IGF 2017 - Day 3 - Room IX - WS167 Internet Governance in Times of the Digital Economy

 

The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. 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. 

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>> Thank you for being here.  I know it's somewhat late.  I guess it's difficult to do the agenda and being at this time of day in another session.  So thank you for being here.  We're going to discuss today how Internet governance is ‑‑ plays a role in terms of digital economy.  So for that we have three panelists now.  There's one of them.  Virat Bhatia who wrote about an hour ago, he said he's got the flu, fever, and he's pretty sick so he cannot join us.  But we have Helani Galpaya, Verena Weber and also Pablo Hinojosa from technical community.  Just to start I'm going to try to provide a framework for our discussion.  I hope that you will participate with questions afterwards.  We also have some people connected that are on the platform in WebEx and we're going to see if they can ‑‑ they want to participate.

So I wanted to give a brief introduction about the topic of the panel, the round table that we wanted to propose here, which is adoption of policies for digital transformation in line with Internet governance and how both topics are related to each other.  So I'm going to start by explaining the current situation in Columbia, what we're doing, what we're trying to do and to set the scene about how developing countries are trying to get to define their own digital transformation policies and how the implementation of those or the adoption of those policies could affect or not Internet governance.  During the last seven years in Columbia we've had a pretty quick development of Internet adoption.  We developed a very large fiberoptics network.  Connected the whole country.  And we have also worked in appropriation initiatives.  We have a lot of new uses for the Internet and a lot of new people connected to the Internet.  So we're trying to move from probably just using Internet for e‑mail and basic stuff to a little bit more productive usage.  And after that this year part of the regulator, Telecom regulator, we published a document which we're trying to analyze or identify different actions and different initiatives that we would need to start and develop so we can get most of the digital transformation in our country in different economic sectors.  We can a you will that the regulatory road map for the development of the digital economy in Columbia.

There we're proposing a strategy to promote data transformation for the country and it's kind of a pioneering study in the region.  We have seen there's some difficulty in different countries mostly developing countries trying to define the best way in which we can get ‑‑ take advantage of the digitalization processes in our country because we're not used to ‑‑ we don't have specific processes on innovation, adoption of technology.  It's a little bit difficult for us.  So as part of this work we reviewed international landscape of key regulatory and public policy initiatives for the globe so we could structure the pillars for the digital economic policy in Columbia.  We reviewed different countries including United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, Chile and United States and we took from them all of the different proposals, recommendations and actions they have been implementing.  And we analyze different economic sectors.  We are a Telecom regulator but we analyzed different sectors including transportation, tourism, media, financial services, manufacturing, trying to understand how digitalization in each one of those specific sectors.  So all of us, I guess, in our own countries, are trying to decide on how to better adjust to digitalization or how to better take advantage of the Internet as a tool for social and economic development.  It's happening in Columbia.  We have decisions taken by different governmental institution, by different, I don't know, the judiciary, parliament that probably are not in line with the discussions that we have here at a venue such as IGF, discussions related to Internet governance.  We were thinking it would be good to discuss how we can inform those different stakeholders about the decisions and what is being discussed here in this forum so we could have some better decisions from their part.  And I want to explain that ‑‑ an example we have.  A decision that was taken a couple of months ago by the constitutional court in Columbia, they decided that specific content was posted by citizen needed to be eliminated from Internet from the Web site it was posted on, platform in which ‑‑ that supported the blog in which it was posted had to reduce as Telecom operator even though they are not Telecom operator and the ministry of ICT had to regulate the principles through which all platforms could block specific content affecting goodwill or citizens or companies.  So if you see ‑‑ if you think about this government in charge of ICTs, we can be placed in like a difficult situation trying to work with other stakeholders, judiciary, parliament and also with the governmental institutions on the definition of best policies so we can migrate from traditional economy, analogue economy to digital economy and also have to balance the decisions with the protection of rights and the way in which Internet works like as an open and free venue for different market players.  Based on the need to promote digital economy and work that we or any of the country in the world has in terms of takes decisions on those policies that would transform digitally their own economies, we formulated a set of questions that probably would be the guide for the discussion today.  The first one is if there's an impact on Internet governance that might arise from implementation of these national policies on digital situation, things could occur and have any of the ‑‑ have seen in different countries that could affect Internet governance.  And also the Internet governance frame network support better digitalization policies for our countries if we can adopt or discuss things with our Internet governance discussions to better for those digitalization policies.  That is the general frame network and I wanted to start with Helani.  I mention she represents Civil Society.  She works with a think tank that covers Asia Pacific, south Asia Pacific and I wanted to get your views on those couple of questions and also if you could give us some examples or cases that you've seen from different countries in the region you cover in which you could tell us about how the discussion and whether the key issues that we need to consider in this adoption of policies and how Internet governance could work and be relevant in the discussions.

>> Helani:  Thanks, Manuel.  I think obviously the basic depending on of a digital economy is the infrastructure, right?  So if you look at India's emergence into digital space as a major player in outsourced software development initially, call centers, very low value added into high value added and then outsource of development and then into software products and innovation, right?  And that's a migration in terms of how much value you can capture as a country.

One of the primary drivers way back sort of in the early 2000s was simple network redundancy on the international back court.  And this sounds very mundane but international companies who want cross border sort of digital work and transfer of data look for redundancy and there are so many countries in regions we work in without redundancy in international back court and obviously you need clear pricing.  These are clearly in the control.  Regulatory regime of a nation state.  I would say that's a very clear example of something in terms of policy that a government can do.  In the case of Sri Lanka which ‑‑ and India is a state which 7 percent more of its GDP coming through the IT enabled sector.  Not a small amount for a large country like India and huge ‑‑ direct economic impact.  In Sri Lanka again it was initially a very government led process of identifying the fact that we had the largest per capita number of qualified chartered accountants in the world and then developing a digital economy strategy where this particular niche market for outsourced account management and accounting work was developed through a multistakeholder process where private sector participated, where Civil Society and government worked this out.

Let's go ability into the labor issues of a different type.  So not the people who work in the big software companies but digital move toward trade where the buyer and seller never meet where individual sellers and buyers work across borders to find each other and to strike up a transaction, do the work and transport the goods.  I'm talking about online micro work and freelancing markets.  This is not significant outside of America.  India is the largest market for online freelancing.  Even little Sri Lanka with 24 million people, our national survey showed anywhere between 17,000 to 22,000 people work doing online freelancing, micro work.  This is a range of work.  At the very low priced end we're talking about one cent for ad clicking.  Really awful work.  At the middle end we're talking five to ten dollars a Gig to design logos, write Web site content and paragraphs and at the high‑end talking 300 to $700 to do software development, right?  This ‑‑ digital economy employment market would not work without good connectivity but we hear other policy issues which I think, for example, one of them is payments.  The dominant payment on most work platforms is PayPal but for example Sri Lanka does not allow PayPal in remittances because they claim customer requirements required by PayPal are not good enough to meet the requirements in the country.  I think there's also a lot of protectionism through the banks.  Is a sector that has to be opened up.  I think there are ways to do that.  The consequence of not having these dominant platforms working across borders is even though these people are earning really valuable U.S. dollar income, which is really important for these small countries, they're not allowed to bring it into the country or if they want to they need to use other methods which basically take away almost 50 percent of their earning in the middle management in terms of charges, compared to PayPal which also keeps a cut but significantly lower than other methods, right?  So this is a nondigital policy that's really affected the digital sector.  And let me do my last thing about data.  I think if the digital economy is to be really meaningful, it has to actually impact other nondigital sectors of a country.  We can't just focus on the digital economy, which is important we need to worry about the ICT sector, digitalized sector but let's go beyond.  How can the digital economy contribute?  And I think one of the key ways is to ‑‑ through data.  We have countries where sort of things like IoT, Internet of things, and having sensors on buses and everywhere transporting, giving data realtime these are sort of dreams that are going to come in the next decade for u. right?  What we have in the form of a digital trace is the mobile phone signal that people generate when they walk around with a mobile phone.  And there's multiple streams of data that come through that.  The call detail records where you were if you are on active Internet session SMS or a call and visitor location registry tells where people were and doing what even if you didn't have active session going on.  Any time you're anywhere.  This can be combined with whole lots of other administrative data like population data for example, vegetation data to do a whole lot of things in nonICT sectors.  One thing we are doing is transport planning working, sort of helping as outsider, Columbo mega development plan which is the biggest development project Sri Lanka has going at the moment because they need to know where people live, come from, put multi modal transport hubs where people can come by train, transport into a bus or auto ricksha.  We need to understand how where this happens realtime, where traffic congestion hotspots are.  You can do this with the cell phone signals because even poor people in our countries have cellphones.  In fact they don't have credit cards so we can't do good credit scoring but we know where people move.  What we have done is to take historical specific cybersecurity and ‑‑ we don't know who these people are, call detail records.  These are trillions of records every week from mobile phone operators, multiple phone operators in Sri Lanka, similarly in Bangladesh, et cetera.  And running complicated algorithm with huge sort of hardware stacks to look at where people live, where they work, where they move to, what the population densities are in in realtime, not based on every ten years of a census that comes out.  Second thing is it helps ‑‑ when you combine sophisticated algorithms which include the reload patterns and Google nighttime lights and the call detail records where identifying where poor people live in terms of service delivery even if you want to deliver E ‑‑ where you put the kiosks you really need to identify this.  This is connecting the digital and nondigital economy of where poor people live.  The third is disease.  Sri Lanka has endemic Denge, malaria like disease, kills thousands of people every year, new disease widely spread and now endemic.  How this disease is spread is like malaria is related to where people move and where there are these particular types of mosquitoes.  Where people move the best indicator of that is the cell phone digital trace that people leave as going about their daily business.  Our predictive models have been as good in identifying where diseases will occur when we compare it to actually six months later where diseases did occur.  Imagine if the government actually used our data six months in advance to prepare because then the health inspectors can go and eliminate the mosquitoes.  You don't stop the people from going but eliminate mosquitoes in these why's, right, which are predicted to have high disease.  This sort of an example of where the digital economy can directly contribute to the functioning of other sectors of the economy.  The biggest problems again are really Internet governance issues here.  One is data sharing.  Privacy is is a real concern.  A lot of data out there that even we could use potentially that identifies individual people.  If I were not a public research institution I could do amazing things with this and make money.  I take that data without the personally identifiable information but there are no sort of easy mechanisms to actually get that data and remove that and how do I share and what kind of legally binding contracts do I sign?  What are the institutional mechanisms for data sharing are really tough.  From the day we started ‑‑ exactly 24 months, until we got the first terabyte of data.  This is a really long time.  We don't have the energy to go through this.  This is Sri Lanka.  Took as long in Bangladesh.  We need to work out mechanisms where data can be shared.  Need to know which data should be protected and not shared and how that should be shared versus a whole lot of data that can be shared which is not being shared because people are afraid the privacy label is put on.  But weather data, nothing private about weather data but even that's not being shared.

I think second what can you move in and out of countries in terms of just for us analyzing this data.  Cheapest thing for me would be to put this on Amazon web services and use computational power that I can buy for very cheap to analyze this data.  However, I'm prevented from laws by law from moving that outside, hosting that outside.  Instead in our little office I have to buy air conditioners, backup generators, run a Hadup cluster.  I now do this in Bangladesh.  Bangladesh data cannot come and reside in the server I have in Sri Lanka.  Now I'm replicating exactly that, paying enormous amounts of money to the few data scientists we can offer, transferring donor money to the hands of the airlines, flying back and forth in order to analyze this data and this is for public interest.  The governments in these countries are using it.  Cross boarder data transfer is what's allowed and what is not.  I'll stop there.

>> Unidentified Speaker:  Just to add to that.  Sounds interesting and very good question.  Do you think that government should have the priority in accessing that kind of information?  Mobile operators could use the information to sell it or provide to anyone else should governments have any priority on accessing that information just for social or that kind of purposes?

>> Helani:  Look, the not nice answer is government can get this data if we want to.  We went through a civil war where people not preferred by the government were tracked using mobile data and triangulation.  Governments can always demand this data in a very privacy and human rights violating way.  That is not a question, right?  However, to your broader point is that, yes, I think we need mechanisms.  I have no problems with government getting this data.  In fact, they should have a priority but the problem in certainly the countries we work in is they don't have data scientist.  They don't have the capacity to do anything useful with this data.  That's the bigger problem which is why then you need academia and Civil Society to come into this and work on this data.  Certainly long‑term government capacity needs to be developed but I can tell you in the governments we work in there are no data scientists.  Not even good statisticians.  This is really a hard thing which is why sort of this multidisciplinary approaches are needed.

>> Man well:  Thank you very much.  Verena, I know that OCD is working on a very comprehensive project which is called going digital.  Discussion yesterday about that.  OCD is trying to formulate a set of guidelines for countries to adopt policies on the use of transformation.  What have you seen from those studies at OCD, the key issues that countries need to address in order to get to foster digitalization in their own economies and how can that affect Internet governance in their own countries and avoid getting to a situation in which government has access to information that may be private and try to use it inappropriately.

>> Verena:  Thank you.  And as you mentioned we're currently having a huge project at the OCD which is going digital.  So why are we having this project?  Because our member countries asked us how to go about the digitalization of the entire economy.  Some of you know we have been coming to the IGF I think since its beginning and where we had like a focus on Internet governance and this is also something we applied with India ‑‑ we put a multistakeholder to the IGF to the way we work so at our table we are having Civil Society, private sector, Internet technical community and trade unions.  What we're trying to do with this project are three things.  One is trying to understand, what does it mean the digitalization of the economy and what already effect this has on the economy as a whole and society.  So for the first time we're trying to work horizontally.  Basically OCD is organized in different committee.  My committee is the committee for digital economy and we're working with a committee for the education, working with trade committee, working with colleagues to develop holistic approach.  Means on the one hand we're asking ourselves what is happening in a different sectors.  We're looking at, for instance, digitalization in the energy sector.  Looking at driverless road support and transportation, we are looking at text challenged, looking at what does that mean for the future skills.  We're doing this critical work in committees but then what we also aiming to do is provide policy whole of government response.  Basically at this stage we're trying internally how to make this work from an institutional perspective and we try then to give governments on how they could do this on a country level.  What would they need, what would be the institutional setting what would need to change.  And the third aim we're having with this project is to overcome the gap between technology and policy.  This is it in a nutshell I would say.

>> Manuel:  Thank you very much.  We also have Pablo who represents the tank community.  I want to ask Pablo what do you think in terms of the model that has been used for these discussions of Internet governance can be utilized within the any countries in trying to find the best ways to promote digitalization and how could I guess the vantage which Internet governance discussions start taking place could serve as a starting point for the discussions with different stakeholders about different policies that need to be taken by governments so they can get to the ‑‑ like the best out of the needs and proposals from those stakeholders to build up digitalization that works for the country.

>> Thank you kindly for the invitation to be here.  It's an honor and it's a bit late but I'm happy to see good group of people attending these discussions.  My name is Pablo.  I work for regional Internet registry in Asia‑Pacific.  We distribute IP addresses in 56 countries.  We basically attend logical layer of the Internet even below the infrastructure layer.  When you talk about sort of economy and policies around that for digitalization, it goes well above sort of the area of the work that we do in of servicing 16,000 networks, mostly Internet service providers with their IP addresses needs.  Was thinking really hard sort of what can I contribute to this discussion and indeed the question that you ask I find it relevant and in a way I think we can contribute to that because the policies for allocating IP addresses are made in bottom up model.  They are community based and ‑‑ the network operators are the ones that decide how we the registry allocate those addresses back to them.  It's quite an interesting model.  It's a 25‑year‑old model.  It is a proven model in a I way.  It proceeds the ICANN model, the one from regional ‑‑ it is very much based in the community.  Later on after we started our operations we took part and we were very much involved in the process of the information society where actually the principles for multistakeholder participation where somehow recognized by the governments at our UN setting.  From there obviously comes the IGF where we have also been active since inception.  Obviously sort of there is no one single characterization of a multistakeholder model and the primary example that has been quoted multiple times is obviously ICANN.  ICANN was at the epicenter of the discussions during the wiz's time particularly the functions.  It is also strange circle of life that very recently last year we completed a process in multistakeholder setting to develop a plan to transfer the IANA functions from government oversight to oversight by the multistakeholder community.  And I think that is a good example and there are more examples.  The RIRs are one.  ICANN ‑‑ the transition process there was the net initiative which was another.  And more and more sort of this sort of multistakeholder settings are having a goal in decision making, policy decision‑making processes as well.  So my suggestion here would be that there is value of considering the views from the technical community and from other stakeholder groups into the decision‑making process before you take decisions that ultimately will have an impact or will affect the operations of the network at many different levels at the higher level of the digital economy or applications or the digitalization policies.

>> Manuel:  Thank you very much.

With that introduction to the topic by our speakers, is there any question from the audience, anything that you would like to ask.

>> Unidentified Speaker:  Yes, I have a question for I think each of the panelists here.  First, Verena, what's the region that (?) in terms of this economy where even the OCD is taking ‑‑ I mean, considering Internet governance in their picture of this economy?  First question.  And another question for Pablo is there ‑‑ I don't know about this but is there any gap between the way in which APNIC has been doing and the request from private actors.  So the private actors obviously going ahead or might be ask some ‑‑ AP would reflect should reflect.  If there's any gap between those two.  So traditional way of doing ‑‑ or way of APNIC doing and new requests because of the technical development.  Lastly I have a question for Helani as well.  You very well talking and explaining the realities but I wonder if you could ‑‑ I would be glad to hear how the actors are engaging in terms of organizations, such as OCD like discussed.

>> Unidentified Speaker:  You asked about the regional approach.

>> Unspied speaker:  The vision.

>> Unidentified Speaker:  So our vision is to, one, develop an integrative framework.  We're currently working with our country, our member countries to develop what is called a policy framework and current draft we're having is, okay, what are the key building blocks.  So we start with access and Helani mentioned it's a necessary condition to make the digital economy work and we offer from being there and this is also true for OCD countries.  Then we have a block that is dealing with, okay, what needs to be done in terms of adoption.  So to use what kind of security and privacy framework do you need, how will the way people work change so that is like the second building block.  We have a third block which is dealing with digital government.  So how does ‑‑ you know, the government needs to kind of reinvent itself for the digital economy and how should the strategy be done.  Then this is our last layer is the strategy.  That's what we're doing across all member countries and in parallel we're trying ‑‑ we're testing this methodology, where it works.  So we're having two pilot countries and one of them is Sweden, other one is Columbia.  We're currently undertaking digitalization review where we're trying to apply this model and analyze the digitalization of the economy and the response of the situations in those countries.

>> Intai, by the way.  In that picture is there some sort of Internet governance piece?  How OCD is trying to interact with intergovernance organization or people.

>> I would say the Internet governance piece is how we go about it.  This is how we work with other stakeholders.  So to develop this framework we're working with a Civil Society, I mentioned technical community to private sector.  So to have like a joint approach.  Not only a government approach but an approach that is kind of agreed by all the stakeholders.  Of course you'll see some bits of pieces that you see in the Internet governance discussion that you also see in the discussion of the digitalization of the economy such as like how to improve access to the Internet, how to guarantee privacy and security.  I would say you have quite some overlap into those concepts.

>> Pablo:  So if I understood your question right, it's how sort of multistakeholder approach defers from strictly private sector led decision‑making process, right?

>> Yes, sir.

>> Pablo:  And obviously I think it is an important question that might have elements around efficiency or expediency or how democratic the decision‑making process is or how inclusive it is and in each of these parts you need to balance out sort of how long it will take for multi party discussions to agree on an outcome and how efficient that process can be, how inclusive that process needs to be and what will be the algorithm to process sort of all this different views and what will be the aggregation of interests that were lefts towards a satisfactory decision.  That obviously many cases is not efficient if you would like to have a decision in a week's time, you know.  It takes long and it takes a lot of energy.  It's just like Bitcoin, you know.  It consumes a lot of energy to process all of these.  But on the other hand there is legitimacy of the outcome.  There is the value of the decision and how it will stand the test of time or it will stand the test of implementation simply because having all these actors interested, included in that decision‑making process will probably make that decision a better one.  And I don't think there is a respiratory or a model which is just one single standardized one that will tell you this is the way that you should do it.  I think it depends a lot on also the cultural participation, also on the visibility of participation.  Sometimes you can have an open process but then there are enormous barriers of ‑‑ or constraints to participate.  So I don't have a single answer but I can just say that at least from the very sort of narrow technical scope of IP addressing policy decision making, we have had a model for more than 25 years, which is participatory private sector led and community based.

>> Unidentified Speaker:  So if you think about sort of government engagement in international ‑‑ with international organizations, I think there's a very mixed picture ‑‑ obviously everybody wants to be in the rich people's club which is which is the rich country club.  India will very enthusiastically engage.  I think when it's needed you will actually have the Indian sort of the diplomatic core engaging at other flora really important to Internet guidance, like government property or WTO on trade and e‑commerce issues.  They will engage and in fact sort of they will very strongly engage and represent their sort of interest.  And even when you think about sort of this current debate on where should Internet governance rules be made, that whole issue about in‑house corporation, even that the Indian government is quite active.  And I think that's partly possibly because interest's national processes where Civil Society and everyone can give input into.  India for example the Telecom regulator I would say has really good consultation processes not just about publishing things and asking for people anyone it's open to everybody giving input back into proposed legislations or if they're thinking about doing something and then there's commentary about that from the regulator and in the final document they actually need to say why certain viewpoint not taken into account.  It's quite a rich process for Civil Society and others to engage.  But then Indian Civil Society doesn't just engage there, right?  If you go to the big debate, for example, on in‑house corporation and Internet governance, Internet Society is one of the strongest voices.  They sit on the working group on in‑house corporation, for example.  Civil Society.  They are quite strong.  Now, the other countries in south Asia the best way of saying that is they have very mixed record of engaging internationally.  Some of these are practical.  It's not easy to come to these and actually get a speaking slot.  And also related to not having the local engagement forum.  For example, how can Civil Society give input at the local level then taken by the governments into international level.  Those are less well defined in many countries and that's a problem in how different sectors engage with these international debates.

>> Unidentified Speaker:  This question is for the OCD.  I was just curious, is there any regulatory challenge for ‑‑ I mean, as a result of the digital economy because much part of digital economy is about shared economy or kind of the shared economy, like shared resource, platform, bigger platforms.  So some people actually measure like regulatory challenge, for example, how to protect individuals, insurance issues, safety issues, these kind of issues.  Because we observe it in China, in other regions, you know.  So I'm just curious, do you have any, you know, have you encountered a similar issue in the OCD?  I mean, your plan, your vision.  Thank you.

>> The short answer ‑‑ I would say on different levels.  So a lot of our member countries are currently looking at how to improve their regulatory framework, when it comes to access policy, right, improving access to communication services.  So we have some thinking of the notion of level playing field.  If there is a need to deregulate, what else needs to be done in ‑‑ to facilitate access to a new entrance and foster competition.  This is an area where I think our member can be working on for many years and still work is to be done.  Also see some new developments.  For instance, we're seeing the first wireless wholesale does not work in Mexico.  Mexico is currently going ahead with this project.  This is a purely wholesale access model where the company that is building this network cannot sell to consumers.  This is very interesting and we're following this model and we think ‑‑ need to see what this means in terms for accommodating regulation.  Then you mentioned platforms.  So we are currently having a study that is looking at platforms.  If you wait for another couple of month we have some first results there.  As I mentioned we have a lot of other areas that are working on the question what digitalization means in terms of adapting I would say the regulatory framework so we have colleagues in transportation looking at what it means to have driverless and automated cars.  We have colleagues in our tech centered, do you need to modify the way ‑‑ we have colleagues in the skills area that look at what should governments need to do to make sure that people are prepared for the digital economy.  These are some examples.

>>man Pablo:  Just to add to that I work for the regulator in Columbia, what we found from all of these discussions out of our countries that as a Telecom regulator we tend to disappear.  And the thing is you should not regulate Internet so your regulatory functions would disappear in time.  Everything is moving towards Internet.  So you would tend to not have to regulate.  So we're trying to move towards a regime in which we deregulate or work with the different stakeholders and market players so they can propose the way in which regulations should be imposed, probably based on principles like basic rules that don't generate additional obligations to market players.  And another thing related to platforms is that we in the Telecom industry, we have different companies, video streaming services that compete with traditional subscription.  We need to analyze those kind of situations and how they become new market players.  We've done two or three different demand studies in the last couple of years trying to identify one of these platforms substitute to the traditional services.  Based on that, based on the situation that ‑‑ what we've seen from the industry, we've got to a point in which we know that we cannot regulate.  As you said we probably need to level the playing field and try to deregulate the traditional market players so they can adjust to the new environment and we're trying to generate as I mentioned in the beginning a methodological guide for other regulators, for example, transportation regulator in Columbia has taken a decision on not allowing platforms to provide transportation services.  So it happens in many of our countries.  So we're trying to recommend those are the regulators from other economic sectors to change their view on how digital actors get involved in the market and how to change the way in which you for example analyze market definition so that you adjust for the presence of digital market players and you get them into the whole chain of your industry.  So there are a lot of challenges as Verena said.  I guess none of us has the exact answer and there are things to be done and a lot of things to be done.  Any other questions from the audience ‑‑

>> (?) Brazil, FCT Portugal.  I know it's not a specific panel on jaws but you're protecting Internet governance in times of digital economy.  Verena just mentioned part of the work is checking out if people are ready for this digital economy and it touches jobs too.  So have you ‑‑ are you thinking of moving forward in analyzing the impact of this digital economies in jobs in alternatives if they are not as much as a digital economy will need?

>> Unidentified Speaker:  That's not my expertise.  That's my colleagues but I can give you my card and have a look at our Web site.  They recently published a report on computers and the future of skill demand where they're addressing those kind of issues so I can point you to that publication and you'll find more information there.  This is one work stream.  Other work stream is we have our colleagues from education if they were testing both the digital skills of students in schools and they ums and this is ‑‑ that's more recent than the other one.  Other one is in the context of (?) they are also testing the digital skill of adults and we really have an issue in OCD and we have a huge gap and when it comes to different age groups, et cetera.  This would be in other words streams OCD is working on.

>> (?)  I'm from Brazil.  It's from OCD.  What is the focus of the OCD discussions when analyzing the taxation of these economy business?

>> Again, we just prepared a nice report on this which is called addressing the text challenges of the digital economy.  I can give you more information in my card after the meeting and I can share that report with you.

>> Manuel:  Anyone else any question?

>> Good afternoon.  My name is Julina Casa Buenas.  I'm from Columbia.  I work for a not for profit organization and use a strategy of queues for Internet.  I'm wondering in this analysis of digital economy it's also taking into consideration not only the economic factor but when applying digital projects that reaches grassroot communities and for instance in appropriation of technology we have seen some analysis in Columbia that for one peso that is invested, the local economies can enter in a dynamic where they can produce three passes for each pass invested.  Is this analysis included in all this digital economy at all or is it just based on economic issues to know if it's clear?

>>

 

>> No, I mean, I haven't done modeling on this, but clearly this is a huge part of the equation in developing country governments, invest in digital anything, right?  So in the case of India the multiplicative effects made in the infrastructure are really clear.  That's 7 percent of GDP.  In fact that was with very little government investment because that was a lot of private sector provisions.  It was actually a good model.  I think sort of the business case is harder when you get to rural areas where the population may be less dense, in the infrastructure case the private sector is not meaning to go and then the private sector may not in the short‑term reap the benefits of investing in infrastructure.  If somebody ‑‑ it's not the same part of the private sector that benefits.  Best case for multiplicative effect is very clear for a government, less so for private sector when pushing the boundaries for example in connectivity, right?

>> I guess if there's any initial question.  I'm going to do a very brief review of the things we discussed today.  We talked about good connectivity.  We need good connectivity to connect people so that we can digitize in some way.  Helani talked about the need to provide avenues for different ways of payment so you can promote, I don't know, e‑commerce in sections, mostly in developing countries where we don't have as much people that use financial services formally.  And also very important point that you raise about data and how data could be used by governments to provide some information and technicians regarding, for example, disease control and things like that.  So we could use that data.  Obviously with some issues that need to be dealt with regarding data sharing, housing of that data that is one of the discussions, most important discussions about where do you host the data if it's in your country or other countries, rules applying to those data that you have from your citizens.  Verena talked about the importance of having a holistic approach to digital economy and how governments should have that holistic approach in terms of the way in which they promote digital transformation in their own economies and economic sector.  Last point very important Pablo about how to use the discussion model used in Internet governance to promote participation of different stakeholder groups in the decision‑making process about these policies regarding digital transformation, how we can get to better solutions probably, sometimes a lot more work for that discussion process but probably better decisions in the end in terms of policies.  I don't know if you have anything else to conclude but I guess that's very brief recap of the things we have discussed.  Thank you very much all of you for your participation.