2015 11 13 WS 154 Connect 2020 Agenda Implementation: Challenges/opportunities Workshop Room 4 FINISHED

The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. 

 

***

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: So maybe because I see already the time is running and we are having a short session coming in a little bit late. So not to delay this too much.

So good morning and welcome to the session on connect 2020 global Agenda. And it is great to see you here especially coming to the end of a very long week. I think everyone is rather tired but hopefully we still will have a good discussion here as well. So I think I'll introduce our Panelists as we go and pose those questions. So just to kick start this discussion I will ask the Deputy Secretary‑General to discuss the Agenda.

>> PANEL MEMBER: Thank you very much and thank you for coming. I'm sure that you found it a very long week. So appreciate you being in this session with us.

Just want to introduce the Connect 2020 Agenda to you adopted at the ITU Plenary Conference a year ago. And it is based on this vision. So the vision offers Information Society is empowered by the Internet‑connected world where Telecom ICT enables and accelerates socially economically and environmentally sustainable growth and development for everyone. That's the vision and then it has four main goals. Growth, inclusiveness, sustainability and innovation and partnership.

So, the idea is to have some targets. Measurable targets for each of these objectives. So this is probably too detailed for you to be able to read. But I'll just pick out some highlights from this. They are targets under each goal which we intend to measure progress on.

And I'll just highlight some of them. Under the first one on growth, for example, we are looking to have a substantial reduction in cost so 40% more affordable telecommunications. Then, inclusiveness. This is not just bridging the gap between Developed and Developing Countries but also looking to increase the number of women online. It's estimated 200 million less women online compared to men. And also including balancer disabilities. In ITU we do a lot of work on accessibility and Andrea Saks is with us and takes the lead on that so it is also to make sure that persons with disabilities can benefit from ICTs.

And then on sustainability, we are working on ways of reducing EU waste for example, so the target there is a 50% reduction in e‑Waste. This is all by 2020, of course. We are working with the UNEP on some recommendations in that area. Also we have done a lot of work on advocating ICTs for reducing greenhouse gas emissions so the idea there is that ICT and Telecom devices should be more energy efficient.

So we are looking for 30% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions per device. And then the fourth goal is innovation and partnership. So in the latter goal we are launching a partnership to encourage innovation with the ICTs with other organizations. You may have heard about it in the emerged partnership which we had a session earlier in the week.

The other thing we wanted to mention is hoping to introduce a new category of membership for small and medium enterprises we have a low cost membership for universities which has been very successful. We are getting more universities joining almost every week. In fact, four universities joined ITU this week. We now have 104. We want to have a new category of membership, very low fee to encourage small and medium enterprises when are the majority of businesses especially in the developing world.

This slide is to show the overall framework where we have international collaboration and ITU implementing these four goals. ITU will be contributing the work we do in ITU in the three sectors of ITU. But we really want to and we will need to work with others, other partners, to be able to implement these objectives and that is why we are very happy that we have some potential collaborators around the table because we know a lot of organizations are setting similar sort of goals and it is very important we all work together. We all have limited resources and we should pool our resources and work together to achieve these objectives.

The ITU will be looking as I say, at methods of measuring how successful we are in achieving these goals by measuring the progress on each target and reporting on if each year. So, I think that is a brief introduction. I know we have a lot of speakers and I don't want to take up any more time. This presentation will be available online so you can have a better chance to read it when you have a look at it online. And I'd really like to thank all the speakers joining us for this event, for working with us. Hopefully to achieve these goals by 2020. So thank you very much.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you very much. And let's get started for the discussion. First if we could ask the research fellow in Africa. So from your perspective, from the work you're doing, what needs to be done what we are now and what needs to be done for the Agenda? How big is the challenge?

>> ENRICO CLANDRO: Thank you very much for the opportunity of giving my opinion on this Agenda. I would like to focus specifically on the challenges of measuring progress made in terms of tar gets and youth. Maybe from the difficulties of the African continent. There is a need to have reliable data to monitor progress of the Information Society.

What we have observed from our status is there is an unevenness of ICT indicators, both in the supply and demand side of data. With regards to the supply side, currently we all rely on ITU data. But, the African context we observe it in a political economy perspective. Countries have difficulties in collecting timely and reliable data. So they have got many problems. So if we analyze simple measurements such as the number of (Indiscernible) or voice SIM cards, those are problematic. Therefore, we need to engage more with government agencies and national regulatory agencies, to try to institutionalize more of the data collection because that is the big global data source that we all use for our studies. That currently might be unreliable, especially in the African context.

Secondly with regards to the demand side data, in that case, we don't have enough ICT surveys conducted nationally. And in order to understand issues related of affordability or to inclusiveness of ICT, we need to collect this data because they provide factors in the demographics that we need to understand in terms of gender, in terms of different levels of income and levels of education and how these factors are affecting ICT access and youth.

Third, there might be opportunities in emerging dataset, for instance, Big Data, sees an opportunity to field some of these data gaps. But currently there is not global consensus on how to use this data that might be available both from a

(Indiscernible) and online platform. So we actually should identify ways of having this data in the public good for policy making purpose. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: So we need to know where we are going, if we want to get there and how fast we are and I think we, here are really committed to measure that and improve the measurement and thank you for your comments on how to do that.

Again, on the challenges of the connecting, one part is I think we need to start before we discuss policy, we need to start with what are new technological solutions and business models to try to help us? And then we'll try to see this discussion how to move policy.

In that regard, I would like to ask Tom Lindstrom, the Director of Government Relations of Ericsson. What are new opportunities and technologies offer to connect necks billions of people?

>> TOM LINDSTROM: Thank you for the invitation to this very important discussion. I would like to start off with a few statistics from the Ericsson report, which measures and forecasts their coverage. Of course recently Ericsson said in the report that we manage close to a billion subscribers so we have a lot of data to base this on. And the current mobility report, there is new one coming next week, forecast that of the world population in 2020, about 90% will have mobile coverage, and that is coverage in such ‑‑ of course mostly 2G coverage but affectionately 40% is 4G coverage.

And so, that is an important thing. I mean, coverage will mostly be mobile. It will not be fixed lines. No one imagines having fiber or copper to every person on the earth. So what can you do to increase this? Both from a technology point of view and from a regulatory point of view? We think a lot can be done if regulators put more requirements on coverage when they license spectrum, for instance if 700 megahertz and 800 megahertz spectrum will be licensed in the near future, this is a good opportunity to cover more areas.

So, to take an example where technology is actually improving, we recently announced a project in central and northern Benin in areas where people live on only two dollars a day. So very low cost economy. And here we deployed managed service where Ericsson actually provides the low‑power bay stations and the whole infrastructure. We provide a managed service where the operator buys the capacity for the service they deliver. And so we are using low‑cost bay stations, which run or have solar power, use satellite for uplink, and the interesting thing here is that not only does it sort of provide connectivity, it also gives a lot of new people can be mobile agents for the operator and kick start the local economy.

Interesting in this project is that we started this a few months ago and already the ‑‑ we started in 50 villages. We had no connection at all and the operator is asking us to increase the coverage. So, the local economy actually can use this connectivity. So maybe I'll stop this here.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you. So indeed Tom mentioned about the solution is mobile and mobile broadband and so that gives a good segue to ask the question to Dominique.

So Dominique Lazanski Public Policy Director for GSMA. So from the mobile industry perspective, what are the challenges and new opportunities and how we connect new users to the global Internet?

>> DOMINIQUE LAZANSKI: Thank you, Thomas. I believe that in order to achieve the Connect 2020, as you just said, Agenda, we actually have to do it primarily through mobile because we all know, I look around the room with FACEBOOK and lines for affordable Internet and we know that is the way it's going and that's what is happening now. I'm going to briefly talk about the four key barriers we have identified to Internet access, and then solutions are opportunities and I'll try to be brief because I can see the time ticking away.

We have identified in our mobile economy report for this year four barriers to Internet access. And they are quite straightforward. Infrastructure being the one which includes mobile Internet coverage and just infrastructure in adjacent infra structure and put it up. The second thing very important is user capability. A lack of digital skills as well as a lack of local content. The third one is low incomes and affordabilities.

So affordability of access as well as affordability of handsets and various other mobile devices and data plans and ownership. And finally, incentives. They are relating to user capabilities as well. Awareness of the Internet as well as social and cultural acceptances and the needs of the local community and consumers. So those are some of the barriers to Internet access which I think we are all seeing as challenges here.

However, we also have solutions and actually small great opportunities. Obviously, the biggest opportunity is to get more people online and that is quite exciting actually as the communities grow and local content grows as well.

Just a couple of quick other solutions around infrastructure spectrum being the most important thing is what we need. And I know that WRC is happening right now and there is lots of discussions around that. But I think the availability of spectrum on a national basis is absolutely crucial. As well as obviously infrastructure sharing and the ability to have competition in markets which drives access as well as drives down cost. Affordability I mentioned earlier. Probably for the mobile industry one of the most important issues is the taxation.

I look today and it looks like our sector revenue specifically in Brazil but also in other countries across the world, like Jordan and Tunisia, 40% of our revenue goes to taxes and obviously driving down taxes and ensuring those low taxation on our industry has a affect to consumers and would only benefit consumers as well. But also diversity of devices coming out and various other options for consumers and I think there is a lot of innovation around handsets and different types of ways to access that makes it available for all people to get online effectively. And it is exciting to see some of those new devices that become very much affordable.

Finally I'm going to talk about what I think is one of the biggest opportunities we have and that is user capabilities and incentives from a user point of view and skills building. It is a really exciting because of the GSMA, we see a lot of new programs underway to ensure that local content is being created and used and also local content that is in local languages.

And I just, one example which I found a couple of examples, but one example which is quite interesting, a South African social network called, MXIT, for a future phone. So for like a low‑end phone that has ovary 7 million users already.

That is just one of many, many examples but hugely exciting that people are starting to develop these things.

Just finally I want to say education, training, capacity building and involvement of Governments, Private Sector and all stakeholders ensuring that we can help communities and individuals who want to get online and learn the skills is very important too. So I hope that was brief enough.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you challenges and solutions. It is very spectrum discussion is very timely. Just in Geneva right now we have discussions on how to allocate spectrum for the next generation broadband. So I hope that will enable further development as well and in that, I will further would like to turn now to Andy O'Connell from FACEBOOK. So FACEBOOK is no longer about content. It's about how to bring people to be able to access the content. So from your perspective, what do you see how to do that? How to bring more people online?

>> ANDY O'CONNELL: Thank you. Thank you for organizing this event. We at FACEBOOK feel strongly that this is an important conversation to be having and that in forum like this, this should be increasing area of focus. Two‑thirds of the people on the planet are still not connected to the Internet and a lot of us here sort of take it for granted, take the benefits for granted. Even in the preparation for this session, there was a little bit of a discussion that maybe we didn't need to talk about how important connectivity was, because everybody here sort of understands that.

But I do think it is important to emphasize that what we take for granted is denied to many, many billions of people, and that translates into very real‑world things like higher child mortality, a lack of jobs, a lack of education, lack of information about health care. And I really think that providing that connect activity tow those people who are currently not connected needs to be an increasing part of the conversation around the world.

And accordingly, our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg at the U.N. General Assembly this year gave a speech essentially calling on Governments, Civil Society and the Private Sector to redouble efforts on this front for the reasons that I just hinted at. So again, thank you very much for bringing more attention to this issue. From our perspective, I think we generally agree with the framing on the barriers we sort of categorized the barriers as we approach it as awareness, affordability and infrastructure.

From our perspective, and we are trying to tackle all three. On the infrastructure side we have connectivity labs. And this is where we are working on longer‑term Research and Development for sort of more breakthrough sorts of technologies. So this is when you heard discussions about us using lasers and satellites and unmanned aerial systems in our framework, that is about bringing connectivity to the 10% of people in the world who are not connected to the Internet because of the infrastructure barrier. But there is also 50% of the people in the world are not connected to the Internet for some combination of awareness and affordability.

So, if you actually look at the data, 90% of the people on the planet live in a place where the cellular infrastructure is strong enough that they could be online but for some reason they are not. And our research suggests that the reason for that slice of people not being connected is again a combination of sort of awareness about the value of the Internet and the affordability of the Internet.

And on the awareness piece, I want to emphasize for us you'll take for granted the powerful, exciting, wonderful things you dock on the Internet. But it's a really difficult thing to describe to somebody who hadn't been online, particularly when it is expensive for them to get online. And so, one of the initiatives that we have been pursuing is called free basics. And it's designed to tackle both the awareness and affordability barriers.

And the way that it does that is, we work with developers around the world and we have an open platform so people can submit content to be included in a suite of Zero‑Rated services that will be offered by mobile operators to people so that they can get a taste of the sort of wonderful things that are online. And that will serve as an on ramp for them to get on to the broader Internet.

We launched this program now in 29 countries with 31 cellular operators and we are designing the program in such a way that people will understand the value of the Internet and transition to the full Internet paying as subscribers so there is a sustainable business model for the operators who will be really an important part of tackling this global challenge. And all of these Internet.org free basic launches include a wide variety of information. Just to be very clear it's not just FACEBOOK. It is FACEBOOK and a number of other types of content sites, BBC, Wikipedia and then a huge amount of local content as well. Again, all sourced through an open platform.

So again, thank you for emphasizing this issue which we think is really important. We are working on sort of the long‑term R&D and the shorter term business models and from our perspective, there is not going to be a silver bullet to these challenges so we are trying lots of things and we know lots of other people are trying lots of things and lots of people in the audience are trying lots of things. And we are hopeful that together we will find a set of solutions to tackle what is probably one of the greatest challenges that we as a global community are going to have over the next 20‑30 years. Thank you very much.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: One is also affordability challenge. We have people who specifically work on that. So I like to introduce Dhanaraj Thakur research morning for alliance affordable Internet. So from your perspective, how far are we from doing this and what needs to be done?

>> DHANARAJ THAKUR: Thank you and thank you for inviting us to participate in this discussion. So The Alliance is a global group of organizations focused primarily on the affordable issue while we are recognizing there are other barriers to accesses that were already mentioned. In terms of where how far we have left to go, every year we publish an affordability report that tracks the progress that countries are making towards in terms of policies, towards bringing down industry costs and prices and our last report we showed that 23‑51 Developing Countries have not yet met the 5% targets. The cost of income target that the U.N. Broadband Commission set a couple of years ago. So there is significant work to be done. All work focuses primarily on advocating for positive changes around key best practices.

So, this occurs at both International and national levels, a national level work to several different multistakeholder country coalitions. I noted to highlight some of the policy best practices with some of the examples of how they are created and the kinds of changes that we think are important.

So one is having effective broadband plans and I think we are all aware of this. In our own research have shown that having a good broadband plan is correlated with lower industry costs and prices.

Another important issue is taxation which Dominique mentioned but this is not just an operator issue. This is important to recognize. Our work, and the basis on which we advocate shows that governments have to have a balance of policy with regard to how the taxation of ICTs, rather than focus on short‑term revenues. There are many long term benefits of having ICT diffusion within a country which we just heard of several mention.

Another issue is to have strategies that serve focus on underserved populations. If we look at the inclusive targets within the Agenda 2020 Agenda, there are key targets there that focus on these kinds of groups. One we are doing is to how broadband strategies targeted policy initiatives for specific groups. For example, in our work in the Dominican Republic, we worked with a coalition to make the national broadband plan tin he region more generally responsive and more increases ability to address the gender access gap in that country.

Another issue is with having strategies, government strategies, that are flexible enough to accommodate new and innovative technologies that are inevitable and constantly emerging. And we often advocate for Governments to experiment and try new strategies on one thing that is emerging and we are seeing several pilot project in our own TDY spaces.

This is important to increase our understanding of the use of these to improve access and affordability.

The last point I mention is with regards to measurement which Enrico talked about. This is very important especially in many Developing Countries. In Mozambique we worked with a coalition there to help them set up an ICT module which could be included in the national census, which will be included in National Census. This module by the way, was based on metrics and definitions as outlined by the ITU in terms of what are important ICT indicators.

We think that is important step. That is something that we are working with in all of the countries we are engaged with in order to improve data measurement. So many different policy options. I mentioned a few we focus on but we are aware that there are many different strategies, all of which in combination, can help reduce industry costs, help reduce prices, which ultimately is what the affordability question is about. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you. And we are hearing quite a bit of the enabling environment and what needs to be done on policy options and also an organization both as organization and members, Americans terms of what are the environment. Among your members other people most connected and also work in Less Developed Countries. So, I would like to ask now Lorrayne Porciuncula the economist at the OECD.

Share your views and insights. What does it take from your perspective to get more people online?

>> LORRAYNE PORIUNCULA: Thank you, Thomas. I am echoing. I'm very pleased to be part of this Panel. The Connect 2020 Agenda is very dear to me not only because it is very important but because before joining the OECD, I actually worked on it on the Broadband Commission before being OECD. I worked with Thomas on drafting part of that plan. So thank you very much for inviting me.

Now it is because OECD. I work in the Digital Economy Policy Division at OECD and the OECD, as you know, we are formed for sharing best practices. And we work in many, many issues. We work on issues related from economics to governance to environment to health. And we cover all the policy areas, the governments normally deal with except for security issues and military security.

So, at OECD, there is an advantage because we can actually work with cross‑area problems and with horizontal issues and connecting the world is a horizontal issue because we are trying to move from the idea that ICTs and broadband is a distinct sector to the notion that the whole economy is being digitized and all of the sectors are being touched for broadband.

So being at OECD and have a dialogue is very important and did is very important to have an analytic approach to connecting the world, not only looking at supply side issues but also demand side issues on the application for that Governments and several different areas.

On that, apart from the work we do with our country members and our key partners in OECD, now we are doing Broadband Policy Toolkit for Caribbean and starting one in southeast Asia. So just to give you a brief introduction on that project, that is OECD and NIDB project. It started last year. We are in the second phase of the project and the idea is to update policies tailored for one specific region. In that case that is Latin America and Caribbean. The idea is to have a whole of government approach to the challenge of connecting to broadband populations.

So the toolkit in the first phase we sent questions and the issues countries are facing and governments are facing on connecting the populations. And right now we are in the second stage in which we are gathering good practices from the region and putting them together with our good practices from our country members in the OEC.

And trying to come up with tailored recommendations for what they can do to improve their policy frameworks and to update their policy frameworks for the coming challenges of the future. So, we touch on issues on regulatory frameworks and the idea that you need to correct incentives so Private Sector can work and invest in infrastructure. We work on spectrum policy, competition, extending broadband access through universal funds and development and included there to convergence issues, regional integration, education skills, economy, business ICT apprentice ship, industry and local content and e‑Health and digital government and trust in digital economy. That includes consumer protection and the security and privacy.

And we understand that all of these issues go hand‑in‑hand and you can not talk about connectivity without taking into account the risks that are being connected brings such as privacy and security issues.

You can not consider for example, the convergence challenges brings when you're doing your national broadband plan. Those technologies are changing and your framework needs to be adapted for that. So we understand that in order to tackle the challenge of connecting the world, you do need to look at this issue as the holistic issue that it is. And the Connect 2020 Agenda is a good example of doing just that and trying to come up with indicators that actually measure the end goal, connecting people.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you. Indeed a very long list of things we need to do. But that is why we have all the stakeholders around the table. And also I think in your interest good practices and I'm also proud that we have some people representing good practices around the table. So Piret is working with Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia and both as a lead example in the world how to do the connectivity for its own country but I believe you have both examples and initiatives to share also how to help others to travel the same road as well. So what is your experience how to connect remaining people?

>> PIRET URB: Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here today. And as you might guess in Estonia we can easily say the biggest region is ICTs and Free Internet which has to be open and accessible to everybody all the time. And we know that ICTs has become the main tool for increasing competitiveness in every theory of the economy and life and any strategy or development plan should take into account opportunities and offers and challenges posts by ICTs.

Actually to contribute that, IT; Agenda, Connect 2020, Estonia created our own Agenda which is Digital Agenda 2020. So this is exactly the creativities of what we are planning to do and started already and there are many activities how to cooperate with others more and better because this is the only way how we are reached to this 2020 Agenda and how we can implement it as well as possible. So, our Agenda is not focusing on the use of ICTs in various areas of life and policy, but the main goal is to strengthen the environment that facilitates the use of ICTs and development of smart solutions in every field in the country in general.

The ultimate goal is to increase the economic competitiveness to the well‑being of the people and the efficiency of the public administration, bras this is something what everybody is always complaining in every country, I guess.

Some people here the topic of next generation broadband network. We have started with that actually. We have the target that by 2020, the development of the network will be fully completed and that means that all residents of Estonia will have access to fast Internet, which is 30 megabytes or faster, and at least 60% of the households will be using all the fast Internet daily, which is 100 megabytes.

As Internet is connecting people and also as I said earlier, to implement ITU's Agenda, we think it would be very practical for countries to join forces and not develop necessary basic service infrastructure on their own, especially for the small countries like Estonia or for the group of countries in certain regions. So we are more and more interested in cooperation with our neighbors for the development of fix route and e‑Identity and digital signature. And there are many, many other continents which are part of this ‑‑ components which are part of this infrastructure. Please show me if I'm going too long. Is it still okay? Sorry.

As certainly some people in the room know that Estonia will hold the EU presidency on 2018. So there we have the goal to expand the use of digital signature in the EU, I think increasing by 2020. And this is important because is facilitating to every day work for the business operations and also for the people it is facilitating management of personal matters.

And to take up the digital signature of the EU will be like very important for everybody in the region to grow and foster.

Someone also mentioned, I think our colleague from OECD, mentioned the privacy issue here. And we have been also thinking on that in the context of growing data volumes and wide usage of data. The creator control over the use of personal data has to be created. And we would like to see more and more in Estonia that everybody knows and will be able to decide who and when and for what purpose is using or watching their personal data from a public sector.

For the greater connectivity, Estonia is cooperating with many, many countries in the world who are development data of course but also through our e‑Government Academy who is taking all the e‑Services to the many countries in the world. They have about like more than 40 countries at the moment. But these are the countries who have been interested in themselves in services. So, and they are cooperating with the state. And they are like separate and independent body. We have many, many experts going around in the world and like helping to make the first steps for the country. So thank you. Thank you very much.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you for sharing experiences in the country and how to build synergies and also reminding us there are risks as well as Lorrayne did as well here.

And also, before we turn to the audience, we also like to again present the framework of the collaboration. Malcolm? What you also do specifically to progress connectivity?

>> MALCOLM JOHNSON: Thank you, Thomas. As you said, intention is that it sets a framework. Very interested to hear what is being done in Estonia. And there is a linkage there as well as what FACEBOOK is doing and others around the table. We all have the same goals, which everybody recognizes are very important goals. U.S. State Department is the also set the same target as ITU for another 1.5 billion online by 2020. So, it shows a lot of people making the same efforts. And we need to collaborate together.

That's the key to it. And very much hope that we can have collaboration from those speakers here and we can work together with you and another to achieve these goals. I just very quickly, what ITU is doing? I think the importance of mobile spectrum has come out quite clearly and I believe we have around three times as many people using mobile broadband as using fixed broadband. And if you're going to extend out to the other four billion people that are not online, a lot of these are living in rural areas, Developing Countries, like 70‑80% of the population in Developing Countries are in rural areas and now how are you going to get to them? Clearly it will be through radio. And making a spectrum available in the UHF band of 700‑800 megahertz band offers the opportunity for much wider coverage at lower costs.

So that, plus the move towards TDY spaces as broadcasters move from analogue to digital, also offers a good opportunity there. So, that's something of course that ITU is the only organization that can regulate the use of the spectrum. So that's a very important role for ITU.

Many other issues like the skills and encouraging people to adopt broadband plans, capacity building, that is very much in the development sector of ITU which is doing a lot of work in that area.

And also on the standard side of course a lot of the new standards now we adopt a farm more energy efficient than previously. We even have a standard for a universal mobile phone charger. So, hopefully people will be buying a mobile phone separate from the charger. So the charger should ‑‑ because many of the main vendors agreed to the connection between the charger and the phone. So things like that. And plus the new G-dot fast standard offering one gigabits over traditional copper telephone lines is good.

I think a very important point was made at the beginning by Enrico, that we have got this these targets. We need to measure them and be sure we are making progress. So how are we going to measure them and the data that we gather? It will be very important. I know ITU comes out with these statistics but they are very often they get criticized and so, working together in that area is very important and hopefully we can improve the means by which we measure our progress. With that we'd like to work with you in those areas. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you. We learned quite a bit from the Panel. Now I'd like to look at the audience. Who would like to pose questions and comments and what you're doing in that regard? Please. And please introduce yourself before speaking also for the transcript as well.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Marshini Chetty with Research Africa, colleague with Enrico Calandro. My contribution to this is that I think in order to achieve the goals that we have set, there is a need to also understand and prioritize demand side issues and in regards to the context in which these plans are being deployed, as well as the content that is available, I'm from South Africa so I'm just looking at one of the business solutions that has been provided by FACEBOOK through inter.org.

It seems like to say great opportunity for people in urban areas because often platforms on the free basics are what most people my age in urban areas do but when it comes to someone from the rural area, some of the content is irrelevant. Then you have a problem of people still not choosing whether not to go online because the content firstly is in English, secondly don't know what it is they want to do.

So I think in implementation, even if not just content but as well as infra structure we need to understand what is it exactly is on the ground. So I'm sure it has been covered but I think it needs to be prioritized as well.

And then in terms of context is a need to understand that I think someone may have mentioned mixer and having ‑‑

(Indiscernible)

Unfortunately, it is actually foreign because WhatsApp has taken over and so once again, another global conglomerate comes in and the local company can't sustain. So I think connectivity in implementation of these opportunities between goals. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: So a brief ‑‑

>> LORRAYNE PORCIUNCULA: The important thing our members are operators that are in those countries need to be involved. So, it needs to be people like MTN and those guys because they are the ones that know what is on the ground. So I think that is crucial to what you're saying because a lot of the local content wouldn't happen without knowing what is there and I can't do that. But our operators can work with other people there.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Syed from Afghanistan. I don't represent government or industry but I will talk on behalf of the government because some of the concern that we are raised were on the supply side. The two, we have all the challenges that were mentioned almost all of them exist in Afghanistan. But two of them that I could see are the legal infrastructure. Sometimes that becomes ‑‑ it hinders in the foreign investment and also in terms of the data protection of the user. We don't have like e‑Commerce law or e‑Transaction law or let's say cybersecurity law. And I'll give you the example of Paypal. When we reached out to them, they said since we don't have e‑Commerce law in the country, we cannot really investor reach out to you. The second was the unified national policy. Because of the aid to organization, ad agency coming up and working in different silos, there is no momentum of development in terms of the ICT sector. So yes, these are the two issues that I did see in the overall goals of the ITU and/or maybe I am missing it. If you could probably hint towards that? Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: About rural ‑‑ the last point?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So my question was the legal infrastructure. Is that covered in your overall Agenda?

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: From Portugal, good morning to all of you. Thank you for organizing this Panel and all Panelists in particular to Deputy Secretary‑General Malcolm Johnson for presenting Agenda Connect 2020. I'm trying to make a linkage between what is this Panel and what we have been hearing this week and in particular, this discussions on U.N. General Assembly high‑level meeting taking place in December. I would like to raise the question, what do you see implications of that meeting could have on these Agenda that we have been talking about this morning? Thank you very much.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you. We will answer all the questions together because of time. Alison?

>> ALISON GILL: Alison Gill from Research ICT Africa. I wanted to welcome the inclusion of universities as members because I think over the last few years, we have really suffered from a public interest or independent public interest research into forums like IG.

And ICANN and various other multi‑electoral forums. I think this gap has been filled by commercial research or research that is supported by commercial Agenda, increasingly with a lot of states, donor support as well. And a lot of the research is actually being informing policy in ways that is actually erroneous. So I think we are dealing with evidence problems with the data that we are dealing with. And hopefully the inclusion of this membership can actually enhance or bring back some sort of independent academic rigor to the research. A lot of the things that happened since the Broadband Commission, the quite arbitrary decision around 5% is affordability.

The correlations between broadband plans and prices and such, on simple correlations without a number of considerations or controls for other factors. Three of the probably the best broadband plans in Africa introduced over the last three years arguably in Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria. No progress is made on implementation.

So the rules of political economy challenges are around institutions, building institutional capacity and of course the demand side issues around human development and I think are absolutely critical and they are not in this measurement scheme. They are not in our research Agendas and as a result, we are not going to address the serious issues or problems. Even if you take the really problematic Agenda research that is coming up recently and informing decisions not based on nationally represented samples or statistics offices or any University or anybody that is setting some standards, producing results that are on the basis of simple descriptive statistics show enormous disparities.

When you control for example in relation to gender, or income and education, you don't find any disparities around six descriptors. So addressing those issues in terms of discounts to women or something like that is the wrong policy intervention. The policy intervention is to address the serious issues of women and children being kept out of education and out of jobs et cetera. These are far more difficult problems to tackle but I think it really goes to the issue of us needing to look at ICTs horizontally and no longer as a simple sector because our solutions are part of the problem. And I don't get a sufficient sense of the ICT ecosystem in the 2020 Agenda.

And I think we'll have to be looking at a whole new set of indicators nerd to measure those outcomes, including looking more closely at labor force surveys, at human development indexes and those kinds of things and there are problems with those as well as they currently exist. So I think it's an enormous challenge to access progress here.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is (Indiscernible)

We have several initiatives around the world. Then to collaborate all working on this area. Now I was not at the beginning of the session but I saw you have a smart ‑‑(Indiscernible)

We have also in Africa AU263 Agenda and also the united commission for Africa to support African country in terms of connectivity, access and, information also to develop policy. We work on broadband how to access broadband in Africa to help the decision making to understand the contribution of ICT to economy grow. Also, how to use innovation among youth because in Africa, you have more than 60% of population are youth and we need for you to analyze and to know very well the views of innovation technology for the development.

I think you have several initiative and we work on billions of partner of ICT. We work closely with ITU and several area. I think we needed to bring onboard in your initiative all organization working on the same objective. Just want to focus on this collaboration. It is very important. You are going to say at the U.N. Group Information Society but it is not enough. We need to involve all. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you. And actually very important point I think part of the Panel is to how to bring stakeholders. So the ultimate challenge here so I'll try to do the same order as we did just the last final comments and you'll see what we can capture from the discussion and challenges like 20 seconds. So capturing what we have here and especially how we could collaborate or more can be done remember so Tom, sorry, Enrico let's start with you.

>> ENRICO CLANDRO: The challenges I think is clear and the need to identify ways to collect systematically as indicators in the supply and in the demand side.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Tom.

>> TOM LINDSTROM: I think quite clear that mobile connection will be the solution for everyone, the question is how can society actually get people to see the benefits from this? This is essential for local economy and also for the global economy to get the benefits and people see the benefits of connectivity. That's the most important thing.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Dominique.

>> DOMINIQUE LAZANSKI: I think we are clear we need to work together and collaborate across the world locally and internationally to make this happen.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Now yes Andy.

>> ANDY O'CONNELL: The scale of the challenge is staggering and there won't be any one solution, one policy, one program that will tackle it. We will need all of these initiatives, all of these ideas, lots of experimentation, we will need to be humble and flexible about trying many, many different ways to tackle this channel.

>> DHANARAJ THAKUR: Just to the say in the process we use to develop these policy solutions we have to make sure we include as many voices as possible. Particularly from the groups that are typically excluded from the processes.

>> LORRAYNE PORIUNCULA: We need to share good practices and some of you mentioned legal infrastructure or regulatory frameworks and capacity building but also on implementing those plans and we need to share what countries are doing, which is working and share with the countries which are doing it at this moment.

>> PIRET URB: We appreciate the increasing corporation with academia which is very important and which has to continue and all of that that we spoke here can be achieved only in a very close cooperation with the Private Sector, the businesses, who are able to provide this technology and work out the practical solutions and also with close cooperation with Civil Society who are the main help of the state to be able to implement it in every corner of the country. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: I like to ask McKayla with the State Department to make a point on how you're doing that.

>> McKAYLA KLINE: Thank you, McKayla Kline from the U.S. Department of State. Deputy Secretary‑General Johnson talked a little bit about a new initiative that the State Department announced back in September called Global Connect. It's a initiative to bring an additional 1.5 billion people online by 2020. Which like we have talked about today is a very familiar and it is great that we are all aligning to a very similar goal.

The purpose is to catalyze multistakeholder effort around these very important challenges and particularly encouraging development banks and various organizations and all stakeholders to really consider connectivity as essential to human development and economic development, just like roads and electricity and other sorts of things.

Based on this Panel, we are hearing or very encouraged by the number of initiatives that are underway and we would view our initiative as mutually reinforcing and complementary to many of what we hear. So we are very interested in speaking with all of you. The last few hours of IGF as well as in the coming months to really see how we can all work together on these really important goals and look forward to those further discussions. Thank you.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Very encouraging. So maybe Malcolm your final takeaway?

>> MALCOLM JOHNSON: Thank you Thomas. Just to very quickly respond to a couple of the questions on the legislative framework. We do have quite a lot of best practice available on the ITU website and OECD has as well I'm sure and we have annual gathering of regulators where these practices are encouraged. And I think we all here recognize ICTs essential for implementation of STGs. We have this forum every year in Mayor and it's very important we lynch the action lines from the WSIS to the STG so we can see a linkage between the two and Connect 2020 will be the target that the ITU may be will be aiming for within implementing the STGs. So it connects quite nicely.

I take the points made about the indicators. It's a critical issue. And as I said, we have a lot of academia members, 104 I think it is currently. So, anymore academia members that could join us and help us with the indicators would be very welcome.

On the advocacy, of course it is one of the main roles of ITU to advocate the use of ICTs. We have been doing that especially in the climate change conferences for many years and we have been doing it more recently in terms of implementing the STGs. We organize events and look to get speakers from outside of ITU. So hopefully you will be coming along to some of these events when we will be advocating and getting the message across of connectivity and ICTs are essential follow we will implement the STGs. I think everybody talked about the importance of collaboration. So hopefully we all agree it is important and we all will be collaborating together from now on and I look forward very much to that. Thank you very much.

>> THOMAS LAMANAUSKAS: Thank you very much. With that, we will conclude the Panel and join me in a round of applause to all the Panelists. And well deserved lunch for everyone. Thank you very much

(Applause)