnerships finding anchor tenants for having a broadband need for usage and bringing them to bear to help private sectors to use those to reach out to consumers and SMEs in that market.
There are tools that we can use from a technology point of view but we can't use them because they're not regulated in a way to allow us to use them in those markets. That might be access to unlicensed spectrum that we're used to in the U.S. is not the same in all countries around the world and that prohibits new entrance to markets and other competes to compete with other technologies out there.
Like the commissioner just mentioned in the U.S. and the same is true in other developed markets mobile wireless is a complement to fix wireless solutions, may it be cable, fiber, DSL, whatever is around.
We look in immerging markets, we typically have a single solution only at this point which is a mobile wireless solution. It is kind of like taking the Ferrari or Porsche, which is a pretty big perspective in the U.S., and making that as the only tool or most prevalent tool out there right now.
If we look, of course, the cost of bringing fiber and copper and co‑axe ought to places is very expensive. So we need to look at these other tools, TV wide spaces and so forth and make them easier accessible to service providers that want to use them.
The other thing we're seeing I think in the U.S. as well and that we're seeing in immerging markets as well we need a whole set of actors. It is not just Comcast and AT&T. It is not just the mobile operators, MTN or pick orange or whichever. We need a lot of actors that will focus on different niches of the markets and different regions around their countries and their continents.
Access sometimes is a real problem for those new service providers. There might be high license fees, which are geared towards those large companies which are small service provider can't afford and makes it impossible for them to really enter in that market.
On the other hand, those are these nimble players which drive innovation forward. We've seen this in Silicon Valley. Nimble small companies drive innovation, have resulted in companies like Google and FACEBOOK, taking on large companies. We need to see that I think in the technology spaces as well and create an innovative drive ask hopefully see the large players embrace that and use that.
I think this all will result in a much wider tools of access, much larger competition, and much lower costs for the consumer.
Where the critical inflection point in my view right now. We have seen such a huge demand, a pent up demand of people who want to get online and want to contribute with creating content and share that in their regions and with their neighbors and throughout larger community around the world, and once we un leash that potential, it's a huge economic impact in those countries and it's a huge educational impact and it's a huge social economic impact in terms of bringing their communities forward in the way they choose to bring them forward and participate in that department. For that reason, I think it is really important to focus on those next steps in how we get past this critical inflection point to enable those opportunities.
Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, Mark.
Pepper, how are we going to get new technologies to drive us past this inflection point.
>> ROBERT PEPPER: These are really great two presentations, one on the U.S. where, you know, when I do most of my work in immerging markets and immerging markets they assume the U.S. has everything, we still are a work in progress, right. Mark, who I've worked with both in Vineo and the Volo world the little guy bought them up doing completely innovative things that defy the rules and get them done, which is great.
But I want to be very pragmatic and raise one very important issue because it's again a very practical barrier to deployment, especially in immerging countries.
Some of this comes from the perspective I it's on the broadband commission along with Paul, and there is an issue that we've looked at and I tend to look at these issues as both supply and demand. We talk about adoption. Adoption is on the demand side, but you can't have adoption unless you have the networks there, so you need supply and demand. Supply by itself is necessary but not sufficient because if it is there but nobody uses it, so what. We don't get the benefits.
There is a significant barrier to both supply and demand in high taxes and fees.
Governments unfortunately around the world still view this sector as a cash cow, as a way to raise revenue. That is completely counterproductive to the government's own goals of deployment and adoption of broadband and ICTs for development.
On the supply side, there are a number of countries in which the taxes and fees to deploy are so high. One example is in Nigeria, Paul and I are founding members as well as other members in the room of alliance for affordable Internet. One of the things that was reported to us by Nigeria is about 70% of the cost of the deployment of fiber across the Country and building out physical broadband, up to 70% of that cost is taxes and fees.
This is completely and totally counter productive. Every state, every municipality and even the federal government looks to this as something they can tax. They view this as a way to just extract money, but that's the treasury side of the equation and it is completely counterproductive to good communications policy that ultimately benefit the population and business that generate tax revenue down the line.
So that's on the supply side. On the demand side, what we see in multiple countries are very high tariffs and fees on equipment, both network equipment, more importantly hand sets and consumer equipment and then very high taxes and fees on the services.
In fact, that is even true in the United States where you have for mobile service, cellular service, you not only have the federal universal service contributions but you then have state taxes, you have local taxes and in some of the states in the U.S. the taxes on mobile service are in excess of 20%. That is the equivalent of taxes on tobacco and alcohol. That is why we sometimes joke that these are syntaxes, but communication is not a sin. And it shouldn't be.
In many of the immerging countries taxing communication services, again, is seen as something, well, these are just rich companies, so therefore it's okay to tax them. But ultimately it's the consumers, it's the customers that pay and this the communications companies really, they don't pay. They just become the tax collectors.
So, you know, this is one of the conclusions of the UN broadband commission. Communication, there is always going to be taxes, but do not tax the services and equipment and the sector as though it's a luxury. There shot not be luxury taxes imposed or barrier taxes imposed on the services, the equipment, the networks, the build out, the permits, the fees, because this is infrastructure and a technology and services that benefit society and ultimately will generate tax revenues down the line.
And I think this is an extremely important pragmatic issue, especially in immerging if we're talking about how do we connect, how do we deploy and connect not just the next billion but the next five billion
Thanks David.
>> DAVID GROSS: Terrific. Thank you Pepper. Keeping the focus on being pragmatic.
Paul, you have a lot of activity in the developing world.
>> PAUL MITCHELL: Being pragmatic is enabling innovation to flow in ways that haven't happened before. I think pepper is very direct at one of the key obstacles, which is excessive taxation. This is on obstacle to afford debility, but there are other things as well.
One of them is access to data. Governments have a lot of data that are useful to the process of building new facilities, to the process of bringing people online to changing the education null paradigm to essentially figuring out what are the things that are needed to drive demand. Demand is the other part of the equation as pepper mentioned, you have networks and nobody wants them, it doesn't matter.
We found in our pilot deploy meant we have a variety of pilot networks deployed around the world from the Philippines to Kenya and Tanzania and South Africa. We discovered that simply building the network or getting people to build the network, because we in fact are not the network operators, is not sufficient. What we have to do is put an entire programme around to upscale the population. To train in ICT skills. So teach development of application so that people can build applications that are in the local language that meet the local needs for whatever it might be, figuring out crop prices in my robe bee before you travel there with your crops and making sure that you maximize.
So, in our sense, we put together a programme called for Africa which tends to‑‑ which tries to address the entire stack.
First of all innovation in how you build the network and how you put the business model together to make it affordable. And then recognizing that 44% of the population of the continent of Africa is 15 years old or younger means we have to figure out how do you get education, the right education, the right skills to that population as they grow up and those are the people that are going to create the small businesses that are going to create the economic activity that is going to be enabled through the connectivity that gets provided.
Putting all of those things together with job skills training in the school curriculum and then working with the governments to make sure that the necessary data is available that can be used for the training is something that's so far been relatively successful for us.
In terms of doing all of this, it's required a lot of innovation in both how we go about putting the networks together to make the network really, really inexpensive. So none of the networks we were involved in at the moment are LDE networks. Not that LTE is great. It is. But it's at the moment too expensive for the areas that we're serving where we're trying to get the profitable cost of the network operation down to less than $4 a month. Which is difficult on the current LTE environment.
So we need innovation in the way governments approach using new technologies for communications because there is a perceived risk that if you use this new technology it might not work. It might go away and maybe there is more harm there than there would have been if you didn't do anything at all. We would tend to view the opposite. Take a chance. It might work. You might get something. You might be able to elevate and build something upon which, you know, an economic foundation will work.
With that, I think I know we're running out of time, so I'll stop, but I think as we get into maybe we will have time for Q and A and be happy to talk about some of the pilots and some of the specifics at that time.
>> DAVID GROSS: Terrific. Thank you very much Paul, because a lot of what you're doing, the pilots are quite ground breaking and extraordinary.
Dominique, wireless has already been the subject of a lot of points in the developing world. Take it away.
>> DOMINIQUE LAZANSKI: Great. Thank you. And I think thanks to both of you already for touching on a lot of things that I would have touched on but I'm still going to briefly touch on them again, so is our colleague as well because we have a report out on surcharge taxes.
So the GSMA has quite a member of world members, 800 worldwide that are facing challenges in developing markets and we've collected actively access and give brief examples of how some of our operators have come to attempt to overcome those barriers and as Paul said we can talk more about different examples in the Q and A.
So the four barriers to access for us is nothing new. It's all the same problems that we based before. Infrastructure, which includes not just lack of infrastructure but lack of access to infrastructure including things like spectrum for example.
Afford debility we have talked about that throughout the whole week in a lot of the other panels and that includes taxes, surcharges, various things like that as well as just afford debility of devices and calling plans and data plans.
Literacy and digital skills. Another theme I've seen throughout the entire week. Not just lack of literacy in particular, in general, but lack of digital skills and literacy to local content. And that leads on to the third one, or the fourth one which is incentives and local content.
So briefly touching on some sort of positive solutions to some of these, when it comes to infrastructure removal energy and our green power for mobile programme has been quite successful in looking at alternative ways to sort of maximize, for example, diesel use or diesel and grid use throughout the developing world and throughout the entire world, but also infrastructure sharing is sometimes appropriate in different markets.
For example, in Dali where there is strict planning rules, six to seven operators share a tower at a time which has actually quite significantly decreased the amount of expenditure on putting up duplicate kind of infrastructure but what it has done is let operators have additional revenue for rolling out in areas that have yet to have coverage, mobile coverage.
Affordability. Chris is here, I see, from Mozilla. They just launched a quite affordable phone for nearly 2000 rubies in India. But also another key theme that we've seen is taxes and reduction in taxes.
I could go on about this for quite a while around the different types of tax, but I'm just going to give a quick example. In 2008 Uregay removed usage tax on mobile phones and by 2011 penetration of usage in mobile phones went up from 65% to 141%. So you saw almost an immediate affect of that. Many more example of that we could get into.
Finally or the last two areas is, you know, in terms of literacy in digital skills. In South Africa there has been a mobile entrepreneurs programme that our operators have been involved in in particular as Durbin they have used the public libraries as areas to discuss with people and interact and hold three training sessions on a variety of things on how to search for local content and how to access banks and financial data just through SMS on their phones. We're not just talking about smart phones here for example. That has been quite successful because in 2012 300 participants in Durbin went through and over 75% of them after say they can access and now are able to find about local finances, government information about how to start and run small businesses.
Finally I'll just close with an example from Uganda on awareness. It is not just awareness let's get online for the first time but about everything, how to use different devices. In Uganda an operator does regional road shows. They go and bring all their devices do free training on you name it. A variety of things including how to set up mail on devices and very basic things. This has been advertised through what we would call traditional media. So they've seen the numbers increase in terms of interest in that, but also they've also seen the growth in the last six months of this particular this operator now sees 30% more penetration after running a series of these events.
So those are just some examples, but there are many, many more and I would like to leave it there and open it up for discussions later on.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you so much.
Dominic, you have got a global perspective, but one that focuses a lot on the Middle East in one of the most rapidly growing in terms of ICT development. Can you give us a little description of what you see going on and where we're going from here?
>> DOMINIC: Thank you, David. What I see is we have these two problems. The main problems in terms of access in our part, two main problems with Internet access. One is regulation and one will be is contracting platform, is contracting between the licensing terms of the licensing between the government and the private sector. Which in one term the private sector is we need to have some sort of requirement where the private sector need to start the deployment within the rural areas, because there you have areas that is completely with no access. And purely that doesn't make any business sense, the private sector to deploy, and the government is not ready to invest in these areas, while the government knows if they will have fees and costs of license will go down on private sectors. So, again, we are looking at the cash out of this situation.
Some other areas you will see in Elan as well is the lack of regulation. That still the DSPs who owns the docs and who can use the docs. You will see it in Elan and the difference between DSPs and ISPs what kind of license will be provided is still on hold and this will keep everybody all the current providers, ISP or DSP providers, they cannot do any investment in any areas because they're waiting to have a long‑term license. So you would have the current licensing that is not taking into consideration the Google area and all the lack of licensing in these areas.
This is from one area and the third area is currently the fast movement of refuges and internal displaced people in the this part of the world is which is getting the mobile networks saturated to up great from 3G to 2G which is also people getting people connected in this part of the world.
This is the main area. And having said that, also the long‑term, like using the white space, using new bandwidth and it's becoming due to security reasons is taking too long in order to go to provide such bandwidths to the providers.
So this is the main area that we look at. So usually I our recommendation has been to more and more allow local providers and to reset connectivity, match networks in a way that will provide more access in this rural area and less whenever the government is not providing the service or the private sector to allow some reset connectivity in order to provide access to this, which has been a big fight in Iraq and Lebanon in many other, in Seria. In areas that we hope other technologies is welcome and be provided for this.
Having said that also you see today that there is a lot of observation being observed very close, there is a net neutrality issue which is putting also Governments on the edge and not knowing how to move forward and as well as the private sector, not knowing if they need to allocate enough funding for investment in this sector. So we are seeing all these challenges in a part of the world where the fund is not the issue, the actual availability of the fund is not the issue but it's more about the regulation and what is going on, and the unknown is the main issue we are facing. Thank you
Robert have you been with the broadband stakeholder groups that we did in Lebanon and in other places. Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Fascinating. Both the issues that arise from a lack of a regulatory environment looking forward as well as the flexibility that I'm hearing you say and the certainty that comes from rules of the world that are unknown and solve and address the problems of the people. That is really quite extraordinary.
Sam, you have looked at these issues economic perspective at the OECD. People have touched on it as well as the regulatory side. Can you share with us some of what OECDs needs.
>> SAM PALTRIDGE: I will, and Galen asked me to look at the tax I shall and said give me a good example of taxation. So I'm going to start with something that is what Bob alluded to which is where countries can benefit from the growth in communications and just regular taxation.
As you probably know the business model for mobile communication to one of prepaid cards and that gave a workable business model which has expanded penetration everywhere. So take the example of Pakistan. It went from obviously 0% above our penetration to today it is 73%.
Along that timeline, GST or that taxation has increased from basically zero to today around half a billion dollars. It's over half a billions dollars and keeps growing. And that's fine. That's the normal taxation revenue that pays for schools, hospitals and that's fantastic. Unfortunately that model of competition is against the model that we had with the accounting race system and tried to extract rents takes traffic went past. In many Developing Countries today people are being told you have to have both. You can have all the benefits of competition domestically but we can recreate a cartel internationally. I'm here to say it doesn't work.
I came here and said it would work two years ago. Since I choose Pakistan as a good example I'm going to pick on them a bit and choose them as the bad example. So they created a cartel for incoming traffic.
What happened? Well the cartel was unstable. When you increase cost of something demand starts to fall so traffic fell. So the official traffic fell by about a quarter. There is lots of effects. I could talk about effects of double taxation, but I thought I would talk about gray traffic and how this is going to affect the Internet in quite a serious way, I think.
If you're going to introduce a policy like this, you have to try to enforce it and bad policies generally lead to worse policies. So what happens is you start to get things like, well, we've got to try and block Skype because we got to make this work, so in the Caribbean recently there has been examples of people trying to prevent bypass through blocking Skype.
You also try and block VPNs. Well, that is a problem for business, so you create a white list
Well, not everyone gets on the white list. In fact Microsoft, I believe, was knocked off the network in Pakistan along with a lot of NGOs the first day this was introduced. But this is where it gets really problematic.
Pakistan about a month ago I think became the second Country to introduce BioMet tricks to get a SIM card. So if you want to activate a SIM card you have to get your fingerprint taken. Just pause for a moment and think how you feel about getting your fingerprint taken to activate a SIM card and what effect this may have on the growth of Internet access in Developing Countries. I think this is really a serious issue.
I don't think it will work and I think there will be a secondary market, but just the fundamental principals of this and what poor people and how they may react to this is really serious.
So, you know, perhaps they've thought about the secondary market so they've said let's limit it to five SIM cards per person. What is that going to mean for M2M? I just leave you with that thought and I stop you there. There is much that could be said but I know it's short for time.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much. You have now taken us down a peg, I would say, with lots of problems, but Mignon usually has some experience in his focus.
>> MIGNON CLYBURN: Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak on a key topic of Internet development of the global access. I will focus my speech on two points. First, the KRON of mobile networks in Internet access expansion today and in the future, mainly in Africa. Secondly the impact of governance and economic realities on Internet architecture and mainly on the feature of Internet.
If you compare mobile and Internet expansions in Africa, particularly we know that upward level and thanks to mobile communication ecosystems technologies regulation, competition, mobile service are developing dramatically today quickly and open the door for new internet users.
There are around 4 to 5 billion mobile users worldwide. Compared to around 3 billion Internet users. So assume all Internet users are also mobile users, still around 1.5 billion mobile users. Additional users may be connected to Internet through mobile technology.
At of Africa level we have very high mobile expansion, but a lot of work still to do. For Africa for mobile has around 70% of mobile subscription rate; however, for internet only less than 20% of sub Saharn population will be connected by the end of this year.
It is clear that mobile technology will continue to play a dominant role in Internet connectivity expansion, in particular in Africa and immerging countries where the potential of fix it Internet will remain low, at least in the medium territory.
In 2008 11 to 12, in Africa the growth rate of mobile broadband is around 10 times higher than the fix‑it broadband one.
In sub SarAfrica fix it access represents only 4% of Internet subscription which is very low growth with very low growth potential.
Also in Africa countries have poor fix‑it telecommunication infrastructure. With low capacities and boundaries this is why building broadband mobile networks requires very important and financial‑‑ sorry dash and technical links. Because more than 90% of Internet traffic is international.
Now if we move to the second of my speech regarding economics and governance issues, we note that governance and economic realities impact quantity Internet particularly at two layers, infrastructure access, access availability and affordability, sufficient boundaries and content level.
For further expansion for immerging countries, particularly in rural area needs more cost effective solution for broadband networks and devices. We have to implement common and shared cost effective infrastructure solution to set up more efficient spectrum policy to ask a satellite solution for rural and large areas to use adapted energy solution because energy shortage in Africa is a big issue for device usage. To encourage cooperation approach for international big bonds‑‑ sorry, for big bonds building and cooperate with other utilities provider like water, electricity and transport.
We can take the example as solar based station as used by Oranje used in Africa
We have to extend also universal service approach and related funds. We have to adopt them to develop Internet access and service to remote and rural areas. To set up a device policy along for price for smart phones tablets and so on. To stimulate investment in broadband and to ensure double access by allowing a fair part of digit value to be allocated to the network infrastructure investments, and through a pricing system incentivizing efficient use of existing resources by own stakeholders to enhance significantly Internet social and economic benefits it's necessary to develop local content and services for citizens in education, health, agriculture, trade and administration.
These should be supported by an efficient architect infrastructure allowing bandwidth optimization and based on Internet exchange point and content delivering network and cloud solution.
To drive Internet growth in parallel with investment in infrastructure appropriate Internet policies should be adopted at both national and international levels. For the Internet should be improved. Internet openness is not specific to Internet access in Developing Countries or rural area. It's a core principal of Internet encompassing open standards, open technology and networks, platforms, open resource management and open development policy of Internet. Us sharing the objectives of transparency should be matter of concern to players at all levels of the Internet value chain and freedom to innovate should be the rule in applications to us in smart phones, in tablets in browsers in operating systems.
The telecom industry is fully supportive for the open Internet as a platform for customers and information for society. It works and history has made broadband access widely available on their own initiatives. One component, in fact, of Internet openness is a prepared traffic management, which is essential to keep Internet open and accessible and affordable for everybody. And without any interference in the relation between end users and educations and content providers, the end users about care more about outcomes than about the technical means used to achieve them. It allows network operators to balance and to optimize capacity resource in order to copy efficiently with traffic demand so every user get a good experience, for example traffic balancing between fixed and mobile.
It allows to match customer needs with the right service, characteristics so you pay for what you want and need and don't have to subsidize to cross subsidize heavy users.
I think I have to conclude, please. Conclude, I believe, that mobile technologies and networks with appropriate development policy are the case solution to connect next billions to Internet and particularly in Africa. In Africa a big investment‑‑ or big investments are needed to transform mobile networks to broadband once and to requires to implement effective solution at all levels. Telecom industry is supported for internet openness over all the Internet value chain and appropriate management is essential to strength Internet openness furtherability.
Thank you very much.
>> DAVID GROSS: Alison, you're up next, and then we're running out of time.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: I think a lot of people have said a lot of things that would obviously identify both from a supply and demand side point of view. Let me say some other things that may won't be as popular.
I mean, I think the issues are as we all face issues of access and I accept entirely that there are vast parts of the developed world where people don't have access, especially particular marginalized groups, but I think the nature of the problem and the scope of the problem in and the scale of the problem is quite, quite different in Africa. I own speak for areas in which I've researched. So I think one needs to address those in a particular way.
But I think the main problem with these discussions that we've had during this week and we've had for the last ten years in fact on access is that failure to define the problem sufficiently. We define the problem at a very superficial level. We define the problem as an access problem and so we fail to really address the problem in its comprehensive necessary. And I think this really, you know, we look at the problem as a technical problem and that's why we see the technical problem that we have in connecting people in the North is the same as the connecting people in the South. But, in fact the problem is much bigger than a technical problem.
I think to really understand it requires a more political economy of what the real challenges are.
And it does take us to a ICT echo system, just to unfortunately use that, because I think it really does explain the linkage jest between the different components and how getting one right and not the other really affects outcomes. And ultimately will even if you open up the Internet at one level, because it's an echo system, if you don't open it up at multiple levels or you close you down in certain levels the health of the ecosystem is going to be effected.
To give you an example, I think again yesterday I raised this point and it seemed very much pouring called water on all sorts of great initiatives. If you take the issue, for example, of Google's high speed network that was given for Compala at a time when democratic gains in the Country have been closed down, we have journalists in prisons, gay rights, homophobia in the Country and Google's response to that is, well, we believe that if we open up the Internet in as many places as we can we will be able to debate this and make it better.
Well, if you try to debate homosexuality in Uganda at the moment, you can go to jail for the rest of your life. How different is that that have to get a license, it was a gift to Uganda at a time when you got the shutdown on rights. That is different from the Chinese backbone that was built and agreement that tries Ugandans for generations into a long‑term relationship. Other than Google claims to these rights and China doesn't. Groups have spoken to GSA before to use the power they increasingly have in these environment to really enforce a full opening up of the system.
So to go where I see that real blockage is, because I think we agreed and all of us have spoken about the real blockage being on the supply side of the infrastructure, at the services side, human development skill side is obviously critical and the local content we need for local language development etcetera, but the real barrier then and actually on the pending bought tell neck is the lack of human rights in many of these environments that will ultimately close down parts of the Internet and has already closed down parts of the Internet.
You know, I think we have to think about very closely where pragmatism is in your interest to align with some really dark forces.
That being said, I want to say that there are some really important ways in which we have to try and open up the Internet in places where there isn't an interest in doing so.
Just to speak very specifically about some of the regulatory and policy challenges, because I think they do exist, they are big problems with institutional capacity on the continent, regulatory capacity on the continent and in this way we need to look very critically at simply adopting as most of us in Africa do, European union type regulations that are really extremely complex and different cull to implement so are not really effectively implement owed the ground and look at ways in which you can possibly get self‑regulation, all sorts of other mechanisms simply greater competition into the market in order to get some of those benefits.
So just looking at those records, I think there are some interesting develops meant in terms of broadband plans that are being proposed across the continent in Kenya and Nigeria and South Africa where open access networks are being suggested and mechanisms to ensure public‑private partnerships, so ensure that will is a leverage of public‑private networks in order to get greater more affordable roll out and greater roll out is on the cards. The end containment is the critical issue because government is the biggest user of broadband and services on the continent so I think in speaking to operators for the South Africa band plan they are far keener to get an anchor tenant on their networks than simply be able to allowed to build at the networks at their own risk. That mechanism worked fairly well.
I think infrastructure competition in many cases in Africa, in many parts of the developing world, is not‑‑ is not feasible to look at open access networks in order to ensure entry for services at a higher level. So access regulation, wholesale access regulation is absolutely critical to get right in this environment and it is a big challenge for us. Particularly because we are in this primarily mobile home and wireless environment where wholesale access is far trickier I think with a lot of unintended outcomes as the mobile operators are apt to tell us, but as enormous potential if we're really trying to drive down those prices and at least get the services best competition that we know is critical ask getting prices down and stimulating demand.
I think that takes us in a broadband environment. We've some success on termination rates on the voice side, and we can do it, and it has been effective, and we've been able to fend off the mobile operators dire consequences. Has been win win for everybody. Cheaper prices, better all around, but we now have to consider these conditions in a broadband environment this is much trickier. We're going into an area where there has not been regulation, particularly down the IT sort of side of things.
The big issues around peering, there is a lot of pressure to ensure sort of open peering for everyone. The unintended consequences of this from an investment point of view are really critical to understand. Openness is not just in and of itself good. One has to really work through some of these complexities, but certainly in terms of the issues around peering and the high cost of IP transit are very critical because it is those that are compelling ISPs from a business point of view to help through London, et cetera, creating these enormous latency problems and a lack of traffic sort of, in turn, in going through the Country
The issues of IXPs and regional traffic flows, etcetera, also critical issues as we move into the broadband phase. I will leave it there.
>> DAVID GROSS: Terrific. I appreciate you speaking so quickly. You put a lot of information into a short period of time.
I saw you nodding in agreement, I think, on human rights.
>> NNENNA NWAKANMAFOR: My name is Nnenna Nwakanmafor for Reliable Internet, which is a 60 member organisation. In just one year some of our members are here from the U.S. state government as well. It is at the moment the biggest collation for internet connectivity that exists. We want to recognize the guiding of us. The A for AI has started work and I want to talk about Africa, in Ghana in Nigeria and pretty soon in free order African countries. A lot has been said with which I would agree here, but I would just like to come back on three points. And I'm not going to raise the happier stories. I'm going to raise the challenges. So I will be raising one challenge on the policy level, one challenge on the industry level, and one challenge or two for users.
On the policy level, as we go along in our study, we published the index, one thing is clear, the countries where interconnection broadband has improved. You can always trace strong leadership in policy. So in African countries if you have seen a Country moving forward is because we have a broadband or a connectivity champion between the policy mechanisms. This is true for Nigeria and the truest for Kenya. It is very important as we move forward we look towards raising champions, people with vision, people who can convince cabinet members about the need for moving from analog economy to digital economy. This is critically needed in our battle connectivity.
Pepper had talked about taxes going to the industry, everyone trying to milk it. In fact I have stories in which a certain Country has asked every company to pin to their towers so it is easily identifiable that this tower belongs to orange and this other tower belongs to another company.
And a law in that Country says that such an act in itself is publicity so they're asking you to ping for security reasons but the local government is asking you to pay for publicity. You're paying for the painting and you're paying for the painting and you're just paying, okay. So there are a lot of these payments that people have to improper vice names for. But I want to come back to the power issue.
In the Western countries, it is easier to take it for granted that that Internet fibers are running on existing infrastructure. But in many other countries in Africa there is zero infrastructure. So you are going to my village and you also have to mount the towers and also you have to generate electricity.
A certain company in a certain Country actually around 60,000 high power generators, runs them, which has nothing to do with Internet connectivity, but there is a huge percentage of their budget going in to generating power alone. So this is something we need to think of when we're thinking about people like us who finally have to pay. Because it's the users who pay.
Now coming down to the users, I always ask this question when I go around in Africa. What is broadband in any Africa language? Nobody knows such a thing. Broadband. How does it translate into your own local language? We don't know.
What is the difference between a megabyte and the gigabyte. You don't know what it is but then you are buying data, so they tell you, we're going to connect you to the Internet. We're going to give you Internet. Okay.
You are giving Internet. You are giving me one gig and you're telling me 1 gig will take you one week. And, so, I go home, I'm happy, I paid maybe 10, $15, I don't know, and I tell me children, hi, guys, we have Internet for one week. I just paid for one week's Internet. And then my children get online and they hit YouTube and the same day the Internet for one week finishes. And I go back. You know how Nigerian woman, they will tie their scar off their wrist and go to fight. You give me Internet for half a day and you told me it was for one week. You have eaten my money. I want my money back.
Now you begin that long explanation that really, it is like the woman said no, look, you told me it was going to be one month. So there is a lack of user understanding about what the Internet is in itself. And this is very important in connecting people.
I want to end with two applications. Talking about content. An application in Ghana has allowed students to track the use of certain websites. You go on a website it tells you this website takes you 300 kilobytes for second. Are you willing to continue. You say yes. And then they have been able to monitor their Internet consumption. And what is surprising is that these people actually did more on the Internet instead of doing less. Meaning that once people get it on connective it tee they make better use for it themself and they invest more.
Lady was kidnapped, raped and killed by a taxi, someone who took her in a taxi. In the same light, the technical community got together and created a taxi tracking application. All you do is to send the taxi ID to a family member if you think you are not safe at night. I'm taking this taxi from this place to this place, this is the number. It allows you to take a photo of that taxi just in case something happens to you. So when we are connecting people, we should make connection good and meaningful to them.
And finally, connection should come with freedom. We do not want this kind of connection in which Internet comes at the price of freedom. And this is what will be happening in many place necessary Africa. Some industry platforms are giving you connection in exchange for your data. In exchange for your privacy. In exchange for a lot of other things and that is very bad and negative. So when I leave here, my dream, my desire is that when someone asks you what does it mean to connect to the next one billion in Africa, you'll be thinking of these.
Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Very powerful. Thank you very much. We've heard about how the Internet can save and provide security for people. It also obviously is driven by economics and including content.
Thomas‑‑ let me warn all the three next panelists, we've got to combine all three into the next 14 minutes. So that is about four to five minutes each.
Thomas, that is a challenge to you.
>> THOMAS SPILLER: I will do my best, and coming from the Walt Disney company, I'm going to try to tell you a story, as usual. I hope it's a good story.
I want to come back to two points that the last two speakers made actually. It's about the ecosystem. It is about the ecosystem and I would say that we've seen that over the past few IGFs and this one in particular that quality online content drives adoption. We will agree on that, it's clear, it is recommended. Okay. Fine. So we know that.
The question and coming from developing economies like Turkey, of course, Indonesia, Egypt and others, is how do we push that, because clearly there is a need and there is a recognition that local quality, local content in local language is the thing that people want most.
Clearly having, you know, dancing cats on YouTube is nice, it's fun, I watch it myself, but on the long run, that's not going to make it.
Cats or other animals, of course. I'm not being against cat or pro cat.
Back to the ecosystem. There is no single bullet, but I would like to mention a few points that are really important I think. The first one and it was mentioned again, is an environment which is supportive of free speech. And by free speech I mean creative expression as well. Content cannot drive without this environment. That is very clear. So that is the first point. Free expression. The second point we see in Nigeria for instance our friends in the movie industry they are facing lots of challenges it is an environment based on the trust. Trust about Internet, about e commerce, trust about privacy and intellectual property. So you need to have this balance environment that help, achieve those goals that you can trust and make sure your own investment in your own local creation in your own local content can achieve its outcome and its results.
Third, I mention it already, it is make it a label and naming and addressing resources in local languages. It is clear that is the next phase but it's coming but I want to make sure this is understood and taken upon by the communities.
The last point is about skill. I mean, skill is well known, but I want to come back to that to get to the next phase of local content creation, of quality local content creation you need to have the right school system. You need to have the right environment where people can think out of the box and create those, you know, whatever animated or real life content that will make their own local communities watch and it drive for adoption.
Countries like Singapore even if a failure advance Country, for years their local curriculum was really focused on math and science and now they are focusing more on skills in order because they realize that the next wave in short format video content is going to generate a lot of revenue for the Country so they are focusing on those soft skills. Those are very quickly only a few points I would like to make at this stage
Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: I appreciate your brevity, and also your focus. Disney always tells a good story.
Subi.
>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you. I am delighted to be on this panel. I come from India. I teach at the University of Deli and there were a bunch of young women that are trying to stand on our cell phones go across into the community regard stories and create content which the corporate media and the giant of the world would not like to share and tell.
There are about 16 languages printed on our currency note alone. 360 dialects at the moment the Internet contributes about 1.6 percent to the GDP which is roughly about 13 U.S. billion dollars. If they're given the right echo system and I call Thomas out on that word, it's really important for us to have renewable power, resources, energy, affordable hand sets and data plans that will not actively cheat you or deceive you by promises last mile connectivity which isn't simply there. So we're talking about also content in local languages, platforms that speak to us in our language.
There are push and pull factors and there is fascinating in terms of stories and addresses and issues. So what is the Internet mean to us? It is a resource that we go for education for awareness. It is our go‑to place. And what is missing and lacking is not having youth on the table, because their perspective is different from ours. They're not end users. They are lead users. What we need is geeks on the table who will tell us that this is what we use the Internet for.
So when you are looking at impediments to access, of course the government sees it as a cash cow, but the government of India deserves a special shout out because they're using the USFO fund which is a unique initiative getting telecom subscribers to pay for running fiberoptic cable connecting 250,000 local style governments. So you have a programme that says follow the fiber, but what we will need is digital literacy and capacity building. So 840 million cell phones Indians have access to more cell phones than toilets. And these are young people who know how to use a smart phone to tell a story.
We just have a new government where the youth has played a huge role. They're creating content. They're not just sharing pretty pictures and cute pictures about kittens and cats, but they're also looking at activism, they're looking at using local media, folk culture to respond to pressing problems of today and they're creating amazing content which is also entertainment, it is also political activism but there will be no access if you have policies which are ambiguous and there are there to respond to issues about spam or send people to jail for updating their FACEBOOK statuses or for posting content.
If you choose free speech or quell free speech content cannot be leveraged. When you have a hand up that does capacity building. That also creates content syndication and resource pool that will allow a tribal man from the hills in the Himalayas to also negotiate territory and be a part of the policy making table, that is when you will have access then we need barriers to access. It is not physical infrastructure it is also the ability to tell your stories in a language that the world will speak to, listen to and connect and engage.
I'm going to just end here, just one last quick point on the issue of access and the echo system. It goes back to something that we said before. The issue of privilege see surveillance and digital trust is at the heart of access. And if you want young people to create innovative content and applications, you have to give them a policy climate that will be enabling and that is not a deter meant to coming online
Thank you.
>> DAVID GROSS: Terrific.
Michael, you've had‑‑ you've got the summing up part. I'll sum up but you have the last substantive word. We have had rights, economics, we've had content, we've had technology. We've hit put it all together.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: Put it all together. I will leave that to you.
I will do an elevator pitch for a project we started at the Internet Society and it starts from the simple observation that there is local content in all countries, or at least the ones we have looked at. There is newspaper, radio stations all have websites. But almost all of it is hosted abroad. So we're doing a study that just looks at why is it hosted abroad? What is the impact and how to effectively bring it home to improve the ecosystem and create a platform.
This started in our work for helping to promote IXPs around the world, level them up and build them and no that they're not attracting content like the big ones in Europe are, so to look at this, we've started a project with the ministry of ICT in Rwanda where of the top 20 websites six are government and required to be hosted locally and the west are hosted abroad.
Google has a catch and there are some data centers, but they're largely empty. The simple why is it hosted abroad is because it is cheaper. You can get these unlimited prices in London for ridiculously low amounts of money but the impact of that is that someone else has to bring the content back. Every time a user in Rwanda the ISP has to pay the price to bring it back. The content providers decision is impose ago cost first on the ISP and then it's increasing the latency because there is a lot of congestion and more distance society increases the price. Less page views. So really kind of retards the development of the ecosystem.
What we've seen is when someone like Google puts cash in a Country it instantly trip els traffic for mobile operator they're selling data for the bits still. It's a win for everybody. We're trying to promote the awareness of what the impact of bringing contact back would be and we don't have all the answers yet. It is a paper that will be coming out hopefully in a month but what we've seen is getting all the stakeholders in a room that we did in a workshop. There is a lot of misconceptions and ideas that the contents, the data centers are more reliable, which me might be, but more secure, which they might be, but there is a lot of issues around cost and reliability and those need to be addressed. Some of it is capacity building and the power issues we've heard about. But some of it really is just ideas from three or four years ago that need to be addressed by everyone talking together and seeing what the solutions could be.
So we'll be putting out this paper and we really think that, you know, this is isn't necessary, but definitely not sufficient step in helping to promote the content cyst em. Get it local, increase the number of possible terse and help to kick‑start the local ecosystem that way.
>> DAVID GROSS: Thank you very much, Michael.
So I was concerned about this session, because we have so many extraordinary talented participants in it. I have to say, I think my concern was misguided, because I think what we've established is an extraordinarily rich set of discussions that actually fit together remarkably well for our un coordinated set of comments.
We heard, of course, from the commissioner who set forth the challenges we see in the United States and the suck sees we've seen in the United States and then we've learned that those issues and those challenges are universal, that they are both universal in the sense of them being significant challenges of getting people online, but also that they are unique in each and every territory. Sometimes there are right space and that is whether or not people have rights
Others are access to technology. Others have to do with the regulatory regimes and how forward looking they are.
What we see, however, is something that's truly common and very human and that is a strong desire for everyone to communicate and to have access to information. Whether it is self created or whether it is created by other professional contents or individuals, whether or not they are local or international, the challenges are large, but the opportunities continue to be extraordinary.
And I think the lesson from my perspective of hearing all these terrific comments is that the future is a challenge that we have lots and lots of work to do, but yet the opportunities are truly extraordinary. And, once again as we have determined in previous sessions changing the world is not easy, but it's being done.
And with that, let us all thank our terrific panelists for an excellent presentation.
I would also like to thank Garland McCoy. He sits in the back of the room, but he has consistently put together terrific panels year after year after year, and we're up front, right, and David is moderating, but Garland is the magician behind the curtain that pulls us all together
Thank you, Garland.
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This is the output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. 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 session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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