Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 28, 2011 - 14:30
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>>MARILYN CADE: My name is Marilyn Cade, and I would like to welcome you to the first of two sessions addressing the interregional and national IGF initiative dialogue. You might have noticed I just expanded our title, and I will explain why.
In these two 90-minute sessions we are going to be very fortunate to hear from a number of the initiatives that meet as a group of countries, but we are also going to hear from countries that are doing initiatives right now that are focused within their own country.
I think it's going to be a long two sessions, but we think it's going to be exciting.
You will learn, as you hear from the speakers, that we are quite passionate about this organic creation of the national and regional IGFs.
For those of you who have been through WSIS and Tunis Agenda and have managed to -- -- And I see the transcript is not active.
Not yet. I may have lost my train of thought.
While we are waiting to be transcribed, I will tell you how delighted I am to be back in Kenya for the second time.
I was here in March of 2010, and many of the people who helped to organize the Kenyan IGF organized and hosted the ICANN meeting. And I met many of you then, and it's, indeed, a delight to be back.
We'll be transcribed fairly shortly, so I probably will not be recounting you with what I have done on my two trips. But if it doesn't start soon, I could.
>> Yes, please do.
>>MARILYN CADE: Shall we go ahead?
>> Tell us about your Kenya trip.
>>MARILYN CADE: On Friday, I was very fortunate to be invited to join a colleague, Waudo Siganga, from the computer society of Kenya, who -- I visited a rural girl's school in Kenya, and participated in the award of two computers and a printer to that school. The girls had no usable printer access or computer access. So it was quite a wonderful experience for me.
Are we going to be transcribed now?
>> We're trying.
>>MARILYN CADE: Okay. I think we will.
To go back to what I was talking about before, if you lived through the WSIS and the Tunis Agenda, you know that the IGF itself, the IGF we are in now, was created within certain guidelines and rules. And so it is associated with the U.N. But the wonderful thing about the national and regional initiatives is that they have grown up quite spontaneously. They all have some similarities and some differences, and we'll learn more about that. But they are truly unique. And they have -- they are growing, I guess we would say in children's book language, like Topsy.
Last year there were eight regionals and ten nationals, and this year there are 11 regionals and we are not done with adding nationals. I think we are at 17 and I think Finland, who is probably going to speak from the floor a little bit later, is going to do their IGF initiative yet this year. So that's really exciting.
What I want to do now, I am going to ask each of our speakers to take a minute, no more, give you their name, their day-to-day affiliation, meaning what their day job is, and then the name of the initiative that they are coordinating or speaking for.
We'll do that very quickly, and then we'll get started with our presentations.
Let me start here to my right.
Lillian.
>>LILLIAN NALWOGA: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm called Lillian Nalwoga and I'm representing the East African IGF, and on a day-to-day basis, I work with a collaboration on international ICT policy in east and Southern Africa, and also I do also lead the Uganda national IGF process. Thank you.
>>MARK CARVELL: Good afternoon, everybody, and as this is my first opportunity to take the mic here in Nairobi, I want to say how great it is to be back here. I was here for the ICANN meeting and East African IGF a couple of years ago.
My name is Mark Carvell. I'm with the U.K. government, the department for culture, media, and sport, which is the U.K. ministry with responsibility for Internet policy. Our minister, Ed Vaizey, the minister for the Internet but also creative industries and communications policy generally, was here yesterday. He's had to move on to a bilateral meeting in Beijing, so unfortunately he can't stay here longer but I hope some of you will have heard him underline the U.K.'s commitment to the IGF and its future development.
I'm associated -- I have a privileged position, really. I'm associated with two fora, in addition to this great global forum. I'm associated with our national IGF, the U.K. IGF, which is one of the First National IGFs to be established, and our principal partner there is Nominet, the dot UK registry and they have done fantastic work in developing the U.K. IGF.
And secondly, I'm a member of the steering committee for the Commonwealth IGF, which is kind of unique in this discussion because it's not associated with one region. It represents states and stakeholders in states in all continents.
So I think today I'm going to talk primarily about the Commonwealth IGF. Sorry, Marilyn, I've gone way over the minute. Whatever. Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: And besides that, if you spoke about the United Kingdom IGF, you'd be stealing your colleague's thunder.
>>NNENNA NWAKANMA: Good day. There is a region in the world that has more than 50% of its population as young people and yet it's all summer all year round. That is West Africa.
That region has the West Africa Internet Governance Forum initiative, and that initiative is being headed by a consortium of five -- of seven stakeholders.
Out of the seven consortium members, the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa is the consortium lead. I am the chairperson of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation, but that is a voluntary, unpaid, hard-working, overworking position.
My day job is to run my company, which is an IT consultancy that is called Nnenna.org, so you will understand that my Web site is Nnenna.org and by inference, Marilyn, my name is Nnenna. Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
>>PENG HWA ANG: Okay. Good afternoon, my name is Peng Hwa Ang. I'm working with the Nanyang Technological University. I'm heading the Singapore Internet Research Center. I work on law and policy especially around new media and the Internet. And the initiative that I'm involved with is the Asia-Pacific regional IGF. My co-conspirator, Edmon Chung, is sitting there. He's CEO of dot Asia. It's been a key supporter of that. Also credit or blame to Paul Wilson, who is not here, of APNIC.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
>>JASNA MATIC: I'm Jasna Matic. I'm the state secretary for digital agenda of the Republic of Serbia. I am in charge of telecommunications and information society in my country, and I will be speaking on behalf of the EuroDIG, which we have hosted in the end of May in Belgrade. Thank you.
>>TOWELA NYIRENDA JERE: Good afternoon. I am Towela Nyirenda Jere. I work for the NEPAD planning and coordinating agency, which is a technical agency of the African Union, and I will be speaking on behalf of the Southern Africa Internet Governance Forum initiative. Thank you.
>>BYRON HOLLAND: Hi. My name is Byron Holland and I'm the president and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. We are the ccTLD operator for the dot ca country code. I'm also the vice chair of the ccNSO within the ICANN realm, and the chair of the finance working group there as well.
CIRA, or the organization I work for, is the sole sponsor and administrator of the Canadian Internet forum, though we have two partners who are critical in helping us with the logistics of it, the IISD who many of you probably know, as well as a Canadian-based organization called MNet or the Media Awareness Network. Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Byron. Now we're going to start our program officially. And let me explain what we're going to do.
You're going to hear from each of the speakers, and we're going to focus this first panel on how the initiatives have addressed the core themes that we all address here at the IGF.
So CIR, security, openness, privacy. We're going to hear from each of them how they've addressed them, and if they've addressed them in the same way that the IGF is addressing them or if there are unique facets to how they've addressed them.
We're going to be looking for some commonalities across our speakers and some differences. Then we will hear, in the audience we have a few other national and regional IGFs that I'll turn to for two minutes on that topic, and then we're going to turn it over to you.
So I am expecting you to be working on questions. The bad news is, if you don't ask them questions, I might ask you questions.
So let's get started.
Lillian, can I turn to you? Oh, Byron's going to start? No.
>>NNENNA NWAKANMA: I can start.
>>MARILYN CADE: Can you start? Go ahead.
>>NNENNA NWAKANMA: All right. I began by saying we live in a region where it's summer all year-round, and our population is mostly young people. It's important to understand the background of the West Africa region itself, to be able to understand the initiative.
Like I've said in my present -- in my introduction, the West Africa Internet Governance Forum, as we call it, it's headed by the consortium who is in the WAIFG consortium. We have a core. The Economic Community of Western African States, which is the regional economic block. We have the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa, which is a continental foundation. We have the Association for Progressive Communication, which is a global communications advocacy group.
We have International Institute for Sustainable Development, which works for sustainability in development. We have the Panos Institute for West Africa, which is a media capacity-building organization. We have AfriNIC, which is our registry for Africa. And we have ISOC Africa, the consortium for Internet Society actors.
These are the members of the WAIGF consortium.
There are other key factors in the West African region. We've held four regional forums so far. For the past four years, we've been holding regional forums in West Africa.
The region itself is composed of 16 countries, and these 16 countries have freedom of movement. We have one passport, so we move around and we can live anywhere in those 16 countries.
We have three official languages: English, French, and Portuguese. And we have over 300 million of population. So West Africa has almost a third of the African population.
Of course it is home to the country that has the biggest population in Africa, which is Nigeria. Out of the 16 West African countries, 10 countries, Madam Chair, already have national IG initiatives. 10 out of 16. And we do hope that by the next time we get to Baku, we will be scoring 16 out of 16.
We have WAIGF.org, which is our official Web site. It's been on for one year. It's running its second year now.
We have a Twitter handle, which is @WAIGF. Please follow us and you're welcome to join us on Facebook as well.
This is the background to our community.
Now, on the issues, we have a very short time, so I'm going to just put -- take one point on every issue.
On access, particularly in West Africa, what we're looking at is the universal access fund policy that we have in the region. We want to know how has it been implemented and we're looking forward to its implementation because implementing the universal access policy is what we see will drive access to an under -- on an understandable level to underserved areas.
On diversity, like I said at the beginning, West Africa is a region of great diversity. Its people, its languages, its culture, and its heritage.
So we're looking at an Internet that will not just preserve but promote and add value to our diversity in our region.
On critical Internet resources and their management, we have AfriNIC which has been doing a lot of work educating all regional actors, especially in moving from IPv4 to IPv6. But we note that there is need for more education. And we're also working towards making West Africa an IPv6-compliant region, all 16 countries, all 300 million of us.
On security, the EACOS legislation on cybercrime, we have one, and it has been adopted by the council of our Ministers. And this legislation will be presented to our heads of state in their very next meeting. So that will be effective by the end of this year, because our Ministers have already adopted our cybercrime legislation.
We also are looking at security from the education point of view on the need to educate our young people on ways to make positive impact with the use of intranet for personal, for national, for regional development, without necessarily engaging into criminal activities online.
On openness, we recognize the need for openness in process, in governance, in technology, in data, and in citizen services across our region, because as I said, we have 16 countries in one block of the region.
On privacy, we understood and we're looking at the fact that while governments in our subregion are taking measures to fight cybercrime and ensure cybersecurity, we're encouraging to see to the ratification and domestication of EACOS legislation on the protection of personal data across this region.
And finally, we're looking at having a harmonized Internet ecosystem across the countries of West Africa that will give us greater access, greater opportunity, and greater potentials.
In closing, I would first want to point out that there are members, key actors of the West Africa Internet Governance Forum in this room. I saw Nigeria, (saying name), I saw Senegal, Mme Diop, I saw Panslett (phonetic) from Gambia and one person from Ghana. We have key actors, individuals who work out of their time to put this initiative forward. In some countries the initiatives have been led by the government. In some others it might be the youth organization, and in one or two places, it's actually in individuals.
So we have different models but we are bringing them all up.
In conclusion, in this warm, wonderful region of the world where we welcome you to visit, as I said, it is summer all year-round in West Africa. We are looking for a must sustained and sustainable multistakeholder engagement at our subregional level, and a more active and engaged national IG initiatives in all our 16 countries, in all our languages, with all our people.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Byron, might I go to you next. Are you ready?
>>BYRON HOLLAND: Sure. Absolutely.
In this year, 2011, CIRA initiated the first Canadian Internet forum to help ensure Canadian voices were heard in the international discussions around the future of the Internet.
The most fundamental lesson we learned from the CIF, or the Canadian Internet Forum, was the complementarity and connectedness of Internet governance and policy issues, major policy issues. In fact, the IGF themes, I would say, also cannot be examined in isolation. And the three topics we're discussing today cannot be examined separately from one another.
That is how interconnected we believe these topics are.
In addition, the impact of the Internet has become increasingly pervasive and profound.
The legal, economic, social, cultural, and communications issues raised by its development and use have begun to be addressed by policymakers and regulators outside the Internet community, through a variety of governance processes.
The complex, highly distributed Internet governance multistakeholder ecosystem involving many different actors and processes at the regional, national, and global levels, this in itself has been crucial to the success of the Internet.
In the Canadian context, it's become clear that digital literacy and economic development are complementary, with digital literacy enabling sustainable economic growth, which in turn generates new requirements for even more digital literacy.
The Canadian Internet governance challenges that emerged from the CIF process largely match the topics of today's discussion; that is access and diversity, critical Internet resources, and security, openness and privacy. And I think that's quite remarkable because our process was very much a bottom-up stakeholder-driven process. We didn't impose topics down. We just let whatever the Canadian Internet public thought bubble out.
On the theme of access and diversity, Canadians raised the following as being priorities. Achieving universal and affordable access to world-class Internet infrastructure. And I want to make a distinction here between access and availability. In Canada, 95% of people have availability to their home for broadband access, but only 79% actually have that access. So for us, the issues are more about why aren't people accessing them.
One of them, of course, is the nature of the land we live in. You know, if -- Africa is about 7,000 kilometers wide, roughly. Canada is 5500 kilometers wide just to give you a sense of the scale. Of course a lot of that landscaped is uninhabited. We have one territory that's the size of the democratic Republic of Congo or Algeria, each of which have about two and a half million people. Our territory has 33,000 people in it so access for us is often bound in the geography of the land more than anything else.
Also, equipping Canadians with the knowledge and skills they need to participate and prosper in the digital economy. Promoting Internet enabled innovation in government, education, and health care, and promoting digital inclusion of all communities from all segments of Canada, especially the more rural and northern populations as well as the youth.
Recognizing that the future development of the Canadian economy means that Canadians will need to acquire progressively higher levels of digital literacy, levels that enable them not only to use the tools for the digital economy but to understand the impact of these tools and the opportunities and significant challenges they present in order to develop creative responses.
One of the themes we heard layout and clear over and over again was that Canada's education system is not using the technology.
(Scribes lost audio)
Participants were also worried about things like net neutrality, price, bandwidth caps, et cetera.
On the theme of critical Internet resources and security, a term of art in environments like this, it was more grass-roots in ours, or interpreted from a more grass-roots perspective in ours. But securing a stable and secure online environment for individuals and organizations was critical in both the public and private sectors, and certainly managing privacy, protecting privacy and the other rights of Internet users rang through loud and clear.
Accelerating the transition to IPv6, and also significant concern about the laws that are in place and the resources allocated to cybercrime were issues that were raised significantly.
Panelists within the forum also drew attention to the key roles that digital literacy can play in helping create a safe and secure online environment for youth and children.
On the openness and privacy theme, significant challenges were raised in light of trends that are transforming the Internet and raising new issues with respect to personal privacy, security, identity management, and online ethics, particularly for vulnerable sectors of the Internet landscape, like youth, mature Canadians and other vulnerable segments.
Policies and legislation need to keep up with the technology and we're not necessarily seeing that yet.
The cloud needs to start examining these issues more thoroughly.
While we noted the interconnectedness of themes in our Canadian forum, we also note how our themes belong within the global IGF themes. It's very important to consider how these themes are interconnected, and interwoven. You cannot achieve increased access and diversity if critical Internet resources are not addressed.
Security and privacy issues cannot be attended to without the digital literacy that comes with proper access and education.
Tackling Internet governance issues through that lens will help us all benefit from the innovation and progress that the Internet can bring us and has brought us.
It's also important to maintaining and enhancing the distributed bottom-up, consensus-driven governance model that has enabled the Internet to flourish and to create so much innovation and advancement.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Byron.
Do I have a volunteer or shall I hand pick somebody?
Lillian, would you like to go ahead?
>>LILLIAN NALWOGA: Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Moderator.
I'm going to try to be brief, speaking about the East African Internet Governance Forum. And I just want to bring to your attention that we -- the East African Internet Governance Forum was the first of its kind in Africa. I stand to be corrected. And it was first convened in 2008. While we have representatives from countries -- five countries, that's Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda. We tried to explore, identify and build on issues common around Internet governance within the region. We tend to also try to enable participation from our region, participants from our region to be able to come to forums such as this and other Internet-related forum to discuss, to get to know what Internet is and how it can (indiscernible).
A model of informed participation, contribution and engagement of community members, and just like we heard from West Africa, we do follow a bottom-up approach. At the national level, we do start our discussions. We hold mailing list discussions in all the countries. I think if Kenya and Uganda is reading on this, because we do have active Internet forums or ICT-based listserves that we do start the discussions on, and the reports on discussions builds -- build issues that address at the national level.
So most -- The national forums are held usually start, they are held at the same time.
And from the national reports that are got from each of the countries, they are sending to the East African Internet Governance Forum. To date we filled four forum with this year's EIGF (indiscernible) hosted by Rwanda, and I think at some point we will have the Rwanda representatives to give their comments about the experience hosting this year's EIGF. And the theme this year, we are trying to harmonize Internet policies at the regional level, because we realize that we may just be doing the talking, but if we identify issues that are not matching with the policies, then we are not moving. So this year-round, we tried to look at the different Internet policies at the national level and see how we can have a voice at the regional level.
Just to go to the issues according to what madam moderator said we should be focusing on, on access and diversity, we recognize that we are not all at the same level of development in terms of access infrastructure and our policies are also not at the same level. And we think that in order to achieve this, we encourage national countries or country representatives to go back and engage with their governments. Because we do believe that we cannot work together. I mean, we cannot work alone but we have to work together.
So we identified issues of access and affordability in the region, and we feel that as the East African regional forum, we should start working with established institutions like the East African Communications Organization, EACO, and also try to improve the different partnerships among different stakeholders in the region to facilitate regional policy-making.
We also discussed the issue of interregional exchange points, and we are trying to explore the idea of establishing a regional IXP to facilitate traffic flow within the region. We believe that this might reduce the cost of broadband. But again, we would like to hear from experiences from you, from the participants or representatives from the different stakeholders here on how our regional IXP can help reduce the issue of broadband -- cost of broadband.
On the critical Internet resources, we encouraged -- we encourage member countries to take on IPv6 in the region, as we believe that applications that are currently being developed are running on IPv6. And many of our users are not aware of this. So we continue to raise awareness about this beautiful resource.
So we encourage our member representatives to invest heavily in IPv6, deploying IPv6 equipment. And just from Uganda I can give, we had aban IPv6 awareness day. I think that was running along the ISOC. So our ministry took on this initiative and they are creating awareness in this area.
On the management of ccTLDs, again, we are not at the same level. In Kenya, they have a model that is working for them, and so is Tanzania, but when you come to Uganda, we still have our ccTLD being run by a private entity, and the same thing is in Rwanda. It's run by someone who is not based in the country.
And the issue of ccTLDs or critical Internet resources was our main theme last year, and in regard to this, a research was commissioned and I think for those who attended yesterday's forum on strengthening ccTLDs in Africa, the research findings were shared, and it shows what is happening at the different country levels. And we still do encourage member countries to push for adopting the best management model.
On cybersecurity, still we are still lagging behind as a region, and yet we -- there's an increase in uptake of Internet and the mobile phone, so issues of how do we address cybersecurity and privacy or privacy and security on the mobile phone -- on the mobile phone came up during this year's EIGF, because in Uganda, for instance, we are seeing the registration of SIM cards. It's common to just walk on the street and buy a SIM card, so how is government doing this? These are issues that we want to see being taken on.
In Kenya, I think the system works that you have to register your SIM card, but in Uganda, it is just being adopted.
I think also Rwanda also have a different -- you know, there are laws, but some of these laws are not harmonized.
We also realize that there are initiatives like the Commonwealth Cybersecurity Initiative.
At the East African level, we have the East African community and they are doing initiatives, so we are trying to see how these initiatives can be harmonized so that we don't replicate processes.
Some of the emerging issues this year was the issue of ICT skill development. We feel that, yes, we've gone ahead to create awareness on the users of this -- of ICTs, Internet, and the like, but there's no investment in local content and development of applications, software applications. Especially mobile applications.
Speaking from my country's perspective, this is not an area that has been adopted, but in Kenya it is working well because the Kenya ICT board -- again, I stand to be corrected by my fellow Kenyans here -- they do have a fund that is dedicated to local content development.
So we are not at the same level, but we are trying to find means in which we can work with organizations best at the regional level to see that we harmonize all these things.
We also -- we also recognize the benefits of social media, and we encourage all governments to utilize these tools as a means of increasing participation, citizen participation, in national matters and citizens to be able to follow and interact with government.
And I think this has been adopted. As we see, for instance, in Rwanda, the minister -- I mean, the president does operate a Twitter account and he tweets all the time, so this is something that we would like to be taken on across the region.
So we also recognize the need to involve the children and youth in Internet governance discussions because these are the future users of the Internet.
Lastly, we believe and do encourage the maintenance of the multistakeholder model in addressing Internet governance issues that we identified. Hence, we continue -- we call upon the content dialogue among different stakeholders in finding amicable solutions to enjoying the benefits provided for by the Internet.
Once again, I thank you all for coming to east Africa. For us, it's not just Kenya hosting this year's EIGF; it's the eastern African region and Africa as a region in whole. Thank you.
[Applause]
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you. I'm going to see if I can convince EuroDIG to pick up now, and then I'll go, if it's all right, to Southern Africa, and then I'll come to -- if I might, to the Asia-Pacific, and then Mark, I'll ask you -- since the commonwealth is very broad, I'll ask you to be the last speaker in this panel before we open up to comments.
Is that all right for order? Thank you.
>>JASNA MATIC: Thank you, Marilyn. I, indeed, welcome this increased transparency and predictability of our framework to work within.
Let me talk a little bit about the framework that we have had, as we have felt that this was a step forward and maybe at this point somewhat unique approach and results that we have had in Europe.
Our EuroDIG conference was so well attended it surpassed all our expectations. We had over 500 participants from more than 50 countries, more than 30 of them being countries from Europe.
The participants were active all the time, and we did not really have the floor and audience relationship but everybody could participate, including the 17% of participants who participated remotely from 12 hubs, mostly from Europe but also throughout the world.
So we had parallel sessions and parallel workshops, 15 altogether. We also had, as one specificity, a two-day youth forum which preceded our main event and we had very high participation from the young generation throughout the event, which we deemed as very important, as they are a very important stakeholder in the online community and they certainly will be the ones to carry forward the torch and the development of the Internet.
On main points, I would say that the conclusions of the EuroDIG were more or less similar to the concerns and the conclusions from the other fora.
One specificity that I could point out is the very high concern for the protection of privacy, which has been present in the EuroDIG, and this of course has become a very prominent issue due to the social networks which have exploded in the past years, the biometric data used on the Internet, and the fine balance that needs to be struck between the free access to content and the protection of privacy and the private data of the users.
What also came out as one of the conclusions of the EuroDIG is that the secure and affordable access to infrastructure and content is seen as the fundamental right, and the Europeans are hoping that this will be recognized as such.
There's also a big need for education in the areas of protection of privacy so that all the users are aware of what's the tradeoff that they are making when accessing free content in exchange for some of their personal data.
And the balance that also needs to be struck between the protection of security for all of us and at the same time maintaining the freedom of expression.
The general theme that came out of that, I would say, is a maximum of rights with minimum of restrictions. That would be the sentence which reflects the position of the EuroDIG.
Finally, the conclusion was that the success and the huge participation in the EuroDIG was a result, in itself, that such an open forum obviously has the vitality to grow and to become more important than it is, and this is something that we are hoping for, so that the discussions and the conclusions are translated into policy recommendations. And even though the IGF has grown in its importance and its influence, we look forward to seeing further growth of the influence and the policy coming out of the recommendations that are the result of the IGF.
And finally, let me say that we all are looking forward to the next EuroDIG to be held in Stockholm, Sweden next year, and we are sure that the participation will be even broader and more active than it has been in Belgrade this year. Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
>>TOWELA NYIRENDA JERE: Thank you. So the inaugural Southern Africa IGF was held from September 1 to 3 of this year in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the embracing of the multistakeholder concept was evident in the way that the event was organized.
As the IGF was convened through a partnership between the NEPAD planning and coordinating agency, which is an intergovernmental agency, the Association for Progressive Communications, APC, and the Southern Africa NGO network, SANGONeT.
It was endorsed by the Southern African development community and hosted by the South Africa Department of Communications, and received support from various private sector, civil society, and other institutions such as Google Africa, Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, Center for Technical Cooperation in Agriculture, Sentech, AfriNIC, the Internet Society, ICANN, the DiploFoundation.
We were also privileged to have with us, during our meeting, the Deputy Minister of Communications from South Africa, representatives from the African Union Commission, from SADC, from the IGF Secretariate, from East Africa IGF, and as well as from the West Africa IGF.
12 out of the 15 SADC member states were represented at that meeting.
In addition to the thematic issues that are addressed by the global IGF, we identified other issues that we felt were pertinent for our region, and these were the whole concept of multistakeholder participation and Internet governance, cross-border Internet governance issues, the impact of Internet governance on vulnerable groups, national and regional perspectives on Internet governance, capacity building for Internet governance, and then obviously being that this was the inaugural forum, we had also to look at the continuity and the structuring of the SAIGF moving forward.
So after the three days of sessions, a communique was issued that captured the salient elements of the discussion across the various themes and I won't read out the communique, but I will just touch on some of the main issues that emerged.
So in terms of issues of access and diversity, the biggest issue that came out for our region is this whole issue of affordable, available, and accessible connectivity. We recognize that we still have a lot of challenges in terms of people being connected, but also in terms of people being able to afford having access to the Internet, and so we are looking at promoting the enforcement of universal service obligations because we recognize that countries actually have established universal service funds and universal service mechanisms, but that there isn't enforcement of these obligations.
We also recognize that issues of local content are significant. If we are going to enjoy the benefits of the information society and actually even promote the availability of access, that this has to go hand in hand also with the stimulation of the local content creation as well.
In terms of critical Internet resources, we recognize that the migration to IP Version 6 is very important for us and that we are basically recommending that government and maybe big corporations will actually take the lead in this by actually doing dual-stack implementations that would actually pave the way for full migration to IPv6.
We also consider the promotion -- (audio dropped) -- domain names in the Internet space as being very critical and we would also like to see the protection of geographic, cultural, and linguistic top-level domains within the context of the new gTLDs that are going to be introduced.
In terms of security, we recognize that there's a need for increased awareness for the development of the necessary legislation, but also more importantly for the enforcement of legislation to protect people's privacy and security online.
We recognize that the youth are an important element, in terms of the whole multistakeholder approach.
Africa has a very young population, as my friend from West Africa has already mentioned. 70% of our people are under 25. And so we recognize that there needs to be a concerted effort to include them in this multistakeholder dialogue.
Remote participation, which we were not able to have during the inaugural forum, is also something that we see as being very key in terms of promoting participation in the Internet governance space, as well as collaboration with other regional and global initiatives.
We consider gender issues to be crucial also, in terms of the Internet governance for development, and we would like to see a gender-sensitive approach. We need to have a way of looking at participation that moves beyond just counting numbers. I think that there needs to be a concerted effort to look at meaningful participation.
We recognize also that there is challenges in terms of awareness as far as the ICT policy space, as well as Internet governance policies among our various countries, and we would like to see a bit more work done in terms of raising the awareness levels but also mainstreaming the development of ICT and IG policies.
Research, in terms of Internet governance and ICT4D issues is another area that was highlighted as needing to be addressed, because we recognize also that there is very limited research that is conducted by Africans addressing African issues as far as ICT4D.
Capacity building also came out very strongly as an area that needs to be addressed, and this cuts across all the various themes.
We recognize that there is a limited capacity in terms of local content creation, limited capacity in terms of the policy development, limited capacity in terms of just very general e-literacy, and so we would like to see all these various aspects of capacity building being addressed.
Cross-border governance issues related to the development of Internet exchange points, both on a regional and national basis, but also the harmonization of the policy and regulatory frameworks was also highlighted as another area that needed to be addressed, and possibly through the SAIGF but also through other mechanisms as well.
So in a nutshell, that was the SAIGF. There is obviously work ongoing in terms of determining how the SAIGF moves forward and how it actually connects with the other regional initiatives but also with the global IGF as well.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you. We're going to go to Peng Hwa but I'm just going to remind the participants in the audience that we'll hear from Peng Hwa on Asia-Pacific, we'll hear from Commonwealth, we're going to hear short comments from some of the other nationals and regionals that are in the audience and then you get to start asking questions or we will start asking you questions. So I'm just reminding you.
Peng Hwa.
>>PENG HWA ANG: Thank you, Marilyn.
Actually, I have 18 slides that I'm not presenting, of course.
What I'm going to do is to give you highlights of this report. Actually, it's gone up to the IGF somewhere, so I'm going to give you some of the highlights.
I want to say first that we had a youth IGF more or less in parallel with our Asia-Pacific regional IGF.
In the youth IGF, we did a simulation, meaning that they came in the door, they were given a role -- manager of a big multinational, manager of a small business, government official, civil society -- and then they tried to solve some problem that we gave them.
And then we chose the best performers, and so in fact, four of them are with us. They've been flown over -- we raised funds for that -- and they are here.
Edmon has done something similar. So talking about, you know, the South African initiative for youth, something to consider, that you can raise funds to bring youth to the IGF. That would be great.
It went very well. We had also among the judges, Sala from Fiji. We also called up Paula Abdul. Totally supportive. Too bad she's in the Pacific region. We claim her as ours.
Markus Kummer also came to be a judge so that went very well. So I highly recommend the program. The idea came from Edmon Chung, by the way. See him for more ideas.
Our Asia-Pacific initiative did not follow the themes in the IGF, and that was quite deliberate. We followed it last year and did it for the first time, and we have -- it was an open meeting. This time we felt there were too many issues to discuss that did not fit the theme neatly and so we kind of went on our own.
First there was an all plenary. We had a keynote address from the Director-General of INFOCON. Then we talked about IPv6, how ready is Asia for this critical resource. We concluded that IPv4 will still continue and that IPv6 was deemed to be a success as it helped double -- in fact, 2.5 times -- the number of Web sites willing to provide v6.
We talked about actor and other controversies and we said -- of course in diplomatic terms -- that closed-door actor negotiations may not be the best way to balance competing IP interests.
We also talked about IDN governance and policy. And here I will note -- pardon me, interpreters, but it's going to be difficult. We talked about two major issues. One about the process, because the IDN manual is 2,000 pages, and since there are no Russian novelists these days who write 2,000 pages, there are no 2,000-page novels, and, you know, a 2,000-page manual. So there are problems in the IDN manual.
Also there was talk of problem in IDN implementation, with concerns about what they call script homophones. Let me give you an example. And here I ask the interpreters to pardon me. Kong-Kong. Kong. Kong-Kong. Kong-Kong-Kong. Which means -- okay? -- yes, I will say it again.
Kong-Kong is grandfather. Kong, said. Kong-Kong, can. Kong, hit. Kong-Kong, grandfather. Grandfather said I can hit grandfather. Kong-Kong, Kong, Kong-Kong, Kong, Kong-Kong.
In the script homophones, what it means is if you have a script of Kong-Kong, meaning grandfather, and another one with Kong-Kong, can, you know, a domain name, it is possible for one party to object because they sound similar.
And Kong, Kong, Kong, Kong, Kong, Kong, Kong sounds very similar, right?
[ Laughter ]
>>PENG HWA ANG: Okay. Good. Hey!
I thought we needed a laugh after one hour. This is very heavy going. I mean, how you guys manage these IGF meetings?
Okay. So then we get -- you get a flavor of kind of some of the discussions that went on and quite sort of Asia-Pacific specific, you know.
Okay. But we brought in also some issues that were kind of current. Arabic revolutions. Okay. It's a long title here. The Arabic revolutions, their impact on the world, roles of social networks for effective representative Internet governance for soon arriving multilingual Internet. Obviously I didn't do the title.
Okay. The conclusion. Two conclusions here.
It raised more questions than answers, and okay, so an interesting one. A blogger from Tunisia felt that the Internet played a minor role in the revolution. And this goes into the minutes, I guess, the recording.
We also talked about ICANN and the new gTLDs, and then the Internet for disaster relief and recovery.
And here I want to highlight the work of Izumi Aizu who organized that session. It was a small group but the group, I felt, left with sort of a -- a more concrete plan of all the other groups to do something further with Internet and disaster relief. So that's quite important.
We also discussed in the plenary -- sorry, in the parallel session, because we ran out of time, we needed some parallel sessions then -- three other topics.
Cybersecurity, privacy and data protection, one.
We talked about review of the IANA function, and then international law enforcement.
So just to highlight the review of the IANA function, because the contract was up for renewal about that time -- okay? -- two points.
There was a general desire for establishing performance or enhancing performance standards and reporting within IANA. That's one.
Second, there was strong consensus on the need to identify what IANA controls or what is not under IANA control, and agreement that there be a strict separation between the process that IANA undertakes and the policy document.
Okay. And then we did a summary and talked about kind of what the future of -- of the IGF looking ahead. And then the next step is that we're going to discuss two bits for the next IGF meeting, which is a good sign, because it means that people are interested to host an Asia-Pacific regional IGF, okay? So thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much.
[Applause]
>>MARILYN CADE: I have a -- I'm already beginning to see some consistencies and some differences, but now we need to go here and learn about the Commonwealth IGF.
>>MARK CARVELL: Thanks so much, Marilyn. I don't know how to follow that Kong-Kong, Kong-Kong-Kong, but --
[Applause]
>>MARK CARVELL: -- anyway, I'll have a go. I can't think of anything immediately to compete with that. That's fantastic.
In order to explain how the Commonwealth IGF intersects with the themes of the IGF here and to explain really how specific our agenda is, despite our very broad reach to stakeholders across the world, at this time, and with the resources available to us, we are pretty specific and project-based.
I'll be handing a cap around to collect some money afterwards to help us expand that a bit, but later on.
But I better explain why that is, and why we're -- we're so different, really, from the experience of others that we've heard about this afternoon.
The U.K., as a commonwealth member, and several other commonwealth contacts that we had thought, after WSIS, it would be useful and valuable for us to engage with other commonwealth partners to develop the concepts of WSIS, to promote awareness of the principles and the key outputs and specifically the Internet Governance Forum and the importance of engaging and developing that forum, which was, in the early days, very experimental.
So we had that idea that we'd develop some kind of commonwealth platform for promoting awareness, but things really took off with the engagement of Commonwealth Connect. Commonwealth Connect, that's the name of a program established -- you know, well established by the commonwealth. It's an ICT for development program. And the Commonwealth IGF really has developed -- under Commonwealth Connect the work we do is basically taking forward Internet governance issues and projects which I'll come onto very briefly in a moment, with the help of Commonwealth Connect. And we've brought in other partners. We've brought in the ITU, Council of Europe, individual active commonwealth members in this space, and Nominet, the dot UK registry. I haven't covered all the partners. We've assembled several partners. But the work for us is really development and capacity-building-generated, and so that's become our principal platform for engaging with -- with the IGF agenda. Capacity building and -- and development.
So to cut a long story short, we -- we kind of set up, about three years ago, and we undertook consultations. There was a lot of great support for the idea that the commonwealth should engage constructively in the IGF, and some issues quickly emerged, and the first major issue was child protection. We developed a toolkit, with the help of experts and partners -- notably John Carr -- and we launched that toolkit at the IGF in Vilnius. We had an open session in Vilnius primarily to do that, and that really is all about capacity building, getting those commonwealth members up to speed, really, on what they could do to tackle child abuse images, to -- to implement legislation, to fill the gaps in awareness of what needed to be done and to develop toolkits -- sorry, to develop hotlines and that kind of thing.
So that was our primary sort of project focus at the Vilnius IGF. It's still a live project. We'll -- the toolkit is still there. It's -- we've got a Web site to promote it.
We're currently working, as was mentioned earlier, on a cybercrime initiative, and again, it's all about capacity building, getting the legislative frameworks and the cooperative mechanisms, getting law enforcement to cooperate and be skilled up and to understand what cybercrime is all about, and the key threats and the means of -- of addressing that, and, as I say, bringing the legal framework into line across the commonwealth.
So we're launching that -- well, we're consulting on that here, actually. We're not at the stage of finally launching it. We're not quite there yet. We want to hear from stakeholders here, and we've got a session tomorrow, 11:00 to 12:30, conference Room 3, if you don't mind the plug. We will present the cybercrime initiative in detail then.
So we have this project basis. We -- just finally, we're doing quite a bit on youth engagement. We have a program called "Wire Up!" and that's been developed by the University of Creative Arts in the U.K., and our objective there really is to provide a platform for the generation born in the digital age to engage on all the issues, actually, here.
We're hoping that they can report and provide content for our IGF Web site, picking up on all the themes that -- here at the IGF.
So we have that kind of stretch across more issues.
But as I say, in a very quick wrap-up, our main effort under the Commonwealth IGF at this time is to -- is in the area of development and capacity building, and we're quite project-based in that regard.
Those who have been listening carefully will have noticed that I have not mentioned any single event with a date because actually we don't hold stand-alone events. Our visibility is primarily here at the global IGF. I mentioned the session we've got tomorrow and that's where we initiate the consultations, and we want to hear back from stakeholders from the commonwealth countries and also other countries, too.
We're very open as to how we take this initiative forward.
So I think I have covered all the points at this stage, Marilyn.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: We heard a real range, and we are actually going to learn a little bit more about how some of the issues are addressed.
First of all, in some of the national and regional initiatives, representatives who are sitting in the audience. And I wonder, Chris Hemmerlein, might I ask you to speak briefly about the IGF USA. You are one of the steering group members.
I should probably disclose, to those of how don't know, that I am the chief catalyst of IGF USA. But we have a very large steering group, about close to 60 people, and Chris is going to report briefly on how we treated, how the IGF USA treated the themes.
Can I just see a show of hands from the other national and regional IGFs who do want to comment briefly from the floor on how you treated -- got you, okay. Finland.
How can you be reporting since you haven't had the IGF Finland yet?
Joking. Yes.
Okay. Let's start with Chris. We will go back here. We will come to Finland. Come here and then we will go back to central Africa.
Okay. And I think I missed somebody here. So I think we have got everybody. Let's start briefly with Chris.
I'm really asking you guys to be brief, if you can.
>>CHRIS HEMMERLEIN: Thank you, Marilyn. And good afternoon, everyone. I shall be brief.
My name is Chris Hemmerlein. I work for NTIA in the United States Department of Commerce, and we have been on the steering group for the IGF USA for each of the last three years when the IGF USA kicked off.
I want to say first it's great to hear all of these approaches to local and regional IGFs. I think it's really helpful that everyone can tailor their agendas to their local needs.
So saying that, I will just mention kind of briefly what makes IGF USA unique.
To begin, with we have a great partner in the academic community in Elon University, and their Imagining the Internet Center which helps us document our event both online and off-line.
The second way that is unique for us we do workshops, we do best practice forums and scenario exercises and all of these are multistakeholder events. All of them promote great discussion, but they all affect participants in different manners.
Internet Governance of the United States is, by its nature, very multistakeholder, and there are lots of groups both in industry and civil society that are doing great work. So at the IGF U.S.A., we don't really -- we try not to duplicate the work that's already being done or to change our efforts, but in a way to advance them with an eye towards the future.
We discuss global Internet governance issues and how they scale toward national levels and vice versa.
IGF USA forms its agenda with respect and with regard to the main themes from the global IGF, but like has been said before, we try not to duplicate them exactly. We look at the IGF USA as a lead-in to the global IGF. So while this year, for example, we did not have an accessibility panel, we did have several members of our steering group who are working on accessibility issues here at the global IGF.
One unique thing we did have this year in lieu of an accessibility panel or workshop was a workshop we had that we called the plethora of principles. It was a pretty topical and timely event. As I'm sure many of you are aware over the last year there have been these ground pronouncements from, for example, the United States and our International Strategy for Cyberspace, from Brazil who released Internet principles for multinational organizations such as the OECD and the G8, and they all made statements on how they predict the future of the Internet, how it can be governed, and what that really means for all of us here.
So we begin the kind of comparing and contrasting all of these statements, how are they similar, how are they different. But more importantly, we talked about what all these principles mean for Internet governance.
Are we moving closer to a global consensus with all of these principles or are we making things more difficult for ourselves or are we moving even farther away from any sort of established consensus? It's a great discussion.
I think the important thing to note in this panel is that that type of discussion could only be held at an IGF. It's the only place where all of these stakeholders can come and have a discussion on such varied outputs from such different organizations.
So I'm going to wrap it up there. I hope that was brief, and I'll look forward to hearing from everyone else.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thanks very much, Chris.
Say your name and the IGF initiative you are affiliated with and I am going to ask you guys to be a little bit briefer but I am also going to ask you guys to think about donating ten minutes of your coffee break.
>>ANDERS JOHANSON: My name is Anders Johanson. I am working for the Swedish government Telecom Authority.
Since 12 years, we have had the Swedish Internet Day, gathering nearly 1,000 people during two to three days. The program is developed and performed every year by many, many stakeholders. A main theme is Internet for All. That includes an open and secure Internet for any people: elderly, children, people with disabilities, rural areas, small enterprises.
These Internet days have been and still are an important event inside our country to promote discussions about the Internet for all. But national is not enough. It is clear, for every year more and more clear and obvious that global as well as European dialogues on Internet governance are extremely important. Therefore, we want to strengthen our efforts in promoting dialogues also at, for instance, regional level like the European dialogue on Internet governance.
Key issues for the Swedish government are human rights, Internet freedom, promoting democracy, Internet and ICT for development and promoting democracy in many countries. And we are happy to host EuroDIG next year after Serbia, which was a great success for EuroDIG. We will host it next year in stock home, and we will promote even more youth engagement.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
So I am going to come here, and then I am going to work my way back and I am going to end up, I think, with central Africa back in the back.
Please.
>>JEFFREY KAYONGA: Thank you. My name is Jeffrey Kayonga. I have a private business in Rwanda, but I also represent the private companies in ICT in Rwanda.
Rwanda IGF is representative -- it's represented by multistakeholders in the ICT field. We have the ministry involved. We have the development involved. The development body involved. We have the regulator, NGOs, civil society, private sector and the education society.
IGF has given Rwanda an opportunity to have multistakeholders address issues that they all say is to achieve a common goal. Some of this is creating awareness.
We do have -- Rwanda has a way of creating a vision and going by it. So we have got an opportunity of strategizing five years ahead of what we want to achieve in the ICT field. And IGF, because it has multistakeholders, gathers input from different organizations.
It has helped us avoid repetition of being the same project and utilizing resources because now we all sit at the same table and know what each one wants to achieve and how we can achieve it together.
On the issue of today, you happen to mention how we could address access to broadband. One of the things that IGF has helped us, that we have agreed on infrastructure sharing. This has helped all stakeholders, both government, regulator and other telecom companies to be able to share infrastructure to achieve the common goal of accessibility of broadband in the country.
We are happy, personally myself, from private sector, to be able to contribute to the development of our country through this forum.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much.
Okay. I'm going to work my way back, and the next person who raised -- thank you. Please, go ahead, and then we will keep going.
>>JEFFREY KAYONGA: Sorry. I forgot to mention that we hosted the last year IGF in Rwanda. Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
>>PETER MATJASIC: Hello, my name is Peter Matjasic. I am the president of the European Youth Forum, and I wanted to follow-up on what the Swedish representative said on being sure to include young people but also youth representatives in such processes. We want to share a best practice that our member organizations and we supported them in doing that, did prior to the EuroDIG 2011 in Belgrade; namely, organizing a new media summer school, bringing together youth representatives and youth activists and experts in this field to take stock of the status of the Internet governance policies and identify the needs of, for, and by young people. And we feel this is something that should be replicated, and we will work towards this for 2012, and we suggest also to our colleagues across the globe to not only let the young voice -- yet the youth voice be heard but also ensure that in between your meetings, you couple online participation of individuals with the work done by youth organizations that are representatives of young people during the whole year.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Excellent. Thank you.
So I have a volunteer here, and I have -- let me go with you, and I have two more people, I think; right? I have you on my list and I have central Africa in the back.
>> Good afternoon. My name is Francis. Actually, I'm project manager, Sentech Systems. I am greatly concerned in terms of, say, okay, accessibility on access to Internet in other languages. Okay. We have Internet accessibility in several languages, but what can IGF do in terms of increasing more languages into the -- into the Internet so that we can have access to even other languages, like Islam and these other languages that could -- cannot have, I would say translation, rather, into accessibility on Internet. It's very important.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Francis, that's a great question. I am going to just pause questions, though, and try to get the rest of the national and regional IGFs in, and then we still are going to try to do a couple more questions.
So I had this gentleman here. You are with a national -- No. And central Africa wanted to speak briefly.
>> Thank you very much. My name is Johnny Budra (phonetic). I am from Kinshasa. I am the team leader of the national IGF and a member of the Coordination Bureau, member of the Coordination Bureau of the subregional IGF.
In Central Africa, we are on our tenth edition, tenth meeting. It took place in 2011 in Brazzaville. And this IGF was very highly supported by the government of Congo Brazzaville, which had a large number of participants, especially youth from Congo Brazzaville.
There were four countries -- Chad, Cameroon, DRC, and Congo Brazzaville -- were included. Five points were discussed during that workshop: internet and the new and growing economy, the bandwidth policies, critical resources, the situation of ccTLD in Central Africa, cybersecurity, and finally, strategies.
The great problem facing Central Africa is the infrastructure of the communication and computing technologies. And this is one of the essential issues that we discussed during that workshop. But as governments have committed themselves to resolve this problem, participants were asked to produce a report that will be discussed during the next workshop in 2012 to be held in Cameroon. And in that regard, we have also proposed that we encourage national IGFs, because we cannot go to subregional nijah (phonetic) if we do not have any concrete proposals when we come to the regional IGF meeting.
We also have an advocacy program so that each country will be active at national level. And that is one of the greatest problems facing us that we would like to resolve as far as Central Africa is concerned and that is briefly what was discussed during the subregional IGF meeting in Central Africa.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much.
Have I missed a national, regional -- I am coming to Finland, I think. Yes?
>>YRJO LANSIPURO: Thank you. Thank you, Marilyn. Yrjo Lansipuro from ISOC Finland. The Finnish Internet forum grew out of an unofficial multistakeholder group that was set up already 2003, primarily to prepare for the national preparation of the WSIS meetings. And at some point we decided to open up and to set up a forum like many other countries have done so far.
The first one was last year, right after the IGF in Vilnius, which was not by any chance -- I mean that was by purpose. We wanted to bring home the discussions from the global IGF fresh. And also, we brought along a lot of guests; that is to say, people who had been in Vilnius and who decided to fly home via Helsinki. Of course now we don't expect anybody to fly home from Nairobi via Helsinki, but, still, the idea is the same. We want to bring back those issues and ideas and discussions which have happened here and see how they are reflected in northern Europe.
This time, we will have a Nordic panel, another example of sort of subregional development here, on similarities and differences among the Scandinavian countries in Internet governance matters.
And another panel will discuss the role of Internet in recent upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East.
We tried to draw some conclusions on how far the Internet is actually a tool for democracy and how it can be used against democracy like some researchers are saying.
Then next day we switch into Finnish. The first day is in English, for the benefit of the people who follow our Webcasts and, of course, guests. And we basically continue on this question of Internet and political participation. But now if Finnish and in the Finnish context, and mainly talking about upcoming elections.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: We're actually going to go to the audience now and see if anybody -- and I noted the question we were asked before. We have one waiting right here. I think we're going to need to take your question with a bit more of the experts, including maybe Edmon who is here, and Peng Hwa, if I might ask you to join as well to have a bit of a private conversation following up in detail on your question.
I am going to take a question here and one back there.
>>MUCHIRI NYAGGAH: Thank you very much. My name is Muchiri Nyaggah. I am principal partner at Semacraft Consulting Partners based here in Nairobi.
Access to infrastructure and knowledge of course we hope always has a positive impact on the economies of the countries that have invested in improving that data access, especially in this context of the Internet.
And one of the things that I have been wondering about is the EIGF I know have conversations right now about setting up a regional Internet exchange point. Are there conversations going on about improving, not just by setting up the exchange point but improving connectivity between member states, terrestrial links between member states. And also improving connectivity within the state itself, within each state itself, extending into rural communities. So that this positive impact that could be leveraged from improved access on education, on agriculture, on governance, can also seep right down into the grass-roots.
And then, also, at least three or four regional IGFs from Africa are represented here at the very least. Are there any conversations happening about harmonizing Internet governance policies across this region so that we have, like, an Africa IGF conversation that's going on?
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Do you want to start? And then we will go to Lillian, maybe, if you want to comment.
Do you want to start?
>>NNENNA NWAKNEMA: What's your good name again, sir?
>>MUCHIRI NYAGGAH: My name is Muchiri, Muchiri Nyaggah.
>>NNENNA NWAKNEMA: In Room 10 on Friday at 1430 there will be a luncheon, the Africa Internet Governance Forum.
>>MARILYN CADE: And does someone want to speak to the -- I think there's some other embedded questions. Thank you very much.
There are other embedded questions others might want to comment on. And I know I have a question pending back here.
So asking about whether -- I kind of think you are asking is there already conversation about harmonizing across regions, or should there be, or will there be. And I am going to ask Lillian if she wants to make a comment on her views about what the experience has been within the East Africa IGF in talking about harmonization. And then maybe come to you and I don't know, Peng Hwa.
>>LILLIAN NALWOGA: Is this about the harmonizing regional forums?
>>MUCHIRI NYAGGAH: Harmonizing Internet governance policies at the international level, yeah.
>>LILLIAN NALWOGA: Internet governance policies. Well, I would say we are at the talking level because working with government, you have to get government on board. We -- In Uganda, for instance, the Internet Governance Forum has been led by civil society. And much of the things that we would like to -- things that we would like to be done, and the government is not ready to set them up, it is a challenge. But I think this years EIGF, we agreed it is time to work with government. And if I'm not mistaken, Kenya already has a national IGF Steering Committee, so does Rwanda and Tanzania which is hosting next year's EIGF already has one in place and Uganda is setting up one after this forum.
So when the national Steering Committees are strong enough, then we can influence policy at the regional level. But you find that most of the representatives in the steering committees are also serving other regional organizations.
For instance, the telco, the regulators are working with the East African communications organization.
So much of the things we discussed sit in there, but we want, as a forum, to be able to have our views. That is why we are trying to have this multistakeholder model, having representatives from all the stakeholders to be able to participate.
Thank you.
>>NNENNA NWAKANMA: In West Africa, I have already said at the beginning that our Council of Ministers have adopted our cybercrime legislation for the whole of the region.
Now, what we are looking at is the possibility of extra -- intercountry police collaboration. Because someone can commit a crime in one country, because we have free movement across West Africa, by the time you announce the crime in Nigeria, he is already living in Ghana. So what we are doing is that collaboration to make it possible that crimes committed anywhere in West Africa can be prosecuted anywhere in West Africa. That's part of the legal, the legislation in place now.
On data centers, there is also some collaboration in West Africa. In Nigeria, Cote D'Ivoire, Ghana, we all have data centers across West Africa.
I am not sure about the cabling, but I know that most of the cable that run around our region, because we are all on the coast of the Benay (phonetic), the gulf of Benay, we have them running across. But where we have been fighting to get something going is on the interconnection, the IXPs across West African countries. That, we haven't got there yet, but we are still going there.
Earlier on in the day, AfriNIC has been -- spoke to us about AfriCERT. That is the Computer Emergency Response Team. We are also looking at collaboration on that across West Africa. But like I said the Africa Internet Governance initiative will only be launched here in Nairobi, and we do truly believe when we get the regionals together and then match it up at the continental Africa level, that will help impose movement at national level. I truly do believe that.
>>MARILYN CADE: I am just going to take two quick comments. One from the southern Africa IGF, and then I am going to ask Peng Hwa to comment about his views about the complexity of harmonization in Asia-Pacific. We will make this one minute each because I have a person with a waiting question and we will try to get more questions in.
>>TOWELA NYIRENDA JERE: I think in terms of the harmonization, what I would say is from a continental perspective, the African Union Commission and NEPAD, normally the strategy of approach is to work through the regional economic communities. So that is why you see the East African community EACOS, SADC they all have these programs ongoing to harmonize the legal and regulatory frameworks within the various regions, and then that gets taken up a step further to get harmonization at a continental level.
With regard to the Africa IGF, the whole intent, obviously, is to harmonize and coordinate the activities of the regionals in the sense that we would like to be able to have a unified voice. And that's one of the reasons why the establishment of the southern Africa IGF was an imperative, because that was one of the regions that was actually lacking in terms of having that kind of fora.
Thank you.
>>PENG HWA ANG: Yeah, I think it's very complex issue. Just starting basically, just start an example, like Singapore we drive on the left side and other people drive on the wrong side. So it is a complex issue. Just taking driving alone.
And generally, policy should be aimed at solving problems. So you are going to have a problem, it's sort of critical. And it's interesting, you mentioned the issue of CERTs; right? Computer Emergency Response Team. There's a similar effort going on in Asia-Pacific. I am sort of plugged in in a small way and my suggestion to the group was to have a hot line to start. So that's the start of the harmonization, just calling to say you are reporting some incident, as a way to get some kind of harmonization of laws, of best practices.
>>MARILYN CADE: I have one question I am going to be able to take who has been waiting for quite some time. I am going to go here, and then we are going to have to wrap up because I am eating up your coffee break, and then you have to come back for another panel.
So let's make this quick, and I am going to make very short summary remarks.
Please.
>>TOM WAMALWA: Thank you very much. My name is Dr. Tom Wamalwa. I am the dean of ICT at Inoorero University. I have been very much happy to hear, this is my first time to participate in IGF forum like this. And I have learned a lot, and also I have a few ideas that I wanted to share with you on what we are doing at university. I actually concur with the comments from the U.S. that university's collaboration within the university is really going to go a long way in building capacity, doing research, and also the ideas from commonwealth where they are trying to improve on the capacity. Working with universities will be one way.
The other comment as far as accessibility, I think university is having like a well-established incubation center that will expose the students at the early age to this technology. And also, it's a sort of cultural change and mind set. At the university, that's where we teach students and we mold them to be the future leaders and so forth. Involving universities is one way. Another way is holding workshops, as our colleague just pointed out, for the youth. At Inoorero University we have actually set up an annual boot camp for mobile computing where we invite all university students from Kenya. Every year they come there and we take them through different programs, and at the end we are able to compete, rating some mobile apps.
Another thing that we have established and the ICT have established a research and innovation center, and we also are working very closely with industry. Rather than being an ivory tower, as people tend to think universities are, we are going back to the industry, engaging them, saying what problems you have? How can we work together?
And this has been very enriching and I want to thank you very much for organizing this. Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you. I think we should go to remote participation and see if we have any questions, and then come to you. Do we have? Okay.
Then let me go to you and then we are going to be closing in just a minute so you guys can have coffee.
>> Mine is a very simple question. It goes to Pacific IGF because they talked about the youth IGF that they run also.
I just want to know what are the issues high on the agenda of the youth in the Pacific?
Thanks.
>>PENG HWA ANG: For the youth, it was more assimilation and the idea was to expose them not so much to IGF issues but more the IGF process. So we wanted to expose them to how civil society, government, and business would interact with each other. So they met in groups, first as like if you are a business, you meet as a business group; if you are government, you meet as a group of government officials. And then they were forced to cross with each other. So business was forced to talk to civil society and government and among themselves. And they were supposed to present and come up with solutions that would fit everybody, sort of those that they met, anyway. So this was to come up with some solutions, one on spamming, one on privacy, and then come up and present.
So those sort of give the best answers, in our view. People answer questions, were then selected to come to this IGF meeting.
>>MARILYN CADE: And we have a comment on Twitter which we will take and then I will do a summing up.
>>NNENNA NWAKANMA: Sorry; I don't know if I told you I was tweeting while I was here. They didn't say not to tweet so I went ahead.
I have someone asking a question about young people. Actually, it's a young man asking how many presidents, how many leaders are using Twitter? They want to know.
>>MARILYN CADE: There's a company called Twitter who should be doing that research and sharing it with us. Maybe we will have to send them a tweet.
I think that's a really interesting question, because more and more politicians and policymakers are getting comfortable with using social networking for the purposes of communicating with themselves.
You guys may remember that when President Obama was elected in the United States, that was the first time that a President of the United States actually was allowed to keep his BlackBerry, and it was because he insisted that they solve the security problems about having a secure BlackBerry.
So I think we're going to see a continued growth of the use of social networks, and when people introduce themselves as the coordinator of the initiative, you may remember that many of them mentioned their hash tag or they mentioned they have a Facebook account.
I want to talk a little bit quickly, before we have coffee and then come back to the second section, about what I have seen as some commonalities and some differences.
First of all, a commonality that I would point out is a focus on capacity building. Sort of not just talking about policy for policy's sake but talking about the application of policy which often means the implementation of policy.
At the IGF, we often say we don't have outcomes. I think that's a pretty profound outcome when people are actually taking the policy, taking it at the national level, and using the synergy between the global IGF and the regional IGF and the national IGF and sort of creating this kind of virtuous circle of beginning to apply or change, tactically change policy in their country or in their region. So I am kind of excited by that.
Many of the initiatives we heard from are driven by the themes established in the IGF, and there's no surprise about that to me because most of the coordinators that are involved in the initiatives have some kind of relationship with the consultation process and the planning process for the IGF. But I heard some real differences. I heard that national and regional IGFs are doing things in many cases very, very differently. The IGF USA doesn't address access. Access is a top priority for many of the rest, if not all of the IGFs. So that's kind of interesting.
IGF USA did a unique workshop, and we'll hear, I think, in the next panel what issues that they think are emerging issues.
We heard a little bit about the involvement of youth. People did not talk a lot about how they involved youth in their particular initiative, but can I ask for a show of hands from the initiatives who did involve youth in one way or another in your initiative.
So the IGF USA has their hand up. And now we have the hands up.
So really, although you didn't talk about your involvement of youth, really for the most part, we are all trying to involve youth. And I distinguish between when we look at talking about policy for the protection of children or vulnerable persons online or dealing with child pornography to the concept of involving youth in helping to plan, in helping to organize, in preparing for workshops and being participants in workshops and maybe panels.
So that may be a topic we want to explore more. It's very possible that one of the outcomes of our having this interregional national initiative dialogue might be that we look for some commonalities and think about where we may want to information share in an easy, and I do say light handed way.
The other thing that I took away from this session is that everyone here works on the initiatives as a volunteer. It's not their job. They are building a kind of an ecosystem and developing partners and finding the resources to build these new, almost, institutions.
That -- One thing that I hear in that is that there could be some fragility, because it's tough to get the resources. And creating awareness, enhancing awareness about the value of the initiatives, broadening and deepening participation can help to contribute to resources.
That might actually put a bigger stress on the existing limited resources.
So we may take that topic up when we talk with our next panel about what are your greatest challenges. We will pose that question to our next panel.
How about 15 minutes for coffee, and do come back for the rest of the interregional national dialogue and we are going to talk about emerging issues.
The summary -- We will have a short report into the taking stock and the way forward session where we will report on the emerging issues that we have identified that have come out of the national and regional IGFs.
Let me ask you to join me in thanking the panelists and in thanking the audience.
[ Applause ]
>>MARILYN CADE: I'm hoping that there is a cup of coffee out there with my name on it.
I will see you all in 15 minutes.
[Coffee break]
>>MARILYN CADE: We are getting started now. Is Sala in the room. Paging Keith Davidson. Okay.
Okay. We're starting now. And any panelist who is planning to speak who isn't up here with me --
I think they're all here. Here you go. You want to --
So let me explain what we're going to do in the continuation of the interregional/national IGF initiative dialogue. Boy, that's a long title.
My name is Marilyn Cade. I'll be moderating this session. For some of you who may be new to the session, I also serve as the chief catalyst for IGF USA, but one of our steering group members will be speaking as IGF USA.
We're going to start with -- this time I'm going to let people volunteer after Andres speaks. So Andres is going with the Latin American and Caribbean, but before I kick off speaking, I am going to have people -- you get 20 seconds to say who you are, what your day job is, and what your -- what initiative you are affiliated with.
And I'm just going to start at the end of the table for that. Leonid?
>>LEONID TODOROV: Sorry. I'm Leonid Todorov from the Russian registry and am associated with the Russian Internet Governance Forum. Thank you.
>>YOSHI OBATA: I'm Yoshi Obata from 3G operator in Japan, eAccess, and also work as a director for the Japan ISP Association, and we are kind of a virtual Secretariat for the Japan IGF.
>>ANDRES PIAZZA: My name is Andres Piazza from Argentina. I am the external relations officer for LACNIC, the regional Internet registry for IP addresses in Latin America and Caribbean, and I am also chairing the NRO -- the regional coordination group, the public affairs coordination group for the NRO this year, and we were one of the hosts of the pre-IGF in Latin America and Caribbean, of course.
>>PABLO MOLINA: Hello, my name is Pablo Molina. I am Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Technology at Georgetown University.
I am also an adjunct faculty member there. And I have had the pleasure of hosting the IGF USA for the last two years in our Georgetown University Law Center campus, which is located very near the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
I'm also on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and on the board of the Hispanic Technology Council.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
>>MARTIN BOYLE: Good afternoon. My name is Martin Boyle. I'm with Nominet, which is the dot uk domain name registry, and we are one of the partners in the U.K. IGF initiative.
>>SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWANARO: Jambo. I'm Salanieta Tamanikaiwanaro. My day job is as an in-house counsel for a licensed operator. I also happen to chair the CG cybersecurity working group, which is a multistakeholder model.
>>MARILYN CADE: Okay. We're going to get started and we're going to talk about a different set of topics in this session.
In this session, I've asked the speakers to focus primarily on emerging issues. What did they see coming out of their initiative, out of their events, that is leading them to see -- or to propose a new topic, or even if it's just a whole new look at an existing topic.
And I've asked Andres to kick off, and then I will, if it's okay, go to Leonid -- if that's okay -- to Russia, and then to Japan.
So Andres, if you'll speak, we'll then do the next two and I'll do another order.
>>ANDRES PIAZZA: Okay. Thank you, Marilyn.
First of all, I know this session is for emerging issues from the regional sessions, but Latin American and Caribbean initiative of Internet Governance Forum wasn't explained in the previous slot, so I will make a summary.
The fourth -- this 2011 was developed the fourth Latin American and Caribbean meeting preparatory meeting for the IGF, and this was an interesting initiative because it was not only the preparatory meeting, but we developed a joint initiative with the seventh Caribbean Internet Governance Forum, so in August this year, we held the first Latin American and Caribbean conference of Internet governance. We did two initiatives altogether in Trinidad and Tobago in the Port of Spain.
Our initiative is not only hosted by LACNIC but also for the Association of Progressive Communications, APC, in the region, the NUPEF Institute, the Internet Society, Google, and of course the local partner in Trinidad and Tobago, the CTU. And it was also -- we have -- and every year it's increasing -- the support of different relevant organizations from the region. This time the IDRC, NIC.br, and CGI from Brazil were supporting the initiative.
The event was held and the dynamic was, in general, respecting the IGF dynamic and the topics at the IGF, but we set a different -- we had a hundred participants and the meeting had a different dynamic. We posted, one and a half months before the meeting, a survey online and the community took the opportunity to answer a survey which have more than over 30 questions.
So the specific matters -- the general topics were the IGF topics, but the specific matters we discuss in the pre-IGF were defined bottom-up by the community.
This was the particular case for Latin America and the Caribbean.
There were some emerging issues different from one year to the other, compared to -- to the previous editions.
Freedom of expression in the Internet was adopted as a cross-cutting issue, and this was the first time we did that. So there were many participants that were involved in the freedom of expression discussion but not in the Internet governance discussion from the region. Our region is very active in freedom of expression matters, so civil society, private sector, even governments were involved.
We were lucky that we had over 10 governments participating, and many -- many of them from the Caribbean, and also ministers and other type of government officers from different countries in the Caribbean that it was one of the main goals because the Caribbean is less developed in some places, not particularly in Trinidad but it's a less developed subregion in our region.
Also, we want to -- well, the outcome is short to -- it's hard to make a brief summary of the outcome of the event. It's posted online, of course, but what we want to address here is that there was a positive aspect, let's say more politically.
We identified as a weak point that the little participants of Latin American region at the global IGF and the case that there were participants, the less diversity of participants, and civil society wasn't present that much. So this regional initiative posted a grant for people to attend -- people that attended with grants to the regional IGF were also participants, and three of them were granted to come -- fully granted to come to Nairobi to the global IGF.
And of course this initiative is not the only one in the region.
For example, LACNIC has a lot one which is called FRIDA and we delivered a prize for the five initiative projects in the region, one of which projects related to one of each main theme in the IGF, and the winners of those prizes are also here and they were granted for us.
Related -- and I'm focusing about emerging issues but I had to make that introduction.
>>MARILYN CADE: Yes.
>>ANDRES PIAZZA: Access matters, and infrastructure aspects were of course in Latin America and Caribbean identified as crucial.
We take into account that, for example, 2011 is a key year in the development of Internet exchange points in the region.
For example, next week at the LACNIC's Annual Meeting in Buenos Aires, there will be launched a new organization called LACAIX, which is the organization that gathers the Internet exchange points of the whole region, so that this will be a new actor in our Internet governance regional perspective, and this new actor will be focused directly to the critical Internet resources and to access and accessibility issues.
And the exchange of information and the cooperation of these different Internet access points is also, of course, promoted with time and effort but also with financial support by the Internet Society and LACNIC as well.
But there are many other matters that came out, not only the freedom of expression matters and the accessibility matters.
There were many public interest principles and human rights approaches that will -- that they wouldn't prevent -- prevail in previous editions and this time it's more and more a regional agenda.
So the last thing I want to say is that -- to point out is that we really think that a huge impact from this IGF, where strongly nobody in this experience in the region had a minimum doubt about the impact and the utility of the global Internet Governance Forum, we all recognize the value and the outcome of -- and the impact of this forum, but we know that the regional initiative is even more important for us because the impact we have directly in the region and the interaction we have between actors, it's fantastic, so as a technical community but civil society and also governments, we want to support the global initiative of the Internet global forum but we want to stand out the importance of the regional initiatives. And not this one, but all the regional initiatives.
Okay. I think I'm done and if there is questions and answers, it's okay, and, well, if not, it will be okay, too. Okay. Thank you, Marilyn.
>>MARILYN CADE: And if there is not questions to you here, people will know what you look like at the event later.
Leonid, can I ask you to speak about the Russian IGF?
>>LEONID TODOROV: Thank you.
Well, as you know, we Russians take an enormous pride in having our country going along its own path all the time, so that's why our event was sort of special, in a way.
Well, it was the second IGF we have, so the tradition has been already established, but the name of these events still sounds a bit controversial to any Russian ear, simply because, well, first of all, "national."
Unfortunately we failed to go farther than the Euros, which means that we failed to reach out to the Siberian part of our country, which is a little bit bigger than Canada.
Second, Internet governance. The concept itself is still sort of foreign to the Russians.
And finally, dialogue. It's not that easy to establish a dialogue in a country after -- which survived after 70 years of communism that was pretty much a monologue-based society.
Anyway, that said, we realized that with the first IGF and we covered all those issues which basically are tackled by any regular IGF, so we went too far and too fast, and we realized that we should step back and focus on some other issues, so that to make the concept more familiar. Which means that we need, first of all, to -- we needed to raise awareness of the concept of Internet governance, per se.
We need -- we needed to demonstrate the intensity and magnitude of the global discussion on Internet governance issues.
And we had to send a message and spread the word across the former Soviet republics which are newly independent states which neighbors -- which neighbor Russia.
So the focus was on showcasing, rather than exploring in depth, some issues.
Well, first of all, we tried to present the European and the CIS -- if there were cases -- perspectives and practices in the area of Internet governance, and we tried to identify similarities and peculiarities in those approaches and practices.
We also wanted to do -- I mean, to have the audience appreciate the scope and range of all these views and practices, so that in a very empirical way, to come to appreciate that Russia should develop its own vision on the -- on issues pertaining to Internet governance.
Plus we held a very specific session that was a Russian/U.S. bilateral session on future of the Internet scenarios, and Pablo and Marilyn were contributing to that.
And we tried to demonstrate what may happen if the concept of Internet governance and how it should be developed is -- well, if such a concept sort of is ignored or is misinterpreted or is practiced inadequately.
And we also had an inside analysis by Professor Dave Farber, one of the fathers of the Internet, on how the Internet was developing, what challenges it generated down the road, and what challenges are ahead of us.
So also, we usually -- well, "usually" for the second time in a row -- we have kind of side events.
We asked some of our speakers to go to the universities to deliver some presentations and to interact with university students on issues of Internet governance and some other issues which may raise their interest in this area.
And we believe that we still have some issues which may arise down the road, and first of all, we need to ensure that genuine nationwide outreach for our event.
We have to reach out to youth. We need to get them engaged in this process, which is not easy. Then we need to promote, let's say, unbiased -- which means, in Russian conditions, depoliticized -- support of the academic community which is still driven pretty much by anti-American and anti-western sentiments. This is very critical.
And we also feel that we need to further promote the concept of IGF and cooperate with our partners and counterparts in the neighboring countries. I mean, in the post-Soviet republics.
And finally, we need to find ways to convince the academic community to get more engaged in this process, so that -- to let them try their best in terms of capacity building.
This also concerns civil society and youth, of course, in particular.
Thank you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much. And I'd like to hear now from Yoshi, the Japanese -- the Japan IGF.
>>YOSHI OBATA: Yeah. I think similar to many countries, we have many organizations, associations, to tackle all these issues on the Internet, including some ministry consultation committees and private councils and industry associations, and which comes out with regulations and of course ministerial orders, guidelines, and industry practices.
But the challenges we are currently facing are surrounding issues like child protection and also some kind of function of the police departments and also cross-border issues.
So for example, for child protection, we have been implementing some filters for kids to -- when they surf the Internet, so that they cannot get involved in any, well, bad functions, and of course they cannot see bad content.
And at the same time, we're trying to -- trying to avoid the spread of child pornography.
But related to these cross-border issues, a lot of these problems can go across borders, and especially if we -- we can enforce something like ISPs or carriers to monitor or to tap into the communication, but it's very difficult to force foreign companies to do similar things. And of course if the operation is -- has to be done overseas, this is very challenging.
And secondly, we have some -- also some industry guidelines and also kind of the -- how do you say? -- not law enforcing, but semi-law enforcing operations, such like when somebody wants to suicide and he shows his intention on the Internet or even some SMS. So that has to be detected and has to be reported to the police department in real time, so that the police can avoid the suicide.
Or there are some other operations like we're trying to find out whether we can filter all the URLs with having a content of child pornography.
So there are many operations like this which are coming one by one, but of course one of the challenging issues is that in most cases, of course, the bad guys are much better in technology than the good guys, and secondly, we cannot catch up with not only the technology development but also in operations to tackle all these challenging problems.
So although, as I told you, that we have many mechanisms to try to find out operations and technologies and ways to tackle these problems, we think that there's a need to have a more broad group of people discussing, well, firstly, why do we need to do these operations or not, and secondly, what is the best way, I mean, across the industry -- or across industries that we can cope up with these challenges, and that is the major reason why we set up this IGF Japan.
It's still on a -- firstly, it's on a completely voluntary basis, and we did not come up with any sort of conclusions but we tried to interact between different people who are involved in various activities, so that they can find solutions among their organizations, associations, or groups or activities.
And secondly, we have some -- also we have some industry associations, and some are supported, not voluntary by either a ministry or by the industry, so that we make this IGF activity completely voluntary, so that we don't have issues, especially business issues, with all the other organizations.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much. I do have a question for you myself later about the workshop focus that you took, but we'll go to the rest of our speakers before we go to questions.
>>SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWANARO: Thank you, Marilyn. I bring greetings from the Pacific, and I'd also like to greet them, the nine remote hubs that are actually streaming in, and kudos for e-participation.
And I'd also like to acknowledge the good work that the U.N. IGF Secretariat is doing in bringing the remote participation.
Very quickly, the inaugural Pacific IGF was held around about April, with an initiative that was spearheaded by Keith Davidson, and it was very well attended by diverse stakeholders from both the public sector, the private sector, and also civil society, amongst -- apart from representatives from the Internet universe.
And it was also interesting to see the head of the international Telecommunications Union, Dr. Hamadoun Toure; Director Secretary-General of the Secretariat of the Pacific community, Jimmie Rodgers; and the chair of ICANN then, Peter Dengate Thrush, who attended.
It was largely experimental in terms of concept, but one of the interesting observations in terms of the core IGF themes that were raised from the Pacific IGF was in terms of access, infrastructure, and of course the Pacific Islands scattered across the sea. So the challenge of bringing infrastructure to remote islands.
And also in terms of content, you have countries that have issues in relation to filtering and censorship.
And also retail Internet costs in the Pacific, believe it or not, are amongst the highest in the world. And the need for Internet exchange points to help reduce costs and improve quality of service.
Internet root server mirrors and IXPs together would help to stop tromboning traffic across the planet and keep traffic in our respective home countries.
And another issue that sort of emerged in terms of critical Internet resources were the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
Compared to Europe, which has a quicker uptake, the Pacific is still, you know, lagging in that regard, and so that was pretty interesting.
In terms of security, there were discussions in cybersecurity, child online protection, DNSSEC, and critical information infrastructure dependencies.
I've touched briefly on interconnection costs.
High IP transit costs that impact the retail Internet costs. High retail Internet costs are exacerbated by the lack of an Internet exchange point.
And also regulatory challenges. The fact that heavy-handed regulation and its impact on retail Internet prices.
Other emerging issues included freedom of expression, such as citizen journalism, censorship, a digital observatory, e-waste initiatives, the Internet to be accessible in Pacific languages. Just in case you don't know, Vanuatu, a country in the Pacific, has the world's largest language per capita.
Capacity development, the need for representation at global IGF forums. And hence, my thanking the U.N. IGF Secretariat remote participation accessible. And not just participation, but meaningful participation.
And in terms of similarities and differences, Madam Chair, between the Pacific IGF and the global IGF, one of the interesting things that we find are the ability and the capacity to actually draw from the diverse experiences.
For instance, I was just in the native language and Latin session this morning, and it was quite interesting where whilst in the Pacific we had identified that we needed to have, you know, the Internet accessible in Pacific languages, you have regions like -- like Latin America, for instance, that have, you know -- that have developed in terms of having languages in -- accessing the Internet through their language. And I think what was mentioned was that 25% of the Basque people actually can access the net in terms of that as being their first language.
And so the diverse -- diverse streams and diverse opportunities and also learning from regions such as countries such as Japan and learning from Asia and the depth and the richness of issues such as of the IDNs, of course, and drawing from Europe in terms of how they've transited and plans to transition in terms of from IPv4 to IPv6, and some of the challenges that they went through, and so that we in the Pacific don't actually have to repeat the cycle but we can actually leapfrog.
So these are some of the -- some of the strengths that the diversity of both the national, regional, and international IGF brings.
And with that, I should say that the multistakeholder model in the Pacific works.
For the first time, what it's actually doing in the Pacific, it's bringing people to the table and they're engaging in robust discussions.
And what the Pacific IGF did, it was the catalyst and it created -- it created incentives for people to get together and talk, and so now you have robust discussions between the PACNOG and the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association and the ISPs and civil society and government, of course, and the Internet community, and so it's just awesome.
And thank you, Madam Chair.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much. I have another question -- I have a question pending for you as well, but Martin, let's hear about the U.K. IGF. It, too, is I think somewhat unique.
>>MARTIN BOYLE: Well, yes, perhaps. But picking up on the last comment from the previous speaker from the Pacific, I think we have got the similar motivation of finding incentives to get people together and talk.
The idea for the U.K. IGF really started probably within a month or two of the World Summit. We started thinking about if we were going to have an IGF, how could the U.K. stakeholders best engage in that process.
And out of that developed quite a strong partnership between several organizations, and as in any partnership, what we're really looking for are issues that ring a bell, that gather enthusiasm or interest over a range of actors.
And we were looking to primarily help people prepare their engagements with the IGF, and very quickly we also realized we had to find some way of communicating the IGF to people who probably had no real concept of why the IGF -- why Internet governance could even remotely be of any concern to them, and that is actually, I think, still a very, very big barrier.
And the other area that very quickly we got engaged in was in sharing best practice, because we realized that learning from others was actually a pretty good way of starting any discussion, start the discussion thinking about success and how to build on the success, was actually quite a useful -- quite a useful approach.
And then the last area that started motivating us, and again fairly quickly, in fact, immediately after the Rio meeting, was to try and use the IGF model to try and help us in our own small island to prepare for the challenges that were coming up to us.
So in other words, build in that multistakeholder cooperation right at the heart of our U.K. decision-making and thinking.
So having given you a little bit of the background, perhaps I now ought to revert to the brief that we were given, before Marilyn gets angry with me and look at what we see as being the challenges.
And to be honest, I can really only say what are the challenges at the moment, because in the preparation for next year, we will go through an exercise that tries to identify the things that are important for the stakeholders, and those issues are going to be the ones that we will want to put on the table.
And of course sharing best practice, we run every year the Nominet Internet awards and what we're doing is looking at solutions rather than at the problems. Look at it from the success side.
If our packages eventually get through the Kenyan customs, you will find these brochures on our stands, and I hope many of you will be interested enough to take them away.
Then the -- the idea of using multistakeholder cooperation to assist in addressing national -- national issues, national concerns. We've been very, very lucky from a very early stage of having a lot of interest from parliamentarians. They have taken an active part. They have got the importance of -- they've understood the importance of a lot of these issues, and one of our parliamentarians has championed the concepts of an e-crime reduction partnership that you get the stakeholders in a room, you get them to understand and work together to help address e-crime issues.
I was hoping the parliamentarian concerned might be in the room to give more information about that, but I can't actually see him. I'm sure he'll wave if he's there.
Then another area where we have been particularly active -- and again, it's one of the partners taking the lead -- is engaging with young people, and we have an organization called Childnet International. They did a workshop this morning. If you -- these brochures are around the place. I do strongly recommend you pick them up. These are the views that young people have come up with, and almost certainly a lot of these issues will come up in our own reflections as we try to respond to them.
Like others, well, we followed on, we saw what the U.S. IGF had done on scenarios and thought, well, that's a good idea.
So build on success. And we have been running a scenarios exercise. We'll be at the scenario summit tomorrow and try and present some of our initial thinking from there. And we will do this as -- we will then present it in the U.K. as a workshop, the Parliament and the Internet conference late middle of October.
And then the last area I think I would like to cover is on that wider communications which is still something that gives us a lot of problem. How do you get over really quite a wide and diverse topic area. And this year, for one of the workshops that we had identified would be a useful thing to do, this was media, media mutation, how the news responds, news media, traditional news media responds to social media, and we had a journalist from the BBC who came over and moderated that workshop, and then spent the rest of the day understanding everything there is to know about the IGF. Well, enough to be able to communicate and try and raise the profile of what the issues are and hopefully get that dialogue, that one step further out.
And I'd like to finish just there.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
Well, I'm going to turn to Pablo Molina who is a member of the steering group of the IGF USA, and also, as he mentioned, has acted as the official host for the past two years.
Pablo.
>>PABLO MOLINA: Thank you, Marilyn.
It always surprises me, for the second year in a row, that an event that focuses on the virtual world happens to be a great success because of its location. And its location, location, location, because this takes place, as I mentioned before, at the Law Center Campus of Georgetown University located occurring only a few blocks away from the White House, the Capitol building, the Supreme Court of the United States, as well as many of the government agencies that concern themselves with Internet governance and use, and many of the corporations that are very active in legislative affairs, even though they may be based on the West Coast.
However, just because we are located in Washington, D.C., I didn't mean that we did not pay close attention to remote participation. For us, this was critical.
We did a number of things that were very useful in engaging people from far away places, mostly in the United States. We certainly Webcast the sessions. We used social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to report. We used Webex conferencing services once again to solicit questions from remote participants, but something very, very interesting that we did is thanks to Elon University and the project, imagine in the Internet we had a group of brilliant students from the sister university come to Georgetown University to record and do the citizen journalism that was necessary to make sure that everybody could know more about this event.
And it is their work that you can find online for the Web site of the IGF USA. The address is www.igf-usa.us. In fact, I believe this is the first time I have ever seen a URL with a dot US at the end.
>>MARILYN CADE: I am actually afraid you might be right.
>>PABLO MOLINA: These short videos that were edited by the Elon University students are a great way to get a feeling about what is it that was discussed at the IGF USA.
Now, this location is something that we have been wondering about. It was thanks to the fact that we were in Washington, D.C. that there was great multistakeholder participation, because we had members of civil society actually participating. There are great nonprofit organizations in D.C. concerned about civil liberties and the Internet, great organizations like the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, many others, even based in other parts of the United States like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sent several delegates to the IGF USA.
We also had great participation by government agencies: The Department of Commerce, the State Department, the Federal Trade Commission, all of them participated. Not only did they send people in the audience but also they spoke very actively in the panels. Ambassador Verveer and Ambassador Strickling opened and closed the IGF USA in some of the plenary panels, and their comments were very, very exciting to those of us who participated.
We had great participation from the corporations, because it is true that Google and Facebook and Cisco and some of the innovative Internet companies are based in Silicon Valley on the other side of the country, near San Francisco or San Jose in California. But many of their policy people actually worked in Washington, D.C., and once again, they attended, they participated.
The same is true for many of the Internet service providers and telecommunication companies. We had representatives from companies like Verizon and AT&T which control a great deal of the Internet traffic in the United States.
We also have outstanding participation by the technical community. Some of the great cybersecurity experts in the United States were present there. Some of the people who were fundamental in the design and the evolution of the technology of the Internet participated with us.
And finally, we also have great participation from the academic community. Many of my colleagues at Georgetown University from the computer science department, from the law school, from the public-policy department came and volunteered their expertise. And we were also joined by colleagues from many other universities, from Cornell University to the University of Pennsylvania who made the trip down to D.C. in order to participate in this particular event.
So in that regard, it was a success. And yet we can improve significantly.
And we can improve because, first, we could think about perhaps moving this event eventually to another location, to reflect that not everybody is based in Washington, D.C. But we could also do regional event that we are thinking of doing next year so we can perhaps have some feeder events on the West Coast, southeast, southwest so that more people can participate in this event in preparation of the actual IGF USA.
The United States is a large country. 300 million people. It's hard to represent an entire country from one city, so it is good to consider also some other geographical locations.
Some of the topics that were heavily discussed, well, the other one has to do with participation. Inclusiveness and diversity. We made sure we had young people participating. But once again, we are always concerned that there continue to be gender differences on Internet use in the United States; differences in the income level of the people who have access to the Internet; differences between inner city families who may not have the level of Internet connectivity as suburban families in affluent neighborhoods.
We're very concerned, for example, about those who are new to the United States. The United States is a country of immigrants. I am an example, with my strong Spanish accent when I speak in English. I am a citizen of the United States. And there are many of the immigrants who are arriving now, some legal, some illegal, who need to access the Internet to make a better future for themselves and for their families. So we really need to improve on the diversity issues.
What was discussed in there? Through the use of scenarios, for example, was the idea that we can project and guess what is going to happen to the Internet in the year 2020. We take some of the statistics that we know from the present day, and some of the trends that we're observing worldwide. For example, natural disasters; for example, the Arab Spring; for example, the difficult economic situation worldwide. And taking those drivers, we were able to project three different scenarios into the future, to the year 2020.
Now, this required a lot of imagination, but it was fantastic because those scenarios were circulated among the attendees and they were heavily discussed by everybody, not just a handful of panelists. The panelists were just moderators for the ideas that were flowing in the room. And then those ideas were collected from these small sessions that had 20, 30, 40 people each, and they were presented at the plenary, gathering the feedback.
So this was very good because we were able to engage the audience in a fantastic way. And I hope that we continue do the same.
But there's one thing that we need to do in order to improve the use of scenarios, which is most of us volunteer our time for the IGF USA the same way people volunteer their time for the U.N. IGF. And the problem is that we have limited resources.
So I believe we need better, more solid research in order to do the scenarios in the future.
And one of the ways which I plan to do this, and I hope they are listening right now, is by recruiting my students from Georgetown University from my class on Internet -- international Internet innovation and policy, and telling them this time, this semester, instead of just writing paper that only you and me are going to read, you are going to work on these scenarios, and your work is going to be scrutinized and read by hundreds of people. And with a little bit of luck, your work will also be commended by people in other countries.
So I think we can get the talents of all these students. And if you are listening online, please be aware that this counts as a class participation grade for you.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>>PABLO MOLINA: I would like to finish with some of the trends that we observed. We were very concerned at the meeting with privacy. As usual, in social networking platforms. Some of the companies had certainly engaged in behaviors that were questionable, at least by the standards of civil society, regarding behavioral advertising, regarding some of the privacy violations by Google and Facebook. Some of them were prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission. People were very concerned about cybercrime and cyber attacks because of the mortgage, economic problems. There was an increase in fraudulent mortgage processing that affected many people with identity theft. And there were always concerns about the Anonymous group that were attacking the Visa credit payment services, the CIA, NATO and Amazon in connection sometimes with the WikiLeaks release of privileged information.
And with that, I believe that I provided a good summary.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
I know we have still a few of the national and regional IGFs in the audience, and I would like to ask, Byron, whether you or Mark or any of the other national regional IGFs want to mention the emerging issues that came out of your initiative.
And then after I do that, I'd like to turn to Izumi, if I might. I'm actually going to pose a question to Izumi so I am going to let him worry for a couple of minutes. The question that I will pose to Izumi is going to be about the approach related to ICTs in disaster.
We heard from IGF USA that they did a workshop on disaster, and actually Kelly O'Keefe who was our coordinator at the best practice forum is here. We also heard, though, that Asia-Pacific did a workshop in that area, and I took from the report that the IGF USA submitted, it must have been because I wrote it, that, actually, we identified that as possibly an emerging issue, the idea of how to look at that.
So let me go, first of all, if I could, to Byron, and then Mark, and then come to Izumi. And then I will come over to you.
Byron.
>>BYRON HOLLAND: Absolutely. Byron Holland. I am the CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. We are the ccTLD operator for dot CA. And for those who were not in the room earlier, we were the primary sponsor and funder of the first ever Canadian Internet Forum back in February.
I'd say the emerging issues that we really started to hear about were evolutions on the theme of access. And in Canada, 79% of people have broadband access at home, but 95% have it available to their home. So what we're looking at and what people are talking about is with almost 100 percent availability, why do we still have that significant or material gap in terms of the folks who don't have broadband access in their home?
So that's really an evolutionary element to the access discussion but it was certainly something that started to come up more and more, and how do you crack that tough nut.
The other issue -- and I will bring up three. The second issue was around youth, reaching out to youth, trying to communicate with youth, trying to engage youth. And while we certainly made efforts, we -- if I look back at some of the things we weren't satisfied with, it was the level of engagement that we managed to achieve from the youth. So how do we -- You can lead the horse to water, so to speak, but how do you get them to drink? And that was one of our real challenges. Are we speaking to them in the wrong way? We're using the channels, but we're not connecting yet.
So that's one of the issues that we really need to wrestle with, and was commented on how do you effectively engage that entire community, get them involved, get their ideas, as somebody was just tweeting, the youth somewhere in one of the sessions here was saying telling me don't tell me no, don't tell me how. Talk to us about why.
I thought that was an interesting tweet that just happened right now as I was thinking about our emerging issues. Somebody well take them up on that.
The other was education, the educational system, you know, has been around for a long time, in the Canadian context, at least. And one of the things that's not happening is within the education, two issues. One is, from a pedagogy point of view, how they teach. They are not engaging the tools, the technology and the Internet can offer. So they are not up-to-date in the teaching methodology or at least they are not engaging in all of the tools that could be used to enhance and make more efficient the educational experience. And then the second part of that is they are not teaching the stuff that kids need to know about becoming truly digital literate and a digital citizen. The youth are doing it on their own and probably have an awful lot to offer in that exchange but it's not really happening in the educational environment anywhere near where it happens -- needs to be happening.
So I think if we look at some of the three emerging issues we saw, it's how do you get that last group to access in the Canadian context, getting the youth engaged overall, and starting to work on the educational system to just get up to Internet speed, because they are woefully behind on a couple of fronts.
>>MARILYN CADE: I am just going to comment --
>> The interpreters regret that they will have to cease interpreting now. The session has come to an end for the interpreters. We apologize. We will see you tomorrow morning.
>>MARILYN CADE: -- so I know a lot about it but it begins to address that question. It also asks the question about whether the -- we should be adding to our expectations of education, not just reading competency, writing competency, math competency, science competency, being a good citizen in the world but also the concept of digital competency or digital citizenship and make it a part of core curriculum.
What that would say to me is that when you look at what ministries you want to go meet with about your national or regional IGF, or we think about ministers who ought to come here, we would be reaching out to another group of government folks to incorporate them. So that's a really interesting concept, Byron.
Mark, did you want to comment on issues, emerging issues?
>>MARK CARVELL: Thanks very much. Mark Carvell, U.K. government. I am on the Steering Committee of the Commonwealth IGF.
We are at a stage, really, that we haven't got anything identified as coming up for us, but we will have the opportunity at our session tomorrow, at 11:00, when hopefully we will hear from stakeholders from the commonwealth what they think the commonwealth IGF could usefully pick up and advance as an issue as we look forward to the program, the 2012. We are running with the cybercrime initiative. It's a major project, as I'm sure everybody will appreciate. And that's the focus at this time. But, you know, it's an ongoing process.
We want to hear from stakeholders, and so, you know, we will hear what next, if you like, in our next consultation.
So at this stage, I can't actually offer anything concrete. Thanks.
>>MARILYN CADE: It sounds like we ought to stay tuned.
Martin, did you want to make a response and then I am going to go to Nnenna, and then I am going to come back to my friend Izumi, whom I warned.
>>MARTIN BOYLE: I thought I would give Izumi a bit longer to get his thoughts in order.
I want to pick up on one of the points that Byron made about engaging with young people. As I said, we were actually very lucky in that one of our leading partners was a well-recognized children's charity that had quite a lot of work going on in engaging with young people in schools and helping them make more sense of the Internet, how to stay safe, and the source of messages that go over.
And they first did this in preparation for the Sharm El Sheikh meeting of the IGF. So this year is the third year running that ChildNet International have brought over to an IGF a delegation of young people and encouraged them to get very firmly and clearly involved in the dialogue, in the discussion.
And part of their starting point was to take the words that are all littered over the Internet governance landscape, that are very difficult words to understand and to put into context, and try to help them understand what these words mean, what the concepts behind them are. And that I actually found particularly useful and interesting. And we tried to adopt some of their material for when we went and spoke to the confederation of British industry. It didn't actually work desperately well, but at least here was a way of communicating lots of these ideas.
So, yes, certainly I can sympathize with you, Byron, about the difficulties of doing this. I guess we just got very, very lucky. But there is a good delegation from ChildNet International here, and they are more than happy to talk about the processes that they followed that actually got a vibrant dialogue going.
Thanks.
>>MARILYN CADE: And one of the benefits of knowing the other coordinators, I can tell you, is that you get to contact them so they bring the kids to your workshop.
So thank you, Martin.
Okay. I want to go to Nnenna, and then I am going to go to Izumi, and then we will have another couple of questions.
>>NNENNA NWAKANMA: Thank you. I just want to raise four points from West Africa. The first was on the issue of cloud computing. At the forum, we asked ourselves a lot of questions. Is it the right option, the trend, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats, especially for many countries in West Africa where we don't have stable electricity.
But we raised our hopes on mobile technology. That has great promise for the region, because as it was noted earlier, we're a very young region, and our youth are active. So we're looking at appropriate mobile technology applications that are customized for West African region or African region of developing countries to help us achieve our development objectives.
We are also looking at IPv6 compliance of technology of today and tomorrow, because we realize in West Africa that much of our technology is coming as development aid, and we have fears that we will wake up in five years' time and find out that technology that was given to us as development aid was not IPv6 compliant.
7.
We have -- We raise an issue on digital literacy and digital culture. As originally stated, we have great heritage of culture in West Africa, and our challenge will be to see how we can use the Internet to add value and to migrate with digital West Africans and not just West Africans.
And finally, it is important for us to stress in this forum, once again, that West Africa and many West African countries are suffering from a kind of image slurring on the Internet.
We hear that spams come from Nigeria, and West Africa is a security zone, security risk zone, and you don't find PayPal in some of our countries.
It is not correct, and that is linked to research information. We don't have empirical data.
So we would like to know, as we talk about security and all of that, how much of spam is actually coming from West Africa that we should be black-listed.
There are actually some European network operators that black-list a bunch of our IP addresses, and being that some of our ministers are using these free e-mail services, we are sending official government information on someone dot something and it has been black-listed because they are from West African IP addresses.
So we really feel that this is something that needs to be talked about.
No, we are not a security threat in West Africa, and we need to be treated fairly on the Internet as all other digital citizens. Thank you.
[Applause]
>>MARILYN CADE: I'm going to turn to Izumi. I had the privilege of hearing Izumi. Izumi and I are on the CSTD working group on improvements to the IGF together, and I had the privilege to hear Izumi talk a little bit about ICTs in a very poignant disaster, but now we've heard that three of the, regional and national IGFs have addressed ICTs in disaster, and I wondered if you might want to speak from your view of whether that is an emerging trend.
>>IZUMI AIZU: Thank you, Marilyn.
Actually, in the Geneva phase of WSIS, there is already mention about disaster relief or management. And also in the Tunis Agenda, Paragraph 91, there's the -- you know, one whole paragraph or three small paragraphs, including the -- you know, "We recognize the intrinsic relationships between disaster reduction, sustainable development, and the eradication of poverty," ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, "and we are clear as to the important enabling role of ICTs at national, regional, and international levels, including promoting technical cooperation and promoting regional and international cooperation for easy access to and sharing of information for disaster management," and there was early warning systems clearly stated.
That's when? 2005.
Because with the backdrop of the 2004's -- I mean the Indian Ocean tsunami, there have been several projects around the ITU and others.
Back in '92, we had INET, if you remember, the first Internet -- international Internet conference held in Kobe, and that city was hit about three years after by a massive earthquake. Then the Kobe government had the Internet website. The next day of the quake they started to disseminate information, including English languages, to share reports of that.
So for us, after 16 years of that happening, have we really advanced the use of ICTs and the Internet to either say early warnings or reduction of the, you know, real damages or relief/recovery areas.
As much as the advancement of the technology uses services such as social network or cloud computing, are they in parallel with the mobile services? I'm not too sure.
That sort of drove me to start some kind of work after March in year.
To make a long story short -- and I will have a presentation tomorrow in the afternoon, thanks to Marilyn and the access partners -- I have six lessons learned.
The first one is mobile networks should be robust enough. That's very important to all of you, perhaps. Imagine your -- your family members missing or unknown for a few hours.
Second one is power supply be seriously considered, especially for rescue and relief operation situation, and most of the power there was washed away, or even including our nuclear power station failure. That station failure was because the emergency power was washed away. And the flexible collaboration network among different institutions, individuals, local governments, NGOs, be there to cope with this massive thing.
And in the Singapore -- the regional IGF we had in Singapore, yes, I had the privilege to organize a workshop where we invited the guys from Indonesia.
After the 2004 tsunami, the ISP association -- and also he is the ccTLD manager of dot in ID -- came and reported that they have set up a special foundation after 2004, and they have the first respondent teams of the kind flying to the volcano eruption areas or, you know, trying to set up a media center so that the journalists and others can write stories over the Internet. And they are prepared, they are doing exercises, they have the equipment, regularly.
Of course the sort of quantity is not enough.
In Japan we didn't have that, although we have as many earthquakes, if not tsunamis, as Indonesia.
The fourth lesson then is the disaster management needs new understanding for the latest ICT services.
Google did a fantastic job of using the Person Finder, which is carried over from Haiti or other disasters. I'm not too sure if we are talking about emerging issues or not. We heard the Haiti ccTLD work in the last year's IGF in Vilnius.
So the fifth lesson is ICT people -- us -- should establish some kind of new emergency preparedness team which was, at least in Japan, not there. There are not that many countries that have that.
And then Number 6 is ICT support for local governments be established. Many city governments, their buildings was washed away, with their servers and PCs, and unfortunately the recovery system and policy framework wasn't sufficient, so that many people were left behind after they lost their families or they lost their buildings.
These are the areas I came to share with you.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
We have to wrap up because the translators have been with us and we've been very privileged to be in one of the main rooms and to have been able to have translation, as well as transcription.
I'd like you to -- to ask you to join me in thanking the translators, and then I'm just going to make a closing remark which will not be translated but it will be short.
So join me in thanking the translators.
[Applause]
>>MARILYN CADE: So here's my closing remark.
I want to thank all of you and the panelists. You know, we do -- we are asked to write meeting reports. I'm a little overwhelmed about how we will do that, but we'll try to pull out some of the key points that we've seen, and we will try to identify a list of emerging issues to put forward into the "Taking Stock" session.
I've certainly enjoyed learning about what all of the other national and regional IGFs that have so far launched are doing. I found it extremely valuable. And we'll be looking to hear from you. You now know what we all look like. We'll be looking to hear from you if you have an interest. If you're thinking about launching a national or regional IGF, well, maybe conversations with some of us would be helpful and informative. And it's a great group. I know most of them, have known most of them for many years, and I've always learned a great deal from them.
So thank you so much for coming. I look forward to seeing you at the gala. That is tonight, isn't it?
Thanks again.