FINISHED COPY
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR ENHANCED
MULTI-STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
04 SEPTEMBER 2014
16:30
WS 3
CLOUD COMPUTING & M2M:
IMPACTS FOR EMERGING ECONOMIES [CB]
***
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.
***
>> J. RUFF: Good afternoon, we're going to start in just a few minutes. I'm the Moderator for the panel, so I would like to invite anyone to come up to the table so we can have more of a conversation than a roundtable.
So many thanks to everyone who's here, our participants as well as our experts with their case studies. As you know, this is a session on cloud computing and M2M, or IoT, Internet of Things. And particularly looking at the impacts for developing and emerging economies.
I am Jacquelynn, Jackie, Ruff, and I'm with Verizon Communications, where I am responsible for international Public Policy and regulatory affairs. Verizon is a broadband wireless provider. You may be familiar with. It's Verizon Communications in the U.S.
And globally we provide enterprise services, which increasingly look like cloud services, or Internet of Things. They're using the networks to expand in that area.
We have an excellent panel today, and the effort is to really learn from experts on case studies, on examples of where these types of services are being deployed, and to try to take from that through their remarks and through the conversation we have today, particularly what may be the impact in emerging and developing economies.
I for one am always very interested in what people call leapfrogging, like the jumping of a frog, where you might be able to go from, you know, kind of a Level 1 to a Level 4 immediately without having to go through steps 2 and 3, because of being able to benefit from things that have been done more recently or technologies that have become available.
So let me just do a couple of administrative things. First to acknowledge the organising groups that are the U.S. Council for international business, LIRNEasia with which one of our speakers is associated and he may want to tell you more about that and the Government of Portugal. And if you were looking at your programme, our speakers are here in the order in which they will come forward. We have Mr. Rudolf van der Berg who is a policy analyst with OECD in Paris. And he will touch on understanding the power of M2M technologies for economic development.
Then Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, who is from LIRNEasia, will ‑‑ in Sri Lanka, will address challenges and opportunities of cloud computing: An emerging economy user perspective.
Mr. Filipe Araújo, if I'm getting that more or less right, is City Councilor for Innovation and Environment at the Porto Municipality in Porto, Portugal, and will speak about Cities as Living Labs ‑‑ Technology in a Multidisciplinary Context.
Then from Colombia we have a change of speaker to cover a very important topic, Verena Weber who is Internet Governance Advisor, right, for the communications regulatory Commission in Colombia. And she will talk about Colombia's Vive Initiative which is using cloud, M2M, and ICTs to reduce poverty and drive economic development.
And from Egypt, Dr. Noha Adly, First Deputy to the Minister of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. And that will be on Egypt Taps into the Cloud and M2M for economic development.
I also want to acknowledge our Remote Moderator, who told me how to pronounce her name, but I think I have forgotten it, but Yuhua, something like that, Jiao ‑‑ yes ‑‑ from the Chinese Association of Science and Technology, thank you.
And our Rapporteur, Sophie Tomlinson from the International Chamber of Commerce BASIS.
You can see we've got a great lineup, and our thinking is to have presentations and then go quickly into discussion, and so on. I won't do an extensive introduction. I know we're all familiar with the value and the statistics of cloud services, the dramatic expansion. Now we're seeing the sort of phase of expansion of Internet of Things and use of big data. It's all at a time when particularly mobile broadband is exploding around the world. So it's a powerful combination of technologies and services which have huge potential for all sectors of our environment, and to me, the important questions are: Can these be done globally in different types of economies? Can they be harnessed as quickly as possible? for important societal needs, which include, of course improving the business sectors, since I come from the business side of things, making those parts of the economy stronger.
What are the Public Policy questions? How can environments be as enabling as possible about those? Are there new issues? And how can we best share experiences now and going forward to all be a part of what does seem to be already evidently beneficial and with even more promise for the future. So with those brief introductory remarks, let me turn it over to Rudolf.
>> R. VAN DER BERG: Yes, thank you. My name's Rudolf van der Berg, and I've included my Twitter handle here, because, well, that seems to be the thing these days.
I originally come from the Netherlands. This is the windmill that I look out from my room in my parents' house where I lived for years. And it is also a bit of an indication that I might be bit misplaced here, because I come from the Netherlands, and this is officially the poorest municipality in the country. And when the statistics were released, journalists came looking for the poverty that the municipality had, only to find out that in the poorest town of the poorest municipality, there was almost zero unemployment, and certainly nobody on the lowest level of Government benefits. People just didn't make a lot of money but many owned their own homes, and had cars, et cetera. So when we talk about developing nations, I might just not always know what I'm talking about because I grew up in such an affluent community, and this windmill is a bit a symbol of that infrastructure.
It has been there since 1893. It doesn't use the wind anymore to get the water out of the polders to keep our feet dry, that's done by an electric pump in the building but it's still there and it has been there for over 100 years.
I work for the OECD in Paris these days. I work with the Internet. One of the things with the Internet of Things in my opinion is it's very much the unseen Internet. This is a nice picture of the new tram that will drive around in the Hague. It has an IP address, not just for that display but each display that you can see has a separate IP address. And some of the systems inside have an IP address, as well.
The Internet of Things is influencing our lives already in many ways that we don't even notice ourselves, we don't know about it, but it's there. And so it's much more pervasive than many of us think.
There's some building blocks and they will lead in the end to various other elements. You have big data, cloud, M2M, end sensors and actuators. Combined they can bring together machine learning and a form of remote control that in total could lead to autonomous machines. The remote control, you can think of things like the traffic lights in London are now all connected together into a launch grid and controlled by central computers that use machine learning to optimize traffic flows throughout London. The city of London says that it can achieve a 15% improvement in traffic flow. Given London's traffic, I don't know if that's good, because that could mean they either go from 5 kilometers on average to 6.5 kilometers on average, but it could also mean that traffic jams really are more gone.
When a road is at capacity you only need a 1% extra increase to have total gridlock so this could just mean that on many roads, the gridlock is gone but that's the kind of remote control I'm thinking of.
At the OECD, we have one big topic that we think the countries need to change in order to get better regulation for the Internet of Things. We think that countries should allow large‑scale users of machine to machine communication access to numbers and SIM cards. Just imagine being a car company and having 50 million or 150 million vehicles on the road, aging between 1 and 15 years, and then desiring to change mobile operators. You'd have to change millions and millions of SIM cards to change from one mobile operator to another. That's not a realistic proposition, and at the same time you run only on one mobile network and not on two, four, or whatever number you choose, mobile roaming, et cetera.
There's a very simple solution because the problem is Government, and if Government will change the regulation that limits the owning of numbers to ‑‑ but they're limited now to public networks, but if they would allow private virtual networks as well, this problem would go away and we'd see a massive, massive boost. The Netherlands has now changed its policies. Energy companies in the Netherlands are now applying for these numbers and rolling out their smart meters on this and thereby connecting to many networks. Germany is doing a consultation. Colombia indicated it is going to look into this and this is really something that needs to be done.
And it could save billions, according to German car manufacturers that spoke to us. It can save 1 Euro per vehicle per month. For the German car industry that's $2 billion a year. That's real money.
Anyways, what does this have to do with developing countries? Well, policies and infrastructure are essential. Last year, based on a conversation between me and Verena when she was still working for us, we came up with a new metric. We were wondering about if you could measure the quality of a country's infrastructure for the Internet. And of course, all traditional numbers are how many Internet users do you have?
So we wanted to know on the supply side of the Internet connectivity how is the infrastructure? And so we thought of this number that if you look at a country's ccTLD, so .tr for Turkey, .gr for Greece. .de. Out of the top one million of most popular sites in the world, could you then see where those sites, those most popular sites, who therefore have real site management, could you then see where those websites are hosted? And then get the percentages? And the numbers are staggering.
The red means that it's not good. The blue means that it's generally quite good. And the gray means that it's more or less in between. Two neighboring countries in the OECD we always like to stimulate rivalry between our members. Well, Greece and Turkey are both members of the OECD, and historically always great rivals.
90% of Greek sites, most popular Greek sites, are hosted in Greece. 81% of most popular Turkish sites are hosted in Turkey. This is what we also analyzed what the causes of this might be across the world, and while we have a limited data set, there's a whole lot of caveats, but if you look across the world, countries with similar development patterns, the two variables that are important to explain why websites are hosted inside or outside the country it is the reliability of the electricity infrastructure, and the ease of doing business as measured by a number of variables.
So essentially, this says if you have good infrastructure in your country, and if the infrastructure ‑‑ the social infrastructure works, that's when people will host in your country. If that doesn't work, the Internet will try and find another place to achieve the same.
So India, for example, is a very good example of reliability. Electricity is not good and as a result over 80% of websites are hosted either in Europe or in the U.S., which means that Indian people have trouble accessing content. There are some data problems. Yemen only has two sites in the top one million. They're both in Yemen, but that may just skew today a bit.
So M2M needs connectivity and connectivity access where there is connectivity and electricity. This may sound a bit weird but you cannot built a network of interconnected networks, what the Internet is, without networks. So if you do not have networks in your country, if you do not have a lot of networks in your country, it is hard to build an Internet of Things. And you need reliable electricity because in the end what is a network other than just shifting electricity from one side to another and putting symbols on top. And then of course you need money.
And there I am a bit worried. Now, this is a caricature, but it was a picture that kind of symbolized the difficulties faced. The more I'm thinking about what is happening is that the more I realize that the Internet of Things brings everything together. It connects everything. Therefore, when one thing doesn't work, other things suffer.
So at this moment, if everything is not fully interconnected yet, if your road system is good, but your electricity system isn't, oh, well, the trucks at least drive on time. You may be able to deal with a generator at your main site, and you can work around many of your issues.
But if just the entire electricity infrastructure of your country doesn't really properly function, then things like autonomous trucks which is something that we will see in the near future, which will communicate full‑time with the road environment around them, will be much harder to achieve, because getting redundant electricity supply everywhere around your highways and around your roads may just be a little bit more difficult to achieve.
And the Internet of Things will just make that more painful, because when it works, it works really well. But when elements fail, it may lead to gridlock. You can't fall back on humans as easily as you could before, because you've just gotten rid of the humans.
And that leads us to the autonomous machines because that is in the end where it leads to, and this will lead to a lot of productivity issues, it will lead to jobs, and it will lead to jobless growth.
And one of the debates that we're having is, where are those jobs going to go? Well, one usual path to development in the last couple of ‑‑ in the last decades was, well, you start with cheap manufacturing, and you work yourself up. That's what many OECD countries have done. That's what the Chinese have done. That's what many developing nations are trying at the moment.
But as the CEO or Deputy CEO of fox.com, the company that employs 1.3 million people to make iPhones and other things, said, it is incredibly hard to make 1 million people enthusiastic for boring work where they assemble phones. So they are better off, particularly given the demographics of China, with robots, and robots are becoming possible. Modular, reprogrammable robots. Why did they use people? Well, changes to an iPhone come up to like 3, 4 weeks before production, making a robotic Assembly line used to cost two years of programming. Scientists are telling me that that day and age will be quickly over and that simulation in the cloud will allow them to make fully autonomous factories, fully autonomous warehouses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and then manufacturing may just move to wherever it is needed. But not necessarily with the jobs and that scares me as an economist because we have massive friction in the economy. And where does that bring the developing world?
>> J. RUFF: Great, thank you very much. Clearly some themes for discussion there, including certainly the impact on job growth.
So that takes us to Rohan. As I mentioned before, Rohan Samarajiva, he's the founding Chair of LIRNEasia, policy and regulation think tank focusing on economies in south, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and the head of it now, and always has interesting research to report. So Rohan?
>> R. SAMARAJIVA: Okay. Was it the phone?
>> J. RUFF: I think it's a little unwanted machine to machine communication.
>> R. SAMARAJIVA: Good afternoon. When we were ‑‑ when I was asked when we were discussing this particular session, I thought a very good decision was made that we would try to focus on practical issues, on case studies. Now, LIRNEasia is a think tank that is pro market, as its tag line, and we don't generally do anything that doesn't fit these two criteria.
So I've been interested in cloud computing and the policy issues, the regulatory issues, and so on, but I was challenged to try to find a practical application of cloud computing that actually affected poor people in the countries that we work in.
I'm not going to bore you with all the definitions of cloud services and cloud computing, just to make the distinction between cloud computing and cloud services, and cloud services is you could say sort of a simpler version and I'm going to focus on that. Basically, it means third‑party provision offsite, access through the Internet, minimal or no IT skills required to use it. Self‑service provisioning. Basically, you pay based on use, and it's fine grain. The more you use, the more you pay, things like this.
So we were thinking about this, and somebody came up with the idea that in our research, we had found considerable use of Facebook among the people that we survey. We run large surveys. The most recent one we did covered 6 countries: Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, and parts of Indonesia, I.E., Java. And one of the more interesting things that we found, after the large survey that we conducted, we also do quantitative interviews, trying to find answers to the "why" questions. Why do people do whatever they do with these technologies?
These are bottom of the pyramid surveys. So our researcher was there, had been, we had a question about do you use the Internet? And the answer was "no." And we kept going, because they were using telephones obviously.
And at that point ‑‑
[ Audio feedback ]
And at that point, we went on with the interview to find the person talking in great detail about Facebook use. So our researcher got quite confused by this, and called me. Is this working? Yeah, okay.
Saying, how is it that you don't use the Internet and you use Facebook? So in a way, I will tell you a little bit more about why Facebook is becoming even more important around these parts. But these people had essentially done a little bit of a leapfrog. They had moved directly to Facebook, and they were using it to keep in touch with friends and family, and to communicate with them, and they didn't bother with the Internet per se. So that's what they were doing.
So we thought this was a bit of an anomaly, but at least now you have a sense of poor people using a service that doesn't require a lot of skills, is provided by a third party. The payment that they make for it is fine‑grained, et cetera, et cetera. You don't actually pay for it, other than in attention and personal data, and so on.
So we probed a little bit more in preparing for this talk about Facebook, and this time I got really surprised. The first time we were surprised, but this time it was compounded. Because we actually found that contrary to ‑‑ in relation to the numbers give by the ITU and various entities that we had also worked on ‑‑ we had done some compilation of numbers for the Asia Pacific Telecommunity ‑‑ Indonesia is supposed to have 37 million internet users, and Facebook, which doesn't ask questions, doesn't conduct surveys, but knows through big data how many people are using Facebook from Indonesia, had 70 million. There is 32 million people who are Facebook users, but not internet users, and this pattern is not an anomaly for Indonesia. This seemed to hold for pretty much all of Southeast Asia, with the Philippines having around 4 million extra. Thailand having 11 million, and Myanmar, which is a country just getting into electronic communication, having about 4 times as many Facebook users as internet users. Now, we can quibble about the data. We can debate these things, but the issue is that in fact, people are using certain kinds of rudimentary, you might say, cloud services. The poor people ‑‑ We don't do surveys of rich people ‑‑ are using these things, and they seem to be getting along quite well.
The other thing that you have to remember about the countries that we work in, particularly Asia, most developing countries, is that most access is based on wireless devices and wireless access networks. Now, there are some people who get very excited about it and say that we are being patronizing, when we say that the future of internet connectivity for developing countries is wireless, but they say we have to give fiber, but the issue is: This is what is really on the ground.
What I say about this debate is that, you know, companies, governments, we should all strive to take fiber as close to the end user as possible. For the rich people, those who live in apartment towers, et cetera, it may be a couple of meters of wireless because they choose not to be tethered to the wall, and they use WiFi for the last bit, and for some of us, it will be a couple of kilometers. And as time goes, the kilometers will come down to meters. So the reason I bring up more wireless stories, because it has a bearing on what I'm going to speak on next.
We have been working on small and microenterprises in our research because we believe that the Internet, if it is going to be an engine of growth, has to create value, has to put money in people's pockets and hope in their hearts.
So we've been doing surveys of small and microenterprises, what's are the technologies they use, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I'm not going to go into the details of those service because in actual fact, nobody among the poor microentrepreneurs that we have surveyed, most recently Myanmar have told us that they use cloud computing so we're going to talk to you a little bit more abstractly about the problems faced by knowledge intensive firms that do actually use or do want to use cloud services based in the developing world. And for that I'm just going to take my own organisation, which is ten years old, which was basically it's a project‑based organisation. We describe ourselves as a nonprofit knowledge process outsourcing organisation.
We take on work that used to be done mostly in the developed countries and we do them. We bid against developed country organisations and we win some of the bids that we put in. And we disseminate our results. We try to take our research to policy. We are extensive users of cloud services, and we know what is involved. We also know what the problems are. So just to give you an example, we use DropBox, we use Google Drive. Our blog, our website, is completely based on WordPress. We use Flickr for our photographs. We use Confluence. We use GitHub. That's just a selection. There's more that we use.
If the Internet goes down for a considerable period of time, my staff has got standing instructions which says: Close down, go home. We don't expect you to be sitting in the office if the Internet is down. That's it. So you can see we are dependent on this service and as somebody who in 1980s tried to set up a consulting business in Sri Lanka immediately after my Ph.D., I can tell you what the world has changed considerably and the world has changed for the better, because of the availability of these services and in particular, the Internet. Now, the issue, of course, is these are the opportunities that we are exploiting but can we do more? And do we face challenges now? One challenge? Electricity. Sri Lanka is one of the two South Asian countries that has 24/7 electricity, more or less. Right? We don't have 18 hour load filling like Pakistan.
But sometimes we have power go out, and that is a serious problem. If you are ‑‑ I have the luxury ‑‑ I don't really have the luxury but I could say I have ‑‑ I don't have it on the day that a deadline is due. But I don't have to be online permanently as an organisation. But if you are an organisation where your Internet connectivity is mission‑critical, I think that the reliability of the electricity network and the reliability of the Internet connectivity is extraordinarily important.
We don't have 5‑9s and I don't think we need 5‑9s but as we move ahead in our work we're now doing extensive work on business data. Business analytics using mobile big data for public interest purposes, for insights into urban planning, transportation planning, and things of that nature and one of the reasons that we are not doing it using cloud, because we believe that the cloud storage is more efficient for that kind of work, is because of the reliability and the cost elements of Internet connectivity for small organisations like ours. So to some extent, when ‑‑ if we were to move our big data to the cloud, we would be in the situation where it's mission‑critical. And we would have serious concerns about that.
And lastly, we have been watching with care what is going on with regard to the extension of territorial jurisdiction so we could say territorial jurisdiction by the courts in the United States where they're claiming that they can go into the databases, the electronic mail of Microsoft in jurisdictions other than theirs.
Now, if that happens, I would see again, I mean, we don't have any secrets. We are a nonprofit. Everything is on ‑‑ is open. But I would see quite a number of small businesses that are trying to use the Internet as an engine of growth being seriously concerned about how many countries surveillance powers they will be subject to under law. Not under lay law is a separate discussion but under law how many they will be subject to and all the uncertainties that would bring to their business planning. So these are some of the challenges that we face. Reliability of the connectivity, the quality of the connectivity, in particular this affects a lot of what we do because we have been one of our research areas has been we have been looking at the broadband quality of service experience, how consumers and small businesses actually experience the Internet that they purchase.
I hear all this talk about 2MB, 5MB, 10MB, these are advertised rates. Very few regulators actually go in and look at what is delivered, and what is delivered is quite different from what is advertised and we have documentation and the data to support that and if anybody's interested I'd be happy to share it it's on our website and in many, many presentations so these are the kinds of issues that would have to be addressed if small businesses are to use the potential of cloud services to prosper and to advance the economies of the countries they're located in. Thank you very much.
>> J. RUFF: Great. Thank you, Rohan, very interesting points. A lot of food for thought that we can get into more deeply during the discussion. So now we will move to Portugal.
>> F. ARAÚJO: Thank you very much. Kindly ask if they can put the presentation on.
>> J. RUFF: So on the feedback while she's checking on the presentation, on the feedback, I'm told that particularly if our mobile phones are close, may cause ‑‑ I put mine on airplane mode and I think the other one was moved down. It's sounding fine now, I think.
>> F. ARAÚJO: So my presentation here is, it's more related about cities. I'm a City Councilor, so it's supposed to talk about cities. I'll give you a perspective what we have been doing in Porto, but I was quite interested with the presentation before, because it really focused on several things that we managed to do a few years ago, like infrastructure and other things that are the basis for everything that we are talking today.
Okay, so Porto and the ecosystem if you can talk that we have there, it's a mid‑size European city. It's around 250K inhabitants. Although it says it's a small city or medium city it's the center of a large metropolitan area and with lots of students we have at least 3 big universities, there's a multimobile intermodal transportation system which is quite important for some of the things we're discussing. Infrastructure for all the information, and it's also in the center of a strong economical ecosystem.
I will focus a bit further on the Porto Living Lab. Which is interesting we're managing some of the problems at least the opportunities of cloud and machine to machine. It's very important nowadays everyone is talking about the startups and all the buzz about it and we consider that this is a basis of so many things that are happening in our city and in our region. So today, due to the cloud, to Ma machine to machine, due to all the opportunities we have in technology we have so many projects that can be made in a city everywhere in the world. Here I think it's not fair to divide between developing or developed countries. I think it's an opportunity for all. It's more about the Portuguese economy at least that we have. The basis, the infrastructure.
Some years ago someone decided, it was not me. I'm just there for a few months, someone decided well, we have a shared optical fiber network which is very, very important when we are talking machine to machine. In the end, you need the infrastructure and you needles the fixed infrastructure for some of these things, it's good to rely on mobile but as we have seen, some things if you want to do it faster, you always have to have a fixed infrastructure. If it is a shared one, even more, even better for to provide at least to have your city available for companies to test things. Wifi of course is a complement and a very important complement to the experiment all the things we are doing.
Besides infrastructure, when you are talking about all the new things that are coming, and this I think it's a step that we can move faster everywhere, it's around when you are talking about the e‑Government and the open data and I think these kinds of things are very easy to go forward in a leapfrog move, and I think at least as far as we can see in our municipality something that we have been doing and with lots of results and some of the track records are there.
Why we are talking about living labs? Living labs, the explanation is simple. We want ‑‑ my presentation is multidisciplinary. Why multidisciplinary? Because cities are doing everything, besides police, security, so firemen, health, and everything that you have in a city, so in the Porto living lab that we brought together, it's a project that's European financed, we brought psychologists, we brought engineers, we brought architects so we have an interdisciplinary team. That's why we are moving with so many experiments and moving in a fast scale.
Also, why a city? Why don't you test it in a lab? All universities have labs, but few have the opportunity to test products in a city, in the urban scale mode. And we want at least our city and I think it's possible for lots of cities to do that, we want companies, universities, everyone that is like that to come and be able to test our projects so more or less we are free to share our infrastructure and the opportunities that they have. It's very important to work with everyone in the city.
So in the living lab we have experiments with the policemen, if they are more stressed or not to understand which situations they have so they have these objectives with all this equipment that they use to test. Even for example taxi drivers or bus drivers to understand, we can understand with experiments we're doing if they are more stressed when they are driving in a certain region a certain street and with this data, we go there and we understand that maybe the cross is not good enough or there is a huge place where they don't see the street so they are more stressed in that area and this helps to build the city. I'm giving examples because I think at least it's more useful for you to understand. Of course, we are not doing this only with newer cities. We wanted the industry to be there and this is very important. Nowadays if you don't do it with a public‑private partnership, it will be very, very difficult. Thank you. Some examples to understand, so what is on the base of this? Large scale sensing platform so we have deployed a lot of sensors, wireless communication, all based in cloud computing. It's very important the security in that privacy. Otherwise if you are talking about a city, if we're talking about the citizens living there day‑to‑day to produce, this is for us, it's the core of it. And it cultivates a social network. Why it's a social network? It's a network of all the vehicles we have, currently the taxis, the buses, all the municipality vehicles, they are connected and they are talking with each other. Maybe it's a bit different, difficult to see on those pictures but more or less tells the streets and the places where the buses and the taxis and all the fleets are talking with each other. And they are talking with each other catching information about the sensors that are on the city, and they don't have ‑‑ they don't need to use mobile or to communicate with the cloud instantly. So when they pass in one place where they have the communications, places like that, the Internet communications, there is the place where they deploy the information to the cloud.
So this is a ‑‑ this at least changes the way you see Internet or at least changes the way that you see communications in a city. And I was talking before with Jacquelynn about this because we totally ‑‑ this is another study, but we totally believe that this would provide cost savings on these kinds of infrastructures if other cities want to deploy. And vehicle to vehicle network is a hot topic, as everyone knows, a very hot topic, and in the future, we'll see cars communicating with each other.
So if we can make these, if we can prove this is possible, maybe we'll cut the costs for developed countries to get there faster.
The sensors we're deploying are various types of sensors. They are monitoring the air quality, noise levels, traffic load, cities and concentration, so we have cameras to understand if you have to deploy security to certain areas so there are lots of sensors being deployed and we have static and mobile units running on the city. We're using all the mobile phones that people have. They already have sensors in it, so we are gathering these data and we are processing it to understand the city, to have more data to decide.
Just to use cases that are current we have right now, besides all the infrastructure that I mentioned, waste management just briefly I will talk about that. The collection that we, or the sensors that we have on the city can provide us valuable information that save a lot of money, at least we believe that we will save a lot of money because we are in the processing of the information. But as you can see from the numbers there is a lot of inefficiency that maybe you are not aware of it, and with this kind of information, you can at least save this kind of money and provide it to make all other things.
This is just an example in terms of less. We had 85% of the times that container was not more than half capacity and we were going there with minimum. So it's a lot of money that we are talking about.
And one other example that we have right now, smart meter for water, and this you have to be careful when you talk about this kind of infrastructure. Sometimes people think that now everyone will know online what we are doing at home, and we have to do it on the other ‑‑ we have to look also on the other way, is that what kind of services can a city provide? And for example we have been doing this quite successfully, we can provide information if they have a leak at home, and to tell the customer that, okay, you have to take care because you have a problem there at your home. And this has for example when people go abroad, this has been quite useful.
Yes?
>> J. RUFF: We need you to leapfrog a little
>> F. ARAÚJO: I'm finishing.
>> J. RUFF: Okay, thank you
>> F. ARAÚJO: The thing is that and to finish is just to tell that we are getting too much data, or a lot of data, and if we are talking about cities we were talking about big data. But as we've seen, we have to ‑‑ the map that we are used to it, but when we are taking a bit more care about the data, maybe if you try to see the map of Europe, with the population, then you have a different idea what you can do. This is a very interesting picture to decide. But for example if you are trying to get data about mobile utilization of your antennas or the commuting flows, then are probably cities or Governments taking the right measures?
Maybe we're not looking to the whole picture and my final mention is just that technology helps to see beyond that and more important of that, is it helps to define the policies on an evidence base and this is for me I think it's what the cities can do in the future. Sorry if I took too long.
>> J. RUFF: That was great. Thank you very much. So, Verena, take us to Colombia.
>> V. WEBER: Thank you very much, Jackie. If you could put up the slides, please, for Colombia. So thank you very much for having me to participate in this very interesting panel.
So what we would like to do the next minute is to first tell you a bit how is the situation in Colombia, what kind of M2M, Internet of Things, cloud applications do we have? And then dedicate the second part to, okay, what is our plan? What do we want to do in the next four years. So this slides shows you, this is a slide for Colombia from 2012 and 2013 that actually the traffic that is being interchanged with the machines is constantly growing, so this is the green line. From basically closes it at a significant level. This is SMS traffic, use user 2 machine and you can see the traffic between humans, between users, which is the blue line, is actually decreasing so we have data actually in Colombia that shows that machine to machine communication is becoming much more important and I brought some examples with me, so to the left, you see our system in Bogota. So Bogota has about 10 million inhabitants so it's a huge city. We don't have a metro, so TransMilenio is our most important bus system. These are connected to a control center via GPS. They are connected to technicians so that people always know, okay, where is the bus? What's the route, et cetera? So it's all automated and this has helped us a lot to actually improve the bus system in Bogota.
Another example in the area of vehicles is for instance Michi Vista, an application that allows you to control your car with your cell phone. So for instance if your car is stolen you can see where it is. If you want, you can open your car with your cell and you get GPS routing information from the system. Some other examples in the area of agriculture include for instance the Colombian coffee growers. Coffee is like a very important product of Colombia. So with that application, they can actually decide what's the best point of time to collect the coffee beans.
There's a lot of quite interesting implication we have used for sugar cane but for many other crops, so we noticed that actually several public entities collect pretty good weather forecasts, weather information, including weather forecasts, but actually, like, the farmers didn't have access to that at all.
So what we did with this application is we basically combined that information and pushed the weather information to the farmers in a sort of, well, an early warning system so they would know, okay, I'd better get out today, because tomorrow it will rain and then my harvest is come. So that made a huge difference. And finally, we have currently banks pushing out SMS each time you did a bank transfer, which is very important because you suddenly realize, well actually, I didn't do that bank transfer. So what's actually going on?
So that's pretty important in terms of security. Now, Jackie was asking, what is the main Public Policy question? And for Colombia the main public policy question is how do we fight poverty? And this is the main question for our next digital strategy ‑‑
[ Speaking language other than English ]
That will be presented by Minister Mulano tomorrow, and will be streamed live. We invite you all to join that presentation.
So one, we want to fight poverty and the other thing is we want to deploy the technology for the people. So our approach is very people centered and the digital strategy focuses on four big areas. One is, like, agriculture, the other one health, then fighting extreme poverty. And growing small and microenterprises so this is for the development of applications.
Now I can tell you a bit, okay, what has M2M to do with that, the Internet of Things to do with that, what do we do in these areas? So in the area of agriculture as a next step, what we want to deploy are smart agricultural systems, so SANAS based systems that allow to increase the productivity of a Sector, that is really important in Colombia. So in the areas of health, in Colombia, we have very remote areas, where it's really hard to get, so the idea here is to develop telemedicine and there we will also rely on the Internet of Things machine to machine communication.
Now, another example, and this is actually a huge thing we have is that by 2018, all Colombian citizens will have an Internet presence, so that means we provide them with an e‑mail account, so all citizens will have an e‑mail account. We provide them with cloud storage space, so every citizen will have a storage space to store whatever information the citizen wants. We want to link health information to it. And it is supposed to be, like, a very important platform to exchange information with the Government.
So all e‑Government services, so we had quite a bit e‑Government strategy in the last past four years, will be connected, like, in the citizen cloud. And finally we'll have digital identification for each citizen, and we will provide ICT training through this cloud.
So we have several objectives with that, so first of all, we want to develop a digital culture. We want that every Colombian is connected to the Internet, that every Colombian knows about what kind of benefits does the Internet do application services provide to me?
Then what we want to do with that is also to increase the demand for ICT services. Why is that? So in the first four years, we focused on the deployment of infrastructure, and we did a pretty good job with that, so infrastructure deployment is no longer a big problem in Colombia, but we firmly believe that you have to work on the demand side. So if you not work on the demand side, if you don't create the demand, if you don't work on the development of application and services, you're really not using the Internet as you should, and you won't achieve the economic and social benefits that this could entail.
And finally, we want to make sure that people all over Colombia with connected, in remote areas, and that we provide really ICT training to them.
So I would like to end with what we're doing on the side of the regulators. So as Rudolf already mentioned, we are currently trying to analyze how to allow access to numbers and SIM cards to third party providers, so actually we want to deregulate. We want to open it so that not only companies like telecommunication operators have access to SIM cards, but also companies such as car manufacturers, for instance.
And what we want, what we also would like to do is increase transparency, to increase competition with this measure. And on the side of basic research, as Filipe has mentioned, you're creating a huge amount of data, so in the area of Internet of Things, we think that, like, two research areas which are big data and Internet of Things need to be linked, so we're currently creating two centers of excellence and the idea behind this is to ‑‑ so this is led by academia to attract National, international researchers but in time to develop solutions that are useful for the market.
Thank you very much.
>> J. RUFF: Thank you, Verena. Could whoever is helping us please get the Egypt presentation up? And as a transition, I will note that I was doing some research to sort of figure out what had been going on recently in this area, and one thing that caught my attention was a study this year that found that people in emerging countries are more likely to use online Government services than those in developed countries, which at first seemed to me sort of odd because we have more connectivity in developed countries and so on, but I've heard so many stories about what used to be a two‑day trip to go into the city from a remote area to do something. Once you get the connectivity, of course you're going to want to do that Government research, or transaction, there where you are, and do it online.
So, Dr. Adly, you have a very distinguished career. I was particularly interested to see your academic background and your work with your company, so I look forward to your presentation.
>> N. ADLY: Thank you very much. Well, actually I'm going to talk on what Egypt is doing on the cloud from the Government perspective. So I'm going to cover a few points on the impact of cloud computing although it has not been yet lots of research and lots of data on that, however we can still imagine given the huge opportunities that it is offering, what are the privileges that could be offered.
The benefits and the challenges of cloud computing from Government perspective, what is the role of the Government that should be doing? And then finally, I'm going to touch on what the Egyptian Government is doing both on the executive and on the strategic level. On the impact, we can see that there are some direct and indirect impacts. On the direct impacts the most visible is enhancing the cost savings, and as we know the fact that people not have to put a capital investment, that we can pay as you go, and so on.
This creates lots of saving. The fact that not every organisation does have to build its own infrastructure, but rather putting that into cloud computing providers due to the global scale and possibility also to aggregate the user services. This also contributes to that.
And this consequently, it affects the growth of the SME Sector and specifically in Egypt we are very focusing on SME Sector. This is presenting 95% of the companies in Egypt and we'd like this to grow.
So basically for the SMEs, this is a great benefit for them. The fact that they do not have to put any capital ‑‑ well, not to put capital investments, and yet being able to have access to cutting‑edge technology in order to carry out their business and focus on the business processes and on the financial aspects.
This is by nature, it improves the business environment, and if we get some of the direct impacts, although there is still not lots of research done in this area, but there are several studies that are done from international organisations such as the OECD and the UNCTAD, where there is seen the positive relationship in between the deployment of cloud computing and the GGP.
Developing new job opportunities, although this is a debate, some are saying that there is ‑‑ that the deployment of cloud computing is going to result in putting ‑‑ laying off people, that they have been working in different organisations, that you're taking care of the data centers. However, this could be looked at in a different manner because actually there are people who will be using ‑‑ working in different job profiles, and also, this, the cloud computing, is expected to increase the new businesses and consequently it will offer new job opportunities.
And obviously there will be environmental, positive environmental impact, due to the consolidation of the infrastructure and having server forms that are more energy efficient.
Very briefly touching on the benefits of the cloud computing, financial saving as we mentioned that the reduction of the up‑front capital moving and converting the capEx into opEx the effect to transforming the computer resources as the utility just like electricity and water were, you just pay for what you consume. This is a big benefit, and this is a link to the performance where you don't have the each organisation doesn't have to do the overprovisioning and building up its own infrastructure with extra resources to accommodate for unanticipated growth, which would lead to more efficiency and flexibility, and also there is no need to put high cost into IT management, whether computer resources or human resources.
And obviously this will also help into the business environment by lowering the entry barriers specifically for entrepreneurs or startups and SMEs.
Now the challenges. There were some that have been mentioned before, and this is something that specifically in developing countries we have to pay attention to. While developing a proper ecosystem, one of the most important things, the broadband infrastructure. The technical infrastructure in general but broadband in specific, because actually the need for the increased bandwidth, the need for the broadband is increasing, with the large amount of data, which would create bottle neck with the cloud computing providers, and consequently can reduce the performance or even the ‑‑ we have heard some cases from Sri Lanka and also if we look at the cloud global index that was published by Cisco, it reports that for high‑intensity application readiness, it required the latency of less than 100 milliseconds, and for the basic readiness it would need 160 milliseconds. These are challenges that specifically developing countries have to face in order to provide the infrastructure the broadband to provide better performance and with affordable cost.
On the ecosystem, there are other challenges we need to face on the legal and regulatory barriers and the standardization and interoperability on preparing the human resources and also there are some challenges faced by the main player while the deployment and operation of the cloud computing, security and privacy of data, this is not something new. However, the cloud computing defies some aspects of it due to the fact you have new business model, we have the sharing environment. There is the location of the data which is moving, we don't have control over the data where it is. So all these are some challenges that they need to be addressed. The issue of interoperability and vendor locked in need to be addressed. The fact there is no measurement and performance assessment for cloud computing this needs more, the policymakers need to have some metrics in order to and criteria in order to create the framework for measuring the impact and the assessment for the cloud computing.
On the area of the business environment, we would see that there is some contractual issues, and the ability for the service providers, and also some standardization or having contracts that they have different nature within the ‑‑ for the services of the cloud. We think that this needs a little bit of regulations until it ‑‑ .
What the Government has to do in this? What is the role of the Government in specific? We believe that it does have two aspects, the strategic aspect and the executive aspect. For one, the Government would need to have a National strategy with a clear vision, and putting the cloud computing as a priority, as a National priority. Also it needs to force work on the provision of the ecosystem which we have mentioned and along with all the items or the issues that comes with the ecosystem, including the infrastructure, the broadband, the governance, and so on.
And while on the implementation of the executive would need to remove the legal and regulatory barrier to allow for the proper framework to protect the rights and the interests of both the public and the providers, to develop education and training programmes. The fact that cloud computing is sort of like, is becoming like a buzzword. Lots of people do not understand what is the concept of the cloud computing, what are the benefits? What is the usage?
So this is a role of the Government to conduct those both on the consumer and on the business level and to conduct awareness for the community and also, there are new skills that needs to be addressed, not only integration of the cloud computing and traditional data and migration of applications, but also now there will be some skills in procurement and legal skills that needs to be developed, because these are totally different new models.
And another aspect is the Government is an important user of the IT infrastructure and consequently they should be leaders into using cloud computing and sort of have a model into using it. Finally they should have encouraged the research and development for specifically for that ‑‑ for the cloud computing.
Now, this is actually a graph, a diagram, which I got from an OECD report which has been published recently. And I could see that it does have its perspective. I think it was 2013 where it presents the challenges and the policies from its perspective which I think it's very much into ‑‑ I mean, I have ‑‑ I think there is lots of commonality and items which we have touched on.
Now, what Egypt is doing in the cloud? The efforts that we are, what we are doing? We have been working more or less into four directions. One is to set the strategy, and actually since the announcement of the ICT Strategy for 2020, which was announced by the Minister of Information Communication Technology in April 2013, it has put the cloud computing, cybersecurity and the broadband as a focus, and I'm mentioning here cybersecurity and broadband because these are elements which are very, very tied with the cloud computing.
And this has been developed into strategic business plans and it has been going through the full cycle of assessment, analysis and with the targets, objectives and milestones, deliverables and budget, and it is into execution. On the cloud, actually on the execution level, we have decided to go on the pilot for the development or deployment in the Government, and also we have some initiatives for SMEs and for R&D which I'm going to touch on.
One sport thing is that while developing the strategy, we have been including all the stakeholders, whether the private sector, the NGOs, the academia, the experts, and the Governments, and the private sector actually it has been included from day zero in all the activities that is done with the strategy and with the execution of the strategy because actually it is our role to enable the private sector in order to take its role within the country.
And finally we have done some efforts into capacity building to serve the cloud computing initiative. So on the strategy as I mentioned that we have engaged lots of ‑‑ all the stakeholders into drafting the strategy, and we came up with a vision, three strategic directions, and 7 strategic initiatives. And this has been launched early this summer, and also along with the business plan for implementation. As we can see, the last strategic initiative is about setting up a cloud pilot, and as I mentioned, the broadband and cybersecurity, these have been the focus with a clear target on to achieving what achieved by 2021 for the broadband, and also the security.
I will not go into the details of that. On the cloud, on the pilot, we have decided to come up with this pilot, which is in the planning phase, with the objective into assessing the readiness of the market, the readiness of the providers, to assess ‑‑ assessment of the Government needs, and also the culture change. This is something that, I mean, it's in the culture of Government, the Government. It's very, very difficult to introduce this new business model. For them you talk to other Ministries, other organisations, the Government about cloud computing they say yeah, yeah, yeah that is very nice. Cloud computing is very nice but I want it here. I want it next to me. So it's going to be a total change of culture that we have been ‑‑ we are working on. And for that we have to introduce that gradually.
And therefore we have selected different kind of services that they are spanning the software, the platform and the infrastructure, and we are spreading that on to more than 70 entities within the Government in the course of 18 months or actually from 18 months to 3 years to have this implementation.
And actually we are considering this pilot to be the Seed for building the cloud. So it's not a pilot where in 6 months will be thrown away but rather to expand the pilot for the continuation of the actual cloud. Another initiatives we're working on is for the SMEs. As I mentioned we pay very strong attention to the SMEs. This constitute 95% of the Egyptian companies so we have been cooperating with the multinationals in order to provide services for the SMEs to reduce their initial cost to promote them and to enable them to enter into the market.
And as an example of that, we have had a cooperation with IBM where it's enabling 100 local ISPs to place their applications on the cloud of IBM. Not only that but it helps them to market their application ‑‑ this application into the Middle East and the region by putting those into the Catholic service of their partners and working with other multinationals as well in order to provide services for SMEs and the startups so they have services ready like AARP and so on so they can take off the ground very quickly.
And finally, on the R&D, we have established a cloud computing center in Upper Egypt in the University of Assiut as a platform for education, training and R&D purposes and with the objective of supporting the research and innovation, building capacity, and also providing enabling environment for the government, entrepreneurs and innovators. So far there are 200‑plus professional graduates that have been released to the market and we have developed new job profiles within this R&D center and this is an example which has been done with the cooperation between the Government, the academia and the private sector.
And with that, I will thank you for your attention.
>> J. RUFF: And thank you. As I was listening to all these presentations, and how comprehensive they were, I was thinking about this ‑‑ these as an example of what the Internet Governance Forum is for, which is to try to bring case studies, examples, and give each of us something to take away with us that we've learned that we did not know three hours ago. So I may not have carved out enough time for questions. We can have a few but I hope you'll agree that all of these examples were very interesting, different sorts.
So I see a hand there. One there. Do we see a third hand? And we can get three questions and then have a little discussion. Yeah? Okay?
>> A. BAGOTRA: Hi. My name is Ankush Bagotra. I am the ISOC investor at IGF. I saw a lot of emphasis on cloud for applications for excellent applications like investment management and other things. So there's a lot of emphasis on cloud to connect more people and applications.
So the other side I wanted to ask, what is happening on the security and privacy of data? When we are talking about connecting masses we have a lot of data so is there any emphasis happening on the security and privacy of data? Thanks.
>> J. RUFF: Can we just get this ‑‑ there's one other question there. And then we can blend them together. Want to make sure there are no questions from the remote participants. If so, please put up the flag.
>> P. MAHAJAN: Hi, good evening. My name is Priya. I am representing the Association of Competitive Telecom Operators, an Association in India. My question essentially is for the distinguished panel. You've spoken about the impact of cloud and M2M in emerging markets. And India actually is one of the emerging economies which is looking to leverage the global experience on cloud and M2M.
Can I have the views of the panel on should a best practice model look like for a country like India on leveraging the growth and success story of cloud and M2M? I mean globally. And how the challenges can be addressed for an emerging economy like India? Thank you.
>> J. RUFF: I don't see any other hands so why don't we start from ‑‑ oh, is there one? Sorry, okay, one other question.
>> N. TANDON: Thanks, Jackie. Good evening everyone. My name is Naveen Tandon, and I represent ACTO, the Global Carriers Association from India, and thank you for the presentation from Egypt. It's very exhaustive and I could certainly relate that to the development which are happening in the Indian atmosphere especially the fact that cloud and M2M has got immense amount of recognition especially in the new National Telecom policy documentation. And there's a large amount of effort which is currently under way in coming out with specific policies, not to say that to regulate that but to try and identify the impediments which will come in the way for embracing cloud applications and exploring the machine to machine application.
And certainly to what my colleague Priya said, but still, there are always issues in terms of how, to what extent the technologies, the regulations can keep pace with technologies, and the cloud. And these are not exceptions to cloud and M2M. So we would be very interested to know that when you talk about M2M, machine and the cloud, that is one aspect that okay, the software providers, the application and content developers, it's not new to them. They've been operating. But the underlying connectivity is always provided by Telecom service providers, especially from Indian perspective the Telecom is highly regulated.
There are concerns in terms of data flow, there are issues related to encryption, the security which my colleague said. So I would be interested in knowing how we are tackling this. There's always an issue talking about cloud and machine to machine there's always an element of what is allowed in terms of gray, can we do it? Or the important question comes about, how do you fence the issues surrounding cloud? More importantly the jurisdictional aspect, the security aspect and the fact that am I allowed to carry the data? Or all of the discussion which is happening in India in industries, why don't we identify mission critical data which needs to be housed in country, and the rest can reside in the cloud? Thank you so much.
>> J. RUFF: So why don't we go down the panel, and if you can each try to do one brief sort of take‑away thought on these themes, how to leverage, how to deal with those complex issues, privacy, security. So it's a challenge but I know this panel can do it.
>> N. ADLY: Okay. Well, actually, the security and privacy which was the first question, I think it's ‑‑ this is quite an issue. It's not a ‑‑ it has to be addressed. It's not new but there are several aspects in cloud computing we have introduced which is giving it another dimension which needs to be addressed. For instance the location of the data. The fact that data it might not be ‑‑ I didn't know where the data is. This is actually it's even creating for some corporations and some countries by law, this could not be accepted.
And this is by ‑‑ however, this would call for, for instance, going to on some situations going to private cloud rather than public cloud, going into a National providers, building clouds within the premises, within the territory but these are some things that could be accepted but they need to be addressed and need to be handled but there are some other issues like for instance which law to apply? Which, National law to apply? What if the data is going across borders? What if there is arbitration? Which National law apply, where the service is originating or the service is used? All that I do not think there are answers for that for the time being and these are something I think policymakers and Government would need to be working on in order to work out something that would be globally accepted and yet complying with what is the regulations within the country.
On the regulations, I do not see that the regulation would be a sort of like a limitation, or limiting. Like, I mean, the freedom of the providers or the opposite. I think actually during ‑‑ while we were drafting our strategy, we have had lots of meetings with the private sector and with the cloud providers and actually, the cloud providers themselves, they were coming. They also said we need the Government regulations specifically on the security and the rights because actually to build the trust of the users. The users would not come to a cloud provider unless they would feel safe, unless they would feel that there is something, that it is regulated somehow.
So this is actually a request which is coming from the private sector. However I do not think that it needs to be limiting or tangling, like, but it would need to be there.
>> J. RUFF: A number of the comments were about identifying barriers to be removed so as we go down the table that might be a good additional point, what you might have learned about that?
>> V. WEBER: We couldn't agree more that privacy and security is crucial, and which started working on this, so part of the new strategy is the National cybersecurity strategy and what we tried to do now is cybersecurity is such an important issue that doing it in the Ministry of Telecommunications alone wouldn't do the trick. We invited the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Justice and other National entities as well as the private sector as well as academia and Civil Society to jointly work on the cybersecurity strategy. That means we don't have one cybersecurity approach per technical area, like we don't have a certain security strategy for cloud computing but the aim is to have a holistic cybersecurity strategy. The second point I would like to make that concerns the question on regulation whether data should be stored in the country. So you have two points here to consider.
So one cloud computing is about economies of scale so it's about being able to shift data around the globe, to have economic benefits. So the more you can shift data around, the cheaper it will get.
So this is the economic aspect there. On the other hand you have, okay, the risk, when I shift data across the globe, when I don't even know where the data is at the moment, and for most of the cloud computing clients don't know that. Unless if you're a big company, you don't know because it's a standard cloud computing contract you don't know where your data actually is so that's an issue. So here the idea could be for instance which data is really sensitive? About which data do we really care and what do we do with that? Should we have a special solution for that kind of data?
>> F. ARAÚJO: Mostly said but just to say in Portugal we have a data Agency, if there is something that is sensitive, they have to approve to be, like, camera, if you want to put a camera, checking the people or something, it has to be approved. But in the end what I'm saying that this is the fight that going on for a long time now, most of our information about the credit cards, all of this is going around the globe for a long time. Now it's getting more to us. It's about the position so we're getting more scared. I think it's more or less the part that is going. I would say that for us, it's, well, it's like it was in the presentation., privacy and security is on top of everything because if you have a problem with that, then you can forget all the things you have done before, because you have a huge problem.
>> R. SAMARAJIVA: Thank you. I will focus only on the Indian case. I will translate into sort of more general case which is how can you use cloud computing, in the situation where the overall infrastructure is weak?
There is a very clear solution, which is why India has become IT superpower, is because we created these enclaves, the zones, where particular companies or particular areas, particular geographical areas are carved out and we make sure that there's 100% redundancy on telecommunications, on electricity, et cetera. If you remember the old stories about Texas Instruments in Bangalore so that is a solution. The unfortunate aspect of it which I highlighted is that that will limit it to the big boys.
The SEMs will be outside. We can't move all the SMEs into industrial parks. So the real long‑term solution, the best case, would be for us to improve our infrastructure, so that we can support the small and medium enterprises that will actually create the jobs, and will create economic growth. Thank you. Oh, just one more thing on privacy and security issues, I think I raised the question of the extension of extra territorial jurisdiction by the United States, in the Microsoft case that is working itself up the court system. These are very genuine concerns that will have to be addressed by everybody, because if you have multiple countries exerting jurisdiction over data that doesn't belong to them, I think there will be lots of concerns about where you ‑‑ about where you put your data. Thanks.
>> R. VAN DER BERG: Yes. Similarly, with regards to what should countries do, well, first of all, make a regulatory framework that works. You already mentioned the complex regulations of India. Yes, when that is addressed, a lot more investment can be made. Ease of doing business is one of the main criteria why websites are in a country or not. That has a lot to do with a good working well‑functioning regulatory framework, better policies for better lives. Well, really, it works like that.
And then money comes and then investment comes and then a lot of things become possible. When we look at the privacy and security issue, we now see several countries taking different approaches based on the situations where Brazil has now said that any data on a Brazilian citizen is under Brazilian authority anywhere it is in the world.
I have some sympathy for that idea, because in some ways, if you limit data, even if it's specific classes, only to a particular nation, you kind of didn't get what the Internet was about, namely, it being global, and, well, we may call sensitive data your health data but most of us are not in our country at the moment. We want our health data to follow us where we are, not where the regulations say it can go.
Because in a Turkish hospital, you have absolutely no use for Indian data ‑‑ or in a Turkish hospital, you have absolutely no use for Indian data, if there is an Indian person laying in that hospital, and that's what we tried to ‑‑ need to facilitate.
Of course, we won't be able to fully solve this, and I think what will happen is somehow we will find an uncomfortable practical work‑around, namely we will develop most of that stuff somewhere where it's reachable in one version or another, much the same as companies these days find that many of their employees are using DropBox, whether or not the company supports it or not, but the company does require them to travel around the world, have access to services and to work across company borders with the whole world. But it is not willing to allow company data to leave the company premises.
Well, DropBox works everywhere, so that is probably the uncomfortable truth that we will find over time, that people will find work‑around and the more regulation you have, the more underground the solution will be. But that's life. That's the Internet. If it finds a problem, it will route around it.
>> J. RUFF: Interesting thoughts. I know we want to let everyone go but particularly our interpreters but I'll just throw out two quick things. I heard on the issue of should you have data centers in every country, can you possibly do that? I heard Citibank earlier this year give an estimate that it cost them $40 million each time they have to open a data center or they decide to open a data center in another country. So if it costs that, you're certainly not going to see them in anything but the biggest countries or the particularly strategic countries because even with a big bank.
And I also read in preparation for this some very interesting work by The World Bank on the question of regulatory ease, reforms and so on, where they actually can calculate the effect on GDP. You do half a dozen sort of rather familiar regulatory reforms, they found you'd get 1% increase on GDP. So a real relationship there.
So thank you very much to our panel. Thank you to the participants. Really glad we could do this. And particularly thank you to Barbara Wanner there at the corner of the table who helped to prepare this workshop and do so much in connection, from the U.S. Council on International Business. So have a good rest of the IGF.
[ Applause ]
[ End of session ]
***
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.
***